Heat Waves In North Pacific May Be Due To China Reducing Aerosols 54
Computer models have found that recent heat waves in the north Pacific may be due to a large reduction in aerosols emitted by factories in China. The findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Phys.Org reports: In this new effort, the research team noted that the onset of the heat waves appeared to follow successful efforts by the Chinese government to reduce aerosol emissions from their country's factories. Beginning around 2010, factories and power generating plants in China began dramatically reducing emissions of aerosols such as sulfate, resulting in much cleaner air. Noting that aerosols can act like mirrors floating in the air, reflecting heat from the sun back into space, and also pointing out that earlier research efforts had suggested that massive reductions of aerosols in one place could lead to warming in other places -- they wondered if reductions of aerosols in China might be playing a role in the heat waves that began happening in the north Pacific.
To find out if that might be the case, the team began collecting data and then input it into 12 different computer climate models. They ran them under two conditions -- one where emissions from East Asia remained as they were over the past several decades and one where they dropped in the way they had in reality. They found that the models with no declines did not cause much change elsewhere, whereas those with aerosol drops showed heat waves occurring in the northeast parts of the Pacific Ocean.
The models also showed why -- as less heat was reflected back into space over China, warming of coastal regions in Asia began, resulting in the development of high-pressure systems. That in turn made low-pressure systems in the middle Pacific more intense. And that resulted in the Aleutian Low growing bigger and moving south which weakened the westerly winds that typically cool the sea surface. The result was hotter conditions.
To find out if that might be the case, the team began collecting data and then input it into 12 different computer climate models. They ran them under two conditions -- one where emissions from East Asia remained as they were over the past several decades and one where they dropped in the way they had in reality. They found that the models with no declines did not cause much change elsewhere, whereas those with aerosol drops showed heat waves occurring in the northeast parts of the Pacific Ocean.
The models also showed why -- as less heat was reflected back into space over China, warming of coastal regions in Asia began, resulting in the development of high-pressure systems. That in turn made low-pressure systems in the middle Pacific more intense. And that resulted in the Aleutian Low growing bigger and moving south which weakened the westerly winds that typically cool the sea surface. The result was hotter conditions.
Ditto ships reducing exhaust particulates (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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Those scientists should be cancelled and debanked for feeding the models with garbage going against the ones following the science and reducing emissions! We all now that those American SUVs are responsible for global warming and that we need to convert everything to electricity and cancel any other product in order to save the planet.!
You're... making fun of people for not living up to your shallow stereotype. Alrighty, then.
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One proposal I heard is that we could reflect heat back into space using those very ships.
All we have to do is add some sulfur to the fuel oil.
We actually have that sulfur because it's a waste product from desulfating the fuel, which is legally required.
So if after we desulfate the fuel we then add back in the sulfur that one simple trick could help fix global warming.
Re:Ditto ships reducing exhaust particulates (Score:5, Informative)
Acid rain.
Re: Ditto ships reducing exhaust particulates (Score:1)
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Following up on my comment, it begs the question: the earth was cooling during the 60s and early 70s.
Best data we have says the Earth wasn't cooling, but from about 1945 to 1980, in fact we didn't see a global temperature rise. Graph here:
https://berkeleyearth.org/wp-c... [berkeleyearth.org]
Did the pollution from factories cause this?
Yes, sounds like a reasonable explanation for the lack of warming. Another hypothesis is that we're seeing some kind of a blip due to the second world war, during which (possibly) strange and poorly-documented things happened due to effects of over a million tons of bombs.
Did things such as the clean air act cause a reversal of that cooling?
(Or, cause that lack of warming). Possibly.
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Yep. Focus on CO2 and Methane and ignore the rest because it might actually be helping us out. The most dangerous words for this seem to be, "While we're at it..."
Sulfuric aerosols aren't helping us at all. The most dangerous words are actually "Let's use this effect to lower the temperatures!"
Note - there is a small amount of Nitric acid in rain that is a helpful source of nitrogen, but not involved in this discussion.
Yes, those sulfuric aerosols will have a temperature reduction effect. They also have other effects that are a real problem.
Acid rain. Destroys buildings and forests, and is harmful to microbial and larger life forms, kills aquatic life, has nega
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Sulfuric aerosols aren't helping us at all. The most dangerous words are actually "Let's use this effect to lower the temperatures!"
Back to my point. The totality matters. At minimum, a replacement needs to be introduced before the new solution is introduced. Causing global temperatures to rise faster because of the reduction of sulfuric aerosols causes the arctic to melt faster, releasing more methane into the atmosphere, causing faster warming, causing.... I think you can see the cycle of destruction. Or, stay out of panic mode and replace the sulfur in the fuel with salts and then introduce the new fuel before abandoning the old. Pan
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Sulfuric aerosols aren't helping us at all. The most dangerous words are actually "Let's use this effect to lower the temperatures!"
Back to my point. The totality matters. At minimum, a replacement needs to be introduced before the new solution is introduced. Causing global temperatures to rise faster because of the reduction of sulfuric aerosols causes the arctic to melt faster, releasing more methane into the atmosphere, causing faster warming, causing.... I think you can see the cycle of destruction. Or, stay out of panic mode and replace the sulfur in the fuel with salts and then introduce the new fuel before abandoning the old. Panicking is probably our biggest enemy in any fight when we need a long-term solution.
