WUWT readers may recall this story from November 3rd NOAA deletes an “inconvenient” kids science web page where NOAA took down a web page called “It’s a gas, man” that talked about a tabletop science demonstration that kids could do themselves to “prove” that CO2 retains more heat. Problem was, the experiment as presented then was flawed, and when it received some attention from skeptical websites, NOAA recognized the flaw and took it down, replacing it later with an updated page.
Fast forward past Climategate to this past Thursday Dec 17th, and we find that the BBC decides to try essentially the same experiment on live TV for an impressed and non questioning audience.
Only one problem, the BBC presenters botched the experiment. Fortunately we can show why, because WUWT reader Professor Kevin Kilty of the University of Wyoming, who took an interest in recreating this experiment with students in his physics class well before the BBC did their experiment, has conclusively demonstrated its scientific shortcomings in an experiment log he sent me on December 20th showing results of a November 23rd experiment run.
What got me connecting what Professor Kilty had done to the BBC live TV experiment was a comment from WUWT reader Bryan C of the UK. Here’s an excerpt:
Dear Anthony
Here’s something I found shocking and that you don’t see every day: the British government’s former chief scientific adviser Professor Sir David King flagrantly lying on national television to boost the dubious idea that some foreign agency (the Russian secret service?) was behind Climategate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8418356.stm
This was in the context of BBC 2’s Newsnight staging a peculiar experiment, with a politically-correct black female “space scientist” heating two bottles – one containing “air” (last time I looked, that included carbon dioxide anyway) and one containing “atmospheric air with a greater concentration of carbon dioxide” (they didn’t say how much they were adding, of course, but I’d bet it was substantially more than 0.000388%!). Surprise, surprise — the latter bottle grew hotter… Of course it did. A greater amount of carbon dioxide will be warmer when heat is applied. This is not a surprise! The proportions are key, of course, as you know.
Newsnight itself characterised the effort right at the start as a “very unscientific experiment” — so why do it at all?! In fact the “science” as presented was misleading and selective to the point of deception.
Indeed when you watch the BBC video, it is clear that there’s no sort of control of any kind, the thermocouples were placed haphazardly at different angles into the bottles, and there’s likely alignment differences between the lights illuminating the bottles. It seems so from my viewing of the video.
Professor Kilty also viewed the BBC video and writes:
You can see that the two bottles start at temperatures of 32+ C. Perhaps the house is this warm, we don’t keep ours this warm, but more likely they have run the experiment and know pretty well in advance how it will turn out. I tried to see from the size of the spot on the bottle if one or other is obviously closer to the lamp–I can’t– but what really matters is the thermocouple, of course. The NOAA description in “its a gas, man” looks like the epitome of careful research in comparison.
This is just kid science. The BBC did their best. Not as good as the ten-year old of a couple of weeks ago, though. It is funny that the journalist sells this as “proof” of global warming early in the sequence.
Here is what a properly conducted experiment looks like, as performed under professor Kilty’s supervision by students at his lab at the University of Wyoming.
A SILLY EXPERIMENT ABOUT CO2
KEVIN KILTY
Date: December 20, 2009.
Are there endless silly or meaningless experiments and demonstrations that one can do with carbon dioxide (CO2)? We’ve seen a few on WUWT recently.1 On Tuesday November 3, 2009,WUWT exposed one endorsed by a major scientific organization under the headline NOAA deletes an inconvenient kids science web page.
Indeed, all reference to this page appears now gone at NOAA. But, thanks to the efforts of WUWT, and the help of the way-back machine,2 selected physics students in three of my courses at LCCC got to try the experiment as someone at NOAA designed it. As it turns out, this experiment is silly for what it attempted to show, but it provides darned good lessons about scientific experiments.
