On certainty: Truth is the Daughter of Time

will be hard to warm in a cold pdo which is not a nino friendly. In addition warm AMO is about to run its course ( within 10 yrs) would suggest reading Dr Bill Gray ideas on the thermohaline circulation and where we are about to go. He correctly forecasted the flip in the PDO and by 2020, the AMO should turn too. I am forecasting cooling and have been since 06 , back to levels as measured by satellites, of the 70s by 2030. I am in complete agreement with the idea that the more you study the majesty of the planet, you realize how little we are, or have to do with it

Joe – yes; all this farrago regarding CAGW simply demonstrates the extraordinary hubris of the warmes, to think that we really affect this globe that much.

Dr Brown writes:
quote
I suspect that nothing we can do will have any meaningful effect on the process, just as I don’t think that we have had any profound warming influence on the Earth so far.
unquote
With all due respect to your greater knowledge, I suspect we could, can and may be so doing. We are spreading enough light oil onto the ocean surface each year to cover it completely approximately every fortnight. I have seen oil smooths snaking out to the horizon from Tenerife, seen a smooth covering tens of thousands of square miles off Portugal, seen the Med covered from end to end. Oil smooths warm the sea surface by reducing albedo, lowering emissivity, reducing mechanical mixing, starving plankton to lower DMS production, reduce aerosol production by breaking waves, lower turbulence and thereby reduce stratocumulus formation and reduce evaporation.
Google Tom Wigley and ‘why the blip?’. Google Benjamin Franklin and Clapham pond.
The north Siberian coast has enough light oil coming down its rivers to equal an Exxon Valdez every five weeks — add in the North Slope and I’ll bet that means the Arctic seas are covered completely. Perhaps that’s why their warming is anomalously high.
Anyway… All you need to do carry on polluting the ocean surface. That’ll do.
JF

@Joe, cooling? Isn’t that always because of global warming? 😉

And there you have it.
Bravo!

@Julian Flood
Ever hear of bacteria? Oil is biodegradable.
That’s why the Gulf of Mexico didn’t end up the catastrophe that some predicted. Yes, a lot of oil goes into the oceans both naturally and from human activities; but a lot of oil is consumed by bacteria as well.

And this is what the alarmists never seem to get:
“The fundamental issue is this. We have some thirty three years of halfway decent climate data — perhaps twice that if you are very generous — which is the blink of an eye in the chaotic climate system that is the Earth.” —- RGB@Duke
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” —- Mark Twain

Just a couple of corrections are needed in this post:
1. It’s pretty well established that the closing of the Central American isthmus initiated the Pleistocene glaciation cycles by diverting oceanic circulation patterns.
2. The Milankovich theory is quiet well-proven and is quantitatively predictive. Various other influences may affect the timing a bit — such as the lag effect of ice on the continents having to melt away before temperatures increase — but the orbital parameters that control insolation are dominant.

Julian Flood says:
December 3, 2012 at 11:32 am
Julian, you need to pay less attention to doom-prophesying “authorities” and more to basic science, in this case geology. The volume of oil seeping from natural sources sources is far greater than human linked “catastrophes.” Studies in the Gulf have imaged steady minor seeps over square miles. The Exxon Valdiz in Alaska and more recent events in the Gulf of Mexico are geographically focused – point locations – that magnify the apparent seriousness of the events. In reality, a small fraction of the oil you would pick up walking on a beach in the Gulf, the beaches of Central Africa, the Arctic, or California, or any of a dozen other places is the result of human activity. Just like water, oil seeps to the surface – la Brea in L.A. for instance, or the asphalt “volcanoes” in the channel off southern California. The asphaltum used prehistorically by the Egyptians, the Chinese, the indians of the southern California deserts, and in many other parts of the world was from natural seeps as well. Tanker spills and plumes from failing wells are are dramatic and can be very hard on wild life, but even there you want to look at the fossil count from la Brea before assuming to much about the influence of humanity on the environment.
Pollution is a serious problem, but we really need to know the magnitude of our own outputs, before we can do something useful about them. It is a profound mistake to simply conclude that nature would be benign if only people were tidier. It is simply not true and makes a secular “original sin” assumption that is logically and empirically unsupported.

With all due respect to your greater knowledge, I suspect we could, can and may be so doing. We are spreading enough light oil onto the ocean surface each year to cover it completely approximately every fortnight.
Let’s look at this closely, shall we? And let’s use arithmetic in the form of a “Fermi Estimate”, not words. The surface area of the ocean is square meters (four hundred trillion square meters). In order to cover with oil at a depth of 1 millimeter one time would require roughly 360 billion metric tons of oil. The complete annual production of oil worldwide is currently around 30 billion barrels of oil, and it takes roughly seven barrels of oil to produce a metric ton. That is, the complete annual production of oil is around 4 billion metric tons. This would make a layer approximately ten microns thick, if you could get it all into the ocean at once.
Of course, we don’t do any such thing. Oil on the ocean is wasted oil, and we want to use it. I would cheerfully estimate that we don’t lose one hundredth of one percent of all the oil mined into the ocean in a year. In that case it would make a layer one nanometer — two or three molecules — thick. Once. Out of a whole year’s oil production, assuming what is in all frankness probably an egregiously high estimate of waste.
On a fortnightly basis divide by 26. We spread a layer one whole molecule thick roughly once ever ten fortnights, call it four months.
This still doesn’t do your assertion full justice. “Oil” is a heterogeneous mixture of hydrocarbons. Some of them are volatile and almost immediately evaporate. Others are dense and sink. All of them are quite tasty to a number of things that live in the ocean. While I am quite certain that there are places where oil slicks both natural and manmade can be seen on the ocean, there is no possible way that those slicks would ever actually cover the ocean because they would be eaten, oxidized, evaporated, and sink faster than they could ever spread. At no time could they cover even a significant fraction of the ocean’s surface area. That, as noted above, is enormous.
So I must regretfully state that unless I have made an egregious error in my arithmetic above — always possible — your statement is an absurd number of orders of magnitude away from being anything like truth. I spend my summers in boats, fishing off of the North Carolina coast outside of its busiest harbor. I have yet to see one oil slick, or even a single extended patch of oil on the surface, even in the harbors. I have also read papers that suggest that the oil dumped into the Gulf in its disaster was eaten at many times the rate anticipated beforehand, so that nature actually cleaned it up at an astounding rate, and that really was a well dumping enormous amounts of oil directly into the ocean (but tiny amounts compared to its surface area for all of that).
I suggest that you change your primary sources away from ones that not only lie to you, but lie to you in a way that insults your intelligence and ability to do arithmetic. I also humbly suggest that if you have posted this misinformation elsewhere, you consider the damage this sort of nonsense does to everybody’s ability to hold a rational conversation on the subject. I would expect the “coverage of the ocean with oil” to be an utterly negligible effect compared to the direct greenhouse effect of the volatiles and natural gas released when oil is pumped plus the greenhouse effect of the burned oil in the form of CO_2. Those positive warming effects might well be partially balanced by particulates that could have either warming or cooling effects and aerosols that are mostly cooling. In other words, there is literally no point even mentioning it, which is why nobody ever does and they are completely ignored in all global climate models.
Try again.
rgb
rgb

For the last fifteen years there has been no warming- absolutely none. So why do you say “continue”?
Because looking at any fifteen year interval as representative of a trend in climate science is so utterly absurd as to beggar description. On both sides. Frankly, 33 years is little better. I’m extrapolating the rise out of the LIA to have at least a century or three in my baseline, and of course that is arguably not terribly meaningful as well. I’m also hedging my bet with the belief that the GHE actually exists and is unlikely to have actively negative feedback; with CO_2 based GHE only one expects roughly 0.1 C/decade of warming, assuming CO_2 levels continue to rise.
This latter is actually the null hypothesis of the entire discussion! Given ignorance about net feedback, the assumption of zero feedback is the best one can do. Climate scientists believe in their positive feedback models enough to bump this to 0.2 to 0.3 C/decade; I do not. That doesn’t mean that I believe the data suggests negative feedback (reliably) either!
rgb

Dr Brown:
“My own prediction for the climate is this. We will probably continue to experience mild warming for another ten to twenty years-”
mpainter says:
December 3, 2012 at 11:46 am;
For the last fifteen years there has been no warming- absolutely none. So why do you say “continue”?
Yes, why?

@ Julian Flood:
The main statement of the post is a humble admission that, very little known about physics of the Earth climate and therefore any reliable prediction is impossible. Unfortunately very few educated people and even fewer scientists admit (or realize) that “science” isn’t omnipotent. Not surprising, since increasingly the “tabloid science” dominates the scene for the reasons of ease of obtaining funding and higher entertainment value. And thus, the “tabloid scientists” entertain/scary public and overwhelm funding sources by showing that their peer-reviewed “science” publications undoubtedly show that “oil smooths warm the sea surface by reducing albedo, lowering emissivity, reducing mechanical mixing… lower turbulence and thereby reduce stratocumulus formation and reduce evaporation.” In the midst of all this confusion neither public nor program managers notice that “reducing albedo” is opposite to “lowering emissivity”… In midst of this confusion examining and questioning the accuracy of these research becomes next to impossible, especially after energized and vocal consumers of “tabloid science” weigh in. Please stop drinking kool-aid, go start business, do something usefull.

Just a couple of corrections are needed in this post:
1. It’s pretty well established that the closing of the Central American isthmus initiated the Pleistocene glaciation cycles by diverting oceanic circulation patterns.
2. The Milankovich theory is quiet well-proven and is quantitatively predictive. Various other influences may affect the timing a bit — such as the lag effect of ice on the continents having to melt away before temperatures increase — but the orbital parameters that control insolation are dominant.
I won’t argue with either of these — although I think that I could. Not so much with the hypotheses, but with the degree to which the evidence “proves” them, especially without controlling for other possible factors. For example, I’ve read theories suggesting that the upthrust of the Himalayas exposing large amounts of rock that subsequently weathered and absorbed CO_2 was also a factor, or responsible, depending on whether or not you want CO_2 to be the sole meaningful driver of going in and out of ice ages on a geological time scale. I don’t think that is “proven” either. I think it is really pretty difficult to prove what happened between 50 and 3.5 million years ago to gradually drop temperatures to where orbital variations seemed rather “suddenly” capable of modulating glacial/interglacial cycles. I also think — and several of my climate scientist friends seem to think — that it is difficult to quantitatively predict or understand why the cycles went from 20-26 thousand years (axial precession) to 40 thousand to 100 thousand years, and why the last half million years have been 90 thousand (or so) of glaciation followed by 10 thousand (or so) of interglacial.
Milankovich works qualitatively well, or even semi-quantitatively well in that it gives us a nice heuristic explanation for the primary fourier components in the pliestocene thermal record as determined by proxy, but it is completely useless as a predictive tool capable of telling us what the temperature outside “should” be right now with or without CO_2. It cannot explain the particular date the Wisconsin glaciation started to end. It cannot explain the Younger Dryas. It cannot explain the several deep dips in global temperature visible in the proxy based thermal record of the Holocene (although it may give us some insight into the Holocene Optimum and general slow reduction of temperature that followed ignoring the fluctuations). It cannot explain the MWP or the LIA. It does not explain why the world warmed again after the LIA or was warming on its own at least up to where CO_2 entered the picture as a possible factor.
Without a quantitatively precise theory for the baseline temperature that the Earth should have ignoring human influences, the task of extracting the human “signal” from the unknown multiple-timescale “natural” variation of the climate due to the Milankovich agencies and many other things is, IMO, a bit of a chore if not an actual joke. We haven’t the foggiest idea of what the temperature in the latter half of the 20th century would have done if humans had not existed on the Earth at all, let alone what fraction of the temperature we imperfectly observed with large error bars was due to human affairs.
If you disagree (and have quantitatively precise references that predict the day and the year of the next ice age) please let me know as I’d love to see them. In the meantime I’ll have to assert that the theory is at least as reliable as the Mayan Calendar for predicting the end of the world. Might be even more reliable, dunno. But either way I’d want to see the direct, contemporary evidence and not yet another argument on the basis of numerical correspondence.
rgb

