by Noël Zia Lee
Sulfate lens enhances climate warming properties of atmospheric soot:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]
Particulate pollution thought to be holding climate change in check by reflecting sunlight instead enhances warming when combined with airborne soot, a new study has found.
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This is pretty important. While soot absorbs heat, sulfates are believed to reflect it. In fact, sulfate levels are used to cool the Earth. Some people have even suggested that we shoot large amounts of sulfates into the atmosphere to reflect back sunlight and help cool the Earth.
But this paper indicates that sulfates mixed with carbon soot actually enhances the warming effects almost 2-fold. I’ll link to the paper when it comes online but one question I have has to do with where in the atmosphere this takes place.
From reading the press release, the soot-sulfate connection happens fairly low, in the troposphere (since soot is usually found lower), while the sulfate as reflector would happen high in the stratosphere. I wonder what effect this will have on some of the models? Also, is there cycling between sulfates in the stratosphere and the troposphere?
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