Hadley CRU isn’t the only government agency that deletes web content related to climate. NOAA/NWS Southern Region Headquarters has gotten into the act. An interesting thing happened today. NOAA deleted an educational web page about an experiment you can do with CO2.
Ordinarily such a thing would go unnoticed, especially since it doesn’t impact anything particularly important like policy, or climate data. It’s just an experiment for kids in the classroom.
Fortunately, I still had the web page open in my browser. I had been looking at it yesterday, and I had been thinking I might try the experiment myself with a datalogging thermometer, just for fun.
Here’s the web page as it was open in my browser:
And here is what the same URL looks like now:
You can try it out for yourself:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/jetstream/atmos/ll_gas.htm
What could cause NOAA to pull a web page like this on a moment’s notice?
Two things.
1 It was featured on Climate Depot yesterday.
2 It had this passage that must not have agreed with somebody higher up in the NOAA food chain:
It has been thought that an increase in carbon dioxide will lead to global warming. While carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing over the past 100 years, there is no evidence that it is causing an increase in global temperatures.
Or maybe it was this one:
The behavior of the atmosphere is extremely complex. Therefore, discovering the validity of global warming is complex as well. How much effect will the increase in carbon dioxide will have is unclear or even if we recognize the effects of any increase.
So rather than corrupt young minds with a simple science experiment with some inconvenient language attached to it, NOAA simply deleted it. Of course nothing is really deleted on the Internet anymore. NOAA looks pretty silly thinking it would go away with a simple delete.
The Wayback machine has the missing web page for posterity:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060129154229/http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/jetstream/atmos/ll_gas.htm
Now it looks like I’ll have to run their simple experiment. Stay tuned.
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Ripper (23:16:45) :
Boffin (22:45:09) :
The page still exists on the NOAA website at http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/yos/resource/JetStream/atmos/ll_gas.htm
That one has gone too now.
I just accessed and saved it. Maybe it was getting too many hits, last time you tried.
[b] Tim Channon (20:32:47) :
“The Wayback machine has the missing web page for posterity:”
So it’s in NOAA’s arc?[/b]
OUCH !!!
SteveBrooklineMA (22:15:40) :
Thanks for the link – it is good to see the results of a true experiment.
I was interested to see that there was no evidence of runaway warming in this experiment, despite a 1,000,000ppm concentration of CO2.
Sorry, Anthony, this is an OT comment but the comment box has disappeared from the tips and notes page. Please feel free to delete but I thought this important enough to mention:
Belief in climate change is now a step closer to be protected in UK law after today’s ruling in an unfair dismissal case:
In a landmark court ruling, a judge ruled that Tim Nicholson’s views on climate change should be given the same consideration by employers as “religious or philosophical beliefs”.
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/latestnews/Beliefs-about-climate-change-ruled.5791898.jp
Make of it what you wish but I think this is getting insane – and just imagine protecting the views of some of the more extreme political factions…
google cache found me the original page
It was clearly removed because it was wrong.
Someone has been updating this recently, the last update to the page was made in January 2008 with this inclusion:
“In 2007, NASA data showed that one-half of the ten warmest years occurred in the 1930’s with 1934 (tied with 2006) as the warmest years on record.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20080103132548/http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/jetstream/atmos/ll_gas.htm
And the claim about the satellite record showing no warming for example is completely outdated and now incorrect so cannot be left up.
A bottle is a literal greenhouse; it prevents convection no matter what atmosphere it contains. Whatever the experiment may or may not show, it doesn’t show that CO2 affects the radiation balance. In short the experiment is just a con and should have been taken down. The only surprise is that it has been.
PS: the Science Museum vote is up and down like a yo-yo. Who knows what will come out of that exercise.
Mike Nicholson (02:51:22) :
I’ve got an idea for an experiment, but this is for adults and much more fun !
Take one empty and heated sauna, and 6 naked adults.
Give every adult a six pack of beer to drink in the sauna.
I wonder when they will outlaw beer and soda pop. If we opened every can of pop and beer in the grocery store, after shaking them, and shut off the ventilation, would we die?
This is tangentially on-topic I suppose.
Last year in my graduate level atmospheric science class, I did the following demonstration:
I fitted a pressure gauge and a valve on a two liter bottle. I weighed the bottle. I pressurized the bottle to 80 PSI, thus effectively adding roughly 8 liters of air to the bottle. We then calculated the mass of 8 liters of air, and sure enough, when we re-weighed the bottle, it weighed about that much more than it had before.
