It's consistent with global warming.
Fossil fuel CO2 is responsible.
It's the Asian brown cloud.
A new satellite to be launched in 2046 which will be able to probe into the deep ocean and prove AGW.
Please pass the popcorn.
Maxx,
I think you might have fallen into a trap of your own making (twice), the very fact that the stratosphere is cooling is indicative of global warming.
In simple terms, the troposphere is the layer of the atmosphere closest to Earth’s surface, heat escaping from Earth is being trapped by the greenhouse gases in the troposphere and causing warming. Because more of the heat is being trapped at the lower level it means less is radiated out into the stratosphere and so it cools.
Further up in the ionosphere the cooling is even more pronounced, again due to less heat escaping from the lower atmosphere. As the ionosphere cools it is contracting, it’s also affecting orbiting satellites.
A more extreme example can be found by looking at Venus. The atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide and it has a runaway greenhouse effect. Despite the fact that it’s not the closest planet to the Sun, the surface of Venus is the hottest place in the solar system other than the Sun itself.
Because Venus has such extreme global warming, there is far less heat escaping into the upper atmosphere and this part of the Venusian atmosphere is even colder than our own.
The other bullet you’ve shot into your own foot relates to solar variation. I know that you frequently posit the notion that a period of high solar activity can explain global warming, but if that were the case then the stratosphere should also be warming. In short, things are going in the opposite direction to your solar variation hypothesis but fit exactly with the theory of manmade global warming.
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RE: YOUR ADDED DETAILS (1)
There’s been a lot of research into tropospheric (global) warming and stratospheric cooling. Most of the papers are available online but you need subscriptions to access them. The first three links are to free sites that provide an overview, the others are scientific publications that require payment:
http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/20c.ht...
http://www.wunderground.com/resources/cl...
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data...
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v39...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.10...
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/314/58...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.10...
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/4/1412.sh...
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/327/59...
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RE: YOUR ADDED DETAILS (2)
Other influences could cause the stratosphere to cool/warm (reduced/increased TSI, ODS’s, pressure etc) so we can’t conclude that stratospheric cooling is conclusive proof of global warming or that it’s caused solely by GW without also considering other influences.
We do know that if GW warms the troposphere then there’s reduced thermal radiation reaching the stratosphere and cooling will occur, and visa versa. Because we can measure the other stratospheric influences we can calculate with some accuracy how much cooling is attributable to tropospheric warming.
GHG’s do not indefinitely block infrared, each photon will eventually be lost into space but as GHG concentration increases the proportion of heat retained also increases, the journey into space takes longer and the rate of escape decreases, hence there’s less heat energy travelling through the lower atmosphere into the upper layers.
Though Trevor has an excellent answer, I'm going to try to give you a for-dummies version.
Heat comes to the planet as sunlight, which is mostly UV and visible light.
UV and visible light pass right through greenhouse gasses like CO2.
But when the UV and visible light hit the planet itself, they mostly get transformed into infrared light. Infrared light does not pass right through CO2, but instead gets slowed down by it.
Imagine a small room. There is a fire in the room, and several blankets covering the doorway.
The fire is the solar input (since it passes right through the greenhouse gasses on the way in, we'll just treat it like the heat source is in the room--if you prefer, you can make it a natural gas fire, and the solar input is the gas)
The blanket closest to the fire is the lowest layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere.
The next blanket is the stratosphere, which is the next layer of atmosphere.
There are 2 basic ways the room can get warmer. The fire can get hotter, or the blankets can stop more of the heat from escaping.
If the fire is getting hotter, then we'd expect all of the blankets to be getting hotter, as well.
But if the blankets are getting thicker, we'd expect the first blanket, which is closest to the fire, to be getting hotter. But since there's the same amount of heat being produced by the fire, that means that there'd be less heat reaching the second blanket, so the *second* blanket would be getting colder.
Does it make sense now?
Because global worming causes the temp The BS has gotten so bad that they do not know what they have to say. The money is running out and with nothing to show They are running with no were to run. It is ending now with not much more than billions of tax dollars lost.
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RSS satellites have been tracking temperatures in the Stratosphere since 1998. The link below provides a graph of the tracked temperatures since this time. The graph has selectable channels and Channels C10 through C25 are readings for the Stratosphere. Different layers are selectable by using the channels.
An image below the channel selector provides an indication of what part of the Stratosphere the data is from.
RSS Satellite Graph
http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_time_series.html
For example, if you select channel C25 you will see what appears to be the average temperature for the entire stratosphere and the decline in temperature is about 1°C since 1998.
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