Questions tagged [climate-change]
Questions about changes of the climate system, including questions about global warming.
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Would covering part of Lake Mead with large sheets of bubble wrap reduce the amount of water lost to evaporation?
I have been recently thinking about how the water level of Lake Mead keeps dropping due to its high water evaporation rate brought on by recent years of historical drought conditions. The continuous ...
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Is it possible to reliably infer the anthropogenic contribution to the post-industrial rise in $\ce{CO2}$ from $^{14}\ce{C}$ observations?
There have been several papers [failures of the review process] that have argued that the post-industrial rise in atmospheric $\ce{CO2}$ is primarily a natural phenomenon, or have sought to minimise ...
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Urban heat island effect during winter time?
Say a given populated area is considered an "urban heat island", this would mean that during summer, temperatures will be higher in that area.
But what about winter? One could argue that ...
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How does carbon dioxide accumulate in the upper atmosphere if it is heavier than air [duplicate]
I am not a scientist but how does carbon dioxide make its way to the upper atmosphere form fossil fuel burning if it is heavier than oxygen (air), especially as the air is thinner in the upper as you ...
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Is the current tropical depression headed towards Taiwan unusually early for the season? (April 7, 2022 at 4.0N 148.0E)
Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau's Current Western North Pacific Tropical Cyclones page shows a tropical depression with the following information:
TROPICAL DEPRESSION
TD02
Position 061800Z at 4.0N ...
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Why is my intuition wrong about the significance of a few degrees' temperature rise?
There has been a lot discussed about historical and future global temperature increases of a few degrees (e.g. the goal of limiting the rise this century to 1.5 °C or 2 °C). Intuitively, I'm tempted ...
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What are some reasons for Aridification
I an working on a Si-Fi world, and am looking for ways that an area would, over a long timescale, lose the majority of its water. I understand how the lose of vegetative cover due to climate changes ...
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What is the unit impact of $\small\sf{CO_2}$ on global temperature?
I'm trying to find the impact of X tonnes of CO2 on global temperature so I can infer the unit impact of CO2 on temperature. While we know there is a positive correlation, I can't seem to find a study ...
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Why aren't diatoms' shells used as a temperature proxy, but foraminifera shells are?
Changes in oceanic oxygen isotope ratios (18O to 16O) are reflected in the shells of ancient foraminifera.
However, I have not read of diatom shells being used, despite the fact that they were (and ...
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Is there more leaf litter in tropical decisuous forests or temperate deciduous forests
I want to run an experiment: collect leafs in forests to try to stabilize them and prevent from rotting and emitting greenhouse gases.
I live in an area with temperate deciduous forest and have a fair ...
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Why don't errors accumulate in climate models when the time horizon increases?
First of all, I want to add the disclaimer that I am not a climate sceptic or anything. I honestly want to understand this phenomenon. Hopefully, someone can also go into the details as I do have ...
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Could the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum have been caused by intelligent life forms?
I was intrigued to learn recently of the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum from this blog of John Baez. For those who haven't seen, it's the sharp spike labelled "PETM" in this graph (from ...
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Does use of hemp oil for transport fuel produce a net positive CO2e?
A Facebook post containing an image from @TheGretaEffect and actual post can be found here mentions the development of a plane build entirely of hemp products and fueled with hemp oil.
I was thinking ...
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Is Global Mean Surface Atmosphere Pressure changed long-term by global warming?
We know the Global Mean Temperature is increasing due to climate change. But for the Global Mean Atmosphere Pressure, can we see an obvious trend?
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Is New York bound to go underwater?
The latest IPCC report basically says that whatever we do, NY is a doomed city with no hope to remain above water due to climate change (among many other settlements) (TS-54). Why is the media not ...
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How much has Earth warmed since preindustrial times, after all?
Call it hair splitting, if you want, but I see at least three numbers in the latest IPCC report (e.g. on pages 7-51–7-52). The first one, "the total human forced GSAT change from 1750–2019", ...
