Patrick J. Michaels testifies before the Committee of Natural Resources at the hearing “An Analysis of the Obama Administration’s Social Cost of Carbon”

glad I don’t suffer TV

George
Ps. They’re called “ships”, not boats.

He must have mistaken a carrier for a submarine.

Ok, couldn’t resist: If sea level rises, shouldn’t it make it easier to get through the Straight of Hormuz?

Trevor, ships don’t float, they displace water.

Case in point confirming your statement that “eradicating the fossil fuel industry would be a crippling blow to the US Treasury”. Here in Canada, just a drop in the price of crude oil (never mind eradication) has been enough to drive our economy into a recession. I’d hate to think of what eradication would do to us.

Wil said:
“Ships don’t float, they displace water”
So I guess your point is that due to rising sea levels, if you float a ship you’re more likely to drown some low lying climate refugees? Is that what makes it harder to get through the straights of hormuz? Just the psychological difficulty of all the climate refugees you’re murdering when you do it? #millimetersmurder

Fascinating, Auto. Thanks.

The admiral is only trying to increase funding for the Navy, plain and simple. As an admiral, you are, for the most part, a political entity, and you’re driven to do what you believe will benefit the Navy.
And frankly, given the way we’ve decimated our military?…I can’t blame him for that.

Black cats swing both ways:
http://www.csicop.org/superstition/library/black_cats

@rgb
+Thanks^4

You mean where you believe that you show that.

True, I do assume that when I point out that the assertion that a “trace gas” helps a colder atmosphere add heat to the Earth is a complete misrepresentation of the Greenhouse effect because it completely ignores the fact that the only source for actual heat in the system is the sun that the reader and I share things like a common language and sufficient knowledge about the system in question to realize that it is true. So it is indeed a belief. Obviously I cannot help it if some of my readers, wishing to beat up on the straw man they’ve erected in their own minds, continue to whack away saying NO! It is JUST a cold trace gas heating a warm earth and that’s impossible! There is no Sun! Whack! Whack! You think CO2 is magic! Whack! Second Law! Whack! Gravity does it! Whack!
Of course, ask any of those readers to actually explain, algebraically, precisely where the supposed violation of the second law occurs (with algebra), or provide a model of their own for the climate that doesn’t seem to require sunlight and uses gravity to heat the surface and to somehow explain the bone-simple spectroscopic data obtained at the TOA looking down, and there is a deafening silence, a pause, and then it is back to AHA! We Win! You think it is JUST a cold trace gas heating a warm earth and that’s impossible! There is no Sun! Whack! Whack!…
Sort of like just now.

But in the end, the alarmists and the luke-warmers argue (sp agree) that CO2 warms the earth and only disagree on how much.

Yeah, it’s really funny how that works, isn’t it, all the people who actually have science degrees and work in fields like physics or climatology all agree that when you actually measure the top of atmosphere spectrum, looking down, and find a black body curve with big bites taken out of it that corresponds to the surface temperature in wavelengths where the atmosphere is transparent and drops to a black body curve corresponding to top of troposphere temperatures in the bites, and notices that the bites directly correspond to absorption bands in particular molecular components of the atmosphere, it kind of ends any possible argument about the Greenhouse effect being real, and leaves one only with the nearly hopeless task of determining whether or if feedbacks within the system amplify or partially cancel any modulation of the effect brought about by mucking around with greenhouse gas concentrations. That is, with plenty of room for disagreement on “how much”. Very perceptive of you to notice.
It’s only the people who don’t understand the science at all who argue otherwise. After all, you have to start by ignoring the spectroscopic data that constitutes a direct measure of the outgoing radiation flux (and the bottom of atmosphere looking up data that constitutes a direct measure of the incoming radiation flux), then you have to continue by asserting absurdities about what photons can, or can’t cause “warming” by misrepresenting the SB law, misstating the second law (but never actually using it algebraically in a computation of energy flow), and finally you have to come up with an alternative explanation for ground warming that usually involves gravity doing work, in perpetuity, without ever quite writing out a complete description of how gravity can keep doing work all by itself or how any other energy in the system gets into the system and gets out again. Usually by referring disparagingly to “trace gases” in spite of the fact that the mean free path for radiation in the absorption bands of those trace gases is simple to compute, measure, and understand, and that like it or not the atmosphere is completely opaque in those absorption bands for the first five or six thousand meters of atmosphere from the sea level surface up.
rgb

Can we accurately calculate a value of TOA Pout that is independent of lower altitude processes that occur at various values of effective temperature and probability of egress and, if so, what level of error bands are likely?

