Could the Arctic meltdown be China's fault?

[Xithras]

Conventional logic in the environmental community declares that the meltdown of Arctic sea ice the direct result of global warming resulting from CO2 emissions within industrialized countries. This makes sense on the surface, but when the rate of sea-ice withdrawal is compared to the rate of global warming, an interesting mismatch appears. Sea ice is retreating at a much faster rate than the local temperature rise, and global warming in the polar regions, while real, has not been occurring at fast enough rate to explain the melt-off over the past decade. Things get even more interesting when you look further back in time and realize that the arctic temperatures in the 1940's were even higher than todays, but that the Arctic didn't see the same high speed melt-off that the region is experiencing today.

While I've always found this a bit odd, I never concerned myself with it much.

Yesterday afternoon, while helping my daughter do some research for her homework, I stumbled across this interesting article: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/03/16/chinasoot_pla.html?category=earth&guid=20070316160030. The gist of the article is that soot and particulate emissions from Chinese coal burning is suspected to be warming the northern Pacific ocean, and that soot deposition in the Sierra Nevada mountains may be directly responsible for earlier melt-offs and glacier retreats in that area. In fact, of all the carbon soot deposited on the state, nearly half originates from Chinese smokestacks. The effect of this soot should be known to anyone who has ever spent any time in a snowy environment. Clean snow reflects heat, but soot or dust on snow retains heat, melting the snow beneath it.

Reading this got me wondering...could Chinese coal soot be ending up in the Arctic as well? The melt-off is primarily on the asian side of the sea, so armed with that bit of evidence and a little bit of curiosity, I did a little research. After doing a bit of Googling, I came across the wind maps on these three pages: (http://www.bigelow.org/virtual/handson/wind.html), (http://cache.eb.com/eb/image?id=7570&rendTypeId=4), and (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~dib2/GE1001/atmosphere2.html) These maps, interestingly, show that there is indeed a prevailing current capable of pulling soot laden Chinese air northward into the Arctic. More importantly, the maps show that the currents exist both mid winter and during the Arctic summer, which would mix soot and particulate pollution within the sea ice as it was forming AND atop it during the melt cycle, which would accelerate the meltdown. The current is more direct in January than in July, but the possibility of year round soot deposition was clearly plausible.

Interesting. Surely someone has looked into this, right? As it turns out, is that the research IS there, and supports the notion that it is industrial particulate pollution, and not global warming, that is melting the Arctic Sea. We know that Arctic soot deposition can impact ice levels (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/dri-acs080607.php), and we have solid evidence that industrial pollution is the culprit (http://cloud1.arc.nasa.gov/arctas/docs/ipy-p3_wp.pdf) (http://climatesci.colorado.edu/publications/pdf/R-309.pdf) (http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2007/aug/science/ee_blackcarbon.html) (http://healthandenergy.com/soot_and_global_warming.htm) (http://www.physorg.com/news105888386.html)

While some of these cite research discussing a decline in soot output among western nations, I don't think it's any coincidence that the sea ice retreat began in earnest at the same time China began its major industrialization initiatives. The intensity of China's pollution problems have been much discussed on this board and elsewhere, and these sum of these articles makes the position that Chinese particulate carbon emissions are the cause of Arctic sea ice destruction practically a given. It would be difficult to argue that they AREN'T a major contributor.

So here's the question: Why do we in the environmental movement still point to US CO2 emissions as the culprit for the Arctic meltdown? It seems to me that the fix is simply to mandate soot scrubbers for coal burning facilities worldwide. Soot scrubbing is already standard operating practice in the West, and if such a simple modification can eliminate so much damage, why aren't we fighting for this? The message "China is getting the north pole dirty and it's melting" is a lot easier for Joe Sixpack to digest than some argument about greenhouse gasses that many people don't even understand. This is a message that even the republiCONS could get behind.

The Arctic sea ice meltdown has the potential to change weather patterns and ocean currents worldwide, and our #1 priority should be averting that disaster. While the wider problem of CO2 driven global warming DOES need to be addressed, particulate pollution seems to be a much more ominous and short term threat, which as a plus is relatively simple to fix.

