From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Dec 03 2002 - 11:45:16 MST
On Tue, 3 Dec 2002 Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
> I believe I recall seeing a picture on one of the space oriented news
> sites of a noticiable brown cloud over the industrial countries of SE Asia
> that is bringing on El Nino. Can some of you comment?
Its a very complex problem. In most third world countries they opt
for cars and/or factories without good pollution controls. As
they develop and people become wealthy enough to purchase cars
the traffic problems increase (because they don't have the road
infrastructure). That in turn causes vehicles to sit in traffic
further aggravating the pollution problem. [This was *very* clear
in Moscow circa 1992-1996.]
This may be providing some of the particulate matter that allows
snow and rain to condense out of the atmospheric water vapor leading
to greater precipitation (as Mez points out a warmer atmosphere
doesn't help either). That ends up leading to the floods in
countries like Bangladesh. That may mean that less moisture
gets transported over the Himalayas which in turn makes central
Asia dryer. That allows very large dust storms to form which
blow out of asia and into the pacific where the dust gets
dropped effectively fertilizing the phytoplankton. Phytoplankton
blooms would then presumably absorb CO2 out of the atmosphere
leading to an increase in the plankton that consume the phytoplankton
and respire the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
I suspect the interaction between all of these things generates
cycles over multi-year periods.
And that is probablBy highly oversimplified.
There was a paper in Science or Nature just a few weeks ago that
the fires burning accumulated peat in Indonesia a few years ago
added as much CO2 to the atmosphere equivalent to a significant
fraction of the contribution of all of humanity in a year!
Lord knows what that will do to the El Nino cycles.
Robert
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