Does dirty air cool the climate? Interesting New Study On Climate Change

[Trent]

Does dirty air cool the climate?
Study adds a factor to climate-change debate.
By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Over the past several decades, industrial countries have made major strides in cleaning up pollutants roiling from smokestacks.

But some researchers now say this progress could have a troubling side effect - accelerating the pace of global warming.

The reason: Tiny pollutant particles, once airborne, can reflect sunlight back into space, easing temperatures in what is known as aerosol cooling. By cleaning up industrial pollution, countries are reducing the effect of this cooling.

Nobody is recommending that nations halt efforts to curb pollution.

Still, when this factor is taken into account, global warming could outpace the level now forecast by climatologists, a team of European climate scientists reports in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature. Already, climate estimates sponsored by the United Nations foresee average temperatures rising by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

The study doesn't represent a formal forecast, but the team says it highlights the importance of pinning down the impact of twin changes in the atmosphere: As aerosol pollutants play an increasingly small role in affecting temperatures, the effect of changes in greenhouse-gas levels will play an even more significant role.

"Scientists must pay more attention to this issue as they do more complex modeling, and the public needs to be aware of the implications," says Meinrat Andreae, who led the research.

The team made calculations based on a simplified set of equations describing how the climate system works. Indeed, other researchers liken the effort to a somewhat sophisticated back-of-the-envelope calculation scientists often perform to see if a phenomenon is worth a second look.

The results, published a week before the G-8 summit in Scotland, are likely to add urgency to British Prime Minister Tony Blair's efforts to keep climate change a headline issue.

But Mr. Blair has been unable to convince President Bush to support mandatory targets and timetables for emissions reductions. The White House's preferred approach instead focuses on reducing the US economy's carbon intensity - the amount of carbon emitted per unit of economic output - by 18 percent over 10 years. It relies heavily on research and market forces to encourage adoption of technologies to achieve its goals.

The European research team's call for more research also comes as the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is in the midst of preparing its next set of climate-change reports, set for release in 2007. Researchers had to submit results to journals by mid-May - deadlines that suggest a flurry of new studies relating to the global climate will come out over the next year.

Researchers are aiming to narrow uncertainties linked to climate sensitivity and man-made aerosols, because sensitivity determines how much warming could be expected as concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping "greenhouse" gases in the atmosphere grow. Even from the effects of what humans already have pumped skyward, many researchers believe the atmosphere's temperature will increase by 2 degrees by 2100. That number would rise with continued greenhouse emissions.

If the impact of aerosol cooling is small and the climate is less sensitive to CO2 increases than current estimates hold, warming might fall toward the low end of projections by the IPCC's science working group. If cooling has been large and the climate is very sensitive, warming could exceed their projections.

Uncertainties about aerosol cooling and climate sensitivity to greenhouse gasses remain large. But as new studies have emerged, the importance of these two factors has appeared to grow, says Dr. Andreae, who heads the biogeochemistry department at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Aerosol cooling may have been greater in the past than we believed, and the climate may be more sensitive to greenhouse-gas accumulation.

While the European team's broad description of cooling and sensitivity is the latest warning, the devil is in the details, other climate scientists say.

For example, the team's calculations appear to be based in part on the assumption that all of the warming since the 1850s is due to human activities. The IPCC, in contrast, has been willing to attribute "most" of the warming over the past 40 years. The difference seems small, only a few tenths of a degree. But it leads to a lower climate sensitivity than Andreae's team calculates, notes Theodore Anderson, a climate researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Moreover, ice core data from the last glacial maximum some 20,000 years ago place limits on the climate's sensitivity, notes Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. This leads to a climate system less responsive to changing CO2 levels than the European team's model implies - and in line with estimates that underlie current climate-change projections.

In addition, all pollutants are not created equal, both researchers add. Sulfur-based aerosols from burning fossil fuels tend to reflect sunlight back into space, acting as an atmospheric coolant. But other aerosols, such as black-carbon soot, warm the atmosphere. The relative contribution of each is highly uncertain. But their offsetting effects could lead to weaker aerosol cooling than Andreae's team suggests. Moreover, aerosols have indirect but important effects on clouds that the model fails to capture.

