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Any Climate Treaty Which Does Not Dramatically Reduce Soot Is Not Worth the Paper It's Written On
Preface: I studied global warming at a
top university in the early 1980’s. I was taught – as Al Gore was
taught in college – that temperatures are directly correlated with CO2
levels.
This essay will not address the question
of whether global temperatures are rising, and if so, how much. Others
have written extensively on that issue. This essay also will not look
at questions of the percentage of climate change attributable to
natural factors, such as variations in solar output, volcanic activity
or El Niño (also called the “southern oscillation”). These are
important issues, but this essay will not address them.
Whether or not you believe the planet is
warming or that it is warming because of CO2 is irrelevant for the
purpose of this essay. Either way, you will benefit from reading this.
Finally, I am against big oil and big
coal. As I have repeatedly argued, power should be taken away from the
oil giants and decentralized. I have repeatedly argued for
microgeneration and for alternative energy. These things are beneficial
for a number of reasons – including better health, less corruption of
our political systems through decentralization of power, and a boost to
our economy – in addition to whatever climate benefits they may have.
Do you remember the stories a couple of years ago about all of the dust coming from China?
There were headlines such as:
Unfortunately, it’s not just dirt. It’s also soot, or “black carbon”.
As the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2007:
“There are times when it covers the entire Pacific Ocean
basin like a ribbon bent back and forth,” said atmospheric physicist V.
Ramanathan at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla,
Calif.
On some days, almost a third of the air over Los Angeles and San
Francisco can be traced directly to Asia. With it comes up to
three-quarters of the black carbon particulate pollution that reaches
the West Coast, Dr. Ramanathan and his colleagues recently reported in
the Journal of Geophysical Research.”
And the New York Times wrote in 2007:
One of China’s lesser-known exports is a dangerous brew
of soot, toxic chemicals and climate-changing gases from the
smokestacks of coal-burning power plants.
In early April, a dense cloud of pollutants over Northern China
sailed to nearby Seoul, sweeping along dust and desert sand before
wafting across the Pacific. An American satellite spotted the cloud as
it crossed the West Coast.
Researchers in California, Oregon and Washington noticed specks of
sulfur compounds, carbon and other byproducts of coal combustion
coating the silvery surfaces of their mountaintop detectors. These
microscopic particles can work their way deep into the lungs,
contributing to respiratory damage, heart disease and cancer.
Filters near Lake Tahoe in the mountains of eastern California “are
the darkest that we’ve seen” outside smoggy urban areas, said Steven S.
Cliff, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at
Davis.
Soot and Climate Change
Time Magazine wrote last month:
Black carbon [another name for "soot"] in the air
actually absorbs sunlight as it comes from space, directly heating up
the atmosphere. “The soot particles are like the parts of a blanket,
and it’s getting thicker,” says Ramanathan. “The smoke absorbs sunlight
and heats the blanket directly.”
The world’s leading crusader against global warming – Dr. James Hansen – said in 2003:
Soot in snow and ice, by itself in an 1880-2000 simulation, accounted for 25 percent of observed global warming.
NASA wrote in 2005, based on Hansen’s work:
download large image (742 KB, PDF)
Far
in the frigid north, glaciers rule and temperatures are harsh. It is
not the sort of place one would expect pollution to be a problem, but
new NASA research reveals that soot is traveling farther north than previously believed.
Soot, or black carbon, could have a huge impact on the delicate Arctic
environment by speeding up the melting of Arctic ice, altering
temperatures and cloud formation, and changing weather patterns.Black carbon is released into the atmosphere when fossil fuels are
not completely burned, either in vehicles, home heating appliances, or
when trees and other plants are burned. When large quantities of soot
enter the atmosphere, they create a haze that absorbs energy from the
Sun, so the temperature of the atmosphere increases. This atmospheric
heating can affect weather patterns and cloud formation.
Dorothy Koch and James Hansen, climate scientists at NASA’s Goddard
Institute for Space Studies (GISS), modeled the transport of black
carbon particles around the world using the GISS general circulation
model. The above images show some of their results. The top image shows
where black carbon is concentrated in the atmosphere, and thus where
surface temperatures and weather patterns might be affected, and the
lower image shows where carbon is predicted to settle on the ground.
In the top image, the regions with the most haze—higher optical
thickness—are white, while the least-affected areas are blue. As the
image shows, Koch and Hansen found that soot in the atmosphere is most
concentrated over southern and eastern China, where industry pumps
black carbon into the atmosphere, and over central Africa, where fires
are widely used for agriculture. Other regions with high concentrations
of black carbon include the United States, Central Europe, and India.
