Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Figure 1. The Experimental Setup
I keep reading statements in various places about how it is indisputable “simple physics” that if we increase the amount of atmospheric CO2, it will inevitably warm the planet. Here’s a typical example:
In the hyperbolic language that has infested the debate, researchers have been accused of everything from ditching the scientific method to participating in a vast conspiracy. But the basic concepts of the greenhouse effect is a matter of simple physics and chemistry, and have been part of the scientific dialog for roughly a century.
Here’s another:
The important thing is that we know how greenhouse gases affect climate. It has even been predicted hundred years ago by Arrhenius. It is simple physics.
Unfortunately, while the physics is simple, the climate is far from simple. It is one of the more complex systems that we have ever studied. The climate is a tera-watt scale planetary sized heat engine. It is driven by both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial forcings, a number of which are unknown, and many of which are poorly understood and/or difficult to measure. It is inherently chaotic and turbulent, two conditions for which we have few mathematical tools.
The climate is composed of six major subsystems — atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, and electrosphere. All of these subsystems are imperfectly understood. Each of these subsystems has its own known and unknown internal and external forcings, feedbacks, resonances, and cyclical variations. In addition, each subsystem affects all of the other subsystems through a variety of known and unknown forcings and feedbacks.
Then there is the problem of scale. Climate has crucially important processes at physical scales from the molecular to the planetary and at temporal scales from milliseconds to millennia.
As a result of this almost unimaginable complexity, simple physics is simply inadequate to predict the effect of a change in one of the hundreds and hundreds of things that affect the climate. I will give two examples of why “simple physics” doesn’t work with the climate — a river, and a block of steel. I’ll start with a thought experiment with the block of steel.
Suppose that I want to find out about how temperature affects solids. I take a 75 kg block of steel, and I put the bottom end of it in a bucket of hot water. I duct tape a thermometer to the top end in the best experimental fashion, and I start recording how the temperature changes with time. At first, nothing happens. So I wait. And soon, the temperature of the other end of the block of steel starts rising. Hey, simple physics, right?
To verify my results, I try the experiment with a block of copper. I get the same result, the end of the block that’s not in the hot water soon begins to warm up. I try it with a block of glass, same thing. My tentative conclusion is that simple physics says that if you heat one end of a solid, the other end will eventually heat up as well.
So I look around for a final test. Not seeing anything obvious, I have a flash of insight. I weigh about 75 kg. So I sit with my feet in the bucket of hot water, put the thermometer in my mouth, and wait for my head to heat up. This experimental setup is shown in Figure 1 above.
After all, simple physics is my guideline, I know what’s going to happen, I just have to wait.
And wait … and wait …
As our thought experiment shows, simple physics may simply not work when applied to a complex system. The problem is that there are feedback mechanisms that negate the effect of the hot water on my cold toes. My body has a preferential temperature which is not set by the external forcings.
For a more nuanced view of what is happening, let’s consider the second example, a river. Again, a thought experiment.
I take a sheet of plywood, and I cover it with some earth. I tilt it up so it slopes from one edge to the other. For our thought experiment, we’ll imagine that this is a hill that goes down to the ocean.
I place a steel ball at the top edge of the earth-covered plywood, and I watch what happens. It rolls, as simple physics predicts, straight down to the lower edge. I try it with a wooden ball, and get the same result. I figure maybe it’s because of the shape of the object.
So I make a small wooden sled, and put it on the plywood. Again, it slides straight down to the ocean. I try it with a miniature steel shed, same result. It goes directly downhill to the ocean as well. Simple physics, understood by Isaac Newton.
As a final test, I take a hose and I start running some water down from the top edge of my hill to make a model river. To my surprise, although the model river starts straight down the hill, it soon starts to wander. Before long, it has formed a meandering stream, which changes its course with time. Sections of the river form long loops, the channel changes, loops are cut off, new channels form, and after while we get something like this:
Figure 2. Meanders, oxbow bends, and oxbow lakes in a river system. Note the old channels where the river used to run.
The most amazing part is that the process never stops. No matter how long we run the river experiment, the channel continues to change. What’s going on here?
Well, the first thing that we can conclude is that, just as in our experiment with the steel block, simple physics simply doesn’t work in this situation. Simple physics says that things roll straight downhill, and clearly, that ain’t happening here … it is obvious we need better tools to analyze the flow of the river.
Are there mathematical tools that we can use to understand this system? Yes, but they are not simple. The breakthrough came in the 1990’s, with the discovery by Adrian Bejan of the Constructal Law. The Constructal Law applies to all flow systems which are far from equilibrium, like a river or the climate.
