I’m off this weekend – talk quietly and politely amongst yourselves. Don’t make me come back here.
If you have something worth posting on the front page, flag a moderator. In the meantime I have a couple of stories that will post using the WordPress scheduler. – Anthony
No wonder Gore doesn’t like being questioned. Look at his performance here.
Joel Shore (13:55:27) : Here you´ll find the general sea temperature oscillations, and these are sucesfully used for fish catches: (From UN´s FAO)
http://www.giurfa.com/fao_temps.jpg
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (14:24:12) :
john ratcliffe (13:00:36) :
$3100 US is a heck of a bill in a Bangkok restaurant! Must have been good wine.
more on the Thomas Becker story at
http://www.rechargenews.com/business_area/politics/article195681.ece
seems like its not just uk gov people with their hand in the till!!!!!
How Bad is The Global Data?
Joseph D’Aleo, October 12 2009 Second Column
PDF available.
http://www.icecap.us
October 12, 2009
Climate Myths and National Security
By Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/climate_myths_and_national_sec.html
Christopher Monckton’s summary of the AGW scam: link
Joel Shore
RSS and UAH
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/rss-and-uah/
[quote]Note: Having compared RSS and UAH to the HadAT2 data set, I find that there’s more divergence between RSS and HadAT2 at the 1992 step than between USH and HadAT2. So I withdraw my opinion that the step change represents a reason to prefer RSS over UAH.[/quote]
Tamino made the mistake of trashing the authors Randall and Herman until one showed up.
RSS warm bias discussed here as well:
http://www.nerc-essc.ac.uk/~kih/TRACK/PERSPECT/Do-models-warm-the-upper-troposphere-too-much-final.pdf
There are others.
Joel Shore (10:06:06)
re:
ok Joel, for clarification, what is the precise verified model for c02 forcing causing a water vapour feedback? It takes much more energy to heat the oceans by1C than it does to heat the air by 1C – effectively, heat doesn’t automatically flow from a warm to a cold zone, but is dependent on its properties of the two factors. air can’t transfer heat to oceans, even if they are warmer, since air doesn’t have the specific heat capacity. water vapour “heat” can’t penetrate oceans either, and that acts a more powerful ghg than c02.
you replied:
“Yes, the oceans are a large source of thermal inertia which is why there is talk of the “warming in the pipeline”. However, air can transfer heat to the oceans. The fact that the heat capacity is low means that it is a slow process but that is just another way of saying that the oceans have a lot of thermal inertia.”
I asked for the verified model, whichwould include the physical process and the data. You give conjecture. NASA don’t have one. The IPCC don’t…
Heat flows out of oceans and into the air – which is a solar forcing. Thats because oceans retain heat due to their heat capacity, whilst air doesn’t retain heat because it has little heat capacity. The thermal energy to heat oceans is just to weak.
Being a physicist, surely know that. The fact that air has little heat capacity, and that temps drop as soon as the sun is blocked or else night begins, whislt oceans don’t change temperature on that magnitude under the same conditions only demonstrate once principle – that oceans govern air temperatures, which in turn are governed by solar forcing.
OK. I have heard it said many times by climate/weather people that COLD air originates in Siberia. In addition, the amount of snow over there and how early if falls is a key indicator of how cold it potentially can get.
Oct 12, 2008: http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims_gif/ARCHIVE/EuAsia/2008/ims2008286_asiaeurope.gif
Oct 12, 2009: http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims_gif/ARCHIVE/EuAsia/2009/ims2009285_asiaeurope.gif
The snow has come early to interior Russia this year……
Joel, I am also interested in how you think that the lw radiation above a body of water can heat that body of water to the degree that “heat is in the pipeline” (and not in the mm of skin that is immediately evaporated back into the air). Please provide equations.
IBD: “Three Decades of Global Cooling”
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=508767
/Mr Lynn
Joel Shore (20:52:05) :
No, I am not that particular skeptical physicist. I am a skeptical retired civil engineer with an interest in the climate debate. I have made a concerted effort to wrap my mind around the heat retaining effect of CO2 in the atmosphere because I have seen (what seem to me) so many simplistic and/or faulty explanations of the role of CO2 from both sides of the controversy.
