IPCC Crushes Scientific Objectivity, 91-0.
By Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Unquestionably, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to build the scientific case for humanity being the primary cause of global warming. Such a goal is fundamentally unscientific, as it is hostile to alternative hypotheses for the causes of climate change.
The most glaring example of this bias has been the lack of interest on the IPCC’s part in figuring out to what extent climate change is simply the result of natural, internal cycles in the climate system. In Chapter 9 of the latest (4th) IPCC report, entitled “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change”, you would think the issue of external versus internal forcing would be thoroughly addressed. But you would be wrong.
The IPCC is totally obsessed with external forcing, that is, energy imbalances imposed upon the climate system that are NOT the result of the natural, internal workings of the system. For instance, a search through Chapter 9 for the phrase “external forcing” yields a total of 91 uses of that term. A search for the phrase “internal forcing” yields…(wait for it)…zero uses. Can we really believe that the IPCC has ruled out natural sources of global warming when such a glaring blind spot exists?
Admittedly, we really do not understand internal sources of climate change. Weather AND climate involves chaotic processes, most of which we may never understand, let alone predict. While chaos in weather is exhibited on time scales of days to weeks, chaotic changes in the ocean circulation could have time scales as long as hundreds of years, and we know that cloud formation – providing the Earth’s natural sun shade – is strongly influenced by the ocean.
Thus, small changes in ocean circulation can lead to small changes in the Earth’s albedo (how much sunlight is reflected back to space), which in turn can lead to global warming or cooling. The IPCC’s view (which is never explicitly stated) that such changes in the climate system do not occur is little more than faith on their part.
The IPCC’s pundits like to claim that the published evidence for humanity causing warming greatly outweighs any published evidence against it. This appeal to majority opinion on their part is pretty selective, though. They had no trouble discarding hundreds of research papers supporting evidence for the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age when they so uncritically embraced the infamous “Hockey Stick” reconstructions of past temperature change.
Despite a wide variety of previous temperature proxies gathered from around the world (see figure below) that so clearly showed that centuries with global warming and cooling are the rule, not the exception, the Hockey Stick was mostly based upon some cherry-picked tree rings combined with the assumption that significant warming is a uniquely modern phenomenon.
As such, they rejected the prevailing “scientific consensus” in favor of a minority view that supported their desired outcome. I suspect that they do not even recognize their own hypocrisy.
As I have discussed before, the IPCC’s neglect of natural variability in the climate system ends up leading to circular reasoning on their part. They ignore the effect of natural cloud variations when trying to diagnose feedback, which then leads to overestimates of climate sensitivity. This, in turn, causes them to conclude that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations alone are sufficient to explain global warming, and so no natural forcings of climate change need be found.
But all they have done is reasoned themselves in a circle. By ignoring natural variability, they can end up claiming that natural variability does not exist. Admittedly, their position is internally consistent. But then, so is all circular reasoning.
Our re-submitted paper to the Journal of Geophysical Research entitled “On the Diagnosis of Radiative Feedback in the Presence of Unknown Radiative Forcing” will hopefully lead to a little more diversity being permitted in the global warming debate.
I don’t think the IPCC scientists are as opposed to this as are their self-appointed spokespersons, like Al Gore and numerous environmental writers in the media who get to over-simplify the climate issue without ever being corrected by the IPCC. Natural climate change continues to be the 800 lb gorilla in the room, and I suspect that some within the IPCC are slowly becoming aware of its existence.
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Vincent says:
Okay…But note there are some important caveats on this:
(1) It is just one study, quite new that other scientists have not yet had a chance to react to.
(2) It still finds an aerosol direct effect forcing in the range that the IPCC gives, although it is in the lower half (in magnitude) of the range…i.e., they estimate -0.1 to -0.5 W/m^2 whereas the IPCC estimate was -0.1 to -0.9 W/m^2.
(3) It doesn’t have anything to say about the indirect effect, which is potentially the larger effect in magnitude. (The IPCC range is -1.8 to -0.3 W/m^2.)
