he year-to-year spring variation in Arctic black carbon (BC) aerosol abundance is strongly correlated with biomass burning in the mid-latitudes. Moreover, current models underestimate the contribution of BC from biomass burning by a factor of three.
NAGOYA UNIVERSITY
CREDIT: SHO OHATA, NAGOYA UNIVERSITY. THE IMAGE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE JOURNAL OF ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS ON NOVEMBER 4, 2021.
Background
Over the past few decades, the annual average temperature in the Arctic has increased almost twice as fast as it has elsewhere in the world. Although the main driver of this warming is the global increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide, various climate forcers and feedback processes amplify Arctic warming. Black carbon (BC) aerosols in the Arctic have been attracting attention as a climate forcer that accelerates this warming.
BC emitted into the atmosphere by fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning efficiently absorbs solar radiation and heats the atmosphere. Furthermore, BC deposited on snow and ice can reduce their reflectivity and accelerate their melting. Most of the Arctic BC is believed to be transported from regions outside the Arctic. However, estimates of the relative contribution by a variety of sources to Arctic BC, and thus of BC’s climate impact, still have considerable uncertainties.
Research content
The research group measured vertical profiles of BC mass concentrations up to 5 km high in the Arctic in March-April 2018, during the Polar Airborne Measurements and Arctic Regional Climate Model simulation Project (PAMARCMiP) led by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Germany. The observations were carried out using the AWI research aircraft Polar 5, and Station Nord (81.6°N, 16.7°W) as the operation base. Observed BC mass concentrations were compared with those obtained in past spring Arctic aircraft experiments (ARCTAS in 2008, HIPPO in 2010, and NETCARE in 2015) with the aim of identifying factors responsible for the year-to-year variation in BC abundance. See Figure 1.
Black carbon mass concentrations in 2018 were between 7 and 23 nanograms per cubic metre (ng m–3), which were comparable to those in 2010 (Fig.1 (left)). On the other hand, systematically higher values were observed in 2008 and 2015 at all altitudes up to 5 km. Even though each aircraft measurement was made over a limited area and time duration, these results reveal a significant year-to-year variation in BC mass concentrations in the Arctic spring.
Results
The research group found that relative changes in the year-to-year variation of “vertically integrated BC mass concentrations” – that is, the amount of BC in columns between 0 and 5 km altitudes – was generally consistent with that in biomass burning activities estimated using MODIS satellite-derived fire counts detected at latitudes north of 50ºN (Fig. 1 (right)). Transport of air influenced by biomass burnings in regions between latitudes 45–60°N and longitudes 30–50°E and 100–130°E (western and eastern Eurasia, respectively) were likely responsible for the observed increase in BC levels during the Arctic spring.
During PAMARCMiP in 2018, a pollution layer, whose sources were likely to be biomass burnings in the mid-latitudes, was occasionally visible through the windows of the research aircraft (Fig. 2). It is likely that more frequent transport of pollution from biomass burning to the Arctic had occurred during the observation periods in 2008 and 2015. See Figure 2.
The research group also investigated the extent to which current numerical model simulations can reproduce the observed year-to-year variability in BC column amounts (Fig. 1 (right)). The numerical models can separately estimate contributions from anthropogenic BC sources and that from biomass burning. The numerical models reproduced the observations relatively well in 2010 and 2018, when biomass burning activity was low, whereas they showed much smaller values than the observations in 2008 and 2015, when biomass burning activity was high. These results suggest that current numerical models generally reproduce the contribution of anthropogenic BC well, while they significantly (by a factor of three) underestimate the contribution of BC from biomass burning.
Significance of the results
Atmospheric heating effects (positive radiative forcing) of BC in the Arctic are considered to be highest in spring when BC mass concentration is highest and incoming solar radiation is increasing. BC in spring is also important because slight changes in the timing of snow/ice melt can influence the radiation budget in the Arctic. The observations presented in this study provide useful bases to improve and evaluate numerical model simulations that assess the BC radiative effect in the Arctic. Furthermore, global warming has the potential to increase biomass burning in mid- and high-latitudes. This study suggests that these future changes in BC emissions could influence the amount of Arctic BC and its radiative impacts more than estimates provided in previous studies.
