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...Did the study use a lot of jargon, confusing verbiage, and passive voice? Did it make clear and specific projections, or was everything couched in "if this scenario and those people do that then something might change here to cause this effect"?

The study summary is here: http://meetingorganizer.copern...
The MIT press release summarizing results is here: http://energy.mit.edu/news/how...

The CO2 climate models were based on Venus... that is the relevance.

Everything blocks outgoing energy. Water vapor, CO2, Nitrogen, Oxygen... everything.

You're saying that that little sliver of spectrum that is unique to CO2 is the only frequency that energy is radiated away from earth on? That's nonsense.

As to CO2, its taken up by plants as well. It might take longer but we are seeing plants respond to the increase in CO2. Will the plants sink the carbon in the ground the way it was when it was oil... eventually... that will of course take a very long time. But even then it might not matter because the plants are sucking a lot of that carbon up. And even if they let it go when they die, the total amount of plant biomass wouldn't have to expand by much to take all that extra carbon out of the air.

Will that ultimately happen? I don't know. But there are many indications that the plants are trying to do just that.

As to Myhre 98
http://meetingorganizer.copern...

The primary issue is that Myhre appears to use "radiative heat transfer" as his primary means of heat transfer in the atmosphere which only makes sense over distances if you're talking about a vacuum... which our atmosphere is not. Therefore, radiative heat transfer is not how heat flows through our atmosphere. It isn't possible. The citation above discusses that and tries to address the problem.

The conclusion it comes to by the way is that the warming effect of CO2 is less than a 3rd of what the IPCC is estimating simply from that one correction. In the paper he modeled a doubling of the CO2... and broke up the atmosphere in layers and lateral zones then modeled the way energy would be transferred between them.

As to puckrin 04, did you look at figures 3 and 4? They overlap completely. Not in intensity but in range and my understanding is that the water is so much more prevalent that the intensity figures may not be relevant... with anything the water vapor touches probably being blacked out by the amount of water vapor. The percentage of the atmosphere that is water vapor is... roughly 2 percent would you say? And CO2 is 0.04%. I'm just saying that if a low peak of the water spectrum touches something the CO2 might have a high peak on it... will the CO2 even matter? Even if the water is MOSTLY transparent to a given spectrum there is so much more of it. We're talking about a difference in concentration of 50 to 1. Even very clear glass is entirely opaque if its thick enough. And as I said... water is NOT opaque to most of CO2's spectrum.

The only situation where I can think the CO2 would be relevant is at high altitude. At low altitude, I can see no way CO2 can do anything unless its concentrations start to rival that of H2O which is not a credible worry. From what I can tell, CO2 concentrates in low altitudes... which means it is hanging out with the water... which means since it is 1/50th the concentration and nearly its entire spectrum is redundant with water vapor... I just don't see how it could matter.

50 to 1 is a massive difference. And look at the overlaps in the spectrums.

Is it that I don't know how to read these charts? That's possible. I consider myself a clever guy... an educated guy... a reasonable guy. But I don't know anything and I am certainly an amateur in all this... so I'm going to make amateur errors. I have the humility to accept that.

Explain why my reading of the spectrum charts is wrong. i don't see it. The portion of CO2 that is not absorbed by water is a TINY silver of the total... and the CO2 is 1/50th of the water... and we're talking about that 1/50th like it is going to wage the dog? The CO2 in comparison to the total atmosphere 1/2500th of the atmosphere. Is this real life?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Is this going to be forever? :D

I genuinely do not understand.

As to

Do you have links to anything that documents Jupiter and Venus being out of chemical equilibria? I searched for a while, but couldn't find much more than a few lines, and I'd be very interested to know more.

For Venus, you have to look at the Soviet literature, as they did most of the exploration, and much of that is not on-line. See, e.g., Volkov, 1991. There is an interesting "tri-modal" distribution of cloud droplet diameters, and Iron, Phosphorus, Sulphur and Chorline have all been detected at altitude.

For Jupiter, look at any of the color images returned by spacecraft. All those different colors are different materials, probably polysufides, although AFAIK there is no consensus as to exactly which material makes each color. Whatever makes the colors, it must be operational on a grand scale, as the colors are consistent over at least a century, and the residence times in the visible layers of the atmosphere are much shorter than that. Perhaps the best evidence is the change in the color of Oval BA, where in less than a year a storm complex the size of the Earth significantly reddened with nothing else apparently changing. The authors of the above paper postulate an unobservable change in global temperature but, who knows, maybe there is a biosystem that thrives in and colonizes the large storms, and the reddening is byproduct of that. That at least has the advantage of being testable (by seeing if the reddening is a general, but delayed, feature of new mega storm systems).

Now, none of this is proof of anything biological on Jupiter, but if you want to take the opposite viewpoint, the Jupiter biosphere could be immense (comparable to or larger than the mass of the Earth), and still be consistent with our available data. For Venus, a biosphere could be a remnant from the age before the run-away Greenhouse, and could easily be comparable in mass to the maximum biosphere that currently could be active on Mars. Neither has gotten much spacecraft attention; I guess bugs in the air aren't as sexy as bugs in the permafrost.

Interestingly, the effect of regional nuclear conflicts in the near future upon the global climate has been studied: see here and here.

