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”
Did Bill Nye just accuse Bastardi of taking bribes?
O’Reilly does pretty good job on most subjects but is making a huge mistake in not addressing the global warming scam at the level he should.
Much like his failure to get out in front of the mortgage/banking collapse which he later apologized for. He told his audience that he should have been paying more and he committed to doing so in the future.
Well Bill? This would be the test.
If this is it he’ll be apologizing again for failing to recognize, acknowledge and combat this AGW movement. Looking out for the folks and all.
Instead of doing so he appears to be trying to present the issue as a close call, developing story, that he’s on it but above the fray.
Look Bill,
You’re essentially out to lunch with Barney Frank. You’re missing the biggest scam in human history. Underplaying the issue is a BIG betrayal of the folks.
Following slowly from far behind is exactly the kind of coverage you apologized for in the mortgage/banking crisis.
You may be arriving at a tipping point where it will be impossible for you to adapt and re-posture yourself as looking out for the folks.
Big mistake.
Bringing up the rear in the no spin zone is not your style.
Trying to later spin that you were on top of it all along will be a Barney move.
Especially with your long time listeners/viewers.
Wise up pal.
What a ridiculous ‘debate’ this was. Neither participant was at all persuasive nor capable of presenting a rational argument. And what was the ‘moderator’ doing letting them both drivel on like this?
Even though I’ve followed the AGW discussion quite closely I could not follow whatever points they were making since it just seemed to be a random set of ‘points’ sprayed around. Who did they think was the audience? A general educated viewer would be completely lost.
1/10 (and you get the 1 for turning up and knowing your own name). Extremely poor
Hey, it looks to me like Phil. is becoming a skeptic. Taking his argument one step further the increased kinetic energy will lead to increased convection. This yields increased upper tropospheric radiation to space and increased daytime reflective clouds. Both of these are negative feedbacks. Welcome aboard Phil..
Smokey (08:23:16) :
Phil. (08:19:41) :
“…if it wasn’t for the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere Earth would be a frozen ice ball.”
Fixed.
Nope censored by some who knows no physics!
I was surprised how little Nye actually knew. And his Venus moment as well as his declaration that CO2 was a very powerful greenhouse gas were disturbing.
Steve Keohane (08:26:39) :
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.
You mean the other 99.96% that has no ability to absorb IR radiation?
Richard M (08:41:38) :
Hey, it looks to me like Phil. is becoming a skeptic.
I’m a scientist, I’ve always been a sceptic (a real one).
Taking his argument one step further the increased kinetic energy will lead to increased convection. This yields increased upper tropospheric radiation to space and increased daytime reflective clouds. Both of these are negative feedbacks. Welcome aboard Phil..
And I’m really sceptical of such nonsense as you and Smokey peddle!
I see all the comments pointing out that Venus’ atmosphere is much denser than Earth’s. Doesn’t Earth’s atmosphere change in density? I could swear that I had read something (Svalgaard?) about Earth’s atmosphere changing in density related to the sun’s activity, of course, I may be wrong too, I have a lot of reading going on right now.
I will see if I can find it, or maybe someone would be helpful and find it before I do tomorrow. I just wonder if the atmosphere changing in density has an effect on temperature?
Hide the incline in whine.
Bill Nye and Ed Begley Jr. Neighbors, green to the core. Noble and passionate, committed to the honorable saving of the delicate Earth from the brutal ravages of Man.
Mother Earth has told them both to shove off, she can handle herself just fine.
Neither are taking it very well. Got earplugs?
Compare Joe Bastardi’s forecast for this winter compared to NOAA…….
Bastardi’s argument about the lack of a direct correlation with CO2 is badly, badly flawed.
If he’s going to start out showing the science is contradicted by data, he needs to start by addressing what the science actually predicts, not some 5th grade version of it.
Even if you try and related CO2 emissions to temperature, you also have to include the driving from anthropogenic sulfates, which tend to cool climate.
Nor even with a net warming from anthropogenic drivings are you guaranteed that short-term temperature swings are going to track with net anthropogenic drivings, because nobody says that once anthropogenic warming started that all of a sudden all of the natural drivers for climate would shut off!!! You can still have a lot of “noodling” of temperature even if the baseline is shifted slightly.
Finally, if you’re going to compare the impact of anthropogenic CO2 to temperature, you need to at least integrate the effect of the forcings over time (in the case of CO2 forcings, there is a “rapid” response which presumably correlates well with mean temperature plus a “slow” response term that maybe takes 30-years to show up. The problem with correlating with the rapid term is there are plenty of natural drivers, e.g., the ENSO, which are large on those short time scales, so you’re pretty much stuck looking at fairly long temperature trends. 1980-2010 is meaningful to study, 2000-2010 is not.
Having said all of that, I agree with Bastardi that there a lot of hype in the AGW community, and to a degree he is just using their own logic against them. (I have no doubt that people like Nye were crowing about 1998 as
“proof” of AGW for example.)
The planet Venus analogy is old and first hyped by Jim Hansen of NASA and Carl Sagen.
It has been falsified many times — surprising that Nye would use it at all.
But it does highlight the connection between astronomy and AGW “science” or lack, thereof.
Many, if not most astronomers back AGW — the recent Climategate has broken that up a bit.
Why do so many astronomers back AGW?
Because their science rests on the same kind of assumptions.
A priori assumptions with back-filled interpretation & analysis to justify the a priori assumptions.
