China's CO2 emissions

Guys, I'm no expert and I don't have the research and sources for research the previous posters have...but all I can say is, when I was doing business in China, it was common to see the sun every 2nd or 3rd Sunday of the month when half the factories in the region shut down. Monday through Saturday - you can't see the sun. The skies were gray. It wasn't uncommon to have a thick black film develop on the paint of your car after two days of being parked. At the end of a typical work day, I'd have black boogers in my nose after 8 hours in the office.

And according to all the locals and some of the factory workers from the north, this was supposedly half the pollution compared to what was circulating in Beijing at the time (2011). China's pollution is intense.

 

Ballbearing, welcome to our weirdness. Seems you were 'inhaling' somewhere other than Beijing? There is a plan (yeah there is always a plan) to clean things up, and if it looks good 10 years hence I will invite you to return.

But this is PriusChat, so if you'd find a place to post about YOU, and how this odd vehicle relates to your life, we could join you there.

 

Boogers (any color) relate to large aerosol particles that our respiratory system exclude/reprocess outwards. More troublesome is the <2.5 micron size that sails on by, into lungs. Too much of those and you get 10 (ish) years less life than expected. The noted Asian country is is famous for this, but India and Mexico (city) are quite competitive.

 

I am guessing HEPA filters in bedrooms/apartments are quite popular? after all you spend almost 1/3 of you life there.

It is common to see people in the streets in Japan wearing a surgical mask. Is there something similar in China?

 

Yeah, the masks. Simplest ones are effective against airborne droplet transfer. (Big particles)

To exclude the <2.5 micron , something more serious is required.

In room air purifiers actually work, although the ones that generate ozone on the side are not your friends

 

The masks also have social benefits if the person doesn't want non-necessary interaction, and they work as face warmers.

 

Try to wear one in US... and watch people freak out

 

See, they have social benefits here too.

 

I was in Chang-An, Dongguan. BUT, in all fairness, the city of Guilin was clear and beautiful! Hopefully the manufacturing stays away and keeps that place preserved.

 

A bad drought is slow not fast. Lakes don't disapear fast. I don't know what 20 times faster means, unless you dumb it down to mean palmer drought index, and then ... the paleo record can't be relied uppon for that.

Yes we agree that most fossil C has been burned since the industrial revolution which ended around 1820. Since fossil C produced carbon dioxide is cumulative, most is in the last couple of climate periods (30 years) being since 1955.

Man-made warming should be a sensitivity times a log of sum of carbon burned in simplest terms. or delta T = S x log (cumulative C). Cumulative C is increasing, but since this is a log function I doubt it is accelerating. Of course some carbon dioxide from burning carbon is sequestered, but that simply should change sensitivity. This also means reducing the C burn will still increase the warming. None of this takes into accounts tipping points, so if we are past one, well changing fossil C burn now won't change delta T much. Fossil C burn is still increasing but should peak in the next decade.

Naw. We don't even have attribution or an end to the texas flood. I doubt it has much to do with ghg. I don't like pointing fingers at Its bad so it must be ghg. There is a whole lot of nature out there. Large extinctions in the little ice age, and I don't see how ghg caused that.

 

Could you elaborate? Water beattle went extinct in Britain during LIA, what else?

 

I am far from an expert. The two that stand out are the dodo bird and auroch. I have seen estimates of around 300 species during the period.

Whenever climate changes there are greater extinctions. These changes often represent a loss of habitat. In the case of the dodo it now looks like invasive species carried on boats are what wiped it out, versus over hunting. There were massive crop failures in europe, which sent europeans out looking for new farmland, further acerbating the natural reduction in habitat. Add changed climate (colder and wetter or dryer), with over hunting, fishing, and invasive species and it was a time for disappearance.

Bringing it back to Chinese coal, the massive air and water pollution exerts further evolutionary pressure for extinctions on top of this warming climate. Animals can typically survive warmer than colder, but not hot, dry, and polluted.

 

The feedback is considered in the sensitivity term. Let's say S = 3 for log2(CO2) (log base 2 of carbon dioxide concentration) which roughly translates into 2 degrees of feedback for each 1 degree of carbon dioxide direct warming.

delta T for going from 280 ppm to 560 ppm of carbon dioxide (doubling) would be 3 degrees C.

Going from 560 ppm to 840 ppm with a sensitivity of 3 then brings a delta T of 1.8 degrees C. Going from 840 ppm to 1160 ppm a delta T of 1.2 degrees C.

IPCC finds the number is likely between 1.5 and 4.5. The average in may was 403.94. If we plug and chug preindustrial 280 ppm and 0.8 degrees C rise since preindustrial times, we get a sensitivity of 1.51, really not much feedback. Some argue though that A) we haven't seen some of the effects yet, and/or B) The earth would have cooled if not for man burning fossil C, so we can't simply plug and chug the numbers.

 

If you are going to play the game ... you need to project how much carbon is emitted. Let's say 180 ppm more is in the atmosphere in 79 years. If that raises temperatures 1C then sensitivity would be 1.9, which is certainly in the likely range of 1.5-4.5. I hope you are right, that gives people a longer time to reduce emissions ;-)

This should give you a good idea of volcanos.

Sulfur dioxide and coal - SourceWatch

China has gotten worse since 2004 while the US has imprvoed this 2008 report.
Volcanic Gases and Their Effects

There are other differences hydrogen sulfite, mercury, nitros oxides, etc. Volcanos eject the sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere while much of the coal pollution stays in the troposphere. Both are deadly.

 

@51 drought speed from the plant-root perspective depends on soil texture. Sandy soils can become physiologically dry in a week. If new rains don't come, plants begin to shut down. New wood formation seems to be very low on the priorities list which is why dendroclimatology sorta kinda works.

@53, the potential for water vapor to amplify heat trapping is exactly what I want to know. The atmosphere cannot just become more and more juicy. CCN and CAPE oppose this.

Volcanic emissions. We have not had a VEI6 since 1992; VEI7 since 500(ish) BC. Sixes are handy for calibrating climate models. Sevens and above are serious.

 

Unfortunately in climate change there is so much misunderstanding of natural variation, that we get strange bidding wars on cooling is good and pollution cools. China is not a lab. The government knows the extreme negative impact the non ghg coal pollution is causing to human and animal health and the environment. If you want to simulate a volcanic cooling you need to release the sulfur dioxide and particulates at a higher level (stratasphere).

We have some climate scientists that claim more lasting and long lived cooling from coal, but to me this seems more of a quest for trenberth's missing heat or an excuse to not pay for scrubbers, than real science. We can measure SO2 in the troposphere but it is recent and with limited historic data.
Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences - Google Books

In 2016 or 2017 there is a new satelite going up to measure moisture in the first couple of inches on soil. That is pretty cool.

I thought the physics was rather straightforward. T tells you the partial pressure of water vapor, which can be used in a log funtion to induce additional delta T. Since T in the equations is degrees Kelvin, at atmospheric temperatures some easy approximations can be made. This is an easy equation to solve, but ... higher amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere will form clouds and percipitation, which imply negative feedback. Solving the physics equations will give you a max value of water vapor feedback.
+1

I think the real test of the volcanic/solar radiation models will be if they can help explain the complex asynchronous global cooling of the little ice age.