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.
No; give me access to ‘the switch’ (literally: the MTSO, “Mobile Telephone Switching Office” see) and the world is yours …
Alternatively, find a ‘switch tech’ who wants to be on ‘your payroll’ (ref Kevin Mitnick see). Kevin made use of many physical security holes overlooked by most people including the so-called ‘security experts’; the sewing together of many bits of info obtained form different sources enabled him to pull off what we did without being extraordinarily sophisticated.
.
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MarkW (05:06:38) :
They are using seltzer tablets dropped into water to create the CO2.
Was there any attempt to account for what the fizzing tablet did to the water vapor inside the “CO2″ bottle? I would expect it to have a much higher amount of water vapor compared to the non-CO2 bottle.
We thought about the tiny fiz-generated droplets making the air more humid. As others have pointed out there is some consensation on the bottles which shows saturation with water vapor. Interestingly, not all of the bottles show the condensation, and they are not consistently from the CO2 or non-CO2 group. We have interesting issues with the HVAC in that lab, so I suspect some bottles have a slightly cool exterior–yet another confounder.
The more I think about this experiment, the more convinced I become that it is a perfect experiment to highlight the catastrophic AGW hypothesis. Because it is such a poorly designed experiment, the huge error bars on the measurements allow the observer to conclude anything. Its the perfect experiment for policy-based evidence-making.
The situation is identical with surface temperatures, cloud cover, precipitation, sea ice cover, glacier mass, sea levels, ocean pH, etc, etc etc.
Are the bottles the same thickness?
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram (07:21:11) :,
And suppose it is not really anonymous to the FSB?
kwik (05:31:50) : Dear kwik, nice experiment!. However we need a team of psychiatrists to explain the hysterical passion exibited by some europeans prime ministers after the copenhagen fiasco. One of them said: “we will have to change world institutions to make possible a success in Mexico”.
Let me tell you that her Gaia goddess is conspiring against them: Today it is snowing on the southamerican andes, closing highways, where the so called global warming deglaciation (btw.absolutely cyclical) took place. Take into account that south of the equator we are in summertime.
Bob Koss (01:27:58) :
How can the air temperature be dropping?.
The first look we get at the temperature readings, the normal air reading was 35.6c and the co2 was 34.0c. You see them change to air 35.5c and co2 34.7c. Last reading is air 34.6c and co2 38.7.
It also appears to me the co2 lamp is slightly lower relative to the bottle.
There are a scad of things wrong with the BBC experiment. The worst is that by using two lamps rather than one, the scientists added yet another confounding factor. She had the thermocouples resting diagonally (it looked) in the bottle, so adding more confounding, had the lamps extremely close (so making the results more sensitive to location) and had the lamps pointed at the centers of the thermocouples, when the sensing element is probably down near the tip–maybe she was after the air temperature, but the sheath will conduct heat down to the tip anyway. But the behavior of the thermometers simply showed the residue of earlier trials. Well, the BBC “experiment” was not meant to prove anything, but to make a point.
Well, now we know why climate scientists prefer computer models. They apparently have no idea on how to set up valid experiments.
crosspatch (01:31:24) :
I meant to say, small difference we saw with the Moll thermopiles.
Another let-down by the BBC was a trilogy called ‘The Climate Wars’. My memories of it are :
The presenter started out by proclaiming to be open minded about the debate, and he did go through the issues of temperature anomalies in built up areas, etc. My first twinge was when he was demonstrating CO2 as a greenhouse gas where he had a long clear plastic tube filled with air and showed a heat source through it, he then filled it with 100% CO2 and showed that the heat source was no longer detectable! If he had used the atmosphere with the CO2 removed, and then with the correct proportion of CO2 added and THEN shown the difference it would have at least been of some relevance.
The program also featured some climate skeptics who had apparently capitulated and agreed that at least some warming was man-made! The turning point was the hockey-stick graph. The argument seemed to be that if there were two competing theories, the sun versus CO2, when the hockey stick ‘proved’ it could not be the sun, but as CO2 levels matched the hockey-stick all the way, then CO2 was the cause.