Of those surveyed, 97% agreed that that global temperatures have risen over the past century. Moreover, 84% agreed that “human-induced greenhouse warming” is now occurring. Only 5% disagreed with the idea that human activity is a significant cause of global warming.[18][19]
The 97% is bullshit — it is a direct read of the thermometric data. The 3% that disagreed must really be mavericks…;-)
If only 84% agree that anthropogenic greenhouse warming is now occurring, 16% disagree, is it not so? That is slightly more than the 15% I asserted. Additionally, IIRC some 53% thought that there was anthropogenic warming, but that it would not be “catastrophic” by the end of the century (although I’m remembering the numbers without looking them up again). Added up, over 2/3 of them disagreed with CAGW., while some 80 to 85% of them believed in some measure of human induced GHE warming.
The 5% can also be ignored, because most of them no doubt know of things like the Sahara desert and desertification due to land use changes. But those things are unlikely to be a major factor in future catastrophic warming. Or maybe not, dunno.
It is still far from the homogeneous 96% of all scientists agree in global warming. Possibly true, but who cares! That’s just reading a thermometer, not assigning causes. The following, however, is a true statements:
According to the George Mason Survey, over 15% of the climate scientists surveyed did not agree with human induced greenhouse warming as a hypothesis.
Not really surprising. In physics, you can’t get everybody to believe in any controversial proposition at the 96% level. Why would it be different in the most difficult physics problem in the world, the solution of the most fiendishly complex set of nonlinear differential equations I can even imagine?
rgb

BobG says: and everyone else
December 3, 2012 at 12:39 pm
Dr Brown is correct in everything his says. He may not be as precise as he would have wished but he was writing this as a comment and not a post. Although you may have read that the movement of the techtonics plates started the current ice age cycling, and that is not an unreasonable assumption, it has never been proven conclusively. Also, no-one has ever been able to quantify how the Milan. cycles produce an ice age. Up to now, the only quatifying attempt has merely shown that it is likely that another trigger, along with the Milan. cycles, would have been necessary. Lastly, we have in the past on various sceptic blogs, had some lengthy discussions on what could cause the ice age cycling within the general ice age of the past few million years. No-one that I have read has yet found the trigger, definitively. Why did we cycle down to the little ice age? It might has been the MM and maybe we will have some conclusive proof in the next 20 years or so but at this moment there is none. You might say the sun, PDO/AMO, thermalhaline anything you wish but show the proof, please.

sorry, I wrote the 2 posts above before Dr Brown’s 2 posts had appeared

Unfortunately very few educated people and even fewer scientists admit (or realize) that “science” isn’t omnipotent
That is something of a cruel statement. There are many, many scientist that read and comment here and very well educated ones at that. I was once but have been retired for too long to remember how well.

Why did we cycle down to the little ice age? It might has been the MM and maybe we will have some conclusive proof in the next 20 years or so but at this moment there is none. You might say the sun, PDO/AMO, thermalhaline anything you wish but show the proof, please.
Yes, precisely. Even listening in on the arguments of experts in the field like Lief, I come away unconvinced on almost every topic that is individually debated. There is a proliferation of hypotheses, all of them at least somewhat plausible, none of them either proven or refuted by our absolutely miserable half-century max of instrumental data that didn’t rely on hot electron tubes with their notorious drift to collect and assess, let along our 33 years of mostly-reliable satellite data. The oceans alone — 70% of the Earth’ surface, a huge VOLUME of its thermal reservoir — we have good data on for maybe half of that. And then there is the sun.
If one applies an honest Bayesian analysis to the entire multilple hypotheses descriptions and models of the climate, one concludes what mere common sense (Bayesian analysis as produced by our intuitive brains) already tells you — we haven’t a clue about what drives the climate, not really. Or rather, we have too many clues, not enough data, and cannot home in on what is probably true to the exclusion of what is probably false yet, in nearly any particular. We cannot even reliably account for large century-scale movements that are empirically many times larger than all of the supposed AGW that has occurred to date, let alone for variations on a scale of thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
One cannot show the proof in this — it isn’t yet possible to prove anything. In fifty years, maybe. In twenty years, perhaps but don’t hold your breath, In a century, probably. To put it bluntly, temperatures could go back down for twenty years and the CAGW hypothesis could still be correct — we have no idea what kinds of natural drivers might override it in the short run, or what “the short run” even is.
rgb

Since the article quotes George Mason survey that is not freely available can anyone provide a link to corroborate of the 50+ % who don’t believe in catastrophic AGW? Thanks.

I so much agree with rgb’s statements on the inherent stability of Earth’s climate system.
If you have a question as to part of “why”, check some thoughts in this thread:
http://beforeitsnews.com/science-and-technology/2012/11/wayne-jackson-new-identity-linking-meteorological-phenomena-2498686.html

Summary articles like this should be done once or twice a year to bring us up to date. This puts the state of knowledge in perspective.
Most folks have no idea that 90%+ of the time of the last million years were ice ages; that the average temperature for the past 12,000 years (since the end of the last ice age) was about 2 degrees warmer than today; much higher CO2 existed even as ice ages were starting; and temperatures have been flat for the last 16 years while CO2 keeps rising.

****
Doug Huffman says:
December 3, 2012 at 12:32 pm
Here is a graph, a graphic, of the current, as of 3 Dec, monthly Smoothed Sunspot Numbers and of their 2009 consensus predicted numbers.
****
Doug, I’ll bet forty quatloos that there will be a second peak in the sunspot number or an extended, several yr plateau.
OK, fifty quatloos.

I applauded Dr. Brown’s original comment when it appeared, but did not comment on it at the time. Further, I agree with every comment that 30 years’ data is never going to give us an adequate picture of what is happening: indeed, given that we know that there is a powerful (approximtely) 60-year cycle in most if not all of Earth’s climatic data, the very choice of a 30-year period as indicative of anything at all seems an egregious cherry-pick designed to induce worry: by definition, it will give us around 30 years worrying about increasing temperatures followed by around 30 years worrying about cooling.
Whether the temperature in 2100 has increased or decreased from that in 2000 depends entirely on whether the (approximately) 1000 year cycle has peaked, or still has a little way to go. If the former, then we should find that temperatures a century from now will be firmly descending, maybe, though not necessarily, into the next inevitable glaciation; if the latter, then my estimate would be that they should be around the same or a (very) little warmer. In (what I regard as) the unlikely event that it is significantly warmer, we may by then be able to discern whether the excess temperature is due to human activity or to some as yet unknown natural cause – my money would be on nature every time, since I don’t share the warmist belief that we are a defining influence on climate.
As a rank, though not entirely uninformed, amateur, I expect something between stasis and cooling for the next 20 years or so. The 30 years’ ‘warming’ after that (assuming the sun doesn’t decide to give us a Maunder minimum) should reveal from its magnitude whether the longer cycle has peaked or not, to be confirmed by the following 30 years’ cooling. Sadly, since I am already on the unfashionable side of 60, I doubt that I shall ever get much closer to the truth of the matter than I am now: the one thing I do not expect to see is any degree of warming over the rest of my life.
With the statement that “The only thing that I ‘believe’ in regarding the subject is our own ignorance, combined with a fairly firm belief that there is little reason to panic visible in the climate record”, I wholly concur. The climate worry-warts would do well to heed Socrates’ observation that “all that I know is that I know nothing”: the older I get, the more I know, the more truly that statement rings.

There are too many subjects in one article. Dr. Brown is not showing evidence why he doesn’t believe in the predictive value of cycles. I do think that with the coincide of 2 cycles global cooling until 2040 or further is a plausible prospect.

A good summary is here:
http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html
They present the results summarized many different ways, some of them internally inconsistent, but they nevertheless make it very, very clear that the “consensus” on CAGW is at best a very thin one. A majority, for example, believe in “moderate” AGW that will do damage, but yet when you add in the 16% that don’t even believe in AGW due to GHGs at all, it doesn’t leave the right remainder for those that they also claim believe in “catastrophe”.
Note well the mistrust of the media! Climate scientists are neither generally dishonest nor fools, but neither are they immune to the constant hammering and disproportionate reporting of every negative event magnified to the falling sky, every positive event completely ignored.
Of course this survey isn’t the only survey and I mistrust them all given the money on the table. Witness the “surveys” conducted by the media in the last election. Only University sites and one or two private individuals got it all unequivocally right (notably U of Illinois, using Bayesian methods to process all of the surveys put together, that was damn near perfectly on the money, slightly underestimating Obama’s eventual margin). We sadly live in a time when not one of the major news services can be trusted to be objective on political or social issues, and most are so yellow in their journalism that it is openly revolting. Or so think I. Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley are all turning in their graves.
Nothing like the “over 90%” usually portrayed in the media, not even among climate scientists. Of course not. They know better. And note well, this surveys their beliefs in spite of the “support” everybody imagines that they are getting. I have a lot of faith in the overall honesty of most scientists. They live on Earth the same as everybody else, and science as a profession demands far more than the usual modicum of ethical behavior because time will make a fool of you if you make a mistake, and a bad mistake can be and often is a career-ender. I think there are a lot of climate scientists that are a bit out on a limb at the moment, sorry that they let the media and religious zealots among their colleagues frame what they all frankly think is a very uncertain discussion.
rgb

rgbatduke said @ December 3, 2012 at 1:15 pm

We haven’t the foggiest idea of what the temperature in the latter half of the 20th century would have done if humans had not existed on the Earth at all, let alone what fraction of the temperature we imperfectly observed with large error bars was due to human affairs.

Presumably, by “temperature” you mean here “the temperature of Earth”. Since Earth is not in thermodynamic equilibrium (yet, thank the Deity du jour), I don’t see how it can have “a temperature”. Sure I can average the temperatures measured for a litre of air from the Atacama Desert and Cairns in far north Queensland, but this does not address what drives climate which is energy. Even if those two air samples are exactly the same temperature, they differ in energy content and mass. Ditto for a litre of seawater from the Maldives compared with a litre from the Atlantic just off the West coast of South America. Averaging temperatures of what are different substances seems to me more akin to numerology than physics, especially when there are so many different averages from which one can choose.
So, I can say with some confidence that, in the absence of humans, the temperature of Earth would be non-existent in the absence of any human to imagine such a quantity.
Nice piece BTW.

