APS responds! – Deconstructing the APS response to Dr. Hal Lewis resignation

“The dwell time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hundreds of years”
The letter comes from APS? Sure? OMG

Well if you ever wanted proof that politics was in charge of the science of AGW, then this statement from the APS demonstrates it perfectly.

The APS doubles down.
What is clear is that these rent seeking idiots have no knowledge of the history of scientific controversies….in the vast majority of cases the lone individual has been proven to be right, and (please forgive the sarcastic quotes here) the “august”, “deliberative”, “body of reputable scientists” proven to be wrong.
At some point Anthony, a mere loss of status and public ridicule simply isn’t enough. What the APS management, Holdren, Hanson, Mann et. al. are doing crosses over into criminal enterprise.

A very week response to the criticisms of the APS made in the Dr. Hal Lewis resignation letter.
This absurd statement caught my eye:-
In light of the significant settled aspects of the science, APS totally rejects Dr. Lewis’ claim that global warming is a “scam” and a “pseudoscientific fraud.”
On most of the key pillars of the CAGW conjecture, most of the science is far from settled:-
The amount (if any) that the extra CO2 from use of fossil fuels increases temperature.
The size (if any) of the positive feed back from extra water vapour and other ‘forcing(s)’.
The role of clouds – ocean – aerosols – solar changes… e.t.c.
How a scientific body like the APS can be blind to the uncertainties in these basic climate mechanisms defies belief! I think Hal Lewis has every right to call it pseudo-science. The whole crumbling edifice of CAGW lies broken on the ground, but the true believers refuse to see it and still keep on repeating the same old discredited mantra.

Is the resignation letter by Dr. Hal Lewis an example of the body of science policing itself?
Is this APS press release (in response to Dr. Lewis resignation letter) an example of the body of science policing itself?
Are the responses (to the APS press release) written by Dr. Hal Lewis and by current APS members Dr. Roger Cohen and Dr. Will Happer an example of the body of science policing itself?
Is WUWT providing a public forum to discuss Dr. Lewis’ resignation and its fallout an example of the body of science policing itself?
My Answer: All of the above are good examples of a scientific self-policing process . . . . finally.
John

I downloaded the pdf version of the above. The pdf version omits that the source of the comments is Dr.’s Cohen, Happer and Lewis, which is indicated in the above posting. I suggest that their names as sourced be added to the pdf, to make it more of a free-standing complete document.

Dr. Lewis’ specific charge that APS as an organization is benefitting financially from climate change funding is equally false. Neither the operating officers nor the elected leaders of the Society have a monetary stake in such funding.
Did anyone else notice that they ignored the specific charge from Dr. Lewis that the bylaws of the organization were violated by ignoring the petition from the 200+ members?
As for the rest of it, maybe physicists will start zeroing in on the effects of CO2 from a physics standpoint, using the well known equations on the subject and maybe, just maybe, blow a hole in the entire AGW theory.

@jorge
“If so few APS members are involved in climate change research, why the hell is the APS issuing statements on it? It would seem the topic is almost as far from the APS’s purview as it could get.”
Maybe they’re commenting on it because it’s an important scientific issue with enormous implications.
Could you provide some figures for what constitutes the appropriate climate science involvement between “What the hell does this have to do with them anyway?” and “Well they would say that wouldn’t they?”
You would think if even a random selection of the charges leveled against climate science (for example that the greenhouse effect just doesn’t exist) that APS members would have the skillset to detect such a thing. Instead, like practically every other scientific organisation, they accept the reality of human driven climate change.
Instead it’s become necessary to explain why the vast majority of the scientific community support something that isn’t true, the explanation naturally being a conspiracy theory.

Anthony,
Regarding snipping the “private” email, I suspected as much. Thank you for doing so. Is there a way running these sorts of things by the moderators before attempting to post?
For the curious, the private email was with a government funded aid organisation that could not give me a justifiable reason for why her organisation “believed” we were suffering, “The effects of climate change (cyclones, floods and crop failures etc)………
I had complained earlier about their pre-exploding-schoolchild-video support of 10:10.

From my point of view the APS’s attempt at face saving is just that and little more. They are of course just as entitled to their opinions as is Dr. Lewis his. While this letter may be the right thing to do, from the APS’s Public Relations prospective, It is less then convincing. I suspect the membership and a large proportion of the public, will see through the spin and obscuration.
In Lewis’ letter he suggested the APS was acting more from self interest, of at least some of its prominent members, and not from a strictly scientific view. On that charge the APS has not successfully defended.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Tawanda W. Johnson
Press Secretary
APS Physics
529 14th St. NW, Suite 1050
Washington, DC 20045-2065
Phone: 202-662-8702
Fax: 202-662-8711
tjohnson@aps.org
_________________________________
Sending a lady, the Press Secretary, to do the “President’s” duty: to respond ‘in kind’. This says more about the APS than anything anyone has ever said about this professional organization, and likely ever will say. Tawanda, you really might want to pass the word to the other staff that the people you work for are cowards and will leave you hanging out to dry if they think it’s for the good of their own backsides.

@Pascvaks
“Sending a lady, the Press Secretary, to do the “President’s” duty: to respond ‘in kind’. This says more about the APS than anything anyone has ever said about this professional organization”
I’m not sure what the sex of the person has to do with anything. If the APS felt a woman was inadequate to represent their views that certainly would say something about the organisation.
As for your other point, you’re reading a press release thus the contact details given are for the press officer. You know, the person whose job it is to manage the organisations communication with the press.

This press release does more to discredit the APS than the original resignation letter. Extraordinary blindness on their part.

“However, APS continues to recognize that climate models are far from adequate, and the extent of global warming and climatic disruptions produced by sustained increases in atmospheric carbon loading remain uncertain.”
Well – they made sure to use the new CAGW catchphrase “climatic disruptions”!
In the end, though, this kind of CYA political statement is all about preventing Climatic Ca$h Disruptions…

Enneagram says:
October 13, 2010 at 11:29 am
“The dwell time of carbon dioxide in the BRAIN impairs reasoning for many years until compensated by fresh oxygen intake from the Blogsphere, specially from WUWT”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Kudos Anthony!

The American Physical Society announces the New Laws Of Mo’Shun, as applied to Anthropogenic Global Warming Research and anyone that dares to refute it.
1st Law Of Mo’Shun
“Every positive Anthropogenic Global Warming conclusion tends to remain in its ‘incontrovertable state’, regardless of the overwhelming body of independently verified evidence refuting it.”
This is a more general statement of the Mann and Jones et.al. Law of Nondisclosure Inertia.
2nd Law Of Mo’Shun
“F = m a : Funding = Malfeasance multiplied by Acceleration”
“The relationship between the funding for Anthropogenic Global Warming research is directly proportional to the positive (wink/nudge/nature trick/hide the decline) results confirming the hypothesis, multiplied by the accelerated declarations of impending disaster trumpeted in a complicit media.”
Note that funding and accelerated declarations of impending disasters by a complicit media are properly italicized, as these are vectors with a common sign or direction. Malfeasance is not, as it is a proportional physical property to AGW.
3rd Law Of Mo’Shun
“For every considered and data supported action refuting AGW, there is an irrational and considerably larger deceitful reaction aimed at castrating the authors of the original refutation.”
See Real Climate web site for current examples.
For further information on these Fund-A-Mental Laws Of Mo’Shun, as applied to the august dissenting members of the American Physical Society,
Contact:
APS Physics
529 14th  St. NW, Suite 1050
Washington, DC 20045-2065
Phone: 202-662-8702
Fax: 202-662-8711
tjohnson@aps.org

Who are they trying to kid with this sorry excuse for a defence?
You might expect this kind of reply from a local government bureaucrat underling, waffle and misdirection and word fog but from the APS? Supposedly some of the brightest minds on the planet and they come up with a badly put together ill thought out letter rushed and frankly rubbish. Perhaps the APS dose indeed have something to hide if they can be panicked into writing what amounts to a real world and real time self indictment.
An August body like the APS would never need to issue such a statement if they had nothing to hide, the wording is stunningly poor and the blame shifting could have come from a college student and in fact if this is the accepted standard of the APS when responding to such damaging charges then they would have caused themselves less shame if they had just admitted guilt.
To anyone with half a brain this IS a simple admission of guilt.

