Reposted from Dr. Roger Pielke Sr’s blog
New Paper “On the Misdiagnosis Of Surface Temperature Feedbacks From Variations In Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” By Spencer and Braswell 2011
There is a new paper published which raises further questions on the robustness of multi-decadal global climate predictions. It is
Spencer, R.W.; Braswell, W.D. On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance. Remote Sens. 2011, 3, 1603-1613.
The University of Alabama has issues a news release on it which reads [h/t to Phillip Gentry]
Climate models get energy balance wrong, make too hot forecasts of global warming
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (July 26, 2011) — Data from NASA’s Terra satellite shows that when the climate warms, Earth’s atmosphere is apparently more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change have been programmed to “believe.”
The result is climate forecasts that are warming substantially faster than the atmosphere, says Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
The previously unexplained differences between model-based forecasts of rapid global warming and meteorological data showing a slower rate of warming have been the source of often contentious debate and controversy for more than two decades.
In research published this week in the journal “Remote Sensing” http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf, Spencer and UA Huntsville’s Dr. Danny Braswell compared what a half dozen climate models say the atmosphere should do to satellite data showing what the atmosphere actually did during the 18 months before and after warming events between 2000 and 2011.
“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”
Not only does the atmosphere release more energy than previously thought, it starts releasing it earlier in a warming cycle. The models forecast that the climate should continue to absorb solar energy until a warming event peaks. Instead, the satellite data shows the climate system starting to shed energy more than three months before the typical warming event reaches its peak.
“At the peak, satellites show energy being lost while climate models show energy still being gained,” Spencer said.
This is the first time scientists have looked at radiative balances during the months before and after these transient temperature peaks.
Applied to long-term climate change, the research might indicate that the climate is less sensitive to warming due to increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere than climate modelers have theorized. A major underpinning of global warming theory is that the slight warming caused by enhanced greenhouse gases should change cloud cover in ways that cause additional warming, which would be a positive feedback cycle.
Instead, the natural ebb and flow of clouds, solar radiation, heat rising from the oceans and a myriad of other factors added to the different time lags in which they impact the atmosphere might make it impossible to isolate or accurately identify which piece of Earth’s changing climate is feedback from manmade greenhouse gases.
“There are simply too many variables to reliably gauge the right number for that,” Spencer said. “The main finding from this research is that there is no solution to the problem of measuring atmospheric feedback, due mostly to our inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in our observations.”
For this experiment, the UA Huntsville team used surface temperature data gathered by the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Great Britain. The radiant energy data was collected by the Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments aboard NASA’s Terra satellite.
The six climate models were chosen from those used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The UA Huntsville team used the three models programmed using the greatest sensitivity to radiative forcing and the three that programmed in the least sensitivity.
==============================================================
Dr. Spencer has a pdf available. He discussed the findings here.
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CO2 radiative (IR absorbing) properties -> climate warming effect = SIMPLETON science.
Stanb999 says: July 27, 2011 at 3:02 am
“Heat can NEVER be exchanged in such a way that a cold body warms a hot one.
The point that you seem to miss is that there are other flows of energy involved besides the exchange between atmosphere and surface.
* The atmosphere can never raise the temperature of the surface higher than ~ 270 K
* Outer space can never raise the temperature of the surface higher than ~ 3 K
* The sun can never raise the temperature of the surface higher than ~ 5800 K
The combination of the three will raise the surface temperature so somewhere between 3K and 5800 K. Exactly where the temperature falls within that range depends on how well “connected” the surface is to each of theses three systems. Clouds “disconnect” the surface from the sun (by reflecting away the light) and “connect” the surface to the atmosphere (via IR radiation), which provides the well known cooling by clouds.
GHGs “disconnect” the surface from outer space and “connect” the surface to the atmosphere. Since the surface is in better thermal contact with 270 K and is in worse thermal contact with 3 K, it will not lose as much energy and will get closer to the 5700 K temperature of the sun.
