http://www.nasa.gov/cente...ilightzone_particles.html
"Widespread 'Twilight Zone' Detected Around Clouds 05.03.07
There seems to be something new under the sun -- in the sky, specifically -- that could complicate scientists' efforts to get a fix on how much the world will warm in the future. Greenhouse gases are not the only things in the air that influence the temperature of our atmosphere. Clouds and small airborne particles called aerosols also play an important and complicated role. And now a new ingredient has been discovered: an extensive and previously unseen “twilight zone” of particles that represents a gradual transition from cloud droplets to dry particles.
In a study published last month, scientists from the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., document for the first time that air around clouds that was previously considered clear is actually filled with particles that are neither cloud droplets nor typical dry aerosols such as dust and air pollution. Worldwide, up to 60 percent of the atmosphere labeled as cloud-free in satellite observations is actually filled with this twilight zone of in-between particles, according to the study.
“With the highly sensitive Earth-observing instruments NASA has used since 2000, we can distinguish aerosols and clouds in greater detail than ever before,” said Goddard's Lorraine Remer, a co-author on the study. “But the area around clouds has given us trouble. The instruments detected something there, but it didn’t match our understanding of what a cloud or an aerosol looked like. What we think we’re seeing is a transitional zone where clouds are beginning to form or are dying away, and where humidity causes dry particles to absorb water and get bigger.”
Precisely accounting for everything in the atmosphere that can influence changes in global temperatures is critical to scientists’ quest to accurately predict what Earth’s climate will be in the future. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assessed the potential risks of human-induced climate change, notes that the overall effect of clouds and aerosols on the amount of heat held in the atmosphere is still uncertain. Finding a previously unknown ingredient in the mix further complicates an already complex picture, but it also holds out the promise of resolving some nagging problems in climate change science.
“The effects of this zone are not included in most computer models that estimate the impact of aerosols on climate,” said lead author Ilan Koren of the Weizmann Institute “This could be one of the reasons why current measurements of this effect don’t match our model estimates.” The study was published April 18 in the American Geophysical Union's Geophysical Research Letters.
Atmospheric scientists have been aware of an indistinct “halo” of particles immediately surrounding individual clouds, which are sometimes visible to the naked eye. These are thought to be aerosols accumulating moisture and growing in size, or a cloud droplet shrinking as it evaporates. But the newly detected twilight zone extends far beyond single clouds to fill an entire cloud field. The research team first came across evidence for this transitional zone in satellite measurements of aerosols that looked “suspicious,” according to Remer. “After working with several years of data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua spacecraft, we consistently saw what appeared to be elevated levels of aerosols near clouds. But we couldn’t be sure that the instrument wasn’t actually detecting stray light bouncing off of the clouds.” The region around clouds is difficult to accurately observe with instruments like MODIS because they operate like our eyes, collecting light reflected by objects below. Scientists interpret the different characteristics of the light received, matching them to known light patterns from different objects such as clouds. But clouds are notorious light scatterers, and the "glare" from the edge of clouds makes it hard to clearly detect what is around them. To be on the safe side, scientists mapping worldwide aerosols with MODIS avoid a 1-kilometer border around clouds. To find out whether the apparent aerosol detection around clouds in the satellite data was real, Koren and his colleagues, including the late Yoram Kaufman of NASA Goddard, turned to an independent observing system on the ground: the NASA-sponsored Aerosol Robotic Network. The automated instruments in this global network minimize scattered light effects as they track the sun and take readings of the amount and size of aerosols in a narrow column of atmosphere between the instrument and the sun. When the sun is blocked by a cloud, the instrument doesn't make one of its regularly scheduled readings, which provides an indirect measure of the presence of a cloud. Combining thousands of observations from 15 sites around the world, the researchers found that the amount of aerosol systematically increased as clouds got closer, as did the size of the particles. This held true regardless of whether the site was in a relatively clean setting or one where aerosols from air pollution or biomass burning were common. "We found that the region affected by this cloud field 'twilight zone' extends to tens of kilometers beyond the identified cloud edge," said Koren. "This suggests that 30 to 60 percent of the atmosphere previously labeled as 'cloud-free' is actually affected by cloud-aerosol processes that reflect solar energy back into space." Introducing this new factor could lead climate scientists to recalculate their best estimates of how Earth's atmosphere holds and reflects solar energy -- the key to accurately predicting the future of global warming. "Current estimates of the effect of aerosols on global temperatures, which is primarily cooling, may be too small because the large contribution from this transition zone has been overlooked," Remer said. "If aerosols are offsetting warming more than we thought, it's possible that warming could increase more than expected in the future if aerosols continue to decline, as has been reported recently." This summer the scientists hope to get a closer look at the "twilight zone" and the hard-to-detect particles inside it with new measurements by the Aerosol Robotic Network and NASA aircraft. "
arooka
160 Comments
By the way, you didn't bother to refer to this related story: Global 'Sunscreen' Has Likely Thinned, Report NASA Scientists
A new NASA study has found that an important counter-balance to the warming of our planet by greenhouse gases – sunlight blocked by dust, pollution and other aerosol particles – appears to have lost ground.
