Archives par mot-clé : Black Carbon

better to know...?, climate-debate

Science team points out a new failure of climate models

by A. Watts, April 6, 2020 in WUWT

From Nature Climate Change:

Ill-sooted models by Baird Langenbrunner

Atmospheric black carbon (BC) or soot — formed by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, biofuel and biomass — causes warming by absorbing sunlight and enhancing the direct radiative forcing of the climate. As BC ages, it is coated with material due to gas condensation and collisions with other particles. These processes lead to variation in the composition of BC-containing particles and in the arrangement of their internal components — a mixture of BC and other material — though global climate models do not fully account for these heterogeneities. Instead, BC-containing particles are typically modelled as uniformly coated spheres with identical aerosol composition, and these simplifications lead to overestimated absorption.

Full article here

Here, the PNAS paper

Carbon soot in from industrial process in the air. Licensed from 123rf.com

climate-debate

19th century glacier retreat in the Alps preceded the emergence of industrial black carbon deposition on high-alpine glaciers

by M. Sigl et al., October 16, 2018 in TheCryosphere

Abstract. Light absorbing aerosols in the atmosphere and cryosphere play an important role in the climate system. Their presence in ambient air and snow changes the radiative properties of these systems, thus contributing to increased atmospheric warming and snowmelt. High spatio-temporal variability of aerosol concentrations and a shortage of long-term observations contribute to large uncertainties in properly assigning the climate effects of aerosols through time.

Starting around AD1860, many glaciers in the European Alps began to retreat from their maximum mid-19th century terminus positions, thereby visualizing the end of the Little Ice Age in Europe. Radiative forcing by increasing deposition of industrial black carbon to snow has been suggested as the main driver of the abrupt glacier retreats in the Alps. The basis for this hypothesis was model simulations using elemental carbon concentrations at low temporal resolution from two ice cores in the Alps.

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