Slashdot Mirror
Satellites Show That Earth Has a Fever
Roland Piquepaille writes "A recent study from NASA says that satellites are acting as thermometers in space. Contrary to meteorological ground stations which measure the air temperature around two meters above the ground, satellites can accurately measure the temperature of the Earth's skin. And this new study, which covers the 18-year period going from 1981 to 1998, shows that the Earth's temperature is rising 0.43C per decade instead of the O.34C found by previous methods. Unfortunately for us, if satellites can more precisely measure this rise of the Earth's temperature, they cannot cure this fever. This overview contains more details and a spectacular image showing the European heat wave of the summer of 2003."
....and the only PRESCRIPTION...is more COWBELL.
What? I'm the only one that thought that?
El riesgo vive siempre!
"A recent study from NASA says that satellites are acting as thermometers in space.
Q) Do you know how to tell the difference between an oral and a rectal thermometer?
A) By the taste.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
If the ground measurements are 0.34 degrees/decade, and the external measurements are 0.43 degrees/decade, then presumably the extra energy is contained within the circulating atmosphere. Certainly this ought to make the global dissipation happen faster (air tends to move more than water and earth (!) and has a fairly good heat-sink at the space boundary, not to mention the poles). I wonder if they've taken that into account.
On a slightly different note, I've always felt a sense of wonder when thousands of billions of air molecules synchronise their motion and hit you full in the face. I've always thought it ought to have a more poetic name than 'wind', considering the breathtaking nature of the phenomenon. Just a thought
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Perhaps we need a sample size of more than 20 years?
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
We don't even know the earth enough to really be sure we are the ones causing these events. What if the planet is just due to warm up. Yes we mess a lot with the planet, humans are very good with messing with unlown stuff. There is so much we don't understand yet.
This is totally insecure, but very convenient.
use the butterfly theory to explain it.
define what is causing it.
is it nature or is it humans.
we do not know, all we have is correlational data which is far from proof of anything at all.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The one thing I've noticed about Slashdot is that a huge number of users seem dead set against the idea of global warming. Am I the only one who thinks that regardless of the exact status of global warming its reasonable to take steps to reduce emissions and so on?
Assume global warming is real, and then enviromentally friendly policies are needed.
Then assume it isn't. Its not like enviromentally friendly policies require you to sacrifice your first born son. We enact them, maybe have fewer SUV's, and live in a slightly cleaner world.
You don't stand to lose anything by assuming global warming is real and going from there. You stand to lose a lot by ignoring it and having it turn out to be real.
I am assuming that since the red showed warmer areas, the blue areas would show cooler areas.
And it looks like most of the rest of Eastern Europe was cooler.
It seems to me that most people think that it's getting hotter, well, it probably is.
But I don't think that people realize that they have to take into count mroe than the most recent 200 years of history, that's a pretty small time table for something as old as the earth.
So, the Earth is getting warmer. Who says change is a bad thing??? Is it bad for the earth to be warmer than it is today??? I would guess not since it has been there before.
I would assume it's because we humans are resistant to change and like what we know. But we are highly adaptive so, I'm sure we will be fine.
Evolution or ID?
The problem isn't global warming, per se -- some like it hot. The problem could be better described as climate change. Sure the Earth's been through many cycles, but none where we were trying to have a technology-based civilization at the time, with food production concentrated in small areas, and the rest as cities/suburbs. All it would take to create major problems would be a major change in the pattern of rainfall. No one's going to want to tear down, say, New York, just because the climate there is suddenly good for growing crops, while California's went too dry and hot for that. And oak trees take a long time to migrate. Sure, the race will survive, but it might not be with as much fun as it could have been.
And this new study, which covers the 18-year period going from 1981 to 1998, shows that the Earth's temperature is rising 0.43C per decade instead of the O.34C found by previous methods.
For those who just skimmed the linked article; the article links to another, which says the satellites can only detect temperature on land, but not over snow covered land. Hmm... seems like a skewed data set to me.
How do they know that the colder, snow-covered regions aren't getting colder, to balance out the average temperature? Or maybe the oceans are getting cooler which might also brings down the average temperature to what the ground stations recorded.
Maybe the scientists do know, and this is just a case of bad reporting...