The model also reveals that instead of being clear of soot, the Arctic is blanketed with black carbon haze.
About one-third of the haze, Koch and Hansen say, comes from Asia,
one-third comes from fire around the world, and the remaining third
comes from the United States, Russia, and Europe.
Soot does not stay in the atmosphere; it falls out in rain or with
dust. Koch and Hansen’s research reveals that soot might have a longer
range than previously believed, with higher concentrations reaching far
into the Arctic. As dark soot falls on the snow and ice of the Arctic,
it turns the white, reflective surface into a dark surface that absorbs
the Sun’s energy. This extra energy makes the snow melt more quickly.
Studies by other mainstream scientists also demonstrate that much of the melting of Himalyan glaciers is due to soot:
Soot emitted when fuels like diesel, wood and coal are
burned, may have a bigger impact on climate in some areas than
greenhouse gases. New research presented here at the American
Geophysical Union meeting shows that the 20 percent decrease in the
extent of Himalayan glaciers since the 1960s may be partly due to an
influx of black carbon [i.e. soot] from Asian cities.
As NASA writes:
A new modeling study from NASA confirms that when tiny
air pollution particles we commonly call soot – also known as black
carbon – travel along wind currents from densely populated south Asian
cities and accumulate over a climate hotspot called the Tibetan
Plateau, the result may be anything but inconsequential.
In fact, the new research, by NASA’s William Lau and collaborators,
reinforces with detailed numerical analysis what earlier studies
suggest: that soot and dust contribute as much (or more) to atmospheric
warming in the Himalayas as greenhouse gases.
Indeed, some scientists think that the role of soot is much bigger. As an article from 2002 pointed out:
The research, published in this week’s Science,
suggests that soot — produced by diesel engines, cooking fires and
other sources — could have nearly as much impact on climate change as
carbon dioxide, which has long been considered the primary culprit in
global warming.
A group of US and Chinese researchers used a global climate model to
simulate how black carbon affects weather patterns. They found that
soot can influence regional climate by absorbing sunlight, heating the
air and affecting rainfall.
Emissions of soot are particularly large in China because cooking
and heating are done with wood, cow dung and coal at low temperatures
that do not allow for complete combustion.
And an article published in the journal Nature Geosciences (subscription
required) concludes “increasing concentrations of black carbon have
substantially contributed to rapid Arctic warming during the past three
decades”, and that aerosols are responsible for “half or more” of
Arctic warming.
Indeed, Dr. Hansen himself now admits:
Black soot is probably responsible for as much as half of the glacial melt.
A paper published by the National Academy of Science in July 2009 notes:
Our ability to predict how global temperatures will
change in the future is currently limited by the large uncertainties
associated with aerosols. Soot aerosols represent a major research
focus as they influence climate by absorbing incoming solar radiation
resulting in a highly uncertain warming effect. The uncertainty stems
from the fact that the actual amount soot warms our atmosphere strongly
depends on the manner and degree in which it is mixed with other
species, a property referred to as mixing state. In global models and
inferences from atmospheric heating measurements, soot radiative
forcing estimates currently differ by a factor of 6, ranging between
0.2–1.2 W/m2, making soot second only to CO2 in
terms of global warming potential. This article reports coupled in situ
measurements of the size-resolved mixing state, optical properties, and
aging timescales for soot particles. Fresh fractal soot particles
dominate the measured absorption during peak traffic periods (6–9 AM
local time). Immediately after sunrise, soot particles begin to age by
developing a coating of secondary species including sulfate, ammonium,
organics, nitrate, and water. Based on these direct measurements, the
core-shell arrangement results in a maximum absorption enhancement of
1.6× over fresh soot. These atmospheric observations help explain the
larger values for soot forcing measured by others and will be used to
obtain closure in optical property measurements to reduce one of the
largest remaining uncertainties in climate change.
This is a new discovery. As Time notes:
The science is evolving — it’s so new that black carbon
wasn’t even listed as a warming agent in the most recent report from
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — but it cannot be
ignored.
Soot Has a More Immediate Effect than CO2
The key is that there is a much shorter lag time between soot and temperature that between CO2 and temperature. As Time writes:
Unlike CO2, which can hang around in the atmosphere for
centuries — CO2 that was emitted by the first coal-powered train is
probably still in the air, warming the planet — black carbon has a
relatively brief life span. It remains just a few weeks in the air
before it falls to earth. That’s key, because if the world could reduce
black carbon emissions soon, it could help blunt warming almost
instantly. “You can wait a week or a month and the totals in the
atmosphere can be significantly different,” says Eric Wilcox, an
atmospheric scientist with NASA. Meanwhile, if we were to vastly reduce
new CO2 emissions immediately, the billions of tons that already exist
in the atmosphere would keep warming the planet for decades.
