Radiating the Ocean

So the physical properties of say, rock, and water are identical?

Great work again, Willis. Would you please take a moment and tell us how Warmista models treat the heat phenomena that you have described as a thermostatic system? With specific regard to infrared radiation, where does your account differ from the Warmista in the way it treats heat and where is there overlap? How do the Warmista models handle what you say about warming from sunlight, if they handle it at all?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_pond
if i had back issues of mother earth news i could show that this has been in the green literature almost as much as how to raise goats in your basement.

Bystander, no, but they both absorb longwave IR in the 5-15 micron wavelength range in about a millimeter or less. Strawman argument, no cookie.

In examining surface temperature of night-time compared with day time it can be seen to what portion of the temperature is due to direct IR or remitted IR after absorption.
Imaging if there is a single night with 36 hours rather than 12. The heat loss would be tripled and the temp drop would likely be in the 30 degrees range where I Iive… look at this daily plot:
http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~rjh/halifax/halifax-weather-ll.html
If night to day has such a huge effect on surface temp…..then why are we torturing ourselves about fractions of a degree? Seems to me the earth has quite a huge capacity to loose heat. We see the effect every night.
I doubt that the earth has chronic heat gain…. heat emission is a forth power of temperature.

gnomish says:
August 15, 2011 at 1:08 pm
Did you get the one where Barry Commoner explained how to heat a 12 story residential building using a V-8 engine in the basement?

David says:
August 15, 2011 at 1:08 pm
I think that the arguement is a question of degree and residence time, not a question of does it heat, but how much? “But the average solar input to the surface is only about 170 watts/square metre.” I am not certain average is what is moat important here. SWR at the tropics and even subtropics is far greater, and because it penetrates far deeper it likely has a much greater residence time. Thus any change in SWR flux may accumulate far more energy over time then a similar W/M2 change in SWR caused by a GHG. Yet I have seen none of this quantified.
============================
Yeah, I keep trying to get an answer to this question too (I think it’s part of the same question). What is the change in DLR over the tropical water vapor-containing atmosphere with 390 ppm of CO2, versus the tropical water vapor-containing atmosphere with 280 ppm of CO2, including Doppler Shift effects on the water vapor absorption, of course.

Anybody who swims or snorkels the sun warmed ‘top layer’ in a lake and has felt the distinct thermoclines at colder layers beneath, has already confirmed that the surface water absorbs long wave radiation. After a day or two of moderate to brisk winds, the top layer is cooled, confirming cooling from evaporation and turbulent mixing with even cooler water below the nearest thermocline.
Spouting baseless theories and touting irrational models will never refute the simple and direct confirmation that a few days of open water swimming or near surface water temperature measurements will provide.

Merrick says:
August 15, 2011 at 1:39 pm
“And, hate to bring up a long gone painful debate, but if DLR can heat one fluid (water) then it ABSOLUTELY CAN heat another fluid (air) and in EXACTLY the same way. ”
Air is mostly occuring in the gaseous phase.

Indeed, the idea that DLR cannot heat the ocean is one of the spurious arguments that should not be used. There are plenty of others. Far too many comments here claim that the Greenhouse Effect cannot be real “because it is not like a real greenhouse”. Or that it contradicts the first or second laws of thermodynamics. Stick to objecting to the infidelities of computer modelling – there is plenty of uncertainty there – the basic physics is much more secure than some people are willing to concede.

DLR is radiation that has already left the surface and been absorbed and re-radiated. It is the sun that does the heating. All the DLR does is slow down the heat loss from the surface.

And I believe that is one of the most misunderstood things about greenhouse warming. Greenhouse warming doesn’t have its maximum impact when the sun is shining, it is at night. When the dominant heat flow is, at night, from Earth to space, the DLR would reduce the rate of cooling and it would moderate low temperatures. Greenhouse warming shouldn’t increase daytime highs, it should increase nighttime lows. Daytime high temperatures will be moderated by things like evaporation and clouds but the nighttime temperatures are moderated only by the blanket that lies between the surface and space.
In the daytime, the same greenhouse gasses also absorb IR from the sun and radiate half of that back into space. Roughly half the energy of solar radiation is IR. Greenhouse gasses act to moderate the amount of IR reaching the surface during the day and moderate the amount leaving the atmosphere during the night.
It is quite possible that one might get with increasing greenhouse efficiency is lower high temperatures and higher low temperatures for a reduction in diurnal range and possibly no change at all in average in the tropics. The greatest impact should be seen at the poles in winter where any enhanced “insulation” should be most easily observed.

Hmmmm,
So far I have to think that Tallbloke gets the cookie! Sigh! It’s not a chocolate chip cookie is it?
One more thing… What idiot proposed that LR does not heat water?
Well, two more things… Somebody give Bystander a penny so he can buy himself a clue. 🙂

Is the top part of that 1 mm heated up to the same temperature as the bottom part or is there a temperature gradient over that 1 mm?