@JohnB: “Yes, it is a tiny proportion, but it is not zero. IPCC say it results in 3C warning per doubling of CO2. Spencer and others say about 1C. But none of them seriously say the effect does not exist.”
OK, I’m going to give you a model which will explain why doubling CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere will not increase the temperature of the earth by 3Celsius. Absolute zero is almost 300degrees C less than the Earths present temperature so what Team AGW is saying is that by doubling this trace gas you can increase Earth’s temperature by 1%.
OK, lets imagine that the earth is modelled by a CFL lamp putting out a lot of light but not much heat. Then imagine that this is completely surrounded by a lampshade made of shiny ball bearings. You can imagine that not much of the light is going to escape – almost all the light is reflected back to the bulb. This is what happens on planet Venus, there is so much of the CO2 that none of the IR at specific frequencies can escape. But that is not what Earth is like. On Earth CO2 is a trace gas. We can consider what this is like by imagining that the lampshade is not made of a solid shell of ball bearings, but the shell is in fact made up of shiny ball bearings spread throughout the space that was occupied by the lampshade – all at different distances from the lamp itself. Now no light has a direct path beyond the lampshade, but how effective is this new lampshade at blocking the light (i.e. reflecting the light back to the lamp). Not very effective at all. The vast majority of the light simply bounces off of different ball bearings at odd angles and ends up reflected back out into space. But this is still not a good model, because this implies the CO2 is 100% CO2, i.e that almost all the outgoing light will come into contact with one of those shiny CO2 balls. This isn’t the case. In reality the vast majority of the light emitted by the lamp should go straight through, so we need to thin out the balls in the lampshade a lot to account for CO2 only being 0.03% of the gas in the atmosphere. Oh, this still isn’t right, because the molecules in a gas are not densely packed one next to the other- in fact they are about 1000x further apart than their own diameter. But it still isn’t right. Because CO2 only absorbs about 1% of the IR radiation because it only absorbs at a specific frequency. The rest of the radiation goes straight through. So now we have to model the CO2 molecule as an optical glass bead with a spec of shiny red dust at the center. Even this model overstates the power of CO2 to reflect IR energy back to earth because CO2 does not “reflect” the IR at all – it absorbs it and then re-radiates it back as light at other frequencies (a bit like having a solar cell that absorbs IR and then uses it to power a white LED).
I think that anyone can understand that a CO2 lampshade like this wouldn’t prevent 1% of the light escaping the lampshade. But that is what Team AGW is telling us that CO2 is doing right now above planet earth.
richard verney says:July 27, 2011 at 6:14 am Well said.
richard verney says: July 27, 2011 at 6:14 am
“If DWLWIR had any ability to do work, someone would have designed a machine that could tap into that energy source. Or at any rate, there would be significant research programs into this, since whoever can tap this source of energy would become a billionaire (it would make Exxon, BP, Chevron etc largely redundant and would mean that the West would no longer be beholden to the Middle East for their energy needs) . However, as far as I am aware, no one is researching into this. This tells you that specialist physicists do not consider that there is any energy in the DWLWIR. There is nothing to be extracted.”
This is partly correct. Any energy has the ability to do work. However, to use thermal energy to do work requires a temperature difference if you want to run a heat engine. An electric power plant has coal to create a hot side and cooling towers to provide a cold side. “Hot” is relative — in ocean thermal energy conversion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion), the “hot” side is ambient temperature and the cold side is the deep oceans.
To extract the energy of the DWLWIR using a heat engine to generate electricity would require a heat sink well below the temperature of the atmosphere. Since there are no such heat sinks handy, this is not a practical course to pursue.
So, yes, there is nothing to be extracted as you say. But there IS energy there, and that energy CAN help slow the cooling of the earth.
stanb999 says:
July 27, 2011 at 5:32 am
“Thermodynamics is simple in the regard to Mass. If an object is of little mass it can’t “hold”, transfer, or dissipate a lot of heat.”
