Frostbite Falls

Mick says: January 23, 2011 at 9:41 pm
I’ve lived and worked many years in desert countries and can confirm it gets cold very quickly after sunset. In those days, during the 1970s, I wasn’t aware of AGW and accepted the nightly temperature drop as unremarkable. In Namibia I was startled many times at night by rocks cracking off pieces as the outer shell cooled faster than the inner.
We need some current real time reports from a few desert countries that will show there is no “CO2 signature” in the so called greenhouse effect.

The obvious reply from a warmist would be, “Just think how cold it would have been without all of that CO2!”
You can’t argue with a tautology. No matter what occurs it is “consistent” with their theory.

It’s that wee eensie weensie little bit of mythical CO2 “forcing” they’re trying us on with EA Smith. You know the ‘SIGNAL’ amongst the “noise”.
Excellent logical observations like yours just knock the whole CO2 theory on the head, but the computer says naaaa.

Sure, weather isn’t climate.
I get that. But minus 46 degrees Fahrenheit, by five degrees a record, does suggest there isn’t a warming trend this Winter for the North American continent.
Back to the drawing board for AGW.
The warmists will come out of the box, again, with some explanation — they always do. But everytime AGW’s do, it gets harder to rationalize their previous erroneous prognostications.
Time is running out on the warmists!

You cannot fight religion with logic. It will only put you on the Black-List.
The feminists at the University of Oslo wanted to ban logic. Logic was too troublesome.

Oh come on, you are talking about a weather event, and CO2 is all about climate, at least in their minds. Weather is not climate, thus this should not have been posted.

Mick says:
January 23, 2011 at 9:41 pm
“The the CO2 blanket -in the the dry desert- not worth a thing. You freeze.
90% humidity in the tropics are balmy day’n night.”
Of course you tested your hypothesis by removing the CO2 from the dry desert air and noting there was no difference.
Oh wait… maybe you didn’t.

Just because an effect is small does not necessarily mean it can be ignored. How about you pay me just 0.1% interest on my money each day? Heck, even 0.01% per day would be better than I can get at any bank right now. Similarly, CO2 provides only a small part of the total back radiation. But a small change in that 300+W/m^2 IR would lead to noticeable changes in climate.
Clearly CO2 has SOME effect on climate. And even 1 or 2 W/m^2 has a noticeble effect on global temperature.

So far the change due to CO2 is not measurable. Yes, there would be a measurable change between NO CO2 and todays’ level but most of the impact from CO2 is already realized. Any additional is just not going to make any measurable difference. The impact from CO2 is logarithmic. So imagine rather than paying you a percentage in interest, I pay you in a fixed amount. The first 10ppm has some impact. The next 10ppm has less impact. The next 10ppm has even less impact. Each 10ppm I add has less impact than the 10ppm I added before.
Water vapor is a much greater impacting greenhouse gas. The earth’s atmosphere is already nearly opaque to the frequencies absorbed by CO2 because water vapor absorbs those same frequencies and there is much more of it. Imagine you have very thick black drapes across a window. Now draw a very light shear curtain across in front of those drapes. It isn’t going to make any measurable amount of difference. Yes, in theory it will make a difference but you will not be able to measure it.

says that the CO2 is not the “driver” here, it isn’t even in the passenger seat…
Hmmm. What if it is the glitch in the GPS that sends you down that dead-end road?
CO2 is a factor in the IR budget. As Steve Mosher above says – it is warmer with CO2 than it would be without it. It is just that there is disagreement to the extent of its contribution.
I’m no subscriber to the AGW theory, but I feel this is a poor contribution to the sceptics’ cause.

pat says:
January 23, 2011 at 10:22 pm
I suspect that the next villains will be soot […] The problem with soot, of course, is that it is almost entirely produced in the Third World. And the enemy is the First World economies. This should be interesting.
I am sure soot is a major player on sunlit snow. This is why NH springtime snow cover is diminishing while it is pretty stable otherwise. Also, if soot forcing (and of course UHI) is taken into account (its efficacy is high), there’s not much room left for CO2 sensitivity.
And there’s an even more serious problem with soot: it is completely removed from the atmosphere in a week or two by precipitation, so as soon as soot emissions are stopped, nothing is left in the “pipeline”. Also, it is not prohibitively expensive to decrease soot emissions, one just needs more perfect combustion & proper filters. It is a proven technology. To make a long story short, stop burning biomass, especially dung for cooking, use natural gas instead. Burn coal in power plants (with proper handling of smoke), not at home. Reap grass. Collect dead wood in forests and burn it in a controlled manner. Do not use small diesel engines, install filters on large ones.
There’s also a collateral advantage in decreasing soot emissions. Soot in air (unlike carbon dioxide) is dangerous to human health.

Steven Mosher says:
January 24, 2011 at 12:07 am
EM. The AGW argument amounts to this.
Existing Atmosphere = effective radiating altitude of X.
Existing Atmosphere + More C02 = effective radiating altitude of X+e
That is, when you add more C02 to the existing atmosphere the it becomes more opaque THAN IT WOULD BE WITHOUT THAT C02. That raises the altitude at which
the atmosphere becomes transparent. which raises the altitude at which energy escapes via radiation.
its about the delta in temp, not the temperature. So that -46 would have been colder with less C02. Warmer with more ;colder with less. Note the absence of any absolute number. C02 doesnt make it warm. it makes it warmer than it would have been with out it.
When you raise the effective rSteven Mosher diating altitude the heat takes longer to escape. That gives you a surface warmer than it would have been otherwise. not warm, warmer than it would have been otherwise.

