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The pre-industrial atmosphere contained more particles, and so brighter clouds, than we previously thought. This is the latest finding of the CLOUD experiment, a collaboration between around 80 scientists at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva. It changes our understanding of what was in the atmosphere before humans began adding pollution – and what it might be like again in the future.
Most cloud droplets need tiny airborne particles to act as "seeds" for their formation and growth. If a cloud has more of these seeds, and therefore more droplets, it will appear brighter and reflect away more sunlight from the Earth's surface. This in turn can cool the climate. Therefore understanding the number and size of particles in the atmosphere is vital to predicting not only how bright and reflective the planet's clouds are, but what global temperatures will be.
...
The CLOUD experiment at CERN also recently discovered that gases emitted by trees can stick together to make new seeds for clouds in the atmosphere – without needing any help from other pollutants as was previously thought. Scientists had thought that the cloud seeds needed sulphuric acid (often mixed with other compounds) or iodine molecules to stick together to initiate the process.In our new follow-up study, published in PNAS, we worked with other CLOUD scientists to simulate this process in the atmosphere. Our work suggests that even today trees produce a large fraction of cloud seeds over the cleanest forested parts of the world.
More trees means more clouds, which means cooler Earth.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Tuesday October 11 2016, @09:33PM
(*These are drastic oversimplifications for the purpose of brevity, obviously)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday October 11 2016, @09:43PM
I was thinking the same thing. This research certainly wrecked some models.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 11 2016, @10:31PM
(emphasis mine)
How do you know the proper word here is "assume" rather than "observe"? Off the top of my head, I can think of some good reasons to think that more CO2 does not necessarily mean increased plant growth:
1. Humans are wrecking plant growth with slash-and-burn agriculture and other forms of habitat destruction faster than the higher CO2 can have its effect.
2. Higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere = higher temperatures (this has been demonstrated repeatedly in lab experiments, there's no guessing about that), which means that areas closer to the equator can become too warm for the plants currently there. In other words, the shift is towards the poles, not towards more plants.
3. Plants need more than CO2, they also need water. If the water is scarce, then a burst of plant growth will be limited by the water, and in fact there's a real risk of desertification.
4. Plants also need nutrients in the soil. Those typically come from dead plant and animal parts or waste being broken down by bacteria and fungi. If the area hasn't supported a certain mass of flora and fauna, it's difficult to make it support more without some sort of artificial stimulation like fertilizer.
Also, many of the positive feedback loops that those climatologists are worried about aren't CO2 feedback, but methane from sources like the thawing of the Arctic tundra. Plants need CO2, but are definitely not helped by large amounts of methane.
In short, those people you are dismissing as "cultists" have already considered the very question you raised already, and answered this specific challenge to their argument years ago [newscientist.com]. And the fact that you would casually dismiss nearly every expert in the relevant fields of scientific inquiry as "cultists" suggests that your motivations for raising this objection are not, shall we say, scientific in nature.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:16AM
Actually, years (decades) of work on that have drastically reduced that sort of destruction. Does it still happen? Yes, but to paint it as a carpet of ashes is not accurate. Also, afforestation is happening in some habitats that had not previously been forested, so that's an element of where CO2 is clearly having a beneficial effect.
Not so fast. More CO2 does seem to link to more retention of heat, but the behaviour of CO2 in doing so is not apparently uniform across various conditions of temperature and pressure. Also, the retention of heat doesn't necessarily lead to huge heat spikes so much as a higher baseline. Many of the plants in those areas are already highly resistant to heat stress, and mostly shut down their biologies and wait for the peak heat to pass before it's business as usual.
Sure - if. One of the factors in play is higher ocean temperatures, which means higher vapour pressure, which means more evaporation, which means a faster water cycle, which means .... more rain. Is it uniform? No. Is it perfect? No. But you can't just paint things with a desertification brush either.
.... and so on and so forth. I largely agree with you, but there are a lot of things in play here. Not all of them lead down the road to hell.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday October 20 2016, @11:10AM
One group of researchers observed
[...] alarming losses comprising one-tenth (3.3 million km2) of global wilderness areas over the last two decades, particularly in the Amazon (30%) and central Africa (14%).
—http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30993-9 [cell.com]
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday October 12 2016, @01:02AM
2. Higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere = higher temperatures (this has been demonstrated repeatedly in lab experiments, there's no guessing about that), which means that areas closer to the equator can become too warm for the plants currently there. In other words, the shift is towards the poles, not towards more plants.
3. Plants need more than CO2, they also need water
Citations? In 2. , adaptation might select for different hardier plants that grow slower -no need to move north (check out poplar tree distribution in the first genome publication)
3. plants adapt to lack of water just fine (cacti and other adaptations are very hardy that have co-evolved more than once). It is a common problem assuming that "I can only see desert with these conditions, therefore only what I see can exist". Biology doesn't care. Could it slow growth -sure. But deserts can appear and disappear rapidly (on geologic timescales).
There are good arguments supported by data, that plants and the ecosystems might adapt just fine. The problem is, it might wreck agriculture as we know it...
Seriously, though, the biosphere models are severely lacking in climate research. I'm not surprised, success is very physics driven which is fine for the energetics but captures very poorly the hysteresis of the biological panorama.
We have very little idea *what* would happen - only that life would persist. The problem with the politics of this, is that homo sapiens sapiens might not be on the list of survivors!
Or at least not as comfortable as now...
And to keep this discussion on track , whether the evidence is overwhelming or not we should aim to reduce the combustion of non-renewables.
