New book: Slaying the Sky Dragon

Anthony,
You must be really regretting your wholly innocent comment about Oliver K. Manuel’s “nutty iron Sun theory”. It is extraordinary that ¾ of your blog responses are obsessing about this theory rather than about the real subject of the blog – an intriguing new book that forcefully argues against CO2 being a global warming mechanism at all.
Call me narrow minded but, frankly, I really couldn’t care less about what is or is not at the centre of the Sun. However I do care a lot about whether the CO2 warming theory is true or false. What a pity the blog trail was inadvertently hijacked by a completely irrelevant side issue.
I have downloaded and read the electronic version of the book. Oliver Manuel’s chapter is very short, almost completely incomprehensible, and utterly unmemorable. But that is in contrast to the remaining chapters by the other authors, all of which are fascinating, intellectually challenging and written with great clarity and simplicity.
As far as I can gather after a quick initial reading of the book, the thrust of the argument is that that CO2 has no effect on the warmth of the Earth’s atmosphere because any minor effects that the trace gas might exhibit arecompletely negated by the energy transfer balancing effects of water in all its three phases.
In a nutshell, any warming of the oceans (which cover 70% of the Earth’s surface) causes evaporation, causes more cloud cover, causes a raised albedo, causes less radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, causes compensatory cooling. This is a closed loop control system which fortuitously contains an extreme non-linearity (the evaporation of water off the ocean surfaces goes up exponentially with the raised ocean water temperature). This non-linearity is the absolutely perfect ingredient for a very strong and stabilising natural thermostat, far more powerful by a factor of many than any greenhouse gas.
Furthermore, and this is the crucial point, any minor warming effect that additional CO2 in the atmosphere might have is not just insignificant, it is actually fully compensated for by the Earth’s water cycle thermostat. This is because the CO2 warming effect is effectively inside the control loop of the water cycle thermostat. To understand the significance of this, a good analogy would be the effect of turning on a 3kW electric fan heater inside my 40kW centrally heated, and thermostatically controlled, house. The extra 3kW from the fan heater will not raise the temperature at all because the additional heat it supplies will be exactly compensated for by the thermostatically controlled CH boiler system, leaving my house at precisely the same temperature as it was before.
The water cycle natural thermostat is not a new theory – others including me have advocated it many times – but this is the first book I have read in which all these concepts have been explained so clearly and forcefully.
I found the book challenging and compelling. It’s a pity your readers were sidelined onto a completely false trail on an arcane and irrelevant subject rather than addressing (and challenging) the arguments it raises. I urge everyone to read it and comment on it and get a real debate going. This is no side issue – it could well be the end game for AGW.

REPLY: Nope, I don’t regret it at all. My opinion of the iron sun theory as being “nutty” is unchanged. One reader said that is in the book, the question remains: why? – Anthony

Interestingly Discover Magazine gave a very honest discussion about Dr. Manuel,
An iconoclastic theory of the solar system’s origin shows how science tests its truisms (Discover Magazine, March 2002)

