And it's got nothing to do with climate change because, as you so rightly say, weather =/= climate.
Not quite. We have no way of saying unambiguously that it is a product of a long- or medium-term climatic variation; it is a single data point.
However, there are specific warming-related possible events (e.g. shutoff or significant weakening of the North Atlantic Conveyor) where a small change has the potential to create a much larger effect.
Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, I'm no climatologist but I'm pretty sure the atmosphere isn't an ideal gas close to thermodynamic equilibrium
As it happens, atmospheric physics was part of my degree (Physics with Space Science); hence my interest in the subject.
For atmospheric systems, the ideal gas is a workable abstraction; it's certainly good enough to describe the planet's troposphere to a useful degree, which is where the vast majority of the atmosphere's mass is located.
Ditto the question of equilibrium; although the atmosphere is not per se in equilibrium, in the denser parts of the atmosphere, the gas atoms and molecules collide often enough and with enough force to provide a local thermal equilibrium (LTE) - Maxwell-Boltzmann still works well enough.
I stand by the analogy of activation energy, though; after all, what initiates a chemical reaction is the collision of a sufficient proportion of the reagent molecules with enough kinetic energy to initiate a change in the mixture; not ultimately that different from the atmospheric processes that trigger precipitation.
no subject
Not quite. We have no way of saying unambiguously that it is a product of a long- or medium-term climatic variation; it is a single data point.
However, there are specific warming-related possible events (e.g. shutoff or significant weakening of the North Atlantic Conveyor) where a small change has the potential to create a much larger effect.
Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, I'm no climatologist but I'm pretty sure the atmosphere isn't an ideal gas close to thermodynamic equilibrium
As it happens, atmospheric physics was part of my degree (Physics with Space Science); hence my interest in the subject.
For atmospheric systems, the ideal gas is a workable abstraction; it's certainly good enough to describe the planet's troposphere to a useful degree, which is where the vast majority of the atmosphere's mass is located.
Ditto the question of equilibrium; although the atmosphere is not per se in equilibrium, in the denser parts of the atmosphere, the gas atoms and molecules collide often enough and with enough force to provide a local thermal equilibrium (LTE) - Maxwell-Boltzmann still works well enough.
I stand by the analogy of activation energy, though; after all, what initiates a chemical reaction is the collision of a sufficient proportion of the reagent molecules with enough kinetic energy to initiate a change in the mixture; not ultimately that different from the atmospheric processes that trigger precipitation.