Haven’t had one in awhile. Too tired and cold (4C and raining in Ballarat) to do much else.
Keep it clean. Play nice.
Bonus picture regarding events of this week:
Image from the Oregonian, h/t to “Gore Lied“
Haven’t had one in awhile. Too tired and cold (4C and raining in Ballarat) to do much else.
Keep it clean. Play nice.
Bonus picture regarding events of this week:
Image from the Oregonian, h/t to “Gore Lied“
Re:Phil
I doubt whether the explosive approach would have done the job.
—
From lurking over at the oil drum, the geology has been discussed and commentors seem to be saying the rock is mostly shale. I’m not a geologist, but isn’t shale quite fragile? If so, that would seem to give a higher risk of uncontrolled fracturing if they tried using explosives.
Well I assume that “Open Thread” means open season too ; but keep it clean.
So I would like to add a favorite rant; well one that I have never ranted on, but have endured the irk while rantless. Well no more; time to rant.
It gets tiresome reading all the claims that “there is no greenhouse effect”; or that CO2 is only 0.038% of the atmosphere so it couldn’t possibly do anything.
If only you knew it; you wouldn’t be here reading this on your computer, if it wasn’t for trace impurities in the very high purity silcon crystal pieces that are inside your computer; and every bit of modern electronics; and 0.038% would be regarded as a veritable avalanche of pollution; compared to the actual (deliberate) impurity levels carefully impressed into silicon chips.
So enough of that nonsense; at about one molecule of CO2 per 2565.47 of the atmospheric ordinary gases (yes I did subtract the CO2 molecule; and used today’s gizmo value); there is plenty of CO2 in the atmosphere to do things.
But my rant is about that other CO2 claim; that LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS have proved that having more CO2 in the atmosphere makes it warmer (which postulate I am not even questioning). It’s the EXPERIMENT that I don’t like.
Well we’ve all seen it demonstrated by fools everywhere on TV and the like.
You take some (dry) air; maybe sans CO2 and some with CO2; or maybe it is ordinary (dry) air; and some air with more CO2 added.
So you place thermometers in the two samples and shine a light bulb on them; to show that the one with the CO2 reaches a higher temperature; and the critics immediately complain that you haven’t protected the thermometers themselves enough from direct radiation from the light bulb; so you can’t really tell, whether the CO2 did the warming or one thermometer is seeing the lamp better than the other.
Well of course if you have followed this so far; and agree that is your objection too; then of course you haven’t understood the experiment.
If you go outside and look around in typical environments; at lawns, and roads, and parking lots, and gardens or buildings or beaches, or lakes; the one thing that you DO NOT SEE, is a whole lot of light bulbs pointed up at the upper atmosphere.
These LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS are a fraud, because they do not employ a source of primarily LWIR radiation.
Trenberth gives the surface radiation of the earth surface as 390 W/m^2, and as I recall, that is precisely the calculated Black Body Stefan Boltzmann radiation corresponding to a surface temperature of 15 deg C, or 288 K; the supposed mean global surface Temperature.
Wien’s Displacement law tells us that the peak of the energy spectrum is at 10.1 microns thereabouts; which is about where the water atmospheric window resides. And CO2 reacts to the 15 micron tail region of that spectrum.
So if you are going to do this CO2 laboratory experiment correctly; you need to use an actual source of LWIR radiation with a spectrum that matches the 288 Kelvin Black Body spectrum; because that is the spectrum that the atmosphere (on average) has to deal with; along with its 0.038964% CO2.
So forget the light bulb; that’s a deliberately falsified energy source. Peronally, I like a brick; an ordinary Philadelphia red brick; like Grace Kelly’s father used to lay down.
Now I think a slab of nice black Basalt would be better; but a red brick is easier to come by.
So you could take a Coleman cooler chest, and put some tap water in it; which usually is about 68 deg F or 20 deg C, so far too hot; so you have to dump some ice cubes in the chest to cool the water down to 15 deg C.
Well hell; don’t bother; I’m a generous and forgiving man; and I don’t care whether you like the 15 deg C mean global surface Temperature or not; or whether you are happier with 20 deg C or even 25 deg C Good grief I would even buy 30 deg C.
So just fill the cooler chest, and then put your red brick into a plastic garbage or freezer bag; just something to protect it from the water; and then drop it in the water, and let it reach equilibrium; so we know your brick or premium basalt slab is at whatever temp in the 15-30 deg C range you chose.
So now you take your dry air samples and add some CO2 to one; maybe a short burst from the CO2 fire extinguisher; or a sliver of dry ice should do the trick. So set those up with the two thermometers; in some place out of the drafts so no wind chill factors; and then you take your brick out of the water , and remove it from the pastic bag.
Hold that brick close to your cheek; and feel the heat exuding from its pores onto you delicate skin.
