UPDATED: This opinion piece from Professor Henrik Svensmark was published September 9th in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Originally the translation was from Google translation with some post translation cleanup of jumbled words or phrases by myself. Now as of Sept 12, the translation is by Nigel Calder. Hat tip to Carsten Arnholm of Norway for bringing this to my attention and especially for translation facilitation by Ágúst H Bjarnason – Anthony
Translation approved by Henrik Svensmark
While the Sun sleeps
Henrik Svensmark, Professor, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen
“In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable,” writes Henrik Svensmark.
The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week [4 September 2009] the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth.
If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing”. But history and recent research suggest that is probably completely wrong. Why? Let’s take a closer look.
Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown – a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period.
But after about 1300 solar activity declined and the world began to get colder. It was the beginning of the episode we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold time, all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Sweden surprised Denmark by marching across the ice, and in London the Thames froze repeatedly. But more serious were the long periods of crop failures, which resulted in poorly nourished populations, reduced in Europe by about 30 per cent because of disease and hunger.
It’s important to realise that the Little Ice Age was a global event. It ended in the late 19th Century and was followed by increasing solar activity. Over the past 50 years solar activity has been at its highest since the medieval warmth of 1000 years ago. But now it appears that the Sun has changed again, and is returning towards what solar scientists call a “grand minimum” such as we saw in the Little Ice Age.
The match between solar activity and climate through the ages is sometimes explained away as coincidence. Yet it turns out that, almost no matter when you look and not just in the last 1000 years, there is a link. Solar activity has repeatedly fluctuated between high and low during the past 10,000 years. In fact the Sun spent about 17 per cent of those 10,000 years in a sleeping mode, with a cooling Earth the result.
You may wonder why the international climate panel IPCC does not believe that the Sun’s changing activity affects the climate. The reason is that it considers only changes in solar radiation. That would be the simplest way for the Sun to change the climate – a bit like turning up and down the brightness of a light bulb.
Satellite measurements have shown that the variations of solar radiation are too small to explain climate change. But the panel has closed its eyes to another, much more powerful way for the Sun to affect Earth’s climate. In 1996 we discovered a surprising influence of the Sun – its impact on Earth’s cloud cover. High-energy accelerated particles coming from exploded stars, the cosmic rays, help to form clouds.
When the Sun is active, its magnetic field is better at shielding us against the cosmic rays coming from outer space, before they reach our planet. By regulating the Earth’s cloud cover, the Sun can turn the temperature up and down. High solar activity means fewer clouds and and a warmer world. Low solar activity and poorer shielding against cosmic rays result in increased cloud cover and hence a cooling. As the Sun’s magnetism doubled in strength during the 20th century, this natural mechanism may be responsible for a large part of global warming seen then.
That also explains why most climate scientists try to ignore this possibility. It does not favour their idea that the 20th century temperature rise was mainly due to human emissions of CO2. If the Sun provoked a significant part of warming in the 20th Century, then the contribution by CO2 must necessarily be smaller.
Ever since we put forward our theory in 1996, it has been subjected to very sharp criticism, which is normal in science.
First it was said that a link between clouds and solar activity could not be correct, because no physical mechanism was known. But in 2006, after many years of work, we completed experiments at DTU Space that demonstrated the existence of a physical mechanism. The cosmic rays help to form aerosols, which are the seeds for cloud formation.
Then came the criticism that the mechanism we found in the laboratory could not work in the real atmosphere, and therefore had no practical significance. We have just rejected that criticism emphatically.
It turns out that the Sun itself performs what might be called natural experiments. Giant solar eruptions can cause the cosmic ray intensity on earth to dive suddenly over a few days. In the days following an eruption, cloud cover can fall by about 4 per cent. And the amount of liquid water in cloud droplets is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Here is a very large effect – indeed so great that in popular terms the Earth’s clouds originate in space.
So we have watched the Sun’s magnetic activity with increasing concern, since it began to wane in the mid-1990s.
That the Sun might now fall asleep in a deep minimum was suggested by solar scientists at a meeting in Kiruna in Sweden two years ago. So when Nigel Calder and I updated our book The Chilling Stars, we wrote a little provocatively that “we are advising our friends to enjoy global warming while it lasts.”
