From the “CO2 is there anything it can’t do department” comes this ridiculous piece of research making the rounds in the MSM that worries about something that has not been observed to happen…oh, wait.
![Temporal variation of carbon at pressure levelZ[thinsp]=[thinsp]-6(altitude [sim] 101[thinsp]km) from the NCAR global mean model simulation.](https://i0.wp.com/www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/carousel/ngeo1626-f3.jpg?resize=302%2C240&quality=83)
Observations of increasing carbon dioxide concentration in Earth’s thermosphere
J. T. Emmert, M. H. Stevens, P. F. Bernath, D. P. Drob & C. D. Boone
Carbon dioxide occurs naturally throughout Earth’s atmosphere. In the thermosphere, CO2 is the primary radiative cooling agent and fundamentally affects the energy balance and temperature of this high-altitude atmospheric layer1, 2. Anthropogenic CO2 increases are expected to propagate upward throughout the entire atmosphere, which should result in a cooler, more contracted thermosphere3, 4, 5. This contraction, in turn, will reduce atmospheric drag on satellites and may have adverse consequences for the orbital debris environment that is already unstable6, 7.
However, observed thermospheric mass density trends derived from satellite orbits are generally stronger than model predictions8, 9, indicating that our quantitative understanding of these changes is incomplete. So far, CO2 trends have been measured only up to 35 km altitude10, 11, 12. Here, we present direct evidence that CO2 concentrations in the upper atmosphere—probably the primary driver of long-term thermospheric trends—are increasing. We analyse eight years of CO2 and carbon monoxide mixing ratios derived from satellite-based solar occultation spectra. After correcting for seasonal–latitudinal and solar influences, we obtain an estimated global increase in COx (CO2 and CO, combined) concentrations of 23.5±6.3 ppm per decade at an altitude of 101 km, about 10 ppm per decade faster than predicted by an upper atmospheric model. We suggest that this discrepancy may explain why the thermospheric density decrease is stronger than expected.
Paper (paywalled) available here.
Here’s a press release from one of the co-authors:
The researchers report evidence that CO₂ levels are increasing faster than expected in the upper atmosphere, which seems to be cooling and contracting at a pace that current models have not predicted. Reduction in atmospheric drag brought on by the resulting decrease in density could keep space junk in orbit longer, creating more congestion by orbital debris.
“CO₂ increases close to the Earth’s surface cause temperatures to rise but, surprisingly, CO₂ higher up results in just the opposite,” Bernath said. In the upper atmosphere, the density of CO₂ is too low to maintain greenhouse warming. Instead, the gas absorbs heat from its surroundings and radiates much of it away from Earth.”
Bernath’s work with the team of researchers derives from his role as mission scientist for the ACE satellite project, which has been collecting important information about ozone chemistry, climate change and air pollution since 2004.
Before joining ODU in 2011 as the chemistry chair, Bernath was a faculty member with the University of York in England and, earlier, with the University of Waterloo in Canada. While at Waterloo, he proposed the Canadian satellite project and assembled a scientific team to analyze data that the satellite instruments recorded and dispatched back to Earth.
During the past four decades Bernath has been credited with seminal discoveries in molecular spectroscopy and atmospheric chemistry, resulting in his election as Fellow of the Optical Society of America. He was granted a Ph.D. from MIT in 1981 and received the 2009 Alouette Award of the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute and the 2004 Excellence in Research Award from the University of Waterloo. Earlier this year, he was given the Faculty of Science Distinguished Alumni Award of the University of Waterloo.
The primary instrument on the ACE satellite, which is in orbit about 400 miles above the Earth, is a Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) that analyzes the types and quantities of gases in the atmosphere. From the absorption of sunlight during sunrise and sunset, ACE is able to determine the composition of the atmosphere at various heights.
Data from the ACE-FTS has set the standard for measurements of the concentrations of constituents in the Earth’s middle atmosphere. This instrument routinely measures approximately 35 gas species in the atmosphere; some of these are in the parts-per-billion range in concentration.
When the project team led by Emmert checked measurements from 2004-12 by ACE-FTS at altitudes of about 60 miles, it found CO₂ concentrations that were surprisingly high. “To date, CO₂ trends have been measured only up to 35 kilometers (22 miles). Here, we present the first direct evidence that upper atmospheric CO₂ concentrations – the likely primary driver of long-term thermospheric trends – are increasing,” the researchers report.
