From the University of Colorado at Boulder comes this press release and accompanying photo. The photo, showing hazy pollution laden air in the Bernese Alps, makes me wonder why they don’t attribute current glacier ice loss issues to soot. Asia in particular, is a leader in soot production, right next to those Himalayan glaciers that…
From the AGU Weekly Highlights, something I’ve pointed out more than a few times. See this photo of a moulin in upper Greenland, where carbon soot has collected at the bottom: Image from National Geographic online slide show – Photo: James Balog – click for more The authors find that BC (black carbon) emitted within…
We’ve had several essays here at WUWT on the role of Black Carbon soot and its role in affecting surface albedo. Anyone who has ever witnessed “dirty snow” knows that it tends to melt faster than white snow under sunlight because the black carbon on top absorbs more solar energy than the base white snow…
International study: Where there’s smoke or smog, there’s climate change By Hannah Hickey In addition to causing smoggy skies and chronic coughs, soot – or black carbon – turns out to be the number two contributor to global warming. It’s second only to carbon dioxide, according to a four-year assessment by an international panel. The…
From the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme via Eurekalert, some of the heat gets taken off CO2 as the ‘big kahuna’ of forcings, now there is another major player, one that we can easily do something about. I’ve often speculated that black carbon is a major forcing for Arctic sea ice, due to examples like this one. …
Interesting point, but I wonder how such a change would come about when people often can’t afford an alternative? Let there be clean light: Kerosene lamps spew black carbon, should be replaced, study says By Sarah Yang, Media Relations BERKELEY — The primary source of light for more than a billion people in developing nations…
From Boston College another failure of climate models to capture reality has been exposed by field empiricism. The map below from NASA’s Earth Observatory will likely have to be revised now that absorption has been demonstrated to be far less. Up in the air: Heating by black carbon aerosol re-evaluated First field study finds soot…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach In my previous post, “Does This Analysis Make My Tropics Look Big?“I discussed a paper called “Recent Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion primarily driven by black carbon and tropospheric ozone”, by Robert Allen et al, hereinafter A2012. They use several metrics to measure the width of the tropics—the location of the…
Short notice – this is on NOW. Worth watching, even if only for how they justify saying ‘black carbon and other “short-lived” greenhouse gases.’. I didn’t know black carbon was a gas. Here’s the release: On Thursday, May 24, at 12 NOON EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME / 9:00 AM PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME, a group of internationally…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach There is a new paper in Nature magazine that claims that the tropics are expanding. This would be worrisome because it could push the dry zones further north and south, moving the Saharan aridity into Southern Europe. The paper is called “Recent Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion primarily driven by black…
From the University of California – Riverside it seems that black carbon soot is driving tropical expansion. How could this be? I thought CO2 was all powerful, so powerful with the strength of 400,000 Hiroshima bombs each day that animals can’t outrun its effects. Manmade pollutants may be driving Earth’s tropical belt expansion UC Riverside-led…
From the American Chemical Society it seems that newer is not always better. Even Yale environment360 bought into this idea. I should add that I’m all for reducing carbon soot, but in the zealous rush for solutions, sometimes too many cooks spoil the soup. Right: Primitive stoves and open fires pose serious health risks, particularly…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach My thanks to Nick Stokes and Joel Shore. In the comments to my post on the effects of atmospheric black carbon, Extremely Black Carbon, they brought up and we discussed the results of Ramanathan et al. (PDF, hereinafter R2008). Black carbon, aka fine soot, is an atmospheric pollutant that has…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Of late there has been a lot written about the effect of “black carbon”, a.k.a. “soot”, and also “brown carbon”, a.k.a. wood and dung smoke, on the climate. Me, I think it’s worthwhile controlling black and brown carbon solely because of the health effects. Inhaled soot and wood smoke kill…