In detail, no, on average, yes. Or at least, maybe. Let’s express it in a way that keeps it simple to illustrate both the problem and the approximate solution. I reduced the GHE to two channels. One is thermal radiation from the surface that goes straight to space as if the atmosphere is totally transparent, because in some bands it pretty much is, at least some of the time. The other is thermal radiation given off from a range of heights called the “effective radiating level” (ERL), a term I don’t like because it implies that it is a constant and its not. It varies by wavelength, the density of the species with active lines at (within a small range of) any given wavelength, and temperature. It varies a lot day to day for things like water vapor, a little day to day for CO_2 or methane. It is better to think of there being a band of heights from which the atmosphere bleeds out radiation in different wavelengths. The key thing to remember, though, is that these heights are all near the tropopause and are one of the things that helps to establish the tropopause and the adiabatic lapse rate (the rate the atmosphere’s temperature reduces in the convective zone with height). It is cold up there.
The actual loss mechanism involves the atmosphere itself — mostly N2 and O2 — bouncing water molecules and CO2 molecules and so on around, eventually exciting one of their upper levels so that the GHG molecule gives off a photon. This photon either goes down (where it is eventually reabsorbed by something, most likely the same species of GHG molecules but near the surface of the Earth the Earth as well) or up. If the density of absorbing molecules above it is low enough, it has a chance of going through them without being absorbed again to outer space, and once there it is gone, carrying energy away from the Earth irreversibly (the “temperature” of space is so low any back radiation is negligible). CO_2 and water vapor have LOTS of levels that couple to the IR wavelengths that correspond to the temperature range (and hence available internal energy) of the atmospheric molecules in question. N2 and O2 do not, and hence make only very small contributions to the outgoing radiation from anything close to Earth or upper atmospheric temperatures (they are basically “transparent” to these wavelengths and don’t absorb or emit to them).
There is a lot of energy in the N2 and O2 reservoirs, and it takes time for CO_2 or water vapor to lose it, so it isn’t like energy reaches a single height and then bleeds out to space instantly. Even though one species and line might begin reaching space at (say) 5 km, there is still plenty of energy to be lost when another species or the same species with a different line/wavelength reaches its ERL at 5.2 km. So “cooling” of the atmosphere occurs over a band of heights near the top, where the atmosphere itself is cold compared to the surface and where the LWIR radiation is emitted at a much lower intensity.
As I pointed out above, the sum of the power emitted by the whole surface of the Earth directly from the surface (no interaction with the atmosphere) plus the energy emitted from the atmosphere (from a range of heights that reaches weakly down to the surface as the absorption lines themselves narrow a bit with height, but MOSTLY from near the tropopause) has to balance to power absorbed by the whole surface of the Earth directly from the sun (this includes both the surface and the atmosphere, which does absorb some of the sun’s energy as well). So far, so good.
This is a VERY SIMPLE MODEL. It helps one understand that if one throttles atmospheric emission, surface emission has to rise to compensate. But is it all that is going on? Really?
Not at all. SOME incoming sunlight is absorbed by the Earth — either surface or atmosphere or even delivered to some depth in the ocean. SOME incoming sunlight is directly reflected before it even has a chance to warm anything! The atmosphere itself reflects some (without heating). White cloud tops reflect a lot! Ice and snow reflect a lot as well. Water and and soil and trees and mountains all reflect different amounts, at different times of the day and year. When you see pictures taken of the Earth from space, the light that made the picture is part of this lost energy.
The “albedo” of the Earth “reflects” the fraction of light energy that is reflected without being absorbed. It is usually treated as being (on average) a constant, but we have little reason to think that it is (on average) a constant. It is also not a symmetric constant — the NH and SH have different average albedos, which has some surprising effects on apparent global average temperature over each year.
Another problem is that the Earth’s orbit is not circular — it is strongly elliptical. You can’t “see” it from the surface, but the sunlight reaching the top of the atmosphere varies by around 91 watts/m^2 — almost 7% of the total — every six months from max to min and back to max. It is maximum when global average temperature is a minimum — in case you like annoying paradoxes — presumably because of the big difference in the amount of land vs sea area in the NH vs the SH, and the very different albedo (and a lot of other things) of both.
