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Global Warming Felt By Space Junk and Satellites
An anonymous reader writes in with a story about another side effect of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. "Rising carbon dioxide levels at the edge of space are apparently reducing the pull that Earth's atmosphere has on satellites and space junk, researchers say. The findings suggest that man made increases in carbon dioxide might be having effects on the Earth that are larger than expected, scientists added... in the highest reaches of the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can actually have a cooling effect. The main effects of carbon dioxide up there come from its collisions with oxygen atoms. These impacts excite carbon dioxide molecules, making them radiate heat. The density of carbon dioxide is too thin above altitudes of about 30 miles (50 kilometers) for the molecules to recapture this heat. Cooling the upper atmosphere causes it to contract, exerting less drag on satellites."
So global warming has nothing to do with it? It's all about the carbon dioxide buildup?
If it's cooling the atmosphere, then why is it called global warming?
That's because you like a number of people think that CLIMATE CHANGE only causes warming. It causes a rougher cycle of warmer highs and colder lows. Overall it causes the planet to warm, but the effects felt are not always to warm.
On the other hand, if this might effect american's TV channels perhaps we can get the majority of people in the US to start believing in science....
Ok maybe not, but a boy can hope.
Does it really surprise you that CO2 reduces the temperature away from the surface of the planet? Cannot you see that is energetically required for the planet to increase in temperature due to the greenhouse effect?
No (of course you can see this). You have simply turned off your brain because you do not want to believe in something. Please: stop talking before you stop thinking.
Your attempt to equate "cooling of upper atmosphere" to "global cooling" is cute.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/world-on-track-for-nearly-11-degree-temperature-rise-energy-expert-says/2011/11/28/gIQAi0lM6N_story.html
http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm
It's the CO2 interfering with their signal.
lol, was thinking the same thing myself ;)
Because there's no extra heat coming in from the sun (indeed, slightly less), but because the CO2 is trapping heat in the lower atmosphere, the heat input to the upper atmosphere is reduced.
And what happens when heat input is reduced?
Cooling.
What happens in the lower atmoshere, where the heat input is increased?
Warming.
Indeed, one of the fingerprints that shows it ISN'T the sun doing it is the cooling upper atmosphere: in a warming sun, the entire atmosphere is being warmed because the heat input and throughput is increased.
Whereas the fingerprint of a greenhouse effect is that there is no extra input, but the throughput has changed.
In other words, this is yet more evidence of AGW.
You've got fear. What else you've got?
Earth goes through calamity every now and then, that's for certain. However, these predictions are not scientific. There's too much to be earned for claiming to know the truth while science is just in its infancy regarding climate change and how life copes with it.
The world as we know it WILL change. It has for billions of years. Change does not entail only destruction. Out of destruction comes also new creations. That's most most probably how we ended up here anyways.
I can't believe anyone still cares about global warming. Maybe the world is right: Americans are backward. The rest of the world has already forgotten about it.
Oh, no, hell will freeze over after all: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/09/peat_ice_age_coming_only_co2_can_save_us/
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Insulted because someone doesn't believe in your version of reality... Sounds like you both believe in a religion to me. Next time you might be better off with a well reasoned response.
I thought that CO2 was heavier than air, so there shouldn't be any of it in the upper atmosphere.
(at least not the stuff emitted by burning carbon based stuff at ground level. There could be some Methane at high altitude that gets converted to CO2 by solar radiation., and maybe jet exhaust and large volcanic eruptions.
Global warming, so cool.
"Cooling the upper atmosphere causes it to contract, exerting less drag on satellites."
Wait.. contract...
A denser atmosphere causes less drag?
Naval Research Lab (lead investigators) press release: http://www.nrl.navy.mil/media/news-releases/2012/NRL-Scientists-Detect-Carbon-Dioxide-Accumulation-at-the-Edge-of-Space
Results published in Nature Geoscience (paywalled): http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1626.html
When 2 liquids can dissolve with each other the weight of the molecules is pretty irrelevant. How do you think alcohol and water mix when water is so much denser? You don't see the alcohol sink to the bottom in a wine bottle left for decades for example.
They have a global warming potential thousands of times higher than CO2 and are being released into the atmosphere in large quantities. HCFCs replaced CFCs because they don't react with ozone so don't destroy the ozone layer. The downside of that is they don't react with ANYTHING in the atmosphere so no one has an idea how they will ever be removed. This is a potentially major issue which isn't being taken seriously enough.
This is amusing, but does not mitigate my previous comment. In fact, your randomly bringing up a reason that global warming might be a good thing (which it may very well be, if that research is in fact correct) suggests you still are not thinking, and just reflexively vomiting rhetoric.
Define the average distances, temperature and densities for the following layers of the Earth's atmosphere:
Troposphere, Stratosphere, Mesosphere, Themosphere, Exosphere.