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
The fact that the parent wasn't modded as "sarcastic" is an affront to /.'s moderation options.
In seriousness, there are the 4 million brits who stand to lose their homes,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,120 0272,00.html
(Sorry I don't know how to highlight links), and that's just the impact in one place.
But I think the importance is that, although we are coming out of an iceage, there is a definite climate change being caused by human impact on the Earth. No, it won't wipe out all life on Earth or even cause us to go extinct, but (in the spirit that Earth day was yesterday) at least consider that we may be messing with things that we cannot control, and may be damaging things that we certainly cannot undo.
The temperature increases for a number of reasons:
* Chemicals, called cytokines and mediators, are produced in the body in response to an invasion from a microorganism, malignancy, or other intruder.
* The body is making more macrophages, which are cells that go to combat when intruders are present in the body. These cells actually "eat-up" the invading organism.
* The body is busily trying to produce natural antibodies, which fight infection. These antibodies will recognize the infection next time it tries to invade.
Taken together with Agent Smith's insightful words:
"Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are... the cure."
I think the message is clear - Mother Earth is trying to get rid of us.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
The problem with this is that it really means nothing. It's useful data to have, but with our current state of knowledge, we can't infer anything from it.
The Earth's weather is a chaotic system. About the only thing you can be sure of is that things will be different tomorrow, compared to today. With a lot more research, we may be able to find strange attractors for some places at certain times, and use them to predict what is going to happen.
The human concept of "climate" is entirely that: a human concept. Eighteen years of observations is a miniscule speck in the age of this planet, and we can't say with any certainty that any trends in those eighteen years will carry to the next eighteen years. A thousand years of observations falls into the same category - a tiny sample of a big and complex system.
The Earth's weather changes on many scales: years, decades, centuries, millenia, and more. At each of those scales, there is change. Until we can understand or predict its behaviour across all those scales, we are practising voodoo when we make predictions.
I have seen arguments and models that predict that the world will heat up dramatically in the next century. I have also seen others that predict that we will be entering a new ice age. The thing is, the models for both predictions are quite reasonable.
So. We have a little data, and that's all we have. Conclusions may follow in the indeterminate future. Until then we have speculation.
This is all fine and well, but the part that annoys me is that the media (in general) are treating the speculation as fact, and only covering the speculation that fits their agenda. Please beware!
---
Take 2 asprins and call me in the morning.
Reflect the sun's energy back into space.
Because this time we appear to be causing it ourselves, and because the ramifications for our descendents are immensely disruptive and expensive.
While many otherwise reasonable people seem to like to question the former point, the fact is that the best climate models we have predicted a certain amount of anthropogenic climate forcing. Observations are right in line with those predictions.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Quite apart from the fact that sometimes life didn't go on (which ought to be enough to concern anyone), if you look at how these phenomena manifest, you'll see that it's typically not a linear process. There's normally a critical point over which X happens and below which Y happens. If X is lethal to human life (snowball earth, greenhouse earth) then we'd damn well better hope we stick with Y.
A case in point is the atlantic conveyer (the 'Gulf Stream' to us Brits). If the conveyer stops, an absolutely massive amount of energy will cease to be delivered to where it currently is. The knock-on effects aren't really model-able, we just don't have the knowledge, but since staggeringly enormous amounts of warmth would cease to be delivered to the UK coastline, you could assume it will get colder, even if you don't know quite how much. To give some perspective, it generates a difference of approximately 20 degrees celcius between points at the same latitude. 20 degrees of delta-T over several hundred billion tons of water is a lot of energy to be dependent on far-easier-to-change salinity level.
The atlantic conveyer depends on salinity in different parts of the world. If it rains more (in places that it currently rains little) and rains less (in places where it currently rains significantly) the saline levels will change, and the conveyer will be affected - at the critical point, it will simply stop. There's no obvious way we could restart it either. Shifting several hundred billion tons of water is way beyond our capabilities, and restoring the initial conditions may not be sufficient.
I guess I'm sufficiently worried about the consequences (which we will not be able to counter) to pay some heed to people who try to assess risk under next-to-impossible scientific conditions. I guess, given the potential consequences, that I'm willing to listen more to those who get off their backsides and put some effort into the analysis than people who sit around saying, 'hell we've had ice ages before and we will again'.