—————–
Steven Mosher,
I believe Lindzen discusses what the greenhouse effect is wrt ( Lindzen’s term of )”the characteristic emission level, τ=1″ of the atmosphere. It is some more precise in Lindzen’s paper [ https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/ArmstrongGreenSoon08-Anatomy-d/Lindzen07-EnE-warm-lindz07.pdf ] than your discussion. I take it to be a major conclusion of Lindzen that there are serious attribution issues for CO2 increases causing so called (my words) ‘observed heating at the earth surface’.
Regards,
John

Thanks Anthony.
Normally these kind of posting are way above my pay grade…..but, this one I understand.

This post has some of the most woefully flawed logic I think I’ve ever seen. It gets cold at night, so therefore CO2 is not a greenhouse gas? Wow. Get on to Nature with that one.

If say there was much less or much more co2 in the atmosphere under the same inversion conditions would there be any effect on night time air temperature?

E.M. Smith,
The air is far more denser in the cold as water molecules(humidity) is not a factor in the atmospheric density.
Add in centrifugal force from planetary rotation which helps force the heat energy away from the planet’s surface.

I too am skeptical of the CO2 contribution to warming the Earth. Yes, Earth’s atmosphere does provide a “comfort blanket” of about 33C above the black-body temperature of 255K. And, yes, CO2 is a powerful absorber of IR energy in the bands you mentioned above (although I think the 15 micron band is more important here, because it’s closer to the terrestrial thermal radiation peak).
But the question should be: how much warming effect does CO2 _alone_ have on terrestrial warming? It seems from the article above that CO2 doesn’t work unless there is water vapor to ‘assist’.
We have an ideal planetary “CO2 greenhouse laboratory” in place on the planet Mars, whose atmosphere is 95% CO2 (with no other GHG’s to complicate the analysis), to observe how much warming is due to CO2 alone.
Finding: Virtually no warming due to CO2 is observed.
The Martian atmosphere is much thinner, only 1% of Earth, but because it’s almost pure CO2 the actual concentration of CO2 is about 30 times greater per unit surface area than on Earth.
Yet the mean surface temperature is the same as the black body temperature, ~210 K, according to NASA’s “Mars Fact Sheet”:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html
Black-body temperature: Mars 210.1 K Earth 255 K
Average temperature: Mars ~210 K Earth 288 K
Conclusion: Even though CO2 is a powerful absorber of 15 micron radiation, in isolation its contribution to “greenhouse warming” is negligible.
Whenever I bring this up, someone invariably mentions that “pressure broadening” may play a role here. Pressure broadening refers to the apparent thickening of aborption lines under high pressure. But is there really any _conclusive_ evidence or experiment that proves that this effect actually produces warming, without any help from other feedback mechanisms?
And, getting back to Mars, why is it that CO2 doesn’t produce a lot of warming?

This is an excellent post and it demonstrates many of the failings behind the AGW theory, not least that the land based global temperature data set is measuring the wrong metric such that there is no evidence whatsoever that the heat content of the atmosphere is actually increasing.
The AGW crowd often argue that one cannot conduct a real physical experiment to show the effect of CO2, and yet nature has already done the experiment. For example, the temperature inversion on this frosty night. Another example would be night time temperatures in arid/desert area. And further, not least in the geological time frame, there are periods when the earth was cold yet CO2 levels were high, times when the earth was hot and CO2 levels quite low, times when CO2 levels were falling yet temperatures increased, and times when CO2 levels were increasing and yet temperatures cooled. Put all of this together and one can see that in the real world, CO2 has no significant impact and does not control temperatures.
I also consider that there is a time period in all of this which is not fully thought through. CO2 cannot heat the atmosphere, the earth or the oceans. At most, it acts as an impediment to the loss of heat from the ground and oceans. It simply delays heat loss. As the photons seek to find there way into space, they can no longer take a straight path. Some of them hit a CO2 molecule and this bounces them in a different direction possibly down back towards the earth where at some time they hit another CO2 molecule and that bounces them in another direction possibly back up to space where upon some of them will collide with a CO2 molecule bouncing them in a different direction etc. All that is happening is that instead of a straight line exit, there is a zigzag course which takes longer for the photon to travel before eventually it finds its way out to space.
If that is so, the question is whether the surface that has received the energy from the sun during the course of the day can sufficiently dissipate all that energy during the course of the night, or does the presence of increasing levels of CO2 mean that it can’t?
The process that I described above happens both day and night, but there is a different energy budget between day time and night time, the effect of which is that during the day, the earth receives more energy from the sun than it can dissipate back to space such that it warms up during the day. At night, the earth is not receiving any energy from the sun and has an opportunity to dump the heat back into space. There is sufficient time during the night to mean that the next day starts off with the same energy balance as did the previous day.
We know that whatever be the effect of CO2 in isolation, it does not significantly impede the night time dumping back of heat into space. This can be seen by night time temperatures in arid/desert areas. It can also be seen over the oceans. Over deserts, the night time temperatures quickly fall away and reach a low supported by the heat capacity/retention of the sands and rocks. The night time air temperature over the ocean is the same temperature as the ocean itself. The oceans have much more heat capacity and it is heat being radiated from the oceans during the night that keeps the air above them warm during the night and at the same temperature as the ocean below.
CO2 in isolation is inconsequential. Further, the wavelength of the back radiation is such that it cannot in any event penetrate the ocean to any significant degree (the penetration is measured in microns whereas the energy for sun penetrates to 10s of metres) which means that it incapable of heating the oceans and if CO2 cannot heat the oceans (which represent about 99% of the heat capacity of the earth, ignoring the core/mantle), it cannot cause global warming.
Tim Folkerts says: January 23, 2011 at 9:58 pm
“Just because an effect is small does not necessarily mean it can be ignored.” The answer, to that observation is that an increase in something that is negligible still remains negligible.