As the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development writes:
Because black carbon only remains in the atmosphere for
several days to weeks, reducing it can bring about almost immediate
mitigation of warming, whereas decreases in temperature lag reductions
in CO2 by 1,000 years or more.
Good News
Time points out that it is relatively easy to reduce soot:
The good news is that while taking CO2 out of our energy
cycle has proven very difficult — especially in poorer developing
nations — black-carbon emissions should be easier to curb. Reducing
deforestation will help — the burning of tropical rain forests is a big
contributor to the black-carbon load. Next, diesel filters in cars can
be upgraded, and biomass-burning stoves can be exchanged for technology
that uses solar power or natural gas. These changes will cost money,
but they should be cheaper than decarbonization. And cutting back on
black carbon will also pay immediate health dividends, with less air
pollution and fewer deaths from respiratory diseases. We might even be
able to see the sky in New Delhi again.
Similarly, Dr. Ramanthan notes in a new paper:
A neglected fast-action strategy presented in the paper
is reducing black carbon soot, an aerosol produced largely from the
incomplete combustion of diesel fuels and biofuels, and from biomass
burning. It is now considered to be the second or third largest
contributor to climate change.
“If we reduce black carbon emissions worldwide by 50% by fully
deploying all available emissions-control technologies, we could delay
the warming effects of CO2 by one to two decades and at the same time
greatly improve the health of those living in heavily polluted
regions,” said Dr. Ramanathan.
The New York Times also notes the cost-effectiveness of reducing soot:
Decreasing black carbon emissions would be a relatively
cheap way to significantly rein in global warming — especially in the
short term, climate experts say …
For these reasons, any international treaty or domestic law which does not focus on significantly reducing soot is not worth the paper it’s written on.
Note 1: As I have previously noted, Dr. Hansen, the economists who invented cap and trade, and the head of California's cap and trade offsets program for the EPA are all opposed to cap and trade. I have also noted that the person who invented credit default swap derivatives is one of the key people pushing cap and trade.
Therefore, any treaty which pushes cap and trade at the exclusion of soot reduction is doubly worthless.
Note 2: As one example of an inexpensive soot reduction measure, solar cookers or plans
for building them could be given to millions of people in the
developing world, thus slashing soot from the burning of wood and dung.
From someone who LIVED IN THE ARCTIC for 15 years, and whose parents still live there...
I have NEVER seen soot-covered snow. This is just ridiculous to talk about how the pure and clean Arctic is being polluted by big bad Chinese.
Yes, China needs to cut down pollution hugely. Yes, man should try to minimize pollution.
But making an appeal to protect the virgin Arctic without any proof that what you (or the scientists you quote) are saying is true, sadly GW, I give this a fail.
As a fan of your work I hope you are able to stick to the facts in the future.
Obama is giving me a 30% tax rebate ($1500) to burn wood in the coldest corner of my house. I would think that the new stove puts out more soot than the oil fired furnace in the basement.
why bother with real environmental issues, didn't you know all the cool "generation Z" greens are on the pigs' side now?
The socialists, communists and other members of the red-green coalition will be looking for another host to jump to like a bunch of fleas jumping dogs. I say, first kill all the fleas (Al Gore, Obama, Liebermann, McCain, and many more) before we allow the greenies to start another crusade.
"don't trust any movement over 30" - that's what most of the sincere co2 control advocates don't understand and that's why they keep getting sacrificed like silly chess pieces for fake environmental causes
Extinguishing the couple hundred million tons burning in coal seam fires annually, some going back to Chinese dynasties, would seem low hanging fruit to pick if the aim is emissions reduction rather than reengineering or some sort of theocratic Garden of Eden/fall from grace hardwired religiousity impulse as replacement opiate. Or maybe if hominids are uninvolved, no wealth creation or transfer afforded, it is simply of no interest. Supposedly 1.5% of CO2 global output, 4%-8% guesstimated Chinese contribution
not to mention particulate nor waste of a resource available for eventual gasification if not burning.
Nary a mention, watt's up with that. They aren't cheap or easy to extinguish, each requiring a unique solution, but doable at possibly a reasonable cost/benefit relative to other proposals. Win-win-win, no losers in sight. Maybe that's the problem.
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html
A couple of thoughts:
1. If you are interested in "decentralization," why on earth are you interested in international treaties, which centralize power dramatically. Ten guys sitting in Brussels telling someone in Nigeria how much wood they can burn in their evening fire on Thursdays?
