Guest post by Steve Goreham, Climate Science Coalition of America
In an address to Green Mountain College on May 15, Carol Browner, Director of Energy and Climate Change Policy, stated “The sooner the U.S. puts a cap on our dangerous carbon pollution, the sooner we can create a new generation of clean energy jobs here in America…” In July, 2009, President Obama lauded the “Cash for Clunkers” program, stating that the initiative “gives consumers a break, reduces dangerous carbon pollution, and our dependence on foreign oil…”
Unfortunately, our President is misinformed about carbon pollution.
The phrase “dangerous carbon pollution” has become standard propaganda from environmental groups.
An example is a May, 2010 press release from the World Wildlife Fund that called for “a science-based limit on dangerous carbon pollution that will send a strong signal to the private sector.” Environmentalists have successfully painted a picture of black particle emissions into the atmosphere. This misconception is being used to drive efforts for Cap & Trade legislation, renewable energy, and every sort of restriction on our light bulbs, vehicles, and houses—all in the misguided attempt to stop climate change.
Carbon is integral to our skin, our muscles, our bones, and throughout the body of each person. Carbon forms more than 20% of the human body by weight. We are full of this “dangerous carbon pollution” by natural metabolic processes.
It’s true that incomplete combustion emits carbon particles that can cause smoke and smog. But this particulate carbon pollution is well controlled by the Clean Air Act of 1970 and many other federal and state statutes.
According to Environmental Protection Agency data, U.S. air quality today is significantly better than it was in 1980. Since 1980, airborne concentration of carbon monoxide is down 79%, lead is down 92%, nitrogen dioxide is down 46%, ozone is down 25%, and sulfur dioxide is down 71%. Carbon particulates have been tracked for fewer years, but PM10 particulates are down 31% since 1990 and PM2.5 particulates are down 19% since 2000. Over the same period, electricity consumption from coal-fired power plants rose 72% and vehicle miles driven are up 91%. We do not need Cap & Trade, Renewable Portfolio Standards, or the California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32), to reduce carbon particulates.
Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic, Figure 78, data from EPA, 2006
The target of “dirty carbon pollution” propaganda is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is an invisible, odorless, harmless gas. It does not cause smog or smoke. Humans breathe out 100 times the CO2 we breathe in, created as our body uses sugars. But since it’s tough to call an invisible gas “dirty,” Climatists use “carbon” instead. It’s as wrong as calling water “hydrogen” or salt “chlorine.” Compounds have totally different properties than their composing elements.
Not only is carbon dioxide not a pollutant, it’s essential for life. As pointed out by geologist Leighton Steward, carbon dioxide is green! Carbon dioxide is plant food. Increased atmospheric CO2 causes plants and trees to grow faster and larger, increase their root systems, and improve their resistance to drought, as documented by hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers. Carbon dioxide is the best compound that mankind could put into the atmosphere to grow the biosphere.
This “carbon pollution” nonsense is driven by Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate. In a debate at the Global Warming Forum at Purdue University on September 27, Dr. Susan Avery, President of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was asked “What is the strongest empirical evidence that global warming is caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions rather than natural causes?” Neither Dr. Avery nor Dr. Robert Socolow of Princeton, who also presented, could provide an answer, except the ambiguous “There is lots of evidence.” In fact, Climatism is based largely on computer model projections. There is no empirical evidence that man-made greenhouse gases are the primary cause of global warming. According to Dr. Frederick Seitz, past President of the National Academy of Sciences, “Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.”
As Joanne Nova, Australian author, points out: “Everything on your dinner table—the meat, cheese, salad, bread, and soft drink—requires carbon dioxide to be there. For those of you who believe carbon dioxide is a pollutant, we have a special diet: water and salt.” So the next time you drink a beer or eat a meal, beware of that “dangerous carbon pollution.”
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic.
Myrrh:
One tower, two towers, upslope wind, downslope wind – these are not as important as the basic idea that local variation is more irregular than global variation, but if the local CO2 infusions and “exfusions” are absent often enough and for long enough, the periods when it is absent can be identified by their lack of irregularity.
By analogy, suppose that people are constantly circulating all over a large region by air, and we wish to measure the Bulgarian percentage of airline passengers in that region, over time. (I choose “Bulgarian” because they’re likely to be a tiny percentage of the passengers.) So we set up an ongoing survey at a major airport. Unfortunately, there’s a Bulgarian community near the airport, and people from that community travel in groups. but fortunately, they don’ t do this all the time. If we count the number of Bulgarians passing through in each hour, we will, at times, see increases as groups from the community pass through. If we discard the periods in which the increases occur, we’ll be measuring the “background level” of Bulgarians (the average over the whole region), provided that, if the community did not exist, the level would not vary nearly so much. This analogy does not have decreases due to the community, but it’s enough to illustrate the principle.
Your argument that we’d be throwing away measurements that we “don’t like” sort of works if the background level variation is great enough relative to the variation that occurs when the local groups pass through. If it is, there won’t be anything to distinguish the periods in which the local groups pass through, and so we should not discard any measurement, but in that case, what we’d be seeing is that the background level varies a lot, so nothing will be wrong. If we’re honest, we’ll say that the background level varies a lot. However, a highly varying background level would be pretty amazing, so you’d have more reason to be suspicious, not less.
I’m not absolutely claiming that they’re doing it right. I’m suggesting that you do not understand the basic idea.
I’ll get back to the rest of your message later in the day or this evening.
Why is it, I have yet to hear an explanation with creditably, of how carbon based oxygen causes Both Climate change and Global Warming?
Climate change is both warming and cooling and Global Warming is only warming, maybe Al Gore will change the name of his unproven Theory again.
This planet causes 37 time more CO2 than Mankind, all the Lungs on this planet produce more CO2 than Call the cars.
Bruce A. Kershaw
Why is it, I have yet to hear an explanation with creditably, of how carbon based oxygen causes Both Climate change and Global Warming?
Climate change is both warming and cooling and Global Warming is only warming, maybe Al Gore will change the name of his unproven Theory again.
This planet causes 37 time more CO2 than Mankind, all the Lungs on this planet produce more CO2 than all the cars, CO2 has been a proven Refrigerant at any temperature and pressure in the Industrial Science World for many years.
