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)
Free Tibet! (Score:5, Funny)
Offer not valid in all areas. Some restrictions may apply.
Re:Free Tibet! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Free Tibet! (Score:3, Funny)
That's the way your hardcore commie works.
Tibet is Cheap (Score:2)
Wow (Score:1, Funny)
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?
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:5, Interesting)
In the troposphere, while it's typically pretty stable, there are cases where it is unstable and particularly strong convection occurs. One case of particularly strong upward motion is supercell thunderstorms. But the upward motion tends to slow and stop at or slightly above the tropopause. Temperature decreases with height in the troposphere, but increases with height in the stratosphere. While momentum carries strong updrafts into the very lower troposphere, even the air in the strongest updrafts don't continue very far before descending again.
In other words, there's not a whole lot of mass exchange occurring between the troposphere and stratosphere.
Understanding this exchange and the sources and sinks of water vapor and other chemicals in the stratosphere is one way to better improve our study of things in the stratosphere.
And you greatly overestimate the accuracy of any numerical model on a computer. It is very impressive, given the large amount of parameterizations and approximations made, that computer models produce as good of output and forecast the weather as well as they do.
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:1)
After all if it is water, that is linked to energy use wholesale, not just the use of Carbon based energy, screwing the environment. We will have to break more than dependance on oil and coal.
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
People might think you to be confused or fooled by the propaganda that the effect of water vapor swamps that of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases, but again you can look that up.
Basic technique for looking anything up == find sites with footnotes and check them. Trolls and PR industry flacks just make things up, and don't have cites that can be checked. It's the simple way to tell science from bullshit. Kind of a smell test.
Science is hard, you know. No other civilization in the ten to hundred thousand years people lived on Earth managed to invent science. It's worth the effort.
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:2)
The bigest problem I have with the global warming hysteria is the clear misrepresentation in the media. Any time you see a graph for instance, it's had it's scale played with in order to make the recent assumed increases in global temperature seem much more dramatic than they are. That these "scientists" need to resort to such tomfoolery in order to scare the public makes me immediately skeptical of not only their ethics, but t
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:2)
Click the links, Luke, the footnotes are done in HTML there instead of with littlel numbers in the text and fine print at the bottom of the page.
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:2)
I'll pull out a few of the links you didn't find at the page I refered you to. Go back and click links for many more citations in the complete discussion:
The links from the discussion of water vapor start with the new abstract:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005.../2005GL023 624.shtml [agu.org]
There's a long discussion with links to press reports discussing exactly the sort of error you complain about a
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:2)
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:2)
Here's a good general discussion responding to questions from one modeler to another:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005
Other relevant threads for your question -- a few in a quick grab-bag -- include:
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2006/05/model_projec tions_of_the_north.php [scienceblogs.com]
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006
http: [jamstec.go.jp]
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:2)
http://www.pacinst.org/topics/integrity_of_scienc
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:1)
Also, I'll mention this since alot of climate prediction bashers seem to get it mixed up with weather prediction. Climate prediction and weather prediction are like apples and oranges because they use different approximation methods. Climate prediction is desinged to give close estimates of general changes
Re:Do we need better models? (Score:3, Informative)
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:Do we need better models? (Score:2)
I'll take my "Flamebait" now with a "ThankYouSirMayIHaveAnother!"
NASA Climate Model on your Laptop (Score:5, Informative)
Note that the resolution is pretty coarse (8x10 degrees) so that it still runs at a decent clip on your Mac/PC, and therefore Tibet gets 1 or 2 grid cells, that is about it.
We just had a request about removing the Tibetian plateau [columbia.edu] and the resulting effect on Earth climate.
Disclaimer: I'm a developer on the project.
Re:NASA Climate Model on your Laptop (Score:2)
Re:NASA Climate Model on your Laptop (Score:2, Informative)
Vertically we have 12 layers and I'm not sure what type of structures appear there... You can see hadley cells, ferrel cells (slightly), etc.
Higher res models ported to the GUI are in progress. If you'd like to run them without the GUI there are many out there... both at GISS/Columbia and other climate labs.
