Asian Air Pollution Changing Clouds

March 10, 2007


Once living standards in a country get high enough people in that country start wanting to reduce pollution. The environmental movement did not take off in the United States in the 1960s because college students were taking LSD and mushrooms. The US reached a point where people had enough possessions that other desires and needs became important. Our problem with China, India, and other Asian countries is that they've rising emissions of pollutants from a few billion people with too many years to go before they reach living standards high enough to care about pollution control.

To put it another way: When the United States and Europe went through industrialization they had a lot fewer people doing the industrializing. First off, the US and Europe had a much smaller populations 100 years ago than they do today. Second, even today the US has a population less than a quarter of China's. India's population will reach 1.4 billion in 2025 and 1.6 billion by 2050 or more than 5 times America's population today. While elites in First World fully industrialized countries are worried about carbon dioxide emissions the Chinese and Indians haven't even graduated to the level of caring much about particulates and oxides of sulfur and nitrogen and the like. The quality of air in Chinese cities is getting worse as coal burning power plants get built at a frenetic pace.

I see this as a big and underappreciated problem for the future. Asian industrialization in such large populations pushes billions of people up into the ranks of polluters many years before they reach the ranks of yuppie environmentalists. Here's some new research on the effects that Asian air pollution is having on northern Pacific Ocean weather.

COLLEGE STATION – Severe pollution from the Far East is almost certainly affecting the weather near you, says a Texas A&M University researcher who has studied the problem and has published a landmark paper on the topic in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Renyi Zhang, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M and lead author of the paper, says the study is the first of its kind that provides indisputable evidence that man-made pollution is adversely affecting the storm track over the Pacific Ocean, a major weather event in the northern hemisphere during winter. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Zhang says the culprit is easy to detect: pollution from industrial and power plants in China and India. Both countries have seen huge increases in their economies, which means more large factories and power plants to sustain such growth. All of these emit immense quantities of pollution – much of it soot and sulfate aerosols – into the atmosphere, which is carried by the prevailing winds over the Pacific Ocean and eventually worldwide.

Using satellite imagery and computer models, Zhang says that in roughly the last 20 years or so, the amount of deep convective clouds in this area increased from 20 to 50 percent, suggesting an intensified storm track in the Pacific.

Dr. Zhang is also concerned that soot could deposit on northern ice and snow, cause more sunlight absorption, and melting of the ice.

"The general air flow is from west to east, but there is also some serious concern that the polar regions could be affected by this pollution. That could have potentially catastrophic results."

Soot, in the form of black carbon, can collect on ice packs and attract more heat from the sun, meaning a potential acceleration of melting of the polar ice caps, he believes.

"It possibly means the polar ice caps could melt quicker than we had believed, which of course, results in rising sea level rates," he adds.

The speed of Chinese economic development and growth in energy consumption is breathtaking.

In November, the International Energy Agency projected that China will become the world's largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in 2009, overtaking the United States nearly a decade earlier than previously anticipated. Coal is expected to be responsible for three-quarters of that carbon dioxide.

And the problem will get worse. Between now and 2020, China's energy consumption will more than double, according to expert estimates.

China has hundreds of new coal electric plants planned.

China's emissions regulations that exist are widely ignored.

The problem is that IGCC plants still cost about 10 percent to 20 percent more per megawatt than pulverized-coal-fired power plants. (And that's without carbon dioxide capture.) China's power producers--much like their counterparts in the United States and Europe--are waiting for a financial or political reason to make the switch. In part, what's been missing is regulation that penalizes conventional coal plants. And China's environmental agencies lack the resources and power to make companies comply even with regulations already on the books. Top officials in Beijing admit that their edicts are widely ignored, as new power plants are erected without environmental assessments and, according to some sources, without required equipment for pollution control.

I find the Western emphasis on Kyoto CO2 emissions reductions somehow quaint. It assumes we've moved on from worrying about already conquered problems with conventional ground level pollutants that directly harm health. But the environmental impact of Asian industrialization does not fit with that view.

Technologies that allow emissions reduction have already been developed in the West and those technologies keep getting better due to tightening environmental regulations in Western countries. So in theory China and India could adopt those technologies. But since those technologies raise costs use of them requires a willingness to pay a price. That price is obviously higher than they are willing to pay.

The Asian pollution problem highlights another reason why we'd benefit from the development of ways to cheaply generate energy without use of fossil fuels. If nuclear, solar, wind, and other energy technologies become cheaper than fossil fuels then the industrializing Asian countries would switch to these technologies without first achieving levels of per capita GDP high enough to trigger the development of large scale environmental movements.

Update: Other recent research finds less rain in China's mountains due to pollution.

Jerusalem, March 7, 2007 -- Manmade climate change due to pollution seriously inhibits precipitation over hills in semi-arid regions, a phenomenon with dire consequences for water resources in the Middle east and many other parts of the world, a study by a Chinese-Israeli research team, led by Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has shown.

The Chinese and Israeli researchers showed that the average precipitation on Mount Hua near Xian in central China has decreased by 20 percent along with increasing levels of manmade air pollution during the last 50 years. The precipitation loss was doubled on days that had the poorest visibility due to pollution particles in the air. This explains the widely observed trends of decrease in mountain precipitation relative to the rainfall in nearby densely populated lowlands, which until now had not been directly ascribed to air pollution.

Here is the paper in Science.

Industrialization in countries holding a few billion people creates environment problems on a scale which we have not seen previously. This comes on top of Western pollution.

Update II: An article from the June 11, 2006 New York Times illustrates the scale of China's pollution problems.

In early April, a dense cloud of pollutants over Northern China sailed to nearby Seoul, sweeping along dust and desert sand before wafting across the Pacific. An American satellite spotted the cloud as it crossed the West Coast.

Researchers in California, Oregon and Washington noticed specks of sulfur compounds, carbon and other byproducts of coal combustion coating the silvery surfaces of their mountaintop detectors. These microscopic particles can work their way deep into the lungs, contributing to respiratory damage, heart disease and cancer.

Filters near Lake Tahoe in the mountains of eastern California "are the darkest that we've seen" outside smoggy urban areas, said Steven S. Cliff, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Davis.

The same double digit percentage increase becomes a larger absolute increase each year. Then there's India.

Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.

To make matters worse, India is right behind China in stepping up its construction of coal-fired power plants — and has a population expected to outstrip China's by 2030.

When China reaches the same total GDP as the United States the Chinese will pollute far more than Americans because China will have much lower living standards per person. At that point China will have less than a quarter the per capita GDP and far less accumulated assets in the form of houses, cars, and gadgets. So Chinese people will be more interested in accumulating assets than in pollution reduction.

The positive correlation between living standards and interest in pollution reduction means we need to accelerate the development of energy technologies that are both cheaper and less polluting. Uptake of technologies that are both cleaner and cheaper does not require development of a big mass environmental protection movement in China and India. Market forces alone will drive the shift away from dirtier technologies.
By Randall Parker at 2007 March 10 08:54 PM Trends Climate | TrackBack