The thinning of Earth’s “sunscreen” of aerosols since the early 1990s could have given an extra push to the rise in global surface temperatures. The finding, published in the March 16 issue of Science, may lead to an improved understanding of recent climate change. In a related study published last week, scientists found that the opposing forces of global warming and the cooling from aerosol-induced "global dimming" can occur at the same time.
"When more sunlight can get through the atmosphere and warm Earth's surface, you're going to have an effect on climate and temperature," said lead author Michael Mishchenko of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York. "Knowing what aerosols are doing globally gives us an important missing piece of the big picture of the forces at work on climate."
The study uses the longest uninterrupted satellite record of aerosols in the lower atmosphere, a unique set of global estimates funded by NASA. Scientists at GISS created the Global Aerosol Climatology Project by extracting a clear aerosol signal from satellite measurements originally designed to observe clouds and weather systems that date back to 1978. The resulting data show large, short-lived spikes in global aerosols caused by major volcanic eruptions in 1982 and 1991, but a gradual decline since about 1990. By 2005, global aerosols had dropped as much as 20 percent from the relatively stable level between 1986 and 1991.
The NASA study also sheds light on the puzzling observations by other scientists that the amount of sunlight reaching Earth's surface, which had been steadily declining in recent decades, suddenly started to rebound around 1990. This switch from a "global dimming" trend to a "brightening" trend happened just as global aerosol levels started to decline, Mishchenko said.
While the Science paper does not prove that aerosols are behind the recent dimming and brightening trends -- changes in cloud cover have not been ruled out -- another new research result supports that conclusion In a paper published March 8 in the American Geophysical Union's Geophysical Research Letters, a research team led by Anastasia Romanou of Columbia University's Department of Applied Physics and Mathematics, New York, also showed that the apparently opposing forces of global warming and global dimming can occur at the same time.
The GISS research team conducted the most comprehensive experiment to date using computer simulations of Earth's 20th-century climate to investigate the dimming trend. The combined results from nine state-of-the-art climate models, including three from GISS, showed that due to increasing greenhouse gases and aerosols, the planet warmed at the same time that direct solar radiation reaching the surface decreased. The dimming in the simulations closely matched actual measurements of sunlight declines recorded from the 1960s to 1990.
Further simulations using one of the Goddard climate models revealed that aerosols blocking sunlight or trapping some of the sun's heat high in the atmosphere were the major driver in 20th-century global dimming. "Much of the dimming trend over the Northern Hemisphere stems from these direct aerosol effects," Romanou said. "Aerosols have other effects that contribute to dimming, such as making clouds more reflective and longer-lasting. These effects were found to be almost as important as the direct effects."
The combined effect of global dimming and warming may account for why one of the major impacts of a warmer climate -- the spinning up of the water cycle of evaporation, more cloud formation and more rainfall -- has not yet been observed. "Less sunlight reaching the surface counteracts the effect of warmer air temperatures, so evaporation does not change very much," said Gavin Schmidt of GISS, a co-author of the paper. "Increased aerosols probably slowed the expected change in the hydrological cycle."