Exactly…which just illustrates the point that one doesn’t have to be able to follow the detailed dynamical evolution of the system in order to make predictions. One can use larger considerations like energy balance. That is not to say that it makes predictions a piece of cake, but it is fundamentally incorrect to say that because the detailed dynamical evolution is sensitive to initial conditions, you can’t say anything about how the climate will change.
Well, the more fundamental reason is that the energy balance considerations is what dominates the climatic behavior over the many decades to century timescales. Yes, there are positive feedbacks in the models; however, these positive feedbacks have a physical basis and, in the case of the water vapor feedback, now considerable empirical support. (The support for positive or neutral cloud feedbacks is more indirect, although it does become difficult to explain past paleoclimate events and the climatic response to the Mt. Pinatubo eruption if the cloud feedback is significantly negative.)
An Inquirer says:
Yes, they are built to incorporate the physics of that system as best it can.
Phlogiston: Interesting food-for-thought and a cool video! One can have lots of fun with a mixture of cornstarch and water…I used to use it in a talk I gave as an illustration of the interesting behavior of non-Newtonian fluids (specifically, the visco-elasticity).
I am struggling to decide how much of what you say I agree with and how much I remain skeptical of. Using your suggested google search words, I found this paper http://chaos.utexas.edu/manuscripts/1119561600.pdf that talks about the role of friction…and they did argue that it plays an important role in determining the pattern formation, although they do still get pattern-formation without it (although just the stripes rather than the two-dimensional patterns). Admittedly, the inelastic effects that they talk about could be another form of dissipation, so maybe you mean “dissipation” more generally? But, of course you will need some dissipation if you are driving the system in order for that system to come to some sort of steady-state.
However, I tend to think that the important feature of pattern formation is still some sort of positive feedback that is producing an instability, because it seems hard to get a pattern without some sort of instability (i.e., a perturbation has to be able to grow to a certain point rather than shrink). Of course, once you have a linear instability, you will eventually have nonlinear terms pull it back again and they are clearly important in determining the pattern that ultimately forms, its characteristic dimensions, and so forth.
I also struggle in relating this back to the climate system. You say, “basic thermodynamics dictates that applied forces induce opposing forces” and this is true…but that opposing force in the case of radiative forcings is provided by the Stefan-Boltzmann (S-B) Equation, which basically says that as the Earth heats up in response to an applied radiative forcing (such as that due to increased greenhouse gases), the amount that it radiates increases such that the net radiative forcing is reduced (and this will eventually drive it back to radiative balance).
However, this does not mean that the net feedbacks can’t be positive when those net feedbacks are defined as they often are in climate science as really meaning “the net feedbacks other than that provided by the S-B Equation”.
In particular, there are really 3 possible regimes for the feedbacks in the climate system:
(1) Net feedbacks other than S-B are negative, which leads to a temperature rise that is less than that which would be predicted from the S-B Equation due to the radiative forcing of the CO2 alone. This is the regime that Lindzen and perhaps Spencer believe the climate system is in. [Although Spencer’s post here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/04/spencer-on-finding-a-new-climate-sensitivity-marker/ suggesting that the equilibrium sensitivity is actually 1.6 to 2.0 C would actually imply it falls into (2).]
(2) Net feedbacks other than S-B are positive but smaller in magnitude than the negative feedback due to the S-B Equation. In this case, the total net feedback including the S-B Equation is still negative and the system is still stable but the temperature rise is greater than the rise that is predicted by the S-B Equation due to the radiative forcing of the CO2 alone. This is the regime that the IPCC and most of the climate science community believe the climate system is in.
(3) Net feedbacks other than S-B are positive and larger in magnitude than the negative feedback due to the S-B Equation. In this case, the total net feedback really is positive and the system is linearly unstable. This is the situation that is believed to have occurred on Venus; it is also the regime that Jim Hansen recently implied that he believes the climate system could be pushed into if we really went to town in burning our fossil fuel resources, although I have not seen him spell out any of the details on this. (Of course, even if the system is linearly unstable, the temperature doesn’t just increase forever as eventually the nonlinear terms will come in and stabilize it.)
