Could Cleaner Air Actually Intensify Global Warming?

Enlarge Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

Is the solution to global warning more pollution?

April 25, 2010

As much of the world marked Earth Day this past week, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that air pollution has declined dramatically over the past 20 years. It sounds like good news, but science writer Eli Kintisch argues that there's a surprising downside: Cleaner air might actually intensify global warming.

"If we continue to cut back on smoke pouring forth from industrial smokestacks, the increase in global warming could be profound," Kintisch writes in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times.

Kintisch isn't talking about greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide; he's talking about another kind of pollutant we put in the sky — "like aerosols from a spray can," he tells NPR's Guy Raz. "It turns out that those particles have a profound effect on maintaining the planet's temperature."

Greenhouse gases and aerosol pollutants work in opposing ways on the Earth's climate, Kintisch explains. "The greenhouse gases warm the planet when they're emitted, because they absorb heat reflected up from the ground — the greenhouse effect. These aerosols, though, do the opposite. They block sunlight, they make clouds more reflective — and by doing that, they actually cool the planet.

"The problem is that we're cutting the cooling pollution as we make our air cleaner," he says.

The Scope Of The Problem: Still A Mystery

Some scientists, he says, are confident that this is connected to global warming, but they don't know how large the effect is. "That's the frightening thing, because if it's a big cooling effect, it means that we've been actually warming the planet more than we know," Kintisch says. "As we take away that unexpectedly helpful cooling mask, we're going to be facing more global warming than we expected.

"If, however, the aerosol cooling is less than we fear, then it won't be such a big deal as we clean our air, though it will still be an effect."

The solution, of course, isn't to stop cutting air pollution. "We have to continue doing that, because these pollutants contribute to asthma, they contribute to respiratory diseases, they cause all sorts of health problems, and they make our environment dirty," he says. "But there's a variety of answers that are more sophisticated than simply continuing to pollute."

Gunk To The Rescue

One of those answers is pretty radical: injecting new pollutants into the stratosphere while we continue to clean up our emissions. It's one of the theories of "geoengineering" that Kintisch explores in his new book, Hack the Planet.

It sounds contradictory, but the idea is actually based on a natural polluter — volcanoes. Kintisch points out that nearly 20 years before the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland shut down air traffic across Europe, a much bigger volcano in the Philippines affected the climate over a much broader area.

"In 1991, when Mount Pinatubo erupted, it put tons of sulfur into the stratosphere," he says. "Those sulfur aerosols cooled the planet."

So if we found ourselves in a climate crisis where oceans were rising rapidly and coastal areas were flooding, some scientists think "we could mimic the cooling effect of natural volcanoes and make man-made volcanoes by putting our own gunk, essentially, up in the upper atmosphere," Kintisch says.

"It's unclear whether we would be able to respond and actually stop a disintegrating ice sheet situation," he cautions. "However, some scientists think we're getting near that worse-case scenario right now."

More Global Warming Profiteering by Obama Energy Official

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/more-global-warming-profiteering-by-obama-energy-official/

Surprising documents made available to this author reveal that Assistant Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi has a huge financial stake in companies likely to profit from the Obama administration’s “green” policies.

Zoi, who left her position as CEO of the Alliance for Climate Protection — founded by Al Gore — to serve as assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, now manages billions in “green jobs” funding. But the disclosure documents show that Zoi not only is in a position to affect the fortunes of her previous employer, ex-Vice President Al Gore, but that she herself has large holdings in two firms that could directly profit from policies proposed by the Department of Energy...

Scientist says Arctic getting colder

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog

MOSCOW, April 23 (UPI) -- A Russian scientist says the Arctic may be getting colder, not warmer, which would hamper the international race to discover new mineral fields.

An Arctic cold snap that began in 1998 could last for years, freezing the northern marine passage and making it impassable without icebreaking ships, said Oleg Pokrovsky of the Voeikov Main Geophysical Observatory.

