Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming
science.org
science.org
Hurricanes and Cyclones will get worse. This is bad news for folks that wish to live near many coasts.
- A̶ ̶w̶a̶t̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶d̶e̶f̶i̶n̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶1̶ ̶j̶o̶u̶l̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶ ̶s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶
̶ A̶ ̶w̶a̶t̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶1̶ ̶s̶e̶c̶o̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶e̶q̶u̶a̶l̶s̶ ̶1̶ ̶j̶o̶u̶l̶e̶,̶ ̶a̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶e̶n̶e̶r̶g̶y̶
- A̶ ̶T̶e̶r̶a̶w̶a̶t̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶a̶y̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶l̶s̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶e̶n̶e̶r̶g̶y̶.̶
[edit: The earth receives 14.9 ZettaWatts of solar power per day, and 173 Petawatts per second, I was reading it as 173 PW over a day, in which case the above works fine. Mea culpa]
See: https://gosolarquotes.com.au/amount-of-solar-energy-hitting-...
Power (kg m^2 / s^3) * Time (s) = Energy (kg m^2 / s^2)
Now from context it's obvious that what was meant is that Earth continually receives 170 terawatts from the sun. The phrasing is technically inaccurate, but it's a turn of phrase that works fine.
[1]: https://gosolarquotes.com.au/amount-of-solar-energy-hitting-...
Watt*day is a perfectly cromulent energy statement although a bit misleading.
Really common mistake in general to use kWh as a kW. Watthour is unit of energy. As watt is energy by time period. So you get back to units of energy.
Technically watt/day could be change in power consumption.
If you pour out one bucket of sand every hour, and you do that for 10 hours, I expect the quantity of sand to be measured in buckets.
"Earth gets over 170,000 terawatts of solar energy every day"
= 170 PW × 1d
= 170 × P(J/s) × 86.4 × ks
= 170 × 10¹⁵ × (J/s) × 86.4 × 10³ × s
= 14.6 × 10²¹ × J
= 14.6 ZJ
However, I also think "of solar energy" could be read as specifying the type of energy for the "rate of energy transfer", which is already implied in 'watt'. And since it's related to energy usage (rate), there really is no need to leave the "rate of energy transfer" interpretation at all and get hung up on "energy vs. power":
"Earth receives 170 petawatts as solar energy - 10,000 times the energy humanity uses, at any moment.
Edit: And let's be real, we all only feel very smart here because we just watched the latest Technology Connections video https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/OOK5xkFijPc :D
(Life has evolved on the edge of a knife, at the narrow balance point between enormous energies that cancel out just so. I often think that at the beach, looking out across the ocean, marveling that the water is almost never sloshing around at any scale proportional to itself. It's up to us to educate those who don't understand positive feedback loops and the existential risk they present to any system in equilibrium.)
You mean watt days (watts * days).
It is akin to thinking that "2 apples" and "an apple divided by 2" are interchangeable because both expressions involve the concept of an apple and the number 2.
i'd definitely rewrite it myself, but it's also a correct way to specify that there are no days of the week, year, or whatever (solar cycle) in which the terawattage is below 170k. Not very intermittent, is it!
I agree with you, FWIW.
watts/unit thus seems fine to me, whatever the unit may be, even if it itself is derived from time. watts per day would just work out to joules/second/1/24*60*60, making 1 watts per day a derived unit that expresses joules/84600 seconds, or an instantaneous rate of one 84600th of a joule.
It's the opposite: joules/day and watts are both units of power.
[0] https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=100943
People love tech solutions, because then they don’t have to stop consuming and live modestly.
People will learn to live modestly, voluntarily or by force.
You are right though, there will be a correction.
> We could solve this problem in a few years with technology if we really wanted to.
Everybody wants to solve the problem with technology. What if, the solution is just plain old hard work like planting trees, conservation, better recycling, better laws that help in saving ecosystem. But who would do that. So let's keep on creating problems with technology and then solve them with more technology.
The only way to stop global warming is to stop extracting carbon from the ground, where it's stored. After that we can think about capturing carbon. But first if all we need to stop pumping it into the atmosphere at a faster rate than the earth can absorb it (about 40% is absorbed at the moment, 60% of all human carbon use is added to the atmosphere).
In the just over a minute it took me to read your comment and write this reply, the fossil industry received _another_ USD 14 Million: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/06/fossil-f...
But even if we would spend only the explicit subsidies we would have a trillion dollar each and every year to spend on things like carbon capture and other mitigations which are not dangerous large-scale geoengineering projects like cloud seeding.
Get rid of the millionaires excessive destructive power (both structural/political and the personal excessive consumption) and by eliminating factory animal agriculture.
Neither would diminish well-being. At least the actual. Some ego/envy issues though as narcissistic "successful" people couldn't feel their power, but I'm willing to sacrifice that for my kids future.
The benefits are many fold as per Durkheim and more recently Wilkinson and Pickett have shown us.
Easy peasy guys.
From the article, there's significant uncertainty what's driving the currently measured effect:
> Climate scientists now need to figure out what’s causing these cloud changes.
> The team also found that 80% of the overall reflectivity changes in these regions resulted from shrinking clouds, rather than darker, less reflective ones, which could be caused by a drop in pollution. For Tselioudis, this clearly indicates that changes in atmospheric circulation patterns, not pollution reductions, are driving the trend.
> But Loeb, who leads work on the set of NASA satellite instruments called Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System, which tracks the energy imbalance, thinks pollution declines may be playing an important role in the cloud changes, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. “The observations are telling us something is definitely changing,” he says. “But it’s a complicated soup of processes.”
To your point, however, we do appear to be the only ones capable of intentionally modifying the environment, so if anybody's going to understand and address this, it'll be us.
