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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.
> "Heejeong separated the data into when the solar wind was fluctuating a lot and when it
> was fluctuating a little," he added. "When the interplanetary magnetic field fluctuations
> are low, she saw the pattern everyone knows,
That is, the likelihood of "substorms" in Earh's ionoshpere is a function of how "northward"
or "southward" Earth's manetosphere is. More southward, more storms, worse
satellite TV reception.
> but when she analyzed the pattern when the interplanetary magnetic field was
> fluctuating strongly, that pattern completely disappeared. Instead, the strength of the
> flows depended on the strength of the fluctuations.
There's this "interplanetary magnetic field" between the Sun and Earth. The solar wind
is Earthward charged particles from the Sun. These particles interact with the Earth's
magnetisphere. When you have large changes in the solar wind, there are more
substorms, and worse satellite TV reception.
So, pseudo-diff-eq, their contribution is the second term (or maybe I'm missing the point):
substorm likelihood =
southwardness of magnetosphere +
change of solar wind intensity with respect to time
Poor graduate student. So much data...
It's good to see some basic science being done though. More, please!
I was wondering how long it would take the anti-global-warming fringe to latch onto this one and say "Look! This shows scientists don't actually know everything, and therefore it proves that they don't know anything!"
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Yeah, I know... and I get why Anderson Cooper would think that's hilarious.
What I don't understand is why your average garden variety left-winger on the internet (where you tend to hear/see it the most)--whether it be slashdot, kos, wherever else--thinks it's so hilarious. I guess what it boils down to for me is, I think it's downright odd how the Democratic party which wholeheartedly embraced liberty, freedom, and the "common man" at its core a generation ago--and still pays lip service to such things--has of late become so dominated by primarily the upper middle classes and the highly educated who are perfectly content to just trust in the government (and ad hom those who don't). I don't understand the scorn for the lower middle class / poor / etc who seem to be at these kind of rallies.
I'll be the first to admit that there are a lot of things I don't understand... but the pure vitriol and loathing of the populist townhall protestors and tax protestors is just ... weird! ... to me.
I don't understand the scorn for the lower middle class / poor / etc who seem to be at these kind of rallies.
I see. You have not been to one of these. It is NOT the lower middle class/poor. I went to one in Denver. Watching ppl drive away in Suburbans is not my idea of lower middle class. Think that there is a real reason why it is pushed by rush?
The idea that this represents the common man would be like having the king of england attend the boston tea party. Basically, the very ppl, neo-cons, that ran up the vast majority of the debt are attending it and trying to point the finger at obama. Now, I am not a fan of Obama's action (though even as a Libertarian, I voted for him to avoid the thought of Palin as a pres), I can say that he was put in a horrible situation. OTH, I have not been impressed by his actions.
But the tea baggers keep pointing their finger at dems while out and out refusing to take responsibility for the nightmare that they got us into. These are the same sets of idiots that voted in W. TWICE.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
... its HAARP
There are legitimate reasons to be unconvinced, no matter what the affiliations of the people offering them may be.
We have an hypothesis about the reaction of the earth's climate to CO2 emissions. The hypothesis is first, that the additional CO2 warms by absorbing IR radiation. That this will occur is not subject to dispute, its basic physics, and has been known for around 100 years. It was only partially known to Aarhenius, who seems to have got the effect right but to have overestimated its magnitude, but the effect itself has been known. This is a relatively minor component of the hypothesis. If this effect were all there was, doubling of CO2 levels from around 300ppm to around 600ppm would raise the average temperature of the planet in the lower troposphere by roughly 1 degree centigrade. This would not be terribly serious - in fact, it might even improve life, and its of the same order as natural variations anyway.
The second hypothesized effect is that when the climate warms by any amount, from any cause, there is positive feedback. This feedback amplifies the effect. So the warming of 1 degree caused by CO2 rises is hypothesized to lead to further warming of a further few degrees. The amounts are uncertain. The total warming effect could be anything from 2-5 degrees C. Even at the lower levels, this would lead to significant problems, and at the higher levels, particularly over 5 degrees, we would be looking at climate disaster.
However, its a question whether the climate reacts to warming by positive feedback, and if so how strongly, or by negative feedback. To have concerns about feedback is not denialism or flat-earth -ism. Its quite reasonable.
This is where we come into the evidence issue. The decisive evidence for feedback would be if the climate were now genuinely warming faster than or differently from ever before. And this is where the question of the refusal of the climate science community to reveal their data becomes important. We have Jacoby, d'Arrigo, Mann, Thompson, Jones and others refusing to reveal the data which would allow replication and verification of their results. Their defenders meanwhile abuse everyone who does not simply believe, without proof, that the results are as represented.
As long as the data and algorithms are not placed in the public domain for inspection and validation, it is going to be reasonable to be skeptical. All that the authors have to do to eliminate this skepticism is to publish. Until they do, it is going to remain an open question whether there is anything very special going on with climate in terms of the last 2,000 years, and so it will remain an open question whether feedback works the way that the IPCC hypothesizes.