Steven Mosher says:
January 24, 2011 at 2:35 am
Another simple way to look at it is this.
C02 can never cause warming.
C02 causes warming, but the effect is too small to measure, yet.
C02 causes some of the warming we have seen and so does internal variability
C02 causes most of the warming we have seen, more than internal variability has.”
Steven Mosher, you left off the most important one of all. 4 is the AGW position. You left off the CAGW position. The C being catastrophic, as in the world will end if we do not move to global transfer of wealth now. You left off that position, without which probably none of us would be either posting or reading here.
In regard to the post I think E.M. is postulating another means for the extra energy of CO2 to be used up in accelerating a convection process of moving energy, such as the potential that some of the energy increase from CO2 is used to speed the hydrologic cycle as opposed to increasing temperature.

@Tim Folkerts: “Yep, weather is much more affected by any of those in the short term. But overall, those affects will average out to produce climate. And even a small change in any of them will change climate.”

Are you purposefully avoiding the obvious conclusion by omitting the key word “significant”? Yes, we can agree that an insignificant factor will have an insignificant impact on weather. Given that climate IS the average of all weather, then why can it not be said that whatever is insignificant to weather in general can ultimately only be insignificant to climate as well?

@Mick: The the CO2 blanket -in the the dry desert- not worth a thing. You freeze. 90% humidity in the tropics are balmy day’n night.

Thanks, that’s a ‘keeper’! Water vapor is reported to be responsible for as much as 95% of the overall so-called “green house effect” but the average person needs an A-B example like yours to bring the point home and it’s a very good one IMO.

I’ve already commented on E.M.’s blog, so I won’t repeat what I said there here.
I’d just point out to the warmists posting here that what E.M. has done is provided a giant “Dig Here” sign. There must have been occasions when the same dry air / no wind conditions occurred in the same place, but yet despite the rise in CO2 levels, the record was set now, not in times previous, which should have been the case if CO2 has a measurable effect on temperatures.
Other posters have also pointed out that those same conditions arise in deserts (including Antarctica) on a regular basis. Why, with the 10’s of billions spent on climate research, have no monitoring stations been placed in these locations. It’s all very well demonstrating CO2’s warming effect in the perfect conditions of a lab, or do some calculations that show it on paper, but there has been no demonstration of that effect in real world conditions, and all the arm waving isn’t going to change that.
The corollary to a thesis being unfalsifiable and untestable is that it is unproveable.

Excellent post sir !!!
“CO2 is a wimp, and can be ignored. Water kicks sand in its face and clouds pee in its beer while the wind gives it a wedgie.”
That is a keeper !!!

Is there any study, comparing the tmin with tmax? Because per GH theory, tmin at night should be affected most. Of course, one has to pick a proper rural station, since tmin is affected by UHI as well.

I appreciate articles such as these that explain the issues down to a layman’s understanding. Thanks Willis!

Juraj V. says:
January 24, 2011 at 5:14 am

Is there any study, comparing the tmin with tmax? Because per GH theory, tmin at night should be affected most. Of course, one has to pick a proper rural station, since tmin is affected by UHI as well.

I happened to have this study handy after reading E Ms article at Chiefios. You can have it 🙂
http://www.john-daly.com/barker/index.htm

Today is the anniversary of the record cold drop in the U.S. during 24 hours. At Browning Montana in 1916 the temp. dropped 100 degrees from +44 to -56.

I find myself very much in agreement with what E M Smith has said in this post and in his subsequent comments.
Dave Springer says:
January 23, 2011 at 10:39 pm
“CO2 is completely swamped by ANY of [ convection, wind, water vapor, clouds / water drops ] and when seen acting on its own can do nothing to prevent record lows from IR radiation from the surface.”
I’d be surprised if there are there any climate boffins who would contend that convection et al do not have the potential to effect local/regional weather to a much greater degree than CO2. That seems like a given in any informed discussion of the subject that should go without saying.
The problem is we’re still left with the fact CO2 is still there and it still adds a surface forcing. So the record cold would have been a bit colder had anthropogenic CO2 been absent. That also should go without saying.
I don’t see how this changes the debate at all.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Had there been less CO2 in the atmosphere, it would not have been colder that night. It would merely have taken slightly less time (and this may be measured in seconds, if not minutes) for the record cold to have been reached.
I think that some people fail to appreciate that occasionally nature allows us a rare glimpse to see what real and practical effect CO2 has when acting in isolation, ie., when “convection, wind, water vapor, clouds / water drops” etc are not masking what effect CO2 really has. When these other factors are removed, one can see that the real effect of CO2 is in fact inconsequential. I am not saying that it has no effect at all, merely that in isolation its effect is insignificant and for all practical purposes one can say that it is so ineffective that it can be ignored.
I also consider that people fail to realize that the effect observed in the example cited by E M Smith (ie., the extent to which CO2 is hindering heat loss) is happening every night at every location of the planet but the only reason we do not see this rapid heat loss is that almost always the other factors (ie., “convection, wind, water vapor, clouds / water drops”) are in play such that these other factors (and not the presence of CO2) prevent the remarkable heat loss. If it were not for these other factors, almost always being in play, we would be freezing no matter whether CO2 levels were doubled or tripled or quadrupled since the real effect of CO2 is negligible and is dwarfed by other processes.
None of this should be that surprising since back radiation does not heat, it merely slows down heat loss, and it does not, in practical terms, matter whether a photon takes a direct route to space involving a distance of say 20 to 30 km or whether it collides with CO2 molecules on its way such that it gets bounced around and ends up having to do a trip of a 100,000 km or 1,000,000 km. Given the speed at which photons travel and given the low concentration of CO2, there is ample time at night for all the heat energy to escape back to space (if it were not for the other factors that almost always are in play). As E M Smith observes, it does not matter whether CO2 in the atmosphere delays the time taken for the heat to be lost by 1 second, 1 minute, 10 minutes or 1 hour, The bottom line is that irrespective of the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, during the night, there is sufficient time for all the heat to find its way back out into space and would do so but for the other factors in play.
I would like to thank E M Smith for this very good and important post.

Actual measurements of downwelling ‘backradiation’ would seem to support E M Smith in regards to the importance of CO2 versus H2O.
Canada
Evans and Puckring 2005, measured at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario (44oN, 78oW) – [note-geographically similar to northern Minnesota]. From their Table 3a:
Winter
H20 94 to 125 W m-2
CO2 31 to 35 W m-2
Note that in Winter, with lower atmospheric moisture, the H2O contribution is about 3x that of CO2.
Summer
H20 178 to 256 W m-2
CO2 10.5 W m-2
In Summer, with higher atmospheric moisture, the H20 value went up and the CO2 backradiation went DOWN SIGNIFICANTLY.
Antarctica
But the current E M Smith article is for very low temperatures and very low moisture. So lets look at similar downwelling backradiation measurements in Antarctica, as reported by Spectral and Broadband Longwave Downwelling Radiative Fluxes, Cloud Radiative Forcing and Fractional Cloud Cover over the South Pole_TownEtAl_2005.pdf
They find that – “Water vapor contributes approximately two thirds of the LDFclear regardless of season while CO2 contributes about one-third. The actual ratio of H2O/ CO2 LDFclear is in the range 2.1–2.3 throughout the year. This constancy is surprising because precipitable water vapor (PWV) decreases significantly from summer to winter, but atmospheric CO2 concentration remains constant as the atmospheric temperatures drop dramatically.”
From their Table 7 (units are W m-2)
Winter
H2O 48
CO2 23
Summer
H2O 83
CO2 35
In both papers, the measured backradiation from ‘all other GHG’ was significantly less than the CO2 values, so CO2 plus H2O accounted for 90 to 95% of the totals.
And lastly in relation to the Kiehl and Trenberth 1997 diagram that shows 324 W m-2 ‘backradiation’ from Greenhouse gasses. The measured values listed above for CO2 are only about 30 W -m2 (no more than about 10% of K&T). To get from 30 up to 320 takes a heck of a lot of water. Or as noted by E M Smith –
“CO2 is a wimp, and can be ignored. Water kicks sand in its face and clouds pee in its beer while the wind gives it a wedgie.”

Steven Mosher says: (January 24, 2011 at 2:35 am)
“Another simple way to look at it is this.
C02 can never cause warming.
C02 causes warming, but the effect is too small to measure, yet.
C02 causes some of the warming we have seen and so does internal variability
C02 causes most of the warming we have seen, more than internal variability has.”
The bottom line is are we willing to accept the redistribution of trillions of dollars by self appointed guardians of humanity just in case #4 may be correct.
Now, as Milankovitch cycles return us to a long period of glaciation (and they will), I am hoping that #4 is correct and advocate a policy that we should do nothing to stop it. After all, warmer is truly better for humanity and we should do everything (or nothing in this case) to make it so.

It seems that the Minnesota cold has reached the east: -25 F this morning in western New Hampshire, predicted high today of 5 F. The good news is that my car started this morning (left outside all night)…

CO2 is a wimp, and can be ignored. Water kicks sand in its face and clouds pee in its beer while the wind gives it a wedgie.

Wonderful posting…. relished your responses… anyone who wants a realistic perspective should also take a look at the glorious Ignore The Day At Your Peril posting by E. M. Smith
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/ignore-the-day-at-your-peril/
[Anthony: That is meant to be a BIG HINT :-)]
THANK YOU E. M. SMITH

The white pine forests of Minnesota were wiped out from 1850 to 1910 and had about 3.5 million acres (5000 square miles) or about 100 Minneapolis heat-islands worth of heat trapping giant pine trees. Deer like to winter-yard in large pine stands because they are warmer. The winter-warming effect of these pine forests probably far exceeded any warming effect of CO2.
Has anyone ever looked at how removal of these white pine forests affected the historical temperature record? The white pine forest range covered a very large area, Northeast US to Minnesota and quite a distance south. Not many trees remain … perhaps 1%. Turn-of-the-century winter temps look awfully cold, was that because so many trees were removed leaving a blank white landscape (some of the old pictures of cutover forests are unbelievable)? Logging went far beyond run of the mill land-use issue, it was a wholesale reordering of the environment imo. How much warmer would winter temperatures in many areas of the country been a century ago if the forests were not cut?

Joe Bastardi tweets:
Did you know International falls has 6 record lows in the past 3 jans? The station history is over a hundred yrs old. Next tweet,the math….. They should have a record every 3 winters. 6 in 3 winters is 6 times normal frequency. Unheard of: it happening in 3 winters in a row!…… 1909 though had 5 records, so for a single year, that is the benchmark
http://twitter.com/BigJoeBastardi

The statement CO2 is not in the passenger seat, it is not even in the car! Correct me if i am wrong but since CO2 needs IR to heat up goes on to when the sun goes down, CO2 loses its IR so no more heating of the air. No SUN = No WARM. I get so tired of reading that CO2 is a heat trapping gas, it can not trap heat only radiate it. Cloud cover at night keeps the warm in no clouds warm radiates to space. IMO

EM is right!
The time constant is in hours not 30 year periods.
When you’re hot you’re hot and when you’re not you’re not.
(apologies to the late Jerry Reed)

This is exactly what I have been theorizing for a while:
That the effect of the total Global Warming factor could be assesed in watching the daily heat loss over the course of a day in different areas that have different CO2 concentrations and also different water concentrations, and that by looking at these minute data points we can dial in the effect of, say, 300ppm of CO2 vs 400ppm of CO2, since there are areas that have that difference currently.
We hear of long term testing, we hear of some seasonal, but I haven’t heard of various daily testing of points that progress through a day where there is a high CO2 concentration and a low CO2 concentration. It seems to me to be a logical way to figure out the differences between the GHE due to various factors.
This post makes a similar comment. I am curious if anybody here has seen any studies to that affect?
(On a side note, in Alaska I went to school in -44 weather in shorts, just to say I did it. -44 is cold…)

What do you mean? It should have been -51F at International Falls that night instead of -46F, since CO2 warms the polar regions more than tropics.

