Some of the Missing Energy

Lots of issues with all eqs. First off: the energy balance should look like
Energy Balance (+ or -) = [1] Energy captured from the Sun – [2] Energy emitted to space – [3] energy captured by earth (land, ocean and air) +[4] energy emitted from Earth (core heat still being depleted from Earth’s birth and the gravity forces adding energy to our molten core as we rotate the solar system and the solar system rotates the galaxy).
The balance is of where we stand (gaining or losing energy) is determined by a very complex system of systems. The simpleton and partial equations we have seen are embarrassing. For example, how much energy is captured and held by land, sea and air? There are two very large and very dynamic energy sources (external energy from the Sun and internal energy from our molten core). There are various sinks and one path for dissipation (to space). I have yet to see defensible models of all 4 factors and their error bars. Until then – no one knows.

Yum. Loverly.
I’ve always favoured a water-cycle based approach put together by a software guy called Robert Clemenzi: http://qs.mc-computing.com//Global_Warming/EPA_Comments/TheGreenhouseEffect.doc
He postulates and diagrams a “heat pipe – like” effect, with the thunderstorm piercing the lower troposphere and sending energy to the escape hatch in and above the tropopause.

Why is the ‘energy’ missing? Because these people are dolts. Much like those unlikely fools that argue the missing ‘energy’ is absent from the first 2,000 feet of surface ocean but is stored in the next 13,000 feet.
It is as clear as day that during the last warming period that life forms sucked up immense amounts of CO2 and used many other biologic resources for propagation and growth. It is equally clear that the insulating effect of CO2 is hugely over-exaggerated. I would suggest that Gaea, if such a being had reason, would thank humans for releasing CO2 just at the time when it was most useful. ie, a warm period.

Excellent post Willis. “Negative climate sensitivity”. Now there’s an incendiary term.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Your conclusion seems to dovetail with the one that Ferenc Miskolczi made a few years back — i.e., that the greenhouse effect has a ceiling, and that limit must have been reached already — naturally.

vis-a-vis the missing energy.
Has anyone looked down the back of the couch?

Keith Minto says:
December 23, 2010 at 10:27 pm
These nuclei are there, what is to stop this energy release lower down from the cloud base? it is hardly a pure, pristine environment from sea surface to cloud base.
Is this reasonable? It may be a source of lower atmosphere heat.

Hot air rises so the energy will go up following the storm upward motion in any case.
There was a long thread in Lucia’s and The Air Vent where a new model of wind creation is proposed by Anastassia Makarieva et al who say that condensation in addition to releasing energy creates a vacuum and winds come in to fill it up and go up, creating the large winds seen in cyclones. Not many people were convinced but in either model hot air ends up high releasing energy.

If your thought experiment is correct, wouldn’t the effect of increased co2 be increased water transport rather than a hotter globe e.g. more rain and snow?
That would seem to be a net positive. At least from LA and other semi arid environs.

I feel strongly you’re on the right track, Willis. I hope you develop your ideas fully. I think you’re agreeing with Spencer and Lindzen. Many aspects of the climate are highly non-linear. Feedback from water vapor starts out as strongly positive and ends up as strongly negative when the thunderstorms get going. But there is something else you should consider – MASS. Rising (and descending) air masses have momentum (mv) and kinetic energy (1/2mv^2). The momentum ensures that thunderstorms take time to form and run on longer than they would if air had no mass. Also, the air rises rapidly in thunderclouds and descends slowly outside of them so the kinetic energy of the air is a net carrier of energy aloft because KE is proportional to the square of the velocity. That will account for some more of your missing energy.
Non- linearity also appears in temperature because of the Stefan–Boltzmann law (sigma * T^4). Take two conditions where the average temperature is 15C (288K):
1) The temperature spends half the time at 278K and half at 298K (+/-10K).
2) The temperature spends half the time at 283K and half at 293K (+/- 5K).
The average is 288K in both cases but the LR energy emitted is different:
1) 298^4 – 278^4 = sigma * 1,913,333,760 = 107.2232239 J/s/m2
2) 293^4 – 283^4 = sigma * 955,802,880 = 53.5631934 J/s/m2
That’s a big difference. This is why all models and formulae based upon static averages are useless.

anna v says:
December 23, 2010 at 10:47 pm
True, but radiative heat loss to space may be reduced if condensation in part occurs lower down, changing the equations. The condensing radiative air is caught between the sea surface and the cloud base.
I did not see the Lucia’s thread but I will check, thanks,(9mth old on my knee, thrashing!!!!)
NS 27 Nov has an article Cloud Power (p40) that has a model proposed by Quinn Brewster that suggests vapour/water phase change is radiative at least in part. (I thought it was?)

“Climate sensitivity is not a constant, it is a function of temperature”
Yes, this is probably the fundamental factor. We don’t yet seem to understand feedbacks, but this seems very plausible.

Keith Minto says:
December 23, 2010 at 11:55 pm
What I get from your post is that you’re suggesting a non-negligible heat loss caused by condensation of water vapor in the lower troposphere, but as anna v attempted to explain, the release of energy due to condensation would warm the surrounding air, which would then continue to rise (as hot air is wont to do) following the air currents of the uncondensed water vapor.
However, some heat *is* trapped in the lower altitudes (remember, GHGs are real, water vapor *is* one, and carries most of the heat in our atmosphere, much more than the paltry amount absorbed and held by CO2), and this could be a mechanism behind it.
My question to you then, sir, is as follows. “What kind of effect would that have on the climate of Earth?” Are you suggesting some bold new form of GHG trapping? This seems actually rather inconsequential… we know that thunderstorms form, and we know they form by the travel upwards of water vapor, which then condenses and allows for heat escape to space… some of them not making it wouldn’t invalidate Willis’ argument… if you’re suggesting that’s where the “missing energy” went, then you need to brush up on the laws of thermodynamics again, because for any significant amount of energy to be lost to this mechanism would requires substantial, noticeable temperature increase in the lower troposphere (read as, Global Warming gone nuts). Furthermore, it would increase global warming not based on CO2 levels, but levels of dust and particulates in the air, things not TYPICALLY associated directly with global warming. Increased dust levels leading to higher tropical temperatures… haven’t seen the study yet.

