Mood: blue
Topic: aust govt
See this article above: It's the global warming skeptics last throw of the scientific dice really via such as Andrew Bolt-er as per Insiders abc tv yesterday:
Book release reignites Costello leadership speculation The panel discusses how any emissions trading scheme will affect the Australian economy and the release of Christine Jackman's book on Kevin Rudd's election campaign. [Webcast available via their front page here http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/]
That's not to say Andrew doesn't have half a point but just not the one he thinks he has: What you can't see in the article in The Australian is the riposte of honest earth mother type Annabel Crabb (God love her): That the rise in global temperatures - 10 hottest years on record in the last 13 years - has indeed plateaued but at a much higher level than is natural.
Which brings us to 3 weeks back when Sunday 9 via Adam Shand - no no intellectual fool either - threw the same skeptic dice. Shand's feature 29 June 08 (curiously missing from their web archive) referred to the flipping of summer and winter in 1815 or so as proof scientists are arrogant to think they have all the answers - the year as Senator Bob Brown pointed out same show that Krakatoa blew it's top and the dust sent the global seasonal pattern haywire. That is cold summer, hot winter in Europe. A one off in fact, not a failure of science or the triumph of uncertainty but of extreme nature:
Interview: Bob Brown
June 29, 2008
Watch our report
This week, Ellen Fanning talks to Senator Bob Brown of the Greens about the new role of the Greens in the Senate and the impact of climate change. more
Which brings us back even further to Jonathan Holmes and 4 Corners presentation via BBC Horizons programme here, about a year ago [actually 3 years plus] presenting the real and intriguing phenomenon of Global Dimming - err sorry, what's that? It's particulate air pollution on a huge scale usually via dirty industrialisation attracting water droplets and thus cloud cover which in turn reflects the sun's warming rays and thus artificially reduces global temperatures.
Apparently scientists clued into this Global Dimming when they discovered that compared to the 50ies and 60ies a whopping 10% less sunlight was hitting the ground due to particulate pollution in the modern world. That's not only weird but bound to have climatic consequences - and it does:
So get this implication of less particulates - from cleaner industry - and thus clean air for clean lungs means higher temperatures in a greenhouse gas polluted atmosphere tending to push up that way already.
Conversely dirty air meaning more particulates means more lung cancer and more cloud cover etc and a dampening of temperatures.
This suggests for want of a better term - The Slow Krakatoa of the Chinese (and probably Indian) particulate air pollution phenomenon no doubt correlating to their economic boom of the last 10 years.
Only anecdotal too but we recall one westerner report of travelling in China an area of the State of Victoria and experiencing a blanket of smog like Sydney or Melbourne (on a bad day) for the whole massive area of land travelled. That's particulate industrial pollution year after year on a scale to influence neighbouring countries - another anecdotal report - and yes even global climate.
That's Global Dimming dampening upward global temperatures in what may well be a temporary reprieve from escalating Global Warming and dangerous climate change.
SAM micro news now fears we are facing Sophie's Choice: Choose your poison - Beijing style lung cancer rates with all the benefits of Dimming from those higher concentrations of particulates, or intensified cyclonic weather in southern latitudes (like Brisbane, Sydney etc), from cleaner yet still C02 (and other GHG) overburdened atmosphere.
And Global Dimming has another big impact - the particulates that form the water droplets that form the clouds - apparently they are smaller in size than your usual cloud forming droplets (or something like that). As a result apparently they tend to rain in different locations. According to the 4 Corners docoumentary this has led to failed rains in Africa resulting from particulate pollution in Europe and North America. Hard to credit sure, but that was the thesis and the science referencing was pretty strong in that show.
Here are some senior scientific voices from the BBC Horizons show:
PROF VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: We saw ten times more particles in the polluted air mass north of the Maldives compared with what we saw south of the Maldives which was a pristine air mass.
NARRATOR: In the polluted air billions of man-made particles provided ten times as many sites around which water droplets could form. So polluted clouds contained many more water droplets, each one far smaller than it would be naturally. Many small droplets reflect more light than fewer big ones. So the polluted clouds were reflecting more light back into space, preventing the heat of the sun getting through. This was the cause of Global Dimming.
