University of Toronto study finds atmosphere will adapt to hotter, wetter climate
(photo by Liam Kearney via Flickr)
A study led by atmospheric physicists at the University of Toronto finds that global warming will not lead to an overall increasingly stormy atmosphere, a topic debated by scientists for decades.
Instead, strong storms will become stronger while weak storms become weaker, and the cumulative result of the number of storms will remain unchanged.
“We know that with global warming we’ll get more evaporation of the oceans,” said Frédéric Laliberté, a research associate at U of T’s physics department and lead author of a study published this week in Science. “But circulation in the atmosphere is like a heat engine that requires fuel to do work, just like any combustion engine or a convection engine.”
The atmosphere’s work as a heat engine occurs when an air mass near the surface takes up water through evaporation as it is warmed by the sun and moves closer to the equator. The warmer the air mass is, the more water it takes up. As it reaches the equator, it begins to ascend through the atmosphere, eventually cooling as it radiates heat out into space. Cool air can hold less moisture than warm air, so as the air cools, condensation occurs, which releases heat. When enough heat is released, air begins to rise even further, pulling more air behind it producing a thunderstorm. The ultimate “output” of this atmospheric engine is the amount of heat and moisture that is redistributed between the equator and the North and South Poles.
“By viewing the atmospheric circulation as a heat engine, we were able to rely on the laws of thermodynamics to analyze how the circulation would change in a simulation of global warming,” said Laliberté. “We used these laws to quantify how the increase in water vapour that would result from global warming would influence the strength of the atmospheric circulation.”
The researchers borrowed techniques from oceanography and looked at observations and climate simulations. Their approach allowed them to test global warming scenarios and measure the output of atmospheric circulation under warming conditions.
“We came up with an improved technique to comprehensively describe how air masses change as they move from the equator to the poles and back, which let us put a number on the energy efficiency of the atmospheric heat engine and measure its output,” said Laliberté.
The scientists concluded that the increase in water vapour was making the process less efficient by evaporating water into air that is not already saturated with water vapour. They showed that this inefficiency limited the strengthening of atmospheric circulation, though not in a uniform manner. Air masses that are able to reach the top of the atmosphere are strengthened, while those that can not are weakened.
“Put more simply, powerful storms are strengthened at the expense of weaker storms,” said Laliberté. “We believe atmospheric circulation will adapt to this less efficient form of heat transfer, and we will see either fewer storms overall or at least a weakening of the most common, weaker storms.”
The findings are reported in the paper “Constrained work output of the moist atmospheric heat engine in a warming climate” published January 30 in Science. The work was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Nothing good comes from Toronto
The prediction: Stormier storms and mildier milds.
Unconfirmable.
(Unless HG Wells didn’t write science fiction after all. I think there’s a glitch in the CAGWer’s time machine. Maybe too much CO2?)
“Stormier storms and mildier milds.”
Now that’s a keeper 🙂
In Adelaide South Australia everyone’s been commenting how it’s been a mild summer to date and obviously we lay humans tend to compare it with most recent ones. Of course that doesn’t suit the narrative of the usual suspects so out comes the BOM to flay all such old wives’ anecdotal nonsense and set the record straight. Now read their reported self-justification pea and thimble tricks to try and hide the measured drop in average temperature-
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/bureaus-long-range-prediction-of-hot-dry-summer-spot-on/story-fni6uo1m-1227242287062
These warmies are so predictable unlike their predictions.
Global warming is a continuous phenomenon and insignificant to influence the general circulation pattern. The so called influence theory is false logic.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Nice weather will become nicer. What’s not to like?
“Global warming research: strong storms to become stronger, weak storms to become weaker”
My fear is that “Medium storms” will become “Medium-er”.
Global warming predicts that strong storms will be stronger……except when they’re weaker. Weak storms will be weaker……except when they’re stronger. There will be more rain…..unless there is less. It will be warmer……unless it’s colder. Hurricanes will be more frequent…..unless there is fewer.
No matter what happens it’s all because of global warming. So shut up!
” … weak storms to become weaker” Quite true. We have a very weak storm right now – fine and sunny with no wind.
The strong get stronger.
The weak get weaker.
What happens to the old ordinary/average storm? If they are going to disappear, it is only right and proper that we arrange a retirement party for them – and perhaps a gold watch.
So, about global warming… strong storms will become stronger while weak storms will become weaker.
Hmmmmmmm! Really?
Sounds like the sort of cheap science that might come out of Zimbabwe or the Solomon Islands … no disrespect to those countries, but definite disrespect to the actual individuals (I won’t call them scientists) who have come up with this crap.
“They showed that this inefficiency limited the strengthening of atmospheric circulation, though not in a uniform manner. Air masses that are able to reach the top of the atmosphere are strengthened, while those that can not are weakened.”
Since no storms reach the top of the atmosphere, all storms will become consequently become weaker.
Wonderful!
So, now they’ve solved the problem of modeling current day clouds.
They haven’t????
Oh, Bummer. Well, it’s back to the old drawing board I guess.