And an over reliance on theoretical constructs justified with mathematical equations unhinged from empirical observation & measurement.
AGW is the biggest hoax on history — but it is more than that, it is a window onto other scientific disciplines. Climategate? The same kind of shannigans goes on in other disciplines, as well.
What is worse is that astronomy schools indoctrinate and enforce the party-line.
It’s just that these other disciplines are not in the spot light and sceptics are quickly labeled “cranks” and nobody hears about it.
Wheren’t AGW sceptics first labeled “cranks” until that became untenable?
The fall back: “Deniers”.
Yes, this is the tip of the iceberg.
So trying to pull things together here, 4/100ths of 1% of CO2 is going to make our climate go haywire, but 1/10th of 1% fluctuations of solar output (sorry don’t have the reference link handy) is nothing to worry about?
Venus is hot.
Venus has a lot of CO2.
Therefore CO2 causes Venus to be hot.
There-therefore if *we* have more CO2 we will get hot.
A splendid scientific argument. /sarcasm
Actually, I recall doing some napkin calculations regarding the CO2 concentrations of Earth verses Venus using basic algebra, and the results don’t tie in with the doomsayers. True, there are many other factors – but I think that’s really the point: you cannot focus on a single element (sic) as a driver for climate.
Conversely, has anybody thought about the climate repercussions of cooling through CO2 reduction? *If* we are warming up significantly through CO2, won’t a reduction in that CO2 cause – result in – a cooling of the atmosphere? What about all those desert creatures freezing to death? Mass failures of crops? Polar bear deaths due to an excessive ice sheet with no open ocean areas allowing the polar bears to fish for seals…drowning seals…oh, the poor Polar Bears…well, they should be at least thankful they aren’t Venus Bears: they’d be extinct already.
Phil. (08:49:31),
You actually believe that “if it wasn’t for the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere Earth would be a frozen ice ball”??
Even with the 99.9%+ of the rest of the atmosphere blanketing the Earth? You’ve had too much CAGW Kool Aid if you believe that.
Why do all these so called “experts” in AGW we’ve heard from lately all resort to the same lay “proof”? (already known to be wrought with fraud)
Such as:
Recital of consensus
The warmest decade (see E M Smith for a dose of reality)
Comparisons to Venus (with double Earth’s solar energy budget and no H20)
Arctic ice melt (while always ignoring the Antarctic)
Glaciers (can you say 2035?)
You go joe, i wish he would have gotten more time to explain pdo. and another thing for the weather is not climate people, i live in houston tx and it is snowing today, also climate is longterm trends in weather so actualy yes, weather is climate. :p
Venus is hotter than Earth…isn’t it also closer to the sun? Mercury has no CO2 at all and it’s really hot… I wonder why? I loved when Nye started with the ” do you deny that there was less CO2 in 1727 than now?”. Yeah, we also imported less bananas back then too … Should I conclude that the amount of bananas consumed by the US causes global warming because the two are correlated? How many people realize correlation is NOT causation? Over and over and over these AGW people make that mistake.
Joe,
I think you smoked him. Great job. Another inconvenient tidbit about Venus is the 243 day rotation. The day side surface bakes in the sun for months on end.
I didn’t see anyone else noting the inverse square law assures Venus’ solar budget is nearly double that of earth.
Smokey (09:41:51) :
Phil. (08:49:31),
You actually believe that “if it wasn’t for the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere Earth would be a frozen ice ball”??
Even with the 99.9%+ of the rest of the atmosphere blanketing the Earth? You’ve had too much CAGW Kool Aid if you believe that.
It’s basic physics, the rest of the atmosphere isn’t capable of blanketing the Earth!
Squidly (07:03:30) :
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.
Apparently in all your reading you missed the fact that the Venusian atmosphere circulates very rapidly.
matt v. (08:11:41) :
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.
Why do you think that there is no wind? Winds in the mid cloud layer can be as high as 450 mph.
I would love to see Joe Bastardi debate Al Gore .Only thing Al won’t debate anyone.
Layne Blanchard (10:04:47) :
Joe,
I think you smoked him. Great job. Another inconvenient tidbit about Venus is the 243 day rotation. The day side surface bakes in the sun for months on end.
How? The surface doesn’t see very much solar insolation, whereas the atmosphere which does, only spends ~2 Earth days on the day side before circulating to the night side!
Joe Bastardi, you’re the best. Keep up the great work! You are one of the few that consistently make good weather predictions. I was thrilled to see you on O’Reilly last night.
Phil,
The upper atmosphere circulates rapidly, but lower down the wind speed is only 0.5 to 1 meter/second.
Still, the whole planet forms two massive Hadley cells that overturn the atmosphere, with the gas alternately compressed and expanded. It gets hot going down and cools off coming up. Most of the heat input is in the cloud layers, which are relatively cool.
My way of thinking about it is that the atmosphere there acts like a diesel or refrigeration cycle, with the delta T determined by the height of the circulation and the adiapatic lapse rate (itself determined by gravity and the atmosphere’s coefficient of specific heat at constant pressure). Given the cycle’s delta T, you just attach some point in the cycle to the external environment (in this case the cloud layers where the radiative effects occur) and the absolute temperatures of the rest of the cycle are automatically set.
The surface temperature of Venus can’t deviate from the temperature at the bottom of the atmosphere because at that pressure, CO2 has about the same convective heat transfer ability as water, several hundred W/m^2 per degree C at the wind speeds found by the Soviet Venus landers.