Are Scientists Always Smart?

“We see a parallel to global warming.”
No we don’t. This is such a simple logical flaw that sceptics should never, ever repeat it. It makes us look like all the crank science fans (although Galileo is generally their favourite).
There are plenty of examples of science accepting amazingly bizarre theories in quite short notice, despite scientists having to learn things from the ground up. Quantum theory never had to put up much fight. Birds descending from dinosaurs was pretty quick too.
There are lots more examples of science rejecting pretty obvious ideas, on the basis that they were totally wrong. Lamarkianism (Lyshenkoism) is one good one.
If you want to prove AGW is wrong, then you need to prove AGW is wrong. Nothing else will do. Going off on a tangent about how other scientists were wrong in the past is totally and utterly irrelevant.

No.
More than half of PhDs’ intellectual scores are not high enough to support genuinely independent thought. Add to that — objectivity is needed — something not everyone posessses.

No.
Only half of PhDs’ have intellectual scores high enough to support thinking outside the box (according to some sources). Add to that — objectivity is needed — something probably fewer than half of the population has in abundance. Moreover, a load of self confidence is needed to handle the criticisms and admit mistakes.
Tough to find all the needed factors in one person.

If Edison said that genius was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, then in the case of AGW I would suggest something like 90% imagination and 10% perspiration.
If we can up the perspiration levels, as we have seen with the huge efforts of Anthony, Steve et al, and cut down on the imagination, we might head back towards a real science.

Uh, Mooloo, it is the warmists who have to prove AGW right, and they haven’t. And they can’t.

Topic: “Are Scientists Always Smart?”
Hence Tim Lambert’s claim that WUWT is ‘Anti-Science’.

Mooloo –
“If you want to prove AGW is wrong, then you need to prove AGW is wrong. Nothing else will do. Going off on a tangent about how other scientists were wrong in the past is totally and utterly irrelevant.”
You seem to forget the null hypothesis.
The obligation of proof lies, not with those who are skeptics of AGW, but with those who posit that the climate is dramatically changing. Actually, Wegener’s “Continental Drift” Theory is similar to AGW – in that it was doubted until a mechanism – seafloor spreading – was discovered to explain the process. Unlike AGW, Plate Tectonics brings together many disparate parts into an understandable whole. AGW, on the other hand, requires the dismissal of the MWP, the UHI, post-LIA warming to make its case.

Mooloo (20:21:05)
This article is not suggesting that because the consensus has been wrong in the past, therefore it is wrong now. It is merely suggesting to keep an open mind and not to assume that the consensus view is necessarily the more credible.

LOL,
I have occasionally brought up this very point that “consensus” has been very wrong before.I would bring up this example along with J.Harlan Bretz (you look it up) to show that consensus is not the proper metric in determining if the “lone rascal” is wrong.
AGW believers would get irritated,when I do that and burrow deeper into the consensus silliness,by pushing the appeal to authority,post a long list of links and think he has made his point.And other dam excuses.
Too many AGW believers are simply lemmings who will bodily follow the “charismatic leader”, such as Al $$$ Gore or some other people who have a conflict of interest a mile long,that AGW believing lemmings amazingly overlook.
Consensus is a common tool in politics and common with ignorant followers,who has no idea what a scientific method is.

As a skeptic, it’s great to see a history lesson about how lots of people were wrong.
But as our first commenter pointed out, to prove “AGW” wrong there’s some serious scientific work required, not history.
In fact, AGW is made out of lots of different elements of science, some of which are strong and some of which are weak.
Even to talk about disproving AGW needs some definition, because lots of “AGW adherents” might disagree with, as examples:
– the removal of the MWP from last 1000 years’ climate reconstructions
– the fact that sea level rise is “accelerating”
– how reliable GCMs are
– whether clouds are understood well enough for us to understand climate
Lots of “AGW skeptics” might agree that:
– sea level is rising and global temperatures have increased in the last 100 years
– more CO2 in the atmosphere will increase the radiative forcing at the earth’s surface
And surprisingly there is a lot of published science supporting many of the different elements that make up the core AGW proposition. Not all from a few people. And from long before the IPCC existed.
Some of the basics, like quantifying the radiative effect of CO2 and water vapor, go back 30-40 years.
As you can see in CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas? Part Five
And if – as a basic proposition – CO2 doesn’t have a warming effect on the surface, why is there downwards longwave radiation measurable at the earth’s surface which matches the absorption characteristics of CO2, O3, CH4? Where does it come from?
As you can see in CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas? Part Six – Visualization

Ray (20:42:47) :
This reminds me of the whole deal about Cold Fusion. There was lots of excitement at the time. It was shown to be an artifact. Artifacts in science are common when you don’t control every parameters. It’s often not easy to see that the signal can be an artifact some times.
———–
Reply:
Sorry Ray, but that’s a bad analogy. Cold Fusion was “debunked” because the signatures that identify hot fusion were applied to it. Well, you can imagine that wasn’t too applicable–kinda like using your wife’s candy thermometer to measure earth’s terrestrial temperature; the wrong tool for the job.
Google or Bing LENR, which is the acronym “cold fusion” has migrated to get rid of the stigma that was never justified. (LENR stands for Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.) The “hot fusion” people (physicists, by the way) jumped all over it to discredit it since it didn’t fit in with their “theories”. Problem is, the physicists were just like the AGWers, bowing to their cherished theories and demanding the world follow their textbooks, which were more than 100 years old, rather than taking a fresh look at the real world.
The chemists, who by the way aren’t as tied to the theory as the theoretical physicists, went into their laboratories and kept working with it, discovering more and more interesting characteristics about it until they came up with a pretty solid explanation.
If you pursue the topic, you’ll see a lot of pros and cons, but all the current activity regarding LENR is happening overseas–the hot spots right now are Israel and Japan. There have been numerous patents filed on the phenomena and there’s even a medical device (upgraded since it was first introduced) that’s based on LENR. The US Navy, to their credit, have begun investigating the process, and maintain that the phenomenon is real.
Sad that the US has decided not to participate in this field–the theoretical physicists did such a good job of debunking the process (in actuality demonstrating their unyielding stubborness by relying on outdated theories) that “cold fusion” lost all funding support in the US. But it didn’t die. Indeed, research is continuing in a number of countries outside the US.
After I researched it several years, I’ve come to the conclusion that cold fusion has more promise than hot fusion. One of the amazing aspects of the process is that cold fusion appears to be the perfect nuclear reaction–there’s no untoward radiation (hence their difficulty in detecting it); in fact, the research indicates it can be used to render highly radioactive materials completely innocuous. You could hold a “Mr. Fusion” in your hand and have no worries whatsoever. And with a couple of liters of heavy water (about $50 a liter now) and the right configuration using paladium (rather more expensive than heavy water!), you could have a basement heating supply that would last 30, 40 maybe 50 years for a few thousand bucks. There’s even evidence it can be used to generate electricity directly, but we’ll see where that goes. Considering how the weather’s going and fuel prices and supply a big question, I’d be happy just for the long-term heating unit.
Truly exciting stuff.