And so, it will remain an open question whether the reaction of the climate machine to an initial warming of 1 degree will be an ultimate stable state of no change, +1, +2 or +5.
In the same way as when I drink a cup of coffee, you cannot predict my future temperature solely by reference to the heat content of the coffee, nor can you make any assumptions without examining the way my body reacts about whether the feedback will be positive or negative, so you need evidence in the form of the behavior of the climate to tell what sort of feedback mechanisms occur. It is very, very odd, inexplicable in fact, that the climate science community seems to see it as positively wrong to ask for the data on what is allegedly going on with the climate to be released. Free the data, free the code, and lets see if the studies prove what they purport to.
There are few changes to the very basic set of facts: that there is warming, and a significant proportion of it is anthropogenic. But there is huge disagreement on the details and especially in predictions. That's to be expected, because many of the systems we're attempting to model have sensitive dependence on parameters and initial conditions. Whether, for example, a shutdown of thermohaline circulation is likely, and under what circumstances, isn't at all well understood--- and that's just picking one large-impact uncertainty.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
To me, the most interesting point of this discovery is that it should improve our understanding of shortwave radio propagation.
It has always frustrated me that the same space program that is producing the data needed to understand the physics needed to make accurate, day-to-day predictions of ionospheric propagation -- a hundred-year-old mystery -- is also the same space program that replaced commercial HF communication with satellites, greatly reducing the economic value of such predictions (and, therefore, the science funding to make them). So now that we have the ability, we no longer have the desire . . . unless one is an amateur radio operator, and it's harder to think of an entity lower on the economic value chain than that.
The most difficult path for shortwave links is one that passes near the magnetic poles, like the path from Southeast Asia to the US East Coast that passes over the north magnetic pole. Energy from the solar wind couples into the Earth's magnetic field; in particular, charged particles are directed parallel to the field. This is great for propagation over most of the planet; however, near the poles the magnetic field becomes vertical and these particles are directed perpendicular to the ground, where they form a ring of radio wave attenuation and refraction in the upper atmosphere that closes this path for many days out of a given month. To open this path there has to be minimal energy coupling from the solar wind, and there is very little understanding of when this will occur. Even the best propagation prediction software (e.g., VOACAP and Proplab Pro) is based on statistics, giving one the probability of a given path being open.
This discovery should add to our understanding of how and when these paths will open. Until then, we have to survive on "Space Weather" web sites like these, and turn on a radio to see for ourselves what the day brings.
(Those interested in an accessible introduction to HF propagation can check out K9LA's propagation site.)
really? The pubs had control of congress from 94-2000, while the dems had control of the presendcy; The pubs had TOTAL control of dc from 2000-2006. pubs had WH from 2006-2008, while neither party control congress during that time (dems controlled house, but the pubs had a slight edge on the senate).
So, where did it get us?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms It MASSIVELY shot up when pubs had total control. It does not appear to matter which congress has it, but which president has it. For example, reagan and W never saw a deficit that they did not love. OTH, CLINTON (a dem) fought against the neo-con deficit and turned it around. So do the dem controlled congress of the 60's/70's, who paid off most of WWII debt.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
why is global warming even a partisan issue to begin with?!
It's naturally partisan. Everywhere, not just in the developed countries, we have a natural division between wealthy and those with much lower resources. This manifests everywhere as common conflicts of interest, between employer and employee, polluter and those affected, rich people and the envious, etc. Environmentalism naturally falls in with the beliefs of the people with lower resources (and those who purport to represent them). And global warming is merely a huge potential environmental problem that will primarily affect people with few resources. Meanwhile the burden of correcting for the problem (if it exists to the extent claimed) falls on the people with greater resources.
Simply calling a group "fringe" does not make it so. Fringe relative to whom? Mainstream society is overwhelmingly skeptical, so if anything the pro global warming hug fests that one sees on echo chambers like this are the true fringe.
Whether you like it or not.
Just calling it how I see it btw.
Additionally just because the mechanism for energy transfer has been present all along does not mean the amount of energy transferred is static. This mechanism could be transferring an increased amount of heat in recent times.
Can anyone actually dismiss this out of hand because it doesn't fit the idea of a primarily human caused global warming and still call it science?
Global warming is a reality in my mind. And quite frankly the track record of climatology results in my own anecdotal experience of temperature being the most substantial source of evidence for that belief.
The cause of global warming, its long term impact, and its duration are NOT settled issues.
As for CO2 levels, nature takes care of itself. Plants use CO2 for fuel, if you increase CO2 in the atmosphere you will increase plant mass. Just as any experienced indoor pot grower and they will tell you, increase CO2 to about 1500ppm and your flower growth will explode. Wheres the proof? Its in the pudding, start paying attention and you will see that there are large algae blooms starting to appear across the globe. Those blooms are natural CO2 sequestering.
Estimates for plant consumption of CO2 are also generally based on the current CO2 level of the atmosphere. But if you give them more concentrated CO2 they consume more.