**Edited to fix formatting.

[poverlay]

1. Excellent work. Thanks for the post...n/t

[Bitwit1234]

2. They say that because of the melting ice in the artic there

will soon be a path from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

[TheMadMonk]

5. There is. It's called the Panama Canal. nt

[whopis01]

10. Oh... I thought it was called the Strait of Magellan. n/t

[TheMadMonk]

11. That too n/t

[iamahaingttta]

3. China wouldn't be burning all that coal...

...if WE didn't buy so much of the cheap plastic crap that they manufacture. If WE induced them to use coal scrubbers, prices here would go up and Joe Sixpack would complain about that. And/or it would cut into corporate profits and Corporatia would be pissed.

In other words... we're fucked.

[Xithras]

6. Oh, understand that I'm not minimalizing western responsibility here.

China has become a free market economy, and they are simply producing the products we want at the price we demand. If we demand that China put carbon scrubbers on their smokestacks, they'll do it. The U.S. is China's single largest trade partner, and they know full well that an environmental boycott would hurt them.

My question was, why aren't we seeing any pressure from the environmental movement to fix this? Why aren't we all driving around with "China Kills Polar Bears" or "Buying Chinese drowns elves!" bumperstickers on our cars to raise awareness of the issue? Why don't we hear the major players in the environmental movement...the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etc...railing on about how Chinese industrial pollution is killing our northern environment, and how it may disrupt global climate even faster than greenhouse gasses? China isn't going to change its practices until the U.S. and other international powers step up the pressure on them to do so, and those nations aren't going to exert any pressure on China unless their citizens demand it. So where is the demand?

[leebert]

17. Fatalism = nihilism

Fear not, we'll go ahead & solve the problems for you, paying no regard to your nihilistic fatalism.

/leebert

[phantom power]

4. I don't think it's as easy as saying "it's soot, not GHGs."

GHG emissions are clearly implicated in increasing the global heat budget. Also, there are a variety of positive feedbacks that may be contributing to this year's rapid acceleration of melting.

There are some good geologic reasons for the Antarctic to be melting more slowly. The continental ice sheet sits directly over the poles, and is not subjected to the ocean water, as is the arctic ice shelf. We have seen that Antarctica's ice-shelfs are also disappearing rapidly, certainly more rapidly than the ice-sheet.

[Xithras]

7. Nothing is ever easy.

GHG's are a problem, of course, and global warming is an issue that must be addressed. My problem with those focusing on GHG's as the cause for the Arctic melt-off is that it ignores solid research indicating that the melt-off may be a regional problem WITHIN the larger context of global warming. In other words, GW would get us to todays melt-off at some point anyway, but regional pollution is dramatically accelerating the process.

If that is the case, our immediate response should be to minimize the regional pollution to slow the damage. There is nothing on the table, no treaties, no legislation, NOTHING, which will reduce global greenhouse gas levels within the next decade or two. Even if we signed a GHG reduction treaty with every nation on the planet today, global GHG levels would continue to climb for another decade or two as the global feedback cycles caught up. Particulate pollution, in comparison, stops climbing the moment we stop emitting it, and can wash completely out of the atmosphere within two years. If it is indeed a major factor in this melt-off, as I and some of the authors I link to suggest, then I think it should be addressed immediately.

[NNadir]

8. Yes. China invented coal burning.

They started this crap thousands of years ago and if they don't fucking stop right now we should Iraqize them.

It's all their fault. Every fucking Chinese citizen on average consumes about 700 watts of continuous power.

This has badly effected our ability in the US to consume 12,000 watts of average continuous power, not counting the energy we burn importing shit from China.

[Xithras]

9. This has nothing to do with "Chinese citizens". Their industrial pollution is unprecedented.

No industrial power, not the US, not Europe, NOBODY, has generated atmospheric particulate pollution on the scale that China is doing. Per capita numbers are completely useless here unless you're deliberately trying to obfuscate reality...what is important is the total national output.

