Another Wrench

Tuesday 30 April 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Another wrench thrown in to the machine of global warming. The Register:

Another powerful negative-feedback mechanism which acts to reduce the effects of global warming has been identified, as scientists say that rising temperatures cause plants to emit higher levels of planet-cooling aerosols.

“Aerosol effects on climate are one of the main uncertainties in climate models,” explains Pauli Paasonen of Helsinki uni. “Understanding this mechanism could help us reduce those uncertainties and make the models better.”

[. . .]

Paasonen and his colleagues’ new work indicates that there is and will be a lot more aerosol in the air and cooling the planet than had been thought, as they have carried out detailed measurements showing that a slightly warmer climate makes plants give off much increased amounts of cooling aerosols. This had long been suspected, but previous studies had been able to identify such an effect only in very specific and limited locations: Paasonen and his colleagues have now shown that the feedback acts on continental scales, overcoming earlier difficulties in accounting for the always tricky effects of the boundary layer where the atmosphere interacts with the surface beneath.

[. . .]

On its own, according to Paasonen, this newly quantified feedback would not wipe out global warming (logically enough, as it needs some warming before it appears). But he and his colleagues consider that it means forecasts should be adjusted downward by around a degree, which is a big deal in global-warming terms. Various other previously unknown cooling or negative-feedback effects have been identified in recent research – for instance, melting ice sheets are said to create a massive carbon sink and the mysterious “Criegee intermediates” are also thought to be a powerful planet coolant.

Such mechanisms may help to explain why global warming has been on hold for the past decade and more, and why some projections now suggest much lower levels of near-future warming than had been feared.

And for those of you who would question the source as an inherent “denier” who wants to see the earth burn so that oil companies can squeeze another dime in their bank account,

Paasonen and his colleagues’ new paper is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

2013-04-30  »  madlibertarianguy