Re:NASA Climate Model on your Laptop (Score:2)
Out of curiosity, has the idea come up of perhaps nesting grids and allowing the effects of things in the nested grid to propagate into the larger grid? It would allow one to better study the behavior
Re:NASA Climate Model on your Laptop (Score:1)
It is also common to feed GCMs to regional models or regional results as GCM inputs. Occasionally people do GCM regional in a dual feedback loop. It is difficult to implement, and this model does not support it out of the box. But the source is available so you could do it if you really wanted to...
Re:NASA Climate Model on your Laptop (Score:2)
More on Tibet and climate (Score:3, Interesting)
(Sorry to post as a reply, but I can't find the frigging "top level reply" link on the article page for some reason...)
Re:More on Tibet and climate (Score:2)
It's...where it always is. Did you buy your 4 digit id off eBay?
Re:More on Tibet and climate (Score:2)
No, I just haven't made a top level post in a while. Some of us have a life outside of
Re:NASA Climate Model on your Laptop (Score:1)
I've requested that our site be exempt, so we'll see if they approve that.
But normally we're high speed, internet 2, all that good stuff. Please come back tomorrow and I promise it'll be plenty fast.
No linux version? (Score:2)
Re:No linux version? (Score:2)
Re:No linux version? (Score:1)
Source code is availble. Check the GISS website, or email with a request.
Re:NASA Climate Model on your Laptop (Score:2)
Removing the Himalayas is something we can certainly do (tunnel into the base and detonate several gigatons of thermonuclear warheads deep inside the mountains), and even manage to disperse much of the mountain range into the upper atmosphere as radioactive dust to immediately reduce global temperature, as was done in 1816 (the Year Without a [wikipedia.org]
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:1)
Global warming causes hurricanes to be more powerful. There is nothing vague or uncertain about that.
Re:Prediction smediction (Score:2)
Even if, say, global warming increased the temperature of the oceans, other factors (such as perhaps increased vertical wind shear) or a change in the location of the ITCZ (probably shifting poleward in a warmer planet) would affect the climatology of tropical cyclones.
And there is reason to believe that greater hurricane activity is due to natural cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PD
Re:Prediction smediction (Score:2)
Fact: Global warming = warmer water
Fact: Warmer Water = more violent hurricanes.
Re:Prediction smediction (Score:4, Informative)
I encourage you to read NOAA's summary of recent research on the topic: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/G3.html [noaa.gov]
If you still doubt it, there's a long list of articles published by scientists in reputable peer-reviewed journals in the meteorological community.
Re:Prediction smediction (Score:1, Troll)
I said nothing about the location of the hurricanes, or their number. That would be impossible to predict. It's a simple fact that hurricanes and similar cyclonic storms are more powerful when they are over warmer water. This is what cau
Re:Prediction smediction (Score:2)
The El-Nino phase of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) correlates with increased vertical wind shear over the Atlantic, for example. While waters in the eastern Pacific are warmer, tropical cyclone activity is actually suppressed over the Atlantic. This is one example of a way in which tropical cyclone activity can be suppressed.
It doesn't m
Re:Prediction smediction (Score:2)
Re:Prediction smediction (Score:2)
Yes. In fact, global warming is going to reduce or eliminate the hurricane problem. The higher temperatures will cause population decimation, or even extinction, among butterflies. And since the root cause of hurricanes is butterflies flapping their wings in China, there will be few-to-zero hurricanes in the near future.
Re:Prediction smediction (Score:1)
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:Prediction smediction (Score:2)
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.)
Re:Not random (Score:3, Informative)
This is a bit extreme; The climate has been perturbed a LOT in the past - such by phenomenal heating through asteroid strikes, and substantial cooling after 'supervolcano' eruptions (most recently, only a matter of tens of thousands of years ago), but has not boiled or frozen. The attrac
The earth is sweating! (Score:4, Funny)
Oh no, global warming has become so bad that the earth is sweating!
Good news/Bad news (Score:5, Funny)
The bad news: it will coincide with the deindustrialization of our civilization due to the lack of fossil fuels.
Re:Good news/Bad news (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, the Irony (Score:2)
I'm not a Marx fan at all, nor do I have anything but contempt for communism, ye
Re:Oh, the Irony (Score:2)
Marx is where I START, not where I END. I hack. I hack systems. Communism is j
Re:Oh, the Irony (Score:2)
That's what we used to call being a nomad. Wandering around, living off the land.