When western nations relied on unfiltered coal smokestacks to power their industrial revolutions, they did so on a much smaller scale than China is doing today. When the U.S. went through its filthiest stage of coal powered industrial pollution between 1880 and 1920, the total national population was less than 100 million, and nearly all of that pollution was confined to a relatively small area of the northwestern U.S. In Europe, coal powered industrialization changed the continent, but the actual manufacturing that drove it was confined to a relative few major urban areas.

Following the 1920's, industrial electrification and the adoption of natural gas and oil began to reduce the amount of coal that western countries used for manufacturing, and by the 1960's we'd begun imposing environmental regulations on the coal burners that remained (primarily electrical generation facilities). While overall coal use has continued to grow, particulate pollution from coal burning has been on the decline since the 1920's and is now only a fraction of what it was a century ago (I know about all of the other nasties associated with coal burning, but this thread is about particulate soot pollution).

China, today, burns more coal than the US, Europe, and Japan combined. During the 1920's, when U.S. non-electrical coal burning rates were at their historical highest (the worst point in U.S. history for coal soot emissions), this country produced and burned about 600 million tons of coal a year. We burn a LOT more than that today, but it's almost all for electrical generation, and particulate soot is scrubbed from the plant exhaust.

In contrast to the 600 million tons of soot generating unscrubbed coal pollution we generated in the 1920's, China today is producing and burning nearly two BILLION tons of coal a year...and that's just domestic production, not counting coal they buy from the U.S. and other nations. I don't particularly care if their per capita numbers are low, because those are just a distraction from the real numbers. Actual soot pollution levels emanating from China today are at least four times as bad as they have EVER been in the west, even compared to our deepest darkest coal polluting days, when whole U.S. towns turned black under the pall of the local factory.

Of course, geography also plays a factor here. The prevailing winds in the US tend to push our particulate pollution east and south. The overall wind directions across most of Europe tend to pull pollution southward. There are some exceptions for England and a few areas along the Atlantic coast, but most of the European particulate coal pollution that did make it to the Arctic only did so after a very long trip across Asia. China, unfortunately, is subject to air currents that can pull their pollution north directly across Siberia and into the Arctic. Even ignoring the fact that they produce substantially more particulate pollution than the west ever created, their location alone gives them a greater impact on the Arctic ecosystem.

[iamahaingttta]

12. You're totally focussed on the fact...

...that China burns shitloads of coal. It's true, China is polluting the planet at an unprecedented rate. Go for it. Make it stop. Thank you!

I'm totally focussed on the fact that Americans buy cheap plastic crap that they don't really need at an unprecedented rate. If we weren't so vapid and wasteful as a nation, maybe China wouldn't be such a huge polluter.

Hopefully, between the two approaches that we are focussed on, we can make some change. Just bear in mind what you're going to have to deal with once your pal Joe-Sixpack has to has to start paying higher prices at Wal-Mart for all that junk that he and Jane and the Joelets all go and buy each paycheck. Also bear in mind that the CEO's of the companies that manufacture all that junk are going to want to have you killed if you cut into their profits by demanding that scrubbers be installed all over their corporate serfdom of China.

I mean, you're right. You're so right. Don't stand near any open windows.

[tom_paine]

13. Excellent post.

:kick:

[RestoreGore]

14. Then how do you explain glaciers worldwide melting three times faster than predictions?

And doesn't the burning of coal emit Co2 as well? Do China's particulates reach South America, Africa, and the Western U.S. as well? Obviously pollution has some effect on melting glaciers and snow and always has, but to dismiss GHGs completely regarding their effect on Arctic ice is just not accurate.

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/arctic-climate-impact-assessment.html

[Xithras]

15. One does not negate the other.

Nobody ever said that we were only dealing with one environmental threat.

As the OP states, GHG's are a threat that does need to be addressed. Global glacial meltoff has doubled since the mid-70's, and the warming associated with that would eventually cause the same melting we are seeing today. My supposition, however, is that GHG's aren't responsible for TODAY'S catastrophic arctic meltoff. Chinese particulate soot pollution is causing levels of arctic ice loss that we might otherwise have not seen for decades. Where a GHG warming trend would have occurred slowly enough for us to address, the arctic is CURRENTLY melting too quickly for us to do much about. If the fault for that melt lies with Chinese industry, that industry needs to clean its act up.

