Heh, this is entertaining.
While Bill Nye argues for “in whose best interest is denial?” and brings up the ridiculous CO2 on Venus argument, Joe Bastardi runs circles around him with technical graphs and explanations on forcing factors and their magnitudes.
Warmists scream “weather is not climate!”. We need to shout back “Venus is not Earth!” since the Venusian atmosphere is entirely different in compositions and forcings, and we understand it far less than Earth’s.
Meanwhile, Bill O”Reilly seems more concerned about making his commercial break on time than saving the planet.
Nye needs a better argument, as Fox News viewers can see past the appeal to emotion. Bastardi while far more technically competent than Nye, needs to focus on explaining a bit about natural cycles, since few viewers would know what the “PDO” is.
A caveat for both men, doing live TV debate by the seat of your pants is tough. You can’t see each other, and you are communicating via earpiece audio. Live TV is never easy, live via satellite interlinks is even tougher.
Watch the segment => here.
h/t to WUWT reader “pwl”
You have a funny way of hiding your links.All TV hosts have to make sure they don’t cut into advertising,it pays their wages.I couldn’t watch the segment,probably something missing on my computer.Did Bill Nye trot out that old people don’t understand the science like he did on that awful Maddow show(she talked to the viewers like they were children).It had nothing to do with old people experiencing the extremes in weather over their lifetime,no,they’re too dumb to understand the science.Nasty man.
Classic…
Actually, Joe was pretty reserved compared to what he writes in his Blog, and on the Video’s he releases to his private clients.
Jack
“Bill Nye the Junk Science Guy”
It’s debatable whose silly science is worse, Bill Nye’s or Al Gore’s.
I was wishing I could whisper in Joe’s ear, “Commercial greenhouses pump that trace gas up to 1000 ppm” when Bill Nye was trying to pin him down.
They should have devoted two segments to this important debate, then I’m sure Joe would have explained natural cycles and PDO.
Maybe had time to touch on subjects like these…
http://www.intellicast.com/Community/Content.aspx?a=222
The last few years, the media ignored the snow that set all-time records further north in much of western and southern Canada, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Iowa, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine and overseas in Europe, south China, Middle East, South America and New Zealand. But when it falls in the normally bare ground Mid-Atlantic and especially in the capitol where the politicians, environmental NGO and alternative energy lobby calls home, it can no longer be ignored. Especially on a day when NOAA had planned a press release on their new Climate Service, which had to be done via a phone teleconference.
So the green media and alarmists spin the tale that these storms are what you expect during global warming. Actually friends they conflict with statements from the IPCC and EPA Technical Support Document that drew on the NOAA CCSP.
EPA TSD ES3 “Rising temperatures have generally resulted in rain rather than snow in locations and seasons where climatological average (1961–1990) temperatures were close to 0°C. (32F).
IPCC FAQ 3.2 Observations show that changes are occurring in the amount, intensity, frequency and type of precipitation. More precipitation now falls as rain rather than snow in northern regions.
For a future warmer climate, models project a 50 to 100% decline in the frequency of cold air outbreaks relative to the present in NH winters in most areas. The 2009 U.S. Climate Impacts Report found that “large-scale cold-weather storm systems have gradually tracked to the north in the U.S. over the past 50 years.”
A DOSE OF REALITY …
You probably predict the record setting rest of this…
I love that Nye pulls out the picture of steam to show off proof of Global Warming again.
A very big contrast between the merits. Bill Nye seems to be saying all the same stuff all the time, based on authorities and statements known to be wrong. He seems identical to his embarrassing TV encounter with Richard Lindzen a few years ago.
I would have problems with Bastardi’s statements, too – like Venus 10 billion years ago. 😉
I’ve always liked Bill O’Reilly, and found him both sensible & honest and entertaining. That’s why I was kind of surprised that he wasn’t a full-fledged climate skeptic – but there were a couple of people like that where the expected skepticism didn’t materialize, so I wouldn’t have thrown Bill O’Reilly away because of that.
Cheers
LM
I saw a portion of the debate, though I was not following it. When Nye opened with a pompous citation of the planet Venus being surrounded by an atmosphere of carbon dioxide and manifesting torrid temperatures, I knew then he was a stuffed shirt and an empty suit (to mangle a metaphor). I studied that problem as a grad student. Venus is significantly closer to the sun than Earth; the solar constant is therefore much higher. And the atmosphere of Venus is radiatively thick (nearly opaque), wheras the atmosphere of Earth is radiatively thin (transparent). Venus is effectively heated by conduction of the upper layers of the atmosphere downwards, and it wouldn’t matter what the atmospheric composition was, so long as it was radiatively thick. Bastardi, not being an astronomer-physicist was ill-prepared to declare Nye’s argument a fallacious red herring, even though it was.
I didn’t watch long enough to arrive at any conclusion as to who had the stronger popular presentation. Bastardi, fortunately, seemed to have facts at his fingertips. O’Reilly, sadly, postures as a modern Know-Nothing, who opines from his self-styled Mount Olympus that global warming must be real, but has no authentic understanding of any of the science—notwithstanding my approval of his general treatment of current events.
We owe great thanks to those (such as Anthony Watts) who diligently compile the arguments on all sides of this issue. It is clear that the AGW case has been furthered by a collusion of lies, secrecy, and corrupt process. Truth must be spoken.
It does seem that the official spin that all true believers have been apparently instructed to use in debates is the “Who’s funding this lot, OMG it’s Big Oil and Big Tobacco, they’re all evil !” Rather too many recent interviews & articles hew so closely to this line it is sometimes hard to think it is a coincidence. Of course one has to then been so utterly dishonest to ignore the fact that BP, Exxon, and Shell are pumping far more money into the alarmist camp than elsewhere. That’s what strikes me about so many of the alarmist defenders, their dfeeply dishonest posturing.
Damn it, perview is my friend, …deeply dishonest…”
Joe was probably a bit too technical for most viewers, but was clearly the most confident and comfortable of the two. While not using the denier label, Nye came close and didn’t come across very well with it. And yeah, what was he trying to do using Venus?
Joe Bastardi and Marc Morano should form a tag team.
They can both be very animated and are fun to watch.
Good job Joe. Original work versus IPCCphone App.
Once again, this just illustrates why we shouldn’t trust men who wear bow ties. Bill Nye is not a science guy, he is the IPCC’s official cheerleader and not a very good one at that.
I can’t believe I grew up watching that idiot on Nickelodeon back in the 80s/90s. His show was sandwiched in between “You Can’t Do That on Television” and “Double Dare”. These shows were extremely popular because they featured unsuspecting kids getting “slimed” by buckets of green slime. Sort of a case of art imitating life in the not-too-distant-future:
How can this guy argue Venus’ temperature has anything to do with Earth’s temperature and say he is a real scientist?
1. Venus’ atmosphere is 96.5% (965,000ppm) carbon dioxide, Earth’s is 0.038% (380ppm) -2,539 times greater.
2. Venus’ atmosphere is 92 times denser than Earth’s.
3. Venus is much closer to the sun – 67 million miles, as opposed to 93 million miles.
Of course, Venus is very much hotter than Earth, it has an average temperature of 467 degrees C.
PajamasMedia are on the case: Their “spoof” even hooks in the Venus story
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/an-interview-with-dr-manfred-aufgeblasener-schwatzer-climate-scientist/?singlepage=true
It’s getting harder to distinguish the spoofs from the “real” interviews.
What is this telling us?
The argument for Global Warming comes back to the flawed political science put out by the IPCC it’s not even a contest!. End this political grab for your life savings and tell the bankers and lairs go screw yourselves!.
Isn’t CO2 a colorless gas? So how can NYE compare ink in Water to CO2? And isn’t a day on Venus 342 earth days? Imagine Death Valley if one day lasted 342 days?
The only thing Bill Nye could do to be taken serious is to loose the dickie bow & suit and dress up in a cheer leaders outfit. Yep, he is a role model for the era of alarmism and we should encourage him more. Not many dinosaurs like him left. Everytime he opens his mouth he makes more people sceptical.
Bill Nye, the IPCC guy. Bill better be careful who he references or his stature as a television celebrity could be in jeopardy.
Remember, when your position is weak.
1. Exaggerate the problem.
2. Attack the messenger not the message.
3. Redirect the debate.
4. Lie.
5. Run away.
6. Hide
Right now it looks like most of the believers are generally hovering between 2 and 3.
Bill Nye seems to be a bit behind the curve, he is still stuck between 1 and 2.
Al Gore and David Suzuki seem to have gone through the whole list rather quickly; perhaps because they started earlier.
I’m always bemused when Venus is used as an Earth comparison, I couldn’t see the linked video, but was it also mentioned that Venus has a solar day of about 150 Earth days and that it has no seas and no tectonic plate movement? Combined with every other Earth/Venus difference, it seems like a red flag to me when the only factor mentioned is the CO2 concentration, it’s as if they were trying to simplify and hide something, now where have I heard that before;)
The point is that every litre of atmosphere on Venus has 233,588 times the amount of carbon dioxide of a litre of air on Earth.
Bad science at its best!!
I am glad this made WUWT. I watched this and was literally screaming at the TV when Bill Nye cited Venus as his “test case” for global warming. As a science educator, I had always held a lot of respect for Bill Nye getting kids interested in science. After tonight, I feel like the kid who just learned Santa Claus is not a real person. So, I looked up who this guy really is – he is a mechanical engineer (B.S.) who applied to NASA repeatedly and never got in. Maybe this is a last ditch effort to join NASA/GISS by supporting the company line?
Slightly OT, but as a science educator at a two-year college, we (science educators) are not very good at teaching our students about the profession of science. It was clear to me that Mr. Nye does not understand peer-review, the scientific method, reproducing others work, and most importantly – being a SKEPTIC!!!
I always thought that Venus being 26 million miles closer to the sun than Earth might have something to do with the differences between the two worlds. But then proximity to a ball of fusion flame 865,000 miles in diameter couldn’t possibly match up to the supernatural power of CO2.
[snip]
A search for Venus temperature at 1bar will bring up a figure comparable with Earth’s taking into consideration insolation at that distance, and lod, alternatively, taking dry air lapse rate and increasing depth of troposhere on Earth to that of Venus it comes out to 756K°, very close again, with no extra CO2 involved, ie. CO2 greenhouse is negligible.
Both Mars and Venus have atmospheres that are mostly CO2. There is a 500 degree C difference in their surface temperatures. That difference is due in part to the massive difference in surface pressure – Venus having a surface pressure about 10,000 times that of Mars.
Ed Snack (23:43:50) :
It does seem that the official spin that all true believers have been apparently instructed to use in debates is the “Who’s funding this lot, OMG it’s Big Oil and Big Tobacco, they’re all evil !”
You know how if you are being accosted on the street by a panhandler. You see him coming up and you want to avoid it so you preemptively ask him for a quarter. He says no, and that’s the end of it.
I did a variation of this on the bad astronomy blog. I had my argument but instead of launching right into it I started out with
“Who owns Discover Magazine?”
Then my argument.
Several of their commenters went right to the google to find out who the publisher is, rather then devote any time fishin for applicable Jim Hansen quotes or Joe Romm links to pelt my real arguments with, including Phil Phlait himself.
This, of course, hyper-underlines the potential problems with “debates”.
The whole concept of the “science” is so complex, and fraught with the potential to misunderstand or mis-state the current state of play.
A “debate” which degenerates to each side of the philosophical question yabbering their own “talking points” is not a debate IMHO.
A true debate acknowledges (and attempts to destroy) the opponent’s argument. In the current scientific void, the “debate” is no such thing – rather, each protagonist sets forth their pet “talking points”, and unless those particular points have been thoroughly reamed by scientific thought, they remain in stasis, despite the best efforts of the opponent.
Clearly, the parameters of the debate have to be narrowed, in order to give voice to the dissenters and denialists. This means that “narrow” issues have to be the topic du jour (e.g. Arctic Ice extent/melt) as opposed to every single piece of scientific study relevant to Arctic Ice over the last 500 or more years.
Can we have a “real” debate, on specific issues?
Luboš Motl (23:37:42) wrote “Bill Nye seems to be saying all the same stuff all the time, based on authorities and statements known to be wrong.” This hits the nail right on the head as to where the warmists are fighting a rearguard action to save their religion. Just take a look at the sciencedaily news and item after item starts or contains all the ifs and buts about sea level rises etc. Most of these ifs and buts have been disproved so why are these false claims not picked up and questioned ? If supposedly intelligent people can continue to publish guesswork as science then Nye et al will continue to get airtime.
Funny that nobody mentions good ol´Mars with its atmosphere composed of 95% CO2. Maybe because of the fact, that its theoretical and actual temperature is the same, about 210K. Hint: its atmospheric pressure is very low, unlike extremely high atmospheric pressure on Venus and medium one on Earth.
Mere existence of the atmosphere creates an insulating blanket, since it keeps the day warmth during the night and brings warmer air from the south during the winter, not speaking about oceans as the main heat sinks. All the “greenhouse theory” just tries to assign this effect to some hypothetical radiation diagrams.
[snip]
Never trust a guy with a bowtie. Just sayin’.
And Venus would be much different with water vapor. A good comet smack would completely change things.
“extract the data from the trend” at 3:09 … nice 🙂
Venus may have a hot climate but at least its a stable one. I guess even with an atmosphere which is 96% CO2 and twice as thick and dense as the Earth’s atmosphere it STILL hasn’t reached that mythical tipping point.
Estimates of the effects of CO2 concentrations on air temperature are often – as mentioned before – derived from conditions on Venus. If one assumed that the atmosphere of Venus was similar to that of the earth, rather than being 95% CO2, and that it still had a pressure of 90 bar, then the surface temperature would be about 660°C, i.e. about 200°C more than at present. The difference arises from the somewhat smaller k value for triatomic as against biatomic gases (k Air: 1.4; k CO2: 1.3).