Actually humankind hasn't had ice-ages before, and to suggest we'd just cope is hubris of the highest order. We live in a highly technological society, and yes, given an immense struggle I think we would probably cope, as in 'Western civilisation' would cope. Countless millions would die in poorer, less developed, and simply unluckily-positioned countries as weather systems went out of control. One other thought is that a highly-structured, lean-and-mean (due to commercial pressures, mainly) society is a vulnerable society. If central America were reduced to a desert (unlikely, but possible) then the food chain would break within the US, and other countries would have a hard-enough time to feed their own. 280 million people is a lot of mouths...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Because, you know, one day Los Angeles will be ok, and five, ten years later it'll be submerged.
What kind of timescale do you think we're talking?
~Berj
Because there's a good chance we're not only causing this change
Who says we are causing the Earth to heat up??? How do we know it wouldn't have heated up on it's own anyway??? If you study the history of the earth you will learn that the Earth is always changing. It has had hotter and colder times in history. It was fluxuating like this before cars, aersol cans, computers and many other modern inventions. To take a look at a small window of a few years to make a judgement is like a doctor looking in your ear for a knee pain and diagnosing you.
Evolution or ID?
Perhaps your slightly misguided antagonistic take on the Christian religion might benefit from some time spent reading.
Be careful, or Jesus might run you over with his Prius. Assuming he's not just a fictional thing some really old authors made up. In which case, this is all there is and screwing it up by polluting will end your afterlifeless life that much quicker. Either way, you're screwed. So be nice.
The point is surely not that the Earth gets hotter and colder. I accept that (where I live I can look out the window and see some leftovers from the last glaciation or so.) /.ers announcing that everything is just fine does nothing for my peace of mind. You are the intelligent people, for the most part. If you aren't taking it seriously, what are the morons doing?
Rather, it is that the heating up is very, very rapid in geological terms. During the 19th Century when the age of the Earth was realised, it was understood that natural processes were very slow. Now they are happening really rather fast, and the satellite data suggests it is faster than previously believed. There has been, in geological terms, a step change in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and a lagging step change in temperature. (as an aside why can't a geek site manage subscript and superscript? Step changes are usually bad news. I have just become a grandfather and I can't help contrasting when I was born into a post-WW2 world rather full of optimism despite McCarthy et al, and my granddaughter being born into a world where accelerating climate change, population migration, hydraulic, food and energy wars may be the norm. A load of
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
"Who says we are causing the Earth to heat up???"
The climatologist, physists, chemist, oceonagrophers and geologists. You know, those people with PHDs who have been studying the climate for decades and who have run all kinds of experiments and have made lots of observations.
I know that you probably know more then all those people combined and are in a better position to make judgement, after all they are probably ignorant liberal elite collage professors who never listen to Bill Oreilly or Rush Limbaugh. So what if you have a PHD and have been stuying the atmosphere all of your adult life. That's just "book learnin". You know better. You have common sense and street smarts.
evil is as evil does
I know you're joking, but parking lots and roads are responsible for altering weather patterns and causing local climate changes. Birds have even adapted to following highways because of the thermals they generate...
Please help metamoderate.
MSU - 1970s era air temperature
- http://ghrc.msfc.nasa.gov:5721/sensor_documents/m
s u_instrument.html
AMSU - next generation of MSU, several are flying on US and European satellites- http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/
- http://aqua.nasa.gov/AMSU3.html
ATMS - next generation AMSU, scheduled for first flight in a few years- http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Technology/atms_summary.h
t ml
SSM/T-1 - old 1970s/80s era air temperature sensor, the last one launched in 1999- http://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/uso/readme/ssmt1.html (about the only decent information that's left about it)
SSMIS - next generation SSM/T-1 that also combines functions of 2 other older sensors (atmospheric water vapor and a ton of surface data like ice concentration, sea surface wind speed, soil moisture, etc), the first of 5 launched in October of last year- http://xenon.aerojet.com/Weapon_Systems/Earth_Sen
s ing/SSMIS/
- http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/IMAGES/ssmisdoc.htm
- http://www.metoffice.com/research/interproj/nwpsa
f /ssmi/ssmis_ug_moud001_v2.pdf (PDF gets pretty technical but lots of good info)
CMIS - next generation SSMIS scheduled to fly by the end of the decadeAll of the above are what are known as microwave sounders or radiometers. They look at radiation in specific bands in the microwave region of the spectrum (based on oxygen absorption lines) to infer air temperatures.
