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Skip to main content Scientific American Opinion July 4, 2025 5 min read A Thought Experiment Reveals the Fingerprints of Climate Change Came Early Climate change left its signature on the atmosphere early in the industrial revolution, reveals a thought experiment investigation By Ben Santer , Susan Solomon , David W. The consequence?
High humidity and heat raise the risk of heat illness —it is harder for the body to cool itself via sweating because the air is already so full of moisture that perspiration doesn’t evaporate. There are also tips for keeping your home cool. in atmospheric chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Read more California’s groundwater drought continues despite torrential rain “We expect that as long as greenhouse gas forcing continues to increase, there will be continued meteorological drought in the western United States,” says Jeremy Klavans at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Still, Suzie Stranik, the chair of the Seldovia Arts Council, recalls shutting down her greenhouse early and flushing her toilets sparingly. Atmospheric warming, however, will almost certainly affect the waters quality. It was quite a time here in our community, she says. Looming above town, the reservoir dwindled.
New York is home to four of the largest bitcoin mines in the country, which consume huge quantities of electric power and water to cool their server farms, emit loud humming noises around the clock and flood the atmosphere with copious greenhouse gases and pollutants.
These trends converged in Paris in 2015 when 195 countries signed a legally binding international treaty on climate change to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and attempt to keep global temperatures from rising to more dangerous levels. In the United States, coal production actually did peak in 2008 at 1.2
When organic waste is packed into landfills, a lack of aeration (introducing oxygen) renders it unable to decompose, causing it to emit larger quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Therefore, finding ways to reduce food waste is essential in neutralizing climate change.
Located about 40 light years from us, the exoplanet Trappist-1 b, orbiting an ultracool dwarf star, has perplexed astronomers with its atmospheric mysteries. and 15 µm), suggest that the exoplanet could either be bare, airless rock like Mercury or shrouded by a hazy carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) atmosphere like Titan. µm refuted this model.
As predicted in 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald , the stratosphere has been cooling. The dominant factors are changes in CO2 (a cooling), ozone depletion (a cooling), warming from big volcanoes, and oscillations related to the solar cycle. But why is the stratosphere increasingly chill? The basic concept is easy to grasp though.
The difference exists because greenhouse gases in the air essentially trap heat from the sun, warming Earth above the calculated temperature. As the sun grows brighter, it will first raise Earth’s temperature so much that we will lose all the water vapor in our atmosphere and then, eventually , all the surface water on the planet.
A "negative greenhouse effect" means rising concentrations of CO2 and methane have slightly cooled parts of Antarctica’s upper atmosphere, but that could change as the air becomes more humid
A "negative greenhouse effect" means rising concentrations of CO2 and methane have slightly cooled parts of Antarctica’s upper atmosphere, but that could change as the air becomes more humid
Step 1: There is a natural greenhouse effect. This means that there is an upward surface flux of IR around (~398 W/m 2 ), while the outward flux at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) is roughly equivalent to the net solar radiation absorbed (~240 W/m 2 ). Step 2: Trace gases contribute to the natural greenhouse effect.
Another clue indicating a shortcoming is if you look at the atmospheric CO 2 -concentrations over time to see how much impact the IPCC reports have had on the real policy-makers in the world (Figure below). The cause of our changing climate is the increase in atmosphericgreenhouse gas concentrations that we have released into the air.
First, the cooling from the reflective materials they will inject, for which they are already selling carbon credits, charging $10 per gram of SO 2 released (!) Pinatubo, widely used as an analogy for SAI, put about 15M tons of sulfur aerosols in the stratosphere and cooled the Earth a little less than 1°C over the following year.
and the never-ending insistence of some solar enthusiasts that a dramatic cooling is right around the corner, these are not serious issues. The size of this cooling varies in the records, most of all in the satellite-derived AIRS v7 data, where the cooling is quite pronounced, and not at all in the ERA5 reanalysis. Lenssen, G.A.
These interactions were thought to lead to alternating decades-long intervals of warming and cooling centered in the extra-tropical North Atlantic that play out on 40-60 year timescales (hence the name). Background. any oscillation that was produced has to be internally generated.
I had reason to be reviewing the history of MSU satellite retrievals for atmospheric temperatures recently. Remember ‘satellite cooling’?]. This was before Wentz and Schabel (1998) pointed out that orbital decay in the NOAA satellites was imparting a strong cooling bias (about 0.12 References J.R. Christy, and R.T.
But this also raises other questions: 1) Can we expect the season to continue to lengthen as global warming from increasing concentration of globally well mixed greenhouse gas (GWM-GHG) continues to warm the Atlantic SSTs? In particular, they don’t just respond to SST changes, but also how the atmosphere changes as the SSTs change.
The increase regional VPD is mostly attributed to human-cause climate change (68%) and the rest (32%) is attributed to variations in the atmospheric circulation. High atmospheric “thirst” over multiple seasons or years can lead to drought conditions as vegetation dries out, and water flow in streams and rivers decreases.
To give the Commission credit where due — and it is due in many places — on one point closely related to these projections, they were uncommonly and admirably frank: Noting the risks and the stark tradeoffs posed by aerosol pollution in the lower atmosphere. Current and coming advances in carbon-free technology will help, of course.
The world is gathering soon in Glasgow to debate how to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades. Does the climate keep warming, stay the same, or even cool? But what happens when we achieve the goal of zero carbon dioxide emissions from human actions?