Perhaps I’m being thick, but I don’t think equations 1 and 2 contradict.
What you seem to have is a very simplified model where dQ in = dQ out, with dT = 0.
So dO = dT / S = 0/S = 0.
For no energy lost, eq 2 becomes 0 = 0 / S
Which by my reading means sensitivity is irrelevant in this simple model, not that it is 0.

The energy is missing, because it was not trapped by “enhanced greenhouse effect”. Lindzen&Choi and Spencer&Braswell presented by real life satellite data, that OLR is not being reduced as the models predict, basically because the alleged increase in tropospheric water vapor as secondary effect is missing, so total IR optical thickness did not change much.

“The idea that thunderstorms serve as a safety-valve, releasing extra heat from the energy system, has always seemed a very obvious solution to me.”
Take one more step and propose that the entire water cycle globally serves as a safety valve. The phase changes of water being the primary energy shifting mechanism.
Or rather some sort of modulator which always reacts in a negative fashion to any forcing either internal or external to the system in order to retain or regain temperature equivalence between sea surface and surface air temperatures.
That basic temperature being dictated by density and pressure differentials at the point of contact between sea and atmosphere plus solar energy input to the system at any given moment.
CO2 could then only have an effect if it significantly altered density and pressure differentials but it does not.

Willis,
I enjoy looking at the research and analysis you do. They are very good.
But the complexity of energy if far more complex then simple equations that you illustrate. CO2 does have some effect of blocking what would normally have been energy hitting the oceans to be absorbed/deflected. Add to this the surface salinity changes and the normal balance is totally changed into the cooling effect of oceans when also adding in cloudcover.
H2O is compressed gases that are forgotten as we are used to water being it’s own element.
Rotational energy is the planet pulling the atmosphere generating the pressurized environment and energy of up to 1669.8km/hr at the equator.
Rotational energy is already infused into the atmosphere and is the physical energy available for wind.
In current science, our planet needs not to rotate to produce the current theories.

Thanks for the excellent post Willis. I think this clarifies part of the energy path and explains why models ignoring evaporation are flawed.
Not being an expert I prefer to keep a low profile and follow-up closely the AGW discussion as it has too big implications to ignore. Sadly it is rather difficult to find unbiased sources of information, this is why I want to thank all contributors for the effort and the high scientific debate one can find here.
Merry Christmas!

What about the “extra energy” from below the Ocean surface
http://au.myspace.com/my/photos/album/965488/custom/list?u=1
Troubling increase in global volcanic activity,REMBERING ONE LAND VOLC’S = 85 SUBMARINE VOLC’S X 20 % ? INCREASE IN VOLCANO’S SINCE 1970.
Underwater volcanoes
Therefore, underwater volcanism should also be the greatest in 500 years. … In the U.S., precipitation has increased 20 percent just since 1970. …
http://www.iceagenow.com/ocean_warming.htm
http://australianconservative.com/2010/11/troubling-increase-in-global-volcanic-activity/
In his book, “Not by Fire but by Ice” the foremost authority on ice ages and magnetic reversals, Robert W. Felix, quoted Peter Vogt of the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office who warned that,
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
“Almost all tectonic movement can be linked to magnetic reversals. Seafloor spreading, sea level changes, mountain growth, earthquakes, and volcanism all seem to speed up whenever the frequency of reversals speeds up.”
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Magnetic reversals are part of the cycles scientists have determined existed over the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s existence. They range from the most ancient, the Devonian, to the Holocene, from 10,000 years ago to the present. “At least twelve (magnetic) reversals can be linked to extinctions and climatic deterioration during the last three million years alone,” says Felix.

@Willis Eschenbach
> PS – Please don’t say “but you left out the greenhouse gases”.
But you didn’t leave out the most important gas (aka ‘control knob’) => water vapor.
CO2, by itself, doesn’t have much effect, as we can see on Mars (where it is almost 30 times more abundant per unit of surface area than on Earth): the mean surface temperature and black body temperature are about the same, ~210K.
CO2 does have voracious appetite for IR radiation in the main terrestrial radiation band around the 15 micron wavelength. So, on Earth, surface heat generated by insolation is totally absorbed in that main band within the first few hundred meters of the troposphere.
But this extra heat energy doesn’t just sit there, it tends to create rising convection currents which just makes your heat engine work faster, making the climate sensitivity smaller than than it would in a static environment.

