Never mind that in 2006 it was reported that levels of the second most important greenhouse gas, methane, have stabilized.
Scientists are now working to create a new “tootless” grass for bovine enjoyment which will help cut methane emissions from the bovine tailpipes. What next? A moratorium on baked beans at BBQs? Editing out that scene from Blazing Saddles so that school kids don’t get bad ideas that might harm the earth?
According to the Scientific American article: “During the two decades of measurements, methane underwent double-digit growth as a constituent of our atmosphere, rising from 1,520 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) in 1978 to 1,767 ppbv in 1998. But the most recent measurements have revealed that methane levels are barely rising anymore — and it is unclear why.”
From NewScientist: “Although this is good news, it does not mean that methane levels will not rise again, and that carbon dioxide remains the 800-pound gorilla of climate change.”
Indeed, methane has made a small uptick in the last year.
Actually, NewScientist is wrong. CO2 is not the biggest “gorilla” of greenhouse gas on planet earth. It’s water vapor. Our earth would be much colder without water vapor in the atmosphere…it would be much like Mars. I seem to recall seeing a figure for average global temperature of about -14°F with water vapor absent.
So many of the climate models focus solely on CO2, but they leave out water vapor as clouds in the equations, or assume water vapor is static.
CO2 is far from being the most potent greenhouse gas. Chloroflourocarbons (CFC’s) commonly used as refrigerants as far worse at trapping infra-red in our
atmosphere.
Of naturally created GHG’s, Methane is 23 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than CO2. Nitrous Oxide is even worse at 296. So far no emergency legislation has been authored to eliminate the effect of cows or dental surgeons. The Kyoto treaty does not address these other gases either.
Here is a gauge of various gases and their “GWP”:
Global Warming Potentials Of Gases
(100 Year Time Horizon)
GAS GWP
========================
Carbon dioxide (CO2) 1
Methane (CH4) 23
Nitrous oxide (N2O) 296
Hydrofluorocarbons
HFC-23 12,000
HFC-125 3,400
HFC-134a 1,300
HFC-143a 4,300
HFC-152a 120
HFC-227ea 3,500
HFC-43-10mee 1,500
Fully Fluorinated Gases
SF6 22,200
CF4 5,700
C2F6 11,900
C4F10 8,600
C6F14 9,000
The concept of the global warming potential (GWP) was developed to compare the ability of each greenhouse gas to trap heat in the atmosphere relative to another gas. In this case, CO2 is the reference gas. Methane, for example, has a GWP of 23 over a 100-year period. This means that on a kilogram for kilogram basis, methane is 23 times more potent than CO2 over a 100-year period.
The interesting thing here is that this stabilization of methane levels in our atmosphere happened all by itself, and the scientists are clearly baffled as to an explanation. But that doesn’t seem to phase anyone promoting research to prevent cow tooting.
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For Arch and others who question how much influence water vapour has on the greenhouse effect, here’s a practical way to get a feel for the numbers.
Spend 24hrs in a desert.
By day the temperature can get into the high forties C. By night the temp is in the low single figures.
Now cross the mountains to the west and spend the day on the same latitude in the coastal plain.
By day the temp can get into the low forties, but by night the temp will stay in the low twenties.
Measure the temperatures, humidity and CO2 levels in both places.
Calculate the average temperature in each place and observe the amount humidity, (water vapour) brings to the greenhouse effect.
In the desert at night you’ll also get a great view of the stars, (but wrap up warm.)
Ric Werme (and others),
Thank you for your comments and further research. Indeed I had not looked at any of the other articles at Ecoenquirer. 🙂
Thank you also for background on the domain name. I have now added whois to my favorites.
Arch
McGrats (05:41:04)
That’s the best you can do? You acknowledge that the proportionate contribution of CO2 as a greenhouse gas (BTW we are not talking about a forcing factor here) is difficult to pin down so you will believe your personal acquaintance over published data? You will believe a source that cites a reference that has the approximate credibility of the Onion to back up his arguments (and even then it doesn’t back them up)?
Do you expect your website to be credible or just to spread half baked propaganda?
About forcing factors: In order for something to be a forcing factor it has to change in the amount of influence it has on the climate (change in quantity). CO2, methane, albedo, these are all changing therefore they are currently forcing factors. They are “forcing” the climate to change. Water vapor is really not changed directly by human activities enough to be a forcing factor. This is why the IPCC does not consider it as such even though it is universally acknowledged as the most influential single GHG. (Funny how so many poorly informed folks think that this is somehow disputed by someone.) Because water vapor is very sensitive to temperature its atmospheric level is being changed indirectly by the other forcing factors. Therefore its value as a feedback mechanism is included in climate models under the appropriate forcing factor, but you will not find it listed individually as such.
