Questions tagged [climate-change]
Questions about changes of the climate system, including questions about global warming.
520
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What are the risks of developing geoengineering?
Wikipedia page for geoengineering entry list a lot of proposals to decrease global temperature:
Solar radiation management methods[5] may include:
Surface-based: for example, surface-based mirror ...
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0answers
27 views
When it comes the average lifetime of chemicals in the atmosphere, is the mean lifetime ~1.4427 times the half-life? As with radioactivity?
There are so many websites giving numbers for 'average' lifetimes of global-warming or ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere, yet they are rarely explicit in their definition(s)...
For instance, ...
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1answer
65 views
Will a new glacial age take place on Earth or Holocene will become a new climatic epoch?
Pleistocene shows a switch between glacial and interglacial ages.
Image source: global-climate-change.org.uk
However, humanity is burning fossil fuels and increasing atmosphere's $\ce{CO2}$ content.
...
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32 views
How is causality between past CO2 levels and fossilized plant spore proxies established?
According to Mann and Kump (2015),
Geologic proxies are characteristics of sedimentary rocks that we can
use to infer ancient environmental conditions. Climate scientists
study proxies because there ...
7
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3answers
493 views
Why divide total insolation by $4$?
From Nature:
We divide by $4$ since the solar energy is spread over the surface of the planetary sphere. The Earth intercepts a circular area of incoming sunlight, and this area is spread over a ...
2
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1answer
88 views
How to get the exact temperature from 1880 to 2020? [closed]
Wherever I look, I find "Temperature Anamolies" which I assume is an annual temperature change relative to the previous year.
If I wanted to find the exact temperatures (based on NASA's ...
1
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1answer
95 views
Is it possible to kickstart an hypothetical frozen earth with 0.6 ice albedo to an earth with an atmosphere, with just the sun at current distance?
Phase change of water at different pressures and temperatures tell us that with no atmospheric pressure 200 Kelvin (minus 73 Celcius) is enough to turn ice into vapor directly
Wouldn't that suggest ...
1
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1answer
24 views
How do geologists measure green house gass emmissions from large regions
I read here that volcanoes release about "0.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year". I wonder though, how scientists can estimate the emissions from large regions with geological ...
5
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1answer
71 views
Why is it that “With higher CO2, the dry gets drier and the wet gets wetter”?
The Phys.org article CO2 dip may have helped dinosaurs walk from South America to Greenland quotes Dennis Kent, "adjunct research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth ...
2
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3answers
92 views
Is a hotter climate making trees grow faster and have lighter wood?
I started thinking about this after seeing several articles about falling trees, in particular a few articles about very large trees falling in Los Angeles and New York City. Plus, just thinking about ...
2
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2answers
97 views
Why has the Earth's average sea level risen 'only' by nine inches after one degree C increase in temperature?
I am only doing gross calculations here, but...
If the Earth has warmed by about one degree Celsius in the last century or so, and the thermal expansion coefficient of water is about .0002085, then ...
3
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1answer
64 views
How to measure global temperature?
people always talk about global temperature (such as the global temperature goal of 1,5 K) - but how is this value achieved? It seems to me that it clearly depends on where the measuring stations are, ...
2
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2answers
136 views
What are the evidences that the earth climate is getting warmer?
Someone, who does not believe climate change asked me today --
How is it possible for us to conclude that the past five years are the hottest five years since record begun, since
There are only a ...
3
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2answers
52 views
Would climate change result in an increase in seismic activities?
Would climate change result in an increase in seismic activities?
I can see two potential forces acting:
Temperature dilation of the Earth's surface.
A change in the distribution of water mass, fewer ...
4
votes
0answers
96 views
Is there scientific consensus on the existence of the iris effect
Question:
Is there scientific consensus on the existence of the Iris Effect and whether it is a positive or negative feedback mechanism? If so, can you refer to a recent publication?
Background:
In ...
1
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1answer
38 views
What potential geoengineering technologies could help a country “achieve its Paris (agreement) targets”?
CNN's China to expand weather modification program to cover area larger than India ends with the following sentence:
"While China has not yet shown signs of 'unilaterally' deploying ...
