Guest Post by Ira Glickstein
Solar “light” radiation in = Earth “heat” radiation to Space out! That’s old news to those of us who understand all energy is fungible (may be converted to different forms of energy) and energy/mass is conserved (cannot be created nor destroyed).
My Visualizing series [Physical Analogy, Atmospheric Windows, Emission Spectra, and Molecules/Photons] has garnered almost 2000 comments, mostly positive. I’ve learned a lot from WUWT readers who know more than I do. However, some commenters seem to have been taken in by scientific-sounding objections to the basic science behind the Atmospheric “Greenhouse Effect”. Their objections seemed to add more heat than light to the discussion. This posting is designed to get back to basics and perhaps transform our heated arguments into more enlightened understanding :^)
As I’ve mentioned before, during my long career as a system engineer I’ve worked with many talented mathematical analysts who always provided precise results, mostly correct, but some precisely wrong, usually due to mistaken assumptions. I got into the habit of doing a “back of the envelope” calculation of my own as a “sanity check” on their results. If their results matched within reasonable limits, I accepted them. If not, I investigated further. In those days my analysis was really done using a slide rule and scrap paper, but I now use spreadsheets.
The graphic above is based on an excellent spreadsheet from http://serc.carleton.edu/files/introgeo/models/mathematical/examples/XLPlanck.xls. It uses Planck’s Law to calculate the black body radiation spectrum from the Sun, as observed at the top of the Earth’s Atmosphere. It also may be used to calculate the radiation spectrum from the Earth System (Atmosphere and Surface, see below for explanation) at any assumed temperature. (I will refer to this spreadsheet as “Carleton” in this posting.)
I modified the Carleton spreadsheet to compute the mean Solar radiation per square meter absorbed by the Earth System, which turns out to be 240 Watts/m^2. I then used the spreadsheet to determine the effective mean temperature of the Earth System that would emit an equal amount of energy to Space, and that turned out to be 255 Kelvins (-18ºC which is 1ºF).
Since the mean temperature at the surface of the Earth is 288 Kelvins (+15ºC which is 59ºF), that leaves 33 Kelvins (33ºC which is 58ºF) to be accounted for. Guess how we acount for it?
The yellow curve (above left) shows that Solar radiation is in a tall, narrow “shortwave” range, from about 0.1μm (microns, or millionths of a meter) to about 4μm, which we call ultra-violet, visual, and near-infrared. The vertical axis is Intensity of the radiation, measured in Watts/m^2/μm, and the horizontal axis is Wavelength, measured in μm. If you divide the area under the yellow curve into vertical strips, and add up the total area, you get 240 Watts/m^2.
Since we humans sense the visual portion of this radiation as “light”, that is the name we give it, and that has led to the false assumption that it contains no “heat” (or “thermal”) energy.
The violet curve (above right) shows that, assuming a mean temperature of 255 K, Earth System radiation to Space is in a squat, wide “longwave” range, from about 5μm to beyond 40μm, which we call mid- and far-infrared. If you divide the area under the violet curve into vertical strips, and add up the total area, you get the same 240 Watts/m^2 as is under the yellow curve.
DETAILED EXPLANATION
The graph on the left shows the actual observed Solar radiation spectrum (in red) as measured at the top of the Atmosphere. It is superimposed on a black body model (in blue) showing very good correlation. Thus, while the Sun is not exactly a black body, it is OK to assume it is for this type of “sanity check” exercise.
If you calculate the area under the curve you get about 1366 Watts/m^2. That means that a square meter of perfect black body material, held perpendicular to the Sun, would absorb 1366 Watts.
However, the Earth is not a perfect black body, neither is it a flat surface perpendicular to the Sun! So, to plot the yellow curve at the top of this posting, I had to adjust that value accordingly. There are two adjustments:
- The Earth may be approximated as a sphere, with the Sun shining on only half of it at any given time. The adjustment factor for this correction is 0.25.
- The albedo (reflectiveness) of the Earth system, primarily clouds and light-colored areas on the Surface such as ice, causes some of the Solar radiation to be reflected back out to Space without contributing any energy to the Earth System. The adjustment factor for this correction is 0.7.
After applying these adjustments, the net Solar energy absorbed by the Earth System is 240 Watts/m^2.