The eight years of satellite-based solar occultation spectra they studied showed a trend of 23.5 parts per million increase of CO₂ per decade. “This rate is 10 ppm/decade faster than predicted by an upper atmospheric model, which may explain the stronger than expected thermospheric density decrease,” according to the article in Nature Geoscience.
Several possible explanations for this trend are considered by the authors, such as swings in solar activity. They even estimate the amount of CO₂ that may have been deposited in the upper atmosphere by the exhaust of orbital launch vehicles, but the total of 2,700 metric tons above 50 miles high cannot explain the overall trends they found.
If the thermosphere becomes more clogged with space junk, this would present a hazard for active launch vehicles and satellites. Although, some scientists have pointed out that cooling of this outer layer of the atmosphere could be good news for satellites such as the International Space Station, which should be able to stay in orbit longer without firing booster rockets.
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To cdquarles:
You cite diffusion as the mechanism. You then make the interesting comment that ” Gravitational fractionation does not occur in the atmosphere until you get to the top (the thermosphere)…”. That, I don’t buy. I have seen a chart giving the concentration with altitude of various atmospheric components, including CO2, and its concentration drops off much faster than lighter molecules. The doggone gas has to be present in some noticeable quantity to diffuse due to collisions with other gas molecules! At the boundary of the thermosphere, the concentration must be mind-bogglingly small.
Hmmm… so (anthropogenic) CO2 is now the Chuck Norris of trace gases. Awesome.
So the models predicted CO2 is wrong for the upper atmosphere. Throw the model out its wrong what more needs to be said.
P. Solar:
re your post at November 13, 2012 at 7:37 am.
Thankyou. That is clear, straightforward and irrefutable.
False claims about radiative physics add difficulty to rational refutation of the AGW-scare. Your post provides a ‘text book demonstration’ of how to demolish the false claims.
Richard
KevinM says:
“The scientific argument is against the ‘C’, not the ‘AGW’.”
I don’t know, I think there’s still plenty of scientific argument for “aGW” as opposed to “AGW”.
My back-of-the-envelope estimation from heat transfer principles of worse case (assuming no work, no heat transfer to sub-surface, radiant balance instead of enery balance, etc.) surface warming sensitivity is about 1.8 K per 10 W/m^2 or 0.67 K per 2XCO2 taking into account “where we are” on the Stefan-Boltzmann curve on average.
Admittedly, I massively oversimplified the problem just to get some sort of answer and I’m sure climate sensitivity does not exactly equal surface warming sensitivity (Yes, I just made that term up.). One thing is for sure: it’s not a simple problem.
No reasonable person would care, but a millionth of a degree warmer would still be warmer.
I blame carbon dioxide for everything that goes wrong. Saves time.
Atmospheric drag at 250 km has been measured for the last 3 years and is much less than was thought. It was measured by the GOCE satellite, by its ion engine working in tandem with the gradiometer. You can go to the ESA website to see.
I know this because I worked on the engine control and it had to be able to throttle from 1 to 20mN to accommodate drag, or according to the “expected” drag. In flight it’s doing about 2 to 3 mN. It’s so low that they have extended the mission.
Principal cause was always stated to be solar activity. In fact it formed part of the mission requirements.
Chris R says: That, I don’t buy. I have seen a chart giving the concentration with altitude of various atmospheric components, including CO2, and its concentration drops off much faster than lighter molecules.
OK you’ve “seen a chart”. Maybe that chart was written by the same “experts” that wrote the NCAR model that has just been shown by empirical evidence to be significantly in error.
The other possibility is that is was written by someone who was not such an expert.
Please, please! Don’t do this again! It took me ten minutes to collect myself from under the table.
P. Solar and John West,
Let’s keep this impersonal. Heat transfer is only meaningful as a flux, which means net power per unit area. Any other aspects of it are trivial. Secondly, I entered this discussion to inquire if anyone could clear up the warmist meme of “reradiation.” I seem to have been misconstrued as denying the very poorly named “greenhouse effect.” I believe I mentioned in an earlier post that water could freeze at 59 F ambient on a clear night, so where are you going with this John?
Any more personal comments will be met with disdainful silence.