Willis
Willis, is it not possible that some systems receive energy quickly, but manifest it slowly? While riding a bicycle up a steep hill I can quickly increase the energy in my legs, which, if I am in a low gear will efficiently manifest as a change in speed, but if I am in a high gear this speed change will manifest far slower. Do we really have the understanding and sensitivity in all of our measuring to capture the energy budget as it changes form, phase, and location, or are there possibly slow changes in thermocline depths, hydrologic cycle speeds, atmospheric elevations, large ocean currents etc, that can receive energy quickly but manifest it as temperature slowly or even imperceptibly in regard to our ability to capture these changes?
Also have you looked at the annual cycles in all that you are measuring to see if the earth’s seasonal energy pulse can reveal some of this mystery? Sunlight, falling on the Earth when it’s about 3,000,000 miles closer to the sun in January, is about 7% more intense than in July. Because the Northern Hemisphere has more land which heats easier then water most people state that the Earth’s average temperature is about 4 degrees F higher in July than January, when in fact they should be stating that the ATMOSPHERE is 4 degrees higher in July. In January this extra SW energy is being pumped into the oceans where the “residence time” within the Earth’s ocean land and atmosphere is the longest
As these immense changes in SWR TSI happen annually, then how much and how rapidly changes in those things you measured in Figure 1 and figure 2 match these annual changes, as well as changes in albedo and cloud cover should give deeper insight relative to heat and energy flux within our earth system.
Sunlight, falling on the Earth when it’s about 3,000,000 miles closer to the sun in January, is about 7% more intense than in July. Because the Northern Hemisphere has more land which heats easier then water most people state that the Earth’s average temperature is about 4 degrees F higher in July than January, when in fact they should be stating that the ATMOSPHERE is 4 degrees higher in July. In January this extra SW energy is being pumped into the oceans where the “residence time” within the Earth’s ocean land and atmosphere is the longest. Some of the energy increases the mean evaporation rate of the earth and is transmitted to latent heat before being released, but most of the extra energy is lost to the atmosphere for a time as it is contained within the ocean, but eventually it is radiated from the ocean as LWR and increased latent heat in water vapor.
In actuality, due to the more intense southern sun’s SW radiation being trapped in the oceans, the earth is gaining energy in the southern hemisphere summers, and losing energy in the northern hemisphere summer. The extra energy is just hidden in the oceans for a time while the northern hemisphere summer reacts on a more sensitive atmosphere, creating a rise in atmospheric heat, but a net loss to the planet relative to the southern hemisphere summer.

Excuse the double paste in the last paragraph please.

* The ‘tiny bit of energy’ in steps 1 and 2 of your figure fits with long wave IR ( back radiation), which would be absorbed immediately at the surface. (Inbound shorter wave radiant energy (from the sun) is more likely to penetrate deeper below the surface.)
* If we take a step earlier in the process (before your Step 1), the initial LW IR sent from the warm surface toward the atmosphere is absorbed by H2O and CO2, and most of that is converted to kinetic energy (temperature) through collisions with air molecules.
So …. the initial IR transmitted up from the liquid surface is absorbed and warms the air above the surface, kick starting the upward convection as described by anna v and others. And any long wave IR back radiation is absorbed at the surface, vaporizes a bit of water which caries that energy as latent heat up with the already rising warm air as described by Willis. The result, as described by Stephen Wilde is –
“Just a miniscule unmeasurable and inconsequential increase in the speed and/or intensity of the water cycle.”

Stephen Wilde says:
December 24, 2010 at 2:15 am
“This is a point that I have been pushing for some time in connection with the so called back radiation (or extra downward IR) from more CO2 in the air.”
Yeah, that’s a sticking point for me too. IR is absorbed by water in a vanishingly thin surface layer which results in increased evaporation but no heating of the water. Visible light on the other hand penetrates hundreds of meters and does in fact heat the water. So called back radiation then cannot heat the water but in fact heats the troposphere at the cloud layer. The AGW boffins know this. It’s why their model of non-condensing GHG heating predicted a signature effect of more heating higher up in the troposphere than at the surface – the infamous tropospheric hot spot.
That’s all well and good and it does work that way but that way results in rather little surface heating. Therefore the boffins introduced a positive feedback effect from water vapor. They reason the increased evaporation rate raises the relative humidity of the air and it’s well known that humid air keeps things warmer than dry air. Thus the small surface temperature rise from more NCGHGs (CO2, methane, et al) fosters a rise in the condensing GHG (water vapor). If things actually worked that way we’d have a runaway greenhouse. But here’s the kicker. One of the more well established paleo-atmospheric facts that must be considered is that for most of the time in the past 500 million years the atmosphere held 10 to 20 times more CO2 than the present atmosphere and there was no runaway greenhouse. Global average temperature was at most were 8 degrees C warmer than today and moreover the higher temperatures were not evenly distributed but rather concentrated in higher latitudes with the effect of turning the earth green from pole to pole. That is the “normal” state of the earth’s climate. What we have today is a temporary, still rather cold, and long in tooth intermission in the full blown ice age that began about 3 million years ago.
Where I believe the AGW boffins go wrong is that there is no increase in relative humidity caused by increasing GHGs but rather an increase in the speed of the water cycle. RH remains constant there’s just more and faster transport of water vapor from surface to cloud layer and more rain. The carbon cycle speeds up too as the higher CO2 level and milder temperatures in the wintry north accelerates and expands plant growth which means more animals get fed and when they die more bacteria decompose them releasing their stored carbon back into the air which is then food for plants and the cycle continues.
Increasing CO2 is a good thing. Increasing warmth is a good thing. The only downside is rising sea level as it pretty much goes without question that as the wintry north gets warmer glaciers will melt but that process takes thousands of years. Wild terrestiral plants and animals have plenty of time to migrate away from the encroaching sea and (like it or not) humans will have to do the same. The net benefit to the biosphere as a whole though is tremendous as the whole world turns a lush verdant green.

