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Global warming's escape hatch
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How do you visualise global warming? If you're not a scientist you may have formed a mental picture of the planet sweating, wearing sunglasses, something like that. One way of looking at it is to think of Earth as a pot full of water on a stove. Differing forces turn the heat up and down and whatever's in the pot (well, us, if you'll forgive the cannibalistic image that produces) gets warmer or cooler.
The image is more accurate if you remember that the top of the pot is open and a lot of the heat escapes to outer space, so the pot doesn't get as hot. One of the key questions about global warming is how much. CO2, after all, is a greenhouse gas because it traps some of the heat and prevents it from escaping. So does methane. But the biggest greenhouse gas (96% of all greenhouse gases, in fact) is good old water vapor--mostly in the form of clouds.
The neat thing is that satellites can measure the heat that escapes the planet. If greenhouse gases are trapping heat within our atmosphere, there will be less heat escaping back into space. If the heat escaping stays the same or even increases, that means the planet isn't warming by as much as previously thought.
Richard Lindzen is a climate scientist (well, he's the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at M.I.T., actually), and one of the skeptic scientists that question the conventional wisdom about global warming. He's not popular with that crowd, as you'll discover when comments start appearing below.
Lindzen just published a paper (which I saw posted on Watt's Up With That, a website that is also not popular with global warming activists, despite it being Science Blog of the Year) that says that the sensitivity of our climate may work in our favor. Measuring radiation over the tropics, Lindzen finds that as the temperature of the surface of the sea increases, radiation into space does too. This implies that there is a self-correcting mechanism that works to counterbalance fluctuations in temperatures near the surface. This in turn means that global warming due to CO2 increases may just radiate off into space. Well, some of it, anyhow. So this is an important paper with serious implications, if it holds up.
Skeptics have been saying this might be true for quite a while, and they will welcome Lindzen's paper. Activists will attack it, as they should. But watch this debate carefully (and you may see a version of this debate in the comments to this article). People on the other side of this argument can and certainly should look carefully at Lindzen's data, his calculations and his conclusions. But what's happened in the past is that global warming activists have attacked Lindzen because of his beliefs on other issues, organisations that have supported him in the past, and other completely irrelevant reasons. They play the man, not the ball.
Skeptics believe that this happens because global warming activists can't answer their objections. Here's an opportunity to prove them wrong.
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- thomaswfuller3 at gmail dot com