Ref – sharper00 says:
October 13, 2010 at 11:47 am
All we have is the Lewis letter to the President and the APS response to Lewis from the Press Secretary. That’s it. The lady is only doing her job ‘as directed’ and there’s nothing else to say about her. Link for APS OPA at –
http://www.aps.org/about/contact/staff.cfm?office=&initial=&dept=Office+of+Public+Affairs
What is left is the ‘black hole’ that is the APS and from which nothing but this excapes. We can surmise that the author of the response was a senior staffer, we can surmise that someone above him proofed it, and that someone above him blessed it, and that someone else faxed a copy to the Prez for the final OK. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, and noting their public stand in support of AGW, let’s assume that the APS senior leadership are a bunch of idiots and the organization is not long for the real world of real physics and real science and real people; they do like to hide behind whatever’s handy, don’t they?

It is nice to have the ability to talk back. In the old days, it was much more difficult. The internet has really helped level the field.

The monolith will break up as soon as the money dries up as it surely will.
November is not very far away. Act accordingly.

Next the APS will be playing the plagiarism card.

The good Doctors pass over the questionable APS statement

On the matter of global climate change, APS notes that virtually all reputable scientists agree with the following observations:
* Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere due to human activity;

which I regard as another bait-and-switch and would reword thusly:

* Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere. Undoubtedly human activity is one cause of this increase; however, it is unclear how large a proportion human activity represents, and probably it is only a very small proportion, since natural processes far exceed human emissions in strength. The fact that carbon dioxide is steadily increasing, somewhat in line with increasing human emissions, can also be explained by the inertia of the oceans in responding to global warming since the Little Ice Age. Carbon dioxide change can lag temperature change by up to 800 years

It’s just totally disgusting. The first thing is that Callan, instead of answering himself, gave the task to his bodyguard who has no idea about science and who just wrote a meaningless and dishonest stream of intimidation. More comments of mine:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/10/aps-thinks-that-tawanda-may-teach.html
I am ashamed of Mr Callan.
REPLY:Thanks Luboš. Reading your post, for the record, I didn’t analyse anything in the APS statement, see the foreword. Also, I think your response is a bit over the top regarding the APS executive secretary. She’s probably just caught in the middle. – Anthony

“This passes over the fact that carbon dioxide absorption lines are nearly saturated.”
I’ve got the same question as Bret. Is this true? If so, it’s game over. ANY scientist worth his salt would recognize this and there would be no debate. So I’m guessing, until shown otherwise, that either it isn’t true or is under dispute.

Bret says:
October 13, 2010 at 10:54 am
“This passes over the fact that carbon dioxide absorption lines are nearly saturated.”
Is it? At all relevant altitudes?
Yes.

I’m not sure how clearer Hal Lewis could have made his resignation. His overriding concern was the response of the APS to the climategate escape, or rather the lack of it, in addition to the manner in which the APS drew up their statement on climate change.
Economist John Maynard Keynes said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” The facts around man made global climate warming disruption change changed with that escape from the University of East Anglia. The naked self-interests, the fudgey computer code, the private admission of uncertainties and most egregiously the attempts at undermining the scientific method and peer-review process were plain to see. Yet the APS were unmoved such was the council’s faith in incontrovertible man made global climate warming disruption change.
jorgekafkazar said: “If so few APS members are involved in climate change research, why the hell is the APS issuing statements on it? It would seem the topic is almost as far from the APS’s purview as it could get.”
Well spotted! Peer pressure would be my bet due to other illustrious societies taking a similar view. For whatever reason it was beyond the council to say ‘This is not our field of expertise’.
The ‘consensus’ is a sham. How many of the scientists involved in writing the IPCC literature are climate scientists? Not many out of a couple of thousand. But there are chapters and chapters and chapters about all the other projected effects written by specialists in those fields. They have to start from a point of certainty – that man made additional CO2 is warming the world – and apply that projection to their own field of expertise.
Those authors are not expressing an expert view on the validity of man made global climate warming disruption change but just setting out what they see as the likely consequences of the projections they have been handed.
Beyond the basic 1 degree C if CO2 doubles (I think that’s the figure isn’t it?) the idea rests on the quality of the data and how correct the computer models and the assumptions contained within them are.

Mac the Knife says:
October 13, 2010 at 12:20 pm
The American Physical Society announces the New Laws Of Mo’Shun,…..
heheheh……very nice!

@Geoff Cranston: Can you supply reference(s)? It would be much appreciated.

There’s so much stuff here I didn’t previously know. For example:

The chair of the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) that re-endorsed the 2007 APS Statement on Climate Change sits on the science advisory board of a large international bank…… Other members of this board include current IPCC chief Pachauri and Lord Oxburgh, of Climategate exoneration fame.

There aren’t even subtle links between those promoting AGW and financial interests. I mean there are blantant conflicts of interest evident in this little piece alone.

Mac the Knife says: October 13, 2010 at 12:20 pm

[Fund-A-Mental Laws of Mo’Shun]

hahahahaha

bob says: October 13, 2010 at 1:02 pm

But Lucy,
Temperature hasn’t changed enough since the little ice age to cause the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere that we have seen.
And the 800 year lag puts the time back to the Medieval Warm period, which we all know was warmer than today.

Look at Akasofu’s work. I disagree that temperature hasn’t changed enough, I believe that if we take Henry’s Laws seriously it only requires a tiny increase. And please note, I carefully said UP TO 800 years, because with the total effects of ocean currents we are really dealing with quite a complex “hydra”, and certainly the major ocean effects, following the sun, kick in far more quickly than 800 years delay AFAICT.

Lucy Skywalker says:
October 13, 2010 at 1:14 pm
Great statement John. But IMO there are still several steps to take, to pull back from the precipice:

————-
Lucy Skywalker,
I agree with all your additional steps. Thanks.
We also must pay very close attention to the IPCC . . . it is the last refuge of the accepted/consensus science of AGW by CO2 . . . . that is where the current leadership will surely retreat to.
John

Hal Lewis says:
—Well, it depends on what you mean by “dwell time.”  If it is the conventional half life of an impulse loading of carbon dioxide, the statement is wrong – by a lot..  The IPCC’s Bern carbon cycle model http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~joos/model_description/model_description.html gets a 16 year half life.  If it is the time for the last molecule to get picked up by a sink, the statement is meaningless.  At the very least, the statement is sloppy and hardly befitting a world class scientific society.—
I’m pretty sure the she means the life of a carbon molecule that “dwells” in the carbon cycle. Which would make her statement absolutely correct and pertinent to the issue of long term climate change. This is established scientific fact that is undisputed. Why Lewis would assume she would only be discussing the “half-life” of molecules that aren’t taken into sink is anyone’s guess. My guess would be that he wants to argue with a strawman.
—-This passes over the fact that carbon dioxide absorption lines are nearly saturated.—
Maybe in his chemistry set at home at sea level but certainly not in the upper atmosphere where pressure and temperature are much different. Has this guy opened an atmospheric physics book since the forties?