I don’t think that you can “a priori” argue on general principles that case (1) should pertain instead of case (2). [In fact, even case (3) can occur, although admittedly the system doesn’t stay in this state for long because it will run off to a new part of phase space where it is no longer linearly unstable.]
People with a systems analysis or control theory background seem to get quite agitated by the idea of “net positive feedbacks” but I think that the confusion here is that they don’t realize that most of the time that people in climate science use this language, they are really talking about case (2), which a systems analysis / control theory person would still refer to as being a net negative feedback. If they stuck more rigorously to the usage of these terms in the systems analysis / control theory fields, they would count the S-B Equation as part of the feedback…and, indeed, that is how it is done for example in “Global Physical Climatology” by Dennis Hartmann (see http://books.google.com/books?id=Zi1coMyhlHoC&pg=PA231&lpg=PA231#v=onepage&q=&f=false ). But, this is just a difference in terminology, not a disagreement about the basic physics of the system.
I am unsure of what this is intended to mean. Can you elaborate?
Most of my problem with AGW climatological discussions is that the terminology resembles that of feedback control systems, but used some key words to mean entirely different things. For example, you’ll see “forcing” used in a context that in a controls setting would simply be a modification of a gain in the feedback loop.
So, it sounds to me as if by “positive feedback”, you’re describing a reduction in the negative feedback gain. Or have I misunderstood?
Joel Shore
Thanks for looking at this and bringing some physical rigour to bear on the question – I wont be able to address the physics points adequately being a mere biologist. I’ll just make a few comments.
The term “dissipation” that you introduce is the one I forgot to include originally – negative feedback can be analagous to the terms friction, damping or dissipation as used in non-equilibrium pattern formation and dynamic chaos studies.
In the first paper from the Texas chaos group that you cite, the 2 dimensional stripes dont really qualify as complex non-linearly generated pattern, at least not as Matthias Bertram would describe it in his study of the CO oxidation on Pt crystals (the process that happens in a car’s catalytic converter). He described the transition from complex patterns to parallel stripes as the loss of complexity and pattern and the imposition of uniformity. I guess that regular waves represent uniformity in an oscillating system. We have to look at the oscillations themselves and see if they are complex/nonlinear or simple. Again I’m not sure if I’ using the correct terms here.
I should emphasise that i dont think anyone is suggesting that chaos / non-linear pattern formation achieves a violation of the physical laws of themodynamics such as the Stefan-Boltzmann laws or conservation of energy. These laws of course apply to the system as a whole. Dynamic chaos affects the fine structure and dynamics of the system. My guess (it is little more than that) is that features such as the ENSO and other periodic localised oscillations might be emergent patterns from a non-linear / non-equilibrium system.
I cited in an earlier post the book “Deep Simplicity” by John Gribben – a good introduction to these pattern formation processes for the non-specialist. He emphasised the term “non-equilibrium”, that as a system is pushed further and further from equlilbrium is at a certain point tips into a regime on the border of chaos where complex and rich patterns arise spontaneously. This region is described by physicists as a “bifurcating” region where possible states branch and multiply and thus the system cannot be predicted along a single deterministic path.
In the context of atmosphere and ocean, it seems reasonable that there can never be equilibrium or even anything close to it. You have huge thermal gradient between the heated water in the tropics receiving the maximum solar heating, and the atmosphere also, and this energy imbalance between the tropics and poles must be redressed by oceanic currents and winds. (A world at equilibrium would be one of stagnant seas and no wind.)
Some of the resulting “complexity” comes from straighforward physical effects such as the Coriolis force. However there is some periodic forcing from natural cycles such as Milankovich cycles, possibly solar cycles, plus changes in atmosphere composition such as CO2 and resultant changes in heat budget, and in general oscillations of global termperature from whatever cause. So you have the ingredients of being far from equilibrium, periodic forcing, and the various forms of damping and dissipation from the fluid behaviour or the water and air. All lead to the expectation of non-equilibium pattern dynamics – at least that is the proposition.
