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Asian soot emissions linked to Arctic melting -- study
Greenwire
03/24/2005 02:12 PM


Body: Asian soot emissions are raising atmospheric temperatures and contributing to Arctic warming, according to a study published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research [subscription required].

Researchers from Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies used satellite images to examine the effects of soot on climate change and found that Arctic warming coincided with the increase in pollution during the late 20th century.

Dark soot particles fall on ice and darken its surface, increasing the ice's tendency to absorb sunlight instead of reflecting it, making it far more likely to warm, they said. Soot particles also warm air and affect cloud formation.

The predominant sources of Arctic air pollution are South Asian industrial emissions and the burning of forests and other vegetation worldwide, the scientists said.

"The standard knowledge has been that most of [the pollution] comes from Northern Europe and Asia," said Dorothy Koch of Columbia University, the paper's co-author. "We were surprised to find that much of it comes from further south" (Miguel Bustillo, Los Angeles Times, March 24).

New model predicts global warming could be more severe than predicted
Meanwhile, British scientists said that global warming could cause average temperatures to rise by up to 11 degrees Celsius, at least a two-fold increase over earlier estimates.

In 1991, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that doubling of carbon dioxide levels could raise temperatures by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C. But a new distributive computing project by Climateprediction.net, a collaborative effort of British universities and government agencies, predicts a far greater temperature increase.

When atmospheric CO2 concentrations double around 2050, average temperatures worldwide could rise by 1.9 to 11.5 degrees C.

The researchers analyzed about 2,000 climate simulations produced by some of the 95,000 people worldwide that donated their computers' idle processing time to run the scientists' climate simulation (Janet Pelley, Environmental Science & Technology News online, March 23). -- LM

Reprinted from Greenwire with permission from E&E Publishing, LLC
http://www.eenews.net/Greenwire.htm