Global Warming Felt By Space Junk and Satellites 224
An anonymous reader writes in with a story about another side effect of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. "Rising carbon dioxide levels at the edge of space are apparently reducing the pull that Earth's atmosphere has on satellites and space junk, researchers say. The findings suggest that man made increases in carbon dioxide might be having effects on the Earth that are larger than expected, scientists added... in the highest reaches of the atmosphere, carbon dioxide can actually have a cooling effect. The main effects of carbon dioxide up there come from its collisions with oxygen atoms. These impacts excite carbon dioxide molecules, making them radiate heat. The density of carbon dioxide is too thin above altitudes of about 30 miles (50 kilometers) for the molecules to recapture this heat. Cooling the upper atmosphere causes it to contract, exerting less drag on satellites."
Faulty headline (Score:3, Insightful)
So global warming has nothing to do with it? It's all about the carbon dioxide buildup?
Re:Faulty headline (Score:4, Funny)
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It was a bad label in the first place. I wonder if whoever coined it even suspected that decades later people would still be quibbling about the semantics instead of the actual cause.
Re:Faulty headline (Score:4, Funny)
No, no, no... we are quibbling as much about the actual cause as we quibble about semantics... and if we can't quibble about those things, we'll quibble about the effects. And during all those shenanigans, we're playing the blame-game.
You didn't really think this was about identifying and solving a problem, did you?
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No, no, no... we are quibbling as much about the actual cause as we quibble about semantics... and if we can't quibble about those things, we'll quibble about the effects. And during all those shenanigans, we're playing the blame-game.
You didn't really think this was about identifying and solving a problem, did you?
Joe six-pack, politicians and the media are quibbling about those things. There aren't any scientists trained in relevant fields who are, about the cause, semantics, or effects unless they're doing so for money or a bizarre reaction to "publish-or-perish".
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No, all the scientists who agree with me are correct/honest and the ones that don't are doing it for money or a bizarre reaction to "publish-or-perish".
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How about just the vast majority... i.e. >99%
That doesn't make them right, but it does make for a much stronger case than "Nuh Uh... that doesn't fit into my world view!
No, headline is right. (Score:5, Interesting)
Because there's no extra heat coming in from the sun (indeed, slightly less), but because the CO2 is trapping heat in the lower atmosphere, the heat input to the upper atmosphere is reduced.
And what happens when heat input is reduced?
Cooling.
What happens in the lower atmoshere, where the heat input is increased?
Warming.
Indeed, one of the fingerprints that shows it ISN'T the sun doing it is the cooling upper atmosphere: in a warming sun, the entire atmosphere is being warmed because the heat input and throughput is increased.
Whereas the fingerprint of a greenhouse effect is that there is no extra input, but the throughput has changed.
In other words, this is yet more evidence of AGW.
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...
In other words, this is yet more evidence of AGW.
Umm, no.
Strictly speaking, it's just evidence of more CO2 in the upper levels of Earth's atmosphere.
Of course, you are free to leap to conclusions...
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It isn't the CO2 in the upper levels of the atmosphere itself which causes the mentioned effect. It's the effect this upper-level CO2 has on temperatures up there.
But this effect is part and parcel of the increased greenhouse effect. Increased greenhouse effect has two prominent effects on atmospheric temperature: warming the lower parts, and cooling the upper parts. It's just that you don't hear much about the latter part (well, unless you read sites like skepticalscience.com, where they point out it's a g
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As well, the growing disparity between temperatures increases the chance that serious storms can occur. Storms are heat engines. Drive low level heat up you get bigger, wetter, stronger storms. If a really huge storm should punch a hole through the thermal division you now have a monster because you've now increase the temperature differential a hundred or more degrees. Read about hypercanes, or superstorms. The ultimate return to equilibrium could put world climate in a very different place and by definiti
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Why is it even relevant? What if there is a naturally occuring global climate change that will make this planet inhabitable for humans? Should we just let it happen becasue it is "natural"?
Oh wait, I tend to forget that the cause, the problem and the solution was decided upon even before the research was done.
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I don't think that CO2 causes global warming (from my own calculations, for which I have been repeatedly ridiculed by simpletons who don't even know what IR and Raman spectra represent, but which seem to match what is happening in the upper atmosphere), but I wouldn't be opposed to a little geoen
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"-1 Overrated" with no other mods? Is this the mythical "-1 Disagree" I've heard so much about?
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What if it's really dragons on Mars, breathing fire towards Earth? Oh wait, I tend to forget that this theory was rejected before there was even done research on it.