2. This "soot" crisis strikes me as a fallback position by the AGW crowd. Their theory is showing it's clay feet and the public has noticed. So they need a new crisis. Remember, the Global Warming crisis was a fallback for the failed Global Cooling theory of the 70's. What all have in common is that there is a huge crisis that must be solved now by global governance. Maybe there is a soot crisis. But I'll approach the science from charlatans like Hansen with a very skeptical eye.
Anon, I'm for decentralization of POWER PRODUCTION.
And I'm NOT saying I believe in global warming. I am purposely NOT addressing it one way or the other.
What I AM saying is reducing soot improves health and does not involve scams like carbon cap and trade, does not involve ceding soveriegnty to World Bank, etc..
It is good to see someone bringing this up.
A few years ago our utility in Texas had a plan to build a lot of new coal plants to ensure supply and lower costs to the booming economy here. The Dallas Morning News put article after article above the fold against that, citing polution and health concerns.
However, seldom did the articles cite any =measures= of pollution types concerned, relative dangerosity of the various polution types, or scrubbing technologies that might reduce the impact pollution types we should be concerned about. Instead we had full page spreads full of fact-free, number-phobic emotionality and hearsay, never any sort of factual breakdown, and for sure no cost-benefit analysis.
We CAN scrub particulates from the stack emissions, at some cost. And only some parts and types of those emissions are likely to be of particular concern for human health(primary concern) or "climate" (so far, still a nebulous concern).
The 9/11 data on diurnal temperature delta spikes is also related to a longer-term discovery about the pan evaporation rate:
"Ironically, if we keep bringing particle pollutants down—with great benefits to health—but continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, Peter Cox believes we could be creating the worst possible combination for global temperatures."
From a recent, and excellent, epsisode of Nova:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3310_sun.html
A list of Dr. Stanhill's original research is here:
http://old.agri.gov.il/People/GeraldStanhill.html
Professor Farquhar's original research is listed here:
http://www.rsbs.anu.edu.au/Profiles/Graham_Farquhar/
Clearly, the science, the models, and the predictions are all guesses - there is neither the data, nor the consensus to make precipitate judgements about future climate states. Soot may not be the only braking mechanism - particulates come in many flavors, and even black carbon soot seeds white clouds. If you talk about removing one kind of particulate, you have to account for the concomitant effects of removing others. No one knows what effect that will have on sun wattage per acre.
All the more reason to declare Copenhagen political circus, shut it down, and proscribe the scientific community of all its ideologues and data-theives, and let the obscure, mundane collectors of real signal, like those cited above, do their work in klieg-light-free peace until some real conclusions can be reached.
GW,
Thanks much for posting this, formatting glitches and all ;-)
FWIW, I've long suspected that the atmospheric CO2 issue by itself was not the primary culprit in glacial and arctic melting, if only because historically while we're in a "warm" period, it's well within temperature deviances even over the last ten thousand years. However, it's rather undeniable that glacial and tundral melting is occuring, something that really hasn't happened over the course of the last several hundred thousand years.
Thus, if it isn't atmospheric CO2, then there has to be another cause, and soot makes a lot more sense. Beyond its atmospheric absorption effects, soot itself also precipitates out onto snow and ice, which then absorbs sunlight and re-radiates it into the snow and ice itself, melting it. As the ice melts, the soot settles to the bottom of the melt, destabilizing the ice beneath it. Ordinarily, that soot would eventually be buried by enough ice that it no longer absorbs heat, but if you end up with a continual deposit of soot over time, this process doesn't happen, and the effect of it is the melting of sheets of ice as normal stress fractures caused by ice movement makes it possible for the (relatively warmer) carbon soot filled water to make its way into those cracks and cause destabilization.
At least that's the mechanism that I'd expect to be at work here. The soot from smokestack emissions is probably also aided and abetted by unburned hydrocarbon chains from fuel emissions and the breakdown of plastics through normal ablative processes.
I don't see cap and trade as solving the problem of soot production and unfortunately I suspect that we'll end up spending a fortune on carbon dioxide gas sequestration (which is probably net neutral as far as deglaciation goes) while only peripherally attacking the real problems.
If there's a direct relationship between carbon & temperatures then how on Earth was there cooling between the 40s through the 70s?
Nobody disputes that these decades saw a cooling trend. And a look at GDP numbers clearly shows a huge increase in industrial productivity during this time.
I'm all in favour of reducing actual pollution. I've seen the photographs of China that show horrific disregard to surrounding lakes, waterways, etc. and I'm old enough to remember acid rain. But this whole obsession with CO2 and with planetary warming is flat-out bullshit and I suspect a sideshow to distract from real environmental problems facing the BRIC countries and those in SE Asia.