Whether the recent decline in global aerosols will continue is an open question. A major complicating factor is that aerosols are not uniformly distributed across the world and come from many different sources, some natural and some produced by humans. While global estimates of total aerosols are improving and being extended with new observations by NASA's latest generation of Earth-observing satellites, finding out whether the recent rise and fall of aerosols is due to human activity or natural changes will have to await the planned launch of NASA's Glory Mission in 2008.
“One of Glory's two instruments, the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor, will have the unique ability to measure globally the properties of natural and human-made aerosols to unprecedented levels of accuracy," said Mishchenko, who is project scientist on the mission.
An unknown component of our atmosphere which covers 60% of the earth and you want to claim you know already how the atmosphere operates? That you can clearly say the cause of possible increased heating of the planet? Come now, try, oh try and think like a scientist. Don't blindly accept what people tell you or you see on tv or the movie, or read in a book or magazine.
Global warming is a scam, and the proof is here because of this unknown component of our atmosphere. It is not possible to claim something is definate when there are unknowns, such as this.
I'm afraid that your title for this piece just demonstrates that you are clearly not a scientist.
Yet you make a conclusion that they have no value to the "cooling/heating of the earth". So who is at fault - Me for suggesting that current studies are flawed(ie. a scam) because they leave out a major component of our atmosphere in determining "global warming"; or in fact you and all the others who blindly believe those studies, without looking at all the evidence avaliable? It is true that these are a newly found form of matter, and so previous studies would not have access to this information.. but if they do not have all the information, than how can they make a definitive conclusion about the heating and cooling of our planet? How can you as a human being make a definitive conclusion to the heating and cooling of our planet?
"What we think we’re seeing is a transitional zone where clouds are beginning to form or are dying away, and where humidity causes dry particles to absorb water and get bigger.”
Not so mysterious.
So explain to me again, because I am not a scientist like you are, how this article proves that global warming is a scam?
Obviously you are not a rational thinker, let alone a doctor.
That's your logic, not mine.
Science is not based on "fully understanding." That's a nonsensical statement. We don't "fully understand" evolution (whether its engine is Darwinian natural selection or Lamarckian adaptation -- or some combination of each), but we know it's a "fact," because of enough of its reality has been demonstrated empirically. We don't understand Einsteinian relativity -- especially since the development of quantum theory -- but we know enough that many aspects of his theory have been validated and put to use.
Stop with your silly talk. You know little about "rational thought," nothing about research. Even your insults are more embarrassing to you than they are to me.
Have a nice day!
;-)
"You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature."
I hope that this helps to clear up any misundertandings about the cause of global warming.
Also, you claimed that this article 'shows' that global warming is a scam. The article 'shows' nothing in the scientific meaning of the word, except for the possibility of a new significant factor in environmental modelling.
Also also, "Anastasia Romanou... showed that the apparently opposing forces of global warming and global dimming can occur at the same time." From the article. Not the only instance of the article indicating clearly that this new information does not, in any way, rule out global warming as a human-driven event.
Also also also, aren't you now quoting a source (NASA) to support an ideal you like, who a couple of months ago you claimed indirectly was involved in a massive cover-up (the Moon Landing conspiracy)? That seems disingenuous.
Do not be offended because I point out your flaws, you need to accept them, otherwise you will never grow as a person.
Come on Dr. Fallon, Don't cry because you have wasted your life so far.. you can change, improve, grow as a person and do something useful for society and people as a whole.
Well, if you put it like that, so is Gravity.
Honest to goodness, Arookie, keep talking. I don't have to say a word to make you look bad...
Have a nice day!!!
;-)
Now excuse me, I have to go back to crying and wasting my life....
