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.
After watching I am convinced global warming is true, as long as the globe is not a sphere, but shaped like a 2 liter plastic soda bottle, AND humans don’t live on the surface of the planet, but they live inside the planet, AND the planet surface is just something resembling clear plastic.
More and more, I really do think I live in a world gone mad!
The alarmists have trumped the skeptics at this year’s Special Olympics.
crosspatch @1:25:30
question – as the CO2 molecule rises, would not the percentage of chance for the photon to be re-emiited towards the earth decrease with height? Say at 5 kilometers, if the photon escaped just below the horizontal, it may not “see” the earth? is this a correct thought process?
Thanx
crosspatch (01:25:30) : “Experiments like this are silly for many reasons. Most importantly they don’t reflect the natural system. Everyone knows that CO2 absorbs radiation in a few very narrow bands of wavelengths. Any moisture in the air would greatly defeat this, though, and swamp the impact of CO2.”
Aye, there’s the rub. Water vapor is the strongest greenhouse gas. Unless the water is kept at the exact same temperature in both vessels, the experiment is bilgewater. It’s propaganda, not science.
Cory (06:41:37) : “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.”
As ScientistForTruth (05:17:40) points out, blocking outgoing IR is of minor importance in a real greenhouse, as demonstrated by constructing one out of material that doesn’t block IR.
Ian L. McQueen (06:58:15) : “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.”
CO2 also absorbs some incoming IR; H2O absorbs more. See this graph from (sorry) Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_Spectrum.png
I have jut posted the following as a comment over at the BBC. I live in England.
I have just watched this video and was quite shocked at how poor the experiment was. Any water in the bottle could make a huge difference.
I was even more shocked at the blatant untruths that Sir David King put out…
When asked for a timescale for Greenland and the Antarctic melting he suggested that it would happen within his grandchildren’s lives ! That is preposterous. I bet he can’t find a single climate scientist to support that in any way whatsoever.
He states as a fact that he knows the objective of the hackers associated with Climategate. We don’t even know whether they were hackers or whether it was a leak.
He states that the hackers have been accumulating the emails since 1992. There is absolutely no evidence in the public domain for that.
He states that mobile phone conversations were hacked. This is not true so far as i know.
He suggests that some kind of agency is responsible for hacking the emails and and says that he will leave it up to us to think about what kind of agency could be responsible. The clear implication is that it is a foreign security agency. He is postulating something based on an assumption that is possibly wrong in the first place.
How can these comments be allowed to stand without an apology?
I find it all rather sad that an ex chief scientist and the BBC together put up such a shockingly bad show.
Merry Christmas Anthony and to all who post on WUWT from Canada. Thank you for your hard work, your enlightenment and determination.
Another quirk with the BBC – I watched a fascinating program about the jetstream, but in the program one meteorologist suggested that global warming moves the jet stream further north. Later in the program the same meteorologist talked about the English floods of 2007 where the jetstream moved unusually far south. I gather that 2007 was a particularly cold year globally [-0.73C] and the implication from the first statement would be that the floods of 2007 were caused by global cooling. That connection was missed out – it was just weather.
From BBC news at the time :
“BBC broadcast meteorologist Daniel Corbett said a broad band of low pressure had been sitting across the UK, pushing the jet stream – a ribbon of fast moving air in the upper atmosphere – further south than usual, keeping high pressure and settled weather away from the UK. ”
Does this make sense? A LOW pressure ‘pushing’ the jetstream. Also I thought it was the jetstream that did all the pushing.
There’s an article written by the reporter who did the show
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ethicalman/2009/12/in_praise_of_scepticism.html
“Obviously, we had to radically cut down the scientists’ presentation to squeeze it into the tight TV time constraints but if you want to dig a bit deeper into the science of global warming the best place to go is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
Woh, he puts the “scientific” demonstration and the IPCC in the same sentence about science.
Read the rest, I figure this guy must have suffered some sort of blunt force trauma to the head as a child.
Merry Christmas everyone. The experiment violates the rules of scientific experiment in several ways
1. Possible biases should have been noted and tried to be eliminated. For example the experiment should have been repeated several times, with the CO2 bottle switched between the bottles.
2. There was no means of calibrating the amount of CO2, which you try to keep the same as best you could.
3. As has been pointed out there was no way that anyone in their kitchen “can prove global warming”. The results would have been inconclusive
THE BIGGEST LIE – HE SAID WE ARE GOING TO PROOVE GLOBAL WARMING RIGHT HERE IN MY KITCHEN!