It looks like the study in the article was using MODIS and TOVS data. TOVS consists of some of the above instruments - MSU and AMSU in particular for this application. MODIS is another sensor that doesn't look at the microwave region of the spectrum, so it's out of my area of expertise. Look at the website for more info on that if you're interested. :)
Say hello to zMac.
Indeed, while certain "global warming" factors can be traced to pollution, more concerning is the effect on wildlife of both pollution and over-harvesting
With respect to changes in the Earth itself, this may be part of a natural pattern, or some core activity which is causing a general increase in the outer skin. I wonder if anyone has done a "deep probe" to see how far these changes are penetrating.
Your link talks about 0.05% increases in solar radiation per decade. Radiative forcing increases due to GHGs are nearly 1% over the last two centuries. Even if the sun has been steadily increasing at the 0.05% rate for 2 centuries, the two trends would be of comparable magnitude - and the human one is accelerating.
The Sun may be big, but without the magnifying glass it isn't likely to fry the ant...
we are already as warm as we've ever seen for the last 420,000 years. See the Vostok Ice Core data, which is is good agreement with otehr ice core data for as far back as the otehr cores go. We know: 1. CO2 (and other greenhouse gasses) trap heat. 2. CO2 (and other greenhouse gasses) have increased rapidly and dramatically in concentration, from anthropogenic inputs. 3. That would be expected to trap heat. 4. WE are already at a local AND GLOBAL temp max for the last 400,000 years or so. 5. We are warming very, very rapidly from that local and global maximum. Given JUST that, even without the good agreement of the models with obeerved data, it seems almost perverse to argue that humans arent creating a pretty solid upward pressure on temps.
would the Earth still be getting warmer even if we weren't creating manmade polution? It may just be that even if were we able to eliminate all of the anti-ozone polution in the world, the global average temerature might still go up anyway
Sigh, the ozone issue and greenhouse gasses that cause global warming are 2 different environmenal issues. They are both atmospheric pollutant issues, but they are not the same.
Ozone stops ultraviolet rays from reaching the surface, greenhouse gasses stop infrared heat from escaping to space.
You can't take the sky from me...
We simply can't wait to collect a geologically significant body of data.
If pollution is causing unnatural global warming, then we can't wait until said warming is undeniable fact before we act.
I suggest an experiment: let's attempt to drastically reduce our emissions, as if we were addressing a real global warming problem. Then we can study temperature changes. If the rise in temprature decelerates or reverses, we could reasonably conclude that our pollution was the cause. If not, then we've made our air and water cleaner for no good reason, but at least we'd know!
The enemies of Democracy are
Here shows some stallite atmospheric data that shows a cooling trend.
So, which one to believe is the "true" measure of our global climate?
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Many people here claim that 20 years is too small a time scale for any maesure that should be compared against a geological time scale.
It is interesting then that the last ice age enged with a temperature increase of 7 degrees world average over just 20-30 years!
Certainly the changes observed are small and the time scale is short. But these data are giving us detailed information of this very short period. And that data is added with the less detailed data collected over the last centuries and milleniums.
This collected set of data is what form the basis of predictions and models about the climate.
There is evidence that the average temperature has been rising since the industrialization, and that the increase in temperature has been faster in the later years.
The measurements only serve to reduce the band of errors and inacuracies. Never the less, slashdotters seem to try twist the evidence around in order to arive at a no evidence at all conclusion.
I still don't think we have anything to worry about, personally...
I'm not an expert on the North Atlantic Current, but I think it works like this:
There's a world wide system of ocean currents, the most famous of which is called the North Atlantic Current. They're all inter-related, and the said current brings millions of power stations worth of heat to Europe (each day I think).
Now the current is driven by a delicate balance of ocean temperature differentials (I think), and flows straight past Newfoundland - accounting for the warm winters, excessive amounts of wind and general crapy weather.
Now, most of the worlds Icebergs also flow past Newfoundland, since they originate in Greenland. As the iceberg flow increases, there has been measurable decreases in the ocean temperature in a part of the said North Atlantic Current.