"I think the development of the shelf will face large problems," Pokrovsky said Thursday at a seminar on research in the Polar regions.

Scientists who believe the climate is warming may have been misled by data from U.S. meteorological stations located in urban areas, where dense microclimates creates higher temperatures, RIA Novosti quoted Pokrovsky as saying.

"Politicians who placed their bets on global warming may lose the pot," Pokrovsky said.

Global warming graph attacked by study

By Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent

Published: April 14 2010 19:51 Last updated: April 14 2010 19:51

A key piece of evidence in climate change science was slammed as “exaggerated” on Wednesday by the UK’s leading statistician, in a vindication of claims that global warming sceptics have been making for years.

Professor David Hand, president of the Royal Statistical Society, said that a graph shaped like an ice hockey stick that has been used to represent the recent rise in global temperatures had been compiled using “inappropriate” methods.

“It used a particular statistical technique that exaggerated the effect [of recent warming],” he said.

The criticism came as part of a report published on Wednesday that found the scientists behind the “Climategate” e-mail scandal had behaved “honestly and fairly” and showed “no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice”.

The e-mails were hacked last autumn from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. They caused a storm, as they appeared to show scientists manipulating and concealing data.

Although Wednesday’s report – commissioned by UEA with advice from the Royal Society, the UK’s prestigious national science academy – exonerated the unit’s scientists, it criticised climate experts for failures in handling statistics.

“It is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians,” the report concluded.

The hockey stick graph was a key part of the scandal. In the e-mails, UEA’s Professor Phil Jones referred to a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures suggested by certain sources of data. A similar trick was used in the hockey stick graph.

The UEA scientists said that “trick” merely referred to a scientific technique – an explanation accepted by some sceptics, including Lord Lawson, former Tory chancellor.

Prof Hand said his criticisms should not be seen as invalidating climate science. He pointed out that although the hockey stick graph – which dates from a study led by US climate scientist Michael Mann in 1998 – exaggerates some effects, the underlying data show a clear warming signal.

He accused sceptics of “identifying a few particular issues and blowing them up” to distort the true picture. The handful of errors found so far, including the exaggerated hockey stick graph and a mistaken claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035, were “isolated incidents”, he said. “If you look at any area of science, you would be able to find odd examples like this. It doesn’t detract from the vast bulk of the conclusions,” he said.

The report into the science produced by UEA, which came from a panel chaired by Lord Oxburgh, a scientist and former Shell chairman, was the second investigation into Climategate in the UK. The first, by a committee of MPs, also found the scientists innocent of manipulating data, though it said they may have breached Freedom of Information legislation.

An investigation into the scientists’ handling of FOI requests is still under way.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools.

Preview: 'The Factor' Confronts Al Gore

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGaHiWDZRNY

Follow the Money : James Hansen Gets Another Pay-Off

http://mensnewsdaily.com/sexandmetro/2010/04/09/follow-the-money-james-hansen-gets-another-pay-off/

Friday, April 9, 2010

Godfather of the global warming hoax, James Hansen has received a $100,000 “environmental prize for decades of work trying to alert politicians to what he called an unsolved emergency of global warming.”

Climate scientist James Hansen wins Sophie Prize : The “Sophie Prize” is awarded for disrupting free-market capitalism and pushing the world toward centralized control. In its mission statement, the organization behind the prize states:

Today’s economic system is at odds with the limits set by nature. Too many decisions are based on short-term profit for a few select groups rather than a moral and fair distribution of the world’s resources.

…

For as long as the means allow, The Sophie Prize will be awarded to an individual or an organization that, in a pioneering or a particularly creative way, has pointed to alternatives to the present development and put such alternatives into practice.