In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel argued at the recent UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that the cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years. His explanation was a natural change in the North Atlantic circulation, not in solar activity. But no matter how you interpret them, natural variations in climate are making a comeback.
The outcome may be that the Sun itself will demonstrate its importance for climate and so challenge the theories of global warming. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable. A forecast saying it may be either warmer or colder for 50 years is not very useful, and science is not yet able to predict solar activity.
So in many ways we stand at a crossroads. The near future will be extremely interesting. I think it is important to accept that Nature pays no heed to what we humans think about it. Will the greenhouse theory survive a significant cooling of the Earth? Not in its current dominant form. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s climate challenges will be quite different from the greenhouse theory’s predictions. Perhaps it will become fashionable again to investigate the Sun’s impact on our climate.
–
Professor Henrik Svensmark is director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at DTU Space. His book The Chilling Stars has also been published in Danish as Klima og Kosmos Gads Forlag, DK ISBN 9788712043508)
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Joel Shore (12:50:37)
A first doubling may theoretically produce more warming but that assumes no negative climate response to offset it.
A second doubling produces a reduced response and further doublings quickly produce a response that is so small as to be insignificant.
Some do say we are already at that point but I make no judgement on that.
Whether we talk about absolute humidity or relative humidity the fact is that the surface air temperature always moves towards sea surface temperature so that changes in humidity are always neutralised by a change in the speed of the hydrological cycle.
The only way that changes in GHGs can warm the Earth is by somehow warming the ocean and I contend that they cannot. Instead the speed of ejection of energy from surface to space changes so as to ensure temperature equilibrium at the sea surface/surface air interface.
Hi Joel
Ferdiinand links to this good explanatory paper.
http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm
The last 10% has a long life, the preceding amount a much shorter one mentioned in dozens or low hundreds of years and the temperature sensitivity is also very low. It is similar to that estimated by misclowski and not far off that estimated by Arrhenius -once he got his act together with his second paper (which strangely never seems to get mentioned.
I can not see how the Archer paper says either of those things nor you either-however if you agree with the above that is fine.
There simply is not enough carbon in the world to reach many of the scenarios postulated by the IPCC.
best regards
tonyb
Stephen Wilde: Well, you are entitled to believe whatever you want but we are entitled to take your beliefs and compare them to the actual work of scientists and find them to be wanting. First of all, what you describe in terms of the response to a doubling is not how a logarithmic function behaves…So, you seem to be proposing, with no evidence whatsoever to back it up, that the logarithmic dependence on concentration is not correct.
As to your hypotheses that GHGs cannot warm the earth, that runs counter to the actual fact that they are already keeping the earth much warmer than would be the case if the atmosphere was not IR-absorbing.
Joel Shore (14:20:18) :
Basically, it works like this: Some of the CO2 released invades the oceans but eventually, the ocean waters become more acidic to the point where they no longer absorb the CO2 (in net). At this point, 20-40% of the initial release of CO2 remains in the atmosphere. Then, one has to wait around on the order of 2000-10000 years, the timescales associated with dissolving enough CaCO_3 out of rocks in order to neutralize the oceans and allow further absorption of CO2. Even that does not get rid of all of the CO2 perturbation (somewhere on the order of 10-15% remains), with the rest having to wait for reaction with igneous rocks, which has a timescale on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.
What about biological absorption? There are huge formations of shell rock around the globe. I know from working on an abalone farm, that supersaturated water(not too the point that they all get the benz and go belly up o course) will lead to increased shell growth… has there been any studies along these lines? And considering the decidedly alkaline nature o sea water its a bit misleading to say acidic isnt it… slightly less basic may be more accurate discription.(we have shell fossils from periods with vastly greater co2 levels, which fly in the face of acidic oceans)
Joel, try this:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-is-greenhouse-effect-logarithmic.html
You say:
“As to your hypotheses that GHGs cannot warm the earth, that runs counter to the actual fact that they are already keeping the earth much warmer than would be the case if the atmosphere was not IR-absorbing.”
