Royal Society to review climate consensus position

“Another society protester said he wanted to be called a climate agnostic rather than a sceptic.”
Which just goes to show, absurdly, that “skeptic” has actually become a smear when climate change is concerned.
Somebody page the American Physical Society and get them to do the same. Our scientific associations are themselves diminishing the faith of the public in science by their political activism.

The real problem for the climate alarmists is feedback.
If it is zero there is no problem since CO2 is a poor GHG.[1 o C per doubling]
If it is negative there is even less of a problem.
If it is positive but small there is still no problem.
Only if it is positive and large is there a problem and recent studies have shown this is not the case, so where is the problem ?

Here’s a thought: Just make everyone’s views available; pro, con, or somewhere in between, sans recommendations, and let the damn politicians stew in their own juices.

So who’s on this board of sorts? Any prominent scientist?

“The sceptics have been very strident and well-organised…”
Given that scepticism is one of the key ingredients in all science I really wonder if these plonkers actually hear what they themselves sound like when they make this kind of comment ….
Whats the hell is wrong with scepticism ??

‘…mainly in physical sciences…’
Ah, the sane ones…
…they should set up a counter organization and leave the rump of the ‘Royal Society’ to promulgate their beliefs on climatology, ufology, and Feng Shui.

How about letting each side and maybe the middle also write up their thoughts on the matter. But a requirement would be that proof of any claim would have to be supplied – along with any code and data. 🙂

David says:
May 27, 2010 at 4:08 pm
“Another society protester said he wanted to be called a climate agnostic rather than a sceptic.”
Which just goes to show, absurdly, that “skeptic” has actually become a smear when climate change is concerned.

I agree, and I agree that it’s absurd.
I’m not wholly opposed to the transition from “climate sceptic” to “AGW agnostic”. I think it’s important to recognise “AGW belief” as a religious, non-scientific, non-proof-based ideology. The word “agnostic” can also be easily and helpfully juxtaposed with the word “atheist”, and of course there is a broader popular understanding of the meanings of the terms “atheist” and “agnostic”.. and of the familiar term “screaming evangelist nutter”. Climate sceptics are AGW agnostic in the main. The word “agnostic” literally means “without Knowledge” (big K, as in religious Knowledge), or “not known/not knowable”. To quote:

I … invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of ‘agnostic,’ … antithetic to the ‘Gnostic’ of Church history who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant.
[T.H. Huxley, “Science and Christian Tradition,” 1889]

Climate Atheists are an entirely different bunch that can be ignored almost completely. They tend to believe that climate change is all rubbish and that it’s never REALLY changed at all, during the the earth’s entire 4,000 year history. Err…
Well, it’s something to consider anyway.

Tempest in a teapot. I am sure they are all wondering how foolish they will all look when climate change turns out to be cold and none of them has figured out how to make CO2 the scapegoat. Maybe they should have joined the debate at Oxford Union.

When the purpose of science becomes the need to persuade policymakers, real science is no longer possible.
Actually I think the response should be rather easy and quite simple:
Climate change is real.
Human caused climate change is possible, but hasn’t yet been confirmed.

Well said, Netdr – The foundation of their fear is FEEDBACK.
Without large positive feedback from cloud formation, etc., there is absolute nothing to worry about. They should admit that actual OBSERVATIONS of feedback so far are inconclusive or in the opposite direction of what AGW predicts. If they put that simple truth in their statement, I, for one, would be very impressed…

It is really hard for some folks to just say they don’t know, isn’t it?

geo : unless there is a third-party shown to have been misleading them. Once someone becomes that third party (could it be the IPCC with another large error?) then you will see a lot more people backing away, or at least watering down, statements.

Anthony: “Americans Are Becoming Global Warming Skeptics” – US News and World Report http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/2010/05/26/americans-are-becoming-global-warming-skeptics.html

brc says:
May 27, 2010 at 5:42 pm
Yessir, you are correct. But that also assumes they are willling to throw IPCC under the bus at this point of history. At best, at this point I give the Scottish verdict –“unproven”.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/mexico-cannot-wait-to-follow-us-lead-on-climate-change-president/article1583574/
————
There is a full court press of alarmism online… This is not coincidental.
This is what we are being fed up here in Canada… And the alarmists are full force on this thread…

sky says:

I wonder how many Society members are equipped to understand that critical distinction and come to the realization that the much-venerated climate models posit a perpetuum mobile of the second kind.

In other words, “I wonder how many Society members are equipped to misunderstand things in the same way that I do?” My guess is that fortunately very few of them are!

My, my, what a year can do. This may be one of those tipping point for which we have all been waiting.
Don’t get me wrong though, as long as the EPA still continues to move on its regulatory path and as long as Britain (or Europe or Australia, or Canada) retains their current carbon legislation, it is still an uphill battle where we cannot relent if we hope to win. After all, there’s still a lot of momentum behind this insane policy.

George E Smith says:

So this has generated the legend of low clouds causing negative feedback cooling while high clouds cause positive feedback heating of the surface. That is the standard gospel.

Actually, you are misusing the terminology somewhat: The standard picture is that an increase in low clouds will generally cause cooling in net and an increase in high clouds will generally cause warming in net. However, it is not always straightforward how cloudiness will change in a warming world. (There is more evaporation but only such that relative humidity is expected to remain approximately constant.) Hence, whether low clouds cause a positive or negative feedback depends on whether they decrease or increase, respectively in a warming world. And, similarly whether high clouds cause a positive or negative feedback depends on whether they increase or decrease, respectively in a warming world.

Well of course that defies both common sense and everyday observation. If you are standing out in the sun with a cloud near the sun direction at any altitude; and that cloud then moves across in front of the sun; then observation says that it ALWAYS cools down in the shadow zone.

Not if you happen to be on the half of the planet that is experiencing the phenomenon that we call “night”. If you don’t believe that high clouds tend to have a stronger warming effect than cooling effect, you might want to take up this with Richard Lindzen, whose “iris hypothesis” (now pretty well debunked) was based on the notion that a warming tropics would lead to a decrease in high clouds which would then cause a negative feedback. (“Much like the iris in a human eye contracts to allow less light to pass through the pupil in a brightly lit environment, Lindzen suggests that the area covered by high cirrus clouds contracts to allow more heat to escape into outer space from a very warm environment.” http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Iris/ )
You might want to warn Lindzen that your analysis says that in fact this decrease in high clouds would be a positive feedback. Or, alternatively, you might entertain the notion that those people who have thought about this more deeply than you have…and have looked at empirical data from satellite measurements and so forth…actually have things basically correct in regards to how changes in low or high clouds affect the temperature. (I think that the more difficult question is honestly how the low and high clouds do in fact change with temperature.)

Some false dilemmas being posed there. If they can’t agree the answer is to say so very clearly what they disagree about. Certainly a document can be arrived at even if it does not include what certain individuals very much want it to include.

“Then when we had got 43 names we approached the council in January asking for the website entry on climate to be re-written. I don’t think they were very pleased. I don’t think this sort of thing has been done before in the history of the society.”
“I don’t think they were very pleased.”
To put it mildly! LOL. And I’m sure Prince Charles is not amused either. Last I heard from him was some dire Al Gore style prediction.
“I don’t think this sort of thing has been done before in the history of the society.”
Well, there’s never been a scientific scam this large before in history either.
Did the Royal Society fall for the Piltdown Man?
Time to rename AGW Humpty Dumpty.

Here is something to make you laugh. Algor is a Latin word that means cold or coldness. See Whitaker’s words: http://archives.nd.edu/words.html
algor, algoris N M 3 1 M [XXXCO]
cold, coldness; chilliness; a fit of shivering; cold weather (pl.);
This is so unbelievable that I now believe in supernatural phenomena (and I will also consult other dictionaries to check the source) 🙂

“do more to question the accuracy of the science on climate feedbacks”
So that would mean they will include language about negative feedbacks?
Are they feeling embarrassed about Spencer’s work on cloud cover? Christy’s, Singer’s, et al work on in inaccurate climate models? Or about Svensmark’s work on cosmic rays? Or on all the work done showing how flawed “manmade global warming” is?
p.s., thank you “Sandy in Derby”

“The sceptics have been very strident and well-organised…”
Gosh, I didn’t know I was well organized with anyone.
p.s., I’m not really a skeptic. You can only be a skeptic of something that could possibly be real. (got that one from Lindzen)

Let it be known that these blowhards have been far more wrong than right over the last couple of centuries. As most American and British science, they view their occupation as a means of riches and fame, thus shunning real science unless they manage to hop on the wagon before it leaves the market scare, oops, did I mean square?

Do they do this on every subject in science? Do they need to get “consensus” on every idea? This is insane… it’s not science… it’s politics.

Panel reports by July? LOL. They’ll need an extension or two. Or three. In fact, if they’re bright, they can just keep on getting three month extensions for a decade or so, watch the data, and when they see which way the trend actually goes, they can issue a report and claim that was what they were going to say all along.
I use the same technique with the lottery. I never get around to buying a ticket and then the day after the draw I can read the winning number and scream “%@@#^%!! that was the number I was going to pick”. Got it right 14 weeks in a row.

