Space Transport News

Climate Change is poorly understood both because it is complex and politically inconvenient for the fossil fuel industry. There are solid fundamentals underlying the grave long term concern which many experts strive to better understand and express.
The Earth radiates primarily in the infrared part of the spectrum (see IIPCC Fourth Assessment, Chapter 1). Much of this thermal radiation emitted by the land and ocean is absorbed by the atmosphere, including clouds, and reradiated back to Earth.  Our Earth's atmosphere's transparency to heat is declining, since CO2 is increasing and its absorption spectra is in the infrared, blocking an increasing amount of heat (infrared radiation) back to space.

Fundamentally, CO2 in the atmosphere has been rising since the Industrial Revolution began. If we compare an Earth atmosphere with no CO2 to the same Earth atmosphere with just 0.03% CO2, we find that the one with no CO2 is 10º cooler. CO2 acts like a blanket. The actual cooling would be even greater, however, because that 10º change in temperature would reduce the water content of the atmosphere, which would lower the temperature even more, since water vapor is also an important "greenhouse gas".[1] 

Rising CO2, however, is only one of many effects that affect the Earth's temperature and climate.  These often overshadow the magnitude of CO2's effect. Among these are volcanoes and the solar sunspot cycles.  Nevertheless, in Alaska, winter temperatures have increased a stunning 6.3 degrees F in the last 50 years.  In the Pacific Northwest, the depth of the Cascade Mountain snowpack on April 1 has declined by 25 percent over the last half century, while spring runoff from the Cascades now occurs nearly a month earlier than 50 years ago. Declining snow pack feeding Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam has resulted in Lake Mead falling to a level not seen since it was first filled in 1937.[2]

To begin the process of understanding some of these wide ranging effects, see NOAA's “State of the Climate in 2010” (July 2011) at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate/2010.php