Re:No, headline is right. (Score:5, Informative)
isotope analysis shows increases over time of fossil carbon as a percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.
add to that the fact that we pump gobs of fossil carbon into the atmosphere every year, and can find no other natural phenomena doing such on that sort of scale.
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The real problem isn't and has never been burning fossil fuel. The problem is the wealth and power that burning fossil fuel has awarded a vanishing few, and they've gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that we will continue burn fossil fuels until they can come up with a decent model for charging us for sunlight. The rest is FUD, smoke and mirrors to ensure that we debate this topic endlessly defending ideologies and political frameworks.
We now have solar cells printed on GLASS, dirt cheap, with 33+% eff
Re:No, headline is right. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about "net production". Nature's net production of CO2 is nearly zero and currently over long periods it's slightly negative. Humanity's CO2 production is almost entirely net positive, we sequester very little CO2, so we are increasing the CO2 level in the atmosphere. It may represent only a small amount of the total carbon in the atmosphere each year but we're putting all of the extra CO2 into it.
It's a like a guy standing by a half-filled swimming pool with a hose pouring water into the swimming pool. While we can't show that any particular molecule of H2O came from his hose, we can observe that the water level is rising and few people would doubt that the reason the level is rising because of the hose pouring water into the pool.
If there are 720 gigatons of carbon in the atmosphere and humans add 10 gigations of carbon a year, you should be able to figure out roughly how long it takes to double it.
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I was thinking more like it needed the pool to be full of kids, producing water a different way.
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And drinking the pool water. Ugh, these metaphors got disgusting pretty quickly.
Point is, non-anthropogenic production of CO2 is on balance with non-anthropogenic sequestration of carbon - at least on the time scales which would otherwise have been relevant for us.
Re:No, headline is right. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, to be completely accurate, it's raining, but there's a drain that's only big enough for the rainwater to drain out. When the man comes along with his hose (it doesn't have to be a big hose, we can be patient) he breaks the equilibrium and it starts to rise.
Re:No, headline is right. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is an utter lack of explanation for this extra CO2. Humans don't produce that much CO2 relative to nature each year
Citation needed. Have fun, because you're dead wrong. For example, we produce on average two orders of magnitude more CO2 than volcanism. Are you getting paid to spout this shit, or are you telling lies for free? That's not a very good deal.
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Citation needed. Have fun, because you're dead wrong. For example, we produce on average two orders of magnitude more CO2 than volcanism. Are you getting paid to spout this shit, or are you telling lies for free? That's not a very good deal.
Even after a major eruption event? I know these don't happen very often, but I have a hard time believing that we output more CO2 than a volcano can potentially output. But if you're talking dormant, or mostly dormant volcanoes, who would be surprised by that statistic?
Re:No, headline is right. (Score:5, Informative)
Even after a major eruption event? I know these don't happen very often, but I have a hard time believing that we output more CO2 than a volcano can potentially output.
Yes, even after a major eruption event. For example when Pinatubo blew in 1991, it released about as much CO2 as 10 days of human activity.
Here: [usgs.gov]
The published estimates of the global CO2 emission rate for all degassing subaerial (on land) and submarine volcanoes lie in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year (Gerlach, 1991; Varekamp et al., 1992; Allard, 1992; Sano and Williams, 1996; Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998). The preferred global estimates of the authors of these studies range from about 0.15 to 0.26 gigaton per year. The 35-gigaton projected anthropogenic CO2 emission for 2010 is about 80 to 270 times larger than the respective maximum and minimum annual global volcanic CO2 emission estimates. It is 135 times larger than the highest preferred global volcanic CO2 estimate of 0.26 gigaton per year (Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998).
Is that really surprising? Think about how many billions of cars, homes, offices and factories there are, spread across the whole world, all directly or indirectly burning fossil fuel and releasing CO2.
Re:No, headline is right. (Score:5, Informative)
I recently tracked it down and the major eruption of Pinatubo in 1991 released around 40 million tonnes of CO2 over several days compared to around 23 billion tonnes of CO2 released by humans that year. Current human emissions in 2012 are around 30 billion tonnes of CO2.
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I completely agree about CO2, however CO2 is the least harmful emission from volcanoes. Particulate and SO2 are the real bastards that volcanoes spew. In fact, aren't volcanoes usually to blame for cooling, not warming?
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Manmade CO2 emissions are much smaller than natural emissions. Consumption of vegetation by animals & microbes accounts for about 220 gigatonnes of CO2 per year. Respiration by vegetation emits around 220 gigatonnes. The ocean releases about 332 gigatonnes. In contrast, when you combine the effect of fossil fuel burning and changes in land use, human CO2 emissions are only around 29 gigatonnes per year.
