Aerosols [Sulfates and Soot] May Drive a Significant Portion of Arctic Warming & Why Only a Global South Strategy Makes Sense
http://www.physorg.com/news158423459.html
the model suggests aerosols likely account for 45 percent or more of the warming that has occurred in the Arctic during the last three decades. The results were published in the April issue of Nature Geoscience.
Though there are several varieties of aerosols, previous research has shown that two types -- sulfates and black carbon -- play an especially critical role in regulating climate change. Both are products of human activity.
Sulfates, which come primarily from the burning of coal and oil, scatter incoming solar radiation and have a net cooling effect on climate. Over the past three decades, the United States and European countries have passed a series of laws that have reduced sulfate emissions by 50 percent. While improving air quality and aiding public health, the result has been less atmospheric cooling from sulfates.
At the same time, black carbon emissions have steadily risen, largely because of increasing emissions from Asia. Black carbon -- small, soot-like particles produced by industrial processes and the combustion of diesel and biofuels -- absorb incoming solar radiation and have a strong warming influence on the atmosphere.
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What a surprise! I’m shocked, shocked shocked!
Who would have thunk it that increased black stuff falling on and darkening ice would make it melt faster?
My God, you would have had to sit in a black car in the summer to figure that one out!
Who can get a Climate Change grant for that type of brilliant experiment?
And what a major insight to recognize that burning wood and charcoal to cook and boil water, and using 2-stroke engines and other black smoke-belching outdated vehicles and factories in the global south and eastern europe might contribute significantly to warming through spewing out black carbon!
And then to make that next leap that sulfates, which normally cause the sky to dim and precipitate humidity into cloud formation, and that reducing them, via cleaning up Northern nation factories’ belches, would let in more sunshine especially in the Northern Hemisphere! What a massive leap! NOT
How come James Lovelock couldn’t have recognized this?
After all he was a major one who targeted aerosols and then with his Daisy World model in Gaia Hypothesis showed the role of darkness and lightness in the atmosphere for precipitation and cooling.
Or maybe they could have recognized why clouds form over algae patches in oceans, release of dimethyl sulfide (DMS).
Dimethylsulfide Emission: Climate Control by Marine Algae?
http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/dime ... erview.php
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The regions of Earth that showed the strongest responses to aerosols in the model are the same regions that have witnessed the greatest real-world temperature increases since 1976. The Arctic region has seen its surface air temperatures increase by 1.5 C (2.7 F) since the mid-1970s. In the Antarctic, where aerosols play less of a role, the surface air temperature has increased about 0.35 C (0.6 F).
That makes sense, Shindell explained, because of the Arctic's proximity to North America and Europe. The two highly industrialized regions have produced most of the world's aerosol emissions over the last century, and some of those aerosols drift northward and collect in the Arctic. Precipitation, which normally flushes aerosols out of the atmosphere, is minimal there, so the particles remain in the air longer and have a stronger impact than in other parts of the world.
Since decreasing amounts of sulfates and increasing amounts of black carbon both encourage warming, temperature increases can be especially rapid. The build-up of aerosols also triggers positive feedback cycles that further accelerate warming as snow and ice cover retreat.
In the Antarctic, in contrast, the impact of sulfates and black carbon is minimized because of the continent’s isolation from major population centers and the emissions they produce.
"There's a tendency to think of aerosols as small players, but they're not," said Shindell. "Right now, in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere and in the Arctic, the impact of aerosols is just as strong as that of the greenhouse gases."
The growing recognition that aerosols may play a larger climate role can have implications for policymakers.
"We will have very little leverage over climate in the next couple of decades if we're just looking at carbon dioxide," Shindell said. "If we want to try to stop the Arctic summer sea ice from melting completely over the next few decades, we're much better off looking at aerosols and ozone."
Aerosols tend to be quite-short lived, residing in the atmosphere for just a few days or weeks. Greenhouses gases, by contrast, can persist for hundreds of years. Atmospheric chemists theorize that the climate system may be more responsive to changes in aerosol levels over the next few decades than to changes in greenhouse gas levels, which will have the more powerful effect in coming centuries.
"This is an important model study, raising lots of great questions that will need to be investigated with field research," said Loretta Mickley, an atmospheric chemist from Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. who was not directly involved in the research. Understanding how aerosols behave in the atmosphere is still very much a work-in-progress, she noted, and every model needs to be compared rigorously to real life observations. But the science behind Shindell’s results should be taken seriously.
"It appears that aerosols have quite a powerful effect on climate, but there's still a lot more that we need to sort out," said Shindell.
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Financing the rollout of clean energy to the Global South should be the top climate priority bar none over doing anything in the rich countries, who already have plenty of electricity, and whose industrial plants and transportation emissions are actually much much cleaner than in the South, and in fact the cleaning of them has removed the protective effect of their sulfate emissions, and left them more exposed to the impact of the dirty energy of the Global South.
Global Energy Equality is the most important thing from a social economic development and independence standpoint, and it is the most important thing to do from an ecological standpoint.
Solar and Wind power and hybrid vehicles (or even more recent repossessed hand-me-down ordinary cars and trucks from the rich countries) in the South will be the most valuable way to provide jobs, stimulate global aggregate demand, and clean up the environment, with one stroke removing the drive for deforestation, the Brown Clouds settling on Arctic ice, and CO2 emissions, where they are growing the fastest, and where the energy production power plants are the most primitive.
When combined with the imminent affordability of LED lighting, hydroponics and desalination, this South Strategy is the surest path to providing food and fresh water security and sanitation and ensuring that the South will not have to continue to race to the bottom to sell their products so they can earn foreign exchange.
And if the workers and businesspeople in the South weren’t competitively racing to the bottom, they wouldn’t be pulling the workers in the North down as fast. In fact, if the workers in the South had more and better paid jobs and more disposable income they would be buying more stuff made by the workers in the North.
And if the South was more livable, fewer skilled people would be brain draining to the North, and more skilled people in the North would choose to move South.
Global Energy Equality gives everyone a bigger and better world to circulate and co-mingle within.
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