I say,
It is not the GHGs that keep the Earth warm. It is primarily the rate of energy release from the oceans with the contribution from the air an infinitesimal component.
The water in the oceans performs exactly the same function as GHGs in the air but on a hugely greater scale.
That is consistent with both physics and observations. It beats me why no ‘scientist’ has countered that point even though I’ve been saying it for over 18 months now.
Joel, you seem to have basic faith and respect for the established scientists in the field.
When people criticise the field’s “knowledge”, you can always refer back to what these “actual scientists” say and use that to claim the criticism are wrong.
I for example, criticise that they cannot predict the future in any useful way. You can always refer back to the actual scientists who say they are making useful and important projections. The difference is I don’t have any particular faith in their abilities, any more than I have faith that the doctor will cure me. Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. But I don’t take it on faith that he will, nor that he is the most likely to offer a cure. I could change my diet, for example, and something in my diet may accidentally cure me.
Please consider this basic question of faith.
Mike Ewing
Yes…Sea water tends to be slightly alkaline and we are making it less alkaline.
As for the vastly greater CO2 levels in the past, it is not the levels that matter but rather the rate of increase of CO2. The point is that the current rate of increase is overwhelming the rate at which CaCO_3 can be dissolved from rocks in order to keep the pH balanced.
Stephen Wilde says:
No it is not consistent with basic physics. Basic physics says that the surface temperature could not possibly be as high as it is if the atmosphere were not IR-absorbing. See here for further discussion: http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.4324
Stefan,
Well, yes, I do have a certain amount of faith in science and the scientific process. I think this faith…if you want to call it that…is well-placed as science has served us well. (And, by the way, while there may be certain issues where I take the scientific conclusions on a certain degree of faith, there are other ones where I have delved more into the details.)
Many people here, on the other hand, seem instead to have a lot of faith in their own ability to know much better than the scientists in the field (as an example, Stephen Wilde in the current discussion). Frankly, I think this sort of faith is very naive and misplaced.
Joel Shore wrote
I have to disagree on this particular point.
It was expected that the ocean acidification will prevent coccolithophores growth, making them unable to build their carbonate armor. (Coccolithphores are the most efficient “carbon traps” that Nature ever invented).
Recent observations have proved just the contrary: oceans acidification seems to cause the Coccolithophores to form bigger coccoliths, trapping more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
That fact alone could mean that current projections about climate change are over pessimistic. But the complete mechanism of global climate regulation is far too complex to allow quick conclusions.
Ref: http://bit.ly/4onH90
Joel Shore:
“Basic physics says that the surface temperature could not possibly be as high as it is if the atmosphere were not IR-absorbing. See here for further discussion: http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.4324”
Please explain why the effect of the energy flow from the oceans appears to have been left out in terms of it’s proportionate contribution to the higher temperature.
Even if the air were not IR absorbing at all the energy flow from the oceans would still maintain a certain surface air temperature over the oceans. The surface temperature over land would be a different matter admittedly but the Earth is 71% ocean surface and the air moves about a lot. The presence of the IR absorbing characteristics of the air just helps to spread the energy flow from the oceans more evenly over the globe including it’s land.
Anyway the air IS IR absorbent mainly due to the water vapour content so the air is merely a continuation of the oceans but in vapour form. Both water in the oceans and water vapour in the air are involved in slowing down the energy flow through the system and of the two the oceans have a far greater effect than the air in maintaining that apparent 33C ‘excess’ temperature.
If you can demonstrate my assertions to be wrong then that would be as helpful to me as being right because I can just amend my climate description to take account of any such correction. But can you demonstrate that I am wrong ?
Let us not lose sight of the fact that the main Green House Gas is H20, more than ten times the CO2 contribution in volume, and in spectral width. The Anthropogenic part of CO2 is a few percent of the total atmospheric CO2, a trace addition to a trace gas.
Let us control H2O then, to be effective. Ooooooooom.
Joel,
I agree science has served us well. I trust my life to the aircraft, the genetically engineered food, the medical procedure. But the trust doesn’t come from an implicit assumption that these things are “scientific”, it comes from seeing them work repeatedly every day. I trust the road bridge I am about to cross because I can see thousands of cars cross it every day. Notice I don’t have to understand how it was built, to the point of being able to design one myself. I don’t need to be an aeronautical engineer to trust the aircraft. The results are plain to see. They have been tested.