Willis, the comment I made in your last thread wrt missing energy seems more apropos after this piece. That was that the atmospheric height has decreased. It was published in the AGU, http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2010/2010-28.shtml . Allegedly, the thermosphere, between 55 & 300 miles, had lost 30% of its density by 2009 due to reduction in the solar wind. I came across a reference I can no longer find this year that put the contraction at 125 miles. To me, this would allow for a more rapid transfer of energy to space during times of low solar activity, slightly less energy into the system, but more going out exacerbating the minimal change in TSI.

I meant to add this from the AGU abstract, “The results showed the thermosphere cooling in 2008 by 41 kelvins (about 74 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to 1996, with just 2 K attributable to the carbon dioxide increase.”
CO2 causes cooling?! WUWT?

Caleb says:
December 24, 2010 at 2:00 am
“The best way to avoid all the beautiful complexity of the earth’s systems of energy-balancing is to stand outside the system, and to devise some method of pointing a satellite at the sun to measure the incoming energy, and pointing a second satellite at the earth to measure the outgoing energy. ”
We have that and we still end up with Trenberth’s ‘missing heat’. In the catastrophic scenario we have 1/2 W/m2 hiding somewhere building up over decades that will suddenly stop hiding and kill us all, similar to the Loch Ness monster.
Without heat hiding somewhere in the system the observed surface temperature increase over the last 100 years is pretty close to what the physics says. I.E. A doubling of CO2 will cause a 1.2 degree C rise in global temperature all other things remaining equal, of which .8 degrees C is already ‘water under the bridge’ so to speak.
Of course the missing 1/2 w/m2 out of 1366 could be measurement error in the satellites that measure incoming/outgoing radiation or the argo buoy’s that measure ocean temps or the satellites that measure sea level.

By the way Willis, I love, love, love this thread. Thanks for starting it.

harrywr2, I believe Trenberth’s conclusion that AGW heat is hiding somewhere is partially based on a very short span of data actually measuring incoming and outgoing radiation added to a model. We do not have a 100 year’s worth, and it really should be 120 year’s worth, of this actual satellite data. Why do we need one longer than what we have? Because some of our natural oscillating cycles that have measurable affects on incoming and outgoing radiation have cycles of 60 years or more. Double that and you get a 120 year minimum to see just one or two cycles. Not exactly a sampling rate I would want to hang my hat on.

Willis—Your type of thinking and research is what meteorologists, like myself, love.
We observe what you postulate.

I’ll bet my Meacham, Oregon pass against your Fargo.

Steven Keohane says:

I meant to add this from the AGU abstract, “The results showed the thermosphere cooling in 2008 by 41 kelvins (about 74 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to 1996, with just 2 K attributable to the carbon dioxide increase.”
CO2 causes cooling?! WUWT?

Yes…The increase in greenhouse gases is expected to cause cooling of the upper parts of the atmosphere (the stratosphere and apparently the mesosphere and thermosphere too). The different temperature change structure expected in the vertical from greenhouse gases distinguishes it from what is expected, for example, for a warming due to an increase in solar radiation.

I wonder how many joules of energy were used to evaporate the water that was just dumped on Cali. And how much of that left to space.

We only have to think of one vector, up against the gravity well. We have a body of salt water and on its surface we have free, hydrogen bonded water molecules and water molecules that form the hydration sphere around ions. The very surface layer is dynamic and has less water molecules with binding affinity than those below as they are at an 3 to 2 dimensional interface. These molecules are being bombarded by gas molecules, mostly N2 and O2 which are about 60% heavier that a water molecule. The water molecules thus gain energy by being bombarded by the air and those on the right hand side of the Boltzmann distribution are converted into the gaseous state. The air ‘cherry-picks’ the water molecules with the highest energy content and the bulk aqueous phase cools.
You can direct a hair dryer, 1500W with a temperature of 65 degrees centigrade, across the surface of bowl of water and you will not get equilibrium. The water will never reach the temperature of the air stream; it will instead remain cool and evaporate. Pools of water are never at the same temperature as the noon air temperature, they are cooler. Air currents cool water by asset-stripping the hottest molecules, a similar system is used in super-cooling liquid He; laser light is fired over the surface and the gaseous He molecules, which have a higher than average temperature than the bulk, are energized and removed from the system in the bulk vacuum.
A gaseous water molecule is then carried aloft, always, on average, getting a better exchange of collision energy from N2 and O2 water molecules. They gain energy and move up the gravity well, again overall, the light water molecules cool the N2/O2 and move ever higher. As they go higher there are less and less collisions, as there are fewer molecules with the energy required to fight the gravity well. As they bounce up, they also slow, due to gravity. High up, a larger fraction of the molecules they encounter are water molecules, rather than N2/O2, due to gravity fractionation. The concentration of gas, at fixed temperature (or heat) with altitude is an exponential function that is dependent on its mass. Very light gasses like H2 and He are fractionated all the way into space and escape the gravity well completely whereas Cl2, which is fatally toxic at concentrations as low as 10 ppm, is harmless if one is above 12 feet . During WWI the rats in the trench’s were not equipped with gas masks and were able to survive German Cl2 attacks by climbing the few trees on no-mans-land.
Our water molecules are now high up and upon collision with each other can form hydrogen bonds. This can only happen to the molecules that are at the left hand side of the Boltzmann distribution; the remaining population is now hotter than the previous average. As the ice particle grows it gain mass, gaining mass makes further mass gain more likely. The collision energy between a gaseous water molecule and a, say (H2O)60, ice particle results in energy transfer to the particle and the binding of the incoming gaseous water molecule.
As the ice particle grows, it will begin to fall. The bottom face will be ablated from impacts with the atmosphere, absorbing heat, and the ice will melt. Upon melting it will maintain a temperature of freezing point, with the molecules on the right hand side of the Boltzmann distribution being stripped by collisions. In this super cooled form it is at the temperature where it can dissolve the largest amount of CO2. During its decent, the rain drop will collect CO2. 3.34 mgs of CO2 will be dissolved in every ml of water; 76 mM CO2 in pure, ice cold rain drops.
The bulk of this CO2 will enter the Seas and Oceans, which would explain the very rapid equilibrium between atmospheric and Oceanial CO2 sinks, with a t1/2 of about a decade.
The hotter it gets, the higher up water goes and the longer it falls.