What was that about a stove? You got three different modes of transfer there. Convection, conduction, radiation, all doing their own thing. If you stop convection you no longer have a steady state, so I don’t see your point. Thermo and Heat Transport are very different. I repeat, heat transfer other than as a “net” flux is trivial. Who cares what one photon does or does not do?
I am really only intererested in the “reradiation” meme, not quizzes from people outside their areas. This thread doesn’t need any more “what if’s” or so-called analogies. Argue against the 2nd Law to your heart’s content, good luck with that….
Michael Moon wrote: “CO2 does have a dipole moment as the learned Poor Yorek has confirmed in his obfuscating way. ”
No, I ‘confirmed’ nothing of the sort: to the contrary, I clarified (12 Nov @1511) that CO2 does NOT have a permanent dipole moment to correct your previous error. What matters (amongst other issues) for EM absorption or emission (in first order) is a CHANGE in dipole moment (e.g. from zero to something finite) during the vibrational motion. Any standard physical chemistry text will illustrate these ideas in its molecular spectroscopy chapter(s). I’m sorry that you find stating fundamental principles of physics and chemistry and clarifying error to be “obfuscating” ([i]et lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non conprehenderunt: Jn 1.5 [/i]). Oh, and please give poor Prof. Wang a break from associating him with your opinions.
Hi P. Solar:
No need to be nasty. Besides, I wasn’t talking to you.
Werner Brozek said on November 12, 2012 at 9:30 pm:
I doubt they’re going into that Sky Dragon Slaying nonsense. Offhand I think it’s a relative effect.
We know from the Ira Glickstein “Visualizing the ‘Greenhouse Effect'” series how the GHE works for CO₂ and H₂0. CO₂ absorbs the longwave infrared in two wavelength bands and re-radiates it, by geometry about half the time towards space and the other half towards the surface, while letting through the LWIR in the “atmospheric window” wavelength band that CO₂ is insensitive to.
Here at the bottom of the atmosphere, with the CO₂ GHE saturated, we get the maximum “warming” effect. Visualizing layers, first CO₂ layer returns half of those two bands, next layer returns half of that, with first layer then allowing half of that through to the surface while sending half back to that next layer, which lets through half of that, etc. Here’s the first piece with those graphics:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/20/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-a-physical-analogy/
So down here CO₂ is doing everything possible to hold in as much LWIR possible, called a “warming” effect although a slowing of the rate of cooling we’d have without greenhouse gases.
But up near the top, CO₂ isn’t acting like a mylar space blanket. All you’re getting is half/half on 2 of 3 bands, and the next layer down throws half of what was returned back out towards space, etc. From space, you see all this LWIR that is being emitted by CO₂ heading out towards space. Thus CO₂ looks like a “radiative cooling agent” from that side of the atmosphere.
Why they call it “the primary radiative cooling agent” is a mystery. Water vapor, the more important GHG, also has that apparent effect. Is there some reason the lighter H₂O molecules aren’t as high up in the atmosphere as CO₂? Or is this yet another example of post-reality (C)AGW science not acknowledging this un-regulatable GHG?
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
November 13, 2012 at 2:47 pm
From space, you see all this LWIR that is being emitted by CO2 heading out towards space.
True, but if instead of 390 ppm up there, if we could somehow just get rid of all CO2 above a certain height, then the upward radiation from the CO2 below that height would just go straight up without being absorbed first. So I do not see what real difference it makes to the cooling if the thermosphere had 390 ppm or 0 ppm.
Is there some reason the lighter H2O molecules aren’t as high up in the atmosphere as CO2?
Yes, they condense out as it gets colder so the concentration of H2O gas is extremely low at cold temperatures. So while the thermosphere may be hot, the H2O gas does not get there in large amounts as it must pass through cold air first.
I couldn’t even get past the first paragraph.
“Anthropogenic CO2 increases are expected to propagate upward throughout the entire atmosphere…”
Don’t these scienticians know that CO2 is heavier than air? And not by a little bit either – by over 60%! Please explain the mechanism by which a heavier molecule propagates upward. Perhaps they need to go to Engineering school to get a dose of reality.
You are incorrect in asserting that data above 35 km is “interpolated”. (By the way interpolation is filling in between observed data points. Going beyond observed data is extrapolation)
Have not read the pay walled paper but the press release you display states that the data is from various altitudes measured by a satellite at 400 km. The statement that “so far” measurements have been made to 35 km refers to earlier studies, not the current one being reported.