The paper, “Arctic black carbon during PAMARCMiP 2018 and previous aircraft experiments in spring”, was published online in the journal “Journal: Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics” on November 4, 2021, at DOI: 10.5194/acp-21-15861-2021.
Authors:
Sho Ohata, Institute for Space–Earth Environmental Research, Nagoya University, Japan
Makoto Koike, Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo, Japan
Atsuhi Yoshida, National Institute of Polar Research, Japan
Nobuhiro Moteki, Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo, Japan
Kouji Adachi, Meteorological Research Institute, Japan
Naga Oshima, Meteorological Research Institute, Japan
Hitoshi Matsui, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University, Japan
Oliver Eppers, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany
Heiko Bozem, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany
Marco Zanatta, Université Paris-Est-Créteil, France
Andreas B. Herber, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Germany
Researcher contact information
Nagoya University, Institute for Space–Earth Environmental Research
Sho Ohata, Assistant Professor
E-mail: sho.ohata@isee.nagoya-u.ac.jp
Funding information
This research was partly supported by the Arctic Challenge for Sustainability (ArCS) project (JPMXD1300000000) and ArCS II (JPMXD1420318865) project of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan and the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (JPMEERF20202003) of Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency. Other funding information is found in “Acknowledgements” of the original paper.
About Nagoya University, Japan
Nagoya University has a history of about 150 years, with its roots in a temporary medical school and hospital established in 1871, and was formally instituted as the last Imperial University of Japan in 1939. Although modest in size compared to the largest universities in Japan, Nagoya University has been pursuing excellence since its founding. Six of the 18 Japanese Nobel Prize-winners since 2000 did all or part of their Nobel Prize-winning work at Nagoya University: four in Physics – Toshihide Maskawa and Makoto Kobayashi in 2008, and Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano in 2014; and two in Chemistry – Ryoji Noyori in 2001 and Osamu Shimomura in 2008. In mathematics, Shigefumi Mori did his Fields Medal-winning work at the University. A number of other important discoveries have also been made at the University, including the Okazaki DNA Fragments by Reiji and Tsuneko Okazaki in the 1960s; and depletion forces by Sho Asakura and Fumio Oosawa in 1954.
Website: https://en.nagoya-u.ac.jp/
JOURNAL
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
DOI
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Observational study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
Arctic black carbon during PAMARCMiP 2018 and previous aircraft experiments in spring
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
4-Nov-2021
Boris CLOSE DRAX !
“How Boris Johnson’s pledge to end forest destruction ignores 25m trees Britain is burning for biomassDrax’s ‘green fuel’, which is made from wood pellets, produces more carbon than coal.
Britain will continue to produce electricity from burning the equivalent of more than 25 million trees a year – despite Boris Johnson’s pledge to end the destruction of forests,
Drax’s North Yorkshire biomass plant, which receives £2.3 million a day in green subsidies from consumers.
Saplings will take decades, if not centuries, to reverse the damage done to the environment ”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/11/04/boris-johnsons-pledge-end-forest-destruction-ignores-25m-trees/
Revert Drax back to coal – we have to save the trees now….
Here in Middle Georgia, we have a thriving business cutting down trees and making pellets, all of which are shipped to Drax… Thank You, Britain for keeping us employed…
Well, we didn’t really want that, our elites did. By the same token I should be blaming you for what Biden is doing – or has failed to do.
How responsible do you feel?
I said no, they did not listen, here we are. 😉
Whether for chipboard, medium density fiber board, pulp, paper or pellets, that forest is raised for purpose. The pine trees grow quickly and are harvestable young.
Why the UK wants to buy heavy wood pellets in the USA, ship them all the way back to the UK when coal and oil have far higher energy densities, is beyond us.
Your elites established the contract, it is in your power to fix.
The answer to your question is not at all.
Boris’s problem is that the UK has more trees now than it had in the mid-1800s. They are greening up nicely. He also knows he would completely denude the UK if he burned those trees. Thus, he is importing wood chips from the US.
