Chinese Efforts to Curb Pollution During Olympics
Turn Into Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity for Scripps Researcher
Ioana Patringenaru | August 18, 2008
Scripps researcher V. Ramanathan sat down for an on-camera interview with This Week@UCSD. Click on the video links below for excerpts.
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When Chinese government officials decided to cut back on pollution and clean up the air in Beijing, they were concerned about athletes’ health during the Olympic Games. But they also inadvertently gave scientists at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find out the real impact of pollution on climate change.
Pollutants, the theory goes, are shrouding the planet in haze; reflecting sunlight back into space that would have otherwise reached the ground; and creating a cooling effect that shields the planet from some of the warming caused by greenhouse gases. So far, scientists relied on observations and computer simulations to estimate pollution’s impact on climate. They couldn’t conduct experiments to observe the effects of a major pollution clean-up in a short period of time—until the Beijing Olympic Games.
“The Chinese government has basically made Beijing a huge natural laboratory for us,” said V. Ramanathan, a professor of climate and atmospheric sciences at Scripps. “This opportunity is bigger than winning a $100 million lottery. And it's up to us scientists to take advantage of it.”
Ramanathan first found out about the Chinese government’s plans to curb pollution last year, while reading the Los Angeles Times. “I literary fell out of my chair because it's just a spectacular experiment for scientists like me, who are trying to understand how air pollution is impacting climate,” the researcher said.
Fast forward to this summer, when Ramanathan has become the lead investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded project. He and his colleagues will observe how the atmosphere responds when a heavily populated region substantially curbs everyday industrial emissions. Chinese officials have compelled reductions in industrial activity by as much as 30 percent and cuts in automobile use by half. UCSD is the lead institution in the effort, Ramanathan said, but researchers from the University of Iowa, South Korea, Japan, China, Thailand and NASA also are involved.
“This will be a very interesting experiment that can never happen again,” said Soon-Chang Yoon, the project’s field campaign co-principal investigator and a researcher at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Seoul National University in Korea.
The UAVs were designed at Scripps an
carry more than 15 miniaturized instruments, squeezed into a shoebox-sized cavity, for
their four-hour flights.
Today, scientists estimate that pollution masks anywhere from 20 to 80 percent of global warming. Ramanathan said he and his colleagues hope to come closer to the actual impact after the Beijing Olympics experiment. The issue here is that as the air gets cleaner, smog gets thinner, pollution’s cooling effect gets smaller and global warming gets worse. If the masking effect is closer to 50 to 60 percent, the urgency to cut down emissions of fossil fuels and carbon dioxide is even bigger that previously thought, the Scripps researcher added.
Ramanathan cautioned that his research shouldn’t be used as an argument against cleaning up the air. “Pollution also has other strong, negative effects,” he pointed out, including acid rain, cutting down on rainfall and destroying crops. “It's a major public health problem,” he added. The results of the study could lead to a dramatic warning about the future of the planet, he also said.
“As we clean up the air, we expect to see huge warming—and that's what I'm worried about," Ramanathan explained.
The Cheju ABC Plume-Monsoon Experiment is named after the South Korean island where Ramanathan and colleagues will be based for seven weeks, from early August to late September. During that time, researchers will launch unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as UAVs, at high altitude above pollution layers and measure how much sunlight is deflected back into space by smog.
The UAVs were designed at Scripps and carry more than 15 miniaturized instruments, squeezed into a shoebox-sized cavity, for their four-hour flights. Meanwhile, an aircraft flying below the pollution layer measures how much sunlight is coming through. The UAVs won’t have to fly over China, Ramanathan explained. At 10,000 to 15,000 feet, the vehicles will be able to “see” for thousands of miles. They will make measurements on air masses coming from Shanghai, Hong Kong and, of course, China’s capital. The experiment also includes measurements made on the ground. Finally, satellites will give researchers the bigger picture, Ramanathan said.
Downtown Beijing at 8 a.m., summer 2003.
Researchers will then be able to compare results, Ramanathan explains, and see whether the air coming from Beijing is systematically less polluted and allows more sunlight to reach the ground as a result. It will take researchers at least a year to analyze the data and formulate findings.
"It's like a big, huge jigsaw puzzle,” Ramanathan said. “And we have to put each piece together painfully."
Rob Monroe from UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography contributed to this report.
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