Don’t pay TV licence. You can watch iPlayer and YouTube TV Shows channel in the UK as well as getting all of Sky TV channels through a computer or Xbox over broadband.
“M. Simon (08:00:26) :
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram (07:21:11) :,
And suppose it is not really anonymous to the FSB?”
That’s what I was hinting at. The FBS via their connections in the Russian Business Alliance would be able to find out who the original uploader through the Turkish proxy is by examining the source’s IP address.
How about a petition on http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/. (It is closed to new petitions over the holidays). It could go along the lines of:
We believe that the BBC should follow up on its “very unscientific experiment to prove global warming”, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8418356.stm with a more formal one to check the effect of doubling the level of CO2, which would be higher than almost any estimates of what we are doing or are likely to do in the atmosphere, in a well controlled environment similar to the one that they used.
We also believe that the BBC should investigate the following areas of Sir David Kings comments for factual accuracy and present their results and if required, an apology:
(details as per my comment here just a few minutes ago).
and any other areas which WUWT readers think should be added?
To make it work, i think it would need its own article here and also a press release to the worlds media. It would be interesting to see how many signatures it might get.
jtwigge (11:49:13) :
“Any water in the bottle could make a huge difference. “
Excellent suggestion. Do same expts., with and without water. It’s only 2 more bottles, so it shouldn’t be too confusing for some in the audience, though from what we’ve seen I wouldn’t give the “experimenters” the benefit of that doubt.
“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.”
A molecule will absorb radiation of a given wavelength from any direction, not just from below. The Sun also has quite a bit of long wave IR. Yes, it does also have a lot of shorter IR radiation. But “a lot” is also a relative term. Think of it like this:
Imagine you are at 10,000 feet altitude and enclosed in a glass bubble. Which long wave radiation are you going to feel more of; warmth from sunlight hitting your face or warmth radiating up from the ground? While the greatest percentage of IR radiating from the Earth’s surface will be in the long wavelengths and the greatest percentage of radiation from the sun may be in the shorter wavelengths, the absolute power of the longer wavelength solar radiation is still much greater than the absolute amount from Earth. If that isn’t clear, imagine 10,000 watts of power from the Sun with 10 watts of that power being long infrared. Now imagine 1 watt of power from the surface of the Earth with 0.5 watts of that power in the long infrared. So 50% of Earth’s radiation in this example is in long IR and only 0.1% of solar radiation is long IR, but we still see more watts of long wave radiation from the Sun than we see from Earth … during the day. At night 100% of the long wave IR is coming from the surface and THAT is where CO2 is going to have its impact … at night or during polar winter. CO2 is going to raise average temperature by increasing the minimum and that is why it has its greatest impact at the poles. They have night for months and it is at night when CO2 impacts temperature change the most by impeding radiation (in a few VERY NARROW wavelengths) to space. The poles are also where the air is driest and CO2 has the greatest relative impact on total impediment to radiation. Water vapor swamps CO2 less at the poles. CO2 would have almost no impact at the equator where water vapor by far swamps CO2 in both the amount of IR absorbed and the band of spectrum that it absorbs.
So while CO2 could very well cause an increase in global average temperature and a greater increase in annual average temperature at the poles, that change will be mostly an increase of low temperature in winter when there is no sun and the air is very dry, not an increase of high temperature when there is sun and there is more moisture in the air.
Experiments of this type are demonstrated at science fairs etc. all the time and they’re a complete waste of time because as set up they are completely unable to show anything related to the ‘greenhouse effect’.
First of all the experiment should be done in a cold room, say -20ºC, rather than a bottle a tall open-necked Dewar should be used. A black target containing a thermocouple should be mounted at the bottom of the Dewar, and a calibrated light source (brightness T ~5000ºC) capable of shining the desired light intensity on the target (~200W/m^2). The top of the Dewar should be closed with a plate of a material capable of transmitting both visible and 15μm (e.g. ZnSe). Then you’d have a chance of being relevant, the soda bottle rigs aren’t even close to the ballpark.
Anticlimactic (11:57:31) :
Does this make sense? A LOW pressure ‘pushing’ the jetstream. Also I thought it was the jetstream that did all the pushing.
It’s correct, fluid flow is driven by pressure differences.
