”Laying the foundations for a new science of climate change”
A quick followup to yesterday’s letter and my expressed commitment. What this headline should tell you is that I feel encouraged about going forward. One small clarification is needed: climate science, broadly speaking, goes all the way back to Aristotle. Many different branches have evolved over the centuries that are not subject to scrutiny, only the branch that deals with climate change. The modern version of this specialty was conceived in 1824 by Joseph Fourier when he proposed the idea of a greenhouse effect. The discovery of actual conduits in the form of greenhouse gases, made by Eunice Foote and John Tyndall, waited until the 1850s. It then took until 1896 for Svante Arrhenius to describe how the process worked in warming the ground. There was some elaboration in the first half of the last century but no real acceleration began until the 1950s. While today’s level of activity is intense, this science is still young and still searching for new sources of information that could explain an assortment of puzzling developments.
Two things in particular have bothered me about the way scientists have handled their need for better research. One is that they have never been quite sure about what to do about water vapor. It is a greenhouse gas, by definition, but utterly different from the rest of them in all kinds of ways, including its great but difficult-to-define properties of strength. This has not been managed as aggressively as it could be. The other thing that scientists have difficult with is the potential greenhouse effect of aerosols. I would define aerosols in the broadest way, as substances of abundance composed of very small assemblies of densely-packed molecules that are able to float around in the atmosphere in much the same way that single-molecule gases do. Some of these are represented by a wide assortment of fine solid particles, some by drops or droplets of a liquid, mainly water, and some by chunks of ice that have wide differences in size.
There are questions: Do all aerosols capture longwave photons of energy? Do they capture all of the wavelengths, or only a certain few, or maybe none? If they do capture photons must they not also re-emit the same amount? How does that process essentially differ from what greenhouse gases do? How can they all be measured, from start to finish, where “finish” is determined by the effects that impact the ground? Some of the answers should be easy, but not so for others. Measuring effects on the ground for most aerosols must be terribly frustrating, but I think there is an exception.
These ingredients can now be found in form of shilajit gold capsules for buy cialis online cute-n-tiny.com an easy intake. Sometimes the men are not aware of the debilitating havoc that high pressure can slowly but steadily wreck on their body. discount generic cialis This is a new kind of a medicine that works in restoring the hair viagra canadian pharmacy growth for men. Vardenafil may well help in achieving erection and also viagra pfizer prix http://cute-n-tiny.com/cute-animals/ducklins-in-a-sink/ in sustaining it for a long period of time at least to see one through the intercourse.It is pretty well established that clouds, in general, have a greenhouse effect. I also suspect, without knowing this as a fact, that the tiny little water droplets they are composed of are deeply involved, via ordinary capturing and re-emitting of longwave energy. Which wavelengths they capture, if not all of those possible, may be interesting but need not be important. It’s the re-emitting of photons that is important, and what follows, perhaps a chain effect of considerable complexity which ends with some photons finally striking the ground and providing energy employed in warming up the air above the ground. Let’s assume for a minute that this is correct, and let’s also assume that because there are so many clouds in the sky as a whole, the total greenhouse effect expressed by clouds could rank highest among all the different kinds of aerosols. Where do these ideas take us?
They lead inexorably to precipitable water (PW). PW is a complex material primarily composed of two substances, water vapor and the tiny droplets of water that form into clouds. The two are in many ways inseparable, and they both exhibit greenhouse effects. One, for sure, has the strongest overall greenhouse effect of all gases. The other quite possibly has the strongest overall greenhouse effect of all aerosols. They always work together, and when they are together, which is quite often, they behave in a completely unified manner, which, upon close observation, happens to be quite exceptional in certain circumstances—like when they appear within spaces organized by jetstream wind systems.
The modern science of climate change has mismanaged its treatment of the unique warming power exercised by PW by separating its two major components into substances it does not know what to do with independently. In consequence, the vaguely-supposed powers of one of them, water vapor, have simply been harnessed to those of carbon dioxide, doing so in a less than scientific manner, thereupon leaving them all but forgotten about. Likewise, the vaguely-supposed greenhouse power of clouds has largely been treated as an offset to the powerful albedo effect that cloud tops have when the sun is shining. The new science of climate change, once established, will look at PW in a more holistic way, unlabored by either CO2 or solar reflection, quickly discovering its profound effects on surface temperatures, which are created one day at a time. These effects are readily measurable, with reasonable accuracy, day after day. They can then be added up and sorted out in any number of ways, with many useful things ready to be learned.
Carl