If nothing else, the effort highlights the importance of a set of satellite missions aimed at solving the cloud-aerosol problems. Two satellites are set for launch later this year that will round out a suite of five satellites dubbed "the A Train." The satellites orbit Earth in a line so their unique instruments can cover the same swaths of the atmosphere. The satellites fill wide gaps in measurements of aerosols, clouds, their movements, and their interactions with each other and with climate, helping to zero in on the climate's true sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentrations.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0630/p01s02-usgn.html?s=hns
That's certainly a different way of looking at.

[foot_soldier]

Thanks for posting this, Trent.

From the article: ....."Scientists must pay more attention to this issue as they do more complex modeling.....
Scientists have been "paying attention" to this issue for awhile now:

1997
The cooling effect of air pollution
http://climate.wri.org/pubs_content_text.cfm?ContentID=2147

Source: 1997. Climate protection and the national interest: The links among climate change, air pollution, and energy security. James J. MacKenzie.

In addition to the CFC destruction of ozone (see the sidebar on halogenated compounds), a second cooling effect offsets some global warming. Small atmospheric particles (called aerosols) are formed from sulfur dioxide air pollution, biomass burning, and other sources. These aerosols shield the earth -- mostly in regions downwind of industrialized areas -- from some of the incoming sunlight and cause cooling both directly, by scattering sunlight, and indirectly, by helping to form reflective clouds.[13]

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), these small particles have offset some of the expected global warming over the past several decades. The predicted warming, with and without the aerosol effect, is shown in Figure 5. The cooling effect of the aerosols brings the calculated rise in temperature into closer agreement with the observed changes of the past few decades.

Unlike most greenhouse gases, aerosols remain in the air for only a matter of days. As a result, as pollution emissions are reduced, so too will the cooling effect of the aerosols. Given the continued need to cut air pollution emissions to protect health and reduce acid deposition, the task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions becomes increasingly important. (more information at link)

July 11, 2001
AIR POLLUTION MAY ACTUALLY AID IN LOCAL BATTLES AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/MediaAlerts/2001/200107115000.html

COLLEGE STATION -- Sure, air pollution is bad, but new research indicates that a limited amount of aerosol pollutants in the air could partially counteract global warming, at least on a local scale.

Texas A&M University atmospheric sciences professor Don Collins has received grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to design instruments to measure the impacts of aerosol pollution on climate. Collins will use funds from the three-year NASA grant to develop an aircraft-mounted device to study the interaction of aerosols with light, while the five-year NSF grant money will go toward an instrument to determine exactly which particles will form droplets in clouds.

"Aerosols are man-made chemical particles that accumulate in our atmosphere," said Collins, who teaches and conducts research in the College of Geosciences' Department of Atmospheric Sciences. "Aerosols are the primary cause of the haze over a city on a polluted day. Certain aerosol particles can absorb sunlight, while others scatter or reflect light. Increased concentrations of particles can also modify clouds, which causes more energy to be reflected back into space."

Both scenarios can affect climate -- absorption of sunlight by aerosols causes warming, while enhanced scattering or increased cloud reflection causes a cooling effect..... (continued)

.....and the public needs to be aware of the implications,".....
Yep.

February 3, 1999
Aerosols, clouds, climate get $25 million study
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/science/9902/03/aerosols.enn/

(ENN) -- There seems to be a general consensus that humans are changing global climate, but are we heating it up, cooling it down or both?

Atmospheric interaction between greenhouse gases, which are causing global warming, and aerosol pollutants, which are known to cool the planet, have made building climate prediction models a tad difficult. An international study is now under way to try to determine how the aerosols work..... (continued)

INDOEX - January to April 1999
Greenhouse Warming or Aerosol Cooling?
http://www-indoex.ucsd.edu/

Regional consequences of global warming depend critically on the potentially large cooling effect of another pollutant, known as aerosols. These tiny particles, of about a millionth of a centimeter or smaller in diameter, scatter sunlight back to space and cause a regional cooling effect. These aerosols consisting of sulfates, soot, organic carbon and mineral dust are produced both naturally and by human activities. Results of numerous global warming models suggest that the aerosol cooling is one of the largest, if not the largest, sources of uncertainty in predicting future climate. Still, the complex influence of aerosol cooling on global warming is not clearly understood. This issue will remain a mystery unless field experiments, such as the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX), are undertaken to collect in-situ data on the regional cooling effect of sulfate and other aerosols.