Hansen never hides his overpowering leftist political views and agenda, having traveled the world to declare that successful capitalists should be jailed. His prattle seems never to be more sophisticated that the target audience demands, with unexamined low-left statements like:

It’s been of parallel interest watching testimony in Congressional hearings about the greedy bastards who caused this Great Recession we’re laboring to overcome. The most frequent criticism was of their short-sighted, short-term view of cause-and-effect relationships. The fossil fuel militia aren’t even that advanced

Cows Absolved of Causing Global Warming With Nitrous Oxide

The research will reignite the argument over whether to eat red meat or not Photo: REUTERS

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7564682/Cows-absolved-of-causing-global-warming-with-nitrous-oxide.html

Livestock could actually be good for the environment according to a new study that found grazing cows or sheep can cut emissions of a powerful greenhouse gas.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
Published: 7:00AM BST 08 Apr 2010

In the past environmentalists, from Lord Stern to Sir Paul McCartney, have urged people to stop eating meat because the methane produced by cattle causes global warming.

However a new study found that cattle grazed on the grasslands of China actually reduce another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.

Authors of the paper, published in Nature, say the research does not mean that producing livestock to eat is good for the environment in all countries. However in certain circumstances, it can be better for global warming to let animals graze on grassland.

The research will reignite the argument over whether to eat red meat after other studies suggested that grass fed cattle in the UK and US can also be good for the environment as long as the animals are free range.

Klaus Butterbach-Bahl, of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, carried out the study in Inner Mongolia in China. He found that grassland produced more nitrous oxide during the spring thaw when sheep or cattle have not been grazing. This is because the greenhouse gas, also known as laughing gas, is released by microbes in the soil. When the grass is long snow settles keeping the microbes warm and providing water, however when the grass is cut short by animals the ground freezes and the microbes die.

Dr Butterbach-Bahl said the study overturned assumptions about grazing goats and cattle.

"It's been generally assumed that if you increase livestock numbers you get a rise in emissions of nitrous oxide. This is not the case," he said.

Estimated nitrous oxide emissions from temperate grasslands in places like Inner Mongolia as well as vast swatches of the United States, Canada, Russia and China account for up a third of the total amount of the greenhouse gas produced every year. Nitrous oxide is the third most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and methane.

But Dr Butterbach-Bahl pointed out that the study did not take into account the methane produced by the livestock or the carbon dioxide produced if soil erodes. He also pointed out that much of the red meat eaten in the western world if from intensively farmed animals in southern countries.

He said the study does not overturn the case for cutting down on red meat but shows grazing livestock is not always bad for global warming.

Arctic Sea Ice Melting Season Posts Latest Start on Record

Bloomberg

Arctic Sea Ice Melting Season Posts Latest Start on Record

April 06, 2010, 1:52 PM EDT

By Alex Morales

April 6 (Bloomberg) -- The extent of sea ice over the Arctic Ocean grew until the last day of March, the latest the annual melting season has begun in 31 years of satellite records, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said.

Cold weather and winds from the north over the Bering Sea and Barents Sea meant that the area of ocean covered by ice expanded through last month, the Boulder, Colorado-based center said today in a statement on its Web site. That’s two days later than in 1999, the previous latest start to a melting season since satellite monitoring began in 1979.

Scientists have highlighted declining Arctic sea ice as an indicator of global warming. The NSIDC has said the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free during the summer by 2030. While this year’s melting season has started late, it probably won’t have an impact on the extent of ice in the summer, the group said.

“The ice that formed late in the season is thin and will melt quickly when temperatures rise,” the NSIDC said.

The peak ice extent of 15.25 million square kilometers (5.89 million square miles) “approached” the average for the years 1979 to 2000. It was 670,000 square kilometers more than the record low ice peak of 2006, the center said.

Melting started in March then reversed during a cold snap, prolonging the annual freeze.

In September, the researchers said Arctic sea ice shrank in 2009 to its third-lowest summer minimum on record, remaining “well outside the range of natural variability.”

