Posted on 09/16/2007 10:16:17 AM PDT by leebert
Overturning the conventional theory that airborne soot emissions cause regional cooling it has been found that brown coulds of airborne soot can contribute to 50 percent of atmospheric heating that had been previously blamed on CO2 emissions. Because of the worldwide scope of airborne soot - such as the vast Asian Brown Clouds - atmospheric models that ascribe certain regional warming trends only to CO2 may need revisiting.
The lead researcher in this study, Prof. V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institute commented, "The conventional thinking is that brown clouds have masked as much as 50 percent of the global warming .. through ... global dimming ... This study reveals that ... soot particles ... are intensifying the atmospheric warming ... by as much as 50 percent."
Other related studies have found that most airborne soot emissions are from industrial sources - particularly coal-powered industries - with only 10 percent originating from cook fires and diesel-powered vehicles.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificblogging.com ...
So now China and India are the biggest contributers to global warming? We’ll see how quickly the greens shift to calls for the emerging countries to control their brown cloud emissions now! Not.
Oops. Bumped to blogging. Not important enough for the front page I guess.
Third worlders produce most of the soot. Therefore whatever the reality is, it cannot lead to punishing the United States. Thus, this is bad science and not worth looking at. ;-)
Nothing but respect, so far, for Ramanathan at Realclimate.org, as far as I have googled.
Brown coulds. This is just great. Cities are covered by domes of gray or brown depending on the nature of their emissions. Part of the warming associated with cities?
This calls for the ‘Springfield Dome’ solution.
These vast shrouds of soot are predominantly from coal-fired industrial sources in Asia, creating the notorious Asian Brown Cloud. Most of the soot falling on the Arctic comes from Asia, 90 percent of the Arctic melt is due to dirty snow melting faster than it can be created. Climate models show that 25 percent of *ALL* global warming is from the Arctic & tundra ice loss.
About 30 percent of the warming on the American West coast is due to Asian soot. 40 percent of the warming in the vast Pacific is due to Asian soot - that’s 30 percent of the Earth’s surface area, causing up to 12 percent of all global warming - just from Asian soot alone. The American Sierra’s are melting sooner due to dirty snow, same goes for the glacial recessions in the Northern Rockies.
There are more vast palls of soot spanning the globe from seasonal slash&burns in the tropics & subtropics, creating a double-whammy for mountaintop glaciers in the tropics — Kilimanjaro’s suffering from lowered microclimate precipitation due to deforestation, coupled with increased solar luminence...
We’re off-shoring production to China, shifting jobs, etc. overseas. In countries committed to Kyoto’s carbon trading scheme, Kyoto’s serving to back-door emissions with the shifted production, which then accelerates globalization by encouraging the additional shifting of production (and jobs) to Asia along with the emissions.
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