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The Upper Atmosphere Is Cooling, Prompting New Climate Concerns
- gardenfelder 3y ago>A new study reaffirming that global climate change is human-made also found the upper atmosphere is cooling dramatically because of rising CO2 levels. Scientists are worried about the effect this cooling could have on orbiting satellites, the ozone layer, and Earth’s weather.
- rektide 3y agoSurrounding ourselves in a warm blanket.
- quaintdev 3y agoA blanket designed to only get warm and you can't take it off
- UncleOxidant 3y agoYep, less heat making it to the upper atmosphere.
- jandrese 3y agoIf you are confused as to why this is a bad thing this video explains the mechanics of global warming in a way anybody can understand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqu5DjzOBF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqu5DjzOBF8
- ihateolives 3y agoI oftentimes miss the internet before YouTube so that instead of a link to 20 minute video there would be a link to an article instead that I could consume and understand in 5 minutes while still feeling that I'm consuming slow internet instead of moving pictures.
- FpUser 3y ago>"I could consume and understand in 5 minutes" Same here. Except that I do not "consume" articles. I read them fuckers.
- theossuary 3y agoI certainly don't. I learn much better from videos with graphics and audio than from dense text. To each their own I guess.
- rcme 3y agoThe issue with video is that there isn't really an efficient way to "skim." So, for those who can learn from text, learning from a video is like 100x slower.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoI 100 agree. I would love a service that would automatically transcribe all the text spoken in the video so that I would be able to absorb the knowledge 2 orders of magnitude faster.
- wrycoder 3y agoAnd YouTube transcripts are awful.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoFor many informative videos the service would need to be good at excerpting relevant images (and ideally summarizing them in text for the blind). Maybe by focusing on areas that are unchanged during a period of time (such as when graphs or pictures are being talked about).
- nathanaldensr 3y ago[flagged]
- garbagecoder 3y agoIs it too complicated for you that one part warming up doesn't mean another part can't cool?
- mrguyorama 3y agoThese are the same people that think "global average temperature going up 2 degrees C" means that the only outcome is local maximum temperature being 2 degrees higher.
- dsr_ 3y agoTo be fair, nobody started to understand chaotic systems until the 1960s. That's roughly 5,000 years of people saying that in any system, moving the inputs a tiny bit should always produce a similarly small change in the output.
- Applejinx 3y agoYes, and chaos theory is SO fundamental to climate and weather that understanding its application there is compulsory. So if you've not heard of chaotic systems, it's completely impossible to be up to speed on what reality's doing.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoDoes chaos theory help to understand this particular phenomenon?
- inimino 3y agoMight have missed a bit of sarcasm.
- MeteorMarc 3y agoLook at the part about sudden stratospheric warming. This results in extreme weather.
- electronicelyas 3y agoit was not enough to have man made horrors beyond our comprehension, we also had to go and cause man made horrors without even being aware of our lack of comprehension
- revelio 3y ago[flagged]
- polotics 3y agoNot true. Global cooling was a fad not supported by most the effects of CO2 had been know for more than a century. The burden of proof is on you: fetch all publications since 1960 and post your meta-analysis to Nature.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoHistorically, Earth has been much hotter on average than it is now: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte... The near past was the one of the coldest points in history in the last 500 million years. The idea that the Earth is going to explode if temperatures increase by 1.5C is amusing. Yes, it's definitely not going to be fun, and yes it looks like it's definitely going to happen. But the world has been that hot plenty of times before (100s of millions of years), and we haven't turned into Venus yet. I'm all for cutting CO2 emissions - definitely think they're causing a problem - but it's not going to be annihilation / world ending. I say this because I had existential dread for literally a decade until I looked into it more.
- revelio 3y agoThey knew all about CO2 and its warming yes, but Schneider calculated that the effect was offset by other pollutants being put into the atmosphere. He had to because, as the NY Times article states clearly, at that time thermometer records showed that temperatures peaked in the 1940s and "have been cooling ever since". Nice try on defining proof as "the people accused of lying have to admit it or else it's not proven". That's not how it works. The NY Times story is high quality proof that Yale's claim about the past isn't true. People were told by the most trusted authorities that not only was the world getting colder but that this was well understood and the trend would continue. If you don't like that article you have to provide equally compelling counter-evidence, not insist on some stupid definition of proof selected only to avoid cognitive dissonance. But hey, seeing as you want more proof, here's NOAA - the US government agency - stating in 1974, two years before the NY times story that "Some climatologists think that if the current cooling trend continues, drought will occur more frequently": https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/NOAA-Magazine-October-1974.pdf https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/NO... Global cooling wasn't in doubt, only its effects. Here's a meeting of the National Science Foundation in 1972: "The present cooling trend, which reversed the warm trend of the 1940s, is still underway" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.178.4057.190 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.178.4057.190 It goes on to list some pieces of easily understood evidence, like "pack ice around Iceland is once again becoming a serious hindrance to navigation" and "warmth loving animals like Armadillos are retreating southward". Today we're told the NY Times, NOAA and the NSF were all reporting on a made up "fad" no scientists believed, and there never was any cooling trend. In this article, Yale is lying to us about the past. Why is that?