It turns out that these types of flow systems are not passive systems which can take up any configuration. Instead, they actively strive to maximize some aspect of the system. For the river, as for the climate, the system strives to maximize the sum of the energy moved and the energy lost through turbulence. See the discussion of these principles here, here, here, and here. There is also a website devoted to various applications of the Constructal Law here.
There are several conclusions that we can make from the application of the Constructal Law to flow systems:
1. Any flow system far from equilibrium is not free to take up any form as the climate models assume. Instead, it has a preferential state which it works actively to approach.
2. This preferential state, however, is never achieved. Instead, the system constantly overshoots and undershoots that state, and does not settle down to one final form. The system never stops modifying its internal aspects to move towards the preferential state.
3. The results of changes in such a flow system are often counterintuitive. For example, suppose we want to shorten the river. Simple physics says it should be easy. So we cut through an oxbow bend, and it makes the river shorter … but only for a little while. Soon the river readjusts, and some other part of the river becomes longer. The length of the river is actively maintained by the system. Contrary to our simplistic assumptions, the length of the river is not changed by our actions.
So that’s the problem with “simple physics” and the climate. For example, simple physics predicts a simple linear relationship between the climate forcings and the temperature. People seriously believe that a change of X in the forcings will lead inevitably to a chance of A * X in the temperature. This is called the “climate sensitivity”, and is a fundamental assumption in the climate models. The IPCC says that if CO2 doubles, we will get a rise of around 3C in the global temperature. However, there is absolutely no evidence to support that claim, only computer models. But the models assume this relationship, so they cannot be used to establish the relationship.
However, as rivers clearly show, there is no such simple relationship in a flow system far from equilibrium. We can’t cut through an oxbow to shorten the river, it just lengthens elsewhere to maintain the same total length. Instead of being affected by a change in the forcings, the system sets its own preferential operating conditions (e.g. length, temperature, etc.) based on the natural constraints and flow possibilities and other parameters of the system.
Final conclusion? Because climate is a flow system far from equilibrium, it is ruled by the Constructal Law. As a result, there is no physics-based reason to assume that increasing CO2 will make a large difference to the global temperature, and the Constructal Law gives us reason to think that it may make no difference at all. In any case, regardless of Arrhenius, the “simple physics” relationship between CO2 and global temperature is something that we cannot simply assume to be true.
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Smokey (20:04:30) :
“Where do the proles fit in?”
“Everyone has a job in the new world order. The job of the proles is to pay the freight.”
Pithy and to the point and I totally agree.
We are as ever……. merely cannon fodder.
Paul Vaughan (23:40:54) :
“There’s nothing complex about climate.”
Hi Paul
I posted these two charts on the ‘fluffy interstellar cloud’ thread:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LOD-GMF.gif
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSN-GMF.gif
In the first example Willis showed that human’s like all mammals regulate their own temperatures. I assume we do not call the regulation of internal temperature by mammals chaotic.
Of course we do, when measured in the short term, if we don’t know exactly what the body is doing and why but only rely on temperature. A body temperature rises and falls all the time, with eating and sleeping and exercise and excitement all affecting it. Only if it is greatly out of the unusual for a long period of time do we raise an eyebrow.
It is surely the same with the earth. We know sometimes why it is hotter or colder (el nino, pinatubo) and we don’t know sometimes. The arguments over climate change surely are:
— are we at an unusual point?
— is this a short or long term rise?
— can we reliably predict the cause?
With a chemistry degree my argument is that saying “climate change is simple physics” is the same as saying “medicine is simple chemistry”.
Re Tom
You say “chemical reaction involving the food, chemicals and enzymes generated by our bodies and other organisms that live in our digestive system. While these processes are incredible (sic) complex and our understanding of them is by no means complete we can predict with a relatively high degree of confidence that overeating will lead to obesity and starvation will lead health problems and possibly death.”
This does not subtract from the arguments posed by Willis. It adds support to them. You are merely stating some boundary conditions.
Our understanding of human nutrition is so poor that we have people making a mint from nebulous things called “anti-oxidants” and overdoses of potentially harmful goods like many vitamins and diluted potions of no sense at all used in homeopathy. In the pure examples from Willis, there is no diversionary thread of exploitation and humbuggery, yet the point is made absolutely clearly.
