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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?
Maybe now I should read the article.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
If it's cooling the atmosphere, then why is it called global warming?
Yeah, well, no, fine. My BS detector smelled a rat.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
...wait...
"Cooling the upper atmosphere causes it to contract" ... what!!?
THE SKY IS FALLING!!!
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.
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.
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.
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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!
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.
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..
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.
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
> man made increases in carbon dioxide might be having effects on the Earth
but not the CO2 from, you know, volcanoes and stuff
...the sky is literally falling
"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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.