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Models overestimate the number of small cooling particles, potentially reducing CO2's role in heatingThe cooling effect of dust created by desert sand blowing into dirt is significantly overestimated, according to a massive new study. That means that the solar radiation likely had a far greater influence on warming, while greenhouse gases like CO2 likely played a smaller than thought role. (Source: bachmont, Creative Commons) Dust particles can effectively render the planet more or less sensitive to solar warming, based on their size. (Source: UCAR)
Some of the Earth's tiniest naturally occurring particles may have just bred a big mess for climatologists. New findings reveal that models scientists have long used to estimate the causes and effects of global warming may be dramatically flawed due to errors in one of their most important inputs.
This revelation is an indirect conclusion of a new study published in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Jasper Kok, a climatology researcher with The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).I. Recent Warming - Blame it on the Sun?
The study's key conclusion was to show that the ratio of small soil dust particles (clay), which cool the atmosphere, to large soil dust particles (silt), which yield an indirect heating effect, may be much higher than previous estimated. This is a critical finding because it shows that the Earth's climate may be much more sensitive to solar radiation than previous models have indicated, which in turn casts doubt on anthropogenic warming theory -- the idea that human carbon dioxide emissions bear the primary warming influence on the climate over the last several decades.
Carbon dioxide, like water vapor, has been shown unquestionably to be a greenhouse gas with some effect on the atmosphere. And human behavior (direct -- via burning fossil fuels, and indirect -- via livestock and clearing vegetation) has caused atmospheric CO2 levels to creep upwards over the last half century.
That said, levels still remain drastically lower than in certain periods of the Earth's early history. Furthermore, it is exactly what impact these slightly elevated CO2 levels are having in terms of warming. While it would be quick to claim causation, due to the correlation in recently rising temperatures, the exact degree of causation -- if at all -- remains unknown.
Solar activity also climbed over the last few decades as the Earth heated up. Based on the newly presented evidence of the composition of atmospheric dust, dust cooling may be less that previously estimated, which in turn may mean that CO2 emissions have less of a forcing effect than previously estimated. While the study does not specifically discuss this, the conclusions lend some support to the theory that the recent increase in solar activity may have played a much larger role in recent warming than atmospheric carbon increases.
II. Dust in the Wind
Mineral dust blows up into the atmosphere from multiple locations around the globe and plays a critical, but poorly understood role on the Earth's climate. The dust is created when sand particles are blown by the wind into soil, shattering it into microparticles. Major sources of mineral dust include the southwestern United States, northern Africa, Northeast Asia (the Gobi Desert) and Australia.
The smallest microparticles measure a mere 2 microns (2000 nm). These particles are known as clay. Past studies have shown that they tend to stay in the atmosphere for long periods of time, reflecting light and cooling the Earth.
Large microparticles, known as silt, can reach 50 microns (50,000 nm) -- about the width of a human hair). Their weight causes them to quickly fall out of the atmosphere. This has both an indirect and direct climate effect. The indirect effect, is that they fail to block solar radiation, allowing the sun to heat the atmosphere more readily. The direct effect is that they tend to accumulate in mountain polar ice, concentrating sunlight, absorbing heat and accelerating melting.
In order to find the true ratio of the particles types, Professor Kok cleverly combined mathematical theory and statistical data. To determine the breaking method, he used brittle object breaking formulas developed by mathematicians. Brittle objects, like glass, rocks -- or soil -- break into a predictable distribution of small, medium, and large particles.
Using these formulas, the researcher turned to statistical information on arid soil, published in a 1983 study Guillaume d'Almeida and Lothar Schüth from the Institute for Meteorology at the University of Mainz in Germany. By combining the two, he was able to arrive at what is thought to be the most accurate statistical distribution for particle sizes resulting from soil breaking published to date.
And the results yielded a major surprise. They showed that the ratio of larger particles to small particles (responsible for heating) was two to eight times higher than originally thought. In other words, dust had less of a cooling effect on the atmosphere and more of a melting effect on glacial ice.
While this may not seem terribly thrilling, it bears tremendous consequence both to global warming policy makers and to climatology researchers. It essentially means that one of the most important inputs to climatologists' carefully crafted computer models could be substantially flawed. In turn this means that major reanalysis of computer-aided climate simulations may be necessary.
III. Back to the Drawing Board
The new findings by no means devalue the idea of using computer modeling to study the Earth's climate. But they are an important reminder that climate models are only as good as their inputs, and in many cases those inputs are based on information that's lacking.
