Heh, this is entertaining.
While Bill Nye argues for “in whose best interest is denial?” and brings up the ridiculous CO2 on Venus argument, Joe Bastardi runs circles around him with technical graphs and explanations on forcing factors and their magnitudes.
Warmists scream “weather is not climate!”. We need to shout back “Venus is not Earth!” since the Venusian atmosphere is entirely different in compositions and forcings, and we understand it far less than Earth’s.
Meanwhile, Bill O”Reilly seems more concerned about making his commercial break on time than saving the planet.
Nye needs a better argument, as Fox News viewers can see past the appeal to emotion. Bastardi while far more technically competent than Nye, needs to focus on explaining a bit about natural cycles, since few viewers would know what the “PDO” is.
A caveat for both men, doing live TV debate by the seat of your pants is tough. You can’t see each other, and you are communicating via earpiece audio. Live TV is never easy, live via satellite interlinks is even tougher.
Watch the segment => here.
h/t to WUWT reader “pwl”
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I used to like Bill Nye. Used to watch “The Science Guy” now and then. I even recall not but a couple of years ago watching him talk about climate as a “skeptic” as I recall.
One thing I have noticed about Mr. Nye as of late. He has become and extremely arrogant individual. I have never seen Mr. Nye with so much makeup and primping as in this broadcast last night.
I can no longer trust a word that comes from “The Science Guy” ‘s mouth. I watched this broadcast in amazement of the stupidity spewing forth from Mr. Nye’s mouth.
Further, I am getting soooo sick and tired of this Venus BS (bad science). For the past several years, I have studied a great deal about Venus. I have watched many broadcasts on The Science Channel, National Geographic Channel, History Channel and others. I have read many articles and papers from NASA to the kid down the block. It is interesting to note the discrepancies and contradictions between all of these as it pertains to the Venusian climate. I can falsify this Venusian CO2 climate claim very easily. Take note, Venus has a very long period of rotation, and yet the dark side is the same temperature as the light side. If CO2 were the cause of Venusian climate heat, then the light side would necessarily have to be somewhat hotter than the dark side as it would be more radiatively active. The FACT is, Venus is a HOT planet. That is, like Mercury, Venus is still cooling and giving off heat. This fact alone, aside from the fact that Venus has a HUGE volume of atmosphere, EXTREME surface pressure, NO direct sunlight at the surface, and many other factors completely dispute the Venusian CO2 climate hypothesis.
I had a little Venus debate with one of my professor friends.
Very little sunlight reaches the surface of Venus, not enough to be classified as daylight, even heavily overcast daylight, on Earth. If I built a greenhouse out in the woods using triple pane glass (which is vastly superior to the CO2 on Venus) and claimed it would get hot enough to melt steel, due to better IR insulation, people would put me in the looney bin.
In Carl Sagan’s 1967 paper on the surface temperature of Venus, he gave estimates for atmospheric compositions ranging from pure nitrogen to pure CO2. The nitrogen atmosphere was hotter because of its different coefficient of specific heat at constant pressure. Sagan got the surface temperature correct to within about 40K, based purely on the cloud top temperatures, the dry adiabatic lapse rate of CO2, and low qualilty radar data on the depth to the surface. He’d have been closer but the radar data was a little off. There was no reference to radiative effects anywhere in the paper.
Sagan, 1967
The correlation of Sun spots to temperature is horrible and I wouldn’t put it up as a pro-natural argument. I would simply dismiss it as a very, very weak temperature trend force that is overwhelmed by intrinsic natural Earth bound cycles. I wouldn’t even show a graph.
The correlation of ocean to temperature is where the gravy is. Ocean conditions, along with a some of Earth’s atmospheric cycles (IE AO, trade winds, etc) predicts temperature trends. To break the CO2 connection, I would post the correlation between CO2 and the atmospheric/oceanic coupling. The correlation will be dismal.
Man-made CO2 is no more a major driver of temperature trend than the Sun is. If it does anything at all, it will warm up my day on land by a fraction of a fraction of a degree more at 350 ppm than if there were only 250 ppm. I’m ballparking here but the oceanic/atmospheric conditions (including natural greenhouse gasses) at the time will determine 99.99% of how hot I feel because these things determine how much shortwave and longwave radiation gets to me. Emission sourced CO2 and other man-made greenhouse gases will contribute that last fraction. And to be sure of my point, I am probably giving a conservative estimate for man-made emissions. I believe it is less influential than I have stated here.
