Could increased storm activity cool the planet and counterbalance global warming ?

Question

I teach inquizitive children. I believe that it benefits them to hear opinions other than mine. I welcome replies that will help to satisfy their natural curiosity, and send them off in new directions of investigation. A bright mind is one that does not stagnate, but keeps flowing. My students enjoy the oncoming rush of new ideas. Contribute to their advancement.

Answer 1

No, global warming warms the earth and the energy obtained from the sun in the form of thermal heat fuels storms, since it allows water to evaporate and clouds and to form and move.  Global warming increases storms in some places and it decreases water feed in other places, therefore it is not a counter balance. The most popular idea of rapid cooling would to put a massive amount of particulates into the air that would block the sun...as does in a volcanic eruption.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, I don't think so. Increased storm activity would simply heighten the amount of hurricanes and floods and make more rain fall. This, along with the melting of glaciers, will only raise sea levels and damage land.

Answer 3

No, it would not because global warming is caused by the degration of the O-zone layer. The Ozone layer acts like a shield from the suns heat. The more storms there are the cooler it would be but it would only be very temporary. Also the change would be minimal.

Answer 4

global warming is a trend that varies, depending on many factors.

one cannot look at "weather" and predict an effect on global warming.

if one were to look at CO2, one might find the following chart interesting.

http://www.oar.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive...

note that over the course of a year, it both increases, and decreases.

however, when you look over a period of 50 years, the trend is quite clear.

global warming is far more difficult to track.

there are many more factors that affect it.

http://geology.com/news/images/global-wa...

note that the red line, for which every point is a 5 year average, is much more smooth.

one might note that Venus is completely covered by clouds all the time, and is 800 degrees.

clouds are not always beneficial.

in fact, one pretty interesting exercise is to record the high and low temperatures for each day, and note what the cloud cover is during the night.

when it's cloudy, it cools off far less -- the clouds keep it warmer.

i note that you didn't mention their age.

that's fairly important when designing activities for them.

one might note that lightning does not make storms.

and storms do not cause lightning.

typically, lightning is a consequence of clouds that form when there is too much moisture in the air, and excess moisture also makes it rain.

it's a common scientific mistake to see 2 events that occur at the same time, and assume that one caused the other.

sometimes that's true.  sometimes it's the other way.  sometimes they're not related.  sometimes they're both caused by something else that you didn't notice.

Answer 5

A massive volcanic eruption with lots of ash would cool the planet.

Answer 6

Ozone is a GHG.

Answer 7

no

Answer 8

What storms, big and small do is to take water vapour out of the atmosphere. Water vapour is our most significant greenhouse gas, so yes, storm activity reduces our greenhouse effect.

This is part of the reason that global warming is like a self fuelling furnace. Warmer world means less cloud cover, but bigger storms.  It may then seem that more storms lead to cooler world? Not exactly. Cooler world leads to more cloud cover, and more frequent storms.

Bigger storms do mean that we get a lot of water vapour converted to water all at once, so we get at least a temporary reduction in atmospheric water vapour.  But we do not lose as much heat in the air. When storms cause condensation the heat of evapouration remains in the air, and inhibits further cloud formation. It also encourages evaporation. so we do regain our atmospheric water vapor. The net effect is longer periods without cloud cover and short intense bursts of storm cloud when we have higher temperature.

If we had more frequent,  storms with the increased cloud cover that goes with that, we would experience lowering temperatures. That is the opposite of what we have during global warming.

If we could instigate more cloud cover that hangs around a long time, it would cool us down.

We can not conclude that more storms mean more lightning. We do know that storms that have higher wind speeds, produce more lightning. TO get more lightning we need to have ions move rapidly through a magnetic field.

The faster  ions move through the magnetic field, the more we get charge separation. Now we need a lot of separation of charge to get a lot of lightning and lightning with higher voltages.

Clouds condensing of course brings charge together, to increase potential, but we only get concentration of charge after we have charge separation... ions through a magnetic field moving fast.

We get higher speed ion movement when we have a storm moving through relatively undisturbed cold upper air.  More storms tend to produce upper air that is more mixed, warmer, so less likely to  create more lightning.

We do get intense rising columns of air when warm moist air rises through deeply cold upper air as in tornado force winds. lots of lightning.

It is just that more frequent storms does not translate to more lightning.

Answer 9

no, storm activity is irrelevant, global warming has nothing much at all to do with thunderstorms in regaurd to helping or detrimenting it. Global warming is caused by the trapping of CO2   and   Methane and other Greenhouse gases in the Earth's Atmosphere. These gases help turn the Earth into a oven, they trap the heat from the sun's rays, not allowing them to bounce back out as easily. In general they trap heat in our atmosphere and slowly build up the Earth's temperature. On the big scale of things, a bunch of thunderstorms, no matter how strong they might be, are going to help the global warming situation.