How China's Filthy Air Is Screwing With
Our Weather
Toxic smog billowing from China's coal-fired power plants is making snowstorms in the US
worse.
By James West | Fri Jan. 30, 2015 12:25 PM EST
Social Title:
How China's filthy air is screwing with our weather.
As the snow began to fall earlier this week in the lead up to the season's first major blizzard,
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters that the Northeast was witnessing "a pattern
of extreme weather that we've never seen before." [1] Climate change, Cuomo argues, is fueling
bigger, badder weather events like this one—and like Hurricane Sandy.
While the science that links specific snowstorms to global warming is profoundly difficult to
calculate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says [2] it's "very likely"—defined as
greater than 90 percent probability—that "extreme precipitation events will become more intense
and frequent" in North America as the world warms. In New York City, actual snow days have
decreased, but bigger blizzards have become more common [3], dumping more snow each time.
Mashable reported [4] that all of New York City's top 10 snowfalls have occurred in the past 15
years. Scientists can trace the cause to the enormous amount of energy we're pumping into the
oceans. Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told
Wired this week [5] that "the oceans are warmer, and the air above them is more moist"—giving
storms more energy to unleash more precipitation. In short, the blizzard dubbed Juno was being
fueled in part by the ocean's excess of climate change-related heat.
But climate change may not be the only way that human activity is making storms worse. In an
emerging body of work, NASA scientists have identified a surprising contributor to American
storms and cold snaps: Asia's air pollution. Over the past few years, a team at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology has found [6] that aerosols—or
airborne particles—emitted from the cities fueling Asia's booming economies are making storm
activity stronger in the Northwest Pacific Ocean. These storms wreak havoc on the polar jet
stream, a major driver of North America's weather. The result: US winters with heavier snowfall
and more intense cold periods.
Pollution billowing from Asia's big cities, they found, is essentially "seeding" the clouds with
sulfur, carbon grit, and metals. This leads to thicker, taller, and more energetic clouds, with
heavier precipitation. These so-called "extratropical" cyclones [7] in the Northwest Pacific have
become about 10 percent stronger over the last 30 years, the scientists say.
Chinese cities, for example, are so toxic that 90 percent of them [8] fail to meet the country's
own pollution standards [8]. But it's not just China. In terms of air quality, 13 of the 20 most
polluted cities in the world are in India [9]. And thirty-one of the world's 50 most polluted cities
are found in China and Southeast Asia [10] (including India), according to the World Health
Organization.
New Delhi, India, has the worst air pollution in the world, according to the WHO. All that
smog is altering weather patterns around the world. Altaf Qadri, File/AP
The NASA animation [11] above shows how these aerosol emissions moved around the world,
from September 1, 2006, to April 10, 2007. I've included two versions of it. The first shows the
Earth as a globe, the second shows the planet laid out flat. Also seen in the video are locations of
wildfires, indicated by red and yellow dots. At the start, fires burn over South America and
Africa, emitting black carbon, while dust from the Sahara moves westwards, getting sucked into
two Atlantic cyclones. Later, in February, fires burning in Thailand and Southeast Asia mix with
sulfates from industry in China and are eventually pulled eastward into cyclones that cross the
Pacific and reach North America.
The work raises questions about proposals to "geoengineer" the globe by pumping aerosols into
the atmosphere, which some argue could reduce the Earth's temperature by partially blocking out
the sun. The NASA researchers found [12] that sulfates are the most effective type of aerosol for
deepening extratropical cyclones, which means that using them to fight global warming could
bring about more stormy winter weather around the world.
There's some hope that China is attempting to stabilize and, eventually, curb its pollution through
new emissions standards that would cut the level of dangerous particles, including sulfates.
There are also signs that China's coal boom—the source of most of the country's air pollution—is
finally slowing down. A new analysis released this week by Greenpeace showed that for the first
time this century, China's coal consumption fell in 2014.
But India is another story. That country, which has the fifth-largest reserves of coal [13] on
Earth, is desperate to provide power to its millions of impoverished citizens. Sixty percent of the
India's power currently comes from coal, and despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi's promises
to ramp up solar energy, he is also planning to double India's coal production [14] to more than 1
billion tons annually.
So stock up on non-perishable grocery items. Looks like those blizzards are only going to
increase in size.
Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/pollution-china-winterweather-america-smog
Links:
[1] https://twitter.com/cbcsteve/status/559765426973208577
[2] http://www.un.org/climatechange/the-science/
[3] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/big-blizzards-have-become-more-common-in-new-york/
[4] http://mashable.com/2015/01/25/blizzard-forecast-got-worse/
[5] http://www.wired.com/2015/01/global-warming-blizzard-worse/
[6] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/19/6894.full.pdf+html
[7] http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/A7.html
[8] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/chinese-cities-toxic-air-pollutiongreenpeace
[9] http://qz.com/307176/thirteen-of-the-20-most-polluted-cities-in-the-world-are-indian/
[10] http://www.who.int/phe/health_topics/outdoorair/databases/cities/en/
[11] http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/research/aerosol/modeling/nr1_movie/
[12] http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2218/
[13] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/18/world/coal-rush-in-india-could-tip-balance-onclimate-change.html?_r=0
[14] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/heres-why-obama-wont-get-a-climatedeal-with-india-this-trip/2015/01/24/77fb95cc-9ccf-11e4-86a3-1b56f64925f6_story.