Research Over Tibet Gives Climate Insight 106
An anonymous reader writes "NASA is reporting that researchers have discovered thunderstorms above Tibet offer a direct path for water vapor and chemicals to move from the lower atmosphere to the stratosphere. From the article: ' Learning how water vapor reaches the stratosphere can help improve climate prediction models. Similarly, understanding the pathways that ozone-depleting chemicals can take to reach the stratosphere is essential for understanding future threats to the ozone layer, which shields Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.'"
Who cares?! (Score:1, Insightful)
Do we need better models? (Score:1, Insightful)
Gosh, aren't we told repeatedly that we already have climate models of sufficient accuracy that we can use them to make sweeping changes to our economy and infrastructure? Don't we already have a "scientific consensus" that we are all doomed? Why do we need more research just to tell us what we already know?
Prediction smediction (Score:2, Insightful)
But still, if this helps my local weatherman to tell me it's going to be sunny on laundry day, and it actually is sunny then I'm all for it...
Re:Prediction smediction (Score:4, Insightful)
But still, if this helps my local weatherman to tell me it's going to be sunny on laundry day, and it actually is sunny then I'm all for it...
Your geography teacher was wrong. He would be right if he was talking about weather, but climate is not weather - it is the long-term average of things. It is like the flow of a river - there may be chaotic localised turbulence and vortices, but the overall flow is steady and predictable.
Re:Good news/Bad news (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Gosh, aren't we told repeatedly that we already have climate models of sufficient accuracy that we can use them to make sweeping changes to our economy and infrastructure?"
No, we are told that are current models predict this and we should be proactive.
" Don't we already have a "scientific consensus" that we are all doomed? "
No, we have scientific consensus that the climate is starting to oscilate and this will change the weather. Making it more violent because of the energy increase.
"Why do we need more research just to tell us what we already know?"
It is another way to make predictions and tests. It is known chemicals get into the upper atmosphere, but no sound theory on HOW they get up there.
Re:Good news/Bad news (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it will be a painful and fairly costly switch, but it's well within our means (technologically speaking) and financial necessity will eventually force it to happen.
Re:Good news/Bad news (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe- Maybe not. We don't actually know what would happen if we applied what we now know of genetics and organic chemistry to native plants and native food/energy production. We're too busy centralizing wealth to ask the correct questions. But if centralization of wealth becomes impossible- if the only thing that can be traded across borders is knowledge because energy is so much cheaper to ship than mass- then it could get VERY interesting. Myself, I'm planting Camas bulbs- in case onions and potatos and grains are no longer available.
Not random (Score:4, Insightful)
(The difference is that a random system has nothing predictable about it. It can do absolutely anything at any time, merely following the probability distribution for that system. However, the exact state at time T can be known - it merely doesn't mean a whole lot. A chaotic system, on the other hand, has definable patterns, definable mechanics and definable structure, but you can NEVER know the exact state for ANY time and small differences CAN - but won't always - cascade into large changes.)
If you were to look at the climate as far back as we can reliably know it, you will see oscillations between ice ages and warmer periods. The troughs and peaks appear fairly random, but really they aren't. The climate can be approximated (badly) as a simple oscillating function, but that's pretty crude. Actually, there's a greater correspondence between 10 years stock prices for wheat and 100,000 years of global temperature than there is between climate and a sine wave. (See: "Fractal Geometry of Nature", Mandelbrot, B., for more details, as the margins here are much too big - err, small.)
I would also be willing to bet that the change in climate as a function of the change in climate composition is also very deterministic. As we're talking systems that appear to be oscillating, my best guess is that the ratio of the peak intervals of different types of oscillation with small differences in climate composition will always be Feigenbaum's Constant, as that's usually the case in chaotically-produced pseudo-oscillations.
Now, despite all this talk of chaos, lack of absolutes and so on, the climate is very predictable in general form. No great surprise there - if you generate the Mandelbrot Set, or the Lorenz owl-mask, you expect to see the same general shape each time. That is not going to change. The same is true with the climate... for now. The climate is orbiting a bunch of Strange Attractors, as per the Lorenz owl-mask. We know the general shape and we know the general effects of altering the various parameters.
There is a problem, however. If the climate were to jump from the current set of Strange Attractors to any other set, the climate would change relatively rapidly and definitely counter to any model that relies on the current patterns holding true.
What could cause such a jump? When could it occur? Well, that's the problem. Strange Attractors are not like nice, neat gravitational sources, you can't see them, and they have no physical existence, they are merely a product of irreducable mathematical problems. They could, however, cause the planet to boil or freeze the moment the system strays too far. (If you don't know which Strange Attractor the climate would switch to, you cannot make any useful prediction from past trends.)