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.
The basic problem is that the CO2 absorption lines are already pretty opaque at sea level. Adding more CO2 to that region will not make them significantly more opaque. Its like being placed on the floor and having a sheet of plywood put on top of you. You then get an elephant to stand on the sheet of plywood. You are pretty much toast. Adding a second elephant does not really change anything. The only result of adding CO2 and global warming is to push the point where the atmosphere becomes a bit more opaque further up into the troposphere. Down here at ground zero, the difference it makes is zero.
The whole greenhouse thing is a flawed concept put off on people who have been instructed by the run of the mill high school science teacher. [Not to insult high school science teachers, they start off trying to fix a defective product anyway]. Greenhouses and cloches work by having the stuff absorb the radiation and convert it to heat and then not be able to get rid of it by convection.
Stupid 101, thy name is the morons that try and teach science to the masses. Most people are more interested in the Simpsons or some bs reality show than they are in what makes the world work.
The whole idea of runaway green house gasses was originally based on the extreme temperatures of Venus. So the earths atmosphere has .00038% carbon dioxide. The atmosphere of Venus has about 90% carbon dioxide. Can anybody tell me what the actual increase of CO2 has been? I’d look it up but I don’t trust Wikipedia any more. I’d rather hear it from one of you.
Thanks
I have made a formal complaint to the BBC, text below, and wait to see what response they offer.
“Some 13 minutes of the Newsnight programme were given to Justin Rowlatt showing a kitchen experiment to “Prove Global Warming” with two ‘top British scientists.
The ‘experiment’ was conducted by Dr Maggie Aderin Pocock who whilst qualified in physics and mechanical engineering is by no stretch of the imagination a top British scientist.
She then set up a totally misleading ‘experiment’ that completely filled one container with CO2 (because it is heavier than other air components and would have filled the bottle from the bottom up) whilst leaving the other with normal air inside. To be at all representative of the effects postulated by the AGW scientists she should only have added some 200 parts per million of CO2 to the air in this bottle i.e. just a few molecules. Her/Rowlatt’s bottle being full of CO2 would obviously have a greater tendency to absorb heat that the plain air one so this was a clear fraud perpetrated on people with no science knowledge at all.
Having produced a fraudulent ‘experiment’ Rowlatt then allowed Sir David King to make unchallenged statements about the emails leaked from UEA/CRU – implying a foreign intelligence-led hacking. He was also allowed to forecast huge sea level rises and othe effects as if they were imminent whereas, IF warming theory is right, they would be a couple of centuries or more away.
The BBC should not put out such one sided and clearly fraudulent information and the BBC Trust should not allow it to happen.”
My son and I did a similar science experiment at home a couple of years ago, without showing any temperature difference between the CO2 bottle and the air bottle. We weren’t very sophisticated, of course.
This article brings something else to mind for me, though it may only be tangentially related. All metaphors break down eventually, or course, but the ‘greenhouse’ metaphor doesn’t seem to really get very far in describing what really happens in the atmosphere. In a greenhouse the heat absorption that matters is the heat absorbed by the physical structures in the greenhouse, including the glass, and the fact that IR energy doesn’t pass through the glass the way the light energy does. So it is trapped inside, at least relative to the light. That doesn’t have a lot of relevance to the atmosphere since there is no glass surrounding it. The light energy is, of course, absorbed by the earth itself, and the gas in the atmosphere. But the trapping of that heat in the greenhouse is much different.
I have looked for any data supporting the idea that it is the gas itself in the greenhouse that makes the difference. In my limited search I could find no claims from botanists, etc, that increasing the CO2 in a real greenhouse has any effect on the temp inside. They do, of course, pump CO2 into some greenhouses, but only because it stimulates plant growth. More CO2 makes for more effective photosynthesis. And greenhouses are, of course, warmer than the ambient temp outside. But the increased temp in a greenhouse comes from an altogether different mechanism, not the CO2. At least the vast majority of it.
Does anyone else have any comments about that?