There is a big danger here for those – such as myself – suggesting non-linear pattern formation as having a major role in climate and oceanic systems. Some on this site, myself included, have held forth on the subject of science needing to be testable and falsifiable – according to the writings of Carl Popper and others. But if one ascribes quasi-chaotic pattern formation as having a major role, how do you prove this or falsify it? One cant control the whole system experimentally as Bertram could with his CO oxidation system, or with a Belousov-Zhabotinsky type chemical sytem, or even corn starch in a bowl. So one is left with computer modelling – either of the whole system if one is very ambitious, or perhaps of a limited part of it. It would be interesting to see if a non-equilibrium pattern formation simulation could reproduce something similar to the ice age-interglacial flipping or the oceanic oscillations such as ENSO.
Slartibartfast:
Yeah…As I understand the language of feedback control systems, I think that this is correct. My case (2) above would correspond to there being some positive feedbacks in the system (due to water vapor, ice albedo, etc.) but not large enough to overcome the negative feedback described by the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation. So, that the net effect would just be a reduction in the negative feedback gain relative to case where you just consider the direct radiative effect of the CO2 and the negative feedback due to the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation.
Thanks for the reply.
I am, at least to some degree, a controls engineer, so my pet peeves are a bit more peevish in this respect than average, I’d guess.
To me, the straightforward way of looking at things is something like this:
-The sun warms the earth and its atmosphere.
-The earth radiates back to space.
-The atmosphere absorbs some of this radiation because of molecular absorption (CO2, H2O vapor both absorb heavily in the IR).
-The resulting entrapment of surplus energy heats up the atmosphere, elevating the “greybody radiation” curve.
-Equilibrium.
There are a few things that I don’t understand, though. For instance, CO2 and H20 don’t entrap ALL of outgoing energy in their absorption bands, because the mean free path to the next photon interaction with one of those molecules is relatively long (because of the relatively low concentration of CO2 and H20 vapor), and eventually an N2 or O2 or other molecule will simply radiate photons of those wavelengths to space. Given that the atmosphere is 99+% N2 and O2, and about 0.25% H20 and CO2, the CO2 is going to simply slow down reradiation to space, and not present retention per se. That’s my guess, anyway. CO2 and H2O aren’t simply going to refrain from colliding with N2 and O2 molecules, once they’ve picked up some extra energy.
As for the danger of Earth becoming more Venus-like, well, our atmospheres (in terms of composition and pressure) and insolation levels are so different that comparison is meaningless. Even if every oxygen molecule in the atmosphere were to acquire a carbon atom (wildly improbable, and not envisioned by even the more catastrophic global-warming predictions), the mass of our atmosphere would increase 28%, which is a bit shy of the 9200% that it would take to make it anything at all like that of Venus.
Not your argument, possibly, but it’s what we see in the press rather frequently.
Further to my previous post on how to prove / falsify non-linear pattern dynamics in climate.
Of course the other approach is looking for a “signature”. What is diagnostic of non-equilibrium pattern? A key feature of such systems is fractal character, measured by making the log-log plot and looking for linearity.
For example, take the Petit 1999 deuterium temperature reconstruction from the Vostok core going back 420,000 years. You can look at the difference (change) measured between neighboring core data points going back (or forward) in time. Then plot the nat log of point to point deg C change with nat log of frequency. What you get is:
Change between consecutive data points deg C,Frequency,NatLog of change,NatLog of frequency
0.1,2074,-2.30258,7.63723
0.2,322,-1.60944,5.77455
0.3,285,-1.20397,5.65249
0.4,198,-0.91629,5.28827
0.5,162,-0.69315,5.08760
0.6,82,-0.51083,4.40672
0.7,54,-0.35667,3.98898
0.8,49,-0.22314,3.89182
0.9,37,-0.10536,3.61092
1,19,0,2.94444
1.1,8,0.09531,2.07944
1.2,8,0.18232,2.07944
1.3,9,0.26236,2.19722
y = -2.1052x + 3.0077
R2 = 0.9305
x: nat log of change
y: nat log of frequency
So with an R2 of 0.93 we have what is effectively the fractal dimension of Vostok temperature change of 2.105. The temporal changes in temperature do appear to show fractal character thus evidence that global temperatures are controlled by processes which possess non-linear / non-equilibrium emergent pattern.
