Made-in-China massive air pollution ignored by global warming gurus Al Gore & Maurice Strong 

By Judi McLeod  Friday, July 27, 2007

You'll never hear this from global warming guru Al Gore and Canadian sidekick Maurice Strong: Massive dust plumes from China fouling air breathed in North America, are causing dramatic changes in climate.

China, in the proverbial doghouse for exporting tainted food for humans and pets, is also sending pollution of nightmare proportions through the air that we breathe.

"An outpouring of dust layered with man-made sulfates, smog, industrial fumes, carbon grit and nitrates is crossing the Pacific Ocean on prevailing winds from booming Asian economies in plumes so vast they alter the climate." (The Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2007).

These are not occasional little puffs of air headed your way from the Orient. These are rivers of polluted air, some of them wider than the Amazon and deeper than the Grand Canyon.
 

Though the dust plumes sound like something out of a Hollywood thriller, they're part of life on this planet.

"There are times when it covers the entire Pacific Ocean basin like a ribbon bent back and forth," said atmospheric physicist V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.

The infamous smog over L.A. is, in part made in China.

"On some days, almost a third of the air over Los Angeles and San Francisco can be traced directly to Asia.  The same goes for Vancouver BC Canada. With it comes up to three-quarters of the black carbon particulate pollution that reaches the West Coast," Dr. Ramanathan and his colleagues recently reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Polluted air choking the residents of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco leaves a gigantic carbon footprint about which we haven't been hearing from global warming champions Gore and Strong.

This transcontinental pollution is part of a growing global traffic in dust and aerosol particles made worse by drought and deforestation, said Steven Cliff, who studies the problem at the University of California at Davis.

The dust plumes are straight out of a pollution nightmare. They carry aerosols--airborne microscopic particles, which are produced naturally every time a breeze catches sea salt from ocean spray, or a volcano erupts, or a forest burns, or a windstorm kicks up dust, for example. They also are released in exhaust fumes, factory vapors and coal-fired power plant emissions.

The influence of these plumes on climate is complex because they can have both a cooling and a warming effect, the scientists said. Scientists are convinced these plumes contain so many cooling sulfate particles that they may be masking half of the effect of global warming.

Asia is the world's largest source of aerosols, man-made and natural. Every spring and summer, storms whip up silt from the Gobi desert of Mongolia and the hardpan of the Taklamakan desert of western China, where, for centuries, dust has shaped a way of life. From the dunes of Dunhuang, where vendors hawk gauze face masks alongside braided leather camel whips, to the oasis of Kashgar at the feet of the Tain Shan Mountains, 1,500 miles to the west, there is no escaping it.

Once aloft, the plumes can circle the world in three weeks. "In a very real and immediate sense, you can look at a dust event you are breathing in China and look at this same dust as it tracks across the Pacific and reaches the United States," says climate analyst Jeff Stith at the National enter for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. "It is a remarkable mix of natural and man-made particles."

The team detected a new high-altitude plume every three or four days. Each one was up to 300 miles wide and six miles deep, a vaporous layer cake of pollutants. The higher the plumes, the longer they lasted, the faster they traveled and the more pronounced their effect, the researchers said.

One of their spin-offs is the spawning of fiercer thunderstorms. The plumes may also block more than 10 percent of the sunlight over the Pacific.

The only unsolved mystery about the giant dust plumes is why Al Gore and Maurice Strong aren't talking about them in their double mission to save Mother Earth from global warming.

Strong, who is China's top advisor on the environment, must know about them.

But both Gore and Strong are too busy spending time talking about the need for corporations in the West to buy carbon credits.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as "the world's first and North America's only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil."

Gore buys his carbon off-sets from himself--the Generation Investment Management LLP, "an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C." of which he is both chairman and founding partner.

Meanwhile, when it comes to carbon footprints, China leaves one of North America's biggest.