250-500 Million MW of Extra Energy Now Roiling the Earth’s Climate System - International Business Times
"It might seem small, but it actually is very significant when you look at earth's history," said Pushker Kharecha, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and The Earth Institute at Columbia University. For the climate to be relatively stable, he said, the energy balance must remain "within a small fraction of a watt [per square meter]."
"No question about it, it's a lot of energy," said Warren Washington, a senior scientist at NCAR.
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"There's a lot of complexity," said Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at NCAR. "You can't understand the [climate] system with simple links."
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2 comments:
This is a false assumption. The climate can change without any external forcing at all. It is not a precisely controlled system; rather it is more like an irregular variable star whose temperature can oscillate over relatively wide values without any external impetus. Other planets are known to vary in temperature with no obvious external forcing.
It's a nonsense, and he knows it. Temperature and cloud cover are varying all the time. Consequently radiation to space is perpetually varying, on time scales from minutes to years. Summer in the NH (with more land than ocean) has a different effect to summer in the SH, with a reverse ratio of land/ocean. There's a perpetual oscillation around the balance point.
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