Bonus points if your BS detector notices the temperature does not uniformly trend with radius.
Even more bonus points if you can explain why, though I figure that your BS detector didn't take basic physics or slept through that too.
The world is more complicated than first order theory. Adapt or die.
So global warming has nothing to do with it? It's all about the carbon dioxide buildup?
Why are you still trolling this bullshit?
It's all about burning fossil fuels. This has many effects, of which global warming is the most dangerous to humans right now, but raising the dangers of space junk is another bad effect.
What you are trying to imply is like saying cigarettes have nothing to do with lung cancer, because there are people who die of emphysema as well.
Go away, oil industry shill!
Hahaha, another one of you filthy pieces of shit.
This is not MY version of reality. I don't pretend that I know better than everyone else, without even having graduated high school, let alone being an expert in the subject.
Umm, OK.
No, this is the scientific version of reality.
But you blow it right there.
And you're probably too damn dumb to understand how.
Even a "WHOOSH!" would go over your head.
Consider this serie : -11; -1; 0;12
Consider this evolve into this one : -20;-2;1;25.
The average of the first was 0 the average of the second was 1 (4 divided by 4 sample). So yeah in average the second one is "hotter" globally warmed. But did it uniformly increse ? No, in fact the extreme went higher. Now think about this in 3 dimensional & temporal way: some part of the atmosphere will have have an average over a year which will cool , some other part will be hotter, the ocean gets hotter, and the yearly averageof the whole planet increse. That does not mean EVERY single part of the planet will increase in temperature. In fact the model forsee some part will get more precipitation and snow, and get cooler.
So next time you read about some temperature average getting cooler, rather than jump into the bandwagon "global warming is global cooling nurf nurf nurf climatologist =dumb" think about mean, average, and global three time in your head before writing ANYTHING.
Other than a strawman, high temperature process can lead to reduced temperatures. Ever heard of fighting fire with fire?
Rising carbon dioxide levels at the edge of space are apparently reducing the pull
Isn't it more of a push?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What would the world be like today if Humans in the 1300s could measure climate? Would they have banned draft and livestock animals because of their methane production? Would they have banned using candles and camp fires and other CO2-producing activities?
Since, you know, when discounting Michael Mann's fabricated data, it was warmer in the 1300s than it is now, without the help of any modern technology..
That's because you like a number of people think that CLIMATE CHANGE only causes warming.
And some people beleive that Earth is a stable system that isn't going from one extreme to another naturally.
Insulted because someone doesn't believe in your version of reality... Sounds like you both believe in a religion to me. Next time you might be better off with a well reasoned response.
Atheism is no more a religion than naked is a brand of clothing.
(note the lowercase 'n' in naked)
Although the prior post was unnecessarily aggressive, it does bring up the valid point of religious belief sets, especially in the US are typically lumped in a package deal together political beliefs and a lack of trust in the world wide scientific community, typically manipulated with falsified information such as this.
I've actually had some wild unemployed troll telling me he would rather die of some dreaded but easily curable disease than accept 'faggoty european commie free health care'. ( I couldn't find the original link he sent me about oil wells magically refilling but it was a huge url with 'wall-street-journal' written near the end of it).
Does these holy books really have such a level of control over these kinds of people or is it just some innate brainwashed gullibility that they will aggressively defend?
So, global climate change / global worming is responsible for BOTH [1] warming the lower atmosphere sufficiently to melt all the glaciers and dry up all the farmland by shifting rain patterns, increasing storm frequency and severity (and ALSO presumably swelling the lower atmosphere because hot gasses necessarily expand relative to cool gasses), AND global warming [2] somehow cools the upper atmosphere sufficiently to reduce total (upper and lower) atmospheric volume to the point that satellites feel reduced orbital drag and have enhanced orbital lifetimes as a result.
Either the degree of upper atmosphere cooling & contraction is mysteriously accelerated relative to what one expects of the lower atmosphere, or something weird is going on with global warming. I don't believe that climate scientists can actually have both warming and cooling of the atmosphere at the same time and blame it ALL on global warming / climate change. Either some climate scientist needs to get REALLY good at figuring out what's going on, or the whole community will be wholesale blamed for "having their cake and eating it too." Everything that happens in the atmosphere can now be blamed on global warming. Just wait until they start blaming the Antarctic ozone hole on CO2 emissions (I'm really waiting for that).
- Anon. Coward.
To see if the recent surge in carbon dioxide has made its way to the uppermost atmosphere, researchers analyzed changes in carbon dioxide concentrations at an altitude of about 60 miles (100 km) between 2004 and 2012 using the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment Fourier Transform Spectrometer onboard the Canadian SCISAT-1 satellite. Since ultraviolet radiation from the sun can break carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen, the investigators also looked at carbon monoxide levels to get a better picture of what average carbon dioxide levels were over time, since levels of solar radiation can vary from year to year.