“Carbon dioxide is an excellent infrared absorber, and therefore, its increasing presence in the atmosphere contributes to global warming; and…”
It is sad to see the representative of what is supposed to be a prestigious physics organization spew such nonsense. They threaten to send us back to the dark ages for sure.

“But Lucy,
Temperature hasn’t changed enough since the little ice age to cause the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere that we have seen.
And the 800 year lag puts the time back to the Medieval Warm period, which we all know was warmer than today”
Exactly. 800 years since the warmth of the medieval warm period and now we are seeing CO2 increasing…
How does that not equal a 800 year lag between warming and CO2 increasing?

Masterful response by APS. Who says scientists aren’t skilled at PR? (sarc)
I can only imagine the inquiries they’re receiving by their membership. It appears they’ve grossly underestimated Dr. Lewis. I can’t think of a more useful or honorable way to end a long and distinguished career. My sincere gratitude to Dr. Lewis and his noble associates.

Any reaction to the President of the Royal Society’s piece in today’s (The) Times?
REPLY: without a link, no – Anthony

Maybe in his chemistry set at home at sea level but certainly not in the upper atmosphere where pressure and temperature are much different.

As are the radiative scattering properties of the ensemble.

Dennis Wingo said
“As for the rest of it, maybe physicists will start zeroing in on the effects of CO2 from a physics standpoint, using the well known equations on the subject and maybe, just maybe, blow a hole in the entire AGW theory.”
* * *
Excellent point. Many phsyicists are questioning it. But, as ususal, their studies arent published in “Nature” or any other pro-AGW journal.
This is one of the best I’ve read.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161

Robinson says:
October 13, 2010 at 1:16 pm
The chair of the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) that re-endorsed the 2007 APS “Statement on Climate Change sits on the science advisory board of a large international bank…… Other members of this board include current IPCC chief Pachauri and Lord Oxburgh, of Climategate exoneration fame.”
If the Chair is on the Advisory Board, he/she must be removed immediately. This is one stinking conflict of interest. It screams “conspiracy” and “cover-up.”

