Chinese Soot Invasion! US DOE Scientist Warn that Soot Causing Earlier Snowmelt

Scientists have long known that Chinese soot crosses the Pacific Ocean, and contributes to the melting of western North American mountain snow, glaciers, and even northern hemisphere sea ice.

Up to 75 percent of the soot hitting the Western USA is from China, potentially causing 30 percent of regional warming in the Western USA. It's also believed as sooty snowfall is deposited in the American Sierras and Rockies, the dirty snow actually causes earlier snow melts and glacier loss as a result of the increased heat absorption from soot-darkened snow and ice. _Source

A new study by the US DOE's Pacific NorthWest National Lab shows that this Chinese soot combined with local soot from diesel engines can be causing early snowmelt in the Cascades, Sierras, and Rocky Mountains, as well as reducing the snowfall amount -- with adverse consequences.

Overall, doubling the dimming of the snow did not lead to twice as high temperature changes -- it led to an approximate 50 percent increase in the snow surface temperature. The drop in snow accumulation, however, more than doubled in some areas. Snowpack over the central Rockies and southern Alberta, for example, dropped two to 50 millimeters over the mountains during late spring and early winter. The most drastic changes occurred in March, the model showed.

The team also found that soot decreased snow's brightness in two ways. About half of soot's effect came from its dark color. The other half came indirectly from reducing the size of the snowpack, exposing the underlying darker earth. _Eurekalert

This study utilised a computer model to estimate the temperature effects of soot accumulation on snowpack. Similar dynamics is at work on glaciers and sea ice.

Climatology has generally neglected the effect of soot on these phenomena, instead ascribing them to CO2 warming instead. Such errors not only expose much of the climatological mainstream as being sloppy and unscientific, they also send engineers off on wild goose chases, pursuing the wrong strategies to mitigate the effect.

Recovering Arctic Ice

Image Source

Be sure to check out this article from the mainstream, and Anthony Watts' take on the issue.

Soot and Dust May Be Responsible for 50% or More of Glacial and Polar Ice Melt

Since the earth's climate has stopped warming, at least temporarily, scientists will have to find another reason for polar and glacial ice melt.

[Thomas] Painter said dust's effects on snow are a global problem. The disappearance of central Asia's Aral Sea, for example, magnifies ecological devastation by sending plumes of dust off the dry lake bed. The dust blows east and settles in China's Tienshan mountain range, where it disrupts the snowpack's hydrologic cycles.

Old lake bed sediments document changes over time, in the way historic weather patterns are written into tree rings. Reading these sediments reveals a surge in dust emissions around the world, Painter said.

LA Times

A similar process is taking place in the Arctic:

Now a team at UC Irvine has signaled that dirty snow can be responsible for over 35 % of the Arctic meltdown, besides global warming induced by greenhouse gases.

Snow gets dirty due to soot from tailpipes, smoke stacks and forest fires which enters the atmosphere and falls to the ground. Dark surfaces absorb sun energy and get warmer, while bright white normal snow surfaces reflect heat back into space, cooling the air.
"When we inject dirty particles into the atmosphere and they fall onto snow, the net effect is we warm the polar latitudes. Dark soot can heat up quickly. It’s like placing tiny toaster ovens into the snow pack," said co-author Charlie Zender, associate professor of Earth system science at UCI.

Source

It is important to ascertain all the influences on Earth's ecosystem--both natural and anthropogenic. Recent discoveries of volcanic melting influences on Arctic sea ice, Greenland pack ice, and Antarctic glacial ice suggests that the mere fact of melting ice needs to be looked at more scientifically--and less politically. (hint to Al Gore)

Naked Glacier Dwellers In Danger of Extinction from Global Warming

A tribe of naked glacier dwellers was recently discovered in the middle of a mass trans-glacial migration, by wildlife photographers high in a remote portion of the Swiss Alps. The ice-dwelling tribe comprises almost six hundred naked members, who apparently speak only body language for communication.

Highly trained anthropologists from Greenpeace were rushed to the scene in an attempt to discover the tribe's history and customs, before the glaciers vanish and the tribe goes extinct. The Greenpeace scientists quickly shed their own clothes, in a desperate attempt to establish communication, as the clock ticks down on global warming.

As of our last radio transmission, all attempts at establishing body language communication had been unsuccessful--perhaps because the proximity to the glacier induced uncontrollable shivering and shrinkage of certain body tissues of the researchers. The message conveyed to the tribe by the shivering shrinkage apparently repulsed all members of the tribe, who significantly turned their backs on the scientists. At that very moment, an eerie yodeling sound echoed from the surrounding peaks, as if the glaciers themselves had cried out in pain.

Al Gore, James Hansen, Bono, Laurie David, and Leonardo di Caprio announced a joint filmmaking expedition to explore and preserve this courageous tribe in the fight for its very existence. "For at least three long ice ages and inter-glacials this care-free tribe led an idyllic existence among the clouds," said Gore. "We hope that their sad story will shame all of those who deny the global warming holocaust, those traitors to the children of Gaia."

All of us can only echo Mr. Gore's sentiments, and wish the very best for the naked glacier dwellers in the sky. Even after they are extinct, we will never forget the ice people and their brave struggle.

