"The IPCC didn’t account for this recent bombshell of a discovery — a big rethink of their climate models is in order…
At an average distance of 778 million kilometres (484 million miles) from the Sun, Jupiter should be cold.
Based solely on the amount of sunlight reaching the planet, the upper atmosphere, in theory, should be no warmer than a frigid -73 Celsius (-100F);
however, Jupiter, in reality, averages out at a scorching 426C (800F).
This has prompted head scratching for the past five decades.
But the puzzle has just been solved, and, it turns out, the IPCC have had it all wrong.
An international team of astronomers using data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, the W.M. Keck Observatory and Japan’s Hisaki satellite have pinned down the source of Jupiter’s toasty temps, reporting their findings in the journal Nature.
“We found that Jupiter’s intense aurora, the most powerful in the solar system, is responsible for heating the entire planet’s upper atmosphere to surprisingly high temperatures,”
said James O’Donoghue of the JAXA Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Sagamihara, Japan.
Auroras are the result of disturbances in a planet’s magnetosphere caused by solar wind.
These disturbances alter the trajectories of charged particles in the magnetospheric plasma.
These particles, mainly electrons and protons, precipitate into the upper atmosphere,
and the resulting ionization and excitation of atmospheric constituents emit light of varying color and complexity.
Most of the planets in the Solar System, some natural satellites, brown dwarfs, and even comets also host auroras.
And while astronomers had previously considered auroras a possible explanation for Jupiter’s atmospheric heating,
earlier models indicated heat from the polar regions would not reach lower latitudes because of high-speed winds powered by the planet’s swift rotation.
However, high-resolution temperature maps based on Keck observations of more than 10,000 data points, along with magnetic field data from Juno and Hisaki,
have cobined to paint a compelling picture: there appears to be a powerful atmospheric ‘heat pulse’ pushing down toward the equator.
“We’ve attempted this multiple times with other instruments but with Keck’s NIRSPEC (Near-Infrared Spectrograph),
we were able to measure for the very first time the light from Jupiter all the way to the equator quickly enough that we can then map out the temperature and ionospheric density,”
said Tom Stallard, a co-author of the paper at the University of Leicester.
Instead of seeing high temperatures confined only to the polar regions,
the maps showed heat in the upper atmosphere was more widely spread out, gradually decreasing toward the equator.
“We also revealed a strange localized region of heating well away from the aurora — a long bar of heating unlike anything we’ve seen before,” said Stallard.
“Though we can’t be sure what this feature is, I am convinced it’s a rolling wave of heat flowing equatorward from the aurora.”
Implication here on Earth
These findings are something of a bombshell, and even on their own threaten to debunk the IPCC’s climate rationale.
The IPCC states that the sun has a very limited impact on Earth’s climate, and that rising CO2 levels are the driving force
— this stance has long been considered garbage by all those able to think critically, but now we realists have another weapon in our ever-expanding arsenal: auroras.
The IPCC has long stated that “changes in solar irradiance (TSI) are not the major cause of the temperature changes in the second half of the 20th century unless those changes can induce unknown large feedbacks in the climate system”.
Well, these “unknown large feedbacks” are now widely known, and they are numerous — yet, the IPCC is willfully ignoring all of them.
The effects of cosmic rays on the atmosphere (via cloud nucleation) is one such ignored large feedback–it is perhaps the largest.
At times of high solar activity, there are fewer comic rays bombarding Earth’s atmosphere, meaning less clouds;
while conversely, at times of low solar activity, more cosmic rays are able to penetrate our atmospheric levels, meaning more clouds.
Basically, increased cloud cover acts as Earth’s sunshade, which equates to cooling.
Back in 2007, the IPCC said “more research to investigate the effects of solar behavior on climate is needed before the magnitude of solar effects on climate can be stated with certainty”.
That research was conducted, by many scientists over many years; but their findings have never made it into an IPCC report.
This is because these new discoveries would have steered things away from the “humans are a cancer” theme that our elites seem so hellbent on pushing.
... The IPCC isn’t a scientific body, it is a political one.
... But getting back to the science: Jupiter’s aurora is giving heat to the entire planetary atmosphere.
It will comes as no surprise that this isn’t incorporated in Earth’s climate models, nor does it even get a mention.
The IPCC, as touched on above, states that because TSI doesn’t fluctuate all that much (rangebound between 1360-1363 W/m2), the sun can have little to no impact on Earth’s terrestrial temperatures.
But this a painfully over simplistic stance.
Downplaying the sun’s role on climate is verging on laughable, but downplaying cosmological reality is something of an IPCC trait:
the impacts of volcanoes, clouds (via cosmic rays), and the magnetic field are also sidestepped (again, because they would blow the AGW theory apart).
But the above forcings now have a new ally, and it may-well be Jupiter that puts the final nail in the global warming coffin,
because with every coronal mass ejection; every coronal hole stream; every solar flare,
heat is being pumped into our planet, heat which is completely missing from the models.
Few argue that Earth has warmed from 1979 (the start of the satellite record) to around 2010.
But this warming has arrived in line with historically high solar output:
And although the rise in TSI from the late-1970s to the 2000s was indeed negligible, as stated by the IPCC,
with an active sun comes an irrefutable increase of coronal mass ejections; coronal hole streams; solar flares, with each heating the planet.
It appears the sun is behind our planet’s climate after all." ...