The Earth Chronicles 7/1/2021
NASA: Satellites record abnormal cooling in the upper atmosphere
NASA satellites have detected that the mesosphere, a layer of atmosphere 350 km above the earth’s surface, is cooling and shrinking. Using data collected over decades and several satellites, the NASA team revealed a dramatic cooling of the mesosphere.
“We had to collect data from three satellites,” says Scott Bailey, an atmospheric scientist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, who led the new study published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics.
“You need several decades to figure out these trends and determine what’s going on,” Bailey, who goes on to blame the observed changes on conventional “greenhouse gas emissions” – well, how else would they get funded – but Bailey also mentions “solar cycle changes and other effects.”
Together, satellites have provided about 30 years of observations that show the summer mesosphere above the Earth’s poles is cooling by 15 degrees C and shrinking by 200 meters per decade.
This cooling and contraction came as no surprise.
“For years, satellite data have shown this effect,” said Brenta Thurayraja, an atmospheric scientist at the Virginia Institute of Technology who participated in the study. “It would have been weirder if our analysis of the data hadn’t shown this,” she added.
NASA’s groupthink (aka consensus) is as follows:
Because the mesosphere is much thinner than the part of the atmosphere we live in, the impact of rising greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide is different from the warming we experience near the surface.
“Near the Earth’s surface, the atmosphere is dense,” says James Russell, co-author of the study and an atmospheric scientist at Hampton University in Virginia. “Carbon dioxide traps heat the same way a blanket traps your body heat and keeps you warm.” In the lower atmosphere, many molecules are in close proximity to each other, and they easily trap and transfer Earth’s heat to each other, keeping you warm like a blanket.
This means that little earthly heat enters the higher and thinner mesosphere. There the molecules are few and far between. Because carbon dioxide also effectively radiates heat, any heat trapped by carbon dioxide is more likely to escape into space than find another molecule to absorb. As a result, more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide mean that more heat escapes into space – and the upper atmosphere cools. When air cools, it shrinks, similar to the way a balloon shrinks if you put it in a freezer.
Very importantly, the decrease in temperature in the upper atmosphere begins to penetrate into the lower atmosphere (such as the troposphere, where we humans live) – a fact that NASA sidesteps.
Since 2016, global tropospheric temperatures have been dropping rapidly.
More:
https://earth-chronicles.com/natural-catastrophe/ice-age-is-coming-nasa-satellites-record-abnormal-cooling-in-the-upper-atmosphere.html
