Global Warming and all that stuff.

[mhaze]

Really? I heard it was the higher the relative humidity the more cloud cover forms. And RH decreases for a given WV content with temperature, as anyone who has studied physics knows.

http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/...&issn=1520-0493&volume=122&issue=06&page=1021

I see no mention of WV content, but a very prominent mention of RH.

This is a pretty comprehensive discussion.

 

[mhaze]

This is a pretty comprehensive discussion.

Bad link, sorry, here is the corrected link. And from the beginning disucssions -

(relating to volcanic activity etc, bold is mine)
"Such variations are referred to as "natural" variability, that is the climate varies naturally for reasons that are not fully understood. The problem for understanding climate changes that might be produced by human activities is that the predicted changes are similar in magnitude to those shown here. The difference between natural and human-induced climate change will only appear clearly in much longer ( >= 50 years) data records."

I would suggest then that the available science does not clearly indicate any positive or negative forcing relationship to have been proven by empirical studies.

In this thread such a relationship seems to have been asserted, that "increased cloud cover warms the planet".

It is worth noting further that the issues of more evaporation, more clouds and the like is basic weather - no "climate scientist" lays more claim to this area of study with any rational basis than the weatherman.

 

[mhaze]

Really? I heard it was the higher the relative humidity the more cloud cover forms. And RH decreases for a given WV content with temperature, as anyone who has studied physics knows.

http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/...&issn=1520-0493&volume=122&issue=06&page=1021

I see no mention of WV content, but a very prominent mention of RH.

Actually that's a very interesting point. I'm having some trouble proving it to myself; here is why. Let's say that it is a typical summer day, and the temperature changes by 1 degree C. It's a day with few outside influences, such as a cold air mass from the Artic or a Gulf moisture laden breeze incoming.

With the increase in temperature, there will be an increase in thermals over the land mass - up and down movement of air. The air, note contains 1 degree C more energy. The altitude at which clouds form will RISE by perhaps 500 meters. Does this mean fewer clouds? Don't think so. The energy available will combine with the moisture available and fall as rain. One certain effect is that the higher energy means more violent storms, but that isn't related to this discussion. Can it be said that the higher temperature does not cause thermal activity resulting in a proportionately higher cloud base on the average?

HOWEVER....

The water cycle as above described doesn't describe that in the northern latitudes, where clouds are mostly ice year round. Snow does not fall according to the same dynamics as water droplets. And at this point we might begin to grasp a bit of why there is more cloud cover the farther north you go. When that air comes back as Artic cold air masses it has been uplifted, so most of it's moisture has been moved out as snow or left as clouds in the northern latitudes. But that is another cycle relating to air moving to and from the poles.

The dynamics are yet again different in say, cirrus and stratocirrus which are ice crystals.

And note I'm ignoring air currents to and from the oceans which is a laughable simplification.

So...is a hot day a clear day? And does this really matter in the context of the overall discussion of GW?AGW?

 

[Schneibster]

There are two glaring problems you have to ignore:
1. Add more CO2, retain more heat.
2. It's getting hotter.
As I have said repeatedly, the physics of the situation are undeniable, and the data are undeniable. The details of how much and how soon are matters of debate; but any first-year physics student can tell you it's going to get hotter still, and it's going to do it sooner than we can do anything about it.

I'll also point out, since y'all are fussing about it again, that we could have got started ten years ago, if y'all had listened instead of playing politics.

 

[mhaze]

There are two glaring problems you have to ignore:
1. Add more CO2, retain more heat.
2. It's getting hotter.

Umm....yes, sort of. But the original question was along the lines of would not the water balance cycle counteract these factors. CP asserted that was not so. I am trying to indicate here that there really isn't any agreement on the effect of the overall water cycle. If the weather expert says he thinks more heat, more clouds...I'm very disinclined to argue.

It does a mistake me to presume that the water cycle (which is a zero sum game in its own right) would counteract exactly as required for human comfort, any effect on warming due to increased CO2. But other cosmological constants seem to oddly have been picked for our benefit

 

[Wolverine]

Considering that the Sun has passed solar maximum and is currently approaching solar minimum...

I thought we were already there.

