http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126226938&ft=1&f=1001
Could Cleaner Air Actually Intensify Global Warming? said:
April 25, 2010
As much of the world marked Earth Day this past week, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that air pollution has declined dramatically over the past 20 years. It sounds like good news, but science writer Eli Kintisch argues that there's a surprising downside: Cleaner air might actually intensify global warming.
"If we continue to cut back on smoke pouring forth from industrial smokestacks, the increase in global warming could be profound," Kintisch writes in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times.
Kintisch isn't talking about greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide; he's talking about another kind of pollutant we put in the sky -- "like aerosols from a spray can," he tells NPR's Guy Raz. "It turns out that those particles have a profound effect on maintaining the planet's temperature."
Greenhouse gases and aerosol pollutants work in opposing ways on the Earth's climate, Kintisch explains. "The greenhouse gases warm the planet when they're emitted, because they absorb heat reflected up from the ground -- the greenhouse effect. These aerosols, though, do the opposite. They block sunlight, they make clouds more reflective -- and by doing that, they actually cool the planet.
"The problem is that we're cutting the cooling pollution as we make our air cleaner," he says.
The Scope Of The Problem: Still A Mystery
Some scientists, he says, are confident that this is connected to global warming, but they don't know how large the effect is. "That's the frightening thing, because if it's a big cooling effect, it means that we've been actually warming the planet more than we know," Kintisch says. "As we take away that unexpectedly helpful cooling mask, we're going to be facing more global warming than we expected.
"If, however, the aerosol cooling is less than we fear, then it won't be such a big deal as we clean our air, though it will still be an effect."
The solution, of course, isn't to stop cutting air pollution. "We have to continue doing that, because these pollutants contribute to asthma, they contribute to respiratory diseases, they cause all sorts of health problems, and they make our environment dirty," he says. "But there's a variety of answers that are more sophisticated than simply continuing to pollute."
Gunk To The Rescue
One of those answers is pretty radical: injecting new pollutants into the stratosphere while we continue to clean up our emissions. It's one of the theories of "geoengineering" that Kintisch explores in his new book, Hack the Planet.
It sounds contradictory, but the idea is actually based on a natural polluter -- volcanoes. Kintisch points out that nearly 20 years before the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland shut down air traffic across Europe, a much bigger volcano in the Philippines affected the climate over a much broader area.
"In 1991, when Mount Pinatubo erupted, it put tons of sulfur into the stratosphere," he says. "Those sulfur aerosols cooled the planet."
So if we found ourselves in a climate crisis where oceans were rising rapidly and coastal areas were flooding, some scientists think "we could mimic the cooling effect of natural volcanoes and make man-made volcanoes by putting our own gunk, essentially, up in the upper atmosphere," Kintisch says.
"It's unclear whether we would be able to respond and actually stop a disintegrating ice sheet situation," he cautions. "However, some scientists think we're getting near that worse-case scenario right now."
And the climate war begins again...
ugh...im so tired of this. they change there minds more than politicians on whats going on. Either way, ill continue to drive and enjoy my truck and continue to not care. Oh my god, i must be the worst person in the world!...
climate change.... what a concept.... assuming the reading I've done over the yrs was accurate ..~ 10,000 yrs ago there was a glacier as far south as Roanoke Va. where is it now ? somewhere in northern Canada ... maybe..? what was the cause of "global warming" then ? and if more reading was/is accurate that wasn't the first time the earth had been that cold... seems like I read somewhere that there have been tropical fern fossils found in Canada... wonder what caused it to be so warm that far north ?
sure there is climate change going on... there, apparently has always been climate change going on....
what ever...
I seen a bumper sticker I wanna get for my V8, 4WD Grand Cherokee.
"My carbon footprint is bigger than your carbon foot print!"
does this mean we get R12 back?? 
i dont know jack about the science here, but pouring fourth massive amounts of man made pollutants cant be good for us, or for the planet...
how does this article begin "the climate wars" again?
Global dimming caused by particulate pollution in the air has been well documented for a long time time.
There were some cool studies done on the effect of airplane con trails on climate done when all the jets were grounded after 9/11.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/contrail.html
I was mentioning to the wife the other day that I need to remember to fill my 5 gallon gas can at the track next weekend. I'm recommissioning all the power equipment for a season of mowing and sawing and weed-whacking and blower-ing and I'm sick of doing carb rebuilds ad-infinitum as a result of the friggin' 10% ethanol that's in ALL the gas in the DC metro area.