“You and your other Pogie friends seem to thrive on demonizing the names of all opposed to your nonsense. Surprise, surprise: your stature is coming to an abrupt end! You can only lie, deceive, and manipulate others for a given time. As the truth finally emerges, you’re going to be left with a reputation in rags and the laughing stock of those in the scientific and academic communities who stood by their guns and against the exploitation and destruction of the scientific method.”
Pogie? Oh brother, do you jump to conclusions! Everyone should be as fortunate as I am to pay so much in taxes.
Destruction of scientific method??? You, the one who accepts (until proven otherwise) arguments from people who cite facetious articles as references imply that you are the defender of the scientific method?
Kevin B,
I have acknowledged (multiple times) that H2O vapor is the single most dominant GHG (although not a forcing factor of the world’s climate). Why would your experiment help us to quantify H2O vapor’s contribution to the global climate? If it really were responsible for 95% of the GHG effect wouldn’t we expect the nights on the desert get closer to 5K (or whatever the temperature of outer space is?)
Arch, if, when the whole global warming deal blew up, we had installed well maintained, reliable measuring devices for temperature, humidity and CO2 levels in rural areas in both low and high humidity zones we would have had twenty or thirty years worth of high quality data on which to base our theories.
Instead, we opted for relying on the old weather stations and spent the money on international conferences and speculative models.
Trying to model climate is a worthwhile endeavor, but without reliable data to develop the theories and test the models out, the well known GIGO principle comes into play.
The way I understand it, at sea level or near ground level (I realize these can be drastically different things) CO2 absorption bands are saturated and overwhelmed by H2O IR absoption, since the bands overlap. But at higher altitudes the bands separate once again, which is why the mid-to-upper Troposphere should be warming faster than the surface. That the observations don’t show any warming at those altitudes, it can be concluded that CO2 has a minimal effect.
Oh and Arch. Spending twenty four hours in the desert gives you a good insight into what the ‘greenhouse effect’ is and how big a role water vapour plays in it, and the contrast between a desert where the sweat comes out and evaporates instantly at two in the afternoon and a coastal resort where the sweat drips of you and your cold glass of beer seems to leak all over you at two in the morning also gives a hint.
And I also found it good for the soul. (I wasn’t joking about the stars.)
I’ve put together a table showing greenhouse gases by pre-industrial numbers, additions broken down by source (natural and anthropogenic), and another table with the GWP added. I also calculated percentages and more. The table can be found at http://www.climateclinic.com/html/gwp.html.
Constructive criticism, suggestions, and comments welcome. Pogies… forget it! I wouldn’t waste my time reading your junk.
Jack Koenig, Editor
The Mysterious Climate Project
http://www.climateclinic.com
Harold Pierce Jr said: “EUREKA! ATTN: Everbody! I have finally found a really nice IR spectrum of ambient air which shows the absorptions of H2O and CO2 that are on scale. GO:
http:www.nzclimatescience.images/PDFs/ccr.pdf”
Nice find! But the correct URL is http://www.nzclimatescience.com/images/PDFs/ccr.pdf
Jack Koenig, Editor
The Mysterious Climate Project
http://www.climateclinic.com
In the vein of “one is innocent unless proven guilty,” should not the AGW proponents be made to first “prove” the hypothesis that increased CO2 = increased global mean temperature, despite contrary empirical data over the past decade? All the heavy science quoted above is great inside the glass walls of academia, but moot if Mother Earth, under the spell of an anemic Solar Cycle 24, Chilean volcanoes, etc., does not abide by any of it!
Remember, 99% of the Earth’s history has been inhospitable to us soft, pink humans! How in God’s name can we suddenly effect a change counter to Earth’s “normal” state of glaciacian? BTW the “normal” state is FAR worse than the worst scenerio the AGW types can gin up!
BOTH sides above sound like a school yard full of 5 year olds!