Thus it would actually be somewhat colder on earth if our atmosphere consisted of CO2 rather than air.
http://freenet-homepage.de/klima/error.htm
That debate was disturbingly poorly communicated. I think the points made were somewhat mistakenly chosen by both sides because there was not enough time to detail what they were talking about. Something simple such as just stating that we know CO2 is a greenhouse gas but then illustrating how much the entire world would need to output to increase the temperature by 1 degree given we know CO2 has about 1.7watts/M^2 would have been more interesting. Then articulating why we argue about the positive feedbacks and what the latest evidence is etc as well as misconceptions and what the latest ‘arguments’ have been or logical ways of interpreting the IPCCC models.
I don’t respect O’Reilly one shred, he is a moronic shill and has constantly been an opinion journalist. This world is so mixed up when Republicans (who claim theyre just objective journalists) are presenting the counter side to an important debate which offsets the attempt at malevolent mass mind control of the population.. but to me this is by pure happenstance. Also, the science guy didn’t even talk about science.. he made an apples to oranges comparison about Venus which was a total slam dunk to call him intentionally dishonest.. he must think the viewers are extremely dense (although they are so what am I talking about?.. I suppose he picked the right way of communicating after all).
Sorry to all the people who like O’Reilly but truly, the network is a joke, so is MSNBC, they’re all advocates. I watch on occasion just to find out how laughable the ‘news’ is lately, plus its quite evil but i like to laugh at stupidity sometimes.
WUWT wins because it actually is objective, please don’t change! It’s so rare.
Same tired old warmists arguments. AGW is real because there’s “overwhelming evidence”, it’s the warmist decade on record, Venus is hot enough to melt lead. The more I listen to this stuff, the more entrenched I become in my scepticism.
AGW is built on a lie: CO2. It absorbs all the IR now and it absorbed all the IR then. There is no difference. That’s the end game for CO2 and once you understand how they have to resort to INFERRENCE (as Bill Nye did with his multiple graphs), the quicker it becomes obvious. Apparently Bill hasn’t examined his core assumption; if he did, he wouldn’t be shilling for AGW anymore.
There’s one big theory (AGW) and it is based on that one big lie. Nothing else really matters.
(It is obvious from this No Spin segment, however, that the science isn’t settled. Far from it. But again, it could be settled very quickly if everybody just concentrated on and recognized the One Big Lie. GW is alive; AGW is dead.)
James Hansen’s PhD disertation was on the Venusian atmosphere and the “Venusian Greenhouse Effect”. After that inspiration he transfered Venus to Earth giving birth to Al Gore and AGW. As an old math advisor once told me, “all you need is one new idea to get your PhD”. Hansen at least had one idea which made him a millionaire.
Bill Nye is a mechanical engineer who’s best claim seems to be he studied under a fellow named Carl Sagan. Perhaps it was Sagan that started him on his entertainment career? Regardless, he’s reasonably good at teaching first and second graders and obviously that’s were he should stay, if he’s smart. If he’s heavily invested in the carbon tax, trading, etc., expect to see him on that popular network, CNN.
Note on the google ad “outrageous Bachmann”: Never heard of Tarryl Clark before she chose to run, that in the middle of her stomping ground.
I’ll bet it’s free google activism following Supreme’s support of corporate free speech.
Good luck with that.
It’s a real shame. I used to enjoy his show. Even as an adult I found it entertaining and educational. I don’t remember him pushing an environmental or warmist agenda back then.
I actually saw the segment last night when it was aired. He offered the usual circular arguments, a non-sequitur about Venus and cited the IPCC as if he’s been in a coma the past four months.
Last night PBS had a long story (~3-4 minutes) on the admission of a mistake about the rate of glacier melting by the UN’s IPCC [5:30 pm here in Cape Girardeau, MO].
Although the story was mostly in defense of the concept of global warming and the UN’s IPCC, it was the first time that I have heard an admission of major error about global warming on any major news media.
Many good, intelligent citizens – including personal friends – are absolutely convinced about the truth of global warming, but the Climategate iceberg is steadily melting away to expose decades of deceit and data manipulation in our federal research agencies.
Keep up the good work, Anthony.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear & Space SCiences
Former NASA PI for Apollo
It’s amazing how many AGW believers seem to ignore a very basic fact about CO2 greenhouse warming. They seem to assume that if you have lots of CO2, as with Venus, then you will have lots of warming. Of course, that simply isn’t true. It’s a classic case of the law of diminishing returns. As you increase CO2 the warming soon reaches saturation, when all the available windows in the infra red are fully blocked. However much more CO2 you add, there is negligible extra warming.
With this in mind, it seems unlikely that the Venusion hothouse is due primarily to CO2. I suspect the extraordinarily thick Venusian is the prime reason and that CO2 has little effect.
As far as I’m aware, no one has been able to prove that the climate on Earth was driven by CO2 in any epoch of Earth’s history. When the Earth is warmer there will be more CO2, due to the action of the oceans. As proven by the ice cores going back 600,000 years, CO2 is driven by the climate, and not the other way around.
Chris
When people scream Venus I scream Mars with its atmosphere of CO2 making up 95.32%. (Use a silly argument against a silly argument, forgot how it’s in Greek).
The radiative effect cannot be given an empirical value because the only way to find it is with computer models and not by experiment. Scientifically it is not significant and technically therefore, does not exist. Some say the concept violates accepted laws of physics given it is a trace gas and the effect attributed to it.
CO2 is not a trace gas on Venus so the ‘blanket effect’ of Greenhouse, ‘transfer of heat between layers of fluid of different densities’ may have some relation to said gas (on Venus). On Earth CO2 is once again … insignificant at 0.04% and therefore technically … it does not influence anything including climate.
CO2 is only food for plants and a biological trigger for aerobic respiration for beings on Earth and it is well below levels that life on Earth evolved in. Some say due to natural sequestering and the efficiency of plant life scrubbing it from the atmosphere, we will never return to paleo levels.
I think Joe Bastardi did great!
His “one hair on de bridge” CO2 argument and his reference that we now see the weather patterns of the seventies can be understood by everybody.
Who cares what the climate on Venus is?
Thanks for posting this one, as it will give me a chance to see the debate. From most of the responses above, it seems that it went pretty much as one would expect.
Venus? Unbelievable that any attempt would be made to use it to support AGW.
Watch for Inhofes “Minority Report” coming out this morning. http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-and-the-law-senator-inhofe-to-ask-for-congressional-criminal-investigation-pajamas-mediapjtv-exclusive/
The air at the surface of Venus is 80 or 90 Earth atmospheres. I can’t remember which.
I do know this, that diesel engines operate at 25 to 1 compression ratio.
Imagine standing inside a diesel piston as on it’s up stroke. Now multiply by 3 and a half.
That’s Venus. It doesn’t matter much what the air is made of.
I’m actually rather ashamed for/of Bill Nye – I used to love the fact that his show (and Beakman’s World) tried to make science approachable for kids. Now, though, I don’t think I’d let my kids be in the same county as Nye (if I had any kids).
Julian Braggins (01:37:34) :
Ah, very good. I was going to say that too, but figured I’d see if someone else did already. The WUWT readership seems to be big enough so I don’t have to read everything any more to make sure my point of view or factoid gets heard. Maybe I can break my addiction to WUWT now!
Links to Venus atmospheric profiles:
http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM5A373R8F_index_1.html
http://www.datasync.com/~rsf1/vel/1918vpt.htm
Warning: the second one is a bit weird. Okay, more than a bit weird. However, the graphs are easy to read.
Marvin (comments above), you are quite correct. TV for the most part is moronic and dumbed down to get ratings. This was pitiful to put Bill Nye clearly in-over-his-head against an expert meteorologist like Bastardi, but it’s better than anything else on TV. Every other network is pro AGW.
Mr ‘science’ guy Nye dismiss climate-gate as just typical of what happens in scientific debates. What?!
I wonder if O’Reilly will follow with a dopey segment on analyzing the body language of this ‘debate’
Our planet learned young to incorporate a resource it had to protect water from evaporating and boiling away and that is salt and rotation.
Without water a planet or gas can only absorb or reflect heat.
Our planet has learned to use a complex method to regulate itself from becoming too hot or too cold using evaporation and water.
Our land masses separating shows that we have not lost or gained any water as the edges of the land are still well defined.
Rotational energy is limited and will eventually slow to a stop when the compressed energy in the mass is used up.
Our concept of our core is incorrect as speed of rotation pushes mass to the outer edge. Our concept of the core being nickel because it was pulled down by gravity is incorrect.
The pompous unsmiling face of Bill Nye is mute testimony to the workings of his mind. He believes that he is smarter, better and holier than thou. Whatever he believes is not to be questioned; he believes that all must bow to his will.
No Meteorologist can know more than he does.
gcb (05:10:07) :
I used to faithfully watch Mr Wizard (Don Herbert). I learned a lot from
that show. I’m not sure how one learns from Bill Nye, way too frenetic.
Maybe a level in between would work.
Oh wow – Mr. Wizard’s on the Web!
http://www.mrwizardstudios.com/
I remember him making a hammer out of mercury frozen by liquid nitrogen. Mercury was great stuff, Dad would bring a little home from work from time to time. Sometimes while on a long car trip we’d buy one of those little plastic mazes with a drop of mercury instead a ball bearing.
Sadly, Dad didn’t work with liquid nitrogen.
I bet Bill Nye never made a mercury hammerhead!
I watched last night with open mouth. If Mr Nye is the best they can put up it is definitiely worse than they thought. A few incoherent talking points and appeals to authority and it’s all clearly OK not to be a skeptik ?
Joe did very well but I agree the lay memebers of the public might have been confused by his use of acronyms. Having said that he had only a few seconds. I like Joe a lot.
Mr O’Reilly didn’t come off well at all. He seemed to be in a complete fog all night for example not understanding the difference between a democratic socialist and a communist dictator. If you can’t undestand that one Bill it might be time to hang it up.
Mars has 9x the amount of CO2 as earth yet it’s cold.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/mars_water_011129.html
A little off-topic, but has anyone seen the post on slashdot about AGW?
here is a post on this thread that imho would be worth of post-of-the month, or some additional discussion here on WUWT….
Nope, i am not the author of this post, only read it and found it well written and highlighting what I have found disturbing from the begining with AGW alarmism, even before founding some problems with the science itself…
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1559622&cid=31242996
Actually, this was kind of a breakthrough for O’Reilly who has spurned the climate change topic previously. Six months ago he commented that he believed that there was global warming because he trusted the NOAA temp. history.
With his audience dwarfing the other cable networks, he could serve a function to show that there is still a debate. I doubt he’ll choose a side.
Peter Miller said:
“1. Venus’ atmosphere is 96.5% (965,000ppm) carbon dioxide, Earth’s is 0.038% (380ppm) -2,539 times greater.
2. Venus’ atmosphere is 92 times denser than Earth’s.
3. Venus is much closer to the sun – 67 million miles, as opposed to 93 million miles.”
You should add:
4. Venus has a permanent upper level cloud deck creating a legitimate greenhouse condition, which Earth does not have.
Nye also glosses over the fact that CO2 has not always been 280 ppm in the past, he implies that CO2 was low until recently.
E. Beck’s compilation of direct chemical bottle CO2 data shows clearly that CO2 has fluctuated from <280 to up to 550 ppm several times in the last 200 years, most recently above 440 ppm (at 388 ppm now) in the 1940s. This hokum that CO2 has been historically low is a proven lie created by cherry-picking the data.
Also, plants do not function well at CO2 below 200 ppm. 280 is too darned close for comfort, if we want our O2 levels to be maintained. Anybody thought about that little point, when they criticize and demonize CO2?
If Bill Nye remains one of the alarmists’ spokespeople….. awesome!
[snip I’ve snipped several comments on discussions of appearance, please don’t post any more]
I was under the impression that this debate was going to be about
Nye’s absurd assertion a couple of weeks ago that this winter was caused by global warming. That is what I was prepared for, and was going to link
the major external forcing factors I used for the winter idea to the triple
crown of cooling ideas I am pushing over the next 20-30 years. Unknown
to me, the debate changed to pure global warming as the latest IPCC
debacle ( how NYE refers to them with any seriousness is flabbergasting
given their credibility issues) about sea levels. So I was set to hammer
him on that, but it turned into a pure global warming debate.
And yes the Venus thing caught me off guard but not in the way you
might think. I just couldnt believe he would actually bring that up
because it has nothing to do with this. So I reacted in a way that hopefully got a sarcastic point across. Neither he nor I know how Venus got that
way, and the earth is certainly not on that path. But the ideas brought up
by you folks probably would have been better. I do more reading of spiritual
things and weather related items than I do on the planets, and so I reacted that way.
I am not someone who wants to be out front on global warming simply
to be part of this debate, but
instead wishes to show that my position is leading to better forecasts
and hence, attract business. Its like training with weights. I may know
inside and out what I am doing, but I do it to compete, not to be
a trainer. So I will fight like a tiger to show why you better darn well
understand where the earths temps are going, if you want to forecast,
but the debates I crave are weather oriented and I do every day by making a forecast!. Every time you forecast, you debate the weather, and other weather people
God made me to forecast the weather, and that is what I do. That I am convinced that we are cooling the next 30 years, and more worried about
ice, than fire is because I need to know things like this to improve forecasts.
Sheep get slaughtered, wolves eat. Following blindly along in this
matter can lead to being slaughtered in a forecast.
All the best
JB
Haha Venus is about 41 million kilometers closer to the Sun than Earth. Of course it will be warmer than earth. Is that really an arguement proving AGW?
Chris Wright said:
“As far as I’m aware, no one has been able to prove that the climate on Earth was driven by CO2 in any epoch of Earth’s history. ”
Right! Arrhenius speculated in 1896 about CO2 possibly warming the atmosphere, but his hypothesis was never proven.