In the late 1960s, chemist Oliver Manuel made a small but staggering discovery about meteorites. He noticed that the abundances of certain elements in meteorites were distinctly different from those in the Earth and much of the solar system. This observation spurred research showing that our solar system probably formed from material generated in many different stars. For Manuel, it also spawned a radical theory about the origins of our solar system, which he has doggedly pursued for forty years. Nearly all astronomers agree that the Sun and the rest of the planets formed from an amorphous cloud of gas and dust 4.6 billion years ago. But Manuel argues, based on his compositional data, that the solar system was created by a dramatic stellar explosion–a supernova–and that the iron-encased remnant of the progenitor star still sits at the center of the Sun. Manuel fits a popular stereotype, the lone dissenter promoting a new idea that flies in the face of the scientific establishment. In the real world, some of these theories eventually have been proven right but vastly more have been proven wrong. Manuel is under no illusions about the popularity of his idea. “Ninety-nine percent of the field will tell you it’s junk science,” he says. The evidence weighs in heavily against him. If he’s right, however, we need to completely rethink how planetary systems form. Even if he’s wrong, some scientists say, at least he has made people think. Astrophysicists don’t deny the validity of Manuel’s original meteorite data. “It was a good observation,” says cosmochemist Frank Podosek of Washington University. “This was something we hadn’t observed before. It was a fruitful thing to notice, but he picked it up and ran with it very much farther than the basis could justify.” To support his theory, Manuel pieced together bits of information from history, astronomy, biology and physics. He founded his theory on isotopes, variants of an element that have different atomic weights but the same basic chemical properties. On Earth, isotopes have consistent, well-known relative abundances. Manuel cited unusual mixes of isotopes in meteorites and possibly in the atmosphere of Jupiter as evidence that those objects formed from the outer layers of a supernova, where such strange isotope ratios would be the norm. The inner planets, made from rocky debris, formed from heavy elements in the inner part of the supernova, he says, where more familiar isotope concentrations prevailed. And the Sun, which Manuel argues is iron-rich, formed around a neutron star, the collapsed remnant of the exploded star. “This is not a news flash,” he says. “This is my conclusion from 42 years of measuring the abundance of isotopes.” Manuel’s insistence both infuriates and amuses others in the field. Scientists who know him talk about him in a tone that is both weary and indulgent, as they would describe an eccentric relative. “I happen to like Oliver,” says Donald Burnett, professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology. “I don’t agree with anything he says, but I find him a colorful character.” There is one widely accepted element in Manuel’s scenario. In the universe, many elements heavier than iron are thought to have been forged in supernovae. But the evidence increasingly seems to rule out Manuel’s supernova-genesis theory. At the start of the 20th century, many scientists believed the Sun was made mostly of iron. Manuel cites the historical support for an iron-rich Sun as evidence for his theory. “A high iron content for the Sun is not revolutionary but is actually quite compatible with the history of solar research,” he says. But in 1925, astronomer Cecelia Payne analyzed the light of our star and proposed that the Sun was most likely a burning ball of hydrogen. By the late thirties, the case was nearly settled. The surface of the Sun has been proven to be mostly hydrogen, and many subsequent studies have led to extremely detailed models of the hydrogen fusion reactions that power our star. “We can make an explicit model of the Sun, putting its mass and brightness into the computer, along with the laws of physics and that then produces right amount of Sunshine and brightness,” says Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. These models also explain the various stages of stellar evolution that astronomers can observe. And the principles of hydrogen fusion are well established, both in the laboratory and in the detonations of hydrogen bombs. According to theory and experiment, light hydrogen atoms in the Sun fuse together to form helium atoms, releasing bursts of energy in the process. All of the evidence points to our Sun being made primarily of hydrogen. Manuel argues that the surface is made up mostly of hydrogen only because elements in the Sun separate according to mass. Hydrogen, the lightest element, floats to the surface, while heavier elements huddle below. But his theory creates another problem: If the Sun isn’t made of hydrogen, how does it generate its energy? Fusing a heavy and stable element like iron consumes more energy than it releases. In his theory, Manuel relies the neutron star at the center to make up for energy lost when hydrogen is taken out of the picture. The neutrons that make up the star have higher energy than free neutrons, he says, so a neutron escaping from the star releases energy. The free neutron then decays into a proton as it migrates toward the surface, again releasing energy. The proton, which is a hydrogen atom minus an electron, fuses to form helium and releases even more energy. He supposes that some of the decayed neutrons stick around as protons and account for the abundance of hydrogen on the surface of the Sun and in the solar wind. Manuel’s colleagues are skeptical about this elaborate and unproven explanation. Many scientists also find it improbable that our solar system could have formed quickly from the debris of a supernova. They have only found one system in which planets formed around a neutron star, and it looks nothing like our solar system. On the other hand, astronomers have spotted innumerable stars forming out of clouds of gas and dust and find strong indications that planets are forming around these protostars. Finally, there is persuasive evidence that our solar system contains the remains of many different supernovae. Ironically, Manuel’s own discovery contributed to this understanding. Chemists have traced the strange isotopic concentrations Manuel first observed to individual grains within meteorites. The proportions of each isotope vary from grain to grain. If the solar system formed from a single supernova, all the grains should have roughly the same abundances of isotopes. Since they don’t, most scientists view the isotopes in a particular grain as a clue to its origin, and, hence, as evidence that meteorites, and most other bodies in the solar system, are made of heterogeneous material derived from many stars. That makes Manuel’s theory look less likely than ever. “Fifteen years ago, I would have kept a question mark in my mind,” said cosmochemist Roy Lewis, of the Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. “I would have said well he’s almost certainly wrong but by golly if he turns out to be right, won’t that be interesting.” Although most scientists don’t believe Manuel’s theory, they all acknowledge that outlandish hypotheses have been proven correct in the past. It seems especially unlikely in Manuel’s case, however. In addition to citing the contradictory evidence, many scientists also dismiss the iron-Sun theory on the grounds of simplicity. Most observations of our solar system can be explained by fairly common processes, so why evoke rare and complicated explanations? Still, some scientists see fringe theorists like Manuel as an asset, as they make people reassess long-held theories. “Manuel is a little off the wall,” Lewis says. “But science is filled with people a little off the wall. Our great strength is to allow them to express their views.” Manuel’s views got an airing again at the January meeting of the American Astronomica
l Society meeting in Washington, DC, where once again they received little notice. Meanwhile, Manuel continues to argue his theory with an air of implacable certainty, believing that solar physics is on the verge of a revolution. He talks as though scientists need only to come to their senses and reassess the data. “I’m not trying to refute the professional careers of the scientists whose shoulders I’m standing on,” Manuel says. “My work depends on their evidence. It’s just a different interpretation.”