What I see is an approved method for the Petrochemical companies to use the worst possible fuels, which while introducing sulfur, continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, and will eventually make the problem much much worse. Kicking the can down the road, and making perhaps more creatures extinct. You might want to check out what a thousand years of Global acid rain will do. And then, unless you have some way to remove perhaps 10 times more than what we put in already All this is is an invitation to go bac
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No. (Score:4, Insightful)
50C+ isn't due to reduction in aerosols. That's nonsense. This is man-made climate change brought about by an unnatural excess in greenhouse gases. Yeah, less smoke means more sunrays reaching the ground, but 50C+ for weeks on end isn't natural, smog or not.
We should stop and avoid looking for excuses not to hurry with the eco -turnaround. We're late enough as it is.
Re:No. (Score:4, Interesting)
You're not getting the message.
1. China bad! It's their fsckin fault!
2. But we can probably be the good guys and solve global warming by stepping up our pollution game!
Kinda beautiful, this talking point, isn't it...
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that would be the editor's message or intention in any case (knowing the audience and the business model it wouldn't be surprising). however, the study is by a dozen chinese scientists, so hardly anti china propaganda. also, nowhere it is suggesting stepping up pollution. it does caution to factor in the effects of diminishing pollution, though.
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You're not getting the message.
1. China bad! It's their fsckin fault!
2. But we can probably be the good guys and solve global warming by stepping up our pollution game!
Kinda beautiful, this talking point, isn't it...
First air too dirty is the enemy. Now air too clean is.
The worlds largest warmongers know the way to maximize profit. Sell to both fucking sides.
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
50C+ isn't due to reduction in aerosols. That's nonsense. ... 50C+ for weeks on end isn't natural, smog or not.
the weak spot in their study is that it's based on the accuracy of current simulation models. then again that's a much better record and way more scientific rigor than your baseless statement out of the blue.
We should stop and avoid looking for excuses not to hurry with the eco -turnaround. We're late enough as it is.
this study doesn't sound like excuses to me. it could be used to suggest combating heatwaves with pollution, but only by some utter moron, and sadly we indeed do have lots of those. but these scientists are just documenting a fact of life, trying to figure out how strong an effect we very well know exists actually is. knowledge is good, don't be afraid of knowledge.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
>this study doesn't sound like excuses to me. it could be used to suggest combating heatwaves with pollution, but only by some utter moron, and sadly we indeed do have lots of those
Actually, this kind of thing is used to support the geoengineering idea of spraying reflective particles into the air to reduce insolation.
Which absolutely would reduce temperatures, the problem with it being it only takes care of one issue while elevated CO2 causes multiple serious issues... and us being humans, if you mask the symptom we notice most, we'll stop caring about the others and continue making things worse. And then one day (because you'd have to keep the system going forever, which is a really long time) we'll stop doing it and get hit with a sudden heat rise worse than we've been dealing with so far.
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so, what should they have done? not research the topic? not publish it?
this is a scientific study. anyone paying minimal attention to scientific research about climate has a clear picture that co2 emissions are bad, and are still bad even if you can mitigate a fraction of the consequences. anyone not paying attention to it but pandering to the usual opinion shapers won't pay attention to this study either; these are parallel worlds, so i don't see a huge problem here. if anything, maybe everyone should st
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>this study doesn't sound like excuses to me. it could be used to suggest combating heatwaves with pollution, but only by some utter moron, and sadly we indeed do have lots of those
Actually, this kind of thing is used to support the geoengineering idea of spraying reflective particles into the air to reduce insolation.
Which absolutely would reduce temperatures, the problem with it being it only takes care of one issue while elevated CO2 causes multiple serious issues... and us being humans, if you mask the symptom we notice most, we'll stop caring about the others and continue making things worse. And then one day (because you'd have to keep the system going forever, which is a really long time) we'll stop doing it and get hit with a sudden heat rise worse than we've been dealing with so far.
This should be at +5 informative.
Because if we take this stupid idea of purposeful sulfur aerosol injection as the cure for AGW, what to we do when we run out of high sulfur fuels?
I suppose we could start cutting down trees and burning elemental sulfur directly.
The real takeaway is that we're getting irrefutable proof that we screwed up bigtime and some people want to continue it as somehow good. Or as Homer Simpson noted when talking about beer “Here’s to alcohol: the cause of, and so
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Where are you seeing 50C+ "for weeks on end" in the North Pacific?
I see -2C to +24C depending on where we're looking.
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data... [noaa.gov]
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A cost we have to accept.... (Score:4, Insightful)
This was known for a long time (Score:5, Interesting)
Oddly, I saw something the other day that might help the arctic. Basically, they are looking at doing the same thing we did back in the 60s to make rinks on lakes. Cut a hole in the ice and pump water onto the ice. It was surprising how thick that area could get compared to other ice. So, they are looking at putting a number of pumps in the ice and have it build up over a season. This could be started in April using PV, and pulled out in oct. Hopefully, this would not turn darker than normal since it will have a constant small particles falling on it. Still, this might be an interesting way to rebuild arctic ice.
