Solar Storm Dumps Gigawatts into Earth's Upper Atmosphere...

[Darnok]

I know it is not new information, but I haven't seen it here

“This was the biggest dose of heat we’ve received from a solar storm since 2005,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA Langley Research Center.  “It was a big event, and shows how solar activity can directly affect our planet.”

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/22mar_saber/

“Carbon dioxide and nitric oxide are natural thermostats,” explains James Russell of Hampton University, SABER’s principal investigator.  “When the upper atmosphere (or ‘thermosphere’) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.”

This ^ is interesting, it would suggest that carbon dioxide is protecting us from overheating and the less we have it the more heat will reach Earth surface

 

[Green Baron]

It's not only the thermosphere that protects the surface from heat, many layers play a role. There are many "thermostats"/control circuits in the different spheres and looking at a single one in a limited envorinment leads to false conclusions.

Concerning carbon binding we have "thermostats" from short-term (days, like the one described) to long term (geologic scale like the building of reefs). In some carbon stays in the same reservoire, in others it switches from atmo- to hydro- to lithosphere.

The thermosphere is very thin and the effects there might well be overruled by lower level effects.

Furthermore these thermostats seem to work flexible and can take a certain amount of variability, but can snap into different states (don't work anymore or even reverse) when overstressed. Which is one of the great concerns of climatoloy, it'll be challenging to find out about conditions and constraints and side-effects. Knowledge is increasing :-)

 

Edited August 12, 2016 by Green Baron

[peadar1987]

7 hours ago, Darnok said:

I know it is not new information, but I haven't seen it here

“This was the biggest dose of heat we’ve received from a solar storm since 2005,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA Langley Research Center.  “It was a big event, and shows how solar activity can directly affect our planet.”

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/22mar_saber/

“Carbon dioxide and nitric oxide are natural thermostats,” explains James Russell of Hampton University, SABER’s principal investigator.  “When the upper atmosphere (or ‘thermosphere’) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.”

This ^ is interesting, it would suggest that carbon dioxide is protecting us from overheating and the less we have it the more heat will reach Earth surface

 

It really depends where the CO2 is, and what exactly is depositing the energy.

The atmosphere is relatively transparent to visible light, so most of the sun's radiation passes through the atmosphere without depositing much energy. It's then absorbed by the ground. The ground slowly releases the energy in the infra-red range.

CO₂ emits and absorbs most strongly in the infra-red wavelengths, so if your CO₂ is near sea level, it's hard for that energy to escape, so CO₂ basically traps the energy near the surface. Instead of passing straight back out to space, the energy gets absorbed by the CO₂ and bounced around a bit, increasing the temperature.

But this energy the article is talking about wasn't deposited by visible light, it was a solar storm, which is composed mainly of charged particles. They hit the upper atmosphere and deposit their energy by collisions with particles there, causing the thermosphere to heat up. The CO₂ in the thermosphere can then release the energy as infra-red radiation, and being above most of the bulk of the atmosphere, this can escape into space quite easily.

Completely different mechanisms. In the grand scheme of things, global warming due to increased CO₂ in the lower atmosphere outweighs any increased protection we might get from solar storms.