[...]
"We now have direct evidence that a major driver of upper atmospheric climate is changing," study lead author John Emmert, an upper atmospheric physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., told SPACE.com.
More bad science done. From a feeble eight or nine years of data, they're claiming things that simply can't be claimed.
I have this theory. Scary research about AGW will have something fundamentally broken about the research. Here, it's extrapolation from a small set of data.
That's because you like a number of people think that CLIMATE CHANGE only causes warming. It causes a rougher cycle of warmer highs and colder lows. Overall it causes the planet to warm, but the effects felt are not always to warm.
I imagine flyingfsck's BS detector is pegging on this bit of rhetorical dodge. Normal people would call this the much more accurate "ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING" not the vague "CLIMATE CHANGE".
We add an additional 4% each year and there is nothing to balance that. We can also look at isotope ratios (fossil fuels are ancient carbon). It is our CO2.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions-intermediate.htm
Take a walk in a redwood forest and see a cross section from a tree that was 2000 years old. It is obvious to even the simple minded that the rings on the tree show large and long cycles of strong grow and slow growth...none of those cycles of climate change in the past were due to man.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
...the sky is literally falling
that cant be possible. I think God placed that tree there to test our faith.
"Rising carbon dioxide levels at the edge of space... "
"The density of carbon dioxide is too thin above altitudes of about 30 miles..."
Are you saying there's not enough CO2 in the upper atmosphere?
please explain, you lost me
No, no, the CO2 from "volcanoes and stuff" is a factor, I'm sure.
But we should probably deal with the 99% of CO2 that comes from humans burning stuff, before moving on to the volcanoes releasing the other 1%.
What do you think is the result of H, C and O being combusted together?
H2O and CO2.
If you want to know roughly how much CO2 humans have produced, go through the fossil fuel industry financial reports and total up how much they've sold.
Of course, you are free to leap into a pit and hide your head from the facts. It won't stop you getting shot in the arse.
Because the CO2 would lie closer to the ground than the O2 and there is enough to cover 10m of atmosphere.
Since you are not 10m tall and cannot breathe CO2, you would die if you went to the seaside.
You're the one who doesn't understand the scientific version of reality is merely the current set of theories that best matches observations.
Where there are competing theories, or controversy, this "reality" can be quite blurry. The basic facts of AGW is not one of those places.
Enjoy your 4 more years of that derg gern negrie, faggot. Sounds like he plans to do something about global warming too. I'll love to hear you and your kind squeal like raped pigs for years and years if he does.
So to sum up the summary, global warming is causing cooling that is reducing gravity and making satellites more efficient.
"Global warming" has "a cooling effect" that is "reducing the pull that Earth's atmosphere has" and "exerting less drag on satellites."
What great news!
But I don't think that you are getting anywhere by telling them they're wrong by posting on here.
Of course, if you dared post "You're wrong" to climatedepot on climatedepot, then your comment would get you banned. They don't like facts and truth there. Only Goodfact.
Even if there is such a thing as MAN MADE global warming, the scientific world & the media have politicized it to the extent, no one would believe it now. I for one believe in global warming, done by the SUN, not by man.
Not really. GW is caused by conversion of high energy photons (light) into low energy photons (heat). If CO2 increases this conversion rate, then the result should be increased warmth at all levels of the atmosphere where increased concentrations of CO2 are present. This observation throws the fundamental axion of AGW into doubt--something I have been talking about for some time, as the heat capacity of CO2 is slightly below the average of other atmospheric gases, meaning that an increased fraction of CO2 should cause very minor cooling rather than warming. This article (or summary) seems to imply that this is the case. If there is global warming going on, it is likely to be from a different source than CO2 (I propose water vapor as the primary driver, as it's continuous output rise matches the slow rise in CO2 over relevant time scales, but I am open to alternative hypotheses). If that is the case, then REJOICE, because if we can find it, we can fix it. CO2 is the only one that we can't fix without a radical overhaul of worldwide energy infrastructure (which we would still benefit from, but which should be motivated by economic concerns rather than the threat of impending doom).
Your ability to explain any phenomena with the same cause is a strong indication that you are not a rationalist.
the lower atmo is heating up while the upper atmo is cooling. shouldn't there eventually be some heat transfer from the lower to the upper?
I'm Canadian eh. Global warming means that one can farm the tundra in Canada and Russia and will enable the planet to sustain a few billion more people. It is generally a good thing.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
If you didn't graduate from HS, then this probably isn't the right forum for you. Unless you've independently invested a lot in your education then you don't have the necessary background to comment here intelligently. Personally, I'd prefer you read, learn, and keep quiet until you do.