What many people do not know is that CO2 absorbing IR does not produce warmed CO2. The energy is almost immediately re-radiated as IR – it is not realized as kinetic energy (heat). There is, however, the slight chance that, while temporarily energized by IR absorption, a molecule might bump into another and the energy could be transferred as heat, causing warming. This is not a high efficiency process and allows CO2 to have a tiny warming effect, which we all agree it can accomplish.
But, it’s effectiveness in this minor way is subject to Beer’s Law and diminishing returns as its concentrations in the atmosphere increase. At current levels it is 90-95% exhausted.
The IPCC would like to have us believe that this tiny effect by CO2 is magnified 10 or more times by water vapor, which is the dominant heat-trapping gas by far. However, this time 2+2≠4 as they get in each other’s way and do not have a strictly additive effect.
Much to the IPCC’s discredit, they systematically pretend that the Earth’s atmosphere is a real greenhouse in which the air does not circulate vertically. Water vapor is part of a global-sized heat engine which carries energy upwards where it is released by condensation and lost very effectively to space. This yields the principle heat-trapping gas in our atmosphere to be a huge negative forcing factor which prevents the atmosphere from excessive warming.
The icing on the cake that Arrhenius was wrong in his speculation is the recent work of Miskolczi and his colleague Zagoni in which they worked out the thermodynamics of CO2 and water vapor. They have elegantly described the interaction of these atmospheric components and shown that they interact such that water vapor decreases as CO2 increases, yielding a relatively constant heat-trapping effect. (A decrease i upper level water vapor has indeed been detected.) Their conclusion is that CO2 is effectively irrelevant to our climate.
CO2 is plant food and the source of our food and oxygen.
[snip]
Joe Bastardi (06:30:23) ,
Joe, I thought you did a very good job. Showing that you predicted this winter before hand gave you credibility. To the majority of people who are unsure about AGW this was probably key. You now have credibility and you don’t believe in AGW. That will be what convinces many people. They won’t understand the rest of it.
[snip]
Bastardi connected with reality. Sorry Joe was over Nye’s head.
As a Premium Member I posted the following on O’Reilly’s website after the show – ‘Bill Nye? He’s a micro-pinhead! On MSNBC he said, “The IPCC got a ….. scientific prize for making a discovery. They discovered climate change….” And the even dumber thing he said was, “Older people just have a much harder time grasping the idea that….” Mr. O, Bill Nye is less of a “science guy” than my pet squirrel.’
Now, I don’t actually have a pet squirrel but you have to keep explanations simple for Mr. O because as he has said many times, he’s a “simple” guy. The real tragedy here, as Marvin (03:01:46) pointed out above is “That debate was disturbingly poorly communicated.” Wrong people, not enough time, dreadful science analogies, incorrect format – – – it’s a real shame because The Factor has a very large middle of the road audience, but based on that segment last night, they should stick to political subjects and guests wherein (unfortunately) simple mindedness abounds and rules the day.
[snip – no comments on that here please]
@Joe Bastardi:
As a long time consumer of your forecasts (usually via finance / investing related venues) I have to say: You Rock!
I always know when the hurricane season is serious and oil is a good trade because I’ll see your work showing up on two competing finance / trade TV channels. Neither one can afford to go with “second best” 😉
My theory, which is mine:
The Sun was once a planet like Earth, inhabited by humans, who unwisely emitted so much carbon dioxide that their home burst into self-sustaining nuclear fire.
Hope everyone sent a copy of their comment here to O’Reilly. TV personalities love fan mail like this. Keeps their feet on the ground.
Important people never know what Joe the Plumber is thinking unless he puts down his Monkey Wrench, turns around, and tells them.
The only thing this shows, is how utterly worthless television is.
(Well, except for Olympic Ice Hockey)
Marvin (03:01:46) :
I don’t respect O’Reilly one shred, he is a moronic shill and has constantly been an opinion journalist.
Of course he is an opinion journalist. His specific job is news analyst, i.e., he is specifically on Fox to report his opinion, not report the news.
O’Reilly claims no such thing. He is intentionally on Fox to offer an opinion.
Mark
I used to like Bill Nye. Used to watch “The Science Guy” now and then. I even recall not but a couple of years ago watching him talk about climate as a “skeptic” as I recall.
One thing I have noticed about Mr. Nye as of late. He has become and extremely arrogant individual. I have never seen Mr. Nye with so much makeup and primping as in this broadcast last night.
I can no longer trust a word that comes from “The Science Guy” ‘s mouth. I watched this broadcast in amazement of the stupidity spewing forth from Mr. Nye’s mouth.
Further, I am getting soooo sick and tired of this Venus BS (bad science). For the past several years, I have studied a great deal about Venus. I have watched many broadcasts on The Science Channel, National Geographic Channel, History Channel and others. I have read many articles and papers from NASA to the kid down the block. It is interesting to note the discrepancies and contradictions between all of these as it pertains to the Venusian climate. I can falsify this Venusian CO2 climate claim very easily. Take note, Venus has a very long period of rotation, and yet the dark side is the same temperature as the light side. If CO2 were the cause of Venusian climate heat, then the light side would necessarily have to be somewhat hotter than the dark side as it would be more radiatively active. The FACT is, Venus is a HOT planet. That is, like Mercury, Venus is still cooling and giving off heat. This fact alone, aside from the fact that Venus has a HUGE volume of atmosphere, EXTREME surface pressure, NO direct sunlight at the surface, and many other factors completely dispute the Venusian CO2 climate hypothesis.
I had a little Venus debate with one of my professor friends.
Very little sunlight reaches the surface of Venus, not enough to be classified as daylight, even heavily overcast daylight, on Earth. If I built a greenhouse out in the woods using triple pane glass (which is vastly superior to the CO2 on Venus) and claimed it would get hot enough to melt steel, due to better IR insulation, people would put me in the looney bin.
In Carl Sagan’s 1967 paper on the surface temperature of Venus, he gave estimates for atmospheric compositions ranging from pure nitrogen to pure CO2. The nitrogen atmosphere was hotter because of its different coefficient of specific heat at constant pressure. Sagan got the surface temperature correct to within about 40K, based purely on the cloud top temperatures, the dry adiabatic lapse rate of CO2, and low qualilty radar data on the depth to the surface. He’d have been closer but the radar data was a little off. There was no reference to radiative effects anywhere in the paper.
Sagan, 1967
The correlation of Sun spots to temperature is horrible and I wouldn’t put it up as a pro-natural argument. I would simply dismiss it as a very, very weak temperature trend force that is overwhelmed by intrinsic natural Earth bound cycles. I wouldn’t even show a graph.
The correlation of ocean to temperature is where the gravy is. Ocean conditions, along with a some of Earth’s atmospheric cycles (IE AO, trade winds, etc) predicts temperature trends. To break the CO2 connection, I would post the correlation between CO2 and the atmospheric/oceanic coupling. The correlation will be dismal.
Man-made CO2 is no more a major driver of temperature trend than the Sun is. If it does anything at all, it will warm up my day on land by a fraction of a fraction of a degree more at 350 ppm than if there were only 250 ppm. I’m ballparking here but the oceanic/atmospheric conditions (including natural greenhouse gasses) at the time will determine 99.99% of how hot I feel because these things determine how much shortwave and longwave radiation gets to me. Emission sourced CO2 and other man-made greenhouse gases will contribute that last fraction. And to be sure of my point, I am probably giving a conservative estimate for man-made emissions. I believe it is less influential than I have stated here.
The article linked by Marcus (02:48:21) above is really quite compelling:
Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis Violates Fundamentals of Physics
by Dipl.-Ing. Heinz Thieme
http://freenet-homepage.de/klima/error.htm
His argument, based on physical principles, sounds plausible to me. I’d like to hear what others on this board think. Are there problems with it?
If we could convince the public that the whole idea of a ‘greenhouse gas’ having any measurable effect on climate was wrong, that would cut the legs out from under the alarmists. What is needed is a simple, dramatic, observational test, like the one in 1919 verifying General Relativity’s prediction that light from a distant star would be bent passing near the gravitational field of the Sun.
For example, since CO2 is heavier than air, it should be possible to fill a large enclosure, open at the top but blocked from wind, with CO2, and a second one with just air, and see if there is any difference in temperature. Then invite the press.
No doubt there are problems with that one, but I’ll bet the scientists and engineers here could come up with a definitive test.
/Mr Lynn
Fox blurb
British Met office proposes a do-over.
The atmosphere of Venus is 95% co2. The atmosphere of Earth is .054% CO2 by weight. So the concentration of CO2 in Venus’ atmosphere is 1700 times as high as it is on Earth. But Venus’ atmosphere is also far denser than Earth’s. On Earth the atmospheric pressure is 14.7 pounds per square inch. Think of that as the weight of a column of air with a 1 sq in cross section stretching from the surface to the upper reaches of the atmosphere. On Venus its 90 times as heavy, or about 1300 pounds per square inch. When you include both of those factors Venus’ atmosphere has 150,000 times as much CO2 as Earth. That’s a huge difference, far more than the doubling of CO2 the warmers worry about.
Also, Earth has oceans that cover 70% of the planet’s surface. Those oceans play a huge roll in our climate. When water evaporates from the oceans it carries a huge amount of heat with it, about 1000 btu’s per pound of water. Water vapor is lighter than air so it tends to rise. When it rises high enough it can condense and give up that heat above much of the greenhouse blanket where it can be more readily radiated into space. Venus has no such mechanism.
With the EPA trying to control CO2 as a “dangerous pollutant”, I looked up the toxicity of CO2 to find out just how dangerous it is. The greenies think that 350 ppm is about right and I suppose they think anything more than that is a killer. Is that even close to true? Nuclear submarine crews live in an atmosphere that ranges between 3,000 to 10,000 ppm of CO2. It takes something like 60,000 ppm before you start feeling sick. A level over 100,00 ppm will kill you by simple asphyxiation. How did we ever get the stupid idea that the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are deadly?
The same EPA that calls CO2 deadly in the air is the outfit that mandated that we put catalytic converters on our cars so that internal combustion gases will be converted to water and CO2. So is it deadly in the air and good when it come out of the tailpipe? WTF! Are we really so crazy as to believe any of this AGW nonsense?
Bill Nye is channeling Carl Sagan via 1992…. Well, trying to anyway. The “Venus = Earth” is the canard that got me interested in this subject in the first place.
Charles Higley (06:35:27) :
What many people do not know is that CO2 absorbing IR does not produce warmed CO2. The energy is almost immediately re-radiated as IR – it is not realized as kinetic energy (heat). There is, however, the slight chance that, while temporarily energized by IR absorption, a molecule might bump into another and the energy could be transferred as heat, causing warming. This is not a high efficiency process and allows CO2 to have a tiny warming effect, which we all agree it can accomplish.
Many people don’t know that because it isn’t true! At normal atmospheric pressure an excited CO2 molecule will experience thousands of collisions with neighboring air molecules during its radiation lifetime. The absorbed energy is effectively converted into kinetic energy, at such pressures ‘re-radiation’ is a very rare event.
Pamela Gray (07:07:53) :
The correlation of ocean to temperature is where the gravy is. Ocean conditions, along with a some of Earth’s atmospheric cycles (IE AO, trade winds, etc) predicts temperature trends. To break the CO2 connection, I would post the correlation between CO2 and the atmospheric/oceanic coupling. The correlation will be dismal.
So why don’t you do so instead of handwaving, the data’s freely available?
Bill Nye the Propaganda Guy.
Does anyone have a temperature proxy graph from either tree rings or ice cores on Venus? No? How about temperature records for the last few hundred years? Because that would be helpful if we’re going to compare global climate between the planets.
What’s next? Are the alarmists going to argue that Mars is a barren desert because its atmosphere is 99% CO2? Hmm… maybe I shouldn’t give them any ideas.
So will they hire Steve McIntyre to manage the new datasets?
Not bloody likely!
/Mr Lynn
The weather on Venus is dominated by a very hot interior and thousands of active volcaonoes .
Anybody seen this?
Climategate Meets the Law: Senator Inhofe To Ask for DOJ Investigation
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-and-the-law-senator-inhofe-to-ask-for-congressional-criminal-investigation-pajamas-mediapjtv-exclusive/
Judicial Watch Sues for Records on “Climate Czar” Carol Browner’s Role in Crafting Policy
http://www.judicialwatch.org/news/2010/feb/judicial-watch-sues-records-climate-czar-carol-browners-role-crafting-policy
Max (06:33:07) :
Haha Venus is about 41 million kilometers closer to the Sun than Earth. Of course it will be warmer than earth. Is that really an arguement proving AGW?
—————
Reply:
Well, sure–they’ve changed the “A” to mean Any. They just don’t like to add the “?”, but that’s how it’s turning out.
Thank you Joe Bastardi .
Thank you thank you.
I am a layman. But it was my understanding that the cause of winter in the NH was the tilting of the Earth, such that the NH tilts away from the sun in winter.
It was also my understanding that the Sun provides the heat that warms us, and the energy that drives the climatic systems ( at least mostly).
Why do AGW propagandists and indeed Pamela Gray, dismiss the effects of the Sun ? Isn’t that what warms the oceans ?
If a Venus style runaway warming was possible on Earth, it would have happened a couple of billion ago, when Earth’s atmosphere had a 100 time more Methane and CO2 than it does currently. As it stands now, if it wasn’t for the water vapor in the atmosphere, Earth would be a frozen ice ball.
Well it was a good outing … Bill Nye, the junk science peddler guy. Everything he said has been proved false. But hey, he kept trying.
Bastardi needs his own show ^_^. He is likely an avid WUWT reader …
For the clueless science guy, Venus has no magnetosphere, therefore the Sun’s Solar Wind has had it’s way with it’s atmosphere, blowing away all the lighter molecules, leaving only the heaviest residual molecules, like CO2. No one really knows when Venus lost it’s magnetic field, just some guesses.