Thank you Dr. Brown for a most refreshing and interesting read, both in this post and your subsequent comments. Your intellectual honesty shines out, illustrated by your use of the word dunno. I dunno why it, or its equivalent, is so seldom expressed or even hinted at by so many scientists these days. Or perhaps we all do?

The global climate models stand refuted by the temperature record of the past fifteen years, in my view. A resumption of warming is the hope and prayer of the modelers, but there is no basis for such an expectation now that the principles of radiation physics are shown to be erroneously applied to our atmosphere. In short, the verdict is in on the GCM’s. What now is the reason for forecasting a resumption of warming?
I have no idea what this even means. What “principles of radiation physics” are being erroneously applied to our atmosphere? Please separate the predictive value of the GCMs from whether or not there is a greenhouse effect or AGW, as they are not the same thing. The GCMs could be wrong but AGW might still be true. The GCMs could accidentally predict the right answer sometimes with errors, so that AGW could be false. What is certain is that the GHE exists, and warms the Earth compared to a reasonably well established baseline. The warming predicted due to the increase in CO_2 alone is 1.2 C per doubling, give or take a bit. That warming can be increased or decreased by feedback, but the null hypothesis (since we don’t have any compelling evidence for either one) is to assume that it is the only average, anthropogenic change, although honestly with human based aerosols and particulates and so on in place even this is probably false too.
Many people on the list are certain that temperatures will drop with the solar cycle. I am not. I think it plausible, even somewhat likely that they will given the data, but there are huge uncertainties in the data and many arguments over its meaning. All one can really be certain of at this point is that atmospheric CO_2 will almost certainly continue to increase, at least until some form of cooling overwhelms any CO_2 driven warming and the ocean becomes more receptive of CO_2.
If we are too ignorant to build a good climate model that can reliably predict CAGW, we are certainly too ignorant to build a good climate model that can reliably refute it as well. To do either one requires more data, more time, and more knowledge. Which we will get. In part by waiting and seeing if in fact warming does resume at a good clip, or the temperature does remain basically flat, or the temperature does in fact plummet.
That’s why they call it “research”, because we don’t know the answer yet and have to find out. Otherwise we call it “engineering”.
rgb

Earth did not go directly from the Eocene (56-34 mya) to the Pleistocene Epoch. The Oligocene (34-23 mya), Miocene (23-5.3 mya) & Pliocene (5.3-2.6 mya) intervened.
But if I recall correctly — and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong because I’m trying to know things in at least a half a dozen distinct fields here and at some point things get diluted — the temperature over that 50 million year period went from very warm — the 4-5 C warmer that warmists consider “catastrophic” — to much cooler by the start of the Pliocene (2-3 C warmer), then cooled more or less to where we are now, where we cycle between this “critical” temperature in the interglacials to 5 to 10 C cooler during the glacials (gradually decreasing with time — the earlier shorter cycles weren’t as cold at their peak coldness).
Let’s see, I know I’ve got a link somewhere… oh yes, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
Well, OK, there is some structure in there too. Structure that once again I doubt is understood.
rgb

Thanks Dr Brown , your comments often are posts in their own right and always enlightening.

rgbatduke says December 2, 2012 at 6:21 pm: “The general consensus was, and remains, that there has definitely and unsurprisingly been warming post LIA, that humans have caused some part of this”
====================================================
I see, consensus, why am I not surprised?
Well, it is not true what you are saying about “general consensus”. It is rather the opposite what is true.
If we look at this study (http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf) carefully, we can see that 70% of the more than 10,000 scientists from relevant fields polled confirmed neither “global warming”, nor “caused by humans”. I would not call 30% a “general consensus”.

Ah, if only the money was in Reason, and not in Sensationalism.

Robert Brown says:
“it is almost certain that some fraction of that warming was completely natural, not due to human causes and we do not know that fraction — a reasonable guess would be to extrapolate the warming rate from the entire post LIA era, which is already close to 0.1 C/decade. ”
—————————————————————————————————————-
You are being quite liberal in your estimate of warming Robert. If you take the Central England Temperature record (the longest available) from 1659 to 2010 and insert a linear trend then the overall rate is not 0.1 C deg per decade but 0.25 C deg per 100 years or 0.025 C Deg per decade post LIA. And the human caused effect? – We’re back to bee digit magnitudes.
Cheers.

rgbatduke;
Another great thread Robert, you are a great writer and fantastic teacher.
I was wondering if you could expand on the CO2 doubling = +1 degree estimate a bit? As you know from past conversations, there’s no doubt in my mind that the GHE exists. But I do question the general estimate from two perspectives:
1. The temperature increase cannot be evenly distributed for three reasons:
a) SB Law requires that a given forcing (say 3.7 w/m2) will result in far less than 1 degree in the tropics and far more in the arctic regions…BUT:
b) The forcing itself cannot be evenly distributed since there is less upward LW in the cold regions of the planet, we cannot expect the same net forcing as in the warm regions due to a given change in CO2… AND:
c) Any additional energy that is retained by the planet will be redistributed from areas of high concentration to low, so even if we can resolve a) and b) above to we have any “known physics” that would be a useful predictor of how the temperature distribution would ultimately change from tropics to arctic regions.
2. The concept of forcing is (my understanding here, please correct me if I’ve gone astray) defined by calculating the “extra” downward travelling photons that would not have existed if CO2 had not doubled and subtracting from them the “extra” downward photons that would not otherwise exist (that’s roughly the IPCC explanation). The net equates to roughly 3.7 w/m2 which I am good with. Here’s the part I’m not so certain of:
If the sun’s radiance were to increase by 4 w/m2 at TOA, we could measure exactly that amount at TOA. We could calculate exactly via SB Law what the change to the earth’s effective black body temperature would be. But where do we “measure” the w/m2 from CO2 doubling? It doesn’t matter if the number is 1, 3, 5 or 15, it doesn’t exist at any single altitude in the atmosphere. It is a value comprised of infinitely small values spread across the atmospheric column. If this is the case, is SB Law even a valid calculation?
3. (I said 2, but I’m in sales, I can’t be counted upon for numerical accuracy) Further, how do these downward photons get to the surface to warm it? We often discuss the fact that CO2’s effects at sea level are overwhelmed by water vapour, and so are more pronounced at higher elevations where lower temperature squeeze the water vapour from the air and CO2 becomes proportionally more significant. But wait…if water vapour makes CO2’s effects insignificant on the way up… aren’t the same CO2 effects coming down running into a wall of water vapour that absorbs and re-radiates it? Does some get through to the surface to warm it? Sure. But all of it? Surely not? Most of it? Some of it? I’ve asked this question in the past, and gotten long explanations about warming at elevation plus lapse rate = warming at surface, but I haven’t found them all that compelling. At day’s end, if some of those downward photons don’t make it to surface in some quantity, there’s no warming (at surface) and I’m not understanding how this can happen with all that water vapour resisting LW (in both directions).
TIA!

Correctomundo, FrankK. There is no discernable human signal in any temperature record. None whatever. If there were, we would get beat over the head with it by the alarmist contingent 24/7/365. The rise in global temperature since the LIA has been the same, whether CO2 was low or high. Global warming has not accelerated. If anything, it has stopped, at least since the 1990’s.
This is the central fact that constantly gets glossed over and ignored. There is NO verifiable anthropogenic signal in any temperature record. The null hypothesis remains un-falsified.
So let’s pretend we’re all Captain Obvious, and think about what that means. There’s a conclusion there, hiding right in plain sight.

Thanx Anthony for making this a post. Thanx Dr. Brown for taking the time to reply.

Blast you Dr. Brown. You can read, comprehend, and give long pertinent responses to comments faster than I can read them. I can’t even type and make sense as fast.
Thanks for the sanity, intellectual honesty, and scientific skepticism. I’ve very rarely seen these to this degree from anyone on any side.
One comment. If climate scientists are privately doubtful of the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers, and the catastrophism in the MSM, let them say so publicly. Intellectual honesty demands it.

dabbio
I’d just like to SEE what those proportions look like. If one could see them. The whole thing just seems like such a fantasy to me.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I’ll be very interested to see rgb’s answer to this one, but I run into this question a lot, so here’s mine:
It isn’t simply proportions that count. It is scale. CO2 molecules don’t get “used up” and neither do the photons. A CO2 molecule can absorb and re-radiate an infinite number of times, it doesn’t wear out, and that is key to the rest of the explanation.
Instead of imagining it as a grid, imagine it as a round jar. Make the jar’s bottom 100 square millimeters and make the jar 100 mm high. The jar has a volume of 10,000 mm cubed. Imagine filling the jar with 9,996 yellow bb’s and 4 blue bb’s. Since this is a make believe jar and make believe bb’s, they exactly fill the jar. The chances of you seeing a blue bb through the sides of the jar are tiny.
OK, so make the yellow bb’s invisible. Now you can see the 4 bb’s suspended in the jar. I know what you are thinking. So what? Doesn’t that just prove the point? Four specs of blue in the entire jar?
This is where the atmospheric scale comes in. Imagine 100,000 jars stacked up in a single column 10 kilometers high. Yes, from the side, all you would see is a spec of blue here and there. But there’s now 400,000 blue bb’s stacked up in that column. Assuming they are evenly distributed, a photon going straight up from bottom to top would hit a CO2 molecule 4,000 times.
Well, assuming it was absorbed and re-radiated straight up it would be 4,000 times. If you assume that instead sometimes get re-radiated up and sometimes re-radiated down, a lot more than 4,000 times.

D Böehm says:
December 3, 2012 at 6:26 pm
Correctomundo, FrankK. There is no discernable human signal in any temperature record. None whatever. If there were, we would get beat over the head with it by the alarmist contingent 24/7/365. The rise in global temperature since the LIA has been the same, whether CO2 was low or high. Global warming has not accelerated. If anything, it has stopped, at least since the 1990′s.
———————————————————————————————————–
Mr Boehm no correction necessary, I agree the trend over that long period is natural at 0.25 C deg per 100 years since the LIA – precisely what I said. The human contribution is as I described above – a bees willie – indiscernible if its there at all..
If you want to talk about individual ups and downs in the temp graph then I always point to my warming friends how come the same Central England temp record shows a rise of over 2 C deg over 40 years from the end of the 17th Century to the start 18th when industrialisation was virtually nil with no rise in CO2 level. And yes CO2 has gone up over the last 16 years and temperature has flat-lined. The AGW theory is well and truly busted.

Duster says:
December 3, 2012 at 12:35 pm
“It is simply not true and makes a secular “original sin” assumption that is logically and empirically unsupported.”
A necessary ingredient for any religion.
Mike Borgelt says:
December 3, 2012 at 4:22 pm
“Lots of luck on the 4 x fall in solar costs…”
So true. When you’ve spent 50+ years waiting for “the big breakthrough” hyped continuously beyond rational thought, you tend to become a little jaded. We’re just not going to get there pounding our heads against the same stone wall. Some radical new insight is going to be required, and who can predict when such an epiphany will occur, if ever? Same goes for fusion power. It’s all pie in the sky for now and any foreseeable future.