While I don’t fully agree with the remainder of your reply, I thank you for your contributions to this thread and your venturing into the domain of skeptics.
P Wilson and Pamela Gray: The question of how the detailed heat transfers work, e.g., how much of the ocean warming comes from direct absorption of solar radiation and how much from heat transfer from the atmosphere, is an interesting one that I am not up on the details of…and, it is probably important in determining how rapidly the climate system equilibrates to a change in radiative forcing. However, these details can’t somehow get you around the fact that, when there is a radiative imbalance with the Earth system receiving more energy than it emits back out into space, it has to warm up in order to relieve that imbalance.
P Wilson, in particular: The statements that you are making are just various ways of saying that the oceans have a much larger thermal inertia than the atmosphere, which is true. However, that doesn’t mean that the atmosphere can’t transfer heat to the oceans via conduction, convection, and radiation. Surely, you can verify this on a small scale by taking an ice cube out of the freezer or just a cup of cold water…Over time, it will warm up.
By the way, for those claiming that the greenhouse effect for CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) is saturated, here is a good webpage http://www.skepticalscience.com/saturated-co2-effect.htm that has links to various peer-reviewed papers that have directly measured the increase the greenhouse effect in two ways: (1) By using satellite data to look at the decrease in emitted radiation from the Earth over time at those frequencies where the various gases have absorption peaks. (2) By looking at the increase in downward IR radiation at the earth’s surface (in one paper, again spectrally resolved).
Robert Austin says:
Thanks, Robert!
Yo, Joel:
I got this chart off of the WUWT blogroll: click
Why don’t you tell us what you think of it?
Here’s another one: click
It was also in a recent WUWT guest post by Dr Akasofu. You’ve been invited to post your own article here. You could write about how no chart is valid unless it has your approval. Sort of like when no paper gets peer reviewed by Science or Nature unless it has at least some gratuitous alarmist language.
And here’s another chart. Maybe you could explain to us hoi polloi what’s wrong with this one: click
[Robert Austin: Yes, a handful of alarmists post here. That’s the difference between the “BEST SCIENCE” site and censorship-prone alarmist blogs like realclimate, climateprogress, tamino, etc. If Joel Shore was a skeptical scientist instead of a true believer, and he tried to post on those sites, he would be censored. His posts would be deleted. Alarmist blogs wouldn’t censor the comments of skeptics if they had arguments that could withstand debate.]
By the way, here are a couple of links that I just found with Google that give a quick summary of ocean-atmosphere heat transfer: http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/climate/lectures/o_atm.html and http://www.aph.gov.au/library/Pubs/ClimateChange/whyClimate/naturalClimate/oceanAtmosphere.htm
It seems that the alarmists depend on the PDO, since most people don’t live long enough to feel the cycles… Most people trust the alarmist physicists to their peril… great graphs, Smokey…
Still waiting for catastrophe since 1980…
Mike Bryant
PS Ain’t been and ain’t gonna be no stinkin’ catastrophe…
Its easy to understand what has happened. Since air temperatures are on a decrease trend, AGW’s have lost interest in the air and are now focussed on the oceans, and saying that its all happening there instead. Whewn the oceans don’t form a parallel identity to models and computer simulations, they’ll say its in the stratosphere instead, and when thats disproved they’ll concoct another anthroipogenic c02 formula on some other chain of climatic event.
Its like Empedocles on Etna
“”” Joel Shore (08:45:56) :
By the way, for those claiming that the greenhouse effect for CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) is saturated, here is a good webpage http://www.skepticalscience.com/saturated-co2-effect.htm that has links to various peer-reviewed papers that have directly measured the increase the greenhouse effect in two ways: “””
Thanks for that web site Joel.
