111–120 of 146 posts
Earth gets over 170,000 terawatts of solar energy every day—10,000 times more than humanity uses. Losing just a fraction of our cloud cover means a massive, invisible throttle is coming off the climate system. If this trend holds, we’re not just warming—we’re stepping on the gas.
terawatt is not an energy unit.
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What technology specifically has caused the clouds to shrink?
Anything that facilitates or requires extracting carbon from the ground: Coal plants, petrol engines, cars, airplanes, mass production, modern agriculture processes. The only way to stop global warming is to stop extracting carbon from the ground, where it's stored. After that we can think about capturing carbon. But first if all we need to stop pumping it into the atmosphere at a faster rate than the earth can absor…
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If one particular ideology happens to be consistently agreeing or disagreeing with the scientists, then you should take that pattern into account when it comes to choosing who should deal with the consequences. Those are matters of opinion, albeit informed by the facts. The fact remain independent of ideology, and any claim that they are the result of an epically vast conspiracy of scientists should require an extremely high standard of evidence.
Oh dear, that does not sound very promising. Seems like the simulation results mentioned in this article might not be so outlandish, and rather a relevant potential worst-case scenario projection: https://www.quantamagazine.org/cloud-loss-could-add-8-degree...
We are going to need geoengineering solutions to manage solar radiation, and we are going to need to deploy them relatively soon. I don’t know if this will undo the cloud effects, but there’s no more time for screwing around.
I'm not a fan of geoengineering, which I see as "screwing around" because we don't know nearly enough to predict its effects. Nonetheless, we may well reach a point where it cannot make things worse, and that point just became even more likely.
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Anything that facilitates or requires extracting carbon from the ground: Coal plants, petrol engines, cars, airplanes, mass production, modern agriculture processes. The only way to stop global warming is to stop extracting carbon from the ground, where it's stored. After that we can think about capturing carbon. But first if all we need to stop pumping it into the atmosphere at a faster rate than the earth can absor…
Sorry, but did you read the question or the article at all?
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How come you sometimes see very dark, lonely clouds in blue skies?
Your relative position to the sun and the cloud.
I think diffraction has to play a role. Why wouldn't it? Dense, or raining clouds certainly have different water droplet sizes and shapes than fine, fluffy clouds. They may even reflect the ground or sky at some point, I imagine, like the ocean.
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We could solve this problem in a few years with technology if we really wanted to.
I'm not disagreeing, but we don't even need technology, all we need is the political will to truly stop subsidising fossil-based energy. In the just over a minute it took me to read your comment and write this reply, the fossil industry received _another_ USD 14 Million: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/06/fossil-f...
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Clouds are all the same color. The darkness we see is the shadows from other clouds.
No, darkness comes from density. The denser the cloud (the more water it contains), the less light can come through, thus it looks darker.
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I'm not disagreeing, but we don't even need technology, all we need is the political will to truly stop subsidising fossil-based energy. In the just over a minute it took me to read your comment and write this reply, the fossil industry received _another_ USD 14 Million: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/06/fossil-f...
If we immediately stopped all CO2 and methane emissions, the problem wouldn't be solved. There's still more warming that's going to happen as a result of the past emissions.
But even if we would spend only the explicit subsidies we would have a trillion dollar each and every year to spend on things like carbon capture and other mitigations which are not dangerous large-scale geoengineering projects like cloud seeding.
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I think a clearer example would be saying a car runs 20KM/H every day.
On the other hand batteries energy capacity is commonly rated in Watt hour. Watt*day is a perfectly cromulent energy statement although a bit misleading.
Really common mistake in general to use kWh as a kW. Watthour is unit of energy. As watt is energy by time period. So you get back to units of energy.
Technically watt/day could be change in power consumption.