Ric Werme introduced the 4:1 ratio of a sphere surface are a to a circle of the same diameter. That has little to do with the issue I raised. When the sun comes up over San Jose California; it doesn nto radiate at 342 W/m^2 less atmospheric absorption; we are used to getting the full 1366 W/m^2 less atmospheric absorption which brings it down to aorund 1000 W/m^2 which is a far cry from the 168 +30 reflected, that NOAA claims. Now we also have a latitude obliquity factor to get actual ground area insolation; but the point is that when we get sun, we get it at a level that is about 5 times what NOAA figures suggest.

This does two things; first of all our surface temperatures warm up much faster than they would under the NOAA sun, and because of the greater flux; the surface temperatures get very much higher than the 15 deg c that corresponds to NOAA’s budget. That means that our surfaces radiate infra red energy at a much higher rate than the NOAA model would lead to, and when the sun goes down in the evenings which it doesn’t in the NOAA budget, our suface temperatures drop very rapidly.

My whole point is that the real planet earth responds completely differently to the real energy and temperature variations than some fictitious planet would to NOAAs global average fictional model.

Harold Ambler says that his surfing temperatures go down evn though no hurricane comes within 300 miles.

Well then that has nothing to do with my post; because what I talked about was what happened to the water surface temperatures AFTER a real live hurricane had already passed over those waters. So NO Harold, if the hurricane didn’t come within 300 miles of you then what I said would not apply to your surfing waters. The astronomical thermal energy in a hurricane can only come from the waters that the hurricane passed over; it won”t transport enegy from the sourth pole or any other place that the hurricane didn’t pass over.

Bill Illis mentioned that a photon escapes from the atmosphere on average within 18 hours. I would venture that it doesn’t last here for more than 18 milliseconds.

An incoming solar photon can traverse 300 km of the atmosphere in a single millisecond. If it encounters elastic scattering on the way, it may meander for a bit, somewhat like Brownian motion or a random walk problem; and something tells me that doesn’t increase the travel time by more than a factor of pi on average, or maybe it is sqrt (pi). So solar photons are all dead in less than 5 milliseconds; having hit something fatal to their existance; like the waters of the ocean mostly; where their energy becomes thermalized as waste “heat energy”, or else they get capture by some clorphyl or other biologicvally active molecule and energise some life form.

Outgoing thermal radiation photons have a more bizarre life since they can escape in one msec or else get captured; and at high altitudes coud re-radiate; but at lower altitudes they get lost to thermalization by collisions with atmospheric gases. This will result in thermal emission at some other energy level and wavelength; only to run the gauntlet again.

But once agfain I don’t see any photon surviving for 18 msec, let alone 18 hours.

Photons are not like high energy neutrons that can get thermalized down to a few eV, and then wander around aimlessly; but they too suffer oblivion; since free neutrons have a half life of 14 minutes

So nearly 99% fo thermal neutrons would be gone in just one hour.

Most of the time, when I post something here; I specify the conditions I am talking about rather carefully. You can introduce arbitrary variation like surfing wet suits if you want to; but that makes it a diffeent problem from the one I was talking about.

I once wrote in Physics Today, in commenting on a review of Spencer Weart’s book; “The Discovery of Global Warming”, that when the floating se ice melts, the latent heat to melt it comes out of the ocean water it is floating on which thereby cools, and shrinks so the sea level will go down when the floating sea ice melts.

Weart scoffed at that suggestion, in his response to my letter; and affirmed that whent he ocean waters heat up; they expand so the sea level will rise.

I couldn’t agree more; but what the blazes does that have to do with the melting of the floating sea ice; which is what I was talking about.

So if you want to change the problem conditions then don’t expect to come up with the same conclusion I reach for my set of conditions.

George

That’s not correct. Here’s the current upper troposphere plot of winds, heights, temperatures and dewpoints: http://weather.unisys.com/upper_air/ua_300.html The sky above me is completely clear (northern VA) is completely clear due to very dry air (300mb dewpoint is -63). That means I have global cooling in my local area.

There is gaseous water (water vapor) in that -41C air and there is always water vapor in -55C air. There will be water vapor in any air above absolute zero provided there was some to start out (e.g. ice crystals to sublime like when you watch a contrail disappear). The amount of water vapor will depend on air temperature and pressure.

What I always heard was that the heat hits the roof (the barrier) and then once the barrier heats up it conducts in and heats the air inside.

The barrier itself has a temperature, and it radiates downward and upward (in addition to conduction as you mentioned). If it were only conduction, then you might expect the top of the room to heat up in statically stable configuration (since only the air at the top can touch the hot roof) and the bottom to remain cool, (except for the very slow rate of downward heat diffusion).

What I’m not clear on is to what degree heat that convects up to the upper parts of the atmosphere cools by anything other that temperature/volume considerations.

Eventually, the air has to radiate heat to space, right? There’s nothing else to conduct to at the top boundary and yet heat does escape.

A further observation on the GCMs. If I took on the program of building a climate model, based on my own experience, I’d have a staff of 15-20 Ph.D.s in solar physics, atmospheric science, optical physics, oceanography, thermodynamics, computational fluid dynamics, and finite element modeling…

If there’s a GCM out there developed using this approach, I haven’t heard of it.

You provide the people and the funds, and I’m sure it will be done.

Climate pact in jeopardy as China refuses to cut carbon emissions

China will not make a binding commitment to reduce carbon emissions, putting in jeopardy the prospects for a global pact on climate change.

Officials from Beijing told a UN conference in Bonn yesterday that China would increase its emissions to develop its economy rather than sign up to mandatory cuts.

