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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.
These 'scientists' with Phds, and you with...? Probably not much.
Except the ability to jerk off at the keyboard while thinking about how much smarter you are with all of your common sense that the 'elite' scientists lack hey?
This is going to be taken by both supporters and detractors of Climate Change: Warming Trend as evidence for their cause. Let me go get the popcorn.
Nothing productive will come of this so I might as well sit back and enjoy the fireworks. Nevermind we are trying to figure out a complex model as it changes under conditions that about as far from scientifically controlled as possible. My only hope is we don't accidentally cause an Ice Age trying to fix this.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
This is why many American companies outsource manufacturing to china. lax regulations, and those regulations are ignored. It's far cheaper to make your phone in a location where waste can be dumped into the stream behind the building or just thrown into the trash stream and bury those heavy metals in the landfill.
But as long as we ignore that and enjoy low priced products it will all be ok.
Environmental regulations hurt jobs and business! And because of them, business has to outsource overseas because they won't be able to compete! And then there are the taxes .... American business has to go overseas for the cheap labor and the lower taxes in order to compete with the rest of the World.
Translation:
We want to lower our costs to the bare minimum so the CEO and other executives can get filthy rich off of the backs of the workers and shareholders all the while poisoning the people and land of foreign nations because their leaders want to enrich themselves - (fascist) capitalism working with despots.
In the meantime, the super rich propaganda machine has brain washed us peons into thinking that if we work hard and get educated, we too can one day join their ranks - it's a given! As long as we can keep those pesky environmental regulations and taxes low for the very wealthy ($10 million+ assets) out of the way.
In the meantime, the entire World spirals down economically and ecologically and the super rich hang out on their yachts and private jets.
Want to know who to go after? Get the Gulfstream, Bombardier, Cessna (Citation Jets), and the other "corporate jet" makers client lists and then get the individuals behind those corporations.
Does this mean that I'm supposed to be pro-pollution or pro-global warming? As some people age, they can't figure out the remote control. Me, I have trouble keeping up with the world-ending-panic-du-jour.
"I know that every word that man just said is true, because it's EXACTLY what I wanted to hear." -- Space Ghost
I can't understand statistics or concepts that are beyond my grasp. Therefore, the scientists must be wrong.
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.
It may affect warming, but it doesn't fix ocean acidification
If they are accounted for, why is this news?
Well, actually climate models do account for aerosols and this isn't news.
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
Even I can spot bullshit from my armchair. Completely dismissing 30 years of evidence just because it doesn't conform to your pet idea--that's bullshit. And it's not how science is supposed to work.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Grand claims are needed (if you're referring to the claim "anthropogenic air pollution very probably results in significant warming of Earth's climate", which is pretty much the biggest claim scientists made). There's a reason to think that way, and that reason has been questioned by tens of thousands of capable minds over the course of decades. Intelligent humans would listen to the warning, and act even when the above is not completely certain. Nothing can ever be completely certain, but scientific results will always be the closest thing.
By the way, we *are* able to predict the weather to a known level of accuracy, which is also rather high for short-term forecasts. Climate simulation is the same thing but much simpler (because we don't care about where and when it will be what temperature, only the average), but of course more difficult because of other reasons. That said, there are many uncertainties, some so uncertain that no value is given, but their range *is* known. The possible ranges can be read in the IPCC documents from 2007. This-and-that effect cannot be bigger than some limit, and these values are quite trustworthy, because if some effect was HUGE, then it would necessarily also be evident. The sun's impact is actually pretty well known - the changes in power output have been much too small to account for detected changes.
The temperature measurement network isn't grand, but it's also not giving out random numbers. We know that. The numbers don't look random. The signal-to-noise ratio is big enough that we can use those numbers, and other effects are accounted for (right, some thermometers are next to asphalt, but guess what - asphalt warms up the ground, there's now more asphalt than 50 years ago, thus asphalt indeed contributes to global warming (I suppose these effects go under the label of "land use" in IPCC documents if you want to look it up)).
Scientists are sceptics and continue to be that. But this means more than just questioning findings. Turns out the scientists have long ago researched the problem of how good their results are, and the 2007 report was groundbreaking indeed because then, for the first time ever, scientists concluded their results are "very probably correct". And mind you, their result was that the humans cause warming in the range of 0.6 - 2.4 watts per square meter. Of course there's always a tradeoff between dependability and accuracy of some result, now the numbers add up such that scientists can very confidently say something that's very approximate, but still useful.
By the way, the biggest uncertainty in climate forecasts is the amount of pollution humans spew out in the future. How would they know that? They wouldn't. We might be able to cut pollution by 50% in 20 years, or we might quadruple it in the same time frame. No way to know.
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.
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.
Do you think asking some questions about sulfur is worse than actually advocating for trillions of dollars of expense on the economy?
"People who have absolutely no expertise whatsoever think they can just handwave the results and scientific consensus of thousands of researchers who have spent millions of man-hours analyzing datasets from dozens of different and unrelated sources, all of which have the same levels of correlation pointing to the same issues."
This cuts both ways. You want people outside the field to accept their expertise. So just tell me how to falsify the theory. Temperatures not matching predictions won't work because apparently another source will be blamed.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.