I dislike the tone of Harrabin’s piece — it’s got a mean flavour, with his prejudice showing through where he harps on about ‘well organised and funded deniers’. Yes, it’s nearer real science reporting than usual, but he’s not there yet. I have a general purpose letter for climate journos, and a poem. Here’s the letter:
“Are you convinced by any of the arguments for proxy evaluation of temperatures for the last 1000 years? If so, please elaborate — skip the baby talk, skip the ‘polar bears are in trouble’ hand-waving, lay out a numerical argument for your thesis that humanity is warming the planet. Yes, I know, it’s not ‘your’ thesis, but you are a flag-waver for it and, if you’re prepared to wave the flag, the least you can do is defend it with cogent arguments. Which proxy, to your mind, is defensible as a thermometer for the times when we don’t have real glass tubes filled with alcohol or mercury? Not bristlecone pines, surely, evaluated and found wanting. Ababneh’s trees? Briffas? Those before or after the decline? Come now, old chap, is there no remnant of a reporter’s instincts in that indoctrinated and battened-down heart?
There’s a story here, a story of fudge and obfuscation and weasel words. Is there not a twitch from the deep-down nosiness that every reporter needs if he is to be anything other than a mouthpiece for other people’s press releases? Frogs? Remember when it was all the frogs dying which showed global warming but it turned out to be a fungus disease? Don’t you owe it to the frogs to be a real reporter?
.
I was frightened when I saw the first hockey stick. Then I read about it, how it was created, read the Wegman report and felt like fool. You have read the Wegman report, of course. How, as a decent, intelligent man, let alone a reporter, one of the breed known for their resistance to spin, can you look at the attempts to resurrect the stick, that scion of corrupt wishful thinking, as anything other than scandal? I know the temptation to which you are subjected: green advocates are passionate about the needs of nature, our responsibility for the ecosystems on which we depend, the love for the fragile Earth. That love does not absolve you from the necessity of pursuing truth. In the end the science will win, truth will out and one side or the other will be triumphant.
However, if you have been shown as a fudger, if you have swept aside legitimate doubts about the reality behind the claims, you will have done huge damage to the cause you think you are serving and, more important to a man trying to earn a living in what we hope will be a world purged of this hysterical nonsense, you will have made yourself a laughing stock. The hockey-stick farce turned me into a luke-warmer, convinced that the world was warming but unconvinced as to the cause. Can you really, in your heart, treat it as good, unbiased science?
.
The best temperature measuring system in the world, so they say, is in the USA. You will have watched Anthony Watts and his team of volunteers assess that system. The ‘best system in the world’ has about half of its locations measuring to an accuracy of greater than + – 5 degrees. Global warming caused by CO2, at its IPCC -enhanced greatest, is about .7 degrees. You _know _ this. If you have any trace of integrity you’ve read the reports as they come in, the thermometers a few feet away from sewage farms, the air conditioner outlets, the acres of concrete and asphalt, the MIG fighter exhaust pointing straight at the sensor. What are you doing to your mind to see that and still to spout the party line that the world is warming, it’s all CO2 and there’s nothing else it could be?
.
There are those who feel it is acceptable to tell lies that the greater good be served. Read the leaked — leaked, not stolen – emails from the CRU at UEA. Can you really face yourself in the mirror in the morning, can you sincerely describe yourself as a reporter if you don’t follow the story and be damned where it leads?”
.
And here’s the poem:
“You cannot ever bribe or twist
The honest climate journalist.
But when you see what he will do
unbribed
You’ll find you don’t need to.”
Me, I’ve moved from luke-warmer to confused and I want the world to share the causes of my confusion. Call me a dissident, a climate dissident.
JF

Do you know what you call a system where the ELITE agrees on a CONCENSUS, and noone is allowed to go against the CONCENSUS after the fact?
It’s called MARXISM!!!
I hereby urge the whole society to read Dr. Roy Spencers book on the Great Climate blunder. Learn how a whole group of scientists might have misinterpreted data.

So 43 members of the Royal Society have finally proved they have something between their legs! Whilst it gladdens the heart, it still makes me wonder why they took so long!

I do hope the Royal Society will debate the application of the Stefan-Boltzmann’s equations as used in the IPCC reports as against the methods devised by NASA to ensure the safety of the astronauts during the Apollo Moon landings.

I smell a rat.
First I checked out the Royal Soc site
http://royalsociety.org/
There’s no news of this new reflection there, but there’s news of 44 new fellows
elected to the Royal Soc..
Harrabin’s propoganda states “Lobbyists funded by the fossil fuel industry were fighting to undermine that consensus (…)” – which I suspect is a lie, and
follows with this;
“Climate change doubters among the society’s Fellows say that in their anxiety
to support government action, the academies failed to distinguish between “hired guns” and genuine scientific agnostics wanting to explore other potential causes
of climate change. ”
Now that scenerio has skeptics being understanding and forgiving of abuse
from alarmists, which they understood was really intended for the evil oil
lobbyists.
It looks like a work of fiction to me.
Now, “The panel should report in July and the report is to be published in September” tells me the report is already written, and awaiting some
approval.
So I’m expecting a rehashed alarmist report which expresses doubt about
the importance of ludicrously minor details: say, the albedo of seagulls.

Scepticism about CAGW has come a long way since this ‘cargo cult science’ quote from Lord May, who in his desire to please his master forgot what real science is all about:-
The first “climate agnostic” also said he was angry at previous comments from the previous president Lord May who declared: “The debate on climate change is over.”
Lord May was once quoted as saying: “On one hand, you have the entire scientific community and on the other you have a handful of people, half of them crackpots.”
Now ‘the debate’ really is in full spate and the ‘crackpots’ are winning!

“I know it looks like a tiny fraction of the total membership (1,314) but remember we only emailed our friends – we didn’t raise a general petition.”
They only emailed their friends, somehow that gives the appearance of conflict to me, and appearance is everything.

sky says:
I wonder how many Society members are equipped to understand that critical distinction and come to the realization that the much-venerated climate models posit a perpetuum mobile of the second kind.
They do understand eg Makarieva et al 2010 a
A critique of some modern applications of the Carnot heat engine concept: the dissipative heat engine cannot exist
In several recent studies, a heat engine operating on the basis of the Carnot cycle is considered, where the mechanical work performed by the engine is dissipated within the engine at the temperature of the warmer isotherm and the resulting heat is added to the engine together with an external heat input. This internal dissipation is supposed to increase the total heat input to the engine and elevate the amount of mechanical work produced by the engine per cycle. Here it is argued that such a dissipative heat engine violates the laws of thermodynamics. The existing physical models employing the dissipative heat engine concept, in particular the heat engine model of hurricane development, need to be revised.
http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/466/2119/1893

Please can you delete my post as it is factually incorrect Lord May is a Past President.
Please accept my apologies.

Offtopic, but funny. 🙂
Beyond polar bears? Experts look for a new vision of climate change to combat skepticism
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/w-bpb052710.php

Climate change is about more than just polar bears. That is the message from Dr Kate Manzo whose research into climate change communication has been published in Meteorological Applications. The research, which reviews the efforts of journalists, campaigners and politicians to engage the British public with climate change, explores how new ‘visual strategies’ can communicate climate change messages against a backdrop of increased climate scepticism.
“There have been various efforts to put a face on the climate change issue,” said Dr Manzo, from Newcastle University. “Communicators need to move away from the traditional images of polar bears or fear-laden imagery to find new, inspirational motifs to engage people with climate change. My research has uncovered a variety of possibilities – such as windmills as icons of renewable energy – as well as alternatives to documentary photography as the dominant form of climate change communication. Artists and cartoonists are among the producers of inspirational alternatives.”
(…)

They have promised to make the new statement “robust”. I guess that should make it OK then.

Even our greatest, most well-educated minds make grievous errors of consensus. Here is the caption from a portrait of Royal Society Fellows London:
John Cooke, R. A., Royal Academy Portrait. In 1915, the partisans of Piltdown Man gathered to celebrate his arrival. On wall: picture of Charles Darwin FRS. Standing (left to right): F. 0. Barlow (British Museum), G. Elliot Smith FRS, C. Dawson, and A. Smith Woodward FRS. Seated: A. S. Underwood, A. Keith FRS, W. P. Pycraft FRS, E. R. Lankester FRS. Royal Geological Society archives.
http://www.clarku.edu/~piltdown/map_expose/the_pilt_hoax.html

To understand the Royal Society requires a more than superficial understanding of the class system which still holds sway in the UK. The leaders of the Royal Society generally inhabit a certain position in the British class structure which perceives those who did not attend an Oxbridge university as inferior beings; there is a stronger bond between Oxbridge Political Science grads and hard science grads than there is between science grads from other universities. This bond is most evident in politics in the UK – a head-count of millionaire Oxbridge grads on the front benches of the current UK parliament, then a trawl through the backgrounds of the leaders of various industries and occupations shows a high degree of shared experience and values; there are always exceptions, such as Lord Sugar (formerly Sir Alan Sugar) and Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin everything, both remarkably successful self-made men who became entrepreneurs in their teens without bothering with formal education beyond high school.
The Royal Society has usually reflected the common beliefs of the social class of its leading members. The fiasco in the society’s history of their outright rejection, then grudging acceptance which eventually morphed into full approval of Harrison, the village carpenter and his sons, deemed to be working class in the extreme at the time, who defied the class and education barriers to become brilliantly inventive horologists and invented a new technology embodied in their successively more accurate naval chronometers which solved the age old problem of defining longitude exactly while at sea and out of sight of land.
The Royal Society is a bastion of wealth, priveledge and class; it will eventually accede and recognise scientific method and ethics, but not without defending its position vigorously. Those of us whose antecedents fled the UK to carve out new societies in the New World, be they the Americas or other English-speaking nations such as Australia and New Zealand, tend to see the Royal Society in a different light from our English cousins – it is an anachronism, a piece of history, an artifact of society in the UK but not very important in the modern world beyond the confines of old-world priveledge and upper-class cronyism.

