Surprise Discovery In Earth's Upper Atmosphere

elyons sends word out of UCLA of a completely unexpected discovery in the physics of the Sun-Earth interaction — a previously unknown basic mode of energy transfer from the solar wind to the Earth's magnetosphere. "'It's like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun. This discovery is like finding it got hotter when the sun went down,' said Larry Lyons, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences. 'We all have thought for our entire careers — I learned it as a graduate student — that this energy transfer rate is primarily controlled by the direction of the interplanetary magnetic field. The closer to southward-pointing the magnetic field is, the stronger the energy transfer rate is, and the stronger the magnetic field is in that direction. [It turns out that] if it is both southward and big, the energy transfer rate is even bigger.'" The researchers have two papers on the discovery coming out in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Comments

Re:anti-solar prejuices, prior neglect

[khayman80]

Obviously the IPCC has been caught several times making propaganda by spreading lies it's own scientists don't agree with (most famous the hokey stick graph). This "somehow" keeps happening, and even today you can find that graph in IPCC materials.

I don't know how many times I'm going to have to repeat this, but the Mann et. al. 1999 reconstruction was accurate and has been independently confirmed by many researchers. Those links contain many references to peer-reviewed research papers that you can read to learn about paleoclimatology temperature reconstructions.

Re:inb4 "that explains global warming" posters

[Wonko the Sane]

Have you missed the fact that people all across the nation are angry with both republicans and democrats? More than one republican who assumed that he could just get in front of this movement has been booed off the stage.

Politicians are the problem. The republican/democrat distinction is just a distraction. Both sides want to take away your freedoms and your money - they just pay lip service to different ideals when they do it.

Re:Or

[khayman80]

However, its a question whether the climate reacts to warming by positive feedback, and if so how strongly, or by negative feedback.

There's a debate about how much positive feedback exists, but the case for negative feedback is very weak. For example, events such as Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events are the best examples of abrupt climate change in the paleoclimate record. These ancient events are worrying because they show the climate has a propensity to shift quickly from one state to another, given even small forcings. That requires positive feedback.

Also, the estimated magnitude of the Milankovitch cycles and other forcings are insufficient to account for the temperature variations observed in ice cores from Vostok and EPICA. This requires positive feedback. In fact, the estimates of positive feedback are too small to bridge the gap.

The decisive evidence for feedback would be if the climate were now genuinely warming faster than or differently from ever before.

Approximately 35x faster, which isn't surprising because of the unprecedented (in the last 2 million years) CO2 levels. Also, the warming is happening after the CO2 increase, which makes this warming qualitatively different from all previous deglaciations.

And this is where the question of the refusal of the climate science community to reveal their data becomes important.

Proxy data are available, Wahl and Ammann have made their code available, the CMIP3 database makes model output public for researchers to perform comparisons, etc. I've previously complained about the (widespread) tendency of scientists to keep their data private to wring every last discovery out of it before making it public. It's worrying, but not a problem unique to climatology. Nor ar all climatologists so hesitant to release their code and data. I publish all my code under the GPLv3, for instance.