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."

Comments

Re:One is not like the other.

[gagol]

The process cool the upmost strata, but keep heat inside. RTFA

No, headline is right.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:No, headline is right.

[drinkypoo]

There is an utter lack of explanation for this extra CO2. Humans don't produce that much CO2 relative to nature each year

Citation needed. Have fun, because you're dead wrong. For example, we produce on average two orders of magnitude more CO2 than volcanism. Are you getting paid to spout this shit, or are you telling lies for free? That's not a very good deal.

Re:No, headline is right.

[hamburger lady]

isotope analysis shows increases over time of fossil carbon as a percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.

add to that the fact that we pump gobs of fossil carbon into the atmosphere every year, and can find no other natural phenomena doing such on that sort of scale.

Re:No, headline is right.

[slim]

Even after a major eruption event? I know these don't happen very often, but I have a hard time believing that we output more CO2 than a volcano can potentially output.

Yes, even after a major eruption event. For example when Pinatubo blew in 1991, it released about as much CO2 as 10 days of human activity.

Here:

The published estimates of the global CO2 emission rate for all degassing subaerial (on land) and submarine volcanoes lie in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year (Gerlach, 1991; Varekamp et al., 1992; Allard, 1992; Sano and Williams, 1996; Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998). The preferred global estimates of the authors of these studies range from about 0.15 to 0.26 gigaton per year. The 35-gigaton projected anthropogenic CO2 emission for 2010 is about 80 to 270 times larger than the respective maximum and minimum annual global volcanic CO2 emission estimates. It is 135 times larger than the highest preferred global volcanic CO2 estimate of 0.26 gigaton per year (Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998).

Is that really surprising? Think about how many billions of cars, homes, offices and factories there are, spread across the whole world, all directly or indirectly burning fossil fuel and releasing CO2.

Re:No, headline is right.

[drinkypoo]

Consumption of vegetation by animals & microbes accounts for about 220 gigatonnes of CO2 per year

And consumption of CO2 by vegetation accounts for what? Here's a hint, plants are made almost entirely out of carbon, and almost all of the carbon comes from the atmosphere. Rainforests produce about as much CO2 as they consume, their "job" is to filter. But other types are carbon sinks. And the ocean is a net carbon sink; it takes in CO2 from the air, which makes the ocean more acidic. It's fixed out from the ocean primarily by reaction with subaquatic limestone. It's disingenuous in the extreme to discuss CO2 production of the ocean or of vegetation without simultaneously discussing the fixing of CO2 in the ocean or by vegetation, or foolish in the extreme to believe it when someone else does it.

Re:No, headline is right.

[riverat1]

I recently tracked it down and the major eruption of Pinatubo in 1991 released around 40 million tonnes of CO2 over several days compared to around 23 billion tonnes of CO2 released by humans that year. Current human emissions in 2012 are around 30 billion tonnes of CO2.

Re:What is CO2 doing up there?

[aug24]

Even if it is heavier stochastic processes will push a proportion of it up. Increase the total proportion and the proportion at high altitudes will increase.

Global warming has EVERYTHING to do with it

[mangu]

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!

Re:Global warming has EVERYTHING to do with it

[Bigby]

No, he is saying something more like "lung cancer doesn't cause second hand smoke". Because the title would read something like:

Lung Cancer Affects Health Of Those Around You

Re:Global warming has EVERYTHING to do with it

[silentcoder]

>Please prove that the commenter was bribed by the oil industry, that there exists any attempt by oil industry companies and that any money is on the table. I want receipts, invoices or funding statements in company records. Otherwise you're just full of shit.

Of course, because it's standard practise for companies to keep careful, public accounting records of illegal or deceitful activities (paying shills is sometimes the former and always the latter).

The extra CO2 is pretty well explained.

[cnaumann]

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

Re:Never mind just CO2 , what about HCFCs?

[khallow]

HCFCs replaced CFCs because they don't react with ozone so don't destroy the ozone layer.

HCFCs do react with ozone and more so than CFCs. But since they're more reactive, they're more likely to decompose before they get to ozone-destroying altitudes.

Re:less drag?

[silentcoder]

There is no contradiction.

Go put your hand behind your fridge - notice that the iron grid there is quite a bit warmer than room temperature ?
But the inside of the fridge is cold...

See to make the fridge cold, we have to MOVE the heat inside it somewhere, that grid is where it ends up being radiated away from.

The grid gets warmer, so the fridge can get colder.

Is that a contradiction too ?

Re:What is CO2 doing up there?

[You're All Wrong]

Nice, but simplifying matters, and perhaps misleading. Gasses of different densities are *perfectly* happy to settle out. It's only the continual stirring of things like what we locally call weather that makes them mostly homogeneous in the layer above the earth's surface most of us experience. The words "homosphere" and "heterosphere" thus got their names. I can't do better than wackypedia, so I'll just lift the pertinent section:
"""
Above the turbopause at about 100 km (62 mi; 330,000 ft) (essentially corresponding to the mesopause), the composition varies with altitude. This is because the distance that particles can move without colliding with one another is large compared with the size of motions that cause mixing. This allows the gases to stratify by molecular weight, with the heavier ones such as oxygen and nitrogen present only near the bottom of the heterosphere. The upper part of the heterosphere is composed almost completely of hydrogen, the lightest element.
"""

The reason we do not suffocate is not because gases do not separate out, it is because we have not just a source of O2 and a sink of CO2, but also constant stirring.