Is a “tiny bit” of energy smaller or bigger than a bread box?

“But this does not keep it from warming the ocean, because of the turbulence of the top layer. So while evaporation is greatly enhanced as you say, some of the heat is mixed downwards, because of the mixing action of wind, waves, currents, and spray.”
Maybe so but where is the evidence ? The mixing actions themselves increase evaporation even without any more downward IR.
Evaporation is a net cooling process. It always takes more energy from the surrounding environment than is required to provoke it so in fact it accelerates energy flow out of the ocean faster than energy flows up from below. Hence the cooler layer at the top of the oceans that is 0.3C cooler than the ocean bulk below.
More evaporation from extra downward IR would either enhance the coolness of that topmost layer or be neutral. It certainly couldn’t weaken it by warming the water otherwise that cooler layer could not exist in the first place.
I’ve put that issue to a lot of AGW proponents over the years. No satisfactory evidence ever seen as regards a net warming effect within the oceans from more downward IR.

Willis Eschenbach says:
December 24, 2010 at 12:36 pm
Willis I wouldn’t have thought too much of the LW warming at the surface skin would mix down. Remembering that the area with the warmest air, the tropics, are dominated by the so called “dolldrums”. Very little mixing happens in these areas.
Also, the water temperature in these areas is already quite high, 28-30DegC so that extra little bit of warming would increase evaporation quicker than any mixing might send it below. But as usual, I could be wrong 🙂
Merry Christmas mate, thankyou for taking the time to post all those wonderful thought provoking essays, I love ’em.
p.s. there is a way to get the likes of Lacis et al to respond to your posts. Post under a pseudonym or get a trusted friend to post for you 🙂 As soon as they see your name, they know they can’t con you with their confusing pseudo answers so they run.

Willis
One other point re the assumptions that are made re the warmed ocean layer, ENSO and NAO surely ensure that a constant depth is not a valid assumption. Im still with Pielke on this in that there are major errors in the warmed layer calc.

Re:
Steven Keohane says:
CO2 causes cooling?! WUWT?
Joel Shore responds saying:
“Yes…The increase in greenhouse gases is expected to cause cooling of the upper parts of the atmosphere (the stratosphere and apparently the mesosphere and thermosphere too). The different temperature change structure expected in the vertical from greenhouse gases distinguishes it from what is expected, for example, for a warming due to an increase in solar radiation.”
My response:
And this is connected to catastrophic AGW/change/disruption how? CO2 is a bit player in warming or cooling of the stratosphere and any temperature change at that level leaves us untouched by that change.
At issue is whether or not a fraction of a % increase in CO2 leads to substantially warmer/cooler/extremes here on terra firma, in the pressure systems that surround us, and in our oceans.
I give you this: if the heat you say should be here warming us up is instead escaping to space, then it should show up in the upper troposphere somewhere as it passes through. But we can’t find it there. That is not to say it isn’t there. It could be a problem with how we measure it. I think as heat is escaping, it is difficult to capture its signature in the upper troposphere as I think it is a very localized, sudden, transient phenomenon, with at least two different kinds of escape hatch that move around. I know through experience that localized strong radiative cooling is a sudden large drop in temperature, as if it were on an oiled slide. And that cooling that occurs in and around thunderstorms can take your breath away and leaves you searching for a jacket in the middle of summer. These localized great escapes of heat are quite different than the slow rise in temperatures in regional areas. Might this balance out?

Anybody have the full text to this:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AGUFMSA31B1737L
It would seem that temperatures in the stratosphere and mesosphere, and tropopause are teleconnected to the solar wind. So change in the solar wind is hypothesized to have an affect on the measured temperatures at these layers. Mind you, I don’t see how these changes greatly affect whether or not we peel off clothes or add downy jackets to our daily wear.

“Jim D says:
December 24, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Willis, there are only three ways to increase the evaporation rate, 1) the ocean gets warmer, 2) the wind gets stronger, 3) the air gets drier”
1) is based on a false premise. There is no need for the ‘ocean’ to get warmer. All that is necessary is for additional energy from any source to be captured by individual water molecules that are already on the cusp of evaporating. The more energy that is supplied the more molecules are affected.
The additional energy brings forward the moment of evaporation and when evaporation occurs more energy is drawn from the environment than was required to provoke it. Evaporation is always a net cooling process.

Sorry about your name. Replace “Steven” with Stephen please. Again I apologize. However, your post is so filled with assumptions and either/or statements that it has my dander up and my red hair flaming!

Stephen Wilde, there is an equilibrium vapor amount at a water-air interface given by Clausius-Clapeyron. There is no way to just add to the evaporation rate if temperature there is not changing. It is incorrect to think IR photons just cause evaporation, and not heating of water molecules. How can they distinguish, and does a single photon even have enough energy to evaporate a molecule by supplying sufficient latent heat? Not quite.