The only climate change which is dangerous to the Establishment is the decreasing gullibility of Joe Public in swallowing whole the propaganda that they wish to disseminate for the purposes of control.
Shocking implications for rulers if a society were truly able to discern the truth from propaganda, eh?

Science is inherently sceptical. It is entirely different from denial unless that denial is of opinions and assertions which are unsupported by evidence.
Scepticism is a noble tradition to which we should all aspire:-
Sceptic via latin Scepticus, disciple of Pyrrho of Elis, from Greek Skeptikos, from skeptesthai, to examine;
Philosophical skepticism (from Greek σκέψις – skepsis meaning “enquiry” – UK spelling, scepticism) is both a philosophical school of thought and a method that crosses disciplines and cultures. … One kind of scientific skepticism refers to the critical analysis of claims lacking empirical evidence.
A scientific (or empirical) skeptic is one who questions the reliability of certain kinds of claims by subjecting them to a systematic investigation. The scientific method details the specific process by which this investigation of reality is conducted.

Before the Royal Society or any other institution tries to figure out what the actual climate feedback is, it would be wise to actually go back and review the basic assumptions about the Greenhouse Theory itself, which says that the ability for Greenhouse gasses to hold onto some heat emitted from the surface of the earth, makes the earth warmer than the theoretically calculated one using the Stephan-Boltzmann function.
What if there are actually other materials (solid, liquid or gaseous) that actually can hold onto solar heat energy and then emit that heat at a later stage (at night). This is determined by the heat capacity of that material.
An element with a high heat capacity needs more energy to warm by a certain amount (and will thus take longer), than one with a lower capacity. However once the heat source is no longer applied and if the surrounding environment has a lower temperature, the materials will try to lose the heat to come into equilibrium with its environment. The element with the higher capacity has more energy stored and will need to lose more energy than the lower one. It will thus take longer for the higher one to obtain equilibrium.
Water, which covers 70% of the surface of the earth, has a very high heat capacity compared to dry air (also higher than humid air) (See: by Professor Nasif Nahle).
Even on the moon the ability for the regolith, which covers its surface, to hold on to some heat on the night side (= about 13 earth days), makes it 60 deg Celsius warmer than the Stephan-Boltzmann calculations. (It is even 20 degrees cooler on the day side as new analysis of Apollo 14 and 17 data has shown – see Alan Siddons, Martin Hertzberg & Hans Schreuder Source Link: source
The question to ask is which the likely source of the warmer earth is: The greenhouse gasses (only trace gasses in the earth atmosphere), which can hold onto its heat radiation for a fraction of a second only, before re-emitting or the oceans and the materials on the earth land surface, which have the ability to hold onto that heat for far longer.

When the new revised edition of “Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” gets published will it contain a chapter on the Skeptics or Warmists as being the deluded madness of crowds of scientists?
My money is on the AGW folk being the meat and potatoes of that chapter. Why? Because I meet so many airheads who believe that their own little plan will solve this “problem”. People who think that vegetarianism, banning airplanes, living underground, and on and on and on , will make the place cooler. These same people who believe that the climate of 150 years ago was the best climate imaginable for all things on Earth despite the fact that they didn’t live then.
The Royal Society book by Bill Bryson “Seeing Further” ISBN 978-0-00-730256-7 has a chapter on climate change by a very decent sounding chap called Stephen H. Schneider who bases most of what he says on IPCC 4 and some Bayesian stats. Done before the holes in IPCC 4 began to appear. Is he one of the scientists who will be involved in the review?
Bah!

The whole point is that Global Warming is a political agendum! There is no interest whatsoever in saving the planet other than tokenism & a sop to the genuine greenie eco-stalinists who want to return to the stone age. It’s all about wealth distribution, rich nations tapping the wallet to give to the poor nations, which are run primarily by Marxist Socilaist dictators & or criminals creaming off their share of the aid money doled out to them.
Never in the last 500 million years has CO2 been shown to have driven temperatures on Earth. When CO2 levels were up to 20 times what they are today, no runaway greenhouse effect occurred. So, could somebody on the greenie side please explain “exactly” (no ifs buts or maybes) what mechanism changed all that for a small increase of the current pityfully low level of CO2 in todays atmosphere? Please, I really do want to know like the millions of us out there!

Re education camps, for the publicly employed.
It’s all falling apart.
In a revolution you need the Polity. Unfortunately we are tech societies nowadays.

Yes, Lord May is perfectly happy to use other forms of mind-control instead when the AGW one is becoming tired and ineffective 🙂

I suspect this is only a puff to show how accommodating and rational the RS really is, even in the face of hysterical critics who aren’t *real scientists like Rees and cronies. There will be some sort of whitewash which takes us back to the consensus position and a flurry of concentrated odium academicum in which the agnostics are either booted out or get their coats and leave in disgust. You should not believe a word of what the Beeb and Harrabin say – after all, the “prestigious” Reith Lectures are being done by Rees this year.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/01_january/04/reith.shtml
“His Reith Lectures will explore the role of science as a common culture and the scope and limits of our scientific understanding.
Professor Rees will also discuss how science might further transform our lives in the rest of the 21st century – posing new opportunities, threats and ethical challenges.
And he will consider scenarios, some optimistic, some less so, for a world in which pressures on resources and the environment will become ever more acute. ”
Yeah.

ImranCan says:
May 27, 2010 at 4:46 pm
“The sceptics have been very strident and well-organised…”
Given that scepticism is one of the key ingredients in all science I really wonder if these plonkers actually hear what they themselves sound like when they make this kind of comment ….
Whats the hell is worng with scepticism ??
__________________________________________________________________________
Nothing is wrong with scepticism.
All scientist are supposed to be sceptics so there is something very very wrong with so called scientific bodies that brand sceptics as deniers and worse. To any intelligent person these announcements of “the science is settled” and “there is a consensus” especially in a very young science like Climatology, shouts “We are no longer a scientific organization but a political propaganda outlet for the government.”
Shades of the Soviet Union me thinks.

‘Another review member told me: “The sceptics have been very strident and well-organised.”‘
Well that hackneyed defamatory guff had better not find its way into print. For a start, I represent an organisation of just one: me. Not a red cent from anyone on this. What’s driving me (and, I’m sure, millions of other sceptics) is watching the good name of science being trashed by scammers peddling an idiotic hoax to make a buck. It’s downright sickening. That’s what’s “unprecedented”.
Reading this prelude to the next RS attempt at a formal statement is depressing. It looks like they’re not going to shift much from the utterly childish claptrap they delivered last time, straight from Gore’s abominable song sheet.
http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/science/2009/12/royal-society-statement-on-cli.html

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them”
Whether they incline in favor of next AGWrs´Cancun and face bankruptcy or …

Julian Flood says:
May 27, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Please forward your letter to as many media outlets as you can think of.

Diamond Duke says:
May 28, 2010 at 6:20 am
that uncertainty is not a reason for inaction
Uncertainties? just in your imagination:
Facts about CO2:
CO2 it is not black, but trasparent and invisible
CO2 is the gas you exhale. You exhale about 900 grams a day of CO2
CO2 that you exhale is what plants breath to give you back O2 (oxygen) for you to breath.
CO2 is heavier than air, it doesn´t fly up, up and away CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere, it is the 0.038 per cent of it, or 3.8 parts per ten thousand.
The atmosphere, the air you know, does not have the capacity to “hold” enough heat, it only “saves” 0.001297 joules per cubic centimeter, while water , the sea you know, has 3227 times that capacity (4.186 joules).
Would you warm your feet with a bottle filled with air or filled with hot water?
The so called “Greenhouse effect” does not exist, see:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/28018819/Greenhouse-Niels-Bohr
But if you have been cheated to the core and still believe in it, think the following:
Svante Arrhenius, the guy of the greenhouse effect, said he thought CO2 acted as the “window panes” of a green-house, but as its concentration in atmosphere it is just 3.8 per ten thousand, you would have a greenhouse with 3.8 window panes and 9996.2 empty holes

I would rather not be termed a “climate agnostic” or even an “AGW agnostic”. I believe the science has been so distorted with political overtones that the science is warped or nonexistent. The term “agnostic” gives opportunity for the opposition to simply say: “Well, come–let us educate (or convert) you”.
As I’ve stated in prior posts, I would rather be called a “climate realist”–someone who takes the anti-intellectual, anti-political, anti-fadist and even anti-populist position based on real, unadulterated science (unfortunately the web site “Real Climate” has helped to obfuscate the meaning of “real” in this context, much the same way the movement changed their slogan from “Global Warming” to “Climate Change” once the former became an obvious embarrassment, while the latter lets them embrace the status quo (these people have no scruples or shame)).

This is the best news I’ve heard out of the Royal Society in years. I could not imagine how the RS could have been so sure of itself regarding Co2 and climate change. I used to believe in AGW, but I became a climate skeptic/denier from reading the UN IPCC Ar4 report and the Royal Society website covering climate change. I had more faith in the opinions of the RS than the IPCC but I figured I must have misread the Royal Society climate change pages because they provided so much evidence which was contrary to AGW. Yet the RS sided with AGW, it made no sense to me. So perhaps I did not misread the RS pages after all, and now they are going to end up fighting over it. Welcome to the club.

Is it too a hard choice to choose between Politicians’ Invented Science and Science?.
BTW, If Nikola Tesla could be alive again, he should have died once more by laughing watching those silly “Wind-Farms”.