And if – as a basic proposition – CO2 doesn’t have a warming effect on the surface, why is there downwards longwave radiation measurable at the earth’s surface which matches the absorption characteristics of CO2, O3, CH4?>
Here lies the problem Mr Doom. You begin by putting words in the skeptics’ mouths, and then arguing against them. The question is NOT if you can measure downward longwave radiation or not. The question is does the presence of CO2 result in a net increase in energy retained? The latter question is far more relevant than the former. The latter question is governed by the laws of thermodynamics which say no, have been repeatedly demonstrated by experimentation to be accurate, and which are in general agreement with long term observation of the climate via the geological record.
A wise old woman once explained to me that she could prove that man had never landed on the moon. Mosquitos! she said. Huh? said I. If they can’t even get rid of mosquitos, how could they possibly figure out how to go to the moon? she asked. I had no more answer for her than I do for your question.

Science & western civilization?
1st – pre Classical Greece period- some Asia minor mathematicians and metaphysicians
2nd – Classical Greece period- lots of “natural” philosopher (i.e. scientists)
3rd – Classical Roman period- natural philosophers and engineers
4th – Lights Out (Dark Ages) – scientists? zippo outside of religious dogma yes men
5th – Renaissance – scientists are born again
6th – Enlightenment – scientists see the light and multiply
7th – “Post Enlightenment”- massive science on a scale not known in the history of mankind
8th – Now Period (I don’t have a name for it) – political manipulation of science by democratic (yes, democratic) gov’ts
9th – Future – ???? [ but I am an optimist in spite of denying it on other WUWT posts]
John

so will Neal Adams finally be recognised for his expanding planet theory?

‘Any child can see that’ the continents fit together like a jigsaw. As a child in the late forties, looking at a world map, I never doubted it and often discussed it with my friends. Guess I wasn’t so sceptical in those days.

So, we’ve proved scientists can be idiots. Which doesn’t prove they are always idiots.
And Pasteur got it worse, and with more consequence.
Do I think the consensus of current day climatologists shows dangerous evidence of hubris? You bet I do. But that doesn’t make them wrong. Time will tell.

For me, Climategate is such a gripping narative because it plays out so many subplots. Everything from placing thermometers to the intricacies of the human psyche. Plus, of course, it is happening in real time. (Actually reading CRUTape letters too, which fills me in on a lot of detail as I am late to the party)
I am not sure that we are quite there yet. There are so many entrenched views that I don’t know how we will move forward. I am grateful to the poster who mentioned Eugenics. I think this has a somewhat chilling and ironic twist that Eugenics got swallowed up into Nazism, and led to the Holocaust. I find the current use of the word “denier” particularly poignant in this regards.
My mother was brought up in Nazi Germany and has some tales of a gun pointing at her head when she was 12 because she wouldn’t Sieg Heil Hitler.
My hope is that we can not only get a rational and modern approach to climate science, but that we will acknowledge these days as a darker moment of human history and intellectual freedom.
If we shove it under the carpet, like Eugenics, then that is the worst kind of denial.

It is impossible to prove AGW is wrong, because the AGW predictions adapt to whatever the weather is. Ten years ago we were told that snow was rapidly becoming a thing of the past, now we are told that record snow is because of AGW. Drought and heat has been replaced by floods and cold. Hurricanes have been replaced by lack of hurricanes. AGW is a religion, not a science.
It will take 300,000 years for Antarctica to melt at current NASA estimated melt rates. Al Gore doesn’t need his mechanical lift.

I have spent my entire life suspended at this divide between science and anti-science.
Some anti-scientists are ecologists and/or environmentalists. They amongst others recognize and appreciate partial, fragmented, distributed, multiply directed process. … In short, ‘holistic’ process.
The problem with ‘anti-science’ is that by definition, it is indescribable. It is nevertheless real. The fundamental, essential obstacle is that it cannot be perceived as a single, instantaneous ‘totality’.
If one is unable to engage and bind the ‘totality’ with sufficient rigor for intended purpose, then not even an open/dynamic system approach will be appropriate.
Anti-scientists become frustrated by the inability to describe what they understand. They react and respond to being criticized for expressing gibberish. There is no alternative but to put up with the dumbstruck lack of effective expression or to opportunistically and covertly adopt meaningful tokens of science in a pseudo-scientific manner. You know what? That is OK. Given the choice between “that” or nothing, “that” is at least ‘something’ even if it is wrong or nonsensical.
Scientists simply cannot grasp and engage what ‘exists’ yet is also fundamentally or for reason otherwise, … “indescribable”.
The usual explanation that scientists provide when they realize that they have it ‘wrong’ is that the situation was ‘misconstrued’. That is another way of saying that the problem was badly formed.
Climate is a large, multi component structure and process. If it is insufficiently described, so as to effectively extrapolate for intended purpose, it is not ‘science’.
If one cannot do science then one struggles to render the situation into a form which is sufficiently effective as description and/or else fall back upon methods of critical thinking which are not intensely rooted in “description”.
To my casual perusal and mostly inexpert eye ….
… Although the argument for AGW has the appearance of being hard science based on proven, verified, quantitative analysis, it’s strength and honest merit is qualitative.
By qualitative, I mean that a large number of arrows are pointing in the same and commensurate direction towards a ‘warming trend’. Is that the whole story? … a done deal and proven, indisputable scientific fact? No. Far from it, I suspect.
For me what has be demonstrated so far is 1/3 of the story. Ignoring the remaining 2/3rds of the process invites the outcome to widely depart from what is predicted.
The earth has been around for a long time. Over the course of that history, it can almost be taken as given that the climate, atmosphere and other components that go into constituting the entire global climate system has been strongly perturbed. Mechanism(s) act to restore or to shift to some equilibrium. The earth’s history does not seem to indicate a runaway instability, save perhaps for a fondness for ice ages.
It is all very well to demonstrate and assert that the trend is towards increasing temperature and increasing CO2. Nevertheless, by describing and emphasizing only the start of the trend, one ignores the follow on trend and the hysteresis effects.
The description of the hysteresis follow on consequences seems to be missing. The trend only continues in a monotonic manner so long as it is seen to be and/or is predicted to be trending (or persisting) as expected.
Without having a good understanding of the salient hysteresis processes, one doesn’t even have half of the description.
Environmentalists have traditionally been anti-science. They do not inherently trust science’s earnest, stalwart insistence that science understands and the science is correct. It amuses me to see them do an about face and support science because ‘science’ currently appears to support their view point. It amuses me to see environmentalists call skeptics ‘anti science’.
I am a proud ‘anti science’ scientist. I know to mistrust my own opinion. My skepticism is born out of hard earned personal experience at being wrong, wrong, wrong, … wrong.

“Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.”
– Michael Crichton

No, of course scientists are not always smart. Scientists are human (except of course for Commander Data) and therefore subject to the same set of temptations and errors as other humans. I have heard a rumor that some scientists may additionally suffer from inflated ego, but of course that may be a lie.
Thirty excellent examples of smart people, including some scientists, being wrong can be found at http://listverse.com/2007/10/28/top-30-failed-technology-predictions/
One of my favorites is No. 8, the well known Lord Kelvin remark that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”

Re: Mooloo (Feb 12 20:21),
If you want to prove AGW is wrong, then you need to prove AGW is wrong. Nothing else will do. Going off on a tangent about how other scientists were wrong in the past is totally and utterly irrelevant.
I respectfully disagree. AGW isn’t just about the science. Large proportion of the population is involved in this debate. many are saying “200 scientists can’t all be wrong” etc
This example shows/reminds people that a concensus of respectable, established scientists can indeed be wrong.

Steven Goddard wrote:
”” There is no question that some of the greatest minds have been scientists.  Da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Edison, Einstein, Fermi, Feynman are a few names that come to mind.””
Steven,
I offer what I consider a very frightening possibility. What if those you listed are actually normal human minds. What if our culture & educational methods were not effective on them, so they are therefore natural capacity normal humans. Perhaps most of us & those around us everyday are not normal.
John

Very nice set of statements on what complexity does to and for science at
http://wenovski.ning.com/profiles/blogs/so-what-changes-in-a-complex
(Extracts from The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability (Complexity in Ecological Systems) http://is.gd/8hWaC at Amazon)

The problem is not the science. The problem is the politics. If we can get the politics out of the science, the science will look after itself.

For what it’s worth, probably nothing, I think it’s o.k. that someone with a bee in their bonnet , a wayout hypothesis, goes for it and perseveres regardless of criticism. We know, as Popper said, we’re all theory ridden. That’s what probaly triggers our exploration in the first place. HOWEVER, (post second glass of wine,) however, the scientific method, requiring open critical review of a falsifiable hypothesis, its data, methodology,replication, brings ‘us or the other guy’, back to the field. (Racing terminology,.My father pioneered photo finish technology.)When that goes wrong, i.e. stringent criticism of the evidence, real data is replaced by postmodern science, then ends justify the means. The critical process must be upheld. Guess you’d call this a rant…

Two points.
1, the consensus view used to be humanity couldn’t materially effect the climate – there were people sceptical of that view…
2, Steven Goddard (or anyone here) is free do to the research, present the evidence, and gather the data that refutes accepted science. So far what we’ve from said has just been a load of profit for the final nail industry…

I’m glad Feynman was mentioned. I’m about half way through ‘Classic Feynman’.

Being smart haScientists are almost universally stupid

Correction:
“…this is particularly relevant to Warmists who conclude that the recent warming must be down to manmade CO2 because we can’t think of anything else.”

Does that meant that because Plate Tectonics is the current scientific consensus, it must be wrong, and the Expanding Earth theories should be taken seriously?

John F. Hultquist (23:12:11) :
It is up to the AGW crowd to show a force and a mechanism that supports their theory.
Until they do it is right for all the rest to remain skeptical.
Small correction. it is our right for all to remain skeptical.
The point with AGW crowd is that there is a trend to take that right away, they don’t call us deniers for nothing.

Average is average and not just in science. What about painting, music, architecture or even cooking? True geniuses are exceptionally rare. Let’s say it was decided we need more poets or music composers. No amount of education would do that. The spark has to be there to start with. The average bureaucrat scientist doesn’t have the fine-grained discrimination of the greats.

There were good reasons to reject Wegener’s work. How could any one accept tidal forces making continents plough through the oceans? There were two things missing from Wegener’s work: measures of relative continental motion and a plausible mechanism. Having to deal with creationists and a few crackpots over this same issue I’m very disappointed to see this in this blog. This is a very bad post.

Anyone for Surge tectonics?

“If you want to prove AGW is wrong, then you need to prove AGW is wrong. Nothing else will do. ”
Infact that conclusion is wrong. Alarmists have to prove AGW/ACC is happening. They have so argued, so they have to prove it…

Are politicians always smart?
Obviously not!
Obama keeps on pushing for solutions to solve a non existing problem, putting us all in “green shackles” and our economy off down the drain:
From Drudge report:
“NYT SATURDAY: White House officials are searching for ways for Obama to ‘use executive powers to advance energy, environmental and other policy priorities’… Developing…”

Funny how Al Gore uses the same story to make the opposite point, well actually he makes the same point but he views the warmers as the modern version of Alfred Wegener where as sceptics see him as the modern sceptic.

The real parallel with the historical controversy over continental drift is not with AGW; the claim that the scientific community holds a consensus on AGW is merely their own propaganda. There is no such consensus, and there never has been. The real parallel with Wegner’s case for continental drift is the case that Svensmark, Shaviv, Soon, and others in the solar and astrophysical fields are making for the role that solar-modulated high-energy cosmic ray flux plays in earth’s cloud cover and hence climate. Like Wegner, who as a meteorologist was an outsider to the field of geology, they come from outside of the mainstream of climate science–and have gotten a similar reception. Like Wegner, they are now being ignored, dismissed, ridiculed, and suppressed–in this case, not just by the AGW crowd, which brooks no competition, but by much of the rest of the scientific community which has been distracted by the activisism of the AGW advocates. My own judgment is that the evidence they have produced so far is just as compelling for their case as Wegner’s was for his in his day.

“Does that meant that because Plate Tectonics is the current scientific consensus, it must be wrong”
No, but imagine someone on an internet message board tried to argue that Plate Tectonics is wrong. There would be no need to simply scream “Consensus!” at him and rest your case. Instead, you could point out that the continents fit together pretty well and that the geological and fossil elements of the continents seem to match up pretty well too. Indeed, it’s possible to summarize the best evidence for continental drift in just a few sentences.
In other words, “consensus” is what people rely on when they don’t actually have good arguments on the merits.

I was nearly failed in my Geology course because, as an engineering student, I could not accept that mountains were formed by SHRINKAGE of the earth’s surface due to cooling (tension) . It seemed to me that only compression could have formed mountains.
I was told accept that mountains were formed by shrinkage or I might fail the course. I passed the course (and hence got the engineering degree I wanted) but writing what I knew to be untrue bugged me.
I think similar pressure is applied today to students to accept AGW theory. Fortunately the leaked CRU e-mails have emboldened some to stand up for what they secretly knew.

John Whitman (01:17:05) :
Responding to comment “Dodgy Geezer (00:42:48) : ”
Dodgy,
Yes, your point is excellent. From the dates below it does look like Bacon was a transition guy from religious orthodoxy of the late Dark Ages toward the next periods that forwarded toward scientific method.
He appears to me to be pivotal figure in transition from Dark Ages forward.
Roger Bacon, 1214 to1292
Dark Ages, ~5th Century (~400s AD) to ~ late 11th Century ( ~late 1200s)
John
I got Dark Ages info from :
From http://www.history.com/
The Dark Ages, otherwise known as the Early Middle Ages, was a period in European history from the collapse of Roman political control in the West—traditionally set in the 5th century—to about the late 11th century. It should be emphasized, however, that the fixing of dates for the beginning and end of the Dark Ages is arbitrary; at neither time was there any sharp break in the cultural development of the continent.
But don’t, please, just stick to Europe. When we were in the Dark Ages the Arab civilisation was way ahead (by the time of the Abbasids). Most of the enlightenment’s favourite Greek texts came to us via Arabic translations. Non-muslims also enjoyed more freedom than non-christians in Europe. They were pretty good at maths then, as were the Hindus.