The graph on the right shows the black body model for an Earth System at a mean temperature of 255 K, a temperature that results in the same 240 Watts/m^2 being emitted out to Space.
Of course, the Earth System is not a perfect black body, as shown by the graph in the upper panel of the illustration below, which plots actual observations from 20 km looking down. (Adapted from Grant Petty, A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation, Figure 8.2, http://www.sundogpublishing.com/AtmosRad/Excerpts/index.html.)
The actual measured radiation is the dark squiggly curve. Note that it jigs and jags up and down between the topmost dashed curve, which is the black body spectrum for a temperature of 270 K and a lower dashed curve which is the black body spectrum for 230 K. This data was taken over the Arctic, most likely during the daytime. The Petty book also has a graph looking down from over the Tropical Pacific which ranges from 300 K down to 210 K. Observations will vary by tens of degrees from day to night, summer to winter, and Tropical to Polar.
However, it is clear that my result, based on matching 240 Watts/m^2, is within a reasonable range of the true mean temperature of the Earth System as viewed from Space.
NOTE ABOUT THE ABOVE ILLUSTRATION
WUWT readers will notice some apparent inconsistencies in the graphs above. The top and bottom panels, from Petty, peak at 15μm to 20μm, while the purple, blue, and black curves in the middle panel, and the Earth System curves from the Carleton spreadsheet I used (see above) peak in the 9μm to 11μm range. Also, the Petty black body curves peak at a “Radiance” around 100 mW/m^2/sr cm^-1 while the black body curves from Carleton peak at an “Intensity” of around 14 W/m^2/μm. Furthermore, if you look closely at the Petty curves, the labels on the black body curves are mirror image! What is going on?
Well, I know some of the reasons, but not all. (I hope commenters who are more fluent in this than I am will confirm my explanations and provide more information about the differences between “Radiance” and “Intensity”.) I have Googled and Wikied the Internet and am still somewhat confused. Here is what I know:
- The horizontal axis in Petty’s plots are what he calls “Wavenumber”, increasing from left to right, which is the number of waves that fit into a cm (centimeter, one hundredth of a meter).
- This is proportional to the frequency of the radiation, and the frequency is the inverse of the wavelength. Thus, his plots are the mirror image of plots based on wavelength increasing from left to right.
- The spreadsheet I used, and my previous experience with visual, and near-, mid-, and far-IR as used in military systems, always uses wavelength increasing from left to right.
- So, when I constructed the above illustration, I reversed Petty’s curves, which explains why the labels on the black body curves are mirror image.
- Fortunately, Petty also included a wavelength legend, which I faithfully reproduced, in non-mirror image, at the top of each plot.
But, that still does not explain why the Petty black body curves peak at a longer wavelength than the Carleton spreadsheet and other graphics on the Internet. I tried to reproduce Petty’s blackbody curves by multiplying the Carleton values by the wavelength (μm) and that did not move the peak to the right enough. So, I multiplied by the wavelength again (μm^2) and, voila, the peaks agreed! (I hope some WUWT reader will explain why the Petty graphs have this perverse effect. advTHANKSance!)
ANSWERING THE OBJECTIONS TO BASIC ATMOSPHERIC “GREENHOUSE EFFECT” SCIENCE
First of all, let me be clear where I am coming from. I’m a Lukewarmer-Skeptic who accepts that H2O, CO2 and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the Atmosphere do cause the mean temperature of the Earth Surface and Atmosphere to be higher than they would be if everything was the same (Solar radiation, Earth System Albedo, …) but the Atmosphere was pure nitrogen. The main scientific question for me, is how much does the increase in human-caused CO2 and human-caused albedo reduction increase the mean temperature above what it would be with natural cycles and processes? My answer is “not much”, because perhaps 0.1ºC to 0.2ºC of the supposed 0.8ºC increase since 1880 is due to human activities. The rest is due to natural cycles and processes over which we humans have no control. The main public policy question for me, is how much should we (society) do about it? Again, my answer is “not much”, because the effect is small and a limited increase in temperatures and CO2 may turn out to have a net benefit.