Outsourcing.
That’s the way to do it – especially heavy manufacturing
I believe the UK does not include the CO2 emitted from the burning bio mass in their CO2 annual CO2 emissions report because trees will be planted to replace the trees cut down. (?????)
And here in Canada, 42 scientists from The Department of Environment & Climate Change indicated Canada’s 318+ billion trees produce more CO2 than they absorb.(????)
You can’t dream this up, even if you wanted to.
Models again, eh. Zzzz
“BC emitted into the atmosphere by fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning efficiently”
I hope they don’t mean Drax, that’s so efficient it’s the number one belcher of plant food in the UK, and it isn’t exactly beneficial to American forests.
I suppose we can conclude from this that the more ‘BC’ that gets into the Arctic, the colder our winters will be.
Models compared to gross estimates and assumptions. No real observations at all.
Real world observations are all fake it’s a well known fact!!!! Puter models on the other hand are infallible because they produce (mysteriously) exactly the output the modeller wants them to produce!!! Sarc!!!
” …. main driver of this warming is the global increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide, …. “.
It would be useful if they could give proof of this please.
No?
Anyone else, then?
Thought not.
I’m sure they would have if there were any.
Proof outside of Lysenkoism would be a bit tricky as “experts” like Stephen Schneider used to promote global cooling before they switched to global warming.
And if I remember correctly Schneider mainly blamed Aerosols(man made of course,for the psychological guilt impact) for the coming ice age (that is now blamed for warming) while at the same time “top scientist ” who met on dec 3rd 1972 to write a letter to Nixon to save us from the ice age ,
by melting the arctic ice with a layer of soot(which is a potential aerosol).
It’s not only that they did not care about the existence of arctic ice at that time,they wanted to get rid of it(don’t let Griff read this) ,and noone bothered wether the melting arctic ice would slow down or stpp the flow of the gulf stream,which has nowadays become the gold standard of pseudo intellectual narcissistic virtue signalling climate bullshitters.
But something happened a few years after 450 scientist met at an UN meeting in Swiss in 1979 to save us from the coming ice age,
A force so strong that it turned climate science upside down and caused some serious amnesia among ice age zealots who instantly converted warming priests.
The same thing that happened to Nazi scientists who were imported into the USA (operation paperclip)got new identities and worked happily ever after side by side with jewish scientists.
A force called Skanderbeg Syndrome:
Skanderbeg was a devout Christian highly honored by the Vatican ,than a muslim bootlicker after the turks invaded,
converted back to Christianity after the tide changed,became muslim once again etc etc
then switched from Otoman military commander to serve the bankers of Venice and then served the Kingdom of Napoli.
Skanderbeg is so to say the godfather of shapeshifting science as he could change his direction faster than Prince Harrys Polo Pony.
History has been changed so that none of that ever happened now. Scientists always knew that the real problem was the evil of global warming caused by mostly white people. Whether it’s getting colder or hotter or staying the same we can all be sure that white people are the problem. Even when those white people are Chinese they really didn’t do anything because the only people asked to take responsibility for the existence of temperature oscillations in climate are the evil European, Australian, and North American countries.
Everything is clown shoes with the modern left.
Recently the Democrats have proclaimed that whites voting for a black woman as Lt. Governor, is racism.
Mark, apparently it’s because they make exceptions for their racism when they agree with the “POC” and she doesn’t adhere to the “black prototype”.
Seriously, that’s what some professor is touting on the talk shows.
I’ve always been fascinated by the eagerness of white liberals to declare the limits of what blacks and other minorities are allowed to say and believe.
“ tricky as “experts” like Stephen Schneider”
“On one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change.
To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what is the right balance between being effective and being honest.” —Dr. Stephen Schneider, former IPCC Coordinating Lead Author, APS Online, Aug./Sep. 1996
There was a time when science was the search for truth and it’s subject was reality. And when art was the search for beauty and its subject was humanity and the human spirit. Those times seem long ago. Today science is about political advocacy, manipulation, power and money and art is about ugliness.
Universities once stood for learning about truth and beauty. Today academia is a branch of socialist ideology.
