Reducing Soot Might Be Shortcut to Reverse Climate Change, New Study Says

No just the opposite: paint the soot white and watch it reflect more light and the global warming turn into an ice age!

It's pretty funny they talk about "a century of global warming" when, in fact the planet has cooled an average of about a degree and a half since '98, which, by the way, was the last eleven year cycle of the Solar minimum, now we're entering the Solar maximum phase of the sun so the average temperature should rise a couple of degrees.... regardless, these climate changeologists would have us believe that this cooling and warming trend is unique to our (humans)era when it's actually been going on for hundreds of millions of years. There's an assload of evidence that proves that at many times in the past this planet has had many many times more CO2 in the atmosphere than it does now... The glaciers are going to melt no matter how much money we put into trying to stop it because we can't control how much radiation (heat) the planet receives from the sun. Not gonna happen folks...

@Ender: pretty much... We know the planet goes through massive swings in temperature. We seem more confident than we should be about how much of an impact we are having on a system with more variables than any supercomputer could even hope to handle.

Before I get swarmed by people who are trying to save the planet, let me say that I have nothing against renewable energy. Fossil Fuels are going to run out eventually, so we should start the transition now.

We know the planet goes through swings in its temperature. If it is happening beyond any normal amount, are we helping to neutralize it? No. That said, I'm just afraid that if we try too hard to control something as fluid as the climate of an entire planet, its going to blow up in our faces and the very attempts to stop the heating are either going to accelerate it or send us into an ice age. A friend of mine found an article that said that we're actually overdue for an ice age and its possible that the stuff we're pumping into the atmosphere is preventing that catastrophic result.

Climatologists know that the climate has changed dramatically throughout Earth’s history. They are the ones that study Earth’s climate. The hottest decade on record was the one that just ended (00s).

Here’s a video that should clear up any misunderstandings that you might have.

http://www.climateprogress.org/2010/07/30/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-climate-science-in-under-10-minutes/

@Ender7718: Actually it is quite the contrary the last solar maximum ended in 2001 and we are in the solar minimum phase of the suns 11-year cycle... Although it is true that there is insurmountable evidence that throughout the earths history there were times where CO2 levels toppled levels of CO2 in our atmosphere today, but you have not taken into account CFC's, nitrous oxide levels, and methane levels which have been steadily increasing over the last 30-40 years AND the ever increasing CO2 levels. Since 1 molecule of CH4 is worth 25 CO2 molecules you can see how methane has a much larger impact on the amount of radiation absorbed by the sun which is therefore trapped in our atmosphere indefinitely. But i do agree with you on that there is not much we really can do besides doing what we can to reduce these emissions as much as possible.. although we will never the less see an increase in global temperature and the decrease of arctic glaciers but to not believe that the warming of the earth's atmosphere is "unique to our (human) era" is naive and arrogant...

You said it yourself, if we continue to let companies, governments and people push gases into the atmosphere that haven’t been there for millions of years it will definitely “blow up in our faces”. We should stop those people from tinkering with our atmosphere. We would not be “controlling the climate”, just stopping those that would play with it, from touching it.

Oh I wish people would just be content to enjoy the weather whatever it may be instead of trying to play god and control the weather.

Human vs. Nature Warming Climate Correlation? :
CO2 levels can’t be a factor for the “CO2 Correlation Theory” since plant life has not responded to the increased levels, therefore climate variation is still the great mystery it always was. Dangerous levels of CO2 would be seen by plants first, then climate.
Now, be happy and love Nature, not throw it under the bus as being weak and fragile and helpless.

Why are we supposed to trust computer models that are predicting relatively small changes in temperature over a long period of time when they cannot accurately tell me how warm its going to be tomorrow?

@boom_f15

That's a terrible argument if you think about it. There's a difference between predicting short-term changes and long-term changes. Just like you can't predict the weather tomorrow, whether it will be hotter or colder, but you know that when winter rolls around, it will be colder.

Unfortunately, Jacobson is Mr. Soot himself due to his ideological support of Wind & Solar Energy and consequent soot producing Biomass/Garbage Burning (Denmark does a lot of that). And the EU is big on Soot Spewing Biomass/Garbage burning - they actually have the extraordinary audacity to call that Carbon Neutral.

