On 6/15/23 10:50 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
--------
Tom Van Baak writes:
Steve,
> We can probably put a lot of the blame onto El Niño
That sounds plausible but I'm suspicious of quick and simple explanations.
I dont think the primary El Niño phenomena involves enough
mass transport to measurably change the angular momentum. It is
mostly just a vertical inversion phenomena, which changes the
evaporation from the sea surface. It has far ranging secondary
effects, but those are mostly orthogonal to the rotation, so their
effect is also attenuated.
What I wonder is if anybody has done the angular rotation math on
major forrest fires ?
They convert a lot of trees from rigidly rotating surface mass to gasses,
but I have no idea what the total incinerated mass might be...
pretty small, compared to say, snow or ice. The ice melting in
Antarctica and Greenland is much larger mass wise than mass of trees
burned (and of course, most of the mass stays fixed, the blackened trees
remain)
If we estimate based on the CO2 release - the wildfires in CA are
estimated to have released about 127 megatonnes in 2020 along (came
across this in an article saying it's frustrating, because for all the
work in green house gas reduction, CA had reduced their emissions by 65
megatonnes over 18 years)
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-20/california-wildfires-offset-greenhouse-gas-reductions
But only 12/44ths of that is carbon that used to be fixed to the Earth
surface - so a bit less than 35 megatonnes of carbon. OTOH, there's also
hydrogen in those plants, etc.
And on a annual time scale, soil moisture is probably a larger mass -
after all, let's say that the average annual rainfall is on the order of
50cm everywhere, so that's 1/2 tonne/square meter. The US is about a
gigahectare, so 10 terasquare meters, or 5 teratonnes of water. That's
quite a bit more than the mass from all those Canadian fires, I suspect.
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