Marxist ideology is the most deadly and infectious thought pathogen ever devised; more a religion, than an economic or political system!
For Marxists, the slaughter of one’s political opponents is justified by their intransigence against the attainment of the Marxist Utopia!
When that Utopia fails to materialize, due to the lack of liberty at the core of their beliefs, the Marxists then imprison and slaughter those who have the audacity to complain about the failure!
Marxism means never having to say you’re sorry for those you’ve tortured, imprisoned and murdered! 95 out of 100 psychopaths approve!
I love that every place ever mentioned in any of these scare articles is warming twice as fast as everywhere else. They really don’t think they’re have ever been any natural oscillations in temperature.
Glug glug glug glug glug glug…
South East England
These days that phrase is standard boiler plate that has to be in any study in order for it to pass the gate keepers.
Sort of like Nazi Germany, where every communication was required to begin with Heil Hitler.
I’ve read that the fact that every communication began with “Heil Hitler” was of great help to the British code breakers.
Yep, perhaps ‘some’ but CO2 is not the ultimate driver of climate.. Chutzpah
The Japanese researchers sometimes have trouble translating to English. Where it says “Arctic BC” I’m pretty sure they mean “Arctic BS”.
A few million years ago there was over 19 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere than today, yet the Earth was in the middle of an Ice-Age, Griffy baby, please explain, still waiting!!! 😉
The thing that struck me here is why these fine particles apparently only serve to cause global warming and do so after falling to Earth and sullying the snow/ice. Surely particulates from volcanoes cause cooling? Are the two forms of aerosol at all comparable in overall effect? Perhaps a suitably knowledgeable reader of WUWT could comment?
I think even a village idiot would question why particlates from one source effectively cool, and from another source cause warming
Whether it is true or not, the article specifically says that BC “efficiently absorbs solar radiation and heats the atmosphere. Furthermore, BC deposited on snow and ice can reduce their reflectivity and accelerate their melting.”
This is rather different than particles that block/reflect solar radiation.
fretslider,
In this era of nonconformity the particulates can choose which they wish to be! And the best choice is to conform to what the other BC particulates tell them to be!
Isn’t it really rather racist to cite only Black Carbon as the source of the problem? And are there White Savior particulates involved?
What struck me was the wind direction that carries the particulates towards the Arctic. I was under the impression (whether wrong or not) that the wind direction was generally from the north-east in the northern hemisphere so mainly blowing away from the Arctic. What mechanism are they suggesting for depositing all this in the Arctic?
FedEx?
UPS?
What can brown do for you – takes on a whole different meaning.
Barry,
Just don’t ask Admiral Brown; made famous by the Royal Navy in the Age of Sail!
I read that FedEx and UPS were going to merge.
The ensuing company was going to be called Fed-UPs.
Wind
https://www.ventusky.com/?p=74;52;2&l=wind-900hpa
Sorry Vuk but I still see the wind direction going away from the Arctic, not towards it. Unless the study was done on the most southerly part of the sea ice?
The article about findings of says Nagoya University says,
So, there are said to be two effects which warm the Arctic in the Spring; i.e.
And the article also says,
However, BC is also emitted from natural sources notably forest fires. Indeed, alarmists are claiming global warming is increasing forest fires. But the article says climate models are being used to support an assumption that fossil fuel combustion and (anthropogenic) biomass burning” significantly contribute the source of BC deposited in the Arctic in the Spring.
I am reminded of the ‘Acid Rain’ scare in Northern Europe during the 1970s and 80s. It was claimed that ‘waldsterben‘ (i.e. forest death) in Scandinavia was being induced by sulphurous emissions from burning of fossil fuels. The claim was promoted as vehemently as AGW is promoted today and was used as an excuse to close power stations. However, eventually the actual significant cause of increased sulphur and acidity in rain was proven to be enhanced emissions DMS (i.e. dimethyl sulphide and similar compounds) from phytoplankton in the North Sea. Also, and importantly, it is now known that the forests had been increasing – not dying – at the time of the ‘Acid Rain’ scare.