And Jacobson is a prominent anti-Nuclear fanatic, which of course means burning lots of soot belching Biomass, Garbage, Oil, NG and Coal. NUCLEAR ENERGY PRODUCES NO SOOT OR GHG EMISSIONS!!

If only Jacobson would abandon his hypocritical ideology and embrace Nuclear Power like the #1 Environmentalist on this Earth - James Lovelock.

And you can argue about Global Warming until you’re blue in the face, but the fact remains that Oil hit $140 per barrel in 2008 and was on its way to $200 per barrel had it not been for the Global Recession. And $200 per barrel Oil will be a disaster to the World’s economies and already suffering middle and lower class Americans. We need an all out, WWII style push for Nuclear Energy.

Nuclear Energy – The Power to Save the World!

No worries. Not anymore. Remember how all of us fools thought the gulf oil spill was terrible. CNN is now announcing that the oil spill was overblown, at http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2010/07/30/ac.oil.spill.cnn?hpt=T2 Unbelievable, amazing, shocking and more adjectives popped in my head as I watched how we were all fools for thinking it was an environmental catastrophe. Thank goodness millions of barrels of oil in the gulf were overblown. I feel like such an idiot.

So I have the solution to all climate change its been called an environmental catastrophe too. And no its not soot. Are you ready, it's a good one. All we have to do is make climate change politically damaging to the current administration or other pol's. Climate change will quickly disappear from public discourse as the oil spill so quickly did. It would then not exist any more. Perfect

I swear politics and the media are the most disgusting dishonest SOB's I have ever seen. Nothing we know about anything is untainted by politics and media dishonesty. How do we combat such a willingness to lie about everything? And it's everywhere, worldwide in all media. Working collectively toward a common goal in all ways.

Popsci was doing good coverage originally, but they too dropped the story. I just don't understand how any of these people, any of them, can look themselves in the mirror. To look at their children and know what they've done.

It's just unbelievable.

So is the corollary true? Will it be warmer in the summer? NO! Not always. Oftentimes large volcanoes emit huge amounts of ash and sulfuric gases and these get blasted into the upper layers of the atmosphere and block the sunlight and we have 'volcanic winters' during the summer that can last for years or even decades depending on if it's a big volcano Tambora or a super volcano like Toba

What we should do to control the weather is setup a 10,000 foot tall chimney stack on the top of Mt Everest and then pump ashes up it at high speed so that they get blasted up over 100,000 feet high and trickle over the globe and block the sunlight and thereby cool the earth and equal amount as the CO2 buildup. Problem solved.

Or a faster solution would be to set off a couple hundreds 50 megaton nuclear weapons under yellowstone park a few miles deep and then watch a super volcano in action reduce the CO2 buildup to insignificance as the ashes block the sun for decades and we get colder than heck.

But that's over kill ha. Maybe we could the same with Krakatoa which has been building up for a big one again and set it up to go off sooner and it will reduce temperatures a good 1 to 2 degrees for several years. Then do the same thing again and again to keep lots of ashes in the upper atmosphere blocking the sun.

Of course I'm just kidding!

It's so sad to see this popular science media coverage of what will be to science, Bush was to world peace.
EnvironMENTAL Voyeurism and Gutless Rubber Necking From the Climate Controllers:
If they had been real “concerned for Earth” environmentalists, and REAL saintly “scientists”, the issue would have been population control, not climate control.
If they had been real “concerned for Earth” environmentalists, and REAL saintly “scientists”, the issue would have been celebrating the doubt surrounding the CO2 theory as the planet is not dying after all as we had mistakenly threatened our children with for 24 years of predictions.
System Change NOT Climate Change
Population Control NOT Control

If you want to see Global Warming in our solar System, then just put in your browser,Search with Image, Russia, Venus Missions. The temperature on the surface of Venus is over 500 degrees, all the water, is up in the clouds, the CO2 lever is about 87%, cloud cover is 95%. The Russians took some pictures of the surface, which looks like all Asphalt surface. Large Cloud cover creates the "Greenhouse" effect. Will or is this happen to our Earth?

I have argued for years that the big enemy of the Arctic ice shelf in the summer is all the soot now coming from China. Not only does soot act as a greenhouse gas while airborn, when it falls on ice or snow it greatly accelerates the melting.

However, good luck on getting China to do anything at all about their soot production. They add like 5,000 more diesel engines a month to their roads and build a new coal fired power plant with no scrubber every two months.