It seems to me that climate hysterics - sometimes including those who claim to be climate scientists - are just making stuff up. Some admit that they exaggerate findings for political effect. It's hard to know what is going on. No good comes of this of course, as any semi-sensible person with the intellectual maturity of an 8 year old knows, but it's not about good. The consequences are worse than just bad policy and wasted resources, it hampers the discovery process. For example:

Recent studies now show that soot - in the air as aerosol brown clouds and on the ice as dirty snow - has contributed a significant amount to global warming in both the air on and on the ground. Over the vast Pacific soot-ladened brown clouds have been recently found to cause up to 40 percent (60 percent of CO2's effect) of the observed warming anomalies, alone accounting for 12 percent of all of the Earth's ongoing global warming. In the Arctic its current effects are seen to be equal to that of CO2 in that small region but its long-term effects are nearly 20 percent of all global warming in the past two centuries. . .

The role of sootfall in the progressive decimation of Arctic and Subarctic ice has been long known, accounting for nearly 90 percent of the boreal thaw -- accounting for nearly 20 percent of all sesquicentennial global warming.

The discovery that airborne soot is in fact causing as much warming as it does, however, was made almost by accident in a field study using small robotic airplanes flying over the Indian Ocean. These field data - collected in situ - were contrary to the conventional view that soot-ladened brown clouds only dimmed the Earth's surface and hence inhered a net cooling effect, whereas in fact the net effect is to heat the air beyond the ground-dimming effect.

The reasons for this misunderstanding were manifold: The associated whitish sulfates were wrongly assumed to impart albedo (reflectivity) to the brown clouds, canceling out the heat-absorptive properties of black carbon (soot, or for short, B.C.). Indeed it was found that sulfates actually impart heat into the airborne soot particles via visible near-infrared light. The discovery itself could not have been made without actual field data collected - in situ - from within the brown clouds, since the actual effect was masked from both space satellites as well as ground instruments.

The issue of masking is interesting because prior to the discovery (made Summer, 2007) climatologists had long believed that the surface-dimming effects of sooty brown clouds was in fact masking global warming from CO2 and other greenhouse gases. This clearly implicated greenhouse gases as possessing far more ongoing warming potential that could be unleashed by sudden reductions in aerosol pollution. Instead it appears that soot was implicating CO2 for more than its due as extra heating anomalies are originating in the sooty brown clouds themselves.

I was alerted to this by an item that came in on the RSS feed. It has now disappeared. It said:

Soot: Calling "Bull" on Global Warming Activists and Politicians from Scientific Blogging - Earth Science by leebert

In my previous posting, "Fixing Soot Gains 20 Years against Global Warming" I found myself toning down some of the more-pointed language in hopes the idea gains acceptance and distribution.

It seems that this was edited away. A pity, since I would like to have read the more pointed language. In my view a great deal more of it is needed.

Reducing soot will not be easy, but it seems to be far more rewarding than reducing CO2 emissions, and the effects are almost immediate. The benefits of improved systems that don't emit so much soot would be multiple. More complete combustion reduces soot and also yields more energy to do work. It would save fuel and at some point perhaps repay the costs of improvement. Some soot might be scrubbed and captured and may have value. If it is fairly pure carbon it may be useful as a soil amendment. Something that is a problem in the air, or on the ice, may be solution when incorporated in the soil. An added benefit is that the carbon would then be safely sequestered.

Heavy soot emissions seem to be associated more with less developed regions. In a sense it is a poverty and development issue as well as a climate issue. Pursuing solutions might achieve multiple objectives. It's a scandal that this known problem has not been given much attention so far, while climate nutters sought to cripple developed countries in the name of, of, well, sin I suppose. It's time to get busy.

Dr. Zender has essentially stated this: That with the albedo-blunting effects of soot being equal to that of extant CO2 warming the benefits of significant soot mitigation in the Arctic would be like cutting CO2 levels by a two thirds (or more). The magnitude of global warming in the Arctic approaches that of 20 percent of all sesquicentennial global warming, and amending the Arctic melt through soot abatement has a far greater impact than mitigating CO2 emissions in an equivalent region elsewhere in the world. The recovery of the boreal ice environs holds many benefits, not least of which would be the continued wellbeing of Polar Bear populations. The heat-reflective properties of a relatively pristine and bright Arctic and Subarctic -- the entire boreal environment -- would reject far more heat from the sun, thereby aiding significantly in slowing climate change.

Dr. Ramanathan makes similar points that the the efficacy of soot mitigation is such that we can broaden the window of opportunity up to 20 years against climate change by simply cleaning up industrial sources of soot. Soot mitigation has an immediate effect as opposed to waiting 50 years for the effects of an equivalent reduction of CO2 to finally have an effect.

It seems too good to be true. You'd think that all of those whingeing about polar bears and melting ice would have been on this long ago, demanding a clean up of soot more so than flogging the CO2 corpse. There may be another shoe store ready to fall from the sky.

Update: Roger Pielke Sr. posts about soot and polar melting.

There is an article in Scientific American by David Biello entitled “Impure as the Driven Snow - Smut is a bigger problem than greenhouse gases in polar meltdown“. The article states that:

. . . Belching from smokestacks, tailpipes and even forest fires, soot—or black carbon—can quickly sully any snow on which it happens to land. In the atmosphere, such aerosols can significantly cool the planet by scattering incoming radiation or helping form clouds that deflect incoming light. But on snow—even at concentrations below five parts per billion—such dark carbon triggers melting, and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming.

This seems to be wrong in part. The new research indicates that such sooty aerosols do not have a net cooling effect. It's a double whammy - melting the ice and heating the air.