The Climate Change Debate Thread

[jmcc]

One question: If there is genuine Global Warming (as opposed to regional variations) then where was the Irish Summer?

Regards...jmcc

[fiannafailure]

One question: If there is genuine Global Warming (as opposed to regional variations) then where was the Irish Summer?

Regards...jmcc

In Spain, where it always is

[myksav]

I just love the complaints of "where's the Irish summer if global warming is genuine?" Ireland spans from 51 22 North to 55 22 North. Far enough north to be in the region for short summers and long cold winters, instead we have a comparatively mild climate mainly due to the Gulf Stream effect.
It is more likely for Ireland to get a shorter summer/colder winter if the global temperatures rise even a small amount. More heat in the weather system the less water gets trapped as snow/ice and more of the existing ground ice melts. That puts more fresh water into the oceans particularly from the Arctic areas. If enough fresh water gets into the North Atlantic, it would alter the flow of the Gulf Stream and we get short summers and bloody freezing winters. Think Canadian coastline climate.

Our lovely wet, dull climate in summertime is because more heat generates more evaporation from the oceans, more clouds and an increased likelyhood of more rain. Lucky us, just look to Greece and Spain for lovely hot summers. And wildfires.

People mix up warm and heat. Warm is a subjective concept, heat is an objective concept. For the same level of heat in an environment, one person will feel warm, another will feel cold (or chilly).

It's all energy in the system, more energy more activity, less energy less activity. The energy talked about is heat, not warmth.

[fiannafailure]

I just love the complaints of "where's the Irish summer if global warming is genuine?" Ireland spans from 51 22 North to 55 22 North. Far enough north to be in the region for short summers and long cold winters, instead we have a comparatively mild climate mainly due to the Gulf Stream effect.
It is more likely for Ireland to get a shorter summer/colder winter if the global temperatures rise even a small amount. More heat in the weather system the less water gets trapped as snow/ice and more of the existing ground ice melts. That puts more fresh water into the oceans particularly from the Arctic areas. If enough fresh water gets into the North Atlantic, it would alter the flow of the Gulf Stream and we get short summers and bloody freezing winters. Think Canadian coastline climate.

Our lovely wet, dull climate in summertime is because more heat generates more evaporation from the oceans, more clouds and an increased likelyhood of more rain. Lucky us, just look to Greece and Spain for lovely hot summers. And wildfires.

People mix up warm and heat. Warm is a subjective concept, heat is an objective concept. For the same level of heat in an environment, one person will feel warm, another will feel cold (or chilly).

It's all energy in the system, more energy more activity, less energy less activity. The energy talked about is heat, not warmth.

Energy, energy, energy, no wonder it attracted Einsteins attention, and formed the basis for his most famous work.

People who put themselves forward as climate gurus should do a crash course in thermodynamics

[jpc]

The main issue is the waste of finite resources.
Recycling is a good start but rengineering production processes to ensure better recovery of material has to come on a bit more.
And slowing population growth.

[Destiny's Soldier]

People mix up warm and heat. Warm is a subjective concept, heat is an objective concept. For the same level of heat in an environment, one person will feel warm, another will feel cold (or chilly).

It's all energy in the system, more energy more activity, less energy less activity. The energy talked about is heat, not warmth.

I really don't know what you're getting at there. This loose talk about Energy in the system is a bit misleading in my opinion. I think I can say pretty much for certain that there are fewer storms in the summer than in winter in Ireland.

I'll save myself a lot of bother and get to the crux of the matter. If people spend a few mins reading the below it will explain where all that rain filled low lying cloud comes from. Met Eireann clearly hasn't a clue.

Billions of tonnes of water droplets vanish from the atmosphere, as if by magic, in events that reveal in detail how the Sun and the stars control our everyday clouds. Researchers of the National Space Institute in the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have traced the consequences of eruptions on the Sun that screen the Earth from some of the cosmic rays - the energetic particles raining down on our planet from exploded stars. 'The Sun makes fantastic natural experiments that allow us to test our ideas about its effects on the climate,' says Prof. Henrik Svensmark, lead author of a report newly published in Geophysical Research Letters. When solar explosions interfere with the cosmic rays there is a temporary shortage of small aerosols, chemical specks in the air that normally grow until water vapour can condense on them, so seeding the liquid water droplets of low-level clouds. Because of the shortage, clouds over the ocean can lose as much as 7 per cent of their liquid water within seven or eight days of the cosmic-ray minimum.

'A link between the Sun, cosmic rays, aerosols, and liquid-water clouds appears to exist on a global scale,' the report concludes. This research, to which Torsten Bondo and Jacob Svensmark contributed, validates 13 years of discoveries that point to a key role for cosmic rays in climate change. In particular, it connects observable variations in the world's cloudiness to laboratory experiments in Copenhagen showing how cosmic rays help to make the all-important aerosols.

Other investigators have reported difficulty in finding significant effects of the solar eruptions on clouds, and Henrik Svensmark understands their problem. 'It's like trying to see tigers hidden in the jungle, because clouds change a lot from day to day whatever the cosmic rays are doing,' he says. The first task for a successful hunt was to work out when 'tigers' were most likely to show themselves, by identifying the most promising instances of sudden drops in the count of cosmic rays, called Forbush decreases. Previous research in Copenhagen predicted that the effects should be most noticeable in the lowest 3000 metres of the atmosphere. The team identified 26 Forbush decreases since 1987 that caused the biggest reductions in cosmic rays at low altitudes, and set about looking for the consequences.