The non-parsing formula was the fourth root of two times T_0 = 1.19 T_0, sorry. Grumble grumble no edit/preview feature in wordpress grumble.
rgb

We do know some things; for example, below about 160 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, life as we know it begins to end. We geologists know that the earth has been extraordinarily efficient at extracting CO2 from our atmosphere and oceans, in the amount of trillions of tons, from day dot. The ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland, although perhaps arguably dispositive, indicate we got near the termination point for long periods of time. As a result, I don’t fear CO2 “zooming” up to levels like 1000 ppm; life has prospered at levels far above that. I dread the opposite. A return to LIA conditions, along with cessation of manmade CO2 emissions, could be a very bad thing (for more than one reason).
On another point, I agree that a few years of temperature stasis means nothing (the historical picture we have of temperature trends is something that maintains over periods of a few hundred years, e.g. the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, etc. However, as I understand the models the warmists depend on, every single additional molecule of CO2 adds a fraction of a degree to the earth’s temperature. Therefor, it is impossible that the earth’s temperature can exhibit a standstill of five years, much less 15, given the nearly exponential increase in CO2 we have experienced over the last 15 years. Therefor, their models don’t work, and those who continue to push their results are shown as charlatans, and should be defrocked and at least, have any service with the US Government terminated with prejudice.

George Lawso9n says: December 3, 2012 at 12:22 pm
quote
I doubt whether anyone would support your stupid statement that you’ve seen oil smooths completely cover the whole of the Mediteranean.
unquote
My apologies, I meant that I had seen smooths from end to end, not that one smooth extended from end to end. I have flown over the Med frequently over the years — smooths, large smooths off Cyprus are very common now, and the Western end has huge rivers of smooth flowing out from all the towns and villages. I appreciate that it’s not a nice thing to contemplate, but it’s there and calling me stupid wil not get rid of the facts.
quote
I suspect that is part of the warmists scaremongering again. Just look at the sites of major oil spills around the world and see how they have very quickly returned to their natural state within a very short space of time.
unquote
Why I am assumed to be a warmist is puzzling. Perhaps you have not thought through the reasoning behind the CO2 scare: ‘it’s warming and it’s CO2.’ My argument would be ‘it’s warming and some of it is CO2, some is black carbon, some of it is agricultural albedo change, some may be oil spill mediated changes in the ocean surface.’ Now follow the logic. If it is warming (oops, was warming until recently) because of more than one cause then the CO2 portion of the warming is reduced. CO2 sensitivity is low and there is no need to close down civilisation. Dr Hansen has flirted with this fact in a paper called IIRC Global Warming In the 21st Century.
As an exercise you also might try looking at the HADCRUT graphs and the Climate Audit posts about the Folland and Parker bucket correction. Then look at ‘why the blip’ as I suggested earlier. The sea temperature blip in the 1940-45 period is real and unexplained. Try to think of a reason other than the entirely possible ‘it was natural’.
JF

Walt The Physicist says:
December 3, 2012 at 1:08 pm
quote
And thus, the “tabloid scientists” entertain/scary public and overwhelm funding sources by showing that their peer-reviewed “science” publications undoubtedly show that “oil smooths warm the sea surface by reducing albedo, lowering emissivity, reducing mechanical mixing… lower turbulence and thereby reduce stratocumulus formation and reduce evaporation.” In the midst of all this confusion neither public nor program managers notice that “reducing albedo” is opposite to “lowering emissivity”… In midst of this confusion examining and questioning the accuracy of these research becomes next to impossible, especially after energized and vocal consumers of “tabloid science” weigh in. Please stop drinking kool-aid, go start business, do something useful.
unquote
Please look at PJ Minnett’s pdf modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/sci_team/meetings/200503/…/minnett1.pdf
and explain the emisssivity wind speed graphs. They’re not the ones I initially used to check the idea — those were much simpler — and it would be nice if an expert like yourself would interpret them. My naive view is that they show emissivity falling as wind speed decreases, even though Masuda’s theoretical study (also shown on the graph) assumed the opposite.
I do not understand why reducing albedo and lowering emissivity are contradictory but that may well be a failing of my education. Lower wind speed will allow a smoother surface. Smooth ocean albedo is lower than ruffled. Minnett’s graphs show lower emissivity as wind drops. I must be making an obvious error here and I’d be grateful if you could explain it.
I did start a business: it paid the mortgage, paid the school fees and financed the children through university, though what that has to do with a discussion on ocean warming is puzzling me.

Dr Brown wrote
{}{
I enjoyed your calculation of the oil required to coat the oceans — it reminded me of Willis’s calculation re Salter’s cloud ships where he proved that they would have to shoot water into the air so fast they would drive themselves underwater. I doubt anyone now sees Miss Pockel’s experiment where one gets an estimate of a molecule’s dimensions. Look it up, it’s fun physics. It also shows that oil does spread out into layers a few molecules thick. Anyway, be that as it may, perhaps you could check your — and my — numbers with the NASA Wifis numbers for light oil spill. Benjamin Franklin’s experiment shows that a teaspoon of oil smooths a hectare. Ish, ballpark handwaving figures, but it gives us somewhere to start. Like you I’m always dubious of my calculations, especially with the varying measurement systems — at one stage I was working in gallons US per fortnight per hectare.
quote
This still doesn’t do your assertion full justice. “Oil” is a heterogeneous mixture of hydrocarbons. Some of them are volatile and almost immediately evaporate. Others are dense and sink. All of them are quite tasty to a number of things that live in the ocean. While I am quite certain that there are places where oil slicks both natural and manmade can be seen on the ocean, there is no possible way that those slicks would ever actually cover the ocean because they would be eaten, oxidized, evaporated, and sink faster than they could ever spread. At no time could they cover even a significant fraction of the ocean’s surface area. That, as noted above, is enormous.
unquote
Yes, I’ve seen the sea. You seem to be thinking in spill and slick terms which is why you are going off at half cock. Think of the oil coming down a river, it has little or no volatile fractions, no thick lumps, it has already been sorted to be the right consistency to spread on water — that’s how it gets to the sea. In 1994 that was 363 million gallons per year and now it will be much more. Don’t think slick, think smooth, a layer a few molecules thick that alters the properties of the oceanic boundary layer. Follow the example of your illustrious compatriot and trickle a few mls of olive oil onto a lake and watch the result. I haven’t done that actual experiment, but I’ve seen the oil from sun tan lotion smooth a bay in Ibiza. The Med is really filthy and I find myself reluctant to swim in it: if oil spill really does warm then enclosed areas like the Med should show it.
Now, science, numbers, measurements etc; can you tell me how fast an oil spill oxidises in the open ocean? In the Arctic seas? How much oil is in the oceanic boundary layer in an area like the Gulf? The sea of Okhotsk? Where are the measurements? Remember I have seen a smooth covering tens of thousands of square miles in an area that is far from land. The Azores high had been parked there for weeks so the stuff was at least several weeks old and, checking the way the wind and currents flow in the North Atlantic, I can’t see an easy way for it to come from the nearest coasts. The only oxidation experiment I’ve managed to track was with droplets, not the same thing of course, but maybe someone has done the work. Yes, bacteria will eat oil, but how fast?
You’re a scientist, I assume. Have a look at the references I suggested, Wigley and Franklin.
quote
So I must regretfully state that unless I have made an egregious error in my arithmetic above [][] I spend my summers in boats, fishing off of the North Carolina coast outside of its busiest harbor. I have yet to see one oil slick, or even a single extended patch of oil on the surface, even in the harbors.
unquote
One quiet evening next summer when the sun is going down and there’s a nice breeze ruffling the surface, cruise off the harbour and look up sun. You will see areas ruffled by the wind and large smooth areas — no, they are not all caused by variations in the wind because you will see a cat’s paw tickle the ruffled areas while leaving the smooth areas untouched. Something is altering the surface properties. That’s the effect I’m talking about. If you want some idea about what to look for then just Google a few pictures of boats — many of them show a smooth. The best are the ones with a polar bear, I find it amusing to see the threatened and a possible cause of the threat in one image. But I digress.
quote
I suggest that you change your primary sources away from ones that not only lie to you, but lie to you in a way that insults your intelligence and ability to do arithmetic. I also humbly suggest that if you have posted this misinformation elsewhere, you consider the damage this sort of nonsense does to everybody’s ability to hold a rational conversation on the subject. I would expect the “coverage of the ocean with oil” to be an utterly negligible effect compared to the direct greenhouse effect of the volatiles and natural gas released when oil is pumped plus the greenhouse effect of the burned oil in the form of CO_2. Those positive warming effects might well be partially balanced by particulates that could have either warming or cooling effects and aerosols that are mostly cooling. In other words, there is literally no point even mentioning it, which is why nobody ever does and they are completely ignored in all global climate models.
unquote
An oil smoothed surface will produce many fewer aerosols: one aerosol scientist tried to get them sampled over the Gulf spill to see if that actually happened there, so the idea is not too far from feasibility. Fewer aerosols means lower albedo of the 30% of the ocean which is covered with stratocumulus cloud and I expect this to be the greatest effect. Israeli scientists have tried reducing reservoir evaporation by doping the surface with oil. I have heard that rice paddies are warmed by the same process but I’ve not been able to find any references on-line.
Perhaps I may be permitted to follow your example and give some advice: the CO2 based models are failing, but the world has warmed a bit, the Arctic has warmed enormously, the blip in SSTs from 1939 – 45 was so pronounced that the proponents of CO2-only warming were forced to make an ad hoc ‘correction’ to reality (see ‘why the blip’ in the Climategate emails). My advice to you is to be more open to new ideas which suggest an explanation (any explanation, all explanations, that’s how you get new ideas; I exclude the dragons) for those facts, because it’s the anomalies which will show what is actually happening. More particularly, don’t blunder off doing calculations that spring from ludicrous preconceptions. Millimetres of oil spill over the entire ocean? Man, you’re out to lunch! I want you to have an open mind, but not that open.
quote
Try again.
unquote
Open your eyes and look around. Happy sailing.
JF

….impossible that the earth’s temperature can exhibit a standstill of five years, much less 15, given the nearly exponential increase in CO2 we have experienced over the last 15 years.
Not quite. Suppose that the temperature over the last fifteen years would have gone down, all things being equal, if it were not for the addition of the CO_2. The point is that the range of natural variation is large enough to explain the recent rise without CO_2, or to explain the recent flat spot with it. However, the probability of such a sustained (canceled) downturn is not so great, hence the addition of p-values indicating that improbability. The longer without an actual rise, the less probable, perhaps, that the upper bounds of CO_2 forced high feedback climate sensitivity are correct.
So it certainly isn’t impossible. It is just increasingly improbable. Eventually it will become too improbable to believe — or the temperature will start going up again. Some would say that we’ve already reached the former state; I disagree. The IPCC 2008 report assigns the probability at 5%, which is not all that close to zero. This is, I suspect, a bullshit statistics number pulled out of somebody’s ass, not a real computed probability estimate with some grounding, but it still it indicates correctly that the over the last hundred and fifty plus years of thermometric records, downturns or flattenings of 15 years or so are not unknown. I’d actually say the empirical odds WITHOUT CO_2 of such an downturn episode are no worse than 1 in 10 across the post-LIA warming (one is clearly visible in the climate record) but with presumed AGW it should be smaller so 5% is probably not crazy, bullshit or not.
Of course, speaking of probability at all is de facto evidence that climate science is far from certain, as we use probability in this context to describe our essential uncertainty in the actual climate dynamics. This is the more interesting consequence of the flat stretch — no matter what, it increases that uncertainty (out to where the probability of the observed event is not too small) OR we’re awesomely (un)lucky to see a very unlikely extreme in the first 33 years of accurate records when only one such episode has occurred in the previous stretch from the Dalton minimum to the present.
As I said, at the moment this hardly strengthens the CAGW argument, without disproving it. In four or five years, it will weaken that argument to the point where the “C” part is pretty unbelievable even to people that formerly believed it quite firmly. But to actually disprove the argument we have to have a better understanding than we have now of the climate, not just a moderate stretch of apparently contradictory data.
rgb