Even locally albedo is not only not a constant — as has been asserted on this list, it may well be part of a profound negative feedback cycle over a large fraction of the Earth, where as the day warms, clouds form and start to limit that warming by reflecting away a lot of sunlight before it is absorbed. So water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but it can easily have a net cooling effect because of its variation of albedo as it forms clouds.
But that’s still too simple — the Earth turns on its axis, so we only get sunlight at all part of each day, and the amount we get varies continually. And at night clouds warm, they do not usually cool, because then the only thing reflected by the high albedo is LWIR being given off by the Earth as it tries to cool to space. Anybody who has lived on the Earth for a reasonable amount of time knows that clear, dry nights are likely to be colder than cloudy nights, all things being equal, and humid nights often don’t seem to cool at all.
Not done yet. The Earth is tilted — by quite a bit — so we have seasons, the time of day and angle of sunlight hitting the Earth varies all year long, with two major sections where it is light all day or dark all day for months of the year. Being dark 24×7 really does tend to favor cooling, as the only real source of heat is energy transport from where the sun falls and it is at least somewhat warmer. And did I mention that the world is round? Well not exactly round — oblate spheroid, distorted from being round by its rotation, but distorted enough that mount Everest is not the highest point on Earth as measured from its center of mass. It isn’t even close.
A lot of complexity, right? So people say “Hey, screw all of this complexity. We’ll estimate the average TOA insolation and pretend that it is really a constant and ignore the annoying NH/SH problem as if it isn’t there. Then we’ll somehow compute an average value for “the albedo” and throw away that much TOA sunlight. Then we’ll average the incoming radiation over the sphere of the Earth, mostly ignoring the fringe effects at “sunrise/sunset” where the sunlight isn’t really hitting the Earth per se any more but only the atmosphere and any day/night accidents of resonance with the underlying albedo and any day/night variation of “average cloudiness” or “average snowpack” and so on. Finally (depending on what we are trying to argue) we’ll either consider the remaining energy to be delivered all the way to the surface or for part of it to be absorbed on the way down by the atmosphere.”
At the end of the day they come up with a number that is supposed to represent the average input power of the whole planet or more likely, they divide this out by area to get the average “intensity” of incoming energy per square meter. As you can see, this number is entirely meaningless, and yet it is also in a sense meaningful as one at least hopes that it is, in fact, the total average power divided into the total radiating surface area.
OR, they write a General Circulation Model, and do not do all of this. They use the actual shape of the Earth, the actual orbit around the sun, the actual tilt — all of the things they can actually/exactly compute — and do not ignore the fact that treating albedo as an “average” might be horribly wrong, but instead try to express it as some sort of distribution of space and time, perhaps even one that is a function of the nearby surface state. Then they try to actually account for all of the internal energy transport.
I don’t know which one is worse. The first one you can draw on a piece of paper to try to convince people that you understand what is going on, is “computable” given simple enough assumptions, but the answer that results is almost certainly wrong and is easily manipulated by people who want to “prove” this or that because making even small changes in the numbers you assign freely to the whole planet can produce major changes in what you say is going to happen. The second one is implemented at a level that by design is computable, and the answers look like they should be meaningful, but we actually know enough about the dynamics being solved to know better than to think that they are. And when we compare them to nature, they give terrible answers.