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This sort of thing is only going to get worse. It's been going on for a long time with things like seeding rain clouds and damming/diverting rivers, but as climate change gets worse and there is more impetus to fix it, there are more opportunities for it to happen.
Unlike cloud seeding or building a dam, we can't really expect other countries not to clean up their emissions and environment. I expect someone will try anyway.
Re:This was known for a long time (Score:4, Interesting)
"Known" for values of "known" that go as far as "strongly suspect". But yeah, that's definitely a suspicion that climate scientists have had for years.
The Proposal has been around for a couple of years, but I didn't know it had been used previously.
the same thing we did back in the 60s to make rinks on lakes
I hope that someone did a deal of science on this back then, to constrain the uncertainties on the process. Obviously the presence of significant salt (~32 permil) would have an effect. The big problem I can see is how to keep the PV panels above the new ice that you're forming. You could - temporarily - solve that by putting the (floating) PV farm at some distance from the pump and new ice floe. Floating PV is certainly in development - but that then changes the problem to that of getting the floating PV to climb onto the edge of the expanding new ice floe ... which is a different problem. Maybe you'd need to put the PV farm up onto (buoy-supported) stilts, and allow the ice to form below the farm ... choices, choices.
Hmmm. Look at numbers. Say you need 10,000 of these, each producing a 1km radius reflective floe (so 31,416 sq.km extra ice - is that anything like the necessary scale? Another order of 10?) - that is a lot of deployments and retrievals. It very rapidly - long before you get to that scale (unless you want to be building many, many additional harbours, storage facilities, construction yards too. Boatyards ...) gets to the point of leaving the things at sea permanently. You've still got a servicing and deployment problem, but you haven't created a deployment/ retrieval problem.
I don't think you'll be adding to the existing issue of "soot in ice" significantly, as long as you put your water inlets ... order of 10 times the diameter of the suction pipe above the seabed. That's an estimate - from the effects of pumping into fluids - and needs updating from (I hope) the 1960s experience you refer to. I'd start with a keel of 20x diameter, just to be on the safe side. That will affect the water depth you need for deployment, hence distance from shore, hence number of deployment harbours, construction/ assembly facilities ...
You're talking about the Alaskan and Canadian coasts, because the chances of getting Russia to contribute meaningfully is negligible, and there is zero infrastructure in Greenland on it's North coast (and a few hundred thousand sq.km of reflective land ice too, just next door). So .. the Canadian northern archipelago (where the complex bits of the NW passage are). Yeah, that's a complex question. How much overland transport do you rely on in winter (when it is less unreliable than intermittently-iced sea) ... complex.
Someone, somewhere should be doing test deployments. To see if it works at all. And if it works, how well?
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So Trump can blame Chaina anyhow? (Score:2)
Chaina not doing enough for the environment.
Chaina doing too much for the environment.
What a dilemma!
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trump? dilemma? i don't think so ...
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Or the alternative dilemma : make allegations of dementia a thing against Biden, and see those allegations reflect upon yourself.
When does America face it's biscuit problem? November, just before or after Thanksgiving?
(The Biscuit Problem : choosing the lesser of two weevils.)
Good morning! (Score:1, Troll)
Global dimming is a thing you know...aerosols and soot above the cloud level (minuscule nuclear winter in fact) - a "gray filter" of sorts that is constantly replenished by us burning coal and wood mostly... Data from counties with open irrigation systems show clear decrease of the amount of sunlight reaching the earth in the 20th century.
It is quite possible that the global temperature drop in the 50's, 60's and 70's which was significant enough for worries about decreasing crop yields to penetrate all maj
im no scientist.... (Score:1)
this cant be true.... everyone know any and all weather comes from global warming, end of, period, full stop.
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this cant be true.... everyone know any and all weather comes from global warming, end of, period, full stop.
Title of your post checks out.
Opinion (Score:2)
My takeaway from this is that we've got another weapon in the toolbox against climate change. We don't want to intentionally spray aerosols to reduce temperatures, but it's an option.
I have a massive pair of channel locks under my workbench that are never the first tool I reach for, but when something is well and truly stuck, they come out. That's what active climate engineering should be, the last tool in the toolbox when we're truly stuck.
Climate Baddening (Score:2)
Funny how they conclude that even following their advice leads to the climate getting worse. That's why I think the theory is Climate Baddening, not Climate Change. Every single thing the study is discovered to be a ratcheting mechanism where things get more bad.
Similar slashdot story from last year (Score:2)
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
Wait, don't we WANT to cool the planet? (Score:2)
People are losing their mind over increases in temperature and now this happens. So don't we want more Chinese particulates?
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Well, we want more cloud cover, but if the cloud cover is made of soot and microplastics instead of water vapor then it is just delaying the problem while creating a worse one.
How to A/C Earth (Score:1)
So if we here in CA get too cold, all we have to do is trigger a 60's-ish beehive hairdo trend in China, and all that hairspray will warm us back up.
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Correction: "too hot"