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”
“Nye needs a better argument”
No, he needs a better reference than the IPCC… ooopppsss, there are none! Bill Nye, come back to reality, please.
Anyone who follows Bastardi online line knows his long term forecasts are 2nd to none.
….and how many forecasts has Bill Nye made?
Compare Bastardi’s forecasts to the NWS coming into this winter – Bastardi nailed it & the government had a clueless statistical model & flunked out.
I will put my money on Bastardi over the next 20 years vs the government & IPCC.
If CO2 intercepts IR going outward from Earth, and radiates some (less than half) of that IR back to Earth, then certainly the same CO2 intercepts incoming IR, and radiates some (more than half) of that incoming IR away from Earth. Clearly, by geometry, CO2 radiates more IR away from Earth than it radiates IR to Earth in the aggragate total.
Essentially, asI see it, warming fabulists are claiming that CO2 is the incarnation of Maxwell’s Demon.
It is if I, as a highway engineer, set up a traffic counting station on Interstate 40 at the CA-AZ border, and only counted vehicles going in a westerly direction. I might well come to the false conclusion that the vehicle population in CA was increasing by that traffic count amount, if I didn’t also take the easterly bound traffic count into consideration.
Phil. (08:49:31) :
“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!
So, you’re claiming that warming does not lead to convection. Is that right? Just trying to understand what you are claiming is “nonsense”.
George Turner (11:05:42) :
Phil,
The upper atmosphere circulates rapidly, but lower down the wind speed is only 0.5 to 1 meter/second.
At the surface, but the bulk of the atmosphere is circulating rapidly, particularly the clouds which are radiating IR back to the surface.
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.
Still swamped by the radiative flux from the surface, ~17,000 W/m^2.
Well, it was certainly all there: the irrefutable evidence, Venus, the integrity of the IPCC and the research it does ( I do seem to recall that the IPCC doesn’t do or commission research), accusing skeptics of cherry-picking start-dates for their graphs showing a decline and then using the start-date for his graph in the middle of the LIA, climate-gate is just a he-said-she-said squabble between scientists and doesn’t affect the science, follow the money trail to see who benefits from skepticism about AGW…
Bill Nye is dishonest and I think he knows he is dishonest. I also think the emergence of a new set of talking points and a new generation of trolls of the sort we’ve seen here is just fascinating.
Pamela Gray (07:07:53) :
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.
Pam, you keep saying this but it depends on the time scale you use. Grand Solar Minimums correlate perfectly with extemely cold periods. We have two that were observed and I am convinced we will get to watch this present ‘Dalton Type Minimum’ as it progresses with modern instruments.
If you take away the noise of the internal systems of Earth and correct the proxy of ‘sun spots’ for ‘solar activity’ and even tie it to something like ‘planetary tides’ on the sun or other mechanisms the correlation gets better when you deal with years and not days or months.
The fact is the Sun is the forcing agent and we do not understand all the energy transport mechanisms. I am sure the obsessive detail with which solar scientists observe the sun and its interaction with the Earth, Solar System, and Galaxy (magnetically and otherwise) will yield some fruit while we go through this anomalous event … Solar Grand Minimum. I also expect it to be cold in the order of Dickens.
Robert E. Phelen: I think we should start a new game: Whack-a-Troll.
Maybe Bill Nye should remember what anyone who has ever taken an intro chemistry class knows. That is PV = nRT
As pressure goes up (Venus) so does temperature.
“Carrick (09:17:42) :
[…]
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 ”
Argo finds no rise in the Ocean Heat Content during 2003-2008. No integration of the effect of forcings to be found.
terry46 (10:24:05) :
I would love to see Joe Bastardi debate Al Gore .Only thing Al won’t debate anyone.
He won’t debate Tipper?
Well, you can’t deny he’s at least that smart.
The laughter started with BN’s first four over-used words: “The evidence is overwhelming . . .”.
BTW, BN is a dead ringer for A. Lincoln. Give him a beard and a top hat.
He’ll have a lifetime job at the Lincoln Museum.
I heard O’Reilly comment on this issue before. His statement was it’s impossible that all the pollutants we are putting into the atmosphere are not affecting the planet.
He seems to be firmly in the all emissions = pollution camp. Not exactly what I would call a well-versed or nuanced opinion.
Very entertaining but way too short, this debate. So both men are forced into “Reality show” behaviour to score as many points as possible. Still, the better man won.
