Quote :

"What happened to global warming? By Doyle Rice, USA TODAY What happened to global warming? This week's heat wave notwithstanding, scientists have been puzzled as to why global warming has occurred at a slower pace since 1998, following decades of increasing temperatures. A new study out today in the journal Science reports the cause could be an increase in the amount of aerosols – tiny, airborne solid and liquid particles from both natural and man-made sources – high up in the stratosphere. In the study, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other agencies found that an increase in stratospheric aerosols decreased the global warming that would have otherwise occurred by 25 percent since 1998. "There was less warming than you would have had without the aerosols," says study co-author John Daniel of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. Sea salt, dust and volcanic ash are three common types of natural aerosols; these airborne particles can also come from man-made sources from the burning of fossil fuels. "Most of the global warming of the past half-century has been driven by continuing increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gases," the study reports, "but natural aerosols from particular 'colossal' volcanic eruptions have significantly cooled the global climate at times, including for example the 'year without a summer' experienced after the eruption of the Tambora volcano in 1815 and notable cooling after the Pinatubo eruption in 1991." Daniel added that he wouldn't have thought that the aerosols would still be a factor now, this long after the 1991 volcanic eruption of Pinatubo. The stratospheric aerosol increase could also be due in part to human emissions of sulfur precursors (such as sulfur dioxide from burning coal), the authors point out in the study. This study follows another study earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found that China doubled its coal consumption from the years 2003 to 2007, leading to a huge increase in sulfur emissions that may have had a cooling effect on the planet. The researchers in that study suggested that this cooling effect may have counteracted ongoing warming due to increased carbon dioxide concentrations, permitting natural forces to predominate the planet's temperature. Will there be a point in the future at which the impact of aerosols on global temperatures will be less of a factor than it is now? "What happens in the future depends on the cause of the aerosols," says Daniel. "If it's volcanic, it depends on what volcanoes do. If its sulfur, it depends on what our pollution is." The paper does not address how man-made versus natural activities contribute to aerosol creation, which they say is a question to be explored in further studies. As for aerosols' impact on climate models used to estimate future global warming, according to the study, "climate model projections neglecting these changes would continue to overestimate the … global warming in coming decades if these aerosols remain present at current values or increase.""

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2011/07/global-warming-slowed-aerosols-stratosphere-volcanoes/1

7/21/2011 3:41:09 PM

If only there were multiple threads this could have gone into...

7/21/2011 3:49:57 PM

7/21/2011 4:10:55 PM

Interestingly enough, this "lack of global warming" is planet-wide, north and south hemispheres. These heavy particulate emissions from China remain in the northern hemisphere, so how would this effect the southern hemisphere as well?

7/21/2011 4:13:14 PM

I think it's because of the morning glories that I've been successful at growing this year. Sucking up all the excess CO2. And my English Ivies are filtering out most of China's pollution. Earth pwnt saved, stay home.

7/21/2011 4:18:28 PM

lol

does this mean I can stop sequestering my car's exhaust in plastic Harris Teeter shopping bags? I'm running out of room to store this stuff...

7/21/2011 4:29:09 PM

Not just that, but we can all stop exhaling into Food Lion plastic bags and sequestering those as well. I say we use your stockpile of penned up car exhaust as a fracking method to retrieve more natural gas!

7/21/2011 4:37:43 PM

I'm in!

7/21/2011 4:49:26 PM

This is simple.

Burning COAL releases tons of co2 which causes global warming and stays in the atmosphere for 100 years.
Aerosols don't stay in the atmosphere more than a few years.

Do the math.

7/21/2011 4:53:58 PM

Quote :

"so how would this effect the southern hemisphere as well?"

Penguins.

7/21/2011 4:56:19 PM

^^ wat? You can't have it both ways, dipshit. You can't have, on the one hand the aerosols be counteracting the CO2 and driving temperatures down, and on the other lament that CO2 is driving up the temperatures by hanging around longer. which is it?

7/21/2011 6:56:41 PM

The major point is that these aerosols have been making the progress of global warming happen more slowly than previously predicted; their effect is not powerful enough to fully counteract the effect of increasing levels of greenhouse gases.

7/21/2011 8:57:53 PM

Aerosols, eating my ozone layer? It's more common than you think!

7/21/2011 9:04:15 PM

Quote :

"^^ wat? You can't have it both ways, dipshit. You can't have, on the one hand the aerosols be counteracting the CO2 and driving temperatures down, and on the other lament that CO2 is driving up the temperatures by hanging around longer. which is it?"