It was a delight to read the lead article. I envisage those towering masses of clouds rising much higher than the bizjet at 50,000 feet, replete with turbulence and heat transfer that has a low probability of a proper model.
Counter analogies to AGW alarmism are nice to ponder. Positive feedback analogies exist too.
Rev your parked car right up to the red line. It will likely survive as long as then temperature light doesn’t come on. Rev it up just a bit more and boom, your radiator vents and the engine dies. AGW alarmists claim the earth’s temperature light has been ominously flickering for thousands of years, despite clear evidence of hot spikes over the last 10K years that dwarf the controversial Medieval and Roman humps (http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/lanser_holocene_figure5.png). There’s nothing special about CO2 in AGW theory. They seem to claim that no temperature rise of any cause can be a mild one.
It’s curious since Tipping Point theory does resemble a chaos theory. Non-linear positive feedback is required since simple positive feedback is a ridiculous idea, since if any temperature increase is amplified then logically that amplified rise will itself be amplified since an amplified rise in temperature is just like any other increase in temperature. It’s confusing.
The only support I can imagine for it is the evident ice core fact that CO2 has been rising sharply for the last 10K years on its own, so really did start out at its naturally maximum value when the Industrial Revolution kicked in, so former hot spikes did not occur when CO2 was yet very high. I guess that’s why more recent warm periods are so important to the debate.
WE says, “The IPCC says that if CO2 doubles, we will get a rise of around 3C in the global temperature. However, there is absolutely no evidence to support that claim, only computer models.”
No: there’s data from the instrumental record, current data, volcanic eruptions, the last glacial minimum and proxy data.
Here’s a link to some papers:http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/papers-on-climate-sensitivity-estimates/
Roger Sowell (21:03:31) :
Third, it is puzzling that climate is described as a flow. While it is true that some portions of the earth do flow (atmosphere via winds, and vertically via thermals, also ocean currents and icebergs, etc), as a whole the earth is not flowing anywhere.
Actually, the earth is flowing, and has been since Day 1. It’s called Plate Tectonics. Although not flowing at incredible speeds, the continents and oceanic basins are moving on a conveyor belt of sorts. Also, if you want to break it down even further, colliding continents are pushed up, oceanic basins are subducted down, rock is eroded and flows downstream as sediment, mass earth movements, and even in the atmosphere as dust. So, I would reevaluate your statement in light of the above.
Louis Hissink (22:15:02) :
“A lot of hydrothermal activity goes on at these spreading centers. The process involves downward migration of ocean water through the broken basalt along the flanks of the spreading centers and expulsion of that water as heated, mineral-rich hydrothermal fluids adjacent to the spreading axis in a continuous flow.”
Er, no, the water cycle as envisaged by standard plate tectonics theory requires the suspension of gravity for starters, (less dense matter cannot descend into more dense matter), and it is more likely that the water coming out of the spreading ridges comes from the asthenosphere itself. Remember that igenous quartz crystals of the milky white color contain water in their crystal lattices – quartz without water is transparent – like a wine glass or the glass thermometer Willis used in his personalised experiment.
Not quite true. The subducting basalt and sediment (sediments are also subducted, although not in the same quantities as basalt) are normally rich in hydrous minerals and clays. During the transition from basalt to eclogite, these hydrous materials break down, producing copious quantities of water, which at such great pressure and temperature exists as a supercritical fluid. The supercritical water, which is hot and more buoyant than the surrounding rock, rises into the overlying mantle where it lowers the melting temperature of the mantle rock to the point of actual melting, generating magma.
Will you explain all this to:
1. The carbon credit traders and their trading platform providers;
2. The MSM’s funders;
3. Politicians who need to control people by blaming them;
4. Scientists whose publication record is mostly asserting things you have described as incorrect here;
5. Education ministers the world over who think dynamic system engineering concepts should never be taught at school.
Many thanks for a very interesting article.
Happy New Year to all WUWT staff.
@ScienceofDoom
It is true that if you have a very simple chaotic system like the logistic map, the long run behaviour / average is predictable – called the invariant density. But that assumes that the parameters of the system are constant. If you start twiddling with the parameters, then the long run average is also unpredictable ! So not only is the weather chaotic, but if you have all these parameters changing such as CO2, solar flux, and god knows what else, then the climate itself has no long run average either.
Roger Sowell
“Having some experience with design and control of heat transfer systems, including those at steady state and non-steady state, my conclusion is that Constructal Law has nothing to do with it.”
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every job looks like a nail!
Thank you, I will store a copy of this article because it puts across a complex scientific message in language that I and my friends can easily cope with.