Depends on how you want to define your terms. It takes over 1000 BTUs to turn a pound of water at 212F into a pound of steam at 212F. It takes only 1 BTU to raise the temperature of a pound of water or a pound of steam by 1 degree F when no phase transition is involved. Few if any substances have such a high latent heat of vaporization as water. In that context water vapor can hold an inordinate amount of heat and indeed this property along with a few other unique properties of water is why CO2 won’t work as insulation over water because one of water’s other properties is that it is opaque to LWIR. LWIR is absorbed in the first few microns of water at the surface which only serves to excite a few more molecules than otherwise beyond the latent energy boundary between liquid and vapor. The excited molecule then leaves as vapor which, being lighter than air, rises by convection. And because the energy is latent it causes no increase in surface air temperature but rather remains hidden until the vapor condenses back into liquid again which is generally at the cloud deck when adiabatic cooling reaches the dew point. At the cloud deck the underlying GHGs now serve to insulate the ocean surface by making it more difficult for downwelling LWIR from the cloud to make it back to the surface and, having been carried aloft a few thousand feet, has an easier radiative path out to space.
The same DOES NOT hold true for a land surface which will happily absorb that downwelling LWIR which in turns slows the rate at which the heated solid can radiate the absorbed energy.
I believe the climate boffins are well aware of this and they thus made up a just-so story about how the increased water vapor rising from the ocean due to GHGs causes more clouds and the clouds are what causes the surface temperature increase. This is the so-called “water vapor amplification”.
Water vapor amplification has always been the nut of this controversy among those with enough understanding of basic physics and properties of materials involved to understand what’s going on. And even a casual observer knows that clouds serve to make nightly low temperatures higher and daytime high temperatures lower. It’s the position of the AGW climate boffins that the surface warming effect of clouds at night, which limit radiative transfer rate from surface to space, is greater than the daytime cooling effect of high albedo tops reflecting sunlight back out into space before it gets a chance to warm the ocean. Real world observations appear to indicate that there is no imbalance but rather clouds are a self-regulating phenomenon. More retained heat at night generates more clouds but less energy arriving at the surface during the day causes fewer clouds. So we end up with a relatively constant average cloud cover over the globe regardless of amount of non-condensing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The water cycle is the key to all this. Once you have a planet covered, or mostly covered by a liquid ocean, the water cycle takes over as the big driver of surface temperature and it has a self-limiting ceiling on maximum temperature through negative feedback engendered by huge difference in albedo between cloud tops and water surface. The ocean is, for all intents and purposes, black and absorbs all visible that reaches it. Cloud tops are, for all intents and purposes, mirrors which reflect all visible light that reaches them.
If ever the global ocean, for whatever reason, becomes largely covered by ice then the water cycle effectively shuts down and a runaway cooling results. This has happened more than once in the earth’s history. Non-condensing greenhouse gases are then believed to become very important. In a frozen scenario the carbon sinks that normally take up CO2 from volcanoes cease functioning and, over the course of millions of years, builds up until it’s enough to begin an ice melt which then rapidly accelerates as low albedo liquid ocean surface replaces high albedo ice cover. Personally I think volcanic soot darkening the frozen surface also plays a large role in ending a so-called snowball earth episode.
One thing that’s uncontested is that earth has been in an ice age for the past several million years where the ice reigns for 100,000 years and goes into retreat for 10,000 years. The only tipping point the planet is near is tipping back into the part of the cycle where ice has the upper hand. The current interglacial period is already over 10,000 years old and is overdue for an ending. That is what any sane informed person fears. Ice is very bad news for the biosphere while warmth and lots of CO2 is very good for it. Plants and everything higher up the food chain trive in warmth and high CO2 concentrations and do very poorly in freezing temperatures and low CO2 concentrations.