So, my motivation for this Visualizing series is not to add to the Alarmist “the sky is falling” panic, but rather to help my fellow Skeptics avoid the natural temptation to fall into an “equal and opposite” falsehood, which some of those on my side, who I call “Disbelievers”, do when they fail to acknowledge the basic facts of the role of H2O and CO2 and other gases in helping to keep temperatures in a livable range.
Objection #1: Visual and near-visual radiation is merely “light” which lacks the “quality” or “oomph” to impart warmth to objects upon which it happens to fall.
Answer #1: A NASA webpage targeted at children is sometimes cited because they say the near-IR beam from a TV remote control is not warm to the touch. Of course, that is not because it is near-visual radiation, but rather because it is very low power. All energy is fungible, and can be changed from one form to another. Thus, the 240 Watts/m^2 of visible and near-visible Solar energy that reaches and is absorbed by the Earth System, has the effect of warming the Earth System exactly as much as an equal number of Watts/m^2 of “thermal” mid- and far-IR radiation.
Objection #2: The Atmosphere, which is cooler than the Earth Surface, cannot warm the Earth Surface.
Answer #2: The Second law of Thermodynamics is often cited as the source of this falsehood. The correct interpretation is that the Second Law refers to net warming, which can only pass from the warmer to the cooler object. The back-radiation from the Atmosphere to the Earth Surface has been measured (see lower panel in the above illustration). All matter above absolute zero emits radiation and, once emitted, that radiation does not know if it is travelling from a warmer to a cooler surface or vice-versa. Once it arrives it will either be reflected or absorbed, according to its wavelength and the characteristics of the material it happens to impact.
Objection #3: The Atmospheric “Greenhouse Effect” is fictional. A glass greenhouse works mainly by preventing or reducing convection and the Atmosphere does not work that way at all.
Answer #3: I always try to put “scare quotes” around the word “greenhouse” unless referring to the glass variety because the term is misleading. Yes, a glass greenhouse works by restricting convection, and the fact that glass passes shortwave radiation and not longwave makes only a minor contribution. Thus, I agree it is unfortunate that the established term for the Atmospheric warming effect is a bit of a misnomer. However, we are stuck with it. But, enough of semantics. Notice that the Earth System mean temperature I had to use to provide 240 Watts/m^2 of radiation to Space to balance the input absorbed from by the Earth System from the Sun was 255 K. However, the actual mean temperature at the Surface is closer to 288 K. How to explain the extra 33 K (33ºC or 58ºF)? The only rational explanation is the back-radiation from the Atmosphere to the Surface.
Steve says:
May 17, 2011 at 7:42 am
That’s not quite right about steam. If you can see it, it isn’t steam it’s condensed water droplets. I’m not implying you said that I just wanted to clarify for others.
Where you wandered off the reservation seemed to be implying that water vapor molecules must carry the energy of 212F sensible heat plus heat of vaporization which is about a thousand times the sensible heat. Water is really weird. The physics of boiling and the physics of evaporation at two seperate and distinct phenomena. The latent heat of evaporation is much lower than latent heat of vaporization (boiling) as is the sensible heat. It’s still much higher than sensible heat in any case. Evaporation ONLY takes place at the surface while boiling takes place everywhere. I believe it boils down to (pun intented) statistics and at any one time there’s just a statistical chance a water molecule will rob enough energy from its neighbors to peel off from the surface as vapor. Even ice evaporates without melting going straight from solid to gas with no change in sensible temperature. I wasn’t aware that evaporation and boiling were separate things until maybe two years ago when I got interested in heat engines and started reading a lot more about the physics of water. Ambient temperature of the water just increases the odds of any one molecule peeling off the surface as vapor. Once the ambient temperature of the water reaches the boiling point determined by the pressure all hell breaks lose and they violently turn to vapor anywhere and everywhere even condensing back into liquid momentarily and then back to vapor. There are also some conditions where it can remain liquid far past the boiling point as the tipping point becomes critically close throughout the volume. Most of us have seen superheating too which is strange. This happens often when heating water in a microwave where we leave it in too long and as soon we remove the cup and set it down it explodes. The shock wave of the glass hitting the countertop triggers the superheated water into turning to vaporizing. It can also be supercooled under some conditions. It’s probably the most exotic substance in the universe. It’s also a unversal solvent, among other things as well a possibly unique property (pure water only) of the solid phase being less dense than the liquid phase. Fresh water lakes would freeze from the bottom if not for the latter property and would freeze solid rapidly because there’s no layer of surface ice insulating the unfrozen water from the below freezing air above.
