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.'"
Great, kill 2 birds (Score:5, Funny)
with 1 stone... put lots of rockets up and build something cool like a Elysium space city, or maybe a space elevator. And solve global warming at the same time!
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Solve? Water vapour is a pretty good insulator. Increasing the water in the atmosphere increases global warming.
Re:Great, kill 2 birds (Score:4, Informative)
water != cloud
white cloud reflects a lot of sun's radiation back into space. Yes water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas, but we're talking about more efficient trapping of [heat that has been greatly reduced by higher albedo before it ever hit the ground]. Net effect is reduced overall heat.
Just go out on a cloudy summer day vs. a cloudless one and feel the effect.
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Works really well for Venus. Coolest planet in the solar system due to all those clouds.
On Earth you can go out on a cloudy night vs a clear night and feel the effect.
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Venus is a lot closer to the sun.
Put Venus in the same orbit as Earth and see what the temperature is.
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Venus is a lot closer to the sun.
It isn't that much closer to the Sun, much less then Mercury which is cooler then Venus. There's a reason that Venus was expected to be inhabitable until the temperature was first measured by radar in '59 or so and it was so surprising how hot Venus is.
Put Venus in the same orbit as Earth and see what the temperature is.
Close enough to what it currently is. The greenhouse effect is pretty powerful, even the Earth is 40 Kelvins hotter then it would be without an atmosphere and Venus is more like 400 Kelvins hotter even with it's very high albedo.
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Forget the models - Do we get our glaciers back?
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I'm looking forward to getting these [xkcd.com] back!
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Forget the models - Do we get our glaciers back?
Yep. At the very next ice age. Coming soon (in geological terms) to a theater near you.
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Re: (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 increa
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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),:
You forget the well-known practice of extracting the air from bubbles in ice cores, for direct measures.
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Always good to include a citation...
Keeling: The reconstructions before the ice core period, which take us only back 800,000 years, are a lot less secure. In the case of ice cores, we actually have samples of old air. And subject to some small caveats, you can simply analyze those and figure it out. In earlier geologic eras, the reconstruction of carbon dioxide depends on more indirect measurements. The work of people like Mark Pagani at Yale, who is in the business of reconstructing paleo CO2, shows that the last time that CO2 was around this level was probably in the mid-Pliocene, 2 to 4 million years ago.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/may/14/record-400ppm-co2-carbon-emissions
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There's no single model - just like with fluid flow
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the source of the clouds could be a natural reaction to the increased CO2
It could be but it isn't. Water vapour from the troposphere does not generally get into the stratosphere let alone the mesosphere unless put there by a tall volcanic plume or a machine. Once the water is up that high it doesn't fall back down easily, rather it is slowly broken down by radiation and the hydrogen tends to leak off into space.
Yet in years past they were predicting increases cloud cover at all altitudes
Umm, no the prediction was more water vapour and less cloud in the troposphere, there has been very little done in the way of research into clouds in the mesosphere so an
all altitudes isn't mesosphere (Score:2)
Re:Lazy Scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more like scientists making mild suggestions requiring further research and the media taking that as "Rocket launches are going to cause permanent overcast skies within 20 years!!!"
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Obligatory [xkcd.com] (especially the tooltip)
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This article is about the very thin, topmost portions of the atmosphere, with basically less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the air. Warming related data there looks funny, compared to the main bulk of the atmosphere (roughly 99.9%).
Remember "climategate"? That was about somebody either trying to fudge data or honestly reconcile odd data on high altitude forests. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the researcher was totally guilty of some kind of deliberate fraud - it was still data about roughly the f
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For real scandals you have to look at things like the guy that faked the link betwee
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This.
As an aside, light pollution in my area is bad enough that it's not easy to see these noctilucent clouds. Between that pollution and clouds, it's nigh impossible to see much of the night sky; I consider that one of the problems afflicting city dwellers is the inability to see the nighttime sky, which might otherwise provide for feeling humility and awe.
NLCs (Score:1)
Probably worth noting that this refers to noctilucent clouds (NLCs) which occur in polar regions.
The findings of NASA's AIM satellite are, as of yet, inexplicable. Therefore, what's mentioned here is purely speculative.
woah there nellie.. (Score:2)
Are you saying /doters are posting speculative assumptions to explain inconclusive observations.
Them is fightin words, sir! Pistols at sunrise.
Not rockets. (Score:2)
Since there hasn't been a significant increase in rocket launches in the last two years, rocket launches can't be the explanation for an increase in noctilucent clouds in the last two years.
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Are you sure he didn't mean "koans"?
Question! (Score:1)
If we would lose the ozon layer would creating more of these clouds be a possible solution? TM by the way.
Re:Cloud size (Score:4, Informative)
Clouds (Score:3)
Funny thing about clouds... they increase reflectivity. As the temperatures go up more water vapour goes up into the sky to form clouds, which reflect incoming light and heat and provide a cooling effect. i.e.: it's self-regulating.
They reflect incoming light. and outgoing heat.
To first order, in fact, clouds don't have a significant effect on average temperature (if they reflect incident light and exiting infrared equally well, the effects cancel). They do have a big effect on the day/night temperature variation (cloud-free days have high daytime temperatures and low nighttime temperature.
Re:FUD (Score:4, Informative)
Funny thing about clouds... they increase reflectivity. As the temperatures go up more water vapour goes up into the sky to form clouds, which reflect incoming light and heat and provide a cooling effect. i.e.: it's self-regulating.
This is Richard Linzen's "Iris" hypothesis. One of the few plausible bits of actual science from the so-called climate skeptics. Unfortunately, it seems not to work and was thoroughly refuted [skepticalscience.com] about ten years ago.
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Well if it was refuted by the whackaloons at skepticalScience, then it's obviously true.
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In less kind words Linzen's book is like the popular "Chariots of gods" from the 70's in that it attempts to baffle lay-people with speculative bullshit that just "sounds right".
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Others have pointed out that it doesn't actually work that way, but not why.
Clouds are made out of water, water absorbs UV (rather than reflecting it) and radiates IR. But it radiates it in all directions. It takes about two feet of liquid water to absorb all of the UV, which is why you can still get a sunburn on a cloudy day. UV is still coming through, and now (due to the influence of the clouds) it's coming in at all angles. UV coming in at an angle has less chance to be reflected into space, and more ch
Space Traffic May Be Creating More Clouds (Score:5, Funny)
Good, because I'm going to need more storage space pretty soon.
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.
Rocket waste volume (Score:2)
Truly, times have changed (Score:3)