Yes, back in Sweden when I grew up, that first millimeter didn’t absorbed it all summer long, so it was always solide ice year round….. /sarc
In fact with little tidal change ( 1 foot on average), on a good summer (not too many), the first ten feet would be warm. You could see the thermal layer below if you snorkled.
Heat conduction, most likely?
Wave action, not so likely, it would mix out the thin thermal layer?
Heat radiating down that far? I don’t know, can infrared penetrate that far?
Lastly doesn’t heat radiate in all directions? So, that millimeter would radiate up and down right? So the millimeter below would get some heat that way too, and so on?

But surely the myth about DLR is that it is the tiny fraction of the atmosphere responsible – the less than 1% of the atmosphere that absorbs infrered is not responsible for more than a fraction of DLR. This is the deception that, like a magician diverting your attention – don’t look at that look at thislook at this -from reality to sell you on their theory
Surely the whole of the atmosphere warms and cools predominantly by conduction and convection ? And surely, like everything else in the Universe, the Nitrogen and Oxygen, being at more than absolute zero, constitute the vast bulk of the DLR – ~98% of it ? It must be impossible to seperately detect the tiny amount from GHGs ?
And surely the latent heat of evaporation of water, being some 2500 times the specific heat capacity of CO2, plays a far more important role in energy distribution on earth than DLR ?
Also surely DLR is a small component of the total radiation in the atmosphere with random emission in any direction but surely mostly upwelling following the rising thermal currents ?
So surely on earth radiation plays a minor role in energy distribution ? Else why do common objects such as a car’s “radiator” really rely on conduction and convection ? Why do they put the fan in the oven if radiation is so effective ?
And why can I sit very close to a radiative heater for long periods (not above it though) but when I touch it I’m immediately off to the emergency room ?
The answer must be that radiation, while it may be the only energy transport mechanism through space, is only a minor player on earth ? Sure it is the only escape but there are well known mechanisms for getting the energy up to the upper levels of the atmosphere and radiation is only a small part of that.

Willis,
I’m beginning to see that you are a heretic, and I love it. Yes, this falsehood that DLR can’t heat the oceans has been one of the most absurd things that skeptics have said, this, and the notion that human activity has not been the principal driving cause behind the growth of atmosphere CO2 over the past several centuries.
I realize you are not a “warmist” as I am, though some people insist on lumping all “warmist” thought into the C-AGW category. Regardless, you and I might see eye to eye on more things than might first seem apparent.

1DandyTroll says:
August 15, 2011 at 1:22 pm
So a IR lamp directed at a one square meter tub of water of say one meter in depth to radiate the surface at 170W wouldn’t warm that body of water if it was circulating?
If it only heats the first mm why then are several inches usually warm when going swimming? Or is that an odd question?
170W per square meter, a few billion years . . . it hasn’t done all that much though, except around the equator, has it, I mean the north atlantic, the arctic sea and the antarctic sea is cold as bloody hell year around, but where there’s lots and lots of sun the sea is pretty darn cozy all year around.

Its not an odd question its a rather unthinking question.
the LR in DLR is Longwave Radiation. This does not penetrate far at all into water a millimeter or less. However, you may notice you can see in sunlight. This is because sunlight is largely made up of visible and ultraviolet radiation and this spectrum will penetrate really deeply into the ocean provided that it is at the correct incidence (angle of insolation) and is why the light under water looks greeny blue. If the light is at any angle less than about 40 degrees then most of the light reflects from the surface (see Willis’ last post). This reflection of sunlight at low angles of insolation is another reason that the sunlight on the oceans near the poles does not warm the water much (as you pointed out).
So as you say where there is lots of sun the sea tends to stay warm – but even there – the sea surface water will be considerably cooler by dawn having both radiated and evaporated a lot of the previous day’s heat away.

Hey – I’m not the one with the cartoon and those examples that suggest the behavior is identical.

Now that I think of it, I have observed sunspots that are shaped much the same as our oceans, like a map cutout, blocking those oceans from being served up as much energy. That would explain why a rock on the beach at the equator is hotter than the ocean waves on that beach, when I touch them. I don’t know how to explain the rabbit and dragon shaped sunspots though…

I notice when I microwave my pasta that the outer layer may become overheated before the center gets warm, that’s why I sometimes use a lower power setting. Sometimes with soup too! Crazy huh?
How did we ever get to the moon?
I wonder how long until “you know who” shows up to comment here?!?

Willis,
I note with some interest that none of your four arguments match that of the Team. Their offering is that the backscattered LWIR absorbed in the top 1mm cool skin layer of the oceans reduces the thermal gradient across this 1mm, reducing radiative, conductive and evaporative heat losses. Sadly neither their argument or yours appear to have supporting empirical studies.
To much of the AGW doctrine is based on chalk on blackboards and computer models. One thing that many WUWT readers will be aware of is the paucity of empirical testing of the AGW hypothesis. Your suggestion of putting an infra red source over a pan of water was I believe the most sensible part of your post.
This infra red source would need to be emitting only around the 15 micron frequency. The water would need to be salt water at an initial average ocean temperature. An artificial breeze would also be required across the surface of the tank, using air of the appropriate temperature and humidity. A coastal testing location may be appropriate.
I have yet to read a study based on such a test. If you have a link to such a paper Willis, I would greatly appreciate it.