I did not watch the third program on computer ‘models’. Unless a computer model can take the values of Earth’s atmosphere when life began [A LOT of CO2] and get reasonable temperatures it is invalid.
Also the close correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures proves that it can not be CO2! It could only be true if there was absolutely no other influence, and then we get into the area where solar activity is governed by Earth’s CO2 levels.
To me natural CO2 levels seems to be a thermometer, which is why it lags changes in global temperature. Man-made CO2 seems to be like putting a candle next to a thermometer in a greenhouse. The thermometer may show a large increase but the actual rise in the greenhouse will be tiny.
The BBC showed these programs again during the Copenhagen conference, even though post Climategate the hockey-stick is even more questionable.
Did anyone bother to consider the IR transmission spectrum of the
poly(ethylene terephthalate) used to make the soda bottles?
http://riodb01.ibase.aist.go.jp/sdbs/cgi-bin/direct_frame_top.cgi
I would say that this experiment epitomizes today’s state of “climate science” : ignore every other factor and attribute any change to CO2.
ralph (04:17:38) :
Should the thermocouple not be shaded from the lamps – to prevent radiant energy simply creating an increase in temperature in the thermocouple itself (and not the gasses). Stevenson Screens are shaded, so surely the thermocouple should be.
The way we figured it, we were interested in the equilibrium temperature of the thermocouple just as though it represented the surface of the earth. The experiment is just a mess anyway, and so why put much more effort into trying to improve it? It works well to illuminate other lessons.
I saw the original version of the BBC Newsnight programme and was utterly appalled and amazed by such a naked piece of propaganda and infantile (and incorrect) science. I nearly threw the TV set out of the window. I am planning to lodge a formal complaint to the BBC Trustees and OfCOM. Anyone want to join in?
Christopher Booker quotes the BBC’s editorial policy in his wonderful book ‘The Real Global Warming Disaster’ on p248 as follows:
“BBC News currently takes the view that their reporting needs to be calibrated (sic!) to take account of the scientific consensus that global warming is man-made. The BBC’s Editorial Guidelines, issued to all editorial staff, state that ‘we must ensure we avoid bias or imbalance of views on controversial subjects'”….
Can you believe it. They are telling themselves that they do not need to be balanced on global warming because it is NOT controversial (there’s a consensus, stupid). As Booker puts it, ‘In the name of reporting impartially, it sees no need to report impartially.’
It is time the BBC was held accountable for its Charter obligations of impartiality in regard to the AGW propaganda exercise. So start lodging your complaints.
REPLY: Your most effective actions are to stop paying the TV license tax. Watch TV on your PC. – Anthony
This is the same Dr. King:
“Andrei Illarionov, former chief science adviser to President Putin:
… in respect to the presentation made by representatives of the so-called official team of the British government and the official British climate science, or at least how they introduced themselves at the seminar. I personally was surprised by the exceptionally poor content of the papers presented…
Simultaneously, they revealed an absolute—and I stress, absolute inability to answer questions concerning the alleged professional activities of the authors of these papers. Not only the ten questions that were published nine months ago, but not a single question asked during this two-day seminar by participants in the seminar, both Russian and foreign, were answered.
When it became clear that they could not provide a substantive answer to a question, three devices were used… The British participants insisted on introducing censorship during the holding of this seminar. The chief science adviser to the British government, Mr. King, demanded in the form of an ultimatum at the beginning of yesterday that the program of the seminar be changed and he presented an ultimatum demanding that about two-third of the participants not be given the floor.The participants in the seminar who had been invited by the Russian Academy of Sciences, they have been invited by the president of the Academy of Sciences Yuri Sergeyevich Osipov. Mr. King spoke about “undesirable” scientists and undesirable participants in the seminar. He declared that if the old program is preserved, he would not take part in the seminar and walk out taking along with him all the other British participants.