John Blake – your last paragraph was brilliant.
With your permission. I would like to quote it.
Jack Linard

Science created a barrier that anyone outside cannot possibly have any chance of crossing. Arrogance that no matter what you say will be wrong until proven right.
How can you prove anything when automatically it is incorrect before even being seen.
Debating right and blaming wrong here still misses the point!
Understanding the mechanics of how this planet works in conjuction with the atmosphere has not been studied.
So observational science must do.
Mechanics is how the planet works but science crapped out on a single gas.

The Power of an ATOM is not what you observe on the outside But, the mechanics of how it works on the inside!

another classic example of the “settled science” proving to be wrong is the Nobel Prize won by West Australian biologist, Barry Marshall. He proved that the scientific consensus on the cause of ulcers was wrong – and got a more deserved Nobel than Barack and Al for his efforts

Mooloo
“If you want to prove AGW is wrong, then you need to prove AGW is wrong. Nothing else will do.”
This is the thinking from the witch hunts. People knew implicitly that certain individuals were witches. Bad things that happened were mysteriously caused by their secret evil arts.
The key point is that the onus was on them to prove that they were not witches. The obligation on disproof, not proof. The argument of evil influence through magic was impossible to disprove in fact.
Not only AGW but much environmental activism uses “science” with the logic of the witch-hunt for justification. CO2 emissions? Nuclear power? Genetic modification? Nano-technology? etc… The “precautionary principle” says that once we have a superstitious fear of something, then the accusation of harmful effect needs to be disproved. And the hypothesised effects are carefully designed to be suitably nebulous, uncertain and shrouded in statistically near-impossible analysis that such disproof of harm is near impossible.
Witches were burned, drowned etc on the “precautionary principle”.

Filipe,
Newton couldn’t explain the mechanism of gravity. Did that make him wrong? An intelligent critic of Wegener would have said “clearly the continents have moved and we need to determine how.”
Feynman said “Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.”

Derek
Ranting against “creationists” does not establish validity to any supposed “consensus” on abiogenesis. Recommend you explore Uncommon Descent, and books by Michael Behe etc. No one has yet come up with an quantifiable theory of abiogenesis to replace Louis Pasteur’s Law of Biogenesis Omne vivum ex ovo, Latin for “all life from eggs” i.e., “life comes from life”. Accounting for the recursive irreducible complexity of the simplest self reproducing cell remains a challenge in the Origin Of Life.

I will answer the question posed by the title. I earned a PhD in Physical Chemistry at an Ivy League university. I’ve worked in the sciences my entire career (over 25 years). I can emphatically say that scientists aren’t always “smart”. I can also say that there are few truely “Smart” scientists, especially of the caliber of Newton, Einstein, Feynman, etc. Actually, I’ve known quite a few “dumb” scientists and wondered how they graduated from any college with a degree. One major problem with typical scientists is that they want to boil everything down to a single factor. The world is multivariate. Science does not really teach multivariate analysis…rather it focuses research on very pointed, specific, and univariate research. Global Warming is a classic example: the entire worlds temperature can be linked to CO2 levels. Really? No need to worry about earth’s tilt relative to the sun, sunspots, solar flux, particulate matter in the air, moisture in the air, sea temperature, ocean currents, ocean level, amount of vegetation on the land, etc. The only factor that seems to be the center of attention is CO2 for these GW scientists. And tree ring proxy data? This suffers from the same problem….tree ring width from 1000 years ago can directly and exactly illustrate temperature at that time without knowing a myriad of others factors that were occuring 1000 years ago? It’s the oversimplification of the world that tends to make scientists not too “smart” and makes them highly prone to errors and poor predictions.

Filipe
Newton devised the mathematical model (guess) than fitted with what he saw. That model was then tested by physical experimentation and found to fit the model so scientists ran with the model until it was proven inadequate. Then we moved on to Einstein, Hook, etc but not in that order. The Newton model has been seriously remodeled but it still fits for everyday applications. As scientists say “within the limit it works, at the limit we need something else”. That is not the premise under which climate science has been operating. I find it almost impossible to put science along side the word climate.

I am surprised your article does not mention Henrik Svensmark.
Any child can see that the sun influences our climate and that clouds have a huge effect on surface temperature.
Why not investigate and try to find out how these pieces fit together?
Could cosmic rays be the link?

Tom P,
Positive snow anomalies are widespread at low latitudes around the Northern Hemisphere.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_daily.php?ui_year=2010&ui_day=43&ui_set=2
You claim “one location” of unusual cold and snow. Did you mean North America, Europe or Asia as your “one location?” Or perhaps you meant the Northern Hemisphere?

Unlike other scientific controversies the greater problem with the AGW dispute is that AGW is being used as justification for massive tax increases and redistribution of wealth. Therein lies the basis for such fierce resistance to this unproven theory. It goes well beyond dissenting opinions between different scientific factions and the “see I told you I was right” attitude.

When skeptics come accross riduculous AGW theories that they are then supposed to disprove in order to prove them not true, it is easy, but not too polite, to refer to such theories as BS. I would suggest a more refined term, that could be used consistently – just call such theories a bunch of “mooloo.”

Ray said: “Def.: Pathological science is the process in science in which “people are tricked into false results … by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions”.”
N-Rays anyone? The parallels are there, same with Cold Fusion, AGW, continental drift, and any number of scientific and engineering issues throughout history, including the present. You can see the same thing in the high end audio world, with people who swear by the effects of magic bricks, exotic wire, etc. Main difference is that if the audio nuts want to believe that, it only costs them money for overpriced, useless junk, the AGW alarmists will wind up costing us not only money, but lives.

Please allow me to write the above down more clearly.
object a) emitting at 50 w/m2
and,
object b) emitting at 100 w/m2
Object a) emits (minus) 50, and recieves (adds) 100 = net gain of +50.
ie, -50+100=+50
Object b) emits (minus) 100, and recieves (adds) 50 = net loss of -50
ie, -100+50=-50
IF there were a third object at absolute zero inbetween,
then it might just recieve,
object a) (adds) 50, and object b) (adds) 100 = net gain of +150.
ie, +50+100=+150
But there ain’t an “object c)”, so that is ridiculous.

@Mooloo (20:21:05) :
“Quantum theory never had to put up much fight. ”
You are quite wrong there. Remember the famous exchange between Einstein and Max Born where there is the famously paraphrased exchange of Einstein and Born (note they never actually said this)
Einstein: “God does not play dice with the Universe.”
Born: “Don’t tell god what to do.”
It may not have put up the fight that other theories have, but it hit a lot of resistance from a lot of physicists.

The inability to explain a dynamic mechanism was no excuse. The geologic, geomorphological and paleontological records demonstrated unequivocally that Wegener was correct about the former relative positions of the continents.
Did scientists doubt the existence of life before DNA was discovered?
Wegener’s critics demonstrated a lack of critical thinking skills.