Merry Christmas everyone. The experiment violates the rules of scientific experiment in several ways
1. No possible biases were noted and no controls put into place.
2. The experiment should have been repeated several times, with the CO2 switched between the bottles. Proper controls established
3. There was no means of calibrating the amount of CO2, (which you could try to keep the same as best you could).
4. As has been pointed out there was no way that anyone in their kitchen “can prove global warming”. Or even the greenhouse effect of CO2. The results would have been inconclusive
THE BIGGEST LIE HE SAID STATED WAS – WE ARE GOING TO PROOVE GLOBAL WARMING RIGHT HERE IN MY KITCHEN!
With very sensitive instruments, and very carefully done experiments, you could confirm that CO2 would trap more heat, and the bottle with more CO2 would get a little warmer, BUT THIS WOULD NOT PROOVE GLOBAL WARMING!
Merely the undisputed fact of “the greenhouse effect” of CO2
“Global warming” simply stated is the hypothesis that in our real world, the very small percentage of CO2 we are putting into our atmosphere will cause our planet to warm dangerously.
VERY SPECIFICALLY AGW PREDICTS THIS CO2 WE ARE PUTTING INTO OUR ATMOSPHERE WILL CAUSE THE PLANET TO HEAT BY 3.5C BY THE END OF THE CENTURY, AT OUR CURRENT RATE OF CO2 ACCUMULATION.
This can NEVER be proven by any kitchen experiment or any other experiment for that matter, AND AT PRESENT THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT OUR PLANET IS WARMING THAT FAST OR INDEED WARMING AT ALL
Gary Hladik (11:47:07) :
Cory (06:41:37) : “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.”
As ScientistForTruth (05:17:40) points out, blocking outgoing IR is of minor importance in a real greenhouse, as demonstrated by constructing one out of material that doesn’t block IR.
Can you point me to a case where someone has done that?
DeNihilist (11:40:12) :
crosspatch @1:25:30
question – as the CO2 molecule rises, would not the percentage of chance for the photon to be re-emiited towards the earth decrease with height? Say at 5 kilometers, if the photon escaped just below the horizontal, it may not “see” the earth? is this a correct thought process?
Not significantly the atmosphere is a very thin skin (~100km vs the earth diameter of ~6000km).
Imagine you have a series of pressure systems … H L H L H L, etc, at a given latitude around the planet. Now imagine you have a jet circling the Earth at about that latitude. Remember that air circulates clockwise around H and counter clockwise around L. As the jet approaches the the first H it will be pushed “up” or Northwards to form a sort of “ridge” and as it approaches the low it will be pushed “down” or South to form a sort of “trough” if you were drawing the line on a map. So an area of persistent low pressure at just the right location can push the jet South over the UK while if a high pressure area were in that location, the jet would “ridge” up and around it to the North.
If you look at a jet stream map, where you see the stream dip down to the South, you will generally find an area of low pressure above it and where you see it bend North, you will find an area of high pressure under the bend. And if you look at the map of the US right now, you will find the entire Western US dominated by high pressure and the jet is pushed so far North as to be off the map. There is practically no jet stream over the US right now.
Another important factor is the AO and Atlantic Oscillation which is actually a measure of the circumpolar jet. When it is “negative”, the pressure at the pole is weak, the jet is weak and slower and larger. When it is “positive” the pressure at the pole is strong, the jet is faster, and is smaller in diameter.
The AO is currently the most negative it has been since the 1970’s which means the polar jet is much farther South than it would be of the AO were “positive”.
I’m still waiting for an explanation as to why the temperature DROPPED by 1C over about 10 minutes in the bottle without the CO2 despite the lamp supposedly heating it up. Given the video is clearly a fraud, can any action be taken against the BBC?
A. Erickson,
Thanks for the alert on the article C&ENews. I’ll read it in the place where I do my serious thinking. I might also flush Rudy Baum down the toilet, at least symbolically.
I haven’t renewed my ACS membership yet; I’m still trying to decide whether I can support such propaganda.
Peter of Sydney (04:11:43) :
“I reviewed the video a few times. I’m almost convinced the whole episode was staged. The main reason is I don’t believe so many people can be so stupid not to notice the drop in temperature in the bottle without the CO2 and question it.”
You and I are the only posters here that have commented on this fact.
It’s a most obvious fatal error, easily seen and easily understandable.
It can’t be defended or confused.
It clearly demonstrates the “rocket scientist” experiment as a laughing stock.
Although this may be evidence the experiment was fraudulently staged, that argument would complicate the issue and detract from the simple disproof everyone can relate to and understand. Stick your finger a few inches in front of a light bulb and see what happens.
If you look this map you will see the jet stream in Europe dips South. This has Ireland and Scotland above it experiencing cold temperatures and the storm track crossing right through England, the English Channel and Northern France.