The refusal is a setback for President Obama’s efforts to drum up support for an agreement at Copenhagen in December on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol. As argument erupted between rich and poor nations at the Bonn talks, Yvo de Boer, the UN climate change chief, said that a worldwide pact to prevent global warming was “physically impossible”.

Youre absolutely right about the professional, multi-disciplinary way to construct a climate model. But, then again, you’ve apparently never heard things discussed in a faculty club or a bureaucratic agency. Those guys know EVERYTHING!

I bet experiment doesn’t call for calculation of the pre-existing volume of CO2 in both tanks! A 10 litre bell jar of air will contain less than 5ml of CO2 – I wonder how much the temperature rises with another teaspoonful..?

We have just added your latest post “Suggestions of “strong negative cloud feedbacks” in a warmer climate” to our Directory of Science . You can check the inclusion of the post here . We are delighted to invite you to submit all your future posts to the directory and get a huge base of visitors to your website.

Warm Regards

Scienz.info Team

http://www.scienz.info

“Clouds are less important than the weather that creates them since it is the upper tropospheric moisture that really matters”.

Eric, this statement is utter BS.
First of all, there is no tropospheric moisture in the troposphere.
If any it’s ice or ice needles from Cirrus clouds and the upper amsel of CB clouds. In general the temp at tropospheric level is minus 55 degree celcsus.

Clouds are the visual weather and the proces of heating causing the air to expand and rise (convection) is the
most important energy destructor of the entire weather system.

For example if the atmosphere is 10% less absorbing of surface radiation, wouldn’t the amount of energy of atmospheric back radiation also change?

I think the chaos argument is valid, but climate chaos has some different sources than weather chaos. I assume the sun is a chaotic system which makes us unable to predict the current cycle (or perhaps we just don’t know enough or aren’t taking the right measurements?). The effects on weather are somewhat unknown and possibly chaotic.

Then the circulations like ENSO and PDO are chaotic and coupled. Unfortunately they are also coupled to the atmosphere and the chaotic influences of weather. So presumably it goes butterfly somewhere -> hurricane -> puff of wind somewhere -> PDO shift. None of that will ever be predictable but I still believe that improvements in model fidelity will yield more accurate depictions (a weasel word instead of predictions) of climate under new forcings like more CO2.

I suppose what my statement presupposed was that I was talking about heat transferred by the radiative process from sun to earth.

One of the biggest uncertainties and one of the biggest leaps of faith/assumption in greenhouse theory is the ?K/W/m2 value.

The estimates for its value range from 0.1 to 1.0.

The climate models are presently using about 0.32C in hindcasts and for short-term predictions but the value increases over time up to 0.75C as the long-term equilibrium sets in. Hansen may have used 1.5C as the long-long-term value in his most recent paper.

And I’ve seen climate models use different values for different forcings such as 0.15C for volcanoes.

This is one of the big shortcomings in greenhouse theory that is not talked about much. I think they need to start over with this and develop a theory that is more robust and one that works in the same timelines that the energy being talked here works in [EM radiation that is and that works at the speed of light modulated by the ability of atmospheric, land and ocean molecules to store up this energy - in essence quantum physics/mechanics].

On average, a photon of light received from the Sun escapes back into space within 18 hours. In the cloud feedback example of this thread, the length of time that a photon is “reflected” (more accurately absorbed by a cloud H20 molecule and then emitted back into space) is less than 1 minute. It is possible that a photon absorbed by an ocean H20 molecule may spend more than a thousand years in the deep ocean. I don’t think the physics have been worked out for the proper ?K/Wm2 value at all, they are just guessing based on solving a few equations.

It is literally the second half of the equation for the temperature impact of global warming and we don’t have a solid foundation for its value.

Well, sometimes you can be in a (cool) house that the sun is beating down on through a barrier (the roof) and it gets warmer inside than it is outside. How do you explain that?

Dark shingles, and lack of air-flow, ie greenhouse effect. Open your windows. Don’t worry, the models have the same problem, no empirical evidence in an open-air experiment.

George

I think we’re in violent agreement. 8^)

If it does not replicate the observed data, the model is invalid. Continuing to use it is sloppy science. Changing the observed data to match the model, and then claiming the model is “validated” or “verified” is fraud.

A note on gridding (or meshing). A big source of error in modeling and simulation is defining meshes that don’t have homogenous properties. Large problems are usually run for a number of time steps, intermediate results examined, and the model remeshed to obtain homogeneity, then continued. Some examples are studying how a vehicle structure plastically deforms to absorb energy, analyzing warheads, or studying terminal ballistics. (I’ve been involved in all three, so I’m well aware of the dangers of sloppy analytical technique.) I wouldn’t see any need for remeshing in a climate or cloud model, but proper meshing is critical.

I don’t recall if I read it here or on another site, but someone was describing meshing techniques in some of the GCMs. Apparently, some of them model the ocean in wedges from the equator 100s of kms long – WRONG. Others have meshes that include ocean, city and mountains – WRONG. Any “scientist” doing this would be more correctly understood as a child playing with tools he doesn’t understand.

A further observation on the GCMs. If I took on the program of building a climate model, based on my own experience, I’d have a staff of 15-20 Ph.D.s in solar physics, atmospheric science, optical physics, oceanography, thermodynamics, computational fluid dynamics, and finite element modeling. I’d have an additional staff of 10 or so software professionals. I wouldn’t promise the first version for 3 to 5 years. And, yes, the model would be independently validated (to ensure we actually built what we thought we’d built) and verified against observational data. If there’s a GCM out there developed using this approach, I haven’t heard of it.