You're right that volcanism is a very small modern source of CO2, but human activity is still a very small minority of global output. Choosing to use volcanism as the comparison is misleading at best. The science is conclusive in favor of global warming, so accuracy and facts are enough to com
Re:No, headline is right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Consumption of vegetation by animals & microbes accounts for about 220 gigatonnes of CO2 per year
And consumption of CO2 by vegetation accounts for what? Here's a hint, plants are made almost entirely out of carbon, and almost all of the carbon comes from the atmosphere. Rainforests produce about as much CO2 as they consume, their "job" is to filter. But other types are carbon sinks. And the ocean is a net carbon sink; it takes in CO2 from the air, which makes the ocean more acidic. It's fixed out from the ocean primarily by reaction with subaquatic limestone. It's disingenuous in the extreme to discuss CO2 production of the ocean or of vegetation without simultaneously discussing the fixing of CO2 in the ocean or by vegetation, or foolish in the extreme to believe it when someone else does it.
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Or we can keep this argument in the realm of emotion, assholery, and dogma and continue in the way we've been going. I'm sure that'll work out for us in the long run.
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No he's saying that its time for men (and women) of good will to speak to one another in a civil manner and open their minds (on both sides of the conversation) such that enlightened discourse might lead to real and productive action upon which all sides might come to consensus. Rather than scream and shout and call each other all sorts of horrible names, certain in our tiny warm and cozy ideologies that we are right and justified and that the only answer is ideological jihad (a sad affair without even the
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And its either ignorant or disingenuous of you not to mention that the rise of carbonic acid in the world's oceans is at this very moment threatening the collapse of zooplankton (because a growing number of larval forms that need to make carbonate shells are unable to do so in too low a ph.) So the largest carbon sink on the planet (the oceans) is now showing real signs of failing, and failing catastrophically. Check here for details on Ocean acidification [wikipedia.org].
Also wrong on the rain forest, recent research sugg
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It's disingenuous to mention the CO2 emitted naturally every year in the carbon cycle [wikipedia.org] without mentioning at the same time the natural sinks that make the natural carbon cycle closely balanced over the year.
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Depends on what you attribute to human activity. For instance beside burning fossil fuels there's the burning down of the global rain forests. There's the methane produced by agriculture (a gas 20x stronger than CO2 in its greenhouse effect), and then there's all the secondary effects, warming is uneven, it strikes the poles hardest melting permafrost all over the planet and liberating unprecedented amounts of both CO2 and methane (potentially more than caused be the initial burning of fossil fuels.) There
The extra CO2 is pretty well explained. (Score:5, Informative)
We add an additional 4% each year and there is nothing to balance that. We can also look at isotope ratios (fossil fuels are ancient carbon). It is our CO2.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions-intermediate.htm [skepticalscience.com]
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Gaseous CO2 absorbs infrared radiation (heat) in certain spectral bands. This is easily shown in the laboratory. The amount a IR radiation that it absorbs is affected by the concentration of CO2. The IR radiation that CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs is mostly from the Earth's surface absorbing incoming solar radiation, mostly in the visible range, and re-radiating it in the IR range. More concentration of CO2 means more IR absorption.
In natural warming coming out of a glaciation (ice age in the common usa
Global warming has EVERYTHING to do with it (Score:5, Informative)
So global warming has nothing to do with it? It's all about the carbon dioxide buildup?
Why are you still trolling this bullshit?
It's all about burning fossil fuels. This has many effects, of which global warming is the most dangerous to humans right now, but raising the dangers of space junk is another bad effect.
What you are trying to imply is like saying cigarettes have nothing to do with lung cancer, because there are people who die of emphysema as well.
Go away, oil industry shill!
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Climate change! Is there nothing it can't do?
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make people put down the sippy cup of bile and fucking think for once in their miserable lives. it can't do that, apparently.
Re:Global warming has EVERYTHING to do with it (Score:5, Interesting)
How about you stop framing things in terms of "good" and "evil"? No human sees himself as a villain in his own life story. Those people who burn fossil fuels don't do them so they can audition for a spot in the new Captain Planet movie. They do it to produce the goods and services that people need to live. If you increase their costs to stop global warming, you WILL make those goods and services more expensive. This WILL result in additional starvation among marginal populations, like, say, all of Africa.
If you want to stop CO2 emission WITHOUT causing mass starvation, you need to start advocating for non-CO2 emitting technologies, namely LFTRs, or whatever other promising technology tickles your fancy. Just don't demand that "they" simply stop. People will die if they do.