I happened upon some of the more interesting properties of latent heat, pressure, and boiling temperature farting around in my workshop trying to get a steam engine work with the water at room temperature. I reduced the air pressure around the working fluid enough to lower the boiling point down to something not much above room temperatures. As it turns out this lowers the latent heat capacity so much you can’t get anywhere near the efficiency of choosing a higher boiling point which was an object lesson for me in why steam engines run at very high temperatures. If it was any other way you could use what’s called low quality heat, like that obtainable by a simple black vessel of water sitting out in full southern sun. You have to raise the temperature and pressure to many hundreds of degrees before the latent heat capacity gets big enough to see much efficiency.
In the same tinkering time frame though I did construct a very simple inexpensive room temperature distillation apparatus which could denature a bottle of wine without ever removing it from the original bottle or heating it up enough to cause chemical reactions that impart off flavors. A second initially empty bottle collected and condensed the vapors from the first bottle and that ended up with a 100+ proof (it would burn so it must be over 100 proof) grape brandy. I heated the first bottle with a hot air dryer. It didn’t have have to be hotter than room temperature you just had to replace the latent heat of vaporization being carried off by the alcohol fumes. The second bottle sat in an ice bath. A pretty good quality vacuum was obtained by an inexpensive plastic bernoulli jet driven by tap water pressure. Once the system had a good vacuum in it, which was under a minute you can shut off the water supply to the bernoulli jet after closing a valve so air coudn’t get back into the system. The total volume of liquid and pressure never changes because as the alcohol evaporates one side it is condensing on the other. It was pretty cool I’m but I’m an uber-geek/engineer who gets a kick out of odd elegant contraptions things like especially when I cobble them to together out of ordinary items like copper tubing, hair dryers, rubber corks, ice, cooking pots, tap water pressure, and so forth. The only item that wasn’t off the shelf at home depot was the bernoulli jet which was like $5 from a scientific supply store. In fact I initally did it without the bernoulli jet using a common home depot gizmo for $20 used to evacuate water from air conditioner freon lines. That was based on an air driven bernoulli jet but you need a lot of 90psi air to generate a half-assed vacuum and it’s not something cheap and quiet you can set up on a kitchen countertop when part of the apparatus is a big loud expensive two horsepower shop compressor. The water jet was awesome, cheap, safe, and easily driven anywhere near a 3/4″ garden hose tap.
RJ says:
May 17, 2011 at 7:45 am
This falls somewhere between a red herring and straw man fallacy.
I said you can point that thermometer up at clear black sky at night and it will still read much closer to ground temperature than the near absolute zero of the cosmic void. No thermal mass water droplets in clouds straw man in sight. What the instrument is recording is back radiation from water vapor, CO2, methane, and whatever trace greenhouse gases are polluting the nitrogen and oxygen.
Joel Shoresays:
‘Unfortunately, your understanding of the greenhouse effect hasn’t progressed beyond what was understood around 1950.’
Did you mean to say 1850
Dave Springer says:
This is not correct. For one thing, I have never seen the distinction made between latent heat of vaporization and latent heat of evaporation. They are the same thing, evaporation just being the term used to describe vaporization below the boiling point. Furthermore, the latent heat of vaporization increases with decreasing temperature for water. For example, the value is 22.6 x 10^5 J/kg at 100 C but~24 x 10^5 J/kg at 30 C. [Source: Knight, Jones, & Field, “College Physics: A Strategic Approach, 2nd ed., (2010), pp. 384-5]
Dave Springer says: “That’s not quite right about steam…Where you wandered off the reservation seemed to be implying that water vapor molecules must carry the energy of 212F sensible heat plus heat of vaporization which is about a thousand times the sensible heat. Water is really weird. The physics of boiling and the physics of evaporation at two seperate and distinct phenomena. The latent heat of evaporation is much lower than latent heat of vaporization (boiling) as is the sensible heat.”
