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.
It is a ‘dirty’ experiment but that’s okay IF the factors that impact on the reliability of the experiment are discussed/coaxed afterward.
Experiment to verify that c02 causes global warming:
1) place a thermometer in a container.
2) Add 1 litre of water
3) Add 200mg of caustic soda and seal the container
4) see how c02 causes the temperature to increase
duh. duh, and double duh
I read somewhere an easy experiment to demonstrate that higher temperatures CAUSE higher CO2. Does anyone know where I can find this again?
drink a cool bottle of coca cola.
after a minute or two, witness the belch. This is the c02 being released due to its temperature increasing in the stomach
This experiment seems more apocryphal than real, there are very few controls for the distance to the heat lamps or the mass inside the experimental container. If the atmosphere’s are swapped from tank to tank, it might control for those variables.
I’ve seen several of these experiments and I wonder if they’ve ever been peer reviewed, or if a reputable organization is willing to vouch for them. Here are the experiments I’ve found:
http://dcdc.asu.edu/K-12Education/greenhouselab.pdf
http://www.espere.net/Unitedkingdom/water/uk_watexpgreenhouse.htm
http://www.beloit.edu/sepm/Geology_and_the_enviro/Earth_warming.html
http://www.picotech.com/experiments/global/globalwarming.html
enduser (07:09:59) :
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.
I’m going to answer your question rather obliquely:
Mass=Density * Volume
Force=Mass * Acceleration
“Weight”=Mass * Acceleration due to gravity or “mg”. It will change when the local gravity field changes. So an object will weigh less on the moon, but the mass will remain unchanged.
Orbit is different. A spacecraft is being acted upon by Earth’s gravity and is in a state of “falling” so all the objects inside, including the air, experience “weightlessness”. Here is a short & simple description of what happens in orbit: http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gal109/NEWHTF/HTF611A.HTM
Perhaps NOAA feels obligated to remove inaccurate information from their website?
I initially read the name of that page as “jetsam.” Jetsam is less necessary equipment (spare sail, line, provisions, etc.) which is usually ejected from a sinking ship in order to slow the sinking.
In the context of that misreading, irony abounds.
I have a web archive file of the page I captured on 2nd November. Should I send it to NOAA so they can clear their 404 error?
Brian_G (09:42:05)
none of those experiments are valid for a doubling or a quadrupling even of c02 in the atmosphere – nearly all assume either 100% c02 and normal air in the respective chambers. 100% c02 has a different density to normal air.
Valid experiments would be 200ppm, 300ppm 600ppm, 800ppm of c02 subjected to temperature variations of 10C-30C
Mr. Watts so you disagree with this statement “there is no evidence that it is causing an increase in global temperatures.”? Even Lindzen and Spencer would disagree with you….and for what it is worth, McIntyre and his acolytes too.
Steve Keohane: “I’m sure there will be typical whining that this is only US temps”
That’s the entire point of why that particular part had to be removed.
Pamela Gray (23:19:42) :
Old man winter is about to bite us in the arse. And you thought nothing is going on with the weather. Who washed their car? That’s what I want to know.
Gird your loins, I’d only just begun!
Corrigendum: to post at 1:00:49.
Should read “so you agree with this statement”. Sorry for the typo.
Mike Lorrey (07:12:26) :
“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…”
Acid rain! We need more acid rain!
All those, who continue to call Venus as a classic example of the CO2 causing global warming.
Have they ever seen the atmosphere of Mars ???
Are they really so stupid ???
enduser (07:09:59)
The air was exerting a force on the scale. It’s just that your experiment did not change the amount of air exhibiting the force, because you did not change the total volume of the air column pressing downward. In the first part of your experiment, the volume of air was all exterior to the bag. In the second part, some of the volume was contained within the bag. Since the bag was at the same pressure as the atmosphere, the total amount of air had not changed, and was essentially “tared” out of you measurement.
As to the seltzer tablet experiment, FINALLY a connection between my field (pharma) and climate. Selzter tablets are made with sodium bicarbonate and citric acid. If they were only soda bicarb, they would not fizz so energetically. The exothermic nature of the acid/base reaction would raise the temp inside the bottle. It can take quite a while to re-equilibrate a solution to room temp. It is interesting that they say to measure the water temp at the end of an hour. This does seem to indicate that they cut and pasted this experiment, and that it was designed to show something other than the greenhouse effect.