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> that provide you with everything you eat, drink, wear, and use in your entire life, from the cradle to the grave.
No, they don't do that, and to the degree they do, they are certainly well enough compensated that we don't owe them a debt of gratitude.
The people we are talking about here aren't the people just doing their jobs to get by, as oil field workers or truckers or HR managers at power plants or what have you. It's the people consciously lobbying and manipulating the public against climate action
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I'm sorry but there are people bred and lead into a corporate mentality that think nirvana is the subjugation of the planet or that we can and must for reasons of profit consume then entire planet at least until they get their nut. That my friend is evil. Rationalize it all you want. People are greedy, self obsessed nasty primates, and unless we teach them from an early age that we are all responsible for ourselves and our relationship to one another and life on this planet, we get precisely this me first s
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I'm not talking about the consumers, I'm talking about the forces keeping us needing to use those things to exist, be competitive, whatever.
You mean like your body? It forces you to eat, breathe, and other processes that cause all sorts of trouble. Good luck with that.
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You mean like your body? It forces you to eat, breathe, and other processes that cause all sorts of trouble. Good luck with that.
If you really think that we need to consume fossil fuels to eat, you're sadly deluded, and you deserve what you get, but I don't deserve what I get as a result of you believing that. Get over it.
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If you really think that we need to consume fossil fuels to eat
We need to consume something to eat. And it's usually not growing on our dining room table. So someone has to make, deliver, and cook that food for billions of people. That requires a lot of infrastructure, much of which is fossil fuel-based.
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Or like me they're not against nuclear power per se' but think more needs to be done to ensure the proper handling of nuclear waste and that currently the cost of building nuclear power plants makes it one of the most expensive ways to produce electrical power. If those things can be solved then I'd be more interested in it.
Re:Global warming has EVERYTHING to do with it (Score:4, Informative)
Or alternatively, the People know that the global warming story is white middle-class hysteria and refuse to fund fantasies any more.
The people I've most recently encountered who were dead worried about climate change as an issue that was affecting them RIGHT NOW, were Eskimo in Northern Alaska. They're far from middle class. They see the ice fields they rely on for hunting forming later, and melting earlier, each year.
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Re:Global warming has EVERYTHING to do with it (Score:5, Funny)
please prove that the commenter is 'full of shit', that this person's body is at least made up of a majority of actual dung. i want pictures of said shit, testimonials from manure experts, or pictures from an MRI or a colonoscopy.
Re:Global warming has EVERYTHING to do with it (Score:5, Insightful)
>Please prove that the commenter was bribed by the oil industry, that there exists any attempt by oil industry companies and that any money is on the table. I want receipts, invoices or funding statements in company records. Otherwise you're just full of shit.
Of course, because it's standard practise for companies to keep careful, public accounting records of illegal or deceitful activities (paying shills is sometimes the former and always the latter).
Re:Global warming has EVERYTHING to do with it (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he is saying something more like "lung cancer doesn't cause second hand smoke". Because the title would read something like:
Lung Cancer Affects Health Of Those Around You
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Yes. In fact the carbon dioxide in this case is causing a cooling of the atmosphere.
FTFA:
Enough said... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/world-on-track-for-nearly-11-degree-temperature-rise-energy-expert-says/2011/11/28/gIQAi0lM6N_story.html [washingtonpost.com]
http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm [berrens.nl]
Re:Enough said... (Score:4, Informative)
I read that article before so I know you've done an excellent job of misunderstanding it. But then The Register presented an inflammatory headline for a reason...
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If those predictions are true, then we are fucked. FUBAR
"IF".
What is CO2 doing up there? (Score:2)
I thought that CO2 was heavier than air, so there shouldn't be any of it in the upper atmosphere.
(at least not the stuff emitted by burning carbon based stuff at ground level. There could be some Methane at high altitude that gets converted to CO2 by solar radiation., and maybe jet exhaust and large volcanic eruptions.
Re:What is CO2 doing up there? (Score:5, Informative)
Its molecular weight is irrelevant (Score:3)
When 2 liquids can dissolve with each other the weight of the molecules is pretty irrelevant. How do you think alcohol and water mix when water is so much denser? You don't see the alcohol sink to the bottom in a wine bottle left for decades for example.
Re:Its molecular weight is irrelevant (Score:5, Insightful)
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Liquids and gases are both fluids. If the weight of the molecules in a mixed gas made any different then earths and every other planets atmosphere would have seperated out into layers billions of years ago.