INDOEX addresses questions of climate change that are of high priority and of great value to the US and the international community. The project's goal is to study natural and anthropogenic climate forcing by aerosols and feedbacks on regional and global climate. This issue is at the core of the International Global Change Research Program and has been identified by IPCC as a major gap in the science of climate change prediction..... (continued)

August 17, 2001
Black Carbon Aerosol Pollution Cools, Heats, Confuses
http://unisci.com/stories/20013/0817013.htm

[halva]

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_trans.shtml

[halva]

Ring Could Shade Earth and Stop Global Warming (http://www.livescience.com/technology/050627_warming_solution.html)
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Writer

A wild idea to combat global warming suggests creating an artificial ring of small particles or spacecrafts around Earth to shade the tropics and moderate climate extremes.

There would be side effects, proponents admit. An effective sunlight-scattering particle ring would illuminate our night sky as much as the full Moon, for example.

And the price tag would knock the socks off even a big-budget agency like NASA: $6 trillion to $200 trillion for the particle approach. Deploying tiny spacecraft would come at a relative bargain: a mere $500 billion tops.

But the idea, detailed today in the online version of the journal Acta Astronautica, illustrates that climate change can be battled with new technologies, according to one scientist not involved in the new work.

Mimic a volcano

All scientists agree that Earth gets warmer and colder across the eons. A delicate and ever-changing balance between solar radiation, cloud cover, and heat-trapping greenhouse gases controls long-term swings from ice ages to warmer conditions like today.

Earth's Atmosphere

An illustration of the ring of particles or spacecraft casting a shadow on equatorial Earth. To keep the particles in place, gravitationally significant shepherding spacecraft might be employed. They would herd the particle much like small moons keep Saturns rings in place.

Those who are often called experts admit to glaring gaps in their knowledge of how all this works. A study last month revealed that scientists can't pin down one of the most critical keys: how much sunlight our planet absorbs versus how much is reflected back into space.

Nonetheless, most scientists think our climate has warmed significantly over the past century and will grow warmer over the next hundred years. Various studies claim the planet is destined to warm by anywhere from 1 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit over the next few centuries. Seas will rise dramatically, the scenario goes, inundating coastal cities. But another group of scientists argue that the temperature data supporting a warming planet is not firm and that projections, based on computer modeling, might be wildly off the mark.

Either way, perhaps our fate is more in our hands than we might have imagined.

"Reducing solar insolation by 1.6 percent should overcome a 1.75 K [3 degrees Fahrenheit] temperature rise," contends a group led by Jerome Pearson, president of Star Technology and Research, Inc. "This might be accomplished by a variety of terrestrial or space systems."

The power of scattering sunlight has been illustrated naturally, the scientists note. Volcanic eruptions, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, pumped aerosols into the atmosphere and cooled the global climate by about a degree. Other researchers have suggested such schemes as adding metallic dust to smoke stacks, to flood the atmosphere and reflect more sunlight back into space.

In the newly outlined approach, reflective particles might come from the mining of Earth, the Moon or asteroids. They'd be put into orbit around the equator. Alternately, tiny micro-spacecraft could be deployed with reflective umbrellas.

A ring created by a batch of either "shades the tropics primarily, providing maximum effectiveness in cooling the warmest parts of our planet," the scientists write. An early version of their idea was presented but not widely noticed in 2002.

Eccentric but reassuring

Those researchers who don't buy the argument that global warming is occurring at any significant rate nor that humans are largely to blame may warm up quickly to the new idea.

Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, tracks climate research and the resulting media coverage. He's among the small but vocal group that goes against mainstream thought on the topic of global warming.

"I don't think that the modest warming trend we are currently experiencing poses any significant or long-term threat," Peiser told LiveScience. "Nevertheless, what the paper does show quite impressively is that our hyper-complex civilization is theoretically and technologically capable of dealing with any significant climate change we may potentially face in the future."

Peiser also notes that the Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is estimated to cost the world economy some $150 billion a year. He also sees a broader rationale for supporting the seemingly bizarre manner of managing Earth's temperature budget.

"I believe that this mindset, despite its apparent eccentricity, is actually rather reassuring," Peiser said. "It provides concerned people with ample evidence of the extraordinary human ingenuity that, as so often in the past, has helped to overcome many predicaments that were regarded as impenetrable in previous times."