Assumption (n.b. a model simulation is a collection of assumptions) is not evidence. There needs to be validation of the assumption that fossil fuel combustion and (anthropogenic) biomass burning” significantly contribute the source of BC deposited in the Arctic in the Spring.
Richard
The origin of the pollution leading to the so called waldsterben was the unfilterd burning of brown coal in GDR and other east European countries near-by.
I’ve read that farmers in the regions around coal power plants had to start adding sulfur to their fertilizers after the coal plants started cleaning up the sulfur emissions.
Krishna Gans,
You mistakenly assert,
“The origin of the pollution leading to the so called waldsterben was the unfilterd burning of brown coal in GDR and other east European countries near-by.”
You could not be more wrong.
Firstly, as I said, we now know there was no waldsterben. Forest growth was increasing probably in response to increased atmospheric CO2 concentration.
I was employed at the UK’s Coal Research Establishment (CRE) at the time and I was tasked to assess the matter. I soon observed several reasons to doubt the mistaken assertion which you still make.
1.
If your then popular assertion were correct then most damage to biota would have been near the power stations, but no such damage existed near the power stations.
Oxides of sulphur (SOx) are very water soluble and are washed out of the air by rain (or by showers of water in flue gas desulphurisation, FGD, units). Highest atmospheric concentrations of SOx from the power stations would be near the power stations.
2.
The major sites of high sulphur acid rain were at river outflows.
Sulphur is essential for living organisms and is released from dead biota when they rot. Almost all sulphur compounds dissolve in water so the sulphur released from rotting biota on land dissolves in water which eventually flows to the sea in rivers. The power station emissions were said to be damaging the Scandinavian forests but they needed to pass over the river outflows which were regions of high sulphur acid rain for them to reach the Scandinavian forests. This made no sense (subsequently, it was discovered that the Scandinavian forest damage was a by-product of altered forestry practices).
3.
Phytoplankton were washing up as toxic algal blooms around the North Sea.
The phytoplankton enable all life on land by releasing DMS which has low solubility in water. The DMS escapes from the sea surface and rises in the air until it is broken down by sunlight and becomes SOx that washes to the ground as sulphurous acid rain.
These observations suggested the algal blooms were a more likely source of significant increase of sulphurous acid rain than the power station emissions.
I suggested that phosphate, potassium and nitrate agricultural fertiliser run-off may be washing down rivers to the sea where it could be fertilising the phytoplankton to increase their emission of DMS with resulting increase to sulphurous acid rain.
Independent university studies confirmed my suggestion.
France was promoting the coal-fired ‘Acid Rain’ hypothesis because the hypothesis was providing France with a commercial advantage over Germany and Britain.
France had mostly nuclear power stations but British and German power stations were mostly coal fired. The coal-fired ‘Acid Rain’ hypothesis was requiring the fitting of FGD to British and German power stations. FGD adds ~20% to the capital cost and ~10% to the operating cost of a power station.
Farming was a politically important industry in France and the finding that farming – not coal – was mostly responsible for increased acidity of rain removed French support of the ‘Acid Rain’ scare, but effects of that scare continued to do damage.
The ‘Acid Rain; scare faded away and few now remember it unless reminded. But the EU had established its Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD) which constrained oxides of sulphur and nitrogen (SOx and NOx) from power stations. The bureaucrats operating the LCPD needed to justify their jobs so, as years passed, they increasingly tightened the SOx and NOx constraints with a result that all UK coal-fired power stations had to be shut.
There is much in the history of the ‘Acid Rain’ scare of use for people interested in minimising damage from the AGW scare.
Richard
I shared my knowledge and somebody gave a negative vote to my sharing.
It would be helpful if whomever did that would say why they did it.
Richard
In the New England are of the US, the fact that a number of ponds were becoming more acidic (less basic) was offered up as proof of acid rain.
Then they discovered that the actual cause was reforestation. Rainfall filtering through decaying leaves picks up tannic acid, causing the water to become more acidic.
A couple hundred years ago, there were lots of small farms in the New England region. However once the midwest was opened up the large farms in that region were more economical than the small farms of New England, and most of the New England farms were abandoned and started to be re-forested.