Tim Folkerts says: July 26, 2011 at 10:26 pm
“…Energy can and does move from cool systems to warm systems, but there is always more energy moving the other way….”
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Tim
I am unconvinced that we know for certain whether energy truly flows in both directions, or whether the energy flow from the cool system simply impedes the energy flow from the warm system such that the resultant energy flow from the warm system is less than it would otherwise have been. I am not saying that you are wrong, but I am not convinced that you are correct. If you can refer me to an actual reported experiment clarifying this, I would appreciate reviewing the experiment and its results.
Consider the position where there is a large dam constructed like a kitchen sink containing a huge volume of water with a depth of say 100 feet. It has a sluice exit at the bottom (just like the drain in the kitchen sink). The dam has a fill up point a few feet above the designated ‘full’ water level (a little like the overflow at the top of the kitchen sink), ie., say 103 feet above the bottom of the dam. At the foot of the valley some 1000 feet below the foot of the dam is a lake (this is therefore some 1100 feet from the water level in the dam). There is a pump house by the lake and the pump has just sufficient power to pump the water from the lake through a relatively small bore pipe up the hillside and out through the fill up point situated a few feet above the high water level in the dam (ie., it can pump water through a relatively small bore pipe some 1103 feet but not to any further height – that is the limit of its power). The sluice gate is connected through a large bore pipe which runs down to the lake and ordinarily feeds a generator situated adjacent to the lake at the valley floor.
Now suppose that the sluice gate is opened and a substantial volume of water gushes out and by the time it gets to the bottom of the valley, it has considerable kinetic energy (and is now ‘high energy’ water). Now lets suppose that the pump is rerouted and at the same time as water is gushing down the mountain (through the large bore pipe) into the lake, the pump seeks to pump water from the lake back up the same large bore pipe which is channelling the substantial ‘high energy’ water from the dam.
The question is: Does the pump succeed in pumping water from the lake against the flow back up the mountain and begin to fill the dam from the bottom sluice gate, or does the pump simply result in water being pumped from the lake impeding the downward flow of water from the dam but not resulting in lake water being pumped up the mountain and into the bottom of the dam?
Lets dye the lake water red and see what if any of this red dyed water is pumped into the dam.
Emissivity and absorptivity are equal in gases like CO2. So, if the CO2 can absorb radiation energy from the surface and warm the atmosphere (the warming effect) it also emits energy (the cooling effect) already in the atmosphere. If you increase CO2 BOTH effects increase. The net effect is probably very close to zero.
richard verney says: July 27, 2011 at 6:14 am
Downwelling LWIR, or upwelling too for that matter, is too low in temperature to heat anything hot enough for a practical heat engine. LWIR is in the range of 300 Kelvin, well below the boiling point of water, and you can’t radiatively heat anything hotter than the radiative source. Sunlight on the other hand is in the neighborhood of 5000 Kelvin so concentrators have a theoretical limit of heating something up to 5000 Kelvin with sunlight. Even then we have great difficulty in engineering cost-effective concentrators with sufficiently high heating capacity to drive a heat engine. Theoretical maximum efficiency (Carnot Efficiency) of any heat engine is 1 – Ta/Ti where Ta is the ambient temperature and Ti is the intake temperature both givin in Kelvin. So given you can’t heat anything higher than the source temperature by any means then you’re in a situation where Ti is limited to about 300K and Ta is also near the same temperature. 1 – 300/300 is zero efficiency. No work can be accomplished.
steven mosher says:
July 26, 2011 at 4:31 pm
“have that plane put out a bunch of c02 as a defense mechanism.. same thing, the plane can be shrouded in C02.”
That will not work. CO2 only blocks a few particular ranges of IR radiation. Simply tune the IR sensors on the missile to other bands where the IR can get thru. Modern missiles use this approach (if wikipedia is to be believed).
