GREENHOUSE EARTH

We all know that global warming is indeed upon us. Below are some recent satelitte images of Earth in Infra red and false color from the European Space Agency Rosetta probe to show concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

Earth is warming up , and the coming catastrophes associated with such a warming will begin to expand radically. I am starting yet another global warming thread to facilitate a discussion on the coming crisis





This infrared image of Earth shows some examples of the chemical components of our atmosphere that VIRTIS detected. Areas of higher abundance of carbon dioxide are shown in green.




This infrared image of Earth shows some examples of the chemical components of our atmosphere that VIRTIS detected. In false colours it shows that the maximum emission of carbon dioxide, shown in yellow, is from the colder areas in the high atmosphere and in the Antarctica region.

LINK: www.esa.int...

Bucking the trend that Earth is dimming , new studies show that Earth is actually getting brighter. This trend, combined with the carbon dioxide and global warming is expected to compound the effects of a warming Earth.

Add some El Nino, slowing of the gulf stream, global deglaciation, rising water levels, and other recnet discoveries - it is impossible to conclude anything other that we are headed into a time of changes - what will be the effects on us ? on the fauna? on the ecology as a whole?





From NASA earth Observatory
earthobservatory.nasa.gov...

EARTH LIGHTENS UP

Earth’s surface has been getting brighter for more than a decade, a reversal from a dimming trend that may accelerate warming at the surface and unmask the full effect of greenhouse warming, according to an exhaustive new study of the solar energy that reaches land.

Ever since a report in the late 1980s uncovered a 4 to 6 percent decline of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface over 30 years since 1960, atmospheric scientists have been trying out theories about why this would be and how it would relate to the greenhouse effect, the warming caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gasses that trap heat in the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, a group led by Martin Wild at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, home of the international Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) archive, had gone to work collecting surface measurements and crunching numbers.

“BSRN didn’t get started until the early ‘90s and worked hard to update the earlier archive,” said Charles N. Long, senior scientist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and co-author of a BSRN report in this week’s issue (Friday, May 6) of the journal Science.

“When we looked at the more recent data, lo and behold, the trend went the other way,” said Long, who conducted the work under the auspices of DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program.

Data analysis capabilities developed by ARM research were crucial in the study, which reveals the planet’s surface has brightened by about 4 percent the past decade. The brightening trend is corroborated by other data, including satellite analyses that are the subject of another paper in this week’s Science.

Sunlight that isn’t absorbed or reflected by clouds as it plunges earthward will heat the surface. Because the atmosphere includes greenhouse gasses, solar warming and greenhouse warming are related.

“The atmosphere is heated from the bottom up, and more solar energy at the surface means we might finally see the increases in temperature that we expected to see with global greenhouse warming,” Long said.

In fact, he said, many believe that we have already been seeing those effects in our most temperature-sensitive climates, with the melting of polar ice and high altitude glaciers.

The report’s authors stopped short of attributing a cause to the cycle of surface dimming and brightening, but listed such suspects as changes in the number and composition of aerosols—liquid and solid particles suspended in air—and how aerosols affect the character of clouds. Over the past decade, the ARM program has built a network of instrumentation sites to sample cloud characteristics and energy transfer in a variety of climates, from tropical to polar.

“The continuous, sophisticated data from these sites will be crucial for determining the causes,” Long said.

Long also pointed out that 70 percent of the planet’s surface is ocean, for which we have no long-term surface brightening or dimming measurements.

Originally posted by Alias Jones
We all know that global warming is indeed upon us.

Um ... no ... not all of us 'know' that.

There have been many very good publications stating that any
warm up ithat the earth may be experiencing is a natural thing
that happens in cycles.

My question - do you want to discuss if 'global warming' is a
man-made thing, a natural thing, a combo of things, or a not
happening thing?

Global Warming is real. Period. Carbon Dioxide levels are on the rise, ozone levels are decreasing, average ocean temperatures are rising, glaciers are melting, I can go on and I will. It doesn't matter to me really what the cause is . Is it natural ? - perhaps , cyclical ? - we just arent sure , is it manmade ? - likely, is it a combination of the 2 - almost certainly - is it for real? hell yes it's real. If you are telling me that you doubt that the global warming trend is upon us I would love for you to provide evidence that it is not.

The Greenhouse Earth is in reference to the carbon dioxide levels in our astmosphere. There is evidence indeed that human consumptiopn of fossil fuels are a major contributor ( other natural sources are also culprit ).

So ..uhh...now you know