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Stratospheric Cooling and Tropospheric Warming
Posted on 1 December 2010 by Bob Guercio
This post has been revised at Stratospheric Cooling and Tropospheric Warming - Revised
Increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere have resulted in the warming of the troposphere and cooling of the stratosphere. This paper will explain the mechanism involved by considering a model of a fictitious planet with an atmosphere consisting of carbon dioxide and an inert gas such as nitrogen at pressures equivalent to those on earth. This atmosphere will have a troposphere and a stratosphere with the tropopause at 10 km. The initial concentration of carbon dioxide will be 100 parts per million (ppm) and will be increased instantaneously to 1000 ppm and the solar insolation will be 385.906 watts/meter2. Figure 1 is the IR spectrum from a planet with no atmosphere and Figures 2 and 3 represent the same planet with levels of CO2 at 100 ppm and 1000 ppm respectively. These graphs were generated from a model simulator at the website of Dr. David Archer, a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago and edited to contain only the curves of interest to this discussion. The parameters were chosen in order to generate diagrams that enable the reader to more easily understand the mechanism discussed herein.
I don't WANT a fictious planet with no other constituent gases or particles than CO2 and Nitrogen. I want to know how the Combined absorption of WATER VAPOR and CO2 does not saturate in the LOWER atmos and CO2 increases in the UPPER atmos (where there IS no water vapor) don't matter.
One of blog comments pretty well sums up the frustration I'm describing..
For one thing, I'm not sure that there even would be a stratosphere (ie with temperatures increasing with height) if there was no oxygen/ozone in the atmosphere as there is in your model. So it may not make sense to talk about a warmer lower atmosphere causing an even cooler upper atmosphere in such a simplified case.
Also, I understand that other variations, in water vapour, volcanic aerosols, chlorofluorocarbons and methane concentrations, can cause temperature changes in the stratosphere.
Having said that, I don't actually doubt that rising CO2 does result in a cooling stratosphere, I'm just struggling to understand how exactly and by how much.
Crap, Flatulance, try reading some scientific material from peer reviewed journals, instead of blogs. One should seek knowledge from those more intelligent or knowledgable than themselves, not misinformation from those equally ignorant.
I'm saying a lot here but I must stress that I am very much an amateur at this and may not be totally correct.I'm also a bit tired and may not be writing very clearly.
Bob
THen WHY OldieRocks does the link you've posted THOUSANDS of times say this..
The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect
So even if water vapor in the lower layers of the atmosphere did entirely block any radiation that could have been absorbed by CO2, that would not keep the gas from making a difference in the rarified and frigid upper layers. Those layers held very little water vapor anyway. And scientists were coming to see that you couldn't just calculate absorption for radiation passing through the atmosphere as a whole, you had to understand what happened in each layer which was far harder to calculate.
The greenhouse effect will in fact operate even if the absorption of radiation were totally saturated in the lower atmosphere. The planet's temperature is regulated by the thin upper layers where radiation does escape easily into space. Adding more greenhouse gas there will change the balance. Moreover, even a 1% change in that delicate balance would make a serious difference in the planets surface temperature. The logic is rather simple once it is grasped, but it takes a new way of looking at the atmosphere not as a single slab, like the gas in Koch's tube (or the glass over a greenhouse), but as a set of interacting layers. (The full explanation is in the essay on Simple Models, use link at right.)
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Say HUH? I thought GW predicted a COOLING in the upper atmos also.. But this kind of conflicting garbage is all over the place to explain the spectral overlap between CO2 and Water Vapor and why it still drives the majority of Climate Change.
I cannot help you understand that which you refuse to understand.
So Mathew ----- Certainly we have maps of existing Arctic Ice by age. So WHERE is the reconstruction map of the Medieval Warm Period? Should exist right? Can't find one.. Although I thought I saw it in that video lecture that Old Rocks posted as I breezed thru there.
Would be cool to compare that to the satellite pix..
new study in the science journal Nature says that arctic sea ice has reached the lowest levels of any time period over the past 1,450 years, dipping even lower than the sea ice losses of the Medieval Warm Period. The current sea ice losses have already lasted longer than any other decline during the study period.
"When we look at our reconstruction, we can see that the decline that has occurred in the last 50 years or so seems to be unprecedented for the last 1,450 years," said Christian Zdanowicz of the Geological Survey of Canada, one of the study's co-authors, said Wednesday in an interview with the Globe and Mail.
"It's difficult not to come up with the conclusion that greenhouse gases must have something to do with this," he added, adding that natural processes cannot account for the decline.
Sea ice is a critical component of the arctic ecosystem, with salt pockets in the ice providing an icy habitat for algae and other small life forms. These in turn sustain fish, seals, and eventually polar bears, which rely on the sea ice as a hunting platform.
