Global warming increasing rainfall and intense storms 3

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1. 

   amazingdrx Posted 1:46 am
   01 Jan 2009

   Clouds and confusionReading the clouds to guage climate change maybe very difficult.
   
   
   It's not just the heat the greenhouse gases themselves will trap," said Del Genio. "We have other factors to worry about. Clouds are one of the most influential climate factors, and one of the most difficult to understand."
   All clouds both trap heat and reflect solar energy. They hold heat in like a blanket, preventing it from escaping the Earth, and their white upper surfaces also reflect sunlight back into space before it can warm the atmosphere. The net effect can either heat or cool the planet, depending on how thick, wide and high in altitude the clouds are.
   
   
   So how will greening deserts with renewable energy powered water desalination effect cloud formation?  Will those clouds reflect more heat or trap more heat.  Or will it be a wash?
   Lower, thicker clouds reflect solar energy and higher clouds trap more heat?  Can geo-engineering be used to generate low clouds that reflect solar energy then fall as snow or rain before rising where water vapor acts as more GHG?
   Could a cloud bank offshore be formed to put out a southern California brush fire, for instance?  Is local weather control possible or climate gro-engineering?  Is it safe?
   
   http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

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2. 

   georgia Posted 3:42 am
   01 Jan 2009

   HMMMMMWe don't fully understand clouds yet they are one of the most influential climate factors!  I recall that our current GCMs don't handle precipitation and cloud cover very well.  Therefore, if they can't account for one of the most influential factors, I'd say they are useless at best and misleading at worst.

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3. 

   GonzoDon Posted 6:56 am
   04 Jan 2009

   Georgia is correctin stating that GCM's currently do a poor job of simulating clouds and precipitation (as opposed to temperature modeling, at which they are getting better and more cross-consistent all the time).
   That said, the basic physics of an "accelerated hydrologic cycle" that results from increased heating of our planet is pretty basic, and now pretty widely-accepted in the hydrologic community.  
   An accelerated hydrologic cycle means that evaporation and evapo-transpiration rates will generally increase (dry areas will get drier faster; droughts will tend to become more intense in drought-prone zones), more moisture will be retained in the atmosphere, and more intense convective storms can likely be expected in areas where they already occur (i.e., the 10-year, 2-hour event will produce more precipitation in the future than it does today).
   It may be easy for the armchair critic to pooh-pooh these claims, but I work in the water resources community, and believe me, water professionals take these changes very seriously:
   
   -in terms of the implications for long-term water-supply planning
   
   -in terms of responding to changes in the timing of snowmelt -- now occurring about 1/2 day earlier each year in the Rocky Mountains
   
   -in terms of the need to design dams and bridges to withstand more intense runoff & flooding than in the past.
   Indeed, the professionals have to respond.  Otherwise they'll get sued by people like Georgia in 20 years for failing to react to changes evident today.

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