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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!
I'm inclined to agree with most of your points, but I think the point the environmentalists are trying to make is that the temperature change is much faster now than it has been in the past, rather than it changing more. Things can adapt to slow changes, but fast changes can be more drastic.
I still don't think we have anything to worry about, personally.
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.
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.
Life is adaptive, but even species are not. I kinda think we as humanity want to keep this delaying this meek-inheriting-the-Earth thing as long as possible.
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 study is important and needs to continue, but you can't assume a rise in temperature over 2 decades means something bad is happening. I don't think we'll ever have enough data to prove whether we are right or wrong until the damage has been done (or apparently not done).
//Blessed are they that run around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels.
I smell a troll.
I see that you admit at least there is a global warming phenomena. Most scientists finally agree with that. But you question two things:
1. Whether humans are causing global warming
2. Whether global warming is a bad thing
Let's address these two issues:
1. Do humans cause global warming?
1600 scientists, include over 100 NOBEL LAUREATES, agree that human activity is causing global warming. I trust them FAR MORE than you:
http://dieoff.org/page123.htm
It's obvious that climate has changed on Earth with or without humans, but it's also a known fact that human activity is accelerating climate change in a way different from natural causes
2. Is global warming a bad thing?
Here's where the troll part comes in. Do you actually believe the only consequence of global warming is rolling up our pants and walking inland a couple feet? The economy falls apart when the prices go up on oil. What do you think will happen when we are asked to MOVE LOS ANGELES AND NEW YORK INLAND??? What happens when the phytoplankton are no longer able to survive in the ocean water with low salinity? Well, let me tell you that phytoplankton produce most of the oxygen you breath...
LS
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
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!
At a rise of .024 deg C a year, I seriously doubt the flooding and and mass migration will happen in a short enough span to cause "chaos", much less the kind that kills billions..
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I think this whole debate is moot until people can decide on how to determine such fundamental things. Saying stuff like "because it will cause certain species to die off" doesn't mean anything in an amoral, evolutionistic world view: is it bad for species to die off?
I also like to point out for all you who like their statistics: correlation does not imply causality. (For instance: the fact that trees always move when there is wind does not mean that the movement of trees causes wind.) I do not yet think it is possible to set up an experiment to test the relationship between millions of variables and some average global temperature reading. The inertia and chaotic nature of the terrestrial atmospheric system also makes it quite difficult to put into a control system - do you use a PID controller? H-infinity? What *should* the setpoint be? The answer to most of these is "nobody knows".
*shrug*
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
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.
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.
Nope, that is not the worst case scenario.
The worst case scenario is that most of tropical Asia and Southern China becomes a desert. As a result you get 2 billion of hungry people on the move which are part of at least three nuclear armed nations (China, India, Pakistan) and are bordering a fourth one (Russia).
And that is scary...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
You call that a worst-case scenario?!?
No, the *real* worst is that the Earth heats up just enough to be considered a warm, sunny vacation destination by aliens who will spend their recreation time anally probing us with tools devices that are something like a cross between an industrial drill press, a belt sender and a soldering iron.
Now that's a worst-case scenario...
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
This is what really gets to me in these debates. Most people are unwilling to view humans as merely a part of the complex biological system that exists on the surface of the planet. I see no logical reason why the human species should be set apart specially from everything else, and no reason to arbitrarily define human actions as "unnatural."
I think the reason people are unwilling to consider this idea, is that they assume the reason it was brought up in the first place was to justify the trashing of the environment, under the guise that we are simply behaving "naturally." But seriously, that isn't the point. The point is, the Earth must be viewed holistically, as a system of many interacting and not always distinct parts. To think that we, as one small part, can somehow direct our actions in such a way as to favorably control its evolution, is arrogant and mistaken.
Life and climate are dynamic, chaotic systems. We've all heard of the Butterfly Effect. Even the smallest, insignificant action has profound effects on everything, given enough time. Are these effects good or bad? What causes them to be good or bad? Suppose that we are causing global warming, and in 100 years the world will be a tropical rainforest. All sorts of new species will evolve in the hot jungles of northern Canada. What "right" do we have to alter the Earth's climate, cooling it down, and preventing those species from emerging?
The fact is, global warming is a problem because it is a problem for humans. I don't think the Earth cares if species die off, and new ones emerge. It is a continual process of trying to come into equilibrium -- except the equilibrium is always shifting because of the billions of outside influences. Except this term "outside influences" is also a misnomer, because there are no truly "outside" influences -- the universe is one big system of cause and effect, and the closer you look at it, the harder it is to make distinctions between any of the parts.
Does any of this mean that we shouldn't do our best to curb our production of CO2? It depends, first of all, on what the immediate consequences to human civilization would be. Are we going to flood all our coastal cities? If so, it hardly makes sense to argue about whether the decision is "right" or "wrong" -- it's a matter of practicality. But if not... Suppose species are wiped out, migration patterns shift, ecosystems turn to deserts, deserts to to jungles, evolution gets a kick in the pants in general... Can somebody give me a fundamental, justifiable reason why that is "wrong?" Are natural changes only "right" if they are not guided by conscious awareness? Can you provide a justification for such an arbitrary viewpoint?
The copyright on Mickey Mouse would finally expire.