“This is a very serious challenge to the way the society operates,” I was told. “In the past we have been able to give advice to governments as a society without having to seek consensus of all the members.
Sooooo… the consensus of Scientific Societies could really just be a consensus of non-consensus views?
Well.. I guess we knew that. It’s fun knowing things 10 years before everyone else…

I usually refer to myself as a “climate change heretic,” as I’m firmly opposed to the Church of Infinite Warming and their theological basis for disaster!!
Skeptic? Sure, I paid for that title with my degrees. Denier? I don’t deny anything, I just say “show me the data and prove it.”
Good for the Brits, I wonder how they overcome the influence of Mad Prince Charlie?

I thought the Royal Society’s motto includes the translated words “on no one’s word.”

“‘Another review member told me: “The skeptics have been very strident and well-organized.”‘
I thought that was the funniest comment too.
I suppose it can look that way to them, but then, they shouldn’t make it so easy. Which they do.
The biggest hurdle they have to get over is still the original hurdle.
Convincing people that weathermen can predict the future.

They are about to write down the epitaph on UK’s tombstone.
God save the EU!

Julian Flood
“Is there not a twitch from the deep-down nosiness that every reporter needs if he is to be anything other than a mouthpiece for other people’s press releases?”
The problem for the Press is that they are no longer profitable, as year on year their advertising income falls. Independence and truth with regard to everything must needs be sacrificed in order to keep the revenue streams running, and when that means taking the paymaster’s line that is what they do, willy -nilly.
The reporter at the sharp end cannot question too closely lest that mouthpiece refuses to be interviewed in the future, and thus his teeth are drawn.
The Government takes our taxes and brainwashes our children through shameless manipulation of the education system and brainwashes us by big bucks advertising in the cash-strapped Press.
The three main parties in the recent General Election unbelievably ran a four week campaign without reference to the disastrous financial circumstances we were, and remain, in.
The Press and the TV companies colluded in this for fear of reprisals from the government to come. What a shameful state of affairs!
On the plus side we are, however, well informed on celebrity sexual arrangements, the state of Footballers metatarsals, and which caterwauling recording artist is top of the heap. God help us!

“‘Another review member told me: “The skeptics have been very strident and well-organized.”‘
Organization is a byproduct of truth.

And while it’s still there, here is the 2005 document
http://royalsociety.org/Climate-change-controversies/

Climate change controversies
The Royal Society has produced this overview of the current state of scientific understanding of climate change to help non-experts better understand some of the debates in this complex area of science.
This is not intended to provide exhaustive answers to every contentious argument that has been put forward by those who seek to distort and undermine the science of climate change and deny the seriousness of the potential consequences of global warming. Instead, the Society – as the UK’s national academy of science – responds here to eight key arguments that are currently in circulation by setting out, in simple terms, where the weight of scientific evidence lies.

“”” Ian H says:
May 28, 2010 at 12:39 am
George E. Smith said ”
“I have never experienced any cloud at any height that warmed up the surface in the shadow zone, when it passes in front of the sun; it ALWAYS cools; no matter what.”
And yet cloudy nights are still a lot warmer than clear ones. “””
“”” And yet cloudy nights are still a lot warmer than clear ones. “””
“”” And yet WARMER nights are still a lot CLOUDIER than COLD ones. “””
So which is it Ian ? Are the clouds the reaon for the warmth; or is it that the warmth (and humidity) are the reasons for the clouds. And the warmer it is at the surface, the higher the water vapor has to rise before it reaches the dew point and forms clouds; so the warmer teh surface is the higher the clouds form.
You could do a test on some warm balmy (cloudless day), if clouds start to form late in the day. Start taking the temperature; and keep taking it throughout the night as those clouds form and then tell us whether the temperature rises during the night; or whether it falls.
And for the record I DO BELIEVE THAT CLOUDS SLOW THE EXIT OF LWIR RADIATION.
In fact if you reread my post about the clouds and altitude, you will find this part:-
“”” Now the rest of the ground outside the shadow zone, of course continues in its cloud free state; so its temperature is unaffected by the cloud; as far as solar blockage; BUT the cloud does block a small amount of the LWIR emitted from each surface element outside the shadow zone; which in this example is most of the surface.
So the cloud now intercepts a small fraction of the LWIR surface emission from everywhere outide the shadow zone; and of course at a different oblique angle for each location; so one might need to integrate all of those small contributions to get the total for the rest of the surface outside the shadow zone. “””
That’s the part where I acknowledge that the cloud reacts to LWIR from everywhere outside the shadow zone, to absorb LWIR, and subsequently that slightly warmed blob of atmosphere that is the cloud will itself radiate LWIR back towards the earth (and of course out towards space as well; about half in each direction). And nowhere did I say or intimate, that this process suddenly stops at sunset.
I’m going to assume that you understand how black body radiation works; and that earth radiation at least approximates BB radiation (specially from the oceans which after all are only about 73% of the total surface). Actually the BB result defines a limit envelope within which the real emission must be bounded by the spectral emissiviies of the various surface materials.
Bottom line is that emission is a highly non-linear process; the total energy emitted still varies about as the fourth power of the surface Temperature (K) but the emission spectrum PEAK emittance (Watts/metresquared/micron of bandwidth) varies as the FIFTH POWER of that temperature; and it is that spectral peak region that happens to fall in the ATMOSPHERIC WINDOW between water bands (as well as the CO2 15 micron band)
So what does that mean. It means that by far the most efficient escape of energy and cooling of the earth takes place in the daytime; AT THE TIMES AND PLACES WHERE THE TEMPERATURE IS HIGHEST. The Earth doesn’t lose energy (much) at night; it loses it BIG TIME, in the heat of the day.
So the energy loss during the daytime far outweighs the slower cooling on cloudy nights; and those clouds during the day inhibit a lot moreINCOMING solar energy, than they stop at night.
And reread that part where after I point out that it ALWAYS is colder in the shadow zone (dayitme); and that is true for the shadow zone of every piece of cloud on the day side; all the way up to total dayside cloud cover (which I don’t think ever actually occurs).
So before somebody jumps on me; and says I didn’t compute the downward radiation from the cloud; I DON’T HAVE TO because it is irrelevent; the shadow zone is always cooled no matter how large that shadow zone grows; and that is blockage of incoming solar energy; the rest of it is simply redistribution of some of the energy that is already there.
NOTE: The part of the incoming solar energy that the cloud absorbs (50 % of 50 % in my sample cloud) ends up warming the atmosphere too. It is a NEGATIVE feedback (well cooling) effect; in that it is blocked from the ground; but a positive (or warming) effect; in that that warmer chunk of atmopshere subsequently re-radiates; both towards the ground, and towards space.
Does it sink in; if the cloud wasn’t there to block it, it would reach the ground (or ocean) directly and heat the ground (or get stored deeply in the ocean); but since the cloud absorbed it, and got warmer; it ends up being re-radiated (much of it) BUT in that re-radiation; only half of it heads towards the ground. The rest heads for escape to space (wiht some reabsorption by GHG); so much of the downward radiation from the cloud i actually energy that could have reached the surface directly as solar spectrum energy that is more efficient at warming the surface. Why do I say it is more efficient? Because the LWIR spectrum downward emission, gets mostly absorbed in the top ten microns of the oceans; and does not go deep; and when it warms that thin surface film it causes prompt evaporation that transports massive amounts of water vapor, AND LATENT HEAT, into the upper atmosphere.
So the real net surface heating of downward LWIR is much reduced by evaporation.
So is it warmer at night because of the clouds; or are those clouds there because it was warmer during the late day time; we know for sure it WAS warmer before sundown; because it DOES cool down during the night; clouds or no clouds.
And yes I fully understand that arid deserts get cold very fast at night.

…and my fear is that the society may become paralysed on this issue.
Of course that’s a fear when you pose a poorly constructed political question to a scientific body. The best answer is no answer in such cases.

“”” Joel Shore says:
May 27, 2010 at 7:18 pm
George E Smith says:
So this has generated the legend of low clouds causing negative feedback cooling while high clouds cause positive feedback heating of the surface. That is the standard gospel.
Actually, you are misusing the terminology somewhat: The standard picture is that an increase in low clouds will generally cause cooling in net and an increase in high clouds will generally cause warming in net. However, it is not always straightforward how cloudiness will change in a warming world. (There is more evaporation but only such that relative humidity is expected to remain approximately constant.) Hence, whether low clouds cause a positive or negative feedback depends on whether they decrease or increase, respectively in a warming world. And, similarly whether high clouds cause a positive or negative feedback depends on whether they increase or decrease, respectively in a warming world.
Well of course that defies both common sense and everyday observation. If you are standing out in the sun with a cloud near the sun direction at any altitude; and that cloud then moves across in front of the sun; then observation says that it ALWAYS cools down in the shadow zone.
Not if you happen to be on the half of the planet that is experiencing the phenomenon that we call “night”. “”
Well Joel, I always enjoy your inputs. It would be extremely enjoyable to read your point by point “criticism” of the simple “mental exercise” situation I offered.
It is not helpful to simply re-introduce extraneous materials from some other points of view that do not adress any of the issues pointed out in my example; well unless you can point out to us why that invalidates any parts of my analysis.
I particularly enjoyed this input:-
“”” Well of course that defies both common sense and everyday observation. If you are standing out in the sun with a cloud near the sun direction at any altitude; and that cloud then moves across in front of the sun; then observation says that it ALWAYS cools down in the shadow zone. (my statement)
Not if you happen to be on the half of the planet that is experiencing the phenomenon that we call “night”.
(your response).
Now Joel, try to keep it simple; we aren’t too bright here or we might become Climatologers too. Where (on the surface of the earth) would fall THE SHADOW ZONE formed by the sun shining on a cloud that is on THE NIGHT SIDE

Very important read;
“Thanks to Siddons and his co-authors of ‘A Greenhouse Effect on the Moon,’ the world now has scientific evidence to show the greenhouse gas theory (GHG) was junk all along.”
here;
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5783&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ClimaterealistsNewsBlog+%28ClimateRealists+News+Blog%29

Go back to the early days of the Royal Society and you will see its history is not great. it was driven by the politics of the day to obtain funding.
They wrote Robert Hooke out of history after depending on him for years.
Thank goodness if there are still some independent minded questioning members – if so the spirit of Hooke lives on

Maybe someone can explain this to me. The IPCC and others say the the climate is dominated by positive feedbacks. If there are more positive feedbacks than negative then the climate change would eventually become unidirectional. In other words, in the earth past why have there been periods of cooling? If increasing temperature begets more warming there could be no ice ages…unless the external forcing was much greater than internal I guess.