Willis: As many times before, BRAVO. I’m certain you’ve hit on the extraordinarily large-scale phenomenon that obviates the otherwise static CO2 begets H2O begets even more H2O, all the while broasting earth with LW radiation of the AGW clique.
Here, the H2O just bolts into the stratosphere, gives back its heat as it condenses out to the (now) dry air that goes on to rid the heat to space (and form deserts where it comes back to earth on cooling, plus form the trade winds, yawn!). The water now falls back to earth cooling it, and maybe, sucks up a bunch of CO2 in doing so, putting that varmint in the confines of the ocean.
And, following what Pamela Gray says:
December 24, 2010 at 7:36 am
“…I can’t see how this tiny bit more heat (anthropogenic) at the surface will have much of an affect on land….”
the same thing goes on at temperate latitudes during summer, as massive thunderstorm systems set up in places like Oklahoma and Wisconsin and the Ukraine and so on.
So we now have a system that simply cuts across the radiation in/radiation out/radiation back models, and that incidentally, results in major features of the earth’s surface (deserts) and atmosphere (winds). My guess is that this is one of the key elements of the earth’s climate. All because of one little, uniquely odd molecule called WATER. There ain’t nuthin’ like it anywhere else that we know of.
Keep up the good work.

Willis, I just found this topic and am leaving on vacation early in the morning so must make this short and sweet. I will carefully read your treatise and all comments when I get back in a week.
My take is that the “missing energy” comes from the production of groundwater from slow to recharge aquifers. This water is not in equilibrium with the water present on the surface of the earth. The largest, by far, bulk of the produced water is used for irrigation of food and fodder vegetation. In 1995, this fossil production amounted to 830 cubic kilometers.
The produced liquid water undergoes evapotranspiration and discharges into the air as water vapor, thereby changing the potential energy of the liquid water into kinetic energy at constant temperature. The water vapor rises until it condenses changing the kinetic energy back into potential energy there by releasing the absorbed latent heat as specific heat, which warms the air. After that the condensed liquid water causes the oceans to rise a calculated 2.6 mm per year. At that point the groundwater is in equilibrium with the surface water and becomes part of the hydrological cycle. So the temperature increase and the ocean level increase are a function of only they yearly produced water volume.
The 830 cubic kilometers of groundwater per year releases a huge amount of energy into the atmosphere that was not there before. In recent years, due to dropping aquifer levels, the volume of groundwater pumped for irrigation has started to decline, especially in US and parts of China. This groundwater from slow or no recharge aquifers fits your “model” very well, I think.
Additionally, I believe that there is a functional temperature control valve in or very near the Tropopause that thermodynamically displaces a part of the 4 ppm water vapor as the carbon dioxide content increases due to partial pressure effects. I base this temperature control scenario on the fact that the NOAA measured humidities in the mid and upper Troposphere have decreased each year since 1958.
I can go into more detail but that is the essence of my studies on the causation of global warming and ocean level rise.
JFD

Dan Daly: You don’t need to take friction into account to explain why the atmosphere is heated when water condenses. It happens for the same reason why water must absorb heat to vaporize: a phase change from the liquid to the gas requires the absorption of energy and a phase change from gas to liquid requires the release of energy. It is called the “latent heat of vaporization”.
Willis Eschenbach says:

This is one of the times we seem to be mis-communicating. I’m not talking about models vs. reality. I’m talking about observations versus the current climate theoretical paradigm.
Current climate theory says that ∆U (energy leaving the system) = ∆T (surface temperature change) / S (climate sensitivity).
As the example above shows, that’s not true. And climate models and their antics, while interesting, don’t even enter the discussion.

I think then that you have created and destroyed a strawman. I don’t think climate scientists would claim that climate sensitivity applies down to these time- and length-scales. Climate sensitivity is measured by what happens over the long run, not about a tiny fluctuation. After all, over the short term there is no doubt that energy can go into a lot of different places…It can be absorbed into or liberated from the ocean, and so forth.
And, if you think the effect that you describe is a significant effect over the long term, then you should work out the consequences of your ideas and what they imply, which is where I was going with your notion here.

My best holiday wishes to you,
w.

Happy holidays and best wishes to you as well!

NovaReason says:
December 24, 2010 at 12:34 am
Thanks, that it it in a nutshell. It is just a thought experiment as I have not seen this area discussed before. Yes it could generated heat lower down, the above mentioned NS article says 5% of the condensation energy could be radiative and if the nuclei were continuously generated then the heat would rise together with the extraordinary buoyancy of water vapour. No net heat gain, just a spread of heat generation points closer to sea level. I will keep searching.
Christmas dinner calls and after all this is Willis’ thread.

Jim D said:
“It is incorrect to think IR photons just cause evaporation, and not heating of water molecules. How can they distinguish, and does a single photon even have enough energy to evaporate a molecule by supplying sufficient latent heat? Not quite.”
I said that water molecules are heated but that the timing of evaporation is then accelerated so that there is no net heating of the ocean bulk.
A single photon does not supply latent heat. it supplies sensible heat which then provokes earlier evaporation and when evaporation occurs more energy is drawn from the local environment as latent heat than was acquired from the additional photon(s) that directly caused the change of state.

Jim D said:
“It is incorrect to think IR photons just cause evaporation, and not heating of water molecules. How can they distinguish, and does a single photon even have enough energy to evaporate a molecule by supplying sufficient latent heat? Not quite.”
In the 3D bulk phase each water molecule has four strong hydrogen bonds, with to -H donors and two (:) receivers. At the atmospheric interface, water has a 2D surface, the top layer will have on average only 2 hydrogen bonds. As well as being bombarded by IR from the atmosphere, these molecules will also be bombarded by IR from below; from the thermal energy of the bulk water.
A little experiment for the summer. Take two children’s paddling pools and fill with the same amount of water and place a thermometer in each. Hang a thermometer on a thread above each. Pour a liter of light machine oil on one to stop evaporation. Place in noon-day sun. The water temperature of the oiled pool will be higher than the other, but the surface, air temperature will be lower.

