phill Parsons
Given a dressing down for scaremongering when I first raised the link between cyclone intensity and global warming on TT, readers might be interested in the feedback between those more powerful cyclones and warming now being rcognized, one of those loops in the process that is bringing the immutable laws of physics and chemistry home to everyone for a very basic science lesson on the interconnectedness of the planets systems upon which we depend.

We may have not known the intricacies of these connections, scientific endeavor focused on more practical results these basic relationships were taken as givens that were of themselves fixed in stone by the heavens.

Now we find inter-related feedbacks driving the climate upon which we have built a complex of activity into instability at our own hand. Changing the climate has been relatively easy, indeed we only recently discovered we were doing it and even more recently that it will have more detrimental effects than the heat waves and decreasing rainfall already presenting.

The difficulty will be in turning around the processes by which we are altering the climate and which we have control over, the emission of carbon from burning fossil fuels and forests and of methane from livestock husbandry. All are basic to the development of the human activity that supports the 6 billion humans as they increase in numbers and demand ever more products from the limited supply.

One cannot expect much from politicians, they are only tewarded for delivering pleasure and are punished for delivering pain.

It will be the voters, who understand the impacts of continuing down the paths we have followed who are the ones who will cause change as they demand pain to pass the pleasure the future offers on to our descendents.

One thing stands in the way of that realization being implemented, the passing of the turning point where the positive feedbacks provide the drivers for climate change that no promise, no action and no expenditure can control.

Closer than Bartlett and Rudd would have us believe, exposed by scientific inquiry as our understanding of the climate grows these feedbacks are very near the point where the slide into danger is too steep to avoid and we will simply be scrabbling on the slope to delay the inevitable in the hope of some discovery or perhaps divine intervention.

Of course there will be those making much of a little if some change does not follow an regular pattern such as the trumpeting of the growth of ice in East Antarctic.

Well hey if we had not degraded the ozone layers putting oudselves in danger of being radiated Antarctica would be melting along with the Arctic. A fortuitous convergence of ignorance is the only thing between The Australian demanding action and it carriage of delaying tactics on behalf of the carbon terrorist industries based on fossil fuels.

A media corporation like News may be able to be a chameleon to public opinion, it being fickle and subject to manipulation, but when the cost comes to be paid and the ongoing propaganda in the interest of a few in the short term is overwhelmed by processes not subject to manipulation then more than Goodluck will be needed

Cyclones Spurt Water Into Stratosphere, Feeding Global Warming
ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2009) — Scientists at Harvard University have found that tropical cyclones readily inject ice far into the stratosphere, possibly feeding global warming.

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The finding, published in Geophysical Research Letters, provides more evidence of the intertwining of severe weather and global warming by demonstrating a mechanism by which storms could drive climate change. Many scientists now believe that global warming, in turn, is likely to increase the severity of tropical cyclones.

“Since water vapor is an important greenhouse gas, an increase of water vapor in the stratosphere would warm the Earth’s surface,” says David M. Romps, a research associate in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Science. “Our finding that tropical cyclones are responsible for many of the clouds in the stratosphere opens up the possibility that these storms could affect global climate, in addition to the oft-mentioned possibility of climate change affecting the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones.”

Romps and co-author Zhiming Kuang, assistant professor of climate science in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, were intrigued by earlier data suggesting that the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere has grown by roughly 50 percent over the past 50 years. Scientists are currently unsure why this increase has occurred; the Harvard researchers sought to examine the possibility that tropical cyclones might have contributed by sending a large fraction of their clouds into the stratosphere.

Using infrared satellite data gathered from 1983 to 2006, Romps and Kuang analyzed towering cloud tops associated with thousands of tropical cyclones, many of them near the Philippines, Mexico, and Central America. Their analysis demonstrated that in a cyclone, narrow plumes of miles-tall storm clouds can rise so explosively through the atmosphere that they often push into the stratosphere.

Romps and Kuang found that tropical cyclones are twice as likely as other storms to punch into the normally cloud-free stratosphere, and four times as likely to inject ice deep into the stratosphere.

“It is … widely believed that global warming will lead to changes in the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones,” Romps and Kuang write in Geophysical Research Letters. “Therefore, the results presented here establish the possibility for a feedback between tropical cyclones and global climate.”

Typically, very little water is allowed passage through the stratosphere’s lower boundary, known as the tropopause. Located some 6 to 11 miles above the Earth’s surface, the tropopause is the coldest part of the Earth’s atmosphere, making it a barrier to the lifting of water vapor into the stratosphere: As air passes slowly through the tropopause, it gets so cold that most of its water vapor freezes out and falls away.

But if very deep clouds, such as those in a tropical cyclone that can rise through the atmosphere at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour, can punch through the tropopause too quickly for this to happen, they can deposit their ice in the warmer overlying stratosphere, where it then evaporates.

“This suggests that tropical cyclones could play an important role in setting the humidity of the stratosphere,” Romps and Kuang write.

Romps and Kuang’s research was funded by the Eppley Foundation and NASA.