Mayan ruins in Guatemala.
This is an email I recently received from statistician Dr. Richard Mackey who writes:
The following appeared on Gore’s blog of Nov 19, 2008:
Looking Back to Look Forward November 19, 2008 : 3:04 PM
A new study suggests the Mayan civilization might have collapsed due to environmental disasters:
These models suggest that as ecosystems were destroyed by mismanagement or were transformed by global climatic shifts, the depletion of agricultural and wild foods eventually contributed to the failure of the Maya sociopolitical system,’ writes environmental archaeologist Kitty Emery of the Florida Museum of Natural History in the current Human Ecology journal.
As we move towards solving the climate crisis, we need to remember the consequences to civilizations that refused to take environmental concerns seriously.
If you haven’t read already read it, take a look at Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse.”
This is a most curious reference.
It means that Gore is advocating the abandonment of the IPCC doctrine and barracking for the study and understanding of climate dynamics that ignores totally the IPCC/AWG doctrine and focuses on all the other variables, especially how climate dynamics are driven by atmospheric/oceanic oscillations, the natural internal dynamics of the climate system and the role of the Sun in climate dynamics.
Brian Fagan in Floods, Famines and Emperors El Nino and the fate of civilisations Basic Books 1999, shows that the Maya collapse, whilst having complex political, sociological, technological and ecological factors, was largely driven by the natural atmospheric/oceanic oscillations of ENSO and NAO. The book is one of three by Brian Fagan, Prof of Anthropology UC Santa Barbara, that documents how natural climate variations, ultimately driven by solar activity, have given rise to the catastrophic collapse of civilisations. The book has a chapter on the Mayan civilisation which collapsed around 800 to 900 AD.
Here are some quotes from his book:
“The “Classic Maya collapse” is one of the great controversies of
archaeology, but there is little doubt that droughts, fuelled in part
by El Nino, played an important role.”
“The droughts that afflicted the Maya in the eighth and ninth
centuries resulted from complex, still little understood atmosphere-
ocean interactions, including El Nino events and major decadal shifts
in the North Atlantic Oscillation, as well as two or three decade-long
variations in rainfall over many centuries.”
“Why did the Maya civilisation suddenly come apart? Everyone who
studies the Classic Maya collapse agrees that it was brought on by a
combination of ecological, political, and sociological factors.”
“When the great droughts of the eighth and ninth centuries came, Maya
civilisation everywhere was under increasing stress.”
“The drought was the final straw.”
“The collapse did not come without turmoil and war.”
Brian Fagan describes how the ruling class (the kings had divine powers, they were also shamans and there was a vast aristocracy and their fellow-travellers that the tightly regulated workers toiled to maintain) encouraged population growth beyond what the land could carry; how the rulers enforced rigid farming practices which were supposed to increase food production and the ruler’s incomes but had the effect of undermining farm productivity and diminishing the quality of the poor soils of the area. When there were heavy rains the soil was washed away. In times of drought the soil blew away.
More quotes from Brian Fagan:
“The Maya collapse is a cautionary tale in the dangers of using
technology and people power to expand the carrying capacity of
tropical environments.”
“Atmospheric circulation changes far from the Maya homeland delivered
the coup de grace to rulers no longer able to control their own
destinies because they had exhausted their environmental options in an
endless quest for power and prestige.”
Gore says that we should use our understanding of the Maya collapse help us solve the climate crisis, noting that “we need to remember the consequences to civilizations that refused to take environmental
concerns seriously”.
Given what we know of the Maya collapse, what is Gore really saying?
He is saying that we should take all the IPCC/AWG publications and related papers to the tip and bury them there and put all our efforts into the study and understanding of the reasons for climate dynamics that address every theory except that of IPCC/AWG doctrine.
Specifically, we should understand as well as we can how climate dynamics are driven by atmospheric/oceanic oscillations, the natural internal dynamics of the climate system and the role of the Sun in climate dynamics.
In an overview of his work Brian Fagan concluded: “The whole course of civilisation … may be seen as a process of trading up on the scale of vulnerability”. (Fagan (2004, page xv)).
We are now, as a global community, very high up on that scale.