CO2 is still Dry Ice at any Temperature, and is inert the same as Nitrogen.
~ CO2 ~ 00.03 %
~Nitrogen ~ 78.09 %
Bruce A. Kershaw
Smoking Frog.
The analogy really doesn’t hold up, even in measuring the Bulgarians. Why should a greater influx of Bulgarians mean that it’s those who live near the airport? So no Bulgarians ever travel in large groups or gather in large groups at the airport unless they’re locals?
Back to Mauna Loa. The idea that they are measuring ‘background global CO2’ the moment they discount, what they have set as a limit, ‘volcanic CO2’, is ridiculous. There is no way that they can tell where their ‘if less than their pre-determined volcanic and same at all measuring points’ actually comes from. Carbon Dioxide sinks, as they discount the greater and variable volumes coming from the volcano above them and reach a less voluminous amount this could be, more realistically be, the continuation of the volcanic and local. Just because it’s less than, probably more diffuse because it hasn’t come down in an initial bulk, doesn’t automatically make this their mythical ‘background global’. Rather from whatever has been taken up in local winds upslope during the heat of the day or coming from the volcano above them and those surrounding them. The upslope winds are some 6 times stronger than the downslope winds and the vocano disrupts the trade wind in the local flow which itself isn’t a constant, that this naturally mixes up the CO2 going up in the winds and heat and moisture and can’t be isolated from anything ‘global background’ as it comes down more slowly in the down winds and as it cools.
Not that there’s any proof this ‘background well-mixed global CO2’ actually exists.
You can’t say that Keeling has proved it, because all he’s proved is that he collected varying amounts of CO2 from the station beneath the worlds largest active volcanos which is producing ‘rich in CO2’ measurements on an island of active volcanoes on the world’s foremost hot spot producing volcanic islands area. There is no shortage of CO2 available …
The statement above ‘that the volcanic CO2 will be above 380 ppm and variable and greater nearer the bottom of the towers than at the top’, is, heck, I’m really lost for words here.
For them to claim that this is what makes them so sure that what they then measure is background because it’s not this, is simply absurd as scientific reasoning. They could have made it anything, because, they chose that number. It isn’t a number derived from any actual observation. It could as easily have been 300 ppm and variable. There is no way of establishing at that station that there is any such critter a ‘background global CO2’ from their method and place of measurement.
It’s an emperor’s new clothes scenario, just because it keeps being repeated that this is what they’re measuring doesn’t make it true that it exists. It is simply not possible to extract the area’s own local huge volcanic CO2 production from anything measured that’s supposedly background because it’s all in the mix.
Myrrh:
The analogy really doesn’t hold up, even in measuring the Bulgarians. Why should a greater influx of Bulgarians mean that it’s those who live near the airport? So no Bulgarians ever travel in large groups or gather in large groups at the airport unless they’re locals?
Sorry, I made the analogy wrong; I shouldn’t have said “travel in groups.” I meant to say that the local Bulgarians appear at our airport in groups, but each group scatters as the individuals’ journeys progress. Due to scattering, groups that are local to other airports are unlikely to appear as groups at our airport. If we apply steps (1-4) of the NOAA document to this situation, we’re very likely to get a result near to the regional percentage of Bulgarian travelers.
You say, “even in measuring the Bulgarians,” as if the method should work better with the Bulgarians than with CO2. Actually it should not work as well, since the number of travelers (of all ethnic backgrounds) is many orders of magnitude smaller than the number of molecules in the atmosphere. (Maybe you wouldn’t have made that remark if I had created the right analogy in the first place.)
There is no way that they can tell where their ‘if less than their pre-determined volcanic and same at all measuring points’ actually comes from.
Where are you getting the quoted phrase? I can’t find it or anything like it in this page, the Eschenbach article page, or the NOAA page. I don’t even see what it’s supposed to mean. I can only guess that, in part, it implies that the Mauna Loa people are pre-determining the amount of CO2 that comes from the volcano, and using that in their method. Nothing in the NOAA page says or implies that they do so, and I don’t begin to see why they would, even if they were the frauds you claim they are, because if they did, the fraud would be obvious.
As for “same at all measuring points,” I can’t even guess.
You sound to me as though you know essentially nothing about probability and statistics, because if you did, you wouldn’t be imagining that pre-determined values would be needed.
More later today.
Myrrh:
I posted a message to you a while ago, but it’s not showing up. Maybe it will show up later. I’ll try to repeat most of it more briefly here, but also add a little.
My “Bulgarian” analogy was wrong. I meant to have it that the local group appears at our airport and then scatters as the individuals’ journeys progress. If local groups of Bulgarians originating at other airports do the same, we’ll be able to detect the irregularities caused by the groups originating at our airport and exclude them from our estimate of the Bulgarian percentage of travelers in the whole region.
It sounds to me like you think “background CO2” carries an implication that the CO2 level is uniform (at a given altitude) across the world. It does not.
There is no way that they can tell where their ‘if less than their pre-determined volcanic and same at all measuring points’ actually comes from.
I can’t find the quoted phrase or anything like it on this page, the Eschenbach article page, or the NOAA page. I suspect you made it up, but more than that, I can’t even tell what it means. Do you think the method uses a pre-determined level of CO2 from the volcano? I see no reason to think so. Even if Mauna Loa is the fraud you say it is, using a pre-determined level would make the fraud obvious. Possibly, “same at all measuring points” refers to a claim that the CO2 level is uniform across the world, but there is no such claim – it’s a straw man.
You sound to me like you have essentially no knowledge of probability and statistics, since otherwise your arguments would be different. However, I apologize for making the faulty analogy.
As for radiation, you’re wrong. No one claims that the CO2 actually heats us up. The claim is that it keeps us warmer than we otherwise would be, something like the way that insulation works. So there’s another straw man.
The explanation of how they [NOAA, Mauna Loa] do this and their reasoning is really complete and utter nonsense. Don’t you agree?
No, as I’ve tried to explain.
Myrrh:
In my message of 10/18 4:46 AM, I said, “As for radiation, you’re wrong. No one claims that the CO2 actually heats us up. The claim is that it keeps us warmer than we otherwise would be, something like the way that insulation works. So there’s another straw man.”
