Carbon warming too minor to be worth worrying about
By David Evans (excerpts from a special to the Financial Post)
The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools out of our politicians.
Let’s set a few things straight.
The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.
Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.
Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.
The disagreement comes about what happens next.
The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.
This is the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three — so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.
That’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism.
Read the full article here
I mentioned to a friend that the scientists themselves say the big warming isn’t the CO2 but the warming from water feedbacks.
They were like, “WHAT? WHY isn’t that made clear? Why do they keep saying CO2??”
(I wondered also if I’d gotten the story wrong so good to see this article printed using simple terms for general readers.)
Now now let’s not accuse climate science of perpetuating the largest fraud in mankinds history. Its the second biggest fraud.
Smoking Frog says:
April 11, 2011 at 1:22 am
No, it’s not like that. The bug on the windshield is held there by air pressure. In a vacuum he would not be held (unless the vehicle was accelerating).
But it does carry energy and has some effect.
Stopping suddenly shows the energy has been carried.
Circular motion throws a whole new set of dynamics as well.
When you suddenly stop that circular motion, energy will fly off again.
Leif Svalgaard brought up the instability of Oxygen in our atmosphere. That reminded me of some newspaper articles I have read in the last year on giant flying insects during the Carboniferous period. Oxygen DID get up to 30% back then, and that’s why those giant insects could exist. As plants spread to land, there was more opportunity for fires, and ultimately Oxygen stabilized around the current 20 or 21%.
http://bill.srnr.arizona.edu/classes/182h/Climate%20More%20Refs/Paleo/HighO2.pdf
P.Solar
The story about nitrogen pollution was also on the Beeb radio news this morning. It was quite clear that the news reader (or the writer of the story) didn’t understand any of the science behind the story (indeed, the scientific illiteracy almost had me screaming). As you said, they simply used ‘nitrogen’ to mean all the various NO- and NH-based species that do cause some problems. However, the way it was presented suggested that 78% of the air is going to kill us all…
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 10, 2011 at 5:06 pm . “In nature, there are enough natural sparks [lightening] that more than 30% O2 becomes a problem”.
Stick to the day job,Leif. This is classic case of reverse causation for chemists. The reason for the atmospheric oxygen content being below 30% is that it reacts before its gets so high.
In part, it’s related to the reason that soils have not become 100% carbon from decaying and burned organic matter. The carbon is consumed by oxygen. This in turn puts a big ??? over remediation by increasing the C content of soils. In the long term it is not a sustainable answer. That’s why we measure that natural, unfarmed soils have a few percent carbon and the air has below 30% oxygen. (Not the only reasons, but illustrative).
Overall, for a chemist, it’s simply the jostling for equilibium by a number of competing chemical reactions. Which, taken to the extreme, is the Meaning of Life.
Excellent article.
The AGW movement is all about controlling behavior. The political/environmental class wants to force consumers to support those portions of the economy that they’ve considered are the best choices for us. Thus we have expensive mercury light bulbs, plug-in cars that underperform, and proposals for massive spending on high-speed rail, to name just a few. We, the ignorant masses, just do not have the capacity to decide what is best.
Orion,
I doubt you would find one poster in ten who would disagree with those points. Do you hang out here a lot? How could you not know that? What is your point?
Joe Lalonde says:
April 11, 2011 at 5:25 am
“…Circular motion throws a whole new set of dynamics as well.
When you suddenly stop that circular motion, energy will fly off again.”
Hmmm there might be some misconceptions about circular motion creeping in here….
Without a constant centripetal force anything travelling in a circular path would depart from that path at a tangent. Energy is required to provide a force to accelerate anything remaining in a circular path.
So with a flywheel spun up to high speed on frictionless bearings WHERE does the energy come from to keep it rotating, why dosn’t it slow down (except for friction/air resistance losses) ???
@-P. Solar says:
April 11, 2011 at 2:26 am
“Global warming due to CO2 is a political effect not a scientific one.”
You seem to be taking issue with DAvid Evans and the essay here.
He acknowledges that science has firmly established that the rise in CO2 will cause some warming. But in contradiction to the vast majority of scientists who study this subject he opines that the feedbacks are negligable and are as likely to reduce the known amount of warming from a CO2 doubling as amplify it.
You seem to be going one step further and are rejecting the generaly recognised effect of the CO2 alone on raising surface temperature.
Do you have any basis for this?
dorlomin says:
April 10, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Did you forget to include some science in your rant. Or you still smarting from being BESTed?
Reply
Are you the “Guardian” dorlomin?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/04/un-climate-change?commentpage=2#comment-10272724
http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user/dorlomin
Just wondering.
Geoff Sherrington says:
April 11, 2011 at 6:14 am
“In nature, there are enough natural sparks [lightening] that more than 30% O2 becomes a problem”.
Stick to the day job,Leif. This is classic case of reverse causation for chemists. The reason for the atmospheric oxygen content being below 30% is that it reacts before its gets so high.
