Thanks for sharing. A nice visual. I guess I did the same experiment just never realized what I was accomplishing. I always throw shavings on the paths between all our barns to get a bit more traction for the horses never realizing why the paths thawed so quick.

In Flagstaff, Arizona they use volcanic cinders (without salt) on the roads to melt the snow. It is remarkable how fast the dark cinders can eat through snow and ice, even on cloudy days.

Given the massive amount of gas flaring from oil fields in the North Sea and west Siberia, it is no surprise that those ares have been deficient in ice during recent years.

A recent study by UC Irvine said that up to 94% of Arctic warming is due to soot.
http://www.physorg.com/news100354399.html

Thank you for this clear experiment of the albedo effect of the soot for melting the snow.
I don't understand your sentence at the beginning of the article, saying that it is a misstatement to tell that soot warms the atmosphere. The way the soot warms snow is the same for the warming of the atmosphere.
Or is there something I didn't get because of my broken English?

A very interesting experiment. I am just wondering if there are any immediate effects of placing the ash on the snow, that is, does the ash also have an effect similar to that of road salt. Is there a chance that placing ash on snow raises the freezing temperature of the water so aiding in part to the melting?

This experiment lacks a control in my humble opinion, which is what is the effect of contaminant melting? A common example is salt melting ice. A better experiment will be to do the above test but putting part of the snow in question under shade and note the difference in melting between snow melt with ash under sun and not under sun.

I found it interesting that a recent CBS program on "global warming" showed a piece of Greenland ice sheet that appeared to be covered with a dark substance (black carbon?.) The discussion was, of course, on C02 as the reason for the melting of that ice, the covering was not addressed.

Large swathes of Norfolk, including six villages, could be flooded under a controversial plan to deal with the effects of climate change.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/03/28/eanorf128.xml

*Study Fingers Soot as a Major Player in Global Warming* from Science 28 March 2008:
Vol. 319. no. 5871, p. 1745

*Climate-change authorities long ago tagged carbon dioxide public enemy number one. Now, there may be a new number two: tiny particles of black carbon, or soot. According to a new analysis reported online this week in Nature Geoscience, climate scientists are concluding that reports such as last November's assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may seriously underestimate black carbon's role in global warming.*

*The IPCC report noted that black carbon is a strong absorber of sunlight but downplayed its impact because the haze it produces occurs regionally rather than globally. IPCC estimated that, at current levels, black carbon warms the atmosphere by 0.2 to 0.4 watts per square meter (W m-2), considerably below the value of 1.66 W m-2 for CO2. But in their new analysis of a wide variety of recent data, Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, and Gregory Carmichael of the University of Iowa in Iowa City suggest that black carbon warms the atmosphere by as much as 0.9 W m-2--enough to vault it over the impact of other climate-warming gases such as methane, halocarbons, and tropospheric ozone. *

That's a great idea for a simple science demonstration. I wonder, though, whether some of the accelerated melting might not be due to freezing-point depression. Fireplace ash isn't the same thing as soot and if this were intended to be a real 'experiment', you'd need to separate those effects before drawing any conclusions.

As for the general idea that lowering the albedo causes snow to melt faster, that's easier to demonstrate just by comparing the rates at which shoveled snow and partially shoveled snow melt. Clean, shoveled snow won't melt noticeably at all as long as the air temperature is significantly below freezing. If you've removed enough snow from your driveway that any asphalt is visible, the remainder will melt fairly rapidly when exposed to sunlight.

Well Mike I hope you can appreciate how important the "Tunnnels" are as they remove most of this soot from the atmosphere.

I remember reading an article in the mid 70s suggesting in the coming ice age that it would likely be necessary to "dust" expanding ice sheets and glaciers with soot and coal dust to keep them under control. I guess it's a good thing that we didn't go making control inputs into a system that we didn't and don't yet understand.

All the best

Aaron

Wasn't there a study done by a University in California that was published last fall that basically said the same thing on it applied to the Polar Ice Caps?

Anybody know where we can read about it. The article appeared as a bleep then disappeared. How nice!

"In the context of melting glaciers, at least one of these articles stated that the soot warmed the atmosphere and contributed to global warming. This is a misstatement as to the actual effect of soot on frozen surfaces such as glaciers and polar ice caps."

Nice to see more misrepresented GW "facts" are being torn down and put in context (even reality)!

This AP story puts in context the TRUE mandate of the AGW movement:

"Poor countries at a U.N. conference said Tuesday they won't sign a global warming pact unless industrialized nations guarantee them billions of dollars needed to adapt to the impact of climate change."

Scarey stuff huh ! ! ! ! !

I didn't know that wealth redistribution reduces warming ????

Looks like some of the billions will go toward the proper air conditioning of their grass huts and their relocation from traditional flood zones.

BRILLIANT ! ! ! ! ! !

I have used this technique on my driveway at home for years. I spread the ashes from our fireplace in the driveway and after the next sunny day, that part of the driveway is clear of snow and ice.

My wife hates it because the soot and ashes can get tracked around and make a mess.

Basic Questions:
What's the Average Albedo of the Oceans?
What's the Average Albedo of the Continental Land Mass?
I'm having trouble finding what one would think are basic numbers.

I don't get it, I thought the sun played no part of any warming thing.

