User:Miroslav Novak/Global warming by Solar wind

Principial question: Global warming, is it or is it not caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases

Dandelion

Similarities to our atmosphere

There are a lot of similarities to our atmosphere around us. Let’s start just in the morning when we wake up. Our bedroom is full of vitiated air. We open our street door and a fresh smog is waiting for us out the door.

Los Angeles is known and proven to be one of the most polluting cities in California, let alone the United States. The city is noted to have heavily polluted air, which has generally created a cloud(layer) of smog that hovers over it.

The Great Smog of '52 or Big Smoke was a severe air pollution event that affected London in December 1952. A period of cold weather, combined with an anticyclone and windless conditions, collected airborne pollutants mostly from the use of coal to form a thick layer of smog over the city. It lasted from Friday 5 to Tuesday, 9 December, 1952, and then quickly dispersed after a change in the weather.

In the same way the vitiated air can quickly disperse by ventilation. Like dandelion, when weather is calm the parachute ball creates a full sphere, but any stronger wind blow parachutes away.

If “parachute ball" is Earth’s atmosphere, what is a ventilation wind?

The plasma in the solar wind meeting the heliopause

What about the solar wind?

The solar wind is a stream of charged particles ejected from the upper atmosphere of the Sun. It mostly consists of electrons and protons with energies usually between 10 and 100 keV. The stream of particles varies in temperature and speed over time. These particles can escape the Sun's gravity because of their high kinetic energy and the high temperature of the corona.

As the solar wind approaches a planet that has a well-developed magnetic field (such as Earth, Jupiter and Saturn), the particles are deflected by the Lorentz force.

Venus, the nearest and most similar planet to Earth in our solar system, has an atmosphere 100 times denser than our own. Modern space probes have discovered a comet-like tail that extends to the orbit of the Earth.

Mars is larger than Mercury and four times farther from the Sun, and yet even here it is thought that the solar wind has stripped away up to a third of its original atmosphere, leaving a layer 1/100th as dense as the Earth's. It is believed the mechanism for this stripping is gas being caught in bubbles of magnetic field, which are ripped off by solar winds.

Mercury, the nearest planet to the Sun, bears the full brunt of the solar wind, and its atmosphere is vestigial and transient, its surface bathed in radiation.

When Earth is like Mercury?

Earth is like Mercury in case of particles are not deflected by the Lorentz force. This effect occures when coronal mass ejection is extra strong.

Has Earth ever been like Mercury?

It seems that Earth was like Mercury several times. Look at this atmospheric CO2 and Glacial cycles

CO2 concentrations over the last 400,000 years

Each sharp reduction of CO2 (ppm) means that the solar wind blow a substantial part of atmosphere away. A surface temperature of Earth without “thermal insulation” of thick atmosphere is then under attack of the space temperature. An ice age is stoutly arriving, lasting while strong solar wind has effect and until new atmosphere is regenerated.

The solar wind is a multiple malefactor

Indeed, strong solar wind causes: glacial ages (short or long), extinctions ozone depletion

and weak solar wind causes global warming

The solar wind and human-induced emissions

Although the solar wind is clear malefactor it doesn’t mean we can stop all activities to reduce emissions. It is very important to understand that global warming produces a lot damages, but they are nothing comparing to what Sun can induce if we stay unprepared to face a strong solar wind. Earth is a toy in Sun’s hands. It is only a question of time and power Earth will face Sun’s fancy.

A solar wind challenges

1. According to The Copenhagen Diagnosis: “... the incoming solar radiation has been almost constant over the past 50 years, apart from the well-known 11-year solar cycle. In fact it has slightly decreased over this period. In addition, over the past three years the brightness of the sun has reached an all-time low since the beginning of satellite measurements in the 1970s...”.

Isn’t it a famous calm before a storm?

2. Earth is 150 000 000 km away from Sun and the solar wind propagate at speed about 700 km/s, so it takes the solar wind about 60 hours. We have years to fight with global warming, but only tens hours to face strong solar wind.

3. Are we able to forecast timing and power of solar eruptions?

4. Do we know what Earth surface will be doing during strong solar wind?

5. How long the solar wind have effect on Earth?

6. What do we (humans) have to do during strong solar wind?

7. What kind of shelters are available?

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