4
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1answer
92 views
Climate change impact / risk assessment
I work for a local council in the UK. We want to include climate change as a mandatory consideration in all of our decision making. This would require project managers to look at the risk (what ...
3
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2answers
78 views
How much wind power is there roughly in Britain and its surrounding?
Given the prominence of the climate crisis, it's important to get some estimates of how much wind power is available in Britain as part of a renewably energised future.
Q. What is yearly average of ...
1
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1answer
78 views
It is possible to reduce global sea level via filling empty lowlands with ocean water? [duplicate]
There are empty lowlands in Australia and Iran like Dasht-e Lut. If we fill these lands with ocean water then could we reduce the global sea level and save coastal cities like venice?
5
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2answers
111 views
What effect does climate change have on the Earth's rotation?
I recently read a blog entry from a leap-second expert explaining that in near term (i.e. last 3 years) the Earth has been spinning ever so slightly faster, delaying the need to insert a leap-second (...
4
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1answer
39 views
How far would average sea level rise from a 25% increase in total ocean volume?
What amount of average sea level rise (in meters above 2020 levels) would be associated with a 25% increase in total ocean volume?
The reason I ask is because of this study that indicates Earth has ...
3
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0answers
45 views
How would you predict the future climate with only 7 years of interest?
In my specific case, I have worked with a data set from 2001 to 2018 which had to be split up in 2012 due to major updates in the data. Therefore, I am now dealing with a data set of 12 years (2001 to ...
3
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1answer
235 views
Which type of plant absorbs the most net carbon dioxide per year per square km?
The answer to How many trees would I have to plant to solve Global Warming? demonstrates how unviable it would be to simply plant trees to counter climate change (we'd need to plant ~60 millions km$^2$...
3
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2answers
52 views
What part does methane play in the process of producing biogas?
I should point out first that I don't know the first thing about environmental science, I study mathematics, and the reason I am asking this question is because I want to understand the processes ...
3
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3answers
74 views
To what degree does historical measurement inaccuracies contribute to climate change models?
Often the graphs depicting the earth's historical temperature, the time axis extends well over couple of centuries. Also there are few that extends over thousands of years.
I wonder to what degree the ...
4
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1answer
91 views
Will global warming expand the tropical zone
It is widely known (to the general audience, I'm not a climatologist) that global warming will let the desert climates migrate further away from the equator towards the poles, such that the South of ...
3
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0answers
47 views
Has the research into the apparent “Pause” in GMSTs produced a substantially better explanation?
Zeke Hausfather tweets
Just six years ago many in the scientific community were obsessing
over the apparent "pause" or "hiatus" in surface temperatures. It
famously made it into ...
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1answer
112 views
Why is starting a minor nuclear winter considered an implausible way to combat global warming?
At a superficial level, it seems like we could exploit nuclear winter (the long-term aftermath of a nuclear war) to counterbalance climate change via global warming, and there are a few articles about ...
3
votes
2answers
94 views
Would the climate still rise when we reduce our carbon footprint down to zero?
Every electrical device consumes electric energy and almost every one of them I can think of produces heat as a byproduct. This also applies on every kind of machine powered vehicle. Even our bodies ...
1
vote
1answer
41 views
How much of the Earth's surface was covered with water during the Mesozoic?
When the Earth was at its warmest, and there were no ice caps at all, not even during the winter, and thermal expansion meant a certain amount of water took up more space, what ratio of Earth's ...
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votes
1answer
123 views
Has irreversible global warming already begun? [duplicate]
Climate is a high order nonlinear dynamic system and as such:
is complex to study
is not controllable via linear input as in we pollute less -> temperature drops...
0
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2answers
72 views
Forest fuel biochar burial
Record fires are blazing in the west coast, huge even compared to California's notorious summers.
Dead plants and debris are crucial to get a fire started. This debris could be collected, carbonized, ...
4
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0answers
75 views
Dynamic of glacier retreat? (here: in Greenland)
During the last years I have taken many pictures of obviously retreating glaciers and empty moraines in Greenland - just like this one. Looks devastating, actually.
In my understanding, the current ...
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8answers
3k views
Could an icy/extremely-cold asteroid/comet ever strike and cool the Earth?