Bill Nye’s ink-and water bit was priceless, given the visual opacity of ink compared to that of water. What did he do to finance his way through high school – sell vaccuum cleaners? Never mind, Joe Bastardi dealt with it well enough in his summation.
And the Venus nonsense – well, Joe could have squashed that one a little more firmly if the format of the debate had been that of a genuine debate and not a game-show. Other comments to this blog cover things quite nicely, though. Here’s my semi-science-fiction view:
http://www.herkinderkin.com/2009/11/why-is-venus-much-hotter-than-earth/
DirkH:
Well, keep in mind you really have to look at long term trends. Neither models nor data are good enough to account for all of the sources of short term variations.
Short term, you can actually have variability in other forcings, such as albedo, for which the evidence is it is increasing over this same period of time.
Even if anthropogenic CO2 emissions act as a forcing (IMO they do, the question is what else are the influences of these emissions on climate), that doesn’t mean that increasing CO2 forcings leads to a net heating of the Earth, since other short-term drivers of climate can substantially dominate over the slight “fixing of the climate dice” associated with increasing the GHG effect.
The only way to answer that is to account for all of the other sources of heat loss or gain, and as of right now, we can’t… at least until we get to a long enough period of time that long-term secular effects like changes in total CO2 concentration can dominate.
1) Anthony, Thank you sooo much for this website and for saving civilization as we know it!
2) Anyone else disturbed by Nye’s experiment? It reminded me a huckster water purification company in my community who was using pH as a proxy for biological contamination so they could trick people into buying an extremely expensive water filter. They would use a cheap pool pH kit to show how the color changed.
Let’s assume Nye’s demo is completely analogous and that CO2 acts across the entire band of visible light. Let’s also assume he got the concentration right (looks like he was using a liter of H20). Nye adds the ink @ur momisugly 0.04% and there’s an obvious tainting. Fine. What then would happen if he added 10% or more? Even 100%? If the analogy/experiment were extensible, wouldn’t the answer be, because of the CO2 threshold, there wouldn’t be any more tainting! Am I wrong?
Climate change is constant and variable. Global warming occurs. AWG is an OPINION. The economic impact of a CO2 attribution is immense and sohold be the primary focus.
Bill Nye is a comedian. He used to do “science” gags for kids and appeared on a local late night comedy show called “Almost Live”. We used to call it “Almost Funny”. Looks like he blew town for California to rebuild his career I guess. And I gotta say, the guy looks a lot stranger than I remember him to be. He’s gotta get a new make-up person. Really.
I’ve seen him spew “science” in some other venues lately and as a scientist, the guy is still a comedian. Not a funny one however.
Noelene (23:09:32) : edit
“You have a funny way of hiding your links.”
You need to remember this was a FOX broadcast. Rupert Murdoch is famously against other websites linking to FOX content and even wants to charge for online content, he so badly misunderstands how the internet works. Hence why no embedding of the video in the WUWT article.
As for Bill Nye, back in 1988, I was stationed at McChord AFB outside Tacoma and would listen to a morning radio program he’d appear on in a segment called “Stump the Science Guy”, that invited listeners to call in with questions about scientific things to see if Nye could answer correctly.
I called in asking about the rumbling sound that water makes just prior to reaching boiling temperatures, when heated on a stove. Nye wrongly claimed the sound was due to thermal expansion of the pot, rather than the correct answer which was that microbubbles would form at the bottom of the water, where there was a boundary layer of boiling temp water. The bubbles would rise up into cooler water, cool down, and slap shut, making the noise.
So its clear to me that for 20 years, Nye (whose training is engineering, not science) still doesn’t understand thermodynamics or fluid dynamics….
“the guy (Nye) is still a comedian. Not a funny one however.”
You can’t call someone who’s not funny a ‘comedian’ any more than you can call a person who misses a ‘sharp-shooter’, or for that matter, a climate that’s static.
Therefore, Nye is simply an oxymoron (with emphasis on moron, IMHO).
@Phil.
‘It’s basic physics, the rest of the atmosphere isn’t capable of blanketing the Earth!’
Basic observation tells the story about co2 and methane not blanketing the earth. Apparently the molecules are too few on the one hand, and on the other hand them little crackpot molecules tend to be concentrated in murky streaks around earth (I kid you not, NASA took some nice imagery of em). Oh, and not to forget these molecules tend to vary in concentration between winter and summer.