How much or how little impact this study has on modeling will rest largely on determining more accurately how much atmospheric dust is present. According to a brief conversation we had with Professor Kok, the levels of atmospheric dust and how they change with time is a poorly "understood" topic. Thus the study could potentially invalidate current warming models, or leave them largely unscathed. But it does indicate that a new round of data collection and verification is necessary to determine which is the case.
Despite the controversy that peripheral effect of the study will bring, Professor Kok is more preoccupied by its beauty from a mathematical perspective. He states, "As small as [the particles] are, conglomerates of dust particles in soils behave the same way on impact as a glass dropped on a kitchen floor. Knowing this pattern can help us put together a clearer picture of what our future climate will look like. The idea that all these objects shatter in the same way is a beautiful thing, actually. It's nature's way of creating order in chaos."
Beautiful indeed. Professor Kok's ability to focus on truly objective mathematical and scientific analysis with regard to what is an increasing politicized topic is exemplary as well. Given recent revelations [1] [2] [3], this kind of objective dedication to scientific truth is not always present in this field, so it's as refreshing to see that as it is fascinating to observe the symmetry that underlies many laws of our universe.
Mr Tickle: altogether funnier, nicer and more useful than Sir Crispin Tickell
I’m in Ireland this week and am not yet sure how close I’ll be to the internet. So to tide you over just in case here is a fascinating essay from Ishmael2009 (not his real name) on Sir Crispin Tickell is one of the chief architects of Man Made Global Warming’s towering cathedral of half truths, exaggeration, hysteria and Neo-Malthusian lunacy. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the mighty Ishmael2009…..
Our Man at the Climate Summit: Essay on Sir Crispin Tickell
Sir Crispin Charles Cervantes Tickell is one of the most influential people behind the idea of man-made global warming. Yet you could easily be forgiven for having never heard of him.
Tickell, you see, is a diplomat and a scion of the British establishment, and as such works largely behind the scenes, like a real-life Sir Humphrey. His CV bulges with numerous honorary doctorates, chairmanships and directorships around the world, including the European arm of Pachauri’s TERI organization (1). After starting as a bright young thing with the civil service, he spent two years at Harvard, where he addressed himself to the up and coming subject of climate change, the result of which was his 1977 book Climactic Change and World Affairs, a work that detailed the threat posed to Western civilization by possible changes in the world climate. It made his name, and on his return Tickell was made Chef de Cabinet to the President of the European Commission and afterwards advisor to the Thatcher government, where he was instrumental in persuading leading politicians to put global warming on the political agenda (11).
So is AGW the most serious threat facing the world today, so far as Tickell is concerned? Well, almost. There is one other threat that he sees as even more urgent than AGW – the human race itself. Specifically, those feckless, irresponsible classes and nations that continue to breed at more than the replacement level of 2.1 children (Tickell, it should be noted, has three children. Considerations of overpopulation do not apply to his class, of course (1)). For him, overpopulation is the driving force behind AGW: we are a cancer on the planet. In language which we would normally expect to come from extremists, Tickell lays out his vision of the rest of the world.
We are, he believes, “a malignant maladaption in the corpus of living organisms, and behave and reproduce like a virus out of control” (2). We are “infected tissue in the organism of life” (3). “More than ever,” he writes, “humans can be regarded like certain species of ant” (5).The only relief from this that Tickell sees on the horizon is that “it is hard to believe that there will be anything like current or future human numbers in their present urban concentrations or elsewhere. Whether weeded out by warfare, disease, deteriorating conditions of life, or other disasters, numbers are likely to fall drastically. We must, I believe, expect some breakdowns in human society before the end of this century with unforeseeable outcomes” (4). That’ll teach us to pollute his nice clean world!
Of course, Tickell is well aware that in every single industrialised country, total fertility rates (TFR) have fallen below replacement levels – in other words in modernised nations population is declining. The real threat, then, is from the feckless hordes in the less developed nations. Overpopulation and climate change will, he warns, lead to refugees from these countries becoming a “prime threat” to Western society in coming years (3).
For Tickell, these refugees are clearly at the root of his concerns. They represent a threat to Western culture as they “bring with them alien customs, religious practices, eating habits, agricultural methods, and – not least – diseases” (3). Yikes! Those horrible, horrible people! He warns that environmental refugees “like normal refugees . . . mostly rely on charity” and worst of all “tend to spread their poverty around them” (3). Tickell claims that “full assimilation” into national culture “is rare” and cautions that in the event of rapid change these refugees would be “only one of myriad animal species trying to cope with disruption of their [unassimilated] way of life” (3). They are, he tells us, a “dangerous element” in Western society and their presence will have “secondary effects” such as “disorder, terrorism, economic breakdown, disease, or bankruptcy” (3). Remember, these warnings come from the man largely responsible for putting AGW on the world political map.