Will the fizzing not increase water vapour in the bottle leading to a higher temperature, rather than the co2? plus the co2 levels in the bottle will be massive compared to the increase in the atmosphere.
I loved the following section though:
“In 1997, NASA reported global temperature measurements of the Earth’s lower atmosphere obtained from satellites revealed no definitive warming trend over the past two decades. In fact, the trend appeared to be a decrease in actual temperature.
The largest differences in the satellite temperature data were not from any man-made activity, but from natural phenomena such as large volcanic eruptions from Mt. Pinatubo, and from El Niño.”
I wander if Hansen endored that?
Then there is the classic misleading “look at Venus” example of Co2 causing warming. They mention “crushing pressure” but forget to mention that is what actually results in the plants temperature! Plus is proximity to the sun.
Why dont they also say “look at Mars, it has a 95% co2 atmosphere and the planets freezing cold”?
I keep meaning to try this experiment too, but also to go one step further and see how the bottles cool. It would be interesting if someone could put a proper report together identifying the validity of this experiment taking into account differences in pressure, humidity, specific heat etc in the different bottles.
I was also very interested to see someone above mention an experiment Angstrom did – filling a tube with the same amount of CO2 as in the atmosphere and varying it and finding no difference in radiation. Is this true and verifiable, if so what does it mean for the CO2 gh theory? Can we find out more about Angstroms experiment?
I presume that if we filled a transparent and non conductive bottle with warm (warmer than the surroundings) Nitrogen only it would not cool because Nitrogen would not radiate out the heat? But if we added CO2 it would loose heat by radiation and cool? – so I was wondering what happened if we warmed both the bottles in the above experiment to the same temperature and took them outside on a frosty night or put them in the freezer would they cool at the same rate?
Gavin, on RC, had been notified by a commenter on one of their more recent blog enteries (within the last week or so) discussing this specific page and how it was plain outrageous that it was still in existence.
Gavin replied [I will look into this -gavin] or something of the sort.
Perhaps his power extents into the realm of being the destroyer of ‘obsolete’ opinions…think 1984 here.
No mention that Earth’s atmosphere was once 95% carbon dioxide or how and why it is now only 0.0385%.
C’mon! The ‘fizz’ reaction is an exothermic reaction. Of course the bottle with the seltzer tablet is warmer!
The only thing this ‘experiment’ proved is that seltzer tablets cause Global Warming…..
MikeN (09:21:52) :
Experiment that shows increasing temp causes increased CO2
Refer up to my post at aylamp (03:52:43).
SteveBrooklineMA (22:15:40) : The experiment you link to ( reproduced here: http://www.espere.net/Unitedkingdom/water/uk_watexpgreenhouse.htm)
is a better, more controlled scientific experiment than the one given on the NOAA webpage. I’m sure its not perfect either, but it would be interesting to run that experiment to steady state, i.e. until the temperatures for both the 100% CO2 and air containers temperatures stabilized to see the final delta T between the two containers. I doubt the delta T would be a significant percent of absolute T. It would be most interesting to run that experiment with air and the other container being just double the concentration of the current atmospheric concentration to steady state. I suspect the delta T would be almost immeasurable. That experiment would still not be even close to a model of the earth’s atmosphere, but would give many non-scientists insight into the insignificance of CO2’s influence on temperature as purely a greenhouse gas.
The debate is not whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas or not. It is. The debate is whether the IPCC models that assume positive temperature feedbacks through various interactions with the atmosphere reflects reality or not.
It seems like a pure calculation of warming that would occur in a hypothetical earth atmosphere with CO2 doubling with all other variables held constant could be done (no feedbacks of any kind). Does anyone know if that has been done? It would be an interesting data point, even if not much could be made of it.
Also, isn’t the Venus atmosphere much more massive? Is not the atmospheric pressure many times greater than Earth’s? Wouldn’t a much more massive atmosphere of almost any kind cause higher temps, let alone the closer proximity to the sun?
Great News about human beings inhabiting Venus.