California wildfire [image credit: NASA]
Another day, another topic of model uncertainty. ‘Refining’ an admitted high level of uncertainty is an odd concept, but researchers assert the issue will be ‘cleared up’. However, their belief in ‘potent climate-warming agents’ doesn’t inspire confidence.
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New research refining the amount of sunlight absorbed by black carbon in smoke from wildfires will help clear up a long-time weak spot in earth system models, enabling more accurate forecasting of global climate change, says Phys.org.
“Black carbon or soot is the next most potent climate-warming agent after CO2 and methane, despite a short lifetime of weeks, but its impact in climate models is still highly uncertain,” said James Lee, a climate researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and corresponding author of the new study in Geophysical Research Letters on light absorption by wildfire smoke. “Our research will clear up that uncertainty.”
The Los Alamos research resolves a long-time disconnect between the observations of the amount of light absorbed by black carbon in smoke and the amount predicted by models, given how black carbon is mixed with other material such as condensed organic aerosols that are present in plumes.
The team used the multi-instrument laboratory Center for Aerosol-gas Forensic Experiments (CAFÉ) at Los Alamos to sample smoke from several wildfires over two summers in the Western United States, including the nearby Medio Fire in New Mexico in 2020 and aged plumes from California and Arizona.
The CAFÉ team is now collaborating with colleagues at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to incorporate their validated parameterizations into the Department of Energy’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model, or E3SM. This will better evaluate wildfire climate forcing and feedbacks.
Black carbon emitted by vehicles, power plants, residential heating and wildfires is a potent absorber of solar radiation, converting incoming light to atmospheric heating.
“Wildfires emit soot and organic particles that respectively absorb and scatter the sunlight to warm or cool the atmosphere to a varying net effect, depending on the composition of the smoke mixture,” said Manvendra Dubey, CAFÉ director and project principal investigator at Los Alamos.
“This mixing evolves over time as smoke from large megafires disperses globally. We discovered a systematic relationship between the increase in light absorption efficiency of soot with age due to the growth in organic coatings.”
The discovery accurately captures the complex sizes and structure of soot that are currently approximated in models, Dubey said.
“We are pushing to incorporate it in climate models to provide robust estimates of warming by wildfire soot, particularly in the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the globe,” Dubey said.
“While black carbon is generally thought to cause warming,” Lee said, “its climate impact is not well known because of how it co-exists with other types of particles in the atmosphere.”
That uncertainty derives partly from a lack of understanding of how black carbon light-reflecting and -absorbing properties evolve as it ages and undergoes complicated chemistry in the rapidly changing atmospheric conditions as wildfire smoke disperses. The plume can linger for months in the upper atmosphere.
During that evolution, organic aerosols form and condense around black carbon particles. Some of these aerosols focus light on the black carbon, increasing its absorption—but just how much light is absorbed depends on the size of the aerosols and how they coat the soot.
Climate models currently idealize this mixing state of smoke, Dubey said. Because the models don’t account for the variation in organic coatings based on the size of each particle, the models overestimate how much radiation is absorbed by black carbon.
That leads to large uncertainties and biases in wildfire climate effects.
Full article here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
[…] Climate models: Wildfire-smoke observations may help ‘fill gap’ in estimating soot’… […]
I wonder if James Lee has ever heard of water vapor?
“its impact in climate models is still highly uncertain”
“Our research will clear up that uncertainty.”
No, it won’t. Never has. Their “scientific” methodology is inherently fallacious.
models overestimate
As usual. But let’s upend our successful and proven energy supply system anyway 🙄
Given the amount of soot released during the assorted wars throughout the 20th Century, especially after SH lit the Iraqi oil wells (which IIRC the alarmists claimed would cause a ‘nuclear winter’) I’m surprised they haven’t any quantity of information.
But hey, it’s just another grant farming scheme right?
From the article:
The discovery accurately captures the complex sizes and structure of soot that are currently approximated in models, Dubey said.