4 says:
May 28, 2010 at 3:38 pm
See my post at May 28, 2010 at 1:22 am.

Jordan says:
May 28, 2010 at 3:26 pm
sky says:
May 27, 2010 at 5:17 pm
There are real objections to be made about how the climate modelers evaluate and utilize feedback, but this isn’t one. See my post at May 28, 2010 at 1:22 am.

Pascvaks says:
May 28, 2010 at 8:11 am
“Yet, what has their “Official” position been? All that is knowable on Global Warming and Climate Change is known! Anyone who disagrees is a fool! They, as a Society, are beneath contempt. Their Royal Charter should be burned. The Society should be disbanded.”
Absolutely. The damage to science may well be irreparable, whatever they come up with. Even so, an unconditional mea culpa may be a step in the right direction.

The Royal Society is a registered charity and receives its funding from a variety of sources, by far the greatest of which is a goverment grant.
nuff said

I heard Roger interview an FRS yesterday: he asked some genuinely searching questions – which has pretty pathetic answers.
The Telegraph also reported it today.
To which I wrote:
Dear Sir,
What a timid bunch of scientists make up the Royal Society. The case for man-made climate change has been dead and buried for a decade, but they are behaving as if they are in the Monty Python ‘dead parrot sketch’.
Yours faithfully,

Atheist…Agnostic… These are words that describe religious belief. How appropriate that they are no in play in AGW context.

Jordan says:

Joel Shore does’nt understand the relationship between feedback and energy conservation. If he is correct (that the SB response can be offset and therefore amplified by positive feedback) he will surely be able to develop his thinking into a demonstration of amplification by temperature resonance (should be possible if he is correct).

I’m not clear why resonance is relevant here. Usually resonance occurs because there is a natural frequency at which a system wants to absorb energy so that if you send energy close to that frequency, you get a large response from the system…such as occurs on a swing.
I am also not sure what you think the relationship between feedback and energy conservation is, but a positive feedback, particularly in the sense that it is meant in climate science, does not violate energy conservation. In fact, the equations used in all the various climate models from the most simplistic to the most complex explicitly invoke energy conservation.
What a positive feedback means is that as the earth warms in response to the initial radiative perturbation (whether due to an increase in greenhouse gases, an increase in solar luminosity, or something else), changes occur that slow the recovery to radiative balance so that it takes a larger increase in temperature to restore radiative balance than would be predicted by the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation considering only the original radiative effect. Such changes can be, for example, an increase in water vapor in the atmosphere, which itself has a radiative effect.

George E. Smith says:
June 1, 2010 at 11:02 am
“….I don’t have any interest in dumping on Joel. I read pretty much all that he posts; and I do follow up most of his leads (if I can).
But he does tend to exhibit, a characteristic; that I encounter a lot with the AGW proponents (I’m sure they aren’t alone)…”
_______________________________________________________________________
No this is not a characteristic seen only in AGW proponents. Farmers have been dealing with it from the USDA and WTO for several years too.
This is a similar type of manipulation in a more structured setting:
“In the USDA Friday March 18-19 meetings that were held for Traceability they have facilitators at each table. Now notice in these docs that each topic discussion is timed and then the groups move to another topic. No group knows what the other is saying. They did this in all the other NAIS sessions. It is highly manipulative and I highly doubt these people know who attend know what is going on other then the believers. What the USDA is using is the Hegelian dialectic to get a predetermined consensus. This process was designed by George Wilhelm Hegel, a transformational Marxist
Here is how it works: A diverse group of people ( Farm Bureau, American Horse Council, VETS ( believers (thesis) and unbelievers (antithesis) gather in a facilitated meeting (USDA and with a trained facilitator/teacher/group leader/change agent) using group dynamics (Peer pressure) to discuss a social issue (NAIS/Traceability) and reach a pre-determined outcome (consensus, compromise, or Systhesis)
To understand it more (typing the HTTP http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/brainwashing/dialectic.htm ) Read it all and you will see that the very groups we know use the ‘Process’ to sway our thinking. Learn and understand it. The Delphi technique ( type in Http http://www.learn-usa.com/transformation_process/acf001.htm) is based on the Hegelian principle and there is ways to break this up but you must know how to recognize when the Delphi/Hegelian principle is being used.(type in the Http http://www.learn-usa.com/transformation_process/acf002.htm ) “ Comment gisela — April 6, 2010 http://nonais.org/2010/04/01/nais-is-back/#comment-1754066

“”” Joel Shore says:
June 1, 2010 at 2:40 pm
George E Smith says:
……………
………………Then he resorted to “appeal to authority” citing Professor Lindzen and some research of his; but Joel never pointed to just how and why Lindzen’s work (which I haven’t read) refuted points of my argument. “””‘
Well, I hardly think that it is extraneous to point out that an argument that looks at the total radiative effects of clouds has to consider the fact that the sun is not always present. I haven’t thought enough about your argument to know what else might be wrong with it…but that is certainly something that is.
As for “appeal to authority”:
(1) There seems to be a strange viewpoint among many on this website that because authorities are not infallible, it is therefore useless to consider their opinion and, in particular, that their own opinion deserves to be accorded at least as much weight as the opinion of a respected scientific authority. I happen to find this attitude strange and, frankly, rather arrogant. Scientific authorities in a field are authorities because they have thought about these issues a lot more than you and have probably acquainted themselves with the literature (and the basic textbooks) much better than you have. “””
Well Joel; perhaps you should distinguish between my criticism of “appeal to authority” and your quite unwarranted conclusion that ergo; I must be dismissing that authority. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t in any way dismiss what Professor Lindzen or any other recognized expert have to say on any of these matters; and suggest that “maybe I know better.” I have never said or implied that. In fact I have almost no knowledge whatsoever as to Lindzen’s specific teachings on climate; never read anything; except for things of his that Anthony has posted here.
That makes it even less helpful in understanding your criticism of my sketchings, without ever pointing out just where you feel that Professor Lindzen is in disagreement with something I have said.
I presented an argument; not for the entirety of reported climate science; but for a very simple to understand single aspect of the matter. Namely the common observation that two nearby locations; one in a cloud shadow (any cloud shadow) and the other out of that shadow that argued from that observation and some simple optical geometry reasoning, that the subsidiary warming of the surface by LWIR radiation from cloud regions due to the cloud having captured surface emissions; never makes up for the loss of direct heating due to the cloud shadowing of the sun.
I’m happy to read of any credible observation of the reverse being true; or of a particular cloud type for which that has been observed to be not true; or of any argument from Professor Lindzen or any other climate science authority which addresses that phenomenon.
But it isn’t helpful to simply say to me:- “Steven Hawking or Michio Kaku know more physics than you do.” and not offer how they would refute my reasoning.
As to this: “”” (2) In the case of Lindzen, it is not just that he is an authority but that he is one of the few authorities who agrees with you on the larger issue (that AGW is no big deal) but who nonetheless still seems to have concluded that the conventional wisdom that high clouds have a net warming effect is correct…And, in fact, he has based a hypothesis of why he thinks AGW is no big deal on this being the case. That, I think, should give you pause. “””
As I have pointed out I’m not conversant with the whole of climate science literature. For one thing; I have an actual job to do; so I can only read so much in spare time. So in particular I’m not conversant with Lindzen’s writings; and I take his authority and credibility simply on his reputation and what i have seen od his adresses. Also I have no free access to most of the climate science literature which is largely behind pay walls.
So the argument I have often seen in print as to why high clouds “warm the surface” has been that they are thin clouds, and don’t block much sunlight; yet they reradiate LWIR from the ground.
So it should be trivial to place two thermometers; one in the shadow of such a cloud; and the other out of the shadow. You’ll get no argument from me that the high thin cloud doesn’t block much sunlight; and the higher the cloud, the thinner it is and the less sunlight it blocks so the surface warms even more. And if the cloud is high enough it will almost be invisible, and it will block very little sunlight; so there will be almost as much sun in the shadow as out of the shadow. The thermometers will show whether the LWIR re-radiation ever replaces the lost solar insolation.
It would be nice if you can give a reliable peer reviewed paper citation from a reputationally accredited expert on research results that prove that the clouds are the direct cause of the observed warming; and are not in fact caused by the warming itself.
I’m familiar in some very primitive way; with the concept of a warmed surface leading to evaporation that rises in the atmosphere until the Temperature relapse rate gets the Temperature down to the dew point and clouds form. I understand to some extent; how higher surface temperatures and lower relative humidity will tend to delay the onset of cloud formation until colder lower density higher atmospheric conditions prevail.
What I have no understanding of, is how clouds can form at great heights without first having water evaporated from the ground because of the ground being warmer and moister.
I guess if it can be observed in the Arctic; that warm moist air moving into a colder region can give rise to clouds while warming the local surface; surely it can be observed elsewhere too.
No Joel; I do not challenge any of the authorities you want to name; as I am not even able to read most of their works; let alone understand them.
But if you choose to cite them as authorities; please try to link that to your criticism of my reasoning; instead of simply saying they know more than I do; which conclusion I am more than ready to accept.
It would be even more enjoyable, if you would refute my arguments with your own reasonings, since this does appear to be your field of expertise, and certainly not mine.

