Open Thread

Dear interested readers,
Please kindly send the following to your political representatives:
———-
Dear Honourable Senator / Representative,
This is my view on the proposed climate bill:

Also, please tell the authors of this bill to ram it up where the sun don’t shine, i.e. where the greenhouse gases come out.
Thank you for your time, sincerely
(Your Name)
———–
I just sent it to my reps from Vermont.

That flag and title has a storied history. Like common words in our English lexicon, its meaning has gone from good to tarnished. It is ripe for misinterpretation. As a result, it would bring more bad press than good press to fly such a flag and title to represent a new mission.

A rather stern warning from Sen. Lindsay Graham:
Either the Congress acts to pass Climate Change Legistlation (and he means Cap and Trade to be enforced by 2013) or Obama will sic the EPA on us next year.
That tells me that the US government has presumably lost control.
Read between the lines: Pass the bill and deal with it in 2012 as to it’s legitiimacy and desirability or we go down hard into severe depression at the population level. The big boys are immune & insured by the Treasury (read that as in control of).
Listening to the Round Tables of political discussion this weekend, there is talk of something boiling over down deep in the American psyche.
America calls out one last time for a leader. Who will answer it’s call?

Ron,
Thanks – I just sent Grahm my opinion

Would that CO2 protesters take up the clean water mission.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/10/11/space.clown.lands/index.html

More than one Southern States organization called themselves by the same moniker during and after the Civil War, and clearly tried to tie their organization back to the original one. I am not saying that the original organization under that title and flag is not to be lauded for its efforts in bringing to birth our Declaration of Independence and repeal of the Stamp Act. I am just saying that opposition groups will be all over you with that title and flag, not for its original purpose, but for the later slave states organizations under the same title.

Sandy says:

I’m with Smokey. The Sun irradiates the Earth with an awful lot more 15 micron IR radiation each day than the Earth attempts to emit at night.

and

This is simply wrong. The Sun sends us much more radiation at all wavelengths than we emit. This is the physics of black body radiation and there is no frequency whose intensity goes down with rising temperature. Rising temperature may reduce the proportion of radiation at a given frequency, but always the intensity at every frequency rises with temperature.
So since the Sun is hotter than the Earth it must be sending us more CO2 infra-red than we are attempting to emit.

Sandy, I will explain to you exactly where you go astray: What you are doing is presumably looking at the Steffan-Boltzmann Equation and saying that the amount of radiation that the sun emits is much larger than the earth emits. And, yes, the amount it emits AT ITS SURFACE is much larger than the amount that the earth emits at its surface. However, the sun is 150 million km away from us whereas its radius is 696 thousand km. That means that by the time the energy emitted by the sun gets out to where we are, the area of the sphere that the emitted energy is spread over has increased by a factor of over 46,000…and hence the W/m^2 is way down by this factor.
In fact, we know that the radiation that we receive from the sun and the radiation that the earth emits back out into space must approximately balance. If the former was larger than the latter, the earth would be warming very rapidly and would continue to warm until it reached a temperature where it was emitting as much as it receives. There would be no arguments about what ocean heat content is doing because it would be rising like a rocket. Right now, we are trying to detect changes in ocean heat content that are due to a radiative imbalance that is well less than 1% of the input energy from the sun.
Hence, and because of the vast difference in the spectrum for the sun and that for the earth, in fact there is way more infrared radiation in our atmosphere from the earth than from the sun. And, again, this graph shows it: http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Transmission_png

Mike Jonas says:

The proper figure, ie. without “feedback”, from a paper by James Hansen (sorry no link) is from memory 1.2-1.3 and from Richard Lindzen (again sorry no link) is from memory 0.5. Given that these two guys are at opposite ends of the debate, it seems safe to expect the true figure to be between about 1/3 and 1/6 of the IPCC figure. Not enough for the burning of fossil fuels to be of any real benefit if the global cooling phase continues.

Actually, I think the number that you quote from Lindzen is his estimate of the climate sensitivity, which includes his belief that the feedback is negative. I don’t think that Lindzen disputes Hansen that the value without feedbacks is a bit over 1 C.
Of course, there is a lot of empirical evidence (e.g., from paleoclimate events such as the last glacial maximum, as well as the climate response to the Mt Pinatubo eruption) that the net feedbacks are positive and that the actual climate sensitivity is in the range of 2 to 4.5 C, as the IPCC notes.

Dave Dodd:

Sorry, I don’t claim any “reputation in the scientific community.” I have no idea who Gerlich and Tscheuschner are, but I DO have six decades of empirical evidence that heat ALWAYS flows from the warmer medium to the cooler.

Well, the problem seems to more be reading comprehension then since I agree with you on this point and explained how the atmospheric greenhouse effect is consistent with the NET heat flow being from warmer to cooler.

It should be noted that the “greenhouse effect” itself does not exist within a glass greenhouse: no radiation is trapped therein to heat the air, the trapped air is simply heated by convection from the contained solid surfaces (which are heated by absorbing the sun’s IR radiation).

You are correct that the “greenhouse effect” is a bit of a misnomer but it is the name that we are stuck with. The analogy does agree at the level of trapping heat but not at the level of the dominant heat transfer mechanism that is involved, which is radiation for the atmospheric greenhouse effect but convection for the real greenhouse.

If the trapped air were somehow warmer than any of the solid surfaces, our energy worries would be over! That is exactly what you claim atmospheric CO2 does: in your view, there is more heat energy in the atmosphere when the sun shines than there is in the solid structure of the earth. Or put another way, the downwelling IR (from CO2 re-radiation) should show a diurnal cycle.

I lost you here.

Nor is AGW a demonstrable (falsifiable) hypothesis as required by the Scientific Method. AGW is therefore BS to the 4th power!

That is just silly. Aspects of the theory are being tested every day. And, it has already past several important tests. In fact, it languished for decades as a hypothesis in the scientific wilderness because of various objections. E.g., scientists thought that the oceans could absorb all of the CO2 that we produced until the good measurements of atmospheric CO2 and Revelle’s explanation of the complex ocean buffering chemistry gave us both empirical evidence and theoretical understanding as to why the CO2 was and should be accumulating in the atmosphere.

Joel Shore:

As you change the concentration of CO2, you increase the effective radiating level from which emission escapes to space (*) and because the temperature is a decreasing function of height in the troposphere and because the amount of radiation emitted is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature, this means less radiation escapes to space. This results in a radiative imbalance and as a response, the climate system warms until radiative balance is restored.

But, according to Infra Red Systems Engineering (only available in print), CO2 band transmission falls to essentially zero over path lengths between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 miles depending on altitude and weather conditions.
This means that little, if any, IR in the CO2 absorption bands actually reaches the upper troposphere – let alone escapes into space.

“Perhaps someone can explain how a Roman sea port of 2000 years ago in Kent UK can now be 2 miles inland. “
River silt?

“America calls out one last time for a leader. Who will answer it’s call?”
Well, I could not do worse than the current crop. I would take on the Fed and might soon have a bullet in the head.
Naw, I’ll pass. Too much dirt in my past though I am a saint compared to most Americans.
Vote for Ron Paul. He is probably your last good choice.