 

[Schneibster]

Curses, foiled again! I have to check these better! Thanks Wolverine.

 

[Ceritus]

I was referring to the NAM GFS and WRF models for weather prediction. Short term mind you.

 

[Schneibster]

I guess, then, I'm not quite clear on the relevance to AGW. These are 1-10 day forecasting models (at least the ones I pulled up were- there are apparently several others, including RUC and some other ones that I'm not sure what they model). Descriptions of the way they (the ones I looked at) work indicate again that we are looking here at relative humidity, not total moisture.

I think the temperature's gone up enough that if we were going to see a significant offset from increased clouds, we'd have seen it by now. There's not a sign of it, and there's collapsing ice shelves, and retreating ice caps, and on and on. I think we ought at least to be arguing about what we should do about it instead of whether pie in the sky is gonna save us from teh evul global warming monster, or whether it's happening or not.

 

[CapelDodger]

I think the temperature's gone up enough that if we were going to see a significant offset from increased clouds, we'd have seen it by now.

I'm of the same opinion.

It seems that a lot of people haven't realised that we're not just in the realm of predictions now, we're actually watching the process in action. Ideas dreamt up twenty and more years ago to "explain" why AGW would not occur can reasonably be consigned to the fantasy-file, including Lindzen's farcical Iris Theory.

Speaking of Lindzen, I read recently that he's predicting a cooling trend to kick-in within "the next ten years". Does anyone know when he first made that prediction? It's rather bold.

 

[CapelDodger]

Umm....yes, sort of. But the original question was along the lines of would not the water balance cycle counteract these factors. CP asserted that was not so. I am trying to indicate here that there really isn't any agreement on the effect of the overall water cycle. If the weather expert says he thinks more heat, more clouds...I'm very disinclined to argue.

I'm rarely disinclined to argue .

Convection is driven by temperature differences, not temperature per se. Warming is occuring throughout the troposphere, which is where the weather is, clouds in particular. That's why I would expect global warming to have little impact on cloud formation and behaviour. Essentially, the same process will occur, for the same physical reasons, but in a warmer and wetter troposphere.

Perhaps I'm wrong - it happens - but observation seems to bear me out.

 

[Ceritus]

Fair enough, I was talking about the short term models because I thought dodger was claiming that high cloud doesn't effect temp. I also agree with schneibster where we should be figuring out what to do about it. It is obviously too late to make any changes in emissions we should be figuring out how to prepare for the coming disasters and how to protect ourselves from them.

 

[Ceritus]

I'm rarely disinclined to argue .

Convection is driven by temperature differences, not temperature per se. Warming is occuring throughout the troposphere, which is where the weather is, clouds in particular. That's why I would expect global warming to have little impact on cloud formation and behaviour. Essentially, the same process will occur, for the same physical reasons, but in a warmer and wetter troposphere.

Perhaps I'm wrong - it happens - but observation seems to bear me out.

You do realize the warmer the area the higher the tropopause is in the majority of cases right? Heating has a very large impact on cloud cover and developement. While you are correct the driving force in weather is differential heating in the earth atmosphere. Besides the melting of the polar caps will add much more WV into the atmosphere because sublimation is not nearly as efficient as evaporation. RH is directly related to WV.

 

[Harpoon]

Earlier this week you may have been exposed to those news reports about the Snows of Kilimanjaro. Al Gore was wrong!!! -- global warming isn't responsible for the glacier atop the mountain shrinking.

Gore is a huckster IMO. But his error in selecting Kilimanjaro is being corrected. However, only one of the few news reports I saw included that the scientists who conducted the study said global warming IS responsible for glacial shrinkage outside of the tropics.

More sloppy journalism.

The scientists' full report was published in the latest edition of American Scientist.

Here's a link to their report: http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55553/page/1

 

[Schneibster]

Fair enough, I was talking about the short term models because I thought dodger was claiming that high cloud doesn't effect temp.

I believe he explicitly stated he agreed that high clouds do. Lemme see here...

Yep:

High clouds have a major effect on temperature.

No question there.

There ya go.