Bystander:
In terms of absorbance of radiant energy, the state property of interest is emissivity. Liquid water has an emissivity of about 0.9. Sandstone is closer to 0.7, Basalt 0.7, granite 0.95. So, some land will absorb more radiant energy, including DLR and some will absorb less. Some will indeed be exactly equivalent to water.

There are a lot of strange and wonderful thing happening in the first mm of water! GK

Thanks Willis
I have made the point several times before that people who deny the basic physics undermine the efforts of scientists who challenge the AGW theory. If the theory of DLR and its dependence on CO2 was really as flakey as some would suggest the sceptics would have won the argument 20 years ago. The issue is only about the magnitude of the effect not its existence. The trouble is that climate scientists can point to these silly pseudo scientific arguments as justification for ignoring all the sceptics arguments.

The warming of the surface layer of a lake/ocean isn’t evidence that LWR is absorbed. Solar radiation is clearly the primary source of this heating.
In calm tropical oceans, an hour of cloud versus an hour of sunlight has a noticeable effect on how warm the surface layer of water is.
Otherwise, the important question is,
Does the increase in Downwelling LWR (from increased GHGs) cause ocean warming and if so, by how much?
The answer is almost certainly yes it does, but by (much?) less than the climate models predict (and require for their claim of accurately modeling the climate to stand up).

http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=87
Per Doug Hoyt:

In the laboratory, you can point a 10.6 micron laser at a body of water. Its intensity will be millions of times greater than the intensity increase due to a doubling of carbon dioxide. A thermometer placed just a few centimeters deep in the water will not rise in temperature. It is clear that infrared radiation cannot do bulk heating of water with any efficiency.
At best an increased amount of infrared radiation will slow down any cooling that is occurring. It will not cause a bulk heating.

I could not have said it any better myself Willis.
But it won’t go away because the desire to believe is stronger than any rational argument. There are even university professors who should know better pushing this particular piece of nonsense.
And if commenters disagree go do the experiment as Willis says.

It should be very easy to test this per Doug Hoyt’s example.
Sorry, I’m not buying that 100 ppm increase in CO2 can have any measurable effect on ocean temperature.
Water has a shiny surface……

Firstly, who uses “DLR”? Do you mean downwelling thermal infrared? And what do you mean argument against warmistas that it can’t?? The warmistas claim it can’t!
What an odd distortion. The AGWScience argument is that it is “Solar” energy of Visible Light and the two shortwaves either side of UV and Near Infrared which heat land and oceans. They say that longwave infrared, thermal infrared, doesn’t play any part in heating the land and oceans. That’s the picture they give of the Earth as a ‘greenhouse’, that shortwave visible gets through the ‘glass’ of the atmosphere and heats the ground, land and oceans, and thermal long wave infrared doesn’t get through ‘the glass atmosphere’, but then radiates out from the ground and gets trapped by the ‘glass/atmosphere’.
This is ‘standard’ teaching on it, the AGWScience fiction meme gone viral in the general education system – ‘everyone’ takes it so much for granted because it has been so successfully brainwashed.
“When the outer atmosphere or the ozone layer does not trap short wave radiation from the sun, it penetrates the surface of the Earth. This energy is then re-radiated back as energy of a longer wavelength (infrared). This leads to a warming of the Earth’s surface and the lower atmosphere.” http://education.gsfc.nasa.gov/ess/Units/Unit2/U2L5A.html
Light waves, the short electromagnetic of Visible, and the two shortwaves either side are not capable of heating land or oceans. The AGWScience meme is junk science. It claims that blue visible light heats water!!
How???
It’s an argument I’ve been having for quite a while with folks here, those ‘educated’ into believing it, I’m so glad you brought it up.
Just to get this straight. The AGWScience fiction claim is that shortwave converts to heat land and oceans and longwave thermal is radiated out – downwelling SHORTWAVE, Light, upwelling LONGWAVE, heat. By “Solar” they mean these shortwaves and not longwave thermal infrared. See the Kiel/Trenberth 1997 for the AGWScience fiction Basic Energy Balance on which all the has been built. They’ve been denying that longwave thermal infrared heats the Earth!
It’s been the same claim for rather a long time, so long in fact, that even ‘skeptics’ think it is real physics. It’s gobbledegook. Here’s an example: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/07/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-light-and-heat
“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)”
Forget about the watts in/watts out and all the aguments about ‘backradiation’ – it’s the basic physics that is unadulterated d cr*p here…
This perverse physics which has given thermal ability to light, shortwave, and denied that longwave thermal infrared heats the Earth has been systematically taken out of references whenever it can be. AGWScience fiction plays around with properties and processes. The example I found earlier of a NASA page for children which taught the real physics that thermal infrared is the heat we feel from the Sun has been dropped – and this nonsense that thermal infrared doesn’t even reach the Earth’s surface has been put in its place – here’s the post:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/28/spencer-and-braswell-on-slashdot/#comment-711886
Thanks for trying with the secure connection Anthony, but you go away for the day and it’s back to the same old interference.. It was good while it lasted.

