TEACH THE REAL STORY
OF CLIMATE CHANGE
not the idiocy of politicians.
Global Warming has now been retitled
“Climate Change” since predictions of doom in a dozen years never arrived. Here’s a quick story that a 5th
grader can understand.
If you add CO2 or methane to an atmosphere
you get an effect of visible light being penetrable but not infrared. Since most visible light from the sun strikes
the surface wherein continents and oceans re-emits heat (infrared), a “greenhouse effect” takes place. The
trapped heat can’t get out. But that’s
where political knowledge, having congratulated itself on intellect, seems to
stop. The upper 8 feet of all the water on
earth has a much heat storing capability as the entire atmosphere. Middle School Proof: Atmospheric pressure is
14.7 lbs. per square inch. That’s the
weight of a column of air 200,000+ feet high and 1 inch by 1 inch at sea level
on the bottom. How much water does it
take to equal that same weight atop 1 square inch? It works out to 32 feet. But water has 5 times the “heat capacity”, a
measure of the heat it can store per pound, as air does. That means that 6.4 feet of water over all
the planet equals the heat capacity of the entire atmosphere. But of course we only have water over 78% of
the earth, so if we proportion this, about 8 feet of all the surface water on
earth equals the atmosphere in ability to store heat.
So all that talk about raising the temperature
10 degrees in 12 years is counterbalanced by the fact that a little sliver of
oceans and lakes can absorb the heat and then by circulation with the deep, dissipate
it. The oceans are almost everywhere 14,000 to 18,000 feet deep. Thus any
climate model must take account of the ocean currents and water’s ability to
take care of heat.
Next, if you raise the air’s
temperature, what happens with water evaporation? It increases, of course. But when that moist air is carried aloft in
the atmosphere, it forms more clouds.
Cloud tops are brilliant white and reflect 98% of the incoming visible radiation.
That cools things. And studies show that this is happening a lot in the
tropics. The normal clear day absorption
of heat which is over 70% falls to 2% on cloudy overcast days and cools
considerably. This means that any
climate model must account for increased/decreased
cloud cover and also air circulations
like the N. Pacific 60-year cycle of air flow. For 60 years, the Arctic air
comes down over Alaska, then it changes and weather comes from Asia.
Add to this the 500-1000 year cycles
of Solar radiation where the sun
burns brighter, then cooler.
4 effects, maybe more. None is
completely understood. It’s getting complicated, isn’t it. Scientists use various tools to see what the
climate has done historically. Greenland’s ice sheet is 10,000 feet deep in
places and records about 3 million years of ice. Each year has a cold winter of snow
accumulation and a warm summer with partial melting, so each year leaves a record
like a tree ring. Radioisotopes can
approximate the temperature of each year and atmospheric humidity. There are also clever indicators of where the
snow came from that caused the ice. Ice
ages have occurred 24 times in those 3 million years and its not been
determined what causes them. However, “nutation”
of the earth must play a significant part.
Nutation is like when you spin a top and it spins nicely for awhile then
suddenly goes into a few stutters before resuming smooth spinning. That stutter is a nutation and the strongest
of these occurs every 17,000 years. It
causes the tilt of the earth’s axis to change rapidly from 22.5 degrees to 24
degrees. Rapid chill occurs over about
100 years and massive snows in the polar regions sends earth into an ace age
where average temperature is 35 degrees colder.
But we also know that there are smaller ten degree changes during the
ice age—25 years of Saskatchewan climate is superceded by 25-100 years of
bitter cold like Greenland. One theory of why this happened explains how the
temperature of the N. Atlantic Deep Water—water over 10,000 feet deep
changed. The entire circulation in and
out of the Arctic sea comes from the N. Atlantic and thus affects all the
oceans.
I hope this illustrates how hog-washed
and naive the political activists are. At
the end of the last ice age, warming started about 15,000BC, but then had a 17
degree pullback into cold for 1500 years beginning about 11,700 BC
(Younger-Dryas episode) Then there were 2 Sahara warmings, the first at 4400 BC
and the second 2200-2000 BC. This
changed the Sahara from a short grassland to harsh desert. (There was a 150 year dust bowl after 2150 BC
in Egypt that caused the Nile to not flood
and people revolted overthrowing the Old Kingdom. Pharaoh was a “god”
who brought annual flooding, and when that stopped, people revolted.) During
the Roman Empire it was warm all over Europe.
(So much so that grapes grew in England.
You can’t grow them very well there today—too cold.) But beginning in
the 500s to 800s there was a colder climate.
Crops didn’t grow well and people starved. Barbarians were displaced by climate in Asia
and invaded. It’s known as the Dark
Ages. Then there was a significant
warming from 1000-1300 in which medieval life flourished in Europe. Then in the early 1300s Europe fell into what
is known as the little Ice Age.
Recurrent very cold spells took place through the early 1800s. (London used
to have an annual ice fair on the frozen Thames river each year. Today it never freezes.) Siince 1900 we have had our current warming
trend. The bottom line is that climate is always
changing and there’s much more to it than Al Gore preaches.
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