As an environmental engineer for more than 47+ years I have reviewed many experiments and data related to water,wastewater treatment , air pollution control, ground contamination, an other aspects of the environmental condition. When I started look at the issue of Mann-made global warming cause by the “greenhouse gas effect” I asked one question-Where is the creditable experimental data showing that the “greenhouse gas effect exists”? In more than 5 years of asking many universities ,governmental agencies, “scientists?’and the internet , I have yet to get an answer. The closes is three experiments from different source that think they have proved the “greenhouse gas effect” each has at least 3 to 10 scientific faults that show that the experimenters do not know physics. The work of many renown physicist has shown that the “greenhouse gas effect” violates fundamental laws of physics. I have developed an experiment that shows that the “greenhouse gas effect does not exist”
below is a list of references that show that the “ghg effect” and Mann-made global warming is a political hoax.
When the AGW continually using circumstantial evidence instead of real evidence you know they do not have the real thing.
List of references:
The paper “Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 greenhouse effect within the frame of physics” by Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner is an in-depth examination of the subject. Version 4 2009
Electronic version of an article published as International Journal of Modern Physics
B, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) 275{364 , DOI No: 10.1142/S021797920904984X, c World
Scientific Publishing Company, http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmpb.
Report of Alan Carlin of US-EPA March, 2009 that shows that CO2 does not cause global warming.
Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis Violates Fundamentals of Physics” by Dipl-Ing Heinz Thieme This work has about 10 or 12 link
that support the truth that the greenhouse gas effect is a hoax.
R.W.Wood
from the London, Edinborough and Dublin Philosophical Magazine , 1909, vol 17, p319-320. Cambridge UL shelf mark p340.1.c.95, i
The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory
By Alan Siddons
from:http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_hidden_flaw_in_greenhouse.html at March 01, 2010 – 09:10:34 AM CST
The below information was a foot note in the IPCC 4 edition. It is obvious that there was no evidence to prove that the ghg effect exists.
“In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first speculated that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.”
After 1909 when R.W.Wood proved that the understanding of the greenhouse effect was in error and the ghg effect does not exist. After Niels Bohr published his work and receive a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. The fantasy of the greenhouse gas effect should have died in 1909 and 1922. Since then it has been shown by several physicists that the concept is a Violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Obviously the politicians don’t give a dam that they are lying. It fits in with what they do every hour of every day .Especially the current pretend president.
Paraphrasing Albert Einstein after the Publishing of “The Theory of Relativity” –one fact out does 1 million “scientist, 10 billion politicians and 20 billion environmental whachos-that don’t know what” The Second Law of thermodynamics” is.
University of Pennsylvania Law School
ILE
INSTITUTE FOR LAW AND ECONOMICS
A Joint Research Center of the Law School, the Wharton School,
and the Department of Economics in the School of Arts and Sciences
at the University of Pennsylvania
RESEARCH PAPER NO. 10-08
Global Warming Advocacy Science: a Cross Examination
Jason Scott Johnston
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
May 2010
This paper can be downloaded without charge from the
Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection:
http://ssrn.
Israeli Astrophysicist Nir Shaviv: ‘There is no direct evidence showing that CO2 caused 20th century warming, or as a matter of fact, any warming’ link to this paper on climate depot.
Web- site references:
http://www.americanthinker.com Ponder the Maunder
wwwclimatedepot.com
icecap.us
http://www.stratus-sphere.com
SPPI
many others are available.
The bottom line is that the facts show that the greenhouse gas effect is a fairy-tale and that Man-made global warming is the World larges Scam!!!The IPCC and Al Gore should be charged under the US Anti-racketeering act and when convicted – they should spend the rest of their lives in jail for the Crimes they have committed against Humanity.
The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.”
—Albert Einstein
I have several other references that Ican add if necessary.
30 June 2010
On Some Flaws in Greenhouse Gas Global Warming
I have just finished reading an excellent article by Alan Siddons called The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory on American Thinker from way back on 25 February 2010. The article is a little slow in developing, but finishes with a death blow to the usual theory put forth by catastrophic anthropogenic global warming advocates. I intend to explain more concisely what Siddons explained and to add comments of my own in this post which make the deathblow much more gory.
First of all, I am going to enlarge the context of the discussion. The primary source of heat for the surface of the Earth is the radiant energy of the sun. The solar wind of the sun, materials dumped into the atmosphere from space, heat from the deep interior of the earth, and the interplay of changes in the Earth’s magnetic field and the sun’s magnetic field are also contributors of heat, though the sum of these is much less than that from the sun’s radiant energy spectrum of ultraviolet (UV), visible, and infra-red (IR) light. The entire catastrophic greenhouse gas hypothesis ignores effects upon the incident IR portion of this spectrum of light from the sun. This is foolish.
UV light is 11% of the radiant energy from the sun. The UV light variance of 0.5 to 0.8% with the solar cycle is much larger than is the visible light variance of 0.22%. UV light is absorbed throughout the atmosphere, but much still reaches the ground and is absorbed there. The amount of UV radiation absorbed in the upper atmosphere is highly dependent upon the amount of ozone there. The amount of ozone is highly dependent upon the solar wind, CFCs, and volcanic activity. When UV light is more absorbed in the stratosphere than the ground, its surface warming effect is diminished. The absorbed energy is re-emitted as IR radiation and much of that energy is quickly lost to space.
The entire atmosphere is transparent to visible light which is the form of 44% of the radiant energy from the sun, so aside from reflection from clouds and aerosol particles, the visible light reaches the ground or oceans and warms them near their surfaces.
Finally, the IR radiation is not absorbed by nitrogen, oxygen, and argon gases which make up 99% of the atmosphere, so a large fraction of it directly warms the Earth’s surface. Some, is absorbed by the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapor, and small amounts are absorbed by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The incoming IR radiation absorbed in the atmosphere is less effective in warming the Earth’s surface than is that which is absorbed by the Earth’s surface directly. This is because some this energy absorbed in the atmosphere then is radiated again in the form of IR radiation, but now half or more of that is directed out to space. In other words, more water vapor and CO2 in the atmosphere results in a less effective warming of the surface than does less of these gases with respect to the incoming IR energy from the sun. The greenhouse gases have a cooling effect on the original solar radiance spectrum for the 45% of the solar energy in the form of IR.
In each case, whether UV, visible light, or IR, not all of the radiation of that form striking the Earth’s surface is absorbed. Some fraction is reflected and the fraction is very dependent on whether the ground is covered with snow, plowed earth, grasses, forests, crops, black top, or water. There are two real ways that man does have some effect on the Earth’s temperature. He changes the surface of the earth over a fraction of the 30% of its surface which is land. He also converts fossil and biomass fuels into heat. Compared to the overall natural effects, these man-made effects are small, yet they are probably large compared to the effect of his adding CO2 and methane to the atmosphere.
Wherever the atmosphere is heated, there is transfer of heat. In the outer, very low density atmosphere, the primary means of heat transfer is radiant transfer by IR emission from an energetic molecule or atom, since collisions of molecules and atoms for direct energy transfer are rare. In the denser atmosphere, most energy transfer is due to collisions and the convective flow of masses of warmed air. Near the Earth’s surface, almost all of the energy lost by the warmed surface is due to gas molecules striking the surface and picking up heat and then colliding with other molecules to transfer heat from one to another. Once a body of air is so heated, then masses of warmed molecules are transported upward into the cooler atmosphere at higher altitudes or laterally toward cooler surface areas by convection. Any warmed molecule, most of which are nitrogen, oxygen, and argon will radiate IR radiation. However, no molecule or atom at a low temperature such as that near the Earth’s surface is a very effective energy radiator, since the Stephan-Boltzmann equation depends upon the fourth power of the absolute temperature, which commonly near the Earth’s surface is about 290K. Thus, gas molecule collisions and convection are the very dominant means of heat transfer. These processes on balance cool the surface of the Earth and redistribute some of the heat back into the upper atmosphere and cooler places such as those shaded from the sun or the arctic regions.
The favorite claim of the catastrophic greenhouse gas global warming people is that an increase of carbon dioxide and methane gas in the atmosphere will cause energy radiated into the atmosphere from the ground to be absorbed by these molecules and they will radiate half of it back toward the ground, where that energy will warm the surface again and reduce the cooling due to the ground originally radiating that heat into the atmosphere. According to Alan Siddons, less than 1% of the cooling of the Earth’s surface is due to IR emission of the surface or the gases near the surface. More than 99% is due to direct contact and convection.
Since the dominant source of energy warming the surface of the Earth is the sun, let us do a simple calculation based upon the facts presented above. Let us say that greenhouse gases absorb a fraction f of the incoming IR radiation from the sun, which is 45% of the sun’s incoming energy. Thus the energy absorbed by greenhouse gases from the incoming spectrum of solar energy is 0.45f and a fraction of this, say k is radiated back into space without coming near the surface. NASA says k is 0.5, but it is actually slightly larger than that given that much of this absorption occurs at appreciable altitudes. The total cooling due to greenhouse gases, somewhere in the atmosphere, is now 0.45fk. Of this energy, had it become incident upon the surface as IR radiation, a part would have been reflected rather than absorbed. The fraction that would have been absorbed is q. The net energy then lost to the warming of the surface is then 0.45fkq.
Now, let us suppose that a fraction g of the total energy from the sun is absorbed in the Earth’s surface or in the very lower part of the atmosphere. We know that g is a larger fraction of 1 than is f, since most of the solar radiation does reach the ground, including that part in the IR part of the spectrum. Of the energy g absorbed in the surface, only 0.01 times it is emitted as IR radiation according to Siddons. Since the greenhouse gas content of the atmosphere is unchanged the amount of outgoing radiation, serving to cool the surface, is now 0.01gf. A fraction j of this energy will be emitted by the IR warmed greenhouse gas molecules back toward the ground. NASA has said this fraction is 0.5. Let us then say j is about 0.5. The greenhouse gas warming of the surface due to absorbing IR radiation from the ground would then be about 0.005gfq, where q is the fraction of back-reflected IR radiation that was incident upon the surface and absorbed. Remember that some radiation is reflected.
Now we will compare the greenhouse gas cooling effect upon the incoming solar radiation of 0.45fkq to the re-warming of the surface due to 0.005gfq times the total solar radiant energy. Breaking down the parts:
0.005 is much less than 0.45, in fact it is 0.011 times as large.
f appears in both factors, so the comparative effect is cancellation.
The factor q appears in both the cooling and the warming quantities, so it cancels.
k is somewhat more than 0.5, while g is the surface absorptivity for the entire solar spectrum and is likely to be near 0.7, or quite comparable.
So let us say g and k are an approximate trade-off.
Thus the net cooling effect of greenhouse gases is very greatly dominant because the re-heating effect is approximately 0.01 times the cooling effect.
In sum, using a simple calculation we can approximate the effect of greenhouse gases on the surface temperature of the Earth. It turns out that the cooling effect due to keeping incoming solar IR radiation away from the surface is about 100 times the re-heating effect proclaimed by greenhouse gas alarmists. Now, if the effect were very large in either case, this might be cause for concern. We would likely be better off heating our planet than cooling it. But, then we are heating with land use changes and the release of energy from fossil fuels, so the generation of cooling CO2 may simply be compensating for these other small effects. Much more important to this issue than CO2 and methane is water vapor in any case. So, most of this cooling effect is due to water vapor and only a small part is due to CO2 and methane.
Now, of course so much is going on here that this calculation is but an indicator of the likely net effect of greenhouse gases. A more careful calculation would consider the different weight of IR frequencies in the original spectrum of the sun and in the Earth surface emission spectrum. But, any changes due to these secondary issues are likely to be small compared to a factor of 100. In any case, this calculation makes mincemeat of the usual simple rationale for greenhouse gas warming alarmism. It is insane to focus only on the outgoing IR radiation from the Earth’s surface while ignoring the large part of the sun’s total incident radiation which is IR from the get-go. It is also insane to ignore gas collisions and convection currents as mechanisms for heat transfer.
I used the greenhouse gas term in the presently conventional way, but in reality, all gases when warm radiate IR energy and as pointed out by Alan Siddons, they are all really greenhouse gases. But, here I used the term only for those gases that absorb IR energy.
Posted by Charles R. Anderson, Ph. D. at Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Labels: Alan Siddons, CO2 emissions, greenhouse gases, solar radiation
Charles R. Anderson, Ph. D.
Dr. Anderson is the founder of AME and is a co-owner of the company. Dr. Anderson has long specialized in the characterization of surfaces, interfaces, thin films, and coatings. He began applying surface analysis techniques to the solution of materials problems in 1972 with the use of Auger spectroscopy and Mössbauer emission spectroscopy to characterize the magnetic properties of surfaces. Since 1980, he has used XPS or ESCA extensively for the analysis of materials properties, often combining XPS and Auger results with those of other techniques such as microscopy, DSC, SEM, FTIR, EXAFS, Rutherford backscattering, electrochemistry, thermogravimetry, SEM, and XRD to solve complex materials problems. He has had a wealth of experience with surface chemical phase identifications, corrosion, battery development, adhesive failures, contamination, electronic packaging, thin film and bulk materials composition, composite interfaces, particle and sintered ceramic surfaces, surface oxidation and degradation, and many other applications of surface analysis. He has served as an officer of the ASTM Committee E-42 on Surface Analysis and an U.S. Expert on several sub-committees of the ISO Technical Committee 201 on Surface Chemical Analysis. He worked for Case Western Reserve University as a post-doctoral fellow, the Dept. of the Navy as a research physicist, and Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin as a senior scientist before founding AME, Inc. in 1995. Dr. Anderson especially enjoys integrating the results of multiple analytic techniques to solve tough materials problems. He has assembled a team of materials scientists and engineers with complementary skills and experience who all enjoy working together to solve challenging problems. He is or has been a member of AVS, ASM, MRS, ASTM, the Electrochemical Society, ACS, APS, and SAMPE.
PS:As an environmental engineer designing wastewater treatment plants the fact that about 99% of them are biological has slipped by the Environmental Wackos- everyone of them convert waste material in the sewage to CO2 and organic material that is frequently burned producing more CO2. Now if there is so much danger from CO2 do we shut down every sewage treatment plant in the world? What other collateral damage will occur from continuing the lie of greenhouse gas effects and Mann-made global warming. I know of one suicide/murder (family of 5) because the poor soles did not understand that “Mann-made global warming/climate change “is a total hoax/fairy-tale ,lie. Does the World court reside to change AL Gore and other conspirators with complicity to Murder?
The Third world counties are planning to sue the Developed counties for Trillions of Dollars ,E U’s,and Pecos for damages from “Mann-made global warming that does not exist”. The court costs will cause poverty throughout the World except the lawyers and the “climatologist that don’t know what they are talking about.
Will the APS and others reverse their positions to cover their asses?