A question to ponder, the earth’s magnetic field is decaying, and a pole shift is overdue. So when the pole shift occurs, does the earth’s magnetic field go to zero for a period of time, or does it shift suddenly and pass through. Important question, no answer yet. But it’s a really important question.
There are other serious issues with the greenhouse explanation for the extra warming of Venus. Temperature measurements of Venus show the night side to be about the same as the day side. With no wind, how does the heat get to the night side unless there is an internal heat source that constantly heats the planet regardless of the side facing the sun. Also Venus has very bright white cloud tops which reflect most of the sun light [over 90%]. So how could the greenhouse effect even occur to the degree claimed? We know lot less about Venus’s climate than we know about earth’s. To bring Venus up as an example of what is happening on earth will even further diminish the credibility of the AGW science. They really are desperate now.
cedarhill (03:39:37) :
James Hansen’s PhD disertation was on the Venusian atmosphere and the “Venusian Greenhouse Effect”. After that inspiration he transfered Venus to Earth giving birth to Al Gore and AGW.
Actually it wasn’t about the Greenhouse effect at all, it was titled:
The atmosphere of Venus: a dust insulation model. Apart from predicting the effect of volcanos and clouds it isn’t ‘transferable’ to earth.
Joel Upchurch (07:52:53) :
If a Venus style runaway warming was possible on Earth, it would have happened a couple of billion ago, when Earth’s atmosphere had a 100 time more Methane and CO2 than it does currently. As it stands now, if it wasn’t for the water vapor in the atmosphere, Earth would be a frozen ice ball.
No, if it wasn’t for the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere Earth would be a frozen ice ball. Water would just condense out of the atmosphere and freeze without the permanent GHGs to sustain it.
Phil. (08:19:41) :
“…if it wasn’t for
the CO2 and methane inthe atmosphere Earth would be a frozen ice ball.”Fixed.
Phil. (07:25:48) :
At normal atmospheric pressure an excited CO2 molecule will experience thousands of collisions with neighboring air molecules during its radiation lifetime. The absorbed energy is effectively converted into kinetic energy, at such pressures ‘re-radiation’ is a very rare event.
The whole atmosphere is holding whatever heat it has via kinetic energy, a function of mean free path, a function of temperature. If you think the kinetic energy of .04% of the atmosphere (CO2) is a more significant factor than the other 99.96%, I have some magic beans you may be interested in.
Some bad science here in the comment section too.
Please, if you don’t know then don’t say.
Did Bill Nye just accuse Bastardi of taking bribes?
O’Reilly does pretty good job on most subjects but is making a huge mistake in not addressing the global warming scam at the level he should.
Much like his failure to get out in front of the mortgage/banking collapse which he later apologized for. He told his audience that he should have been paying more and he committed to doing so in the future.
Well Bill? This would be the test.
If this is it he’ll be apologizing again for failing to recognize, acknowledge and combat this AGW movement. Looking out for the folks and all.
Instead of doing so he appears to be trying to present the issue as a close call, developing story, that he’s on it but above the fray.
Look Bill,
You’re essentially out to lunch with Barney Frank. You’re missing the biggest scam in human history. Underplaying the issue is a BIG betrayal of the folks.
Following slowly from far behind is exactly the kind of coverage you apologized for in the mortgage/banking crisis.
You may be arriving at a tipping point where it will be impossible for you to adapt and re-posture yourself as looking out for the folks.
Big mistake.
Bringing up the rear in the no spin zone is not your style.
Trying to later spin that you were on top of it all along will be a Barney move.
Especially with your long time listeners/viewers.
Wise up pal.
What a ridiculous ‘debate’ this was. Neither participant was at all persuasive nor capable of presenting a rational argument. And what was the ‘moderator’ doing letting them both drivel on like this?
Even though I’ve followed the AGW discussion quite closely I could not follow whatever points they were making since it just seemed to be a random set of ‘points’ sprayed around. Who did they think was the audience? A general educated viewer would be completely lost.
1/10 (and you get the 1 for turning up and knowing your own name). Extremely poor
Hey, it looks to me like Phil. is becoming a skeptic. Taking his argument one step further the increased kinetic energy will lead to increased convection. This yields increased upper tropospheric radiation to space and increased daytime reflective clouds. Both of these are negative feedbacks. Welcome aboard Phil..
Smokey (08:23:16) :
Phil. (08:19:41) :
“…if it wasn’t for the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere Earth would be a frozen ice ball.”
Fixed.
Nope censored by some who knows no physics!
I was surprised how little Nye actually knew. And his Venus moment as well as his declaration that CO2 was a very powerful greenhouse gas were disturbing.
Steve Keohane (08:26:39) :
The whole atmosphere is holding whatever heat it has via kinetic energy, a function of mean free path, a function of temperature. If you think the kinetic energy of .04% of the atmosphere (CO2) is a more significant factor than the other 99.96%, I have some magic beans you may be interested in.
You mean the other 99.96% that has no ability to absorb IR radiation?
Richard M (08:41:38) :
Hey, it looks to me like Phil. is becoming a skeptic.
I’m a scientist, I’ve always been a sceptic (a real one).
Taking his argument one step further the increased kinetic energy will lead to increased convection. This yields increased upper tropospheric radiation to space and increased daytime reflective clouds. Both of these are negative feedbacks. Welcome aboard Phil..
And I’m really sceptical of such nonsense as you and Smokey peddle!
I see all the comments pointing out that Venus’ atmosphere is much denser than Earth’s. Doesn’t Earth’s atmosphere change in density? I could swear that I had read something (Svalgaard?) about Earth’s atmosphere changing in density related to the sun’s activity, of course, I may be wrong too, I have a lot of reading going on right now.
I will see if I can find it, or maybe someone would be helpful and find it before I do tomorrow. I just wonder if the atmosphere changing in density has an effect on temperature?
Hide the incline in whine.
Bill Nye and Ed Begley Jr. Neighbors, green to the core. Noble and passionate, committed to the honorable saving of the delicate Earth from the brutal ravages of Man.
Mother Earth has told them both to shove off, she can handle herself just fine.
Neither are taking it very well. Got earplugs?
Compare Joe Bastardi’s forecast for this winter compared to NOAA…….
Bastardi’s argument about the lack of a direct correlation with CO2 is badly, badly flawed.
If he’s going to start out showing the science is contradicted by data, he needs to start by addressing what the science actually predicts, not some 5th grade version of it.
Even if you try and related CO2 emissions to temperature, you also have to include the driving from anthropogenic sulfates, which tend to cool climate.
Nor even with a net warming from anthropogenic drivings are you guaranteed that short-term temperature swings are going to track with net anthropogenic drivings, because nobody says that once anthropogenic warming started that all of a sudden all of the natural drivers for climate would shut off!!! You can still have a lot of “noodling” of temperature even if the baseline is shifted slightly.
Finally, if you’re going to compare the impact of anthropogenic CO2 to temperature, you need to at least integrate the effect of the forcings over time (in the case of CO2 forcings, there is a “rapid” response which presumably correlates well with mean temperature plus a “slow” response term that maybe takes 30-years to show up. The problem with correlating with the rapid term is there are plenty of natural drivers, e.g., the ENSO, which are large on those short time scales, so you’re pretty much stuck looking at fairly long temperature trends. 1980-2010 is meaningful to study, 2000-2010 is not.
Having said all of that, I agree with Bastardi that there a lot of hype in the AGW community, and to a degree he is just using their own logic against them. (I have no doubt that people like Nye were crowing about 1998 as
“proof” of AGW for example.)
The planet Venus analogy is old and first hyped by Jim Hansen of NASA and Carl Sagen.
It has been falsified many times — surprising that Nye would use it at all.
But it does highlight the connection between astronomy and AGW “science” or lack, thereof.
Many, if not most astronomers back AGW — the recent Climategate has broken that up a bit.
Why do so many astronomers back AGW?
Because their science rests on the same kind of assumptions.
A priori assumptions with back-filled interpretation & analysis to justify the a priori assumptions.
And an over reliance on theoretical constructs justified with mathematical equations unhinged from empirical observation & measurement.
AGW is the biggest hoax on history — but it is more than that, it is a window onto other scientific disciplines. Climategate? The same kind of shannigans goes on in other disciplines, as well.
What is worse is that astronomy schools indoctrinate and enforce the party-line.
It’s just that these other disciplines are not in the spot light and sceptics are quickly labeled “cranks” and nobody hears about it.
Wheren’t AGW sceptics first labeled “cranks” until that became untenable?
The fall back: “Deniers”.
Yes, this is the tip of the iceberg.
So trying to pull things together here, 4/100ths of 1% of CO2 is going to make our climate go haywire, but 1/10th of 1% fluctuations of solar output (sorry don’t have the reference link handy) is nothing to worry about?
Venus is hot.
Venus has a lot of CO2.
Therefore CO2 causes Venus to be hot.
There-therefore if *we* have more CO2 we will get hot.
A splendid scientific argument. /sarcasm
Actually, I recall doing some napkin calculations regarding the CO2 concentrations of Earth verses Venus using basic algebra, and the results don’t tie in with the doomsayers. True, there are many other factors – but I think that’s really the point: you cannot focus on a single element (sic) as a driver for climate.
Conversely, has anybody thought about the climate repercussions of cooling through CO2 reduction? *If* we are warming up significantly through CO2, won’t a reduction in that CO2 cause – result in – a cooling of the atmosphere? What about all those desert creatures freezing to death? Mass failures of crops? Polar bear deaths due to an excessive ice sheet with no open ocean areas allowing the polar bears to fish for seals…drowning seals…oh, the poor Polar Bears…well, they should be at least thankful they aren’t Venus Bears: they’d be extinct already.
Phil. (08:49:31),
You actually believe that “if it wasn’t for the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere Earth would be a frozen ice ball”??
Even with the 99.9%+ of the rest of the atmosphere blanketing the Earth? You’ve had too much CAGW Kool Aid if you believe that.
Why do all these so called “experts” in AGW we’ve heard from lately all resort to the same lay “proof”? (already known to be wrought with fraud)
Such as:
Recital of consensus
The warmest decade (see E M Smith for a dose of reality)
Comparisons to Venus (with double Earth’s solar energy budget and no H20)
Arctic ice melt (while always ignoring the Antarctic)
Glaciers (can you say 2035?)
You go joe, i wish he would have gotten more time to explain pdo. and another thing for the weather is not climate people, i live in houston tx and it is snowing today, also climate is longterm trends in weather so actualy yes, weather is climate. :p
Venus is hotter than Earth…isn’t it also closer to the sun? Mercury has no CO2 at all and it’s really hot… I wonder why? I loved when Nye started with the ” do you deny that there was less CO2 in 1727 than now?”. Yeah, we also imported less bananas back then too … Should I conclude that the amount of bananas consumed by the US causes global warming because the two are correlated? How many people realize correlation is NOT causation? Over and over and over these AGW people make that mistake.
Joe,
I think you smoked him. Great job. Another inconvenient tidbit about Venus is the 243 day rotation. The day side surface bakes in the sun for months on end.
I didn’t see anyone else noting the inverse square law assures Venus’ solar budget is nearly double that of earth.
Smokey (09:41:51) :
Phil. (08:49:31),
You actually believe that “if it wasn’t for the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere Earth would be a frozen ice ball”??
Even with the 99.9%+ of the rest of the atmosphere blanketing the Earth? You’ve had too much CAGW Kool Aid if you believe that.
It’s basic physics, the rest of the atmosphere isn’t capable of blanketing the Earth!
Squidly (07:03:30) :
I can falsify this Venusian CO2 climate claim very easily. Take note, Venus has a very long period of rotation, and yet the dark side is the same temperature as the light side. If CO2 were the cause of Venusian climate heat, then the light side would necessarily have to be somewhat hotter than the dark side as it would be more radiatively active.
Apparently in all your reading you missed the fact that the Venusian atmosphere circulates very rapidly.
matt v. (08:11:41) :
There are other serious issues with the greenhouse explanation for the extra warming of Venus. Temperature measurements of Venus show the night side to be about the same as the day side. With no wind, how does the heat get to the night side unless there is an internal heat source that constantly heats the planet regardless of the side facing the sun.
Why do you think that there is no wind? Winds in the mid cloud layer can be as high as 450 mph.
I would love to see Joe Bastardi debate Al Gore .Only thing Al won’t debate anyone.
Layne Blanchard (10:04:47) :
Joe,
I think you smoked him. Great job. Another inconvenient tidbit about Venus is the 243 day rotation. The day side surface bakes in the sun for months on end.
How? The surface doesn’t see very much solar insolation, whereas the atmosphere which does, only spends ~2 Earth days on the day side before circulating to the night side!
Joe Bastardi, you’re the best. Keep up the great work! You are one of the few that consistently make good weather predictions. I was thrilled to see you on O’Reilly last night.
Phil,
The upper atmosphere circulates rapidly, but lower down the wind speed is only 0.5 to 1 meter/second.
Still, the whole planet forms two massive Hadley cells that overturn the atmosphere, with the gas alternately compressed and expanded. It gets hot going down and cools off coming up. Most of the heat input is in the cloud layers, which are relatively cool.
My way of thinking about it is that the atmosphere there acts like a diesel or refrigeration cycle, with the delta T determined by the height of the circulation and the adiapatic lapse rate (itself determined by gravity and the atmosphere’s coefficient of specific heat at constant pressure). Given the cycle’s delta T, you just attach some point in the cycle to the external environment (in this case the cloud layers where the radiative effects occur) and the absolute temperatures of the rest of the cycle are automatically set.
The surface temperature of Venus can’t deviate from the temperature at the bottom of the atmosphere because at that pressure, CO2 has about the same convective heat transfer ability as water, several hundred W/m^2 per degree C at the wind speeds found by the Soviet Venus landers.
“Nye needs a better argument”
No, he needs a better reference than the IPCC… ooopppsss, there are none! Bill Nye, come back to reality, please.
Anyone who follows Bastardi online line knows his long term forecasts are 2nd to none.