“Mooloo (20:21:05) :
[…]
If you want to prove AGW is wrong, then you need to prove AGW is wrong. Nothing else will do. Going off on a tangent about how other scientists were wrong in the past is totally and utterly irrelevant.”
Ok, if you want it. AGW posits that earth warms. Surface temperature show slight cooling for the last 12 years. Even though we increased athmospheric CO2 by 38 %. So where else can the heat / the stored energy be? In the oceans. Argo measurements show that the oceans don’t accumulate heat since 2003.
QED. There you go.

Steve Goddard (06:26:24) :
“You claim “one location” of unusual cold and snow.”
I claim nothing of the sort – it is rather you who made a spurious point about temperatures in the Deep South. Again, as Spencer said “Northern Hemispheric land, on a whole, is not as cold as many of us thought.”
stephen richards (06:03:30) :
“You’re back again with your usual crap. Arhennius did indeed say that CO² molecules could be heated by incoming IR radiation. What he never got right was how a more energetic CO² molecule would affect the rest of the atmosphere.”
Crudely argued and quite wrong. The major problems with Arrhenius’ original analysis are to do with treating the atmosphere as a single slab and neglecting the effect of water vapour. The kinetic theory of gases shows how injecting energy into one gas will cause heating of the atmosphere as a whole – Arrhenius certainly got the simple thermodynamics right.

scienceofdoom,
Whether the measurements were taken in the day or at night is fantastically important when you’re claiming to measure downward IR flux. More than half of what we receive from the sun is already in the IR, so a daytime measurement is just measuring spectral lines by shining a light source through a gas. Anyone could do that in a lab with just air. The energy measured is just solar energy.
If at night, what was the upward flux? When talking about IR, the Earth would still be radiating because the IR radiation is thermal. What was the surface temperature and what was the atmosphere’s temperature profile at the time of measurement? What was the humidity profile?
One of the complaints the skeptics have is that you can fling poo on a page, say it proves global warming, and a science journal will approve it for publication within a day.

Steve: Svensmark has an interesting theory which may or may not prove to be correct.
Agreed. The CERN CLOUD experiment may help prove or disprove the cosmic ray part. We may have results soon.
My point is that the way the continents fit together like a jigsaw is similar to the sun and cloud cover being screamingly obvious places to look for global climate drivers. From an atmospheric physics perspective, sun and clouds both seem like the best candidates for playing a major role while CO2, a trace gas, is such a poor candidate for a primary driver. This is so obvious that a child can understand it.

The real story here is about the sociological environment of scientific communities.
Even if scientists where infinity intelligent, they’d still be herd animals like the rest of us. If the herd is going in one direction, it is a rare individual that will choose to go the other way. This theoretical herd of infinitely intelligent scientists will apply their intelligence to mock them.
To my mind, the best scientists are borderline autistic (a la big bang’s Sheldon). These people can abandon their own ideas with no thought to social consequences.
And herein lies the problem with the “save the world” sciences (sociology, environmental science, climate science, etc). They inadvertently select for people who want to save the world: people who are both highly socially aware, and who are pre-disposed to believe that we are causing problems.

Reply to ASK-AN-EARTH-SCIENTIST
Subject: Snow in Hawaii
I would like to know if it can snow in Hawaii??
The answer is “yes”. It snows here every year, but only at the very summits of our 3 tallest volcanoes (Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea and Haleakala). The snow level almost never gets below 9000 feet in Hawaii during the winter, but since these mountains are taller than 13,000 feet, 13,000 feet, and 10,000 feet, respectively, they get dusted with snow a few times a year. It rarely stays on the ground for more than a few days though.
Although the rest of the island chain enjoys warm tropical weather the entire year-round, there have been “freak” cold storms a few times this century that have brought local snow storms down to as low as 3000 to 4000 feet. This snow has melted very quickly, however.
Ken Rubin, Assistant Professor
Department of Geology and Geophysics
University of Hawaii, Honolulu HI 96822
Guys – Florida is hardly covered with snow! (Nor Georgia.)
But, if you just count the prescence of snow, then ALL 50 STATES HAVE SNOW RIGHT NOW!
(Feb. 13, 2010)

Lee Moore (07:14:49) :
At present, the Arthur Holmes approach is the only scientific one for global warming too. There are some interesting conjectures, but there is just insufficient evidence to how much of a problem global warming might turn out to be.
You mean the science isn’t settled?  🙂
There is evidence that falsifies the AGW hypothesis.
AGW tries to explain warming in the last half of the 20th century as primarily due to increases in CO2. The only true support for AGW are computer models that assume as a postulate that as CO2 causes surface temperatures to increase, specific humidity in the radiative zone must also increase. It is this positive feedback of increased humidity in the radiative zone that reduces OLR (Outgoing Long wave Radiation) resulting in global warming. If the specific humidity does not increase in the radiative zone then there is nothing stopping the OLR from radiating out into space. Note that the transport of latent heat by evaporation to the top of the convection zone means that increases in specific humidity in the convection zone are not a significant factor.
Peer reviewed papers such as Paltridge’s “Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data” and Solomon’s “Contributions of Stratospheric Water Vapor to Decadal Changes in the Rate of Global Warming” show that specific humidity in the radiative zone has gone down as CO2 has gone up; a negative feedback in contradiction to the assumptions built into all of the IPCC climate models.
A key requirement of AGW has been contradicted by the data.
Mike Ramsey

Since we agree to disagree on this Subject, I offer a OXYMORON: ACADEMIC INTEGRITY?
Dedicated to the University of Pennsylvania for the whitewash of DR
Micharl Mann.
Enjoyed the comments on this post.

Are Scientists Always Smart?
Clearly not as any scientist that has won an ig nobel can testify.
http://improbable.com/ig/
OK, not completely fair. Some winners were just misunderstood. But not all of them!
Mike Ramsey

One thing is for sure.
Sometimes its difficult to say this is “voodoo-science” and
this is not.
Look at the miskolczi discussion here;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/26/debate-thread-miskolczi-semi-transparent-atmosphere-model/
Unfortunately the thread ends abrubtly at precisely the same moment as Miskolczi enters the debate himself.
I have’nt kept my knowledge on radiation up to shape, so I cannot say whether he is right or not. Kirchoffs law, or not
Kirchoffs law…..
Should’nt this man be allowed to have a seminar where other physisists could challenge his theory right on, and a paper resulting from that? Put some money on that, IPCC!
Discussions in writing is like having an email-war that never ends….
If he is right, it would be fantastic. If he is mistaken at some point of his reasoning, it could be clarified.

Geoff Sherrington (02:04:26) :
“I have a CD of the Symposium if you are genuinely interested. It is another story of a theory that the old school would like to forget. Yet, it might be right. One of its rationales was to do away with the need to subduct plate edges. It asks a number of questions that classical geologist simply cannot answer – and they are valid and pertinent.”
Geoff, you are confusing me. How can one do away with the need to subduct plate edges? It is not a matter of need; it is an observed phenomenon. Many studies have been carried out on the seismicity of plate boundaries resulting in a three-dimensional structural models of the subducting plates. Subducting plates are just facts.