The first group of physics students to get a crack at greenhouse warming in a two liter bottle were from my Physics 1050 course – physics without math. They set the experiment up as closely to the NOAA specifications as possible and made Runs 1 and 2 as I describe below. The algebra based physics course got a stab at it next, then the calculus-based physics class had their try. These classes modified the experiment to get a better picture of what was going on. They performed Runs 3 and 4, respectively.
1. Procedure
The NOAA web-page suggested doing the experiment according to the following recipe.
(1) Partially fill both bottles with water. In fact, we filled each with the same amount of water – about two inches worth.
(2) Add the seltzer tablets to one of the bottles. We delayed this step until we had the apparatus assembled.
(3) Suspend the thermometers inside the bottles in such a way that you can measure the temperature of the air and seal the tops with molding clay. We thought there was little reason for sealing the top completely, so we used a cork stopper with hole large enough to allow gas generated in the bottle to pass out around the thermometer.
(4) Place the lamp at equal distance between each bottle. This is the tricky step in this seemingly simple experiment.
(5) After an hour, measure the temperature of the water in each bottle. We thought the word “water” was a mistake here because there was no instruction to make the amount of water in each bottle equal, nor any reason the water would be of interest when the thermometers were suspended in air. Accordingly we monitored the temperature of the air to equilibrium at least, which was less than an hour.
Despite the simplicity of the procedures, we encountered plenty of experiment design issues. These included:
1) the typical lab thermometers have fiducial marks at one-degree interval and so temperature can be read to a resolution of about 0.5◦C at best,3
2) the marks are actually not of uniform size,
3) it is really difficult to get a label completely off a two-liter soda bottle, and so there is a readily available shield or
reflector to confound one’s results. Finally, there is that deceptively simple step 4; Place the lamp at equal distance between each bottle.
Although a person can purchase clear light bulbs that allow one to see precisely where the filament is, and what geometry it has, there is almost no way to decide what is the exact center of radiation. After all 95% of the radiation leaving the lamp is infrared and invisible. From outside the lamp does radiation appear to come from the filament? Or does the bulb envelope appear as the source? Moreover, even if a person can decide where is the center of radiation, there are a host of other ways to get the set-up wrong. Figures 2 and 3 show some. Students rarely noticed if the thermometer was centered and vertical or if it stayed that way during the course of the experiment – and as one might expect to happen sometimes, thermometers in the CO2-filled bottle tipped toward the lamp, as Figure 3 shows, while those in the control bottle tipped away like Figure 2.
2. Results
The table below summarizes our research of November 23, 2009. The first experimental run, using ordinary lab thermometers, appeared to detect an increased temperature rise in the CO2-filled bottle. However, students failed to appreciate at this point that repeating this experiment, no matter how exactly, could arrive at a different outcome.
Indeed, Run 2, using six thermocouples read to a temperature resolution of only 1◦C indicated no average difference in temperature rise, but showed greatest temperature change in some bottles without CO2.
Run 3, using thermocouples read to better resolution of 0.1◦C, showed the greater average temperature rise to occur in the non-CO2 bottles. In this case students swapped thermocouples among bottles to make certain no variation was the result of mis-manufacturing of these sensors. We concluded from these results that sufficient replications of properly randomized runs would likely show no detectable difference at temperature resolution typical of equipment in K-14 science labs.
Run 4 made use of Moll-type thermopiles. These devices capture a very broad spectrum of radiation, from far IR through visible, and conveys it to a highly absorptive collector at the base of a conical reflector. A series connection of 17 type-K thermocouples indicates the temperature rise of the absorber. These thermopiles have a sensitivity of 0.28mV/μW; a voltage that good quality bench multimeters can read easily. Figure 4 shows one of these devices.
In these runs we organized a moll-type thermopile to look at the lamp through our plastic bottles. When the potential of the thermopile became stable we then dropped two selzer tablets in the bottle and monitored the decline in potential until it became stable again. In this manner we managed to avoid all confounding influences except variations in one plastic bottle to another, and possibly extremely small variations in aim of the thermopile. The average decline was 0.095mV .
