….
Who knew? Climate change causes horrible wildfires but these dump aerosols in the sky which causes cooling which will in theory, stop more bushfires. It’s another feedback loop the models got wrong.
One author even admits the models “have to take fires into account” — which is the same as saying that their robust settled science of the last thirty years was wrong.
It has all the hallmarks of high quality astrology. The science writing is full of colorful vagaries like “vast amounts of energy”, and “overwhelming evidence” without ever spelling them out. There is spooky inference: we “suspected the world might be witnessing something new”. And then there are the vague predictions: if we scale these fires up by (pick a number) we either set off a nuclear winter or we are turbo-charging climate change. That provides excuses for the next fail in any direction.
If only the ABC had real science reporters they could have asked real questions.
h/t Eric Worrall, WattsUpWithThat (and RicDre)
Super-outbreaks of fire thunderstorms could change Earth’s climate, Australian and US experts warn
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- Fire thunderstorms during Australia’s Black Summer released as much energy as about 2,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosions
- Clusters of fire thunderstorms may be powerful enough to change the climate, scientists say
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Fire thunderstorms — which occur in pyrocumulonimbus clouds — not only create their own weather system but may also be powerful enough to actually change the climate, according to scientists from Australia and the United States.
A “super-outbreak” of fire thunderstorms — also known as pyroCb events — during Australia’s Black Summer fires of 2019-20 released the energy of about 2,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons, according to a study published recently in the journal Nature Climate and Atmospheric Science.
“The energy released was just vast,” said Rick McRae, somewhat innumerately, from the University of New South Wales.
The Hiroshima counting system sounds frightening, but every second the Sun dumps 2,700 Hiroshima bombs of energy on the Earth at the top of the atmosphere. So the entire Black Summer of bushfires in Australia produced less than one extra second’s worth of energy from sunlight on Earth.
“Of course, we don’t have anything on the scale of an atomic exchange when it comes to these forest fire events,” Dr Fromm said.
“But, with these events [such as the Black Summer super-outbreak], you have a scalable phenomenon.
“So, if you scale it up 10, 50 or 100 times, you could see if you would get a nuclear-winter-sized plume and [consequent] effects.”
But, ultimately, he said the evidence was overwhelming.
“You reach a point where you can’t stay sceptical, because there is such a body of evidence saying things are changing. You have to try [to] get ahead of the curve rather than just stick with what you’re used to,” Mr McRae said.
He can’t stay skeptical, he says. No kidding…