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Climate change: Stratospheric cooling

Started by A Sea of Red, August 28, 2015, 02:12:59 AM

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A Sea of Red

http://www.wunderground.com/resources/climate/strato_cooling.asp

The cooling of the stratosphere is something the contrarians in climate change discussions can never really fully explain. The issue? The stratosphere is cooling rather than warming, as one would expect if solar related forcings were to blame for the observed warming in the troposphere and cooling in the stratosphere. It's also the case, that the leveling off of the warming in the troposphere as the tropopause begins is within predictive theory; this would require a very technical explanation for most of you but the research is out there, and the models are within observed readings.

The banning of CFC's in the 1987 has lead to the recover to the ozone layer. Problem is, the recover is slowing down due to the radiative transferring increasing the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the troposphere. And it's about the rate we would expect from human caused climate change.

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However, this recovery of the ozone layer is being delayed. A significant portion of the observed stratospheric cooling is also due to human-emitted greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. Climate models predict that if greenhouse gases are to blame for heating at the surface, compensating cooling must occur in the upper atmosphere. We need only look as far as our sister planet, Venus, to see the truth of this theory. Venus's atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide, which has triggered a run-away greenhouse effect of truly hellish proportions. The average surface temperature on Venus is a very toasty 894 °F! However, Venus's upper atmosphere is a much colder than Earth's upper atmosphere. The explanation of this greenhouse gas-caused surface heating and upper air cooling is not simple, but good discussions can be found at Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and realclimate.org for those unafraid of radiative transfer theory. One way to think about the problem is that the amount of infrared heat energy radiated out to space by a planet is roughly equal to the amount of solar energy it receives from the sun. If the surface atmosphere warms, there must be compensating cooling elsewhere in the atmosphere in order to keep the amount of heat given off by the planet the same. As emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, their cooling effect on the stratosphere will increase. This will make recovery of the stratospheric ozone layer much slower.



See why contrarians are not taken very seriously in the community? Sorry, the science is settled.