That’s why I try not to do this. Sure, clouds on one part of the Earth can block a lot of LWIR in what is supposed to be a “transparent” atmosphere, dropping the radiation intensity for that patch. At a different time of the same day those same clouds might block incoming sunlight and actually prevent the absorption of more radiation than they trapped a few hours earlier. Yes, it is very difficult to determine if “average cloudiness” is varying in time, or worse if details of cloudiness are changing so there are more daytime (cooling) clouds and fewer nighttime (warming) clouds at constant average cloudiness. Models don’t prove anything at this scale that you don’t build into them. We have almost no real data and what data we have we have only over an utterly insignificant window in time (we have only had “flight” for around a century, and only had satellites for maybe half of that and had good satellites with good instrumentation for maybe half of that). And to top it all off, climate phenomena are part of what Prigogene referred to as self-organizing phenomena things that self-organize to maximize dissipation. Maybe his ideas will turn out to be wrong, but tif not, even if we do warm the Earth, we are most likely to force the Earth to discover new modes of cooling that are a bit more efficient and reduce the all-things-equal rates we might otherwise predict. Things like El Nino/La Nina are large scale self organized phenomena that do just that. So is the Gulf Stream. A small change in either one could have huge effects on global average temperature and the distribution of heat on its way out of the system.
In the end, IMO all we can say is what I said above. All things being equal, increasing CO_2 is almost certainly going to raise the ERL of its emission lines. This in turn will slightly reduce the temperature that fuels the emissions from those lines, which will slightly reduce the radiation intensity from the upper atmosphere. This, in turn, will probably raise surface temperatures to compensate.
But, it could end up just making it a bit cloudier during the day in the tropics. Or, it could make it more humid, and hotter still, everywhere. Or, it could leave the tropics pretty much alone and warm primarily the polar zones, which in turn could precipitate land ice melt, huge positive feedback, and Hansen’s “five meter by 2100” of sea level rise. Or it could cause the Atlantic to divert the Gulf Stream just a bit south, cool the arctic and start a negative feedback loop of albedo driven cooling, while confining the additional heat to the tropics where it is maximally efficiently lost and where the cloud response minimizes the absorbed heat at the same time. Or it could do something nobody can anticipate because the Earth’s climate is a chaotic highly nonlinear systems and we don’t come close to understanding it, or having enough data to start to properly understand it.
But the data, such as we have, suggests that CO_2 is in fact gently warming the Earth as my simplest model describes, with little “uncommitted warming”. And we have the promise of finally getting enough, good enough, data to resolve many questions. CERES in particular:
http://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/
more than any other project at hand is likely to put solid numbers in our hands in many places where right now we don’t even have particularly “educated” guesses. In particular, we ought to be able to see a clear correspondence between directly measured average radiative imbalance at the TOA and average surface temperature. We also ought to be able to see a clear correspondence between CO_2 concentration and the specific intensity of radiation in all the wavelengths coupled to it, over a long enough time to begin to average out confounding effects. It shouldn’t be too difficult to compare CERES output to the predicted modulation of TOA outgoing radiation as ERL increases and pushes up the lapse rate to colder temperatures. It should also be easy to look to see where, how, and if this is dynamically compensated or augmented — so called “feedback”.
So why theorize or argue in the meantime? In a decade, or two, we will know. One measurement trumps any amount of jawing. And with the Sun about to (maybe) enter a near-Maunder minimum for the next cycle, or maybe even two, we might learn a bit from that as well. With ARGO out there, we might eventually learn something about the ocean. If we simply had somebody appointed to head NASA who was an actual scientist, somebody whose integrity and objectivity is not easily questioned — personally I’d vote for Trenberth if I had the choice because I think he is a basically honest man and would follow the data, not the politics the way the House that Hansen built did for the last few decades — and who might, just might, clean house and force a serious reappraisal of their temperature products as CERES data comes in.
Because CERES, more even than the tropospheric temperature series, is going to be a serious, serious limit on what can be claimed for warming. During “the pause”, the TOA radiation imbalance should have been increasing if the GHG theory was accurate and there were no confounding natural processes. CERES data ought to instantly reveal if aerosols matter, what is happening to the brightness of the tropics vs the poles, and so on. It will take decades, but in decades we should have little doubt about what is going on. The trick is going to be to avoid spending all of the world’s surplus income on the worst case scenario when the best fit to the past data does not justify it, when the failing GCMs do not justify it, while waiting for new data sources to produce enough real data to be able to answer the unanswered questions to the satisfaction of all reasonable, honest, people (the ones that, for example, acknowledge that there are unanswered questions that matter).
rgb