How can Mike be certain that the CO2 in the old soot didn't just cause the snow to melt?

I bet the electrically driven solar powered black helicopters of the AGWists are on their way to Wichita right now. Mike, you better start listening for a "whirring" sound and head for cover.

LOL

Nice series of pics. It is fun to watch the snow disappear around a piece of sand or other aggregate on a sunny day. I have used the lowered albedo effect for melting snow for a long time. I melted down 16" of snow next to my driveway one afternoon after we got nailed by the "Blizzard of 08". Ambient air temp was in the 20's by the way.

Being the skeptic I am, instead of soot, I used old motor oil. Which I later burned to get rid of it.

OOP, sorry, I forgot, no more blizzards due to AGW. It was just solid white fluff.

Thirty years ago, our brightest climatologists believed that the solution to "climate change" was to melt the polar ice caps. Sadly, they were unable to get the political support they needed to engage in this important endeavor.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot

http://www.junkscience.com/apr05/coolingworld.pdf

Excuse me, but I was under the impression that this was common knowledge, not the experiment, but the cinder/ash/smoot effect on snow and ice.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-02/teia-scs022608.php

With upwards of 900 trillion tons of dust blowing off the continents into the oceans every year and the resulting algae/plankton growths due to the iron content, biologists were even suggesting that we seed iron into the oceans to do some 'man-made' climate repairs.

Thus, there is also a huge amount of dust (it doesn't have to be soot) blown into the Arctic, the Antarctic, Greenland and other ice sheets. Likely with a cooling ocean but a rise in sea levels at the same time, such melting due to this factor is by no means a 'minor' occurrence.

The average person sees the ice sheets as pristinely white while, in fact, they are filthy.

Maybe this accounts to some extent for the sea level rise, the surface melting on the ice sheets, and the resultant natural collapse of Antarctic ice shelfs?

Wow, so we've just proved that darker colors absorb more heat than lighter colors. Perhaps we can reinvent the wheel next.

Mike Smith isn't much of a climate scientist. He didn't get a $100,000 grant from some benefactor to have a more controlled experiment with all the variants mentioned by others. If he had a grant, his ruler would have been in centimeters. This illustrates how ? that the dirty ole CO2 is causing the earth to warm. See the snow melt? Also Mike could have had his report peer reviewed and sold the photos to Big Al for his next movie. Come on Mike, get with the program. AGW is the Klondike gold rush of today.

Soot warms the atmosphere and the surface. The difference is simply a matter of quantity and location. In the atmosphere, it's a particulate whereas at surface it's a deposition/acummulation. So at the surface the capacity to warm is greater. In the atmosphere whatever heat is manufactured by particlate is radiated in all directions but convective forcing tends to make it go in one direction, up. The heat is passed from molecule to molecule on its upward journey. Anything that is added to the atmosphere in the way of a gas will warm the atmosphere as a function of the time it takes to release heat to space. Albedo warming and gas warming. There's no denying it's anthropogenic.

Hi Bob Burk,

I flew over southern Greenland last fall and noticed the same thing. The south-western portion of the ice sheet (where the melting is occurring) was extremely dirty. From 35,000 feet I couldn't tell if it was from sand that blew up off the beach or some other pollutant - but it was unmistakable. The melting ice was filthy. Odd that NASA papers about anomalous melt didn't mention it.

Denver Mark,

The UCI paper is here-
http://www.physorg.com/news100354399.html

I put together a short slide show showing some recent changes in NASA temperature data.
http://docs.google.com/PresentationEditor?id=ddbr44ks_95f8t448cx

The first three slides show Dr. Hansen's pre-1999 and post 1999 graphs of US temperature data. Slide number three overlays the two graphs, and shows how since 1999 the 1920-1950 data has been adjusted downwards. It also shows how the 1970-present data has recently been adjusted upwards. 1990 and 1991 being the extreme cases - both were recently adjusted upwards by about 0.4C. The blue line represents the pre-1999 graph, and the red line shows the more recent graph. The overlay is precise with the grid lines matched to within 0.02 degrees.

Slides 6 and 7 show how the Antarctica temperature trend map changed last year. It used to show a strong downwards trend, and now shows a strong upwards trend.

Black absorbs, white reflects. Like on a snow covered road and a small bare patch appears and turns into a big bare patch through the day even when temps are well below freezing, so some think the sun has no affect on heating..hmm..why don't they try this experiment at night when it is cold out. One thing to me is a little cooky is one time I got some black plastic out to put over the garden to warm the soil and laid it on top of the snow and the snow didn't melt much underneath even though it wasn't all that cold out, someone try it and see what happens,try a single layer and some folded into multiple layers. I guess heat rises so it made me wonder if it was warming the soil a whole lot. Also a sort of related story NASA study showed in 2005-2006 the North Atlantic colled due to dust blowing off the Sahara desert in Africa, cooling not warming.

Just a bit off topic, but I find this interesting considering that according to AGW hypothesis, all mountain glaciers should be receding rapidly. Yet, in the midst of this a brand-spanking new glacier has formed where none was present (at least on May 18, 1980).

Apparently, Crater Glacier on Mt. St. Helens is now 200 meters thick and growing despite being intruded by lava domes over the past 5 years. Something must be done abo