Anthony,
I would like to clarify one technical point for your visitors. It relates to: “This passes over the fact that carbon dioxide absorption lines are nearly saturated.”
The statement is fact, but it does not by itself imply that additional amounts of atmospheric CO2 will not cause significant warming. Straightforward radiation transfer calculations have established that the effect of doubling atmospheric CO2 would be to increase global average temperature by only about 1 deg. C. — if there were no other climate effects involved. However, these other effects, generally called “feedbacks,” can amplify or attenuate the primary radiation altering effect of additional CO2. The most prominent feedback is the “cloud-water vapor feedback,” which is very difficult to calculate or determine empirically. The IPCC says these feedback effects are in aggregate large and positive, giving rise to their most recent estimate of 2 to 4.5 deg. C for doubling, with a most likely value of 3 deg. C. However, a substantial body of other research points to a much lower value, much closer to the zero feedback value of 1 deg. C, or even lower. The actual aggregated effect of feedbacks is a critical aspect of the debate.

Heh! IPCC dug a big hole, and many famous people and even whole scientific organizations, university departments, and NGOs have fallen into it. What is hilarious is that they all are still digging!

Jimbo says:
October 13, 2010 at 11:12 am
“The dwell time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hundreds of years.”
“Then are the following in error or am I missing something?”
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a5e507c9970c-pi
No, you havent missed anything. Its the ordinary AGW propaganda, as allways.

“REPLY: Ah aged mega troll “Boris” returns with a smackdown. You might want to read Dr. Roger Cohen’s note above. Since you obviously didn’t see it, I’ll put it in the body in large print for you and the kids. -Anthony”
Heh, I guess their response was also “composed over lunch.”
“At the very least, the statement is sloppy and hardly befitting a world class scient[ist]…”

I wonder, did he complained about the post-WWII influx of vast monies for weapons and atomics research?
And is he distancing himself from this, now that it’s getting more press? “It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist” Now they seem to say that’s about policy debates, not science.

Another scientist destroys data
http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4742.html
even admits to being unable to keep up with information
REPLY: oh puhleeeze….
Compare these two statements:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr. Aaserud:
Your papers — correspondence, notes, manuscripts, things of that sort — what’s the status of those? That’s another thing we’re interested in.
Dr. Lewis:
Yes. I really don’t have them, you know. I’ve long since either lost in moving or discarded everything that I had. So I have no papers around from JASON, if that’s what you mean.
Aaserud:
No, generally — both JASON and generally speaking.
Lewis:
There are lots of things, but they’re scattered in a complicated way. Generally speaking, I throw things away after a few years, so the only things I have are the things that have accumulated over the last few years and are relevant to the things I’m actually doing these days.
Aaserud:
That’s another thing that the Center is strongly involved in — just saving papers for historical purposes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now the Climategate deletion:
From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Big difference between discarding old things as you move, versus asking other to delete.
Your point fails.
-Anthony

Jimbo says:
October 13, 2010 at 11:12 am
The dwell time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hundreds of years.”
Then are the following in error or am I missing something?
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a5e507c9970c-pi
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ef800581r
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N31/EDIT.php
Dr A Burns agreed:
October 13, 2010 at 1:49 pm
and
bubbagyro says:
October 13, 2010 at 2:00 pm
However, the actual data in the text of the IPCC report separately states a value of 4 years.
Well all the references are wrong: The 4-6 years mentioned in the different references and the IPCC 4 years are the residence time, that is how long any single molecule of CO2 stays in the atmosphere before being catched by a tree or the oceans. This depends only of the turnover of CO2 in and out the atmosphere over the seasons. That is in total some 150 GtC going in and out within a year of the 800 GtC in the atmosphere, or about 20% or a refresh rate / turnover / residence time of about 5 years. If both the inputs and outputs are equal, that doesn’t change the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at all.
Compare that to the turnover of a factory. The turnover doesn’t say anything about the profit or loss of a factory, only how much material did go through the factory over a year.
Thus the turnover of CO2 within a year has nothing to do with the speed at which an excess amount of CO2 (currently some 110 GtC) in the atmosphere will be removed from the atmosphere. That is a quite different and near independent item: humans emit 8 GtC per year, but only 4 GtC per year shows up in the atmosphere, that means that some 4 GtC per year is really removed from the atmosphere. That is the real loss from the atmosphere, not the 150 GtC turnover. Thus the real removal time will be quite longer than 4-5 years…
Far less than the hundreds of years the APS (and the IPCC, based on the Bern model) claims, which anyway is only relevant for a fraction of the total excess and if you burn all reachable oil and lots of coal.
But some 40 years half life time for the bulk of the excess will do the job, see the calculation of Peter Dietze at:
http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm

So APS admin doesn’t trust it’s members, all being scientists, to know enough proper science to be able to vote on APS’s public standings? But the few at the admin do?
Very interesting. (APS plunges into the ___)

@ Roger (2:25): Thank you. But now I have an additional question. It is my understanding that water vapor is also a strong absorber, yet you don’t hear any calls for reducing “water emission”. I had it explained to me once by a climate scientist that this was because water absorption was saturated (i.e. at the wavelengths water absorbs, all of the radiation was already being absorbed). My question now is, do your comments about CO2 also pertain to water?

