Cleaner Air Adds To Global Warming

shmlco writes "In the "You Can't Win For Losing" department, an article on the BBC web site is reporting that reduced air pollution and increased water evaporation appears to be adding to man-made global warming. Research presented at a major European science meeting adds to other evidence that cleaner air is letting more solar energy through to the Earth's surface. Burn fossil fuels, you make things worse. Clean up your act, and you make things worse. Is it time to set off a few nukes and see if nuclear winter can cool things down?"

Comments

No, no, no...

[Cally]

The story submitter has profoundly misunderstood the BBC story.

"> reduced air pollution and increased water evaporation appears to be
>adding to man-made global warming.

Actually, the pollution was (or 'is', in southern Asia and China) *masking* the effects of increased warming at ground level. Cleaning up the air doesn't add additional forcing; it merely keeps it elsewhere.

I don't think I can bear to read the following hundreds of ignorant "I've heard it's all due to the sun getting hotter" crap we always get on Slashdot AGW stories. If you think that, you don't know what you're talking about. Go away and read Real Climate or, for a comprehensive refutation of all the trolls we can expect to see attached to this story, please refer to this excellent debunking of so-called 'sceptic' canards, lies and deliberate mis-statements of facts.

Re:Clearly affecting global warming is the wrong g

[hawkfish]

In the 70s, scientists were absolutely convinced that they'd mastered the complex climate change models, and confidently assured us all that an Ice Age was imminent.

No they didn't.

And not only does it appear that global warming is much greater in scope than any amount of anthropogenic factors can account for

No it isn't.

it also appears that there's not much we can do about it anyway.

If we can cause the problem, we can fix it. The only question is, will we?

Re:Angels Down?

[JasonKChapman]

he referred in that book to a world that was suffering from an ice age, but that was not the issue, and it was not solved it in the text...

Acutally, the book was Fallen Angels by Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn, and it went a little further than that. The ice age had been held off by pollution-related greenhouse warming. It was only after the world cleaned up its act that the ice age came on.

It's a great book. The heroes were SF fans.

Re:Don't agree with global warming

[muyuubyou]

I can travel 30 miles in any direction and be far far from any 'over population'.

Which doesn't matter in the slightest. They are consuming resources from all over the world, be it the Amazon rainforest, oil from Saudi Arabia or cheap manufactured goods from polluting factories in southern China.

Thats because water vapor is a greenhouse gas.

[code shady]

No, really, it is.

Each gas that comprises the atmosphere has the capability to act as a greenhouse gas, and each one blocks different wavelengths of infared radiation. Some of then trap it when the sunlight passes through the atmosphere, some of them capture it when the radiation bounces off the earths surface back into the atmosphere.

C02, Methane, and *gasp* water vapor all contribute to heat retention in the atmosphere. It's basic Geography 101 shit that everyone learns.

However, since water vapor is, you know, an integral part of the atmosphere and several cycles on earth, we really can't do much about that. Better to worry about all the other gasses we up dump into the atmosphere that we can control.

Re:Don't agree with global warming

[Theatetus]

Two degrees? On the surface? That's the best scare you can give us? Two degrees is nothing! Industrial revolution, mass globalization, nuclear weapon testing - and two degrees?!

OK, dude, time for calorimetry 101. Let's assume for a second that the temperature increase was just for the oceans (to avoid messing around with too many different specific heats). Let's further assume that it only applies to the top centimeter of the water (ie, the rest of the oceans are not affected). What would the impact be of a 2 degree fahrenheit increase in the surface temperature?

• The oceans are 361,000,000 square km, which is 3.61e18 square cm, which by the assumption would yield 3.61e18 cc of water raised by 2 degrees F
• 2 degrees F difference is 1.11 Kelvin difference
• The specific heat of water is 1 cal / g * k, and the density of water is 1 g / cc (yes, ocean water is slightly less dense and has a slightly higher specific heat; the ballpark will be correct though)
• So, the amount of extra energy this represents is temperature * mass * specific heat (which then factors out since it's 1): 1.11 k * 3.61e18 g * 1 cal / gk = 4.01e18 calories
• 4,010,000,000,000,000,000 cal (that's 4 quintillion calories), or 1.68e19 joules, or approximately 4010 megatons of TNT, or about 1000 modern middle sized nuclear devices

That's a lot of energy to have floating around that we didn't used to have.

Re:Don't agree with global warming

[dgatwood]

You're twisting reality pretty severely. Most agriculture in the U.S. is done on land that you would describe as unarable. According to worldstats.org, the U.S. is in the 35-49% range (1), i.e. 35-49% of land is used for agriculture. Thus, if only 19% is so-called "arable land," we must be growing at least half our crops on land that is artificially irrigated. Not a surprise if you've ever lived in the South....

Thus, by your math, the U.S. can provide all of the agricultural products that it needs, and this is supported by the positive balance of agricultural trade that the U.S. has shown for the last 40 years (2). We ship out things that we can grow more easily (e.g. corn), and import things that we can't (e.g. rice). That margin is dwindling, and we may start to import a bit more than we export, but this is primarily due to an increase in import of consumer-oriented products, not bulk imports. This suggests that to a large extent, this is due to consumers being more savvy and choosing to buy more imported products for variety, rather than because we can't produce enough food.

Anybody who says that that the U.S. can't feed itself is either misinformed or outright lying. Either way, that's a sure sign of somebody with a political agenda.

1. Source: WorldStats.org
2. Source: TruthAboutTrade.org

Re:Clearly affecting global warming is the wrong g

[Just Some Guy]

In the 70s, scientists were absolutely convinced that they'd mastered the complex climate change models, and confidently assured us all that an Ice Age was imminent.

No they didn't.

Yes, yes, they did. Perhaps you're too young to remember the scare, but I very clearly remember being terrified after listening to a scientist explaining to the viewing audience that we were all going to starve to death in the near future. Your link is quite convincing, and I'd probably believe it if it weren't for the fact that I was there and I remember what was said.

Re:not that far off

[locofungus]

Your calculations are wrong. (using your figures)
Transmission efficiency * transformer efficiency * charging efficiency * storage to motor efficiency * drivetrain efficiency = .7*.95*.8*.85*.95 = .43 (57% loss)

This is better than pump to wheel for an IC engine powered car.

I don't have, and can't find, the figures for refining crude but I've seen claims that the cost of refining a barrel of oil in 2004 was $10 so I'll assume 25% loss.

Gas fired electricity plants say 50% efficient. (probably can do better) .43*.5 = 22% efficiency for an electric car powered by gas fired powerstation. .3*.75 = 23% efficiency for a gasoline powered car. (Not sure what you meant when you said "Right there is enough, to make them equal" with regards to the 25-30% losses in transmission - this is losses in transmission, but efficiency for a car - read about the air otto cycle in any undergraduate thermodynamics textbook if you really think cars are getting 70-75% thermal efficiency)

The best you are ever going to get from an IC engine is about 50% efficiency - the biggest marine diesels can just exceed 50% thermal efficiency when run in their most efficient configuration.

Push that powerstation efficiency up to 60% and you are going to struggle to build an IC engined car that doesn't have more losses in the car than the entire energy chain has for the electric car.

Tim.