The Upper Atmosphere Is Cooling, Prompting New Climate Concerns
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
5 years later he testified to Congress about the dangers of excess CO2 emissions causing runaway warming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI
On the surface these two messages may seem contradictory but underlying both is a consistent message that excessive man-made changes to a delicate highly non-linear system are dangerous to our survival as a species.
Elephant in the room: dangerous to continued exponential growth of our species' population count.
There’s a significant, nonzero risk of complete species death though, a matter about which I care a great deal. Extinction is worse than stagnation.
That is annoying when you are working with the stuff, but when you are living inside that system, that is downright suicidal. Sure. If you are lucky nothing happens. If.
I do feel a bit of surprise every time I read about the massive popularity of Youtube, or hear from a friend how they love the 2020s because they learned to do some bit of home improvement or car maintenance by watching a video. I wanted to learn how to frame an accessory building, so I went to the library and picked up "The Very Efficient Carpenter" by Larry Haun, when I needed to replace the water pump in my new car car I got a Haynes manual.
On the other hand, engineering school seemed at times to be a test to filter out anyone who wasn't capable of ingesting massive amounts of text in a short amount of time, which did well to prepare me for my career, which mainly consists of gleaning data from enormous PDFs, so maybe my cohort is unique in this ability.
Also, I find videos tend to communicate more, better. For example when I needed to learn how to drywall, I could have picked up a book about it. But drywalling is more about feel and experience. Watching a video and seeing their technique and what the finished product should look like before it has dried is way more educational.
The reason I wrote my original comment was to point out that these types of comments (I prefer this, I prefer that) don't really add anything to a conversation. I guess I should have spelled that out instead of assuming people would make the connection.
did you also know that , and . will go frame by frame?
From the position of someone very confident about server management, I prefer the text.
Horses for courses and all that.
You just will have to hover the link.
Premium will outright book you visit to penis enlargement clinic based on your IP browsing history from 20 years ago, saving you your precious time and adding a groupon discount.
Same here. Except that I do not "consume" articles. I read them fuckers.
If you increase atmospheric CO2 on Earth, you'd see a similar effect.
Notice also that this debunks the 'Earth warming is due to increased solar output' claim, because if that was true, increased solar radiation inputs would result in a warming of the stratosphere, not a cooling.
Imagine looking at a human in an IR scope at night. Then the human wraps themselves in a nice sleeping bag, and their apparent temperature decreases from the point of view of a remote observer. Even after equilibrium is reached, they'll still appear cooler due to thermal diffusion effects.
While there's strong evidence that the increase in CO2 caused by human activity is causing global warming, the sun has increased output considerably over the eons, and Earth's surface was much hotter billions of years ago. Thin stratospheric air doesn't absorb nearly as much heat as denser layers closer to the ground and the ground and water themselves. Water is black in IR imaging because it absorbs so much of it!
However I was discussing the Exxon-financed Willie Soon theory of sunspot modulation of Earth's climate:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/28/climate-...
> "Dr Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is known for his view that global warming and the melting of the arctic sea ice is caused by solar variation rather than human-caused CO2 emissions..."
If he was correct then you wouldn't see a steady trend of stratospheric cooling, would you? However, if you were looking at an increase in the IR-absorbing blanket of atmospheric CO2, then you would expect it, right?
This was all verified in the 1950s, by the way. The fact that people still don't understand it can be put down to the disinformation put out by the fossi fuel lobby since the early 1980s, I suppose.
https://history.aip.org/climate/Radmath.htm
> "Plass pursued a thorough set of one-dimensional computations, taking into account the structure of the absorption bands at all layers of the atmosphere. In 1956 he explained clearly, for the first time, that the water vapor absorption lines did not block the quite different CO2 absorption spectrum, adding that there was scarcely any water in the upper atmosphere anyway. He further explained that although some of the CO2 band itself was truly saturated, there were many lines to the side where adding more of the gas would increase the absorption of radiation. His arguments and calculations showed convincingly that adding or subtracting CO2 could seriously affect the radiation balance, layer by layer through the atmosphere, altering the temperature by a degree or more down to ground level."
Framing everything as truth vs disinformation is not a healthy way to foster debate. I am genuinely interested in understanding the mechanisms here. Don't call me a propaganda dupe because I don't fully grasp some concept or another.
Water that looks black in an image is simply emitting less IR radiation than other objects in the image... typically because the water is colder. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcyU8oXBn6k
<-- used to work on infrared detector development and IR radiometry
This is not necessarily true, if increased radiation hitting the water raised the temperature and caused release of dissolved carbon dioxide you'd see the stratospheric cooling effect no matter where that carbon dioxide came from.
To be clear I'm not saying that global warming due to man made co2 isn't real. I think it is. But there is a scenario or hypothesis in which you might see stratospheric cooling as a result of increasing solar radiance. I don't know the exact numbers and I'm sure the math has been done on that showing that any co2 from oceans due to surface warming wouldn't have as pronounced an effect as we see and might get negated by absorption at higher altitudes, but the hypothesis is sound and I'm sure looking at data on it would be enlightening.
Imagine you have a surface that reflected a unit X of heat back to its source. Now it does 2X. In the next few decades it’s going to do 3X.
Does it make sense now? That X was enough to keep us warm. Now we’re facing with that amount increasing significantly.
The reason CO2 is like very spicy pepper is that it is very good at absorbing infrared radiation from the sun, and then re-emitting that energy as heat in the atmosphere.
If cheap clean portable fusion was invented tomorrow, if would quickly be banned for one reason or another. People need to sell disasters, not solutions.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-...
https://www.acs.org/climatescience/atmosphericwarming.html has a pretty good (though above ELI5) set of graphs and explanations of the chemistry involved.
https://history.aip.org/climate/co2.htm
> "Improved physics theory and precise laboratory measurements in the 1940s and after encouraged a new way of looking at the absorption. Scientists were especially struck to find that at low pressure and temperature, each band resolved into a cluster of sharply defined lines, like a picket fence, with gaps between the lines where radiation would get through.(24) As Hulburt and Callendar had claimed, the most important CO2 absorption lines did not lie exactly on top of water vapor lines. Instead of two overlapping bands, there were two sets of narrow lines with spaces for radiation to slip through. So even if water vapor in the lower layers of the atmosphere did entirely block any radiation that could have been absorbed by CO2, that would not keep the gas from making a difference in the rarified and frigid upper layers."
However, this CO2 at 12km only accounts for about 1/3 of the warming - what happens is that the warming is amplified by more evaporation (due to increased warmth) which injects more water vapor into the atmosphere (from the oceans and land evaportation) and that's the other 2/3 of the effect more or less.
It is a slow change, but steady. It's entirely possible that humans will be able to adapt to much of the change, assuming we stop pumping fossil CO2 into the atmosphere within the next few decades or so.
CO2 is the point of concern because the carbon cycle is slow. Any CO2 we add will be there for many decades. So it’s like compound interest: a small change over time adds up to a noticeable effect.
The water cycle is very short, extra water vapor rains out quickly.
This explains the physics:
Many centuries.
Both the concentration and effect of CO2 are small but since human life has a limited temperature band, even a 1.5°C increase does matter.
And so far I have just been applying some commonsense to your number comparison logic. I didn't even have to understand the basic mechanisms of how it works, just that there might be some effect.