--Editors: Randall Hackley, Reed Landberg

When the Germans give up on AGW you really do know it's all over…

By James Delingpole Politics
Last updated: April 1st, 2010

No people on earth are more righteously Green than the Germans. They built the foundations and set the tone of the modern Green movement in, ahem, the 1930s. They invented the phrase Atomkraft Nein Danke. They were the first country to allow nasty, dangerous Sixties eco-radicals to reinvent themselves as respectable politicians. They were the first place to buy, wholesale, into the solar power con, which is why so many of their rooves – especially on churches – shimmer and glow like reflective-coated crusties at a mid-Nineties rave, while the German taxpayer is ruing the day his government ever chose to subsidise (Achtung Herr Cameron!) this fantastically pointless scheme… (Hat tip: Robert Groezinger, et al)

So when the Germans say “Auf Wiedersehn AGW” it really is time for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice. And that’s exactly what they just have said. See for yourself in this tear-inducing glorious feature in one of their leading newspapers.

Der Spiegel has done a number on AGW - one of the best and most comprehensive I’ve read in any newspaper anywhere – and it could hardly be more damning.

Truly, the experience is akin to having honey (really good stuff, heather probably) licked off one’s body by nubile blonde Nibelungen.

On the recently vindicated Prof Phil Jones:

“I am 100 percent confident that the climate has warmed,” Jones says imploringly. “I did not manipulate or fabricate any data.”

His problem is that the public doesn’t trust him anymore. Since unknown hackers secretly copied 1,073 private emails between members of his research team and published them on the Internet, his credibility has been destroyed — and so has that of an entire profession that had based much of its work on his research until now.

On the politicisation of science:

Reinhard Hüttl, head of the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam near Berlin and the president of the German Academy of Science and Engineering, believes that basic values are now under threat. “Scientists should never be as wedded to their theories that they are no longer capable of refuting them in the light of new findings,” he says. Scientific research, Hüttl adds, is all about results, not beliefs. Unfortunately, he says, there are more and more scientists who want to be politicians.

On the Urban Heat Island Effect (complete with nice dig at the aforementioned “exonerated, give him his job back” Prof Jones)

Critics reproach Jones for not taking one factor, in particular, sufficiently into account: the growth of urban areas. Stations that used to be rural are now in cities. And because it is always warmer in cities than outside, the temperatures measured at these stations are bound to rise.

Environmental economist Ross McKitrick, one of McIntyre’s associates, examined all rapidly growing countries, in which this urban heat effect was to be expected, and found a correlation between economic growth and temperature rise. He submitted his study in time for the last IPCC report.

Jones did everything he could to suppress the publication, which was critical of him. It proved advantageous to him that he had been one of the two main authors of the temperature chapter. In one of the hacked emails, he openly admitted that he wanted to keep this interfering publication out of the IPCC report at all costs, “even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

On the myth of monster storms:

The all-clear signal on the hurricane front is another setback for the IPCC. In keeping with lead author Kevin Trenberth’s predictions, the IPCC report warned that there would be more hurricanes in a greenhouse climate. One of the graphs in the IPCC report is particularly mysterious. Without specifying a source, the graph suggestively illustrates how damage caused by extreme weather increases with rising average temperatures.

When hurricane expert Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado at Boulder saw the graph, he was appalled. “I would like to discover this sort of relationship myself,” he says, “but it simply isn’t supported by the facts at the moment.”

Pielke tried to find out where the graph had come from. He traced it to the chief scientist at a London firm that performs risk calculations for major insurance companies. The insurance scientist claims that the graph was never meant for publication. How the phantom graph found its way into the IPCC report is still a mystery.

Der Spiegel would never have got away with this article four years ago. But then, in 2006, according to a poll, 62 per cent of Germans surveyed answered “Yes” to the question “Are you personally afraid of climate change.” In 2010 that figure has dropped to 42 per cent, which for those of you who haven’t done the math means that the majority of Germans are now not personally afraid of climate change.

Way to go, Germans! Gott Mitt Uns and all that. Stimmt. Genau

Climate Craziness of the Week – Greenpeace posts threats

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/03/climate-craziness-of-the-week-greenpeace-posts-threats/