MarkW,
Thanks, that is interesting.
A similar observation was made of lakes in Denmark, and some of my colleagues at CRE were testing the effects of liming to ‘correct’ the matter, but I don’t remember the results of their studies.
Richard
Returning to historical norms needs correcting?
MarkW,
Returning to historical norms does not need correcting.
At the time it was being claimed that the (misnamed) ‘acidification’ of the lakes was an effect of anthropogenic acid rain. I put the word ‘correct’ in inverted comments because the ‘correction’ was an attempt to overcome that putative effect which – as you say – was a mistake.
Richard
A lake where I used to trout fish had acidic in-flow through the peat bogs. The native brown trout didn’t do as well in the acidic water so we used to add limestone to the feeder streams which increased the pH to between 5 and 6 and definitely produced a more healthy fish population.
Acidification of lakes has been observed as a result of anthropogenic emissions, e.g. https://bioone.org/journals/folia-zoologica/volume-66/issue-1/fozo.v66.i1.a2.2017/Recovery-of-brown-trout-populations-in-streams-exposed-to-atmospheric/10.25225/fozo.v66.i1.a2.2017.full
There are rock walls are over the Southern Maine from abandoned farms and pastures. Roads cut through them with the walls running off on both sides disappearing into the woods…
So, should they be saying ‘small controlled burns in forests, will reduce the total amount of BC release.
Perhaps California should be held responsible for the increase in BC?
Small burns are cooler, which might mean less efficient combustion. However, being cooler, the carbon particles that are produced will not be lifted as high into the atmosphere and hence not travel as far.
Where did you pluck that from MarkW?….The ancient silver and lead mining and metallurgical industries of Carthage , Greece Rome and the Holy Roman Empire were the equivalent of ‘small burns ‘ yet the residual lead particles were transported all the way to the Arctic ….Winds can circulate carbon particulates from blazing infernos or low intensity fires high into the atmosphere and high altitude jet streams …
“The main driver of this warming…is carbon dioxide!” Bullshit!!
They make no mention of ocean circulation conveying heat from the tropics up to the Arctic, to be radiated back to space! They’re ignoring the elephant in the room while hyperventilating about a fruit fly
One theory of recent warming is that pollution control caused a large drop in particulates, that led to increased insolation and higher UHI effect! Why would volcanic particulates and aerosols cool, but others warm?
But if they use their BS to call for the end of scams like Drax, I’m okay with it! I’d rather they did it for honest and valid reasons like how incredibly wasteful and inefficient it is, but anything that ends stupidity is good. Sometimes even more stupidity!
How dare you challenge their religion!!!!
Must be wrong. The concentration of CO2 is the only factor that affects climate. Te
he Science Is Settled! /sarc
At least no one is seriously disputing that CO2 increases plant growth.
Hmmm. Increased plant growth causes more shade, isn’t it supposed to be colder in the shade?
There have been a couple of articles claiming more CO2 is bad business for plants.
Quote:”BC emitted into the atmosphere by fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning efficiently absorbs solar radiation and heats the atmosphere”
Now tell me something I didn’t already know and have been telling anyone who’d listen since time immemorial
It gets worse – black carbon if/when it lands on places with any modicum of greenery down on the ground, acts like Biochar, no wonder coz that’s what it is, and enhances plant growth
Sometimes called Global Greening
Is it too late – another case of not knowing what you’ve got till its gone
They know what we’ve got – and they want it gone.