I then weighed an empty 30 liter trash bag, then filled it up with air and tied it off. I asked the other students to predict how much more the bag would weigh when full of air. Of course the full bag weighed exactly the same as the empty one.
Part of my conclusion was that weight is simply a force that can be exerted in any direction, and if the air is buoyant, it has no weight. Thus weight is not an inherent property of air, but that mass is.
My PhD physics teacher and I disagreed fiercely on whether air always has weight. He said that if the air is being acted on by gravity it has weight, even if it is the air in the Space Station. I said that weight is nothing but force, and if the air is not exerting a force on the scale it has no weight.
Who was right?
Robert van der Veeke (22:13:32) :
“But it is a future that awaits our own planet in a pretty distant future, ”
Actually, no, you are wrong there. Venus has 92 times the atmosphere that Earth has because it never had life evolve to reduce most of its atmosphere into limestone rock that make up much of the continents. Earth once had 52 times more atmosphere than it has now, and all that is now tied up in the limestone bedrock, never to be breathed again. The Earth will never have that as atmosphere again, so the state of Venus will never be the future that awaits our own planet.
Instead, life will continue to sequester CO2 over time into limestone, even if we burn all the fossil fuels there are, it will all be rebound as limestone by ocean corals, until there is no CO2 left, leaving the Earth as a permanent ice planet with a pristine nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, until the day that the Sun suddenly swells up into a red giant (rather quickly mind you) and engulfs Mercury, Venus, and Earth.
Mars will then get treated like Mercury, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn will become somewhat enjoyable locales.
Jeff, unemployment in Oregon has always been higher than the national average, even when only one Democrat lived in the state. It was also high when only one Republican lived in Wallowa County. The current rate has nothing to do with progressive green policies. We are still a very scattered and agrarian/wood products working population. Unemployment is chronic, made worse by any downturn in the new housing market. But we survive. Most of us know where to kil* [cough] find food.
DennisA, it is still there from where I’m sitting.
Spot the difference in the two versions of the National Weather Service JetStream Learning Lessons.
Version A
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/jetstream/append/lessonplans.htm
Version B
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/yos/resource/JetStream/append/lessonplans.htm
OT but interesting: First snow in Copenhagen
http://www.dmi.dk/dmi/index/danmark/regionaludsigten/kbhnsj.htm
Not totally off-topic:
Here’s Note I put up on Facebook, especially to gig the CO2-is-evil crowd, but no one noticed or didn’t get where it was going. If anyone knows a site with a good sense of (as well as knowledge!), please let me know.
Start:
“Preliminary Ramblings on My Brilliant Plan”
“How to heroically save the planet, give the homeless a warm place to sleep at night, have the best tomatoes ever, profit off cap-and-trade, and generally migrate onto a higher moral plane”
Original inspiration and undoubtedly catchier:
“Save the planet – hug a watermelon”
(hat-tip: John)
A work-in-progress.
Some might suggest that this plan would be best presented in its final version; however, in keeping with its altruistic aspects (even profiting off any cap and trade scheme could be done for the benefit of the planet, as Al Gore has demonstrated), I would much prefer to share the glory, and the forthcoming Nobel prize, with any collaborators who might volunteer. There are a number of scientific questions to be researched and time is of the essence (Save the Planet!). In addition, as mentioned in my comment to the previous note, a micro-climate modeler would be most welcome. As also mentioned, any devices invented by me would be my gracious gift to the world.
Some of us know that when 2 people sleep during a blizzard in a canvas pup tent acquired with Green Stamps, they get nice and cozy warm.
Obviously, these are not airtight, or we wouldn’t wake up in the morning due to our own CO2. However, can we presume that the CO2 levels are higher inside the tent than outside?
How much CO2 does an individual emit?
What is the highest level of CO2 in the “ambient air” (just wanted to finally use that term) that can be inhaled by an individual without deleterious effects?
In an airtight environment, how much oxygen would have to be infused in order to maintain the human organism optimally? Any other gases?
Any suggestions to replace “migrate” in the working title?
NB: Tomatoes were chosen for the pilot project since they form an integral part of virtually every cuisine worldwide. Naturally, the principles could then be adapted to any plant, with the possible exception of Acorn squash (see my “what’s on your mind” question).
Whoever is tempted, I’ll beat you to the punch:
“Some people have way too much time on their hands.”
Actually, I don’t, but this may be the pinnacle of achievement in my heretofore ambition-free life.
Off to the day job for now.
Finish.
Any suggestions welcome on where I can put this.