Iceberg flow is increasing... perhaps because of global warming. If the iceberg flow increases to a certain amount, at a particular time of year, then the North Atlantic Current will be reset somehow, and Northern Europe will become as cold as parts of Northern Canada.
That means permanent snow down to North Germany. Mmmm... just a theory I saw on the discovery channel.
I think the potential for climate change is only a small reason for reducing car emissions. Environmentalists have done their campaign a disservice by relying on such an easily disputable theory.
We are affecting the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate. If the world was the size of a basketball, then the atmosphere would be about as thin as a layer of plastic shrink wrap... and it is elementary to life on earth.
So here's an anecdote about how we're affecting the weather (remember that the plural of anecdote isn't data). When my parent were growing up they hadn't heard of asthma. Today, in some places of the world almost every child suffers from asthma. I think about 20% of children suffer to various degrees in Toronto.
There was a bad smog day in Toronto, and the emergency rooms at hospitals were filled with children needing treatment. A lot of those children were driven to hospital in SUVs. Screw the environment... do you think that smog might have an impact on human health?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
0.024 deg C a year represents a huge amount of energy.
In the oceans alone, that is about 24 thousand peta-joules of
energy.
What does that mean? It's just a number. I don't know the significance of it, but I couldn't dismiss it offhand.
"Kyoto so we can actually lower the rate of global warming by 1% which is likely a natural occurance that we are speeding up in an insignifigant way. Most resonobly attainable emmisons reduction goals would have NO MEANINGFUL impact on the enviornment, over just keeping current standards." how about some citations there, jeb. or are we to take it to be gospel becasue you preech it in strong terms? how about this: you come up with some EVIDENCE to support your bizarre claims that go against the clear consensus in the scientific community. then we can talk. "They will be a huge economic burdon. To really "stop polluting" you would drive the economy to a screeching halt." time to go back and study some economics. developing whole new industries based around new methods of generating, distibuting and using power will be a gigantic boon to the economy.
More seriously though, have any of you heard about Blaise Pascal ? He didn't invented French Fries, but come from the same country. This guy just had a revelation once, during a late night studying. The revelation of God.
To persuade other people to actually give faith into his idea of christianity, he gave us a cunning scientific principle : bet (based on both probabilities and cost of opportunity). If you bet on the existence of God, and if indeed it exists, you are ready for a happy millenar fucking angel chicks. If he doesn't exist, it's all the same. If you refuse to believe, and he does exist, just bring a cooler with you. If he doesn't exist, you're dead the same way.
The analogy is relevant in the sense that global warming does exist, but the causality with human activities is not proven. Hence the bet. Of course there are a lot of people saying that it would cost us our life standards. Answer : bip ! bullshit. Go on civil nuclear (just catch up your late, Sam !), spend less oil, learn to walk, get out of your fucking basement and take the streetcar.
Gosh ! Think, before you brain freezes...
Regards,
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
Now someone with a Nobel prize in physics is going to be a very smart person, but he or she will be no more able to assess claims in climatology than myself.
How thick is the crust where these measurements are made? Crustal thicknesses, thus the depth to which solar energy or other radiant source can penetrate, vary considerably throughout a continent - and between different continents.
.
How much geologic activity is occurring in the region sampled? Is it active, like the Pacific Rim areas, or is it relatively inactive, like the cratonic regions of the continenets?
I consider this pretty important information if one is evaluating this kind of data.
The first-blush inference drawn from the article summary is that mechanisms contributing to global warming (i.e., anthropogenic sources) are driving surface temperatures on the Earth in the same way as air temperatures. No mechanism is described in either the long article from Goddard or from the summary on exactly how surface temperatures could be affected by human activities.
The Earth's crust varies from one or two kilometers to several kilometers in depth and there is a great deal of geologic activity that is going on all over the planet irrespective of man's presence. While the evidence of global warming continues to point to a strong antropogenic contribution, both article and summary fail to explain how this paticular information is realted to anything
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
and the only perscription... is more cowbell!
And yoe said more than that. You said: "there's absolutely zero evidence that this is due to human activity." That isnt true. Not even close. Right now, there isnt bulletproof, conclusive evidence. But there is a mountain of circumstantioal, mechanistic, theoretical, field-observation, and model-derived evidence in support of anthropogenic causes for at least a good part of observed warming. When you make a dogmatic statement like "there's absolutely zero evidence," please dont come back with nitpicking about how you are being misread.