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Do "aerosol shields" protect big emitters from the impact of their own GHGs?
Green house gases typically have higher lifetimes than aerosols and their precursors (e.g. SO2) so, as I understand it, GHGs usually spread more or less evenly across continents, no matter where they ...
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What on Earth are we doing and can be done to prevent the projected (massive) water shortages?
I have heard it from many, many places that the big cities are drawing too much water from their aquifers, and then climate change will exacerbate that problem amongst a very many others. My city, ...
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Are their any tools or code available to evaluate cmip6 models (r or matlab preferred)?
I would like to carry out a superficial analysis of a small number of CMIP6 models I downloaded from the ESGF. I'm thinking that a spatial correlation or Mean Square error between climatologies of ...
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Could climate change make air unbreathable? [duplicate]
A lot of the press discussion, IPCC information and scientific inquiry about climate change refers to changes in the temperature of the atmosphere. I have not seen debates about changes in the ...
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Is Russia going to benefit from climate change? [closed]
There are clear ways climate change can and does harm Russia: more frequent forest fires, floods, thawing permafrost. On the other hand, winter, says the latest IPCC report, is going to warm at a ...
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Alternative natural explanations for rise in atmospheric CO2? [duplicate]
I am in no way a climate-change skeptic, nor a denier. Motivated by this question and some articles I read online:
Are there any known natural processes beside human activities that are able to ...
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How to explain the remarkable regularity of the increased concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide?
The Keeling curve is very well approximated with an exponential function with an offset $256$ [ppm]
$$256+A\cdot e^{\alpha\cdot t}$$
where $A=1.095\cdot10^{-12}$ and $\alpha=0.0161$ ($t$ is in years ...
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Why is draining wetlands not a good idea, climate-wise?
Suppose we say, "We have a climate emergency going on, there's no way we're going to decarbonize our economies fast enough, to hell with biodiversity, we are going to drain the swamps". What ...
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What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up estimates?
I find the IPCC report hard to read. It's peppered with unexplained terms and is generally cumbersome (no offence to its authors). Here's one example. What is the difference between top-down and ...
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How are they holding COP26 if the IPCC hasn't yet finished the report?
How are they holding COP26 if the IPCC hasn't yet completed its latest Assessment Report? I'm reading it at the moment, and more often than not there are descriptions to figures without the figures ...
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1.5° above what?
We know all about how the Earth's temperature needs to stay below "1.5° above pre-industrial levels". But what were they?
Every news article and policy statement seems to hand-wave it away. ...
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Does carbon dioxide preferentially accumulate in one layer of the atmosphere?
Just as Ozone concentration peaks at around 20 km in the stratosphere, having a distribution around higher and lowers layers of the atmosphere, does the same happen for carbon dioxide or other ...
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Looking for the mathematics so I can run climate change simulations
Sorry for the stupid question, but I have been unable to answer it even after wasting time googleing for a while... I know there are several climate-changes scenarios, and I know the several climatic ...
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Why does the Arctic warm so fast despite being so white?
It may be a silly question but why does the Arctic warm so fast despite being so white ("albedo" is the word, I believe)? Isn't all that whiteness supposed to deflect all those pesky sun ...
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Carbon emission from estuaries
I've heard that estuaries like Chesapeake Bay produce a lot of methane during anoxic conditions. Is there a chance of these estuaries emitting significant amounts of CH4 in the future (because of the ...
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Do greenhouse gases absorb and re-emit photons or reflect them diffusely? Or both? (CO2, CH4, H2O, N20, HFC-134a, etc.)
Also, would it matter if a particular type of greenhouse gas molecule reflected rather than absorbed and then re-emitted light? Would its GWP be higher or lower?
Perhaps this is more of a pure ...
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Are wetlands a net source or net sink of GHGs?
Are wetlands a net source or net sink of GHGs? On the one hand, they store a lot of carbon. On the other hand, they emit methane, a potent green house gas.
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Is cutting down boreal forest good or bad for our climate?