That’s not really clear. I should have said that no one claims that CO2 heats us up as a warmer object heats a cooler object by conduction. Scientists do claim that, ceteris paribus, an increase of the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will heat us up; it will do this in the same way that adding insulation to your house will heat you up (if it’s colder outside), i.e., by “re-radiating.” This is fundamental. I’ve never even heard of a scientist who rejects it, and I’m a reasonably well read AGW skeptic. (Yes, I’ve heard of Miskolczi. He doesn’t reject it. He claims that the climate sensitivity is even much smaller than the other skeptics claim.)
Do you know of Roy Spencer of UAH (University of Alabama at Huntsville)? He’s a skeptic. I suggest that you read this article by him:
“Yes, Virginia, Cooler Objects Can Make Warmer Objects Even Warmer Still”
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
Why nonsense? AGW says that CO2 raises the temperature in the atmosphere, globally. The atmosphere in my room is cold, it’s -10 degrees C, it is 10′ cube. I am the only hot body in it. I am radiating IR quite well… I have the windows and doors closed, there is no external air coming in. I keep breathing out CO2 raising the ppm considerably. Which would come first – the extra CO2 I’m generating by breathing will raise the temperature in my room until I’m comfy or I die from suffocation and stop breathing? What happens if I die of cold first? Will the room full of CO2 continue to radiate raising the temperature although it will, alas, be too late for me?
You wouldn’t get comfy. The house is radiating, too. The CO2 would only make you slightly warmer than you would be without it, and I’m not even sure it would do that much.
Smoking Frog –
I’m getting to feel really bogged down with Bulgarians..
You said, I shouldn’t have said “travel in groups”. I meant to say that the local Bulgarians appear at our airport in groups, but each group scatters as the individuals’ journeys progress. Due to scattering, groups that are local to other airports are unlikely to appear as groups at our airport.
If the airport they’re going to is a prime holiday hub for example any such groups starting out from elsewhere are fairly certain to remain in the groups, and it’s still supposition that the majority local Bulgarians will arrive in groups at their airport.
When I said “even in measuring the Bulgarians”, it was not as if the method should work better with the Bulgarians than with CO2, as above para, I don’t think it works any better for the Bulgarians.
Perhaps I don’t understand statistics well enough but even with your clarified description of Bulgarian travellers the validity of Mauna Loa method doesn’t hold for me, because when alls said and done the figure for local volcanic v ‘background global’ is still arbitrarily decided, an assumption – as some of those travelling in from other regional airports may well stay clumped together in large groups, if say, some of the regional airports are prime hubs for holiday destinations then the greater groups would be those non-local and instead of being counted would be excluded, the local could well be stay at homes servicing the holiday trade of primarily Bulgarian nationals, and the regional airports then closed for lack of use…, Perhaps your example means something to statisticians, but it appears to me to have that ‘fallacy of the average’ feel to it, that of an average of a year’s rainfall say being taken to be mean that this is what happens on every day and in every place.
At best the Mauna Loa figures might be useful to say something about local conditions, but to extrapolate this to global claims, and with such certainty to such fine detail claim this is representative of CO2 rising globally from man’s imput only etc., is to stretch its credibility because this method doesn’t show there are any visiting out of town CO2 molecules to begin with.
So, I’ll stick with observation here. Observably, there is no way to tell apart what is local from anything which may be construed as ‘background global’ in such an area extremely high in local production of CO2, from the variety of local sources including the volcano the station sits below, in the mix of winds around the mountains.
Together with its own volcano’s production this station’s measurements will include neighbour volcanic output and whatever else is producing CO2 unclumped and spread by the local conditions of turbulence, from the meeting of the often prevailing trade and daily daytime upslope winds in the warmth and the sun etc., in its ‘under the deemed volcanic cut-off point of plus 380 ppm’ and ‘not variable between the measuring points; it will not be able to exclude this purely local imput meeting its criteria. Even if it were true that there is such a thing as a ‘global background well-mixed’ as a constant because the AIRS satellite data concluded that there was no such thing, but rather that CO2 was clumpy and not well mixed. The dogmatic belief of AGW that such a thing as well-mixed exists on which they base their reasoning was here shown to be an assumption proved false.
Your comments re: There is no way they can tell where their ‘if less than their pre-determined volcanic and same at all measuring points’ actually comes from.
But that is what they are doing. They have decided that less than 380 ppm only is to be measured because anything above that is deemed to be volcanic, and if below that only if not variable between those points measured. The 380 ppm is still arbitrary based on an assumed figure for ‘global well-mixed background’ actually being in the mix. This is a highly volcanic area with CO2 from the oceans, the earthquakes, the constant volcanic activity plus the plant life (and here too they make an unproven assumption that in daylight the plants are lowering the CO2 in the atmosphere, other studies don’t show that), and whatever the population adds from the ground up or from planes above. All I’m saying is that they cannot tell that the CO2 they are measuring within their parameters is not volcanic and not locally produced (except what gets statistically included as a token added to the ‘assumed global well-mixed background’), it could be 100% , + or – a bit, wholly volcanic and local. I’m not saying anything here about fraud, but saying that it appears to me irrational scientific method to use unproven assumptions and already falsified by science claims for CO2 to establish a base line of ‘well-mixed’ and from that base line decide what is volcanic and what not at Mauna Loa.
As this is about the ‘well-mixed global background’ figure, there are two views relevant here from the AGW explanations given to describe CO2 in the atmosphere, although these are not distinctly held, but used in overlap.
The first description comes from using ideal gas laws to describe CO2 which is a real gas. So we have explanations such as ‘the molecules of gases are all moving around at great speeds in empty space between them, knocking into each other and and becoming very well mixed, as then does any CO2 entering into the atmosphere; diffusing into the atmosphere by this ideal gas description it too becomes thoroughly mixed and so in the same proportion everywhere. Even those admitting that CO2 is heavier than air will still argue the ideal gas concept actually describes real gases and ideal gas laws are how real gases act in the real physical world; they argue that a quantity of CO2 having pooled on the floor and with no change to the conditions which made the pooling possible, ventilation/wind, will diffuse into the atmosphere as per the the ideal gas idea and so become well-mixed in the atmosphere.