Oh, sorry, did I get here late?...
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Wasn't it back in the late 70's and early 80's that everyone was freaked out about what looked like an upcoming ice age? We just do not have enough historical data to know what a "normal" temperature pattern is. No question that pollution is not good, but we just don't know what effect it's having on global temperatures.
I am in the crowd who does not support most global warming theories. Why? Because they are just that, theories. We try to explain how something works, have the audacity to think we can model it, then go along the lines of where the most money is.
How about that controversial Theory Of Gravity? I mean, why should we support it, because after all it's "just a theory?"
This rant sounds like something straight out of the mouth of Rush Limbaugh and the other right-wing "there is no problem here" people. Most of these "facts" have been debunked time and time again, but your side always cynically believes that the scientists are looking for a meal ticket rather that solving real problems.
One side effect of clean energy is more energy consumption and production. This leads to a new pollution which may account for some of what we see, heat. Heat is a standard byproduct of all energy use. As we get more efficient in producing it we consume more... so how long before we stop worrying about what chemicals go into the air and start worrying about the excess heat we push there.
Most of your post was right-wing claptrap, but this isn't. It is a real problem, and is one of the big concerns about some clean energy technologies such as solar, especially space-based solar. And I'll also agree about the problem with Eastern countries and their pollution. Many in the West would like to have trade based on trade between equals (i.e. don't trade with China until they bring their environmental regulations up to a reasonable level), but the free-trade zealots won't here of it. Buy those cheap Chinese products, and don't worry about the Chinese environment or Chinese greenhouse gases.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
To all those repeating the old mantra "you can't prove that we are causing the warming -- it might be natural".
Yes, the fact that global warming seems to be correlated with our spewing of CO2 into the atmosphere may be a coincidence. It might all just be part of some natural planetary cycle.
But add to this the fact that we are currently seeing a mass extinction unlike anything in the last 65 million years, and you've got quite a conspicious coincidence.
I'm surprised how few anti-warmists (or would it be anti-anti-warmists?) see this.
The Medieval Warm Period occurred as Europe was recovering from the collapse of the Roman Empire, resulting in deforestation across Europe as farming communities expanded. The Little Ice Age began around the time the Black Death caused a 40% fall in the population of Europe, and continued as the genocide of the native North American peoples caused massive reforestation over New England.
Correlation is not causation, of course, but holding up the MWP and LIA as examples of non-anthropogenic climate change events is making an unwarranted assumption.
Our species has been altering ecosystems on a massive scale for tens of millenia; It'd be pretty amazing if the destruction of Europe's broadleaved forests over the last 10 millenia turned out to have left no trace on the climate record. The same goes for the fire management of the Australian forests, or the turning of China into one vast paddy field. I just don't understand how it is possible to believe that taking things one step further - pumping vast quantities of carbon from under the ground, massively changing the composition of the atmosphere - will magically have no effect at all on the climate.
Okay, if everyone flushes all their asprin and antibiotics down the toilet, maybe we can take care of this...
I seem to remember global warming described as a self correcting phenomenon. The argument wnet as follows:
1. Earth warms. Could be due to pollution, increased solar activity or increased volcanic activity.
2. Ocean evaporation increases. Warmer air and water means easier evaporation.
3. Increased levels of water vapor in the air leads to increased global cloud cover.
4. Increased cloud cover raises the Earth's albedo (measure of reflectivity) causing less solar gain.
5. Less solar gain leads to global cooling trend.
So the atmosphere seems to be a feedback system, like a thermostat or buffer solution. Note that the reverse happens when the Earth is too cool. Also, the increased ocean evaporation mitigates somewhat the rising sea level due to melting ice caps.
It's also interesting that SUVs don't appear to actually be any safer for the driver, despite being more dangerous for everyone else, not to mention polluting at about double the state-of-the-art.
But then I realized that you're a total nut-job:
However, a reasonable person might make the point that SUVs are probably not the biggest problem we've got as far as pollution goes. How about coal power, which still produces about half of the US electrical supply? Electric vehicles will never really be "zero emissions" until we do something about the coal problem.