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Global Warming Climate Science: It's Freakin' Hard!

Posted on Thursday, September 08, 2011 at 10:05 PM by Richard Schitts

The physics laboratory CERN has been doing some very high tech research on climate science. How you may ask? By Using cloud chambers, particle accelerators and cosmic rays. Some very cool stuff!

Clouds are made when water vapor condenses around ammonia and sulphuric acid "seed" molecules. The suns ions (cosmic rays) help to form the "seed" clusters of ammonia and sulphuric acid. This means the sun plays a direct roll in cloud formation (read about the sun's cycles here). The question is - how much of a roll does the sun play?

-More complicated than you'd think.

Some techno-babble:

Today's climate models used to predict global climate change have a hard time linking Sun activity to cloud formation. CERN's research will help with this. CERN's experiments have shown that sulphuric acid and ammonia seeds only account for 1/10 to 1/1000 of the clouds we observe in the atmosphere. Currently climate models assume that ammonia and sulphuric acid are the most common seeds water vapor attaches to in order to form clouds.

This means that in the cloud department current climate models are 1,000 to 100,000 percent off!

(If the climate model says there is 1 cloud it should actually say there are 0.001 to 0.1 clouds.)

Edited on: Wednesday, September 14, 2011 9:55 PM

Posted in Other Environmental Discussion (RSS)