The article linked by Marcus (02:48:21) above is really quite compelling:
Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis Violates Fundamentals of Physics
by Dipl.-Ing. Heinz Thieme
http://freenet-homepage.de/klima/error.htm
His argument, based on physical principles, sounds plausible to me. I’d like to hear what others on this board think. Are there problems with it?
If we could convince the public that the whole idea of a ‘greenhouse gas’ having any measurable effect on climate was wrong, that would cut the legs out from under the alarmists. What is needed is a simple, dramatic, observational test, like the one in 1919 verifying General Relativity’s prediction that light from a distant star would be bent passing near the gravitational field of the Sun.
For example, since CO2 is heavier than air, it should be possible to fill a large enclosure, open at the top but blocked from wind, with CO2, and a second one with just air, and see if there is any difference in temperature. Then invite the press.
No doubt there are problems with that one, but I’ll bet the scientists and engineers here could come up with a definitive test.
/Mr Lynn
Fox blurb
British Met office proposes a do-over.
The atmosphere of Venus is 95% co2. The atmosphere of Earth is .054% CO2 by weight. So the concentration of CO2 in Venus’ atmosphere is 1700 times as high as it is on Earth. But Venus’ atmosphere is also far denser than Earth’s. On Earth the atmospheric pressure is 14.7 pounds per square inch. Think of that as the weight of a column of air with a 1 sq in cross section stretching from the surface to the upper reaches of the atmosphere. On Venus its 90 times as heavy, or about 1300 pounds per square inch. When you include both of those factors Venus’ atmosphere has 150,000 times as much CO2 as Earth. That’s a huge difference, far more than the doubling of CO2 the warmers worry about.
Also, Earth has oceans that cover 70% of the planet’s surface. Those oceans play a huge roll in our climate. When water evaporates from the oceans it carries a huge amount of heat with it, about 1000 btu’s per pound of water. Water vapor is lighter than air so it tends to rise. When it rises high enough it can condense and give up that heat above much of the greenhouse blanket where it can be more readily radiated into space. Venus has no such mechanism.
With the EPA trying to control CO2 as a “dangerous pollutant”, I looked up the toxicity of CO2 to find out just how dangerous it is. The greenies think that 350 ppm is about right and I suppose they think anything more than that is a killer. Is that even close to true? Nuclear submarine crews live in an atmosphere that ranges between 3,000 to 10,000 ppm of CO2. It takes something like 60,000 ppm before you start feeling sick. A level over 100,00 ppm will kill you by simple asphyxiation. How did we ever get the stupid idea that the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are deadly?
The same EPA that calls CO2 deadly in the air is the outfit that mandated that we put catalytic converters on our cars so that internal combustion gases will be converted to water and CO2. So is it deadly in the air and good when it come out of the tailpipe? WTF! Are we really so crazy as to believe any of this AGW nonsense?
Bill Nye is channeling Carl Sagan via 1992…. Well, trying to anyway. The “Venus = Earth” is the canard that got me interested in this subject in the first place.
Charles Higley (06:35:27) :
What many people do not know is that CO2 absorbing IR does not produce warmed CO2. The energy is almost immediately re-radiated as IR – it is not realized as kinetic energy (heat). There is, however, the slight chance that, while temporarily energized by IR absorption, a molecule might bump into another and the energy could be transferred as heat, causing warming. This is not a high efficiency process and allows CO2 to have a tiny warming effect, which we all agree it can accomplish.
Many people don’t know that because it isn’t true! At normal atmospheric pressure an excited CO2 molecule will experience thousands of collisions with neighboring air molecules during its radiation lifetime. The absorbed energy is effectively converted into kinetic energy, at such pressures ‘re-radiation’ is a very rare event.
Pamela Gray (07:07:53) :
The correlation of ocean to temperature is where the gravy is. Ocean conditions, along with a some of Earth’s atmospheric cycles (IE AO, trade winds, etc) predicts temperature trends. To break the CO2 connection, I would post the correlation between CO2 and the atmospheric/oceanic coupling. The correlation will be dismal.
So why don’t you do so instead of handwaving, the data’s freely available?
Bill Nye the Propaganda Guy.
Does anyone have a temperature proxy graph from either tree rings or ice cores on Venus? No? How about temperature records for the last few hundred years? Because that would be helpful if we’re going to compare global climate between the planets.
What’s next? Are the alarmists going to argue that Mars is a barren desert because its atmosphere is 99% CO2? Hmm… maybe I shouldn’t give them any ideas.
So will they hire Steve McIntyre to manage the new datasets?
Not bloody likely!