Let's invest in more fission then crack fusion ; that's 12 orders of magnitude better energy density than combustion.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @03:24AM
3. plants adapt to lack of water just fine (cacti and other adaptations are very hardy that have co-evolved more than once). It is a common problem assuming that "I can only see desert with these conditions, therefore only what I see can exist". Biology doesn't care. Could it slow growth -sure. But deserts can appear and disappear rapidly (on geologic timescales).
What the fuck?
Who cares about geologic timescales?
I don't know what kind of alien you are, but I'm a human. I care about human timescales.
That evolution to a cacti based ecosystem doesn't mean shit if we are ALL FUCKING DEAD!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:11AM
We have very little idea *what* would happen - only that life would persist. The problem with the politics of this, is that homo sapiens sapiens might not be on the list of survivors!
We do know enough that if humanity's existence is threatened, it's not going to be the likes of modest climate change. It's going to be something like a massive nuclear war with cobalt bombs or a gray goo nanotech disaster.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @01:20AM
re. 3.
Plants lose a lot of water through the pores they open to absorb CO2. It has been demonstrated that water requirements for many plants go down as the CO2 levels go up.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 12 2016, @01:54AM
The really sad, particularly tragic aspect of slash-and-burn agriculture is that it's practiced in the Amazon, where the natural soils are quite poor and the heavy rainfall depletes the burned fields very quickly, when the Amazon was where the indigenous people figured out how to make incredibly fertile, self-replenishing soil called terra preta [wikipedia.org] . Terra preta increases crop yields 800% over what slash-and-burn can. It's mind-boggling.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:02AM
Because if it was more than an assumption dozens of you would have bombarded me with links to a proper observation, or demonstration. It's not. It's an assumption built into their models.
"Off the top of my head, I can think of some good reasons to think that more CO2 does not necessarily mean increased plant growth:"
Nice shift of the goal posts. You first try to raise it to the level of observable fact, without citation, then suddenly you're talking about simply being able to imagine reasons why it might be true. No one questioned that we can think of lots of reasons it might be true. We can also think of lots of reasons it might be false. What's needed is disciplined observation and experimentation to determine where the truth lies, not more people passing off their personal opinion as scientific fact.
"1. Humans are wrecking plant growth with slash-and-burn agriculture and other forms of habitat destruction faster than the higher CO2 can have its effect."
Do you have any proof of that? Slash and burn has decreased steadily for decades, as has agricultural land use in general, so it seems unlikely you are correct here.
"2. Higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere = higher temperatures (this has been demonstrated repeatedly in lab experiments, there's no guessing about that), which means that areas closer to the equator can become too warm for the plants currently there. In other words, the shift is towards the poles, not towards more plants."
Very unlikely. In the past Earth has actually been a hothouse more often than an iceball (it's an iceball currently.) Hothouse periods see tremendous vegetative growth all the way from the tropics to the poles. A true hothouse earth, should it come, would be a very challenging transition for humans but I think we can be quite sure that the plants will continue scrubbing carbon with or without us.
"3. Plants need more than CO2, they also need water. If the water is scarce, then a burst of plant growth will be limited by the water, and in fact there's a real risk of desertification."
And desertification is more often associated with cooling periods than heating periods. You should look up on the Saharan Pump.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 11 2016, @11:08PM
Current models spend a lot of time trying to debunk the Gaia hypothesis [wikipedia.org] instead of finding ways to test it and use the parts that prove promising, and which might be subject to intentional manipulation.
To that extent you might be correct.
Watch for papers knocking down these meddling physicists, or to minimize these effects.
Nobody will recommend major (and largely free) programs of reforestation of disused farm land. (And yes, we do use FAR less marginal farmland today than in the past - even allowing for housing tracts.)
On the other hand, the article does not address the limits of magnitude in relation to other forces at work in AGW. Are we talking about rounding errors within the weakest of actors what?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:59AM
There's also the fact that from a quick read *I* though it might indeed wreck those models...by making them understate the speed of onset of the process.
If trees are more effective at generating clouds than we thought, then deforestation will have stronger effects than we thought. And deforestation is continuing to happen all over the world.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @11:46PM
Does not really mater which side you end up on. Pollution is not good. Pollution in pure economic terms is waste, waste costs you money. Pollution in metaphysical terms messes you up. It is not good for you as a human.
I think they had it right in the 70s. Give a hoot dont pollute. Nice and simple.
It is plainly obvious 2 different groups have hijacked the whole thing to make money from the arbitrage. Getting rid of pollution means creating better things. That is hard and costs time and money. It is easier to 'trade it away' and 'make a market for pollution'. Everyone wanted to get rid of coal. It was not going anywhere. Right up until the point the bottom fell out of the cost for natural gas. That alone did more to curb air pollution than anything. However, it may have ended up creating a whole new type of pollution. You can use laws to help curb pollution but it is only a short term stop gap. Because people will figure ways around the new laws. There is money to be made.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Wednesday October 12 2016, @02:44AM
I think they had it right in the 70s. Give a hoot dont pollute. Nice and simple."
This is all true but what you seem to have missed is that the AGW cultists have *redefined* pollution. They're calling CO2 pollution now, even though it's a normal part of the atmosphere that's already been there, and is therefore NOT pollution in any rational sense.
I'm not joking when I call them cultists, they have all the trappings of one, including the habit of redefining words whenever convenient, with little or no regard to their actual meaning.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @03:54AM
Just making a point. If its not clear to you, you probably need it the most.
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:12AM
Vegetation does scrub co2, encourages water mist, regulates temperature...
CO2 does encourages plant growth, but humans are very busy at cutting down trees and filling the oceans with filth.
No new information here, but that said, the equation is far more complex than you alluded to.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 12 2016, @05:32PM
If that hypothesis was correct then global warming should have stopped already, correct? We've already massively increased the c02 concentration in the atmosphere and yet the temps keep going up.