svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
NOTE: This thread is NOT about is it caused by CO2, if it's man-made, or politics. If you want to talk about that stuff... please start your own thread.
Hopefully this is just science we can all discuss reasonably. For whatever reason, global warming is a real thing easily measured/recorded by satellites, ocean buoy's, etc. Apologies for the possibly offensive "note" above ... I just don't want the thread to get derailed by accidentally pushing anyone's button's - hopefully we're not talking about any of the more polarizing aspects.
So, this thread is about if the global weather has been getting worse with global warming. I've always heard that with global warming we can expect more storms and worse weather. It seems logical, higher temperature, more evaporation, more clouds, more rain. Certainly as weather changes some areas should see more severe weather and other areas less.
But I now suspect that at a global level, unless I've really misunderstood something, weather is overall less severe - by a lot.
Please double check my thinking here and let me know what flaws you see.
Atmospheric electricity measurements have been taken for a long time and the daily cycle confirms the existence of the electrical layer at 50 km (measurements are the same, at the same time of day, at any point on the globe).
So, if the temperature increase is increasing the amount of severe weather, there should be a corresponding increase to atmospheric electricity. Instead, we get the opposite (the images are links to their source):
The authors thought the decrease was from a decrease in galactic cosmic-ray flux. That doesn't jive for me for a couple of reasons, first is that their data doesn't show any increase after 2001 which was the minimum (see chart below). Second is that the reduction hardly seems like enough to have changed the air resistance, that is there still should have been plenty of ionization.
Hopefully this is just science we can all discuss reasonably. For whatever reason, global warming is a real thing easily measured/recorded by satellites, ocean buoy's, etc. Apologies for the possibly offensive "note" above ... I just don't want the thread to get derailed by accidentally pushing anyone's button's - hopefully we're not talking about any of the more polarizing aspects.
So, this thread is about if the global weather has been getting worse with global warming. I've always heard that with global warming we can expect more storms and worse weather. It seems logical, higher temperature, more evaporation, more clouds, more rain. Certainly as weather changes some areas should see more severe weather and other areas less.
But I now suspect that at a global level, unless I've really misunderstood something, weather is overall less severe - by a lot.
Please double check my thinking here and let me know what flaws you see.
Atmospheric Electricity This whole supposition is based on Atmospheric Electricity measurements. We know that atmospheric electricity is the "circuit flow" between Earth and sky that complete the lightening (i.e., severe weather) cycle. If you're not familiar with atmospheric electricity, you can google it, check wikipedia; personally I like Feynman. Here's an illustration that explains the circuit --> This is where the 100V potential difference per yard comes from (yes, at eye level the atmospheric potential is ~200V, or rather it used to be ) and is in general pretty cool stuff every nerd should know about. |
Atmospheric electricity measurements have been taken for a long time and the daily cycle confirms the existence of the electrical layer at 50 km (measurements are the same, at the same time of day, at any point on the globe).
So, if the temperature increase is increasing the amount of severe weather, there should be a corresponding increase to atmospheric electricity. Instead, we get the opposite (the images are links to their source):
The authors thought the decrease was from a decrease in galactic cosmic-ray flux. That doesn't jive for me for a couple of reasons, first is that their data doesn't show any increase after 2001 which was the minimum (see chart below). Second is that the reduction hardly seems like enough to have changed the air resistance, that is there still should have been plenty of ionization.
Last edited: