UAH global temperature posts warmest January

Henry Pool (10:49:35) :
Hi Phil.
Like Missingo before (read my posts) you have not really studied the solar spectra just before it reaches the atmosphere and just on top of sea level. Where did the missing radiation between the two spectra exactly go (unless reflected)?
On the contrary I have studied it, the difference is due to absorption and subsequent thermalisation. As I told you before your ‘experiments’ are flawed and do not represent the physical processes involved in heating and cooling the atmosphere.
If CO2 does not reflect how come we can measure the CO2 as it reflects off the moon?
CO2 high in the stratosphere emits radiation (IR) thereby cooling the stratosphere, a well known fingerprint of the GH effect.
You see, if carbon dioxide traps infra red radiation from earth (keeping us warm) then it must follow that carbon dioxide also shields us from the sun (similar to ozone blocking UV and water vapor blocking IR).
That does not ‘follow’, the wavelength ranges of the solar spectrum and the Earth’s BB spectrum are different and the absorption by CO2 in each is different, there is no strong band in the solar spectrum comparable with the 15μm band. In any case incoming solar absorbed by CO2 will warm the atmosphere just the same as if it heated the ground first.
If I look carefully at the spectra I would say it is close to 50/50 i.e. it cools as much (by reflecting radiation from the sun) as it causes warming in the 14-15 um range by trapping radiation from earth …
You are mistaken, the absorption by CO2 at ~2μm is in the tail of the solar spectrum is nowhere near the absorption at 15μm, and in any case it doesn’t causes cooling.

Phil. (11:13:37) :

Roger Knights (08:57:34) :
And mainstream science is wrong. Since 1998 it’s been known that the length of the PDO is 60-some years. Using a 20-30 year cycle as significant will (and has) misled the mainstream into thinking that the recent 20-year upleg (1978 to 1998) heralds an unstoppable uptrend, rather than merely being an up-leg (warm phase) of the PDO.

Really, then kindly explain why the PDO Index doesn’t appear to show that?
Do you think that a total record of 110 years would be enough to establish that?
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/img/pdo_latest.png

Go here (to the “parent” page of the link you provided): http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo There you’ll find the paragraph below, which points out that while there were four PDO “events” or “regimes” (i.e., two uplegs plus two downlegs) during this period, there were (therefore) “just two full PDO cycles in the past century”.
Therefore I was correct in saying that “the length of the PDO is 60-some years,” that a 20- or 30-year period refers only to its warm or cool phase, and that to mistake such a half-period as a long-term trend is mistaken:

The “Pacific Decadal Oscillation” (PDO) is a long-lived El Niño-like pattern of Pacific climate variability. While the two climate oscillations have similar spatial climate fingerprints, they have very different behavior in time. Fisheries scientist Steven Hare coined the term “Pacific Decadal Oscillation” (PDO) in 1996 while researching connections between Alaska salmon production cycles and Pacific climate (his dissertation topic with advisor Robert Francis).
Two main characteristics distinguish PDO from El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO): first, 20th century PDO “events” persisted for 20-to-30 years, while typical ENSO events persisted for 6 to 18 months; second, the climatic fingerprints of the PDO are most visible in the North Pacific/North American sector, while secondary signatures exist in the tropics – the opposite is true for ENSO.
Several independent studies find evidence for just two full PDO cycles in the past century: “cool” PDO regimes prevailed from 1890-1924 and again from 1947-1976, while “warm” PDO regimes dominated from 1925-1946 and from 1977 through (at least) the mid-1990’s. Shoshiro Minobe has shown that 20th century PDO fluctuations were most energetic in two general periodicities, one from 15-to-25 years, and the other from 50-to-70 years.
http://ingrid.ldeo.columbia.edu/%28/home/alexeyk/mydata/TSsvd.in%29readfile/.SST/.PDO/