He also sees an ultimate big-picture reasoning to look favorably on the notion of controlling Earth's climate.

"Whatever the cost and regardless of whether there is any major risk due to global warming," Peiser said, "it would appear to me that such a space-based infrastructure will evolve sooner or later, thus forming additional stepping stones of our emerging migration towards outer space."

[foot_soldier]

....."I believe that this mindset, despite its apparent eccentricity, is actually rather reassuring," Peiser said. "It provides concerned people with ample evidence of the extraordinary human ingenuity that, as so often in the past, has helped to overcome many predicaments that were regarded as impenetrable in previous times."....
This guy's been watching too many Rumsfeld videos.

Jesus, is there any limit to how patronizing these jerks allow themselves to get?

[Trent]

Wow. Thanks for all of the links.

Lots of good stuff here to absorb. It'll take a while to read it all.

[jayreynolds]

This guy's been watching too many Rumsfeld videos.

Jesus, is there any limit to how patronizing these jerks allow themselves to get?

Why so pessimistic? Life is beautiful. The human lifespan has increased from under thirty years several thousand years ago, to around forty for our great-grandparents, to around 80 years now.

This increase and the increased leisure time and general prosperity of our modern life have allowed us to not be forced to carry water twice a day or spend many hours walking from place to place each day. The resulting time surplus should be not be utilized complaining and spreading gloom and doom stories, but enjoying the fruits of our human ingenuity.

Still, there have always been sullen muttering discordants, pessimists, and false pundits.Z
Time deals harshly with them.

Global cooling.
Global dimming.
Chemtrails.
One by one, all fall down.

Whatever happened to Paul Ehrlich?

[halva]

Why motivate him to keep coming back here, footsoldier?

He is finding other interests, and that is to everyone's advantage, including his own.

[foot_soldier]

If we're going to have to share space here in the Science section with threads about Fendi bags I think it's reasonable to have the threads that are actually science-related on top.

[halva]

July 19, 1999

Scientists see ominous signs of rapid global warming (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/archive/1999/07/19/NEWS7965.dtl)

Like an omen from the Book of Revelation, a wispy, silvery-blue noctilucent cloud hovered over Colorado late last month.

The timing couldn't have been more appropriate.

The cloud - the "miner's canary" of climate change, some call it - appears as global warming research is becoming a major scientific industry in fields ranging from atmospheric physics to biology.

Experts are increasingly convinced that carbon dioxide gas from the burning of fossil fuels is at least partly responsible for the marked warming of recent years.

And the warming is accelerating.

"Almost every climate model says the same thing. . . . In the next decade, we might see the same amount of warming that we saw over the last century," says ocean chemist Peter G. Brewer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Monterey.

What will global warming bring? Fewer fish and icebergs? More rain and a damper Big Apple? In the diverse world of global warming research, the latest news includes:

*Californians can look for rainier weather, because average temperatures are expected to rise from 2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years.

That could be especially bad for Californians if, as climate models project, the sea level rises by one to three feet around North America. Heavier rain and higher seas would increase coastal damage during storms, like the El Nino-generated storms of recent years.

*The Pacific ecosystem, especially fish that benefit much of the West Coast economy, could be threatened by global warming, Bay Area researchers warn.

"There's lots of data showing there are big changes in marine ecosystems from the tropics to the poles," says biological oceanographer James P. Barry of the Monterey Bay Institute. For example, "if you look at the record from 1992 to now, there's just been a precipitous decline in salmon stocks - they're smaller and have less fat."

*An ominous absence of icebergs in the Grand Banks shipping lanes off Newfoundland might be an early warning sign of global warming, Science magazine reported July 2.

*New York City will suffer repeated flooding in the next century as global warming raises the sea level, soaking subways and turning parts of Brooklyn into wetlands, said a report issued jointly on June 29 by the Environmental Defense Fund and Columbia University.

Global warming might seem like an unreal issue to residents of Northern California: They are shivering through one of the chillier summers in long memory.

Indeed, the Northern California coast is likely to remain unusually cool through the summer, thanks to cold Pacific currents. So says the seasonal forecast by meteorologist Jim Wagner and his colleagues at the U.S. Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Md.

The cold water is associated with La Nina following the warm-water El Nino of the winter of 1997-98, Wagner says.

Still, such short-term coolings can't obscure the long-term signal: It's getting warmer, all around the Earth.