I think it once was that high IIRC, but in any case my argument still holds should it become higher. Perhaps soil chemistry back then was not exactly the same as today [different soil]. Extrapolation is always dangerous.
An article on ‘The Missing Hotspot’ by David Evans in an Australian newspaper began my journey from concerned warmist to some one sceptical of climate science,( or rather the lack of it) …’The Missing Science.’ This beginning led me to the evidence based science of John Daley, Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watt and Freeman Dyson. And so to the climate team’s dramatic exposure when Climategate revealed …
‘The Missing Objectivity’. Thank you David.
A warmist acquaintance of mine is telling me that Evans does not have the bona fides, and is/was not a credible “climate scientist”. (In typical alarmist fashion, my friend went after the messenger, instead of the message.)
My Internet searches did not turn up much at all on him (there are a lot of David Evanses out there). Can anyone point me to more about him?
As CO2 stimulates plant growth this stimulation ought to also increase the amount of oxygen emitted by plants. As such more CO2 ought to increase the volume of the atmosphere (i.e. the tropopause ought to go higher.) I’m unconvinced that the CO2 ppm figures we see are accurate, at least until I get a really good description of how this number is derived. If it’s derived from a fixed constant, this is wrong since the constant isn’t actually fixed, is it?
What does the change in tropospheric height do to the models?
There may or may not be negative feedbacks. And there may or may not be positive feedbacks. They are conceptually separate matters. This thread is arguing the second matter, not the first.
I think the following passage from Dr. David Evans article needs further discussion, rather than being stated as fact…
“…Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much…”
Water vapour accounts for ~95% of average total ‘green house’ gases (GHGs), with CO2 accounting for only ~3.6% with other non-water vapour GHGs ~1.4% (the biggest amount in others is N2O at ~0.9%).
In the final analysis, GHGs produced by man through burning of fossil fuels e.t.c. comprises only ~0.28% of the total ‘green house’ effect and this tiny amount has an insignificant and immeasurable effect on global climate.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
The other significant factor is that the amount of water vapour can vary over very short time scales as it changes phase from vapour –> liquid –>solid (or vice versa). The paper Greenhouse Effect in Semi-Transparent Planetary Atmospheres by Ferenc M. Miskolczi shows that the current greenhouse effect equations are incomplete because they do not include the correct boundary conditions. The new theory presented in Miskolczi’s paper shows that the atmosphere maintains a ‘saturated’ greenhouse effect, controlled by water vapour content. Full paper here…
http://www.met.hu/idojaras/IDOJARAS_vol111_No1_01.pdf
An easier to digest simplification of basics, that even I can understand, here…
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/The_Saturated_Greenhouse_Effect.htm
The other contradiction in the above passage is the phrase, “…Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet…” This should be restated that total GHGs slow the rate of cooling, a subtle but important point which the author has clearly missed.
No surprise, perhaps, that observation has failed to confirm any sign of CAGW and the computer climate models used by the IPCC continue to drift further and further from reality despite the IPCC gatekeepers of the various GMT data sets best efforts to confirm a significant warming signal. Like the Dodo, their conjecture is dead!
HFC says:
April 11, 2011 at 2:10 am
“And now our hated EU masters want us to become vegetarians; but I understood the methane we will emit as a result is a dangerous pollutant.”
No; it’s a precious renewable source. Wait for the presentation of the new functional underwear for EU citizens.
Murray Grainger says:
April 10, 2011 at 2:52 pm
“Great article. Does anyone know of any skeptic that has considered the evidence and changed sides to pro-AGW and the alarmist camp?”
Murray, good question.
I too congratulate David on boiling his message down to a concise statement that can have a very positive effect on the AGW debate.
What I want to add is a bit of commentary on the often-read criticism of his education in the alarmist blogs, which includes a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, that he is merely an Electrical Engineer and what could he possibly know about climate science?
I had the pleasure of knowing David when he was finishing his PhD at Stanford. Saying that he is merely an EE is like saying that Einstein was merely a patent clerk. His specialty area was signal processing, specifically Fourier transforms, the incredibly arcane branch of mathematics that makes things like cell phones and wi-fi work by analyzing the multiple paths that the radio signals take, extracting information from the “noise” and matching them up to make a single strong signal. His dissertation was a thousand page treatise on an improved method for solving these equations. I hardly think that he would be daunted by anything that climate science data could throw at him. There is a very good reason why he was hired to work for the Australian government – because he is incredibly competent to analyze the data coming out of climate science. And as it turns out, incredibly ethical and independent as well.
TBear:
At April 10, 2011 at 9:49 pm you ask:
“Again the Bears asks, if it is all so simple and straightforward, where the hell are the rest (non-climate-change) of the world’s scientists/professional academies in this?
Why are they not shouting this rubbish (if that is truly what it is) down?
The Bear remains confused.”
OK, I assume that you are asking a genuine question and not making a ‘warmist’ disingenuous misleading assertion. So, I provide a proper answer.
