Without scientists and tools that study the climate we would not notice what trouble we kicked out. As in the aftermath of the industrial revolution.
Without satellite observations, climatic models and scientists able to interpret them we would be completely unaware of the effects of human activities on the terrestrial climate. In the weeks in which Trump eliminates funding to hundreds of research programs, including climate, a study just published on Pnas He wonders: if we had always had current technologies available, when we could have noticed, for the first time, that we were altering the terrestrial climate?
The first unmistakable signs of man’s climbing action
The answer is: Already in 188525-30 years after the research of the scientists Eunice Newton Foote and John Tyndall, to whom the first experimental tests are attributed underlying the understanding of the Serra effect and his role in global warming.
Benjamin Santer, independent climatic scientist of Los Angeles, and Susan Salomon, of the Department of Earth Sciences, atmospheric and planetary planetaries of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have shown that the first unequivocal signs of global warming up to human activities linked to human activities they were already visible before the end of the 19th century. When the greenhouse effect due to fossil fuel emissions was starting to increase due to the industrial revolution, but the average daily concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere were far from 430 parts per million today.
The effect would have been evident then then, if only the scientists of the time had been able to study it with the technology we have today. The two researchers “remedied” using nine latest generation climatic models to estimate The impact of emissions of anthropic origin poured into the atmosphere since 1860when you think that the emissions of fossil fuels of the industrial revolution have undergone a decisive, first surge.
The atmosphere warms up, the stratosphere cools down
Serra gases, especially carbon dioxide and water vapor, heat the lower layer of the atmosphere because they retain the infrared radiation that emits the earth’s surface hit by the sun’s rays. In the upper layer of the atmosphere – the stratospherestarting from 7 km from the earth’s surface – the opposite phenomenon takes place. Since most of the infrared radiation is trapped in the low atmosphere, The stratosphere cools down.
The authors of the study used climatic models To predict the cooling of the stratosphere since 1860: an indicator considered more reliable than the heating of the low atmosphere, because it is less subject to weather fluctuations. The stratosphere temperatures are detected by satellites for terrestrial observations, such as those of the Noaa.
Twenty -five years only
It has been seen that, in order to appreciate evident evidence of the cooling of the stratosphere due to the heating of the lower atmospheric layer, 25 years would have been enough.
If the current technology had been available in the second half of the 1800s, Already in 1885 the first effects of the greenhouse effect caused by man would have been seen. Even before the cars appeared on the streets.
In addition to showing how pervasive the effects of fossil fuels were immediately, the study confirms the importance of invest in climatic sciencein times when it seems there is every interest in putting it on.