I really useful service for those that want to understand the science behind the sceptics case against the hysterical outpouring in the media that the world is heating up because of C02 emissions, but do not always have the scientific and mathematical where-with-all to fully understand many of the posting on this site.
Wow! This is the best problem description on climate research I’ve ever comeback across!
Should be made an article in all major news papers around the globe! Thanks Will!
Steve Hempell (00:18:06) : edit
Sure. To start with, he claims that the solution to the “Faint Early Sun” paradox is a higher level of GHGs. I discuss this question here, and come to a very different conclusion. He also makes a curious claim at 8:35, which is that increasing the temperature decreases the CO2, and decreasing the temperature increases the CO2 …
Next, he shows a slide at 20:15, and claims that it shows causation in that some of the CO2 indicators show low CO2 when there is more glaciation. However, it leaves out some glacial episodes. It also disagrees with his theory from 8:35, which is that low temperatures lead to high CO2 and vice versa. He seems to have forgotten that theory. Finally, the ice retreats before the CO2 rises, not after … why is that?
Next he manages to talk about the Permian Extinction with only a scarce mention of acid rain … while extensive vulcanism increases CO2, there’s lots of other nastier stuff including sulfuric acid coming out of volcanoes. Why don’t they get mentioned?
More later, it’s 3:30 AM, why am I still awake?
Mike McMillan (02:07:43) :
Can’t comment on the Hiller, but anything with that many moving parts shouldn’t be flying. Not in civilized society, anyway.
My instructor’s theory was that the OH-23’s vibrations were so annoying that the earth rejected it.
“People seriously believe that a change of X in the forcings will lead inevitably to a chance of A * X in the temperature.”
I think I do find a correlation between CO2 and Temperature:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/mean:24/derivative/scale:7.7/offset:-0.853/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:1/from:1959.8
Of course it’s adjusted by the slope and offset to be similar, in fact to match the linear trend between 1965 to the end, as for the first years there’s a big discrepancy.
There are other areas with high error, between both trends, as around 1993 (Pinatubo effects?) but I think they look quite similar.
Greg (22:51:14) :
“As far as the simple physics goes, how about we include the following into our simple physics to get a more complete picture:
(list followed)”
Something else that struck me was a thought about lightning; If passage of lightning causes molecules to un-bond or re-bond (creation of ozone), what effect would it have on CO2?
If increased atmospheric temps are going to cause more severe weather (with increased lightning), would this increased electrical activity break down CO2 as well?
Anybody know experiments have been done concerning this?
This could be one of Nature’s “tricks” to reduce pollutants in the atmosphere.
OK. I get what is being said here. This is a very good piece and the reason I read this site is because although most of the time I don’t agree, it’s thought-provoking.
But the part about the climate of planet earth not being in equilibrium? How do we know that? Isn’t the case being made by the AGW side that it IS in balance and that the additional CO2 is throwing it out of balance resulting in the behavior described?
“Final conclusion? Because climate is a flow system far from equilibrium, it is ruled by the Constructal Law. As a result, there is no physics-based reason to assume that increasing CO2 will make any difference to the global temperature”
Quite a conclusion! I am not seeing how the piece actually links the well-described and very interesting Contructal Law, but it doesn’t really link this law to climate. The conclusion simply doesn’t follow.
Enquiring AGW but open-minded people- like me- want to know how this thinking pieces together. It’s too important.
Thanks.
Pippa, I don’t get the distinction between “man” and “nature”. Do we say that giraffes “interfere” with trees on the savannah? That grazing animals interfer with plants? We are nature. Humans are nature. Nature made us. We happen to be conscious of that fact, but our somewhat rudimentary intelligence doesn’t change that fact.
Now in nature, if a species hits limits, then that species’ numbers get reduced. But they could also be reduced by disease. By lots of things.
So the question is, what are you trying to conserve, really? You say you want to preserve an Earth worth living in. Well if changes in climate worry you, then I’m guessing you’d like a comfortable Earth, a pleasant habitat. Well again this is where I don’t understand the picture. Most of our comfortable lives are the result of material advances as we prigressed out of poverty and feudal societies. We are modern, fairly free, democracies with free time because of labour saving machines. Even ancient tribal societies were either matriarchal or patriarchal based on whether the type of plough they used was light enough to be handled by a woman bearing children. So again, I don’t get the picture. Our life quality and that of our children is a question of powerful technology. Doing a bit if conservation isn’t going to make any difference when another few billion people are born. Only technology of a greater power than we have ever seen can provide for the existing poor of the world.