Slartibartfast:
There is an aspect that you are missing here and it involves the fact that the greenhouse effect is actually subtler than the simple explanations of the greenhouse gases absorbing infrared radiation and re-radiating some of it back to Earth. At the end of the day, what turns out to be most important in determining the radiative balance is how much radiation gets emitted back to space. And, the way that greenhouse gases change that is that as you increase their amounts, the average level in the troposphere from which the radiation escapes into space rises. (You can imagine that a plot showing the number of IR “photons” that escape vs the level in the atmosphere will have a peak at some level because for IR emission low in the atmosphere, there is a large probability that the photon will be re-absorbed before it escapes into space and for IR emission very high in the atmosphere the radiative emission is lower because the temperature is colder. In between, there is a “sweet spot”, although obviously it is not that all photons that escape to space come from this level but just that the distribution has a maximum value at this level.) When the average level from which the emission into space occurs rises, that means the emission is occurring at a level at which the atmosphere is colder and hence, by the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, the power emitted is lower (because it is proportional to T^4).
See here for a historical discussion of how the understanding of this evolved during the mid-20th century: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm#L_0623
You are right that the process is complicated because you have to consider the details of the spectra of emission and absorption and so forth. So, there is really no substitute to doing detailed atmospheric radiative transfer calculations to determine what the actual numerical value for the radiative forcing due to a given change in CO2 levels is. However, I don’t think that there is any serious disagreement in the scientific community in regards to what this value is (to within about 10-15% precision), as even “skeptic” scientists like Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen don’t dispute this value, but instead dispute how the various atmospheric feedbacks then translate this into a certain temperature rise.
Well, I won’t argue with your basic point that Earth and Venus are quite different. However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn anything from looking at what happened on Venus. And, it is also important to remember that we are observing Venus’s atmosphere after a runaway greenhouse effect occurred. I don’t know how much is known about the likely makeup of its atmosphere before this occurred.
But yes, Venus and Earth are quite different and most climate scientists seem to believe that a runaway effect on the Earth is not in-the-cards (at least for the sun at around its current luminosity). Jim Hansen does seem to believe that a runaway would be possible if we really aggressively use most of our fossil fuels but I haven’t seen him spell out his thinking in the scientific literature. (It seems to vaguely involve a notion that what has prevented this from ever occurring in the past were negative feedbacks in the carbon cycle due to geophysical processes [e.g., the drawing down of CO2 levels by chemical reactions that incorporate it into rocks] that occur on timescales that are too long to save us on the much shorter timescale over which we are releasing these stores of carbon back into the atmosphere.)
Joel Shore,
I was kinda keeping up with you until, “And, it is also important to remember that we are observing Venus’s atmosphere after a runaway greenhouse effect occurred.”
Could you explain this, before I make any assumptions about what you meant?!
Thanks a lot,
MS.
MattyS: All that I am saying is that the composition and density of the atmosphere on Venus is likely very different now than before the runaway greenhouse effect occurred. By the way, this Wikipedia article on the runaway greenhouse effect is good as a general reference and particularly for discussing the relevant differences between Venus and Earth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect
There is an aspect that you are missing here and it involves the fact that the greenhouse effect is actually subtler than the simple explanations of the greenhouse gases absorbing infrared radiation and re-radiating some of it back to Earth.