….and how many forecasts has Bill Nye made?
Compare Bastardi’s forecasts to the NWS coming into this winter – Bastardi nailed it & the government had a clueless statistical model & flunked out.
I will put my money on Bastardi over the next 20 years vs the government & IPCC.
If CO2 intercepts IR going outward from Earth, and radiates some (less than half) of that IR back to Earth, then certainly the same CO2 intercepts incoming IR, and radiates some (more than half) of that incoming IR away from Earth. Clearly, by geometry, CO2 radiates more IR away from Earth than it radiates IR to Earth in the aggragate total.
Essentially, asI see it, warming fabulists are claiming that CO2 is the incarnation of Maxwell’s Demon.
It is if I, as a highway engineer, set up a traffic counting station on Interstate 40 at the CA-AZ border, and only counted vehicles going in a westerly direction. I might well come to the false conclusion that the vehicle population in CA was increasing by that traffic count amount, if I didn’t also take the easterly bound traffic count into consideration.
Phil. (08:49:31) :
“Taking his argument one step further the increased kinetic energy will lead to increased convection. This yields increased upper tropospheric radiation to space and increased daytime reflective clouds. Both of these are negative feedbacks. Welcome aboard Phil..”
And I’m really sceptical of such nonsense as you and Smokey peddle!
So, you’re claiming that warming does not lead to convection. Is that right? Just trying to understand what you are claiming is “nonsense”.
George Turner (11:05:42) :
Phil,
The upper atmosphere circulates rapidly, but lower down the wind speed is only 0.5 to 1 meter/second.
At the surface, but the bulk of the atmosphere is circulating rapidly, particularly the clouds which are radiating IR back to the surface.
Still, the whole planet forms two massive Hadley cells that overturn the atmosphere, with the gas alternately compressed and expanded. It gets hot going down and cools off coming up. Most of the heat input is in the cloud layers, which are relatively cool.
My way of thinking about it is that the atmosphere there acts like a diesel or refrigeration cycle, with the delta T determined by the height of the circulation and the adiapatic lapse rate (itself determined by gravity and the atmosphere’s coefficient of specific heat at constant pressure). Given the cycle’s delta T, you just attach some point in the cycle to the external environment (in this case the cloud layers where the radiative effects occur) and the absolute temperatures of the rest of the cycle are automatically set.
The surface temperature of Venus can’t deviate from the temperature at the bottom of the atmosphere because at that pressure, CO2 has about the same convective heat transfer ability as water, several hundred W/m^2 per degree C at the wind speeds found by the Soviet Venus landers.
Still swamped by the radiative flux from the surface, ~17,000 W/m^2.
Well, it was certainly all there: the irrefutable evidence, Venus, the integrity of the IPCC and the research it does ( I do seem to recall that the IPCC doesn’t do or commission research), accusing skeptics of cherry-picking start-dates for their graphs showing a decline and then using the start-date for his graph in the middle of the LIA, climate-gate is just a he-said-she-said squabble between scientists and doesn’t affect the science, follow the money trail to see who benefits from skepticism about AGW…
Bill Nye is dishonest and I think he knows he is dishonest. I also think the emergence of a new set of talking points and a new generation of trolls of the sort we’ve seen here is just fascinating.
Pamela Gray (07:07:53) :
The correlation of Sun spots to temperature is horrible and I wouldn’t put it up as a pro-natural argument. I would simply dismiss it as a very, very weak temperature trend force that is overwhelmed by intrinsic natural Earth bound cycles. I wouldn’t even show a graph.
Pam, you keep saying this but it depends on the time scale you use. Grand Solar Minimums correlate perfectly with extemely cold periods. We have two that were observed and I am convinced we will get to watch this present ‘Dalton Type Minimum’ as it progresses with modern instruments.
If you take away the noise of the internal systems of Earth and correct the proxy of ‘sun spots’ for ‘solar activity’ and even tie it to something like ‘planetary tides’ on the sun or other mechanisms the correlation gets better when you deal with years and not days or months.
The fact is the Sun is the forcing agent and we do not understand all the energy transport mechanisms. I am sure the obsessive detail with which solar scientists observe the sun and its interaction with the Earth, Solar System, and Galaxy (magnetically and otherwise) will yield some fruit while we go through this anomalous event … Solar Grand Minimum. I also expect it to be cold in the order of Dickens.
Robert E. Phelen: I think we should start a new game: Whack-a-Troll.
Maybe Bill Nye should remember what anyone who has ever taken an intro chemistry class knows. That is PV = nRT
As pressure goes up (Venus) so does temperature.
“Carrick (09:17:42) :
[…]
Finally, if you’re going to compare the impact of anthropogenic CO2 to temperature, you need to at least integrate the effect of the forcings over time (in the case of CO2 forcings, there is a “rapid” response which ”
Argo finds no rise in the Ocean Heat Content during 2003-2008. No integration of the effect of forcings to be found.
terry46 (10:24:05) :
I would love to see Joe Bastardi debate Al Gore .Only thing Al won’t debate anyone.
He won’t debate Tipper?
Well, you can’t deny he’s at least that smart.
The laughter started with BN’s first four over-used words: “The evidence is overwhelming . . .”.
BTW, BN is a dead ringer for A. Lincoln. Give him a beard and a top hat.
He’ll have a lifetime job at the Lincoln Museum.
I heard O’Reilly comment on this issue before. His statement was it’s impossible that all the pollutants we are putting into the atmosphere are not affecting the planet.
He seems to be firmly in the all emissions = pollution camp. Not exactly what I would call a well-versed or nuanced opinion.
Very entertaining but way too short, this debate. So both men are forced into “Reality show” behaviour to score as many points as possible. Still, the better man won.
Bill Nye’s ink-and water bit was priceless, given the visual opacity of ink compared to that of water. What did he do to finance his way through high school – sell vaccuum cleaners? Never mind, Joe Bastardi dealt with it well enough in his summation.
And the Venus nonsense – well, Joe could have squashed that one a little more firmly if the format of the debate had been that of a genuine debate and not a game-show. Other comments to this blog cover things quite nicely, though. Here’s my semi-science-fiction view:
http://www.herkinderkin.com/2009/11/why-is-venus-much-hotter-than-earth/
DirkH:
Well, keep in mind you really have to look at long term trends. Neither models nor data are good enough to account for all of the sources of short term variations.
Short term, you can actually have variability in other forcings, such as albedo, for which the evidence is it is increasing over this same period of time.
Even if anthropogenic CO2 emissions act as a forcing (IMO they do, the question is what else are the influences of these emissions on climate), that doesn’t mean that increasing CO2 forcings leads to a net heating of the Earth, since other short-term drivers of climate can substantially dominate over the slight “fixing of the climate dice” associated with increasing the GHG effect.
The only way to answer that is to account for all of the other sources of heat loss or gain, and as of right now, we can’t… at least until we get to a long enough period of time that long-term secular effects like changes in total CO2 concentration can dominate.
1) Anthony, Thank you sooo much for this website and for saving civilization as we know it!
2) Anyone else disturbed by Nye’s experiment? It reminded me a huckster water purification company in my community who was using pH as a proxy for biological contamination so they could trick people into buying an extremely expensive water filter. They would use a cheap pool pH kit to show how the color changed.
Let’s assume Nye’s demo is completely analogous and that CO2 acts across the entire band of visible light. Let’s also assume he got the concentration right (looks like he was using a liter of H20). Nye adds the ink @ 0.04% and there’s an obvious tainting. Fine. What then would happen if he added 10% or more? Even 100%? If the analogy/experiment were extensible, wouldn’t the answer be, because of the CO2 threshold, there wouldn’t be any more tainting! Am I wrong?
Climate change is constant and variable. Global warming occurs. AWG is an OPINION. The economic impact of a CO2 attribution is immense and sohold be the primary focus.
Bill Nye is a comedian. He used to do “science” gags for kids and appeared on a local late night comedy show called “Almost Live”. We used to call it “Almost Funny”. Looks like he blew town for California to rebuild his career I guess. And I gotta say, the guy looks a lot stranger than I remember him to be. He’s gotta get a new make-up person. Really.
I’ve seen him spew “science” in some other venues lately and as a scientist, the guy is still a comedian. Not a funny one however.
Noelene (23:09:32) : edit
“You have a funny way of hiding your links.”
You need to remember this was a FOX broadcast. Rupert Murdoch is famously against other websites linking to FOX content and even wants to charge for online content, he so badly misunderstands how the internet works. Hence why no embedding of the video in the WUWT article.
As for Bill Nye, back in 1988, I was stationed at McChord AFB outside Tacoma and would listen to a morning radio program he’d appear on in a segment called “Stump the Science Guy”, that invited listeners to call in with questions about scientific things to see if Nye could answer correctly.
I called in asking about the rumbling sound that water makes just prior to reaching boiling temperatures, when heated on a stove. Nye wrongly claimed the sound was due to thermal expansion of the pot, rather than the correct answer which was that microbubbles would form at the bottom of the water, where there was a boundary layer of boiling temp water. The bubbles would rise up into cooler water, cool down, and slap shut, making the noise.
So its clear to me that for 20 years, Nye (whose training is engineering, not science) still doesn’t understand thermodynamics or fluid dynamics….
“the guy (Nye) is still a comedian. Not a funny one however.”
You can’t call someone who’s not funny a ‘comedian’ any more than you can call a person who misses a ‘sharp-shooter’, or for that matter, a climate that’s static.
Therefore, Nye is simply an oxymoron (with emphasis on moron, IMHO).
@Phil.
‘It’s basic physics, the rest of the atmosphere isn’t capable of blanketing the Earth!’
Basic observation tells the story about co2 and methane not blanketing the earth. Apparently the molecules are too few on the one hand, and on the other hand them little crackpot molecules tend to be concentrated in murky streaks around earth (I kid you not, NASA took some nice imagery of em). Oh, and not to forget these molecules tend to vary in concentration between winter and summer.
Mayhap you ought to spend more time in the physics book instead of the Troll for dummies book.
Maybe I got this wrong. Bill Nye said that CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas. I was under the impression that CO2 is a weak greenhouse gas. It is the contributions of stronger greenhouse gases such as water and methane which lead to the scenarios of very high temp increases, not CO2.
Nye is an engineer. He doesn’t even have a PhD, so it’s no wonder he doesn’t understand the atmosphere of Venus.. At least get someone on the show that has some credentials.
PHIL
The temperature on the surface of Venus is extremely hot and unlikely to have winds .[Magellan Orbiter data] .I am referring to surface winds.
A warmist, bringing up Venus, presents a WONDERFUL opportunity for serious scientists and historians to discuss an historically comparable scientific consensus and fallacy, the misperceived “canals” of Mars.
An international consensus of leading scientists — Schiaparelli in Italy; Dawes of England, Burton of Ireland; Pickering, Young and Lowell in the United States — all published peer-reviewed papers on Mars and its canals. The peers carefully observed that distant planet thru the best scientific instruments the world had to offer and they literally “connected the dots”. They severally and jointly presented Science, the popular press, and citizens at large with maps of Mars, including canals. And then, some of the leading scientists went even further. Canals, they said, meant life, even, perhaps, industrial civilizations not unlike our own. All confirmed by scientific observation — all just one world away.
These scientists were not idiots or morons. They weren’t careless. They weren’t perpetrating a hoax or a sham or a fraud.
They saw what they hoped to see, what they expected to see, and what their friends and colleagues had already reported having seen. And they turned out to be wrong. Collectively, categorically, absolutely wrong. There are no canals on Mars. Period.
These 19th century astronomers did other great science. Some men cataloged stars previously too faint to see. Some predicted, and showed how to find, still undiscovered planets. Some worked out various advances in celestial mechanics, astronomical photography, and other great ideas. As a group of peers, they accomplished wonders.
But Percival Lowell and his ilk gave the world, gave the public, and gave history one of history’s biggest lies — the Canals of Mars. For decades after the skeptics won and the scientific consensus moved on, the lay public and the popular imagination persisted in discussing the fabled Martian canals. Even by the 1960’s when the first space probes rocketed by, the cameras were looking, hoping, scrutinizing one last time to finally settle the matter. And not until then did the public finally accept: there are no canals on Mars.
Now, with modern, better instruments and more observers and many actual probes sending us radio data from on-site visits we know — not believe, KNOW — that Mars, like Venus, has an atmosphere that is over 90% carbon dioxide. We have direct measurements of the temperatures of our neighbor planets. We know that , unlike Venus, Mars is cold — with visible icecaps. Our 19th century trail blazers were correct to infer a decreasing temperature trend from Venus to Earth to Mars. And that trend, historical and modern astronomers agree, has at least as much to do with distance from the Sun as it does CO2 concentrations.
We also have a few decades of photographs of real Martian terrain — not canals, but icecaps. Astronomers have photographed and cataloged the icecaps of Mars diminishing. Sadly, we don’t have photographs of polar surface features on Venus. But it might appear that if both Earth and Mars show common trends in their polar regions, there might be a common cause. And even the public can be confident that carbon emissions from growing industrial civilizations is NOT that common element. Astronomers properly suggest the sun itself needs closer study. However much more we now know than Professor Lowell, a century ago, we know there is vastly much more that we still do NOT know.
Again I emphasize, Percival Lowell and his peers weren’t dishonest; and they did some very good science — but they were wrong about Mars. I’m confident Professors Hansen and Jones today have persuaded themselves and each other into comparable errors regarding Earth. They have connected the dots, combining true observations with optical illusions, into trend lines that appear to them real and plausible– but have no physical basis. And from these mistaken physical inferences they infer greater and less probable notions about planet-wide civilization. Hansen at NASA may turn out to be as prominent in history as Lowell of Flagstaff. Hansen’s theories of climate change may turn out like Lowell’s hunt for “Planet X” — proving fruitful even if not strictly correct. It is no shame in history for a scientist to be wrong.
But Lowell was wrong.