Now as to the CO2 “saturation” effect. I’ve never seen a formal definition of “saturation” as used in regards to CO2 (or othere GHGs) but one might reasonably presume that the implication is that the amount of CO2 we have has already absorbed all the LWIR spectral range energy that it can. Even if that were true, all that really means is that if CO2 increases, the same amount of LWIR gets absorbed in an even thinner near surface layer of atmosphere. One would also expect that the absorption of the same amount of energy in a thinner less massive air layer would result in a slightly increased air temperature resulting from the transfer of that energy to the N2/O2 molecules. But of course that warmed air layer now itself emits LWIR correspoonding to its temperture, and part of that emission tires to escape to space; but now can get re-absorbed in the next layer of CO2 containing air. The multiple thermal emission and subsequent GHG re-absorption cascade, is a likely explanation for the satellite observations you reference; and of course your conclusion is true; even if there is enough CO2 to absorb every single surface emitted LWIR photon in a specific spectral range; that will not stop the process of slowing the escape of that LWIR because of multiple re-absorptions.
I’m sorry I can’t offer any more than a hand waving explanation of this; but I did once try a formal rigorous analysis of the cascade process, and it quickly got out of my mathematical toolkit.
And of course anything that slows or delays (It doesn’t stop it) the LWIR escape, just allows that much more solar energy to arrive during that increased escape delay, which means more warming. Well of course that is the situation, absent the well known water vapor feedback; and the cloud cover adjustment will soon kick in to oppose what seems like an endless CO2 bonanza.
And don’t forget, that the very concept of a “climate sensitivity”; that nonsense dreamed up by Arrhenius claiming a logarithmic relationship between CO2 and temperature; or is it W/m^2 forcing that is logarithmic with CO2 abundance; implies that there is indeed a saturation effect in play; although not the one people think of.
I believe it was Phil (hope I’m not misquoting him) said that for low CO2 abunbdance the relationship is linear with CO2 (must be the W/m^2 “forcing”); and for intermediate levels of CO2, the relationship is logartithmic, and then for high CO2 levels it changes to square root of CO2.
If what Phil says is true then of course the relationship isn’t really any of those functions; they just can curve fit portions of the complete function.
Well I can always do that with Bessel functions or Tchebychev polynomials or any other set of orthogonal funtions; but none of that implies there is any real physical causation that follows that mathematical formula.
So I don’t doubt that in a lab experiment with dry air (why do they always do atmospheric experiments with dry air), that the (air) warming does continue to increase with increasing CO2, satuation or not.
Too bad about that ocean water cycle isn’t it; somehow the oceans manage to screw up all the laboratory dry air experiments; well except the ones that Gaia does out in her laboratory, complete with perfect modelling of the water vapor feedback effects.
But back to that skeptic skeptic page you referred us to. I’m not sure what delta Brightness Temperature means. In my many years of dealing with radiometry and photometry terminology; I quickly learned to avoid that word “brightness”, since it has a colloquial street meaning that bears no relationship to any formal scientific usage of the term.
But be that as it may; the interestign part of that graph was out there on the right where there is all that CH4 mayhem going on. Isn’t it amazing; there;s not a hint of any water vapor in that spectrum. You say this is an actual satellite observation from this IRIS satellite ? That is toally amazing that NASA can find not a hint of any water vapor in the atmosphere from a satellite.
But it is that CH4 mayhem that intrigues me. All that mess around 1300 looks dramatic compared to the almost invisible little dimple around 970 for CO2. No wonder CH4 is such a fearsome pollutant.
Well I see that there is another CO2 dip down at the bottom at 700-770.
I don’t know why IR folks use upsidedown numbers for their spectra. If they want to relate them to energy; why not simply plot them as Electron Volts ? I prefer wavelengths in Microns or nm which is something we can easily measure. Not many people go about trying to measure the frequency of electromagnetic radiation at around 30 TeraHertz.
But I see that the center of the scale is equivalent to 10 microns wavelength which happily is close to the black bod peak at the earth’s mean temperature of about 288 K (10.1 microns).
So a little bit of stick in the sand calculation tells me that all that CH4 mayhem takes place between about 7.3 and 8.2 microns wavelength. It is easy to see that the well known Ozone hole runs from about 9-10 microns wavelength.
Now there are some simple things we know about black body spectral shapes (which real spectra are bounded by). Only 25% of the total spectral energy is in wavelengths shorter than the peak, so taking 10.1 microns as the peak for 288K we would have only 1/4 of the total global emissions at wabvelengths less than that, for Ozone and Methane to attack. Well I see that only 12% or less of that spectrum would be below 8.2 microns with maybe 7-8% remaining below 7.3 microns; so it appears to me that about 4-5% of the total mean global LWIR emission spectrum is in the wavelength range where CH4 is active. sure doens’t sound like any terror pollutant to me.
