Air Pollution, Aerosols and Clouds in the Climate System

This is going to be interesting! This morning I woke up early and while checking my email, this title caught my attention in Space Daily Express newsletter... After reading the article, I could not stop my self to post this on the blog although, I have already posted one article yesterday... "The entire debate about global warming is a mirage", this is the opening statement of the news article. Article talks about fundamental of temperature and different averaging methods and other thermodynamics involved in it. I am posting some of the statements from the news as it is "global temperature' is thermodynamically as well as mathematically an impossibility" "It is generally assumed that the atmosphere and the oceans have grown warmer during the recent 50 years. The reason for this point of view is an upward trend in the curve of measurements of the so-called 'global temperature'." Even more sound statement "It is impossible to talk about a ...

Transport of dust aerosols from Sahara dessert, anthropogenic pollution from Asia, smoke from Canadian and Mexican fires to United States remain areas of research for atmospheric aerosols community. Recent, research by Renyi Zhang has been in news all over the world. According to his research "pollution from industrial and power plants in China and India. Both countries have seen huge increases in their economies, which means more large factories and power plants to sustain such growth. All of these emit immense quantities of pollution -- much of it soot and sulfate aerosols -- into the atmosphere, which is carried by the prevailing winds over the Pacific Ocean and eventually worldwide." More Recently, research study by Hadley from Scripps demonstrate that black carbon and fine aerosols transported to North America over Pacific during April 2004. The abstract read as "This study presents estimates of long-range transport of black carbon (BC) and aerosol fine mass (diamet...

Global dimming is a term coined for reduction in surface reaching solar radiation. Surface observation of solar radiation over different location around the world shows overall decline in the surface reaching solar energy over long period of time. One of the major causes for this dimming is increase in aerosols loading in the atmosphere. There was research study by Alper et al., 2005 published in GRL. The abstract reads... ‘From the 1950s to the 1980s, a significant decrease of surface solar radiation has been observed at different locations throughout the world. Here we show that this phenomenon, widely termed global dimming, is dominated by the large urban sites. The global-scale analysis of year-to-year variations of solar radiation fluxes shows a decline of 0.41 W/m2/yr for highly populated sites compared to only 0.16 W/m2/yr for sparsely populated sites ( less than 0.1 million). Since most of the globe has sparse population, this suggests that solar dimming is of local or regio...