The first global impact of the shortage of cosmic rays is a subtle change in the colour of sunlight, as seen by ground stations of the aerosol robotic network AERONET. By analysing its records during and after the reductions in cosmic rays, the DTU team found that violet light from the Sun looked brighter than usual. A shortage of small aerosols, which normally scatter violet light as it passes through the air, was the most likely reason. The colour change was greatest about five days after the minimum counts of cosmic rays.

Why the delay? Henrik Svensmark and his team were not surprised by it, because the immediate action of cosmic rays, seen in laboratory experiments, creates micro-clusters of sulphuric acid and water molecules that are too small to affect the AERONET observations. Only when they have spent a few days growing in size should they begin to show up, or else be noticeable by their absence. The evidence from the aftermath of the Forbush decreases, as scrutinised by the Danish team, gives aerosol experts valuable information about the formation and fate of small aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere.

Although capable of affecting sunlight after five days, the growing aerosols would not yet be large enough to collect water droplets. The full impact on clouds only becomes evident two or three days later. It takes the form of a loss of low-altitude clouds, because of the earlier loss of small aerosols that would normally have grown into 'cloud condensation nuclei' capable of seeding the clouds. 'Then it's like noticing bare patches in a field, where a farmer forgot to sow the seeds,' Svensmark explains. 'Three independent sets of satellite observations all tell a similar story of clouds disappearing, about a week after the minimum of cosmic rays.'

Averaging satellite data on the liquid-water content of clouds over the oceans, for the five strongest Forbush decreases from 2001 to 2005, the DTU team found a 7 per cent decrease, as mentioned earlier. That translates into 3 billion tonnes of liquid water vanishing from the sky. The water remains there in vapour form, but unlike cloud droplets it does not get in the way of sunlight trying to warm the ocean. After the same five Forbush decreases, satellites measuring the extent of liquid-water clouds revealed an average reduction of 4 per cent. Other satellites showed a similar 5 per cent reduction in clouds below 3200 metres over the ocean.

'The effect of the solar explosions on the Earth's cloudiness is huge,' Henrik Svensmark comments. 'A loss of clouds of 4 or 5 per cent may not sound very much, but it briefly increases the sunlight reaching the oceans by about 2 watt per square metre, and that's equivalent to all the global warming during the 20th Century.'

Science Centric | News | Cosmic meddling with the clouds by seven-day magic




It's the Sun not CO2 which rules the Climate.

[myksav]

I really don't know what you're getting at there. This loose talk about Energy in the system is a bit misleading in my opinion. I think I can say pretty much for certain that there are fewer storms in the summer than in winter in Ireland.

I'll save myself a lot of bother and get to the crux of the matter. If people spend a few mins reading the below it will explain where all that rain filled low lying cloud comes from. Met Eireann clearly hasn't a clue.



Science Centric | News | Cosmic meddling with the clouds by seven-day magic




It's the Sun not CO2 which rules the Climate.

The sun puts heat into our atmosphere, CO2 helps keep it in. Not enough CO2 and the planet freezes, too much it over-heats.
A small amount of extra heat over a period of time can be tolerated if the excess heat can escape. The system is in balance.
If the heat cannot escape, that heat builds up.

Add heat to a system that is heat governed and you get more activity. In Irelands case this means more cloud cover, for Greece, it means wildfires. In other areas it means drought.
You don't need storms for the extreme effects. Too much cloud cover and/or rain means crop reduction or failure. Too little means crop reduction or failure.

[Noelene]

That's true enough. But the issue at the moment is how much of the sun's energy-spectrum arrives, and how much of it is blocked by the changing chemistry of the upper atmosphere, what reactions then occur, and how much of it is to pass through now to reach the earth. The last few years have seen low solar activity, so the effects of global warming have not been evident in the weather in Ireland. The increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, like the build-up of methane or (earlier) of aerosol propellant gas, is causing chemical chain-reactions in the upper atmosphere, interacting with the spectrum of energy from the sun. One effect of this is to alter the amount and type of energy entering the lower atmosphere: you may not feel warmer in winter, but incidence of skin cancer is likely to increase. Another effect of pouring stuff into the air and water is to prevent the escape into the higher atmosphere (and thus recycling downwards) of elements and compounds that the earth and sea need to maintain themselves. The rate at which we produce CO2 is important chiefly because the earth's system simply cannot recycle so much so fast: the Co2 is going into 'sinks' - mainly in the oceans - and with warming ocean temperatures occurring - whose cause/effect relationship to the ElNino is more problematic than usually represented - the whole system is breaking down. Whether a person in this place or that happens to feel a bit warmer or cooler this summer isn't a fair measure of what's happening.

[Al.]

Amazing that so many continue to believe the IPCC's propaganda. Their models are wrong, even if carbon dioxide absorbed as much IR energy as they claim (which it does not). Excluding the only actual greenhouse gas, that being water vapour, is pseudoscience.

[Jethro]

Amazing that so many continue to believe the IPCC's propaganda. Their models are wrong, even if carbon dioxide absorbed as much IR energy as they claim (which it does not). Excluding the only actual greenhouse gas, that being water vapour, is pseudoscience.

Even if the IPCC's assessment is correct it still only means that global warming will cost us less than 2 years of growth this century. It is a chronic problem that will develop very slowly across decades. Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling said that 'it would represent a cost that would be imperceptible'. Average GDP in 2100 will be $61348 rather than $63109 versus $7000 today.

The 2012 EU plan has been estimated by some to cost $2bn/year for Ireland. And even if the world world did similar for the rest of the century it would only reduce damages by around 10%. And all this so that people 100 years from now can be a tiny, tiny bit wealthier. Why not help the poor - today's generation whether they be the starving in Africa or those lying on trolleys in our hospitals. Both we and our descendants would be a lot better off.