“yet the scientific community took over 50 years to stop ridiculing Wegener and accept his theory”
This is a very kind rendition of the remark most likely written by a geologist. In fact proof of the shifting of continents intruded itself on the science in the form of the discovery in the 1950s of the transform faults along the Mid-Atlantic ridge where the separation of the Americas from Europe and Africa took place and the ridge, of course, also faithfully parallels the relevant coasts. The scientific community had behaved so abominably toward Wegener (W died long before he was vindicated) that the ugly term “plate tectonics” (more appropriately a dental mechanics term) was adopted for the phenomenon and Wegener’s term was left buried with him, with no acknowledgement. I was a student during the 50’s and 60’s and, in the early years, like the AGW stuff, it was worth your career to espouse such a heretical theory. Actually, South African geologists had accepted it decades before European and North American scientists. I apologize for not having links – one of the advantages of being old is you know history from living through it.

Craig Loehle (06:13:44) :
“Ideally, science requires an independent mind. Institutionally, this is beat out of one. First, one must spend years and years in school pleasing teachers. Then, one must get grants and get published, in both of which endeavors non-conformity to the paradigms of the time are punished. Finally, one must get tenure, which can be denied for any reason, including incollegiality (not getting along with your fellow department members). It is amazing anything original can be produced at all after such mental homogenizing”
Hear hear! (British tribal dialect for “strongly agree”).

Chris Schoneveld (09:33:38) wrote: “Subducting plates are just facts.”
Mid-ocean spreading ridges have been observed & measured. The total length of these “spreading ridges” is about 40,000 miles.
There has been a failure to observed & measure an equal length of “suducting plates” (or an equal distribution around the world).
And the evidence for “subducting plates” in many instances is ambiguous.
Geology is a field science where a priori assumptions have played a significant role in the development of its theories.
But once consensus grabs ahold of any field science, it’s hard to dislodge the consensus even in the face of significant contradicting evidence.
Climate science tends to be a consensus science discipline, thus, opinion, as opposed to empirical evidence often has more weight in the deliberations of its members.

Tom P,
The Northern Hemisphere has been plenty cold. Due to the negative AO, the cold air is spread out wider and thinner than “average” – so more land area is freezing than “average.” That is why we have seen record or near record snow extent in the Northern Hemisphere for the entire winter.
The “average” temperature is not a particularly meaningful metric right now and is being widely misinterpreted by alarmists. The Canadian Arctic and Greenland just aren’t as quite as cold as they usually are.

The resistance to continental drift was in part because the observations supporting it were in isolation. Sceptics were quite correct to demand answers to certain questions, but when the workings of the system as a whole were understood, the sceptics had no choice but to stand down. The climate debate is the opposite, a consensus having been formed around observations in isolation while sceptics continue to investigate the system as a whole and show that the conclusions drawn are less credible the more we know about the system as a whole. In particular, I continue to be amazed at the ease with which the AGW proponents regularly attribute an extra 3.7 w/m2 of energy being retained on earth as if this was a new energy source in addition to the sun itself. CO2 does not, and cannot, generate any additional energy. It can, at best, change the manner in which energy flows between ocean, land and atmosphere layers. In brief, a change in cyclical fluctuations, but not a change in the ultimate equilibrium of the system. I believe the following model is closer to the argument that the AGW proponents are presenting than is the greenhouse model:
Take a tall glass jar with a tight fitting lid. Open it and pour it half full of honey, then close the lid. Mark on the outside of the jar the level of the honey. Now pick the jar up and shake it vigorously. Put it back down and quickly mark the level the honey is now at. If we observe certain factors in isolation, we come up with certain conclusions.
The first conclusion is that the level of honey is now lower, so shaking the jar must have destroyed some of the honey. As we continue to observe however, we note that the level of honey seems to be slowly rising. Where is the honey coming from? Close inspection reveals that there is honey dripping off the inside of the lid as well as sliding down the sides. We can conclude from this that the lid and the glass are creating honey. In fact, we can measure how fast the level of honey is going up, assume that it will continue to do so at the same rate, and calculate how long it will take before the honey fills the jar and forces the lid off or the jar to explode. As further observation reveals that this does not happen, that instead the honey simply levels off at the exact same level as before, we have to ask some new questions. Why did the lid and glass stop making honey? Is it a temporary pause, and all we must do is wait and the making of honey by the lid and glass will resume?
The answer of course is that the lid and glass never did make honey. The observation that they did was made in isolation, the predictions of the jar filling up and exploding based on isolated facts proven wrong simply by waiting for the system as a whole to return to equilibrium. CO2 can no more add energy to the earth system than jar lids can manufacture honey. By no means is the earth system “closed” in the same way that the jar is, but the analogy is apt. You can’t increase the amount of honey in the jar with inserting some from outside the jar. Similarly, you can’t increase the amount of energy retained by the planet (and hence its temperature) except by inserting additional energy into the system. As CO2 only interferes with how energy flows through the various layers, and introduces no new energy itself, we need only wait a sufficient time period for equilibrium to assert itself and show that this.
While the jar of honey only has a limited number of factors governing its system, the planet of course has multiple energy inputs and multiple cycles that govern fluctuations and make this difficult to discern. But continued insistence that CO2 manufactures energy and could lead to a tipping point makes no more sense than concluding that jar lids makes honey and will do so until the jar explodes.

Mooloo (20:21:05) : “Going off on a tangent about how other scientists were wrong in the past is totally and utterly irrelevant.”
Mooloo, he DID make the case, and it wasn’t a tangent.
Fact: plate techtonics had supporting evidence, but was dismissed/attacked by the establishment.
Fact: the AGW establishment has little to no _supporting_ evidence, but it attacks anyone who points that out.
They’re a bit different, but come on… those differences hardly make it an “irrelevant tangent”.

Engineering denial at the Olympics

“The technical officials of the FIL were able to retrace the path of the athlete and concluded there was no indication that the accident was caused by deficiencies in the track.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympic_games/vancouver_2010/luge/8513794.stm
After watching the video of the accident, it is pretty clear that the track design was grossly deficient – the wall wasn’t high enough. I used to be a giant slalom racer, and there is a reason why they don’t line the edges of ski hills with steel beams. Athletes make mistakes and shouldn’t pay with their lives.
Too bad Feynman isn’t around any more. He was instrumental in demonstrating NASA’s negligence in the Challenger explosion.

Tom P, let’s talk about water vapor. Are you saying that the infinitismally small % of CO2 we have in the air (0.03% of the stuff that makes up our atmosphere) of which only 14% of that is man-made CO2 emissions, has caused more water vapor? Or has just heated it up more than normal? And let’s be clear that we are talking only about the 14% of the 0.03% number and the small increase we have seen in that 14% because of increased emissions. I want you to explain to me your understanding of how this tiny, tiny % increase of man-made emissions causes AGW, and if you consider this warming to be significant (as in outside the error bars).