Given that AFAIK, it is not possible to predict either the timing or the strength of the ENSO a decade out, given that weather/climate appears to depend on the particular present and recent past state of the oscillation over much of the globe, how accurate do you think the predictions of “climate change” could be? To make the question concrete, given your choice of the various temperature estimates for the period from 1979 to 2012 — RSS, GISS, HADCRUT, whatever — how would any simple “almanac” level model have predicted either the volcanic eruptions or the superstrong ENSO that is almost certainly responsible for the sharp bump in SSTs and global temperatures that occurred in the general vicinity of 1997-1998? Without this bump, the decadal predictions are horribly wrong, but I see no possible way that anyone could have predicted Mount Pinatubo or the 1998 ENSO effect in 1988, let alone 1978. Do you?
Generally, my point was that the GCM’s have never produced any predictions that have utility (economic value). And there are large economic costs to not correctly predicting the weather, a few weeks to a few decades in advance. Consequently, those who need to know what the future weather will be, are investing in models that predict based on measurable indicators and on a regional basis. We already know some indicators that are useful for predicting months in advance, notably ENSO. I expect more to be found and our ability to predict over these timescales to improve.
Once we can predict, we then in a position to theorize/investigate why we can predict.
As to whether there is ‘climate’ and variability around ‘climate’ that produces weather. I’m not sure this is even an important question. I see climate as no more or less than average weather. Therefore the only difference between predicting weather and predicting climate is timescale.
Of course, these indicators won’t predict volcanic eruptions. I don’t know whether they could have predicted the super El Nino, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility.
I don’t see the GCM climate modellers getting out of their mire of GHGs drive the ‘global climate’ any time soon, so significant advances will come from elsewhere. Science has many examples of a seeming complex phenomena being controlled by simple principles, Gregor Mendel comes to mind. Science also has many examples of economic need driving science forward in particular areas.

Julian Flood,
please note:
1) “Twice an Exxon Valdez spill worth of oil seeps into the Gulf of Mexico every year, according to a new study that will be presented January 27 at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Antonio, Texas. ”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=20863
2) Satellite images of the phenomena:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36873
3) Petroleum is a source of both carbon and energy for primary producers at the base of marine ecosystems. Petroleum is a life-enriching food: not something to hate, but to celebrate:
http://living-petrol.blogspot.com/ncr

The outgoing radiation can be reflected back to the source, of course, but there is apparently no experimental proof this back radiation has any effect on the temperature of the source. Given the fact, that warmists do not present any experiment, it is reasonable to assume, that the effect is either zero or negligible.
Point a) I’m not a “warmist”. Neither am I a “denier”. I’m a physicist.
Point b) I offered a very, very simple physical argument. The only ways it can be wrong are if the Stefan-Boltzmann equation itself is egregiously wrong (it is not) or the laws of thermodynamics are wrong (they’re not wrong either). Or, of course, if I made an actual mistake in my reasoning. If you find an actual mistake, let me know.
Point c) Get a large piece of aluminum foil. Place it in front of your face a few centimeters away. You can feel the reflected heat radiated from your face, warming your face. Experimental proof that reflected “back radiation” can have a clearly perceptible effect on the temperature of the source, right there in your own kitchen!
Point d) hazy nights do not cool as rapidly as clear nights. The diurnal temperature variation of the dry desert is much greater than that of a humid coastal area at the same latitude. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas too — direct evidence that back radiation has an effect on the temperature of the source in the context of climate. CO_2 is a much weaker greenhouse gas, but the principle is the same.
Use your reason, my friend. Ignoring the empirically founded laws of physics because you find them inconveniently opposed to a favored belief serves no one, and it certainly doesn’t make it “reasonable” to reject the correctly derived conclusions that follow from those laws. If you wish to discuss that derivation, I would be happy to accommodate you and explain further until you understand it. If all you want to do is sound clever while salting your dialogue with enough stuff to give somebody a winning sheet if they are playing logical fallacy bingo, then no one can prevent you from doing so, but there is little point to it.
rgb

Greg House says:
December 3, 2012 at 9:51 pm
I really do not think there is any question that, all things being equal, a single IR absorber blanket will tend to trap heat. Dr. Brown’s reference to a “space blanket” is a case in point. Satellites are routinely wrapped in IR reflecting MLI blankets for thermal control. Some 50 odd years into the Space Age, the properties and effects of these blankets are very well understood and confirmed many times over.
But, are all things equal? Clearly not. There are many mechanisms, e.g., evaporation of water and photosynthesis, which can oppose the extra heating from any small change in emissivity. And, do the equations hold for complex atmospheres with many absorbers/emitters? I suspect they may not, though thermal dynamics is not my specialty. I believe however, based on some vague scratches I have made on paper, that I could construct an experimental system, at least, with two absorbers/emitters which would be governed approximately by an equation of the form:
dT/dt = k1*(T1 – T) + k2*(T2 – T)
where T is temperature, dT/dt is its derivative with respect to time, and k1, k2, T1 and T2 are constants related to gases #1 and #2 and their heat capacities/concentrations. T1 and T2 would represent a “warming potential”, i.e., the temperatures each gas would drive the system to in the absence of the other. k1 and k2 would be most directly impacted by concentration.
In steady state, T would approach
T = (k1*T1 + k2*T2) / (k1 + k2)
The partial derivative of T with respect to k1 would then be
dT/dk1 = k2*(T1 – T2) / (k1 + k2)^2
If T1 is less than T2, i.e., the warming potential of gas #2 is greater than gas #1, then the effect of increasing the concentration of gas #1 and thus k1 would be to lower the temperature.
I suspect that, with the interaction of water vapor, CO2, and CH4 particularly in our atmosphere, we might as easily decrease equilibrium temperature as increase it by adding more CO2. It is all very complex, and I do not have faith that those concerned with the dynamics have entirely worked it all out. I am quite certain that there is no significant terrestrial warming signal induced by increasing CO2, as the temperature/CO2 relationship is clearly dominated by causal relationship running from temperature to CO2. Whether the lack of a warming signal is due to feedback or oversimplification of the relationship or both, I do not know. But, I do know that things are not working out according to the script.
rgbatduke says:
December 3, 2012 at 10:41 pm
“Solar PV has been following a Moore’s Law-like curve, and if you follow the literature, they really do continue to make discoveries and improvements that affect cost per watt downstream.”
Moore’s Law is, of course, not a law but an empirical observation. And, those costs are entirely based on currently low demand. If truly large scale demand for solar infrastructure significant enough to make a real dent in our energy appetite were to emerge, you would see the costs skyrocket. Some, for example, have computed that we could satisfy our electricity demand by carpeting a 100 X 100 mile swath of Arizona desert with solar panels. Never minding the horrendous environmental impact of such an expanse, try calculating, sometime, how much material it would take to cover a 10,000 square mile area with these things, and current production levels of key elements. You will find that, at current production levels, it would require centuries to complete the project.

Storing a movement (electricity) increases the risk exponentially for catastrophic failure, as exemplified by the many burned down cars/houses caused by shorted batteries.
Any form of electricity storage is by definition always actively safe, you need to 100% exact have monitoring if you want to store gWatts since if such a device blows up it releases all that energy at once.
As such the idea that a ‘major breakthrough’ that could safely store the vast quantities of energy needed to compensate for day/night cycles is absurd.
Already for a tiny amount such as used by a car it will hard to invent something small, light weight and safe enough to fit in a car that can hold the equivalent of a tank of gas, is an undertaking that will stump science for decades to come.

So far, if catastrophe is in the cards, the measures proposed won’t prevent it even according to those that predict it! In fact, it won’t have any effect on the catastrophe at all according to the worst case doom and gloomers. We could stop burning carbon worldwide tomorrow and if the carbon cycle model currently in favor with the CAGW crowd is correct (which I doubt) it would take centuries for the Earth’s CO_2 level to go back to “normal” — whatever that means,…..

And this is the point. Yet realistically we won’t stop our co2 levels going up no matter how hard we try. India and China will continue their upward spurt which will easily cancel out any Western reductions.
And right on cue we now have this:

Global CO2 emissions have increased by 58 per cent since 1990, rising 3 per cent in 2011, and 2.6 per cent in 2012. The most recent figure is estimated from a 3.3 per cent growth in global gross domestic product and a 0.7 per cent improvement in the carbon intensity of the economy.
CSIRO – December 3, 2012
Dr Canadell said the latest carbon dioxide emissions continue to track at the high end of a range of emission scenarios, expanding the gap between current trends and the course of mitigation needed to keep global warming below 2°C………..
http://csironewsblog.com/2012/12/03/the-widening-gap-between-present-emissions-and-the-two-degree-target/

Yet they avert their eyes at the IPCC temperature / co2 scenarios graph which also shows an expanding gap between this high end co2 output and flat global mean temperature. What part of ooops! don’t they understand? Sometimes I feel like calling them the ‘deniers’ but I will hold off.
Actually, it’s not about reducing future ‘global warming’, it’s about the green agenda, money and power. See Gore, Greenpeace, IPCC and other opportunists.