Here in Christchurch N.Z i take ground temperatures at one metre deep.
The ground temp ranges between 8.9c(record, recorded in the last 3 weeks) to a high of 16.8c in summer. What iv noticed when we get a warm sunny day (say 26c) and even if the next 2 days are only 18-20c( cloudy or sunny ) i get a 0.2c increase in the ground temp 3 days after the warm day.The same happens when we get a cold day too 3 days latter a drop in the ground temp of 0.2c.
If we have a prolonged cloudy period say 2weeks temps at one metre underground only change about 0.3c over that period(usually down).If the skys are clearer over the same period the temp can go up or down by up to 1c.
My conclusion is then that DLR even gos deeper into the ground than what most think.

Yet another general misconception is that all the water molecules in any arbitrarily thin layer are at the same temperature. That isn’t how it works. Some of those molecules are boiling hot and some are ice cold. The average of many of them is the temperature. Evaporation occurs because at any one time some water molecules get bumped, literally, over the edge of latent heat of vaporization. If they are surrounded by other water molecules they don’t get to stay vaporized because they are surrounded by cooler molecules which they bump into and give up the heat. However, if they are on the surface, they have a free path to leave as a molecule of water vapor.
Downwelling IR, because it can’t penetrate more than a few microns, is continually bumping surface molecules over the edge of latent heat of fusion and they fly away. For those molecules that don’t get enough of a bump they don’t mix downwards because wave and winds causing mixing well below the surface not actually on the surface and second because warmer water rises above cooler water. At the end of the day downwelling IR does not cause any significant heating (or, for pedants, lowered rate of cooling). All it does is raise the evaporation rate and the energy is carried aloft as latent heat of vaporization and doesn’t get released to the environment as sensible heat until it condenses. The release generally happens at the cloud deck when adiabatic cooling reduces the water vapor temperature below the dewpoint. Downwelling IR warms the cloud deck and has no direct effect on surface temperature. All it does is lowers the temperature gradient of the atmosphere between surface and clouds and raises the temperature gradient between clouds and outer space.

In peril of sounding like a Warmista, which I’m not, what else could possibly heat the oceans but long wave IR? Reminds me of if not CO2 then what else could it be…. Nothing that I can think of. Well, maybe not the oceans but the near shore waters have another possible explanation.
Back in the 80’s I had a boat and often went to Egmont Key, an island on the mouth of Tampa Bay – beautiful pristine clear waters. One time, and against my better judgement, we went out on Labor Day. Along a 1-mile beachfront I found only one spot where I could back up an 8-foot beam boat onto the beach. While there I did some back of the napkin calculations on the amount of beer consumed by the hundreds of people there, and the resulting urine going into the water at 98-degrees or so. Story short, the waters close to the beach were a lot warmer :). And I stayed out of it!
Best,
J.

What is the primary source of DLR over the tropical oceans?
Any chance It would happen to be water vapor?

Addition to the 1:st of my posts just above: The net heat flux (in thermal steady state) in and out from any surface is of cause zero:
I was referring to the net of the IR-radiation. The non-short-wave-radiations from the sun, hitting the earth’s surface of course equals the net heat loss from the very same surface. Due to the three different cooling mechanisms: IR exchange with adjacent bodies, qater evaporation and thermal convections (conduction too, but negligable here)

“If the DLR isn’t heating the water, where is it going? It can’t be heating the air, because the atmosphere has far too little thermal mass.”
This beats me. The big ocean with its enourmous heat capacity warms the small atmosphere with its little heat capacity and then the big ocean is heated by the small atmosphere with its little heat capacity, again and again. Like if I should be pounding with my own straight lefts on Mike Tyson.
I kinda sniff that something is seriously wrong here…
Or maybe, if you take the radiation approach, you always have to consider radiation in two directions, like Kiehl and Trenberth. Isn’t this correct? Then the net radiation is outgoing (sum of two vectors) and the DLR is negative so it doesn’t heat the ocean.
Simple as that. From a layman’s perspective, that is.

Smokey says:
August 15, 2011 at 5:36 pm
=============================================
Me too Smokey…..I know I’m missing something
We don’t plant tomatoes until we can dig down a good foot and a half and the soil has warmed up…

How do they calculate the work of the earth’s climate system or is radiation the only game in town ?

First, should it not be an extremely simple task (for a scientist) to measure how much DLR there is? That way it can be determined how much it heats. Say for instance, you cover the ground in a substance that can measure the DLR to some precision out in the open air. Then you move a DLR reflective surface on top and ULR absorbing surface on the bottom over top of the measuring substance, and measure it again without most of the atmosphere shooting the DLR downward.
I hear all the thermodynamics arguments of whether radiative energy can warm an item, but is that really the question we are looking for? I just have not seen any evidence that much radiation ever returns to the surface, if it really increases based on the amount of greenhouse gas present, even with the experiment being done in a laboratory where you can limit the number of contributing factors to come out with a realistic starting point.