And this is where climate models come into question. Again, I don’t need to understand how they are made to decide whether to trust them. I merely need to see evidence of their repeated success. We don’t have this evidence, and what evidence there is, is only discernible to those qualified in statistical evaluations. Experts claimed the Titanic unsinkable. Well that was put to the test for everyone to see.
I don’t claim to know more about climatology than climatologists. But I do claim to be able to call them on their predictions. I call out and ask, “where’s the clear obvious results that show you are right?” If those results are not discernible without advanced statistical techniques, ie. I can’t just watch thousands of planes fly successfully every day, or watch thousands of people receive a vaccine and be cured–if the results are not obvious in that way, then no, I have no business trusting them. They may turn out to be right, but I am simply choosing to believe something without evidence if I do.
See it is a question of responsibility. If I go to the doctor, and take his advice, and submit to his procedures, and I become seriously injured as a result, it is my fault, it is my responsibility, because I am the one who chose to believe him. Maybe he was a quack, maybe he was doing his best, maybe it was just bad luck, maybe the treatment worked for everyone else except me. I was the one who chose to believe, even if I was not able to discern whether his advice was correct. So the onus is on me to be very careful about who and what I believe in.
I go to three doctors and they each prescribe something different for the same condition. What am I to make of that? First, it hints there is a difference of opinion. There are obviously complex issues about, say, the use of antibiotics, whether they are topical or oral, and how often to take them. One doctor says, “I don’t know why you were prescribed that stuff.” Then the third doctor says something about the second prescription, “you don’t want to be popping pills”. Well OK, health is complex, the treatments are part trial and error drawing from a range of broad statistical observational studies across a wide spectrum of the population, and the broad advice has to be adapted to the individual patient. Plus there are obviously differing levels of experience, and maybe one day one doc is just a bit tired, and on another day a different doc spots something that the other two missed. Which one do I trust? There is no question of trust. The question is, which treatment worked, which one worked in a way that it is obvious to me that it worked.
The fact that they are experts, helps, it is preferable, it is necessary, but it is not sufficient. I may not be able to understand what they say, but I need some evidence in a form that I can understand, and if that means “thousands of planes fly every day” then that’s the level of obviousness that it needs to be, for me to accept it.
Now the experts say, we have detected this phenomenon, it is too subtle for you to notice for the next 20 years, but eventually it will broadly impact our future generations, and you need to trust us, oh and by the way, whatever you do, be sure you don’t trust those other people over there, according to us they don’t know what they are talking about, but we do, and we’re the ones with the most impressive credentials.
To me, that is all irrelevant. There is simply no place for blind trust. The fact that they claim to be experts and that they claim to be certain or virtually certain is no reason to trust them. Experts can and are wrong on any number of things, especially predictions about the future. We know from broad obvious experience that planes with engines that fall off, crash into the ground. We also know from broad obvious experience that experts’ predictions about the future planet, like overpopulation for example, very easily turn out wrong, and that nonetheless the same experts continue to claim that they are still right!
How can this be? Well there is science and there is science. Some science is hard–repeatable, testable, rigorous, and so on. Some of it is soft, which doesn’t mean worthless, just that it is more about interpretation, about patterns, intuition, broad generalisations. Both kinds can serve us. Neither is implicitly more correct than the other. If a psychologist recommends I so certain things to improve my relationship, and I do those things, and my relationship gets worse, then their advice was wrong. Needless to say, it is rare to find good advice about psychology. See I’m not asking for absolute certainty. I’m asking for testability.
Hard science has been a great success with simple material stuff that can be tested in a lab. Once you enter the world of ecology and planetary systems and biological systems, it starts getting very hard to be successful. Drugs are considered successful because they worked a bit better than a placebo. Not 100% Not 50% Maybe only 20% better than a placebo.