The second explanation from AGW on well-mixed says that the air becomes this in the turbulence of winds acting on it, and any CO2 entering into the atmosphere will also be subject to the same turbulent mixing as the air is getting and so becomes well-mixed within it. I have asked for an explanation of this force, in the question ‘what is wind?’, of AGW’s, I have not yet received any… Hold on, just checked for the latest and, have still not got an answer, but yet another iteration of this claim, ‘that there is always a force moving CO2, and N2 and O2, along, which is why it’s always well mixed and that I’m incapable of comprehending this’.
What I comprehend is that neither of these scenarios describe the real CO2 as a real gas in the real physical world, where real gases are subject to gravity and pressure, can become liquids and solids, interact with each other rather than bounce off each other, have weight, have volume, and most importantly, are the basic foodstuff of all life on earth in the cycle of carbon life form creations and not something that is dangerous and polluting and poisonous which has to be buried out of the way because this new religion loosely based on science for its doctrines, says so.
But anyway, please, no more Bulgarians..
Smoking Frog, I too seem to have mislaid a post in the system, a rather long one on Bulgarians, I’ll wait to see if it turns up before giving a gist of it.
As for radiation, you’re wrong. No one claims that the CO2 actually heats us up. The claim is that it keeps us warmer than we otherwise would be, something like the way that insultation works. So there’s another straw man.
Oh please, what straw man? The claim is that additional CO2 will warm up global temperatures, so much so that all the ice will melt and sea levels will rise and drown whole cities like New York and London and polar bears will drown. That because CO2 ‘accumulates in the atmosphere and radiates in all directions some of that will be directed back to earth making it hotter and hotter the more CO2 is pumped into the atmosphere by man’s production of it.
Ah, just seen your further post on this. I’ve never heard the claim that it ‘heats us up by conduction’, neither from AGW nor from antis saying this is what is claimed by AGW’s. This is the first I’ve heard this, all the arguments I’ve seen about it have been about IR. And I am not saying it’s by conduction. I am saying that the AGW claim is that it will heat us up, that is not a straw man.
You wouldn’t get comfy. The house is radiating, too. The CO2 would only make you slightly warmer than you would be without it, and I’m not even sure it would do that much.
If it can’t do that much even for me desperately trying to fill the confined space of my room with a thicker insulating blanket of it to get warm, how is it going to raise global temperatures to the degree the IPCC says it will? Would that it did for so little effort, we are coming to the butt end of our interglacial..
I think this page is a good summary of the flaws in the IPCC case, particularly what is my main objection to this AGWScience claim in the five paragraphs beginning:
“However, there are good grounds to doubt the IPCC’s current estimates of the effect of changes in CO2 concentration on temperature.”
Re the “Disjointed and often mutually-contradictory particles of information are scattered about the IPCC’s documents” in the fifth paragraph of this chunk.
This is something routinely encountered when discussing the subject with AGW’s in the variety of contradictory replies given back, because there is no actual central gathering of data and method for the hypothesis confirming it a working theory to which they themselves can refer.
That’s why we get different explanations for ‘well-mixed’. Because clarity of explanation is detrimental to the hypothesis there can’t be an actual description of what this means, at least to my knowledge I’ve never seen one and no one’s ever managed to direct me to such, to show me proof. The actual explanations are therefore something transferred by AGW supporters by word of mouth only in the background to ‘the given claim’, which itself is all that is really officially repeated. Hence the strangeness of the explanations from those fully believing that a given claim is real science because it is said to be by this consensus science and therefore real, and this has now permeated the education system to the extent it is taught as scientific fact. 50 years ago it was common elementary science to know enough to appreciate what miners and such knew about the weight of various gases in air and why and how they layered and why this was important for them in their work, and to know enough to appreciate what every weatherman knew, what the wind actually was, even if we still doubted their ability to say for certain which way it would blow..
In scientific reality, both these explanations are already falsified before they can even take a step in explaining the AGW hypothesis, because real science knows that the properties and workings of real gases aren’t to the imaginary concept of the ideal gas and/or that the atmosphere is not a load of nitrogen and oxygen molecules and other gases being stirred around by some imaginary force extraneous to it, for which they haven’t yet come up with an explanation.
The AGW theory is an illusion created out of many unproven assumptions and already falsified parts and so very difficult to pin down. Some say there’s a critical level in information exchange, that when and if that particular point is reached the spread becomes exponential. There was an example of this a few days ago, I think it was from Facebook, that the hits the various ads got could be quite slow and intermittant for a long period and abruptly one would take off and be inundated with interest, suddenly becoming the most important with-it group thing in discussions. It took some 30 years for AGW to reach that, but this last decade has seen a rise in real science making a comeback…
Ah, I see it’s back now I’ve posted another.
Sorry. This page:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/temperature_and_co2_change_briefing.html
Smoking Frog, re your link to Dr Roy Spencer. I couldn’t quite get my head around it.., wasn’t the first plate getting hotter because it was still being heated? Don’t we end up with a sort of perpetual motion heating machine if the colder plate was heating the hotter?
I came across his site not that long ago, and not long after I’d worked out from a discussion I was having (in trying to discover why such strange things were held to be true about CO2, such as that it could accumulate in the atmosphere for hundreds and even thousands of years even though it was heavier than air), that AGW was using ideal gas concepts to describe real gas CO2 in real gas context. So I had learned something about ideal gases which I didn’t know, and when I read Dr Roy describe the movement of molecules in the atmosphere as being at terrifically high speeds through lots of empty space between them I was able to spot immediately that he too was using ideal gas laws out of context of the real atmosphere. An engineer turned up to tell him that molecules may well be moving at such speeds, but they were going nowhere fast. Anyway, because of my previous brief encounter with his ideas I don’t accept him as an authority on the physics involved in this argument, and rather hoped that another such engineer or his ilk would turn up should I encounter something I didn’t already know to be false in reading him again.
I find the IR discussions take an awful lot of effort to follow, unused as I am to the language, but a strange thing happens when a real engineer steps in to argue some point or other, my head begins to stop spinning.
There are several such moments in another discussion on his site, and it can even be something simple like a reminder of something I had once learned, an example from the page relevant to our discussion: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/experiment-test-the-temperature-influence-of-infrared-sky-radiation/
“The 2nd Law does not say that Radiation is excluded! What Physics textbook has EVER said that?”