I’m not sure that these guys have got the hang of alarmism:
“Global warming creeps across the world at a speed of a quarter of a mile each year, according to a new study…”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/23/global-warming-spreading-quarter-mile-year
“Threats” which can be outpaced by a sloth with a limp are unlikely to scare even the dimmest pleb.
The BBC manages to inject some reference to AGW, as if it was an unquestionable article of faith, into roughly every other programme. It’s clear they see themselves as evangelists.
This sort of crude, shameless propaganda is exactly what you’d expect from them. They are of course, completely impervious to criticism and generally, simply ignore it.
@ur momisugly Martin Judge…I agree with Anthony…. ‘Despair I understand, submission I do not.’
@ur momisugly Barry Foster, same applies.
@ur momisugly mikef2 and AndyN (plus anuone else) KEEP GOING…..but to be more effective, get your MP involved and get him to write directly to:
Mark Thompson Esq
Director General
BBC Broadcasting House
Portland Place
London
W1A 1AA
Mark your envelope: Strictly Private & Confidential
Be prepared for a long battle, I have been trying for over 3 years….or, as I have now done, ask your MP to refer it to the Culture, Media and Sprort Select Committee.
Good luck!
From the BBC website:
“One of the problems underlying the climate change debate is that whatever the majority of scientists say about global warming a lot of people remain sceptical about whether climate change is really man made.”
Even if this experiment is done well, in what possible way does it prove that global warming is man made? If man’s CO2 output was more than a tiny fraction of the total CO2 in the atmosphere, then they might have a case, but it’s not.
“Mobile Phone Conversations.” Beeb turns away from grey propaganda, enters Black Propaganda mode now. They must be pretty desperate.
crosspatch (01:25:30) wrote a lot of interesting information that I have had to snip for length. What I question is: “…..CO2 absorbs radiation from two sources. It absorbs heat radiation from the ground but it also absorbs solar radiation. The majority of the Sun’s energy reaches Earth as infrared. Greenhouse gasses will act to block some of that infrared from reaching the ground. A molecule that absorbs a photon from the sun has a 50% chance of re-radiating that photon back toward the ground…..”
It is my understanding that CO2 does not absorb incoming (solar) short-wavelength IR radiation, but does absorb outgoing (from the earth) long-wavelength IR radiation.
IanM
jmrSudbury (04:55:48) :
I too wondered about transfer of H2O along with the CO2
As regards sealed units, typical spacing is from 12 to 24mm, most common being 16 or 18mm. The only people I’ve come across using less being John Carr Joinery of Doncaster who used 6mm.
DaveE.
“And BBC is basically the UK government.” No it isn’t. Both are loathsome but they are not the self-same creature.
Maybe slightly OT, but still relates to CO2. Only not in bottles. This one is about cows, the EPA, and lawsuits.
Excerpt:
NCBA Files Petition Against EPA Endangerment Finding
I didn’t know my wife was so diligent about checking my blogs, but apparently she is. I’m in hot water regardless.
Coming out of the gate on Christmas Eve,The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has become one of the first groups to legally challenge the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent greenhouse gas endangerment finding rule.
I’m thinking there must be some symbolic religious tie-in here. Perhaps NCBA is trying to demonstrate that childbirth in a stable and baby care in a manger would not be allowed under the EPA greenhouse-gas rule. Anyway …
According to a news release Thursday, NCBA filed a petition Wednesday in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
“EPA’s finding is not based on a rigorous scientific analysis; yet it would trigger a cascade of future greenhouse gas regulations with sweeping impacts across the entire U.S. economy,” stated Tamara Thies, chief environmental counsel. “Why the administration decided to move forward on this type of rule when there’s so much uncertainty surrounding humans’ contribution to climate change is perplexing.”
http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/dtnag/common/link.do?symbolicName=/ag/blogs/template1&blogHandle=policy&blogEntryId=8a82c0bc25987ff10125c1133c8901e8&showCommentsOverride=false
Newsnight ‘experiment’ ARGH!!
Merry Christmas everyone – hope Santa is kind to you all : D
There is no question that increasing atmospheric CO2 will cause some increase in temperature. The discussion needs to move to “how much?”