Tom_R says: January 24, 2011 at 7:10 am
A CO2 molecule absorbs at certain wavelengths to reach a higher energy state and then reradiates. Among the numerous CO2 absorptions and reradiations, some of the energy goes downward, – hence the ‘greenhouse’ effect. Can CO2 molecules also be pushed to a higher energy state via collisions with N2 and O2 molecules and then radiate that energy, some of which would go upwards? If so, wouldn’t adding CO2 drain additional heat from the atmosphere via this process?

My perspective is that Radiated Heat is a doubled edge sword i.e. it can cut both ways… and it is an issue most of us are very familiar with if we have a car… when a car is absorbing strong sunlight the temperature inside the car becomes higher than the air outside… this is the greenhouse effect as the hot air cannot escape from the car unless we open the windows. However, even with the windows closed the car is still radiating heat away… you will know this if you have even jumped into your leather drivers seat in your shorts… the leather seat is even hotter than the air in the car… so my guess is that all the plastic trim inside the car would start melting unless the car was radiating heat away on those lovely sunny days.
So far this car analogy is pretty much standard AGW greenhouse climate science… and lets image walking through a very large open field on this bright sunny cloudless day… it feels warm in the sunshine… now lets image walking through this field with 300 cars parked in it… we can probably feel some of that extra radiated heat as we pass by one of those parked cars… but overall the parked cars have very little effect on the average temperature of this large field… and increasing the number of parked cars to 400 doesn’t really do much either… especially as our field is so big it can hold up to 1,000,000 parked cars.
OK so far?
Now lets think about what can happen on a clear, cloudless night… those 400 parked cars start cooling down when the sun goes down… they keep on radiating heat during the night… and the air inside those becomes cooler… and the temperature inside the car is cooler than the outside air temperature before dawn… this is why you end up scrapping ice off your windshield even when there hasn’t been a frost. Now imagine walking through that field just before dawn sing your flashlight… perhaps you can feel the colder air you walk close by one of the parked cars… you might even see those frosted windshields… but overall the average temperature of the field isn’t cooled that much by those 400 parked cars.
Conclusion.
Heat Radiation is a double edged sword in AGW climate terms… CO2 could cause heating during the day… CO2 could cause cooling at night… these effects might even balance out… who knows… but either way the impact of CO2 is trivial because it is only 0.039% of the atmosphere CO2… it you think otherwise try getting drunk on beer that only contains 0.039% alcohol 🙂

@ Tim C
E M Smith actually said “There is a heat bucket into which we pour heat from the sun each day. The clouds, water vapor, and winds keep a 10 Gallon Per Minute hole plugged. We are also plugging a 1/1000 GPM hole with CO2. It’s a 100 gallon bucket. So one night the 10 GPM hole is left open and the darned thing drains dry in 10 hours. That 1/1000 GPM hole just doesn’t matter. (As every year has a few nights with the big holes opened).”
The 1/1000 GPM leak is plugged by the CO2, the CO2 isn’t represented by leaking, like you suggest. (What he forgot to add is every night an elephant drinks the water that doesn’t leak out, but on those nights the 10GPM leak is unplugged, the elephant gets cold as well as thirsty!)
@ E.M.Smith
I like your post, a great example of the relative value in warming of CO2, H2O in all it’s forms, and convection. Thanks for that, chiefio.

Ottawa, ON Canada broke a 41 year record for a Jan 24th low temperature. And the weather was clear and calm.

Pbjosh,
“We hear of long term testing, we hear of some seasonal, but I haven’t heard of various daily testing of points that progress through a day where there is a high CO2 concentration and a low CO2 concentration.”
Good point. I don’t think there is a big enough difference in co2 levels from place to place, although there is the annual cycle, but even that doesn’t amount to much. My suggestion is to construct three transparent tubes that go from the surface to the stratosphere. One contains normal air, the second contains air with co2 at pre-industrial levels, and the third contains air with double the pre-industrial level. The downwelling radiation can be measured and that would at least give a good approximation to the forcing.

Hey E.M. Smith… great article! You really opened up some minds.

Sorry, but I don’t find this article very convincing. Simply replace the words CO2 and temperature with sealevel and waves/tides and one can make a similar story to “prove” that there is no sea level rise…
Of course the effect of CO2 is probably (very) small, but with short term fluctuations caused by other more important variables, one can’t prove or disprove the effect of CO2.

James F. Evans says:
January 23, 2011 at 10:48 pm
The warmists will come out of the box, again, with some explanation — they always do. But everytime AGW’s do, it gets harder to rationalize their previous erroneous prognostications.
This sounds so much like the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They would do a 180° turn on some aspect of doctrine and the fellow travelers in fellow Parties would obediently make the same abrupt turn and act as if nothing had changed.
IanM

A temperature inversion is the only occasion when ‘back-radiation’ from GHG gases could possibly operate because radiation or any other form of heat transfer can only move from a warmer body to a colder body, despite what Science of Doom claims. (I am not disputing that humid air can reduce heat loss.) And yet EM Smith’s article appears to show that even in these circumstances CO2 has a minuscule effect.

Agw will latch onto the “inversion” thing and say this is due to co2 warming. Actually, I don’t believe inv is the mechanism in terms of vertical movement. The cold air mass from the north wedges like a plow under the lighter warm air at the line of the front and the latter rises up the wedge sliding on the interface. The relative motion of the two air masses has a larger horizontal component than the verical. The rest of your analysis re co2 effect seems sound.