I actually think I covered much of what you mention here and in the ensuing paragraph, but I’m a little puzzled. It appears that you’re making a point that the connection between lower and upper troposphere is largely radiative. In order to avoid a lot of misunderstanding, then, here’s the way I see it: a hot lower troposphere would accomplish heat transfer by convection AND radiation to the upper troposphere. In the process of convection, much of the water vapor content is lost, so the heat-trapping is bypassed.
Possibly I’ve completely misunderstood, though. Likely, I’m thinking.
As regards a Venus runaway, I want to reemphasize that Venus has such an enormous greenhouse effect for several reasons that are not achievable on Earth, such as nearly a hundred times more atmospheric mass, and nearly all of that mass CO2.
Possibly we have enough carbonates that, if they were somehow converted to CO2, they’d be able to form a massive atmosphere like that of Venus. But converting them is something you don’t want to hand-wave. Just burning fossil fuels isn’t going to do it, I don’t think, because you’ve got to oxidize the fossil fuels using atmospheric oxygen. And there’s only so much of that. If you could somehow burn ALL of atmospheric oxygen and form CO2, it’d only increase atmospheric mass by something like 28%, as I’ve said.
Thanks for the response, and thanks for the link. I’ll be reading that in a bit.
OK so I get the picture…
On Venus we know very clearly the climate history – an earlier Edenic period existed of apple trees and dwarfs and elves, but they lit too many fires so greenhouse warming somehow became runaway in their oddly linear world, and the planet got toasted as punishment for the sin of industry.
We know all this of course from all the spacecraft and astronauts that have landed on Venus, all the cores that have been taken and all those hardy bristlecone pines somehow still surviving to provide rings.
Our own planet earth of course is a different matter – here the history of climate is lost in the mists of time an unavailable to inform the present. The mediaeval warm period, the little ice age, the Roman and Holocene warm periods, Younger Dryas, ice ages, are all now abstract myths which it is blasphemous to mention or even think about. Instead we extrapolate climate confidently backwards from a handful of borehole estimations with exponentials tending to a straight line.
Yeah right!
Slartibartfast:
It is true that some of the heat transfer in the atmosphere occurs via convection and specifically evapotranspiration, where water is evaporated at the surface (which absorbs energy) and condenses in the atmosphere releasing the energy as latent heat. (See http://www.windows.ucar.edu/earth/Atmosphere/images/radiation_budget_kiehl_trenberth_2008_big.jpg ) These processes are included in climate models. I’m not sure what you mean when you say, “much of the water vapor content is lost, so the heat-trapping is bypassed”.
I agree with you that for the atmosphere to get anything like Venus, there would have to be significant releases of CO2 from carbonates or other sources because we don’t have nearly enough atmospheric oxygen to produce it simply by oxidizing fossil fuels. I’d be curious to understand more about how the process happened on Venus and whether they have any idea of what the atmosphere was like before runaway occurred. But, this is probably mainly of academic interest.
Who says, and can prove, that there was ever a runaway on Venus? The CO2 burden there is quite possibly of ancient origin. The cloud cover on Venus is highly reflective sulphuric acid droplets, IIRC, so the mechanisms are hardly those of a simplistic CO2 greenhouse.
In any case, since the IR bands CO2 absorbs are such a small fraction of the total thermal radiative EM range, I just don’t see how it could possibly even be the “forcing driver” on Venus (much less Earth).
Brian H: My impression is that it is still not certain that a runaway effect occurred on Venus; however, the fact that Venus has a very significant greenhouse effect at the moment, due in large part to CO2, is incontrovertible.
For some information on Venus and its greenhouse effect, see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/venus-unveiled/ Some facts therein:
(1) “Traces of water vapor, which though tiny, contribute significantly to the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere.”
(2) “Most of the greenhouse effect comes from the carbon dioxide, however, which by itself is sufficient to raise the surface temperature most of the way toward its observed value of around 470C.”
(3) “A key feature of the atmosphere of Venus is the sulfuric acid cloud deck. These clouds account for the high reflectivity of Venus, but because they also reflect infrared back to the surface (unlike water clouds, which absorb and emit), they have a warming effect as well, and constitute the second most important factor in the greenhouse effect of Venus after carbon dioxide. Radiation model calculations demonstrate that the clouds have a pronounced net cooling effect on the planet, when both factors are taken into account.”
