"Asia is the world's largest source of aerosols, man-made and natural."
7/20/2007, "Huge Dust Plumes From China Cause Changes in Climate," Robert Lee Hotz, Wall St. Journal
"One tainted export from China can't be avoided in North America -- air. An outpouring of dust layered with man-made sulfates, smog, industrial fumes, carbon grit and nitrates is crossing the Pacific Ocean on prevailing winds from booming Asian economies in plumes so vast they alter the climate. These rivers of polluted air can be wider than the Amazon and deeper than the Grand Canyon.
"There are times when it covers the entire Pacific Ocean basin like a ribbon bent back and forth," said atmospheric physicist V. Ramanathan at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.
On some days, almost a third of the air over Los Angeles and San Francisco can be traced directly to Asia. With it comes up to three-quarters of the black carbon particulate pollution that reaches the West Coast, Dr. Ramanathan and his colleagues recently reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
This transcontinental pollution is part of a growing global traffic in dust and aerosol particles made worse by drought and deforestation, said Steven Cliff, who studies the problem at the University of California at Davis.
Aerosols -- airborne microscopic particles -- are produced naturally every time a breeze catches sea salt from ocean spray, or a volcano erupts, or a forest burns, or a windstorm kicks up dust, for example. They also are released in exhaust fumes, factory vapors and coal-fired power plant emissions.
Over the Pacific itself, the plumes are seeding ocean clouds and spawning fiercer thunderstorms, researchers at Texas A&M University reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March.
The influence of these plumes on climate is complex because they can have both a cooling and a warming effect, the scientists said. Scientists are convinced these plumes contain so many cooling sulfate particles that they may be masking half of the effect of global warming. The plumes may block more than 10% of the sunlight over the Pacific.
But while the sulfates they carry lower temperatures by reflecting sunlight, the soot they contain absorbs solar heat, thus warming the planet.
Asia is the world's largest source of aerosols, man-made and natural. Every spring and summer, storms whip up silt from the Gobi desert of Mongolia and the hardpan of the Taklamakan desert of western China, where, for centuries, dust has shaped a way of life. From the dunes of Dunhuang, where vendors hawk gauze face masks alongside braided leather camel whips, to the oasis of Kashgar at the feet of the Tian Shan Mountains 1,500 miles to the west, there is no escaping it.The Taklamakan is a natural engine of evaporation and erosion. Rare among the world's continental basins, no river that enters the Taklamakan ever reaches the sea. Fed by melting highland glaciers and gorged with silt, these freshwater torrents all vanish in the arid desert heat, like so many Silk Road caravans. Only the dust escapes.
In an instant, billows of grit can envelope the landscape in a mist so fine that it never completely settles. Moving east, the dust sweeps up pollutants from heavily industrialized regions that turn the yellow plumes a bruised brown. In Beijing, where authorities estimate a million tons of this dust settles every year, the level of microscopic aerosols is seven times the public-health standard set by the World Health Organization.
Once aloft, the plumes can circle the world in three weeks. "In a very real and immediate sense, you can look at a dust event you are breathing in China and look at this same dust as it tracks across the Pacific and reaches the United States," said climate analyst Jeff Stith at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. "It is a remarkable mix of natural and man-made particles."
This spring, Dr. Ramanathan and Dr. Stith led an international research team in a $1 million National Science Foundation project to track systematically the plumes across the Pacific. NASA satellites have monitored the clouds from orbit for several years, but this was the first effort to analyze them in detail.
For six weeks, the researchers cruised the Pacific aboard a specially instrumented Gulfstream V jet to sample these exotic airstreams. Their findings, to be released this year, involved NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and nine U.S. universities, as well as the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan, Seoul National University in Korea, and Lanzhou University and Peking University in China.
The team detected a new high-altitude plume every three or four days. Each one was up to 300 miles wide and six miles deep, a vaporous layer cake of pollutants. The higher the plumes, the longer they lasted, the faster they traveled and the more pronounced their effect, the researchers said.
Until now, the pollution choking so many communities in Asia may have tempered the pace of global warming. As China and other countries eliminate their sulfate emissions, however, world temperatures may heat up even faster than predicted."
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"Robert Lee Hotz is the Journal's science columnist. He was a Pulitzer finalist in 1986 for his coverage of genetic engineering issues and again in 2004 for his coverage of the space shuttle Columbia accident, and shared a 1995 Pulitzer Prize at the Los Angeles Times for earthquake coverage. He also has received national awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Geophysical Union. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; an honorary life member of Sigma Xi, The Research Society; and is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers. He is a director of the Alicia Patterson Foundation, which funds independent journalism projects around the world, and a distinguished writer in residence at New York University."
