Hard hitting global and local news
Hard hitting global and local news
Tweet Ugo Bardi from the Frog That Jumped Out draws Eli’s attention (very short span) to an astounding editorial comment in Climate by the publishers. Climate is a new MDPI open access journal whose Editor in Chief, Nicole Moelders is a professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks. Of perhaps more relevance she is closely associated with Syun-Ichi Akasofu, perhaps the best known faculty member there for his work on the upper atmosphere, the Aurora and the Magnetosphere. Moelders, of perhaps equal relevance to this post is married to Gerhard Kramm, a close friend of both Eli and the cyanobacteria’s press agent . Anyhoo, Moelders is the chief editor, big into the u ncertainty and natural variation club, and right out of the box, she published a rant by SI Akasofu, On the Present Halting of Global Warming The rise in global average temperature over the last century has halted since roughly the year 2000, despite the fact that the release of CO 2 into the atmosphere is still increasing. It is suggested here that this interruption has been caused by the suspension of the near linear (+0.5 °C/100 years or 0.05 °C/10 years) temperature increase over the last two centuries, due to recovery from the Little Ice Age, by a superposed multi-decadal oscillation of a 0.2 °C amplitude and a 50~60 year period, which reached its positive peak in about the year 2000—a halting similar to those that occurred around 1880 and 1940.
The AGU has issued its revised statement on climate change , approved by the fifteen member committee chaired by Gerald North with one (predictable) dissent. Human induced climate change requires urgent action. Humanity is the major influence on the global climate change observed over the past 50 years.
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Tweet One of the useful things the Rabett used to do was to explain what happens to the energy when a molecule, say CO 2 (carbon dioxide) although you could also say H 2 O (water vapor) or CH 4 (methane) absorbs light. For the purpose of this post, the photon would be in the infrared region of the spectrum. This is an evergreen for two classes of bunnies Bunnies who don’t realize that the molecule can also emit light. This is a popular one amongst organikers and analytical chemists whose experience with IR spectroscopy is in an absorption spectrum for analysis of samples Bunnies who think that the only way that an excited molecule can get rid of the energy is to emit a photon.   For every CO 2 molecule there are roughly 3000 2500 other molecules in the same volume of air. When a CO 2 molecule collides with one of the other molecules, almost certainly an oxygen or nitrogen molecule, energy transfer occurs. Each CO 2 molecule can be described as having translational, vibrational and rotational energy and the same is true of the collision partner. Any collision can in principle change the amount of any of these forms of energy by any amount subject to conservation of energy and momentum. The probability of this happening depends on the relative translational energy of the collision, the relative orientation of the molecules, their distance of closest approach and the distribution of energy in each of the collision partners prior to the collision. The detailed study of such effects is called collision dynamics or molecular dynamics. Fortunately, we can take thermal averages over many of these variables, either theoretically or experimentally which makes life, theory and experiments much simpler and a hell of a lot less expensive and time consuming. That sort of thing usually goes under the rubric of reaction (when there is one) kinetics or energy transfer studies when there isn’t.
While no one was looking the sun has gone cold, more precisely the sun gods have decreased total solar irradiation by about 4 W/m 2 to 1360.8 + 0.5 W/m 2 from 1365.4 + 1.3 W/m 2 ERB is the Earth Radiation Budget instrument, ACRIM is the Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiation Monitor, SORCE is the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment carrying the TIM, Total Irradiation Monitor. The rest is left to the industrious reader. What happened was that apertures in earlier instruments were not properly chosen, allowing excess light to be scattered into the sensor (right side of the figure below) resulting in higher TSI being measured. The magnitude of the effect was determined in a purpose built testing facility at LASP. The error is not without consequences As Kopp and Lean point out, A nonzero average global net radiation at the top of the atmosphere is indicative of Earth’s thermal disequilibrium imposed by climate forcing. But whereas the current planetary imbalance is nominally 0.85 W/m 2 [Hansen et al., 2005], estimates of this quantity from space‐based measurements range from 3 to 7 W/m 2 SORCE/TIM’s lower TSI value reduces this discrepancy by 1 W/m 2 [Loeb et al., 2009].
News recently announced that China plans to enact a carbon tax , along with its longstanding commitment to never match US per-capita emission rates, and India’s greater commitment to never match OECD rates , all suggest a need to look at emissions a different way. What matters is total emissions over the modern time period from the recent past until several generations (at least) into the future
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