Interesting thread.
Oliver was incesant. IN fairness, Anthony gave full and fair warning to knock it off
but he didn’t listen. He also got booted off of Tallblokes but reason unknown. I liked
Oliver; he was pleasant and interesting but no one liked his theory.

Anthony,
You must be really regretting your wholly innocent comment about Oliver K. Manuel’s “nutty iron Sun theory”. It is extraordinary that ¾ of your blog responses are obsessing about this theory rather than about the real subject of the blog – an intriguing new book that forcefully argues against CO2 being a global warming mechanism at all.
Call me narrow minded but, frankly, I really couldn’t care less about what is or is not at the centre of the Sun. However I do care a lot about whether the CO2 warming theory is true or false. What a pity the blog trail was inadvertently hijacked by a completely irrelevant side issue.
I have downloaded and read the electronic version of the book. Oliver Manuel’s chapter is very short, almost completely incomprehensible, and utterly unmemorable. But that is in contrast to the remaining chapters by the other authors, all of which are fascinating, intellectually challenging and written with great clarity and simplicity.
As far as I can gather after a quick initial reading of the book, the thrust of the argument is that that CO2 has no effect on the warmth of the Earth’s atmosphere because any minor effects that the trace gas might exhibit arecompletely negated by the energy transfer balancing effects of water in all its three phases.
In a nutshell, any warming of the oceans (which cover 70% of the Earth’s surface) causes evaporation, causes more cloud cover, causes a raised albedo, causes less radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, causes compensatory cooling. This is a closed loop control system which fortuitously contains an extreme non-linearity (the evaporation of water off the ocean surfaces goes up exponentially with the raised ocean water temperature). This non-linearity is the absolutely perfect ingredient for a very strong and stabilising natural thermostat, far more powerful by a factor of many than any greenhouse gas.
Furthermore, and this is the crucial point, any minor warming effect that additional CO2 in the atmosphere might have is not just insignificant, it is actually fully compensated for by the Earth’s water cycle thermostat. This is because the CO2 warming effect is effectively inside the control loop of the water cycle thermostat. To understand the significance of this, a good analogy would be the effect of turning on a 3kW electric fan heater inside my 40kW centrally heated, and thermostatically controlled, house. The extra 3kW from the fan heater will not raise the temperature at all because the additional heat it supplies will be exactly compensated for by the thermostatically controlled CH boiler system, leaving my house at precisely the same temperature as it was before.
The water cycle natural thermostat is not a new theory – others including me have advocated it many times – but this is the first book I have read in which all these concepts have been explained so clearly and forcefully.
I found the book challenging and compelling. It’s a pity your readers were sidelined onto a completely false trail on an arcane and irrelevant subject rather than addressing (and challenging) the arguments it raises. I urge everyone to read it and comment on it and get a real debate going. This is no side issue – it could well be the end game for AGW.

maksimovich says:
December 1, 2010 at 11:02 pm
Thanks for the background, which adds to the evidence that volcanic events are not the cause of the CO2 increase.
BTW, I also read somewhere of another (additional?) reason for the CO2 drop after the Pinatubo eruption: small particles in the stratosphere makes that incoming sunlight is partly scattered in all directions. That makes that leaves which are part of the day in the shadow of other leaves for direct sunlight, receive more indirect sunlight, thus increasing total photosynthesis…

This has been a very revealing thread.