I suggest to you, Mr Nye, that much of the data you base your claims upon upon has been retrieved from some location between Saturn and Neptune
(Implicitly — Uranus)
Point #1. Phil, Phil, Phil. Frozen ball? Hardly. Let me refer to that bastion of global warming articles known as Wiki. “Earth’s surface would be on average about 33 °C (59 °F) colder than at present…” without greenhouse gasses. Pick your current tropical hotspot and move there when the temps around 110 get dropped 59 degrees. It would be about right. At least for me. I can’t stand hot. Cold is better. But the Earth would not be a “frozen ball” without greenhouse gasses. It would depend on where you are and what angle the Sun is at. At least let’s be accurate.
Point #2. The correlation of temperature with oceanic/atmospheric cycles has been done so I don’t need to handwave.
See this site and stay a while. http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/PDO_AMO.htm
Point #3. As to the Sun not being a driver. I said it is NOT a driver of TRENDS. It certainly DOES provide the continuing source of heat energy we need. But it is a relatively steady state compared to the marvelously, chaotic, cyclic, oscillating oceanic/atmospheric system we have. The correlation to Sunspot and any other Sun statistic has been posted before. No correlation.
Point #4. Come on people. To err is human but to grasp at straws is beneath us. On both sides of the debate. CO2er’s and Sun Worshippers need to check their science.
Changing the subject only slightly — let me go on for a minute about AGW, “basic physics” and the “what ELSE could it be?” argument.
In the 19th century, the science was settled. Neither matter, nor energy could be created or destroyed. Any denial of the basic physics was rank nonsense and utterly unscientific.
However, this presented a problem. The sun. What in the name of Isaac Newton made the sun shine? (Or, warm, for that matter?)
Well, basic physics, and what else- Gravity. Obviously the gravitational infall of matter from the earliest times of the solar systems formation had heated the sun to an incandescent mass. By the 19th century, some million or hundred million years later, the sun was slowly cooling, but it was still good for several million years. So said Lord Kelvin. So accepted the public, such as Mark Twain.
The problem was that geologists and biologists, notably Charles Darwin, argued that the rocks and fossils indicated that the earliest days of the EARTH’s formation were not millions, or even hundreds of millions, of years ago. Geological evidence “proved” creation had begun some BILLION or more years ago. At least a billion. Perhaps ten billion. According to the science of the geologists, the astronomers and physicist were “out” in there calculations by several orders of magnitude.
It is in this climate of dispute that Percival Lowell conducted his astronomy. And (while I don’t speak of Lowell himself, but of the general mindset of the time) IF astronomers were correct and life were possible in only millions, and not billions, of possible times, then why NOT seen life arising on Mars? And, perhaps, if the sun had persisted longer than some believed, then, perhaps, the infall of matter had not ended with the original creation. Perhaps there were still lots of other bodies — Planet X beyond Neptune, the hypothetical planet Vulcan inside the orbit of Mercury — lurking in space, waiting to be discovered.
In fact as observations became more common and timekeeping became more precise, astronomers discovered little wobbles and variations in the calculated orbits of planets and satellites. Lowell used such in his search. The once-planet Pluto, (partly named for Percival Lowell =P.L.uto) was found while looking for a BIG perturber. Various observers reported moons around Venus, a second small moon around Earth itself, and of course, like Twain, all amateur astronomers were crazy for comets. To account for the persistantly incandescent (warm) sun, theorists believed, with all their hearts and backed by the best of scientific evidence, that the solar system was jam packed with matter– constantly infalling into the sun and keeping it inflamed.
What else could it be?
IN fact, the odd variations from Newtonian orbital predictions and the incandenscence of the the sun were explained by Einstein. The solar system, in fact, is not jam packed with dark matter. It’s nearly perfect vacuum. Solar “infall” is nearly non-existant, and explains nothing at all about the energy the sun releases.
Darwin was right, the Earth is billions of years old, and Percival Lowell and Lord Kelvin were wrong.
When a modern warmist asks you to explain climate and asks “what else” could be responsible for rising temperatures, remember the history of science.
The failure of your imagination is not evidence supporting your hypothesis.
Phil
I neglected to add that there is also no surface evidence of wind erosion or the transportation of sand and dust like there is on Mars.
There is no comparison in credentials,
Joe Bastardi, B.S. Meteorology, Expert Senior Forecaster AccuWeather
Bill Nye, B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Bill Nye the Science Guy
For those who are complaining about O’Reily, he has always been ignorant on global warming. He has idiotically repeated for years that he is against “pollution” not realizing the debate has nothing to do with pollution. His climate stance is almost as bad as his massive economic ignorance thinking “speculators” drive up the price of oil. Bill is scientifically and economically illiterate.
> I’ve always liked Bill O’Reilly, and found him both sensible & honest and
> entertaining. That’s why I was kind of surprised that he wasn’t a
> full-fledged climate skeptic
Bill has an entertaining show (usually) but what he knows about science could be written on the head of a pin with a blunt Sharpie. He had a “real scientist”on once, sorry I don’t recall his name, to rebut Intelligent Design. Bill changed the topic to abortion. Huh??? Somehow, Evolution science is a cause of abortion. Bill also like the “it’s only a theory” line to rebut evolution.
His apparent lack of science skill cause him to be influenced by the X out of the last Y years are the hottest on record argument. “Correlation is not causation” was not part of his education.
I completely agree about Bill. He would fail any science test I gave him at the middle school level.
Sean Peake (12:03:34) :
“… I think we should start a new game: Whack-a-Troll.”
Actually, Sean, it was more water-boarding that I had in mind, but Anthony and his moderators insist that we be civil and treat them as if they were sentient.
Pamela Gray: “Point #4. Come on people. To err is human but to grasp at straws is beneath us. On both sides of the debate. CO2er’s and Sun Worshippers need to check their science.”
To err is human…is a correct statement, Pamela.
I think you have erred here making a comparison to the “CO2er’s” and the so-called “Sun Worshippers.”
I know your position on the sun’s effect as a driver. I know Leifs (10% max.)
But as Stephen Wilde and Tallbloke and others in different ways and to different degrees, are trying to sniff out….perhaps the sun is a “driver behind the driver.”
The oceans are the primary driver. And that I think is what Bastardi is saying too. He makes his long-range forecasts based upon ENSO variations, the PDO, and the AMO…etc….and rightly so.
(Bastardi, with clairvoyant accuracy, forecasted this VERY winter for the US and Europe, way back in July 2009, when the CFS and the UKMet were way off base).
But when looking at secondary….or tertiary drivers….or “drivers behind the driver” so to speak….the jury is still out on the sun.
And so making this rhetorical (and unequal) comparison to the silliness of CO2 as a driver, to the thing that occupies much of the mass of the solar system….this is not a fair comparison.
Anyone that still listens to the scientists in the world (including the Russian ones who give much weight to Sol) is not a “Sun Worshipper” as you call them. Neither are “rogues” like Piers Corbyn or scientists like Nikola Scafetta.
They…(and many curious laypeople like myself)…we are all just trying to figure out the answers in areas of science and complexities of climate that, in our limited understanding and evolution, we have barely scratched the surface.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Bill Nye laughs off ClimateGate and worships the IPCC.
PUTZ!!
Luboš Motl (23:37:42) :
I think Bill OReilly is more concerned with ratings than picking a side right now. I think he doesn’t know how to present what he thinks of global warming so that it will only help his ratings. He is probably waiting it out to see what “the folks” are saying about global warming before he makes a clear statement one way or the other.
Bon mot! LMAO
All that’s needed is one of those signature Bob and Ray deadpan deliveries.
Bill Nye should change his knickname. For a “science guy” he was repeating all of the discredited information from Al Gore’s movie. For any scientist, as this stage of the game, to not want to step back and rethink CO2 as a pollutant, is just foolish.
It’s really tough for guys like Nye and Gore to give this thing up. I don’t know about Nye, but Gore was so close, so close, to becoming a very rich man, with his little carbon trading scheme, and now it’s all blown up to pieces.
I saw something that said Carbon Trading was worth $300 billion on the world market but, if the U.S. got in on it, it could easily go to $3-4 trillion. Does anyone wonder why the Democrats are so anxious to pass cap and tax? There’s money to be made and they want to be the ones making it.
Great effort Joe,
although I’m highly technical – and hence a long way from the average audience of the O’Reilley show, I thought you did quite well – at least at my level and NYE was Sesame Street grade.
Actually, I was wondering what Nye’s qualifications are – other than having some A.D.D. oriented version of Watch Mr Wizard on PBS.
also glad to see you dropped by here.
one thing I didn’t see early on the comments was the simple horrifying fact that the venus is about 200 earth days long – talking about that long hot afternoon.
Phil,
I’m back during a battle with the blue screen of death due to some driver problem. Anyway, of that 17,000 W/m^2, how much is in CO2’s narrow absorption band? 5%, 10%? So you’ve got less than 100 W/m^2 down from the sun, and… What keeps the surface hot?
Venus is a horrible case for the greenhouse effect because it’s so poorly lit down below. Fortunately, it’s interior isn’t nearly as hot as any of the gas giants that receive a trivial amount of sunlight, or a protostar that doesn’t receive any sunlight at all yet whose atmospheric temperatures get hot enough to ignite nuclear fusion reactions – all due to pressure. Ideal gas laws are way cool.
1DandyTroll (15:02:26) :
It appears you are appropriately named!
matt v. (15:46:39) :
PHIL
The temperature on the surface of Venus is extremely hot and unlikely to have winds .[Magellan Orbiter data] .I am referring to surface winds.
Which are not particularly relevant to the fact that the atmosphere does a complete circuit of the planet in 4 days (earth).
Pamela Gray
I disagree in substance but agree in general 😀 The oceans are chaotic compared to what? Jupiters Atmosphere? Depending on your frame of reference you could say the expanding and contracting magnetosphere of Earth is far more dramatic than a cyclone. It seems every mistake is made by putting us in the middle and assuming we have something to do with what surrounds us. We are a side show … a consequence/biproduct of chemistry … nothing more.
Greenhouse is an unfortunate name because I can find no information that shows the radiative effect by experiment empirically. It’s all BS. It would be better named the ‘Blanket Effect’ and we could discuss heat transfer between layers of fluid … Oceans, layers of Atmosphere, and finally space.
The Sun is extremely variable and our exposure to it while our Atmosphere’s constituents have remained relatively the same for over a Billion years. The Oceans moderate but they do not force. I think it was the other ocean zealot with the same surname that I admire who said his data ‘suggests’ the Oceans delay Solar Forcing by a decade give or take a couple years.
What I’m more interested in now are phenomena like the direct coupling of our atmosphere with the Sun’s atmosphere magnetically and electrically and the heat/energy transfer in those less understood phenomena. So far its been observed in the upper atmosphere in a couple of papers. I believe somewhere outside poorly measured light/radiation ‘energy’ is the key. I am also skeptical that present TSI measurements are ‘total’.
HAVE BEEN AN O’REILLY FAN FOR YEARS.
HE IS KNOWN TO BE A BELIEVER IN “GW”, BUT I’M NOT SURE WHAT HE THINKS ABOUT THE “A” PART.
I THINK HE WANTS THE WORLD TO BE LESS STINKY, AND THAT’S ABOUT IT
Pamela Gray (16:03:23) :
Point #1. Phil, Phil, Phil. Frozen ball? Hardly. Let me refer to that bastion of global warming articles known as Wiki. “Earth’s surface would be on average about 33 °C (59 °F) colder than at present…” without greenhouse gasses. Pick your current tropical hotspot and move there when the temps around 110 get dropped 59 degrees. It would be about right. At least for me. I can’t stand hot. Cold is better. But the Earth would not be a “frozen ball” without greenhouse gasses. It would depend on where you are and what angle the Sun is at. At least let’s be accurate.
At least think about what you’re saying, what would happen to the ocean (even in the tropics). Wiki leaves something to be desired as a scientific source, that temperature assumes that the albedo will remain at 0.30, a substantially ice covered earth would have a higher value and therefore a lower temperature. Also with no GHGs night-time radiational cooling would be rapid, you can freeze a bowl of water at night in the Sahara now.
Point #2. The correlation of temperature with oceanic/atmospheric cycles has been done so I don’t need to handwave.
What you said was: “To break the CO2 connection, I would post the correlation between CO2 and the atmospheric/oceanic coupling. The correlation will be dismal.”
Don’t forget to do the correlation with ln(CO2).
It would have been nice if Bill Nye would have been paying attention throughout.
Joe already showed the co2 correlation for both the last century and for the last decade as compared to the alternatives.
I noticed someone attributed a max. of 10% impact caused by the sun on the Earth system to Leif. I haven’t seen him make that statement. However, 10% coming in the form of cloud cover modulation would be quite substantial. Since EArth has about a 62% covering of clouds, their effect is quite dramatic, especially compared to the surface albedo of a planet with 70% ocean water. Breaking it down, one has 0.31 total albedo where 0.23 is cloud cover and 0.08 is all surface contribution including the poles and glaciers. Cloud albedo reflects around 78 w/m^2 so a 10% variation in cloud albedo is almost 8 W/m^2 in forcing – the equivalent of over 2 doublings of co2 even though it’s only around 2% of the incoming solar power.
Given the presence of a snowball earth or even a major ice age, the effect of reasonably fresh snow and ice glaciers totally changes the situation and regardless of the presence of clouds, the surface albedo is far higher and so the effects of the cloud albedo is much less. In warmer times such as now, the clouds form a feedback control system that tends to regulate temperatures. Lindzen has been looking at this sort of concept for some time. Of course, clouds have factors associated with their presence and formation that cause them to have some sensitivity to such things as cosmic rays, pollution, volcanic erruptions, etc. The cosmic ray tie in is what Svensbeck and the CLOUD experiment at CERN are about. Clouds are also highly affected by internal oscillations and the weather.