Mayhap you ought to spend more time in the physics book instead of the Troll for dummies book.
Maybe I got this wrong. Bill Nye said that CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas. I was under the impression that CO2 is a weak greenhouse gas. It is the contributions of stronger greenhouse gases such as water and methane which lead to the scenarios of very high temp increases, not CO2.
Nye is an engineer. He doesn’t even have a PhD, so it’s no wonder he doesn’t understand the atmosphere of Venus.. At least get someone on the show that has some credentials.
PHIL
The temperature on the surface of Venus is extremely hot and unlikely to have winds .[Magellan Orbiter data] .I am referring to surface winds.
A warmist, bringing up Venus, presents a WONDERFUL opportunity for serious scientists and historians to discuss an historically comparable scientific consensus and fallacy, the misperceived “canals” of Mars.
An international consensus of leading scientists — Schiaparelli in Italy; Dawes of England, Burton of Ireland; Pickering, Young and Lowell in the United States — all published peer-reviewed papers on Mars and its canals. The peers carefully observed that distant planet thru the best scientific instruments the world had to offer and they literally “connected the dots”. They severally and jointly presented Science, the popular press, and citizens at large with maps of Mars, including canals. And then, some of the leading scientists went even further. Canals, they said, meant life, even, perhaps, industrial civilizations not unlike our own. All confirmed by scientific observation — all just one world away.
These scientists were not idiots or morons. They weren’t careless. They weren’t perpetrating a hoax or a sham or a fraud.
They saw what they hoped to see, what they expected to see, and what their friends and colleagues had already reported having seen. And they turned out to be wrong. Collectively, categorically, absolutely wrong. There are no canals on Mars. Period.
These 19th century astronomers did other great science. Some men cataloged stars previously too faint to see. Some predicted, and showed how to find, still undiscovered planets. Some worked out various advances in celestial mechanics, astronomical photography, and other great ideas. As a group of peers, they accomplished wonders.
But Percival Lowell and his ilk gave the world, gave the public, and gave history one of history’s biggest lies — the Canals of Mars. For decades after the skeptics won and the scientific consensus moved on, the lay public and the popular imagination persisted in discussing the fabled Martian canals. Even by the 1960’s when the first space probes rocketed by, the cameras were looking, hoping, scrutinizing one last time to finally settle the matter. And not until then did the public finally accept: there are no canals on Mars.
Now, with modern, better instruments and more observers and many actual probes sending us radio data from on-site visits we know — not believe, KNOW — that Mars, like Venus, has an atmosphere that is over 90% carbon dioxide. We have direct measurements of the temperatures of our neighbor planets. We know that , unlike Venus, Mars is cold — with visible icecaps. Our 19th century trail blazers were correct to infer a decreasing temperature trend from Venus to Earth to Mars. And that trend, historical and modern astronomers agree, has at least as much to do with distance from the Sun as it does CO2 concentrations.
We also have a few decades of photographs of real Martian terrain — not canals, but icecaps. Astronomers have photographed and cataloged the icecaps of Mars diminishing. Sadly, we don’t have photographs of polar surface features on Venus. But it might appear that if both Earth and Mars show common trends in their polar regions, there might be a common cause. And even the public can be confident that carbon emissions from growing industrial civilizations is NOT that common element. Astronomers properly suggest the sun itself needs closer study. However much more we now know than Professor Lowell, a century ago, we know there is vastly much more that we still do NOT know.
Again I emphasize, Percival Lowell and his peers weren’t dishonest; and they did some very good science — but they were wrong about Mars. I’m confident Professors Hansen and Jones today have persuaded themselves and each other into comparable errors regarding Earth. They have connected the dots, combining true observations with optical illusions, into trend lines that appear to them real and plausible– but have no physical basis. And from these mistaken physical inferences they infer greater and less probable notions about planet-wide civilization. Hansen at NASA may turn out to be as prominent in history as Lowell of Flagstaff. Hansen’s theories of climate change may turn out like Lowell’s hunt for “Planet X” — proving fruitful even if not strictly correct. It is no shame in history for a scientist to be wrong.
But Lowell was wrong.
I suggest to you, Mr Nye, that much of the data you base your claims upon upon has been retrieved from some location between Saturn and Neptune
(Implicitly — Uranus)