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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!
Good, because I'm going to need more storage space pretty soon.
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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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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.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
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!!!"