You mean that the big, glowing ball in the sky can actually affect our planet?
NASA-funded researchers say the solar storms of March 8th through 10th dumped enough energy in Earth’s upper atmosphere to power every residence in New York City for two years.
h/t Shaken
Footnote: (1) No one on Earth’s surface would have felt this impulse of heat. […] The daily average infrared radiation from the entire planet is 240 W/m2—enough to power NYC for 200,000 years.”
I’m still waiting for the bumper sticker, “It’s The Sun Stupid.”
“No one on Earth’s surface would have felt this impulse of heat”…really? from the time that solar flare hit the planet it took about one week to melt all the snow in Manitoba. Big yellow ball doing what it does best I say.
The sun doesn’t affect the climate, but solar power can replace fossil fuels. Makes sense to me.
Ya – I’m gona git me one of those big honking black lookin panels to put on top of ma pik-up.
I have solar panels at all of my four houses – saving the planet dontchaknow!!!!
From the article:
“Carbon dioxide and nitric oxide are natural thermostats,” explains James Russell of Hampton University, SABER’s principal investigator. “When the upper atmosphere (or ‘thermosphere’) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.” (Emphasis mine)
Er, the filthy, nasty CO2 that every enviro-weenie curses as a poison actually helps moderate planet temperature? To quote Gomer Pyle: ‘Golllleee!’
Earth hour is coming . . . Make sure the BBQ tank is full and all available lightbulbs are in good working order.
Maybe I should make a banner for my balcony?
was thinking of stepping it up a notch for this years earth hour. perhaps putting up a sign in incandescent christmas lights saying happy earth hour in my front yard and attracting visitors by pointing flood lights into the sky. you know, to extend my appreciation for the green movement and all.
Earth Hour…
All set…all I gotta do is run an extensive cord out to the porch…got one of them industrial sodium floods…..it takes a minute er two to warm up but projects the desired image….
It makes me visible from orbit but doesn’t spike me Hydro One Bill.
Unfortunately, for some, that sentence will just be one more piece of evidence to harden their conviction that solar power is the only rational solution to all of society’s energy needs.
// “Carbon dioxide and nitric oxide are natural thermostats,” […]“When the upper atmosphere (or ‘thermosphere’) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.”
Er, the filthy, nasty CO2 that every enviro-weenie curses as a poison actually helps moderate planet temperature? //
A thermostat can be turned up OR down.
CO2 absorbs longwave radiation & sends it in all directions. If all the LR was coming DOWN then the effect is to reduce that amount by sending some back up. [thermosphere]
If the LR is coming UP the effect is to reduce that amount by sending some back down [troposphere]
CO2 doesn’t know up from down, but we should.
Atmospheric CO2: the greenhouse thermostat
@ dizzy at March 24, 2012 1:34 PM
Did you also read the 792 comments that question the validity of the authors conclusions ?
// Did you also read the 792 comments that question the validity of the authors conclusions ? //
+
Heh. Featuring a paper by Lacis & Gavin Schmidt over at the Curry blog was really putting the cat among the pigeons , eh?
Apparently there were lots more; Curry claims to be “weeding out the content free attacks”. Among the rest, I especially like the people who step forward with their own work.
// In order to verify Lacis’ claim that CO2 is driving Earth climate, I propose a small exercise regarding variations of CO2 concentration vs. variations of T° and PDO index, just using a convenient tool and data set available on the Net. // ETC ETC …
The perpetual motion & refuters of Einstein are flocking to the Climate Wars.
// for some, that sentence will just be one more piece of evidence to harden their conviction that solar power is the only rational solution to all of society’s energy needs. //
If the Chinese make solar extractors any cheaper, people will be shingling their roofs with them.
“CO2 doesn’t know up from down, but we should. ”
Foot, meet bullet, dizzy. You just shot down your own argument.
