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
Here is David Evans’ personal website. One of his degrees is in economics, which is clear when you read his papers about the carbon trading scam.
http://sciencespeak.com/
I also found this one amusing, written before Climategate: http://sciencespeak.com/FutureOfAlarmism.pdf
@Leif Svalgaard says:
April 10, 2011 at 5:49 pm
Now that is frightening. These – “the best and brightest” – aren’t really very good or educated (they may in fact be bright, but they never exercised it). One wonders what would happen if they were also tested on, say, history and economics. My guess is you would get the CIA or perhaps, the Goddard Space Agency.
Houston, we have a problem!
Dave Springer:
“Classical mechanics, also called statistical mechanics,…”
Statistical mechanics is a branch of classical mechanics.
“Quantum mechanics never trumps classical mechanics. If a quantum explanation disagrees with the classical explanation the quantum explanation is wrong.”
Does the classical explanation of black body radiation trump the quantum explanation of black body radiation? No! The two explanations are not the same with
the quantum explanation being the correct one. The quantum explanation disagrees with the classical explanation of black body radiation but is the right explanation and the classical explanation is the false one, not the correct one.
Classical mechanics, which is a branch of classical physics, deals with concrete bodies and ensembles of concrete bodies that have definite measurable properties, such as, mass, velocity, position, energy, temperature, volume, pressure, and many others. Quantum mechanics, which is a branch of quantum physics, deals with abstract bodies and ensembles of abstract bodies which have no definite values of properties. If a definite body or ensemble is selected, there will be only a probability predicted by quantum mechanics as to what a concrete measurement of a property will give for that body or ensemble while an actual measurement gives the definite value that the body or ensemble has in objective reality. The belief that an abstract body has a superposition of all possible values for a property is only a metaphor for not having knowledge of the actual values of the properties of the concrete bodies from which the abstraction was formed. Much mischief is done by not distinguishing between the concrete and the abstract.
Its kinda depressing to see the same egregiously wrong information get wheeled out yet again when a little effort would have found the real data.
Tenuc says:
April 11, 2011 at 9:48 am
“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.”
The error perpetuated here is counting the volume or mass of gas present rather than its energy absorption effect. The other mistake is in apparently assuming that the composition of the atmosphere is the same at all altitudes.
But most people are aware that it gets colder as you go up. When the atmospheric temperature drops to freezing the water vapour content also drops to negligable amounts and in no way can be responsible for over 90% of the energy absorption of the ‘GHG’ effect at those higher altitudes.
But a full and excellent explanation of the role of CO2 and its relationship to H2O is easily accesable from the links on this sight at the top right. I would recommend the ‘scienceofdoom’ site which covers the topic very well in the “CO2 – An Insignificant Trace Gas?” series.
George E. Smith says:
April 11, 2011 at 2:03 pm
“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.”
Of course someone has, actually as part of military research into heat sensors during the cold war in the mid-50s. Try looking up Gilbert N Plass.
The author, David Evans, has made a good summary of the situation but not proven or demonstrated his last point:
“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.”
Ask yourself this: Why have so many atmospheric physicists for more than 50 years concluded that water vapor will amplify any warming, including from CO2?
The “standard answer” from commenters on this blog will be that climate science doesn’t know anything.
But why praise Lindzen, Spencer and Christy and not Held, Soden and Dessler?
The science needs to be understood. But it is complex. See Clouds and Water Vapor – Part Four and the preceeding parts.
Why conclude that specific humidity is constant rather than relative humidity? If anything, there is more reason to believe that relative humidity is conserved rather than specific humidity.
How many of the people applauding the author of this article have read the relevant papers of the last decade?
Who is Dr David Evans?
[snip. Please link to creedible blogs. ~dbs]
“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.”
A few things about this:
(i) Yes, the case that global warming is very serious does rely on the amplifying effect of water vapour/lapse rate feedback.
(ii) The IPCC models cover a wide range of strength of this feedback. The climate sensitivity for the IPCC models ranges from about 1.5-4.5 K/doubling of CO2 and I think most of that range is due to different strengths of water vapour and lapse rate feedback, with the rest from cloud feedback.
(iii) Consequently, it’s not true to call it a guess – the uncertainty about this is built into the modelling process.
(iv) Further, the strength of this feedback is an emergent property of the models, it’s not a tunable parameter. This doesn’t mean that the models are necessarily right, but it does mean that they haven’t been fixed to give the “right” answer. Basic physics has been put in, and this is the answer that’s come out. So, it’s not the “guess” of the modellers.
