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China's Coal Power Plants Mask Climate Change
Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports on new research revealing that the huge increase in coal-fired power stations in China, up from just over 10 gigawatts (GW) in 2002 to over 80GW in 2006, has masked the impact of global warming in the last decade because of the cooling effect of their sulphur emissions. But scientists warn that rapid warming is likely to resume when the short-lived sulphur pollution – which also causes acid rain – is cleaned up and the full heating effect of long-lived carbon dioxide is felt. 'Reductions in carbon emissions will be more important as China installs scrubbers [on its coal-fired power stations], which reduce sulphur emissions,' says Dr. Robert Kaufman. 'This, and solar insolation increasing as part of the normal solar cycle, [will mean] temperature is likely to increase faster.' The effect also explains the lack of global temperature rise seen between 1940 and 1970 as the effect of the sulphur emissions from increased coal burning outpaced that of carbon emissions, until acid rain controls were introduced, after which temperature rose quickly. 'Warming due to the CO2 released by Chinese industrialization has been partially masked by cooling due to reflection of solar radiation by sulphur emissions,' says Prof Joanna Haigh. 'On longer timescales, with cleaner emissions, the warming effect will be more marked.'"
'Reductions in carbon emissions will be more important as China installs scrubbers [on its coal-fired power stations], which reduce sulphur emissions,'
So basically never?
Scrubbers have been required in America since the 1977 revisions to the Clean Air Act. And they're still not used in China. My understanding of the situation (although, full disclaimer I do not speak Chinese nor have I ever been to China) is that the companies simply don't follow regulation. The latest news is that they just move to non-urban areas to avoid such regulation:
Carlson Chan is in charge of air quality policy at Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department. He says companies found ways around the stricter limits.
"When we tightened the sulfur content of industrial diesel from 0.5 percent to 0.005 percent in 1998, the resistance then was not very big, mainly because many manufacturers have moved their factories across the border," he said.
Just across Hong Kong's border is Guangdong province, the center of China’s export industry. As the factories there multiplied, the air pollution returned to Hong Kong.
I found it impossibly hard to believe that it's cheaper to move your entire operation than install scrubbers -- failing that, surely a bribe is cheaper. So I dug around and as recent as 2006 the cost seems to be very high (anyone know today's rates?):
The average cost for scrubbers today (2006) is roughly $300 per kilowatt. For a 1,000-megawatt power plant, a relatively common size for coal-fired facilities, the cost for scrubbers for all boilers would be approximately $300 million.
I guess that would be a death knell for a Chinese company (and, let's face it, much of Asia is guilty of over polluting). If China introduces "regulation" that would stunt their free market, the free market simply circumvents it one way or another. It's the story time and time again in China and I think that a large part of their government is complacent with it because their economy is comparatively gangbusters.
... it's going to cost everyone eventually. But oooh, that free market fueled cheap shit at Wal-Mart is just so tantalizing! How can you not buy it? Everybody wins (except the environment)!
And when a country trades with China, they're just exporting their pollution. I mean, we're all on the same planet
My work here is dung.
As a 'non annex 1' country, China is not required to reduce anything. Which is why they readily came on board with it.
Mod parent down, he's completely and utterly wrong.
If they are accounted for, why is this news?
Well, actually climate models do account for aerosols and this isn't news.
Your insightful comments make you a "denialist."
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Actually, when "The Icelandic Volcano" erupted, it was calculated that the decrease in airline activity was a net gain in terms of CO2, even with the volcano factored in.
From the figures on the spreadsheet, just the world airline industry dwarfs world volcanic CO2 emissions with over 3.5 times more CO2
AGW isn't greenhouse gases getting warmer than any other gases. It's because they absorb and emit thermal infrared radiation. Light from the sun passes through the greenhouse gases, then is absorbed by the earth's surface and re-emitted as thermal infrared, which is then partially absorbed and scattered by the greenhouse gases, with some of it being scattered back to the earth and thus trapped. Heat capacity is, I think, more or less irrelevant.
My understanding is that CO2 absorbs the longer wavelength heat energy radiated from the earth but not shorter wavelength light energy from the sun. CO2 moves to an excited but unstable state and releases it's energy some of which goes back down towards the earth. So it basically allows light energy to pass through but catches and sends back some of the heat energy given off by the earth. Hence the "greenhouse" label. The most common atmospheric gasses such as N2, O2, and Ar do not absorb infrared radiation (dipole moment of these wont have a net change when they vibrate) so looking at their specific heat capacity isn't really helpful to the greenhouse gas equation. After those I think C02 is like the largest component though even then it's something like 0.03%.
You also have to remember to take the abundance of a gas into account when figuring out which one is more important. Methane for example is a much stronger greenhouse gas molecule-for-molecule but it is also much less abundant. Water vapor is both more abundant, and a stronger greenhouse gas, but we can't really affect how much water vapor is in the air on a large scale and it doesn't have much staying power (9 days vs centuries for CO2)
Before anyone expands the discussion to include 100 other different arguments that don't address the topic on hand let me just say I'm just speaking to why CO2 works as a greenhouse gas here despite the specific heat capacity, not whether human production of it is contributing to large scale global warming so if you have comments on the original discussion I'd love to be further educated but leave the religious like tangential arguments elsewhere.
"Earth's climate swings hotter-colder-hotter-colder."