So the latent heat content of a mole of water vapor that has evaporated is not exactly the same Joules/mole as water vapor that has boiled? So the latent heat per mole that evaporated water carries away from the oceans surface is much lower than the calculations state? What is it then, in Joules/mole?
Joel Shore says:
May 17, 2011 at 8:21 am
Ya know Joel, if we lived in the thermosphere, which is TOA, I’d be more concerned about it. Unfortunately we live in the much more cluttered world where the air is dense enough to do odd things like convect and conduct and propagate sound waves. It’s a bitch but there’s no getting around it. We don’t live on airless grey bodies made of rock nor in rarefied gases that routinely get heated beyond their ionization threshhold. It’s nice to know about for things like explaining the northern lights to your kids, but even the finicky old ionosphere we used to bounce our radio signals off of to get wireless communication past the horizon is quaint nowadays.
Tyndall demonstrated all the radiative characteristics of greenhouse gases that we need to know. There’s no need to go beyond classical physics. Going beyond that is mostly a tactic that overeducated intellectual thugs use to convince other people it’s just all too difficult to understand and rather perfectly equates to saying we need relativistic physics to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth. Spare me.
Dave Springer says:
This is not correct. For one thing, I have never seen the distinction made between latent heat of vaporization and latent heat of evaporation. They are the same thing, evaporation just being the term used to describe vaporization below the boiling point. Furthermore, the latent heat of vaporization increases with decreasing temperature for water. For example, the value is 22.6 x 10^5 J/kg at 100 C but~24 x 10^5 J/kg at 30 C; hence the latter is what is used in a simple example to calculate the rate at which humans can cool themselves by perspiration. [Source: Knight, Jones, & Field, “College Physics: A Strategic Approach, 2nd ed., (2010), pp. 384-5]
Robert Stevenson says:
It might seem that way given Dave’s reference to Tyndall but I was actually referring more to the chronology of understanding discussed here: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm#L_0623
The atmopheric greenhouse effect from radiative charateristics of water vapor were predicted circa 1850. They were, as it turns out, correct. Tyndall’s lab gear lacked the sensitivity to identify CO2 as a greenhouse gas becuase it’s so pathetically weak compared to water vapor but the principle remains the same. The design of modern electronic CO2 are like Tyndall’s whole LWIR/gas experimental setup which took up a small building reduced to fit into a thimball and do it with orders of magnitude better precision. The underlying theory however is unchanged.
Dave Springer says:
May 17, 2011 at 6:24 am
@Ira
The too many pickers problem is also part of why you can’t slow down the rate of cooling of a body of water with LWIR. The water molecules are so denesly packed in liquid water that the first micrometer absorbs it all. Brownian motion allows the molecules to mix downward another couple micrometers at most but the warmer water is lower density so it wants to fight its way back up to the surface. The end result is there’s virtually no heating beyond the first few micrometers and the molecules near the surface just keep picking up more and more energy as latent heat until they have enough energy to vaporize and then they leave the surface and quickly convect upwards because water vapor is lighter than air. At no point does the average temperature of the vapor exceed the average temperature of the water from which it sprang so the air near the surface never gets any warmer either. The latent heat only becomes sensible again when adiabatic cooling moves it below the dewpoint. This effectively carries off every scrap of downwelling energy up to very near the extinction altitude for 15um and well beyond the extinction altitude of water absorption bands.
Nice try but it’s wrong!
Consider a still ocean surface (~290K) at night with about 300W/m^2 of IR incident on it that gets absorbed in the first 10 microns. That would potentially heat up that surface microlayer at several degrees/sec! Obviously that doesn’t happen, what does happen is that the water surface radiates away at about 400W/m^2, in fact the top few microns will be cooler than the water a mm deeper because the transfer of heat from lower down (conduction, convection, diffusion etc.) is slower than the loss from the surface. Heat will be lost from the surface due to evaporation but it’s not the only mode that you suggest. Also the water vapor doesn’t convect up as you state, humid air will do so.
http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/oceans/additional/science-focus/modis/MODIS_and_AIRS_SST_comp_fig2.i.jpg
RJ says: ” What does the comment below mean. From http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/102-climate-follies-encore”
“Clouds do not absorb and re-radiate heat back to Earth.”