Well I realize that the earth isn’t actually an isotropic isothemal emitter of 288K black body radiation, and that much of the emissions come from somewhat hotter surefaces that 288 K. So for those regions, (tropical deserts) it seems that methen would have more radiation to attack; but I don’t see any way it could ever get up to 10% of the radiation energy available. And of course for the polar regions where the emission spectrum peaks even longer than 10.1 microns; as much as up to 15 microns in the coldest places; well there just isn’t much emission to trap anyway; is there.
I can’t find anything to support CH4 being 25 times worse that CO2; unless it is in just the capture crossection of CH4 versus CO2.
Too bad that NASA can’t find any water vapor in earth’s atmosphere; and they just vandalized the moon to look for water on the moon, and they can’t even find it in earth;’s atmosphere; amazing !
Today is International Skeptics Day! YAY!
I notice there’s no International Alarmists Day. And I think I know why: every day is alarmist day! They’re frightening themselves half to death.
Joel Shore, Joel Shore, Joel Shore, Joel Shore, Joel Shore,
Would still like to hear your ideas, your opinion re: earf *(sic) avg. surface temperature at/about 288 deg. K also coinciding with the spectral peak at 10 um, the ‘atmosphereic window’ for IR bounded (obviously) on either side by other gasous absorption incl. CO2.
SURELY you’ve covered this subject as it relates to the sensitivity of temperature changes related to atmosphereic CO2 concentrations, as the the ‘closing’ of said atmosphereic window occurs from either side?
As an aside, I’m really, really beginning to believe this is all one massive charade, the trivial answers by trolls like Joel are well-known and damning (to his points/POV/their AGW argument), and *this* is only a game played by those still working up to the ‘answers’ and reality of the physics, like the coincidence of the earf’s IR emissive spectral peak (and proportional to temp as T raised 4th power) and that of its surface temperature …
.
.
.
* IF Joel can cite ‘globalwarmingart’ websites as authoratative technical references I can call the ‘earth’ earf.
.
Emissions controlled by, wee??
http://www.smh.com.au/drive/motor-news/the-car-that-uses-urine-to-save-the-planet-20091014-gwiy.html
George: Not exactly sure how to respond to your diatribe. Here is the full paper from Nature: http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~kl/research/kl/class/152/atmosphericradiation/week10/additional_reading/Harris_GHG.pdf so you can knock yourself out reading and understanding it in more detail.
What you are looking at is just a difference in absorption spectrum between the beginning and end of the period…not the absorption spectrum itself. (It is also a clear sky spectrum, so water vapor should be there but not clouds.) Having not read the full paper yet myself, I am not sure what they have to say about detecting any change in water vapor…However, since water vapor is not well-mixed in the atmosphere, I think it would be difficult to do. Of course, what they would have to do is somehow control for the effect of changes in water vapor and I don’t know how they did that. (Much of that wavelength range is in the “infrared window” where water vapor does not absorb that much, although it does absorb some, particularly on each end.)
Again, since the spectrum you see just shows the difference, what you are seeing is the total change in absorption that occurred in these particular bands during that period due to increasing CO2 and CH4 concentrations. CH4 is only 25X worse on a per molecule basis (at their present concentrations). However, there is a lot less CH4 in the atmosphere and the actual forcing due to the change in CO2 levels since the beginning of the industrial revolution is almost 4X larger than the forcing due to the change in CH4 levels (even though CH4 levels have already more than doubled).
George, do you always take such an adversarial approach to scientific papers that you read? I mean it is fine to be skeptical but you seem to take the approach that if there is something that you don’t understand then that means that it must be garbage (unless I am seriously misreading your tone)?
When I see something that other scientists claim, particularly in a reputable journal, I try first to understand it and think about where I may be wrong or misinterpretting before I launch into an attack on it.
_Jim: Can you just tell me what your point is? What do you think the mechanism is by which the Earth’s temperature has its radiative emission peak about in the IR atmospheric window? And, what do you think this tells you?