Could anyone reading this site clarify something for me;
I don’t understand why doing work for Deutschebank or BP is evidence of corruption in favour of a global warming agenda.
A major international bank and a multinational oil company? Clearly I’m missing something here, but I can’t think of two institutions with less to gain from a radical Green policy
The suggestion seems to be that the bank has a green investment fund; well, yes, it does, and I would guess it accounts for a tiny part of their total investments.
And BP have an alternative energy research fund. Again, a tiny percentage of their business which was, last time I looked, oil. That’s oil, as in the supposed CO2 producer.
I know I’m being dumb here, so please, help me out.

My take on the original letter from Professor Lewis were that he was calling out the APS for its refusal to comply with the procedures mandated in the APS Constitution. The APS Constitution provides:
“ARTICLE VIII – DIVISIONS, TOPICAL GROUPS, AND FORUMS
Organization. – If at least two hundred members wish to advance and diffuse the knowledge of a specific subject or subfield of physics, they may petition the Council to establish a Topical Group. The Council shall distribute to the Chairperson and the Secretary-Treasurer of each existing Division and Topical Group a statement of the areas of interest of the proposed Topical Group for review and comment.” Under the Constitution, the Council SHALL distribute the petition for the topical group. Said the APS, “extraordinary steps to solicit opinions from its membership on climate change.”
“Extraodinary steps” means “we did things differently.” A proper response (if they had one) would be, “We followed all procedures outlined by the APS Constitution.” This wasn’t said, meaning that from an objective standpoint the “extraodinary steps” are appropriately described as “arbitrary.”
The APS did not deny any of the allegations of procedural irregularites, which, again, I found to be the most telling. A person may have a different opinion – that’s fine. What is not fine is when the procedural mechanisms – the very rules of operation – are dismissed or ignored when there is a command under the rules to act a certain way. The Council has the authority to disapprove a new Topical Group but only AFTER the appropriate procedures have been followed.
Playing fast and loose with facts is common. Playing fast and loose with procedure is an indication that fairness would be a downfall.

@Original Mike
“I had it explained to me once by a climate scientist that this was because water absorption was saturated (i.e. at the wavelengths water absorbs, all of the radiation was already being absorbed).”
What he likely meant is that the atmosphere in general already holds as much water vapor as it can. Obviously some locations like deserts are water limited but you don’t have much in the way of human activity producing water there either.
Water needs heat in order to be held in the atmosphere. If the atmosphere heats up there’s almost always a plentiful supply of water to provide it. Human water vapour emissions can’t make the atmosphere hold more than it already can.
Water also cycles out of the atmosphere in a matter of days so it doesn’t accumulate.
C02 emissions from fossil fuels do accumulate because we’re extracting it from where it was previously inaccessible and it takes a very long time for it to be removed from the atmosphere again.

How strange that the trolls cannot remember the emissions trading schemes and the carbon exchange and so forth … ideas that banks, at least, could charge fees for for managing and the likes … and ideas that require that everyone agree that CO2 is evil and will cause the world to fry …

Thanks Peter.

My “dwell time” graph for the Bern Model (IPCC, saturating sinks) and the Dietze Model (constant half life). CO2 is diffusing in an exponential way out of the atmosphere:
http://members.casema.nl/errenwijlens/co2/co2afname.gif

@John Holland: “A major international bank and a multinational oil company? Clearly I’m missing something here, but I can’t think of two institutions with less to gain from a radical Green policy”. Deutschebank and BP, and various other big corporations pump millions of dollars into global warming ‘research’, whereas the world’s leading climate skeptic needed donations from his readers to attend a meeting in the UK. Money for the liars, not the deniers.
When your assumptions fail, you abandon them. It’s easy to assume big oil is more concerned about making money from destroying the planet than of funding a mob of hippies led by green politicians pretending to be scientists, but there it is. It turns out capitalism doesn’t work the way we thought.

Theo Goodwin:
—-There is not one single physical hypothesis that describes some natural regularity in the behavior of CO2 in the atmosphere. I dare you to state one – in your own words, as I say to my students.—-
Actually, theories about how it behaves in the atmosphere have been around since Arhennius and Chamberlain. This was furthered by Elsasser in the forties and confirmed by direct observation by satellite after military studies for WWII flight personnel. Gilbert Plass first studied the infrared spectroscopy of the atmosphere and since then, several other scientists (Kiehl, Trenberth, Ramanathan, Coakley, Myhre, etc.) have used empirical satellite observation to detail the radiative forcing of the different atmospheric gases.

“Dr. Roger Cohen writes in with an addedum: …….”
This addendum appears to be the most interesting part of the post. All it needs is a graph showing how well the projections using the large positive feedback models compare with actual data and you have a nice story. I think it clearly says “The science is settled – but in the negative to the AGW case”.

Given all the debate on what “saturated” lines of CO2 might mean in terms of definition and relevance, why not strike it or modify it so that it quantifies something of known relevance? What you’re doing is very confusing and leads to endless debate.

This whole Interwebby thing has really, really changed the ballgame when it comes to publishing spin. You can’t just publish what you think will be accepted, and ignore pertinent points and then sit back smug in the knowledge that you can prevent further publications, and anyway the average reader does not have the staying power to get to the end of this sentence.
I happen to believe that this effect will be the most significant social effect of the current century, and that means a lot when we’ve only just started.
And we’ve got His Goriness to thank for it!

JDN:

Given all the debate on what “saturated” lines of CO2 might mean in terms of definition and relevance, why not strike it or modify it so that it quantifies something of known relevance? What you’re doing is very confusing and leads to endless debate.

Because the physics behind the “saturated” lines of CO2 is well understood. At best bringing it up is a red herring, at worst it displays a lack of understanding of the physics of the atmospheric greenhouse gas effect.
My few cents worth:
• I endorse Cohen’s remarks.
• I endorse the APS statement that global warming itself (since 1850) is incontrovertible. [To say a result is never “incontrovertible” displays ignorance in how science progresses… For example, Special Relativity is a superset of Newton’s Laws of Motion, Newton’s Laws will never be “thrown out” in their established domain of applicability.]
• I manage to hold my lunch while reading that it is incontrovertible that “significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur.” How can something they themselves term as “likely” be “incontrovertible”??? I don’t think that word means quite what they think it means.
• I disagree with the APS that these disruptions/negative effects are “likely”. I agree they are “plausible” outcomes, I do not agree we understand the science well enough to pin down their likelihood. IOW, I think this is pure BS.

Lewis responds here with personal attacks, such as the personal attack on the Chair of the Panel on Public Affairs. What I would love to see is a reply on science and only science.
This reply by Lewis would be appropriate if the APS had said earlier that he (Lewis) is an deranged old person (that is, an attack on a personal level). However, Lewis was not called crazy, not he was insinuated as being crazy.
Finally, Lewis referenced James Delingpole. He should have reference a neutral source because James is too partizan. In references we put neutral sources.

Jack says:

What is clear is that these rent seeking idiots have no knowledge of the history of scientific controversies….in the vast majority of cases the lone individual has been proven to be right, and (please forgive the sarcastic quotes here) the “august”, “deliberative”, “body of reputable scientists” proven to be wrong.

And, you know this how? I’d like to see your review of the cases. In fact, your statement is a shining example of a skewed sample. You simply ignore all of the crackpots that have been wrong and vanished in obscurity (who, of course, you have never heard of) and look at the few cases where the scientific consensus has been incorrect.