This is verbal jujutsu. It is twisting the use of the word heat with energy, and technically correct. Heat transfer does not occur in the “back to Earth” direction. But clouds, or any part of the atmosphere that has a temperature above absolute zero, absorb and emit energy from/to the Earth. The energy emitted in the “back to Earth” direction lowers the heat transfer that is occurring in the “away from Earth” direction.
“Warmists ‘support’ this false hypothesis with IR thermometer readings, but the IR readings of a hot Barbie is the same from any distance; ENERGY is not. Your $60 REMOTE thermometer is not measuring the radiant energy you are receiving, it is measuring the resonance of the Barbie.”
Here’s the manual for a typical IR laser thermometer: http://support.fluke.com/find-sales/download/asset/2437622_a_w.pdf
The statement is technically incorrect, as the instrument also measures distance and averages the total measured IR radiation over the area to come up with a temperature for that area. Pointing the device at a tiny heated object a mile away isn’t going to register the temperature of that heated object, but of the entire area. As you get further from the Barbie the temperature reading will go down.
Conceptually, though, I understand what they are trying to say. With an extremely accurate device we would indeed measure that the hot object has the same high temperature from either one foot or one mile away. Less energy would be radiated directly onto us as the object gets further away, despite the high temperature reading remaining the same.
But this is conceptual sleight of hand. The device is indeed measuring radiation, then combining this measurement with others to calculate a temperature for the object. The only fact that matters is that the device has measured an amount of incoming IR radiation. Whatever radiation you are emitting, which determines your rate of cooling, must now subtract the amount of incoming radiation to determine your lower rate of cooling.
I can’t resist responding to Joel’s red herring about understanding TOA and it’s just a matter of plugging in lapse rate to get surface temperature.
Joel, the lapse rate stalls and reverses for a bit in the stratosphere, which is MIDDLE atmosphere, and completely reverses at the mesopause which is the boundary of the upper atmosphere, and by the time you reach the middle of the upper atmosphere it has reversed so hard for so long it reaches thousands of degrees.
You need to stick to your specialty of crystal growth or whatever the hell it is. You are WAY out of your element in atmospheric physics, geology, biology, oceanography, and pretty much everything else near as I can tell. I haven’t time to more than
cherry pick all the uninformed handwaving you’ve done.
For instance when I had you cornered by ocean opacity to LWIR and asked you how shortwave heating in the mixed layer was supposed to escape you started waving your hands about convective turnover and mentioned diurnal turnover in the mixed layer. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Joel, FYI here buddy, diurnal turnover in the mixed layer, which is 100 meters deep, is restricted to 3 meters on a good day. If you’d actually done more than skimmed the paper I cited on Tropical Atlantic Mixed Layer Energy Budget you might perhaps have caught the text and the graph describing diurnal turnover. In fact the shortwave energy absorbed during the tropical summer at depth remains there until the winter when the humidity falls enough so that evaporative cooling sets up strong enough vertical convection to overcome the shallow diurnal reversals in the topmost one to three meters and dredge those deeper waters up to surface where some more rapid cooling can take place. And it doesn’t do it radiatively to any great degree it’s convection of latent heat that carries it up off the water surface well past the optical extinction layer in typical water vapor concentration and up to about the extinction altitude of CO2.
Moreover the tropical summer atlantic only receives 200-210w/m2 of shortwave energy. How in the hell is it supposed to receive more back radiation than it can possibly emit? You running some kind of perpetuum mobile scam here Joel? It emits 50w/m2. That’s NOT net of 390-340 or whatever ridiculous claim you parrot from Hansen’s mouth. The ocean doesn’t even absorb but half the amount of shortwave you claim it emits!
And nobody really yet understands the complexity of heat exchange between the mixed layer and thermocline nor between the end of thermocline and the vast bulk of the ocean (90% of its volume) below the 1000 meter extent of the thermocline.
You have to expend more effort here Joel than being the third or fourth name on a single critical comment to an actual published paper like Gerlich et al. Gerlich laughed at it your critical comment and it was a well deserved chuckle.
