We are in a fight for this planet and the lives of people.
Do you understand me?
We fight like we never have before and we do it well. Let's do this thing!
End of discussion.
1 September 2022By Jude Coleman
...The stratosphere (click here) sits between roughly 10 and 50 kilometres above Earth’s surface. Smoke particles don’t typically get to the stratosphere, but smoke from the Australian fires reached heights of more than 35 kilometres owing to unusual, fire-induced pyrocumulonimbus clouds. These smoke-infused thunder clouds hold lots of black carbon, which absorbs heat and rises into the lower stratosphere like a hot-air balloon, says study co-author Jim Haywood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Exeter, UK. Once there, the black carbon continues to absorb sunlight and warm the air.
“There were parts of the coastline that were under a haze of smoke for months on end,” says Abram. “The scale of that bush-fire season was just off the charts.”
Haywood and his team used data from polar-orbiting and remote-sensing satellites to observe changes in the distribution of smoke particles in the stratosphere, and combined this information with climate models. They found that the impact of smoke particles on stratospheric temperatures that was predicted by the models matched observed temperature spikes. Previous studies2 have used models to simulate the length and degree of warming in the aftermath of the fires, but this study incorporates a global analysis, definitively attributing the rise in temperatures to the bush-fire smoke, says Haywood.
“This is really putting another nail in the coffin,” says Clare Murphy, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Wollongong in Australia. She says the work builds on earlier studies, “extending the evidence”.
Damaged ozone layer...
High above Earth’s tropics, (click here) a pattern of winds changed recently in a way that scientists had never seen in more than 60 years of consistent measurements.
This disruption to the wind pattern – called the “quasi-biennial oscillation” – did not have any immediate impact on weather or climate as we experience it on Earth’s surface. But it does raise interesting questions for the NASA scientists who observed it: If a pattern holds for six decades and then suddenly changes, what caused that to happen? Will it happen again? What effects might it have?
“The quasi-biennial oscillation is the stratosphere’s Old Faithful,” said Paul Newman, Chief Scientist for Earth Sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author on a new paper about the event published online in Geophysical Research Letters. “If Old Faithful stopped for a day, you’d begin to wonder about what was happening under the ground.”...