Steven Mosher says:
January 24, 2011 at 12:18 pm
There is a debate about AGW, you guys should consider joining it.

Not so much a debate… more like a sermon… and unfortunately the flock isn’t hanging round to hear the rest of the sermon… they have flocked off… or are they flocked off… they might even want to say it…

Thought experiment:
In the complete absence of greenhouse gases, how would the atmosphere lose heat?
It cannot radiate, except for tiny amounts in the UV region, so it wouldn’t lose much to space.
It cannot lose much to the surface through conduction, as dry air is a good insulator, and convection causes heat to tend to rise rather than fall.
It gets gradually heated by the surface at the times and places that the surface is warmer.
Therefore what’s to stop the atmosphere from gradually warming towards the highest surface temperature?

hotrod (Larry L) says: January 24, 2011 at 1:44 pm
Taking a long walk on a clear sky low humidity night and measuring radiant temperatures of surfaces with an IR thermometer is an eye opening experience.

I would like to read more about this eye opening experience. PLEASE! 🙂

@EM: I don’t need to move to a new paradigm, thank you. I need only point to the system remaining stable and convergent (albeit oscillating between the different limit points) through the regular ~100ky cycles of recent glaciations in the quaternary. If it wasn’t stable none of us would be here today to worry over it.
Your argument was that CO2 is “completely swamped” by convection, wind, water vapor, clouds water drops (all daily phenomena – essentially weather – at separate locations); CO2 “is a wimp and can be ignored”. I say that this is just too simplistic: on a decadal or centennial timeframe CO2 is having measurable effect. But within a century or so I expect mankind will have the technology to sequester CO2, so be able to set atmospheric CO2 levels to whatever level within reason the politicians can agree on. (I wouldn’t be surprised to see this as 600-800 ppm, for the earth really to blossom….)

@hotrod (Larry L):
Wonderful links, and observations. Now I’ve got another day going into the past… 😉

I thought you might find those interesting. I bet some interesting experiments could be developed with a proper black body radiator of low heat capacity or IR heat sensor, measuring the hemispherical radiant temperature of the sky under different humidity conditions. If we can characterize the changes due to humidity changes we might be able to show in real experimental behavior exactly how the heat budget to the sky varies with humidity. Subtract that contribution from the “theoretical” CO2 contribution and see if the sums add up right.

Malaga View says:
January 24, 2011 at 3:14 pm
hotrod (Larry L) says: January 24, 2011 at 1:44 pm
Taking a long walk on a clear sky low humidity night and measuring radiant temperatures of surfaces with an IR thermometer is an eye opening experience.
I would like to read more about this eye opening experience. PLEASE! 🙂

When I get home I will see if I can find the notes I made shortly after I got that IR thermometer. I spent a couple nights going outside every hour or so, measuring the IR surface temperature of all sorts of surfaces. You could actually measure the IR cooling of the windshields of cars compared to other surfaces. They were often several degrees F cooler than the ambient temperature.
I work a swing shift so will not be able to respond in until much later this evening.
Bottom line, is I think the issue people need to get their heads around, is that from the view point of the ground the night sky is a very cold surface and it suffers a significant IR energy transfer to the sky, regardless of the air temperature, and unless winds and advection actively warm surfaces by passing warmer air over them, they will chill over night much colder than the still outside air temperature. This is where the heat budget should be calculated not based on air temperature but the actual IR imbalance of surfaces that radiate to the sky.
This radiant cooling is well studied by solar energy folks, as they actively use it to chill water for some purposes (sustainable air conditioning systems using solar cooling etc.) and also because they discovered that their flat plate solar collectors become pretty good heat radiators to the sky at night, and would freeze water in the water loop collectors even though outside air temps were several degrees above freezing.
This radiant cooling of the land surface (which was heated by the suns energy during the day) raises the question about how useful tropospheric air temps are when calculating the heat balance at IR frequencies. Near surface air temperature might not be too useful to calculate the radiant heat balance, if the actual energy loss is occurring by IR energy transfer from surfaces directly to the cold sky.
Larry

Brass monkeys in Boston right now.

Tom_R:
Hey, Tom. Didn’t even get to participate today in the discussion I started last night. Before I read all of these comments and possibly have my thoughts sidetracked I should clarify my thoughts in this area.
Having spent over a year now trying to decipher the science behind AGW, I agree with many that there is much being ignored and not considered in the science of the atmosphere. This is not a test in a lab bottle.
I thing that has influenced me is Dr. Miskolczi’s paper. He makes no claims as to the cause or to the which effects his discover might apply but you can’t ignore one parameter that his paper did hone down: the LW opacity (optical thickness) of the total atmosphere over all latitudes and seasons and over a sixty-one year period as a whole is a constant.
What would that imply for he says little? Only that evidently just co2 concentrations seem to have absolutely no effect and that is on the atmosphere as a whole, all latitudes and altitudes across seasons, considered only as a complete system. To me that means that the stratosphere may cool below normal and therefore the troposphere must increase, or vice versa, but that imbalance vertically would have a limit to maintain the constant optical thickness. I think we are seeing that right now with the UV collapse.
That brings me to the thermalization occurring within the atmosphere. I have yet to pin down it’s role into this interplay of the layers but sure seems it has *some* role. That was my queue to try to get more information on this subject another might hold.
I keep looking. It’s there somewhere but most hides behind pay-walls and that is frustrating having to go to blogs to get current science.
Anyway, now I’ll read all of this and will probably comment back if warranted.