So set the brick up equidistant from your two air samples, and let it sit there and watch the thermometers.
Don’t forget to report back here on your results after you complete the experiment; the whole world wants to know whether CO2 absorbed LWIR actually warms up the atmosphere in the laboratory or not.
For the record, I will state that I do believe in the greenhouse effect; and I do believe that one CO2 molecule in 2566.47 molecules actually does something; and I do believe that that something involves the LWIR that comes from my red brick.
But I don’t believe that climate has anything to do with lightbulbs.
As a corollary to the above experiment; I am also running an opinion poll:-
Question; your Opinion ! is 10.1 micron peaked black body LWIR radiation properly describable as “heat” by human senses ?
Enjoy; George.
Next article on the evils of CO2 should/could be entitled…
“Et tu CO2”
Inspired by the story on the CO2 kill in Mammoth Forest. The commenters on the story lead me down several rabbit trails including limnic eruptions and the potential unintended consequences/perils of carbon capture and storage.
Concerning the warmer cloudy nights: is it really back radiation from clouds, or just slowed down conduction? The bigger difference between warm surface and cold upper air, the higher up-flow of warm air and down-flow of cold air. But with clouds above, the warm air hits the upper deck and the temperature difference is not that high, thus slowing down the uplift of warm air, thus keeping the surface less cooled = warmer. Are we sure, that we are attributing warmer cloudy nights to hypothetical back radiation instead of simple physics?
On the other note, we have four MPs from Citizen Conservative party in our Slovak parliament elected recently, which are truly sceptics. I voted for them myself and I know personally one of them. We are small country and they are few, but bit after bit the Rome was built. This is the only way.
“”” Juraj V. says:
June 28, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Concerning the warmer cloudy nights: is it really back radiation from clouds, or just slowed down conduction? The bigger difference between warm surface and cold upper air, the higher up-flow of warm air and down-flow of cold air. But with clouds above, the warm air hits the upper deck and the temperature difference is not that high, thus slowing down the uplift of warm air, thus keeping the surface less cooled = warmer. Are we sure, that we are attributing warmer cloudy nights to hypothetical back radiation instead of simple physics? “””
Well Juraj, I have made quite a point of suggesting that they are putting the cart before the horse.
Many have commented that cloudy nights seem to be warmer than cloud free nights so clouds must be keeping it warm.
I have suggested that warm moist days result in cloudy nights; when that warm moist air created during the day, finally reaches the dew point elevation.
The standard teaching is that the low clouds cool, and the high clouds warm, and there’s a magic height where clouds do neither.
So the higher the clouds the more they warm; and vice versa.
That of course simply ignores things like the inverse square law; or the fact that atmospheric pressure, and density and temperature decrease with altitude; so the heat capacity, and the thermal radiation spectrum of high clouds simply get forever weaker and weaker as height increases.
They argue that the higher clouds stop very little solar radiation during the day; and being so high and cold at night they radiate very little to space.
Hey earth to cloud ! that same cloud that is a cold evanescent weak radiator to space is an equally weak radiator back to earth.
I know that there are sillier arguments in this whole climate debate; right off hand I can’t think of one though.
Clouds always cool, since any blockage of solar radiation from the ground, may result in some atmospheric warming (after the albedo reflectance is subtracted); but the re-radiation of LWIR from that warmed atmosphere is necessarily shared about equally between return to the ground, as LWIR, or exit to space. The result is ALWAYS a net loss of total surface irradiation in all spectral bands.
A recent issue of “Optics & Photonic News, (OPN) a publication of the optical Society of America (for June 2010) has a short article about Noctilucent Clouds.
Allegedly NLCs were first reported in Europe in 1885; which happens to be two Years after the 1883 Krakatoa Eruption. Note it says first reported in Europe. Don’t know if that means no previous reports; or no previous European Reports.
Anyway they say that NLCs are known to consist of H2O ice crystal clouds which form just above the “Mesopause” which it places at 80 km altitude, at the top of the Stratosphere which begins at the Stratopause at 50 km height.
Very simply their “atmosphere” starts at 15 deg C at the surface dropping (linearly) to -60 deg C at about 13-14 km at the tropopause with all the clouds and weather below that presumably in the troposphere.
Volcanic aerosols it places above the Tropopauses from about 14-20 km height, and the temperature rises back to zero deg C in a pseudo straight line curve at the Tropopause at 50 km. The temperature then falls about linearly to -100 deg C at the mesopause at 80 km, and then the temperature starts to rise again. They only show to +100 km and about -80 deg C and they place the Auroral zone at about 95-100 km height.
They assert that MLC ice crystals condense of nuclei of meteoric dust; Iron and nickel; so that argues in some sense for an extra terrestrial source but not of the water; just the nucleating micrometer dust particles.