Try doing what Gerlich suggested and do a heat budget for an earth with an ocean and without an ocean. It should be easy enough for you to do. Snag one of your graduate students and tell him to strip the ocean out of a coupled ocean/atmosphere GCM and run that puppy to see what the earth looks like with all the greenhoue gasses intact but no ocean. See where your lapse rate from TOA gets you for a surface temperature in that situation. I dare you. You won’t do it of course because I suspect you know just as well I that merely changing 70% of the planet’s surface albedo from the less than 1% of the ocean to the 15% of dirt and rocks will reflect enough additional shortwave energy away from the planet that the bloody thing will be covered in snow faster than you can say Al Gore’s Momma Wears Combat Boots. The albedo of a snow covered world would be about 90% and the earth would soon be so cold that it would make the -26C degree average temperature of the moon look like sunny summer day in Miami.
I know you’re not stupid enough to think this isn’t the way how it plays out with no ocean. What I don’t know is whether you have the intellectual integrity to admit it or whether you’re going keep obfuscating until the glaciers return or hell freezes over, whichever comes last.
O H Dahlsveen
Yes, if the layer is thin enough then the amount emitted up and down will be about the same…but the ratio of the difference to the thickness approaches a constant nonzero value. As a result, there is a gradient. And, the top layer emits more both in the upward and downward directions than the bottom layer, as it must since it is colder.
The “hotspot” predicted in the tropical troposphere has absolutely nothing to do with what you are talking about. It has to do with the physics of the moist adiabatic lapse rate.
Please, O H Dahlsveen, at least preface your nonsense with some statement that this is how you imagine it works. Don’t pretend you know, because you rarely do. It is not embarrassing to admit your ignorance but it is embarrassing when you parade it around as knowledge.
Dave Springer says:
That is exactly the point: The whole reason you want to solve for the radiative imbalance at the top-of-the-atmosphere is that it is rather useless to solve for the surface where other energy flows are just as important.
You are confused: Saying we are solving for the radiative imbalance at the top-of-the-atmosphere doesn’t mean that we are only interested in the temperature there…What it means is that we can use that value, along with the fact that the lapse rate in the troposphere will be determined mainly by convection to figure out what will happen at the surface most easily.
You know, if you weren’t so arrogant then perhaps you would actually be able to learn from the scientists who have studied this stuff a lot more than you have. You tie yourself in goofy knots trying to figure everything out at the surface without having a clue as to what these “overeducated intellectual thugs” might have learned that would make your life easier (although, disappointing, it might also not allow you to lead yourself as easily to the conclusion that you clearly desire, which is that the greenhouse effect, while real, is basically negligible).
I really have no clue why you are so harsh on jae and others given that you are basically cut from almost exactly the same cloth as he is.
And while you’re running that oceanless GCM in your head to see what happens be sure to look up the term “continentality” which 18th century stone age dumbasses figured out empirically. The continents experience much greater diurnal and seasonal temperature swings. That’s because there’s no ocean mixed layer there to buffer the heat between day and night, winter and summer. The atmsphere’s heat capacity is negligible and sunlight doesn’t heat rock very deep either. Absent the ocean it’s all over except the crying. Snow takes over in a vicious positive feedback the first opportunity the rocks get to dump their shallow heat storage and fall below freezing. More snow raising albedo in lower and lower latitudes fostering even more snow cover as surface temperature drops below freezing and no ocean to stop it. Just a dusting does the trick.
For crying out loud Joel, 4 stupid degrees change in axial tilt on a 26,000 year cycle on the planet as it is now, which does nothing more than slightly increase or decrease the summer/winter temperature differential is enough to tip the balance in favor of snow and the glaciers rule for a hundred thousand years until the cyclic change in the eccentricity of the planet’s orbit, driven by harmonics with Jupiter’s mass of all things, gets in phase briefly with favorable axial tilt, is enough cause a 10,000 year respite from the glaciers. Absent a global ocean that respite will never happen again.
You have SO much to learn, Joel. Our climate is driven by SO many more things than TOA budget and lapse rate and the science needed connet all the dots together span many disciplines that even 50 years of devoted cross-discipline study that I have behind me is barely adequate to start putting all the ducks in a row. You should be embarrassed at even uttering such nonsense in public where a student of yours who pays your employer a handsome fee to sip from the chalice of your knowledge might discover how shallow that chalice really is. This is a classic case for anonymity because the internet never forgets.
