[There seems to be a lot of if-only-we-were-right-then-we-wouldn’t-have-been-wrong rationalization lately. Sam Harris’s latest covid rant comes to mind. ~cr]
UCLA researchers say climate change could accelerate slightly if dust levels stop climbing
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – LOS ANGELES
A new study shows that global atmospheric dust — microscopic airborne particles from desert dust storms — has a slight overall cooling effect on the planet that has hidden the full amount of warming caused by greenhouse gases.
The UCLA research, published today in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment, found that the amount of desert dust has grown roughly 55% since the mid-1800s, which increased the dust’s cooling effect.
The study is the first to demonstrate the overall cooling effect of atmospheric desert dust. Some effects of atmospheric dust warm the planet, but because other effects of dust actually counteract warming — for example by scattering sunlight back into space and dissipating high clouds that warm the planet — the study calculated that dust’s overall effect is a cooling one.
Should dust levels decline — or even simply stop growing — warming could ramp up, said UCLA atmospheric physicist Jasper Kok, the study’s lead author.
“We show desert dust has increased, and most likely slightly counteracted greenhouse warming, which is missing from current climate models,” said Kok, who studies how particulate matter affects the climate. “The increased dust hasn’t caused a whole lot of cooling — the climate models are still close — but our findings imply that greenhouses gases alone could cause even more climate warming than models currently predict,” he said.
Kok compared the revelation to discovering, while driving a car at high speed, that the vehicle’s emergency brake had been partly engaged. Just as fully releasing the break could cause the car to move even faster, a stop to the increase in dust levels could slightly speed up global warming.
And while atmospheric desert dust levels have increased overall since pre-industrial times, the trend has not been steady — there have been upticks and declines along the way. And because there are so many natural and human-influenced variables that can cause dust levels to increase or decrease, scientists cannot accurately project how the amounts of atmospheric dust will change in the coming decades.
Some of the microscopic airborne particles created by burning fossil fuels also temporarily contribute to cooling, Kok said. But while scientists have spent decades determining the consequences of these human-made aerosols, the precise warming or cooling effect of desert dust remained unclear until now. The challenge researchers faced was to determine the cumulative effect of the known warming and cooling effects of dust.
In addition to atmospheric interactions with sunlight and cloud cover, when dust drops back to earth, it can darken snow and ice by settling on them, making them absorb more heat. Dust also cools the planet by depositing nutrients like iron and phosphorus. When those nutrients land in the ocean, for example, they support the growth of phytoplankton that take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thereby causing a net cooling effect, Kok said.
Human actions have warmed the planet by 1.2 degrees Celsius, or 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit, since about 1850. Without the increase in dust, climate change would likely have warmed the planet by about 0.1 degree Fahrenheit more already, Kok said. With the planet nearing the 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of warming that scientists consider especially dangerous, every tenth of a degree matters, Kok said.
“We want climate projections to be as accurate as possible, and this dust increase could have masked up to 8% of the greenhouse warming,” Kok said. “By adding the increase in desert dust, which accounts for over half of the atmosphere’s mass of particulate matter, we can increase the accuracy of climate model predictions. This is of tremendous importance because better predictions can inform better decisions of how to mitigate or adapt to climate change.”
The researchers used satellite and ground measurements to quantify the current amount of microscopic mineral particles in the air. They determined that there were 26 million tons of such particles globally — equivalent to the weight of about 5 million African elephants floating in the sky.
They next looked at the geologic record, gathering data from ice cores, marine sediment records and samples from peat bogs, which all show the layers of atmospheric dust that had fallen from the sky. Samples from around the world showed a steady increase in desert dust.
Dust can increase as a result of drier soils, higher wind speed and human land-use changes — diverting water for irrigation and turning marginal desert regions into grazing and agricultural land, for example. While increases in dust levels due to those types of land-use changes have taken place primarily on the borders of the world’s largest deserts, like the Sahara and Sahel in Africa and Asia’s Gobi desert, Kok said, similar changes have taken place in California’s Owens Lake and are occurring now in the Salton Sea, also in California.
But the factors that account for increased dust levels are not clear-cut or linear, Kok said, and whether the amounts of desert particulates will increase, decrease or remain relatively flat is unknown.
Kok emphasized that while the increase in atmospheric dust has somewhat masked the full potential of greenhouse gasses to warm the climate, the findings don’t show that climate models are wrong.