New projections of global warming indicate it might be even slightly worse than originally foreseen. Previously, scientists expected an average planetary temperature rise of 1.4 to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years. Now they're looking at a rise of 2.3 to 7.2 degrees, says Tom Wigley, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

That 1-degree difference in projections might seem slight. In fact, it equals the entire amount of rise in average global temperature over the last century, Wigley says.

Why have climate projections worsened? One reason is increased success in controlling another pollutant: sulfur dioxide. While carbon dioxide warms the atmosphere, sulfur dioxide cools it; until recently, experts hoped that sulfur dioxide would counterbalance global warming.

Now that hope is fading as nations establish tighter controls on sulfur dioxide emissions, Wigley says.

For that reason, slightly higher rates of warming and sea level rise related to warming are expected, according to a climate study written by Wigley and released June 29 by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Washington.

In the next century, the rates of rise in temperature and sea level might occur up to seven times as fast as in the 20th century, the Pew study adds.

Many computer models agree that the warming will continue into the 21st century. As a result, California will see "increased precipitation, at least for the winters," Wigley says.

"When the world gets warmer, the oceans can evaporate more moisture and the atmosphere can hold more moisture - and it's got to come out somewhere." Wigley said. "The tricky thing is to figure out where." Climate models indicate California is one of those places, he says.

Computer models have indicated that global warming in the lower atmosphere would be accompanied by high-altitude cooling.

In 1994, Professor Gary Thomas of the University of Colorado at Boulder forecast that as the upper air cooled, beautiful noctilucent clouds - common in polar latitudes - would appear at southerly latitudes. The clouds are wispy and silvery-blue, composed of very small ice crystals. They resemble cirrus clouds, but are far higher, some 50 miles up.

Sure enough, on June 22, 50 miles in the sky over Boulder, a silver-bluish noctilucent cloud drifted overhead. It is the farthest south such a cloud has been recorded, Thomas says.

The southerly drift of noctilucent clouds may be the miner's canary of global warming - a signal of bad times ahead, he says. "What we're seeing are some dramatic (upper atmospheric cooling) effects that are far greater than what the models are predicting."

Yet the national response to global warming remains sluggish and divided, many scientists complain.

"We are astonished that some members of Congress continue to ignore warnings from the scientific community," says biology Professor Walt Oechel, director of the Global Climate Change Research Group at San Diego State University. "Climate scientists from around the world are in wide agreement that global warming is real and could greatly disrupt society."

On June 28, Oechel and some 50 scientific colleagues assembled at the Congress to warn legislators.

"For too long, a vocal minority denying climate change has had the ear of Congress," said a member of the group, Richard Gammon, a professor of chemistry, oceanography and atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. "We hope our presence today serves as a wake-up call on this important issue."

Some of the most disturbing recent research comes from the scientific sub-specialty of paleoclimatology. Its researchers exploit everything from antarctic ice cores to ancient pollen samples to determine how Earth's average temperature has fluctuated over the centuries.

"I used to believe that changes in climate happened slowly and would never affect me," geophysicist-hydrologist Kendrick Taylor of the Desert Research Institute in Reno writes in the current issue of American Scientist.

But he says his attitude changed profoundly when he and colleagues examined ice cores from Greenland - long tubes of ice, extracted from the polar ice and stored in refrigerators. By analyzing the cores' chemical constituents, they and others concluded that in prehistoric times, the planet's climate repeatedly underwent rapid changes - sometimes in less than a decade, shorter than the span of the TV show "Seinfeld."

Based on the research, "now I know that our climate could change significantly in my lifetime," says Taylor, now chief scientist for an ice-core analysis program run by the National Science Foundation.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen markedly - as has Earth's average temperature. A growing number of scientists blame the former for the latter.

"I have certainly become more convinced that there is not only a human influence on climate - one that will accelerate in the future - but also that the magnitude of that influence is not small," Wigley said.

In the long run, some scientists say, humanity might dispose of atmospheric carbon dioxide by dumping it on the ocean floor. In theory, carbon dioxide from power plants could be collected and liquefied, then shipped to the ocean and dumped thousands of feet deep on the ocean floor.

Down there, in the eternal darkness, the gas theoretically would remain indefinitely, prevented from escaping to the surface by the crushing pressure of the overlying water.

