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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (26376)	12/5/2009 2:02:26 PM
From: Maurice Winn	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

Nice picture Wharfie. See the white stuff towards the poles. That's cloud and snow. See the blue stuff between. That's water. The white stuff reflects light from the sun, which is why it's bright. The blue stuff absorbs it. That's why it's dark. When things absorb incoming light, they get warm. When they reflect it, they don't. The reason the white stuff concentrates nearer the poles is because it's made of drops of water which condense from air when it reaches the dew point. When the drops of water get big enough to fall, they do. If they are cold, they fall as snow. If they fall as snow, they reflect more light while they lie on the ground. Earth's climate is run by dew point, clouds, snow, rain, evaporation, heat transfer, radiation and chlorophyll. Green plants absorb light, deserts don't. Deserts are quite reflective compared with plants. At night they radiate heat rapidly into space which is why they can get chilly to cold. During reglaciation, plants live near the equator. When it's interglacial, they can grow right up there in Canada and maybe even Alaska has some green stuff in summer. When it's ice age, the snow covers the green in permanent ice so the glaciation holds ground until driven back by rewarming. Sol output varies significantly. As predicted by your amazing correspondent over a year ago, this sun cycle and the next would be low, probably around those of the 1812 era when it was not a good time for French troops to go marching off to Moscow and the freezing cold north to conquer Russia. As predicted, Sol is at a low, with sun-spots being infrequent, few and little. Fortunately for the plants, they have lots of CO2 so although they are getting less light, they can breathe easy. Snow has fallen in Houston already. That's record snow. That snow will have reflected light before melting, using that cool word, albedo. That's a feedback loop - more reflection = colder = more dew point = more cloud and more reflection and more snow and more reflection and colder and more dew point and snow and buried plants and before you know it, reglaciation all over North America. And half of New Zealand which is already cold enough thanks. We need more CO2. It's good for our crops. It will help reduce the cooling and perhaps avoid the snowball Earth effect which would be far worse than even an ice age return which seems certain. Mqurice