And yes, coal burning emits CO2, and even our "clean" coal burning emits a large amount of GHG's. Coal needs to be phased out entirely, but until that can happen it needs to be cleaned up as much as possible.

[leebert]

18. Soot ALSO traps heat in the atmosphere!

If we were only discussing the Arctic, you'd be completely correct. But airborne soot, so it turns out, traps in heat in the atmosphere (even tho it dims the surface).

This was just recently reported by Prof. V. Ramanathan & colleagues (Scripps Inst. for Oceanic Studies) flying sorties of robotic planes doing sonde strata surveys of tropospheric sooty brown clouds (temp & soot concentrations). They report that soot supplants up to 50 percent (50%) of CO2's suspected role in greenhouse warming, overturning the conventional wisdom that brown clouds had a minus 50 percent (-50% ) cooling effect.

It appears that soot may be a very bad player in net planetary warming, up to 40% in the vast Pacific region, for instance. Were soot's role as consistently high across the globe it could mean that soot could be either coequal or the dominant greenhouse component along w/ CO2. Who's emitting it? Everyone, but China's the worst emitter, perhaps Russia's Arctic oil fields are playing a role on the tundra & ice. Go to google images & search for "Asian Brown Cloud." It's astonishing.

For more info, see my other reply to "Xithras."

/leebert
http://leebert.newsvine.com

[leebert]

19. worldwide glacier melts explained

1. Soot apparently is hitting glaciers worldwide & having the same effects on them as it does in the Arctic. Soot sources: Industry, slash&burn forest fires, etc. In the Himalayas the Asian Brown Cloud hits the glacial packs with a double-whammy, with a soot-borne atmospheric warming at exactly the altitude of the glaciers coupled with soot deposition as well!

2. Deforestation: When upwind forests are cleared, the moist microclimates from those forests goes with them. If glaciers downwind depend on cloud formation seeded by arboreal microclimates, then deforestation contributes to glacial recession.

3. Rainfall pattern changes: The Asian Brown Cloud has been long blamed for major changes in rainfall & drought patterns throughout Asia. Both surface cooling & the higher-altitude heating (caused by the vast brown clouds) disrupt normal precipitation patterns.

IOW, Xithras is correct.

/leebert

[leebert]

16. Heat-trapping soot ='s major sea change

I see the 'net is abuzz with the new discoveries about soot. But so far it seems that only a few environmentalists and bloggers have caught onto the news, and just a handful of pundits. Again the blogosphere is way ahead of the pack.

Perhaps it's not too puzzling that James Hansen of NASA GISS has known about soot's role in the Arctic since 2003. In earlier papers Hansen, et al, published, it had appeared that though soot was a major culprit in the Arctic ice loss, the net partial effect of total global AGW was only 25%. That left the other 75% to worry about, leading climatologists to recommend curtailing both CO2 & soot emissions. I don't think anyone in climatology - or in the opposition skeptic's corner - anticipated this past summer's (2007) discoveries of airborne soot's surprising heat-trapping characteristics.

Recap:

1. 90% of the Arctic, tundra & taiga net melt-offs are due to soot deposition (see my blog). Most of the soot may originate in Asia, but the expanding Russian oil fields also cast a pall of soot across the Arctic. The past century's Arctic ice loss represents 25% of total global AGW (see my blog).

2. 50% of atmospheric warming *within* brown clouds is due to soot's heat-trapping properties. This had heretofore been attributed soley to CO2 as it had been believed that soot was cooling agent (causing regional dimming) - by an equal margin of minus 50 percent (-50%). The science on soot has almost functionally reversed itself overnight w/ the role of soot as a heat-trapping particulate. (ibid).