/Mr Lynn
The weather on Venus is dominated by a very hot interior and thousands of active volcaonoes .
Anybody seen this?
Climategate Meets the Law: Senator Inhofe To Ask for DOJ Investigation
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-and-the-law-senator-inhofe-to-ask-for-congressional-criminal-investigation-pajamas-mediapjtv-exclusive/
Judicial Watch Sues for Records on “Climate Czar” Carol Browner’s Role in Crafting Policy
http://www.judicialwatch.org/news/2010/feb/judicial-watch-sues-records-climate-czar-carol-browners-role-crafting-policy
Max (06:33:07) :
Haha Venus is about 41 million kilometers closer to the Sun than Earth. Of course it will be warmer than earth. Is that really an arguement proving AGW?
—————
Reply:
Well, sure–they’ve changed the “A” to mean Any. They just don’t like to add the “?”, but that’s how it’s turning out.
Thank you Joe Bastardi .
Thank you thank you.
I am a layman. But it was my understanding that the cause of winter in the NH was the tilting of the Earth, such that the NH tilts away from the sun in winter.
It was also my understanding that the Sun provides the heat that warms us, and the energy that drives the climatic systems ( at least mostly).
Why do AGW propagandists and indeed Pamela Gray, dismiss the effects of the Sun ? Isn’t that what warms the oceans ?
If a Venus style runaway warming was possible on Earth, it would have happened a couple of billion ago, when Earth’s atmosphere had a 100 time more Methane and CO2 than it does currently. As it stands now, if it wasn’t for the water vapor in the atmosphere, Earth would be a frozen ice ball.
Well it was a good outing … Bill Nye, the junk science peddler guy. Everything he said has been proved false. But hey, he kept trying.
Bastardi needs his own show ^_^. He is likely an avid WUWT reader …
For the clueless science guy, Venus has no magnetosphere, therefore the Sun’s Solar Wind has had it’s way with it’s atmosphere, blowing away all the lighter molecules, leaving only the heaviest residual molecules, like CO2. No one really knows when Venus lost it’s magnetic field, just some guesses.
A question to ponder, the earth’s magnetic field is decaying, and a pole shift is overdue. So when the pole shift occurs, does the earth’s magnetic field go to zero for a period of time, or does it shift suddenly and pass through. Important question, no answer yet. But it’s a really important question.
There are other serious issues with the greenhouse explanation for the extra warming of Venus. Temperature measurements of Venus show the night side to be about the same as the day side. With no wind, how does the heat get to the night side unless there is an internal heat source that constantly heats the planet regardless of the side facing the sun. Also Venus has very bright white cloud tops which reflect most of the sun light [over 90%]. So how could the greenhouse effect even occur to the degree claimed? We know lot less about Venus’s climate than we know about earth’s. To bring Venus up as an example of what is happening on earth will even further diminish the credibility of the AGW science. They really are desperate now.
cedarhill (03:39:37) :
James Hansen’s PhD disertation was on the Venusian atmosphere and the “Venusian Greenhouse Effect”. After that inspiration he transfered Venus to Earth giving birth to Al Gore and AGW.
Actually it wasn’t about the Greenhouse effect at all, it was titled:
The atmosphere of Venus: a dust insulation model. Apart from predicting the effect of volcanos and clouds it isn’t ‘transferable’ to earth.
Joel Upchurch (07:52:53) :
If a Venus style runaway warming was possible on Earth, it would have happened a couple of billion ago, when Earth’s atmosphere had a 100 time more Methane and CO2 than it does currently. As it stands now, if it wasn’t for the water vapor in the atmosphere, Earth would be a frozen ice ball.
No, if it wasn’t for the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere Earth would be a frozen ice ball. Water would just condense out of the atmosphere and freeze without the permanent GHGs to sustain it.
Phil. (08:19:41) :
“…if it wasn’t for
the CO2 and methane inthe atmosphere Earth would be a frozen ice ball.”Fixed.
Phil. (07:25:48) :
At normal atmospheric pressure an excited CO2 molecule will experience thousands of collisions with neighboring air molecules during its radiation lifetime. The absorbed energy is effectively converted into kinetic energy, at such pressures ‘re-radiation’ is a very rare event.
The whole atmosphere is holding whatever heat it has via kinetic energy, a function of mean free path, a function of temperature. If you think the kinetic energy of .04% of the atmosphere (CO2) is a more significant factor than the other 99.96%, I have some magic beans you may be interested in.
Some bad science here in the comment section too.
Please, if you don’t know then don’t say.