I disagree. GHGs cause cooling of the stratosphere according to the IPCC and common sense.
Look, I provided a very, very simple physical model of the GHE. Instead of just asserting that you disagree — very useful information that this might be — and adding nonsense like “according to the IPCC” that is obviously false — why not either address the model or explain in some detail how and why, ideally with equations or with some sort of complete discussion?
Otherwise what can I say? You’re wrong, categorically. Now you can say you’re right, I can say you’re wrong, and we can have a kindergarten level discussion instead.
rgb

Dr Brown,
Inspired by your calculations I’ve had another shot at working out oil smooth coverage: you will be pleased with the result. I’ve saved it as ‘humble pie calculation’.
All figures are rounded. We make the assumption that the numbers at the NASA seawifs site are outdated and the real numbers have increased since 1994, which seems reasonable. Call the ‘down the drain’ figure 500 *10^6 gallons US.
That’s 500 *10^6 * 4 = 2000 *10^6 litres ‘down the drain’ = 2*10^9 litres per year
Area of world ocean = 3.5*10^8 sq km (70% of 500*10^6 ) = 3.5*10^10 ha.
5ml of oil will smooth on e hectare (Franklin).
number of 5 ml doses per year per ha = (20*2*10^9)/(3.5*10^10) = 1
Allowing for all the other oil spills/seeps/up in smoke etc we can just about stretch that to 2. So my statement was out by a factor of at least twenty and the egregious calculation error is mine, not yours. Even if I bring surfactant pollution into play that will only bring it up to about 4, and that really is handwaving as I’ve seen no research on surfactant smoothing at all. I think I may have been confusing the number of smoothing doses over the entire ocean for those I calculated for Lake Tanganyika. Sorry about that, I had no intention to mislead.
It now becomes a matter of how quickly a smooth will degrade: at one ‘event’ per year there is only a slim chance that the effect will be widespread. Four doses a year will be significant if the lifetime of a smooth is more than a few weeks. You will have noticed that the Gulf spill biological degradation figures are for deep layer, treated spill with a lot of heavy stuff. I’ve not seen figures for oxidation and degradation in thin films, but it should be fairly rapid where the temperature is at a reasonable level, and very much slower in the Arctic.
The smooth of 20 thousand + square miles which I saw on the way to Madeira was on a line from Santiago de Compostela to Funchal, from approximately abeam Lisbon for forty minutes, G/S about 500kts, height 40k ft. The pollutant cannot have come from the Med as the surface current runs in, not out — unless it gets entrained in the deep water and gets out that way, but I can’t see a mechanism for that. The high had been in place for some weeks, so the pollutant had been exposed for that time and was still suppressing the effects of a breeze of around Force 4, with the smoothed area like glass and whitecaps showing in the area outside. Presumably the pollutant was generated elsewhere — if not, buy shares in anyone who wants to drill off Madeira — and would have taken a while to move into place, so a lifetime of several weeks does not seem too unlikely.
You will have seen the recent paper about uncertainties in aerosols and clouds. If, as I contend, smooths alter low level cloud albedo by reducing aerosol production from e.g breaking waves, then they introduce another uncertainty into the mix.
Thank you for the lesson. It was fun.
JF

BobG says:
December 3, 2012 at 12:39 pm
In pointing out that there is no scientific certainty about several things, you then write what I think is a non-scientific opinion, “there is a risk of a return to open glaciation, the start of the next 90,000 year glacial era — but it is not a particularly high risk …”.
I have not seen any paper about this and don’t really think the risk of another ice age is quantified in any scientific way…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Want a paper? It is from Warmists too.

Lesson from the past: present insolation minimum holds potential for glacial inception (2007)
Because the intensities of the 397 ka BP and present insolation minima are very similar, we conclude that under natural boundary conditions the present insolation minimum holds the potential to terminate the Holocene interglacial. Our findings support the Ruddiman hypothesis [Ruddiman, W., 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era began thousands of years ago. Climate Change 61, 261–293], which proposes that early anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission prevented the inception of a glacial that would otherwise already have started….

Hre is another opinion:

Woods Hole Observatory: Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?
Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth vs climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries. In addition, these climate shifts do not necessarily have universal, global effects. They can generate a counterintuitive scenario: Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates.
This new paradigm of abrupt climate change has been well established over the last decade by research of ocean, earth and atmosphere scientists at many institutions worldwide. But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur.

This maybe bad news for us, it seems Sunspots DO correlate with climate…. Unless volcanic action interferes according to this study of dust in Greenland ice cores, sunspots, and volcanoes.

Study of Dust in Ice Cores Shows Volcanic Eruptions Interfere with the Effect of Sunspots on Global Climate
The research, published in a paper in the May 15 [2002] issue of Geophysical Research Letters, provides striking evidence that sunspots — blemishes on the sun’s surface indicating strong solar activity — do influence global climate change, but that explosive volcanic eruptions on Earth can completely reverse those influences.
It is the first time that volcanic eruptions have been identified as the atmospheric event responsible for the sudden and baffling reversals that scientists have seen in correlations between sunspots and climate…
“By carefully studying the timing of other volcanic eruptions, we found that they coincided with all of the correlation reversals between sunspots and climate,” said Ram.
A chart in the paper shows how six major volcanic eruptions between 1800 and 1962 occurred during precisely the same years when there were reversals in the correlation between sunspot activity and climate….
According to Donarummo, it long has been known that volcanoes add more dust and more sulfates to the atmosphere.

Just keep in mind there are at least two dozen opinions whenever you get a dozen scientists together in private without their bosses nearby.

rgbatduke says:
December 3, 2012 at 9:06 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Thanks for your reply. I’ve used the two shell model as an explanation myself. It doesn’t, however, answer the question I was trying to ask. This may be one of those things that requires a white board and an hour of drawing diagrams and discussing them just to frame the issue correctly in the first place. I’ll take another crack at it though.
First let’s make certain terms of reference. There’s the earth as a system which includes the atmosphere. Then there’s the surface of the earth which does not. When I ask how the photons get to earth surface to warm it, while I agree with the two shell model, I’m not sure it is completely valid to simply consider the atmosphere as the other shell.
The atmosphere would be many shells. But the problem is many fold. First, there would be a lot more shells in the tropics than in the arctic zones because the atmosphere is thicker at the tropics. Then you’ve got density of the shells changing with altitude, and with latitude. Then you have composition changing with altitude and latitude as well. (I’d like to see the model that can simulate all of those factors at once!)
So, when I start thinking about temperature of the earth SURFACE, I think there absolutely needs to be a physical mechanism by which extra photons are absorbed by that surface in order to raise the temperature of the surface. SB Law demands it. But, I come back to the same issue. Of the putative net downward flux of 3.7 w.m2 from doubling of CO2, how much can actually get to earth surface? Most of it is generated at higher altitudes at low latitudes. To get back down to surface, it has to pass through that “last leg” which happens to be 40,000 ppm of water vapour. Just as that water vapour suppresses upward LW by absorbing and re-radiating, requiring that some of the photons reach the surface and elevate the temperatures at surface, so must that same water vapour absorb and re-radiate downward LW, sending much of it back upward before it reaches the surface, substantially diminishing the warming that 3.7 w/m2 would otherwise have caused at surface.

Thank you for the lesson. It was fun.
And you, sir, are a gentleman, as so few people on list take to being corrected well:-)
I’m perfectly happy to believe that there are large slicks from both natural and manmade causes, as long as one puts that in the proper perspective. The ocean is huge (compared to the volume of oil produced).
The two other factors to consider (now that we seem to agree about the basic numbers) is the half life of a monomolecular layer and its probable effect on heating or cooling. Those two obviously go together, because any heating or cooling effect can be for little longer than the half life (although the volatiles that make it into the air may well be GHGs or aerosols in their own right and hence the effect of the spillage may persist through atmospheric chemistry and radiative effects, where they might be net positive or net negative I dunno).
Now I will say that a monomolecular layer is literally the limit of the surface to volume scaling with maximum surface per unit volume (it’s all surface). The evaporative rates will therefore all be their theoretical maximum values for the various volatile fractions, given the temperature of the underlying sea and assuming that the surface air is far from saturated. Furthermore, the molecules are all directly exposed to sunlight. Naturally, somebody (probably many somebodies) have studied this: http://www.iopan.gda.pl/oceanologia/48Skrol.pdf for example. Their findings suggest that the absorption cross section is not trivial even when the oil is in a droplet form, and (because by chance I once studied this very sort of thing) I can assure you that the molecules adsorbed onto the seawater surface can “borrow” bandwidth from the underlying substrate (energy bands) to broaden the natural molecular levels still further. As I consequence, I think that the rate of resonant induced evaporation would be quite high (where a molecule directly absorbs a photon and gets kicked off of the surface by the recoil). Then there is chemical removal because of the formation of lipid complexes (there is a lot of “stuff” in seawater that might bind to oil — sodium ions and hydroxy radicals (always present) for example can saponify it. Again, all surface, no volume, maximum rates. There is biological degradation as things sequester and eat the oil (very high energy content and hence food value). Maximum surface for the bacteria to attack.
I did a bit of web searching, and it looks like the bateriological half-life for oil DROPLETS is around a week to ten days. Another site I found here: http://oil.skytruth.org/site-23051/site-23051-cumulative-spill-report
suggests that the half life for a surface layer 1 micron thick from all sources of degradation — note well many, many times thicker than the monomolecular layer we are discussing — is again a week or less (consistent with droplets in the micron range). Dividing this out by a thousand, a monomolecular layer would have a half life of five to ten minutes and would be completely gone in a couple of hours.
This seems as though it would be pretty much irrelevant to global warming under any and all circumstances. But wait, there’s more.
A thin layer of oil, as no doubt you have observed, not only slicks the water, it makes the top of the water shine (often with rainbow colors). This is a phenomenon called thin film interference, and is discussed and explained in my online physics textbook if you care to understand it further. Because the index of refraction of oil is smaller than that of water, and there is a phase shift of at the both surfaces, when the thickness of the oil is less than a wavelength of light you get constructive interference between the waves reflected from both surfaces and the surface becomes highly reflective. This is the mirror-like “sheen” associated with oil, and it is much higher in albedo than water.
Light has wavelengths of around 0.4 to 0.7 of a micron. Micron plus thicknesses produce the swirly colors from a mix of destructive and constructive interference in particular wavelengths, but thicknesses of 0.1 micron or less will by quite shiny. This complicates the effect of a layer of oil — it interferes with evaporative cooling at the surface (although it itself is evaporating and hence cooling somewhat less efficiently) but it also reflects (at a guess) 30% or more of the visible light energy that would otherwise be entering the surface layer of the water. Note that IR has a much longer wavelength and the surface would have a high albedo in the IR range out to microns and beyond.
How all of this works out is anybody’s guess, but it is clear that the effects of an oil slick aren’t going to be consistently warming-only or cooling-only, but probably a partially canceling mix of the two. Again, this isn’t to encourage the dumping of oil into the ocean, especially in massive amounts — but a drop here, a drop there is well within the ocean’s ability to “digest” with little harm, and in particular the discussion above makes it nearly certain that oil arriving in the ocean by all means in a given year makes an entirely negligible contribution to climate, where even the sign of that contribution remains uncertain. I’d have to solve a boundary value problem with the known indices of refraction to compute the overall reflection coefficient, but at a guess based on the constructive interference “brightness” I’ve observed on oil slicks at least 30%, perhaps more, of incident IR through visible radiation is probably reflected from micron thicknesses on down.
As you say, an enjoyable discussion. Hopefully this puts this particular issue to rest. Oceanic oil pollution can be bad, and it can be locally dangerous or undesirable in various ways, but it is all but irrelevant to the climate.
rgb

richardscourtney;
The magnitude of the reduced efficiency of surface heat loss may be small but it will not be zero. And it will result in some increase to surface temperature.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
I mis-worded as of course conduction plays a part, obviously. Nor do I contend that increase to surface temperature would be zero, in fact my position is the opposite.
What I do contend is that the 3.7w/m2 doesn’t exist in the normal sense that we use that term for. It is a “value” that is computed across the atmospheric column as a whole, it doesn’t exist in any one place. Does SB Law apply? I don’t know, I’m asking the question. My gut says…. maybe.
And if it does… we still have the issue I raised earlier, which is that the bulk of the 3.7 w/m2 is generated above the altitude at which water vapour is dominant (compared to CO2). While I think it would be insane to suggest that this results in zero warming, I think it makes sense to suggest that of that 3.7 w/m2, some lower amount (a bit, or a lot, I really don’t know) winds up at surface via all mechanisms. We simply cannot take that 3.7w/m2 and convert it to a temperature rise via SB Law. imho

“In the meantime, we will without much additional effort beyond existing research and the obvious profit incentives drop the cost of solar power by a factor of four, and it will become at least competitive with the cheapest ways of generating electrical power. We will also have at least one major breakthrough in energy storage technology. The two together will cause solar to become more profitable than coal independent of subsidy, for much but not all of the world….. “ ~ Dr. Robert Brown
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Tsk Tsk says:
December 3, 2012 at 10:03 pm
That’s an article of pure faith. We’ve seen batteries improve at a glacial pace for a century and there isn’t enough pumped storage available to handle green energy at scale…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I am afraid I have to agree with Tsk Tsk. First solar and wind power are OLD technology.
1767: The First Solar Collector by Horace-Benedict de Saussure
1839: Photovolataic Effect Defined by Edmond Becquerel
1893: the First Solar Cell introduced
1947: Solar Power Equipment became popular in the US
1958: Solar Energy is Used In Space
1977: the US government embraced the use of solar energy by launching the Solar Energy Research Institute.
Info stolen fromHistory of Solar Energy
Both solar and wind are showing the earmarks of aproaching mature technology status.