- hn8305823 3y agoHere is Carl Sagan's original essay on climate change in 1980 where he warned specifically about global cooling based on deforestation: https://gizmodo.com/heres-carl-sagans-original-essay-on-the-dangers-of-cl-1481304135 https://gizmodo.com/heres-carl-sagans-original-essay-on-the-... 5 years later he testified to Congress about the dangers of excess CO2 emissions causing runaway warming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI On the surface these two messages may seem contradictory but underlying both is a consistent message that excessive man-made changes to a delicate highly non-linear system are dangerous to our survival as a species.
- foobarian 3y ago> dangerous to our survival as a species. Elephant in the room: dangerous to continued exponential growth of our species' population count.
- notfish 3y agoAm I misunderstanding you? Sure, we probably won’t be able to continue expanding exponentially, but to be honest I don’t really care if we grow forever or stay steady at 10 billion. There’s a significant, nonzero risk of complete species death though, a matter about which I care a great deal. Extinction is worse than stagnation.
- pyrale 3y agoCounterpoint: the countries most responsible for messing with planetary balance are not the ones experiencing significant population growth.
- j0057 3y agoThere's good evidence that if we can alleviate poverty and child mortality everywhere, fertility rates will start coming down like they have in richer countries and we'll end up at 10-11 billion people.
- atoav 3y agoOne thing that I have learned as someone who interacts with highly non-linear systems from an engineering perspective is that the outcome can be unpredictable. That is annoying when you are working with the stuff, but when you are living inside that system, that is downright suicidal. Sure. If you are lucky nothing happens. If.
- xwdv 3y agoWhen the ground gets too hot for crops we’ll have to build aero farms that float high up in the atmosphere to grow food and then bring down the blimps when it’s time for harvest.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoCan someone ELI5 me how a gas that occupies 400ppm (0.04%) of our atmosphere creates a massively scaled “heating blanket” around the entire Earth? More than “scientists have determined”. What is the physical effect that enables the minuscule presence of an element to multiply to such effect.
- aaomidi 3y agoYou’re thinking in absolute terms which is the problem in understanding it. Imagine you have a surface that reflected a unit X of heat back to its source. Now it does 2X. In the next few decades it’s going to do 3X. Does it make sense now? That X was enough to keep us warm. Now we’re facing with that amount increasing significantly.
- yosito 3y agoThink of it like a tiny pinch of a very spicy pepper in a big pot of soup. Even a little bit can have a big effect! The reason CO2 is like very spicy pepper is that it is very good at absorbing infrared radiation from the sun, and then re-emitting that energy as heat in the atmosphere.
- treeman79 3y agoSimple. If you don’t give me your vote and your money the world will end. Exact reason doesn’t matter. If cheap clean portable fusion was invented tomorrow, if would quickly be banned for one reason or another. People need to sell disasters, not solutions.
- polotics 3y agoJust Wow. Clothing yourself in counterfeit cynicism much? "People" don't sell disaster, how much disaster do you fill up at the pump? What proportion of your first world non sustainable lifestyle is spent on these sales of disaster you mentioned?
- polotics 3y agoThe light coming down is in wavelengths that get through, the radiation on the way back is lower frequencies, infrared that CO2 intercepts. The sun is a massive fusion reactor there is a lot of energy coming. The effect is small, but compounds and CO2 is an oxide, very stable molecule that sticks around.
- photochemsyn 3y agoKeep in mind if look at Venus from space (i.e. point an infrared-spectrum analyzer at it) it looks signficantly colder than Earth does from space, because even though the surface of Venus is very hot, it radiates to space at longer wavelengths because of the thickness of the atmosphere. If you increase atmospheric CO2 on Earth, you'd see a similar effect. Notice also that this debunks the 'Earth warming is due to increased solar output' claim, because if that was true, increased solar radiation inputs would result in a warming of the stratosphere, not a cooling. Imagine looking at a human in an IR scope at night. Then the human wraps themselves in a nice sleeping bag, and their apparent temperature decreases from the point of view of a remote observer. Even after equilibrium is reached, they'll still appear cooler due to thermal diffusion effects.
- namaria 3y ago>Notice also that this debunks the 'Earth warming is due to increased solar output' claim, because if that was true, increased solar radiation inputs would result in a warming of the stratosphere, not a cooling. While there's strong evidence that the increase in CO2 caused by human activity is causing global warming, the sun has increased output considerably over the eons, and Earth's surface was much hotter billions of years ago. Thin stratospheric air doesn't absorb nearly as much heat as denser layers closer to the ground and the ground and water themselves. Water is black in IR imaging because it absorbs so much of it!
- photochemsyn 3y agoYes, the sun was producing more output 3 billion years ago. However I was discussing the Exxon-financed Willie Soon theory of sunspot modulation of Earth's climate: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/28/climate-change-sceptic-willie-soon https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/28/climate-... > "Dr Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is known for his view that global warming and the melting of the arctic sea ice is caused by solar variation rather than human-caused CO2 emissions..." If he was correct then you wouldn't see a steady trend of stratospheric cooling, would you? However, if you were looking at an increase in the IR-absorbing blanket of atmospheric CO2, then you would expect it, right?