Atmosphere global climate

The Atmosphere, Global Climate Change and Greenhouse Gases... 

The increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (even if its overall amount is only 0.035%) affects our global climate, although other... 

Clouds cover roughly two-thirds of our earth s surface and play an important role in influencing global climate by affecting the radiation budget. Cirrus clouds are one example of a cloud type whose optical properties are not accurately known. Cirrus clouds form in the upper troposphere and are composed almost exclusively of non-spherical ice crystal particles. The impact of cloud coverage on dispersion of pollution in the atmosphere is an area of great concern and intensive study. 

Burning fossil fuel releases carbon into the atmosphere—more than 6.3 billion tons in 1998 alone. Significant amounts of carbon also come from burning of live wood and deadwood. Such fires are often deliberately set to clear land for crops and pastures. In 1988 the smoke from fires set in the Amazon Basin covered 1,044,000 square miles. By far the most serious implication of this is the significant threat to Earth s ecosystems by global climate change. 

One such feedback is the influence of clouds and water vapor. As the climate warms, more water vapor enters the atmosphere. But how much And which parts of the atmosphere, high or low And how does the increased humidity affect cloud formation While the relationships among clouds, water vapor, and global climate are complicated in and of themselves, the situation is further complicated by the fact that aerosols exert a poorly understood influence on clouds. 

Figure 1. Changes in global climate due to increased atmospheric CO2 will alter carbon cycle processes in land, continent margins, and oceans, which will in turn effect the atmospheric C02concentration. Processes that may have effects large enough to Eilter future projections of atmospheric CO2 are listed under their geographic region.

Fig. 4-13 Calculated and observed annual wet deposition of sulfur in mgS/m per year. (Reprinted from "Atmospheric Environment," Volume 30, Feichter, J., Kjellstrom, E., Rodhe, H., Dentener, F., Lelieveld, and Roelofs, G.-J., Simulation of the tropospheric sulfur cycle in a global climate model, pp. 1693-1707, Copyright 1996, with permission from Elsevier Science.)...

Fig. 17-1 The global climate system, (a) Energy fluxes, including incoming solar radiation, reflected radiation, emitted longwave radiation (from an effective altitude of ca. 6 km), and atmospheric and oceanic heat flux toward the polar regions, (b) The atmospheric circulation corresponding to part (a). Refer back to Fig. 7-4 and associated text for a discussion of the general circulation.

Fig. 17-2 The web of interactions in the atmospheric part of the global climate system. The strength of the interactions is qualitatively depicted by the thickness of the line. Bidirectional interactions have two arrowheads, unidirectional ones have only one. (From Houghton (1984), reprinted with permission from Cambridge University Press.)...

Mankind s impact on the global climate and whether pollution from modern energy use is indeed warming the Earth have become important issues for national and international policy makers. Political pressure and public sentiment are based on complex data sets that, alone, cannot tell the whole story. The ultimate question is whether our climate is becoming warmer because of the slow build-up in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations (1). The answer is not clear, because much of what we know about global climate change is inferred from historical evidence of uncertain quality. 

In addition, global warming is characterized by other important features that imply some difficulties in the implementation of the instruments provided by the standard economic theory of policy choice. First, we cannot determine with certainty both the dimension and the timing of climate change and the costs of the abatement of emissions. Second, the effects of GHG concentration in the atmosphere on climate are intergenerational and persistent across... 

Betts R, Cox P, Collins M, Harris P, Huntingford C, Jones D. The role of ecosystem-atmosphere interactions in simulated Amazonian precipitation decrease and forest dieback under global climate warming. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 2004. 78(1) pp. 157-175. doi 10.1007/s00704-004-0050-y... 

---