Richard M says:
July 27, 2011 at 8:16 am
“Emissivity and absorptivity are equal in gases like CO2. So, if the CO2 can absorb radiation energy from the surface and warm the atmosphere (the warming effect) it also emits energy (the cooling effect) already in the atmosphere. If you increase CO2 BOTH effects increase. The net effect is probably very close to zero.”
Disproven by experiment circa 1850 by John Tyndall. Get used to the fact that GHG effect is real. It’s the basis for every modern digital CO2 sensor in the world today. Not only fact but fact that is employed in countless millions of working CO2 sensors. You just appear like a physics illiterate by denying it.
Tim Folkerts says:
July 27, 2011 at 6:57 am
The point that you seem to miss is that there are other flows of energy involved besides the exchange between atmosphere and surface.
* The atmosphere can never raise the temperature of the surface higher than ~ 270 K
—————————————————————————————————————-
The atmosphere can never heat the surface at all. The fact that the atmosphere is colder precludes it. Postulating If the ground was at absolute zero is moot. It’s not. The rest of your post has no bearing on the conversation.
If your going with the insulation model of GW theory. Which isn’t what AGW promotes. AGW expects a cold object to “heat” a hot one.
How exactly do you square the fact that if the ground was heated it would radiate more. Being that the mass of co2 in the entire atmosphere isn’t enough to raise the temperature of the ground or ocean much. Think it takes a bunch of energy to heat the ocean… Heat the ground. It’s on average 3 times as dense. As the simple back of the envelope math I pointed out above. How will it be able to store more heat that it currently is? I know how well GHG other than water vapor works. It takes about 62 miles to retain the heat of the last 2 miles of water vapor rich air. Ever fly in a plane? What was the temperature outside? Was it rather cold? Wasn’t it as rich in co2 or other GHG’s as the rest of the atmosphere?
Insulation is a funny thing… The greater the temperature difference the less effective it is.
@Steven Mosher
“Andrew you waffled on all those questions. Hpw very CRU like of you.”
No, he didn’t. His answers are clear and concise. I see no waffling, and completely agree with them.
The physics used to interpret what the sensors on a satellite are saying are not the physics used in a GCM. They are completely unrelated. The satellite is electrical information based on the engineering of the sensors, what they are sensitive to, and what it actually means when x amount of electrical current is generated upon sensing what it’s sensitive to compared to some reference x amount. How does electronic engineering have anything to do with GCMs? Data is deciphered based on the physical constants of the equipment itself; which has been determined experimentally and calibrated before launch and calibrated afterwards. Maybe it’s this calibration that you are insinuating is related to GCMs in some single component way, as x to x range of electrical signal has to be matched to x to x range of whatever is being sensed to monitor temperature (Terra uses 14 different electromagnetic wavelengths http://terra.nasa.gov/About/index.php ).
But again, this has nothing to do with the hypotheses that a GCM is built around for simulating in silico the Earth system (and no, the data isn’t mysteriously adjusted for radiative physics theories as used in GCMs — the data is what it is, and is itself a test of these theories, not a product of as with a simulation. When I measure the physical interactions of two macromolecules using surface plasmons, I don’t adjust the data according to what I think the kinetic rates and association constants should be based on a computer model of the physics theories relating to the electrostatic surface maps of the molecules. Rather, the plasmon data is what’s real, and is what adjusts the computers, not vice versa! In biology, we are very well aware that no matter how well we’ve determined the theories and physics of things to simulate, computer models are -always- wrong by a biologically relevant magnitude — they only provide a place to start and guide initial experiments, at best. No computer can accurately simulate the folding of a protein, and that’s far simpler, far more straightforward physics than the Earth’s climate). Furthermore, is a satellite’s data modified for hypothetical effects of volcanoes? Carbon sequestration by forests? Ice-albedo? Oceanic currents? Land use changes? (all components of a GCM) No, this is what the Terra satellite is literally, physically measuring, and is actually testing our theories about. It is not being adjusted by theories, its data is what adjusts the theories. So what in the world are you talking about? And what does “AGW approved” even mean? Certainly that has nothing to do with science itself!