“The climate models are very useful in predicting future climate change, and this finding could further improve their usefulness,” Kok said.
JOURNAL
Nature Reviews Earth & Environment
Dust instead of aerosols as to why the models do not work? We cannot simply conclude there is something wrong with the models, now, can we?
They’re desperately trying to explain the 7-year cooling trend.
Once again, the “scientist” version of “the dog ate my homework.”
Never. Climate models have never been WRONG. They just keep finding ways to make them RIGHTER. As noted by the author.
I have been trying to get the Australian modellers to admit their CMIP3 model is WRONG because it predicted the physical impossible of tropical oceans reaching 40C by 2300. They do not admit they were wrong. They just advise that they now only predict to 2100 and the temperature only gets to 33C by then. Still impossible but easier to defend in their eyes.
For God’s sake…can’t we stop this? Al Gore just announced that the oceans are boiling….this extreme radical climate emergency crisis demands our attention….Al is not yet giving up his private jet…neither is John Kerry…but both are considering becoming vegetarians…that’s how desperate this critical situation has become.
You can’t blame Al… when they wheeled out his Lobster entrée at Davos and told him it was “fresh from the Ocean”, he just made the logical inference that the Oceans simply MUST be boiling.
After all, Al thinks it is millions of degrees at the center of the Earth. So why wouldn’t the oceans be boiling?
Just think: This guy almost became President of the United States!
If anyone could be a worse president than the Trafficker-in-Chief, Joe Biden, it would be Al Gore.
“Unhinged” is a good description for Al Gore, especially when it comes to his CO2 phobia.
At that point, Al couldn’t think of anything but his lobster.
After all, they promised Al that the lobster only ate vegetables when he demanded a vegan lobster.
“Chicken Cordon Blues by Steve Goodman; e.g., “Can you see that old dog, he’s out in the street, got a big smile on his face ’cause they let him eat meat”
Or, Larry Croce’s excellent “Junk Food Junkie “; e.g., “Oh, but folks lately I have been spotted with a Big Mac on my breath”.
Obviously it must be the high dust levels over the Southern Ocean causing it to cool. And here I was thinking it is the declining peak solar intensity that was resulting in cooling.
I wonder if they can provide the dust level over the Southern Ocean for the last 40 years so I can correlate it with the cooling there?
There is no correlation.
graph from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91481-z/figures/1
Dust doesn’t come from oceans.
I was born and raised on the Canadian prairies. Have you ever been there in January Dr Kok? Like spent all of January there? A little/lot more warmth would be appreciated. You see Doc there will be winners and losers. I say Dr Kok – it’s my turn!
[snip. we don’t encourage harassment here ~cr]
It is really sad to see so much effort being wasted on highly flawed concepts.
Climate has become the gift that keeps giving for academia. Predictions 100 years out means the theory will never be tested in a lifetime. Just keep making changes at the fringes to keep the funding going and ever more ridiculous scare tactics.
It would be useful if climate modellers could shift their focus to 10 to 1000 days out rather than 100 years out. But then their model be testable and they would realise they are clueless.
but 10 to 1000 days is too short a time for all the dust to settle.
Dust down their assumptions
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/particulates/surface/level/overlay=duexttau/winkel3
With the greening of the Sahel and the other significant increases in vegetative ground cover around the world, what the heck is causing the increase in dust.
I would expect just the opposite to be occurring?
pillageidiot:
It is NOT dust. The cooling is being caused by increased dimming SO2 aerosol emissions from coal-fired power plants in China and India, and will probably continue for years..
farmers plowing fields
Illegal aliens marching across plowed fields.
Very wet across large parts of Australia too, so unlikely to be significant dust from there.
I am not buying anything they say either.
They lie about everything.
“The increased dust hasn’t caused a whole lot of cooling — the climate models are still close — ……”
Say WHAT ? Close?
About as close as Joe Biden is to EVER telling the truth.
“Delusional” is not a strong enough word for these rent-seeking dolts.
There’s the truth and then there is Joe’s truth.
When you adjust one variable of a complex system other variables also adjust to put the system back in balance.
They just admitted that CO2 is not the only driver of the climate! Dust plays a role now. What other contributor might there be? The oceans, the Sun, the planet’s orbital dynamics?
Wow. AGW is dead. Who knew?
What other contributor might there be?
_________________________________
Follow this WUWT LINK to a Willis E. summation of contributors to the climate system
Steve Case:
Don’t bother . Willis E. doesn’t have a clue
Be nice, Burl.