“some water in a lake that flows out over a water fall.” Is the the potential energy in “some water” cooler than the boiling water?

Neither the water in the lake, nor in the water fall is as hot as the water in the tea kettle. Nor the impellers, nor the magnets, nor the coils of wire, nor the power lines to your house, or the wall socket, or the power cord from the tea kettle. Thought energy is transformed multiple times from the lake water to the tea kettle, not a single one of them is hot enough to boil water. They are ALL cooler than the boiling water.
Yet it boils

Here in central Florida the energy makes my house 30F cooler than it is outside.
Your little story is fine, but you forgot that there is no radiation by CO2 involved in the fable at all. And you never mentioned gravity that is the force that makes it all work. By the way, my grandfather took me to all the TVA dams when I was a lad and I even got to operate the lock system at one of them. Gravity is something my friend.

All I ask is that you stop with the appeals to authority and other condensing statements — but mostly just stop trying to win the debate by calling us “d#niers”.

I’m not trying to win the debate by calling you anything, but I am waiting for you, personally, to engage in some sort of substantive argument that is not appealing — well, I can’t exactly call it “to authority” in the case of dragonslayers, but to third parties whose understanding of physics — in my personal opinion, based on an absolute eternity of nonsense about the second law of thermodynamics and the impossibility of cold heating hot — is almost the inverse of authoritative.
I read, and commented, on both of the articles you linked above. Good, interesting articles. Definitely not dragonslayer material but they deftly dodge any sort of actual demonstration that IR “activity” is a binary switch rather than a slider bar with a differential effect in an atmosphere with constrained mass that is mostly not IR active. Otherwise they describe the same process I describe, without in any way proving that this process will have no differential response to an increase in concentration of a greenhouse gas component. It doesn’t even provide a way of estimating the response and showing that it must be less than thus and such, and hence is negligible, or deriving a functional for for the response (even if that functional form is supposed to be a straight line).
I will repeat in non-denier language what I stated above. I have yet to read a single convincing computation of the dynamical energy balance of the planet that a) is in quantitative agreement with observational evidence in the form of top of the atmosphere spectrographs; b) is in theoretical agreement with ordinary quantum mechanics and electrodynamics; c) is in any sort of agreement at all with the laws of thermodynamics, that predicts the equilibrium surface temperature of the earth. I would include most of the toy models you seem to object to as well as the incomplete model laid out in the two articles you linked. I absolutely do not think that the GCMs work and that the problems is currently computable. You haven’t provided one, and please, you can cheer all you want for Joe, but he hasn’t provided one either in his online sniping and — but let’s not get started down that path… I had actually managed to forget that he existed and then you had to go remind me.
I do, however, find the comparatively simple e.g. single layer models convincing, largely because they do not depend on various details that are otherwise areas of contention. They are ultimately capacitative resistance models, and one can look only at the “currents” on the wires going in and the wires coming out and tell a great deal about what is going on inside using only simple physics. Petty’s single layer model (which is the grown-up version of Willis’ steel atmosphere model with adjustable and hence much more realistic multiband absorption coefficients) is a solvable quantitative model. These models do not, actually, critically depend on how heat is transferred into the atmosphere at the bottom. They do, critically depend on how it is lost to space at the top.
And that’s where one should concentrate one’s energy. If one doubles atmospheric CO_2 concentration, does it have no effect on the top? There is no doubt that the density of the atmosphere where CO_2-coupled radiation can escape must decrease, because it is the density of the partial pressure of CO_2 that has to remain the same (the distance between molecules has to reach, approximately, a sufficiently large number). In order for the temperature at the surface not to change, the temperature of this emission layer must not change, even though its density must be smaller than before the change. In order for that to occur, the lapse rate much change by just the right amount, and since we haven’t altered the total mass of the atmosphere a whit, that seems extraordinarily unlikely.
Beyond that, who cares how the energy gets into the atmosphere at the bottom? Radiation, conduction, convection, latent heat. They all can participate — none of them actually remove energy from the system, and while the capacity of the atmosphere probably does change (with water vapor) making the real system even more complex, again it isn’t the bottom that matters.
As I pointed out earlier, I can be wrong, I can make mistakes. If you, or Joe, or anyone else can come up with a quantitative model that is convincing, I’m happy to be convinced. But arguing that cold cannot heat hot in an open heated system is not a quantitative model, and if by that it is intended to suggest that altering the density of cold material between a heated object and a cold reservoir will not alter the temperature of the heated object, it is not true.
One last comment. I provided a simple functional fit of the standard no feedback model to the temperature, and got excellent agreement. Do you, or any of your draconic friends, or any of the papers you find online, have a model simple or otherwise that can provide an equally impressive quantitative agreement with the data (such as it is)? Or are you limited to saying “it’s all natural variation” (another way of saying we cannot compute it or understand it, which I’m actually very sympathetic to but which does not alter the fact that the simple model works, which is hardly evidence that it is wrong. You systematically dodge this question in each of your replies, where you appear to have your feelings hurt by the d*** label you seem to think that I threw out there for you personally. Here, I will apologize. I’m sorry I called you, or anyone a denier just because you don’t think that there is any greenhouse effect at all. But I’m not sorry about insisting that one has to do a lot better than to just assert this, repeatedly, loudly, usually accompanied by physics nonsense and straw men galore, when faced with a working model that explains the data and is based on sound physics.
If you don’t want the d-label, fine. Don’t just say no its not, show me the equations. Show me some proof. And don’t assert that the “proof” is that the process violates the second law, because obviously that didn’t bother the author of the two articles you linked — it does no such thing. Nor does the single layer radiative model — there one can prove that no laws of nature or thermodynamics are violated in the way you and dragonslayers often assert by actually computing the entropy changes of all of the steps in a direct statement of the first law, something I did repeatedly for Joe but that he somehow was unable to grasp.
I’m not asserting that this is a good model for the climate — quite the contrary — but it is quite enough to put to rest hyperbolic assertions of egregiously incorrect physics. Once those are put away, one can in principle get serious and have to actually produce a working quantitative model of your own that doesn’t violate natural laws and that at least qualitatively behaves as expected when one does things like vary greenhouse gas concentrations in the model, in detail (the detail lacking in the linked articles). So go ahead — try to convince me. I’ll listen. I just told a person that I’m almost certain is a complete nut that I’d read his copyrighted/patented “book” where he connects G to the expansion rate of the Universe, using little g is a key parameter along the way. He’s sending it to me. No mind could be more open than that. But don’t expect to convince me with misused physics terms and argumentation. The alternative model has to make sense and at the very least be quantitatively estimable or I chuck it.
rgb