And, Steven, if you look at the paper, even the least sensitive GCMs were highly off the mark (far more similar to the high sensitivity GCMs than to the physical satellite data).
I’m sorry, but physical data trumps computer models, as any scientist or rational individual will tell you.
richard verney says:
July 27, 2011 at 8:02 am
Heat: A Mode of Motion, John Tyndal, 1879
Available free in its entirety:
http://books.google.com/books?id=3DUJAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Also see:
“Theory and Operation of NDIR CO2 Sensors”
http://v2010.raesystems.com/~raedocs/App_Tech_Notes/Tech_Notes/TN-169_NDIR_CO2_Theory.pdf
Richard M says:
July 27, 2011 at 8:16 am
Emissivity and absorptivity are equal in gases like CO2. So, if the CO2 can absorb radiation energy from the surface and warm the atmosphere (the warming effect) it also emits energy (the cooling effect) already in the atmosphere. If you increase CO2 BOTH effects increase. The net effect is probably very close to zero.
——————–
Wrong. GHGs do not warm the atmosphere, at least not significantly. They re-radiate IR, some of it downwards, which warms the surface. They act more like tiny mirrors than a blanket. But mirrors that are transparent to the radiation coming from the Sun.
And this is not “team AGW”, it is “team physics”. From the wikipedia link: “The greenhouse effect was discovered by Joseph Fourier in 1824, first reliably experimented on by John Tyndall in 1858, and first reported quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896.”
I’m pretty sure those guys weren’t members of team AGW 🙂
Tyndall’s 1850 laboratory experimental setup to investigate the longwave absorptive properties of gases occupied a space the size of a basketball court. A modern NDIR CO2 sensor is essentially Tyndall’s apparatus reduced to the size of a walnut with modern technolnogy and far greater precision and accuracy than Tyndall was able to achieve with 1850’s bleeding edge technology.
This is SO factual and so old it beggars belief that anyone with a pulse, a triple digit IQ, and some time to do some reading would argue with it.
From Stanb999 on July 26, 2011 at 6:02 pm:
In classical mechanics, when traveling much slower than the speed of light so relativistic mechanics is not invoked, the equation for kinetic energy is one-half times mass times velocity squared. Also the direction something is traveling is important as well. To avoid the hassle of vector math, we’ll go with both balls traveling in the same direction as you’ve said.
If both masses are the same, then when the 100 kph ball hits the 50 kph ball from behind, the total kinetic energy would be (m=mass):
1/2*m*[(100kph)^2] + 1/2*m*[(50kph)^2] = 1/2*m*(10000+2500 k^2/h^2)
= 1/2*m*(12500 k^2/h^2)
= 1/2*m*[(111.8kph)^2]
If all of the kinetic energy of the 100kph ball would transfer to the 50kph ball, the first would stop dead while the second speeds off at about 112kph. If both balls start traveling together, each having 1/2 of the total kinetic energy, their speed would be about 79kph. Closer to reality, depending on the properties of the material of the balls, the split will most likely be somewhere in-between, with the formerly-50kph ball moving away from the slower formerly-100kph ball.
John B says:
July 27, 2011 at 8:41 am
Wrong. GHGs do not warm the atmosphere, at least not significantly. They re-radiate IR, some of it downwards, which warms the surface.
———————————————————-
Logic bomb… Take an ice cube and boil a glass of water for me.
You really said that out loud and you weren’t joking?