Now I know where your conductive objection comes from! Although strictly speaking conductive relates only to solids, not to liquids and gases, as far as I recall. Could be wrong, it’s been a while.
Myrrh:
Smoking Frog, re your link to Dr Roy Spencer. I couldn’t quite get my head around it.., wasn’t the first plate getting hotter because it was still being heated? Don’t we end up with a sort of perpetual motion heating machine if the colder plate was heating the hotter?
Yes, the first plate was still being heated, just as the earth’s surface is still being heated by the sun. Spencer didn’t include an analogy to the sun, because it is not necessary for the explanation. A large part of the solar radiation at the earth’s surface is in the ultraviolet and visible parts of the spectrum, as opposed to the infrared. The earth responds to it by radiating infrared. (That’s a large part of why earth and atmosphere are warm, not because the sun heats them directly with infrared.) The atmosphere is mostly transparent to the UV and the visible, so Spencer would have had to include an object like the sun outside the container, and make the walls transparent to this radiation. That would be silly, since the explanation is about what happens to the infrared once it has been emitted, not how the first plate comes to be emitting it in the first place.
that AGW was using ideal gas concepts to describe real gas CO2 in real gas context. So I had learned something about ideal gases which I didn’t know, and when I read Dr Roy describe the movement of molecules in the atmosphere as being at terrifically high speeds through lots of empty space between them I was able to spot immediately that he too was using ideal gas laws out of context of the real atmosphere. An engineer turned up to tell him that molecules may well be moving at such speeds, but they were going nowhere fast.
No, that’s wrong. Ideal gas/not ideal gas has almost nothing to do with CO2 traveling/not traveling to Hawaii from a distant point. An ideal gas is a gas that obeys the ideal gas law: (pressure)(volume) = (amount)(constant)(temperature).
There are several such moments in another discussion on his site, and it can even be something simple like a reminder of something I had once learned, an example from the page relevant to our discussion: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/experiment-test-the-temperature-influence-of-infrared-sky-radiation/
“The 2nd Law does not say that Radiation is excluded! What Physics textbook has EVER said that?”
Now I know where your conductive objection comes from! Although strictly speaking conductive relates only to solids, not to liquids and gases, as far as I recall. Could be wrong, it’s been a while.
It’s true that radiation is not excluded, but when I said that “normal thermodynamics” (your words) is about conduction, I was talking about the usual elementary illustration of a warmer body in contact with a cooler body. You’re wrong to think that GHE theory requires a cooler body to heat a warmer body, but it’s easy to think so by hearing that atmospheric CO2 makes the earth warmer, and being familiar with the simple illustration. It only makes the earth warmer in the way that insulation makes your house warmer. Just because an object is cooler than some other object does not mean that the cooler object can’t irradiate the warm object. That’s how insulation works.
Myrrh:
I don’t have time right now to answer the rest of what you’ve said, but I want to tell you that your take on global warming is comically arrogant. You are rejecting things that not even the AGW-skeptic scientists reject. Those are not what’s wrong with the AGW idea. They’re right.
Regarding Mauna Loa in particular, there might be something wrong, but there is nothing wrong with the idea that CO2 arriving from a distance will be less irregular than local CO2. You have criticized my (revised) “Bulgarians” analogy by saying that people who start out traveling in groups are likely to continue in groups. So what? It’s only an analogy. Bulgarians are not CO2 molecules. All analogies limp.
Sorry, I wasn’t using it as a criticism, just thinking through out loud the idea of discounting large amounts as local re airports and travel, that it would have include site specific knowledge in such a case, because some of the airports could be holiday destinations, hubs, where large groups, any nationality, coming in would stay together.
But anyway, the problem I have with Mauna Loa is that there is no way they can actually tell what is volcanic by the amount as they measure it, because of the winds etc. CO2 from these sources will be spread out and so also come down more diffusely meeting their parameters for measuring ‘background global’.
Re insulation, as I understand it the principle is not of this heating another body, but of delaying heat loss. So for example a blanket around someone shivering with cold doesn’t really give the body heat, but delays the loss of the body’s heat, so the heat the body is producing doesn’t get dissipated faster than it can produce it. Insultation in the attic, cavity wall and double glazing works the same way, but once the source of heat is switched off the body/house will start to cool. The insulation can’t send IR back to heat it.
The earth likewise, the sun heats the earth during the day and at night the earth begins to cool down. Cloud cover can sometimes act as insulation, slowing down the rate of heat loss, but, the earth is still losing heat. If that cloud cover persists to continue blocking out the source of the earth’s heat the earth will continue to cool, because the sun is to the earth as the heating system is to the house or food for the body.
I tried to work out how big that insulating blanket of CO2 would be for a typical human body, 1.8 sq metres of skin, if it was actually “well-mixed”. For 400 ppm I got .00009 square metres, (bit rusty at maths, I think that’s what it is..). That can’t even be described as ‘insulating’ as I think insulating, and pretty much irrelevant to the energy loss of a typical night even if a bit of CO2 IR spectrum was directed back to earth and thought capable of heating this cooling night time body, so the idea of it adding heat to a warmer body is moot. (Moot as in law, having no practical significance, not as debatable, there’s really nothing to debate.)
But anyway, the problem I have with Mauna Loa is that there is no way they can actually tell what is volcanic by the amount as they measure it, because of the winds etc. CO2 from these sources will be spread out and so also come down more diffusely meeting their parameters for measuring ‘background global’.
Do you say, then, that CO2 can spread out, but not so far that amounts worth talking about can reach Mauna Loa from distant places? If that’s true, the large variations at Mauna Loa are due to local CO2, just as they claim, but so is the extremely stable CO2 level that persists for hours on end. So you’re implying that the stable level at Mauna Loa differs from the world average. The trouble is, there’s very good agreement between Mauna Loa and 10 other sites in the Scripps network. (It’s not perfect, of course. No one claims that the CO2 level is uniform throughout the world. For example, it’s lower in the Southern Hemisphere.) Here’s an ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratories) page from which you can access graphs and data from all of them.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-keel.html
You can’t say they’re all dominated by local CO2, because in that case you’ll have to say that local CO2 is very much the same in lots of places, and besides, you’ve made a big deal out of the fact that Mauna Loa is a volcano. So I don’t think you can maintain your position without alleging a conspiracy.