When one considers all the large variations in incoming (and outgoing) power associated with clouds and how unpredicatable they tend to be and then look at the pathetically small effect of what changes have occured so far due to co2 concentration and to how much annual variations of incoming power between NH summer versus SH summer it should be apparent there’s some serious fundamental problems with the co2 proponents. It’s either a religious cult or an unpopular political movement (unless it’s a combination of both).
Curious.
Phil. (22:02:22) :
And yet…
Phil. (08:19:41) :
Phil. (10:06:01) :
So even with the CO2 and methane blanketing the Earth, there is extreme radiational (radiative?) cooling at night in the Sahara. What gas does the atmosphere lack above the Sahara, as in the troposphere? Water vapor. Thus under the CO2 and methane “blanket” things get rather chilly at night, but with a water vapor blanket the heat is retained, smoothing out the daytime to nighttime temperature variations.
Which strongly suggests that CO2 and methane have very little effect with regards to heat retention. And even with these “permanent GHGs” it is still cold enough at night that water would condense out of the atmosphere and freeze if enough humidity was present near and at the surface.
Going further, soil likes to retain moisture. So in the morning, the frozen precipitation starts melting, and the portion that doesn’t change into vapor becomes liquid and soaks into the ground. The heat from sunlight only penetrates so far, so only so much heat is available to dry the soil out, and that heat has to warm the ground back up again from the previous night’s cold, which yields a period of time where liquid water can soak deep into the soil without enough heat to convert it to vapor. Thus over time there would be a reduction of moisture available above the ground, humidity would decline.
Thus on a dirt-ball Earth, without large bodies of liquid water to keep the atmosphere humid enough to retain heat and with nighttime freezing temperatures as found in the Sahara, the atmosphere would dry out to some minimum level as water is retained in the soil under the surface, and with the axial tilt yielding seasons with freezing temperatures during the daytime you would get frozen ground and permafrost in the more polar latitudes, and an equatorial zone where there are freezing temperatures at night, like the Sahara.
I suppose you could talk about a CO2 and methane “blanket” retaining heat and keeping the Earth warm. Likewise there are those who may call a sheet of taffeta a blanket. Good luck staying warm with either at night.
I believe Leif has given us the calculation for the Sun’s variant properties on Earth’s temperature trends and it is much less than 10%.
Phil, when I look at the correlation of CO2 to temperature I work only with the anthropogenic CO2, not natural sourced CO2. It makes no sense to correlate all CO2 with temperature change if the focus of the study is on anthropogenic emissions causing the planet to heat up. If one were to correlate naturally occurring CO2 and temps you would discover a lag with temps leading CO2. Warmer is better for specie survival in the animal and plant growth zones (which would exclude the poles and other low growth environs). CO2 will naturally rise as this lush growth cyclically decays.
So lets focus here. In what “scientific” circle have you been around that says the temperature trend of the last century has been due to manmade CO2 emissions? You already know that the correlation between ALL CO2 and temperature trend is FAR down the list (so anthropogenic CO2 emissions would be even LESS), but oceanic oscillations are nearly 1 to 1 with temperature anomaly. What part of this high school statistics discussion escapes you?
The null hypothesis is confirmed over and over again. Total CO2 is not the leading correlation of temperature variance. And anthropogenic correlations aren’t even 50/50.
No canals? Nothing for Jim and Frank to skate back home on, to warn the colonists about the evil Beecher? Probably no Willis, either (the most engaging extra-terrestrial critter ever reported—I won’t say ‘imagined’).
Wonderful though Viking and Spirit and Opportunity have been, the reality of Mars was something of a disappointment to those of us who had been brung up on Heinlein’s Red Planet.
And Venus, too, for that matter—remember all the stories about the steaming hot jungles of the second planet?
But I must say, two great posts, Pouncer, reminding us of the fervent history of egregious science. Print this out, everyone, and put it on your office doors:
/Mr Lynn
I don’t think it’s productive to try to attack Bill Nye as clueless or a “junk science” guy. He has done his fair share of real science folks. He is, however, compulsive-obsessive about AGW and has demonstrated it repeatedly. If you want to criticize him, point out that for a “science guy” to constantly fall back on emotional rather than scientific arguments shows there’s something lacking in the science.
His near-religious exhortations on AGW really annoyed me at the US Space Symposium’s Space Technology Hall of Fame dinner last year. The question in my mind is whether he’s falling back on simplistic emotional arguments because he’s so accustomed to dealing with science novices on TV now or is it because he inherently understands the problems with tree ring proxies and data manipulation but he’s emotionally wedded to being part of “saving the planet”?
Taking a cold hard scientific approach to the facts and the data isn’t as impressive in a 30 second sound bite but I think it’s starting to sink in with the public — and the public can also tell (eventually) when they’re getting pulled by emotional rhetoric. I’d advise skeptics just keep telling the facts calmly, keep it unemotional, and watch the circus as the AGW proponents go frantic trying to tell us Black is White and Right is Left.
‘Warmists scream “weather is not climate!”. We need to shout back “Venus is not Earth!” ‘
That cracked me up. Great one.
“in whose best interest is denial?”
Those would be the people living in 3rd world countries who need the energy from cheap fossil fuels in order to stay alive and slowly become more productive and improve their economic status. “Warmers” would deny these people a key asset (cheap energy) they require and consign them to shorter, harsher lives.
How’s that for a “save the kids” style response?
[snip – OTT personal]
Pamela Gray (06:51:21) :
I believe Leif has given us the calculation for the Sun’s variant properties on Earth’s temperature trends and it is much less than 10%
Yes, Lief. Yes, the Hale Cycle does not directly correlate with very much but that is a ruse for us ‘sun worshipers’ when any hobbyist can get the data for the entire sunspot cycle and then take any temperature record because over that period of time the fudging over the last 30+ years (with land based measurements) is irrelevant … and behold you get a correlation just like that, I believe, Lindzen has cited of 0.97 (give or take a few). The Maunder Minimum, Dalton Minimum, Modern Maximum, Gleissberg Minimum … all show up in the temperature record. Also, unlike the Goracles simplistic analysis, the causal relationship squares with the time stamp.
For every Lief, there are 10 Willie Soon’s who argue its all about the sun.
With all the complicated internal systems on Earth and all the energy transfer mechanisms we are just starting to understand, the time frame I’m using is, I think, a better gauge of the signature of the relationship.
If you go over paleo lengths of time, past the Milankovitch cycle, the relationship to the Sun to proxy evidence of surface temperatures is muddied as well. You can still find those who argue for solar forcing with other factors such as continental drift, et cetera.
Nye is a big wheel in CSICOP (now CSI), a group that has an emotional need for an essentially infallible process to replace religion and keep the superstitious, irrational rubes in their place. It’s found it in “scientific method,” peer review, and the consensus of scientists. The idea that their emperor might be naked or that a rude rube could rightfully call him out would turn their experts-on-top world-view upside down. That’s what’s bugging him.
Mark T (07:01:08) :
This world is so mixed up when Republicans (who claim theyre just objective journalists) are presenting the counter side to an important debate which offsets the attempt at malevolent mass mind control of the population..
O’Reilly claims no such thing. He is intentionally on Fox to offer an opinion.
Mark
O’Reilly claims when he presents the ‘news’ he does it objectively and that they have no agenda to push. I’ve seen him say it so many times or things to that effect (when I used to watch it a lot). However, the selection of ‘news’ articles, the concoction of fake news, yes they produce the reality to many stories, and the omission of the entire story is what makes Fox an agenda driven organisation. It’s clearly intentional when it occurs to such an extent to work the interests of a Republican view point. The interviews with Palin as opposed to Obama made me want to wretch when I saw them. Anyone who can’t see the difference, just can’t see the difference. But I wonder why that is?
Also, I don’t like Obama he let down the people when he had the chance to do a lot.. and yes he damn well did have the chance e.g. public option. MSNBC enjoy painting pictures and sticking with it as well. There’s no ‘maybe we are wrong’ in any tone of any of the networks.
Mark I didn’t claim
Nice hair dye job there, Science Guy.
Bastardi did a good job but he didn’t go far enough in refuting the Science Watermelon Guy.
Consider, in Science Guy’s demo of ink and water – he showed water with 280 PPM of ink and 380 PPM of ink – “See there, the coloration is perceptible.”
The ink is absorbing about 95% of visible light in water, and the amount of absorption of CO2 in the near IR that contributes to a “greenhouse effect” is (not even 10%. Call it 10%, then the EQUIVALENT AMOUNT of dye to be added to the water to make the comparison accurate isn’t 100 PPM it is 10 PPM.
The accuracy of Science Watermelon’s dilution technique was probably 10 PPM of dye
All of Science Watermelon’s logic was as refutable as that
Marvin (17:28:55) :
If story omission makes a network agenda driven then ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and MSNBC are all agenda driven as well. I love how people think there is some objective non-biased news source. All the networks except FOX are left wing biased. FOX is no more right-wing biased then the rest are left-wing biased. I don’t have a problem with O’Reilly because he is right-wing (he is a social conservative – I’m not) but because he doesn’t understand free-market economics or science. The Republican party is full of fiscal conservatives and libertarians who are in no way represented by O’Reilly but rather people like John Stossel on FOX Business (formerly on ABC and 20/20).
Nothing is funnier then the clueless who voted for our current unqualified empty-suit president and are now having voters remorse. What did he have the chance to do? Increase government to astronomical sizes? Spend us into oblivion? You got your “change”, big government change. Now his EPA wants to take a wrecking ball to the economy via CO2 regulations. Thanks Obama supporters! Thanks a lot!
That’s what the Obama Hope Change Green Job crowd THINKS, Marvin, but they aren’t going to get there.
It’s not just the “buyer’s remorse” crowd who is turning against this flea bag – it’s everybody, people can see that this hope change windmills solar panels forced no choice health care give the country away to the Communists because they hate America program is going to total the country even before his four years are up.
He’s going down the drain fast, and he’s not taking the rest of the country with him
“Derek H (07:04:09) :
I don’t think it’s productive to try to attack Bill Nye as clueless or a “junk science” guy. He has done his fair share of real science folks. He is, however, compulsive-obsessive about AGW and has demonstrated it repeatedly
”
I’m sorry, I must’ve missed something. what real science was that? I hope you’re not talking about that pbs program for kids with ADD.
Pamela Gray (06:51:21) : “I believe Leif has given us the calculation for the Sun’s variant properties on Earth’s temperature trends and it is much less than 10%.”
He admitted that on here one time many blogs ago, as the greatest possible percentage….while implying that the actual percentage was much lower.
I have sent Leif an email with the question and will report back if my recollection is in error.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Bill Nye was good enough to take the time to read the questions at one DOE Science Bowl competition.
He stumbled over the pronunciation of words as common as “mitochondria,” and when challenged by any of the HS students about anything, he was as clueless as a cow in front of a new gate, he had to leave every last bit of controversy to others to take care of.
Admittedly, few of the Science Bowl questions were particularly easy – they were probably at the level of second-year college science major, but as far as being the Science Guy goes, he is, as far as I can discern, anybody’s fool.
Pamela Gray (06:51:21) : “I believe Leif has given us the calculation for the Sun’s variant properties on Earth’s temperature trends and it is much less than 10%.”
I emailed Leif and this is his response:
LEIF [Begin Quote]
“I have two answers:
1: variations in TSI would amount to no more than 0.1 K, which is
0.1/288 as a fraction
2. Correlations between solar activity and observed temperatures show
that no more than 10% of the observed changes in T are due to the Sun.
There is NO DOUBT that the Sun has an influence. There is also NO
DOUBT [at least in my mind] that it is minor.The very fact that this is discussed shows how insignificant the influence is. If it was clear, big, and glaring, and the MAJOR driver,it would so clear that no discussion is needed.”
[End quote.]
He is always good like that about responding!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
The Royal Danish Observatory demonstrated, to an error in 1 part in 10, that ALL apparently anomalous warming between the years 1978-2000 were the result of solar variation.
It’s not just the solar output, gang, it’s the apparent incidence too.
savethesharks (19:40:15)
2. Correlations between solar activity and observed temperatures show
that no more than 10% of the observed changes in T are due to the Sun.
Thanks for getting that.
I found the article I referred to earlier and erred in that it largely refers to Lindzen (and not his) but is by Richard Sanford (written in 1992, Global Warming All Smoke and no Heat). In tracking this down I discovered Lindzen apparently leans toward Liefs view but he has co-authored a paper linking solar activity cycles to atmospheric cycles and in a video I watched of him he says something to the effect that the climate does not vary significantly in temperature over the geological record … another perspective/reference. The paper referred to in the article I referred to, looking at solar activities link to earth was “Length of the Solar Cycle: An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated With Climate, Science, 1991 … E. FRIIS-CHRISTENSEN and K. LASSEN”.
After reading Lief’s quote again and reminding myself of a promise to myself to stop obsessing with this subject, the nuance/detail of this discussion is getting tiring. The only outlier here is Bill Nye, the ‘pop-religion’ Guy.
Outside of that it looks like Lief would even expect a Solar Grand Minimum to have an effect on conditions here, however significant you deem it or how you’d measure it … that is for all those who have the time and resources to pick over the crumbs of data and quibble about it.
In general though, I’ll stick with the Sun. The Space Weather articles on WUWT are becoming more interesting and the observations dealing with the Solar System moving through the galaxy et cetera simply are more fun. The AGW zombie is losing coherence and discussions of climate like Bastardi implies are sometimes best left in the ‘Farmer’s Almanac’ perspective (an art). Weather is not Climate and we haven’t a clue about Climate, but I can still chear for the Solar System Barycenter Forcing model for Gleissberg period variations.
Unfortunately, the time devoted to these types of “debates” by all of the networks is so short that it is bound to produce strange arguments and mistakes. But the Venus canard played by Bill Nye, along with the absurd logical errors littered throughout his presentation, takes the cake for me.