The global climate, of which we have a small amount of patchy data from various sources, is projected on computers (which are not powerful enough), and relying on specific assumptions–because without those assumptions we’d just have to all go home–like the assumption that climate is the long term statistical averages of weather, and so on. Medicine requires control groups. With the Earth that isn’t possible. Please, just call it an intuition and be done with it. There is no need to try to put numbers and a veneer of numerical rigour on this thing when all the models can do is say something like, between 2C and 4C, maybe.
You don’t have to be a pilot to know that flying a plane is hard and that pilots make mistakes. Understanding the planetary system is hard–we haven’t cured many cancers, remember, biology, ecosystems, social systems, these are all very difficult problems. It would be very surprising if any experts managed to nail these problems anytime soon.
In the meantime, by all means, let them be funded and have careers and let them continue to gradually accumulate knowledge. But if you claim to have cured cancer, show us the cured patients.
Stephan, Smokey, philincalifornia, Stephen Wilde
Thanks for the positive feedback!
Phlogiston (15:35:59) :
Stephan, Smokey, philincalifornia, Stephen Wilde
Thanks for the positive feedback!
——————————
No pun intended, eh ??? I’ll come back to that.
Thank you Phlogiston for reminding me where this thread was. WUWT is so fast moving that it’s sometimes hard to keep track of which thread is where. Many have addressed the points Joel addressed to me, but I will add the following point, and a question:
First, although he will not admit to it, Joel with his 1,000 year half-life discussion (which I tend to believe is just parroting) made a glorious confirmation of the principles of “team inductive”, and thereby proved your point exactly. It looked even stranger when this incredibly complex dynamic of how CO2 gets out of the atmosphere was juxtaposed next to the infantile, simplistic view of how CO2 gets into the atmosphere (to paraphrase “there’s more, so it must all be anthropogenic”). The paper was published to get press releases Joel. It has no bearing on the real half-life of carbon dioxide that relates to what is important to the debate in general. As I posted when this dumbsnip paper came out, why didn’t “team inductive” postulate that every carbon atom on the planet has been in the atmosphere at some point and, therefore, the half-life could be measured in billions of years ??
Also Joel, I was most definitely hoping for something more than (again to paraphrase) “a doubling in CO2 gives an increase of 4 Watts per square meter and that causes anthropogenic climate change”. In asking the question re. climate change versus global warming, I was kinda hoping to hear something about the steps in-between, particularly how a rising radiative forcing would lead to the down bits of climate change.
It did, however, make me think of a concept that I’m sure has been thought of before and I just haven’t read it up to now. In trying to imagine myself in a CO2-only world like Joel’s, when they (and I’m not sure on the history of who they are – politicians, scientists and pseudoscientists) foisted the term “climate change” upon us as they retreated from “global warming”, did they not put the scientists in a Catch 22 box ?? If rising radiative forcing can give downturns in temperature (remember I’m in silly CO2 land for now), then the ONLY explanation one can come up with is that there has to be negative feedback, and the positive feedback theory goes belly-up. Is there another explanation where one could retain scientific credibility ??
In other words “climate change” theory equates to dead positive feedback theory. This is no different than the paper on negative feedback by Lindzen that was posted here a few months back. It’s just a different way of looking at it.
For example, if Hansen the CO2 purist were to say “climate change” and “positive feedback” in the same sentence, wouldn’t he lose all scientific credibility ??
Oh, hold on a second ….
Go on Joel, post us up some links on what team inductive says about this.
Stephen Wilde says:
You are confusing two different things. Yes, the oceans have a lot of thermal inertia (i.e., they can store a lot of heat) so they do indeed act to moderate temperature changes. However, the oceans cannot keep the earth warmer than energy balance considerations tell us it should be. Let’s imagine that the Earth (oceans & land surface) were the temperature they currently are and there was no IR absorption in the atmosphere. Then, by the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation, the Earth would be radiating away much more energy than it is receiving from the sun and it would cool down. In fact, it would continue to cool down until it was ~33 C cooler, which is where the infrared emission would balance the energy it was receiving from the sun.
