Role of Atmospheric Convection in Global Warming

Aims: Geophysical convection calculations can potentially obscure details necessary to understand convective-heat-transfer changes caused by changes in the adverse temperature gradient. The objective is to ascertain the functional relationship between adverse temperature gradient and convection efficiency.

Methodology: A classroom-demonstration experiment was conducted to illustrate the principle that convection efficiency is a direct function of the adverse temperature gradient.

Results: Application of this principle to climate science has profound implications for global warming. A brief period of global warming during World War ll followed by rapid global cooling afterward is attributable, not to carbon dioxide, but to particulate pollution and its generalization to post-1950 global warming. Rather than simply blocking sunlight and causing global cooling, aerosol particles are radiation absorbers that rapidly transfer heat to the surrounding atmosphere, raising its temperature relative to atmospheric temperature at Earth’s surface. Thus the reduction of the adverse temperature gradient between the upper troposphere and the surface reduces atmospheric convection and concomitantly reduces convection-driven surface heat loss, causing global warming, heating the oceans, and reducing CO2 solubility and releasing dissolved CO2 to the atmosphere.

Conclusions: Increasing levels of atmospheric CO2, rather than causing global warming, are symptomatic of particulate-pollution-caused global warming. The Anthropocene idea cannot be justified by anthropogenic CO2. Instead the Anthropocene is better characterized by anthropogenic particulate pollution. A drastic reduction in particulate-pollutant emissions will be followed by a rapid and drastic reduction in global warming, as tropospheric pollution-particulates fall to ground in days to weeks, thus increasing atmospheric convection efficiency and potentially providing a radical solution to the global climate crisis. Moreover, reduction of particulate-pollution, the greatest environmental health-threat, will potentially save millions of lives and reduce the suffering of many more.