Space Traffic May Be Creating More Clouds 57
seagirlreed writes "Rocket traffic may be adding water to the Earth's mesosphere, leading to more very high clouds in this layer of thin air on the edge of space. From the article: 'A team of researchers looking for an expected decrease in the number of clouds in this layer, as solar activity and heating have ramped up, were instead surprised to find an increase in the number and brightness of clouds in this near-outer-space region over the last two years. ... The source of the water to make the clouds is a puzzle, Siskind explained, because there is not much sign of it coming up into the mesosphere. On the other hand, rockets and, until recently, shuttles roaming in space could rain water exhaust down into the mesosphere.'"
Re:another variable in climate modelling (Score:3, Interesting)
to confuse the C02 argument even further.
Or perhaps simply to overlook the CO2 (and by the way, it is C oh 2, not C zero 2) issue completely, in their quest to blame some specific activity.
Since CO2 levels have recently pass the 400 ppm level [guardian.co.uk] for the first time in "recorded history" (ignoring for the moment that nobody recorded this until last 50 years or so), the source of the clouds could be a natural reaction to the increased CO2, and the claimed increase in world temperatures.
Since the article says:
'A team of researchers looking for an expected decrease in the number of clouds in this layer, as solar activity and heating have ramped up,
Yet in years past they were predicting increases cloud cover at all altitudes as one of the outcomes of increased temperatures. So why were they expecting a decrease?
It seems far more likely to me that they have their model wrong than it is likely that the puny number of launches of late have dumped that many tons of water in the mesosphere.
I'd worry about planes first... (Score:5, Interesting)
FWIW, there is some indication that Noctilucent clouds in the mesosphere have been only been around since the industrial revolution times (since there aren't really any earlier descriptions of the phenomena in recorded history unlike other atmospheric anomolies like auroras or sundogs), so it's a bit presumputous that the effect has been greatly effected by space traffic vs some other human terrestrial source. It is also suspected that since this phenomena appears to also track the solar cycle, the most recent solar cycle (24) got off to a late start (by a couple of years), and they also noted this phenomena was a bit higher than normal the last couple of years and they don't really know much about this phenomena, so it's hard to get too excited about this yet...
On the other hand, there is much more airplane traffic vs space traffic and airplane contrails apparently have a much larger effect.