It has been understood for a long time that a small difference in input values can result in large differences in output values (LORENZ, Edward N. 1963. Deterministic nonperiodic flow. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20: 130-141.). Lorenz maintained that it is impossible to know the initial state values with enough accuracy to predict the outcome. However, I would ask if, in a continuous system, is there even an initial state at all? Or is it just our convenience? The modern approach is just ‘buy a bigger computer,’ but this doesn’t work, as the derived values diverge with each iteration. All that happens is that we get the wrong answers faster.
This was also discovered decades earlier by Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) (Les Méthodes nouvelles de la mécanique céleste, 3 vol. (1892, 1893, 1899; “The New Methods of Celestial Mechanics”), who also substituded approximations to speed his calculations, and got some wild results. Lorenz probably didn’t know of Poincaré’s work, as it wasn’t translated into English until the 1970’s, when it became useful to NASA. Established science (and math)? Maybe some were ahead of Arrhenius.
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gtrip (20:00:23) :
Where do the proles fit in?
I’ve noticed that when we disagree with them we cease to be the proletariat, and become the ‘brainwashed masses!’
jorgekafkazar (20:31:08) :
north prole at the top, south prole at the bottom.
Good one. Come back Chico Marx, all is forgiven.
Taxes? I got a brother lives in Taxes.
No, Ravelli, taxes is about dollars.
Yeh. That’s where he lives – Dollars, Taxes.
Willis
Nice article.
The oldest coherent reference to the CO2 theory that I have seen was in an 1912 article where it described co2 as a ‘girdle’ encircling the earth. The greater the concentration the thicker the ‘girdle’ would become. However it said that excess heat was still able to disperse into space.
I wondered if there were any figures showing what % of heat ‘escapes’ into space at say 380ppm compared to 280ppm?
Tonyb
WIKI HAS DELETED CLIMATEGATE PAGE! DELETION UNDER REVIEW FOR SHENANNIGANS! PLZ HELP SAVE CLIMATEGATE PAGE!
http://magicjava.blogspot.com/2009/12/climategate-page-deleted-from-wikipedia.html
Re; above comment.
From Wikipedia:
“Ozone may be formed from O2 by electrical discharges and by action of high energy electromagnetic radiation.”
So again, would CO2 break down cause ozone creation?
Also, then, are the new hybrids/electric cars better? Low CO2 emissions, but increased ozone creation from the electric motors?
Also from Wikipedia:
“Although ozone was present at ground level before the Industrial Revolution, peak concentrations are now far higher than the pre-industrial levels, and even background concentrations well away from sources of pollution are substantially higher.
This increase in ozone is of further concern because ozone present in the upper troposphere acts as a greenhouse gas, absorbing some of the infrared energy emitted by the earth. Quantifying the greenhouse gas potency of ozone is difficult because it is not present in uniform concentrations across the globe.
However, the most widely accepted scientific assessments relating to climate change (e.g. the IPCC Third Assessment Report) suggest that the radiative forcing of tropospheric ozone is about 25% that of carbon dioxide.”
So SOME of the Global Warming is caused by increased OZONE. No call to regulate that, though.
Pippa Biggs,
“I do not want to sit and wait for the consequences – I should like to try to take whatever small action I can on a personal level to try and play my part & make my contribution to preserving an Earth worth living in for the next generation!”
Even if such action comprises burning down rainforests to grow palm oil for biodiesel? And even if such action has, by IPCC’s own figures, a negligible effect on global temperatures?
MORE ATTEMPTS TO BLOCK SKEPTICS FROM POSTING TO WIKI TOO! PLZ HELP!
http://magicjava.blogspot.com/2009/12/climategate-page-deleted-from-wikipedia.html
Fine exposition, Willis.
All I have to say is that the “consensus” and the IPCC make it up as they go along. One aspect is fairly certain: Climate change has very little towards nothing to do with c02, yet it is the most dominant parameter of AGW. As R Lindzen maintains: its a framed up culprit (c02) since it goes after people, puts the blame on them and so people are likewise framed up, so as to be punished, taxed and fined.
In other words, since the ideology isn’t accountable neither are the statisticians – I don’t like to call them scientists – and politicians behind the ideology. Its like a throwback to the 1930’s when communism and fascist ideologies put the blame on man as the great fault of civilisation, so people ought to be bent to the ideologies of political extremes to save them and civilisation.
That seems to be the way its developing as an ideology