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For ideal gases, free of intermolecular attractions, what's really most relevant is molecular speed, but (mean) speed is inversely proportional to sqrt(molecular weight). Therefore molecular weight *is* important. And for most of the atmosphere by volume, density is so low that intra-molecular attractive forces are indeed negligible, and so in the largest part of the atmosphere the gases do indeed behave l
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Um , no, you don't. Go get yourself a clue.
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No, no you don't. Wine is a colloid. When you know what that is, go create yourself an account, and log in so we can mock you personally.
Re:What is CO2 doing up there? (Score:5, Insightful)
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slow clap for this one!
Re:What is CO2 doing up there? (Score:5, Informative)
"""
Above the turbopause at about 100 km (62 mi; 330,000 ft) (essentially corresponding to the mesopause), the composition varies with altitude. This is because the distance that particles can move without colliding with one another is large compared with the size of motions that cause mixing. This allows the gases to stratify by molecular weight, with the heavier ones such as oxygen and nitrogen present only near the bottom of the heterosphere. The upper part of the heterosphere is composed almost completely of hydrogen, the lightest element.
"""
The reason we do not suffocate is not because gases do not separate out, it is because we have not just a source of O2 and a sink of CO2, but also constant stirring.
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Never mind just CO2 , what about HCFCs? (Score:4, Interesting)
They have a global warming potential thousands of times higher than CO2 and are being released into the atmosphere in large quantities. HCFCs replaced CFCs because they don't react with ozone so don't destroy the ozone layer. The downside of that is they don't react with ANYTHING in the atmosphere so no one has an idea how they will ever be removed. This is a potentially major issue which isn't being taken seriously enough.
Re:Never mind just CO2 , what about HCFCs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Very good point but I wouldn't say "never mind CO2." I'd say it's an equally big problem.
Re:Never mind just CO2 , what about HCFCs? (Score:5, Interesting)
HCFCs replaced CFCs because they don't react with ozone so don't destroy the ozone layer.
HCFCs do react with ozone and more so than CFCs. But since they're more reactive, they're more likely to decompose before they get to ozone-destroying altitudes.
Re:Never mind just CO2 , what about HCFCs? (Score:4, Informative)
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HCFCs generally have a shorter atmospheric lifetime than the CFCs they replace as the hydrogen carbon bonds are weaker than halogen-carbon ones. The problem is PFCs which are composed of hydrogen and fluorine atoms only. The bonds are so stable the most likely way they will be destroyed is by diffusing to the mesosphere & being hit by cosmic rays.
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Push or pull (Score:2)
Rising carbon dioxide levels at the edge of space are apparently reducing the pull
Isn't it more of a push?
So... (Score:4, Funny)
...the sky is literally falling
Re:One is not like the other. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One is not like the other. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:One is not like the other. (Score:4, Funny)
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That's because you like a number of people think that CLIMATE CHANGE only causes warming. It causes a rougher cycle of warmer highs and colder lows. Overall it causes the planet to warm, but the effects felt are not always to warm.
On the other hand, if this might effect american's TV channels perhaps we can get the majority of people in the US to start believing in science....
Ok maybe not, but a boy can hope.
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That's because you like a number of people think that CLIMATE CHANGE only causes warming. It causes a rougher cycle of warmer highs and colder lows. Overall it causes the planet to warm, but the effects felt are not always to warm.
I imagine flyingfsck's BS detector is pegging on this bit of rhetorical dodge. Normal people would call this the much more accurate "ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING" not the vague "CLIMATE CHANGE".
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that cant be possible. I think God placed that tree there to test our faith.
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Stop right there. CO2 does not convert light into infrared. It absorbs infrared. The conversion from visible light to infrared occurs when the earth absorbs visible light, heats up, and subsequently re-emits the heat as infrared waves.
Re-read TFA (if you really read it the first time) and note that this is about the increased CO2 in the upper atmosphere gaini
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Re:less drag? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:less drag? (Score:5, Informative)
There is no contradiction.
Go put your hand behind your fridge - notice that the iron grid there is quite a bit warmer than room temperature ?
But the inside of the fridge is cold...
See to make the fridge cold, we have to MOVE the heat inside it somewhere, that grid is where it ends up being radiated away from.
The grid gets warmer, so the fridge can get colder.
Is that a contradiction too ?
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The grid gets warmer, so the fridge can get colder.
Is that a contradiction too ?
No, it is merely a phenomenon caused by an omniscient deity to test the faith of their believers -- Now THAT'S a contradiction.
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Obviously. Are you merely illiterate, or just plain thick?
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No, no, the CO2 from "volcanoes and stuff" is a factor, I'm sure.
But we should probably deal with the 99% of CO2 that comes from humans burning stuff, before moving on to the volcanoes releasing the other 1%.
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