I’m puzzled by your idea that background CO2 does not/might not exist; you’ve said that Mauna Loa is no evidence that it exists. How could it not exist? It’s the average over a large region. There would be an average even if local CO2 stayed entirely local.
Re insulation, as I understand it the principle is not of this heating another body, but of delaying heat loss. So for example a blanket around someone shivering with cold doesn’t really give the body heat, but delays the loss of the body’s heat, so the heat the body is producing doesn’t get dissipated faster than it can produce it. Insultation in the attic, cavity wall and double glazing works the same way, but once the source of heat is switched off the body/house will start to cool. The insulation can’t send IR back to heat it.
Yes, the principle of insulation is of delaying heat loss, but no, insulation can (and does) send IR back. It’s just that this is not an important reason why home insulation (except foil) works. It mainly works by reducing conduction and convection. An example of insulation in which sending back IR is significant (but not the whole story) is the insulation in a thermos bottle.
If foil by itself would not work well as home insulation,this is probably because the sending back of IR is overwhelmed by the fact that foil is a good conductor.
All bodies warmer than absolute zero (or something like that) emit IR.
Sending IR back is an example of delaying heat loss. You are assuming that if a cooler body sends IR to a warmer body, this makes the warmer body even warmer, and since you know that’s wrong, you say that a cooler body does not send IR to a warmer body. You’re wrong, because the warmer body is emitting more IR than it gets back. The cooler body only adds heat to the warmer body in the sense that if I were sending you 10 potatoes a minute, and you were sending back 5 of them, you would be adding to what I would have if you were not sending them back.
You’ve made remarks showing that you think AGW theory says that the increase of temperature is proportional to the CO2 increase. It does not. It says that, with other things equal, it’s logarithmic; each increase of CO2 raises the temperature by less than the previous increase of the same size.
I tried to work out how big that insulating blanket of CO2 would be for a typical human body, 1.8 sq metres of skin, if it was actually “well-mixed”. For 400 ppm I got .00009 square metres, (bit rusty at maths, I think that’s what it is..). That can’t even be described as ‘insulating’ as I think insulating, and pretty much irrelevant to the energy loss of a typical night even if a bit of CO2 IR spectrum was directed back to earth and thought capable of heating this cooling night time body, so the idea of it adding heat to a warmer body is moot. (Moot as in law, having no practical significance, not as debatable, there’s really nothing to debate.)
I don’t understand your calculation.
As I’ve said, I do not claim that a cooler body can heat a warmer body, except in the sense of making the warmer body warmer than it would be if the cooler body were not sending back any IR. It adds heat to the warmer body, but it adds less than the warmer body is losing. I thought you’d get that from Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” article.
I asked you how you explain the fact that the AGW-skeptic scientists do not deny the existence of the greenhouse effect. Here’s what you said:
Well, I have to say I don’t really know what they mean by it, I haven’t studied their views on this particular aspect. I know that there’s a general idea that CO2 has a ‘saturation point’ above which ‘doubling’ of CO2 does not mean ‘doubling of temperature’, and several times I’ve seen the figure given as doubling now would raise global temps around 1 degree and that’s its limit, but, that’s not my interest here. I can’t see how it can do that either in the scheme of our global atmosphere in our real physical world.
What the skeptics mean by “the greenhouse effect” is the same as what the warmists mean by it.
Doubling of CO2 never means doubling of temperature. The only doubling of temperature concept that makes sense is a doubling of the temperature above absolute zero, but if that were to occur, the global mean temperature would be over 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Do you say, then, that CO2 can spread out, but not so far that amounts worth talking about can reach Mauna Loa from distant places?
Whether it can, or does, or not, isn’t my gripe here. Their claim is that they can confidently exclude the volcanic to give them a pristine background from air coming in across half the Pacific. They can’t.
..So you’re implying that the stable level at Mauna Loa differs from the world average.
Again, not the issue. All I’m saying is that their claims to provide pristine ‘global background’ is impossible. (The claim is that because CO2 is well-mixed all over the globe it doesn’t matter where it’s measured from as long as the point of measurement is free from anything local to contaminate their readings.)
You need to bear in mind here that their continuing claim for Mauna Loa is that it is a perfect site for such a measurement, chosen by Keeling from the beginning, and that such measurements are taken at places free from local imput precisely to avoid so such problems in their quest to produce ‘background global’, to maintain pristine samples. It should also be borne in mind that most people take such information on trust, it is only those who begin to look into the claims that get to the point where they do a double-take…
..and then the whole thing unravels. From the Keeling/Callendar cherry picking and settling for particularly low series of readings from which to prove that man-made CO2 emissions were growing and would affect the climate. This was the intent, I think that’s a particularly important thing to take into consideration here to fit the jigsaw pieces together, because the intent since then has been clearly also to make it appear that this really was happening, by the constant re-editing of temperature records to fit Mauna Loa and the other stations and the need to get rid of the MWP and LIA. And then of course added to this scientific fraud is the constant barrage of abusive attacks against the integrity of any scientist who raised objections. There are links on the Obituary Ernst Georg Beck which expand on the initial cherry picking. Oh, and this point that Keeling’s intention was to deliberately prove this connection was from his strong environmentalism, Keeling was Gore’s guru, inspired him. Shortly before his death Keeling began to voice that he was wrong, Gore dismissed this as the onset of senility.
This is a typical pro-AGW apologetic: http://www.skepticalscience.com/The-Dunning-Kruger-effect-and-the-climate-debate.html
I’m posting this for the graph which shows a Hockey stick with Mauna Loa data against ice core readings and the graph following. Firstly the first, there are lots of pages on the unreliability of ice-core data, most of which I find too technical to follow, but let’s look at the time line. From around the time of the big melt into our Holocene when sea levels rose over 300′ to now, shows a slight increase even in the ice core, to be expected as CO2 historically shows time lag behind rises in temperatures, but, actually since that beginning very steep rise in temperature which brought in the benign to life conditions in the northern hemisphere as the miles thick ice melted – the temperature has been decreasing, in fits and starts, but decreasing. Our Holocene is no different in general to the past 450,000 years of cycles as seen on the Vostok graph. This AGW on Mauna Loa graph is meaningless to real science without the inclusion of a real temperature line for a start, but, as propaganda it serves AGW purposes. Followed by another such deliberate sleight of hand, the cherry picking of the beginning of the second graph on that page makes it appear that there is lockstep of rising CO2 and rising temperatures, only those taking a closer look will see why this point was chosen..