“I’m not trying to win the debate by calling you anything, but I am waiting for you, personally, to engage in some sort of substantive argument that is not appealing …”
Then you are seemingly incapable of reading with comprehension. I have told you that I don’t care to try to change your mind. I am not going to debate you here on your home turf where I will get moderated, snipped or banned. I have read of way too many others who experienced that when they engaged in full debate here. So, as I said, I set out to demonstrate that there are other theories than your “CO2 what done it” line. And that was done when you claimed that there was little to disagree with in Kristian’s latest posts on a theory that it is mainly mass and not radiation by CO2. Many other theories have theories along similar lines that have been discussed at Tallbloke’s Talkshop has caused problems with Mr. Watts in the past. You know the story better than I do.
I also told you in as simple a language as I can that my point was simply that there are other hypothesis out there that do not rely on the absorption and radiation of CO2 to warm the planet. In fact several different groups think it has a net cooling effect. Did you read the paper referenced on that subject?
I did mention that you could ask questions at another site. I read there and post there. But I doubt you will leave your comfort zone. In fact, I have not seen you at any of the other sites that allow occasional open debates on gravity/mass vs. radiation as the main driver of climate. And that is odd given that you claim that only those with science degrees in physics or climatology know enough to be worth debating. (on the other hand, as I am very busy and I may have totally missed you at another site)
You might think that Joseph P. and that whole crowd only talk about the second law, but you would be wrong yet again. You might think you are right on the second law but if you were honest in saying that you know you have been wrong in the past and might be again, then you might actually read some of the detailed posts and papers which are not the cartoonist deal that you claim. On the other hand, the two posts that you said you read at “Okulær” are similar to the one that set of a large tiff between Joseph P. and himself. By the way, I have mentioned folks other than the not-to-be-mentioned group. Several others but you seem to be fixated on them. Perhaps due to the exchange that some judge you lost decidedly. (and others think the opposite — but that is science is it not?)
I understand that one of the moderators here also believes that the CO2 effect is so small (if it exists) that we will never be able to measure it in the real world. At least that is what he told me on one thread. That is what I see in the data myself. That is what a host of others see in the data. Yet you just said on a recent thread (maybe this one) that a doubling of CO2 had to be at least 1C. Like all the folks who claim that CO2 warms the planet, there is no real world data/experiment showing that or you are hiding it someplace. Care to share?
You are clever. You claim in a roundabout way that a theory that is different from your own might be true but that I would have to prove that to you to not be a “science d#nier.” So, as Reagan said, there you go again.
As I said before, time will tell which theory of why the planet is at the temperature it is wins out in the long run. I think, based on everything I have read over 40 years, that the CO2 hypothesis will not win after government funding stops propping it up. Regardless, others are offering theories that are science based. You and your friends here deny them by name-calling and so forth. Most anti-science don’t you think. (and I have seen other groups call you some pretty bad names — both sides should stop that)
By the way, the Scottish Skeptic wrote a piece on the group-not-to-be-named and claimed they were right on the physics but were horrible at PR. I can agree that Joseph P. can be an arrogant little #$%# as can some here. (present company excluded?) There have been various groups offer models of how the planet’s climate works that have no need of CO2 doing any warming. That was the point. The G.D. debate is not over. It will continue.
Bottom line: CO2 may have a warming effect, may have no effect, or may have a cooling effect in the lower atmosphere. There are scientific arguments for all 3 possibilities. The only anti-science is by those who think that the debate is over. (note: most everyone agrees that radiant gases have a cooling effect in the upper atmosphere — heat gotta leave here somehow)