Phytoplankton are packed with chlorophyll and other chromophores. The IR spectrum of different chlorophylls is well known,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC540707/pdf/plntphys00384-0069.pdf
Plants are only green because we can’t see very far into the red.
The classical way to cool a white light source, for doing photolysis, is to place a round bottomed flask full of water in the beam. This stops sample heating.

Merrick says:
August 15, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Small issue of heat capacity notwithstanding.

“”””” Dave Springer says:
August 15, 2011 at 4:46 pm
Yet another general misconception is that all the water molecules in any arbitrarily thin layer are at the same temperature. That isn’t how it works. Some of those molecules are boiling hot and some are ice cold. The average of many of them is the temperature. “””””
Do you want to take a Mulligan on that one Dave ?
At any given Temperature, the average kinetic energy per molecule has some specific value, but the individual molecules have energies which plot as some Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, which puts the most probable velocity at some value, and tends to cluster the velocities at the low energy side of the peak, giving a long tail on the high energy side; but theoretically having no upper bound on the maximum energy.
For any sample that is at some fixed Temperature, this distribution of velocities (energies) is constant. But any individual molecule can at any time adopt any possible value of energy, as a result of collisions with its neighbors. The thermodynamic Temperature is defined in terms of that distribution and the mean energy per molecule.
I have argued that since the M-B distribution is always fully populated, and any molecule can at any time be anywhere in that distribution, that for any individual molecule, the time averaged distribution of energies , must be the same M-B distribution of the whole population, so one can argue that any individual molecule, has a Temperature that is the same time averaged distribution of kinetic energies as the population as a whole has.
It is not true that near by molecules can have greatly different Temperatures, simply because they have greatly different instantaneous energies.
For example, there is absolutely no tendency for an individual molecule that currently has a high KE (velocity) to seek out and target a neighboring molecule, that has a much lower energy and velocity. The directions of two such molecules are entirely random; and whereas heat would tend to flow in the direction of the highest Temperature gradient; that is only true over time, and nothing would stop the slowest molecule in the bunch from colliding with the fastest; but that is just a random event; not a directed result.

When considering the point raised by Willis, it is important to bear in mind that due to the wavelength of solar light, solar light can penetrate well to a 10 a depth of metre or even more ( indeed, it can penetrate to a limiyed extent as far as about 100m). If you can see the bottom of the sea bed, you can see how far solar light can penetrate.
However, the DWLWIR being re-radiated by the GHGs is of a wavelength that can penetrate no more than a few microns into water. Crispin in Waterloo (August 15, 2011 at 2:07 pm) gives a good explanation of the physical processes that are going on and details why the DWLWIR does not make its way to any significant extent into the ocean.
Accordingly, when one goes diving or snorkelling one can feel warm layers of water (sometimes due to currents) and one can feel the warmth of the sunlight. It is solar energy that is absorbed and which heats the water.
The so called greenhouse effect works differently over land than over water. There is a significant diurnal temperature range over land, but very little diurnal range over the deep oceans. It may be that over land, DWLWIR helps the keeping of night tme temperatures up, by reducing the rate of heat loss from the land. However, over the oceans, night time temperatures do not drop off because in the limit (by which I mean for the period of darkness), the ocean itself is an all but limitless heat source having the ability to constantly replenished the air temperature above it. Further, over oceans there is high humidity such that the effects of CO2 if any are substantially dwarfed.by the effects of water vapour and the water vapour being evaporated from the ocean beneath it acts so as to impede DWLWIR coming from the atmosphere high above.

@Willis
Point by point flaws:
“Argument 1. People claim that because the DLR is absorbed in the first mm of water, it can’t heat the mass of the ocean. But the same is true of the land.”
No, it isn’t. Land doesn’t evaporate. Neither does land allow sunlight to warm it uniformly down to any significant depth. That’s why the surface of a lake doesn’t get as hot during the day as a blacktop parking lot and why the lake won’t get as cold at night as parking lot. The solar heating of the parking lot is concentrated on the surface. It gets far hotter during the day and gives up the heat far quicker at night.
“Argument 2. If the DLR isn’t heating the water, where is it going? It can’t be heating the air, because the atmosphere has far too little thermal mass. If DLR were heating the air we’d all be on fire.”
The energy is going into latent heat of vaporization. That is the very large amount of energy that water absorbs going from liquid phase to vapor phase with no change in temperature. No change in temperature is why it’s called “latent” heat. The energy needed to turn a pound of water into a pound of water vapor at the same temperature is about 1000 times as much as it takes to raise the temperature of a pound of water by 1F. Water vapor of course rises until adiabatic cooling lowers its temperature below the dewpoint but I’m presuming you already knew how clouds form even if you didn’t know how much energy is transported in the form of latent heat from surface to cloud.
“Argument 3. The claim is often made that warming the top millimetre can’t affect the heat of the bulk ocean. But in addition to the wind-driven turbulence of the topmost layer mixing the DLR energy downwards into lower layers, heating the surface affects the entire upper bulk temperature of the ocean every night when the ocean is overturning.”
Wrong and wrong. Wind driven turbulence doesn’t mix down the top 10 micrometers. That’s a film thinner than the wall of a bubble where viscous forces overwhelm other forces. There’s very little diurnal turning in deep bodies of water and again viscosity is the overwhelming force in the top few micrometers preventing it from mixing deeper. Major turning of deep bodies of water is seasonal not diurnal. If you had much experience with deep freshwater lakes year round (I live on the shore of one) you’d know that from experience – you can smell it when it overturns in the springtime. The ocean is no different in that respect which also explains why so much summer heating is retained and released in the winter causing far less seasonal temperature variation than that of land surfaces at the same latitude.
“Argument 4. Without the heating from the DLR, there’s not enough heating to explain the current liquid state of the ocean. ”
Wrong again. Liquid water has the same properties as water vapor when it comes to being transparent to visible light and opaque to infrared. The same properties that make water vapor a greenhouse gas make liquid water a greenhouse fluid. The difference is that liquid water is like water vapor on steroids since there’s more water in the first meter of the ocean than there is water vapor in the column of air above it and sunlight penetrates far beyond the first meter.
You have really failed to think through any of these arguments. You experience sailing and surfing and diving isn’t serving you well at all in understanding the physics of water.