The trouble is, there’s very good agreement between Mauna Loa and 10 other sites in the Scripps network.
Why shouldn’t there be? Keeling’s son has control of all them. I haven’t spent any time looking at the other sites in any great depth, but in passing I’ve come across several mentions of data not freely given, and there was something about sites going out of the loop. But anyway, same agenda. And, in that the gathering of temperature data in AGW is now well settled consensus amongst those taking this seriously, that these have been consistently manipulated to that agenda, I don’t see any reason to give any benefit of the doubt to the equal unreliablity of CO2 station data as these groups have been many working decades together.
You can’t say they’re all dominated by local CO2, because in that case you’ll have to say that local CO2 is very much the same in lots of places,
Well, I’m quite happy to say that. Historical (see Beck) analysis confirmed that…
and besides, you’ve made a big deal out of the fact that Mauna Loa is a volcano.
And my specific argument is as above. Against their specific claims for Mauna Loa, that it is a perfect place to measure ‘global background well-mixed in the atmosphere CO2 cleanly arriving across half the Pacific and free from local contamination of samples’. From which they claim ‘that this shows rising global background CO2 from their measurements pre-Industrial Revolution to rises in temperature in line with increased man-made CO2’.
Again, a cherry picked beginning for temperature rises, the end of the LIA, but this is a many-headed monster.
I’m puzzled by your idea that background CO2 does not/might not exist; you’ve said that Mauna Loa is no evidence that it exists. How could it not exist? It’s the average over a large region. There would be an average even if local CO2 stayed entirely local.
This relates to the AGW claim that there is a ‘well-mixed background CO2 which stays up in the atmosphere accumulating’. From which all the dire predictions of catastrophe and frantic exploration of methods to bury carbon dioxide deep underground..
They haven’t proved such a thing exists. That there is CO2 in the background is not the same thing. Carbon Dioxide is constantly in our atmosphere, our very lives depend on it being there..
Also, its average is pretty much as historical measurement show, around 400 ppm.
Remember, the AGW argument from Mauna Loa is that it has grown from an average of 280 ppm ‘before man’s imput of extra CO2 began leading to higher temperatures’.
So I don’t think you can maintain your position without alleging a conspiracy.
Hmm, conspiracy has certainly been proved in the email saga, but here there was definitely an agenda, Keeling made no secret of that so there’s no conspiracy there. It was the stated reason for choosing Mauna Loa in the first place.
Now, this is very poorly remembered so it’s not the detail that’s my point here, but some time ago on this site there was a discussion about some readings from Mauna Loa, seems their computer had gone on the blink or something, or somehow large variations were not included, but someone made the comment that in analysing reems of data there’s a possibility of a kind of ‘blindness’ to anything that isn’t expected. My own personal view of Keeling is that his belief in the accuracy of his ideas had the same effect on him. This makes more sense to me of his much later attempts to retract from the accuracy of the conclusions in his own work. Over the years he must have been exposed to counter arguments, finally, I think, these raised doubts even in him as someone driven by his vision. I think this was a brave thing to do, it was his life’s work. Of course, by then the juggernaut was rolling and crushing all opposition, hence Gore’s uncharitable remarks.
According to the Observatory website: “the undisturbed air, remote location, and minimal influences of vegetation and human activity at MLO are ideal for monitoring constituents in the atmosphere that can cause climate change.” http://www.americanthinker.com/2009.12/greenhouse_gas_observatories_d.html
While looking for information on the winds around Mauna Loa I found a discussion between helicopter pilots, the in-joke was that those learning to fly on Hawaii wouldn’t know how to deal with calm conditions when flying elsewhere..
The real pattern here is the constant propaganda of descriptions at odds with the facts, it becomes rather pathetic really when it’s looked at in the detail as we’re doing here.
I’ll have to leave it there for the moment, will come back to the rest of your post after the weekend.
Enjoy yours.
Here’s one of the pages looking at the earlier CO2 data and the cherry picking, http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2007/03/real-history-of-carbon-dioxide-levels.html
Apologies, poor coding check, reposting:
Do you say, then, that CO2 can spread out, but not so far that amounts worth talking about can reach Mauna Loa from distant places?
Whether it can, or does, or not, isn’t my gripe here. Their claim is that they can confidently exclude the volcanic to give them a pristine background from air coming in across half the Pacific. They can’t.
..So you’re implying that the stable level at Mauna Loa differs from the world average.
Again, not the issue. All I’m saying is that their claims to provide pristine ‘global background’ is impossible. (The claim is that because CO2 is well-mixed all over the globe it doesn’t matter where it’s measured from as long as the point of measurement is free from anything local to contaminate their readings.)
You need to bear in mind here that their continuing claim for Mauna Loa is that it is a perfect site for such a measurement, chosen by Keeling from the beginning, and that such measurements are taken at places free from local imput precisely to avoid so such problems in their quest to produce ‘background global’, to maintain pristine samples. It should also be borne in mind that most people take such information on trust, it is only those who begin to look into the claims that get to the point where they do a double-take…
..and then the whole thing unravels. From the Keeling/Callendar cherry picking and settling for particularly low series of readings from which to prove that man-made CO2 emissions were growing and would affect the climate. This was the intent, I think that’s a particularly important thing to take into consideration here to fit the jigsaw pieces together, because the intent since then has been clearly also to make it appear that this really was happening, by the constant re-editing of temperature records to fit Mauna Loa and the other stations and the need to get rid of the MWP and LIA. And then of course added to this scientific fraud is the constant barrage of abusive attacks against the integrity of any scientist who raised objections. There are links on the Obituary Ernst Georg Beck which expand on the initial cherry picking. Oh, and this point that Keeling’s intention was to deliberately prove this connection was from his strong environmentalism, Keeling was Gore’s guru, inspired him. Shortly before his death Keeling began to voice that he was wrong, Gore dismissed this as the onset of senility.