You can't beterribly bright if you think 6 billion people could live on this planet in such a manner.
Re:Oh, the Irony (Score:2)
You might want to look at it again, it's somewhat more civilized than that. Think Feudalism and Guilds- small scale distributed manufacturing and local knowledge brokers, trade with your immediate neighbors first, trade outside your community only for what you can't make for yourselves.
You can't beterribly bright if you think 6 billion people could live on this planet in such a manner.
I think if we had 8 billion people,
Re:Oh, the Irony (Score:2)
Remember, an idea is no good if it's not practical. Implementing your system would be, I fear, even more difficult than achieveing the utopian marxist society. Although in the field of finite mathematics, when you start seing such ludicrously high numbers the diference betw
Re:Oh, the Irony (Score:2)
I'm beginning to think that, in short, is the wrong goal entirely. Instead of changing the GLOBAL political structure, what we need to do is change our LOCAL political structures. Create defensible, small communities that are ready for the end of mass long distance transportation- and are ready for public short-distance transportation services. Make sure those communities have everything they need locally. Empower citizens to m
Re:Oh, the Irony (Score:2)
And I don't quite get what basic freedoms such as freedom of speech or freedom
Re:Oh, the Irony (Score:2)
The other alternative, of course, is to find a place where the geography works wi
Re:Good news/Bad news (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
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 th
Re:Good news/Bad news (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good news/Bad news (Score:2, Informative)
No need to buy a new engine, new car, or new anything. Simply grow a 100% compatible with gasoline fuel, right now.
Re:Good news/Bad news (Score:2)
This assumes that widespread use of fossil fuels is the primary cause and driving force behind global warming.
That is unlikely, considering that the current global warming trend started over 10,000 years ago. [nasa.gov]
Also, there are powerful positive feedback loops (e.g., the millions of square miles of thawing/decomposing tundra [wikipedia.org], and the rising levels of global humidity) that will shortly eclipse the carbon e
I bet it's the monks. (Score:1)
HV/AC and the Ozone Daily News (Score:1)
Re:HV/AC and the Ozone Daily News (Score:1)
Re:HV/AC and the Ozone Daily News (Score:1)
Re:HV/AC and the Ozone Daily News (Score:1)
But who am I to question the "science" gods.
Re:HV/AC and the Ozone Daily News (Score:2)
Dust and aerosols are heavier than air too.
Being inert is precisely the problem: the compound survives long enough to get to where it can do harm.
Re:HV/AC and the Ozone Daily News (Score:1)
-Monitoring data show that the growth in concentrations of ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere is slowing, consistent with the declining production required by international agreements.
-The maximum ozone depletion (and increase in UV-B radiation) is likely to occur within the next 10 years; thereafter, the ozone layer is expected to slowly recover over the next several decades.
Somehow appropriate (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Somehow appropriate (Score:2)
No, it was just the only way to escape China.
Disclaimer: No, I haven't been to China. Yes, I am full of shit.
Okay... (Score:2)
Re:Okay... (Score:2)
Not meaning to troll (Score:1)
Should be (pick one):
NASA is reporting that researchers have discovered [that] thunderstorms above Tibet [that] offer a direct path for water vapor and chemicals to move from the lower atmosphere to the stratosphere.
Sorry /., but bad grammar annoys the crap out of me. </grammar police>
Re:Not meaning to troll (Score:2)
From http://www.cmdl.noaa.gov/ozone.html [noaa.gov]
"Stratospheric Water Vapor
Utilizing balloon-borne frost-point hygrometers, GMD has detected an approximately 1% per year increase in stratospheric water vapor at Boulder, Colorado, since 1980. Besides implications for climate change, increased water vapor can affect the rate of chemical ozone loss, for example, by increasing the incidence of polar stratospheric clouds. Satellite measurements of water vapor, although not of adequate length for acc
Article raises questions (Score:1)
Re: New Ozone Hole? (Score:2)
Flatten Tibet (Score:2)
Interesting theory/observations (Score:1)
If this is true, then most of those channels must be over Antarctica.
Or, once the 'ozone depleting' chemicals are into the upper layers of our atmosphere, they have been, or are, shuttled/attracted to the south pole.