I read in the latest IPCC report that felling trees growing in Northern areas lays bare snow cover that, since it's white, reflects sun rays so it's kinda good (or at least, has a substantial positive ...
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Would home heat pumps provide large benefits against climate change?
Some facts I have learnt
The Global Warming Potential (GWP) was developed to allow comparisons of the global warming impacts of different gases. Specifically, it is a measure of how much energy the ...
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Why is the Arctic melting, but the Antarctic doing great?
Why is the Arctic melting, but the Antarctic doing great? That's what the latest IPCC report says (p. 2-192 of the Physical Science Basis provides a time series), but it says nothing, unless I missed ...
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What is the difference between surface specific humidity and surface relative humidity?
What is the difference between surface specific humidity and surface relative humidity (it's wetter and dryer respectively)? The trends, according to the latest IPCC report, are opposite for the two, ...
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What happens if a cyclone can reach the warm waters of the Persian Gulf?
Historically cyclones were very very rare along the southern coast of Iran, maybe one in a century. But in recent years two cyclones hit Iran and northern Oman: Cyclone Gonu in 2007 and recently ...
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Is anthropogenic global warming unavoidable under modern civilisation? [closed]
Which are the reasons to believe that the climate crisis can be solved within our type of civilisation, that is, without putting in jeopardy the important advances of humanity that have been achieved ...
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Why can't we increase cloud coverage of the Earth to reduce mean temperature by flooding basins to increase evaporation?
There are millions of square kilometers of below sea level dry land, mostly in desert areas. Reducing the mean temperature of the earth by 2 °C requires increasing cloud cover of stratus clouds by ...
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How serious is the issue of vast quantities of methane release from an ice-free Arctic?
A bunch of climate scientists claim that humans will go extinct by 2026, when humanity crosses the major tipping point known as "Arctic Blue Ocean Event (BOE)".
According to the climate ...
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Does increased water vapour in atmosphere increase the risk of hypoxia?
I recently found that each degree of warming increases water vapour by 7% and I've also learned that the atmosphere contains (on average) between 1-5% water vapour when saturated, this confused me a ...
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Does global warming inhibit transport of moisture?
This northern summer, 2021, there were wildfires in Southern Europe and floods in Germany nearly at same time, also, floods and wildfires in different parts of Turkey, and floods in Far East of Russia ...
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Why are the CMIP6 model outputs for Relative Humidity not scaled to between 1-100%?
I have been looking at the CMIP6 model outputs for 'hur' (Relative Humidity/RH) and I see that they are not scaled to be between 1 and 100 (the units are percent).
Why is this? Is it just an oversight ...
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How can I calculate the relative change in Precipitation using CMIP models without producing unrealistic results in Dry areas?
I am calculating changes in precipitation using the Delta method, wherein the relative changes are calculated thus:
Delta change = (modelled Future climatology (2050s) - modelled historical ...
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Why is the energy transition start not reflected in the CO2 concentration graphs?
This is a graph from a reputable source of CO2 concentrations in atmosphere the last decades:
I would expect that, as we have been using clean energy for some years now, the graph would start to ...
user20559
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Do satellites decrease the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth?
According to this website, there were 3,372 active satellites in orbit at the beginning of 2021. Furthermore, SpaceX is planning to launch 12,000 satellites to provide cheap internet for everybody, ...
user20559
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When would the next glaciation appear? Worst case
Suppose that the IPCC's best estimate of climate sensitivity (3 K) is relevant and that the Keeling curve will increase as now, with a certain procent more emission next year than previous year, into ...
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Does deforestation increase global temperatures or just local temperatures?
Did human-caused deforestation impacted climate and rainfall patterns in the past?
I'm asking this because I don't know much about the impact of forest cover loss and evapotranspiration on global ...
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How much does earth's core temperature affect earth's global surface temperature
Has anyone managed to read the (latest) full IPCC-report and do you know whether they have taken into account the Earth's core temperature in their models. Besides the IPCC-report, do we know how much ...