Would carbon dioxide dumping work? Brewer of the Monterey Bay Institute and his colleagues from Stanford took a beaker of liquefied carbon dioxide and lowered it to the Pacific floor, 2 miles deep.

Observing via remote TV camera, they noted that "slushy ice began to form in the bottom of our beaker." Then blobs of the carbon dioxide spilled onto the seafloor and rolled away, out of camera range.

Might the gas harm the undersea ecosystem? That's the subject of experiments planned for next year.

During the last experiment, "a fish came by and thought of eating (a carbon dioxide blob)," Brewer recalls. As the fish "sniffed" it, though, the creature briefly behaved erratically - in Brewer's words, "it got a bit loopy."

[foot_soldier]

Re: July 19, 1999
Scientists see ominous signs of rapid global warming
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/archive/1999/07/19/NEWS7965.dtl

.....Why have climate projections worsened? One reason is increased success in controlling another pollutant: sulfur dioxide. While carbon dioxide warms the atmosphere, sulfur dioxide cools it; until recently, experts hoped that sulfur dioxide would counterbalance global warming.

Now that hope is fading as nations establish tighter controls on sulfur dioxide emissions, Wigley says.....
That's very interesting.

[NE0]

Lest say that "dirty air helps cool the climate" is truth, THAT dosen't mean it's ok to polute the air (you dummy-phony-conservatives) .
It means we should invent some kind of NON TOXIC/HARMLESS SPRAY for airplanes to spray over the sky in hot, over drouted areas; to create some sort of ARTIFICIAL CLOUDS.

(what do you think? )

[Et in Arcadia ego]

http://www-abc-asia.ucsd.edu/

You guys may be interested in this study:

Quick facts

* brown haze extends over South, Southeast and East Asia
* haze is concentrated 3 kilometers above the surface and can travel halfway around the globe in less than a week
* large surface cooling due to reduced sunlight perturbs the hydrological cycle

Brown haze composition

* black carbon and ash
* sulfates
* nitrates
* mineral dust
* 75% of the cloud is man-made

Cause

* forest fires
* inefficient cooking fuels
* factories
* motor vehicle use

Effects

* significant reduction of solar radiation to the surface by as much as 15%
* altered regional monsoon patterns (less sea evaporation from sunlight means less rain)
* less rain in northwest India, Pakistan, Afganistan, and western PRC by as much as 40%
* more rain and flooding in other areas
* reduction of photosythesis (drop in agricultural productivity)
* acid deposition and plant damage
* respiratory ailments

Sounds alot like what people blame Chemtrails for, eh?

[Et in Arcadia ego]

Lest say that "dirty air helps cool the climate" is truth, THAT dosen't mean it's ok to polute the air (you dummy-phony-conservatives) .
It means we should invent some kind of NON TOXIC/HARMLESS SPRAY for airplanes to spray over the sky in hot, over drouted areas; to create some sort of ARTIFICIAL CLOUDS.

(what do you think? )

See this month's Popular Science page 57, technique 5.

After doing that take a peek at the Pacific once or twice a day with the GOEES satalitte & make up your own mind. Matter of fact, you can take a look right now if you wanna:

http://weather.msfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/post-goes

The zoomed out page you can select viewing areas with:

http://weather.msfc.nasa.gov/GOES/goeswestpacus.html

[whitemajikman]

See this month's Popular Science page 57, technique 5.

After doing that take a peek at the Pacific once or twice a day with the GOEES satalitte & make up your own mind. Matter of fact, you can take a look right now if you wanna:

http://weather.msfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/post-goes

The zoomed out page you can select viewing areas with:

http://weather.msfc.nasa.gov/GOES/goeswestpacus.html


YOUR NOT VERY GOOD AT SPREADING FALSE PROPAGANDA.......

YOU MUST BE A NEWBIE AT THIS........BECAUSE YOU SURE HAVE NO CLUE OF WHAT YOU ARE SAYING.........BOTH SCIENTIFICALLY AND ETHICALLY.......

WMM

[Yaak]

Whitemajikman,

A few qustions for you concerning your past year of posting on these various related forums :

Is there anybody you haven't attacked?

Is there any religion you haven't been a member of?

Are there any belief systems you haven't held?

Have you backed-up any of your claims?

Do you feel that you have any credibility left?

Out of respect for the chidren that may be viewing here, would you please stop using foul language? It degrades everyone's image of you and serves no other purpose. Thanx.