We then discussed the ethanol thing and considered the energy equation when the growing, fermenting, distilling, and transportation of the corn and it's product are factored in. Then you subtract whatever the difference is between the specific energy of of ethanol and gasoline for that 10%.
It's a crap deal all around, except for the corn, electricity and oil businesses....
motomoron wrote:
I was mentioning to the wife the other day that I need to remember to fill my 5 gallon gas can at the track next weekend. I'm recommissioning all the power equipment for a season of mowing and sawing and weed-whacking and blower-ing and I'm sick of doing carb rebuilds ad-infinitum as a result of the friggin' 10% ethanol that's in ALL the gas in the DC metro area.
We then discussed the ethanol thing and considered the energy equation when the growing, fermenting, distilling, and transportation of the corn and it's product are factored in. Then you subtract whatever the difference is between the specific energy of of ethanol and gasoline for that 10%.
It's a crap deal all around, except for the corn, electricity and oil businesses....
corn, the modern hybrid type that is grown all over the midwest, is total and utter dog E36 M3. We'd be better off enivormentally to just burn most of nebraska and cook over tire fires.
No one knows the right answer. They can't even decide if it's ok for me to have eggs for breakfast.
Everything in moderation. The world will get warmer and then it will got colder. We just make it happen faster. A science friend of mine told me that if we stopped emitting carbon into the atmosphere today the temp will still rise another 2 or 3 degrees anyway. So, have fun while you can and buy land in the mountains just to be on the safe side. I personally have no idea how it will go. But, the Earth has killed off most species through its history. It is just a matter of time.
What people seem to be missing is that the planet will do just fine with or without us.
We're just screwing up our personal settings.
I'm sure whatever is left once the earth shakes us off like a case of the fleas will be fine for whatever life takes over.
If you look at it, we're just parasites in the long run.
Shawn
HappyJack wrote:
I seen a bumper sticker I wanna get for my V8, 4WD Grand Cherokee.
"My carbon footprint is bigger than your carbon foot print!"
I should get me one of those. I only have 2 cars, but one is a 1987 E-150 with a highly used 302, it has no cats, and burns every fluid in the engine, and it does so poorly, especially the gas. it smokes random colors every start up, but i can't bring myself to sell it because it always starts up, even in -30. Also it was the first vehical i ever drove alone, and i'm sentimental. Oh yeah and it's worth absolutely squat. 11mpg mixed city/hwy. My other car pollutes so much they just took it off the market in europe.
924guy wrote:
does this mean we get R12 back??
i dont know jack about the science here, but pouring fourth massive amounts of man made pollutants cant be good for us, or for the planet...
Agreed!! The A/C in the above mentioned van runs on R12, and unfortunately it leaks out every winter. We tried hot shot, but the condenser would freeze, plus the super small molecules leaked out in the summer within a month. Luckily my dad the appliance repairman has been in business for decades and happened upon a full R12 tank in the shop that he had forgotten about long ago. A/C fixed 
and again every spring... Speaking of which, it's about that time again.
BTW i'm not a enviornmental hating person, I like the planet.
I like the planet too, it's where I keep my stuff.
I recycle and try to stay environmentally friendly simply because I don't want to be an shiny happy person and mess up the place I live in.
I'm also confident that in the long run we will probably be replaced by something else that the planet cooks up.
To quote "E36 M3 my dad says": Science and Mother Nature are in a marriage where Science is always surprised to come home and find Mother Nature blowing the neighbor.
Shawn
Mental
SuperDork
4/26/10 7:46 a.m.
Trans_Maro wrote:
I like the planet too, it's where I keep my stuff.
I recycle and try to stay environmentally friendly simply because I don't want to be an shiny happy person and mess up the place I live in.
I'm also confident that in the long run we will probably be replaced by something else that the planet cooks up.
To quote "E36 M3 my dad says": Science and Mother Nature are in a marriage where Science is always surprised to come home and find Mother Nature blowing the neighbor.
Shawn
Thats the difference between an active enviromentalist and and enviromental activist. The former actually helps.
Peter Tyson and the entire NPR staff don't have the collective cojones to match the guys who produced this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAlMomLvu_4
