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Post by magellan on Sept 27, 2013 1:05:35 GMT
On the China reference: Last time I posted on here, I was living in the Seattle Area and had just moved there from the San Francisco Bay Area. Since that time, I've lived in China, and am preparing for a move to Korea (The only place moss has ever grown under my wife's and my feed was Seattle, and that's just because it grows everywhere there ). We lived in Shanghai, but you might guess, business took me to Beijing a number of times, and just because of opportunity, we travelled a lot to the outlying areas, but still didn't make it everywhere we wanted to go. Not a big problem, though, since it isn't THAT far from Korea to Shanghai or Beijing, or the other areas where we want to go. Observation: Shanghai really isn't as bad as everyone told me it would be. Just looking visually, I took this specifically for comparison to show my friends. The view from our apartment in Shanghai one day: The next morning, my wife and I got on the train and went to Beijing for business. The view from our hotel room when we checked in in Beijing: Now, to put it in perspective and be honest. It rained the day prior to that Shanghai picture, so it was a clear day. Still, you can see the two suspension bridges. On a bad day in Shanghai, I could barely make out the outline of the nearer suspension bridge, but we're talking about maybe 5 - 10 miles there. Beijing is terrible in the winter where the whole place smells like the charcoal based heating fuel (Which I haven't actually seen in China, but I remember it from my days in the '80's when I lived in Korea where it was used at that time). It's bad in the summer, too. Autumn, it can clear off and be surprisingly clear (surprisingly if you've only had contact through news). Actually, two days after I took that picture, the air cleared up in Beijing to where I could see the park, and all of the buildings out that hotel window. But on its bad days, it's several times worse than Los Angeles was back in the 1970's even - or at least it is according to my memory. I NEVER remember a day in LA that compared to a bad day in Beijing. However; even on the bad days, on the express train, you get to see that you really only need to get out of the 7th ring in Beijing before it becomes pretty clear. The areas between Beijing and Nanjing is really clear and pretty. Going north, the times I've gone to Badaling to see the great wall, it's similar. When you get to the outer rings of Beijing, the sky clears dramatically, and by the time I've gotten to the great wall, it's been clear. That's nice because the mountains are beautiful in that area - reminds me of the Southern California mountains a bit. I wouldn't mind posting pictures from there to give an example if someone would like to compare. This is where I have a little trouble putting the soot argument together. All I have to go by, and all I've ever had to go by is my own experience, observations, and anecdotes which I compare against the news or "scientific" data that people push out. I'm back in Seattle very temporarily as I write this, and there is no doubt the air is crystal clear here as I'm writing, but with China fresh on my mind and near again in my future, I can't tell that much difference between here and the rural air quality in China - it's not perceptible. The localized areas - specifically Beijing - can be very bad, but it seems to me that it is very localized - it's not visible even in the rural areas surrounding Beijing. Because of this observation, I find it difficult to believe that cities are having that big of an impact on the soot levels of the arctic. I can believe it has an impact around the surrounding areas, especially since that has to go somewhere, but staying suspeneded, dodging the rain and precipitation prior to getting to the arctic, and then being deposited in significant amounts in the arctic or antarctic is specifically what I have a little difficulty believing is happening. EDIT: Yes, China DOES recognize it has a problem, and is working to fix the issue. A lot of China is very different in person from what my friends and colleagues outside of Asia think it is, but in this, yes, China does recognize it has a problem and is working to address it. Wow slh, haven't seen you around here for ages. Yes, I wonder the same thing about soot as you mentioned. Globally, the air is much cleaner than say 100 years ago when nearly all sectors of society used coal heavily, including locomotives which were popular for many decades. What business venture are you in if I may ask?
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Post by slh1234 on Sept 27, 2013 17:18:29 GMT
Wow slh, haven't seen you around here for ages. Yes, I wonder the same thing about soot as you mentioned. Globally, the air is much cleaner than say 100 years ago when nearly all sectors of society used coal heavily, including locomotives which were popular for many decades. What business venture are you in if I may ask? Hello Magellan, I still work for that same software company. When I was in San Francisco, I worked as a field engineer. I moved to one of their customer facing R&D teams when I moved to Seattle, and went to another of their (less customer-facing) R&D teams in China and focused mostly in Shanghai, but had to also work in Beijing sometimes. Now, I'm staying R&D, but moving to an even more customer facing position, and that is what is taking me to Korea. I'm currently focused on cloud computing, and that is booming in Korea and China. That, and my previous background in Korea seemed to my company to make me a good candidate for that move .