[…] Y el metano estuvo aumentando en la atmósfera entre 1978 y 1998 de de 1.520 a 1.776 … ¡partes por billón! Imaginaros, subir de casi nada, a casi nada más una fracción de casi nada. Carne de cañon para los alarmistas, y para los empresarios con ojo y ganas de desarrollar negocios subvencionados, que son los fetén. Una vez que el CO2 ya está completamente demonizado, aunque sea lo que las plantas comen y lo que nuestros pulmones expulsan, el siguiente salto adelante es el metano. En ello estamos, sin que importe nada que las mediciones recientes de la concentración atmosférica de metano indiquen que ha dejado de crecer. Jamás, jamás, permitiremos que los datos estropeen una buena política y unos buenos negocios. ¿Hay algo más brillante que sacarle la pasta a la gente cada vez que se come un filete, consiguiendo además que aplaudan encantados? La noticia viene de aquí –>, y está recogida de aquí –>. […]
Pierre Gosselin (08:41:42) :
“I’ll be happy when I don’t have to see this flaming cow…
REPLY: Oh you just wait, I have more pictures. ;-)”
For the back-path CH4 travel, I think flaming nostrils would look good. That and some dragon wings. Closing in on someone strapped in but not secure in his F50.
Arch, here’s an experiment to try.
Take a large sealed vessel and fill it with a mixture of 20% Oxygen and 80% nitrogen and suspend a temperature sensor in the vessel.
Apply heat to the bottom of the vessel. You will notice that the temperature of the gasses in the vessel will begin to rise. This is because the molecules of gas in contact with the bottom of the vessel will get excited as the heat gets through the vessel. These excited molecules will rise up through the gas and bounce of other molecules causing them to get excited. As the rising molecules pass up through the gas, other less excited molecules will sink to the bottom to replace them, where these in turn will contact the hot surface and get excited themselves.
These effects are known as conduction and convection, (a.k.a the forgotton modes of heat transfer.)
Record the rise in temperature of the gas and then remove the heat source. Record the fall in temperature of the gas. Note that the temperature does not drop of instantly but falls gradually till it matches the temperature of the vessel.
Now take a vessel filled with the same proportions of O2 and N and add 5% water then repeat the experiment. Pay particular attention to the slope of the temperature graph after the heat source has been removed. You can repeat this experiment with other proportions of water vapour up to 5%.
Take another vessel filled with O2 and N, but this time add a smidgeon of CO2, (say 380 ppm/v), and repeat the experiment. Again observe the slope of the decay.
Double the amount of CO2in the mix. Heck, whack it up to 1000ppm/v and repeat.
Using the results of these tests, build a computer model which can accurately recreate the global mean temperature for the past 100 yrs and accurately predict global mean temperature for the next 100 yrs.
Oh, and when you visit the desert, if your very careful you might see, just as dawn breaks, insects and the lizards that prey off them sipping from the tiny drops of dew on the shady sides of dunes. Desert air is dry, but seldom completely dry.
Arch:
“If it really were responsible for 95% of the GHG effect wouldn’t we expect the nights on the desert get closer to 5K”
That is patently absurd. There’s PLENTY of water vapor in the desert. Obviously not as much as in other places, but clearly more than you appear to think is there.
Arch; actually there is an anthropogenic imput into H2O levels into the atmosphere, and, therefore, by your definitions an increase in H2O forcing; since 1945 the amount of water dammed has increased drastically; this has the effect of increasing water surface area, since that water now in dams would otherwise be in the ocean and under its surface; with an increased water surface the amount of evaporation must increase; it is, therefore inappropriate for IPCC not to include H2O as a direct forcer.
The CO2 issue of forcing is rather ‘forced’; the IPCC give a forcing value to increased levels of CO2 based on its ‘forcing’ of a stable (which is incorrect for the reason above) quantity of H2O to increase its forcing effect. The other problem I have with the forcing effect of CO2 is its alleged heat trapping and transfer properties; Harold and Fucaloro, amongst others, have touched on the complex facility of CO2 to absorb IR; Wien does not appear to have a limiting effect on CO2 absorbtion because the temperatures are not sufficient to shift the wavelength to non-absorbant windows; Beer and the linear-sq root-log decline also appears to not be a dampener of CO2 sensitivity because of the difference between the rate of excitation due to thermal excitation and the rate of collisional deexcitation; Fucaloro’s observation seems to confirm that. Given that, what is the limit to CO2 heat trapping and transfer properties other than limiting the amount in the atmosphere and waiting for the ‘opaqueness’ of the stuff already there to gradually lesson?
The JSE is a very dubious source. They also think Dowsing is something that should be taken seriously.
Grass species are highly influenced by water, temp, soil, and grazing pressure. Even if they were were to alter ryegrass, which is the most used grass, they would maybe affect 2-3% of the grazing done by bovines. That leaves 97% of the grass niche unfilled.
These researchers are full of cowpoop.