[NE0]

See this month's Popular Science page 57, technique 5.

After doing that take a peek at the Pacific once or twice a day with the GOEES satalitte & make up your own mind. Matter of fact, you can take a look right now if you wanna:

http://weather.msfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/post-goes

The zoomed out page you can select viewing areas with:

http://weather.msfc.nasa.gov/GOES/goeswestpacus.html
What was your point ? (I'm lost here)

About Popular Science. I read it after after I poted my "atificial cloud" idea, and I thought "my idea was not at all farfetched"

1) I liked the idea of "tiny salt particles" to make the clouds brighter and more reflective.
We can do this over the oceans and desert.

2) The idea of creating a "shield in the orbit" is a good idea too.
It is expensive to build the shield but after that it is very cheap to mantain(?)
with tremendous results. (and it dosen't block the light)

[halva]

The BBC Horizon documentary 'Global Dimming' (with Greek subtitles) can be seen on-line at http://www.spitia.gr/greek/perivallon/planitikiskiasi.htm

Click under the gruesome picture on the orange line containing the words '33Mb me WMP'

[jayreynolds]

The BBC Horizon documentary 'Global Dimming' (with Greek subtitles) can be seen on-line at http://www.spitia.gr/greek/greek.htm

Click (under the gruesome first picture) the underlined line in red containing the words '33Mb me WMP) and wait for it to download.
Wayne, all I get is a virus warning, no thanks.

It really doesn't matter anyways, because two months after the BBC show about "global dimming" aired, the notion was superceded by research showing that 'Global Brightening had been underway for ten years!

Cleaner air makes brighter skies
By Richard Black
BBC News environment correspondent

"The amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface is increasing, two new studies in Science magazine suggest.

Using different methods, they find that solar radiation at the surface has risen for at least the last decade.

Previous work had found the opposite trend, leading to a popular theory known as "global dimming".

But the latest Swiss and US research indicates the dimming in the past has now been reversed, possibly because of reduced atmospheric pollution.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4520831.stm

[DvdGStwrt]

Lest say that "dirty air helps cool the climate" is truth, THAT dosen't mean it's ok to polute the air (you dummy-phony-conservatives) .
It means we should invent some kind of NON TOXIC/HARMLESS SPRAY for airplanes to spray over the sky in hot, over drouted areas; to create some sort of ARTIFICIAL CLOUDS.

(what do you think? )

Brillant! Absolutely brilliant that Idea is. Let's run a few models and see what comes of it!

;) :D ;) :D

I'm not laughing at you here - The fact is there are many who believe this is happening already.

They call it Chemtrails.

Cheers

[halva]

Wayne, all I get is a virus warning, no thanks.

Great, we've got the viruses on our side also.

It really doesn't matter anyways, because two months after the BBC show about "global dimming" aired, the notion was superceded by research showing that 'Global Brightening had been underway for ten years!

According to the 'global dimming' hypothesis this means exacerbation of the climate change/global warming problem, from which 'global dimming' allegedly provides temporary protection.

You're going to have to do better than this if you want to neutralise the 'global dimming' wonks.

I edited the 'Spitia' URL.

[jayreynolds]

Great, we've got the viruses on our side also.



According to the 'global dimming' hypothesis this means exacerbation of the climate change/global warming problem, from which 'global dimming' allegedly provides temporary protection.

Wayne, I never contended any "protection" was needed, as no "problem" exists to "exacerbate".

to put it bluntly, "U" can't make an "ASS" out of "ME"(ASS-U-ME because I don't accept your bull.

Your people always have to ply your trade by inventing phoney bogeymen, then base your paradigms on fear, which you intend to use asa control mechanism.

Hell of a way to make a living, Wayne.

[halva]

Bump.

[foot_soldier]

Thanks for posting (the article which initiated this thread) Trent.

Scientists have been "paying attention" to this issue for awhile now:

1997
The cooling effect of air pollution
http://climate.wri.org/pubs_content_text.cfm?ContentID=2147

Source: 1997. Climate protection and the national interest: The links among climate change, air pollution, and energy security. James J. MacKenzie.

