Climate change clues in sky (super-cooled water found at -30 C scraps last week's model!)

EUREKA, Nunavut Territory -- Scientists are peering into the clouds near the top of the world, trying to solve a mystery and learn something new about global warming.

The mystery is the droplets of water in the clouds. With the North Pole just 685 miles away, they should be frozen, yet more of them are liquid than anyone expected.

So the scientists working out of a converted blue cargo container are trying to determine whether the clouds are one of the causes - or effects - of Earth's warming atmosphere.

"Much to our surprise, we found that Arctic clouds have got lots of super-cooled liquid water in them. Liquid water has even been detected in clouds at temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 F)," said Taneil Uttal, chief of the Clouds and Arctic Research Group at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

"If a cloud is composed of liquid water droplets in the Arctic, instead of ice crystals, then that changes how they will interact with the earth's surface and the atmosphere to reflect, absorb and transmit radiation," said Uttal.

"It's a new science, driven by the fact that everybody doing climate predictions says that clouds are perhaps the single greatest unknown factor in understanding global warming."...

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I'm one of the minority of freepers who thinks that global warming may be being caused by humans.
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There are some important factors to consider:

1) the climate is *always* changing because of unknown factors, most of a long-cycle nature such as the tilt of the earth, solar radiation levels, cosmic rays, changes in ocean currents, changes in the amount of heat that radiates from the core of the earth, etc.;

2) the climate is altered by short-cycle events such as volcano activity;

3) human activity such as increased particulate matter, high-altitude contrails, large-scale paving of urban areas.

Please recall that in the 900's AD, Greenland was so warm that Erik the Red was able to settle that island with people who raised crops and cattle.

You also have probably seen photos of the Anasazi cliff dwellings in the area of Mesa Verdi, Colorado and elsewhere in the southwest US. These communities prospered in a certain climate that changed. By 1300 AD the settlement was abandoned.

It is absurd in the extreme to propose that the climate change that turned Greenland into an area that could be farmed, yet later killed off the Anasazi peoples was caused by human activity. These changes are on a far broader scale and in scope than any climate change we have seen in the last few decades. Yet, this past change has not challenged climate scientists to verify their models based on the past- they are only interested in telling us for certain what will happen in the future.

Given that the climate is always changing, even without any human activity, the only question that is important is a simple one:

To what extent is human activity changing the climate to the detriment to humans and if so, what can humans do to mitigate the damage?

From my wife, who works in a scientific library:

I glanced through the thread & noted those that are advocating Fuel Cells, seem to not be aware of a couple of facts:

So far we don’t have a way of getting hydrogen in a cost effective manner (one that costs less in input energy to extract the hydrogen than we get out from the process)

And one of the products of the fuel cell process is water vapor (a purported green house gas)

Anyone advocating hydrogen powered autos or any other use has to ignore how they get the vast quantities of hydrogen that will be needed. The scope and scale of those quantities is **greater than** the present scope and scale of the present level of electricity production!

To convert autos from gasoline to hydrogen would require more than doubling the number of power plants. Since slightly more than 50% of our electricity comes from coal, unless some great new technology is economically indicated, this means doubling the burning of coal and the resulting pollution.

Of course, in the dreamland of clean energy where economic considerations are not allowed to constrain idealism, the hydrogen condenses out of the air at the slightest command.

Strangely, if the subject comes up, hydrogen advocates find it amazingly easy to construct hundreds of nuclear plants to supply the fuel. Putting aside how, at a different cocktail party, they rail against the evil Bush Administration's plan to store what little nuclear waste we have now in a Nevada mountain, they have no clue as to the timeline, nor incredible distortion of the capital markets this would cause.

A nuclear plant today would cost in excess of $10 billion and take somewhere like 10 years to get online. Building 100 plants means we would have to find a mountain of capital that was willing to be tied up for the better part of a generation before it could be repaid and in a quantity that is a surprising percent of the present GDP.

Nuclear plants need cooling water. In some parts of the country, the capacity of the surface water sources such as rivers and lakes for use in cooling is already pretty much filled up with existing coal and nuclear plants. Enviros love to use the issue of heat discharge into the marine and aquatic habitat as a tool in long court battles to bring proposed projects to a halt in the environmental impact assessment stage. Indeed, some of the very same enviros who champion hydrogen power will be filing suit to stop the construction of the necessary power plants.

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