New Satellite Data Confirms Global Warming

starannihilator writes "Researchers at the University of Washington have analyzed satellite data using a new and more accurate method (using channel 4 on the Microwave Sounding Unit satellite) to show that the troposphere has been warming faster than the Earth's surface for more than two decades. Nature reports that previous interpretations (using MSU channel 2) did not indicate such dramatic tropospheric warming because the data were compromised by stratospheric conditions. For years, the debate over global warming raged largely as a result of an incongruency between trends in surface and tropospheric temperatures. The new data gained by MSU channel 4 are consistent with the surface temperature's rising trends and indicate that global warming is, in fact, occuring in the troposphere. Read the full article in Nature, or similar stories in the Seattle Times and Newswise."

Comments

Global warming or global cooling

[jgardn]

I've changed my view on global warming. I used to think the whole earth couldn't warm or cool, but it would stay the same over time. Now I believe that the earth does warm and cool over significant variations. So we are in a global warming phase, if the toposphere is absolute proof (which we can't be sure about.)

The question is: What can we do about it?
The answer is: Unfortunately, not much. If we cut all the world's emissions of greenhouse gasses drastically in half, that wouldn't account for the other variations responsible for global warming like a more active sun or just the phase of the weather patterns on earth or the temperature of the sea. I have to think about it this way: If humanity did all it could to cool or warm the earth, what would we accomplish? The answer is that the earth is so huge and so complicated that we can't predict whether our actions would cause havoc or remedy. I mean, we could spend trillions of dollars on a system to cool the troposphere only to find out that by doing so we are causing more hurricanes and such.

The earth is a chaotic system, and chaotic systems for the most part are unpredictable. A variation of a few hundredths of a degree in one place in the world can be responsible for a hurricane in another.

Contrails?

[BigZaphod]

Perhaps the biggest source of the problem is contrails. The study they did in the near airplane-less skies after 9/11 seems to indicate that they have quite a massive impact on weather patterns.

Re:Not news

[Anonymous Coward]

"Rather than trying to "cope" with global warming, why not try to exert some control over man-made atmospheric changes that have a strong likelihood of contributing to it?"

Because there is no evidence of man-made atmospheric changes contributing to anything. So what you end up with is 100% political efforts like Kyoto which requires that "bad" countries decrease CO2 emissions and requires that "good" countries increase them. If these efforts were in tune with the phony environmental theories instead of vengeance politics, you would think that they would demand that all countries decrease emmissions.

"Who the hell cares if we have to pay a few cents more for a banana or stack of CD-ROMs due to costs associated with reducing the emission of greenhouse gases (in manufacturing and/or transportation)? It beats the hell out of mass extinctions and ecological disaster."

I'd rather pay more for banana's and CDs to stop Martian invasion, Godzilla attacks, and hangnails. As long as you are paying to affect something that has nothing to do with anything....

Don't forget the rest of the world

[Spamalamadingdong]

The only thing I am panicking over is will we be able to get the US administration to give a shit about the environment.

The rest of the world has ~20 times the population of the USA, and is trying to get what the USA has got. China is already using more coal every year than the USA (which burned about 22 quadrillion BTU worth in 2002) and has just passed Japan as the world's second-largest consumer of oil. It's not enough to give a shit about the environment; we have to make sure they give a shit too, or at least give a shit about what the industrialized world will do if they don't act like it.

This means China needs to radically boost its efficiency (not hard even with current technology), Indonesia has to prevent the drainage and burning of peat bogs, and all that. If things there continue as they have been going, the USA could cut emissions to zero and still not make things better.

This also means that the Kyoto system of quotas is fundamentally broken. It will not do to give each nation a quota; each emitter of CO2 and other climate-changing gases has to have an incentive to prevent those emissions, and the competitive advantage should go to those producers and nations which are doing it the best. This means something like a unified system of carbon taxes.

Order out of chaos

[Spamalamadingdong]

Let me reverse the order of these two sentences to make my point:

A variation of a few hundredths of a degree in one place in the world can be responsible for a hurricane in another.... The earth is a chaotic system, and chaotic systems for the most part are unpredictable.

You confuse chaos with randomness. They are not the same; a chaotic system is contrained by a chaotic attractor, a multi-dimensional surface in the N-space of physically possible states on which the current state is found. You cannot predict whether it will rain or shine two weeks from today, but you can predict with very high reliability how much rain you'll get because we know the characteristics which are due to the attractor.

Which brings me to my next point: if you change the characteristics of the attractor, the behavior of the system can change radicaly in a very sudden fashion. I fear that this is what we are doing with climate change, and we may suffer huge damages from the results.

i knew that...

[compro01]

everyone know that global warming is going on. the only question being aruged over is "are we to blame?" and i say no.

this is almost exactly like what happened to the climate 1000 years back. it got warm enough that Greenland was usable for farming. that just seems like to much similarity to be a coinsiance.

but still, what is causing it??