Nobody has the process nailed down properly, to date. Some think they have it nailed. Time will tell. And it will take time.
CLOUDS…
The guy doesn’t know anything about brakes, either. Driving at high speeds with the parking brake applied would cause it to overheat and self destruct. Beside that, it’s the throttle that determines the speed. It’s not likely the car would be going at full throttle on a public road.
As Mitch Hedberg once said, it’s not so much an emergency brake as it is an emergency make the car smell funny lever.
Wow! 8%, I’m stunned.
Funny! Since the great deserts (no, Antarctica produces no dust) are in the NH, this claim would only add to the mystery of a totally one sided warming..
I know, the narrative here is to claim high climate sensitivity and to justify why it does not materialize. Both pollution and dust must serve as “climate sensitivity maskers”, but can only do so at the first glance. In both instances their effects would be restricted to the NH, where we have way too much warming already. Actually these claims only unmask the most profound problem of “climate science”.
E Schaffer:
Our Climate is controlled largely by the levels of industrial SO2 aerosols in our atmosphere, primarily from the industrialized NH. SO2 from volcanic eruptions is superimposed upon the effect of the industrial SO2.
For those of you who have been voting me down, here is proof of what I have been saying
SO2 emissions from China and India lead those of the rest of the Northern hemisphere.
The Earth’s climate is not “controlled” by Man in any way, shape, or form.
Natural process do what they do.
Some have gained cash and by claiming this or that that Man does, somehow, “controls” the climate and, therefore we must control Man.
That’s all a load of BS.
I haven’t noticed “way to much warming” in my part of the NH
“The increased dust hasn’t caused a whole lot of cooling — the climate models are still close —“
CMIP6 climate models predicted the median global warming trend should already be 0.37C/decade (and accelerating), and by the end of 2022, the global temperature anomaly should have been 1.42C, which are both completely devoid from reality and certainly “not close”.
UAH6.0 global temperature anomaly observations show a 43-year warming trend of only 0.13C/decade (models almost 3 times greater), and as of December 2022, the global temperature anomaly was only 0.05C (models warmer off by 1.37C).
The CMIP6 model projections are hilariously devoid from reality (as are all CAGW’s scary predictions), yet Leftist global governments assume the computer models are “still close’, and are implementing economically destructive policies which will cost taxpayers literally $quadrillions, and will utterly impoverish and starve most humans, and cause the demise of billions more if these programs continue.
CAGW is already disconfirmed under the rules of the scientific method, and all evidence show ECS will be around 1.2C, compared to CMIP6 median ECS projection of 3.7C.
So, what’s to come?
Unfortunately, it will likely require a number tragic winter grid failures costing 1,000’s of lives, skyrocketing utility bills, and economic collapses to show wind and solar grids are completely unreliable, expensive and dangerous.
The coming PDO and AMO 30-year ocean cool cycles will also further increase the already huge disparity between climate model projections vs, observations to the point where CAGW becomes untenable.
I also think in around 10 years when China’s first working prototype Thorium MSR reactors are producing energy 24/7/365 at $0.03/kWh vs. wind/solar at $0.40/kWh, will have such monumental political and socio-economic consequences, the CAGW hoax will miraculously be disconfirmed because “our models didn’t simulate clouds effectively”..
“Truth is the daughter of time.”
“I also think in around 10 years when China’s first “
Do you know something about the size of the first Thorium MSR reactors the rest of the world hasn’t been told? Maybe the plural – reactors – means 500 or 1,000. After X (large number) are in place, how many years until something consequential happens? Will they come on-line at the rate of one a day, one a month, or one a year?
I like to keep the concept of “scale” in mind.
China’s first 2MW prototype Thorium MSR started testing operations in September 2022, which was 2 years ahead of schedule,
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-molten-salt-reactor-cleared-for-start-up
China will then proceed with a 100MW MSR reactor based on the results of the 2MW test MSR.
A commercial TMSR reactor design is expected by completed 2030.
Just one thing. The “ECS” you indicate incorporates a generous assumption that the sum total of temperature change is attributable to increases in atmospheric CO2 levels.
Since there is ZERO EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE that atmospheric CO2 levels have EVER been the “driver” of the Earth’s temperature, the actual, as opposed to hypothetical, ECS cannot be distinguished from ZERO.