George E Smith says:

It would be even more enjoyable, if you would refute my arguments with your own reasonings, since this does appear to be your field of expertise, and certainly not mine.

Well, it is not mine either…What I have studied in this field has been haphazardly and informally in my free time. But, I did make what I think is a pretty fundamental point (although for reasons that I cannot fathom, you seem to think it is “extraneous”): Namely that your argument obviously fails for clouds that are on the night side of the earth. Such clouds clearly will have no effect on the incoming shortwave radiation…because there ain’t any but will have an effect on the outgoing longwave radiation. So, even if your argument about what happens on the day side of the earth is correct (and I haven’t really thought about whether it is or not), it would not demonstrate that high cloud necessarily causes net cooling.
And, I have pointed out another problem with your argument: You are fundamentally misusing the terms “positive feedback” and “negative feedback” in reference to high and low clouds because you are confusing two different issues: What effect an increase in certain types of clouds has on the radiative balance and whether those given cloud types are expected to increase or decrease with warming. Hence, your notion that low clouds are a “negative feedback” and high clouds are a “positive feedback” are fundamentally mistaken. In fact, it is my impression that most of the climate models predict that low clouds are a positive feedback (i.e., that there will be a decrease in low clouds with warming and hence this will produce additional warming), although this is something that Roy Spencer disputes. I am not sure what the models predict for high clouds although I believe that the general feeling is that it is the effect on low clouds that is more uncertain.
By the way, having gone back and read through your argument again, I also realize that you also seem to be completely missing a rather fundamental piece of physics in your discussion: namely, you do not seem to understand why it is said that high clouds tends to have a greater effect on the longwave radiation. The reason is that these clouds absorb radiation from the ground and then (re-)emit radiation; however, the rate of emission is governed by the temperature (i.e., it increases with temperature like T^4) and hence the higher clouds, which are colder because of their height, cause less radiation to be emitted back out into space. (It is much more useful, by the way, to consider the radiative balance between the earth-atmosphere system and space than it is to consider the radiative balance at the earth’s surface because the temperature at the surface is not fundamentally controlled by the radiative balance at the surface…Convection and evaporation / condensation play a very large role. So, a view focused solely on what is happening radiatively at the surface can lead you astray.)
Finally, I should note that just because people sometimes simplify things for the purposes of discussion does not mean that those things are actually studied in such a simplistic manner. In particular, climate scientists understand that both the thickness and the height of the clouds matter and there is a nice figure somewhere in the conference proceedings “Clouds in the Perturbed Climate System” that attempts (in a still oversimplified way) to show the radiative effect of clouds as a function of BOTH their height and thickness. So, rather than get all stressed out about the fact that you found one paper that had some simplified graph of the effect of clouds simply as a function of their height, you need to understand that it is understood that the real world is actually more complicated than that.
This all goes back to my original point that one needs to approach a field of science that you are not intimately involved in with a degree of humility rather than making arguments that seem to be based on multiple misunderstandings of some of the basic ideas.

Well Joel, you truly are a jewel. You come as close as you can, without saying it in so many words; that I am arrogant, because I reject the works of experts in the filed who know far more than I do, and know much betetr text books than mine.
So then you tell us that; well you didn’t actually follow my argument; and so you don’t really know whether it is correct or not. And now you say that this isn’t even your field either; just some hobby interest that you dabble with in your free time.
Well so who is it that is arrogant ? Is this some new kind of National communicable disease? The State of Arizona passes a law that essentially says; whatever the Federal Statute signed into law in 1940 regarding non US citizens in America by Franklin Roosevelt; the darling of the left; as to the requirements for all legal resident non citizens to permanently carry on their persons, proof of legal residency status; to be produced on demand to any government official; that requirement shall now also be Arizona State Law.
so everybody has a conniptioon fit. President Obama calls it “misguided”; his radical activist AG Eric Holder says the justice depoartment will study the situation for Constitutionality; the Czarina od Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano; the Nation’s last line of defense, says it is a bad law. And not one of those Radical lefties has even read the law; it’s only ten pages; and does exactly nothing that Roosevelt’s Federal Law; that all three of those clowns took an oath to uphold, does not do.
So Joel criticises my Arrogant Optical analysis; which he has not followed and does not understand; yet he is sure that it isd wrong; because well all of his AGW heroes from the IPCC on down disagree with me; but he doesn’t know in what way; since he doesn’t understand my argument.
No it is not a complete theory of cloud climatology; and as Sky points out I do not adress all the heat transfer mechanisms of the atmosphere including evaporation; I didn’t intend to ; just the optical coupling issue; which doesn’t mean I ignore the issues sky raises; they just aren’t a part of this particular element.
Then of course we all know that by far the most Robust part of Climate Science and the computerized climate models the GCMs if you will, is the precision and completelness with which they address the role of clouds in climate. Yes it is not like that flaky near ground Temperature anomaly crap that Anthony has shone the spotlight on; you know the stuff that Hansen roared in front of the Congress more than 20 years ago; about all the warming that is supposed to happen by 2100; none of which (almost has yet shown up; and of course we know that CO2 has been rising inexorably at about 1.5 ppm per year, and the Temperature faithfully follows the log of the CO2, so considerably more than that 20% of Hansen’s warming, should already have occurred since the logarithmic process gradually slow down with time; so the big changes happen early. No, that part of the models is a big joke; but the cloud modelling; well that is the epitome of physical theoretical modelling; the crown jewel of climate science, and Joel’s Expert cadre.
So far be it from me to offer a simple analysis; of part of the most robust aspect of climate modelling; the treatment of clouds.
You shouldn’t have any trouble following it Joel; it is nothing more nor less than the simple optical coupling problem that is to be found in any common Opto-Coupler; well we are somewhat bipolar on that and some times we refer to them as Opto-Isolators instead.
Well actually they are supposed to Optically couple signals; either analog; or digital; while at the same time, electrically isolate two parts of a circuit.
So on one side you have an LED driven by a current signal to emit light proportional to the drive current. On the other side you have a receiving Photo-detector, that absorbs some of the light and generates a photo-current proportional to the received light. And the two are packaged in a single device separated by an electrical insulating; but light conducting medium capable of operating with perhaps 1500 -2500 Volts Electrical Potential difference between the input an output; but actually able to endure short discharge spikes of perhaps 15 to 25 kV.
So the Earth surface is the equivalent of the LED; and it is powered by the sun which heats it, so that it can emit roughly Black body thermal radiation proportional to the 4th power of the Temperature; and emit that in a Lambertian Radiation pattern.
Well of course neither the LED, nor the earth is truly a Lambertian radiator; but either one of them is so close to that; that nobody would ever bother to assume otherwise. The black body on the other hand Truly is a Lambertian radiator; but then the earth is only an approximation to that.
The photo detector is of course our cloud.
so the optical coupling problem is quite trivial; you have a circular disk uniformly emitting radiation in a Lambertian pattern from a source of radius (R1), and co-axially with that at some separation (d), you have a uniformly absoirbing disk of radius (R2); which can be greater than R1 or less; or even equal.
Well you see they are not really point sources or detectros; so you have light from any point on the LED heading off at some angle to the normal, until it strikes the photo-detector. Of course the Irradiance on the photodetector falls as Cos^4 of the off axis angle; that is pretty obvious almost by inspection.
So it’s a trivial Integral Calculus problem to solve for the coupled energy. You need to integrate over R from zero to R1, then again over R from zero to R2, and then twice more over (theta and phi) to cover the range of possible ray angles. Pretty simple actually; if you are curious, Joel you migh want to try your hand at it. Maybe Mike can give you a hand; he’s a Mathematician.
I did it over 35 years ago, in fact an Applications Engineer from Hewlett Packard, and I did it together, although I worked for a competitive company. When I say together; we both did it independently and then compared notes. The order of the integrations makes a huge difference to the difficulty of the problem Joel; so watch out that you choose the right sequence to do the four integrals. I have to fess up, that Hans selected a better order than I did, and his solution was much cleaner than mine; but then I turned the table on him; and showed him, that his solution equation; which was absolutely correct, was nevertheless, a very bad computing equation, because it had on the denominator, a difference of two nearly equal numbers, which could lead to high computation errors. I showed him how to derive a much more sanitary expression that eliminated the difference of near equal numbers, and replaced it with the sum of the same two numbers; but on the top of the expression. You’ll see that when you get that far Joel.
And then you will have an exact geometric expression for the coupling from ground to cloud, and also from cloud bacxk to ground. It’s a little different from the Optocoupler case, because one would take the diameter of the earth as infinite compared to a finite cloud size. It’s an important problem, because you want to make both the LED and the detector large in diameter compared to the spacing to increase the optical coupling. Unfortunately those two conductive surfaces also comprise a capacitor, so there is undesirable direct capacitive coupling from one side to the other; so that dictates towards small emitter and detector, and a long gap spacing; whcih you also want for high Voltage break down. Well the cloud height may affect Lightning strikes; but we can ignore that for the simple warming case.
Maybe I forgot to tell you Joel, that I am an expert on Optocoupler design and manufacturing. Started in earnest around 1970; and did it solidly for 12 years before going on to other things; but then coming back to it when I went to HP myself. Haven’t done any of that for the last decade or so; but the results fall right into use when figuring out the optics of clouds.
I somehow doubt that you will find the answer to that quadruple integral in any climate science text book Joel; not even the ones written by your AGW heroes.
But I’m not knocking them; that would be arrogant; since they are recognised as being experts on modelling of clouds.
And no Joel; I do not miss the point that at night, without the sun, the earth cools at a slower rate if there are clouds; well it cools more slowly even if there are not clouds, but a more humid atmosphere; the H2O in the atmosphere simply puts the CO2 to shame; either with or without clouds.
And if it is warmer but less humid; then those clouds will form at a higher altitude; and create the illusion that they are causing the warmer surface.
The point is Joel, from the Trenberth energy budget model, we can say that the night side cooling rate on average, in W/m^2 is only about 1/4 of the dayside peak solar input; and the resulting higher daytime surface Temperatures result in much faster cooling than the lower nightside Temperatures. In the daytime, those same clouds will also slow the cooling rate; but the sun blocking of incoming energy will outweigh any cooling slowdown. The fact is it still cools at night; cloud or no cloud.
And I’d still like to see that peer reviewed paper, that proves that the high clouds are the cause of the warmer surface Temperatures; and NOT the result of those warmer surface temperatures (along with a moisture source).
Good luck with your integral Calculus Joel; somebody on another thread said I couldn’t do integrals; so maybe you should try this one Joel.

