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Space Traffic May Be Creating More Clouds
seagirlreed writes "Rocket traffic may be adding water to the Earth's mesosphere, leading to more very high clouds in this layer of thin air on the edge of space. From the article: 'A team of researchers looking for an expected decrease in the number of clouds in this layer, as solar activity and heating have ramped up, were instead surprised to find an increase in the number and brightness of clouds in this near-outer-space region over the last two years. ... The source of the water to make the clouds is a puzzle, Siskind explained, because there is not much sign of it coming up into the mesosphere. On the other hand, rockets and, until recently, shuttles roaming in space could rain water exhaust down into the mesosphere.'"
with 1 stone... put lots of rockets up and build something cool like a Elysium space city, or maybe a space elevator. And solve global warming at the same time!
to confuse the C02 argument even further.
Or perhaps simply to overlook the CO2 (and by the way, it is C oh 2, not C zero 2) issue completely, in their quest to blame some specific activity.
Since CO2 levels have recently pass the 400 ppm level for the first time in "recorded history" (ignoring for the moment that nobody recorded this until last 50 years or so), the source of the clouds could be a natural reaction to the increased CO2, and the claimed increase in world temperatures.
Since the article says:
'A team of researchers looking for an expected decrease in the number of clouds in this layer, as solar activity and heating have ramped up,
Yet in years past they were predicting increases cloud cover at all altitudes as one of the outcomes of increased temperatures. So why were they expecting a decrease?
It seems far more likely to me that they have their model wrong than it is likely that the puny number of launches of late have dumped that many tons of water in the mesosphere.
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Since CO2 levels have recently pass the 400 ppm level for the first time in "recorded history" (ignoring for the moment that nobody recorded this until last 50 years or so),:
You forget the well-known practice of extracting the air from bubbles in ice cores, for direct measures.
At half a gram per cubic metre or 0.0005 kg/m^3, your 10^6 kg would make a cloud of 2 cubic kilometers, or two typical cumulus clouds.
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Funny thing about clouds... they increase reflectivity. As the temperatures go up more water vapour goes up into the sky to form clouds, which reflect incoming light and heat and provide a cooling effect. i.e.: it's self-regulating.
They reflect incoming light. and outgoing heat.
To first order, in fact, clouds don't have a significant effect on average temperature (if they reflect incident light and exiting infrared equally well, the effects cancel). They do have a big effect on the day/night temperature variation (cloud-free days have high daytime temperatures and low nighttime temperature.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
FWIW, there is some indication that Noctilucent clouds in the mesosphere have been only been around since the industrial revolution times (since there aren't really any earlier descriptions of the phenomena in recorded history unlike other atmospheric anomolies like auroras or sundogs), so it's a bit presumputous that the effect has been greatly effected by space traffic vs some other human terrestrial source. It is also suspected that since this phenomena appears to also track the solar cycle, the most recent solar cycle (24) got off to a late start (by a couple of years), and they also noted this phenomena was a bit higher than normal the last couple of years and they don't really know much about this phenomena, so it's hard to get too excited about this yet...
On the other hand, there is much more airplane traffic vs space traffic and airplane contrails apparently have a much larger effect.
Funny thing about clouds... they increase reflectivity. As the temperatures go up more water vapour goes up into the sky to form clouds, which reflect incoming light and heat and provide a cooling effect. i.e.: it's self-regulating.
This is Richard Linzen's "Iris" hypothesis. One of the few plausible bits of actual science from the so-called climate skeptics. Unfortunately, it seems not to work and was thoroughly refuted about ten years ago.
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It's more like scientists making mild suggestions requiring further research and the media taking that as "Rocket launches are going to cause permanent overcast skies within 20 years!!!"
Forget the models - Do we get our glaciers back?
Yep. At the very next ice age. Coming soon (in geological terms) to a theater near you.
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Always good to include a citation...
Keeling: The reconstructions before the ice core period, which take us only back 800,000 years, are a lot less secure. In the case of ice cores, we actually have samples of old air. And subject to some small caveats, you can simply analyze those and figure it out. In earlier geologic eras, the reconstruction of carbon dioxide depends on more indirect measurements. The work of people like Mark Pagani at Yale, who is in the business of reconstructing paleo CO2, shows that the last time that CO2 was around this level was probably in the mid-Pliocene, 2 to 4 million years ago.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/may/14/record-400ppm-co2-carbon-emissions
Quite apart from all this wonderful science being thrown around, which is quite beyond poor old me, would there even be enough waste water being left by the rockets to account for these vasty high clouds? They're very small things, comparatively. And as slew mentions, if it were airplane contrails, there's a lot more air traffic than surface-to-space.
"Rocket traffic". The first time ever I saw these two words written together as a new, compound expression for a new concept. The XXIst century has very well begun :-))
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Others have pointed out that it doesn't actually work that way, but not why.
Clouds are made out of water, water absorbs UV (rather than reflecting it) and radiates IR. But it radiates it in all directions. It takes about two feet of liquid water to absorb all of the UV, which is why you can still get a sunburn on a cloudy day. UV is still coming through, and now (due to the influence of the clouds) it's coming in at all angles. UV coming in at an angle has less chance to be reflected into space, and more chance to hit the ground. Meanwhile, much of the IR radiated by the clouds will strike the planet. So in fact, the amount of energy reflected by the clouds is not nearly as much as you might think. And much of what is reflected is reflected not by the top layer of clouds, but by a subsequent layer. Some of that will simply be reflected down again. In the process it's also lending heat energy to the atmosphere, which will be released over time; some of it outwards into space, and some of it downwards into Earth.
TL;DR clouds are not made of mylar, HTH
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