I don't understand what you are talking about. Let me spell it out for you.

Burning one ton of coal produces over 2 tons of CO2 that will stay in the atmosphere for ~100 years

A very liberal aerosol number on coal burning would be ~10% of coal mass max and these particles won't stay in the atmosphere longer than a few years.

So lets say you burn 10 tons of coal this year and produce 10 tons of CO2. Lets also assume that the warming from the CO2 is offset by your 1 ton of aerosols.

year 1 CO2: 10 tons
year 1 aerosols: 1 tons

year 2 CO2: 20 tons
year2 aerosols: 2 tons

year 3 CO2: 30 tons
year 3 aerosols: 3 tons

year 4 CO2: 40 tons
year 4 aerosols: 3 tons

year 5 CO2: 50 tons
year 5 aerosols: 3 tons

year 6 CO2: 60 tons
year 6 aerosols: 3 tons

See the trend here? The CO2 sticks around while the aerosols level off. Now, as you continue to burn more and more coal each year, you continue to pool your CO2 causing a runaway greenhouse.

year 20 CO2:2000 tons
year 20 aerosols: 3 tons

So even if those initial aerosols offset your warming, they will fall back down too quickly while the CO2 hangs around for what seems like forever.

Then when you account for the plantlife lost due to acid rain and mining from increased coal production, you are gaining even more CO2

7/21/2011 9:59:27 PM

The E man is right on this one. Atmospheric life-cycles of CO2-releasing events are in the hundreds of years, while for aerosols it's only measurable for a handful of years at most.

7/21/2011 10:52:47 PM

The CO2 life cycle is not fully understood and there are several studies that disagree with the "100s of years" line and in fact say it's much less. I will try to locate some if I have spare time today.

7/22/2011 8:52:18 AM

Hooray!!! No more global warming!!!

7/22/2011 9:00:59 AM

^lol nice pic

7/22/2011 9:06:09 AM

I almost posted this one



for a few LOLs

[Edited on July 22, 2011 at 9:12 AM. Reason : I thought it was a plastic bag at first but now I think it might be a scarf or something]

7/22/2011 9:11:25 AM

Quote :

"I don't understand what you are talking about. Let me spell it out for you. "

So, basically, you took a long winded approach to say exactly the same thing. Again, which is it: are aerosols keeping the temperature lower despite the increased CO2, or not?

Quote :

"The E man is right on this one. Atmospheric life-cycles of CO2-releasing events are in the hundreds of years"

It's kinda funny how the original estimates of CO2 lifetime were quite lower, until the climate fearmongering took hold. Then all of a sudden the lifetime exploded into much higher numbers. Funny how that works. And it's funny how the IPCC estimates are consistently higher than contemporary studies, as well.

7/22/2011 12:46:44 PM

Quote :

"are aerosols keeping the temperature lower despite the increased CO2, or not?"

yes, but the aerosols will dissipate before the co2 does, so in the future the co2 will catch up to us

7/22/2011 1:22:47 PM

eating shit lowers food costs too

7/22/2011 1:37:31 PM

^^That just gives the ocean more time to absorb CO2.

7/22/2011 1:41:19 PM

you are assuming the coal plants are cut off magically one day, too... Really, this whole deal reeks of desperation now. Heeeey, we made all these predictions before, when we claimed we knew all we needed to know... and they fell flat. But now we know why the failed! We know it all now... Trust us!

[Edited on July 22, 2011 at 2:32 PM. Reason : ]

7/22/2011 2:31:41 PM

The US by itself has enough coal for several hundreds (more) years of consumption.

7/22/2011 2:35:41 PM

Quote :

"^^That just gives the ocean more time to absorb CO2."

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/how-long-will-global-warming-last/langswitch_lang/tk/

Quote :

"When you release a slug of new CO2 into the atmosphere, dissolution in the ocean gets rid of about three quarters of it, more or less, depending on how much is released. The rest has to await neutralization by reaction with CaCO3 or igneous rocks on land and in the ocean [2-6]. These rock reactions also restore the pH of the ocean from the CO2 acid spike. My model indicates that about 7% of carbon released today will still be in the atmosphere in 100,000 years [7]. I calculate a mean lifetime, from the sum of all the processes, of about 30,000 years. That’s a deceptive number, because it is so strongly influenced by the immense longevity of that long tail. If one is forced to simplify reality into a single number for popular discussion, several hundred years is a sensible number to choose, because it tells three-quarters of the story, and the part of the story which applies to our own lifetimes. "

You seem to have mistaken the equilibrium concentration of CO2 in the ocean with an infinite sink.