Also, I didn’t know that the absorption bands in the atmosphere is such a controversial topic that you wouldn’t believe the ‘globalwarmingart’ diagram. It happened to be the easiest such diagram to find on the web, but if you think there is something wrong with it or have a source that you prefer, then by all means, tell us.
By the way, I think you have a pretty warped definition of the word “troll” if includes me but not people like Smokey or P Wilson!
Joel complains:
“By the way, I think you have a pretty warped definition of the word ‘troll’ if includes me but not people like Smokey or P Wilson!”
I didn’t say you were a troll. I said you were an alarmist, which you are. I’ve even suggested that if you really believe that runaway global warming will be caused by a minor trace gas, you could be suffering from CD. But a troll? No.
Nor am I, nor is P Wilson. We’re still skeptics, which means that you haven’t made an adequate case for CO2=AGW. Not that you haven’t tried, with thousands upon thousands of words appealing to authority, citing censoring alarmist blogs, and worshiping at the alter of the climate peer review clique.
Heck, you might as well make your case in your own article here. Get your thoughts together, tell your boss you haven’t been actually wasting company time writing endless article-length posts here and elsewhere all day long, and then make the very best argument you can that a tiny trace gas is gonna cause climate catastrophe.
Or, you could continue taking daily pot shots from the sidelines. But if you do, expect skeptics to push back when your comments don’t prove anything except GIGO.
Smokey says:
At this point, I assume you are just goading me since I’ve told you exactly what is wrong with it in two other threads in the last few days. I am not sure what the fact that you use a graph that you know to be outdated (and even erroneous near one) end says about your actual commitment to the truth as opposed to propagandizing, but I’ll let others contemplate that while I just repeat what I said in this thread http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/11/spotting-the-agw-fingerprint :
Smokey says:
Just drawing a line through a graph and saying “recovery from the Little Ice Age” is not a theory, it is just putting a name on our ignorance. Why is such a recovery from the Little Ice Age still occurring? What are the actual forcings involved? (The Little Ice Age may have been the result of decreased solar irradiance, although there is still some uncertainty about that…but most of the rise in the last 50 years can’t be explained by changes in solar irradiance.)
And, why is the Earth “recovering from the Little Ice Age,” whatever that means, and not responding to the known forcing due to greenhouse gases that we can actually measure the radiative effect of (see http://www.skepticalscience.com/saturated-co2-effect.htm )?
That is simply a public opinion poll. It is hardly surprising that during bad economic times and with two ongoing wars, the public is more concerned about immediate issues than something that is somewhat more abstract and whose effects will mainly be felt well down the road.
And, there are also polls out there that show that the public supports the current climate / energy bill in Congress. The result one gets in a poll depends a lot on how the question is structured.
No, they moderate comments because they want to keep the signal-to-noise ratio at a reasonable level rather than dealing with the same absurb arguments and misstatements over and over again. You still see lots of “noise” from skeptics in the comments section on those sites. (Also, RealClimate seems to like you to be on-topic so they didn’t really want their comment section in another thread overrun with Yamal stuff before they had a chance to put together a post on it and let people put the comments in there.)
Nearly everyone who has a blog on the internet on climate change or any other controversial topic and attracts a lot of comments has to deal with the dilemma of what to do about moderating it and there is no easy answer. Too little moderation and you just get the same discredited nonsense or tangential things shouted over and over again. Some “skeptics” like Roy Spencer and Roger Pielke Jr. have chosen not to allow any comments on their blogs.
Also, the goals of RealClimate and this site are quite different. RealClimate is trying to explain the science as most climate scientists in the field currently understand it. Having the comments section completely dominated by nonsense and irrelevancy detracts from that mission. Here, Anthony is trying to raise questions and attract interest for ANY alternate point-of-view other than the prevailing theory and this has presumably led to his interest in a “lighter” hand in moderation, although I have certainly occasionally had part of a comment snipped and I tread lightly to avoid saying things I know are likely to be snipped.
If I were running RealClimate, I think I would start censoring the comments of you and P Wilson, for example, and it is not because I feel that you are making such brilliant points that I can’t respond to them. If you think that, then quite frankly, you are deluding yourselves.