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Post by nonentropic on Sept 27, 2013 18:12:21 GMT
in spite of the minds version of the past we used much less fossil fuels then than now. and that includes coal. The smog in cities is not any issue for the worlds climate other than impacting the local temperature records. what matters is particulates of carbon that have a very different radiative absorption or emission curve than snow or ice and these particulates ending up at or near the Arctic.
its during the melt when you would expect to see a major acceleration of decline due to the high incident solar radiation and the surface concentration of particulates. conversely as winter sets in fresh deposits of snow will prevent any impact from the soot.
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Post by nautonnier on Sept 27, 2013 18:41:58 GMT
in spite of the minds version of the past we used much less fossil fuels then than now. and that includes coal. The smog in cities is not any issue for the worlds climate other than impacting the local temperature records. what matters is particulates of carbon that have a very different radiative absorption or emission curve than snow or ice and these particulates ending up at or near the Arctic. its during the melt when you would expect to see a major acceleration of decline due to the high incident solar radiation and the surface concentration of particulates. conversely as winter sets in fresh deposits of snow will prevent any impact from the soot. I think you are right about particulates, but the assumption that their source is power station chimneys may be a 'useful fiction'. Soot is actually unburnt fuel - so having soot from a coal fired power station is actually quite rare these days. However, there are huge and unstoppable fires in Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo with lots of slash and burn farming clearing land for palm oil plantations. I would think that the particulates from these are a major part of the problem. Below is a picture from Kuala Lumpur and their high buildings - the smoke is all from burning forest not industry. The meridonal jetstreams will be carrying the particulates poleward where they will precipitate out in snow.
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Post by nonentropic on Sept 27, 2013 21:06:09 GMT
its not power stations as you say its coal burning domestic and industrial usage.
the steel industry may be a big part and boy have the new big economies gone fully into it.
the older power station are responsible for pollution as they lack scrubbers etc but not soot.
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Post by slh1234 on Sept 27, 2013 21:29:05 GMT
in spite of the minds version of the past we used much less fossil fuels then than now. and that includes coal. The smog in cities is not any issue for the worlds climate other than impacting the local temperature records. what matters is particulates of carbon that have a very different radiative absorption or emission curve than snow or ice and these particulates ending up at or near the Arctic. its during the melt when you would expect to see a major acceleration of decline due to the high incident solar radiation and the surface concentration of particulates. conversely as winter sets in fresh deposits of snow will prevent any impact from the soot. In Beijing last december, what I was describing smelling isn't coal like you'd think, and it wouldn't have been in a power plant. What I said I haven't seen, but remembered the smell of is what these soldiers are passing among themselves in this picture: This is what was used to heat almost all houses the first time I lived in Korea (84 - 87). The heater systems were very dangerous, though, and they were being phased out for oil heaters, and that is how I heated my house the second time I lived in Korea (89 - 91). (It's rather difficult to find pictures of that stuff anymore ... ) Those cylinders are called "yonton" by Koreans, but the GIs called it "Ondol." (Ondol isn't correct, but a lot of things GIs say aren't correct ). The way that is used is that there is a ceramic cylinder that sits outside the house. Those charcoal cylinders fit neatly inside of that ceramic cylinder. There is a thin version of that charcoal that has a starter substance on it that smells like the old hot-patches you use for your bicycle tires, and that is enough easy-start to get the charcoal started. Once you get it started, one cylinder lasts about 12 hours. You put your burning yonton on the bottom inside your ceramic cylinder, and put a new yonton on top of that, and the fire will burn up through those holes in the center. Changing it out every 12 hours like that is how you keep it going. That ceramic cylinder sits inside a concrete housing and has water that flows around it. The heat from the yonton heats up the water around the cylinder, and it is circulated under the floor, at least in the water heater version of this. In the true ondol systems, it was the gas from the charcoal that flowed under the floor to heat it ... so it was many times more dangerous than the water-heater versions and a lot of people died of CO poisoning from leaks in those systems. The oil heaters that came after those still heated the houses, but used oil like Kerosene as the fuel. These days, if that floor heater system is used at all, Natural gas or propane is the fuel. A lot of more modern housing in Korea uses central heating ... but the floor heaters are more efficient and quite comfortable ... so long as you don't overcook your buns when you sit down. Imagine those charcoal systems on each house. One system can heat a small room. You have hundreds of thousands of houses using that to survive the cold winters in Korea, and they sometimes used it to cook with, too. You can imagine what the air got like in those