(v) The observational evidence is not strong enough to discount either of the strong water vapour feedback or no water vapour feedback hypotheses. That’s a data problem common to a lot of climate science. We could pay climate scientists a ton of money to collect the necessary data to settle this problem over the next 50 years, or we could simply play safe, do ourselves a lot of favours in terms of moving away from fossil fuels, and then be able to forget about the issue.
Alistair Ahs says:
“The observational evidence is not strong enough to discount either of the strong water vapour feedback or no water vapour feedback hypotheses.”
Well, that’s completely wrong. There is no ‘strong water vapor feedback’ because if there was, temperature would closely track CO2. It doesn’t.
Direct observational evidence shows conclusively that CO2 has a negligible effect on temperature. The reason is because sensitivity to CO2 is much lower than claimed by the IPCC. Observation trumps climate models, which have been repeatedly debunked.
“Dr. David Evans is a former Warmist who had gone cold. ”
Well, he’s not a professor, but an engineer and a consultant. His argument for years has been that the main (sole?) signature of CO2 warming is an atmospheric “hot spot”, as he claims again in this piece. Then he states that it doesn’t exist (as of 1995), and therefore feedbacks are negative. People were complaining about his statements on this back in 2007! I love this bit — “The official thermometers are often located in the warm exhaust of air conditioning outlets” so he should then be quite interested in BEST results. And he again invokes “The satellites say the hottest recent year was 1998, and that since 2001 the global temperature has levelled (sic) off.” arguments too. And the alarmist fear-mongering — “Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government ” And etc.
jakers:
Those who “complain” at Evans’ comments on the missing ‘hot spot’ should complain to the IPCC and not him.
See Chapter 9 of IPCC AR4 Section 9.2.2 titled “Spatial and Temporal Patterns of the
Response to Different Forcings and their Uncertainties”
You can read the Chapter at
https://www.ipcc-wg1.unibe.ch/publications/wg1-ar4/ar4-wg1-chapter9.pdf
Please note Figure 9.1 on Page 675.
Anybody who checks the link I provide can see (within seconds) that Evans’ comments on the ‘hot spot’ are merely reports of the IPCC’s statements together with correct statements that the ‘hot spot’ is missing according to independent measurements using
(a) radiosondes on weather balloons available since 1958
and
(b) microwave sounding units on satelites since 1979.
The remainder of your post at April 12, 2011 at 10:36 am consists of equally wrong and scurilous nonsense.
Apologise then go away.
Richard
I have a question for people who know more about science than I do.
If CO2 has a positive feedback and amplifies temperature, doesn’t that mean that the Earth’s atmosphere would thus unsustainable and could not support life on Earth?
In my mind, a major volcanic blast or meteor hit would unleash a massive amount of co2 and other pollutants in the atmosphere. The positive feedback would warm the planet, the oceans evaporate releasing even more co2 into the atmosphere and warm further to dangerous levels. It would seem then that the Earth should have never recovered from the meteor hit that killed the Jurassic Period and life on this planet now is impossible. Logically, the Earth would need negative feedback mechanisms to sustain itself as a single incident could create a chain reaction turning this planet into a barren rock once again. Life needs a sustainable environment to flourish. Just a question that came to mind while I was reading the article.
SS81;
Basically correct; it wouldn’t even need a trigger, just ordinary incoming radiation would do it.
But the Warmistas have put a qualifier on it, saying that the positive feedback is logarithmic, self-limiting. So there’s negative feedback on the amount of positive feedback. Maybe, unless there’s a “tipping point” at which stage it becomes accelerating positive, presumably because there’s some negative feedback on the negative feedback.
As you might intuit, it’s all bushwah, as a positive-feedback system runs once, and then self-destructs. Which the “climate” has yet to do, despite huge variations in virtually every possible “external driver”.
scienceofdoom says: Ask yourself this: Why have so many atmospheric physicists for more than 50 years concluded that water vapor will amplify any warming, including from CO2?
Except that, with all other things equal, it seems to be eminently logical, I don’t know, but the question interests me in that I’ve never heard of a warmist speaking to the press or the public and making that sort of statement with the words “any warming,” and I think this shows incompetence, because the amplification claim is far easier to understand and believe when it is made clear that it applies to any warming, not just warming from CO2. Here I am, a skeptic, criticizing the warmists for not making their best case.
@Smokey – “Well, that’s completely wrong. There is no ‘strong water vapor feedback’ because if there was, temperature would closely track CO2.”