He has prepared his own program which he proposed, it is available here and my colleagues can simply distribute Mr. King’s hand-written program to change the program prepared by the Russian Academy of Sciences and sent out in advance to all the participants in the seminar.
A comparison of the real program prepared by the Academy of Science and the program proposed as an ultimatum by Mr. King will give us an idea of what scientists, from the viewpoint of the chief scientific adviser to the British government, are undesirable. In the course of negotiations on this issue Mr. King said that he had contacted the British Foreign Secretary Mr. Straw who was in Moscow at the time and with the office of the British Prime Minister, Blair, so that the corresponding executives in Britain should contact the corresponding officials in Russia to bring pressure on the Russian Academy of Sciences and the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences to change the seminar’s program.When the attempt to introduce censorship at the Russian Academy of Sciences failed, other attempts were made to disrupt the seminar. At least four times during the course of the seminar ugly scenes were staged that prevented the seminar from proceeding normally. As a result we lost at least four hours of working time in order to try to solve these problems.
During these events Mr. King cited his conversations with the office of the British Prime Minister and had got clearance for such actions.
And thirdly, when the more or less normal work of the seminar was restored and when the opportunity for discussion presented itself, when questions on professional topics were asked, and being unable to answer these questions, Mr. King and other members of the delegation, turned to flight, as happened this morning when Mr. King, in an unprecedented incident, cut short his answer to a question in mid sentence realizing that he was unable to answer it and left the seminar room. It is not for us to give an assessment to what happened, but in our opinion the reputation of British science, the reputation of the British government and the reputation of the title “Sir” has sustained heavy damage.”
It’s the mad hatter’s tea party
Either their well-placed “skeptic” Phillip is a complete dumb*ss or is a plant. To go from being a skeptic (albeit one with an obligatory brick in his toilet) to being convinced that he would be an “idiot for not believing” and willing to “gladly pay [more taxes to solve AGW] tomorrow” over the course of a bogus kitchen experiment and some misleading statements from a “top scientist” is just too convenient.
It has been clearly demonstrated that if you’re skeptical like Phillip, you would be an idiot not to change your mind based on this experiment and pay more taxes tomorrow as well. This reeks of infomercial.
Bruce (01:47:41) :
“This is a huge scoop! Who knew there were mobile phone conversations hacked? Only the FSB or the CSIS could/would do that! Which was it? Were they working together? The world needs to know! Why was such huge news slipped out like that? Did Sir David reveal this by mistake? Does he know too much? Is his life now in danger? Ian Fleming, eat your heart out – real life is much more exciting than your mundane stories!”
For what it is worth I was talking to a guy with CIA connections. He said British Intel and our CIA swap favors because although our laws make surveillance by our FBI and CIA illegal they do NOT cover British Intel. Therefore the spying is done by a foreign intel service and turned over to the national. Truth? Heck if I know but it would not surprise me.
Speaking of demonstrations that are sceintific nonsense, but are effective at fooling the scientific illiterate, see NOAA Administration Jane Lubchenco here:
http://multimedia.boston.com/m/27701104/state-of-climate-science-dr-lubchenco-demonstration-pt-2.htm
What is it about NOAA and these ridiculous demonstrations?
The flood of complaints may give the BBC some food for thought but, if it’s anything like the EPA, the nett result is likely to be zero!
When that latter organisation went ahead on that ill-fated day, December 7th 2009, with the infamous ghg pollution endangerment finding it did so on a Tsunami of public comment!
This from the EPA site:
EPA issued the proposed findings in April 2009 and held a 60-day public comment period. The agency received more than 380,000 comments, which were carefully reviewed and considered during the development of the final findings.
Over 6000 comments a day and I’d be extremely surprised if the majority were supportive of the planned actions!
How did they manage to process this enormous volume, how did they extract the evidence that they’d asked for to lend legitimacy to the process and where is the report that presumably had to be produced?
Anyone know? FOIA anyone?
Flights canceled as Europe snowed in
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/flights-cancelled-as-europe-snowed-in/story-e6frg6so-1225813292257
Molon Labe (01:14:18)
Below is charted the calculated Specific Heat
(at constant pressure) for dry air @300K.
