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from the did-they-expect-to-find-handwarmers? dept.
OSLO (Reuters) - Natural swings in the Arctic climate have caused up to half the precipitous losses of sea ice around the North Pole in recent decades, with the rest driven by man-made global warming, scientists said on Monday.
The study indicates that an ice-free Arctic Ocean, often feared to be just years away, in one of the starkest signs of man-made global warming, could be delayed if nature swings back to a cooler mode.
Natural variations in the Arctic climate "may be responsible for about 30–50 percent of the overall decline in September sea ice since 1979," the U.S.-based team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Sea ice has shrunk steadily and hit a record low in September 2012 -- late summer in the Arctic -- in satellite records dating back to 1979.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday March 15 2017, @12:35AM (2 children)
Methane is 20-30 times more potent in trapping infrared.
Has to do with the number of vibrational modes possible with the molecule (quantized, of course) and the half-life of the molecule in an excited state (the longer the half-life, the more - usually IR - energy is trapped in the molecule)
CO2 has double bonds between C and O, thus 2 (pretty stiff) oscillators, 1 degree of bending-like oscillator- 3 vibration modes in total [purdue.edu], 4 degrees of oscillatory freedom (2 stretching, 2 bending - one X the other Y plane with the same energy)
Methane has 4 simple C-H bonds - heaps of vibrational degrees of freedom, many with the same energy, 9 vibration modes [purdue.edu].
Di-chloro-ethilene - 12 modes of vibration [purdue.edu]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday March 15 2017, @01:15AM (1 child)
TIL something that's not easy to place in a random chat.
As DeathMonkey pointed out, the amount does matter. Cows and broken wells still don't make up for the CO2 we output...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday March 15 2017, @02:04AM
Amount you say... 2 words: tundra and Arctic.
By the CO2 we've release already, we may have squeezed [businessinsider.com] the trigger [wikipedia.org] hard [wikipedia.org] enough [wikipedia.org].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford