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Research Over Tibet Gives Climate Insight
An anonymous reader writes "NASA is reporting that researchers have discovered thunderstorms above Tibet offer a direct path for water vapor and chemicals to move from the lower atmosphere to the stratosphere. From the article: ' Learning how water vapor reaches the stratosphere can help improve climate prediction models. Similarly, understanding the pathways that ozone-depleting chemicals can take to reach the stratosphere is essential for understanding future threats to the ozone layer, which shields Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.'"
Humanity doesn't have the incentive or motivation do anything about it, so basically this is useless info.
With purchase of equal or greater value Tibet
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After all these years who would have thought it was Tibet's fault?
Gosh, aren't we told repeatedly that we already have climate models of sufficient accuracy that we can use them to make sweeping changes to our economy and infrastructure? Don't we already have a "scientific consensus" that we are all doomed? Why do we need more research just to tell us what we already know?
If you'd like to run your own NASA Global Climate Model (GCM) on your own computer, the EdGCM project has ported a GCM to Mac & Windows and wrapped it in a GUI so you can point-and-click your way around. Turn the sun down or add some nitrogen, whatever you want...
Note that the resolution is pretty coarse (8x10 degrees) so that it still runs at a decent clip on your Mac/PC, and therefore Tibet gets 1 or 2 grid cells, that is about it.
We just had a request about removing the Tibetian plateau and the resulting effect on Earth climate.
Disclaimer: I'm a developer on the project.
Space and Computers.
and those who have the will, do not have enough sex to go on and make something.
I was always taught by my geography teacher that there as so many variables concerned, and all fairly random - that even a reasonably accurate prediction of climate changes over any length of time would be only ever be wildly inaccurate.
But still, if this helps my local weatherman to tell me it's going to be sunny on laundry day, and it actually is sunny then I'm all for it...
Oh no, global warming has become so bad that the earth is sweating!
The good news: global warming will be solved within 50 years!
The bad news: it will coincide with the deindustrialization of our civilization due to the lack of fossil fuels.
Maybe liberating Tibet could solve global warming !
Won't somebody think of the data storage?
AGW appears to be drying out Tibet. The number of people in those watersheds is frightening.
(Sorry to post as a reply, but I can't find the frigging "top level reply" link on the article page for some reason...)
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Just so people know. Every single "Certified" air conditioning installer and repair person that I have met and known just lets their repair or replacement freon go into the sky. Think it one further. When you call them in because your having trouble cooling your house or building, it is most likely due to a leak in the system. Which only means that it's being let go into the sky anyway. So for real, every system ever made will eventually fail and most likely have its refrigerant just plume to the sky, slowly or all at once. Sad situation is, is that AC manufacturers actually plan the weakest link as the coil at its fittings. So right about when the warranty expires, you can expect the coils to fail shortly after and lose your refrigerant into the sky. Take note of all names, especially budget names, that will not be around in another 10 years due to the manufactured defects, yet to only have that same company reappear under a different name selling another defect. Sneaky huh. Not to mention cars or ice boxes. It is a serious situation that is going on everywhere and has been for a long time.
I mean, it turns out that Tibet even provides a path to the heavens for water vapor!
You monicker and your statements stand in absolute opposition to eachother. You obviously fail to realize that Marx was a proponent of Industrialization and Capitalims because he strongly beleived that only a capitalist economy could be strong and productive enough to provide the sort of wealth neccesary for a transition into Communism. Transfer from the rich to the poor indeed. Have you not the slightest bit of common sense?
I'm not a Marx fan at all, nor do I have anything but contempt for communism, yet even I know that much about the man. Either change your name, or read some of his writings.
Don't they mean Xizang? "Tibet" is a nice idea for activist bumper stickers and so on, but it's not a contemporary geographical designation. They might as well refer to Iran as Persia, or Turkey as the Ottoman Empire. What's next? Weather reports for Prussia? Travel guides for Siam?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Tibet is cheap though once you get there with enough greenbacks, my friend lived there for less than 200 dollars a month for years and he had to freight 2 tons of crap through India when he was done.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
So does this mean that we can save the environment by using enough nukes to reduce the elevation of Tibet to a more reasonable level? I suppose we'd have to deal with the rest of the Himalayas similarly, but hey, we've got enough nukes to destroy the world several times over, right? So this ought to be easy!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Should be (pick one):
NASA is reporting that researchers have discovered [that] thunderstorms above Tibet [that] offer a direct path for water vapor and chemicals to move from the lower atmosphere to the stratosphere.
Sorry /., but bad grammar annoys the crap out of me. </grammar police>
What differentates Indian thunderstorms from those in Tibet? For example how high are the tops of Indian vs Tibetan thunderstorms? The article lacks this information. What other places on earth that have similar thunderstorm stratosphere pumping mechanisms? It is improbable that all the water vapor in the stratosphere originates from Tibet.
