Atmospheric

Countries vary across the globe in releases of greenhouse gases (GHG). For example, eight countries -- USA (23.5), Canada (22.6), Czech Republic (13.7), UK (10.6), Spain (10.1), Switzerland (7.3), South Africa (9.0), and Thailand (5.6) -- released in 2005 their portion of per capita carbon dioxide emissions in metric tons as shown inside the parentheses. The data are from the World Resource Institute and exclude bunker-fuel emissions and land-use change. Just USA, EU, Canada, Czech Republic, Switzerland, South Africa, and Thailand contributed on the same basis 43.4% of the total global emissions in 2006 per U.S. Department of Energy.

A narrow focus on carbon dioxide has long focused attention of the political and economic motivations of the European countries behind treaties like the Kyoto protocol rather than the science data and what parameters are needed to make climate simulations truly accurate.

Now that the fad aspects of global warming are behind us, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have taken a step to make better climate simulation.   Their results, published in Biogeosciences, illustrate the complexity of climate modeling by demonstrating how natural processes still have a strong effect on the carbon cycle and climate simulations.

I. Introduction

From time-to-time, one has the opportunity to assist in developing a research tool with the versatility of a Swiss Army Knife (or sonic screwdriver for the Dr. Who aficionados). I was lucky enough to have that opportunity while working on my postdoc at the University of Louisville Comparative Planetology Laboratory (CPL) http://louisville.edu/cpl/ established and lead by Prof. Timothy Dowling in 2000. The primary goal of CPL is to develop theoretical and numerical models that may be used to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms that shape large-scale planetary atmosphere characteristics.

Air pollutants which travel from a country like China, the world's top producer of CO2 who also happens to be exempt from  Kyoto because they insist they are a developing nation,  impact the USA and then on to Europe, says a new report by the National Research Council.

Poor air quality is most strongly a result of local emissions but the influence of non-domestic pollution sources may grow as emissions from developing countries increase and become relatively more important as a result of tightening environmental protection standards in industrialized countries. 

Scientists say they have discovered the chemical reaction that forms the molecule triacetylene in the ultra-cold atmosphere of Titan, one Saturn's more popular moons for researchers since Titan's current atmosphere is thought to resemble Earth's early one.

If you're concerned that too much politically-motivated action regarding the environment will end up costing a lot of money and accomplish little, you're not without rationale.  History has shown that government involvement rarely helps and is always expensive.

But merging more than a decade of atmospheric data from European satellites, scientists have compiled a homogeneous long-term ozone record that allows them to monitor total ozone trends on a global scale – and it shows an ozone recovery.  So there is at least one example where industry complained, government regulations were put into place and the environment actually improved.

Contrary to short-term consensus beliefs, El Niño has not been getting stronger because of global warming, says  Benjamin Giese, a professor of oceanography at Texas A&M who specializes in ocean modeling, but he found a link between El Niño and the severe flu pandemic 91 years ago.

Coincidence?   The 1918 El Niño was apparently one of the strongest of the 20th century but how is it relevant to flu?

What is your yardstick for climate change? Really, how do you relate climate response to human CO2 emissions?

A new yardstick is proposed by Damon Matthews, a professor in Concordia University’s Department of Geography, Planning and the Environment. With colleagues from Victoria and the U.K., Matthews used a combination of global climate models and historical climate data to derive a simple linear relationship between total cumulative emissions and global temperature change.

As complex as the climate change is, a new metric is always possible to better relate to it. What could you come up with if you compared various climate modeling experiments? Some observations were noted, for example, in the global temperature response to increasing atmospheric CO2:

There were a number of reasons carbon dioxide got singled out as a primary contributor to global warming and a key one was that it was the easiest problem to fix in Europe - more nuclear power and closing Soviet-era factories made goals achievable.  The US had no quick fix, since environmentalists dislike nuclear power in America, and with world leader China exempt from emissions caps, the effort to curb CO2 basically stalled.

Australian scientists believe northern hemisphere pollution in Asia, Europe and North America  is to blame for southern hemisphere rainfall changes.  

The new research announced at the international Water in a Changing Climate conference in Melbourne, 24-28 August, used a climate model that includes a treatment of tiny particles,  aerosols, and said that the build up of these particles in the northern hemisphere affects their simulation of recent climate change in the southern hemisphere, including rainfall in Australia.