Giveitupguys, hopefully your Engineering school taught about turbulent mixing which is the primary mechanism by which the lower atmosphere is kept well mixed as opposed to the atmosphere above the turbopause where the composition is influenced by diffusion. That’s the reality which the scientists who wrote this paper are well aware of.
As to Anthony’s rhetorical question if the sun were more active the CO would be higher and the CO2 lower as indicated by the graph shown above.
Latin??? Latin. That is a first. And not obfuscating in any way. What is this now, “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” Not a quiz show kids, we are not displaying our large IQ props, we are seeking after truth about IR and exactly how it does or does not heat the planet. The Internet is useful sometimes, and other times not……………………………………..
Give it up guys says:
November 13, 2012 at 6:06 pm
Don’t these scienticians know that CO2 is heavier than air? And not by a little bit either – by over 60%! Please explain the mechanism by which a heavier molecule propagates upward. Perhaps they need to go to Engineering school to get a dose of reality.
Buoyancy is a concept that applies to objects in water, but not to individual gas molecules. If it did, you would never see chlorofluorocarbons high up in the stratosphere. As well, ozone, having a mass of 48, would sink quickly. However when discussing water, we have to keep in mind that while its molecular mass is 18 versus an average of 29 for air, the individual water molecules condense to the liquid form and form clouds. The density of liquid water is about 1000 times that of air. However if the droplets in the clouds are small enough, Brownian motion can keep clouds up there for a long time. Water in the liquid phase does not generally go straight into the atmosphere unless you have severe weather such as a hurricane over water.
(P.S. I do have an engineering degree.)
Michael Moon, Perhaps you can see how a cool blanket makes a human warmer. A dead human at ambient temperature won’t be made warmer by the blank, but a living human generating heat internally will be made warmer, even assuming the human’s heat generation constant. That is because heat loss is slowed, and the surface from which heat is lost is the other side of the blanket.
In the case of CO2, the sun warms the earth every day. Of course the warming earth is radiating IR during the day as well, but lets just look at the night. Without GHGs, the surface warmed by the sun can radiate the IR directly to space, cooling directly. With GHGs the loss of heat is slowed because some of the IR is absorbed and re-radiated back to the warm surface, and some of the absorbed IR warms other molecules in the air. IR must be absorbed and re-radiated multiple times to get to the top of the atmosphere, where GHGs actually make that part of the atmosphere more efficient at radiating heat to space. So GHGs are like a blanket, slowing the loss of heat, not technically heating the surface, but come morning when the sun rises, the surface has not cooled as much as it would have been if the sky had been transparent to the IR frequencies. Having started the day, warmer, high daytime temperatures might actually be achieved also, although with GHG “warming” more of the warming is in higher lows rather than higher highs.
Chris R. says: Hi P. Solar:No need to be nasty. Besides, I wasn’t talking to you.
Hi Chris , that was in no way intended to be “nasty”. I was simply pointing out whatever chart you recall seeing was very likely wrong even if it was from a scholarly source (and without knowing its source it is as reliable bar room chat since you don’t seem to have the slightest recollection of the source and there is an awful lot of crap flying around).
Assuming those making the models are applying the best level of understanding currently available and that this paper has just shown the thermosphere rise in CO2 to be about 26+/-6 ppm/decade ,( that is just about identical to the changes in well mixed tropo CO2. ) then the chart you saw was almost certainly based on the same incorrect guesses that have just been shown to be wrong by observation.
That suggests you should put the chart into question rather than saying “I don’t buy it”.
” I wasn’t talking to you.” These are public discussions.
Please don’t take offence. Sorry if the last post was a bit terse.
M.Moon says: If you stop convection you no longer have a steady state, so I don’t see your point.
You don’t see my point because you deliberate refuse to. You claim to be a qualified engineer so you are quite capable of extending the though experiment to a more controlled environment with no air and considering just the radiation. You should even be able to write the equations and verify the result.
The fact that you start knit-picking secondary issues and ignoring the main argument shows you are not even considering the radiation which is what you wanted to discuss.
This is not a case of a cold body heating a warm body, it is a cold body SLOWING the cooling of the hot body. This is exactly what the badly named green house effect is about.
If you think that violates the 2nd law, I’m not surprised you struggled with your exams. It in fact rather worrying that someone can get a degree in Mech Eng without having grasped the basics. I guess you just hit lucky with the questions.