Molecule %/Atm Cp Cp-Atm
N2 78.08 1.039 0.8113
O2 20.95 0.918 0.1923
Ar 0.93 0.521 0.0048
CO2 0.036 0.846 0.0003
Ne 0.0018 1.031 0.00002
He 0.0005 5.196 0.00003
Dry Air 99.9983 1.00875
In the following chart the CO2 is doubled and
the N2 and O2 percentage reduced proportionally.
Molecule %/Atm Cp Cp-Atm
N2 78.053 1.039 0.81100
O2 20.941 0.918 0.19224
Ar 0.93 0.521 0.0048
CO2 0.072 0.846 0.00063
Ne 0.0018 1.031 0.00002
He 0.0005 5.196 0.00003
Dry Air 99.9983 1.00872
So doubling the CO2 has almost no effect on the
Specific Heat of dry air.
Left out of all this is water vapor which can vary
from 0-4%. The saturated vapor at this temp would
have a Cp of around 1.37 kJ/(kg)(K).
In Robin (08:30:30) is:
REPLY: Your most effective actions are to stop paying the TV license tax. Watch TV on your PC. – Anthony
Sorry, but in comments I’ve read the UK government seems to have that one covered as well, it’s television programming therefore it’s a TV therefore you pay the tax.
Do they still make radios that pick up the audio of TV signals? Did the BBC broadcasts go digital and do they have radios for that? It’s still TV programming therefore they may be taxing the radios as a TV. Don’t blind people pay the tax, and they don’t use the video either?
REPLY: Your most effective actions are to stop paying the TV license tax. Watch TV on your PC. – Anthony
Watching live TV on your pc still requires a licence in the UK – watching tv real time through any medium requires a licence.
I don’t think, in the experiment as screened, any extra CO2 could have been in the “global warming” jar. It was only 20 seconds between putting the bicarb in the feeder bottle (2:30), putting in the connecting tube (2:35) and then removing the connecting tube (by 2:51 it was gone, though we didn’t see it removed). Not even enough time to expell all the existing air in the tube, let alone the air in the feeder bottle.
Of course the experiment wasn’t as screened, as indicated by the various commentators above.
I wonder what temperature the air in the feeder bottle was – there was no thermometer measuring that.
Thanks for the laughs. That was one of the funniest videos I have seen in a long time. I can’t stop laughing!
Ummm…..it was meant to be funny….right?
The complete failure to include any actual science in this experiment has been well demonstrated by everyone else, but the red herring concerning great skills, resources and organization needed to obtain and distribute the emails is yet another case of fear mongering. The evil organization operating from an underground base on a volcanic island in the Pacific, straight out of james Bond. Give me a break. A 14-year-old script kiddie in his parents’ basement could have done the job over the course of a bag of Doritos and a Mountain Dew (standard script kiddie nutrition). Russian servers are weak and widely used as distribution points. You could get a list of vulnerable Russian servers as long as your arm at any blackhat site. Besides, this wasn’t a hack….it was a inside job pure and simple.
Not sure where I just saw it in connection with the “explanation” of this bogus experiment, but the notion that Venus is hot because of CO2 with no mention of it in relation to the sun is most peculiar.
Global warming seems to me to be another Galileo/hubris thing. In his time the sky revolved around the earth. Poor guy tried to point out man was not the center of the universe, that the earth revolved around the sun.
Today, we “know” the sun’s warmth *never* fluctuates more than 0.01% and cannot possibly have as much to do with climate as mankind. I’m thinking maybe the Hawaiians had something there. Perhaps there is a need to sacrifice more virgins to volcanoes to make them stop belching.
Anticlimactic (08:12:21) :
Another let-down by the BBC was a trilogy called ‘The Climate Wars’.
I also remember this trilogy. Dr Iain Stewart’s open minded (?) analysis of the AGW debate.
Typical BBC – high production values, superficial analysis and a schmaltzy ending.