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Re: The Climate Story Nobody Talks About

Subject Re: The Climate Story Nobody Talks About
Newsgroups sci.physics
References <ZIOdnULaFtdRiWvInZ2dnUU7-VkAAAAA@giganews.com> <o7ihcc-h2p.ln1@mail.specsol.com>
From Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com>
Date 2015-09-13 20:08 -0500
Message-ID <ZIOdnXTaFteAg2vInZ2dnUU7-VmdnZ2d@giganews.com> (permalink)

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On 9/13/15 7:50 PM, jimp@specsol.spam.sux.com wrote:
> An utter, puerile lie, spamming shit head.

   I'm afraid not, jimp. You are blinded by your anger problem.
   Try Rancho Cucamonga Anger Management Classes
> http://www.yellowpages.com/rancho-cucamonga-ca/anger-management-classes

   Someday, you will thank me, jimp.

   The Climate Story Nobody Talks About
> http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/09/10/438913284/the-climate-story-nobody-talks-about

 > Just two centuries ago, humanity barely understood that a planet's
 > climate could change at all. People were still digesting the idea
 > that Earth was a whole lot older than 6,000 years. But by the 1870s,
 > most scientists accepted that our planet had experienced prolonged
 > climate shifts — in the form of ice ages — dating back tens or
 > hundreds of thousands of years. Explaining the causes of the ice ages
 > was, however, far beyond the capacities of science at the time. That
 > meant humanity would have to build those capacities.
 >
 > Across the latter half of the 20th century, an effort worthy of
 > multiple Manhattan Projects unpacked something entirely new and
 > entirely remarkable: a science of planets in all their complex glory.
 > Wind, oceans, ice and rock: All of it had to be accounted for if the
 > story of Earth and its climate was to be told.
 >
 > But we couldn't tell Earth's climate story without understanding
 > climate on other planets, too. That's why it's no accident that
 > climate science came to maturity in the space age.
 >
 > This is the first point to understand. All the effort and all the
 > genius poured into humanity's bold exploration of the solar system
 > have found their deepest expression in the science of climate.
 >


 > But, it's Venus that's the real poster child for climate science
 > triumph, extra-terrestrial or otherwise. Even though it's about the
 > same mass and size as Earth, temperatures on Venus hover around 860 F
 > (hot enough to melt lead) and there is almost no water anywhere on
 > the planet. Venus is as close to hell as you'll find in this solar
 > system — and its location closer to the sun does not, by itself,
 > explain it's terrible state.
 >

 > In other words — with our modern understanding of climate — we now
 > know that if Earth were placed in Venus's location, the greenhouse
 > effect would go nuts, heating the planet and driving water molecules
 > high into the atmosphere where sunlight zaps them apart. What's left
 > is a hot, dry atmosphere composed almost entirely of CO2. That's a
 > runaway greenhouse effect. "There's good evidence this happened on
 > Venus," says Kasting, who points to detailed chemical analysis of the
 > Venusian atmosphere that proves the water was lost to space.
 >

 > Now, let's return to the climate of our own blue world. Catling can
 > easily tick off a list of terrestrial climate science's epoch-making
 > achievements. There's the development and deployment of a global
 > monitoring system for the planet. "A major achievement of modern
 > civilization," Catling says, "is the continuous satellite monitoring
 > of the Earth's weather, climate and atmospheric composition, in
 > combination with thousands of monitoring stations on the surface."
 > Then, there's exhaustive work measuring molecular properties of
 > atmospheric gases to understand how they interact with both sunlight
 > and heat radiation emitted by the Earth. One also can point to the
 > development of high performance computer simulations of planetary
 > climate. "The advances in computing to solve the physics and
 > chemistry of the atmosphere cannot be overstated," Catling says,
 > pointing out this advance led to huge increases in weather prediction
 > accuracy.
 >
 > More than anything, however, the real triumph of climate science
 > comes in its ability to understand what's happening to the Earth now.
 > Del Genio describes it in the simplest of scientific terms:
 >
 > "The major achievement of terrestrial climate science is that 34
 > years ago, Jim Hansen and colleagues published a paper in Science
 > making the first prediction of the rate of climate change over the
 > next few decades as a result of CO2 increases [see Figure]. Looking
 > at how much the Earth's surface temperature has actually changed in
 > that time, they came remarkably close. That was a true prediction of
 > the future, and sufficiently long ago that we have the chance to see
 > how good it was."

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Thread

The Climate Story Nobody Talks About Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com> - 2015-09-13 19:29 -0500
  Re: The Climate Story Nobody Talks About Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com> - 2015-09-13 19:30 -0500
    Re: The Climate Story Nobody Talks About jimp@specsol.spam.sux.com - 2015-09-14 00:52 +0000
  Re: The Climate Story Nobody Talks About jimp@specsol.spam.sux.com - 2015-09-14 00:50 +0000
    Re: The Climate Story Nobody Talks About Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com> - 2015-09-13 20:08 -0500
      Re: The Climate Story Nobody Talks About jimp@specsol.spam.sux.com - 2015-09-14 02:26 +0000
  Re: The Climate Story Nobody Talks About gilber34 <invalid@invalid.com> - 2015-09-13 20:35 -0500

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