The Arctic has already lost 30% of its sea ice coverage in summer. Computer models predict an ice-free Arctic in summer by 2050 unless action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Thanks for posting this but rw's have their heads stuck up their butts way too far to ever understand anything this complex.
After all, the Rs have said they are against any and all education and most recently, against critical thought.
Says it all.
Professor Jennifer Francis gave a wonderful presentation of exactly how that works. That you will not watch it, and even if your did, you would not understand it, is your problem, not mine.
Translation:Riesensturm lässt Nordpol-Eis schmelzen
- Wind schiebt die Schollen in wärmere Gefilde oder zertrümmert sie.
- Ozeanströmungen aus dem Süden schmelzen das Eis.
- Die rhythmische Verlagerung einer Klimaschaukel über dem Atlantik, die sogenannte Nordatlantische Oszillation (NAO), bringt alle paar Jahre warme Witterung in die Arktis.
- Der sogenannte Arktische Dipol, ein Luftdruckgefälle zwischen Nordamerika und Sibirien, bestimmt das Wetter.
Diese Faktoren waren es wohl, die dafür gesorgt haben, dass die Arktis in den dreißiger Jahren ähnlich warm war wie heute - und dass die Region im sogenannten Holozänen Klimaoptimum vor 5000 bis 8000 Jahren noch mit weitaus weniger Eis bedeckt war als heutzutage. Damals war es in der Arktis etwa drei Grad wärmer. Eine schlechte Datenlage erschwert die Prognosen: Wissenschaftler forderten bereits die Herausgabe der Daten von Spionagesatelliten, um den Wandel am Nordpol besser zu dokumentieren. Doch Taupfützen auf dem Eis gaukeln Satelliten mitunter offenes Meer vor, wo eigentlich noch Eis liegt. Ein weiteres Manko: Satelliten messen lediglich die Oberfläche des Eises; die Dicke der Schollen kennen Forscher nur aus Messungen von vor Ort.
Guess what..these trees I photographed when I was on Greenland and Ellesmere Island...:These factors were the same that were responsible when the arctic ice cover and temperatures were the same during the 1930`s as they are today
and that 5000 years ago the ice cover was only a fraction of what it is today
It is known in Germany for its distinctive, academic writing style and its large volume—a standard issue may run 200 pages or more. Typically, it has a content to advertising ratio of 2:1. As of 2010[update], Der Spiegel was employing the equivalent of 80 full-time fact checkers, which the Columbia Journalism Review called "most likely the world's largest fact checking operation".[4]
An explanation of Cryosat for the scientifically challenged among us.
BBC News - Cryosat mission's new views of polar ice
That the conventional satellites can only measure the surface ice but are not able to measure ice thickness...Eine schlechte Datenlage erschwert die Prognosen: Wissenschaftler forderten bereits die Herausgabe der Daten von Spionagesatelliten, um den Wandel am Nordpol besser zu dokumentieren. Doch Taupfützen auf dem Eis gaukeln Satelliten mitunter offenes Meer vor, wo eigentlich noch Eis liegt. Ein weiteres Manko: Satelliten messen lediglich die Oberfläche des Eises; die Dicke der Schollen kennen Forscher nur aus Messungen von vor Ort.
That this is exactly what the article I quoted said...that conventional satellites can`t measure ice thickness...only the ice above the waterline...!!!....and not the rest. Are you that "challenged" that you don`t know the meaning of "Average ice thickness about 2.5 meters"...???...and that was "determined" by drilling a few holes and not by satellite:How to measure sea-ice thickness from space
So before that, on what EXACTLY was the data which was used for all these trend graphs based..???For Cryosat, it is another illustration of its capability. Radar satellites have traditionally struggled to discern the detail in the steep slopes and ridges that mark the edges of ice sheets,
The entire exercise is (as usual) to re-structure faulty data in order to "prove" that all prior publications & the "computer model" which was used to appear as credible...:Cryosat found the volume (area multiplied by thickness) of sea ice in the central Arctic in March 2011 to have been 14,500 cubic kilometres. This figure is very similar to that suggested by PIOMAS (Panarctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System), an influential computer model that has been used to estimate Arctic sea ice volume, and which has been the basis for several predictions about when summer sea ice in the north might disappear completely.
Cryosat's principal investigator, Prof Duncan Wingham - formerly of UCL but now chief executive of the UK's National Environment Research Council - summed up:...blah blah blah
So what else is new...????
Duncan Wingham is Professor of Climate Physics at University College London, and was the first Director of the Centre for Polar Observation & Modelling. Wikipedia
Because if you were not so "scientifically challenged" and had even a vague idea how that works, then you would also realize what kind of crap this "back radiation" is...where almost 1/2 the IR is supposed to come back down,....regardless of phase angle and heat us up even more.Radar satellites have traditionally struggled to discern the detail in the steep slopes and ridges that mark the edges of ice sheets, but the Esa spacecraft can recover far more information thanks to a special interferometric observing mode that uses two antennas.