LOL!!!
you keep telling the truth arroka, more people need t oloisten to you
you must be a prankster theres no way i just read that ridiculous, ignorant, crap! hahahaha@came from monkeys
So let me school ya here smart guy annd see if we can add a few oints on your smart meter. What does Evoultion say with regards the relationship between man and monkey. Ans: absolutely nothing. Evolution says their is a relationship between man and great ape, not monkey. And that relationship is not that man descended from ape but rather that both the modern apes and modern man had, at one time, a common ancestor. Let me say it again so that the fact that you are so much smarter than I am will not lead to any confusion on your part. Evolution extrpolates features of modern Homo-sapiens and those of the great apes (Chimp, Gorilla , and Oranatangue) and fromthat extrapolation inferentially deduces that at one time these four groups all had a shared ancestor. Once you stop "apeing" short sighted inaccuracies about something you might have a chance to learn whatis really going on. Now if Evolution is right then we should expect in the fossil record to find evidence of that common ancestor. So far we have not. This is what is reffered to as the "missing link". So why is no missing link available int he fossil record. Unknown however it is true that a common ancestor between mand and modern ape would have existed a very long time ago and as I am sure you are aware the corpus of the fossil record degrades in numbers as a function of time. We know for example that the hominids dating back to man's ear;iest ancestors go way back . Of those species of hominids that we can say mans is descended from we know that they had nlong since diverged from the same line as ape.
So the next time you critizise and idea, use a little information whcih is accurate so that others might have the benefit of uinderstandiung your point of view. Simple ad hominum attacks are persuasive of nothing.
i love that dr fallon
LOL!!! You don't need anyone else, Arookie!!! You've got it all figured out. Why hasn't the Nobel committee contacted you.....or have they...?
For that matter, can you present a scientific argument at all? Nothing you've said so far has any scientific merit to it.
Actually, to take the exercise a bit further, I'd like to see you present an argument in 'geometric form' (as described by Descartes, possibly introduced by Leibniz, I'm not sure). This is much like what you would expect to see in a mathematics paper, where definitions, proofs, lemmas, and logical arguments are presented as discrete and clearly labelled entities, with predicates and propositions numbered and referenced by number. Based on your previous assertion regarding science as requiring fundamental truth, absolute knowledge, and so forth, I should think that anything you believe could be built from a set of fundamental principles through the geometric form, and thereby be indefatigable.
For my part, I think you can't do it. However, as a scientist, I would be equally satisfied with a clear validation of your capability to do so, and would then gladly reverse my current opinion.
1) "...why people who strictly believe in only their opinion as being the only correct one are considered religious." - You begin by changing the question that I asked. You thus introduce an unstated assumption--that Dr. Fallon is such a person.
2) "...I will simply say they follow a religious view." - I assume this one is relatively clear by itself; it is an explicit statement without support, and therefore axiomatic. I further assume that the conclusion you are trying to illustrate is that Dr. Fallon is believing religiously in evolution. His message on the subject does seem to suggest that he admits no doubt, but most people would speak thusly in a competitive and emotionally charged context. I know you do from ample prior evidence, immortalized here on this board. In any case, I won't question that particular link, because as it stands, there does seem to be circumstantial evidence in support of it.
3,4) "In my opinion, evolution is flawed in science, and so for me, not a scientific fact, rather a religious view... my knowledge is gained from fact, rather than faith." - You began the thought by making a statement of opinion. You follow this by claiming (incorrectly, and inconsistently with your prior position) that the difference between science and religion can be a matter of opinion. Finally, you conclude the thought by stating that your knowledge is gained from fact instead of faith; the same thought you began by stating as opinion. Knowledge cannot be both fact and opinion; fact is objective.
5) To dig a bit deeper, there's a fundamental problem with considering science as a source of true knowledge at all. Science is a mechanism for deriving facts from axioms, and so goes hand-in-hand with 'faith'. All scientists who are worth their salt admit that their knowledge is axiomatically founded; the best scientists are those who are most aware of this fact, and of what their personal axiomatic sets are. Since you claim knowledge, you clearly are operating on a basis of faith yourself; which makes you ill-positioned to criticise others for it.