This is a typical pro-AGW apologetic: http://www.skepticalscience.com/The-Dunning-Kruger-effect-and-the-climate-debate.html
I’m posting this for the graph which shows a Hockey stick with Mauna Loa data against ice core readings and the graph following. Firstly the first, there are lots of pages on the unreliability of ice-core data, most of which I find too technical to follow, but let’s look at the time line. From around the time of the big melt into our Holocene when sea levels rose over 300′ to now, shows a slight increase even in the ice core, to be expected as CO2 historically shows time lag behind rises in temperatures, but, actually since that beginning very steep rise in temperature which brought in the benign to life conditions in the northern hemisphere as the miles thick ice melted – the temperature has been decreasing, in fits and starts, but decreasing. Our Holocene is no different in general to the past 450,000 years of cycles as seen on the Vostok graph. This AGW on Mauna Loa graph is meaningless to real science without the inclusion of a real temperature line for a start, but, as propaganda it serves AGW purposes. Followed by another such deliberate sleight of hand, the cherry picking of the beginning of the second graph on that page makes it appear that there is lockstep of rising CO2 and rising temperatures, only those taking a closer look will see why this point was chosen..
The trouble is, there’s very good agreement between Mauna Loa and 10 other sites in the Scripps network.
Why shouldn’t there be? Keeling’s son has control of all them. I haven’t spent any time looking at the other sites in any great depth, but in passing I’ve come across several mentions of data not freely given, and there was something about sites going out of the loop. But anyway, same agenda. And, in that the gathering of temperature data in AGW is now well settled consensus amongst those taking this seriously, that these have been consistently manipulated to that agenda, I don’t see any reason to give any benefit of the doubt to the equal unreliablity of CO2 station data as these groups have been many working decades together.
You can’t say they’re all dominated by local CO2, because in that case you’ll have to say that local CO2 is very much the same in lots of places,
Well, I’m quite happy to say that. Historical (see Beck) analysis confirmed that…
and besides, you’ve made a big deal out of the fact that Mauna Loa is a volcano.
And my specific argument is as above. Against their specific claims for Mauna Loa, that it is a perfect place to measure ‘global background well-mixed in the atmosphere CO2 cleanly arriving across half the Pacific and free from local contamination of samples’. From which they claim ‘that this shows rising global background CO2 from their measurements pre-Industrial Revolution to rises in temperature in line with increased man-made CO2’.
Again, a cherry picked beginning for temperature rises, the end of the LIA, but this is a many-headed monster.
I’m puzzled by your idea that background CO2 does not/might not exist; you’ve said that Mauna Loa is no evidence that it exists. How could it not exist? It’s the average over a large region. There would be an average even if local CO2 stayed entirely local.
This relates to the AGW claim that there is a ‘well-mixed background CO2 which stays up in the atmosphere accumulating’. From which all the dire predictions of catastrophe and frantic exploration of methods to bury carbon dioxide deep underground..
They haven’t proved such a thing exists. That there is CO2 in the background is not the same thing. Carbon Dioxide is constantly in our atmosphere, our very lives depend on it being there..
Also, its average is pretty much as historical measurement show, around 400 ppm.
Remember, the AGW argument from Mauna Loa is that it has grown from an average of 280 ppm ‘before man’s imput of extra CO2 began leading to higher temperatures’.
So I don’t think you can maintain your position without alleging a conspiracy.
Hmm, conspiracy has certainly been proved in the email saga, but here there was definitely an agenda, Keeling made no secret of that so there’s no conspiracy there. It was the stated reason for choosing Mauna Loa in the first place.
Now, this is very poorly remembered so it’s not the detail that’s my point here, but some time ago on this site there was a discussion about some readings from Mauna Loa, seems their computer had gone on the blink or something, or somehow large variations were not included, but someone made the comment that in analysing reems of data there’s a possibility of a kind of ‘blindness’ to anything that isn’t expected. My own personal view of Keeling is that his belief in the accuracy of his ideas had the same effect on him. This makes more sense to me of his much later attempts to retract from the accuracy of the conclusions in his own work. Over the years he must have been exposed to counter arguments, finally, I think, these raised doubts even in him as someone driven by his vision. I think this was a brave thing to do, it was his life’s work. Of course, by then the juggernaut was rolling and crushing all opposition, hence Gore’s uncharitable remarks.
According to the Observatory website: “the undisturbed air, remote location, and minimal influences of vegetation and human activity at MLO are ideal for monitoring constituents in the atmosphere that can cause climate change.” http://www.americanthinker.com/2009.12/greenhouse_gas_observatories_d.html
While looking for information on the winds around Mauna Loa I found a discussion between helicopter pilots, the in-joke was that those learning to fly on Hawaii wouldn’t know how to deal with calm conditions when flying elsewhere..
The real pattern here is the constant propaganda of descriptions at odds with the facts, it becomes rather pathetic really when it’s looked at in the detail as we’re doing here.
I’ll have to leave it there for the moment, will come back to the rest of your post after the weekend.
Enjoy yours.
Here’s one of the pages looking at the earlier CO2 data and the cherry picking, http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2007/03/real-history-of-carbon-dioxide-levels.html
Myrrh:
Keeling was Gore’s guru, inspired him. Shortly before his death Keeling began to voice that he was wrong, Gore dismissed this as the onset of senility.
That wasn’t Charles Keeling! It was Roger Revelle. Again and again, you show that you are not familiar with the question of global warming or the events surrounding it.
This AGW on Mauna Loa graph is meaningless to real science without the inclusion of a real temperature line for a start, but, as propaganda it serves AGW purposes.
What “AGW on Mauna Loa graph”? The article doesn’t show any graph of AGW.
Followed by another such deliberate sleight of hand, the cherry picking of the beginning of the second graph on that page makes it appear that there is lockstep of rising CO2 and rising temperatures, only those taking a closer look will see why this point was chosen..
No, it doesn’t. There’s no information in it about temperature. Besides, anyone who claimed that CO2 and temperature moved in “lockstep” would be in conflict with “mainstream” scientific opinion.
Smoking Frog, please let me know if you’re still reading this. I haven’t been able to return to it earlier.
Myrrh:
Yep, I’m still reading, or rather, I will keep reading, since the “notify” email alerted me to your message.