Thanks,
Kendra
Corr:
good sense of humor
It’s been a few years, like about 30, since I’ve had thermodynamics, but if you increase pressure without changing any other parameters, then temperature will increase. I believe Mark T. made reference to this earlier.
On the subject of Venus, exporting a few colonies of CO2 loving bacteria who can tolerate an acidic environment and letting them work for a few centuries could probably reduce the atmospheric pressure on Venus (and hence temperature) to the point of making the planet habitable. Of course the plants and animals would have to be imported from Earth.
If this is true it is THE NEWS that killed AGW
http://www.prisonplanet.com/al-gore-admits-co2-does-not-cause-majority-of-global-warming.html definite story value here IF true…
Well it IS TRUE
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/gore_clears_carbon_dioxide_of_most_blame/ This completely changes the whole scenario “Politically anyway”
Pamela Gray (20:33:41) : “I am guessing the chemical reaction that causes the fizz fizz of the seltzer tablets builds up quite a head of heat. I use a similar experiment to shoot the lids off old plastic film canisters with a legoman sitting on top.”
You obviously had engineering tendencies as a child . . .
However, I believe that when you dissolve seltzer tablets in water there is an endothermic reaction, causing the solution to cool. It is only the release of carbon dioxide that causes the pressure to shoot the lids off of the canisters. In the case of the experiment, the bottles are allowed to sit for an hour before measuring the temperature, which allows the solution to warm back up to room temperature.
Also, the instructions for measuring temperature in the experiment are a little confusing. At first it says to have the temperature probe measure the gas temperature in the bottles, and then later to measure the liquid temperature in the bottles. I would guess that someone did a cut-and-paste from somewhere else, and didn’t clean it up later.
It had to go. There was some resemblance to real scientific method and the questions were not rediculously biased. It needed to be replaced by propaganda like the childish rubbish we see at RC of Deep climate.
Alberto (03:02:00) :
Sorry for the automatic translation
1 .- The acid-base chemical reaction that generates CO2 is exothermic, it releases heat.
2 .- The concentration of CO2 in the bottle is thousands of times higher than that of the atmosphere.
3 .- The bottles should be exposed to the sun. The incoming solar radiation has a wavelength range of fully or partially saturating CO2
4 .- The radiation from the lamp is far from representing the emission of the planet’s surface.
5 .- The effervescence of air humidity increases, this factor is itself a greenhouse.
beat me to it. This is a dirty experiment. The exothermic component and the drastic and unmeasured variance from the actual CO2 on our planet makes this a joke. A kid has no tools to set this up. Get a .03% and equal starting temps.
I take my hat off to ol’ Al and drink a beer in his memory LOL
Jack Barratt and Heinz Hug also conducted c02 experiments using an FT-IR spectrometre. I’m not sure if their results are available online. Certainly, Hug’s metering method added 2.6% water vapour although both found that absorbtion in the peaks accounted for 99.84%, to give very little transmission values to other molecules for any addition of c02. Barrett’s findings were that c02 becomes thermalised with 02, h20 and N2 before re-radiation takes place. It essentially disproves the cascade model used by those who maintain that since c02 does little at ground level, the effect must be taking place elsewhere in the atmosphere, at higher altitudes, where it can reach -50 to -60C. There is no explained mechanism as to how temperatures this extreme can maintain warmth at ground level, so for empirical purposes, if there is a greenhouse effect, it takes place in the first 15 metres from ground level. According to hug, the first 10 metres
oh. I think, or read that the NOAA page is salient because it states:
“It has been thought that an increase in carbon dioxide will lead to global warming. While carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing over the past 100 years, there is no evidence that it is causing an increase in global temperatures.”
and
“The 1930s through the 1950s were clearly warmer than the 1960s and 1970s. If carbon dioxide had been the cause then the warmest years would have understandably been in the most recent years. But that is not the case.”
Bobn (06:13:20) It was clearly removed because it was wrong. “In 2007, NASA data showed that one-half of the ten warmest years occurred in the 1930’s with 1934 (tied with 2006) as the warmest years on record.”
So, you’re saying that that actual mercury readings taken in the 1930’s were determined to be in error in the year of 2007? You cannot be serious. They did however change the past data so it appears warmer today. This has been posted many times here, but people like Bobn haven’t seen it, http://i42.tinypic.com/vpx303.jpg
I’m sure there will be typical whining that this is only US temps. Globally, if one removes those nasty-cool rural stations, and just guesses at most of the readings, the temperature can be made to appear warmer yet. http://i27.tinypic.com/14b6tqo.jpg