Allow me to quote a little from my Rhodes Fairbridge paper because of its relevance to Brian Fagan’s work and what Gore is really trying to say, but can’t quite find the right words.
(My paper is here: http://www.griffith.edu.au/conference/ics2007/pdf/ICS176.pdf ).
“In his many publications (for example, NORTH (2005)), Douglass North stresses that if the issues with which we are concerned, such as global warming and the global commons, belong in a world of continuous change (that is, a non-ergodic world), then we face a set of problems that become exceedingly complex. North stresses that our capacity to deal effectively with uncertainty is essential to our succeeding in a
non-ergodic world. History shows that regional effects of climate change are highly variable and that the pattern of change is highly variable. An extremely cold (or hot) year can be followed by extremely hot (or cold) year. Warming and cooling will be beneficial for some regions and catastrophic for others. Brian Fagan has documented in detail relationships between the large-scale and
generally periodic changes in climate and the rise and fall of civilisations, cultures and societies since the dawn of history. The thesis to which Rhodes Fairbridge devoted much of his life is that the
sun, through its relationships with the solar system, is largely responsible for these changes and that we are now on the cusp of one of the major changes that feature in the planet’s history. As
Douglass North showed, the main responsibility of governments in managing the impact of the potentially catastrophic events that arise in a non-ergodic world is to mange society’s response to them so as to
enable the society to adapt as efficiently as possible to them.
Amongst other things, this would mean being better able to anticipate and manage our response to climate change, to minimise suffering and maximise benefits and the efficiency of our adaptation to a climate that is ever-changing – sometimes catastrophically – but generally predictable within bounds of uncertainty that statisticians can estimate. At the very least, this requires that the scientific community acts on the wise counsel of Rhodes W Fairbridge and presents governments with advice that has regard to the entire field of planetary-lunar-solar dynamics, including gravitational dynamics.
This field has to be understood so that the dynamics of terrestrial climate can be understood.
References:
North, D. C., 2005. Understanding the Process of Economic Change
Princeton University Press.
Fagan, B., 2004. The Long Summer. How Climate Changed Civilization.
Basic Books.”
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Thanks anna v, if you think this is confused you should have seen me earlier.
So humid air is kept warm or rather cooling is slowed by the IR bouncing (absorb/emit) around taking longer in its eventual escape to higher levels and to space.
A single tap dripping does not release much water but a million dripping taps.
This site: Understanding CO2 Lasers would seem to suggest that the Devil is really in the details.
It would seem that energy transfer from CO2 to other gases in the atmosphere is only permitted when there are matching (quantized) energy states that can be reached. That is, CO2, if giving up energy, must drop to one of its lower states, but the energy transferred must match a jump to a permissible state in the species it collides with.
Also, it seems like N2 cannot radiate away the energy it has picked up so … things could get interesting.
beng (06:16:36) :
that’s speculation, although perhaps a reasonable first-assumption.
CO2 has helped more than once in the past:
http://www.physorg.com/news147361639.html
It is good to see that the email about Gore and the Mayan collapse I composed in some haste has generated such a useful debate on WUWT.
It seemed to me that if the Gore enterprise took the advice on the Gore blog seriously, namely the advice to:
As we move towards solving the climate crisis, we need to remember the consequences to civilizations that refused to take environmental concerns seriously.
then Gore enterprise would, as I suggested, take all the IPCC/AWG publications and related papers to the tip and bury them there and put all their efforts into the study and understanding of the reasons for climate dynamics that address every theory except that of IPCC/AWG doctrine.
Specifically, the Gore enterprise would proceed to understand as thoroughly as possible how climate dynamics are driven by atmospheric/oceanic oscillations, the natural internal dynamics of the climate system and, maybe, the Sun.
Of course this won’t happen.
The Gore enterprise and the IPCC are primarily political and ideological entities. Science is at best incidental but mostly irrelevant. Look how long the Vatican took to correct its grievous error in relation to Galileo. That could be a bench mark for turning around the IPCC/Gore enterprise. In addition, the scientific method has become seriously corrupted in the process as Golem (see here http://tinyurl.com/5w7f75 ) has become yoked to that gigantic enterprise. Golem is being well feed by the yoking and might not ever be freed or ever want to be freed.