So, in other words, you still believe nonsense that doesn’t even satisfy the conservation of energy. http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/06/03/lunar-madness-and-physics-basics/
@Phil
Your numbers are so far from reality it’s ridiculous.
The troical atlantic ocean receives an average of 200w/m2 (see Tropical Atlantic Mixed Layer Heat Budget) yet you’d have me believe it gets 400w/m2 at night. Must be some really bright moon on your planet. Full moon every night that shines down with almost half the intensity of the unobstructed high noon tropical summer sun. ?That’s some trick. What’s your moon made of – radioactive cheese?
Right.
Your comment has been duly noted.
Next!
@Phil
Hey thanks for digging up the diurnal turnover depth in that graph you linked. See how it only extends to a depth of 1 meter? Joel was trying to tell me the whole mixed layer turns over every day when I knew only the top 1% turns daily. The entire mixed layer turns seasonally.
I’m not at all sure what point you wanted to make with it. Did you accidently make the wrong link or just didn’t know what you were looking at or what?
Nonetheless I thank for linking to a graph of what I already pointed out to Joel. Very sporting of you.
@Phil
re; “Also the water vapor doesn’t convect up as you state, humid air will do so.”
Huh?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_vapor#Lifting_gas
Of course it won’t rise if it condenses close to the surface. But then it isn’t water vapor. We call that “fog” on my planet. Again, what’s your point? As long as it remains a vapor it rises until adiabatic lapse cools it below the dew point.
Until it condenses the vast majority of the heat if lifted out of the ocean remains hidden away in latent form.
Did I lose you anywhere there? What part don’t you understand? I like you and am willing to spoon feed this to you if you’d just stop making faces and spitting it out.
@Phil
Maybe I figured out the soruce of your confusion.
Steam is invisible. I pointed that out earlier in the thread for anyone who might not know that.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_steam_Invisible?
This is elementary school science, Phil. Literally. Steam (water vapor) is fourth grade material.
http://www.scprimesite.com/portal/page/portal/santee_cooper/communityeducation/teacher%20resources/videos/energy
How old did you say you were?
Steve Ok Thanks
But what does he mean by Barbie. What is it?
So what does the slayer think the reader is reading if it is not incoming radiation because I do not know what a Barbie is.
(Unfortunately this slayer paragraph seems poorly worded)
And even if the reader is reading incoming radiation does it also measure the type of radiation and whether when the radiation arrives it will in fact have a warming impact. Because radiation from a colder atmosphere will not warm a warmer earth.
“Warmists ‘support’ this false hypothesis with IR thermometer readings, but the IR readings of a hot Barbie is the same from any distance; ENERGY is not. Your $60 REMOTE thermometer is not measuring the radiant energy you are receiving, it is measuring the resonance of the Barbie”.
Mr. Springer says: “It’s also a unversal solvent, among other things as well a possibly unique property (pure water only) of the solid phase being less dense than the liquid phase.”
In regard to pure water, if I remember correctly my college chem professor said that absolutely pure water was poison to humans. I don’t remember the quanity you had to drink.
Anybody ever seen fog “burn off” at night?
Me neither. I’ve seen it blow away if a wind picks up but never burn away in still air.
That’s because even though it is absorbing every last joule of upwelling and downwelling LWIR at night it isn’t enough to heat it above the dew point. Only sunlight has the energy density to do that and it typically does it early in the morning in most times and places where fog forms, long before the sun has attained an elevation bringing it near full noonday intensity.
The notion that there is all this power, hundreds of watts/meter illuminating the surface night is utter bullshit. Pardon my French.
Dave, your statements at May 17, 2011 at 5:44 am and May 17, 2011 at 5:56 am hit it directly on the nose. That is exactly what I visualize but I seem not able to word it, BUT YOU CAN! Now I know where to holler for help. ☺
Joel Shore saysMay 17, 2011 at 7:58 am:
“———–No…Tim is absolutely right.” ——
Ok Joel, I must be getting old and forgetful, possibly senile even. So thank you for putting back on track, you’re right and I am wrong.
Well done Tim.
Dave Springer says on May 17, 2011 at 1:36 pm:
“Anybody ever seen fog “burn off” at night?”
Heh-heeh-heh-h
There’s another missing “Hotspot” Dave