6) "...you were biased about me from the start, rather than giving the benefit of the doubt." - An untrue assumption. I knew nothing of you at 'the start', whenever 'the start' was. I built my opinion of you from the evidence you presented me, as we all do with each other. Sometimes prejudgments will creep into a person's opinion about another, and I'm certainly no exception. There is a skill, however, in suspending these prejudgments, and this is a skill I have cultivated for a long time. I believe that I'm suspending such pre-judgments at the moment, at least for the duration of the posts I write.
7) "...benefit of the doubt." - I am, most clearly, actively giving you the benefit of the doubt. This is precisely what is embodied in the last sentence of my previous post. Having said that, in truly scientific reasoning there is no sense in 'benefit of the doubt', there is simply axiom and evidence, support and proof.
8) "Clearly a waste of my precious time, as even if I write the most perfect factually correct paper, you would simply not read it and go on claiming what you believe." - An entirely untrue assertion, and an aggressive one. I would like to point out that using emotional machinations in a discussion which is ostensibly centred around reason is uncouth in the extreme, and by no means free of the argument itself; it provides evidence about your character, which is also by no means free of the argument.
As stated previously, as proven by your comments, it is a waste of time to discuse matters of logica and rational thought with someone who is clearly not ready to think in these terms.
You asked a question of providing proof to specifically Dr. Fallon, I presented a summary explination to all human beings, who think in the same terms as he does. Is this flawed in logic? Not at all. To understand why people behave the way they do, you must consider why they think as they do. If you are unable to consider this aspect of thought, than you will be unable to understand why an individual has a specific thought or acts in a certain way.
You go on to critique my english, in order to completly avoid the information provided in my response. This is typical of the response I would expect from someone who is unable to negate my response, since it is based on truth.
So my final statement of you being biased.. is truthful. You are biased, from the start of the last comment you provided til this one. You asked for a response, but hoped that there would be none, otherwise your true colours of being biased would appear. Bravo. I am convinced now. Congrats.
You are biased, arokka is not, nor am I
evolution has evidence behind it, religion does not
thats the difference
i really think theres no point in getting into a debate with you - so ill stop here, you aren't the friendliest of woyano-ers, nor the most stable
You believe your religion too much to be scientific.
keep giving them facts, aroka and don't be discouraged by these radical left leaning pot-smokers.
You're right. That evidence probably doesn't exist.
You are a pisser, my man.
fossils, the fossil record, radiometric dating, continental distribution,
continental drift and the list goes on
really before you open your yap perhaps you should think before you post!
(for arooka etc)
Don't you know there are many different theories, many different religious idealogies - not just ones based on christianity?
Come on, I can not believe you are so ignorant. Be open minded, read some history, learn about the societies that have existed on this planet.
For that matter, a clear identification of your notion of creationism would also probably come in handy.
A scientific formulation of creationism does have one flaw to it, though: it isn't generally falsifiable. Although this is also a trait of most metaphysical causation theories, and of mathematics in general.
Although, the requirement for a scientific theory to be falsifiable is a questionable one. It eliminates doing real fundamental theory work in a number of important areas, for example the behaviour of the mind: there's a form of Heisenberg-style uncertainty at play, where the presence of experimentation changes the results.
http://www.woyano.com/view/5234/What-makes-you-you
Your comment is very similar to something I was planning on saying there, but hadn't done yet. And that is -- I think there is probably critical information in the brain that is stored as quantum state. This would solve the problem of having 2 "you"'s around. The scan to get all the required data to replicate your brain on a computer would destroy the quantum state of your brain in the process -- which I think is ultimately what defines who you are. Thus, your consciousness would essential be transferred to the computer, rather than duplicated. This would also apply in cases of teleportation.
I'm currently doing some research on the relationship between quantum superposition and spiriituality. When I feel comfortable enough with the material, I'll do a post on that, too.
If I publish any results, Woyano will have the exclusive. heh, heh. In the future, who knows...
I certainly thank you for your interest!
....drives me nuts...