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus and references therein. In terms of a runaway effect, the second link says: “Studies have suggested that several billion years ago Venus’s atmosphere was much more like Earth’s than it is now, and that there were probably substantial quantities of liquid water on the surface, but a runaway greenhouse effect was caused by the evaporation of that original water, which generated a critical level of greenhouse gases in its atmosphere.[34]” Ref. [34] is available as a PDF file here: http://geosc.psu.edu/~kasting/PersonalPage/Pdf/Icarus_88.pdf This thesis would presumably also be a good source of information: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.75.6539&rep=rep1&type=pdf and here is a recent review of the radiative transfer in the Venusian atmosphere: http://yly-mac.gps.caltech.edu/Z444/Flash4/Venus_greenhouse/RT_in_Venus_Atmosphere_AGU_GM01301CH08.pdf
Since the absorption spectrum of CO2 is in one tiny tail of the total EM / IR band, I harbor fundamental doubt about the capacity of that gas to drive up temperature.
My prediction is that mature science will conclude that Venus’ temperature is the result of geophysical factors and convection effects, not radiative “trapping”, as per the GH hypothesis.
The first crucial question that needs answering, IMO, is: where did all the CO2 on Venus come from? Its atmosphere is about 100X as dense as Earth’s and CO2 here is 1/3,000 of the atmosphere, so the relative CO2 concentration on Venus is 100×3,000=300,000X that of Earth. That is a whole different scenario than any relevant to our situation.
Brain H: Well, you may harbor doubts…but I would go with the people who have actually performed the radiative transfer calculations. If you have your doubts, why don’t you read up on the calculations that have been performed and understand them better?
I don’t know what you mean by “geophysical factors and convection effects”. The only way that Venus planet-atmosphere system can get rid of heat is to emit it into space radiatively. (I suppose a little bit could be liberated through mass transfer out of the atmosphere into space, but probably not very much.) And, the Venusian surface simply could not be nearly as hot as it is without an IR-absorbing (or reflecting) atmosphere because otherwise it would radiate out into space way more energy than it absorbs.
If by geophysical factors, you mean that the planet itself is generating sufficient heat internally through, e.g., nuclear decay that is then being transported to the surface, I think you would have a real uphill battle in claiming that. As I recall, a paper from way back in the 60s or 70s showed that even if such a process were occurring internally, the amount of heat that could possibly by transferred to the surface of the planet was too small to maintain the high surface temperature.
As for your last question, here is a paper that discusses their hypothesis of where all the CO2 on Venus came from: http://www.ucm.es/info/climast/paco/abstr/venus00.pdf
thanks interesting article 🙂
ohoohhhhoo
Well, I’ve been referred to a paper by two German physicists that mathematically dismantles not only CO2 warming, but the entire greenhouse hypothesis. It’s written in math and Gerglish, but is readily understandable in all important respects.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161v4
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
Version 4.0 (January 6, 2009)
Sample excerpt:
In case of partial differential equations more than the equations themselves the boundary conditions determine the solutions. There are so many different transfer phenomena, radiative transfer, heat transfer, momentum transfer, mass transfer, energy transfer, etc. and many types of interfaces, static or moving, between solids,
uids, gases, plasmas, etc. for which there does not exist an applicable theory, such that one even cannot write down the boundary conditions [176, 177].
In the “approximated” discretized equations artifcial unphysical boundary conditions are introduced, in order to prevent running the system into unphysical states. Such a “calculation”, which yields an arbitrary result, is no calculation in the sense of physics, and hence, in the sense of science. There is no reason to believe that global climatologists do not know these fundamental scientifc facts. Nevertheless, in their summaries for policymakers, global climatologists claim that they can compute the influence of carbon dioxide on the climates [of planets].
CO2 is irrelevant. There is no greenhouse warming.
thanks