…. novel technologies will often display a sigmoid growth curve, starting with a gradual development, suddenly experiencing an exponential increase in complexity, sophistication, and efficacy, followed by a long plateau of little or no development after that technology has achieved maturity….
link

or if you want from WIKI

A mature technology is a technology that has been in use for long enough that most of its initial faults and inherent problems have been removed or reduced by further development…. Another indicator is a reduction in the rate of new breakthrough advances related to it—whereas inventions related to a (popular) immature technology are usually rapid and diverse, and may change the whole use paradigm—advances to a mature technology are usually incremental improvements only.

People point out “Moore’s law” but the export of the solar industry to the sweat shops in China plus the horrible pollution caused by China’s rare earth mining is not represented in the curves I have seen. I doubt the curves includes inflation and all the subsidy programs or permitting, hook-up and inspection fees since they are ‘advertisements’ for the industry.
I am also surprised that Dr. Brown does not consider the Shockley–Queisser limit for a pn junction only 33.7% of the sunlight can be turned into electricity. we are at 22% with reflection from the surface playing a large part in limiting further gains without going to multilayers.
The last point is all the bankruptcies. It reminds me of the shake-out in the computer industry in the 1990’s when Prime, Digital, Wang and others went belly-up as the initial market explosion died off.
Of course the real problem with wind and solar is power storage. Without a reasonable and efficient means of storing power it can be nothing more than a niche market or political boondoggle.
The east and west coasts of the USA with mountains could use water and elevation for power storage but the NIMBYs and Activists would scream. (Wild Rivers Protection Act of 1973)

Julian Flood says:
ecember 3, 2012 at 11:32 am
…..
We are spreading enough light oil onto the ocean surface each year to cover it completely approximately every fortnight. I have seen oil smooths snaking out to the horizon from Tenerife, seen a smooth covering tens of thousands of square miles off Portugal, seen the Med covered from end to end.

Wow, those are some pretty extreme claims you’re making. Being ex-Navy and having circumnavigated the globe, I’ve never seen what you describe. Cover the entire world’s oceans every fortnight? Oil slicks to the horizon? Tens of thousands of square miles? The entire Mediterranean from end to end? Seriously?

The north Siberian coast has enough light oil coming down its rivers to equal an Exxon Valdez every five weeks….

An Exxon Valdez every 5 weeks? And this isn’t “front page” news? Sorry, you’re going to have to back-up these claims with something better than that Zeitgeist blip thingy.

Always a pleasure read RGB’s articles and the lively discusions that follow. Thanks, Anthony.

Gail Combs said @ December 4, 2012 at 11:57 am

The Pompous Git says:
December 3, 2012 at 11:15 pm
….The most obvious characteristic of climate is that it determines the vegetation type growing at a locality…..
_________________________________
Best and most logical definition that I have seen so far. Thanks for the links.

Thanks for the kind words Gail. And your often thought-provoking comments. It seems to me that climate in the current debate (the one that’s over & we didn’t need) is a completely different creature than the one I’ve been studying for the last 30-40 years.

vukcevic said @ December 4, 2012 at 1:16 pm

For the true AGW believer Dr. Pratt of Stanford University has produced a real treasure.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/12/04/multidecadal-climate-to-within-a-millikelvin/

I am gobsmacked! That’s numerology at its… er… finest. Thanks Vuk.

John West says: December 4, 2012 at 1:31 pm
quote
Julian Flood says:‘humble pie calculation’.
LOL
unquote
In my own defence I’d like to claim that it was more a lapse of memory than real stupidity — I’ve been looking at various parts of the world which are warming above the predicted rate and had done some dubious (using population of various towns as a proxy for oil run-off but that’s all the info I could get) calculations about Lake Tanganyika. To do the whole ocean calculation was comparatively easy and it was some time ago and.. the two got conflated. Waffle, excuse, etc…
The whole process that got me interested was this: Tom Wigley’s ‘why the blip’ which is about an SST blip during WWII; then the strange changes to the SST graphs and the obvious graphmanship going on with the published versions — you know what I mean, the red and blue bars with the zero line chosen to emphasise the modern warming; after that the Climate Audit posts on the bucket correction were a revelation. For all the juggling, the abrupt blip during WWII showed like a canine’s gonads. Climate science was obviously worried about the blip and was trying to explain it way rather than explain it, a reprehensible habit.
An possible cause of strange weather (apart from natural variation, but it looks a bit abrupt for that) during that time was the war at sea with its concomitant oil spill. Primary cause oil spill, which leads to reduction in aerosol production, lower turbulence, less evaporation. I still think that an oiled surface has lower albedo and lower emissivity, but people have argued about that; maybe I’m wrong with these, but I did poke around to look at various papers and I suspect people are forgetting that the big result of oil pollution is a reduction in roughness. Anyway the main effect is aerosol reduction.
Observation trumps theory of course, and I’ve seen these smooths, seen one which was over twenty thousand square miles and which because of its location must have been at the very least several weeks old. Unless it had been generated by biology, in which case all climate calculations are off and a new game is afoot, it says that something odd is going on with the ocean’s surface. The smooth I saw was resisting about 7m/s wind which agrees nicely with the experience of using radar for slick detection which are also overwhelmed by wind speeds only just above that. No breaking waves, no aerosols. I hope Salter’s cloud ship will give us a handle on the numbers here, but we already know that stratocumulus clouds, which would be modulated by the effect, are a large cooling influence.
I have been known to suggest that the only way to say for sure is to experiment, a procedure sadly lacking in climate science. It would be nice to think of Dr Brown, his youthful enthusiasm for experimental science rekindled by the conversation here*, sneaking out of harbour with a bottle of synthetic detergent and a bottle of olive oil, dribbling them onto the surface and watching in awe as Franklin’s experiment unfolds. If it works as advertised, and he manages to blag the experiment up to a huge oil tanker full of both off the coast of Fiji, I volunteer to carry the bags.
My involvement in this thread started with the idea that we couldn’t do anything about cooling. Well, not by any brute force technique, but I bet we could, if we had to, by manipulating the ocean surface to alter the stratocumulus coverage. The piece of pie, you will observe , was not all that large….
JF
*I hope he looked at the images of North Carolina harbours and saw the same things that I see. Smooths are a real phenomenon but people don’t watch the water surface, they accept its behaviour as normal without looking closely.

Smooths are a real phenomenon but people don’t watch the water surface, they accept its behaviour as normal without looking closely.
Smooths, as you put it, may have more than one cause, too.
As for albedo variation, see previous post and thin film constructive interference. You can see that at any time by putting a drop of gasoline or oil into a puddle on the pavement. It doesn’t darken the water; it brightens it. A lot. As in you can see the pavement beneath before, but often you cannot afterwards because the water surface becomes mirror-like at all angles.
I also have to say that this same drop of gasoline doesn’t seem to cover a hectare of rain-slick pavement, nor does the occasional drop of oil or gasoline that drips from my boat’s motor into the ocean seem to cover, or smooth, anything like a hectare of ocean. If it did, the entire Beaufort inlet (or any inlet to a harbor) would be one big slick, and they’re not. Even a clean and well maintained motor blows some unburned gasoline out in its exhaust, and in any given harbor with thousands of boats, there are at least tens of boats with egregious leaks of gasoline and/or oil.
rgb

To reply to all at once on the solar power issue — again, I’m being a pundit and using the pundit’s privilege to pull a future prediction out of my ass and throw it out there. If it fails, downgrade me as a pundit by all means. The basis for my punditry — not that I have to or should explain, because doing so reduces the “magic” when it all comes true and people go “how did he know, he must be a pundit” — is that following numerous threads on slashdot and gizmag and sometimes attending the odd seminar (I do work in a physics department, remember:-) I think that there are at least three, maybe as many as five or six, significantly different general approaches to solar power any one of which is capable of “breakthrough” at a level that might knock a chunk off of the overall price/performance ratio. People are working with completely different kinds of materials, with crystalline versus amorphous designs, with different dopings, with nanoscale structures in carbon and other materials (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotubes_in_photovoltaics). Then there are non-PV approaches including old fashioned focused light used to heat a boiler and variants thereof, and exotica like solar updraft towers that can generate substantial power and at the same time mobilize a lot of surface heat upwards, essentially facilitating a teensy bit of “global cooling” by warming the upper atmosphere. Any and all of these have some issues, sure, but they are different issues, and some of them represent whole spectra of testable possibilities any one of which could turn out to be “it”.
So my bet isn’t on silicon-based solar PV as a single horse in the race — I’m betting that one one of an entire field of horses being cared for and fed by highly motivated trainers who will make a ton of money if their horse wins will turn out to be a winner (indeed, that many of them will, gradually but incrementally improving, hence the prediction of gradual continued reductions in price). And to be honest, I think that plain old boring solar silicon PV has a factor of two to four of pure fat in its price as well and that it will continue to get cheaper per watt for the next decade or two regardless of what happens in the more interesting science, largely due to improvements in manufacturing process, economy of scale (a big one!), scale of demand, and so on.
Could I be wrong, Gail? Sure. Pundits are often wrong. It’s a horse-race, and all of the horses could turn out to be nags, fit for nothing but the glue factory. But I don’t think they will — too much money in it, and the theoretical bases for the various designs are all plausible or you wouldn’t have anybody even trying. But in many locations, for many purposes, solar PV is already break even to win a bit unsubsidized, even using stone age storage technology (or better yet, dumping surplus back into the grid to avoid having to store it at all). So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to predict that solar will advance to where it is a net win over a substantially larger space than it is now. Personally, I could amortize the cost of a 5 kW system for my house today over thirteen to fifteen years. That’s too long, but by 2020 I rather expect that the amortization will be down to 8 to 10 years and literally all new construction will have built in solar rooftops with the cost rolled into the house and mortgage.
Storage advances are a bigger risk, but the stakes are huge. Two technologies that might break out (or might not, see “bigger risk” include Zinc Oxide batteries, that have a lot of the right stuff, and some very wrong stuff indeed. But the wrong stuff seems (to me) to be vulnerable to some really clever engineering, perhaps driven by advances again in nanoscale technology. Also, again there are interesting possibilities associated with carbon nanotubes quite independent of any particular battery design — it seems likely that they can take any existing design and make it more efficient and robust. Billions of dollars in payoff to the first to a really killer patent.
So here’s the secret of my punditry. Sometimes a problem is physically intractable — blocked by inadequate understanding of some very difficult physics. Controlled thermonuclear fusion is a great example. Sometimes a problem is blocked less by physics, more by politics or a lack of will. Liquid Salt Thorium reactors are a case in point. Sometimes a problem is entirely tractable as far as the physics or basic chemistry is concerned, but there are substantial problems with details of the engineering that keep them from working — yet.
The first sort of problem is very difficult to predict. We could break through to a feasible fusion technology tomorrow (or rather, somebody could announce it tomorrow). Or next week. Or ten years from now. Or never. The latter two — my advice is trust the free market system, especially when it is partnered with substantial public investment in the underlying science and engineering.
It works.
rgb

ps ~ no idea who Grant Perry is.