This is obviously an imaginary question, but it seems like something computable (which I don't have the mathematical ability to do so unfortunately). P.S. I do not have in-depth knowledge about comet/...
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0answers
40 views
Are events like the Siberian heat wave factored into models of sea ice decline?
I've been looking at a lot of charts of Arctic Sea Ice lately, wondering when it will be gone, and whether the more extreme predictions are credible.
When scientists come up with a chart that points ...
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0answers
47 views
South Georgia Island and Settlement
I know there were settlements in South Georgia in the past, but they were all abandoned. Is there any environmental reason why a new settlement could not be made? Especially with global warming, the ...
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0answers
61 views
Thunderstorm Frequency Depending on the Year [closed]
Why is it that some years have significantly more thunderstorms than others while other years have significantly less? For example, in 2008, there were 15 thunderstorm days in Asheville but above 40 ...
0
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3answers
58 views
Book Introduction to Climate Change
The question might be in an opinion-based grey zone. If it is, I apologize.
My wife and I want to get informed about climate change.
We want to read a book (no online course etc.) and it should be ...
4
votes
2answers
214 views
Why is the creation of water from the combustion of hydrocarbons not listed as a cause for rising sea levels?
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa8390
According to this paper, water is created by burning hydrocarbon fuels. It seems like a major thing to exclude from "reasons the sea ...
2
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4answers
190 views
Review of calculation of CO$_2$ contribution to warming
In a Swedish Facebook group for "climate change skeptics" Erik Larsen has shared his calculation of how big part of temperature change can be attributed to human emissions of carbon dioxide. ...
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2answers
158 views
Will life still be sustainable on earth when solar eclipses stop?
Estimates put the last solar eclipse at 600 million years.
The question then becomes how much time is left on Earth? Stephen Hawking believes we have less then a 100 years left on Earth but that ...
2
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3answers
124 views
Using Enhanced Rock Weathering in the Sahel Region of Africa
A recent Guardian article "Spreading rock dust on fields could remove vast amounts of CO2 from air" has gotten some attention in the nongovernmental and UN organizations working in the Sahel ...
4
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1answer
111 views
How does the act of producing animal feed from the leftovers of a process result in a negative carbon footprint? [closed]
According to this source, it is claimed that (emphasis is mine)
At Arbikie Distillery in Angus, scientists claim to have developed the world's first "climate positive" gin. By using garden ...
2
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0answers
68 views
Why don't they use balloons in ocean as battery? [closed]
We need more batteries, to store renewable. But why don't they just pull down big balloons in the ocean and let them go up when they need the power?
0
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1answer
75 views
Doesn't increased human activity add to heating the atmosphere directly?
My question relates to the fact that 1- the human population is continually increasing, and 2- everybody is constantly 'doing more stuff' (or causing more to be done). So doesn't 'more people doing ...
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0answers
29 views
Raised Dew Point from global warming: will cool weather burning off (for fuel load reduction) get harder?
Dew appears to be a factor in fire behavior and management, slowing and extinguishing fires in cool conditions. Higher temperatures mean less dew. Given the importance of fuel reduction fires during ...
2
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1answer
71 views
Is there any animation to demonstrate if the sea level rise up?
I found a very cool video here:
Draining Earth's oceans, revealing the two-thirds of Earth's surface we don't get to see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uOwv_Krqk8&feature=emb_logo
However, I ...
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0answers
151 views
How would I simulate the effects of the Antarctic ice sheet being deleted on Earth's climate?
This is a follow-up to my question If its ice sheet were removed under modern atmospheric conditions, what climatic and ice-sheet equilibrium would be re-established over Antarctica?. As it has ...
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0answers
89 views
Providing Edgar emission using prep_chem_source for tracers (CO2-CH4)
I am working on CO2 and CH4 by WRF-CHEM, for providing my anthropogenic emission from Edgar data base, I'm going to use the Prep_chem_source App.
I would like to use Edgar data emission (as my ...
3
votes
3answers
68 views
Has recent drop in airline flights over the US had a measurable warming effect as was found after 9/11?
I recall that after 9/11, when all US flights were canceled, there was a statistically detectable bump in average temperature. Something about jet contrails disappearing for 4 days. Has anything like ...