Yes. Yes it does. It does so seasonally. It does so on El Nino / La Nina decadal scale. It does so on ~100k glacial/interglacial scale. It does so on ~250Ma "Icehouse/Greenhouse" scale. The question is, what cyclic process accounts for the average temperature increase of the last century or two? That's not clear at all. Furthermore, we can see secular, long-term changes that are pretty unique over geological time, such as the dramatic changes in the isotopic composition of the CO2 in the atmosphere that are caused by introducing so much "old" carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
And, no, humans do not put out less CO2 than one volcano. There are various estimates of human CO2 output, but it is more than 30 000 Mt/year and increasing. Total output from volcanoes is tougher to estimate, but is about 300 Mt/year on land [PDF]. Estimates for total output inclusive of underwater volcanism vary widely because of the uncertainties, but those totals are all less than 500 Mt/year [PDF], and some are less than 200Mt/year. Any way you slice it, this is far less than human input, let alone the comparatively minuscule amount from a *single* typical volcanic eruption. Even if you take some of the biggest eruptions in deep geological history, far in excess of eruptions that have occurred in historical times, humans still rank highly or on par with them. These sorts of "supereruptions" are rare things -- once in 100000 to million-year events. Think "Yellowstone Caldera" scale, which erupted about 2 million years ago. In effect, it's as if we're pumping CO2 into the atmosphere on the scale of some of these "biggest eruptions in Earth history" every single year, but without the mitigating effect of as much airborne ash or sulphate particles. An insightful calculation in the second article above is to use the well-studied, second-largest eruption of the last century as a measure -- the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 in the Philippines. It produced ~50 Mt of CO2 output. The equivalent of human CO2 output would be more than 600 Pinatubos a year (conservatively -- the article uses more realistic numbers and gets 700 Pinatubos/year).
You're promoting a "volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans" myth that has been shown to be wrong many times. It's not even in the ballpark. It's several orders of magnitude wrong. This does not inspire confidence.
I did manage to find one situation where your statement might be considered correct -- for a period of a few hours in a major volcanic eruption the output may be on par or greater than human CO2 output. It's explained in more detail in the second article above. But that's only briefly during the peak eruption. It's not sustained day-in, day-out, every hour over years like human outputs are. It would be pretty misleading to refer to that momentary comparison as if it was relevant in any general sense. Averaged over a year, those momentary volcanic spikes in CO2 output are pretty irrelevant.
..regardless of which method the hairless apes select to justify controlling each other, every 75Kyears, where I'm sitting right now will be covered with two miles of ice alternating with a nice limestone producing inland sea.
WOAH! Which religion did that just come from?
Right, it has been covered by ice periodically in recent times. But only in recent millennia when there hasn't been much CO2 in the atmosphere. There have been very long periods without significant glaciation on Earth. CO2 levels are already much higher than ever before during recent glaciation events, and we might very well be in for another 250 million years without ice.
That's the key, see. Our emissions have already pushed the climate system of Earth beyond the boundaries of what it has been during the last few millions of years. The current ice age started 2.6 million years ago (with alternating glacials and interglacials), and it might be over in 1000 years. Before the current ice age there was 250 million years without glacial periods.
That's because the scientists are done arguing. And it doesn't help when people keep repeating points that have been rejected (or as close as science will ever get to rejecting something):
* It's happening.
* We're at fault.
(Most climate scientists agree that) it's not part of a natural cycle. That's as close to resolved as it's going to be.
My UID is prime. Hah!
The answers to all you questions are here:
http://climate.nasa.gov
But I guess they're socialist conspirators at the same time as being American heros, right?
My UID is prime. Hah!
Consider the Beer-Lambert law. CO2 is transparent to visible light (like oxygen and nitrogen). When light hits the earth, it heats up the surface. Hotter surfaces radiate IR radiation. CO2 happens to be absorbing IR in those ranges (while oxygen and nitrogen don't). So, CO2 absorbs it and starts to vibrate more. Other air molecules bump into CO2 and pick up the energy. Result: The air gets warmer.
Water is indeed a greenhouse gas. That's good. We need it to keep the planet at the desired temperature. Doesn't matter whether the IR radiation gets absorbed by water of CO2. That is the good news. However, the absorption spectra and absorption constants (at various wavelengths) of CO2 and water are NOT identical. So, CO2 can have an effect that water alone doesn't have. Because CO2 doesn't do politics, it does. You can debate the amount of the effect, not the effect. The effect is pure physics.
It is not that hard to understand. Actually, I think that just about any scientist should be able to come up with this by him/herself. In any case, people I'm looking to hire should be able to figure out the relevant parameters and how this works by themselves.
And as to your statement that water fluctuates 100x as much as the total rise of CO2, try to figure that one out yourself.
Bert
So, indeed, heat capacity has nothing to do with it
I saw nothing on that site about how the theory would be falsified.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Exactly! Look for an example to Mr "inconvenient truth" himself, the Rev Al Gore of the church of global warming. While he is ALL FOR slapping the USA and the west with a carbon credits scam, because of course he and his friends farting around in the Lear jets * have set themselves to be carbon billionaires off the scam, you haven't seen him come out demanding blocking of Chinese imports, nor those of other polluting third world countries, NOT ONCE, why? Because he and his friend make MONIES off of that silly!
Do we need to cut down on pollution? Sure we do, as we all live in a fishbowl. A good place to start would be to stop allowing companies to enjoy the American system while using tricks like the double dutch to get out of paying taxes. Halliburton wants to Inc in Dubai? Then let them move, CEO and all. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Tax the shit out of imports being brought in from countries that have shit regulations, and instead of building the F35 and new aircraft carriers when we outnumber the entire planet on those already by a huge number (what are we up to now, 11? What is this WWII?) and park half the ones we do have and use that plan the military was testing of using shipboard nuclear reactors to make biodiesel and jet fuel from reclaiming carbon from sea water.
*-which Rev Al has the carbon soaked balls to say is "carbon neutral because he pays himself credits from his own company which is like moving money from your left to right pocket and calling it "wealth redistribution" and demanding a tax break
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.