You simply can’t ignore energy balance considerations.
anna v says:
No, the anthropogenic part is all the part that is above the pre-industrial baseline of 280ppm. This means that CO2 has increased by close to 40% over what it was before we began to burn fossil fuels…Or, in other words, we are responsible for about 28% of the CO2 in the atmosphere. (And, some more of the CO2 we’ve emitted has invaded the oceans or gone into the biosphere.)
The amount of H2O in the atmosphere is controlled by the temperature. Hence, by increasing the amount of long-lived greenhouse gases such as CO2 in the atmosphere, we will cause an increase in the amount of H2O there. This is the water vapor feedback.
philincalifornia says:
It amazes me how people can continue to not understand something when I am sure they are smart enough to do so but they really don’t WANT to understand it! Are you going to tell me that the seasonal cycle is non-existent or unimportant to the climate here in Rochester because the temperature trend over the past week here in Rochester has been up even though the seasonal cycle says it should be down? The fact that CO2 is the dominating forcing controlling the long-term temperature trend does not mean that there are not fluctuations, just as the fact that the temperature trend here in Rochester over the next few months will be dominated by the seasonal cycle does not mean that we will not experience some stretches of several days where the temperature trend is positive.
Heck, even the climate models that have our best understanding of atmospheric physics programmed into them, including rising greenhouse gases and positive feedbacks, show such fluctuations so it is manifestly ridiculous to claim that such fluctuations are inconsistent with this. In fact, the models tell us that decade-long periods with little trend or even a negative trend will not be that uncommon.
As for scientific credibility, while in this little corner of the web, things may seem different, in the larger scientific community it is the so-called “skeptics” that do not have scientific credibility and one of the biggest reasons why is that they repeat silly discredited arguments like this.
Joel Shore says:
Could you be any more insufferable? “This little corner of the web” is the world’s “Best Science” site, and has more traffic than any of the censorship prone alarmist sites. And that is why you post here instead of the pathetic realclimate, tamino, climateprogress, etc. sites. You crave the exposure that a twenty million hit site gives you.
And if you want credibility, quit dodging Anthony’s open invitation to write your own article. Your incessant sniping from the sidelines is getting old, pal.
Phlogiston (15:35:59),
You’re welcome. Your post on Karl Popper was thought provoking. I hope you continue to post here.
I’ve had this link for quite a while. You might be interested:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html
Popper’s conclusions:
Stefan (13:54:57) :
Well said.
WRT the presence of Experts not inherently validating what is asserted.
e.g. 1. Lysenkoism had many experts – but no validity.
Smokey (19:16:00) :
“This little corner of the web” is the world’s “Best Science” site, and has more traffic than any of the censorship prone alarmist sites.
Traffic does not equal quality of science.
The voting is by users rather than scientists.
Best Science site? The Blog that brought you:
CO2 condensation in Antarctica at -113F? (cannot remember the original title that was even more ludicrous) with 240 responses trying to decide!
bill,
I agree with everything you said [and it applies even more to RC].
But the CO2 thread was fun.
And the Popper comments are serious.
Admit it: You’re here because you like it!
Joel Shore (18:53:52) :
The amount of H2O in the atmosphere is controlled by the temperature.
Jumping Jehoshaphat.
Do you hear what you are saying? In a chaotically dynamic system with n variables, where n is a large number, what meaning : “controlled”?
Hence, by increasing the amount of long-lived greenhouse gases such as CO2 in the atmosphere, we will cause an increase in the amount of H2O there. This is the water vapor feedback.
Minuscule also as far as data goes.
BTW
100*0=0
100*dx=a very small difference
CO2 is a trace greenhouse element . period. the tail does not wag the dog.
Joel Shore says:
It amazes me how people can continue to not understand something when I am sure they are smart enough to do so but they really don’t WANT to understand it! Are you going to tell me that the seasonal cycle is non-existent or unimportant to the climate here in Rochester because the temperature trend over the past week here in Rochester has been up even though the seasonal cycle says it should be down? The fact that CO2 is the dominating forcing controlling the long-term temperature trend does not mean that there are not fluctuations, just as the fact that the temperature trend here in Rochester over the next few months will be dominated by the seasonal cycle does not mean that we will not experience some stretches of several days where the temperature trend is positive.