The upload on to the Russian file-sharing server was made via a Turkish proxy server which is well known and was accessed by a Mac using Netshade. That Turkish proxy server, which is open to all, is owned by a consortium known as the Russian Business Alliance, who dabble in all sorts of illegal activity, piracy and espionage and have links to the FSB.
Sorry, scratch that last post as it wasn’t completed.
The upload on to the Russian file-sharing server was made via a Turkish proxy server which is well known and was accessed by a Mac using Netshade. That Turkish proxy server, which is open to all, is owned by a consortium known as the Russian Business Alliance, who dabble in all sorts of illegal activity, piracy and espionage and have links to the FSB.
The Russians have so far said that the upload was not made from Russia but probably from the UK.
I’ve always wondered how the CO2 warming equation was derived. In a simple way, I would think that somebody built equal sized greenhouses and filled each one up with different amounts of CO2 (all else being equal), recorded the temperatures and came up with the equation.
Smokey (04:15:36) :
Trefor Jones (03:51:49),
“The BBC has an “Ethical Man”?? That’s really very funny. Is it a parody? Does he wear a clown suit? Or is he really that insufferable?
If I went to work for the BBC, could I be “Superior Man”? “Wonderful Man”? “Totally Honest Man”? “The Pope’s Supervisor”?
Do BBC employees get to pick whatever title they want, no matter how silly?”
They certainly don’t have a Skeptical Man or an Honest Man (they don’t recruit in Ayr Scotland for that reason -Ref Tam O’Shanter R Burns).
Can somone tell me who exactly is arguing that co2 cannot “retain heat”?
Last time I checked that wasn;’t the real issue being debated among scientists (and last time I checked the earth wasn’t contained in a bottle either).
Perhaps the BBC could spend some time on the real issues instead of screwing up experiments to knock down a strawman argument.
Arthur, J
ohn above is correct re: Reader Brian C.’s letter states:
“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%!).
Current atmospheric CO2 content is 388 ppmv, which is 0.0388%, not 0.000388%.
388 ppm is 0.0388%. For example, 1% of 1,000,000 ppm is 10,000 ppm. 0.01% would be 100 ppm. So, 388 ppm would be 0.01% x 3.88 = 0.0388%.
The man in the grey jacket knows not only the e-mail were hacked, but knows why they were hacked and “knows their strategy”
He lies. He hasn’t met the people and has no idea what their strategy is. Does he read minds of people for which he doesn’t even have names?
He makes stuff up.
I could not watch it. What is point of bringing in scientists to conduct a “very unscientific experiment”, unless it is to convince the audience that the unscientific experiment is actually scientific? This crowd looks very easy to to convince. You know you have an unquestioning lot when one guy thinks that putting a brick in his toilet will some how reduce global warming.
crosspatch (01:31:24) :
Also notice the water droplets on the inside of the bottle in figure 3. That says the atmosphere inside the bottle is saturated with water vapor and it is condensing on the inside of the bottle.
Indeed, water in the bottle is a confounding factor, but we were following the prescription of NOAA, remember. CO2 absorption bands are a bit different from H2O vapor and so the small difference we observed is repeatable and unsurprising. There is a long, long list of things wrong with this experiment, which is the learning lesson it provides. We learned it, the BBC did not.
For non science people is see several questions non science people do not know to ask.
They don’t have measurements for the temps of the vinegar or the Na bicarb.
They also don’t have readings of bottle temps which have no light added. Remember much of our 24 hour day is dark.
We of course see no sample of CO2 that is similar to real life.
The Dr looks like Aunt Jemima. I wonder if she uses Aunt Jemimah pankake mix and measures the elevation of temps from the chemical reaction of baking soda and water when the mix is prepared. Some reactions give off heat and she didn’t mention that.
There are a long list of sloppy experiment techniques she uses that tell me she is a great teacher for gullible students. She also didn’t measure the humidity in the 2 bottles. It would have to also be equal. I haven’t read all the posts but know of several questions that haven’t been raised to even get to the point of the experiment being a clean one.