Arctic Warming? From Black Soot, Not CO2

Remember the sad polar bear from Al Gores Propumentary? It was easy to see in the old bear's eyes that it knew -- IT KNEW!!! -- that it was doomed to drown in the lonely arctic seas. And the wise old bear obviously understood that it was humans that melted the ice. Humans who blasted the atmosphere with CO2 from their central air conditioning, their sports utility vehicles, their incandescent light bulbs. The bear knew.

But in real life things can be a bit different from in the propu-movies. It seems that most of the warming and melting of the arctic comes from black soot -- not CO2. Of the rest, most is due to natural climate cycles.

A pair of researchers from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space (GISS) and Columbia University have found that black carbon is responsible for 50%, or almost 1 °C of the total 1.9 °C increased Arctic warming from 1890 to 2007. The paper by Drew Shindell and Greg Faluvegi of Columbia, published in Nature Geoscience, also notes that most of the Arctic warming—1.48 °C of the 1.9 °C—occurred from 1976 to 2007.

The study is the first to quantify the Arctic’s sensitivity to black carbon emissions from various latitudes, and concludes that the Arctic responds strongly to black carbon emissions from the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, where the emissions and the forcing are greatest. _GCC

Most of this soot comes from China. Since China has built a huge new coal plant every 10 days over the past year or so, there is no sign of slowing down for Chinese soot production. CO2, on the other hand, is a negligible contributor to arctic warming. Between soot and natural weather cycles, roughly 90% of arctic warming can be explained. CO2 may be responsible for under 5% of warming.

The old bear thought he understood, but he had been misled by Al Gore's script writers. Just like millions of school children, and hundreds of thousands of politicians, journalists, and college professors. Of the rest who believe in anthropogenic global warming catastrophe -- gullible fools and zombies -- nothing more needs to be said at this time.