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.

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.

Soot from China, Asia, Escapes into Global Air

Image Source

It is finally being recognized that soot plays a larger role in climate and the melting of polar ice than does CO2 and other conventional greenhouse gases. Besides this indirect role of causing melting snow and ice, soot may also play a more direct role in "climate change":

The report concludes that the atmospheric warming effect of black carbon pollution is as much as three to four times the consensus estimate released last year in a report by the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The findings are of concern to areas such as the Indian subcontinent, where retreating glaciers in the Himalayas have the potential to flood densely populated areas and affect the drinking water of billions of people.__LAT

China is likely the world's largest emitter of soot, by far, given its huge dependence upon dirty coal power plants. China has become so polluted, in fact, that Olympic athletes have traveled outside of mainland China to train for the summer games.

As can be seen from numerous satellite images, the soot emissions of China and Asia do not all stay close to the sources of blight. In fact, Canada and the US suffer from wind-blown soot from Asia. Certainly the northern sea ice has suffered from contact with Asian soot.

The IPCC GCM's are in urgent need of modification to address new findings in the area of soot contributions, ocean oscillations, cloud feedbacks, solar cycles, and other important contributions to climate change which have hitherto been ignored by the climate orthodoxy.

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)

Dirty Snow Responsible for Over a Third of Arctic Warming

Soot from industry in China and other industrial northern nations, and soot from forest fires, is staining Arctic snow darker, helping to cause a substantial amount of arctic warming. Other causes of arctic warming include other atmospheric particles, clouds, land use, solar variability, and possibly greenhouse gases.

The public has a difficult time mentally distinguishing soot and other atmospheric particles from CO2 and other greenhouse gases. That is unfortunate, since the distinction is extremely important when considering the future of climate, and possible human interventions to mitigate possible warming.

Such a huge impact on arctic warming should have been discovered prior to this time, and would have been, if GCM climate models actually had any credibility. The stubborn tendency of climate modelers to refuse to look at other reasons for warming suggests that many other credible causes of warming may have been suppressed in the rush to blame CO2.