The synopsis seems to be that regardless, pretty much, of the height of the cloud standing underneath it in it’s daytime shadow will always make things cooler.
At night time there is no shadow so it feels much the same wherever you are because it’s the humidity of the air that carries heat.
Sounds reasonable to me.

Well Joel; or course I was being facetious; even sarcastic, when I suggested that cloud modelling is the most robust part of climate science.
Most of the literature; pro and con, would argue that it is the most poorly understood , and modelled part of climate science. Some go a bit overboard, and claim that water vapor isn’t considered in the GCMs; which of course isn’t true; but that doesn’t mean it is modelled correctly; but even IPCC fans say cloud modelling leaves a lot to be desired.
But despite that, you believe it is more fruitful for even more people to simply waste time and effort playing with standard deviations and linear trend lines, trying to find the magic set of their favorite numbers to prove that we are in a runaway warming trend.
I would think, that the prudent scientist; specially ones who seek peer recognition; would address the least understood parts. You know on an exam paper, it is always easier to get the first 20% of the available marks, than the last 20%; so one should always do the required amount of questions; even at the cost of not completing all of them. Don’t forget to tell your students that.
So a beginning Physicist should start out his career by working on gravitation; because that is well understood by the peer group, who will then appreciate his non-contributory utterances. Perish the thought he should work on something less well understood to actually make a contribution to knowledge.
So you don’t think surface emission has much to do with the radiative balance of earth’s energy.
By your own admission; you have stated that high clouds warm the planet more; and the higher the cloud, the more warming they cause. At the highest elevations, where the air density is lowest and the moisture content even lower, and other GHG molecules even less abundant; any cloud that exists there, will of course capture less and less radiation from the surface; or for that matter from re-emission from lower hotter atmosphere layers.
Now the radiant emittance from the surface is quite independent of the presence of that high cloud. If the surface is at +60 deg C during the desert day; or maybe 288 K for a ho hum general earth location; the surface emittance is quite independent of that cloud. But the amount of that LWIR radiation from the surface that is intercepted by that cloud is very much dependent on that cloud; as you have pointed out; because only something a bit more than half of that captured energy will be radiated to space; and slightly less than half; will be returned to the earth surface. With each subsequent GHG capture, a further division by two will occur.
Now the big mystery Joel; and here is where your reasoning powers would really help, is this. The surface is still emitting the same amount; but the ever higher cloud is absorbing and radiating to space, an ever diminishing amount, as cloud height increases. So what the hell happens to all the rest of that surface emitted radiation that doesn’t change with cloud height ?
Is there any chance at all Joel, that all of that surface emitted radiation that is not captured by GHG or your high cloud, simply passes on by the cloud and is lost to space, in a spectrum that is characteristic of the hotter surface temperature ? I’m sure the laws of Physics won’t simply allow that energy to simply vanish; isn’t that the first or zeroth law.
I’m trying hard to understand how a cloud that intercepts an ever diminishing amount of radiant energy, and reradiates to space about half of it, somehow prevents the rest of the non-captured energy from escaping.
Yes I know radiation is not the only cooling mechanism so don’t go there; but it is the final cooling mechanism since we don’t have many convective or conductive paths to the rest of the Universe. But if you think that somehow the earth cools by suddenly having some stratospheric layer of the atmosphere; where mean free paths and times exceed the lifetime of excited states, so that GHGs start to spontaneously decay; and in some supernova of radiant emission they dump the earth’s extra heat to space; somehow that doesn’t work.
The hottest desert surfaces at Temperatures of +60 deg C or higher; are the most efficient radiating bodies that are ridding the planet of it’s excess thermal energy. And they do so at spectrally shifted wavelengths where the influence of GHG like CO2 are somewhat diminished compared to 288 K average radiating surfaces.
Given the poor state of cloud modelling results; it seems to me that is where useful advances can be made.
You know Optics (geometrical) is one branch of Physics where it is hardest to make new progress, since the art goes back hundreds of years.
I once had to defend the Federal Government of the USA; specifically the Department of the Army, and the US Post Office, as an optical expert witness on a patent infringement lawsuit. I actually found pertinent prior art going back to the region around 1610; 400 years ago; some guy by the name of Johannes Keppler; later there was a newcomer by the name of Huygens who discovered some new stuff around 1700; only 310 years ago.
The late Warren J. Smith; a true giant in Optical theory and design; once told me, that it was his opinion that there were virtually NO valid lens design patents in the US patent office; because there was so much prior art; stuff so ancient that no newcomer would find anything new to discover in that field.
When Moses descended from Mt Sainai, with the ten commandments he actually had another tablet with some facts of Optical design enscribed on it.
One of those ancient truths was the fact that for a spherical imaging surface; reflector or refractive; there are only three cases of a spherical surface forming an extended image having zero spherical aberration. In every other situation, a spherical surface produces spherical aberration; which is why many astronomical telescopes employ parabolic mirrors for imaging of stars.
All three of those magic situations also have zero coma for off axis images; so they are also Aplanatic; the only three cases of Aplanatism for a single spherical surface. Two of the three also produce zero astigmatism, so they are Anastigmatic as well as Aplanatic.
One of the three is a trivial degenerate case; the object and image coincide on the surface itself; so it actually produces no Optical image magnification at all, and is usually avoided since images coincident with surfaces will inevitably be contaminated by dust or scratches on the surface, which will be painfully obvious to an observer. No matter, I have seen useful applications for that configuration; even used them. That case does contribute to the Petzval Sum, which is a fundamental Optical property that is important in every lens design and even for things as exotic as the magnetic lenses of the Large Hadron Collider. Well they may refer to it as “strong focussing”, but it is simply Petzval sum control.
The object and image, can also be coincident at the center of curvature of the surface of an immersion lens; where the object is inside the lens material. This case is Aplanatic; but not Anastigmatic; in fact it produces the maximum amount of astigmatism for s single spherical surface. It has a lateral magnification (angular) equal to the refractive index; but it is a very dangerous case; to be avoided; as many in the early LED display field discovered to their dismay. The spherical surface is also image forming as a partial reflector and the image is once again coincident with the object at the center of the sphere, and also with the refractive image. Problem is the reflected image has unity magnification; so you get a ghost image coincident with the magnified image and maybe 4% of its intensity for ordinary uncoated lenses. Looks really bad in a magnified LED display to have a 2/3 size ghost image superimposed on the desired image, and in sharp focus also.
So the only truly useful of the three cases is the so-called Aplanatic or Weierstrass Sphere lens; where the object is immersed in the lens material at a depth of R/n beyond the center of the surface of radius R. It is completely Aplanatic, and Anastigmatic, and it can focus a complete hemisphere of 2 pi steradians of rays from a point source, into a diffraction limited geometrically perfect point image which is outside the lens at a distance of n.R from the center of the sphere. The angular lateral magnification is n^2 or an areal magnification of n^4, and the image is also perfectly Lambertian from zero degrees out to an angle of arcsin (1/n); where it sudenly plunges to zero beyond that angle. All rays originating from a concentric sphere of radius R/n, which pass through the R/n sphere on their way to the surface emerge from the lens as if they came from the n.R Sphere that is also concentric with the lens.
It is the cornerstone for high power microscope immerison objective lens design.
So you’ll probaly find all three of those unique cases in whatever favorite optical text books you use; even the ones used by those experts that are a lot smarter than me, and know better books.
What you won’t find in any of those texts; by any of those super authors or in peer reviewed papers going back to Galileo; is the totally unknown fourth configuration of perfect diffraction limited Aplanatic/Anastigmatic imaging by a spherical surface. You won’t find it in any of those text books because it isn’t in any of them.
You could check the US Patent office to see if you can find any mention of it. The Patent office is sort of the Industrial Peer review process that reiews and passes muster on the works of actual working scientists and engineers. Whereas Academics must publish or perish; the working stiff must patent or perish; given that patents allow businesses and others to profit from their research results; which fortunately provides for the gainful employment of many people, besides those inventors.
If I’m not mistaken; you might find, a US patent # 7,495,837 granted on Feb 24, 2009 to a George E. Smith; who discovered that new fourth case of Aplanatic refraction by a perfect sphere.
No not the 2009 Physics Nobel Prize winner; he didn’t discover it; it was that arrogant know it all, that wastes our time on WUWT.
If you own one of the correct models of Logitech laser mice, you might even have one of those new refractive surfaces in your mouse; since it actually does useful things. Well it actually is combined with a unique ellipsoidal surface to expand the divergence angle of a VCSEL, laser, then colimate it to a perfect diffraction limited Gaussian beam; and in the process bend the beam by maybe 30 degrees from its original direction, so a surface mounted laser can throw a colimated Gaussian beam off at an angle to illuminate objects on the mousing surface.
No sorry; it isn’t any use in determining whether high clouds warm surfaces, and the higher the cloud the more the warming; or whether those warmer surfaces are the sole reason that the cloud is there at all.
So you see Joel; sometimes it is possible for amateur tinkerers like you for example to discover useful things that were not known to even the most respected and learned Academic practioners; or generations of such, going back centuries.
So keep tinkering Joel; it might be you who discovers the correct trend slope for the global mean lower tropospheric Temperature anomalies, and the correct standard deviation to use to prove that AGW is an acknowledged fact of science.
But be careful who you call arrogant; it might come back to bite you someday.
Hopefully some for those mushheads, whose parents entrusted their children to you; actually survive the experience, and maybe learn something along the way; it could help them out, a half a century down the road.