It is a sad day to see Bill Nye become this little pompous, arrogant fool, because my son and I used to watch “The Science Guy” when he was starting school, and it was very informative and entertaining. Nye is neither of those now.
len (22:24:10) :
savethesharks (19:40:15)
2. Correlations between solar activity and observed temperatures show
that no more than 10% of the observed changes in T are due to the Sun.
Thanks for getting that.
I found the article I referred to earlier and erred in that it largely refers to Lindzen (and not his) but is by Richard Sanford (written in 1992, Global Warming All Smoke and no Heat). In tracking this down I discovered Lindzen apparently leans toward Liefs view but he has co-authored a paper linking solar activity cycles to atmospheric cycles and in a video I watched of him he says something to the effect that the climate does not vary significantly in temperature over the geological record … another perspective/reference. The paper referred to in the article I referred to, looking at solar activities link to earth was “Length of the Solar Cycle: An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated With Climate, Science, 1991 … E. FRIIS-CHRISTENSEN and K. LASSEN”.
Unfortunately that paper contains an error in the plotting of the data such that the correlation between cycle length and T is greatly overstated.
The clouds near the Venusian surface (the reason why the Venusian surface is invisible from a height of about 10m or greater) are composed of nearly pure sulfuric acid, the clouds are continuously formed by the condensation of sulfur trioxide in water vapor, the solution heat alone of sulfur trioxide in water is hundreds of kJ per gm mol; obviously this solution heat is contributing a substantial amount of heat to the Venusian lower atmosphere
“No it isn’t!” howls Ray Pierrehumbert
[um, Ray, we like, can’t even SEE Venus because of the sulfuric acid and you’re telling us to ignore the sulfuric acid clouds?]
His bow tie has become, to me, symbolic of junk science; all junk science ought to be packaged and tied with a Bow Tie
Pamela Gray (06:51:21) :
Phil, when I look at the correlation of CO2 to temperature I work only with the anthropogenic CO2, not natural sourced CO2. It makes no sense to correlate all CO2 with temperature change if the focus of the study is on anthropogenic emissions causing the planet to heat up. If one were to correlate naturally occurring CO2 and temps you would discover a lag with temps leading CO2. Warmer is better for specie survival in the animal and plant growth zones (which would exclude the poles and other low growth environs). CO2 will naturally rise as this lush growth cyclically decays.
You mean this imaginary correlation which you keep talking about but avoid giving any reference to? How can you possibly correlate with anything but total CO2 when thr effect is nonlinear?
So lets focus here. In what “scientific” circle have you been around that says the temperature trend of the last century has been due to manmade CO2 emissions? You already know that the correlation between ALL CO2 and temperature trend is FAR down the list (so anthropogenic CO2 emissions would be even LESS), but oceanic oscillations are nearly 1 to 1 with temperature anomaly. What part of this high school statistics discussion escapes you?
I know no such thing, support your handwaving with data and references.
Phil:
If you follow the analysis of Michael Beenstock, et al. (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/14/new-paper-on/) or my less sophisticated version of the same thing (http://www.2bc3.com/warming.html), you will see that the temperature increase correlates to the rate of increase of CO2, not the level of CO2. This is certainly non-linear, but the contribution of natural sourced CO2 would be zero, since it isn’t changing.
If you could figure out the feedback mechanism that makes the CO2 contribution temporary, you would be making a real contribution.
Brian G Valentine (05:54:55) :
The clouds near the Venusian surface (the reason why the Venusian surface is invisible from a height of about 10m or greater) are composed of nearly pure sulfuric acid, the clouds are continuously formed by the condensation of sulfur trioxide in water vapor, the solution heat alone of sulfur trioxide in water is hundreds of kJ per gm mol; obviously this solution heat is contributing a substantial amount of heat to the Venusian lower atmosphere
“No it isn’t!” howls Ray Pierrehumbert
[um, Ray, we like, can’t even SEE Venus because of the sulfuric acid and you’re telling us to ignore the sulfuric acid clouds?]
He’s probably objecting to the SO3 dissolving in water bit. The cloud droplets (particularly in the lower and mid troposphere) are composed of almost pure H2SO4, not SO3 dissolving in water. H2SO4 vapor condenses to form the clouds (latent heat ~50kJ/mol), any water would be H2O dissolved in H2SO4.
Hunh?
Sulfuric acid forms in one way ONLY, and that is from SO3 combining with water vapor, the heat of that reaction (which is a “heat of solution” if you want to call it that) is immense – haven’t been in a college chem lab? You can boil water that way
The vapor condenses to form droplets, evidently resulting from particulate impurities in the atmosphere because, the vp of sulfuric acid (enhanced by drop curvature) exceeds the ambient atm pressure at the T of the atmosphere
A more interesting question is, what catalyzes SO2 oxidation to SO3 …
oh skip it
Suffice to say, all that “feedback” crud from CO2 in the Venusian atmosphere is just that, total crud.
And you can take that right to the bank, Lon!
Anthony – I meant to address Phil, not Lon
@ gkai (06:07:31)
Many of the readers and moderators at Slashdot are young and have little real-world experience outside of game programming and software. There are some voices of sanity there but they generally tend to get voted down via groupthink.
Nye obviously has a couple of coaches for his “science” talks about global warming, I wonder who they are.
Whoever they are, they are not very effective, leaving a rather unprepared Nye an easy target; Science Guy’s handlers must have a low budget for his “coaches.”
Not that his “coaches” have A-1 grade material to coach, either, and the “coaches” must be well aware of that; they probably don’t give their 100% effort into the end product, either.
Brian G Valentine (13:08:03) :
Hunh?
Sulfuric acid forms in one way ONLY, and that is from SO3 combining with water vapor, the heat of that reaction (which is a “heat of solution” if you want to call it that)
Actually I don’t, we’re talking about the formation in a solution of supercritical CO2 at pressures up to 90 bar and temperatures up to 740K!
When hot sulphuric acid rises due to convection eventually it reaches a temperature and pressure where it condenses to form a cloud of H2SO4 droplets, it does not dissolve in liquid droplets so any heat release would be due to the latent heat of vaporization not solution.
haven’t been in a college chem lab? You can boil water that way
Been in one, taught in one, researched in one! You certainly can boil water that way (dangerously), which is why you should always add the acid to the water rather than v.v., but we’re talking about the formation in the gas phase not in aqueous solution.
I truly enjoyed Bastardi’s arguments against Nye in this piece, because contrary to what the latter espoused in simply regurgitating the same old IPCC/NOAA mantra, the former actually manages to bring forth and highlight fresh research and lesser known yet well established data-sets. Mr. Bastardi never falters within this debate, not only due to his ability to keep a seemingly locked chest full of fresh graphs and data from which he can choose appropriate pieces at any given moment, but also through his amazingly professional and well versed understanding of our atmospheric dynamics.
Mr. Bastardi wasn’t exaggerating in regard to the accurate U.S. Winter projection from July of 2009 either, and his point was extremely poignant in posing the question: “How did I do that?”. As he stated in certain terms, he simply understands atmospheric science. Such in-depth understandings are what set him (As well as others) apart from the AGW theory proponents (I can also directly attest to the fact that when some in my area where concerned during our dry January this year, that we might never see anymore snow this Winter, Bastardi directly responded with a forecast about certain time-frames in February, and he said that we would be getting slammed. Sure enough, when February rolled around, we in the Washington, D.C. area were hit with the snowstorm equivalents of a proper carpet bombing campaign).
Mr. Nye was fun to watch as I grew up in elementary school, and he seemed extremely interesting in capturing childrens’ attention towards science and such, but sadly he is now nothing more than a broken record when speaking upon the AGW issue (Not to mention his comment which dared to question the Patriotism of our “Greatest Generation” to say the least, which in my view, took away any shred of respectability he might have still possessed).
The reaction
SO3 + H2O -> H2SO4
could be taking place only in the vapor phase, and evidently the particles upon which the droplets condense are the catalysts for the oxidation of SO2 to SO3, my guess is vanadate, which is oxidized at the surface.
Anyway have a wonderful week, Phil!
bgvalentine@verizon.net
Brian G Valentine (13:08:03) :
Hunh?
…
Suffice to say, all that “feedback” crud from CO2 in the Venusian atmosphere is just that, total crud.
And you can take that right to the bank, Lon!
Gracious, how did my model for CO2 heating get moved from the earth to Venus? I gather you didn’t look at it: http://www.2bc3.com/warming.html.
I would be glad to hear your comments.
I referred to the wrong person Lon
I sincerely apologize for my error or any confusion
Phil, I hope you understand that I believe CO2 is a greenhouse gas and is partly responsible for keeping us warm. I also know how it functions as a greenhouse gas though probably not as well as you do. Before I go get my links (and I do have them) regarding possible correlations between CO2 and the warming trend, do you have a good paper that demonstrates that the rise in CO2 is responsible for the rising temp trend? Mine is a 2008 paper (thanks Leif) and says it is responsible for some of it (it does not include data past 2006).
I also use climate4you for most of my personal study of the issue because it is so handy to have it all updated and on one website. I also appreciate the fact that the data is simply graphed. No fancy codes for the most part unless the data came that way.
Brian G Valentine (17:20:45) :
The reaction
SO3 + H2O -> H2SO4
could be taking place only in the vapor phase,
I would expect so since there’s no liquid H2O in that part of the atmosphere.It should be an equilibrium in the gas phase:
SO3 + H2O ⇋ H2SO4
which by Le Chatelier’s principle would heavily favor H2SO4 at the high pressures involved (I’m sure the K is known in the combustion literature)
The papers I have read say that it’s H2SO4 that condenses to form the clouds and those drops are 95%+ H2SO4. Any vapor phase H2O around would be absorbed on the drop.
and evidently the particles upon which the droplets condense are the catalysts for the oxidation of SO2 to SO3, my guess is vanadate, which is oxidized at the surface.
Those papers imply that this has happened elsewhere, but as you say there’s a good chance that this is a heterogeneous reaction, many candidates for the catalyst I’d think.
Anyway have a wonderful week, Phil!
You too, I’m going to be competing in a track meet so it should be fun.
What, may I ask, is the basis of your belief that CO2 in the air is “partly responsible for keeping us warm,” Pamela?
Have you any evidence other than some others evidently told you so?
Or can be calculated to be so?
There are radiant exchange models which do show that CO2 in and of itself, can result in 1.2 deg C of “warming” in the atmosphere. That of course is within the range of natural variability of the natural climate and so could never be discerned within any (decade or more) period and is why there is no geological record that can be discerned.
With but the slightest adjustment of radiant exchange calculation, the contribution of CO2 to atmospheric temperatures is zero.
People seem to prefer a positive value only because it coincides with their intuition.
In either case the contribution is not measurable to date, I have written at length how it could be discerned, it is more convenient for people to assume it than it is to demonstrate it
At the T and P of the Venusian surface and calculating the fugacities of the vapor phase components (at this T and P these are not ideal gases) I calculate
ln (K_phi) = 10.3 per gm mol of H2SO4
=> the equilibrium ratio of the mol fractions of the components is exp(10.3) in favor of H2SO4
That is to say, the reaction to H2SO4 is complete (gotta be, if you think about it)
Brian G Valentine (20:57:53) :
At the T and P of the Venusian surface and calculating the fugacities of the vapor phase components (at this T and P these are not ideal gases) I calculate
ln (K_phi) = 10.3 per gm mol of H2SO4
=> the equilibrium ratio of the mol fractions of the components is exp(10.3) in favor of H2SO4
That is to say, the reaction to H2SO4 is complete (gotta be, if you think about it)
Sure, at the surface, but I’d expect that the reaction might take place high in the atmosphere where there is more H2O, so H2O, H2SO4 and SO3 coexist. When circulation to lower altitudes takes place the equilibrium will shift to H2SO4, the Wiki article suggests that dissociation takes place at low altitude but I think high pressure would preclude this (as your calc shows).
Wik-a-wiki-wiki-wiki-wa-ka-ki … dat’s jes’ ’bout ’nuff o’ dat dere Wiki.
On a less circular topic here are some Interesting fun facts:
m Venus=0.185 m of Earth
ave. density Venus = 4.9, Earth = 5.52 g/cc
surprisingly though
g Venus=0.86 and g of Earth
escape velocity Venus=10.3, escape velocity Earth=11.1 km/s
Trick question: Why then is the atmospheric pressure of Venus so high near the surface?
In this interview, I agree with others here who have said that Bill Nye brought up the real ‘red herring’ issue when he mentioned the carbon dioxide atmosphere of the planet Venus. He seems to be using the logic says Venus is hot and Venus has a carbon dioxide atmosphere, so carbon dioxide must be the planet heater.
From a zetetic point of view, I have never seen convincing evidence presented that proved CO2 alone was primarily responsible for the deadly high surface temperatures on Venus.
That’s because none exists. It’s interesting that Venus’s rotational period is just a bit longer than Venus’s sidereal year, and the rotation is retrograde.
I had the following rather interesting discussion with Eli Rabbit some while ago:
I noted that Mars, with an atmosphere nearly 100% CO2 at about 2-5 mm Hg pressure, had a diurnal surface temperature difference of nearly 250 K (maximum).
Eli: “That would be expected, given a surface of iron oxide with a heat capacity of about clay dust, the atmospheric pressure, and the diameter of Mars.”
Me: So you agree with me, then, there is no “greenhouse” effect on Mars.
Eli: [no response at all]
I note that Bill Nye got away with a dismissive comment about Climategate in this interview. I suggest that Joe forward a copy of the recent IOP statement on Climategate to Bill O’Reilly as I believe that Bill tends to respect official statements of this type.
What’s really hilarious is that people think that they can learn anything from 2 minute “debates” like this. Read science journals if you want to know about science. There is very little controversy among those who actually study climate and understand it. The earth is definitely getting warmer, and although some of the cause is natural climate cycles, there are clear anthropogenic causes as well.
Yes, please read science journals,
500 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of “Man-Made” Global Warming
You will find extensive controversy.