This translates into a typical decline of 0.34 μW of radiation power entering the conical collector.
3. Discussion
The presence of CO2 in a plastic bottle reduced radiation collected by a thermopile looking through that bottle. But what radiation is reduced, and what causes the reduction? We are pretty sure that visible light isn’t reduced as there is no visible difference between bottles with CO2 and those without. Thus, the difference is likely in the infrared (IR) part of the spectrum. CO2, as we have heard interminably for the past 25 years, absorbs certain bands of IR radiation, most notably in the IR near 2, 3 and 4 micrometers wavelength, and in longwave bands between 13 to 17 micrometers wavelength. At thermal equilibrium CO2 will radiate in these same wavelength bands as much power as it absorbs. The radiated radiation does not travel in the same direction as the absorbed radiation was traveling, however. It is radiated uniformly in all directions. In the case of our experiment this leads to a small decrease in power reaching the Moll-type thermopile.
Applying this to the case of a simple Earth atmosphere, containing nothing but CO2 and having no weather, leads one to conclude that longwave radiation leaving the top of Earth’s atmosphere will decline in magnitude slightly. This decrease in longwave power traveling away from the surface forces the Earth’s surface temperature to rise slightly in order to maintain its thermal equilibrium. This is the “greenhouse effect” in its pure form.
4. Conclusions
When this experiment is set-up according to the prescription on the NOAA webpage it is quite possible to get a difference of temperature of 1 ◦C between or among thermometers even if none of them contain any CO2. A properly randomized experiment will likely result in no discernible difference among thermometer readings irrespective of CO2 in bottle or not. The issue is one of not enough magnitude of effect to resolve on typical lab thermometers.
An instrument as sensitive as a Moll-type thermopile can detect a small difference in radiation passing through bottles filled with CO2 as compared to an identical bottle not filled. The amount of IR power re- directed by a two-liter, CO2-filled bottle appears to be about 100μW/m2.
The most important result of this experiment is how it shows students so many issues of experiment design. First, there is the issue of how difficult temperature measurements are to make accurately. Students are quite surprised at this. They are equally surprised that seemingly identical temperature sensors will not measure identically. Second, there is also the difficulty of proving conclusively that A causes B when the experiment includes confounding factors. This is an important lesson about the value of skepticism in climate change research, observations, and publicity. If X, Y, and Z cause B just as readily as does A, then what allows one to claim A causes B?
NOTES
———————————-
1See for example: http://wattsupwiththat.com, 2009/11/18/, Climate Craziness of the week.
2The way-back machine still has a copy of this web-page at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060129154229/http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/jetstream/atmos/ll gas.htm
3Actually it is possible to tell that the liquid in the thermometer is above half
way, but below the next fiducial mark. Thus, I suggested students could resolve
the least significant digit as .0, .2, .5, .8, respectively.
A complete report on this experiment from Professor Kilty in PDF form is available here
———————————
Back to the BBC video, Bryan C points out some problems with statements by Professor King, who joined the group after the CO2 bottle experiment was performed. Here is his comment, continued.
…
Professor King adroitly avoided key questions. Anyone there with any knowledge of the science could have taken him apart. The BBC clearly wasn’t interested in finding anyone equipped with the facts who could have countered the orthodoxy. In contrast, we had an ignoramus who expressed scepticism at the beginning saying he was now completely convinced. Others taking part who maintained their scepticism unfortunately didn’t have the facts at their fingertips to back up their positions.
Professor King’s assertions about Climategate (from 6:20) were particularly shocking. He conceded that the behaviour shown was unacceptable, but no conclusions were then drawn by him — the program simply moved on! But I was most stunned by his obfuscatory introduction of the conspiracy theory about “agencies” which went unchallenged, and involved a direct fabrication about mobile phone conversations.
