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Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

science.org

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Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#71

Post by Shekelphile »

My pet theory is that we are only a few decades away from turning earth into venus 2.0 at this point. It feels like we keep finding new catastrophic tipping points every few months at this point.

It is worth mentioning that we are already in the last few hundred million years of earth's lifespan -- the sun was much dimmer last time the planet had this much GHG and warming going on. We may have already set the conditions for the oceans to boil away and the heat death of our planet without massive geoengineering.

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#72

Post by energy123 »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #23
tomrod wrote: post #5

> the team has turned to a single satellite, NASA’s Terra, which has been monitoring the planet for nearly a quarter-century. Looking at the same cloud systems, the team found exactly the same trends, with cloud coverage falling by about 1.5% per decade, Tselioudis says. “It’s only now that the signal seems to be coming out of the noise.” Bjorn Stevens, a climate scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology,…

Including inland mountains 700km from the coast like in Vietnam and North Carolina which both got destroyed last year as tropical depressions dumped historical levels of rain.

Why mountains in particular?

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#73

Post by justinzollars »

Shekelphile wrote: post #71

My pet theory is that we are only a few decades away from turning earth into venus 2.0 at this point. It feels like we keep finding new catastrophic tipping points every few months at this point. It is worth mentioning that we are already in the last few hundred million years of earth's lifespan -- the sun was much dimmer last time the planet had this much GHG and warming going on. We may have already set the conditi…

if it bleeds it leads.

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#74

Post by roter »

dbacar wrote: post #19
kacesensitive wrote: post #11

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.

Units provided were power not energy. The number provided is just the product of the solar constant and the cross-sectional area of Earth [0], roughly.

[0] https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=100943

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#75

Post by lucianbr »

simpaticoder wrote: post #39
dbacar wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

terawatt is not an energy unit.

I like the use of watts/day instead of joules here because we have some intuition about watts. Earth must dissapate 170 exawatts per day of sunshine, in addition to letting off some amount of heat from the molten core. (Life has evolved on the edge of a knife, at the narrow balance point between enormous energies that cancel out just so . I often think that at the beach, looking out across the ocean, marveling that t…

Your comment still reads like watts are energy, which they are not. Maybe you mean "watt-days instead of joules". Watts/day is nonsense, and joules/day are watts. (With some coefficient)

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#76

Post by banqjls »

Shekelphile wrote: post #71

My pet theory is that we are only a few decades away from turning earth into venus 2.0 at this point. It feels like we keep finding new catastrophic tipping points every few months at this point. It is worth mentioning that we are already in the last few hundred million years of earth's lifespan -- the sun was much dimmer last time the planet had this much GHG and warming going on. We may have already set the conditi…

> My pet theory is that we are only a few decades away from turning earth into venus 2.0 at this point. It feels like we keep finding new catastrophic tipping points every few months at this point.

Given that the glaciers should’ve all melted by now, and that we can’t even predict with certainty whether it will rain tomorrow, I wouldn’t pay much attention to predictions.

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#77

Post by gpderetta »

AlienRobot wrote: post #51
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don't, you need to divide, not multiply just like you would with every other unit. 1l of rain every day is 1l/day, not 1l * day . Which means Watt per day is J/s^2

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.

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#78

Post by NX9mqsSv8 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #68
NX9mqsSv8 wrote: post #58

[flagged]

I know this comment is just a list of fully-general counterarguments that can be dropped (with small modifications) on any scientific article, but you've invoked Poe's law. If this is parody, then it's an excellent parody; but if it's not, it's an almost maximally-uninsightful comment.

[dead]

Re: Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

#79

Post by energy123 »

amazingamazing wrote: post #45
kacesensitive wrote: post #11

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.

These types of comments are pointless. We are destroying the world. Ok. What’s the solution? All involve pain, but no one wants to talk about that . Tech isn’t going to solve it. For one, the kind of person on this site is contributing literally 10000x more to the issue than the worlds bottom, so we can start there. People love tech solutions, because then they don’t have to stop consuming and live modestly.

Most likely mass migration from the equator into the colder north or geoengineering. It's already overly hostile for over a billion people with the 1.4C warming we've had. School closures for multiple weeks a year, difficulty working outside. The human body did not evolve for these wet bulb temperatures.
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