@richard Verney
That is not a good analogy, mainly because photons do not “impede” each other. Better to ask “can water flowing from the lake at the top of a hill pump water up to a level higher than the lake surface?” Answer, yes! A large volume of water driving a pump can easily raise a smaller volume of water to a greater height than the large volume came from. In fact this principle is used in the “hydraulic ram”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_ram
“A hydraulic ram, or hydram, is a cyclic water pump powered by hydropower. It functions as a hydraulic transformer that takes in water at one “hydraulic head” (pressure) and flow-rate, and outputs water at a higher hydraulic-head and lower flow-rate. The device uses the water hammer effect to develop pressure that allows a portion of the input water that powers the pump to be lifted to a point higher than where the water originally started. … it requires no outside source of power other than the kinetic energy of water. “
More on heat engines. The highest efficiency attained in any practical heat engine is about 60%. If Ta is 300K then to overcome the 40% loss in the best heat engine ever made Ti must be greater than 1.6 x 300K or 480K or 404.6F. That temperature is where you just begin being able to extract some useful work after parasitic losses in the heat engine. Indeed the output temperature of steam in modern steam turbines at electrical generation plants is right around 500F which is still hot enough to avoid condensation in the final, very high speed turbine stage. Water droplets in that final stage wreak havoc slamming into the turbine blades at supersonic velocity and because temperature pressure distribution isn’t the same everywhere within the turbine enclosure the steam has to be kept much hotter than boiling point to avoid all condensation.
@Stanb999
Sorry mate, you really need to go learn some physics.
John B says:
July 27, 2011 at 8:41 am
Wrong. GHGs do not warm the atmosphere, at least not significantly. They re-radiate IR, some of it downwards, which warms the surface. They act more like tiny mirrors than a blanket. But mirrors that are transparent to the radiation coming from the Sun.
By atmosphere I was referring to the complete surface-atmosphere system. So, yes, they do warm the system. That is the so-called greenhouse effect. However, they also do not necessarily immediately re-radiate the energy. Often the energy is kinetically transferred to another molecule in the atmosphere. In addition, when the energy is radiated it does not necessarily go all the way to the surface.
However, you ignored the key point. GHGs also cool the atmosphere-surface system. GHGs are the primary source of energy leaving the system.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
July 27, 2011 at 8:51 am
If both balls start traveling together, each having 1/2 of the total kinetic energy, their speed would be about 79kph. .
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And this is exactly why perpetual motion works and we utilize it today to perform all types of work.
😉
The example I gave wasn’t about an object in motion. It was convient… It was about the “energy” of the object.
stanb999 says:
July 27, 2011 at 8:57 am
John B says:
July 27, 2011 at 8:41 am
Wrong. GHGs do not warm the atmosphere, at least not significantly. They re-radiate IR, some of it downwards, which warms the surface.
———————————————————-
Logic bomb… Take an ice cube and boil a glass of water for me.
You really said that out loud and you weren’t joking?
—————————————————————————————–
Reality bomb. Downwelling IR doesn’t warm the surface. It reduces the rate at which the surface*** can cool. For practical considerations the difference between ‘reduction of cooling rate’ and ‘warming the surface’ is pedantic.
***doesn’t apply to all surfaces. It doesn’t apply to liquid water, for instance, which in this case is a very important caveat and the main reason why this controversy lingers on. In the case of water LWIR only serves to increase evaporation rate. Increased evaporation in turn causes more clouds. More clouds at night traps more energy in the lower atmosphere than fewer clouds but conversely more clouds during the day reflects more sunlight away before it gets a chance to warm the ocean. The AGW boffins insist, without proof and contrary to all observations, that the warming effect of clouds at night is greater than the cooling effect of clouds during the day thus by a round-about mechanism they use this so-called water vapor amplification to turn a 1C surface temperature increase over land per CO2 doubling into a 3C rise over the oceans. Satellite measurements of air temperature over the ocean disprove the myth about water vapor amplification. There is no, or at least not signficant, GHG effect over the ocean. It only happens over land which has far different absorptive and emissive properties than seawater.
John B says:
July 27, 2011 at 9:06 am
@Stanb999
Sorry mate, you really need to go learn some physics.
—————————————–
The atmosphere actually contains less heat energy than the surface. Always. Heat moves from warm to cold.
Do you not accept this? IS this “magic”.