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.
How many of you posters are using the Ideal Gas law equation to argue anything about temperature? Remember that when you use the PV=nRT equation, that you have to have a volume measurement in the calculation.
What volume measurement are you using to explain the temperature of Venus?
The Ideal Gas law and the PV=nRT equation are used to calculate the change in temperature, pressure or volume when they change in a closed system, and does not apply to the atmosphere of Venus.
Venus also reflects way more light than the earth, so the amount of energy receives from the sun is less than that of earth even though it is closer to the sun, so why again is Venus so hot?
I flubbed the link to the other experiment in my previous post. Here it is again.
http://www.espere.net/Unitedkingdom/water/uk_watexpgreenhouse.htm
“Wouldn’t a much more massive atmosphere of almost any kind cause higher temps, let alone the closer proximity to the sun?”
They say that if the earth were in Venus’ orbit, it would only raise the temp by 90 degrees. Venus has temps of 900. The atmosphere reflects most of the sun’s input back out to space.
I think it is another case of a planet which is radiating much more energy than it is receiving. Like Jupiter.
Nobody noticed the obvious spelling error in the title of the page yet?
I mentioned this before: Alka-Seltzer tablets in water are an endothermic reaction, not exothermic. The water will be cooler after dropping the tablets in. Perhaps people are confused by the bubbling? Can we come to some sort of consensus on this?
http://www.pasco.com/chemistry/experiments/online/classic-endothermic-reaction-alka-seltzer-and-water.cfm
http://ccgi.dcpmicro.plus.com/DCPMICRO/files/pdf/teacherresources/s/endothermic%20reaction.pdf
bob (13:55:21)
Whether its Charles law or Boyles or the ideal Gas LAw, during a closed chamber experiment, gases can’t expand so the pressure increases with heat. In the atmosphere, gases can expand so as not to affect their pressure. Supposedly, for a constant volume of gas in a sealed container the temperature of the gas is directly proportional to its pressure.
Not sure if you’re referring to closed experiments or the comparative pressure of the atmospheres of earth and venus – not that there is a comparison
bob:
If venus receives less radiation than earth then it can’t be a greenhouse effect. It could only be internal heat that reaches the surface of the planet. The atmospheric density prevents this heat from escaping.
Just a few guesses.. Are the assertion that venus receives less solar energy than earth a true one?
P Wilson
I was trying to say that using the Ideal Gas law to explain the temperature of Venus is wrong. Try using it to explain the temperature of any of the gas giants for example.
Or the high pressure gas bottles in the lab where I work. They are at high pressure, yet at room temperature.
In referring to a closed system, I also had in mind but didn’t mention, a pistion and cylinder arrangement where the volume could change in response to either a temperature or pressure change.
But that still does not apply to planetary atmospheres where the gas can expand almost indefinately.
thanks
P Wilson,
Yes the assertion that Venus receives less solar radiation than the earth is true.
Data from wikepedia, but if you want a better source then go for it.
The earth is 1 au from the sun and venus is 0.7, so by “I squared R” the radiation at the top of the atmosphere for Venus is about twice that of the earth’s.
But Earth’s albedo is 0.29 for bond albedo and 0.367 for geometric, while Venus’s is 0.75 for bond and 0.84 for geometric.
Albedo being the amount of light reflected from the top of the atmosphere.
So the amount of light not reflected is 0.71 or 0.633 for the earth and 0.25 or 0.16 for Venus.
So 0.25 times 2 or 0.16 times 2 is less than 1 times 0.71 or 1 times 0.633.
The albedo of Venus is more than twice that of earths so it gets less sunlight than earth.
Na2CO3 + H2O = 2NaOH + CO2
H◦298K = 171.5 kJ
My poor chemistry says: amount of CO2 rules; wherever it comes from. Venus makes me shudder. Some scientists say there is enough CO2 to do that here. Hope THEY get good sleep. But the government censoring the young man’s experiment! That’s outrageous! Whether it proved anything or not to anyone. Such censoring is overkill.
” bob (13:55:21) :
, so why again is Venus so hot?”
Coz there’s no humans to fix the air-con?
gallier2 (14:13:46) :
Nobody noticed the obvious spelling error in the title of the page yet?
“Its” in “Its a gas, Man”? No, didn’t notice.
Now if only we could create thunderstorms inside the bottles…
[ Richhard111 (12:23:04) : No mention that Earth’s atmosphere was once 95% carbon dioxide or how and why it is now only 0.0385%.]
Plant life ‘occured’ and ‘decided’ that CO2 was lunch. Considering the discovery of extremofile lifeforms here on earth, can we totally discount the possibility of, say, some acidohyperhyperthermophile lurking on Venus ?
whether or not the kids theory is good or not, why is it being censored?
Oooo! This is fun. Why bother with consensus when you can gather empirical data?
Each alka-seltzer tablet contains about 1500mg soda bicarb and 1000mg citric acid.
1.5 grams sodium bicarbonate + 1 gram citric acid, added to 200mL water at 21.1dC
Temperature of the water decreased within 1 minute to 19.9dC.
I don’t have any two liter bottles or clay to work with, but I can hypothesize (based on the molecular weight of CO2) that this experiment does, in fact, do a pretty good job of simulating the atmosphere of Venus.
I won’t include all of my math, but each seltzer tablet has the potential to liberate about 0.8g of CO2 (1.6g for two tabs). A liter of air weighs about 1.2g. I doubt that the molding clay is air tight, so I am guessing the CO2 probably replaces most of the air in the bottles. Even if it didn’t, the concentration of CO2 would be greater than 50%. It would be nice if the experiment explained to the poor kids the difference between the amount of CO2 in the bottle and the amount in our atmosphere.
The money invested in green technology is so huge, that global warming not being a man-made disaster will cause G.E., and Al Gore to lose millions while the rest of us will be punished into not being able to heat or cool our homes because we rely on the standard fossil fuels. Remember when Obama said that Americans think they can have their thermostats set on seventy-one whether they live in Arizona or Minnesota? It was two states like that, so I can’t really say if I remember them correctly, but he then went on the say, “The rest of the world disapproves”. Michelle herself said that Americans are going to have to get use to having less, yet neither of these statements rang a bell with his supporters. Now he has shut down a nuclear waste dump that cost utility bill payers billions, so he wants no new nuclear plants either. We will only have expensive solar panels and windmills. And we will suffer. And brainwashing the children is the first step to totalitarianism.
NOAA has now put the page back up.
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-25061-Climate-Change-Examiner~y2009m11d17-Controversial-NOAA-climate-change-page-returns–missing-original-text
They removed five inconvenient paragraphs in the discussion portion. But the last modified date is still shows September 1, 2009.
They must have read Orwell. “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”