Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Looking at clouds from both sides now...

LeChatelier's Principle

"A system under external stress will tend to reorganize and reconfigure itself internally in ways that will relieve or minimize the effects of that stress."

It gets hotter, more water evaporates, increasing the amount of water vapor (a greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere

The water forms clouds, which reflect sunlight back into space, cooling things off.

But at night, the clouds act as an insulating blanket, preventing heat from being radiated into space. This is why deserts are hot during the day, but cold at night.

All these feedback mechanisms (both positive and negative) interact and their cumulative effect is to help moderate temperatures. Some are local, some are global, they often operate at different time scales. Some are linear, some asymptotic, some exponential, some cyclical. Some are of little consequence or influence until certain threshold conditions are reached and a cascade of catastrophic events are unleashed. Others tend to work against each other, cancelling each other out, others work synergistically, feeding on one other.

But as long as you keep pumping in more heat, or increase the insulating blanket of greenhouse gases, its going to get hotter. And as it gets hotter, more energy gets radiated away to space. And the more energy radiates away, eventually you will reach a point where the top of the atmosphere is in thermodynamic equilibrium with the rest of the universe. But it will be at a higher temperature.

There is no way around this. The system will adjust, it will not necessarily lock into a runaway positive feedback loop (although that is not impossible). However, it will eventually stabilize. But the system will not be the same as it was before.

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