Of course, the real nightmare scenario for Malthusians has always been not overpopulation per se, but differential fertility, so that the fecund foreign hordes pour into an under-populated and degenerate West. This is also a worry for neo-Malthusians such as Tickell as well, it seems. Pointing to the fact (as he sees it) that illegal Mexican immigration into the USA has led to many parts of America taking on “Hispanic characteristics”, he foresees a tidal wave of foreigners swarming into the under-populated areas of the world:
Desperation could push Africans into Europe, Chinese into the relatively empty parts of Russia, the Indonesians into northern Australia. Sheer numbers could swamp most efforts at control (3).
Double yikes! Start breeding chaps, there’s billions of ‘em! So, clearly, as industrialisation leads to a decline in population, what Tickell demands is the modernisation of the poorer countries, right?
Well, no. There aren’t enough resources to go around, you see. Tickell demands that the world pursue”‘sustainable development”. What does that phrase mean? He doesn’t spell it out exactly, but he does know one thing – what was right for the West is not right for the rest:
We should also be clear what it [sustainable development] does not mean: following the methods of industrialisation espoused in the West [ . . . ] Instead it should mean something specific to each country or regions’ resources and culture (6).
Like fellow neo-Malthusian Jonathon Porritt who believes that allowing poor nations to have an electricity grid would be “the end of the world,” Tickell believes that instead of allowing poor nations to industrialise, thus lowering their fertility rates as every developed nation has done, they must lower their populations without first industrialising (7).
At a lecture to The Royal Geographical Society in March 1990, while among friends and colleagues, Tickell spelt out exactly whom he was referring to. Industrialisation in the developed Western world was fine, as it “grew out of previous history” and was sustained by a “resilient” environment with the result that although the environment was greatly altered little irremediable damage was done” (12). Non-Western countries, sadly, do not have the same “history” and have not yet learnt to stop breeding, and so must not be allowed to follow the same path of modernisation. Well, of course. Makes perfect sense, if you’re a neo-Malthusian.
This is reflected in UK government policy towards global warming, according to Left-wing environmental historian David Pepper, who observes:
. . . the British Government (advised by neoMalthusian Crispin Tickell) predictably used Neo-Malthusian arguments at the Rio environmental summit in 1992 to try to shift the blame for global environmental degradation from the West to third world countries (9).
Tickell, unsurprisingly, puts it differently. Overbreeding by poorer nations is he claims “the biggest single environmental issue” and was ignored at Rio, thanks to a “tacit conspiracy”, though he forebears to mention any names behind this ‘conspiracy’ (13).
Like all neo-Malthusians, Sir Crispin Tickell knows full well that fertility rates in industrialised countries always decline to a perfectly manageable level as people decide to more with their lives than simply raise children. If overpopulation really is a problem, then the solution is simple: modernisation and industrialisation – which is exactly the route these countries are pursuing for themselves. To compare mankind in general with “infected tissue” and demand that poor countries simply stop breeding before they modernise is surely not acceptable. But then, our man behind AGW doesn’t see it that way.
————–
1) Crispin Tickell CV at his website http://www.crispintickell.com/page109.html
2) Crispin Tickell, ‘The Ecological Challenge in a Global context’ http://www.crispintickell.com/page61.html
3) Crispin Tickell, ‘Risks of Conflict – Resource and Population Pressures’ http://www.crispintickell.com/page13.html
4) Crispin Tickell, ‘Visions of the 21st Century. The Future: A Bumpy Ride’ http://www.crispintickell.com/page22.html
5) Crispin Tickell, ‘Environment, Islam and the Future’ http://www.crispintickell.com/page146.html
6) Crispin Tickell, ‘Development in an Unstable World’. http://www.crispintickell.com/page95.html
7) Jonathon Porritt, ‘An Audience With Jonathon Porritt’ Tuesday 7th October 2003 @ The Lowry, Salford Quays, Manchester.
8) Jonathon Porritt, ‘Population the Number One Issue’ http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.media.archive.html
9) David Pepper, ‘Modern environmentalism: An Introduction’ page 279.
10) Crispin Tickell, ‘Environment on the Edge’ http://www.crispintickell.com/page87.html
11) Brian Wynne, Peter Simmons et alia, Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks. Vol. 1 (MIT Press, Mass: 2001). P. 103.
12) Crispin Tickell, ‘Human Effects of Climate Change: Excerpts From a Lecture Given to the Society on March 26th’, 1990. Royal Geographical Society.
13) Crispin Tickell, ‘The Human Species: A Suicidal Success?’ The Geographical Journal
Vol. 159, No. 2 (Jul., 1993), pp. 219-226. P. 224.
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