One purpose of my email was to state that we can learn form the way past civilizations and societies have managed their adaption to climate dynamics, drawing on scholarship like Brian Fagan’s and the economic theories of Douglass North and the institutional economists. The Gore/IPCC enterprise won’t, anymore than the Vatican could come to terms with the scientific advances of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. And for the same reasons.
Richard Sharpe (15:24:09) :
Phil says:
It would be much appreciated if you could provide links for these things.
Well it’s mostly the sort of information you find in textbooks but here’s a couple of links:
John Houghton, CommentlSpectrochimica Ada Parr A 51 (1995) 1391-1392
“For absorption and emission of radiation to couple with the kinetic energy of the molecules and hence with the thermal regime it is necessary for the collisional de-activation time of the molecular vibrations to be very much shorter than the radiative lifetime. This is the case in the lower atmosphere where conditions known as local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) apply. At the much higher levels where there are fewer collisions, much of the solar energy absorbed by carbon dioxide molecules is radiated by fluorescence and is not effective in heating the atmosphere.”
For a web accessible source:
http://www.laserk.com/newsletters/whiteTHE.html
“The important lifetimes in the CO2 laser are practically all determined by collisional phenomena. The radiative lifetimes vary from a few milliseconds to a few seconds, whereas the mean free time between molecular collision is of the order 10 to 100 nanoseconds.”
Note that these collision numbers are for pressures ~20 torr and therefore longer than at atmospheric pressure (see kinetic theory of gases).
MartinGAtkins (01:55:41) :
Phil. (19:17:33)
Because H2O is not a permanent gas, as the temperature drops the vapor pressure drops, as the vapor pressure drops the GH effect of the water drops etc.
There is no such thing as a permanent gas. The states of gas, liquid and solid are the product of heat and pressure. You are also wrong about the GH effect of H2O. When the sun heats the ocean it is in effect warming a liquid gas. When water vapour rises it can absorb black body radiation in exactly the same way as it does in it’s liquid state. It is the same for CO2. Nether rely on each other for for their absorption qualities.
About time you read up on some physics! In the absence of CO2 more of that ocean would be ice.
Arthur Glass (11:20:02) :
CO2 didn’t stop water from condensing but rather water condensed first.
CO2, of course, does not condense, if ‘condensation’ is the phase change from gas to liquid; rather it passes directly from gas to solid (dry ice) and vice-versa.
Just like water below 0ºC!
In the long-running records dept:
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2008/12/01/historic_center_of_venice_flooded/ says:
Phil. (19:18:55) :
About time you read up on some physics! In the absence of CO2 more of that ocean would be ice.
This is almost vacuous as it stands. The issue is how much? 0.0000000000000001 %, 0.0000001 %, 0.01 %, 1%, 10%, 90%?
The Mayan civilization collapsed due mainly to long drought and mismanagement of land. I don’t think this is a particularly brilliant idea from Mr. Gore, although I defend 95% of what Gore says and does…. droughts happen even without climate change though and many civilizations have not managed land well.
Also, the Mayans have not disappeared. There are still hundreds of thousands of Mayans alive and well in Central America to this day, and many of them (I have met some) are environmentalists trying to save the forests in Belize and Guatemala. So you could say they had a chance to learn their lessons from the past, but we won’t have that chance, because what we are doing is far worse and world-wide.
Phil. (13:26:20) :
anna v it seems like you’re contributing to the confusion!
Many things in your piece are wrong but this is way out:
“” Does a GHG molecule always emit after it absorbs or is some shared with the surrounding non GHG molecules?.””
” The state is unstable and it will always emit within 10 to the minus sixteen seconds ( characteristic electromagnetic time). ”
The emission characteristic time is way more than you suggest, depending on the state, ~100 microsec. The characteristic collision time is ~0.1 nsec, many times faster so collisional quenching is the dominant mode of de-excitation in the troposphere. These lifetimes have been much studied in connection with the CO2 laser
Thank you for the correction , thats why I put “order of” :though I fell far off of “order” still, the state is unstable. Thanks for the laser link.