Stephen, actually on clear nights the ground cools more than the air, being a black body. On cloudy nights it cools less, same for the ocean. CO2 has the warming effect of clouds, though much weaker and sustained, while it doesn’t have the cooling effect in the day due to being transparent to light. If you imagine the ocean subjected to such forcing it can’t help but get warmer.
Hopefully you don’t really believe in Miskolczi and his radiosondes. It goes against basic physical science in textbooks (not just climate science). It will go the way of cold fusion soon enough when no one else finds what he did with his selected data.
On the other message, yes photons heat water molecules. Why can’t they just distribute that heat rather than evaporating. This is where the whole idea of evaporating balancing the GHG falls apart. Evaporation does increase, but only after the surface has warmed to a new Clausius-Clapeyron equilibrium. This is the basis of the water vapor feedback. You are saying evaporation cools it back to the original temperature. No, because the photons are still there keeping it warmer. The new equilibrium with these photons is a warmer temperature with more vapor at the interface.
DocMartyn, the IR photons don’t have enough energy to supply the latent heat needed to evaporate water. They will therefore all just go into heating the water. The evaporation rate is governed by the sustained interface equilibrium between vapor and water, which depends on temperature.

Willis,
Something NOT considered is the pattern of WIND.
Wind has a rotational pattern.
How can I prove this?
A snowflake! When evaporating water vapour is freezing with a wind, the water vapour has to be spinning two dimensionally in order to achieve a flat plane of the snowflake.

Interesting discussion. Living in the Keys I tend to think more about hurricanes than snow. The average hurricane losses about 600 trillion Watts per day in rain out. Wind energy is about 1 trillion Watts per day. Blocked incoming radiation is probably between 1 and 10 trillion Watts per day. Wave energy produced I have never seen estimated. I just think it is amazing how big that tiny bit of energy can be for just one storm day.

Pamela Gray sais:
“Stephen, your statement, “Anything that affects stratospheric temperatures affects climate.” is an hypothesis without merit. ”
On the contrary, it is established climatology. I’m puzzled by your lack of awareness of that.
Even a temprary warming of the stratosphere from say a so called sudden stratospheric warming event changes the pressure distribution below to mimic a negative AO.
Also differential UV warming of the equatorial stratosphere from imteractions with ozone in the stratosphere is supposed to lower the tropopause, widen the tropical air masses and push the jets poleward.
I am not putting forward speculative statements. Instead I take established propositions, compare them with observations and set out some of the logical implications.
What puzzles me greatly is that since CO2 became the universal bete noir such an approach appears to have been neglected by the climate establishment yet it should be at the heart of the science.
Your personal opinion of the quality or otherwise of my work is of little interest. It has received favourable responses elsewhere.

Jim D said:
“Hopefully you don’t really believe in Miskolczi and his radiosondes”
What has ‘belief’ got to do with anything ?
So has the atmospheric optical depth changed over the past 60 years ? I have seen lots of personal comments about him and his work but without that point being addressed.

Regarding Miskolczi, I have not seen anyone confirm his data, but on the contrary satellite data which is much more precise in directly measuring the effect of CO2, does show its effect increasing. For me the weight of direct measurements is greater than the weight of Miskolczi’s indirect radiosonde approach, but people can choose for themselves.

Stephen Wilde,
You obviously are much more knowledgeable than I, but, I would ask you to change your terminology on CO2. It absorbs and emits LW. There is a fundamental difference in what happens in these two scenarios. If CO2 reflected and scattered only it could not heat the surrounding air mass.

Stephen Wilde says:

Jim,
Can you link me to any satellite data relating to optical depth , please?

There are a bunch of references given in here: http://skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect.htm
There are also studies relevant specifically to the water vapor feedback such as this paper by Soden et al. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5749/841.abstract and various papers by Dessler.

Joel,
I don’t see anything there about optical depth over the last 60 years as measured by satellites. Have missed something ?

Jim, Joel,
You need to explain to me why you are referring me to data about Outgoing Longwave Radiation when I am asking about optical depth.

Willis, we all know that when you make a step change in forcing dU, T doesn’t respond immediately. S is effectively very small or zero in the first seconds. How long does S take to reach the full climate sensitivity? I say several years at least. What does this mean? It means the “missing energy” is just a temporary situation representing thermal inertia, because changing the surface temperature in a climate system actually has deeper impacts in the ocean and soil that have to get into the new equilibrium. The missing surface energy is just going into warming these deeper layers. Averaging over long enough beyond the dU change, the missing energy goes to zero, as T reaches its full response.

I am still trying to understand Miskolczi’s definition of optical depth. It seems to be St/Su where St is the part in the window region of the OLR. If so, this is not including the greenhouse gas OLR in his definition, which therefore is not surprisingly insensitive to GHGs. Is this a correct interpretation? Why not use total OLR over surface emission which gives optical depths nearer 0.5 instead of 1.8. His high optical depth is because he is taking only the window fraction, which is just a function of the window width he chooses.

Stephen Wilde says:

I do recognize that the early NOAA data might be less accurate than more recent data, but this is what the data shows.

Actually, that radiosonde humidity data is complete garbage for determining long-term trends, as has long been recognized in the literature (you can find a reference in the Soden paper that I linked to) and does not agree with satellite data. Note that the Soden paper shows that both the long-term trend and the shorter-term fluctuations (e.g., due to El Nino and La Nina) show the positive water vapor feedback.