Smokey says:
August 15, 2011 at 7:37 pm
“Dave Springer,
Since the ocean doesn’t glow in the infrared,”
The ocean certainly does glow in the infrared. All matter with a temperature above absolute zero glows in some portion of the spectrum. Discounting glow from rarified ionized gases the glow is pretty much a continuous blackbody spectrum with a center frequency set by its temperature. The difference between land and ocean is that it glows a lot less than land does because most of the energy leaving travels as latent heat of vaporization. The dearth of infrared energy leaving the ocean is made up for by an increase of infrared energy coming out of the cloud deck where that latent heat is being transported to and released.

astonerii says:
August 15, 2011 at 6:13 pm
“First, should it not be an extremely simple task (for a scientist) to measure how much DLR there is?”
Absolutely. It’s called pyregeometer. Wanna buy one?
http://www.meteorologyshop.eu/Pyrgeometer/ENG_276_EUR_264_1173__.html
A bargain at a mere 5000 euros but if you want to pinch some pence you can wait for the after-Christmas sale in January when they deeply discount the last year’s models to make shelf space for the newer models. /sarc

Dave Springer says:
August 15, 2011 at 7:49 pm
The difference between land and ocean is that it glows a lot less than land does because most of the energy leaving travels as latent heat of vaporization.
The ocean starts from a much lower temperature than the land, in sunlight. One can cook eggs on a rock at noon, when the sea is barely 25C in my region of Greece.
The whole package of energy balance as treated by climatology is a mess, in my opinion. They take two meter temperatures when the ground can be up to 60 and 70C and the two meter 36C, the sea 25C. It is not the air that looses energy to space according to T^4. And all this down welling and up welling confusion is like magicians tricks. There is perfectly adequate thermodynamics to describe all thermal situations accurately. The reason they do this sleight of hand is, in my opinion, that if they take the beaten thermodynamic track, the small increase in the heat capacity of the atmosphere due to the anthropogenic CO2 cannot be beaten up into a bogey through bogus feedback arguments that lead to the energy oven .

David Springer,
Finally, a victory for solid scientific argument!
On average, the Earth’s surface (both ocean and land) receives 492 W m^-2, 168 W m^-2 from direct sunlight (mostly visible) and 324 W m^-2 from back radiation (mostly infra-red) from the atmosphere. The problem with Will’s argument is that assumes that soil/rock and vegetation act in a similar manner to sea-water.
Both the land and sea are efficient at absorbing visible light, all be it by different mechanisms, however the land is heated far more efficiently by infra-red light than the ocean surface.
On average the Earth surface (both ocean and land) looses 492 W m^-2, 24 W m^-2 by upward convective transport, 78 W m^-2 by evapo-transportation, and 390 W m^-2 by surface radiation.
Most of the 102 W m^-2 that is lost by upward convective transport and evapo-transportation is lost over the oceans and not the land (even if you allow for their differences in area). Will mistakenly compares this 102 W m^-2 with the 324 W m^-2 atmospheric back radiation, when he
should be comparing it to the net infra-red radiation exchange between the ground and the atmosphere/space i.e. 390 W m^-2 (infra-red radiation from the Earth’s surface) – 324 W m^-2 (infra-red back radiation from the atmosphere) = 66 W m^-2.
It is not hard to see that over the oceans the 102 W m^-2 upward infra-red radiation more than over-powers the net 66 W m^-2 downward infra-red radiation. This is where the energy goes!
Sorry, the infra-red back-radiation may warm the oceans by a small amount but it pales in comparison with the far greater warming that occurs by teh absorption of direct visible radiation
that takes place mostly at the tropics.

Sorry, the second last paragraph should have read:
It is not hard to see that over the oceans the 102 W m^-2 upward energy loss more than over-powers the net 66 W m^-2 downward infra-red radiation. This is where the energy goes!