“Remember that these emails go back to 1998 and they’ve been accumulating them and just released them in the week before Copenhagen…
“Let me also make this allegation for the first time in public. It’s an extraordinarily sophisticated piece of work to hack into all of these emails and mobile phone conversations, right? What agencies have got the sophistication to manage that? I leave you to think about that.”
Of course, the most likely scenario is not of an outside hacker but a whistleblower inside the CRU who pulled them together and released them. The suggestion of “an extraordinarily sophisticated piece of work” doesn’t really hold up if you’re just referring to emails, but introducing the idea of monitoring mobile phone conversations (a complete lie as far as I’m aware) serves to boost the conspiracy theory and muddy the waters. And this man was Britain’s most senior scientist?
I hope you can draw people’s attention to this deception!
Regards Bryan C
Clearly there has never been any mention of “mobile phone conversations” in any known discussion about the Climategate incident. This appears to be a complete fabrication by Professor King. It is troubling that the BBC has not corrected this.
All in all, this was not a well thought out or well researched video presentation by the BBC, and in my opinion it does a disservice to the citizens that pay taxes through television licenses to support the BBC.
UK readers are encouraged to make the issues and independent experimental results known to the BBC and to media monitors there.
Haha, well said! This “experiment” does allow us to reach some valid conclusions after all… albeit none which were intended by the BBC or its “Top British Scientist”
Was it just me or was anybody else waiting for Maggie to pull a coin out from behind the host’s ear?
Professor King was providing his conclusions to an ongoing police investigation. If he has information, especially about mobile phone hacking and the source of the hacking, then shouldn’t he be making a statement to the police, and not making outlandish pronouncements about it on TV?
As for the ‘experiment’, where was the ‘greenhouse’? The visible light was transmitted through the gas in the bottle, but what was reflecting infrared in the wavelength that is blocked by CO2? As demonstrated, the so called experiment is showing that direct sunlight on CO2 has an effect on the temperature, which is not at the ‘greenhouse wavelength’ of around 12 to 20 microns.
you guys are thinking about this in a much to complex maner. yes C02 does act as a thermal blancket, when the sun goes down the I.R. radiation is thraped somewhat by the C02. But it nowere nere efficient enough to rais earths temperature even a degree.
This is just an experamental theory i have because i am still young and learnig, but the greenhouse effect is somewhat caused by the atmosphere but that does not acount for all the warming. I believe that it may mainly be caused by the curveture of a planet, it’s size and proximity to the parent star. the curveture oft the planet and its atmosphere act somewhat like a lense. onother factor is that the backside of the atmosphere acts like a miror reflecting back what inferred radiation was captured. But i still do believe that my hypothesus about C02 being to dense to be a green house gas might be correct. but i am only 15 and still very eager to learn.
The current warming we have seen was in my mind caysed by the P.D.O., and the resent entense solar cycles. Now that the P.D.O. has gone negative, and the A.O. in addition with low solar irradiance we will see a steady coling trend over the next 30 to 50 years. how much of a cooling trend i dont know, but i hope it makes all the sheeple wake up and go “wait its getting colder right?” this winter in the northern hemisphere is the first of many like it and mor intense than it. I live in houston tx and we have had snow 3 years in a row now, that to me is a sign of theings to come.
so all you global warming domesayers whatch out, beacouse what goes arround comes arround.
NickB.
Thank you and glad you got a “haha”!
In my comment (01:46:30) I wrote that 1600 ppbv (1.6 ppmv) is the same as 0.000016%. Sorry, too many zeros … should have been 0.00016%. That tiny amount relates to total methane in the air we breathe. Yet the warmers go bananas over it, insisting that cows and the like should belch less and that we should eat vegetables instead of meat.
Re cows’ carbon footprint, CO2 makes grass, cows eat grass, cows die and CO2 returns to air, CO2 makes grass. Virtually zero carbon footprint. Conclusion: the warmers don’t know what they’re talking about.
Use some other heavy gas instead of CO2, i.e. Argon, which is clearly no GHG, you get the same result with this foolish BBC experiment.