I also agree with schneibster where we should be figuring out what to do about it. It is obviously too late to make any changes in emissions we should be figuring out how to prepare for the coming disasters and how to protect ourselves from them.

Well, now, just hang on a cotton-pickin' minute there, Hoss.

First of all, who said anything about disasters? What we're talking about here is a gradual process, it's not like fifty-foot tidal waves are gonna hit every coastline in the world or something. But the thing is, it's gonna just keep gettin' worse little by little.

Second of all, if we don't stop making CO2, then we might actually find ourselves in a serious situation, evolutionarily speaking, which there's a pretty good chance if we do what we can now we won't have to deal with. Like as in, we might tip the climate into the zone of another strange attractor than the one it's in now, and that could be really bad, long-term; or depending on the strength of the attractor, really bad short-term.

Overall, I'd say what we need to do is look at how we live, how we work, how we play, how we get to work, how we eat, and so forth, and be more prudent than we've been so far, each and every one of us. We also need to look at big things that a lot of people are involved in- power generation, heavy industry, civil works projects, and think how we can do them in, again, a more prudent manner than we have up to now. If we do that, there's an excellent chance we won't have to do anything really drastic to get by pretty nicely, if perhaps not quite as nicely as now. But right now we're a day late and a dollar short; we should have started on this ten years ago, and if everyone hadn't been paying more attention to where Bill Clinton's schlong was than what the scientists were telling us, we would have. Now we are going to pay for that, and it's looking like it's going to pinch a bit for a little while.

The three big ones are personal transportation, power generation, and concrete. These need to change in a big way, fast.

The auto industry will do what it needs to do; people are already buying the products, and the longer that goes on the better the products will be, because people will buy the best they can get for the money, like they always do. Consumer Reports will report on how green products are, along with everything else (and don't start the CR fight; there are plenty of other organizations doing the same thing, I just picked CR because they're the best known). We have, I think, gotten through to most people that if they don't start owning this, it's going to own them, or anyway their kids. Kinda hard to look at them cooing at you and think, "Yeah, ya little ◊◊◊◊, we're screwin' the pooch for yer a$$, we're really gonna ◊◊◊◊ you up."

There's going to be the damnedest fight you seen in a month of Sundays over power. There's a whole s**tload of coal in the US, and a bunch of people who own it (or the land it's under, which is close enough for me), and first is gonna come the fight with them. They want their money. They're not gonna like it when someone tells them it's worth about as much as so much black rock and maybe they can make tables out of it or something.

And then there's the "environmentalists," who are going to whine about "nukes." It's gonna be nucular this, and nucular that, and all about how some guy had all his skin turn orange and green and fall off, and his schwantz turned green and purple and swelled up like a football, and now he's gonna spend the rest of his life in a tank, and it's all because he got "poisoned by evul nucular radiamation." They're going to be selling pyramids and crystals on every corner that will protect you from cell phone radiation, and microwave oven radiation, and whatever the negative wave woo of the month is. And some folks are gonna chain themselves up to some gates, and a few of them are gonna get the ◊◊◊◊ beat out of them and they'll whine some more about how the "pigs" are out to get them.

Then comes the NIMBYs. And that's the big one, because they're voters. You have to do SOMETHING with high-level waste, and you have to do something with low-level waste, too. Somebody's gonna get hosed, and it's gonna be out in the desert somewhere, betcher booty. But if we do it right, nobody'll get exposed to anything, and eventually they'll stop whining; of course, the stories will go on for years about how the gummint spilled some in the water, or how little Johnny came up with cancer and it's all them nucular storage sites' fault. But they'll do every damn thing they can come up with before we get there. Bet on it. If you live in the desert, I got advice: move. Soon. Because at some point, somebody's gonna say, "Look, we gotta put it somewhere, whadda ya want, the middle a' Manhattan?"

Then comes concrete, and that's a whole other story. Now we're talking about serious stuff. Our society runs on concrete in ways that most people never consider. It makes up a great deal of our infrastructure; roads, buildings, dams, airports, shopping centers, warehouses, silos, bridges... and as these things wear out, or get damaged by the environment, we need to replace them, and as we get more people, we need to make new ones. And we're not going to be able to make concrete so much any more. Concrete is going to become something we don't do very often.