“jimmi_the_dalek says:
August 15, 2011 at 1:52 pm
Indeed, the idea that DLR cannot heat the ocean is one of the spurious arguments that should not be used. There are plenty of others. Far too many comments here claim that the Greenhouse Effect cannot be real “because it is not like a real greenhouse”. Or that it contradicts the first or second laws of thermodynamics. Stick to objecting to the infidelities of computer modelling – there is plenty of uncertainty there – the basic physics is much more secure than some people are willing to concede.
”
——————————————————————————–
I think this is something to argue. Why is it that the computer models never match reality? The only true answer is that they use incorrect physics or some mistake somewhere. If they correctly modeled the physics of our planet, they should theoritically spit out a good synopsis of weather patterns but alas, they do not. They in fact never agree with each other on local conditions, and globally, well the IPCC itself split the difference and stated 1.5-4.5C. Why is it that they require such large fudge factors in the first place?
The true scientist would have figured this out and realized that the physics was wrong. Go back to the drawing board, find the mistake and plug in over again. No, instead they fudged it. This is important. The part of science and physics is important. The part of getting this correct so that in the future we do not make the same mistakes. The same mistakes applies to a political and/or ideological movement that looks to make energy scarse and drive our economies into the ground. This movement is nothing but an inquisition all over again.
But alas, the physics might be right if the Earth was actually a black body. But we are a water planet. Water is our dominant feature from the oceans to the atmosphere. Since this is the case and the models like I said have never matched reality, we KNOW there is at LEAST one mistake in their physics calculations. I don’t think closing the book on any part of the physics is the greatest idea in the world. Keep an open mind and realize that yes, there is at least one mistake, and I would guess more since greater minds have attempted this issue. I would point most people towards the lapse rate in general (type does not matter…just look at the changes in pressure and how this effects the atmosphere.)
DLR might have a mistake in it, but I am willing to bet that if it does, its a small one. Focus on where the physics is likely wrong (where Dr. Sagen and Hansen got it wrong on Venus for instance) and explore from there. That is where the mistakes are going to be found.
Falsify the physics, and you falsify every GCM out there. Sure, the theory is still supposedly possible, but I think that blow would be enough to settle the science the other way.

Subscribe.

Three great articles from Willis in two days. My head is going to explode !!

Willis says,
” DLR heating of the surface slows that overturning.”
Umm, exactly where do all those GHG’s get the energy to radiate all night? Do they have their own tiny personal cold fusion generators?? Me thinks this statement is also very misleading!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Lemme see, the ocean has a huge thermal mass and radiates all night providing energy to the GHG’s, if they didn’t the rest of the atmosphere would be driving the GHG’s radiation, although at MUCH reduced levels!!

Dumb question
How does rivers figure in all this?Rivers are always cold are they not?Is that because of their depth?

Willis,
I look at the semantics of ‘warming’ vs. ‘reducing the rate of cooling’ in this way:
if the ocean is radiating 400 watts/square meter, and there were no CO2 or H2O above radiating back to the ocean (the DLR), it will cool at a certain rate – obviously faster than with CO2/H2O above it, radiating back, say, 300 watts/ square meter. But in both cases, the result is a cooling ocean.
Now if the CO2/H2O were radiating 400 watts/sq meter, then the ocean is neither heating nor cooling, it is staying the same – might one say the two are in equilibrium with each other?
Further, if the CO2/H2O were radiating MORE than 400 watts/sq meter, then that is when I would say the DLR is ‘warming’ the ocean.
That’s just how I look at. One object is warming another when the object doing the warming raises the temperature of the other object ABOVE the temperature state the other object is in.
Now even that could be argued semantically, because if I were out in the cold air, my hands were cold, and I put a pair of gloves on, my hands would become warmer. I might say, ‘my gloves are warming my hands – though I could also say, ” . . my hands are warming AS A RESULT of the gloves” (prevent them from losing heat in the cold air ). . .
So obviously this discussion over ‘warming’ vs’ reduced rate of cooling won’t end, but I still prefer ‘reduced rate of cooling.
I should mention that even with this discussion and my perspective, I agree with your arguments.

Dave Springer,
“Absolutely. It’s called pyregeometer. Wanna buy one?”
And that is exactly the problem with Climate Science and the way the problem is stated. Stefan Boltzman does not compute 390 w/m2 from the AVERAGE surface of the earth unless it is to a vacum. What would happen to the surface of the ocean if we were able to remove the atmospheric pressure and radiation from above it?? I would love to see a video!!!
These things should be built in pairs to only measure up and down at the same time so Climate Scientists can’t play games!!! Even then we dont’t get the other directions!! 8>)

Willis Eschenbach says:
August 15, 2011 at 9:35 pm
“I have referred to generally accepted estimates of radiative loss from the surface (usually taken as ~ 390 w/m2), evaporative loss (~ 80 w/m2), convective loss (~ 20 w/m2) and sun hitting the surface (usually taken as 170 w/m2). ”
The same people who generally accept a 3C rise in global average temperature per CO2 doubling. Let’s look at an actual study of ocean heat budget (which I’ve posted before and you either ignored or forgot):
http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~carton/pdfs/foltzetal03.pdf

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 108, NO. C5, 3146, doi:10.1029/2002JC001584, 2003
Seasonal mixed layer heat budget of the tropical Atlantic Ocean
Gregory R. Foltz, Semyon A. Grodsky, and James A. Carton
Department of Meteorology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
Net surface heat flux is a combination of latent and
sensible heat loss, shortwave radiation absorption, and net
longwave emission. Sensible heat loss is insignificant (<10
W m
2) due to small air-sea temperature differences, while
net emission of longwave radiation is a relatively constant
50 W m
2 [da Silva et al., 1994].