It is worth mentioning that we are already in the last few hundred million years of earth's lifespan -- the sun was much dimmer last time the planet had this much GHG and warming going on. We may have already set the conditions for the oceans to boil away and the heat death of our planet without massive geoengineering.
Given that the glaciers should’ve all melted by now, and that we can’t even predict with certainty whether it will rain tomorrow, I wouldn’t pay much attention to predictions.
The new cable car even when it was in construction _already_ did no longer reach the glacier, as the glacier has descended another 20 steps since construction started: https://www.chamonix.net/english/news/chamonix-new-telecabin...
You can see with your own eyes not only how it is disappearing, but how much the speed at it which disappears increases year-by-year. If you ever plan to visit it, better do it so now; I find it unlikely there will be anything visitable left of it by the end of next decade.
It is very similar to the birthday paradox - it is an order of magnitude easier to predict average weather, than the exact weather at a specific time.
Despite that, we care about the former for our long term survival, and for the latter on whether to put on a rain coat today.
Pretty much every 'breakthrough' in climate research in the last few decades has been finding new data showing we are dropping the planet's albedo much faster than expected. The biggest climate shock we have experienced in the last 20 years has been reduction in use of bunker oil fuel in ships which was masking the albedo loss from ice melt by flooding the upper atmosphere with reflective particulate pollution.
I am not worried about the increase in severe weather as much as I am worried about runaway greenhouse pretty much instantly destroying all multicellular life on the planet.
In the past, temperature changes have been slow enough for evolution and ecological systems to adapt, but now it is happening fast enough that these systems can’t adapt fast enough.
And we are not in a stable situation, we don’t know wha will be the new normal, nor when it will be reached, and finding more positive feedback loops like this one put everything in the extreme side of things.
There is an algae that flourishes in warm water that almost solidifies water into a reddish goop. That goop is much like blood.
We, society, are making this happen. And, it’s happening at a prodigious rate.
The earth’s cooling mechanisms rely upon these bodies of water. The warmer the water the greater the chances of these algal blooms.
Yay us.
As I look out my window, I see dark clouds right now as opposed to white fluffy clouds. Will need to note the colors as time goes on for my fully non-scientific surveys :)
I think diffraction has to play a role. Why wouldn't it? Dense, or raining clouds certainly have different water droplet sizes and shapes than fine, fluffy clouds. They may even reflect the ground or sky at some point, I imagine, like the ocean.
We burn more coal than ever! Yeah, we’re so close to peak usage…
We’ve known coal was a big problem for 40 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
A disadvantage of solar radiation management like this is that it does nothing for ocean acidification. But it could buy us time by heading off feedback effects that cause the planet to emit a lot more greenhouse gas of its own, due to melting permafrost, forest fires, etc.
We've just got a taste of it, when we realized the sulfur contamination by crude oil burning cargo ships was unknowingly off-setting climate effects by solar shielding, because cleaning up emissions apparently accelerated climate change. So there we have a horrible scenario: Pollute the environment or suffer rapid global warming.
Imagine the fun, if we engineered and employ a shielding "solution", intentionally. Comfortably sitting around 1.5°C, at some point, me may notice out there is some horrible chemistry happening in the upper atmosphere due to our "inert" shielding agents, where the fallout increasingly sterilizes every mammal on the planet, but we also kinda, uppsie-doopsie now additionally have 4°C worth of CO2 in the atmosphere waiting for prime time, so... stopping with the shielding emission would cause extremely rapid warming acceleration collapsing every ecosystem on the planet.
Caught between a rock and a hot plate.
That's not a concern for the idea I linked, which restricts itself to the lower atmosphere, using nothing more than seawater.
When we've gone carbon neutral, we may think about these measures to reduce the temperature a bit again, but it's just a recipe for disaster, if used to "buy some time".
The reason we need this to buy some time is that those climate feedbacks aren't far away. We've seen in the geological record that really doesn't take much excess heat (usually from orbital variations) to kick off a warming cycle that would take things entirely out of our hands.
Simply eliminating emissions would have been a great plan, but we're beyond that now. A lot of climate scientists say the safe CO2 level is 350ppm. I remember when we blew past that and they said "ok, but seriously don't go past 400ppm." Now we're at 425ppm with emissions going strong. Solar power, electric cars, all this stuff gives me hope for the future if we can do it in time, but we're in a race and we're losing.
And it's not like this sort of cloud seeding would deploy all at once. We'd ramp up gradually and see how it goes. At the very least, we could replace the cloud cover that the article says we've eliminated over the past twenty years.
Clouds reflect light and infrared radiation from the sun. Less clouds means more of that heat gets absorbed and then trapped by green house gases. Like water.
I'm not a fan of geoengineering, which I see as "screwing around" because we don't know nearly enough to predict its effects. Nonetheless, we may well reach a point where it cannot make things worse, and that point just became even more likely.
BTW I am actually cautiously optimistic about the GHG reduction piece. We’re way past where we should be at this stage, but rapid decarbonization now looks like it will be at least technically possible. Most global emissions are in China and Asia, and China is actually deploying the technology we need to eliminate those emissions. The US shouldn’t be screwing around the way it is, but I’m hopeful that what’s happening with renewable technology costs in Asia will eventually be more meaningful than any short term political interference that’s limited to the US. (This is very much a lemonade-out-of-lemons opinion, but the alternative is to be very depressed.)
Only if we have enough funding for the scientists to study these important changes for the sake of future generations
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/neptunes-disappeari...
AI summary; "Yes, astronomers have observed that Neptune's prominent clouds have largely disappeared, and NASA scientists suggest this phenomenon is linked to the sun's 11-year solar cycle and its impact on Neptune's atmosphere"