No, your supposition is not right. There are many reasons why temperature does not closely track CO2. They are:
(i) Thermal inertia of the oceans. It takes a long time to warm up the oceans, and consequently a long time for the climate to respond to CO2 [and other forcings].
(ii) While CO2 does effect the climate, it’s not the only variable that does so. There are other GHG [eg methane which mysteriously stabilised during much of the 2000s], sulphate aerosols [ which cause a cooling], solar effects, ENSO variability, other sources of internal variability.
(iii) Further the global near-surface average temperature is not particularly well observed, so there’s a large amount of sampling uncertainty.
Consequently the lack of a one-to-one relationship between temperature and CO2, particularly on a year-to-year basis, tells us very little about how strong a GHG CO2 is, or how strong the water vapour feedback is.
Scientists have shown this by analysing the observed temperature trends, combined with information about CO2, solar changes, etc, to try to calculate the climate sensitivity. Look up papers by people like J Gregory, for example.
Perhaps here:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0442%282002%29015%3C3117%3AAOBEOT%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Gregory comes up with a 5th percentile lower bound of 1.6K, but doesn’t quote an upper bound, since the data isn’t strong enough to do so. The median, ie 50th percentile, climate sensitivity comes out as over 6K, which is way above the range given by the models.
The observations provide an even weaker constraint than the supposedly fiddled models.
How’s that for confounding your expectations, eh?
lrshultis says:
April 11, 2011 at 7:47 pm
“Does the classical explanation of black body radiation trump the quantum explanation of black body radiation?”
Unless the “black body” is so small that it doesn’t have a measurable temperature then yes statistical thermodynamics rules the day. Thanks for asking.
lrshultis says:
April 11, 2011 at 7:47 pm
“Quantum mechanics, which is a branch of quantum physics, deals with abstract bodies and ensembles of abstract bodies which have no definite values of properties.”
Nonsense. Offhand I can think of at least several concrete (not abstract) technologies which have no classical explanation but which are explained by QM: flash memory, tunneling electron microscopy, quantum computing, and low temperature super conductors. Then there are a number of experiments such as the double slit which don’t have a classical explanation for the results.
re: Richard S Courtney says:
April 12, 2011 at 2:24 pm
Hilariously weak. The so-called “hotspot” is indicative of any warming not just from CO2, and instead of being missing, it is there, if you check the literature. And so I stand by my entire post, and you can try to spin the original quotes from Evans any way you care if you want to make them seem even half reasonable.
Joe Lalonde says:
April 11, 2011 at 5:25 am
“But it does carry energy and has some effect.”
It does not change the “force” of gravity, it merely balances it out on a curved orbit path via centrifugal, azimuthal, and coriolis “forces”. These effects are well understood and included in calculations of orbital trajectories.
Alistiar Ahs says:
April 12, 2011 at 7:53 am
“Further, the strength of this feedback is an emergent property of the models, it’s not a tunable parameter. “
It is an “emergent property” of models (CGCMs) which are parameterized based on their agreement with models in which it is a directly tunable parameter (AGCMs). So, in the end, they all effectively depend on this tunable parameter.
“The observational evidence is not strong enough to discount either of the strong water vapour feedback or no water vapour feedback hypotheses.”
Incorrect. There is strong observational evidence that cloud feedback is dominant, and negative.
StrongStyle81 says:
April 12, 2011 at 5:36 pm
“If CO2 has a positive feedback and amplifies temperature, doesn’t that mean that the Earth’s atmosphere would thus unsustainable and could not support life on Earth?”
It would, if the positive feedback were dominant. But, the idea is that there is an inner positive feedback loop which is dominated by an outer negative feedback, in particular, the T^4 radiation which radiates heat from the Earth more rapidly as the temperature increases. It is very difficult to overcome stabilizing feedback which increases this rapidly. In such conditions, the inner positive feedback loop simply acts to amplify the output.
Brian H says:
April 12, 2011 at 6:26 pm
“As you might intuit, it’s all bushwah, as a positive-feedback system runs once, and then self-destructs.”
See above answer to StrongStyle81 .
Alistair Ahs says:
April 14, 2011 at 7:17 am
“Consequently the lack of a one-to-one relationship between temperature and CO2, particularly on a year-to-year basis, tells us very little about how strong a GHG CO2 is, or how strong the water vapour feedback is.”
Were that true, the whole signal would be too uncertain to draw any conclusions from it.