days. What I was saying is that while I was in China, I could smell what smelled like yonton, but I never actually saw anything that looked like those yonton cylinders, and I didn't get into the kinds of housing that might use that. I was staying in an apartment in the Xujiahui district that had central climate control. All of the housing in that area was modern and had modern climate control systems (which still wasn't as reliable as systems in the US.) My point with the soot deposit is that this is visible in the air. You can see the pollution in places like Beijing. However; outside of Beijing, it becomes clear. If that soot is travelling toward the poles, then it must be detectible between sources and destinations. In the case of aerosols, it seems to me that any significant amount of that would be visible, yet it isn't. It seems to get deposited either by rain, or just by settling somewhere in the outsides of the cities ... and when you live there, you find it settles inside your house, too . For it to get to the poles in significant quantities, it has to stay suspended in the air, which would make me ask why I can't see it even 20 miles outside of the city, and it would have to make it to the polar regions without getting washed out by precipitation before it gets there. That doesn't seem likely to me. This seems to me to be a heavy aerosol. EDIT: I just found if I search using the Korean spelling for yonton (??), I can find many more pictures. Whoda thunk it? huh? Cooking with it, too. This used to be how most of the food tents on the streets cooked in Korea: And when it is burned out, and you remove it and let it cool down, you can break up the cylinders and they make great soil to grow strawberries ... and I really liked strawberries If you're looking at that burning yonton in that heater cylinder above, you might wonder how you get that burning stuff out to change out your heater fuel every 12 hours. The instrument is called "Yonton chiktae" (If I've spelled it correctly. They're a neat little set of tongs about 3 feet long ... and you should be able to hold a burning yonton with one hand And also on further search, it looks like yonton is still used in rural parts of Korea. I would imagine there is still some older houses there. In the bigger cities, I doubt it's still used much.
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Post by throttleup on Oct 1, 2013 21:47:24 GMT
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Post by trbixler on Oct 2, 2013 1:42:27 GMT
throttleup you fool, do you not know its AGW! CO2 is magical and its acolytes or demi gods know all! Yea its a lot of ice.
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Post by sigurdur on Oct 2, 2013 2:29:28 GMT
throttleup: Get your big blow torch down there will ya? ?.........I don't like the looks of that trend at all.
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Post by cuttydyer on Oct 2, 2013 8:59:40 GMT
Paul Homewood reflects on the IPCC's take on increasing Antarctic ice in the Fifth Assessment Report: Extracts from the report: 1) Available evidence precludes us from making robust statements about overall changes in Antarctic sea ice and their causes.
2)There has been a small but significant increase in total ice extent of 1.5% per decade between 1979 and 2012, and a greater increase in ice area, indicating an increase in concentration.
3) The observed upward trend in Antarctic sea ice extent is found to be inconsistent with internal variability based on the residuals from a linear trend fitted to the observations, though this approach could underestimate multi-decadal variability.
4) The CMIP5 simulations [i.e climate models] on average simulate a decrease in Antarctic sea ice extent though Turner et al. (2013) find that approximately 10% of CMIP5 simulations exhibit an increasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent larger than observed over the 1979-2005 period. However, Antarctic sea ice extent variability appears on average to be too large in the CMIP5 models (Turner et al., 2013; Zunz et al., 2013)In other words, their models forecast less ice, and they cannot explain why there is instead more ice. The fact that area is increasing even faster would suggest that the increase in extent is not due to winds spreading the ice out. Link: notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/ipcc-on-antarctic-sea-ice/
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Post by nautonnier on Oct 2, 2013 11:09:48 GMT
throttleup: Get your big blow torch down there will ya? ?.........I don't like the looks of that trend at all. It's almost like that Antarctic ice graphic should be put into the 'How would an Ice Age Start' thread. Taken together with the Arctic ice recovery ... As Harold would say - don't sell your coat.
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Post by nautonnier on Oct 2, 2013 16:30:35 GMT
The ice is definitely rotten and thinning in Spain though
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Post by karlox on Oct 2, 2013 16:48:08 GMT
The ice is definitely rotten and thinning in Spain though Talking about middle-class? Is it that our submarine pass through the sewers of our cities? (don´t expect we have many more) Worried
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Post by throttleup on Oct 2, 2013 21:06:56 GMT
throttleup: Get your big blow torch down there will ya? ?.........I don't like the looks of that trend at all. Sig, look on the bright side! Now you can walk to Antarctica from Tierra del Fuego!
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Post by Andrew on Oct 3, 2013 7:45:47 GMT
According to the DMI graph, the unusually cold Arctic seems to have turned into the typically warmer Arctic, where there are clearly more warmer temperatures over the last year than colder ones.
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