The atmosphere is not a laser.
Vibrational and rotational temperatures are interesting for physicists but have little to do with the temperature measured with the thermometers and discussed as AGW.
What you are suggesting to my simplified exposition is that a CO2 molecule will transfer its excitation energy to an N2 molecule as kinetic energy of the N2 molecule? If the energy of the infrared photon is not turned into kinetic energy of the whole molecules the thermometer temperature does not change.
Compton scattering of the infrared will do it, (transfer of part of the energy of the infrared photon as kinetic energy to the whole molecule) but that does not pick GHG labels and heats the air democratically.
I would be interested if you made a similar broad brush exposition of how you see the green house gases keeping the heat. The laser analogue is intriguing.
The whole thing is nonsense.
Like the one about how lead pipes caused the fall of Rome (acretion coated the pipes and protected those where they had lead pipes in the first place).
Unending hordes and scads and waves and swarms of Barbarians, anyone? Goths, Mr. Rico, zillions of ’em. The west lasted a hundred years longer than it should have, and if Aurelian had lived, who knows? And the East endured (more or less) for a thousand years.
The only time I ever heard of a major civilization actually going devo without some kind of intense outside (human) pressure was the original Indus Valley civ (the Sarawak River simply dried up and the place fell apart and reverted to its previous state).
The following is an extract I did on historical cold and warm periods over at Climate Audit a few months ago;
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—”Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley
The civilisation of Akkad-2000bc. Lines taken from the curse of Akkad
For the first time since cities were built and founded,
The great agricultural tracts produced no grain,
The inundated tracts produced no fish,
The irrigated orchards produced neither syrup nor wine,
The gathered clouds did not rain, the masgurum did not grow.
At that time, one shekel’s worth of oil was only one-half quart,
One shekel’s worth of grain was only one-half quart. . . .
These sold at such prices in the markets of all the cities!
He who slept on the roof, died on the roof,
He who slept in the house, had no burial,
People were flailing at themselves from hunger
.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_Empire
Around ten civilisations are generally thought to have perished due to climate change-some undoubtedly already weakened by other events. They include the Vikings and in ancient times the Egyptian Old Kingdom, The Moche, Anasazi and of course the Akkadians who are quoted above. I have been to what is thought to be the centre of Akkadian civilisation close to Baghdad and also Babylon. The latter reminded me very much of Ozymandias. It is quite sobering to see great civilisations completely vanished.
TonyB
anna v:
” The state is unstable and it will always emit within 10 to the minus sixteen seconds ( characteristic electromagnetic time). ”
Phil.:
“The emission characteristic time is way more than you suggest, depending on the state, ~100 microsec. The characteristic collision time is ~0.1 nsec, many times faster so collisional quenching is the dominant mode of de-excitation in the troposphere. These lifetimes have been much studied in connection with the CO2 laser”
anna v:
“Thank you for the correction , thats why I put “order of” :though I fell far off of “order” still, the state is unstable. Thanks for the laser link.
The atmosphere is not a laser.”
Indeed not but the reason for the study of the natural radiative lifetimes doesn’t change the values.
anna v:
“Vibrational and rotational temperatures are interesting for physicists but have little to do with the temperature measured with the thermometers and discussed as AGW.”
That’s not what I’m talking about.
anna v:
“What you are suggesting to my simplified exposition is that a CO2 molecule will transfer its excitation energy to an N2 molecule as kinetic energy of the N2 molecule? If the energy of the infrared photon is not turned into kinetic energy of the whole molecules the thermometer temperature does not change.”
That’s exactly what happens, during the radiative lifetime of the excited state it will endure ~10^5 collisions, more than enough to deactivate the excited state and share the energy with the colliders, predominantly N2 & O2.
Some of the posts above on “climate change” conflate the planet’s overall climate [by which the AGW contingent means the planet’s temperature] with local climates.
For example, the Sahara was once green and fertile, but local conditions changed. And the Mayan civilization collapsed due to drought, not because of land use changes, which may have been incidental, but which were not the reason for the collapse of the Mayan civilization. In fact, local climate change is a natural constant.