Hat tip Lubos

Inconvenient Global Warming Update Truth: Earth Still Warmed by Sun

Recent climate research reinforces a point I made in this post: the sun's influence on climate cannot be ignored and swept under the rug. Research published in PNAS illustrate the dramatic effect of solar variation on levels of glaciation in the Andes, over the past 1000 years.

Check out this analysis of the study in climate audit:

Eduardo Zorita sent me an interesting paper (Pollissar et al 2006, Solar modulation of Little Ice Age climate in the tropical Andes) hot off the press on June 1, 2006, co-authored by Bradley, which reported:

The intersection of the ELA [equilibrium line altitude] and pollen estimates indicate that during the LIA the Venezuelan Andes were both cooler (~3.2°C) and wetter (~208 mm/ yr, +22%) than present … Our data suggest considerable sensitivity of tropical climate to small changes in radiative forcing from solar irradiance variability.

They mention that "during most of the past 10,000 yr, glaciers were absent from all but the highest peaks in the Cordillera de Merida." Go to climate audit for more analysis with graphs from the study.

The Pollisar paper was also mentioned in CO2 Science:

Since Polissar et al.'s data suggest that the Little Ice Age in the tropical Andes of South America likely owed its existence to decreased solar activity, it follows that the prior Medieval Warm Period was likely sustained by greater solar activity. In addition, since the Current Warm Period in this region has not yet achieved the high temperature level experienced by the Medieval Warm Period, when there was something on the order of 100 ppm less CO2 in the air than there is today, there is no compelling reason to believe that earth's current warmth is sustained to any degree by its extra 100 ppm of CO2. It's the enhanced activity of the sun that is likely responsible for it. Source.

This Chronwatch piece entitled: "Global Warming: Some Inconvenient Glaciers", pulls no punches in taking the implications of solar variation's effect on climate straight to Al Gore's doorstep:

Al Gore says the world’s glaciers are melting because humanity has emitted too much CO2.

A new peer-reviewed study shows, however, that in South America‘s Andes Mountains the glaciers’ advances and retreats have not been governed by CO2, but by small variations in the sun’s intensity.

The study, led by P.J. Polissar of the University of Massachusetts, found that Andean glaciers expanded only four times during the 600 years of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1250 AD to 1850. Each of those glacier advances occurred during a solar minimum, when the sun’s lowered activity apparently dropped the mountain-top temperatures by 2–4 degrees C and increased precipitation by about 20 percent.

The Polissar team’s report, “Solar Modulation of Little Ice Age Climate in the Tropical Andes,” was recently published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team studied the glaciers’ moraines--piles of rocks, soil, tree trunks and other glacial debris left behind when the glaciers retreated. Then they matched the glacial debris with the sediment layers in nearby mountain lakes. The pronounced seasonality in the Andes precipitation allows the researchers to count years in the sediments and precisely date the glacial advances.

The Andes glacier study not only links glacial advances and retreats with the sun, but emphasizes that the earth’s glaciers have often retreated--and even disappeared--during past centuries, long before humans built cars and smokestacks.

Most of the Andes glaciers must have disappeared during the Holocene Warming that ended just 5,000 years ago. Temperatures then were as much as 2 degrees C warmer than today’s. So far, the Modern Warming has produced about only 0.8 degrees C of total temperature rise in its 150 years.

The sun has been linked to earth’s climate changes for the past 400 years--by sunspot records. Early astronomers noted that the two coldest periods of the Little Ice Age occurred when there were virtually no sunspots on the sun. The Sporer Minimum lasted from 1420 to 1570, and the Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1710.

The solar-earth linkage came to the fore again in the 1980s, when researchers brought up the first long ice cores from Greenland and the Antarctic. The 400,000 years of temperature history contained in the ice cores clearly showed a moderate, natural cycle that raised temperatures at the latitude of New York and Paris by about 2 degrees C, and then lowered them by a similar amount. The cycles averaged about 1500 years in length. Carbon 14 and beryllium 10 isotopes in the ice clearly linked this temperature cycle to the sun.

The question for Al Gore is not whether our temperatures are rising; the key question is why they’re rising. Antarctic ice cores tell us that temperatures and CO2 in the atmosphere have tracked closely together through recent Ice Ages, but the CO2 changes have lagged behind the temperature changes by about 800 years.

Higher temperatures have produced more atmospheric CO2, rather than CO2 producing higher temperatures! That’s because most of the planet’s CO2 is stored in the oceans, and as the seawater warms, it can’t hold as much CO2.

If CO2 is the driving climate force, why did the earth begin warming in 1850, while human CO2 emissions didn’t start to really expand until about 1940? Mr. Gore doesn’t tell us the answer.

Why did the earth’s temperatures decline from 1940 to 1975, even as CO2 emissions were soaring? Mr. Gore doesn’t say.

How warm will New York get in the Modern Warming? Apparently Mr. Gore can’t tell us, but a total of 2 degrees C seems likely--based on the history in the ice cores.
Source.

The illusion of "consensus" in the scientific community in regard to a "human caused climate catastrophe of monumental proportions" has been well maintained by those who call themselves journalists of the mainstream media. Currently, many young scientists are afraid to express their divergent opinions due to the current hysterical atmosphere surrounding the topic of climate change. Al Gore is responsible for much of the hysteria that is inimical to objective science.