“We are pushing to incorporate it in climate models to provide robust estimates of warming by wildfire soot, particularly in the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the globe,” Dubey said. [bold added]
*Four times faster* – looks like an upgrade. We need less soot – or is it more soot?
Anyway…sound the alarm…louder! 🙄
“and the amount predicted by models”
gee we just now discovered the models are crap…. OR…. they just now acknowledged the models are crap.
“But if you just give us a couple billion more we’ll have it all straightened out in no time.”
[edit:] for some reason my closing tags failed. Only the word “acknowledged” was suppose to be bold italic. Oh well.
[mod] amended – missing ‘/’
The Union of Disgruntled Chimney Sweeps approves this research.
So they’ve assumed it’s potent in their models but the models are not coming out right so we have to tweak them some more…
This is simply stupid. Build a simple model that is reasonably accurate FIRST. Then if you need to, add more detail and more resolution. You can then test what you’ve done each time so you know if it’s right or not. Building as complicated a model as you can that doesn’t work, and believing its because its not detailed enough is madness.
And even then it won’t be long before it deviates from reality and becomes useless because that is the way of models of chaotic non-linear systems.
Now THIS is interesting: “We discovered a systematic relationship between the increase in light absorption efficiency of soot with age due to the growth in organic coatings.”
As I serendipitously discovered snorkeling and scuba diving in the Bahamas and Norther Caribbean, anything that Nature or Mankind put into the sea becomes either food or a home for some creature or plant, large or small.
Apparently, if I read the report correctly, even soot particles from wildfire smoke serve as homes for organics….living things?
Latest aerosol thinking(?)…
The great paradox: Drop in air pollution has INCREASED global warming because clean air does not contain aerosol particles that reflect sunlight and cool the Earth
Current pollution rates are 30 percent lower than in 2000
However, this has led to an increase in warming from carbon emissions
Scientists found there is less haze in the atmosphere to block the sun’s radiation
They suggest using solar engineering to launch aerosol particles into the atmosphere in a bid to combat climate change
PUBLISHED: 21:56, 22 July 2022
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11040557/Drop-air-pollution-INCREASED-global-warming-study-reveals.html
IIRC there was a reason we reduced the output of sulphate and NOx into the atmosphere, wasn’t it causing acid rain?
And aren’t we spending a fortune taking the NOx out of IC exhausts?
On page 232 of his great work: The Theory of Heat; James Clerk Maxwell shows that clear gases cannot absorb Radiant Heat (a vibration of molecules sending an electromagnetic wave through the Ether, as with radio waves etc.. ) It is now available as a reprint from Amazon, along with many others including his Complete Works…. Everything else from Michael Mann on not to mention Arrhenius etc. is tripe. Brett Keane, New Zealand…
They suggest using solar engineering to launch aerosol particles into the atmosphere in a bid to combat climate change
Or do more diesel engine miles 😉
ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE AND AEROSOLS:
Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate.
Schneider S. & Rasool S., “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols – Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate”, Science, vol.173, 9 July 1971, p.138-141
Those results were based on a climate model developed by none other than James Hansen, incidentally.
Better catch those arsonists…or maybe not?
Smoke from Western wildfires can influence Arctic sea ice
Date: July 27, 2022
Source: University of Colorado at Boulder
Summary: Sea ice and wildfires may be more interconnected than previously thought, according to new research.
Previous research had already shown that when the sea ice melts, large wildfires become more widespread over the western U.S. By showing that smoke from wildfires can help protect the ice, this new research suggests that this variability may be creating more of a feedback loop than previously thought.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220727163049.htm
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Do they understand what’s going on?
“Do they understand what’s going on?”
Apparently not.
So presumably the huge amount of coal burning between the start of the Industrial Revolution and the reduction in soot beginning in the 1960s when the Clean Air Acts in the UK came into force must have left a clear global footprint?
I remember the amount of soot that was kicked out in the industrial North and Midlands of the UK when all the tens – hundreds? – of thousands of Lancashire boilers were fired up in the early hours of Monday morning, and when all the workers got home after work and lit their bituminous coal fires!
And that was just in England!