Saturday 24 September 2011

Great news from the University of Utah

There is reason to celebrate: The National Geographic reports about a new study that shows the benefits of  global warming :

There may be a bright side to global warming, at least in the Arctic—the changing climate could improve air quality in the polar region, a new study shows.
The find is rare good news for the Arctic, which most studies find is warming much more rapidly than the rest of the planet.
Currently, air pollutants generally travel from industrially developed regions in the south northward to the Arctic, where pollution contributes to heating up the polar climate.
The reason for the potential boost in air quality is increased global rainfall, which many climate models predict will be a widespread result of global warming, said study leader Timothy Garrett, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah. (See an interactive map of global warming's effects.)
"Precipitation is the atmosphere's single most efficient way of removing particulate pollution," Garrett said. That's because raindrops simply take the pollutants with them as they fall from the atmosphere—the mechanism behind acid rain.
Thus, pollution may be already scrubbed from the air in other regions before it even reaches the Arctic.

Less Soot = Less Warming?
To verify that rainfall can remove pollutants before they reach the Arctic, Garrett's team examined a decade's worth of air-quality records from Barrow, Alaska, and Alert in Nunavut, Canada—the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world. (See an Arctic map.)
The team compared levels of carbon monoxide—a pollutant not removed by rainfall—with those of sulfates and soot, which are scoured out of the atmosphere by rain. The results showed that the sulfur and soot levels were lower than expected, leading the team to conclude that rainfall is already cleaning the Arctic air. (Test your knowledge of pollution.)
This effect may also partially counteract Arctic warming, Garrett noted.
That's because air pollutants, particularly soot, increase the greenhouse effect that's the hallmark of global warming. (Watch a video explaining the greenhouse effect.)

Read the entire article here

Cleaner air and less warming - what more could one ask for! This must be really unpleasant news for all doomsday prophets. Somewhere the warmists must already be planning a counterattack on the "traitor" Garrett and his University.

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