Markstoval@4:11
“Don’t you think we have both wasted time here today…?”
No, Mark, I don’t. Professor Brown deals with the second part of your question, so, with RGB and your leave, I’d like to address this part.
The exchange here discusses the fundamental scientific basis for whether ANY political action is warranted to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That was the raison d’être for Dr. Michael’s testimony. I suspect that many viewers of this site have a much better understanding of the arguments surrounding net radiative heating for temperature variation and the myriad feedbacks (convection, etc.) that can diminish the effect. The main upshot is that the “C” in CAGW is toast, from both perspectives. Evidently, the two of you have discussed this issue at length on other sites, but it’s beneficial to have it presented on the Big One.
The paper you reference on net negative sensitivity narrowly addresses a more general concern that I have had since the Willis E post that presented a graph of surface temperature v. Net radiative flux TOA, particularly for land. Ocean currents and atmospheric circulation pump a huge amount of energy from equatorial regions toward the poles. Yet, there was a fairly uniform relationship evident in the plot. RGB points out that over the 4π steradians TOA, a net radiative flux MUST lead to a surface/atmosphere temperature change. So, in my mind, two questions emerge. Is the satellite coverage sufficient spatially and temporally to resolve the energy circulation? Can storms transport enough warm air to a sufficiently high altitude for the water to emit radiation to space without it being detected?
All of the spectra that I’ve seen for the radiation balance have residual water bands, despite efforts on the part of the authors to suppress the aspects to dry conditions. The overwhelming majority of the GHG effect is through these bands, and can’t be neglected in a comprehensive model.
Obviously, I don’t mean to snub the redoubtable RGB here, but he seems to want quantitative descriptions, which I am unprepared to provide. Comments from either or both of you would be appreciated.
As for this being RGB’s “home turf,” get real. Many of us look forward to your comments as well! 🙂
Hopefully one or both of you is still checking this thread. I’m doing a summer session, and the students are keeping me out of trouble.

I have been thinking for some time that we should be able to use our satellites to measure energy incoming from the sun very exactly and then use satellites to measure very exactly the energy back out. I speculate without any data do back it up that we could measure with enough precision and accuracy to be able to crack the riddle of the question of is the planet warming or cooling. Certainly using land based thermometers is not doing the job.