Imagine a little lonely CO2 molecule, right smack on the surface of a perfectly spherical Earth. It emits a photon of LW infrared energy, on some totally random vector. Now, imagine a plane, tangent to the surface of the Earth, at that same point, and arbitrarily define the elevation of that plane as zero degrees. Any vector with an elevation of less than zero degrees will cause that emitted photon to strike the Earth, thereby heating it. Any vector at an elevation above zero degrees will permit that emitted photon to go haring off into the vastness of outer space, barring a collision with another molecule of gas.
With me so far? Good. Now let us define all vectors capable of hitting the Earth as “down”, and all those capable of hitting outer space as “up”. For a molecule of CO2 sitting right at Earth’s surface, the set of all possible “up” vectors, infinite though it is, equals the set of all possible “down” vectors. So any randomly-chosen vector has a 50% chance of being “up” and a 50% chance of being down, for a molecule of CO2 emitting at the planet’s surface.
Now let’s transfer our attention to a CO2 molecule wafting around the atmosphere at a height of 10,000 meters. Maybe it’s a relic of one of David Suzuki’s jet airliner flights to some important global warming conference. Let’s do the equivalent geometry for that molecule. I did the math; at 10,000 meters altitude, the visible horizon is about 3.211° below a horizontal plane (the astronomic horizon). That means, for a molecule at 10 km elevation, there is a thin conical wedge of possible vectors below a horizontal plane which cannot hit the Earth directly. So the volume of space previously defined as “up” has been augmented by the volume of this wedge, and the volume of space previously defined as “down” has been diminished by the volume of that wedge. So any randomly-emitted photon from that CO2 molecule at 10,000 meters elevation stands a slightly better chance of being lost into outer space than it does of hitting the Earth and heating it.
So what happens in the event that emitted photon strikes another molecule elsewhere in the atmosphere? Simply, the probability of that target molecule radiating “up or “down” as defined above is a function of its elevation. The probabilities are equal at elevation zero, but as elevation increases, “up” is increasingly favoured.
Needless to say, the Earth is not a perfect sphere, and irregularities in its surface can shift the balance of probabilities locally. A CO2 molecule in a deep valley has a lot more “down” available to it than “up”, and the converse for a molecule near a high mountain top. All that means is that the effective 50/50 elevation is not zero meters, but somewhat higher, maybe a few tens of meters, maybe a few hundred, but certainly not out beyond the limits of the atmosphere.
The bottom line is that there is a slightly increased probability that IR radiation from CO2 will be emitted into space than will be absorbed by the ground.
dizzily
do you know the meaning of logrithmic
The earth worshippers still blame the middle class for the heat the sun disburses – far better for the carpetbagging green con men who ride the global warming hysteria for profit.
Watch the warm summer bring out a fruit fly infestation.
When the electrical grid goes off line for good or until or until sanity returns to then green Luddites. Don’t count on reality piercing anyones brain in this camp.
Damn, if only Solyndra had not gone bankrupt. /s
// dizzily
do you know the meaning of logrithmic //
Posted by: NME666 at March 24, 2012 5:26 PM
Yes. AND how to spell the word.
Fascinating !
// So what happens in the event that emitted photon strikes another molecule elsewhere in the atmosphere? Simply, the probability of that target molecule radiating “up or “down” as defined above is a function of its elevation. The probabilities are equal at elevation zero, but as elevation increases, “up” is increasingly favoured.
[…]
The bottom line is that there is a slightly increased probability that IR radiation from CO2 will be emitted into space than will be absorbed by the ground. //
But not quite the bottom line. Remember the implied question was How can CO2 prevent IR from reaching the earth in the thermosphere while causing IR to reach the earth in troposphere? That is, how can it cool & also warm?
The key difference is the the direction from which the IR is coming.
As you say, at thermospheric elevations, the earth [your down] is a smaller portion of the circle. This reinforces the ability of CO2 to protect the earth from downward IR, even a small redirection will do it; that is cool the atmosphere. So your calculation clarifies that NASA comment — “When the upper atmosphere (or ‘thermosphere’) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.”
For the troposphere some things are different. Your “Down” is a much larger part of the circle, since elevations are much lower. And, since the IR direction is up, ANY redirection which is towards earth exerts a warming effect. And at these levels multiple absorptions & emmissions are the rule, the troposphere being much denser than the thermosphere. In fact this is pretty well what tropospheric warming means.