7/22/2011 2:41:28 PM

I'm sorry I didn't preface it by saying all CO2. My apologies, feel free to continue freaking out over a trace gas.

7/22/2011 2:44:26 PM

what about trees absorbing some of the shit

7/22/2011 3:05:04 PM

shhhhhhhhhh. everyone knows that CO2 never disappears. There's never been studies before this that showed lower lifetime numbers. Nope. These studies are in no way politically convenient

and then there's this:
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812/full/climate.2008.122.html
in 1990, the IPCC said the lifetime was 50 to 200 years.
In 1995, it was 5 to 200.
And now? They flat out refuse to give a number. not fishy at all, is it?

[Edited on July 22, 2011 at 4:08 PM. Reason : ]

7/22/2011 3:55:34 PM

My understanding is that for a given ppm concentration of CO2 in the air, the ocean will adjust it's concentration of CO2 to a corresponding ph value.

7/22/2011 4:18:08 PM

ocean acidification is a huge problem for us as well. You lose photosynthetic plankton thus get a lot more co2. Also when you increase coal production, you kill trees both directly and indirectly.

7/22/2011 4:59:34 PM

If you're worried about the feedback of CO2 phytoplankton then you might not want to look up the potential feedback from frozen seabed methane.

7/22/2011 5:40:16 PM

Humans don't live in the ocean so why the fuck should we care if it turns to acid?

7/22/2011 5:52:44 PM

^^^ocean acidification isn't a problem, as there isn't enough CO2 for it to become high enough to harm anything.

http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/10/not-enough-co2-to-make-oceans-acidic-a-note-from-professor-plimer/

7/26/2011 8:51:42 AM

TKE-Teg

At this point it's obvious that you are taking absolutely whatever evidence you can to say that anything that is pointed out to be a problem isn't a problem. Do you have any awareness of this at all? Saying that CO2 won't increase the temperature of the Earth is one thing, but saying that the acidity of the ocean is not increasing is reaching a new level of flatly denying reality.

You know that out of the CO2 we release not all of it stays in the atmosphere right? We can count what we've emitted and what we've increased the CO2 in the atmosphere by and there is a difference. Where did that go? A LARGE fraction of it went into the ocean. The ocean is perhaps the largest sink aside from the atmosphere. Do you contradict this in any way?

So if CO2 is entering the ocean, what on God's green Earth are you trying to say is happening? That dissolved CO2 doesn't change ph? What in holy hell is dissolved CO2 in the ocean doing in your mind? How how how can you believe what you're saying?!

HOW?!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

Quote :

"Between 1751 and 1994 surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.25 to 8.14"

This isn't the predicted change in pH in the future, this is what has already happened. Just think about what you wrote! You're saying there isn't enough CO2 for it to become acid enough to harm anything. For one, it certainly is enough for it to become more acid. It already has! And pH isn't a controversial science. The idea that a change from 8.25 to 8.14 isn't enough to harm something sounds very very very wrong, and that's not even what you said, you were talking about IN THE FUTURE.

Have you ever owned a fish tank? Talked to the guy at the fish store about what you need in order to keep a healthy environment for the fish?

And for the future:

Quote :

"Time pH pH change Source H+ concentration change relative to pre-industrial Pre-industrial (18th century) 8.179 0.000 analysed field[11] 0% Recent past (1990s) 8.104 -0.075 field[11] + 18.9% Present levels ~8.069 -0.11 field[3][4][12][13] + 28.8% 2050 (2×CO2 = 560 ppm) 7.949 -0.230 model[10] + 69.8% 2100 (IS92a)[14] 7.824 -0.355 model[10] + 126.5%"

The ocean is right now more acid to a very concerning level. According to the predictions of climate science, it is going to go from today's significantly acidified state to "holy shit" in 2100.

We're not talking about a little pond here. This is the entire goddam ocean. How do you believe this stuff about "ocean acidification isn't a problem"?!!! Please tell me!

7/26/2011 9:28:41 AM

I never said the acidity wouldn't change mrfrog.

I say it's not a problem b/c it's been proven time and time again that the coral reefs are not in any danger. And that was the bulk of the worry that marine biologists have over increased ocean acidity. Furthermore as well all know the atmosphere in the past has had way way way more CO2 concentration so I fail to see how it would be catastrophic now. In comparison to the history of the planet you could definitely say that our current period is carbon dioxide starved.

[Edited on July 26, 2011 at 12:25 PM. Reason : k]

7/26/2011 12:24:23 PM