Here's a model for you. An expanded war in the mideast results in a limited nuclear exchange centered around iran, with a lot of secondary explosions in saudi arabia, israel, iraq, etc. A nice middle sized war, not a tiny one like now. Aproxiximately 4 million tons (pick your own wild guess, I think that is reasonable for 20-30 nukes which will be a small amount used most likely if they get used at all) of radioactive dust is injected to an altitude of over 20,000+ feet and starts to drift eastward. For weeks afterwards, major regional sized fires (entire cities, oil tankers, oil production facilities, forests near major targets, etc) add to the particulate matter injected into the atmosphere. It hits this tibetan plateau area, picking up moisture on the way, then a lot of that dust/smoke/gasses whatever makes it into the stratosphere, entering the jetstream and rapidly crossing across the northern hemisphere, thereby creating a persistant and extensive artifical "cloud" cover (yes, I know, pretty hard to maintain at that height, but past giant supervolcanoes did it and the effects lasted a long time and past one-at-a-time atmospheric nuke tests did it as well).
:) (no, not going to run my own model, use them super dooper throw down clustered boxes you got, don't cost ya much, it ain't your money is it?? heh, hey, "homeland security" grant study cash, go for it!)
How much cooling would we expect the first year after the exchange? Similar to the last mini ice age? 5 degrees C maybe? What would be global crop losses due to a lessening of the sunshine reaching the surface and the drops in temps? Could we expect to see at least one summer with a major freezing (crop killing) frost every month, completely through all the summer months, as well as the sping, fall and winter? (I would guess 3/4ths or better crop losses based on one year living "up north" with major frosts every month in the summer and having a big garden at the time)
If so, how extensive, if not, why not? (I don't ask much do it
There's a real world scenario *someone* should be researching _right now_, before the neocons, likudniks and mullah uber:loonbots let loose over there, which I am afraid looks pretty likely now.
note to self:buy more canned tuna and vegetables.....
(The difference is that a random system has nothing predictable about it. It can do absolutely anything at any time, merely following the probability distribution for that system. However, the exact state at time T can be known - it merely doesn't mean a whole lot. A chaotic system, on the other hand, has definable patterns, definable mechanics and definable structure, but you can NEVER know the exact state for ANY time and small differences CAN - but won't always - cascade into large changes.)
If you were to look at the climate as far back as we can reliably know it, you will see oscillations between ice ages and warmer periods. The troughs and peaks appear fairly random, but really they aren't. The climate can be approximated (badly) as a simple oscillating function, but that's pretty crude. Actually, there's a greater correspondence between 10 years stock prices for wheat and 100,000 years of global temperature than there is between climate and a sine wave. (See: "Fractal Geometry of Nature", Mandelbrot, B., for more details, as the margins here are much too big - err, small.)
I would also be willing to bet that the change in climate as a function of the change in climate composition is also very deterministic. As we're talking systems that appear to be oscillating, my best guess is that the ratio of the peak intervals of different types of oscillation with small differences in climate composition will always be Feigenbaum's Constant, as that's usually the case in chaotically-produced pseudo-oscillations.
Now, despite all this talk of chaos, lack of absolutes and so on, the climate is very predictable in general form. No great surprise there - if you generate the Mandelbrot Set, or the Lorenz owl-mask, you expect to see the same general shape each time. That is not going to change. The same is true with the climate... for now. The climate is orbiting a bunch of Strange Attractors, as per the Lorenz owl-mask. We know the general shape and we know the general effects of altering the various parameters.
There is a problem, however. If the climate were to jump from the current set of Strange Attractors to any other set, the climate would change relatively rapidly and definitely counter to any model that relies on the current patterns holding true.
What could cause such a jump? When could it occur? Well, that's the problem. Strange Attractors are not like nice, neat gravitational sources, you can't see them, and they have no physical existence, they are merely a product of irreducable mathematical problems. They could, however, cause the planet to boil or freeze the moment the system strays too far. (If you don't know which Strange Attractor the climate would switch to, you cannot make any useful prediction from past trends.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
the Tibetian Plateau has elevation that makes it unique in the world. There's a new one million square mile hole forming in the ozone over that area, believed due to air ciculation and not cfc
Or source code?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Yeah and when the research proves global warming isn't caused by the capitalist industrial pigs, you'll hear fuck all about it.
and from the depths of hell I stab at thee, BSD!
I don't remember those, got any links?
Maybe we should flatten Tibet if it is such a contributor to global warming. Let's create some nice rice-fields and do away with al lthese tiny valeys.
free Mac mini [freeminimacs.com] Now thats
a dead link.
Good one, keep it up.
Man I love diversity on the Internet.
(Of course, I think you're 100% insane!)
If this is true, then most of those channels must be over Antarctica.
Or, once the 'ozone depleting' chemicals are into the upper layers of our atmosphere, they have been, or are, shuttled/attracted to the south pole.