All the 1.2C represents is a CEILING on what ECS could POSSIBLY BE, and then ONLY IF you apply that generous assumption that the sole source of warming is CO2 increases. Since the climate started to warm during the Little Ice Age a hundred years BEFORE the Industrial Revolution and about two hundred years before human CO2 emissions were supposedly “significant,” that generous assumption is unwarranted.
AGW-san:
i actual assume CO2 forcing only accounts for roughly 50% of the 1.1C of global warming recovery we’ve enjoyed since 1850, and the rest is from natural factors (LIA recovery, PDO/AMO warm cycles, Super El Niño events, 1933~1996 Grand Solar Maximum, natural variation, etc.) but we don’t know what the actual split is.
CO2 will likely add around another 0.5C of beneficial warming by 2100 for an ECS of around 1.0C~1.5C, which is a net benefit to all life on earth especially at higher CO2 concentrations (CO2 fertilization, global CO2 greening, increased plant drought resistance, less crop frost loss, expanded arable land in Northern latitudes, longer growing seasons, 30% increase in crop yields, slightly more rainfall from increased water evaporation, fewer exposure deaths, etc.,).
CAGW is already dead. It has become such a joke.
“They determined that there were 26 million tons of such particles globally”
Hmmmmm.. last I heard, there is around 6 quintillion tons (or tonnes, can’t remember which) of atmosphere. That’s 6 followed by 15 zeroes, so a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation puts that at roughly 1 ton (or tonne.. whatever) of dust in every 230,000,000 tons (or tonnes) of air (approx). I don’t know the relative weight of a particle of dust to a molecule of air, but even at 1:1 (I would think a molecule of nitrogen, oxygen and even CO2 would be much, much less) I can’t see that there was enough to warrant funding this study. Please feel free to correct me if my sums are wrong. I’m getting old.
Not far off. I get 5.3E15 tons of atmosphere. One source on the internet puts the mass of a dust particle at ~1E-11 gm, or 1E-14 kg. A nitrogen molecule has a mass of about 4.6E-26 kg, so it is about 4.6E-12 times less massive than a dust particle.
Your ratio of atmospheric mass to dust mass is pretty close. That’s the interesting one to me. It would put dust at 4 parts per billion in the atmosphere, or 100,000 times less than the 400 parts per million of CO2. It’s tough for me to imagine how that could make a difference.
Ooops1 That was 5.8E15 tons of atmosphere, so you are spot on.
Thanks for confirmation. Of course, one cannot assume the dust is evenly mixed in the atmosphere, and clouds of Saharan dust are known to drift as far as South America (and indeed to the UK, finding a thin layer of orange dust on my car is not uncommon, usually the day after I washed it), but that will not be a global effect, so no way is it “masking the greenhouse effect” as claimed.
Proof by assertion.
It is not even clear that the planet has warmed by that much, indeed it is climate scientists, so called, that have questioned the global nature of the Little Ice Age, and the recovery from it.
And it is also claimed by climate scientists, so called, that human induced warming is all post WWII.
Nope. We have no idea of how much warming is related to human activity, post 1850.
That 1.2C of warming since the 1850’s occurred during the year 2016. Since 2016, the global temperatures have cooled by about 0.5C, so Dr. Kok is living in the past.
It’s currently cooling, Dr. Kok, not warming. You are assuming it is warming because of your ideology, and are not paying attention to the temperature record. Assuming too much is contrary to the scientific method. Not assuming too much is contrary to your ideology. You are in a bind.
From the article: “most likely”
There’s a solid scientific term.
Prosecutor: “Judge, this guy most likely robbed this store.”
Judge: “Most likely? That’s all you have? Case dismissed.”
From the article: ““The climate models are very useful in predicting future climate change, and this finding could further improve their usefulness,” Kok said.”
Now how would you know that? Are you a time traveler from the future coming back to tell us how it’s going to be? That’s the only way you could factually make such a statement.
Another Climate Alarmist Assuming Too Much. This is their stock in trade.
‘The climate models are still close’. Stopped reading there.
Same here.
Mod:
There is a 30 year long dataset about Saharan atmospheric dust measured at the astronomical observatory on the island of La Palma.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/656329
Perhaps something for Willis to have a look at?
They say the amount of desert dust has grown 55% since the mid 1800s.So who exactly was measuring the amount of desert dust, and how, in the mid 1800s?
“who exactly was measuring the amount of desert dust, and how, in the mid 1800s?”
