Where's The Heat? Think 'Deep Blue'
Date: Monday, July 25, 2005 @ 22:09:27 UTC
Topic: General
"It's a match!" For detectives in a crime story, identical fingerprints or cloth fibers might solve the case. For scientists, it could be something equally dramatic. It might be real-life observations that match the simulations of their computer models.
Such a match would provide evidence that they understand enough about a complex system to be able to understand its past behavior and perhaps anticipate its future behavior. For researchers studying climate change, the proof they've been looking for is in the ocean.
A group of scientists led by Dr. James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently published their findings that Earth is absorbing more energy from the Sun than it is emitting back to space.
Their climate model predicted that growing amounts of human-produced greenhouse gases would trap solar radiation and lead to a warming planet. If the model were correct, it should be possible to find all that excess heat somewhere -- and they did.
New measurements show that, over the past ten years, the heat content of the ocean has grown dramatically. It's grown by so much that it can finally account for the excess energy that the climate model calculated should exist. It is, in fact, a match.
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Read the whole story here:http://www.physorg.com/news5402.html
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