So a tiny scrap of sample data is enough to make a grandiose statement.
Note to the wise: Any big, popular theory heralded by the emotionally over-active and therefore biased public is always going to be overlooking several key pieces of information.
Things are a-changing, no doubt, but the forces involved are much bigger than these ego-centric thinkers can contain in their limted, "socially aware" minds.
Bring up the fact that the environments on the other planets in our solar system are also undergoing observable changes, link and you get spittle in your face. Also bring up the fact that Carbon Taxes would benefit the same elites who currently run the oil/banking cartels, and you get blank stares.
We know that science is corrupt; there are many hundreds of instances, dozens of which have been reported on this very site, but few are willing to concede that this problem might be affecting this particular sacred cow of the research spectrum, where there is arguably more at stake than nearly any other.
I'm not saying that pollution isn't a problem, but it's just one part of a much larger puzzle. I see the situation being spun by the psychopathic element of our world's leadership to their own advantage, using emotionalism to shut down the rational centers of the populace.
There's a giant con job going down, and very few of us are willing to question its basic premises.
Then what the hell is your original comment? You should be all "huzzah! more global warming detected!"
Stop right there. CO2 does not convert light into infrared. It absorbs infrared. The conversion from visible light to infrared occurs when the earth absorbs visible light, heats up, and subsequently re-emits the heat as infrared waves.
Re-read TFA (if you really read it the first time) and note that this is about the increased CO2 in the upper atmosphere gaining energy from collisions with O2, and re-emitting that energy as infrared, much of which makes it into space, since it is happening above most of the atmosphere. Has nothing to do with trapping heat from the sun that is causing gloabl warming, other than both involve CO2 & infrared.
yes yes, this response was unnecessary. My point was purely that responding the way the GP did was purely a waste of space/time.
When you start off a post with..
It is a loaded statement which has less to do with objective insightful science discussion then it does religious dogma. That's not to say that the original poster was any better however this statement annoys me more and was worth commenting on as the AC could have come back with a well reasoned response instead of sinking to the same level as the original poster and making the divide wider.
I'd prefer you lick my balls. OK?
Doesn't anyone in the climate warming business know anything about the basic physics of gases? To paraphrase TFA for brevity: CO2 'collisions' with O2 molecules are exciting the CO2 molecules making them radiate heat??? It is basic physics that ALL gases in the upper atmosphere are constantly colliding at a rate proportional to their temperature and are constantly radiating (and absorbing) photons at frequencies determined by their molecular structure. Both O2 molecules and the very scarce CO2 molecules (and the far more abundant N2 molecules) are continually radiating heat into space. And then we read: "The density of carbon dioxide is too thin above altitudes of about 30 miles for the the molecules to recapture this heat" which is utterly meaningless. The only way that anything about this article makes even a tiny bit of sense is if we assume that the author is attempting to claim that the upper atmosphere is cooler as a result of heat being blocked by carbon dioxide in the lower atmosphere and that is, itself, a ridiculous claim as the planet heat balance between the heat arriving and the heat being radiated is always very nearly in balance or the planet would overheat in a matter of days as a result of the massive amounts of heat arriving and leaving every day. A change in the atmospheric heat flux sufficient to significantly change the temperature of the planet's outer atmosphere on a short term basis is obviously from something other than carbon dioxide and is probably due to a change in solar radiation or a change in interstellar radiation or some other less understood effect.
CO2 is essentially transparent to visible light (your high energy photons). The visible light is absorbed (or reflected) by things that aren't transparent to it. That absorbed energy is then emitted sooner or later as energy in wave lengths according to Planck's law, generally in the infrared range at normal Earth temperatures. CO2 is not transparent to certain wave lengths of IR radiation so it captures it. The heat capacity of CO2 has nothing to do with it, it's strictly a matter of radiative physics.
It's impossible for water vapor to drive global warming. The level of of water vapor in the atmosphere is strictly limited by temperature. If the feedback from additional water vapor were high enough to drive global warming it would have driven the Earth to get so hot the oceans would boil and totally evaporate long ago.
The physical world is not always as simple as you'd like it to be.
AC didn't deserve the Troll rating. In a sense the sky really is falling because the upper atmosphere is contracting. The top of the sky is getting closer to the surface of the Earth. I thought it was a nice turn of phrase.
Waving away criticism by saying "it's complicated" is not rational. This is a curiosity stopper, and should be avoided.
Ok, do you want me to write a tl;dr reply? The fact is warming of the lower atmosphere and cooling of the upper atmosphere is not contradictory when it's caused by an increase in greenhouse gases. If the warming were caused by increases in solar radiation then both the lower and upper atmosphere would warm. All it takes is some physics to understand why.
Yer right, nothing else could have caused those lean and mean years. **sarcasm**