no idea who Grant Perry is.
A double typo — damn ‘t’ key next to ‘r’ key. Try Grant Petty.
http://www.amazon.com/First-Course-Atmospheric-Radiation-2nd/dp/0972903313
God, I hope I haven’t been mistyping that for the last day or so. In any event, I’ve communicated a teeny bit with him, and I think he is viewed as being both knowledgeable and objective in this. Most of the graphs you see posted e.g. here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/10/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-emission-spectra
or on wikipedia seem to come out of his book (well, out of NASA by way of his book). I don’t own it, but it isn’t too expensive and I’m seriously thinking of getting a copy. But he’d almost certainly be the man to ask — after you read his book and see whether or not or how this is all taken into account already. Otherwise it is certainly not safe to assume that it is not. People are usually pretty careful.
rgb
rgb

“In the past, I always assumed that the difference from 1.2 degrees was from feedbacks. Now I’m starting to wonder…. maybe the 1.2 degrees itself is bogus.”
David, I don’t think I would jump to bogus but your thought to question it is a big step forward. Read again Robert’s description of co2 radiation being better thought of as more a diffusion process due to the relative short path length compared to the vastness of our atmosphere and due to the a relative high pressure and density. He and I are parallel in that respect and I greatly appreciate him speaking of just the physics and nothing but the physics. The question is; is it accurate to assume that a measurement of the radiative properties of co2 in a small lab test are exactly the same as if that test had been on one cubic kilometer of a mixture of N2 and O2 with the proper concentration of co2? The larger test then includes the fact that at short path lengths radiation in all respects is operating more like diffusion of energy, not a one-time energy transfer.
I am starting to realize that, like Dr. Brown stated above, changes in carbon dioxide’s concentrations may have a markedly different answer in an actual atmosphere with huge distances involved and pressure, density and temperature gradients present. Possibly thoughts and assumptions started way back with Arrhenius and Plass may be flawed. Just look to the path length of individual spectrum lines to help visualize what is happening at the grand scale. Stop thinking that radiation in co2 or h2o lines can beam down directly to the surface from altitudes greater that about a tree’s height, that simply does not occur. Diffusion is a correct view.

JazzyT says:
December 4, 2012 at 3:06 pm
Gail Combs says:
December 4, 2012 at 11:10 am
People point out “Moore’s law” but the export of the solar industry to the sweat shops in China plus the horrible pollution caused by China’s rare earth mining is not represented in the curves I have seen..
Rare earth metals aren’t that rare; China has just cornered the market by selling them at unrealistically low prices. Some see that loosening, and you can probably expect to see them being mined in places with better environmental and labor practices.
____________________________________
And that was just my point. You have to look not only at the innovation process but also the cost of manufacturing;
Operating Overhead
Buildings
Manufacturing Equipment
Electricity
Permits
Lawyers
Accountants
Safety/OSHA compliance officers
QC
Maintainence
Water
Sewer
Labor
Raw Materials
However the era of Cheap Chinese goods is almost over. American and EU manufacturing has been wiped of the board.
Manufacturers scrambling as raw material prices surge… Demand from emerging economies outside the United States also continues to push up prices. China now accounts for 45 percent of the world’s steel consumption and 10 percent of crude oil consumption
The end of cheap China: What do soaring Chinese wages mean for global manufacturing?
In 2000, Mexican manufacturing labor was more than three times as expensive as Chinese. But after of decade of stagnant wages in Mexico and a sustained rise in China, Chinese labor is no longer cheap. In fact, it costs almost the same amount to hire Mexican workers…
China is taking steps to mitigate air pollution… Its hefty subsidies to its solar industry have prompted some U.S. manufacturers to file a complaint with the International Trade Commission.
Pressure is being brought to bare on China. Propelled by its rapid industrial expansion and low environmental standards, China also has become one of the world’s biggest polluters. It now produces more sulfur dioxide than any other country, and has taken the lead in generating carbon dioxide as well…. if China doesn’t take steps “to bring pollution levels closer to those in the rest of the world, China’s trading partners can justifiably complain that China’s failure to act confers on its domestic steelmaking industry an unfair competitive advantage.”

Rare-Earth Mining Rises Again in United States
…China now controls 95 percent of total rare-earth supply….
…The fight over the minerals that run the electronic world entered a new phase in March when the United States, the European Union and Japan collectively filed a case against China, accusing the rare-earth powerhouse of violating world trade rules to manipulate mineral prices.
Environmental problems also played a role. Salty, radioactive water kept leaking from waste evaporation ponds, leading to the mine’s closure in 2002. Mining for rare earths is classically a very environmentally destructive process, and China’s market domination is due in part to disregard for health, safety and environmental controls. The country has recently started cleaning up its messiest mines, adding to export controls in pushing rare-earth prices up.
…“They were cheap,” Kaiser said, “because China was willing to subsidize the price by producing things with lower environmental and health and safety controls — all the things that we over here don’t allow.”
… in California, where a company called Molycorp has reopened what until the 1980s was the world’s flagship rare-earth mine.

wayne says:
December 5, 2012 at 1:47 pm
davidmhoffer, maybe I should have said “Diffusion is a more correct view.”
I knew what you meant 😉
agreed

Greg House;
I hope to enjoy watching your first steps.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A clearer demonstration that you understood not a single word of the discussion could not be had.

richardscourtney said @ December 5, 2012 at 1:29 pm

Large flywheels have been investigated but bearing wear would pose a severe threat of unintended release of the energy (with similar effect to unintended ignition of TNT).

IIRC from several decades ago the proposal was that the bearings would be magnetic and the whole enclosed in a vacuum, so no friction. You are correct of course that more conventional bearings would be problematic.

richardscourtney says:
December 6, 2012 at 4:07 am
“The V2 rocket was intended to not carry a warhead because its impact energy would be equivalent to two express trains colliding head-on.”
Some friends and I wondered about the energy release from LCROSS impacting on the Moon and worked it out. I do not recall the figure, but it was quite staggering. When energy increases with the square of velocity (linear or angular), it goes up pretty fast.
I have an hypothesis that this is why there is such a huge perceptual difference between driving 60 mph and 70 mph, even though you are only going 17% faster – I think our brains innately sense the energy of motion. Unfortunately, this causes us to believe we are really getting somewhere much faster when we stomp on the gas, when we may really only be making meager gains.

I keep getting different answers to these calculations, not least because it’s a long time since I’ve tried cubing negative exponents. Could someone help? My first calculation was:
quote
All figures are rounded. We make the assumption that the numbers at the NASA seawifs site are outdated and the real numbers have increased since 1994, which seems reasonable. Call the ‘down the drain’ figure 500 *10^6 gallons US.
That’s 500 *10^6 * 4 = 2000 *10^6 litres ‘down the drain’ = 2*10^9 litres per year
Area of world ocean = 3.5*10^8 sq km (70% of 500*10^6 ) = approx 3.5*10^10 ha.
number of 5 ml doses per year per ha = (20*2*10^9)/(3.5*10^10) = 1
unquote
It ought to be quite simple but I keep getting lost in the zeros and, my initial result being the same as Dr Brown’s calculation, I didn’t check any further. /Nullius in verba/ and all that.
First, how big is an oil molecule? 2*10^-10 metres across is one answer I’ve found. How thick would a 5 ml dose be when spread over one hectare, in molecule diameters? Franklin’s experiment found that 5ml smoothed one hectare. Is this realistic? If not, of course, all bets are off. I’ve got a tentative answer of 3, which is OK, but I don’t trust it. If the coverage is greater than one layer then it’s worth continuing with the next bit.
The primary oil spill is 2*10^9 litres down the drain: — this number is from NASA’s down the drain portion of its seawifs calculation 1994 (363 million gallons US) and assumed to have increased to about 500 million gallons US. Approx 4 litres per gallon.
Here’s the area of the ocean:
3.5*10^10 hectares (335,258,000 km^2 * 100 (hectares per km^2) )
One ‘dose’ of oil is 5 ml. I don’t know what the ‘dose’ of surfactant is which would result in the same effect, but I make the arbitrary assumption that the surfactant load is the equivalent of the oil load.
Total number of down the drain oil doses overall is 2* 10^9* 200 (n.b. 200 doses of 5 ml makes one litre)
Question : how many ‘doses’ of ‘down the drain’ oil does each hectare of ocean receive, on average, each year? (From this we can estimate the number of doses when we add in the extra oil and surfactant.)
Could someone go through it again? I see that I’ve divided 1000 by 5 and come to 20 in the original which is possibly in error*. Also, the number of hectares for the ocean surface keeps coming out differently and I’m running out of fingers**.
I suspect there are two errors, or more, which cancel out, but, as I say, it would be a mercy if someone else would check the whole thing, including the simplest of facts. Help!
JF
*this is a joke.
** so is this.

TomB,
Re the Exxon Valdez spill:
I’ve found a new figure for the spill.
http://www.evostc.state.ak.us/facts/qanda.cfm seems to be a reputable site. It gives the following spill details:
quote
How much oil was spilled?
Approximately 11 million gallons or 257,000 barrels or 38,800 metric tonnes. Picture the swimming pool at your school or in your community. The amount of spilled oil is roughly equivalent to 17 olympic-sized swimming pools. 
unquote
Siberian river oil spill: 500,000 tons. So the number of EV size spills is 500,000/38,800 =12.8866.
52 weeks per year divided by 12.8866 = 4.0352.
Enough spilled oil comes down the rivers into the Siberian seas to equal the Exxon Valdez spill amount every four weeks, five hours and 58 minutes, so I seem to have understated the case. Sorry about that and thanks for letting me set the record straight.
JF