Henry Pool (21:23:07) :
Henry@Phil
“On the contrary I have studied it, the difference is due to absorption and subsequent thermalisation”.
This is where we differ in opinion.
It’s not my opinion, it’s a scientific fact!
It cannot happen like that because the nature of light is that it has to keep moving. There is some absorption and thermalisation but only up to the point as to where the molecule becomes saturated and it cannot accept any more photons.It is here where it becomes like a crystal or mirror at that wavelength, not allowing more light to get through.
This is nonsense, saturation of the absorption (when it occurs) does not mean that the gas molecules start to reflect!
“About 30 percent of the sunlight that beams toward Earth is deflected by the outer atmosphere and scattered back into space. The rest reaches the planet’s surface and is reflected upward again as a type of slow-moving energy called infrared radiation.”
This ‘common knowledge’ as you term it is totally wrong!
About 30% of incoming solar is scattered by clouds or reflected by the surface back into space. The remainder is absorbed by the atmosphere or the surface, and black body radiation (IR) from the warmed surface radiates outwards (it is not ‘slow-moving’, it travels at the speed of light!).
How do you explain the conclusion, namely that CO2 is a powerful probe in the near infra red? That most certainly conflicts with your statement that there is no reflection of CO2 and thus no cooling effect.
No it doesn’t, CO2 absorbs and under the right conditions emits IR, it doesn’t reflect!
I have to beg to differ from opinion and I stay with my observation that nobody has proven to me yet that the net effect of CO2 is warming and not cooling or what the ratio between the warming and cooling really is.
Well if you make it up instead of reading the science (a first year undergraduate text on Physical Chemistry, particularly on spectroscopy would help), and ignore what you’re being told then I’m not surprised.

Henry Pool (23:04:06) :
Henry@Phil
“CO2 high in the stratosphere emits radiation (IR) thereby cooling the stratosphere, a well known fingerprint of the GH effect”
You admit that there is some cooling.
I don’t ‘admit’ anything! I state what has been known for years that high in the atmosphere radiational cooling by CO2 and other GH gases takes place.
See for example Clough and Iacono:
Clough, S.A. and M.J. Iacono. Line-By-Line Calculations of Atmospheric Fluxes and Cooling Rates 2: Application to Carbon Dioxide, Ozone, Methane, Nitrous Oxide and the Halocarbons. J. Geophys. Res., 100, 16519-16535, 1995.
http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/20c.html
We are getting there. But this statement also does not make sense to me. Namely, we know for sure that unlike some other gases, Co2 is completely diffused into the air, i.e. its concentration from the top to the bottom and from the east to the west is more or less exactly the same. So the cooling effect and warming effect of CO2 (by reflecting radiation) must be similar?
Its mixing ratio is the same, its partial pressure however is much lower at high altitudes therefore the collision frequency is much lower and the CO2 molecule has more chance to emit IR.
Also, in a well designed experiment I would like to see water vapor introduced as a factor because we know that water also absorbs in the 14-15 um range. We should know what the influence of this is, at various concentrations close to the earth’s average water vapor content.
This is well known, H2O doesn’t absorb much in the 15μm band due to the sparse line spectrum:
http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn107/Sprintstar400/H2OCO2.gif
The top spectrum is H2O.
But like I said, it seems nobody has any money for this. I would actually like someone to sue the oil companies and see how quickly they would find the money to do this research.
Plenty of money has been spent on this, the HITRAN database for instance, started in the 60s.

Henry Pool (10:32:13) :
Henry@Phil
“Its mixing ratio is the same, its partial pressure however is much lower at high altitudes therefore the collision frequency is much lower and the CO2 molecule has more chance to emit IR.”
You now want me to believe that the radiation coming from the sun is somehow disturbed by pressure?
No, I want you to read it again!

Henry Pool (22:56:21) :
Phil, I think this is a debate that will never get an end. You believe in absorption that will apparently never end, I believe in absorption up to point after which there is reflection or deflection or radiation- back or re-radiation, whatever, .
So, let us agree to disagree, OK?
No, I won’t ‘agree to disagree’ whatever that means. You’re wrong and whenever you post incorrect statements I’ll refute them.
It’s not a question of ‘belief’ but scientific fact.