Gary P says:
October 13, 2010 at 5:26 pm
“The dwell time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hundreds of years.”
Dear APS leadership, since you have abandoned all use of experimental evidence in favor of argument from discredited authority, perhaps you can know bless us with an answer to the age old question, “How many CO2 molecules can dance on the head of a pin ?”
======================================================
AARRGGH…..I came back to this thread to ask the same question!!!
Well said.
In the same vein, can some of the CO2 experts tell me if all the CO2 molecules uniformly lay on their backs or bellies? If they lay on their bellies, do they only absorb from their backs and then emit from their bellies, or do they, like like the girls on the beaches of Florida turn every half hour and emit and absorb from the same side?
In other words, can someone, without the vehement rhetoric, explain if a CO2 molecule absorbs and emits uniformly, and if extraterrestrial IR is the primary source of heat, how is more CO2 will allow the same IR to pass through and not reflect it as it comes in, but reflect it more as it tries to escape?

As an engineer, I have always counted on using incontrovertible basic data as essential to successful projects, and in my career I have never heard another engineer question that assumption. During the last few years I have been astonished that so many scientifically trained people seem not only unwilling to question the data being used to support AGW, but throw roadblocks of every kind against those who want to get at the truth. I am beginning to think that there must be some kind of very high level conspiracy (besides the money) that is trying to use AGW as a tool to power. Perhaps it is the “one-world” crowd. In any event, it seems that in the internet period it is, fortunately, not possible for anyone to crush all the seekers after truth; and the public is beginning to catch on to the shenanigans of the so-called elite! So beware of any attempts to regulate the web. It will be our salvation.

At some point scientist of high character and respect for their field of endeavor begin stepping forward.

The Hal Lewis “problem” probably came up over lunch and a few of them decided a response letter was in order – so after another bottle of wine, deep thought and deliberation, they produced this lousy letter.

And in spite of all the hubub, the tropospheric temps are the warmest on record (in spite of the current deep La Nina) and arctic sea ice (seems to be accelerating in its loss) and glacial land ice continue to melt. And only some of the CO2 rotational bands are close to being saturated.
Nature will have its way and the laws of physics obeyed.

Dr. Hal Lewis has joined the club of honest science Skeptics that was begun some 400 years ago, in 1610, by a man named Galileo Galelei who challenged the SCIENCE-DOGMA of his time. At least in 1610 the DOGMA was based upon ignorance and not greed.

James Sexton says:
October 13, 2010 at 5:57 pm
In the same vein, can some of the CO2 experts tell me if all the CO2 molecules uniformly lay on their backs or bellies? If they lay on their bellies, do they only absorb from their backs and then emit from their bellies, or do they, like like the girls on the beaches of Florida turn every half hour and emit and absorb from the same side?
In other words, can someone, without the vehement rhetoric, explain if a CO2 molecule absorbs and emits uniformly, and if extraterrestrial IR is the primary source of heat, how is more CO2 will allow the same IR to pass through and not reflect it as it comes in, but reflect it more as it tries to escape?
=======================================================
Ahahaha, I’ve developed like like a stutter in my typing! But seriously. I’d like a legit answer.
The sun emits IR which is our primary source of heat. CO2 absorbs and then upon excitement, releases heat, uniformly. Right? So, the sun emits, CO2 absorbs, half goes back out to the cosmos, the other half comes to the earth. The earth bounces some back to CO2, and CO2 does again the same thing. Uniformly in and out. If the sun emits 100 sexton units of energy, how does increasing or decreasing atmospheric CO2 change the total units of energy kept on the earth?

Harry Lu says:
October 13, 2010 at 8:08 pm
Anthony: A few more examples of attack on Jones which according to your last post should not have happened:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/23/taking-a-bite-out-of-climate-data/
====================================
What do you mean an attack on Jones???
I see most sane people here, including Dr. Michaels, only “attacking” his piss poor science and refusal to make public his data.
Speaking of “attack”…
I seem to recall one of the emails from last November which reveals one of the Hockey Team’s Ben Santer threatening to “beat the crap out of” Michaels.
That is an “attack”.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Luboš Motl says:
October 13, 2010 at 12:42 pm
It’s just totally disgusting. The first thing is that Callan, instead of answering himself, gave the task to his bodyguard who has no idea about science and who just wrote a meaningless and dishonest stream of intimidation.
But Tawanda apparently knows Climate Science just about as well as any other Climate Scientist!

Smokey says:
October 13, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Harry Lu,
No, Hal Lewis is a hero. But thanx for the interesting red herring argument.
===============================
Smokey you are being too generous. It ain’t even a red herring.
And it definitely ain’t “interesting”.
It is a bold face “does not follow”…non sequitur.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

gryposaurus said: “And I mean a closed system, where the energy budget is balanced.”
Can you clarify what you mean by a “closed system where the energy budget is balanced?” What would you consider the system to be: the surface and atmosphere of the earth; the entire earth (including hydrocarbons extracted from below the surface and burned at the surface); the entire Sun/earth system? And how is the particular definition of the “closed system” relevant to the question of whether or not there are amplifying feedbacks that would drive the temperature higher than CO2 alone?

James Sexton says:
October 13, 2010 at 7:56 pm
The sun emits IR which is our primary source of heat. CO2 absorbs and then upon excitement, releases heat, uniformly. Right? So, the sun emits, CO2 absorbs, half goes back out to the cosmos, the other half comes to the earth. The earth bounces some back to CO2, and CO2 does again the same thing. Uniformly in and out. If the sun emits 100 sexton units of energy, how does increasing or decreasing atmospheric CO2 change the total units of energy kept on the earth?
The sun emits IR, but that is at higher frequency (near visible) and the main CO2 absorption band is below these frequencies, there is some absorption, but that is minor. The outgoing IR from the warmed earth is at much lower frequencies, and the main IR absorption band (not overlapping by water absorption) is in that range (15 micometer). Thus incoming IR is hardly filtered out by CO2, but outgoing IR is. That makes the difference if CO2 increases. If that is a real problem (or beneficial), including feedbacks, that is a entirely different question. See:
http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/ees/slides/climate/absorption.gif

Is there some magic about CO2 that it causes additional warming by “feedbacks”? It seems to me that if such significant feedbacks existed they would respond to any warming however caused. Any minor warming would be amplified by feedbacks, causing even more warming and even more feedback, etc., etc., runaway warming, death of the planet, etc.
This doesn’t seem to happen in reality, although we are continuously told that it is the mechanism by which CO2 will overheat the planet. So what is the magic with CO2 if this effect isn’t observed for other causes of warming?