This BBC experiment neglects lots of other physical laws, i.e. radiation transport, only to take the most important example.
All heavy gases (with big molecules), act the same way.
The main problem with that kitchen top experiment by the BBC is that it demonstrates how much LESS of the sun’s heat will be able to penetrate the atmosphere and reach the earth’s surface with extra CO2 in the atmosphere.
The experiment, as they have set it up, is proving global cooling not warming.
I found a very good, condensed & relatively easy to read and understand explaination of the “greenhouse effect” by Lindzen and Emanuel here:
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/198_greenhouse.pdf
This shows (according to the theory) why upper tropospheric temps should increase more than the surface (at least in the tropics), and also why CO2 levels near the ground don’t matter much — levels around the tropopause are what count, where radiation controls the temps. Convection controls temps nearer to the ground.
As Ken Wilber put it, “science can’t predict where my dog will be in the next 15 minutes”.
Just to be clear, science is great fantastic stuff. I love science. I love technology. Unfortunately many greenies kinda hate science, they deny progress.
There are some huge confusions going on, where those who love science will happily point out its shortcomings, whilst those who don’t like science will hold it up as “absolute” (but only when it suits them).
If I may just take a quick tour round the houses a moment…
A greenie acquaintance of mine visibly winces when you mention the word “progress”. He interjects, “is a nuclear bomb better than a mortar?”
My acquaintance doesn’t distinguish between “bomb” as technology and “wanting to kill” as morality. (There is a vast difference between science-as-truth and morality-as-goodness. )
And because he thinks nukes are “bad”, he thinks modern man is “worse” than early man. He forgets that early man’s only loyalties were to his tribe—anybody else was fair game. Today if I attack a stranger I am thrown in jail. In earlier tribal epochs, attacking strangers (ie. not of my tribe) was the day’s highlight.
Just think of the numbers… thousands of tribes attacking each other over tens of thousands of years… just like, you know those lovely furry apes, they look so noble and natural, the same ones that go around killing the babies of other apes?
So I tell my acquaintance, yep, nukes are better because they were produced by more civilised minds that have greater compassion. — That really winds him up.
There is a similar confusion around science and technology and population and sustainability. Greenies quote “the science” because they think that’s what people believe, not because that’s what greenies themselves believe.
Greenies come from post-modern culture where the perception is that you almost don’t think there is any such thing as truth, because all truths are simply “narratives” constructed by power structures in society.
So greenies say, OK, let’s construct our own narrative and build own own power structures, using NGOs and charities, to push our narrative into the culture. They use “the science” as their narrative, but if everyone believed in aliens, they’d be pushing the narrative through “the aliens say…”
This is very obvious in the issue of genetic modification. Why is it that greenies completely reject any science that says there is no evidence that genetic modification is bad, and yet these same greenies will call you a “flat earther” if you question global warming science??
But in amongst all this confusion, unfortunately the scientism of some groups — the naive belief that everything is only properly studied using reductive scientific methods — is churning out a bunch of stuff that, surprise surprise, is failing to make any useful predictions about climate. But is is convenient garbage, is is “fertilizer” for greenies, to grow and nurture their preferred narrative, that humans are “bad”, that we must “reduce our numbers”, and so on.
But of course, if you are inside these science fields where mechanistic methods just don’t get you very far towards anything practical and useful, you nevertheless have to remain faithful and humble to the field and to your peers, and be seen to be spending years citing other people’s papers before you’re deemed worthy of having anything useful to say, even if what you do end up saying is just more scientisms about how you can predict the climate to within a degree in a hundred years…
Scientisims predict climate, and greenies ignore science but use scientisims to foster a narrative onto the people. It’s a wild party!
nathan
density C02 reflects more light than it lets through, there fore cooling the planet not warming it making it an “ice house gas” not a green house gas. plus C02 is plant food so that disproves them calling it a pollutant. There i have thus dis proven the entire global warming theory, and i am only 15.