WOW!
This post certainly generated a lot of interest.
On the issue of IR guns, I have done the same as hotrod Larry – I purchased the gun to check for “hot spots” on horses to detect injuries but have used it to check for heat loss in houses, and to check surface temperatures as Larry has – and detect what does and does not store heat. Most informative.
But the most important thing in Mr Smith’s article that resonated with me was the differentiation between horizontal and vertical distances. The International space station orbits at 208 to 285 miles above the earth. The distance from International Falls to Minneapolis is 294 miles. It’s a five hour drive. You can look up and see the space station go by. But you can’t see Minneapolis from International Falls. From 30,000 feet you can see pollution plumes that extend hundreds of miles, from the space station you can see smoke from forest fires or sand from sand storms that span thousands of miles. Looking up from a point on the earth, you just see stars or you don’t, you have no understanding of the scope.
“Dave Springer says:
January 23, 2011 at 10:39 pm (Edit)
I don’t see how this changes the debate at all.”
Dave – as a pilot, you have to know that if you compare vertical sensitivity to horizontal sensitivity, there is a huge difference and you must see it on your instruments when you fly. And this is why all those two dimensional climate models don’t work so well as the problem is multi-dimensional and we don’t even know how to quantify all the variables … which is what I see in the posts in response to Mr Smith’s post … and many other posts on WUWT lately. It is becoming clear that as we learn more and more about climate that we actually “know” less and less.
And that is as it should be. The more we know, the more we know that we know less.

Ok I am home and can devote some time to digging up old info.
This topic first came to my attention 40 years ago when I took a winter survival course. Our instructor had us spend a night out in the mountains near Evergreen Colorado wearing only street cloths a light jacket and the survival gear we could fit in a very small fanny pack. One of his lessons was get under shelter and out of the view of the open sky.
Believe me at 3:00 in the morning with temperatures in the high 20’s F you can tell the difference in the radiant temperature of the clear sky and the radiant temperature of a pine tree that blocks most of your view of the sky.
Now years later, I bought an IR thermometer for automotive purposes (checking tire temperatures) looking for cold header pipes to find a cylinder not firing etc.
It is a Master Cool model 52224-b, rated as having a useful range on the IR sensor from -76 deg F to 1200 deg F (-60 C to 648 C).
It has a viewing angle of 15:1 (3.8 degrees).
I decided to verify the radiant cooling from the clear sky by taking some temperatures and got the following results:
(Note there is a dependence on emissivity of the surface and the IR reading so I have included the generic setting of E=.95 I used for most of these measurements, unless I had a reliable value for some other emissivity for the surface)
===================
weather conditions
outside temp per Rocky Mountain Metro airport (BJC) weather report :
39.2 deg F (dewpoint 15.8 deg F)
I live about 2 miles from the airport, in an apartment complex on the 3rd floor which has an open breeze way through the building, in this breezeway my thermometer read
(hallway) = 42.6 deg F (E=0.95)
Breezeway floor (concrete open to the air on both sides) 37.1 deg F (E=0.95)
pavement north side of building = 20.6 deg F (E=0.95)
snow near swimming pool = 15.1 deg F (E=0.95) <– open view of sky of about 170 degrees .
surface of snow on grass = 10.4 deg F (E=0.95)
sidewalk surface in the open space = 10.9 deg F to 6.6 deg F (E=0.95)
hood of parked car (cold soaked had not run in days) 12.8 deg F (E=0.95)
windshield of cars
2.6 deg F (E=0.95), -3.4 deg F (E=0.84)
Early in the morning I remeasured some of the following temperatures:
0:750
Temperature 39.2 deg F
Pavement north side of building 16.8 to 14.6 deg F
When the IR thermometer was pointed at the clear northern night sky it instantly showed off scale low which for this thermometer is -76 deg F.
I had expected the sky to be cold but not that cold, so I contacted a friend who is a thermal control engineer for an aerospace company, and they use an empirical formula to estimate the effective temperature of the sky for their calculations of heat load on the pad.
It is:
Tsky = 0.04114 x ( Tair deg R) ^1.5
Tsky = effective absolute temperature of the sky
Tair = absolute temperature of the air in Rankin (this formula is not in Metric units)
I have not done a carefully controlled series of measurements, these were just dash out and take some readings temps, as at the time it was simply a curiosity question.
Using the above rule of thumb calculation, you come up with the following approximate values for the effective sky temperature under various conditions.
Effective sky temperature vs air temperature
(calculated radiant temperature of the sky in typical conditions)
air temperature sky radiant temperature
120 deg F 114 deg F
100 deg F 85 deg F
80 deg F 56 deg F
60 deg F 28 deg F
40 deg F 0 deg F
20 deg F -27 deg F
0 deg F -54 deg F
-20 deg F -80 deg F
I will leave it to the math wizards to convert this relationship to Kelvin temperatures.
I also found another paper that gives another relation for sky temperature/emissivity.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V50-497T2FY-GY&_user=10&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F1982&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1618705469&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=bbcef1e0ac613a3af09999a7f76744a6&searchtype=a

The thermal radiance of clear skies
article
Paul Berdahla and Richard Fromberg
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A.
Received 28 July 1981;
accepted 18 January 1982.
Available online 7 August 2003.
Abstract
Measurements of the longwave radiance of the sky were made during the summer of 1979 at Tucson, Arizona; Gaithersburg, Maryland; and St. Louis, Missouri. The global longwave radiation (wavelengths greater than 3 μm) was monitored with a pyrgeometer and the distribution of this radiation in several spectral bands at five different zenith angles was monitored with a spectral radiometer. This paper presents results for the global sky radiation during clear sky conditions. The spectral radiometer was used to calibrate the pyrgeometer and to detect the presence of clouds. The results can most appropriately be summarized in terms of the correlation between the global sky emissivity epsilon (Porson) sky and surface dewpoint temperature Tdp(°C). The global sky emissivity is defined as the ratio of sky radiance to σTa4, where Ta is the absolute air temperature near the ground, and σ is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. Based on 2945 night-time measurements in all three cities we find
epsilon (Porson) sky=0.741 +0.0062Tdp
with a standard error of estimate of 0.031. A similar relationship with almost identical coefficients holds during daylight hours.
This work was supported by the Assistant Secretary for Conservation and Renewable Energy, Office of Solar Heat Technologies, Passive and Hybrid Solar Energy Division of the U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract No. W-7405-ENG-48.