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Ed. note: The author didn't question why several large western US states have been strangled to death by so-called environmental regulations for an atmosphere over which they have almost no control--and that has nothing to do with CO2. Everyone wants "clean air and water" but that's not why America was shut down and an international commodity trading market started up. It was supposed to be about poisonous CO2. The author didn't note that Communist China will never change its ways because the US takes the blame for everything and pays for everything. The idea that they're really going to turn things around and be good stewards as the author suggests has been claimed for years and will never happen. It's put out to keep US taxpayers from complaining. While they're dying they can think, "I'm good."
In another 2007 article the author even bought the 2010 deadline for "50 million environmental refugees" which obviously never happened. He also conveyed suggestions for "worldwide" regulation:
2/28/2007, "A call to arms on climate shift," Robert Lee Hotz, LA Times
"To reduce the effects of climate-related disasters, such as floods or prolonged droughts, the panel urged better international emergency response measures, warning that there may be as many as 50 million environmental refugees by 2010....
To minimize the hazards of rising sea levels and more powerful storms, the group called for a worldwide ban on beachfront construction near existing high-tide lines.
The researchers were financed by the nonprofit United Nations Foundation and the 60,000-member research society Sigma Xi."...
"Courtesy SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and ORBIMAGE
A satellite view from 2001 shows dust arriving in California from Asian deserts. Concentrations of dust are visible to the south, near the coastline (lower right); To the west the dust is mixed with clouds over open ocean. This dust event caused a persistent haze in places like Death Valley, California, where skies are usually crystal clear." image via Wall St. Journal
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At Cancun 'climate summit,' Communist China threatened to spew extra poisonous gas into the atmosphere if anyone messed with the hundreds of millions in profits it's making via UN CDM deals. (near end of article)
12/13/10, "‘Perverse’ CO2 Payments Send Flood of Money to China," by Mark Schapiro, Yale Environment 360
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1998-2008, global CO2 has risen but temperatures have not:
Sources for data used in graph: NCDC, Hadley CRUT:
UAH NCDC LT: http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
Hadley CRUT: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/te...hadcrut3gl.txt
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"Why the government even bothers trying to reduce CO2 emissions is a mystery. Rising CO2 emissions from China and the rest of Asia
- make any efforts to reduce CO2 emissions in the U.S. irrelevant."...
"Global warming, now called climate change, is a big industry with academic and commercial branches. One way or another the government provides the money to keep it in business. The academic side supports thousands of scientific workers churning out some good science larded with lots of junk science. The commercial side is busy turning out tank cars filled with corn ethanol and covering the landscape with windmills. Nobody would be doing any of this without government subsidies and mandates....
How big is the climate change industry and how large could it become? Probably the research side is in the single digit billions. The mitigation, or CO2 reduction, side is where the big bucks are. To get an idea consider that the cost of electricity amounts to about $3 a day for each person in the U.S. or around $300 billion per year. Double the cost of electricity, something that is seen as good start by the preachers of climate change, and you have another $300 billion per year. That's half of the cost of Medicare in 2008. Some people in California are already paying 5 times[i] as much as people in areas less affected by the green virus. The beauty of green electricity mandates is that it results in a gradual creep upwards in the cost of electricity and
- it's not easy to know who to blame.
"ii] The California Air Resources Board wrote an allegedly scientific analysis of the wonderful results that would follow for the California economy from draconian greenhouse gas limitations. The Board was mandated by law to obtain a peer review of their report. The 4 peer reviewers, all hired hand professors, demonstrated that there are limits to corrupting academics with money. They all said, not very politely considering the source, that the board's economic analysis was garbage.
- The Board ignored them.
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5 tools for destroying the US were provided by supposed Republicans:
1990, The U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990, by Pres. George Bush the first, which spoke of human induced "global warming"
1970, The EPA was created by Richard Nixon
1970, The Clean Air Act signed by President Richard Nixon
1970, NOAA was created by Richard Nixon.
1973, The Endangered Species Act was created by Richard Nixon
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"A victim of a famine machine that is entirely man-made, not by red communists this time,
- but by greens."...
"Fresno, Calif., stands as the de facto capital of California's mighty Central Valley, the breadbasket of America. So why is that city preoccupied with winning a $1 million prize to stave off hunger?"...
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