——————————————
I most certainly do want to understand it.
Smokey’s word “insufferable” is very appropriate in your response to me.
We all know that the climate changes. Temperatures go up and temperatures go down. There are, as you point out, fluctuations.
My question to you (which you evaded by the usual method these days of acting like my articulation of the question was suspect) was as follows:
Your team have a concept called “anthropogenic climate change”, although they frequently leave out the word anthropogenic having just said previously “anthropogenic global warming” and hope they can dupe the public with that little trick.
You, however, told me that 4 Watts per square meter causes anthropogenic climate change. So, ignoring all those fluctuations downwards caused by anything else, please give me a molecular mechanism or chain of molecular events whereby carbon dioxide causes downward fluctuations in temperature. Simple question. There are simple answers, but I can think of none where feedback is not negative. I’ll think about it some more, but I can’t think of any where feedback is zero.
Others please chime in. I don’t mind being educated on this point and being enlightened about the errors in my thinking but, as of now my thinking is that if anthropogenic CO2 causes fluctuations downwards in temperature then I don’t see how there can be positive feedback. Of course, it should also be clear that my problem can be solved by verifying that the term “anthropogenic climate change” as it pertains to CO2 is a garbage term/big hoax.
Stephen Wilde (23:38:11) :
The water in the oceans performs exactly the same function as GHGs in the air but on a hugely greater scale.
That is consistent with both physics and observations. It beats me why no ’scientist’ has countered that point even though I’ve been saying it for over 18 months now.
————————————–
Well I’m certainly not going to counter it. Rather, I have this question:
Has anyone done a study on residence times of energy or heat (sorry, I forgot who won that argument, but you know what I mean), for example, the extra energy associated with a TSI increase or some other event, such as decreased cloud cover (or both). In other words, the Watts per square meter X the residence time in the ocean of that extra energy/heat. #1
I’m not done yet … and then compared it with the CO2-generated (particularly the anthropogenic CO2 at the top of the logarithmic curve-generated) energy/heat X its residence time in the ocean. #2.
I would guess that, given the huge amount of water vapor in the atmosphere in the tropics together with the lack of penetrance of that form of energy/heat, #2 would be a pretty small number, possibly even zero, whereas #1 would be a much larger number. Is there any literature on this ??
My climate description is in full accordance with Popper’s requirements.
There are multiple ways to falsify it or elements of it and elsewhere I have highlighted some of them.
Instead I just get told that it does not observe basic physics in some unspecified manner or that it cannot be true because so many scientists say something different.
I’ve spent 18 months so far saying what seems to me to be perfectly obvious from basic physics and observations. I’ve been expecting a killer refutation at every stage at which point I would have been content to withdraw.
Instead I find that more and more observed phenomena fit the basic gist of my description even though individual components of it may not be a full account or a fully accurate account of real world climate events.
I don’t expect to get everything right but minor defects do not seem to be discrediting the basic scenario.
“Joel Shore:
You are confusing two different things. Yes, the oceans have a lot of thermal inertia (i.e., they can store a lot of heat) so they do indeed act to moderate temperature changes. However, the oceans cannot keep the earth warmer than energy balance considerations tell us it should be. Let’s imagine that the Earth (oceans & land surface) were the temperature they currently are and there was no IR absorption in the atmosphere. Then, by the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation, the Earth would be radiating away much more energy than it is receiving from the sun and it would cool down. In fact, it would continue to cool down until it was ~33 C cooler, which is where the infrared emission would balance the energy it was receiving from the sun”
Reply:
You are the one ignoring energy balance considerations by ignoring the role of the oceans in creating and maintaining that balance seperately from the similar functuion in the air.
It is true that if the air had no IR absorption capacity there would be no oceans no hydrological cycle and the situation would be as you say.
However the IR absorption characteristics of the air do allow a hydrological cycle and the presence of liquid water oceans and once those two componemts of the system become possible they then take over and control the entire energy flow overwhelming the comparatively miniscule contribution of the air.
The composition of the air is merely an enabler. Once it has served it’s function in permitting the creation of liquid oceans and a hydrological cycle it’s significance becomes marginal.