I am not a scientist. However i read once that reduced particulate matter in pollution has exacerbated global warming because the particulate matter in the atmosphere reflects solar radiation back into space.

Apparently when Mt Pinatubo in the Philappinnes erupted a few years ago, the increased atmospheric particulate matter effectively slowed down the rate of warming, albeit temporarily.


Any scientists want to chime in on this? I’m curious and would slso like to know about the efficacy of adding sulphur dioxide to the upper atmosphere to slow down global warming that way.

Thanks.

Yes, more particulate matter in the air would slow or even reverse global warming. The trade off is that we would have to breathe the particulate-laden air. Gag. Plus particulates (aka dirty air) are only temporary. Gravity and/or rain will take them out of the air over time.

Sulphur dioxide (aka rotten egg gas) does reflect sunlight. It also smells awful, is poisonous, and is corrosive. So the challenges are: how do you manufacture several hundred million tons of the stuff, how do you get it into the stratosphere, and how do you keep it there. Plus, adding large amounts of sulphur dioxide to the atmosphere may have its own bad effects on climate.

You are asking the right questions, "what are our options, and will this work?"

BoJ is the life of every party.

Seriously, thanks for the information. It's nice to read posts about complex questions from people who are experts.

. . . one of the nice things about RfM.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2018 02:11PM by Lot's Wife.

I'm not so much an expert as I read way too much, almost all of it science/math related, and I've had a few lucky breaks, like for instance, a good friend of mine had the cubicle next to Jim Hansen when he was at JPL, so I'd get the inside scoop on climate studies sometimes years before they went public.

The main worry at JPL right now is that satellite launches are scheduled about 15 years out, so we are already well aware of what the scientific satellite pipeline looks like for at least the next decade, and the US is a very small part of the pipeline. Just like we have to use Russian spacecraft to get scientists to the International Space Station, we are probably going to end up having to buy our climate change data from China in the 2030s. China and the EU and even Brazil have a significant number of satellites in the pipeline.

"Life of every party." ::snort::

FYI, when sulfur dioxide meets water, it forms sulfurous acid, which equals acid rain.

it so simple OPie ~

science has proven that fires produce heat and smoke ~

be cause of science principles, heat and smoke rise up into the sky because fire ~

since all the heat and smoke go up into the sky there is little effect here on Earth ~

Since I'm on a roll here, comment on CateS' original sub line question, how will wildfire affect global warming?

In the extreme short term (weeks or a few months) all the smoke will probably reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the ground. Smoke particles are fairly large and at a low altitude, and wash out of the air pretty quickly.

On the other hand, all the CO2 released from the fires will stay in the atmosphere for centuries. On the third hand, assuming the vegetation grows back over a few decades, that will recapture the CO2 out of the air, and the atmosphere will be back where it started.

So, unless the number of wildfires spikes dramatically, and deserts increase so that all the vegetation does not grow back, they probably won't have much effect on climate.

Volcanoes can dramatically cool the planet with both sulphur dioxide and dust injected into the stratosphere. That is also temporary (a few years).

"On the third hand,..." (Since we're already OT)

That would be the gripping hand, of course. I can't read "on the third hand" or "on the other, other hand" without thinking of the three-armed Moties in Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye".

Don't forget Larry Niven!

I loved "The Mote in God's Eye"!

And Niven's Ringworld series...

"Save life as *we* know it..."

Interesting phrase!!

Had you said, "Save life as *I* know it..." I wouldn't have responded, because that's what I want to do, save life as *I* know it.

The question arises: who is the *we* in your sentence? There are lots of *we*s and some of them want to save a lifestyle complete foreign to the lifestyle you want to save. I think there is a lot of danger in the struggle to determine whose "...life as we know it" gets saved.

And since some ways of life may be inimical to your way of life, how is that struggle going to be carried out? There are more than a few 'life' systems willing to kill to preserve that life. How far will you, or I, go to preserve that with which we are happy/content?

And most, MOST, intriguing to me at this point, will Alec Baldwin play Trump in the blockbuster movie, "The Comb-over That Ate the World for Dessert"?

BOJ thanks for your info. I’m grasping at straws here bc there is no political will to anything to solve the global warming problem and save life as we know it on the planet. I don’t really want to choke on smoke.

I know. It used to be that February was The "Time of Miserable Air" in Utah, but it is getting to be that the smoke of July, August and September (and, God forbid, October) is giving February a run for its money.

Does any of this mean that the air pollution of the 50' and 60's blocked some of the solar heat making the temperatures lower.

By extraction, with EPA and all it rules and regs have cleaned up the air pollution and as a result is causing global warming.

We just can't win, one way of another.

Just because the world population has gone from 2 billion people in 1930 to 7.5 billion now has nothing to do with global warming.

Somewhere, Hie is weeping.

I for the life of me can't tell whether tumwater's last sentence about population growth having no effect is meant ironically, or if the poster is actually serious.

In the off chance poster was serious, here's the 60 years of standardized observations of co2 concentrations at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, still the gold standard of CO2 measurements.

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/full.html

For geologic perspective, over the last 800,000 years or so, based on analysis of air bubbles in glacial ice cores, the earth's CO2 level has oscillated between 170 ppm during glacial periods to 270 ppm during warmer interglacial periods.

The earth started climbing above that in the mid 1800s, about the time of the US Civil War. It was 315 in the late 1950s when Mauna Loa came online. Now we are consistently above 400, and still climbing. Human population growth and the industrial revolution is responsible for most, if not all of that truly exceptional spike in CO2 concentrations over the last 150 years.

Somebody give Hie a hug.

I was being sarcastic, there are too many of us.

Whew!!!

Good to hear. Thank you.

I do believe that overpopulation is the root of almost all of humans problems.

Close to that, surely.

n/t



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/15/2018 12:18AM by Lot's Wife.

Kind of like the ones I saw in CA when Mt. Pinatubo (sp? - too lazy to check) erupted.

I look to the West and think, "Well, at least the end of the world offers a great view."

:/

More immediate question is, how does global warming affect the
wildfires?

I'm just an armchair "expert" but it seems to me that greater
evaporation from the ocean would lead to greater rain during the
rainy season which would mean more vegetation which would become
dryer during the hotter dry season and create more tinder for
wildfires.