Thomas Sowell, eminent scholar and philosopher, latest treatise is “Intellectuals and Society” (Basic Books 2009). In the introductory chapter, Dr Sowell defines and distinguishes between intelligence and intellect as follows:
“The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect and of reason itself, but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all — the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce coherent understanding. Wisdom is the fulfillment of the ancient admonition, With all you’re getting, get understanding.” Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.”
“George Orwell said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man can be such a fool. The record of twentieth century intellectuals was especially appalling in this regard. Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator in the twentieth century was without his intellectual supporters, not simply in his own country, but also in foreign democracies, where people were free to say whatever they wished. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler all had their admirers, defenders, and apologists among the intelligentsia in Western democratic nations, despite the fact that these dictators each ended up killing people of their own country on a scale unprecedented even by despotic regimes that preceded them.”
Irrespective of brilliance, persons who lack experience, common sense or judgment invariably satisfy the qualifications to be “foolish.” This seems to be a common trait of too many modern scientists. When they lack ethics too, the outcome is corrupt science along with all of its unacceptable accouterments.

John Whitman:
Your ages of science is missing the Medieval period; the Dark Ages ran from 450- 950 A.D. and the Medieval Period lasted from 950 to 1350 A.D. The Dark Ages were a period of fertile technological development in Europe, in which Chinese, Roman and Arab and older technologies were adapted and changed to produce a new society that was economically based on the use of artificial power from wind and water mills, especially the vertical water mills (the latter a 1st century Roman invention, that was not widely used in the Roman era for fear of displacing slave labour and leading to idle workers). You do not see the adoption of energy dependent technologies to such a high degree in China or the Middle East prior to this development in Europe, partly because irrigation and navigation were held to be more important uses of streams and rivers in these regions.
Because European population fell so dramatically in the Dark Ages due to various iterations of plague, and due to constant incursions at different times by barbarians, Mongols and Islamic forces, Europeans in the Dark Ages were focussed mostly on survival; standards of living fell massively in the 5th century. This was not conducive to scientific inquiry.
While the Roman Catholic church was focussed on the afterlife and did not encourage science, astronomy and medicine remained important disciplines, and ‘scientists’ other than Roger Bacon -all of them clergy – were involved in theoretical queries as well as practical astronomy (needed for horoscopes and setting church calendar dates). The problems that engaged them included trying to understand the nature of motion, the question of what lies outside of the universe and what is the motion of the universe, and what the heavens were made of; at the University of Bologna, human dissection (cadavers) was introduced in medical teaching in the 12th century (1100s) for the first time since it was briefly allowed during the Hellenistic period in Ancient Alexandra. An excellent source for building up your knowledge of science in this period is: The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450 by David C. Lindberg.

scienceofdoom (01:44:18) :
George Turner (21:59:27) :
You cite measurements of downward radiation. Were those measurements taken during the day or at night? Your link doesn’t say, and the answer is extremely critical to your argument.
-This was from the article CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas? Part Six – Visualization.
It’s nice to see someone else referencing the Evans and Puckrin paper. I first came across it quite some time ago and have tried to raise it for discussion in several comment threads over the last year, without much success. Most people can’t seem to get past the authors attempts to screw themselves into the floor trying to put an AGW spin on measurements that actually seem to offer the best contradiction of the AGW hypothesis that I’ve seen.
Although they did detect an increase in downwelling longwave radiation attributable to CO2, their measurements suggest that almost all of it occurred in the cold dry air of the Canadian winter, which I would think most Canadians would not see as a bad thing. Living in Minnesota myself, I know that I don’t. The model they used to construct their profile of DLW for the preindustrial past seems to do a fairly accurate job for most of the nonH2O greenhouse gases, but can’t come within the broad side of a barn for H2O. The variations in the H2O contribution, both seasonal and interannual, dwarf not only the incremental changes in all the others, but their overall contribution as well. In fact for the winter which showed the greatest increase in DLW from CO2, the total DLW was below their preindustrial model because the H2O element was over estimated by more than 5 times the increase from CO2. In the warm moist air of summer the CO2 contribution is almost completely suppressed [less than 4% of the total] which would seem to indicate that in Tropical and Subtropical latitudes where temps and humidity are generally higher than Canadian summers year round CO2’s contribution to the greenhouse effect is negligible, if not in total at least in any incremental change.
What I’ve found most interesting is that this experimental technique would seem to offer a clear path to quantifying once and for all the contributions of the various atmospheric gases to greenhouse warming, yet having done several fairly deep Google rummages over the last year, I haven’t come across any efforts to broadly replicate this work, which was done over a decade ago. Evidently no one has been willing to come up with the grant money to fund such a project. I wonder why that is?

Apropos.

I don’t think we can easily dismiss the IPCC as being stupid. Sure, the majority of scientists can be wrong on an issue, but mostly they are not.
But I do think there are reasons why we shouldn’t be over-pessimistic about global warming: http://howisearth.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/geoengineering-climate-change/

Filipe (02:10:23) :
There were good reasons to reject Wegener’s work. How could any one accept tidal forces making continents plough through the oceans? There were two things missing from Wegener’s work: measures of relative continental motion and a plausible mechanism. Having to deal with creationists and a few crackpots over this same issue I’m very disappointed to see this in this blog. This is a very bad post.
So wegner being proved correct means nothing to you?

I am glad to see that Geoff Sherrington (02:04:26) raised the memory of Professor Warren S Carey. I think the record will show that Carey was one of the earlier scientists to give credence to Wegener’s work. What Geoff does not mention is the sequitur to the concept of drifting continents followed by Carey, which is “an expanding earth”. This was the how he explained so-called subduction, as questioned by Chris Schoneveld (09:33:38).
In his book “Expanding Earth” (1976, Elsevier) he observed that the continents did not fit precisely as suggested by Wegener on a present day-sized earth, but they would fit much better on a smaller diameter globe. Some of his observations and questions stand today, others have been answered or refuted by subsequent investigations.
But memorable (to me) is the statement towards the end of his book: he asks — why does the earth expand? His frank answer was that he did not know, but he stood by his empiricism.
The idea of an expanding earth is now a generally rejected hypothesis, but … is the current paradigm of continental drift another consensus science?

For George Turner:
Commenting on the downward longwave radiation in CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas? Part Six – Visualization, George wrote:

..More than half of what we receive from the sun is already in the IR, so a daytime measurement is just measuring spectral lines by shining a light source through a gas. Anyone could do that in a lab with just air. The energy measured is just solar energy..

There’s an interesting fact about radiation that everyone should know – to do with Planck’s blackbody radiation theory..
Solar radiation has its peak at 0.5um wavelength and 99% of its energy is below 4um in wavelength.
Terrestrial radiation – that emitted up from the surface of the earth – has its peak around 10um and 99.9% of this radiation is above 4um in wavelength.
You can see this graphically at CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas? Part One
Therefore, it is very easy to distinguish energy radiated from the sun from energy radiated from the earth.
And if we were to look specifically at the proportion of solar energy above 14um (e.g. for CO2), it is 0.02%.
This is why downwards longwave radiation at the earth’s surface demonstrates the absorption and re-emission of the earth’s radiation by “greenhouse” gases including CO2 and CH4.