I don’t see anything there about optical depth over the last 60 years as measured by satellites. Have missed something ?

We haven’t had satellites monitoring this stuff for 60 years. The Soden paper essentially measure relative humidity (by measuring the infrared radiation passing through the atmosphere in certain frequency bands), which is the same thing that the reference that you gives reports…except that your reference uses radiosonde data of this that is known to be unreliable, especially for assessing long-term trends.

Note also that there has been a dramatic drop in water vapour at all altitudes in 2008, which is not included in the above calculations.

…Which is exactly what one expects if water vapor is a positive feedback, given that the temperatures in 2008 dropped quite dramatically due to a strong La Nina.

Pamela,
That link is limited to short term wind induced anomalies.
For climate purposes we need to consider long term stratospheric temperature trends such as the cooling observed throughout the late 20th century tropospheric warming trend. Conventional climatology says that all the layers should warm together when the sun is active but they didn’t. That is what encouraged the AGW proponents to propose human intervention.
Anyway, back to the point. A warmer stratosphere lowers the tropopause and a cooler stratosphere raises the tropopause whatever the cause of the temperature change.
The reason is the lapse rate so look that up if you need to.
The height of the tropopause dictates the size, intensity and position of the air circulation systems in the troposphere.
So if one changes stratospheric temperatures the perceived climate will change because the air circulation systems shift, especially the jets.
That is established climatology.

I’m wondering if:
Since the heat they are looking for is in the form of LW radiation, it seems logical to ask where can such heat be stored? If not the oceans (an unlikely source because it can’t store any of it except a tiny fraction that may, as some have suggested, get mixed in at the top most layer along with short wave solar radiation and eventually make it to the deeper layer via the http://oceanmotion.org/html/impact/conveyor.htm), then where? Could it be that this is where the notion starts about weather pattern disruption? That this LW heat, that at one time could simply escape but now gets bounced back to the surface and can’t escape, is causing almost immediate changes to weather? Could this be where the idea of “extreme” comes from?
If this is part of AGWer thinking, it forms a conundrum. If it’s getting stored in deep layers of the oceans, it can’t be causing “climatic disruption” (their term for what I think is more properly called weather pattern disruption) at the surface. If its being used at the surface to cause weather pattern disruption, it can’t be getting stored somewhere. If my “wonderings” are full of it, enlighten me.

Stephen Wilde says:

However the Miskolczi finding fits well with my proposition about a variable speed for the water cycle such that any increased optical depth would be negated by an increase in the speed of the water cycle.
So I’ll go with Miskolczi until I find something better.

Well, don’t be surprised to find yourself pretty lonely then in the scientific community, given that Miskolczi uses a data set that nobody seems to believe is accurate for the purposes that he uses it for.

Let’s just say Stephen, that there is more than one change in stratospheric temperature to consider. Your thoughts on ozone depletion and signs of recovery in light of your thesis?
http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sola/5/0/53/_pdf

Pamela,
That link is one which I have referred to regularly and it is fully accommodated in my proposals already.
May I suggest that you actually read what I say ?
Joel Shore said:
“Well, don’t be surprised to find yourself pretty lonely then in the scientific community, given that Miskolczi uses a data set that nobody seems to believe is accurate for the purposes that he uses it for.”
Since the scientific community has a serious problem explaining why AGW now seems so weak in the face of natural variability there isn’t much point joining them just to avoid loneliness. Anyway loneliness will disappear with a bit more evidence of what the natural processes are and can do.
harrywr2 said:
“Of course since we don’t know why the Hadley cells are acting the way they are it’s hard to simulate them.”
Now you are getting to the heart of it. They don’t know why ANY of the major circulation systems behave as they do.
My proposals provide just such an explanation and as time passes the real world is behaving as it should by my account.
If one adds a top down solar effect on the vertical temperature profile in the atmosphere and modulates that with bottom up oceanic variability then the pressure distribution changes and in particular mid latitude jetstream variations become fully explicable.
To achieve that top down solar effect I increasingly think that the secret is to regard radiative physics as largely irrelevant. What seems to matter most is chemical reactions caused by variations in the the energy and particles reaching us from the sun. Those reactions alter ozone quantities differentially at different levels to alter the vertical temperature profile so as to ultimately alter the height of the tropopause so as to alter the pressure distribution beneath.
The role of radiative physics is then merely to try and restore equilibrium after the chemical reactions have done their work.

Here’s another one that uses models and observations to describe the ozone-stratospheric temperature connection. It seems that several new and improved models are including a natural forcings only version.
hmmmmm.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/n56tw2k9xj546247/

Jim,
I don’t know the answer. I don’t even know whether your question is soundly based.
Pamela,
Very interesting and curious. I await developments.

Pamela Gray says:
December 25, 2010 at 5:40 am
I also find Stephen Wildes blog responses rather confusing but still gid value. If you are going to haul him over the coals for not being a good enough professional scientist to distinguish a hypothesis from a theory then I shal haul you over the coals for constantly confusing the words “affect” and “effect”.
So there!

Thanks for the support, chaps but I’ve had to put up with worse than what Pamela said and she did back off later in the thread when she seemed to start seeing my point.
Equations and words are just different means of expression. Words are best for a general overview with equations best for detailed application.
In climate issues we don’t have the general overview right yet so in my opinion words are more helpful to a lay reader and more effective to get across the general concepts than equations.
Intellectual snobbery is ill advised since those who are best with equations are often the worst with words and vice versa.