3. 40% of atmospheric warming in the Pacific is caused by dispersed airborne soot (most of it originating in Asia). 75% of the soot airborne over the Western USA is still from Asia (e.g. China's soot may account for about 30% of extra forced warming in springtime Oregon). (ibid)

4. The bulk of airborne soot comes from coal-burning, diesel motors and biomass/wood fires. I might note that in 2001 the current president (anagrammatically, Herbage Glue Works) did instate new regulations to clean up off-road diesel soot emissions, a regulatory initiative long neglected by his ... erm ... predecessors. I might not take exception to anyone pointing out the irony that by pure happenstance that GW-B has done more to fight A-GW ... ;-)

Soot travels worldwide and is a problem worldwide, it just happens to be at its worst in the notorious Asian Brown Cloud and eastward across the Pacific. Were we to assume that soot dispersal is almost universally global, and fairly even (and at this point I don't know if anyone really knows for certain), we might take that net 40% heat-trapping role, apply it to the warmer & damper (not cooler & drier) latitudes where CO2's warming effects are lessened & soot's effects are most pronounced.

Back of the napkin calculation: 40% + 25% = 65% of all observed human-caused global warming might be due to soot. Too high a figure? OK, shave 15% off - 25% airborne soot heating instead of 40% - we're still looking @ 50% soot vs. 50% CO2. That's a lot of atmospheric greenhouse effect!

That 40% global average for soot might not be so far off the mark, however. There are major non-point source soot emissions in the subtropics and tropics with vast seasonal slash-and-burn forest fires from itinerant farmers in Yucatan, throughout Amazonia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Africa. The Yucatan burns can reduce visibility to less than 5 miles in locale as far as Austin, TX & beyond (I can tell you it looks like hell & is miserable - as bad as 1960's L.A.).

What's great about this news is this: Soot disperses within months *AND* once the dirtied Arctic ice falls into the sea, so there is great promise that the Arctic would recover as soon as Arctic sootfall sufficiently abated.

Records suggest there was a big Arctic melt-off during the late 19th & early 20th century that as late as the mid-1920's saw wide-open morraines of gravel & rock and major glacial recessions north of the Arctic circle. Recent studies in Greenland found those very soot deposition layers that diminished in the mid-1920's, establishing the link between the anecdotal accounts from the era to the actual deposition of soot (from wood-burning fires, etc.).

This does cast some doubt on the state of the art of climatology, that such a broad assumption that soot's effect of dimming the surface also suggested it was an atmospheric coolant. That the soot-coolant notion had stood unchallenged for so long, and that its newly discovered role is so absolutely contrary to the prior conventional wisdom, does suggest that there's more research to do w/ the other big atmospheric unknowns like aerosols, etc. Maybe score one for the milder skeptics? :-)

However, it does proffer win-win opportunities for everyone, industrialists & environmentalists alike. As Prof. Ramanathan of the Scripps Inst. for Oceanography points out, this could help us out of our conundrum. It gives nations and industrialists a phased alternative, it gives environmentalists a tangible gain & both parties a chance at good faith cooperation with each other.

Technically speaking, soot's not a greenhouse gas, nor is it an aerosol - it's a particulate. It's actually good to make this distinction for a few reasons. Soot disperses very quickly, within months, whereas gases like methane & CO2 persist for years (so the chronic problem w/ CO2 will still be there for continued study & solutions).

Soot-scrubbing tech is readily at hand, a worldwide initiative could start abating soot emissions tomorrow. There are also other side benefits such as mitigating smog and some heavy metals that may bind to soot.

And depending on what the gross heat-trapping role of soot is determined ... whether it's 40% or 65% of total global AGW, dealing with it readily may help us dodge a bullet in a very manageable way. Kyoto was a marginal pilot program at best, the EU carbon trading scheme is going to need a total restructuring after its carbon trading price crash earlier this year (2006-2007) and last week's Vienna climate meeting's recommendations were non-binding (and didn't make any kind of definite statement about soot...).

See also my blog: http://leebert.newsvine.com

I've contacted a handful of think tank fellows about this, explicated at depth, many are not aware of this yet. I'm trying to spread the word. Xithras, if you'd like to collaborate on this, please contact me. If you're interested in working w/ me on this I'll check my messages - I can't send private messages, I'm freshmeat on DU.

Best regards,

/leebert

(edited for grammar, clarification, additional commentary)

[NMDemDist2]

20. as soon as you get the whatever post number you need, you need to post

this again as it's own thread

fascinating!

and another heartfelt welcome!