Seems that as the bandwagon mentality rolls on about how great it is to get the soot out of the air have not installed or been involved in scrubber technology--first and foremost is that I am for clean air--the huge problem with any type of scrubber technology(removal of said contaminate) wether bag-water or static electricity is WASTE DISPOSAL. Remove 1 ton of soot and you have 1 ton of waste---where does it go ??? rivers -dumps-creeks-old mines etc---there is no difference between it falling out of the sky into the rivers etc than using a skidloader and putting it into dump trucks for disposal. Either way we still pollute.
where does it go ???
how about into the soil using gasification processes to filter out carbon and make biochar (side bonus -- also producing clean hydrogen power).
http://www.chickenjohn.com/mayor/innovation.html
biochar is super fertilizer--the soil in the amazon rain forest (what they call terra preta) has the highest concentration of biochar on earth.
of course, the one snag in this is that gasification also emits some of the boogeyman CO2, but if you have a farm next to that plant, i bet the crops would eat it up.
mad props btw for considering the waste disposal angle. methinks the real solutions will be about figuring out ways to close the loop.
Yes angles are the hardest part of any equation-total agreement on closing the loop-yet we are dealing with power/manufacturing giants and we all know what they are concerned with $$$$$$$$$.
Here is Mirant's reply to scrubber installation--yes it goes in landfills and I would imagine a percentage gets Deep sixed--as for the difference in waste via wet or dry is moot where dry always ends up in landfills rivers etc where wet method ends up as filler --ever wonder why concrete cracks and crumbles-too much fly ash-as for myself when ordering mud specify no flyash. Forgot about mercury-yes it is removed just to be moved.
http://www.mirant.com/our_business/what_we_do/scrubberfaq.htm
AGW has hijacked the attention of the world. Thanks for shifting the focus.
Now that is something I could support, AGS. The reality is people closer to heavy traffic areas are more likely to get cancer, and the small particles from burning fossil fuels are a health issue (ethanol is even worse). I am anti-soot and support anti-soot polllution regulations (because we have the technology to clean up soot) although I still don't want to cede sovereignty to a global government made up of GS and the World Bank.
Yup.
I read that too:
"During the three-day period when there were no commercial flights and only a few contrails from military planes, we got this sudden increase in the temperature range due to the fact that we suddenly had clearer skies across the country," Travis said.
The diurnal temperature range rose sharply on Sept. 11 and fell again on Sept. 14 when commercial flights resumed, he said.
The diurnal temperature range for Sept. 11-13 for the last 30 years across the U.S., prior to 2001, was 35 degrees. But for the same period last year after the terrorist attacks, it rose to 38 degrees.
I was around in the 70's when every smoke stack was black and catalytic converters didn't exist. The US cleaned up it's act and global cooling went away. That black stuff is China and India doing what we did in the 70's. The US is proof pollution can be corrected. We have cleaner water,air, and more trees now than we have ever had. Trees are planted 3 to 1 for every one cut down by federal law since 1920.
This angle you are using to breath life back into that rotting corpse in Copenhagen isn't working. But maybe if you all get together right quick and change back to global cooling. Then when China and India clean up their act, change back to global warming!
Yep. The U.S in the 60's-70's was a big mess. Rivers were catching on fire, smog was a real issue. We've come a long way in exporting the pollution to producer countries.
excellent point
GW;
You seem about as conflicted as the sorry excuse for a piece of human garbage at the end of this link.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/busy-man.htm
I agree, The comment at the end of this link about "human Garbage" is waaay inappropriate and says nothing. The garbage is in his head. His link doesnt work either. He should go back to the ya=hoos at those Yahoo financial blogs where he'll fit right in with with a Low IQ and attack comments instead of substance.
George please explain this to me I'm a seeker of truth not a scientist......
I read a study by climatologists that claims that the temperature rose dramatically over the USA in recent history due to a profound lack of something on a certain day. Question: what day and what was the anomaly?
That day was 9/11, all aircraft were grounded.The condensation trails that usually sunscreen the country weren't there. Therefore some pollution protects is the way I read it.....It seems like a simple sunblock concept.
What say you about that? That has been bugging me. Try not to over complicate the science in your explanation to where we no/savvy...OK my friend?
Thanks for any help with that ,
Condensation trails are white and reflect most of the sunlight, and therefore heat, that hits them. Soot is black and absorbs a much larger percentage of the sunlight. Different pollutant, different effect.
Sorry about the formatting ... I've tried five times to fix, and have given up ...
Good work, and thanks! I was trying to figure out how to explain Cap and Trade as a sham-megatax, yet still positively address the issue of harmful emissions.