Being young it’s easy to be too ambitious. Science is about methodically studying each aspect of the subject of your interest. As you learn so you will look back and wonder how what seemed like common sense to you at one time does not apply to the real world.
Thee nature light has confounded man from the outset of scientific exploration. Needless to say your obsevation is wrong in so many ways in that I won’t try here to explain.
You seem to be interested in this subject as I was at your age. There is no easy road. You must study more if you want to be taken on a journey into a world that will challenge every aspect of what you would think of as common sense,
http://physics.info/light/
It doesn’t mean that you can’t form your own hypotheses as you go but be prepared to dump them when they contadict what you have learned.
Hi Stefan. Good observations on greenie psychology, as usual.
PS to my comments above: The effect of soot on Arctic warming and melting is another recently discovered devilish detail that (again) indicates that the good fit of climate models prior to its discovery undermines their credibility. It means that they were either tweaked improperly, or were so fundamentally bad, that they are untrustworthy. I.e., the more post hoc rejiggerings are needed, the worse these models look in comparison to Punxsutawney Phil, a wooly caterpillar, or Ye Olde Farmers’ Almanac.
I suspect there are other recently discovered devilish details that could be added to the indictment. Any nominations?
PPS: I suggest that this C & E News article deserves a thread of its own.
They have a new lesson up now with the offending heresy scrubbed from the lesson. http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream//atmos/ll_gas.htm
I’ve sent emails asking why they changed it to the following persons.
Marie Marks, Team Leader, NOAA FOIA Staff
(E-mail address – Marie.H.Marks@noaa.gov)
Telephone number: (301) 713-3540, extension 211
Jean Carter-Johnson, NOAA FOIA Officer
(E-mail address – Jean.Carter.Johnson@noaa.gov)
Telephone number: (301) 713-3540 , extension 209
I have at last received my proforma rebuff from the BBC. How disappointing that a great institution has reached such a low point.
There’s a MASSIVE flaw in the BBC experiment. While the infrared light energy may be absorbed by increased levels of CO2, this is NOT a good example of the process on Earth.
When the infrared energy passes through the air, the majority of the energy does NOT go outward into space, it hits the Earth and is absorbed by rocks, trees, dirt, and other things on the ground. So, either the air is warmed OR things on Earth are warmed; either way the air will be warmed by the same energy.
It would be interesting to do the exact same experiment with a sheet of black paper inside BOTH jars and measure the temperature. Whether the energy is absorbed by the CO2 OR by the black paper, the total energy is still the same. Thus, the temperatures should be the same.
Pity, I wasn’t there during the filming of this segment, my comments would have pissed of the scientist trying to pull a fast one on the people.
When I was having a discussion with a warmist the other day I pointed out that news item after news items shows either New Orleans Katrina or Tsunami or any other natural disaster footage with a climate change alarmist voicetrack. He said that was just poor journalism which unfortunately seems to be the only type around. To the BBC’s credit they did show it snowing outside. And no one at the BBC can do much more than this and expect to keep their job or ever get a promotion.
This was a sham. I am shocked that the once-revered BBC could indulge in such ‘smoke and mirrors’. If it wasn’t, as admitted, a “scientific experiment”, then why bother to do it? The answer is of course is it was to make a political point, one that cannot easily be demonstrated scientifically. I am genuinely saddened to the core that my BBC – something I once adored (when I was younger, and those running it are not those who do now), is indulging in such chicanery. I repeat once again; if it’s admittedly not scientific, why do it? What was your agenda. Even Pravada is laughing at you now; how the mighty fall.
Just a note of clarification: Prof Kilty teaches at Laramie County Community College (LCCC), not at the University of Wyoming. The two schools are closely related, but not the same.
I have not read the entire thread but has Prof. King informed the police that private telephone conversations have been intercepted and made public. I believe this is breaking the law and should be investigated.
As the Chief Scientist it is his duty to do so.