The current outside temp is 29.3 F
Pavement temperature in IR (E=95) on the north side of the building is 4.3 deg F.
North sky is off scale low (clear sky no haze or clouds)
The face of the building across the parking lot is 10.7 deg F
The grass surface is at -7.5 deg F.
And some wonder why we think site conditions are important for weather enclosures!
Larry
Larry

The IPCC report is a political document not a science paper, hence the political recognition by the Nobel panel. It is important that CO2 is the main climate problem because water vapour, convection and wind cannot be controlled and cannot be taxed. CO2 emissions, on the other hand, can be used to tax us back to the stone age and prevent us from doing all those things we like doing. I am beginning to think that climate science belongs to the same group as those other robust sciences like astrology, psychology and Scientology.

@wayne
> Somehow broadening got into the discussion …
Broadening is crucial because it allows the warmists to mitigate the negative finding of CO2 warming on Mars.
AFAIK, there is no compelling proof that “pressure broadening”, by itself, would explain why it would “enable” CO2 warming. For example, the NASA GISS folks (Lacis et al.) recently acknowledged in their “CO2 is the control knob” that CO2 warming is surprisingly absent in the CO2-rich Martian atmosphere (where it is 30x more abundant per unit area than Earth). All they could say was that this was due to the absence of “pressure broadening” on Mars, as if it were some kind of conjecture yet to be proved.
> since it is also quantized, broadening always present of course, ..
A small amount of quantization noise may be present, but it is probably not the main artifact here. I think there are two major components to this broadening effect:
1) Some of it, dependent on the quality of the instrument, is internally generated by the response function of the spectrometer. This produces a “point spread” (convolution of response function with signal) which makes lines look thicker than they really are. For example, stars are zero-width points, yet they seem to have a measurable “disk” to the the Airy response of the scope. Or why an unmodulated CW carrier signal seems to have a measurable band-width on most radio receivers, when actually its true bandwidth is virtually zero (disregarding any tiny bit of AC hum and other noise modulating the signal slightly)
2) The other part of it is external, related to the uncertainty of precisely determining the frequency of the spectral lines (which in reality are zero-width points, like stars). This is caused by Doppler shift and also truncated spectra caused by re-absorption (analogous to changing FFT length in Fourier analysis).
> Dr. Vonk …. are you there? He seems to know more on this
> particular subject than any other physicist I have come across.
Yes, I would love to hear his take on all of this, from a real subject-matter expert.
😐

@John Day
AFAIK, there is no compelling proof that “pressure broadening”, by itself, would explain why it would “enable” CO2 warming. For example, the NASA GISS folks (Lacis et al.) recently acknowledged in their “CO2 is the control knob” that CO2 warming is surprisingly absent in the CO2-rich Martian atmosphere (where it is 30x more abundant per unit area than Earth). All they could say was that this was due to the absence of “pressure broadening” on Mars, as if it were some kind of conjecture yet to be proved.
Yes, I agree. The warmists keep trying to prove that co2 warms by trapping thermal heat on one side of the argument but I personally have moved on past that to absolutely no effect at all when the climate system is studied from afar, from space. My major was chemistry up to the last year and you study endothermic reactions that truly trap heat thermally into the bonds. That energy is gone forever without a reverse reaction occurring and will never express itself as heat again. But in physics all of the laws and relationships mainly are symmetrical. The warmist side have so brainwashed most people that everyone is now discussing on one-sided processes without nary a mention of the opposite side of the relationship. Warms yes but it also equally cools.
There are effects from co2 locally and that was my point. co2 in a couple of band groups does absorb IR well but that also means co2 in these bands also, and equally, emit radiation the these bands. If the atmosphere were viewed as blood then co2 is like a blood thinner on the radiative side in those spectral bands. That is why International Falls is setting low records. E.M. is correct to bring up inversions and did a good job on the subject but there have always been inversions in winter, so why the new lows? Just natural variation?
We seem to have two effects both who have their signatures overlaid in the temperature records. One is UHI and the removal of higher altitude and rural station. This shows mainly the low temperatures to be elevated across the decades. But I feel this is masking the effect I mentioned (the radiative thinning so to speak) that would show the atmosphere temperatures having higher highs and lower lows. We can only see this lower lows signature in a small percentage of the stations because they keep removing all but those with high UHI signatures also. And the thermalization between co2 and the other gases, both ways mind you, is the only explanation I’ve been able to find.
But I keep looking. To me co2 has NO effect, OVERALL, on this globes temperature. Just locally redistribution and most of it vertically, again, both ways.
Wish I could write more fluidly but you should still see my point.

“Dave in Delaware says:
January 24, 2011 at 6:06 am
They find that – “Water vapor contributes approximately two thirds of the LDFclear regardless of season while CO2 contributes about one-third. The actual ratio of H2O/ CO2 LDFclear is in the range 2.1–2.3 throughout the year. This constancy is surprising because precipitable water vapor (PWV) decreases significantly from summer to winter, but atmospheric CO2 concentration remains constant as the atmospheric temperatures drop dramatically.”
As we know, radiation depends on the fourth power of the absolute temperature. And 300 K to the 4th power is about 3 times as much as 230 K to the 4th power. So while the “atmospheric CO2 concentration remains constant as the atmospheric temperatures drop dramatically”, is it possible that at very low temperatures, there are way fewer photons at the 15 micron wavelength to allow CO2 to act as effectively act as a greenhouse gas?