Heightened flood risk The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in a recent outlook that about 44 percent of the United States is at risk of floods this spring, equating to about 146 million people. This includes most of the eastern half of the country, the federal agency said.
The radiative forcing bar chart has gone full circle: Almost every IPCC report has a version of the radiative bar chart showing the contributions over the historical period of all the different forcings (greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar, etc.). Russell, "Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide", Science , vol.
If the sun was driving the warming, we’d see it in the stratospheric temperatures (which are cooling in line with expectations from the impact of CO2, not warming due to the supposed increase in solar activity). But we have mega-oodles (the SI unit) of additional data that tell us this conclusion cannot be correct. 27489-27492, 2000.
If people everywhere stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, stored heat would still continue to warm the atmosphere. The radiators are, in fact, cooling down, but their stored heat is still warming the air in the room. Historically, the first climate models represented only the atmosphere and were greatly simplified.
Meanwhile, note that the factors listed above involve the whole Earth system: the oceans, the cryosphere, the atmosphere, the solid earth and lithosphere, and a full range of scales, from the city block and shoreline, to ice dynamics that change over kilometers, to GRD footprints, to the whole global ocean. 2020) or Sadai et al.
With the federal government and state of Maryland each having announced within days of each other, the mandated disclosure of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, we have received, maybe not surprising, many calls in the last two weeks inquiring “what are GHGs?” Simply put, gases that trap heat in the atmosphere (.
estimate of no further CO 2 -induced warming or cooling once global CO 2 emissions reach and stay at next zero. C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.
Human activity adds more than 50 gigatons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year. What if scientists could turn back the clock on greenhouse-gas emissions – just a little? What if scientists could turn back the clock on greenhouse-gas emissions – just a little? Basalt is a porous rock formed from cooling lava.
As the Arctic is 30 degrees Celsius (50 F) warmer than what it should be right now, finding local solutions to cool down the poles suddenly doesn’t seem this far-fetched anymore. . High CO2 levels would continue to trap heat in the atmosphere, but with less energy coming in, temperatures on the surface would go down.
“Participants in the GreenChill Partnership and Store Certification Programs have been leading the industry in environmentally friendly refrigeration practices, and EPA annually honors their achievements at both the corporate and individual store certification level,” said Paul Gunning, Director of EPA’s Office of Atmospheric Protection.
Atmospheric rivers Similarly, atmospheric rivers are carrying more moisture due to climate change. Imagine the Mississippi River except in the sky and even more massive— atmospheric rivers can stretch more than 300 miles wide and transport 15 times the amount of water flowing out of the Mississippi. Reduce emissions.
“Natural gas”, also known as methane gas or fracked fossil gas, is a potent greenhouse gas that pollutes the environment and causes climate change when it is burned and when it escapes into the atmosphere during extraction, production, and transportation. Enbridge should be made to stop deliberately misleading the public.”
Writing as part of Frontiers’ guest editorials series, the study’s lead author – Prof Martin Siegert, deputy vice chancellor of the University of Exeter (Cornwall) – discusses how without there being a rapid shift to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the Antarctic environment will experience ever more drastic changes.
Student in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University Most people remember the water cycle they learned in school: water evaporates from lakes, rivers, and the ocean, air carrying this moisture rises, cools, condenses, and forms clouds, and these clouds precipitate water back down to the surface.
Satellites, for example, are used in meteorology to track weather systems and to monitor atmospheric fronts to predict what the weather will do next. Known as ENSO, they are opposite effects of the same process and are defined as an oscillation (a variation in magnitude) between the temperature of the atmosphere and the ocean.
They also provide cooling shade which helps heat-sensitive aquatic organisms survive (such as brook trout), and control algal growth by blocking sunlight. Trees remove carbon dioxide (CO2), a major greenhouse gas, from the air and return the oxygen. Where do we need riparian buffers?
Wild Weather Threatens Farm Viability Although the IRA funds are directed at greenhouse gas mitigation, many forms of agricultural climate mitigation also increase farm resilience. Keeping nitrous oxide out of the atmosphere is not the only conservation contribution of practices like these, though.
It details 80 (+ 20) ways to slash global greenhouse gases emissions and achieve emissions levels that can be absorbed by Nature. Eventually, CO2 levels in the atmosphere would return to 350 ppm. Back to 2017, I had loved listening to famous environmentalist Paul Hawken present his book Drawdown.
The key aspects were the inclusion of water vapour feedback as temperatures increased, and the use of ‘convective adjustment’ to maintain stability of the lower atmospheric column. The basic issue stems from the different timescales of the ocean and atmosphere. Fred Singer, before his turn to the dark side).
It is 33 years now since the IPCC in its first report in 1990 concluded that it is “certain” that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities “will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface.” It’s not hard to understand. Gray areas show lack of data.
CO 2 levels in the atmosphere hit an all-time high in early May. And while greenhouse gas emissions may dip this year because of lockdowns, we should not celebrate. Think of the atmosphere as a bathtub, and emissions as the water that flows from the tap. This directly impacts human health and wealth. The tub is still filling.
With proposed federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions by the Securities and Exchange Commission requiring GHG disclosure and new state statutes, including a new Maryland law that requires not only disclosure, but also a mandated reduction in GHG emissions, a greater appreciation of the subject of GHG appears in order.
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