Jeff Alberts said: “The JSE is a very dubious source. They also think Dowsing is something that should be taken seriously.”
Jeff, as far as I’m concerned at this point, I can’t comment on whether the article is any good or not. I did download it and print it out for later reading and found the first couple of pages interesting. It seems like the only time I have left for reading anymore is when I’m sitting on the thunderjug.
However… With respect to dowsing, that’s another matter. As a lifelong researcher, I’m inclined to try just about anything once. And I did just that with a “dowsing rod” I purchased over the ‘net.
Jeff, I couldn’t believe my eyes, that dowsing rod located an old well on my property as well as a PVC sewage line (that did not have a trailer wire imbedded in it). I opened the well and sure enough… water. As far as the PVC pipe is concerned, it always has some type of water in it whether it’s raw sewage or dishwater.
It was an interesting experiment, and one I’ll always remember!
Jack Koenig, Editor
The Mysterious Climate Project
http://www.climateclinic.com
Jack, you need to read up in the Ideomotor Effect, and go to Randi.org. Dowsing always works, when the dowser knows where the items he’s looking for are. When he doesn’t, no better than chance.
As for water, you can drill pretty much anywhere and eventually hit water.
Jeff Alberts (said: “Jack, you need to read up in the Ideomotor Effect, and go to Randi.org. Dowsing always works, when the dowser knows where the items he’s looking for are. When he doesn’t, no better than chance.”
This may be true. However in my case, I had no idea a well had ever been on my property much less capped off and buried under ~8″ of grass. I also had no idea a drainage pipe was in that location. I had thought the drainage pipe would have gone under a porch instead of around it since the porch was relatively new in relation to the house.
As far as being able to just about drill anywhere and hit water, in this case, therein lies the snag: it turns out all homes in this area had wells but because they ran dry, they had to bring in a municipal supply. The amount still in the well was very small.
Jack Koenig, Editor
The Mysterious Climate Project
http://www.climateclinic.com
Jeff, the so-called “Ideomotor Effect” appears to be little better than a form of pop psychology. Skepticism is about keeping an open mind about things, not being closed-minded. Dowsing has neither been proven to work, scientifically, nor has it been disproven. Einstein himself, while perhaps not a believer in it, thought there was something to it.
Regardless of what you think about dowsing, it has no bearing on the article at JSE.
cohenite said: “Arch; actually there is an anthropogenic imput into H2O levels into the atmosphere, and, therefore, by your definitions an increase in H2O forcing; since 1945 the amount of water dammed has increased drastically; this has the effect of increasing water surface area, since that water now in dams would otherwise be in the ocean and under its surface; with an increased water surface the amount of evaporation must increase; it is, therefore inappropriate for IPCC not to include H2O as a direct forcer.”
Here’s a better one: the products of the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels are of course CO2, but also H20. If I balance the equation properly, isn’t (by vol) half of the tailpipe emission water vapor? If so, that’s a lot of forcing right there.
“So many of the climate models focus solely on CO2, but they leave out water vapor as clouds in the equations, or assume water vapor is static.”
This is simply not true.
Not sure what “vapor as clouds” means; clouds are condensed water or ice suspended colloidally.
If by “the” climate models you mean GCMs, i.e., models built from small scale physics, this claim is in any case false. All GCMs include dynamic water vapor. It is obviously crucial to have water vapor as one of the varying quantities, since without tracking water vapor you can’t have realistic storm patterns emerge from first principles. No GCMs have “static” or “left out” clouds or water vapor.
REPLY: I beg to differ. I’ll let my buddy Craig James at WOOD-TV explain it in his posting That darned water vapor
Jack, dowsing has failed every legitimate test. Your experience is anecdotal, since no controls were in place, no witnesses, etc.
Personally I don’t believe in the Ideomotor Effect, I believe in con men.
That’s where the GCMs fall flat. Sure they take water vapor into account. If it weren’t for the positive reinforcement of increased water vapor, CO2 warming wouldn’t matter for beans.
Trouble is, there ain’t no positive reinforcement.
The water vapor won’t oblige by forming high-level cirrus clouds or hanging around as ambient vapor as the models predict. Instead a big chunk of it appears to be going into low-level cloud cover which increases albedo and acts as a negative reinforcement, leading to homeostasis. Which is why we had 10 years of flat temps in spite of the PDO, AMO, NAO, and AO blasting away at max. warm plus a 4% CO2 increase to boot.
Now PDO is gone south and Solar Cycle 24 is dudding out on us.
DeVries. (Rhymes with “Freeze”.)