Weak storms will get weaker? Let’s see, the weakest storm is — no storm at all, 0 on the scale of storminess. Weaker than 0 is what, exactly? Or are they claiming that the distribution of storm intensities will flatten while maintaining the same centroid — otherwise known as increasing the kurtosis of the distribution? Not implausible, but it isn’t exactly making weaker storms weaker and strong storms stronger, it is just shifting the probability distribution of storms around.
But the real virtue of this claim is its utter non-falsifiability in timescales less than 100 years or thereabouts, if then. The climate is not stationary on 100 year timescales! It is not stationary on 10 year timescales. The underlying “decadal” probability distribution of storms changes from decade to decade anyway, and not just from global warming but due to the interactions of the multidecadal oscillations. That is, they shift on a roughly decadal scale with ENSO, they shift on timescales of around 30 to 70 years for the AMO and PDO, there is probably an underlying secular shift due to general warming over the last century or so (to the extent that this warming has actually occurred relative to imperfectly known temperatures from over 65 years or more ago). There may well be shifts caused by variations in aerosols and soot and CO_2 and deforestation and reforestation and land use change in general, and then the Earth’s climate system is chaotic and so it can just change anytime because it wants to (to anthropomorphize an utterly unpredictable butterfly-effect shift that is much larger than any simple natural or anthropogenic forcing, such as a shift in the Gulf Stream that would put the entire NH into the icebox).
Note that the high end storms that are supposed to become more frequent are rare. There isn’t even one a year, on average. It takes decades to get enough of them to even begin to estimate a moderately reliable “probability of violent storms” at some given category level, more decades the higher the level of the storm.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that we are continuing the all time record-smashing interval without a major Atlantic storm making landfall in the US. I am thinking we are getting very near doubling the previous record. Last year’s hurricane season was pretty much a bust in the Atlantic — I was directly underneath the eye of the worst storm that did make landfall (right down to the wind dying down and starting up again) and it was a category 1 that might briefly have pretended to be category 2 with a gust or two, and did almost no damage UNDER the eye of the storm on the NC coast. Sandy, OTOH, did a lot of damage but was only a category 1 hurricane. Hard to reconcile this fact with the prediction, hmmm.
rgb
So eventually as all the small storms shrink to nothing, the bottom end of the large storms start to shrink too? Or do they get stronger until all the strong storms have merged into one giant megastorm?
I suppose we could live with One Giant Megastorm somewhere on the planet in any one year…
Or did they mean something else? /snarc;
Yep, It was storm of the biblical Great Flood, during Minoan Warming Period (1500s BC)
(/sarc)
…strong storms to become stronger, weak storms to become weaker
It’s already happening. Tropical storms have moved up to Hurricane status! You could read it on the news.
[OK, if I must: /sarc.]
Tropical storms, cyclones, and typhoons will all become hurricanes! All you need is seeding by that dastard molecule, dihydrogen monoxide to all of these events, as is predicted by global warming theory, and you have all these events turning into hurricanes!!!!!! Quick!!!!! Ban dioxide monocarbon along with dihydrogen monoxide! Rid the world of these poisons before regular storms disappear!
Gosh. My thoughts are worthy of a Bill Meir travel log episode.
No, what happens is that rich storms get richer and poor storms get poorer. Everyone knows that.
Not really a need for the tag, that’s pretty much what ‘they’ are doing.
Recently the was a TRS in Queensland, name Marcia. The BOM called it cat 5. It barely just touched minimum for cat 1 Hurricane; one observation at one station, Yeepon. None of the other nearby(or further away) stations reached Hurricane status.
Below an excerpt from the relevant observations at Yeepon.
I have played golf in stronger winds than that.
Does this mean that during the period of global cooling between 1940 and 1976, strong storms became weaker and weak storms became stronger?
Plus 10. Backcasting. It’s like screaming “Fire” in a crowded theater when you say “backcasting” at a global warming conference.
That global cooling might be (at least partially) a result of the two World Wars. Here are some details on this subject: http://www.2030climate.com/a2005/02_11-Dateien/02_11.html
Storms over land are caused by trees wagging back in forth. Over the ocean, I’m pretty sure it’s the waves; particularly the white ones. Check it out!
Ooooohhhhh Dear! The shrinkage is happening to storms on Jupiter tooooooo….
Jupiter’s Red Spot Is Shrinking!
http://youtu.be/ADPJZzharSk
Interesting thesis! We are paying more and more attention to the ocean, which is great, event if it is a bit late. And I see that not only seamen, but also the general public start to realize the importance of the ocean in the climate change process. I have read the thesis ‘Booklet on Naval War changes Climate’, by Arnd Bernaerts, and are more and more convinced that wars at sea are one of the most important causes for the global warming. If you want to read more, go to http://www.1ocean-1climate.com. I also think that any initiative that draws attention on the climate change is a good initiative.
“strong storms to become stronger, weak storms to become weaker”.
I think they are talking about themselves.
Actually, strong storms becoming strong is all we’ll see as weak storms weaken away. Sooooooooooo, the storms are predicted to get stronger. Is that not what this article refuting?