The best analysis of the usurption of the scientific institutions’ organisational leaderships that I have read is by Richard Lindzen. His very readable and shocking account is
Lindzen RS, ‘Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?’ Physics and Society (2008)
That paper can be downloaded as a pdf from
http://arxiv.org/vc/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.3762v1.pdf
Anybody with any interest in the science and/or the politics of AGW needs to read it.
Richard
What exactly is that supposed to mean? Is this supposed to be a reference to Anthony giving BEST the benefit of the doubt? You’re saying this like it’s a bad thing? Yes it turns out BEST has gone the way of science-by-press-release at this point. It remains to be seen if they’ll offer any sort of apology for that misbehavior in the future by turning out great science, or go the way of science-attached-to-the-teat-of-government. That doesn’t mean Anthony, or anyone for that matter, was wrong in giving them the benefit of the doubt first. It would be nice if the warmist/alarmist side knew how to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, but I see your comment is proving me wrong on that front.
I’m also curious about the reference to “science” in any singular post. Have all Anthony’s posts been about the science except this one? That’s kind of a ridiculous position to take considering all the deliberate humor posts, and the personal-situation posts he’s made.
It is also quite humorous to me that all Anthony has to deal with at this point is the random troll-attack post that only tangentially relates to anything, and whose originator simply makes one post and then abandons the thread. It’s like the alarmists have conceded the game, and at this point are little more than a peanut gallery with almost no control over where the debate is headed.
That makes me happy. 🙂
REPLY: I appreciate the thought, but from experience I can say that trying to reason with “dorlomin” is generally an exercise in futility. – Anthony
Well I think the good Dr is on the right track. I have never been convinced, that somehow, CO2 is likt the kindling wood you use to start a fire to get the logs burning.
We know that H2O IS a GHG, and there is plenty of H2O in the atmosphere, even if the Temperature was below the Black Body equilibrium Temperature at earth’s orbit location; 255 K or whatever it is.
And we know that to the extent that H2O causes heating of the atmosphere; which in turn results in LWIR emitted to the surface; where on the ocean surface, prompt evaporation of more H2O can occur; that there already is a positive feedback effect due to H2O alone; even if CO2 were completely absent. Now that does not mean that we have a runaway thermal event; simply that there is some regenerative gain, but the loop gain doesn’t exceed unity, so it is stable. Yes CO2 can cause more atmospheric heating, and therefore more LWIR surface heating which in turn can result in more CO2 outgassed from the oceans. So CO2 induced warming also has a regenerative gain due to itself, and the CO2 amount is further enhanced by H2O caused warming of the atmosphere and surface.
So labelling CO2 as a GHG (lighter fluid) and H2O as simply an amplifier, is quite arbitrary and fits the BS definition.
What H2O can and DOES do, that CO2 CANNOT do, (in earth atmosphere), is form clouds; and the negative feedback cooling of clouds simply overpowers any positive feedback from either H2O or CO2; it is a clamping mechanism that depends pretty much on the Physical properties of the H2O molecule.
Whatever can or may cause cloud modulation; either the Svensmark Cosmic ray concept, or aerosols or whatever; those things will result in changes to the cloud cover; but one way or another the cloud cover will adapt to the combination of all those perturbations, and ultimately bring further warming to a stop. And don’t forget, that positive feedback or no, ANYe xtra H2O (or CO2) added to the atmosphere, MUST result in a reduction of the ground level solar (spectrum) energy insolation, so even without clouds, there already is a significant H2O vapor negative feedback effect. The CO2 one is considerably reduced, because CO2 is not absorbing in the far read, and NIR region, where H2O is quite prominent, so CO2 negative feedback due to incoming solar absorption, is at most dealing with a couple of percent of solar energy, whereas H2O is dealing with a part of the solar spectrum that contains abpout 45% of the soalr energy (700 nm to 4.0 microns) Of course the H2O absorption bands don’t address more than about half of that spectral range. I wish someone would do the actual integration of the real H2O spectral lines, that make up the H2O band spectra under real atmospheric conditions. Is there some reason why people doing research in “climate science” can’t bring themsleves to actually do the calculations of one of the most important fundamental phenomena of earth climate. Is it that much easier to get grant money to look for pollens in ancient muds, or bore a hole in a Siberian tree, and then describe the complete geological History of Asia ?
Now that is something that Gavin could use his Terracomputer to actually calculate; well maybe Peter Humbug should do it; that is his forte isn’t it ? Just take the standard atmosphere (STP) and nominal average global moisture content at sea level, and calculate how much solar spectrum energy gets absorbed by H2O.
Ted Wagner,
“A warmist acquaintance of mine is telling me that Evans does not have the bona fides, and is/was not a credible “climate scientist”.”
This is from the article. This guy has more bona fides than your friend, I think. Or you could take the argument the opposite way and ask “If he is so unqualified,what was he doing working from the Australian Government Office of Climate Change?” He was no denier then, and that office is alarmist to the core.
“David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modelling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. He is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees, including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. “
I guess there the only “credible” climate scientists are the ones from climategate, then.