You agree with the statement [ BC emitted into the atmosphere by fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning efficiently absorbs solar radiation and heats the atmosphere ] ‘ and have been telling anyone who’d listen since time immemorial ” ? The paleo -climatologist Joe McConnell not so long ago commenting on the black carbon samples in ice cores taken from the Antarctic Peninsula’s James Ross Island said precisely the opposite : ” aerosol particles in the atmosphere from ….fires and other combustion cool the planet by blocking sunlight or seeding cloud cover ” …To some extent that is true and this was the standard narrative of climatologists and other scientists in the 1960’s and 1970’s who were warning then of industrial carbon soot pollution driving future global cooling [ Among them Stephen Schneider ] …The highest biomass burning activity evident in the Greenland NEEM ice core chronology , coinciding with data from the Siberian Belukha ice core , was in the 17th century – the nadir of the Little Ice Age…There are also black carbon and levoglucosan [ a pyrogenic proxy ] peaks in the medieval optimum centuries ..My point is there are indeed ‘considerable uncertainties ‘ regarding the Nagoya researchers thesis ..Arctic temperatures soared from 1920 to the 1940’s accompanied by dramatic ice loss and it appears a convergence of the AMO and PDO positive phases and solar activity were the primary forcing’s….It can only be speculated if the enormous fire peaks of the 20’s and 30’s in North America played some role although it is worth exploring …
Solar insolation the Arctic is, at best, reduced to 17% of direct vertical solar energy due to the low angle at summer peak and reduced another 17% due to the longer slice of atmosphere the solar energy has to pass through to get to the surface. This means that, at summer peak, insolation is 2.9% of full sunlight, which means that solar energy input DOES NOT warm the Arctic. In addition, solar insolation is zero during the 6 months darkness. During the 6 months it would vary from zero to 2.9%, for an annual average of from 1.45% to 0.73%.
Also, solar energy into the sea is fully absorbed and that energy almost immediately canceled by evaporative cooling from the surface. This obviates the claim that open waters facilitate warming.
Thus, soot on the ice has nothing to do with melting of Arctic ice. It is warm water input from the North Atlantic Oscillation, pumped into the Arctic Ocean basin, seafloor volcanic activity, and loose ice being blown out of the Arctic to melt elsewhere, a la the prefect set of conditions we saw in 2007.
I don’t know about the Arctic in particular but there is plenty of information saying that incoming solar, unlike IR, travels as far as 100 meters into sea water, depending upon local conditions. Any heating from solar radiation at depth, probably depth from about 1 inch, maybe less, to much further down, isn’t going to increase evaporation in real time.
And yet the Arctic is still frozen and covered in ice and snow. Imagine that? Antarctica, too. Funny how that it is.
Can this be the lingering effect of European governments pushing diesel automobiles before the emissions scandals?
Does that include the aholes in the UK and Europe burning wood pellets after using fossil fuels to transport the wood very long distances? Yes the same place where they blame climate change for storms that fell their local trees and limbs over their rail lines while trying to get to COP26 mass gathering and the spread of COVID19. I guess that’s how former colonialists still think and operate.
Please explain how forest fires — which occur almost exclusively in summer in the Northern Hemisphere — could be responsible for Black Carbon deposited in the Arctic in the Spring. Does the smoke take 6-8 months to get there? Why? Does “transport of air” take a really really long long time?
But hey, they SAW the Black Carbon out the porthole of their PaPerCliP fossil fuel spewing Experts on Funded Junkets Big Science Jet. Not to mention the simulation models, which are not the same as stimulation models, Bunky. Reading skills, please!
Speaking of Black Carbon, are there any other carbon colors? I like Green Carbon myself. There’s a meme waiting to go viral.
Furthermore with emphasis, if soot lowers the albedo of polar ice and thereby warms the planet, then that would be a Good Thing because — Warmer Is Better, Fight The Ice.
Wood pellets?
How does that reduce CO2?
I mean, hey, they want to burn wood pellets… ok, fine.
I’ve seen some attractive & warm pellet stoves.
But coal, natural gas produce warmth & energy less expensively & more efficiently at large scale.
Heck, you got a lot of wood you want to sell… go to it & good luck… it’s the American way.
Wood houses are a good value, not to mention all the other wood products.
The whole black carbon story is total BS. Snap out of this atmosphere obsession already! The only place to look for the wellspring of climate is in the ocean. It’s not CO2, not red or yellow, black or white carbon, not methane, not warming by volcanos, not cooling by volcanos, not cows or dinosaurs farting, not laughing gas, not aerosols or parasols. It’s not ozone or sunspots, CFCs or body odour. It’s the fri99ing ocean. The near-freezing deep ocean is chilled by Antarctica and can snap us back to glacial any time it wants.