http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/grnlndice.htm

What sort of flowers?

Soot makes sense because it causes snowmelt bringing earlier thaws and lowered albedo. Indeed during the seventies, when the coming ice age was the current theory, there was a great deal of research for using finely powdered coal to do just that. Soviet scientists in particular conducted airdrops on glaciers with positive results.

China’s massive coal based electrical generation expansion may account for this. While all this may be just be speculation, particulate carbon might well explain much of the NH temp increase.

Chapters and page numbers…?

Thanks for helping out. I had asked the question because I wanted to know whether my opponent was simply asserting that of course the IPCC had discussed it, without himself knowing whether it was true or not or what they had said, as a way of scoring a cheap point. If they had, he ‘wins’ the point for no effort. If they haven’t, it’d cost someone a lot of time and effort to prove it – to no profit, since he never acknowledges any fault. I’m not arguing about whether the IPCC has offered an explanation, I’m arguing about whether he knows what it is.

That said, the section you present doesn’t really help. Firstly, as you note, it isn’t the latest report. Has this science been superseded since? Secondly, most of the paragraph is talking about a report on the greater damage that climate change would do in the Arctic, so the reference is unlikely to help. The only part that comes close to answering the question is “Because of a variety of positive feedback mechanisms,…” which is vague and uninformative in the extreme.

What are these positive feedbacks? How do they stack up against the negative feedbacks? How do we know that the drivers are positive? (A positive feedback magnifies whatever effect other forcers have, so warming is made warmer and cooling is made cooler. For example, if aerosols caused net cooling in the industrial Northern hemisphere, the positive feedback would magnify the cooling effect.) Why do these positive feedbacks not apply in the Antarctic? Is the effect quantified well enough to explain why the Arctic effect is “orders of magnitude” greater? What are the physical mechanisms involved here? How much confidence is there: to what extent is it a plausible hypothesis, versus solid, established science?

The extract you quote answers none of these. If that was the best the IPCC reports had to offer, I’d consider the original claim vindicated.

But as it happens, and as I said above, the latest report does allude to at least one possible reason for the difference. However, it isn’t so easy to find that not knowing of it could be regarded as evidence that “you obviously haven’t read, or at least haven’t understood, any climate science at all.” As demonstrated by the fact that the person who made this statement apparently hasn’t found it either.

As you say, it doesn’t matter in the slightest. I’m simply entertaining myself here, baiting our resident troll.

I took the guys advice on searching, and yeah the guy who said the IPCC went into that appears to be if not completely correct, the more correct in spirit at least of the two.

It doesn’t solve anything, but I think I found what he was talking about here (not the most recent IPCC report)…

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg2/595.htm

“The IPCC, in its Special Report on Regional Impacts of Climate Change (RICC), produced an assessment of the impacts of climate change on the Arctic and the Antarctic (Everett and Fitzharris, 1998). In addition, the impact of climate change on the cryosphere is discussed in the IPCC Second Assessment Report (SAR) (Fitzharris, 1996). The main points arising from the regional assessment were that the Arctic is extremely vulnerable to projected climate change—major physical, ecological, sociological, and economic impacts are expected. Because of a variety of positive feedback mechanisms, the Arctic is likely to respond rapidly and more severely than any other area on Earth, with consequent effects on sea ice, permafrost, and hydrology. On the other hand, the Antarctic would respond relatively slowly to climate change, with much smaller impacts expected by 2100, except in the Antarctic Peninsula.”

I’m not sure it matters though. The idea soot melts ice still makes sense. The arctic section of that 2001 IPCC report also mentioned how melting ice releases latent heat, which adds support to the comment in the article that goes…

“By this theory, the warming of the Arctic partially results from the loss of ice, rather than the other way around.”

Seems like these scare stories are like an old suit, they become fashionable again every thirty years or so.

Of course, there have been mistakes made in the `70s whereas the EPA mandated pollution control devices without giving enough time for auto makers to properly engineer the controls, thus causing driveability and performance problems. This has left a bitten taste in the mouths of “old timers” who would deactivate controls to regain some of the lost horsepower.

Of course today, with computer controlled fuel injection, internal combustion engines are far cleaner. I believe that we should continue to control such pollutants as HC, SO2, CO, and NOx. CO2, even if considered a greenhouse gas, is NOT a pollutant. No matter how many times the newspaper calls it a pollutant, it is not.

At least the website “www.fueleconomy.gov” gets it right. While they push the whole “carbon footprint” concept, at least I can give them points to using the terms “pollutant” and “greenhouse gas” when referring to real pollutants and CO2.