Tribes of nomadic Tuareg climate scientists, by weighing the dust accumulated in their camel’s noses maybe..?
has cosmic dust increased or just terrestrial dust ? maybe it’s an increase in anthropogenic dust ?
“They determined that there were 26 million tons of such particles globally — equivalent to the weight of about 5 million African elephants floating in the sky.”
I just about lost my large sip of coffee when I read this.
Science!
Let me be the first to suggest that the formal unit of measurement for this be “Dumbos,” as in 2.6 x 10E07 tons = 5 x 10E06 Dumbos. I hope that this proposal doesn’t create a big flap.
Dang it, now I cannot unthink of African elephants floating around in the upper atmosphere.
‘Remember Man thou art only dust and unto dust thou shalt return.’
So we’ve returned to dust – the old standby. Wasn’t it dust back in the 1970 that was causing rapid cooling and our descent into a new ice-age and Climagheddon? And Man’s fault of course, coal power stations, factories, agriculture boosting lots of dust into the atmosphere by tilling the land and harvesting crops and burning stubble.
So… Who’s on next? My money is on the ozone layer – either too thin, or too thick – and/or the ozone hole – too big/too small.
It makes zero sense to describe an effect that counteracts warming as “hiding” or “masking” global warming.
To the extent that the globe is indeed warming, if it is, any cause that produces a cooling effect is not hiding anything, or masking anything, it is simply another factor working in the opposite direction. If warming causes more dust (not saying it does, but just for the sake of discussion), and that dust produces a cooling effect, then that is a negative feedback, plain and simple.
To even use such language is to let the alarmist warmistas control the conversation, because it implies that the “true” trend is warming, and various factors are concealing it from our curious eyes and instruments.
It is more true that global warming activists and their alarmist malarkey is masking the fact that our planet is in a frickin’ ice age, and is way too cold!
The entire notion that warming is dangerous is taken by almost everyone, even skeptics, as a truism, and is not even seriously challenged much, if ever.
This is on top of the fact that the data indicates that any warming actually consists of more moderate cold intervals, and not warmer hot intervals.
Ice ages, glaciers, ice caps…these things are a catastrophe for life, and anything that was living where permanent ice is found, has been wiped out completely. We should have as a goal to elimination of all permanent ice from our planet, if we are going to think that we can change such things. We probably cannot do any such thing, but it makes far more sense to talk about such matters from the point of view of making the world more hospitable for life, and have more of the surface of the Earth more, not less, inhabitable.
Every single aspect of the Warmista spiel is the exact opposite of what is true, stating from the idea that CO2 is bad and a pollutant and we should be trying to get rid of it, right through to the idea that life is fragile, and that a cold planet is somehow better than a warm one.
It is all just pure bullshit, and anyone pushing back against it all should not be willing to give them one inch of space to propagate their lies.
The IPPC’s GCMs are useless with respect to long-term attribution and predictive value. They contain too many statistical parameters (each with errors). Any model that contains more than four or five parameters is questionable. Averaging a bunch of useless models just gives you another useless model. Simplify your model to to only two or three parameters. For example, just study the vertical flow rate of CO2 in natural emission and sink zones as a function of time.
You mean the stuff that’s largely always there (except on September 12th and 13th, 2001 in North America)? Could it be that the “warming” over the last two decades are from increases in efficiency and cleanliness of air travel? Some warmies are trying to eject sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to cool the planet (and got arrested/stopped for being in mexico illegally to do it)
Question.
Which Climate Model that we’ve based our Western Economies on predicted this?
(Is all that dust soaked with oil?)
“… we can increase the accuracy of climate model predictions.”
Climate model predictions are not accurate to begin with. “Increase the accuracy”. Humbug.
The dust ate my global warming. More seriously, the science is not settled if they still can’t decide if dust has a net warming or cooling effect, or perhaps both at differing locations and concentrations, and types of dust.
“More seriously, the science is not settled if they still can’t decide if dust has a net warming or cooling effect”
That’s right. That’s the takeaway from this study.
The hottest UK surface temperatures are during dusty Saharan plumes. Altitude matters.
So…. the “science” ISN’T “settled” then, now IS it???
This alleged research is inadmissible to any honest science or scientist.
Pal reviewed?
To sum it up. They are saying their models can accurately project what the climate will be years into the future, except they can’t because they don’t factor in all the variables.
So, do you think these “scientists” have an explanation for the difference between “masking” and “counteracting/negative feedback” in this instance? Since they assume “warming is real”, they can’t frame it any other way.