I would also like to ask Shelly T. to justify the statement, “…what we are doing is far worse and world-wide.”
The U.S. has cleaned up its environment, and did so before the “Green” movement had any influence. People live longer and healthier lives. Almost all pollution emissions are history. What are we doing now that is ‘far worse and world wide’?
Phil.:”In the absence of CO2 more of that ocean would be ice.”
Leif beat me to it, but I’d like to see you quantify your statement above. More to the point, if atmospheric CO2 were 300 ppmv rather than 387 ppmv, how much more of the ocean would be ice?
I was responding to this, which is clearly incorrect.
Leif Svalgaard (12:46:59) :
“And the real greenhouse gas is H2O. It is the one that keeps the Earth 30K warmer than it would have been without an atmosphere. Forget CO2, it is but a minor player.”
Smokey–
It’s true that in principle, Phil should quantify. However, in practice, we all know this is difficult.
If the question is: All other things being equal, does more CO2 lead to warming, the answer is yes. Is there enough CO2 for the effect to be non-negligible: yes. All other things being equal, if there was half as much CO2, would the temperature of the earth drop? Yes. It would drop somewhat, even if there was H2O in the atmosphere. Would the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere drop: Almost certainly. The maximum absolute humidity drops as air temperature drops.
Would lessened water vapor lead to less trapping of heat due to water vapor itself: Yes. (Note: Water vapor is distinct from clouds or the reflection due to surface ice.)
All these sensitivity questions can be explored with “Daisy World” type simulations. Yes, it’s a model. But qualitatively, this is the way things must behave given things that are quite well known and which apply widely in many, many fields. (Let’s face it: the absolute humidity as a function of temperature is not going to suddenly deviate from the level in Engineering handbooks just because someone is running a climate model!)
But actually quantifying the effect on the real earth? That’s difficult.
Approximations in convective parameterizations and cloud parameterizations, ice albedo etc. could make it very difficult to get the feed back corrects, and the actual warming is strongly dependent on the feedback. Even if the physics are understood, predicting the magnitude of forcing is difficult. (And not just because we don’t know when volcanos erupt!)
These difficulties are qualitatively the exact same sort of difficulties we have running engineering models! Sure, an engineer might not be worried literally about clouds condensed from water, but there are “clouds” of coal dust in furnaces etc. Weird “microscale” features and the non-linear nature of the conservations equation for momentum make everything difficult. (BTW: I use microscale as small relative to the scale of the installation you are modeling but large compared to molecular scales.)
The stuff Phil is posting is basically correct. Equally obviously, he is not going to be able to quantify in a comment at a blog. (The GCMs are the attempts to quantify the effect. The current versions may be able to provide accurate estimates– or not. The proof of accuracy is in the comparison to data. )
Phil.
About time you read up on some physics! In the absence of CO2 more of that ocean would be ice.
At no time did I mention the effects of CO2 on oceanic ice formation. To requote my self.
Now I could be wrong but could we do better than “About time you read up on some physics!”?
Arthur Glass
CO2, of course, does not condense, if ‘condensation’ is the phase change from gas to liquid; rather it passes directly from gas to solid (dry ice) and vice-versa.
Liquid Carbon Dioxide Pump delivers high-pressure operation.
July 31, 2008 – Able to pressurize carbon dioxide up to 10,000 psi at flow rates from 0.01-24.0 ml/min, self-contained SFT-10 utilizes dual sapphire syringe pump technology and can perform in standard constant pressure mode as well as optional constant flow mode. Peltier (thermoelectric) technology makes it possible to achieve high pressure without external cooling bath; chiller maintains temperature at pump heads low enough to ensure CO2 remains liquid.
http://news.thomasnet.com/fullstory/547486
Phil. (06:49:37) :
I was responding to this, which is clearly incorrect.
“And the real greenhouse gas is H2O. It is the one that keeps the Earth 30K warmer than it would have been without an atmosphere. Forget CO2, it is but a minor player.”