And I agree. So does NASA:
http://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/
So in a decade or two, the argument will be resolved the best way — by actual data. In the meantime, the actual data we have — massaged or not — suggests that increasing CO_2 without bound or care is probably unwise, but that it is not very likely that any increase we will experience before the world turns and we invent new sources is going to cause a catastrophe that justifies demonizing coal-based electrical power in the meantime. In the meantime, the failure of the GCMs to agree with all of the temperature records, even after the latter have been repeatedly adjusted, suggests that they (to be very quite and understated about it) “are not suitable as the basis for public policy decisions of any sort”.
That’s what Dr. Michaels, and Roy Spencer, and many others are pointing out at every opportunity. It isn’t about whether or not “the greenhouse effect is real”. It is about a serious lack of evidence for a climate sensitivity much greater than (roughly 1.8 C per doubling of CO_2). RCP 8.5 is a fantasy and shouldn’t even be considered as a possible CO_2 future. CO_2 is not likely to peak much over 600 ppm if that, and will go up slowly enough that we have plenty of time to react if CERES and other UNbiased experiments reveal a problem. In the meantime no, we do not need to take expensive mandated action, or embrace carbon trading schemes, or outlaw coal burning plants in general. We just need to continue to invest public money in alternative energy generation science until technologies emerge that need no subsidy to have them adapted by the world out of sheer self-interest, not “to save the world” while lining certain people’s pockets and keeping the world’s poorest people safely poor for another generation.
BTW, I apologize again if I made you feel bad at any point in our discussion. I’m hoping that if nothing else I have made you a bit more skeptical about the claims that there is no meaningful CO2 linked greenhouse effect, as both the contemporary data and the simplest possible model suggest that there is, at the same time that same data suggests that there is little chance of catastrophe. So far, CERES seems to be closing to the door on the last bastion of the catastrophic warmists like Hansen, the uncommitted warming problem, where they claim that it will take another (fill in the blank with a time order decades to centuries) to equilibrate the Earth to the CO2 we already have. The actual TOA imbalance it measures suggests that if we froze CO_2 right now at 400 ppm, there is a whole 0.1 C of “uncommitted warming” (or so) required to bring it back to balance. and that it would likely accomplish it in around one decade.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere on this and other threads TODAY, I’m fully aware that the climate is complex and that the model I fit and its physical basis (and that is being discussed on the Mathematical Basis thread) is highly conditional and could be completely wrong just because the Earth is complex. That doesn’t stop it from fitting the last 165 years of data well enough to make one think twice about rejecting it on the basis of crude arguments. I’d be happy to be wrong — I just don’t think that I am at the same time I’m pretty sure that the egregiously large estimates for climate sensitivity to date are absurdly large and not supported by the data without the “uncommitted warming” that CERES appears to be eliminating as a serious possibility. Beyond that I can make up science fiction as well as Hansen or the producers of climate catastrophe movies, but even the best-told story has to eventually be confirmed by correspondence with data to become science.
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What am I missing ?

I’m not sure. Here is the data (HadCRUT4, with error bars) and my own computed best fit (using R). I also throw in AR5 MME mean and a purely for fun CO_2 driven warming PLUS a sinusoid (because a lot of people have noticed the approximate sinusoid in the data and like to make much of it). Don’t take the sine bit seriously, but it does improve the already excellent fit, doesn’t it?
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Toft-CO2-vs-MME.jpg
As you can see fits the data damn well, and this corresponds to a total climate sensitivity defined as temperature increase per doubling of around 1.8 C, and the adjustments probably make little difference to this (and I don’t think HadCRUT4 has jumped on this bandwagon just yet, as it is their/Hadley’s work that Karl et. al. were disrespecting).
HadCRUT4 has more like a 0.8 C rise over the run of the data — it is GISS that does an extra 0.1 or thereabouts. But either way, that’s chickenfeed. I get a either way. This is a direct fit of the CO_2 only model to the actual data (see the Mathematics of Carbon Dioxide… ” on WUWT elsewhere just now) with no lag for uncommitted warming. This means that RCP 6.5 is unlikely to produce any sort of catastrophe, and frankly 6.5 is probably excessive. This TCS predicts 1 — that is 1.0 C of additional warming at 600 ppm, which is probably a reasonable upper bound for the peak CO2 we are likely to see before coal based power just can’t compete with one or more of the alternative technologies in the open marketplace. So why worry about it or spend a fortune on it now? That won’t even shift NC’s climate one whole growing subzone south.
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[‘shift .. one growing subzone south” – or shift NC’s (current) climate one zone north? .mod]

If you’re saying that 1.6 C or 1.8 C is an absolute upper bound, then I get it.