PROF VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: Basically the Global Dimming we saw in the North Indian Ocean, it was contributed on the one hand by the particles themselves shielding the ocean from the sunlight, on the other hand making the clouds brighter. So this insidious soup, consisting of soot, sulphates, nitrates, ash and what have you, was having a double whammy on the Global Dimming.
NARRATOR: And when he looked at satellite images, Ramanathan found the same thing was happening all over the world. Over India. Over China, and extending into the Pacific. Over Western Europe... extending into Africa. Over the British Isles. But it was when scientists started to investigate the effects of Global Dimming that they made the most disturbing discovery of all. Those more reflective clouds could alter the pattern of the world's rainfall. With tragic consequences.
NEWS REPORT - MICHAEL BUERK VOICE OVER: Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korum it lights up a biblical famine, now in the 20th Century. This place say workers here is the closest thing to hell on earth.
NARRATOR: The 1984 Ethiopian famine shocked the world. It was partly caused by a decade's long drought right across sub-Saharan Africa - a region known as the Sahel. For year after year the summer rains failed. At the time some scientists blamed overgrazing and poor land management. But now there's evidence that the real culprit was Global Dimming. The Sahel's lifeblood has always been a seasonal monsoon. For most of the year it is completely dry. But every summer, the heat of the sun warms the oceans north of the equator. This draws the rain belt that forms over the equator northwards, bringing rain to the Sahel. But for twenty years in the 1970s and 80s the tropical rain belt consistently failed to shift northwards - and the African monsoon failed. For climate scientists like Leon Rotstayn the disappearance of the rains had long been a puzzle. He could see that pollution from Europe and North America blew right across the Atlantic, but all the climate models suggested it should have little effect on the monsoon. But then Rotstayn decided to find out what would happen if he took the Maldive findings into account.
DR LEON ROTSTAYN (CSIRO Atmospheric Research): What we found in our model was that when we allowed the pollution from Europe and North America to affect the properties of the clouds in the northern hemisphere the clouds reflected more sunlight back to space and this cooled the oceans of the northern hemisphere. And to our surprise the result of this was that the tropical rain bands moved southwards tracking away from the more polluted northern hemisphere towards the southern hemisphere.
NARRATOR: Polluted clouds stopped the heat of the sun getting through. That heat was needed to draw the tropical rains northwards. So the life giving rain belt never made it to the Sahel.
DR LEON ROTSTAYN: So what our model is suggesting is that these droughts in the Sahel in the 1970s and the 1980s may have been caused by pollution from Europe and North America affecting the properties of the clouds and cooling the oceans of the northern hemisphere.
NARRATOR: Rotstayn has found a direct link between Global Dimming and the Sahel drought. If his model is correct, what came out of our exhaust pipes and power stations contributed to the deaths of a million people in Africa, and afflicted 50 million more. But this could be just of taste of what Global Dimming has in store.
PROF VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: The Sahel is just one example of the monsoon system. Let me take you to anther part of the world. Asia, where the same monsoon brings rainfall to three point six billion people, roughly half the world's population. My main concern is this air pollution and the Global Dimming will also have a detrimental impact on this Asian monsoon. We are not talking about few millions of people we are talking about few billions of people.
NARRATOR: For Ramanathan the implications are clear.
PROF VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN: There is no choice here we have to cut down air pollution, if not eliminate it altogether.
These global weather effects look grim folks, and the egotistical rivalry amongst high paid journalists doesn't seem to be helping things much either. What we need is more light less heat as the saying goes, pun intended.
Postscript #1
We wrote our comment above before absorbing John Garnaut's piece 2 days earlier about the huge particulate pollution in China :
19-20 July 2008 Light in the fog - World - smh.com.au
with this instructive graphic here:
John Garnaut doesn't quite get to grips with the science of Global Dimming but otherwise he is right that the particulate pollution in China is a Big Thing with global implications. Global Dimming explains more of the how and why this pollution feeds into climate instability.