Dirty power plants exert temporary protective effect.

The grey, sulphur-laden skies overlying parts of Asia have a bright side — they reflect sunlight back into space, moderating temperatures on the ground. Scientists are now exploring how and where pollution from power plants could offset, for a time, the greenhouse warming of the carbon dioxide they emit.

A new modelling study doubles as a thought experiment in how pollution controls and global warming could interact in China and India, which are projected to account for 80% of new coal-fired power in the coming years. If new power plants were to operate without controlling pollution such as sulphur dioxide (SO₂) and nitrogen oxides (NO_X), the study finds, the resulting haze would reflect enough sunlight to overpower the warming effect of CO₂ and exert local cooling.

But this effect would not be felt uniformly across the globe and would last only a few decades. In the long run, CO₂ would always prevail, and the world could experience a rapid warming effect if the skies were cleaned up decades down the road.

“The paper highlights the fundamental inequity and iniquity of anthropogenic climate change: ‘enjoy now and make others pay later’,” says Meinrat Andreae, an aerosol expert at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, who was not involved in the work. In fact, he says, dirty coal plants could be seen as “a very primitive form of geoengineering”.

The study, which is under review at Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, builds on a well-established idea. Global temperatures were relatively stable in the decades leading up to the 1970s, even as fossil-fuel consumption shot up. Then industrialized countries began curbing SO₂ and NO_X to reduce acid rain and protect public health — and temperatures increased rapidly. The latest work, led by Drew Shindell at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, looks at how the climate effects of air pollutants and greenhouse gases could play out over time and geography.

The study analysed a suite of scenarios for the years 2000 to 2080, mixing annual rates of power-plant growth from 5% to 10% with various controls on SO₂ and NO_X pollution. SO₂ is a precursor to sulphate aerosols and dominates the cooling effect, which varies depending on when plants adopt pollution controls. The sooner controls are put in place, the sooner the warming potential of CO₂kicks in.

In one scenario assuming rapid growth in coal power with pollution controls phased in between 2040 and 2060, the effect of aerosols from the plants outweighs the effect of their CO₂until the year 2046, when the CO₂ effect catches up and then overtakes aerosols. But the effect isn’t uniform: the SO₂emissions produce a net cooling across much of the Northern Hemisphere. The Southern Hemisphere and the Arctic see fewer aerosols and, because CO₂ has global effects, they exhibit net warming.

How quickly China and India will move to clean up their coal emissions is unclear. In the past few years China has been aggressively installing SO₂ scrubbers on many of its power plants in an attempt to improve air quality and protect public health. But some experts have questioned whether those scrubbers are being used properly — or even turned on.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100217/full/463860b.html?s=news_rss

Chinese search engine $BIDU released a pretty good earnings, “doing butter than expected” shall be the best news in this cool economy status. However, investors are not satisfied with its lowered revenue guidance for the next quarter. The stock is getting hit with great vol right now in market: down over $50 in the mid day trading (11.5%), where is the 50-day moving average of 380

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

I was warned.

I have never received any spam since I use Gmail, Today I get one and a bit funny. Here is it…

“Dear Mr. Law

It is a blessing to communicate to you in my quest for a faithful, sincere and reliable foreigner who will assist me claim and invest my late father’s fortune in an amount of US $3,700,000.

This funds was deposited in a security and finance company here in Ghana, just before my parents and two of my siblings (sisters) were killed by family members contending for the chieftancy (Kingship) stool in my village.

As the heir to the throne of my late father and the only survivor of our family i have successfully gone into hiding. I am now staying in one of the Catholic orphanages home in the country. Upon subsequent discussion with the Reverend Father of the Catholic orphanages home, he asked me to look for a God-fearing one, to stand-in as my late father’s business partner to claim this funds from the security as my beneficiary.

You will also be required to assist us in investing our own part of the money into viable business ventures abroad and for all this we are offering you 17% of the total funds as reward.

Please note that you stand no risk at all in assisting me to conclude this transaction because the money is legitimately our family fortune.

Stay blessed,

Godswill Nana.”

I do not know if other get this before?