Good provokative subject. In how many areas must a person be to be an
expert? When Einstein was driving around the campus, I read, not a hedge was safe Have often wondered if some of the people acknowledged as genius didn’t
have some weak spots. In other words, if his mind was in the clouds, were his feet touching the ground? I feel sure there were some who would qualify.
ANOTHER OXYMORON: ACADEMIC INTEGRITY- FOR THE WHITEWASH OF DR MICHAEL MANN.

Tom P (15:36:25) :
” That is why there has been much work since Arrhenius in better understanding these complexities. But the approach of Arrhenius has a firm underpinning in thermodynamics. To say that an increase in CO2 cannot possibly warm the atmosphere is to reject some basic tenets of physics. ”
Are you referring to his first or second paper on the subject?
HINT – He revised almost all his own work in the second paper…
Everyone else – see my previous posts re back radiation – AGW disproven full stop.
Are you ignoring this because it also disproves the greenhouse effect “theory”. ?
ADVISORY HINT – Please check thread title before answering.
AND derek with a small d, change your name I was posting here first.
I do not want to be confused with you, maybe you might not want to be confused with me either come to think of it from your point of view.

Pamela Gray said:

I want you to explain to me your understanding of how this tiny, tiny % increase of man-made emissions causes AGW, and if you consider this warming to be significant (as in outside the error bars).

I think there are really two very important questions there, and separating them out is what helps to increase climate understanding.
The first question, hard for non-physicists to understand, is how an apparently insignificant trace gas, increasing by a few ppm every decade, can actually do anything to the surface temperature of the earth.
The second question, hard for anyone to know the answer to, is what actual effect this has had on the surface temperature of the earth.
The reason the second question – well the answer to the second question – is so tricky is that climate is full of many complex effects. These different effects are often inter-linked, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes cancelling out. And many unknowns, or poorly knowns.
You can see this in the last million years of the earth’s temperature history at the Science of Doom article – An Inconvenient Temperature Graph
Back to the first question, well there is a whole series starting at CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas? – Part One. This might answer your question.
But one point worth noting is that the “skeptical” scientists whose work is featured here like Dr Roy Spencer, Prof Lindzen – are all people who understand and agree with the radiative effect of CO2 at the earth’s surface.
Their real question, and mine, is all about the feedbacks – and about the other effects of climate.
More CO2 having a warming effect – “all other things being equal” – is basic physics. It didn’t start with the IPCC. It didn’t start with observations of temperature changes and scientists trying to find a cause.

Scienceofdoom:
This is why downwards longwave radiation at the earth’s surface demonstrates the absorption and re-emission of the earth’s radiation by “greenhouse” gases including CO2 and CH4>
First of all, its RADIANCE not radiation. Second, the earth has a tiny, tiny amount of its own radiance, due to its hot core, friction from tides, and so on. Most of earth’s radiance is second hand radiance. That is, it absorbs energy from the sun and re-emitts it at a longer wave length. So….
Any energy absorbed from the earth by CO2 would be third hand from the Sun. So at any point in the process, we’re talking about energy from the Sun. At no point are we talking about any NEW energy. Just energy from the Sun and where it went and for how long.
Since there is no NEW energy being put into the system, and the amount of energy being put in will, over the long term, equal exactly the amount of energy coming out, all you get at most is a short term fluctuation. If I am wrong, then you have invented perpetual motion.

Scienceofdoom:
More CO2 having a warming effect – “all other things being equal” – is basic physics>
The point being that if you actually knew anything about physics you would know that all other things are NEVER equal. Every action has an equal and opposite re-action. Gosh darn, I think a physicist said that. The act of heating something up cannot, and does not, exist in isolation. It has consequences.
Heating something up IS a feedback loop all by itself. The amount of energy it takes to heat something up 1 degree is a roughly linear relationship. The amount of energy it radiates back out as a result goes up exponentialy. So to maintain a linear temp increase you need an exponential power increase to keep up.

may Io ask for help from someone good with equations please.
This is the Penman equation…
Penman’s formula: E0 = (0.015 + 0.00042T + 10−6z) [0.8Rs − 40 + 2.5Fu(T − Td)] (mm day−1), where T is the daily mean temperature (i.e. the average of the extremes), z is the elevation (m), Rs is the solar irradiance of the lake’s surface, F stands for (1.0 − 8.7 × 10−5 z), u is the windspeed at 2 m, and Td is the dewpoint temperature.
What I need to know is, which has a stronger influence on the equation, T temperature or Rs solar irradiance?
Thankyou in advance

davidmhoffer:
I reread your comment again, and maybe I misunderstood what you were saying or questioning. Apologies if I have.

Most people regard it as axiomatic that if CO2 is a greenhouse gas, then increasing its concentration in the atmosphere must eventually warm the planet. To demonstrate that this is not necessarily so, it should be possible to make a sealed box ‘model planet’ with one or more sides made of glass, a means of setting the internal CO2 concentration, an internal temperature sensor and an external filament bulb ‘sun’. A climatologist or other scientist could be challenged to model its behaviour. Can he predict whether increasing the concentration of CO2 in the box will increase its average temperature, or decrease it? If the modeller feels capable of predicting the climate of the whole planet, then this should be a doddle.
Without cheating, what simple mechanisms could cause an actual reduction in average temperature with increasing CO2? Well, for example if the box contained a mechanism whereby increasing internal temperature tripped a reduction of transmissivity of the glass with some hysteresis (you could do it with a mechanical or LCD shutter), then increasing CO2 would cause the average internal temperature to either rise or fall, depending on the precise settings. Even if the modeller was told the basic mechanism, he could not predict the direction of change without very accurate measurements of all parameters and even a tiny tweak to the mechanism would render his predictions useless.
Could something like this be used to make the point?

Scienceofdoom
Why is there downward longwave radiation at the earth’s surface (it’s not solar, it is at different wavelengths). Where does it come from? And why does this downwards energy match the absorption profile of CO2 (14-16um), CH4, O3 etc?>
Ah, but it IS solar. It started out at the sun as sw. It got absorbed by the earth and radiated back up as lw. some of that gets absorbed by CO2 etc and re-radiated or conducted etc in all directions, some of which goes back down to earth. BUT… we’re still talking about energy that originated at the sun.
Scienceofdoom:
Upwards longwave radiation from the surface of the earth is around 390W/m^2.
Upwards longwave radiation at the top of the atmosphere is around 240W/m^2
Nyet. At 0 C, radiance is about 320 watts/m2. At 30 C, its about 550 watts/m2. You can’t just average the numbers from low to high across the globe and get the right answer either. you get a curve with a peak or high about mid day, but you also get a curve with a peak at the equator as compared to the poles. The average between the lows and the highs is NOT the average of the curve. check out ERBE for example, and you will discover that the planet retains energy at the equator (where it is warmist) and loses it at the poles (which are cooler) which may seem counter intuitive. Temp variance is WAY higher at the poles, so when the planet warms, the temp increase at the poles is out of proportion and the amount of radiance to space also out of proportion.
If you measure all the energy going in at TOA vs all the energy going out at TOA, you will find that they net to zero over time.