The adoption, so quickly, by the APS of the phrase “climate disruptions” show that this reply by the APS to Hal Lewis’s resignation letter is no more than a PR damage-limitation exercise and not a rebut of the scientific criticisms of man-made global warming.
That speedy adoption of words directly attributable to President Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren highlights how much trouble the APS now feel they are in over its global warming advocacy.
“Climate disruption” now translates to a fear of recriminations and finger-pointing within the APS.

bob says: October 13, 2010 at 7:36 pm
Thanks Bob for replying so nicely, and at such length. I was tired, so noisier and less exact than I usually try to be. However, I still disagree with you, and for the same reasons.
* Ca++ has the power to replenish itself constantly, drawing on CaCO3 worldwide rocks, and to be leached constantly by supplying material for shells – thus the balance continues, naturally.
* Here and here are papers challenging your “CO2 isotopes levels shows human interference” thesis. I’ve seen others too.
* Re us being responsible for CO2 increase, I respectfully disagree with both you and Ferdinand Engelbeen, because I think you both wrongfully dismiss the power of the vast natural flux to more than absorb comparatively tiny human inputs of plant food. The flux itself is an order of magnitude bigger. I’ve seen even the similarities disappear under the microscope. Your thesis depends on a mechanistic interpretation where a human surplus can accumulate; but in reality we have a huge turnover in the ocean / atmosphere, and the living biomass is highly responsive to any extra CO2. Therefore, despite apparent similarities in patterns of increase, I hold that this is fortuitous, accidental, of minimal significance re causality.
* Since I’ve been persuaded by evidence for the maintenance of a natural equilibrium, I’m really not worried about microscopic changes in oxygen levels. What I abhor is the squandering of oil as nonrecyclable plastic containers, bottles, wrappers, etc that mess up our landscape all too visibly.
I object to the alarmist ideas which assert that (a) warming is bad for us (b) CO2’s increasing GHG effect is serious (c) we, rather than the natural flux, are the cause of increase, and thus conversely can decrease the CO2 levels. I say, due diligence has not been done. I say, the understanding of the most basic Science held by the experts is being eroded, not maintained, and certainly not improved. To talk about CO2 as “pollution” shows this. I think the research that suggests natural homeostasis has been systematically downplayed, because it’s not alarmist, and therefore not a money-attractor.

gryposaurus says:
October 13, 2010 at 4:25 pm
“…And I mean a closed system, where the energy budget is balanced.”
Good points. Of course the Earth is not a closed system and the ‘energy budget’ is never in balance. It is an open system driven by the turbulence of deterministic chaos and energy balance varies at all time scales. No wonder that the laws of ‘ideal’ physics break down when applied to our messy ball of rock.

It’s difficult to see why they’re endorsing a theory of global warming when, as they admit in the statement, its provenance is based on climate models which “are far from adequate”. If they were just plain adequate, would it endorse the theory any more?
Pointman

Dear Freddy,
Luboš Motl is absolutely right about all the Tawandas of this world.
Your misunderstanding doesn’t make him an idiot.
Quite the other way around.

Bret says:
October 13, 2010 at 10:54 am
“This passes over the fact that carbon dioxide absorption lines are nearly saturated.”
Is it? At all relevant altitudes?

I’m not sure what altitude has to do with it. There is a “fixed” (if you will) incoming radiation parcel that the earth gets every day on the absorption lines of CO2. Whether those lines are absorbed at a high altitude or a low altitude, their energy is still absorbed by the earths atmosphere and are not doubly-absorbed by both high and low altitude. This seems akin to arguing whether you put your home insulation up against the inside wall or the outside wall, it should make no difference to the overall energy flow.

@Ammonite
I fully understand the difference between CO2 residence time and “effective residence time” of lifetime or adjustment time to a step change in CO2 concentration.
However, can you or any CO2 expert explain the evidence for claiming this CO2 lifetime is a 100 years (or up to 500 years as some claim- Doug Mackie at skepticalscience.com ). What experimental evidence for this critical element of the climate models?
The only support I can find is from modeling ‘experiments’ – a totally circular argument.
For example, in AR4, I found in Sect 2.10.2 only a table for greenhouse gasses with CO2 being an exceptions under footnote a:
Footnote a: “The CO2 response function used in this report is based on the revised version of the Bern Carbon cycle model used in Chapter 10 of this report” – a model study, no observation.

First I want to contradict Dr. Roger Cohen on carbon dioxide infrared absorption spectrum. It so happens that Ferenc Miskolczi* has shown, using NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948, that the optical thickness of the atmosphere in the infrared band has not changed for 61 years and has a value of 1.87. This means that constant addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for 61 years straight has not had any effect on the transparency of the atmosphere in the infrared where carbon dioxide absorbs or the optical thickness would have increased, and this did not happen. This is an empirical observation, not some theory, and must take precedence over predictions by Arrhenius et al. If you want to go against it you will have to disprove both his theory and his observations and I have not seen this done. Roy Spencer tried, unconvincingly, to explain it away with poor quality of older observations. In the meantime, validity of carbon dioxide greenhouse effect right now stands empirically nullified. Respond to it or live with it. Furthermore, I have proven, using satellite temperature measurements, that the so-called “anthropogenic global warming” has never been observed. It starts with Hansen’s testimony in 1988 that global warming has arrived. That was false – satellite observations prove that there was no warming in the eighties and nineties. Real warming started in 1988, ten years after Hansen’s pronouncement. In four years global temperature rose by a third of a degree and then stopped. Its origin was oceanic, not carboniferous. And if you want to bring out arctic warming you can. It is very real, has been going on for more than a hundred years, and is caused by warm water brought north by currents, not some magical arctic amplification of the greenhouse effect. It looks like Miskolczi was right – anthropogenic global warming simply does not exist.
*Ferenc Miscolczi, E&E 21(4):243-262 (2010)

James Sexton says:
October 13, 2010 at 7:56 pm
“In other words, can someone, without the vehement rhetoric, explain if a CO2 molecule absorbs and emits uniformly, and if extraterrestrial IR is the primary source of heat,”
It isn’t. The primary source of heat is sunlight, which is twenty times hotter (shorter wavelength) than the thermal radiation trying to get out. Your question is like asking how a bullet can get through a glass window when rain cannot.

Sorry, typo in my comment! Real warming started in 1998, not in 1988 as I typed. It was brought by the super El Nino of 1998. Its cause was warm water from the Indo-Pacific region, deposited by a storm surge at the beginning of the equatorial countercurrent and carried by that current to South America. This water mass caused the warming which created the twenty-first century high. A third of a degree is half of what was supposed to have happened during the entire twentieth century. This, and not some greenhouse effect is responsible for the first decade of our century being the warmest on record.

http://www.suite101.com/content/royal-society-humiliated-by-global-warming-basic-math-error-a296746

Lucy, you are more than kind.
But there are annual cycles in both the atmospheric concentration of CO2 as well as the C12/C13 ratio that indicate that the biomass is not an inexhaustable sink for CO2.
And I agree that the change in O2 concentration is of little consequence, it is just evidence that we are indeed burning tons of fossil fuels, and that is having an effect on the composition of the atmosphere.
During the holocene climatic optimum 7000 years ago or so, temperature was a bit warmer than today and CO2 levels were flat. If the current warming causes the current increase in CO2, then we should have seen similar changes 7000 years ago, but we didn’t.

“On these matters, APS judges the science to be quite clear. However, APS continues to recognize that climate models are far from adequate, and the extent of global warming and climatic disruptions produced by sustained increases in atmospheric carbon loading remain uncertain.”
At the risk of this question making me look a tad stupid, can someone please explain the above quote from the APS response letter. The issue that is constantly rammed down our throats is that increased carbon dioxde levels are causing a “greenhouse” type feedback, warming the planet and leading to climatic “disruptions”
But, if what APS says is true, ie, climate models far from adequate and uncertainty about the effects of atmospheric CO2 on global warming and climatic changes, HOW do they deduce that the science is “quite clear” ? Am I missing something here ?
By the way, isn’t the term “far from adequate” pretty much the same as saying “inadequate” ?
(I’ve been a daily visitor here since finding a link on Joe B’s blog. WUWT is a fountain of much appreciated information, so kudos to Anthony and all the contributors. Brilliant site. )