Allegedly first North American sightings of NLCs was only in 1933; and not south of +45 degrees before 1993 in North Dakota.
They say it is unknown whether NLCs existed before 1885.
They don’t know whether the increase in sighting frequencise is an actual increase or just more research grant money being given to more people to look at them (my surmise).
Well I’m not going to extract from the whole article; but if you are interested in NLCs then it is worth a read; unless of course they are old hat to you; in which case maybe you wrote the article.
Joseph A. Shaw, of Montana State U Bozeman is listed as the author.
The Article asserts that the clouds are NOT self luminous; they are just so darned high that sunlight persists well after sundown with the sun 9-12 deg below the horizon for best visibility.
George
Juraj V. Reur June 28, 2010 at 2:00 pm
I think your question is very important, and at least partly correct, but I’m unaware of any studies into it, and how to quantify it seems to be very difficult. A useful reference is this NASA “Earth’s Energy Budget” diagram, but the derivation of the global average numbers is questionable. (as discussed elsewhere). From this figure, 58.9% of the energy leaving the surface is given as from conduction/convection plus evapo-transpiration. Radiatively, only 29.4% is shown absorbed by GHG’s, and 11.7% escapes directly to space.
I would argue that in addition to a reduction in conduction/convection with cloud cover, so too would evaporative cooling be less, because of the reduced temperature gradient and increased humidity. The two processes act in amplification together, so a twin reduction is intuitively significant. They are a potential bank of energy flux that is given as about double that of the radiative greenhouse effect.
Additionally, most of the greenhouse effect takes place rather close to the surface, and not as depicted here, in the clouds. (after Trenberth et al.) (as discussed elsewhere)
I apologize for posting here but it did say Open Thread: and you don’t seem to connect nitrogen to global warming any where else.
Physics of the ‘bends’: New study helps explain decompression sickness – Mozilla Firefox
Moon Dirt Mystery Piled Up Over Billions of Years – Space.com – Yahoo! Buzz
Both these podcasts contain NITROGEN & its strangeness. The Moon’s unusual nitrogen out numbers solar type 10 to 1. Earthlings have decompression sickness due to the strange fact that nitrogen exists in tissue in opposition to principals of physics which says body pure nitrogen should collapse in face of nitrogen/ox mix outside of body & doesn’t.
What makes this so much weirder is that in the absence of all frame of reference our body has a 25 hour cycle like—–the Moon’s.
On CNN’s Situation Room a nuclear expert from Livermore, Milo D. Nordyke, suggested that a Peaceful Nuclear explosive may be the only option. To see an interview with Nordyke go to http://www.larouchepac.com/lpactv
The first problem we have is that the Obama Administration and BP are sitting on the situational and geological data. This means we don’t know how bad it is or what can be really done about it. (To see a detailed technical analysis based on the data that is available email me at chuckstvns@gmail.com.) Most people who talk about the nuclear option do not have access to the 60 years of experiments and data carried out on nuclear excavation and effects. Nuclear explosives can be tailored to produced a wide variety of outputs and effects. From EMP, heat, shock, laser beams, directed particle beams, etc. Because of these wide variety of effects, at the very least their use in this case should be carefully studied. In any case there is no question that the impeachment of Obama is called for. The only question is how much of HRH’s oil will you have to ingest before it happens.
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Houston, TX – The Houston Texans signed Andre Johnson to a two-year develop development on Thursday, a see to that, according to the Houston Account, makes him the highest paid encyclopedic receiver in the NFL.
Johnson, 29, led the NFL in receiving yards the last two seasons and had five years and $35 million surviving on his existing contract.
The Chronicle reported the increase to be significance $38.5 million, including $13 million guaranteed. On normal, Johnson resolution nowadays manufacture $10.5 million per year during the next seven seasons, not including fulfilment incentives.
“I always said I wanted to play in compensation in unison band, and to be skilful to depict pro the Houston Texans in favour of my whole career is a tremendous honor,” Johnson said. “I always said I wanted to be business of something memorable, and I knew that coming to a late classification, things were growing to be a baby jagged in the beginning, and with it I feel like things are attractive that wheel with a view us.”
The University of Miami-Florida product has burnt- his total seven-year pursuit in Houston after the Texans selected him with the third total pick in the 2003 NFL Draft.
Johnson has recorded back-to-back 1,500-yard receiving seasons, including a 101-catch, 1,569-yard campaign last year. He also scored nine touchdowns in 2009 to up his career mount up to to 42 TDs in 102 games.
“Over the extent of the last two years, unknown has played to the honest that this girlish valet has as fancy that I’ve been round, other than one other guy,” said fully cram Gary Kubiak. “What he’s been doing has been certain, and there’s a assignment more to come. So, that’s prospering to be exciting.”
He has caught 587 passes in search 7,948 yards over the passage of his career, no more than two of the numerous club records he owns.