As an http://www.space.com/7685-earth-upper-atmosphere-cooling-dramatically.html “>article on thermospheric cooling states, [even acknowledging KevinB’s objection] “(While that may seem to contradict the idea of global warming, it has long been known that carbon dioxide causes warming in the lowest part of the atmosphere and cooling in the upper layers of the atmosphere.)
Dizzy, we can play this game all day.
It is true that CO2 can absorb heat a little faster than nitrogen and oxygen but it becomes no hotter because it cannot absorb anymore heat than there is available to the other gases. This is against the laws of thermodynamics. All gases share their heat with the other gases. Gas molecules fly around and are constantly colliding with other gas molecules so they immediately lose any excess heat to other molecules during these collisions. That’s why the air is all one temperature in any limited volume.
• Even if CO2 levels were many times higher, radiative heating physics shows that it would make virtually no difference to temperature because it has a very limited heating ability. With CO2, the more there is, the less it heats because it quickly becomes saturated. For a detailed explanation go to: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
The following facts show that even high levels of CO2 can make almost no impact on heating the atmosphere.
1. Glasshouses with high levels of CO2 – hundreds of times higher than in the air to make plants grow faster – heat up during the day to the same temperature as glasshouses with air in them. This is also true for bottles of pure CO2 compared to ones with air.
2. The planets Venus and Mars have atmospheres that are almost entirely CO2 (97%) yet they have no ‘runaway’ greenhouse heating effect. Their temperatures are stable.
3. The geological record over hundreds of millions of years has shown that CO2 has had no affect whatsoever on climate. At times, CO2 was hundreds of times higher, yet there were ice ages.
4. In recent times when Earth was considerably warmer during the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warming, the higher temperatures then were totally natural because there was no industrialization back then.
• Water vapour is 4% of the air and that‘s 100 times as much as CO2. Water vapour absorbs 33 times as much heat as CO2 making CO2’s contribution insignificant. But like CO2, water vapour also gives this heat away to air molecules by contact (conduction) and radiation, thereby making the surrounding air the same temperature.
• The Earth’s atmosphere is very thin so its heat is continually being lost to the absolute coldness of outer space (-270 C). As there is no ‘ceiling’ to the atmosphere, surface heat cannot be retained. The Sun renews warmth every day.
Over the last few years Earth has had much colder winters due to very few magnetic storms on the Sun. These four increasingly colder winters have been particularly noticeable in the northern hemisphere where most of the land is. Because of this, the Arctic has re-frozen and glaciers that were receding are now surging due to the heavy snow falls. The Arctic showed some melting around its edges from the mid 90s to the mid 2000s due to the very high level of solar storm activity at that time. But as the Sun is now entering probably 2-4 decades of low solar activity, this is expected to cause global cooling.
// Dizzy, we can play this game all day. //
Yeah we could play this game all day, expecially if you dump a farrago of propositions like this on the screen.
Read gordonkneehill’s post. It makes an argument, shows the logic & actually advanced my understanding of the thermotropic cooling caused by CO2.
I’m not impressed with that site you link to.
Lots of fonts & colours, tarted up with graphs galore. But to lay out inaccessible 90s quotes about water vapour,[ insinuateing that CO2 doesn’t matter], from Wallace Broeker, the man who first used the expression “global warming” is bizzare.
Read this recent review —
Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat–and How to Counter It by Wallace Broecker and Robert Kunzig Hill and Wang, 2008
// Wallace Broecker, of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, first warned in the 1970s that the earth would warm because of a buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases released by burning fossil fuels. In his new book, Fixing Climate (co-authored by Robert Kunzig), Broecker, 76, argues that we must not only reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) but also remove it from the atmosphere on a massive scale to avert environmental ruin. //
@ Dizzy
first warned in the 1970s that the earth would warm because of a buildup of carbon ….
So why has there been no warming in the past 11 years ?
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/10/30/surprise-no-warming-in-last-11-years/