From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2014 10:42 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: real A.I.
On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
> The point is that none of these previous events involved such rapid change as
> we're seeing now, but even if they did, so what? We know what's going on, it
> isn't hard to monitor. We've known how the greenhouse effect works for more
> than 2 centuries, we can measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the
> atmosphere, we know it's gone up just over 40% since the industrial
> revolution, we have a reasonable model of the likely results
>>We can't even answer very basic questions about our planet's climate. Clouds
>>are what determines how much of the sun's energy gets reflected back into
>>space and how much is retained to drive the planet's weather machine, so will
>>increasing temperature cause more clouds or less?
Not just clouds… the extent of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice and snow pack
has a large effect by affecting the earth’s albedo.
If all things are the same (and they're not see below) increasing air
temperature will cause more water to evaporate into the air from the seas, but
higher temperature also means the air can hold more water until clouds must
form. And although you'd never know it by listening to environmentalists, water
vapor (but not liquid water droplets or ice particles) is by far the most
important greenhouse gas, vastly more important than CO2, and unlike CO2 water
undergoes phase changes from gas to liquid to solid and that makes it
enormously more complicated to figure out than CO2.
CO2 has an outsized effect because it is opaque at IR frequencies in which
water vapor is clear – i.e. it acts in concert with water vapor to close what
had been an available window --in those IR frequencies -- for heat to escape
out into the ultimate heat sink of outer space. In order to understand how CO2
acts in the atmosphere you need to understand this interaction with water
vapor. Dipolar gases are opaque to light at different frequencies. CO2 closes I
believe it is two IR frequency windows, which the major global warming dipolar
gas – e.g. water – leaves open.
And everybody talks about global warming but there is something else going on
too, global dimming. For reasons that are not clearly understood but may be
related to clouds, at any given temperature it takes longer now for water to
evaporate than it did 50 years ago.
Global dimming – from what I have read is largely related to particulates and
SO2 released by human industrial and agricultural activities (the large scale
burning to clear land for palm oil plantations in SE Asia for example)
Chris
John K Clark
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