Some geniuses at Harvard have determined that cooling in Wyoming and West Texas from 1930 to 1990, was due to particulate emissions on the east coast.
“What we’ve shown is that particulate pollution over the eastern United States has delayed the warming that we would expect to see from increasing greenhouse gases,” said lead author Eric Leibensperger, who completed the study as a graduate student in applied physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
“For the sake of protecting human health and reducing acid rain, we’ve now cut the emissions that lead to particulate pollution,” he added, “but these cuts have caused the greenhouse warming in this region to ramp up to match the global trend.”
Before the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, particulate pollution was prevalent in the air over the central and eastern states. Most of these particles in the atmosphere were made of sulfate, originating as sulfur emissions from coal-fired power plants. Compared to greenhouse gases, particulate pollution has a very short lifetime (about 1 week), so its distribution over the Earth is uneven.
Besides the geographical nonsense, there are two other fatal problems with this theory.
- A rapid reduction in particulates over land in the 1970s would have produced a step function in temperature, not a drawn out 40 year rise. There is no physical mechanism which could explain such a lag.
- Almost all of the reported warming in the eastern US since 1960 is due to upwards adjustments by USHCN. Thermometers don’t show much of an upwards trend.
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Strike three – another peer reviewed Ivy League joke.
