[It began
here]
On the contrary, in July, it's the NH the one getting most of the heat. As it has less polar ice than the SH, it reflects less solar energy (and as it has less and less ice every year, this contributes to warm the NH faster). Less ocean area to absorb the heat, and temperature in large continental areas going quickly up.
Comparatively, the SH, with its ocean masses, experiences a great loss of heat but without temperatures dropping so steeply. So the global mean temperature goes up.
A variation of the global air temperatures at surface of almost 4°C around the year shows how the planet adapts to sunshine conditions to match energy-in with energy-out. You already knew it? Well, if that is true you can easily gut-feel the result of this hypothetical situation:
Suppose all mankind joined together in a journey of prayer. Every living human being praying the deities for them to do this miracle: take heat from the atmosphere, the first 5 metres of ground and the first 10 metres of ocean, and take heat enough to make every temperature to drop 1°C, so the world would have about the same temperatures as 1900. The miracle also includes to take away enough heat to condensate 20% of water vapour in the atmosphere.
Suppose that Xenu hears our prayers and grants us such a miracle. Temperatures drop and global warming is wiped out from the surface of the Earth. How long do you think it will take for the temperatures to get to the levels before the miracle? Don't make any calculation. Your gut-feeling is enough. Take 15 seconds.
(15 seconds pass) Well, about a week later, half of the heat will have returned to the system. One month later the miracle will be just a memory. Of course, pretty strange weather patterns would arise in the meantime, but soon the miracle will be gone. The reason is the miracle requiring 2.2 x 10
22J of sensible heat and 0.4 x 10
22J of latent heat to be withdrawn. Less than two days of Sun given energy.
Let's raise the bet. If we're asking a miracle, let's not be cheap. We like all the thermal energy the system trapped since 1900 to be withdrawn, including that energy melting all that ice -but we're not asking the ice to come back ... yet-. That is asking a lot. There isn't an exact figure but 70 x 10
22J is a good estimate. Some 45-50 days of solar energy trapped in a span of 114 years (+40,000 days). What tells your gut now? How long until we are back in square one (take other 15 seconds).
In some 6 months most of the change will be undone. Of course it's not easy to get those petajoules back into deep ocean and history wouldn't repeat itself. In less than 2 years all the temperatures will be going up again "normal" speed. And if we had asked all the lost ice to be recovered? Almost exactly the same, with a difference of weeks.
That leaves us with this bit of truth. Today's world temperatures depend mostly of the ability that the atmosphere has to deal with today's incoming solar energy. Yesterday is not much relevant -yesterday, 24 hours ago, and even less relevant is yesterday, 114 years ago-. To solve the current warming we might wipe out all the energy accumulated in 114 years pretty much to no avail. Nothing can be solved because the system is damaged. The miracle shouldn't have affected the heat content or the ice cover but the atmosphere.
If we ask the miracle of an atmosphere back to 300ppmv of CO2 -and the same with other main greenhouse gases- it will take to the planet a few weeks to go back to 1900 -with also strange weather patterns in the meantime-. And ice cover will be recover in a few years -its area, not its volume-.
That poses the question. What are we discussing when we "debate" global warming with the endless parade of denying vagrants that show hear now and again?
Here, there are a lot of intellectual vices and lack of knowledge operating both sides of the rope in this sort of tug-of-war.
Just as a uncategorised sample:
- Discussing "it's the Sun" with the famous figure against "the Maunder minimum" and other notions that are irrelevant to the problem.
- Discussing heat trapped in the system and loss of ice as if that could take command of the warming process. Of course they give life to feedback loops. Yes. Feedback! Not the basic problem.
- Innumeracy has another ugly companion: asystemicity. How the very concept of feedback is dealt is such a big problem. People believing that any negative feedback will cancel the original signal, like a person in a boat having a breach in its hull and they thinking that they can avoid the boat sinking with a bilge pump or just patting water outboard with their hands (most denialists believe this thing). Or people believing that any positive feedback will make the system much worse, or even changed into a different system (way too many "warmers" believe this).
[it will continue]