Lucia (06:52:55) :
If the question is: All other things being equal, does more CO2 lead to warming, the answer is yes. Is there enough CO2 for the effect to be non-negligible: yes. All other things being equal, if there was half as much CO2, would the temperature of the earth drop? Yes. It would drop somewhat, even if there was H2O in the atmosphere. Would the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere drop: Almost certainly. The maximum absolute humidity drops as air temperature drops.
Clearly removing the CO2 would drop the temperature and therefore the amount of H2O by some amount, but once that drop has been accomplished things would stabilize and we would end up with an Earth perhaps 5 degrees cooler [to be generous to the AGW crowd], which still leaves H2O to account for 25K of greenhouse effect, hence H2O is still the dominant GHG. In fact, it does not matter which tri [or more] -atomic gas is present as long there is one [or two]. Also consider Lucia’s example and assume that there was some warming [ocean fluctuations, even – God forbid – the Sun], then more water vapor would be produced and that extra H2O would raise the temperature even more until a new equilibrium is obtained without the need for CO2 [not forgetting that some extra CO2 may also be driven out of solution by the warming]. So, at any time H2O is dominant, as long as you don’t increase CO2 by one or two orders of magnitude. The physics of the GHG warming [the 33K over the no-atmosphere temperature of 255K] does not depend on which tri-atomic gas is present, as reading up on the physics would show.
Leif says:
However, that seems to ignore the special properties of H2O that CO2 does not have. To wit, that it condenses into clouds, and thus can block insolation, and that it transports large amounts of energy around as it undergoes phase transitions, and that it transports energy around from one place to another in its liquid phase.
Following up on my own comment:
The really interesting questions, it seems to me are:
Given that the temperature response to CO2 is logarithmic and the negative feedback provided by clouds, is there any possibility of a thermal runaway?
Secondly, to address the issue that Brendan seems so fond of, would humans go extinct if average temperatures rose by say 3-5K? (Says he, tongue firmly in cheek).
Richard Sharpe (09:04:28) :
“So, at any time H2O is dominant, as long as you don’t increase CO2 by one or two orders of magnitude. The physics of the GHG warming [the 33K over the no-atmosphere temperature of 255K] does not depend on which tri-atomic gas is present, as reading up on the physics would show.”
However, that seems to ignore the special properties of H2O that CO2 does not have. To wit, that it condenses into clouds, and thus can block insolation, and that it transports large amounts of energy around as it undergoes phase transitions, and that it transports energy around from one place to another in its liquid phase.
Those special properties make H2O an efficient ‘thermostat’ of the climate, but has nothing to do with the basic greenhouse effect [the 33K added to 255K]. What H2O does is to introduce negative feedback into the system that helps prevent runaways.
This is how I understand the relative importance of CO2 vs. H2O as GHG’s.
CO2 is an important GHG and contributes to earth temperatures in the range of concentrations up to about 200 ppm. The narrow absorption bands of CO2 with the logarithmic (rapidly diminishing) GHG effect above 200 ppm concentrations result in man’s minuscule CO2 emissions having of negligible effect on the climate.
H2O, having abroad spectrum infrared absorption spectrum is the dominant GHG. H2O, because it is so prevalent and exists in both liquid, aerosol(clouds) and vapour phases is much more complex to model. AGW modelers apply hypothetical positive feedback factors to the small theoretical forcing due to increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration in order to achieve their predictions of catastrophic global warming. I understand that their hypothesis is that the slight warming due to CO2 concentration increase results in more H2O vapour in the atmosphere, thus amplifying the effect of the CO2 increase. These hypothetical feedback factors are derived from the supposition that recent warming is entirely due to man’s emissions of GHG’s. Even more conjectural are the alleged “tipping points” of Hansen and Gore. Until we know more, I would rely on Occam’s Razor which leads me to the hypothesis that H2O stabilizes the earths climate through negative feedback mechanisms.
Richard Sharpe (09:15:11) :
Given that the temperature response to CO2 is logarithmic
This is only over a limited range. Imagine that the response was truly logarithmic, so that a doubling of CO2 would increase T by [say, 2K, but any number greater than 0K would do], then a halving would decrease T by 2K, another halving would decrease by another 2K, and 100 halvings by 200K, so it seems that removing CO2 [infinitely many halvings] would result in a infinite delta T.