In addition to the CFC destruction of ozone (see the sidebar on halogenated compounds), a second cooling effect offsets some global warming. Small atmospheric particles (called aerosols) are formed from sulfur dioxide air pollution, biomass burning, and other sources. These aerosols shield the earth -- mostly in regions downwind of industrialized areas -- from some of the incoming sunlight and cause cooling both directly, by scattering sunlight, and indirectly, by helping to form reflective clouds.[13]

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), these small particles have offset some of the expected global warming over the past several decades. The predicted warming, with and without the aerosol effect, is shown in Figure 5. The cooling effect of the aerosols brings the calculated rise in temperature into closer agreement with the observed changes of the past few decades.

Unlike most greenhouse gases, aerosols remain in the air for only a matter of days. As a result, as pollution emissions are reduced, so too will the cooling effect of the aerosols. Given the continued need to cut air pollution emissions to protect health and reduce acid deposition, the task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions becomes increasingly important. (more information at link)

July 11, 2001
AIR POLLUTION MAY ACTUALLY AID IN LOCAL BATTLES AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/MediaAlerts/2001/200107115000.html

COLLEGE STATION -- Sure, air pollution is bad, but new research indicates that a limited amount of aerosol pollutants in the air could partially counteract global warming, at least on a local scale.

Texas A&M University atmospheric sciences professor Don Collins has received grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to design instruments to measure the impacts of aerosol pollution on climate. Collins will use funds from the three-year NASA grant to develop an aircraft-mounted device to study the interaction of aerosols with light, while the five-year NSF grant money will go toward an instrument to determine exactly which particles will form droplets in clouds.

"Aerosols are man-made chemical particles that accumulate in our atmosphere," said Collins, who teaches and conducts research in the College of Geosciences' Department of Atmospheric Sciences. "Aerosols are the primary cause of the haze over a city on a polluted day. Certain aerosol particles can absorb sunlight, while others scatter or reflect light. Increased concentrations of particles can also modify clouds, which causes more energy to be reflected back into space."

Both scenarios can affect climate -- absorption of sunlight by aerosols causes warming, while enhanced scattering or increased cloud reflection causes a cooling effect..... (continued)

February 3, 1999
Aerosols, clouds, climate get $25 million study
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/science/9902/03/aerosols.enn/

(ENN) -- There seems to be a general consensus that humans are changing global climate, but are we heating it up, cooling it down or both?

Atmospheric interaction between greenhouse gases, which are causing global warming, and aerosol pollutants, which are known to cool the planet, have made building climate prediction models a tad difficult. An international study is now under way to try to determine how the aerosols work..... (continued)

INDOEX - January to April 1999
Greenhouse Warming or Aerosol Cooling?
http://www-indoex.ucsd.edu/

Regional consequences of global warming depend critically on the potentially large cooling effect of another pollutant, known as aerosols. These tiny particles, of about a millionth of a centimeter or smaller in diameter, scatter sunlight back to space and cause a regional cooling effect. These aerosols consisting of sulfates, soot, organic carbon and mineral dust are produced both naturally and by human activities. Results of numerous global warming models suggest that the aerosol cooling is one of the largest, if not the largest, sources of uncertainty in predicting future climate. Still, the complex influence of aerosol cooling on global warming is not clearly understood. This issue will remain a mystery unless field experiments, such as the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX), are undertaken to collect in-situ data on the regional cooling effect of sulfate and other aerosols.

INDOEX addresses questions of climate change that are of high priority and of great value to the US and the international community. The project's goal is to study natural and anthropogenic climate forcing by aerosols and feedbacks on regional and global climate. This issue is at the core of the International Global Change Research Program and has been identified by IPCC as a major gap in the science of climate change prediction..... (continued)

August 17, 2001
Black Carbon Aerosol Pollution Cools, Heats, Confuses
http://unisci.com/stories/20013/0817013.htm
.

[foot_soldier]

Jay "Mission from God" Reynolds wrote:
.....Your people always have to ply your trade by inventing phoney bogeymen, then base your paradigms on fear, which you intend to use as a control mechanism.....
You're the one who's into "control", Mister. And everybody knows it.

[Insurrectionchemistry]

Jay "Mission from GOD" Reynolds is more about "Obstruction of Justice" using faked up lessons on god and promoting hate as his platform.

He seeks a false God of humans that is controlling and not defined from enlightenments of the natural order and goals of peace and love.

[halva]

Baiting of Reynolds on this thread too. Let's stop it and give him a chance.