Moshpit: Someone still needs to explain to me why it is so much hotter in Phoenix than in Atlanta on a sunny summer day. Same elevation and latitude, but Atlanta has 4 times as much “greenhouse gases.” It seems to me that the radiation cartoons can’t explain this.
AGW radiation cartoons are produced the other side of the looking glass, in this case the opposite effect of “greenhouse gases” is touted as ‘real’, and all arguments then based on this, pro and con. Water is the greenhouse gas of our real greenhouse world, the greenhouse being the whole atmosphere, without it our world would be hotter, not colder, in other words, real greenhouse gases primarily cool the atmosphere, they don’t warm it. All the ‘back-radiation’ arguments are irrelevant.
The difference between the two places is percentage of humidity. The higher the humidity, the cooler the local atmosphere. Water vapour as the major real greenhouse gas in our real world and not the world we step into with Alice, absorbs the greater heat from the sun in more humid areas and because water vapour is lighter than air and heat rises and so on as in real world physics, takes that heat up and away (bringing it down as rain as it reaches colder higher levels and washing the dirt out our atmosphere in doing so, the cool wash recycle programme..). Without water our world would be some 20-30oC hotter. Hotter AGW claims it would be some 20oC colder. Our world would turn into a desert without water to cool us down from the effects of the sun.
That’s why it’s taken out of AGW cartoons and models, so the modellers can continue to pretend that water does not have a significant role to play in cooling the earth, it’s best to ignore it altogether.
What’s more difficult to understand is why anti-AGWScience protagonists join in by arguing from the AGWScience premise that water is a greenhouse gas in the AGWScience sense, that “greenhouse gases warm the earth and without it the earth would be colder”. So the arguments roll on, that AGW doesn’t take into account the greater direct warming potential of water vapour v CO2, and that greenhouse gases actually cool the earth in our wonderful greenhouse is excised …
I can only imagine that the AGWScience from the other side of the mirror has so successfully inculcated their impossible looking glass premise into ‘general knowledge’ that even otherwise real science antis take it as read.

oneuniverse, Thank you for the information.
Trial begins for retired professor Manuel (The Missouri Miner)
This is unreal. How come this was never brought up before?
REPLY: It has been, but in other places, and it didn’t get “legs” as they say in the news business. It’s been on Scienceblogs/deltoid in comments in 2008 as well as Physorg.com http://www.physorg.com/news163863704.html in 2009. It is an ugly situation, and had I known about it I would have banned Dr. Manuel long before I did. Unfortunately like you, the comment from “oneuniverse” is the first I heard of it.
– Anthony

Poptech says:
December 2, 2010 at 8:38 am
oneuniverse, Thank you for the information.
Trial begins for retired professor Manuel (The Missouri Miner)
This is unreal. How come this was never brought up before?
REPLY: It has been, but in other places, and it didn’t get “legs” as they say in the news business. It’s been on Scienceblogs/deltoid in comments in 2008 as well as Physorg.com http://www.physorg.com/news163863704.html in 2009. It is an ugly situation, and had I known about it I would have banned Dr. Manuel long before I did. Unfortunately like you, the comment from “oneuniverse” is the first I heard of it.
– Anthony

Now that’s disturbing. I had no idea. Thanks for posting these links. Dr. Manuel’s behavior seemed odd — I have seen his iron sun ‘carpet bombing’ on other blogs. This is the first I’ve read of the charges and trial. I’m not sure what to make of all of this, but I’ll certainly keep it in mind.
Anthony, good on you for banning OKM if indeed he was carpet bombing your blog the way I’ve seen on Judith Curry’s blog. After the first few comments on Judith’s blog that seemed to be copy-and-paste templates promoting his theories, I just started to scroll past them without reading — ironic, as I doubt he understands he causes readers to tune out by his ham-fisted promotional antics.

Sad indeed to have the thread highjacked… I was hoping for a review of various aspects not Dr. Manuel’s sun theory.
REPLY: Hope elsewhere, because there’s no way in double hockeysticks it will ever be discussed here again. – Anthony