NASA: Satellites record abnormal cooling in the upper atmosphere
NASA satellites have detected that the mesosphere, a layer of atmosphere 350 km above the earth’s surface, is cooling and shrinking. Using data collected over decades and several satellites, the NASA team revealed a dramatic cooling of the mesosphere.
“We had to collect data from three satellites,” says Scott Bailey, an atmospheric scientist at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, who led the new study published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics.
“You need several decades to figure out these trends and determine what’s going on,” Bailey, who goes on to blame the observed changes on conventional “greenhouse gas emissions” – well, how else would they get funded – but Bailey also mentions “solar cycle changes and other effects.”
Together, satellites have provided about 30 years of observations that show the summer mesosphere above the Earth’s poles is cooling by 15 degrees C and shrinking by 200 meters per decade.
This cooling and contraction came as no surprise.
“For years, satellite data have shown this effect,” said Brenta Thurayraja, an atmospheric scientist at the Virginia Institute of Technology who participated in the study. “It would have been weirder if our analysis of the data hadn’t shown this,” she added.
NASA’s groupthink (aka consensus) is as follows:
Because the mesosphere is much thinner than the part of the atmosphere we live in, the impact of rising greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide is different from the warming we experience near the surface.
“Near the Earth’s surface, the atmosphere is dense,” says James Russell, co-author of the study and an atmospheric scientist at Hampton University in Virginia. “Carbon dioxide traps heat the same way a blanket traps your body heat and keeps you warm.” In the lower atmosphere, many molecules are in close proximity to each other, and they easily trap and transfer Earth’s heat to each other, keeping you warm like a blanket.
This means that little earthly heat enters the higher and thinner mesosphere. There the molecules are few and far between. Because carbon dioxide also effectively radiates heat, any heat trapped by carbon dioxide is more likely to escape into space than find another molecule to absorb. As a result, more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide mean that more heat escapes into space – and the upper atmosphere cools. When air cools, it shrinks, similar to the way a balloon shrinks if you put it in a freezer.
Very importantly, the decrease in temperature in the upper atmosphere begins to penetrate into the lower atmosphere (such as the troposphere, where we humans live) – a fact that NASA sidesteps.
Since 2016, global tropospheric temperatures have been dropping rapidly.
The two graphs below show the calculated linear annual global temperature trend over the past 5, 10, 20, 30, 50, 70 or 100 years.
The first graph shows satellite temperature trends for the most cited UAH and RSS datasets:
The second graph shows surface temperature data from GISS, NCDC, and HadCRUT4 data:
Note the sharp cooling trend observed by all five datasets over the past five years.
The likes of NASA can blame a cooling mesosphere for the increase in CO2 emissions until the drawn cows come home, but how do they explain the cooling troposphere – because that contradicts their entire hypothesis…?
The “global warming” dogma is the cornerstone of all climate research – the powers-that-be cannot allow a natural atmospheric phenomenon to occur without human blame in some way, some way – but low solar activity, as the lead researcher of this new work himself admits, is the cause – and it is the main cause.
This observed and ongoing temperature drop was completely predicted by those who study the Sun, but I’m sure it came as a complete surprise to all those who sit on a fact-free diet of AGP (global warming adherents) propaganda.
First they said that such a drop in temperature was impossible because of ever-increasing CO2 emissions.
Now they say that this drop does not reflect the climate because it only lasts 5 years.
By the time these empty-nesters admit the cooling trend will have occurred – it will take a grand crop failure to make it obvious, it will take empty grocery store shelves and government rationing – and even then they will still believe it was because of “catastrophic global warming”…
NOctilucent Clouds (NLCs) – Silvery Clouds
One way to notice the cooling of the mesosphere on Earth is by the prevalence of noctilucent clouds (NLCs) – so-called nighttime luminous clouds.
In the last few weeks, NLCs have been going beyond the polar circle and covering more than half of Europe and they are already being observed all over Russia…
Noctilucent clouds are frozen meteoric smoke.
They form in the summer, when the mesosphere has all three ingredients for cloud formation: water vapor, very low temperatures, and dust from meteors burning in this part of the atmosphere.
Very low temperatures as low as -65 °C are required for NLC formation.
This frozen meteor smoke is always more common during solar minimum, when less solar energy heats the upper atmosphere and, as the Sun is still trying to get out of the grip of the deepest solar minimum in more than 100 years, this largely explains the appearance of these objects at low latitudes.
There is a steady, long-term trend toward an increasing number of NLCs:
(a) SBUV merged seasonal average IWC (ice water content) values for three different latitude bands: 50N-64N (purple triangles), 64N-74N (green crosses) and 74N-82N (blue squares). The solid lines show multiple regression fits to the data for the periods 1979-1997 and 1998-2018. (b) SBUV merged seasonal average IWC values for 50S-64S, 64S-74S, and 74S-82S. The solid lines show fits for the periods 1979-1997 and 1998-2018
Not so long ago, these luminous clouds were confined to the Arctic, but in recent years they have been spreading unusually far south and can be seen in London, Paris, Rome, Los Angeles, and Moscow as record cooling penetrates the mesosphere.
As discussed above, this cooling in the mesosphere now penetrates the lower atmosphere.
From this point, the train begins to accelerate.
Next stop is the Little Ice Age…
Great content! Keep up the good work!