“”” Joel Shore says:
June 2, 2010 at 6:11 pm
George E Smith says:
Now the big mystery Joel; and here is where your reasoning powers would really help, is this. The surface is still emitting the same amount; but the ever higher cloud is absorbing and radiating to space, an ever diminishing amount, as cloud height increases. So what the hell happens to all the rest of that surface emitted radiation that doesn’t change with cloud height ?
Good question. My guess would be that it goes into warming the IR-active layers (including the high cloud layers, but also the other absorbing layers). “””
Come now Joel; aren’t you grasping at straws ? I’m quite sure that you are smarter than that.
Let’s just step back; and see where we are with this specific issue.
We both agree that GHG of all kinds, including H2O and CO2 do absorb LWIR radiation that originates from the surface; BUT also from any lower layers of air that already caught some. By the way; I pretty much ignore all the other GHGs as not really mattering if we can get past the CO2/H2O issue. But I reserve a special place for Ozone, since it is uniquely placed in a thin high layer; and it falls right in “the atmospheric window”, and apaprently we need it any way.
So cloud or no cloud, GHGs are absorbing LWIR and THEREFORE warming the atmosphere, basically by molecular collisions that happen too fast for spontaneous re-emission (from the GHG) to occur. I don’t think we differ much on this concept.
Then it is a somewhat undisputed experimental observation tht arid deserts that are at record high surface Temperatures during the day; cool extremely rapidly; precipitously so, after sunset. (absent clouds of course). To me this is pretty indisputable proof, that CO2 is quite ineffectual in blocking enough LWIR emitted from hot surfaces, to do much surface warming by either the trapping or the re-radiation downwards. And of course I believe this is so because of the Wien shift to a shorter (8.8 microns) spectral peak wavelength for the LWIR spectrum. Even though this is right on the Ozone hole (spectral); even the Ozone can’t be doing much surface heating.
Now add in the H2O in a hot but not so arid situation (still sans clouds); and the observation is that it stays warmer longer; the cooling rate slows down; fairly establishing that H2O truly is a powerful GHG with a lot of warming potential. Note also that this same H2O during daylight hours intercepts quite a significant amount of energy out of the incoming sunlight in the 0.75-3-4 micron range; perhaps as much as 20% of the solar energy. Now this adds heating to the atmosphere; but it keeps that insolation off the surface and so cools the surface; so this is a negative feedback aspect of H2O as it relates to solar spectrum radiation of the surface. But the resultant atmospheric warming by the H2O is not really different from any other kind of atmospheric warmign from any GHG absorption of surface LWIR; it simply warms the atmosphere, and then that warmer atmosphere (by any means) sends increased LWIR re-emission from the atmospheric gases (and characteristic of THEIR Temperature; back to the surface; and of course about half of any such emission directed outwards rather than inwards; and the downward emissions then warm the surface and cause increased evaporation (since 70+ % of the surface is oceans. And in particular, I believe that this atmospheric warming of the surface; strongly results in evaporation since it is absorbed in the top ten microns of the surface (waters). But in any case this is arguably a positive feedback since the atmospheric warming (by any means either H2O or CO2) leads to further H2O in the atmosphere. This is the much loved “positive water feedback enhancement of CO2 heating.” Well you see that happens without any need for CO2; and the arid desert observation demonstrates pretty conclusively that CO2 sucks compared to H2O when it comes to GHG warming of the atmosphere.
Wentz et al support the surface temp rise to evap conversion at a rate of 7% evap increase per one deg C surface temp rise.
There is the additional fact that evaporation also transports a lot of surface (water) heat into the atmosphere (to great heights); which is a surface cooling effect. Trenberth doesn’t assign a very large amount to this effect. he says 78 W/m^2 versus 390 for the BB surface LWIR radiation. I have no reason to dispute those numbers; as to their relative amounts; I don’t like his methodology though. Teh Gaianian Language does not contain words like ‘average’, ‘trend’, ‘standard deviation’ etc. Gaia does NOT do statistical mathematics. Gaia’s Mantra is:- “What happens next, starts now !” but enough of that; Trenberth seems to be saying that evap at 78 isn’t much alongside 390 for radiation; and even less at 24, is ‘thermals’; aka conduction/convection.
I have no quarrels with that. I’ve always believed that conduction sucks compared to convection; and even moreso compared to evaporation. All of my computer microprocessors have evaporative heat pipe cooling sinks.
So according to Trenberth; conduction/convection/evaporation accounts for only 20% of surface cooling; 102 W/m^2 : 390 W/m^2. That pretty much sums up why I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to those other heat processes; since radiation is still 80% of the game. But the fact that I don’t pay a lot of attention to those doesn’t mean I ignore them. The radiation cooling is still the 800 pound gorilla that has to be dealt with.
I’m not sure you and I are in much disagreement WRT the above.
Where I disagree with Trenberth, is in the whole concept of averaging all this stuff out. If you look at his cartoon drawing he manages to find a way to claim that out of a grand total of 235 W/m^2 outgoing LWIR , THROUGH the top of the atmosphere; ONLY 40 w/m^2 exits DIRECTLY from the surface via the atmospheric window in the 8-12 micron region. Oddly; and presumably deliberately; Trenberth draws that 40 Watt trail right through the biggest cloud in the sky; presumably implying that it is of course spectrally in the water window; AND IT IS PASSING OUT THROUGH THE CLOUDS.
Joel; that is simply insane. The Peak Spectral Emittance of BB radiation is given by:-
W(lambdamax) = 1.288 E-11 . T^5 W/m^2/micron
At 288 K, that comes to 25.5 W/m^2/micron and the water window is reasonably open from about 8 to 12 microns; so that would give something like 100 W/m^2 going right out through the atmosphere (sans clouds). I actually don’t have a problem with believeing that something like 40 goes out right through (non-precipitating) clouds; but that is in addition to something like 100 simply bypassing the clouds and the GHGs.
But now if you go to a hot desert surface; well lets not be greedy; we’ll limit it to +50 deg C; although they can get much higher than that; so that is 323 K. Now the spectral peak has moved from 10.1 microns down to 9.0 microns. But the peak Spectral emittance has gone up to 45.3 W/m^2/micron; and that peak has moved into a better position in the window; and 4 microns of bandwidth now gives 181 W/m^2 direct escape to space sans clouds; along with maybe 45.3/25.5 8 40 = 71 W/m^2 through the clouds.
It’s the averaging; that Gaia does NOT do, that is gumming up the works.
Anyway; I don’t diss the folks who ares till repeating all the old fashioned measurements and hoping to find a different result. I don’t have any confidence in the anomaly methodology; since it still relies on a baseline, that itself is unmeasureable. And the there’s that OOoops! at around 1980 that Christy et al reported on in Jan 2001; that effectively black flags all the previous surface (ocean) measurements.
In the end; I don’t think it matters since I firmly believe that nothing more than simple cloud modulation is regulating the whole thing in a quite stable feedback loop.
Thanks for the comment on the patent thing; I’ve lost count of how many there are; but that one sort of grips me. Conrady gave an exact (geometrical) expression for Longitudinal Spherical Aberration’ and showed that it is zero for only the three conditions that are well known. Amazingly; what neither he; nor anybody else before or since discovered; was that his third solution; which is the useful Aplanatic or Weierstrass sphere; itself has two solutions. The one everybody knows about being the hyperhemispherical converging lens; but they all missed that if you reverse the refractive indices; you get a hollow concave hyper-hemisphere (well you can only mold the hemisphere part) that expands the beam angle perfectly (in the geometric approximation). We used it to increase a laser divergence angle which increases the expansion rate so you reach a beam diameter in a shorter more compact length and then a special ellipsoidal second surface perfectly colimates the beam (geometrically). Since both surfaces work at any beam angle size; you can then go off center with a smaller beam angle; and get a deflection of the principal ray at each surface. If you make the deflection equal at each surface you set up the minimum deviation prism condition; which makes the total deviation a minimum and stable against small angular rotations of the optical element. So it is highly tolerant of assembly tolerances.
Interesting that you worked in OLED. The small Sony one I have seen is spectacular. I have wondered about the chemical stability of OLED from contamination; but then LCDs had that problem in spades; and they have largely overcome that so it is a non issue. Probably will happen with OLED as well.
You need to think a bit more openly about the options Joel; the standard model sin’t too darn robust; none of the projections are happening on schedule.
I’ m with Lindzen; whatever is happening is of no consequence; a storm in a teacup.
Take care Joel.