But that's a big whack at it right there.

Other things will be done, too. Everybody's gonna tighten their belt a bit, like we always have when it got down to it. People who don't aren't gonna be welcome any more, and nobody's going to think it's amusing or even OK if you're not on the bus. How it is, there're places I don't shop. Period. Unless I absolutely gotta have what they got, and I've driven a hundred miles to find someone else and they didn't have it. And even then, I try to find a way not to need it. Lots of people are gonna be like that about it, because they know damn well what's comin', mommy and daddy been tellin' 'em it was gonna hurt when it came, an' now they're ready; we've had our decade of BS, now it's time to get to work. The only ones still fighting the plunge are the greedy ones.

Now we're talking about a situation where the risk is far enough out timewise that we've got some breathing room for technology to catch up and start making a difference. In fact, it's far enough out that it's arguable that other things that happen to the climate will overwhelm it. And quite frankly, I like living among trees, and that's another way to help the problem. Consider this for a moment: where did all that coal come from? I'll tell you: trees. They conquered the land before the animals that eat them got there, and over a period of about 300 million years, the Earth's climate rose and fell in, first, the Silurian and Ordovician ice ages, and finally le gran guignol: the Karoo Ice Age. It lasted over a hundred million years. And the Carboniferous period that led to it laid down the coal deposits we are burning now; that's why it's called "Carboniferous." That's how we'll fix it.

Tree-huggers rejoice: your time is coming. And genetic engineers specializing in plants: you too. There'll be no more whining about GM plants. It was always ridiculous, anyway; we've been screwing around with plants' genes for several thousand years now, and it's worked out pretty well, I'd say. What we need is trees that suck carbon out of the atmosphere. Get to work.

Mind you, this is all speculative. Nothing outlandish, mind you; not much science fiction; just not well-founded. But the part about how it's gonna get bad if we don't get down to it, that's not. No question about that, looking at the signs I see. We need to start now. We could deeply regret not getting on with this for a very long time, if we fool around any more.

 

[Schneibster]

Should I edit that and put /rant at the end?

 

[robinson]

Probably not. Most will just scroll past it. So it doesn't really matter.

 

[CapelDodger]

Earlier this week you may have been exposed to those news reports about the Snows of Kilimanjaro. Al Gore was wrong!!! -- global warming isn't responsible for the glacier atop the mountain shrinking.

Gore is a huckster IMO. But his error in selecting Kilimanjaro is being corrected. However, only one of the few news reports I saw included that the scientists who conducted the study said global warming IS responsible for glacial shrinkage outside of the tropics.

More sloppy journalism.

The scientists' full report was published in the latest edition of American Scientist.

Here's a link to their report: http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55553/page/1

An interesting piece. (The reference to "rimming" is presumably aimed at earning Google points ? )

Kilimanjaro was not a good example to choose; it has a high recognition-factor, obviously, but is not terribly representative. It's a stand-out, in more ways than one . Denialists can make mountains out of molehills, so they can make something frickin' enormous out of Kilimanjaro, enough to put Pluto in the shade (yet again).

I won't get started on journalism. I have other things to do today.


eta : Oh, that's riming. My bad .

 

[Harpoon]

Pluto should be kept in the shade, and as the climate continues to warm, Mickey should see to it he has plenty of fresh water.

As for journalism, I keep telling myself it can rise to the level of its responsibility. It can. Really. I'm sure of it.

Just don't ask me for proof.

 

[Harpoon]

I still believe AGW is just the tip of the iceberg , with our uncontrolled population growth the greater threat.

Science has done it's job in that respect providing several good methods of birth control... as if that's done any good. So I presume we'll continue to multiply unabated, and that means we will have to deal with that growing impact.

I hope AGW's effects will lead us to further research about the broader implications of humankind being a consumptive creature living among finite resources.

As Schneiber notes, we're not facing an overnight, global apocalypse because of AGW. But past civilizations have so stressed their food and water supplies and delivery systems that they crashed. Those culturals were regional. Our civilization and its impacts are now global.

AGW is a symptom of a greater disease... oh well, take two aspirins and call the doctor in the morning.