SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Earth has been trapping heat at an alarming new rate, study finds:
The amount of heat trapped by Earth's land, ocean, and atmosphere doubled over the course of just 14 years, a new study shows.
To figure out how much heat the earth was trapping, researchers looked at NASA satellite measurements that tracked how much of the Sun's energy was entering Earth's atmosphere and how much was being bounced back into space. They compared this with data from NOAA buoys that tracked ocean temperatures — which gives them an idea of how much heat is getting absorbed into the ocean.
The difference between the amount of heat absorbed by Earth, and the amount reflected back into space is called an energy imbalance. In this case, they found that from 2005 to 2019, the amount of heat absorbed by Earth was going up.
[...] The researchers think that the reason the Earth is holding on to more heat comes down to a few different factors. One is human-caused climate change. Among other problems, the more greenhouse gases we emit, the more heat they trap. It gets worse when you take into account that increasing heat also melts ice and snow. Ice and snow can help the planet reflect heat back into space — as they disappear, more heat can be absorbed by the land and oceans underneath.
There's another factor at play too — natural changes to a climate pattern called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Between 2014 and 2019, the pattern was in a 'warm phase' which caused fewer clouds to form. That also meant more heat could be absorbed by the oceans.
Journal Reference:
Norman G. Loeb, Gregory C. Johnson, Tyler J. Thorsen, et al. Satellite and Ocean Data Reveal Marked Increase in Earth's Heating Rate, Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2021GL093047)
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday June 28 2021, @04:28AM (2 children)
One of the nicknames for Economics is "the dismal science". And I see that name not as a complaint of economics, but as yet another way of saying that people just don't want to accept limits. Unfortunately, you are probably correct in thinking that there's just not enough will to address Global Warming, and consequently, we will do far too little too late to save our current coasts. Say goodbye to the Greenland ice sheet, and New Orleans, Miami, Venice, Calcutta (Kolkata), and many of the other coastal cities of the world.
While that is the most likely scenario, we owe it to ourselves to still try to stop it from happening. And a very strong reason to give it our best shot is that rapid sea level rise is going to displace an awful, awful lot of people. How on Earth we're going to manage such massive migration without war is a real poser. I feel very unsure that peace can be kept. Then, if war does break out, can we restrain ourselves from using nuclear weapons? We should strive to avoid ever sliding into such an awful fix. That's the smart thing to do.
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Monday June 28 2021, @01:09PM (1 child)
I'm not sure what you're talking about or if I'm missing some sort of irony or whatever? 33k of these plant and human emissions = 0. That's like about 900 plants per country if we only consider OECD countries
Unless this plant doesn't work, and there's no reason to think it won't - then that's it, this is all over. Not only will you be able to undo human emissions, you could even bring CO2 levels arbitrarily low (or high) as desired. It will lead to an awesome scenario where we can actually remove all concern whatsoever about CO2 emissions which will also enable the rest of the world to rapidly accelerate their development and for us to more fully utilize our natural resources.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday June 28 2021, @04:02PM
33k sounded like an awful lot of plants. I just assumed it would be impossible to build that many. Not really impossible, but politically impossible. Upon further thought, 33k spread out over the nearly 150M km^2 land area isn't all that much, really, just 1 plant per 4500 km^2, which is very roughly 1 plant per 2 or 3 counties. That may be the way forward.
Still, there's a lot to be said for other moves, such as transitioning our transportation from internal combustion engines to electric motors, apart from the reduction in CO2 emissions that will make possible. The issues with energy storage-- like that if the Li-ion battery is the best we can do, it will take an awful lot of lithium to have a massive fleet of electric cars powered by them-- can be worked out, I'm confident.
If you want a bit of irony, it's that these CO2 scrubbing plants are called "plants", and seems they weren't even trying for any correspondence in name with those natural CO2 scrubbers, plants, as in those green, leafy naturally growing things that cows eat.