That is quite silly. The release of mercury, heavy metals, acid rain, and other factors beyond CO2 have done enough to give coal its (deserved) image as a ‘dirty’ source of energy. Plenty of environmentalists hae been after it. One factoid I remember from the 1970s that remains true is that more radioactive material is emitted from coal plants than nuclear, by a huge factor. Think radium and beyond.

but if you are into conspiracy theories, one funny thing: The “Coal is Dirty” campaign in Texas that was opposing new coal plants in recent years was underwritten by the owners of …. the natural gas power plants.

However this ‘long term’ cycle of Svensmark is just tossing things out as well.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7352667.stm

<<>>

REPLY: You are right about “half baked”. This study citing “Forbush increases” as benchmark for looking at cosmic ray increases is flawed. This is a short term solar event, with different energy particles mostly involved. What Svensmark proposes is a long term cycle that modulates super high energy GCM’s.

Obviously you never read the paper, you are just tossing things out.

Apart from writing code I can only make one suggestion as to how you could make it a bit easier to convert the GISS data.

Excel has a wonderful function called OFFSET. It allows you set up row or column of numbers that can be used as a reference to say convert rows to columns and vice versa… Have a look in Excel help. I hope this helps….

REPLY: Thanks I’ll check that out

I was informed by my Gen Y staff member that she considered this a personal attack on her and… aww… it just gets too nuts after that…. she then went off to a sustainability dinner with the rest of the staff… that I didn’t get an invite to because I’m a “Climate Change Denier”… I’m the only one in the whole place that has actually done something about reducing greenhouse gas emissions!!!!!!

You know what… I’m beginning to hope the whole thing is real…. let ‘em all burn….

In the words of Mugatu…”Am I taking crazy pills or something!!!!”

REPLY: Next time try hanging garlic cloves.

Even if AGW theory were able to dodge the 2nd law back-radiation would fail to produce warming of the surface.

Since Hottel (1942) the emissivity of CO2 at STP, at either 300 or 3000 ppm, has been experimentally determined to equal its absorptivity at 9*10^-4.

Asphalt’s emissivity is above 0.9 or 1000 times greater and most solids greater than 0.1. If measurement begins with the two at equal temps, the earth will always radiate heat away faster than the atmosphere can heat the surface.

If memory serves, the emissivity of gaseous H20 is about twice that of CO2.

UAH/RSS are satellite measurements of MW proxies and measure troposphere, not surface. GISS gets the (corrupted) surface stations.

Why is there such a disparity between UAH/RSS and GISS? This appears quite absurd.

+0.67C (from 0.26).

I remain Speechless. I bet Anthony won’t. Have a field day on it Anthony!

REPLY: Yes I saw it earlier today. Part of the problem with GISS is the way they format their raw data, which is totally different than the other 3 metrics, and makes it difficult for my plotting program to read in.

So, there is lots of manual work involved. Does anyone know of a simple way to take the left to right tabular column format that GISS uses and convert it to a more data friendly format like HadCRUT, UAH, and RSS use?

Here is the GISS raw data link

Here is the UAH raw data link

Good LORD! He is giving “’round the twist” a whole new meaning. (He has departed the realm of science entirely. He is beginning to give Gore a run for his money.)

Yes, it is full of german professor english and perambulating, but the basic observation about the second law on “green house” is simple: Two reservoirs, surface, R1 with temperature T1 and Top Troposphere R2 with T2, T1>T2 unequivocally. To transfer heat from R2 to R1 work must be done, the same as cooling with a refrigerator , or a room on a hot day. Conductivity, reflectivity, insulation,radiation rate etc enter in determining how much work is needed to keep a specific temperature T1 in R1, not on whether work is needed.

I have looked at the Smith paper. He does not treat the second law of thermodynamics, nor in his presentation is the enormous amount of sun energy stored as kinetic energy treated ( he says he does not want to enter the full scale general circulation models) . Maybe if I look at it more carefully I will find where the paradox enters . I suspect it is in treating radiation partially classically and partially expecting quantum mechanical behavior but I have not located the spot. ( energy levels and absorption reemission are quantum mechanical).

The second law paradox in this atmospheric greenhouse model remains.
So it must be that it is mixing up semantics and uses analogies from incompatible frameworks.

Take the particle/wave paradox. It is a paradox when it (our brain) mixes two physics representations, the classical statistical mechanics and motion, and quantum mechanics which by its invention contains as a meta level the untangling of the paradox .

I’ve looked at the G&T paper several times and find it a bit bizarre. To paraphrase an old movie, I don’t think the 2nd law means what they think it means. For another take on what they did, have a look at http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.4324 – “Proof of the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect” by Arthur P. Smith.

“This cause-versus-effect role of the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect is an important distinction. I mentioned above the common explanation that the Earth’s “energy balance results in a roughly constant globally-averaged temperature”. But I believe that this has cause and effect turned around: It is more accurate to say that “Heating by the sun causes weather, which in turn generates a greenhouse effect that is in proportion to the available sunlight”. Unless we understand the processes that limit the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect to its present value, we can’t hope to understand how mankind’s small, 1% enhancement of the greenhouse effect will change global climate.”

and the observation by Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner,
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161, that the greenhouse effect as pushed by IPCC models is not compatible with the second law of thermodynamics.

I do not think that anybody is disputing that it is the atmosphere that is keeping temperatures in livable numbers on earth, and that humidity and other “green house ” gases play a large role in this. But I do not think there exists a physicist that will go against the second law of thermodynamics.
So there is a paradox.

When there are paradoxes it means that wrong use is being made of available information. In language, it means that two levels that should be held separate, are being confused. A statement from a meta language has been incorporated in the language. It is how the old pardox is resolved: A Cretan said all Cretans are liars. So he was lying, therefor all Cretans are not liars. But if he was telling the truth, then all ….” by setting the Cretan making the observation at a metalevel of the Cretans being observed.

Further I have been thinking of heat pumps with respect to modeling the climate. The way Spencer is describing it, it is like a normal air conditioning heat pump that keeps a steady temperature in a room by doing work, either cooling or heating. In the standard green house model there is no work foreseen. All energy is in watts per meter and is supposed to be balanced like a checkbook. Nevertheless there is enormous energy from the incoming of the sun,( 235 watts/m2) that is stored as kinetic energy in oceans and air, and phase transition energy as in precipitation and evaporation. So it is very simplistic to say 235 in 235 out. These stored energies must be what are providing the “work” to keep consistent with the second thermodynamic theorem, and keep the earth much cooler than it would be if it saturated in humidity. And these are not in the IPCC models in a dynamical way.

REPLY: Science is self correcting, I’m sure that they’ll be corrected soon.

http://news.yahoo.com/i/1539

To the untrained eye, they have the appearance of news reporting.

It makes me want to break out in song. I just can’t decide between “We don’t get fooled again” or “Baby it’s cold outside”.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080407/sc_afp/usclimateenvironmentnasa_080407051048

The tide is turning, and he has to ‘con’vince the faithful, to remain calm, and ignore the man behind the curtain.
Another “beautiful theory” is about to be destroyed by a “nasty little fact”.