I fished around a little and found a link for the actual research paper the article is based on. The paper itself requires a subscription, but here's the abstract:

The atmospheric implications of radiation belt remediation

C. J. Rodger, M. A. Clilverd, Th. Ulich, P. T. Verronen, E. Turunen, N. R. Thomson

Abstract: High altitude nuclear explosions (HANEs) and geomagnetic storms can produce large scale injections of relativistic particles into the inner radiation belts. It is recognised that these large increases in >1 MeV trapped electron fluxes can shorten the operational lifetime of low Earth orbiting satellites, threatening a large, valuable population. Therefore, studies are being undertaken to bring about practical human control of the radiation belts, termed "Radiation Belt Remediation" (RBR). Here we consider the upper atmospheric consequences of an RBR system operating over either 1 or 10 days. The RBR-forced neutral chemistry changes, leading to NOx enhancements and Ox depletions, are significant during the timescale of the precipitation but are generally not long-lasting. The magnitudes, time-scales, and altitudes of these changes are no more significant than those observed during large solar proton events. In contrast, RBR-operation will lead to unusually intense HF blackouts for about the first half of the operation time, producing large scale disruptions to radio communication and navigation systems. While the neutral atmosphere changes are not particularly important, HF disruptions could be an important area for policy makers to consider, particularly for the remediation of natural injections.

I'd never heard of the "radiation belt remediation" procedure that was mentioned in the article, so I dug around some more and located the following paper:

Remediation of radiation belts using electrostatic tether structures

Abstract: Scattering of energetic charged particles by high-voltage electrostatic tether structures may present a technically and economically viable method of rapidly remediating radiation belts caused by both natural processes and manmade events. In this paper, we describe a concept for a system of electrostatic tether structures designed to rapidly remediate an artificial radiation belt caused by a high altitude nuclear detonation. We then investigate the scaling of the system size and power requirements with the tether voltage and other design parameters. These scaling analyses indicate that a conventional single-line tether design cannot provide sufficient performance to achieve a system design that is viable. We then propose innovative multiwire tether geometry and show that this tether design can significantly improve the overall performance of the electrostatic system, enabling the requirements for total power and number of satellite systems to be reduced to levels that are both technically and economically viable.


The slashdot submission and popular press-article (but not the research paper) engages in some fear-mongering about how the US is supposedly planning on deploying RBR, but I haven't found any sources which confirm this to actually be the case. It should probably be mentioned that DARPA funds almost everything under the sun, usually without much expectation of it actually being of practical use. I mean, this is the same DARPA that funded psychic telepathy research and mechanical elephants for the jungles of Vietnam.

Regardless of whether or not it's practical, radiation belt remediation still seems like interesting research. It'd be a shame if fear-mongering about this being a "US plot to disrupt worldwide communications" or something resulted in funding for this research being cut off.

There is other information available.

For example, the date of the observation (7 November), and commentary in the article leads to the reasonable supposition that the observation was from a meteor in the Taurid stream http://comets.amsmeteors.org/meteors/showers/tauri ds.html. Since the Taurids are very well characterized, their orbital velocity is extremely well known, and thus the net impact velocity would be known with great precision, too. If it's one of the Taurids. Which is not so bad an assumption.

Even without the Taurid assumption, you can look at other data to put some bounds on the meteor velocities. For example, there are excellent "head echo" observations by some big radars:

Arecibo http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/acp/4/947/acp-4- 947.pdf

Jicamarca http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/acpd/3/6063/acpd -3-6063.pdf

and there have been several PhD dissertations in recent years exploring a variety of aspects of meteors, just from the plasma physics side (let alone the "meteor astronomy" side); check out Close and Dyrud from 2004 at BU, http://www.bu.edu/astronomy/alumni/phd.html.

The past decade has been a remarkably active time for meteor studies. There will be presentations about meteors at the URSI meeting in Boulder CO 4-7 Jan 2006, http://cires.colorado.edu/ursi/

There is other information available.

For example, the date of the observation (7 November), and commentary in the article leads to the reasonable supposition that the observation was from a meteor in the Taurid stream http://comets.amsmeteors.org/meteors/showers/tauri ds.html. Since the Taurids are very well characterized, their orbital velocity is extremely well known, and thus the net impact velocity would be known with great precision, too. If it's one of the Taurids. Which is not so bad an assumption.

Even without the Taurid assumption, you can look at other data to put some bounds on the meteor velocities. For example, there are excellent "head echo" observations by some big radars:

Arecibo http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/acp/4/947/acp-4- 947.pdf

Jicamarca http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/acpd/3/6063/acpd -3-6063.pdf

and there have been several PhD dissertations in recent years exploring a variety of aspects of meteors, just from the plasma physics side (let alone the "meteor astronomy" side); check out Close and Dyrud from 2004 at BU, http://www.bu.edu/astronomy/alumni/phd.html.

The past decade has been a remarkably active time for meteor studies. There will be presentations about meteors at the URSI meeting in Boulder CO 4-7 Jan 2006, http://cires.colorado.edu/ursi/

Problem solved.
http://www.ucd.ie/ucdnews/apr00/mystery.htm

or for people who like equations:

http://www.copernicus.org/online-papers/EGS/NPG/20 02/3/npg-9-373.pdf

Actually, with regard to point #2, the earth and moon are a double planet system, because the moon orbits the sun, not the earth, as evidenced by the fact that it always falls towards the sun. More here: http://www.copernicus.org/EGS/egsga/nice00/program me/abstracts/aac6816.pdf

What do you think of the credentials of the Leipzig signees?

http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/npg/8/npg8/357.pdf Quoting from the conclusion: While the effects of chaos eventually lead to loss of predictability, this may happen only over long time scales. Exponential-on-average error growth does not necessarily imply rapid error growth. In the short term it is model error which dominates, and which must be considered in any scheme of quality control.