The math ain’t difficult Willis. The tropical Atlantic absorbs about 200Wm from the sun. What goes in must come out. 10Wm it loses by conduction. 50Wm it loses by radiation. The rest, 140Wm, is lost through latent heat of vaporization.
10/200 = 5% lost by conduction
50/200 = 25% lost by radiation
140/200 = 70% lost by evaporation
What part of that do you and Trenberth and the rest of the bandwagon science brigade not understand?

@Willis
Can you or someone please explain to me how an ocean that receives only 200Wm of incoming energy can possibly emit more than that? The figure of 390Wm lost by radiative transfer is physically impossible. That would require it be absorbing at least 390Wm which it absolutely does not do. Have you people never heard of the law of conservation of energy? Maybe it’s the thorium dissolved in the ocean that producing all the extra heat, huh? The sun gets focused into a laser beam by water amplification which heats the thorium which causes it to condense and give off more heat than it absorbs through some mechanism that left unexplained except to say it definitely isn’t fission.
God almighty the pseudoscience nonsense pecked out by pikers around here sure gets frustrating at times. It’s so thick in the OP you can cut it with a knife.

Good on you, Willis, for trying to do a little education here. You have great patience.

What happens to the DLR if the ocean doesn’t absorb it? Does it power Santa’s sled back to the North Pole? Go back to space? Why haven’t satellites definitively proved this? Quit wasting your time on BS folks. Willis, you have better things to do, right? I can understand, by the way, the reason for using gross over net. I wouldn’t say acceptable, I would say preferable.

No mention of the Coriolis effect?
How does a rain drop freeze? Did someone figure that out yet?
If this is an exercise in determining if ~100 ppm of CO2 can account for the OHC increases seen for the last ~50 years, I beg the question to be asked what is the heat capacity of CO2 that allows for it to warm the oceans more so than the sun itself.
Just wondering.

Brian W says:
August 15, 2011 at 10:02 pm
“Neither clouds, nor water, fellows DO NOT glow in IR. Since IR is by definition non visible radiation, YOU CANNOT SEE IT.”
Yeah, but some animals can. I hope you aren’t some kind of species bigot who thinks human eyeballs are some kind of universal standard for what glows and what doesn’t?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_sensing_in_snakes

The ability to sense infrared thermal radiation evolved independently in several different families of snakes. Essentially, it allows these animals to “see” radiant heat at wavelengths between 5 and 30 μm to a degree of accuracy such that a blind rattlesnake can target vulnerable body parts of the prey at which it strikes. It was previously thought that the organs evolved primarily as prey detectors, but recent evidence suggests that it may also be used in thermoregulation and predator detection, making it a more general-purpose sensory organ than was supposed.

@Willis
“Please stop the condescending snarkiness, it just makes you look ugly.”
Then please stop parroting Trenberth, it just makes you look stupid.

Willis,
you want serious? OK, dead serious, here is the problem with individual energy flows.
IF there was no atmosphere and no GHG’s above the ocean the instant temperature and energy emissions would have no relation to 390 w/m2. Computing this number is an abortion. My understanding of this from people who understand how to derive the equation is that it simply is not real.
The fact that there IS atmosphere and GHG’s above the ocean means that there has been a relative equilibrium reached where you CAN measure these fluxes, BUT, they are not meaningful without the opposing flux. Saying there is 390 w/m2 is only meaningful if there is ALSO 320 w/m2 down to go back up to create that much energy in the first place. The IR down is the IR up, time shifted by a tiny amount of time, minus the losses that went on out and were transferred to the atmosphere and a few other miscellaneous things. Talking about heating the ocean is poor semantics as the flux is into the ocean with the SW and out of the ocean with IR. IF you wanted to get really picky we would have to include the gravitational energy and electrical energy that disrupts the ocean and atmosphere adding to the wind from the convection. Just like the conduction between dissimilar objects, at a very low level there may be occasional flows against the gradient, but, generally it is all warmer to cooler. I would stick with the SLOWS COOLING and forget the abortion of 390 w/m2 as it only allows people to get confused. If you say 390 you must say 320… (or whatever the correct numbers of the situation are)
“I can hand you a hundred dollar bill, and at the same time you hand me four twenties. That’s one way to describe the transaction, the way I described it above, listing the individual flows. ”
You could also give me a hundred dollar bill without me giving you back anything. The ocean cannot give the atmosphere 390 w/m2 without first getting the 320!!!! At least not with our current set up.
I apologise for misquoting you. Your statment was: “It can’t be heating the air, because the atmosphere has far too little thermal mass.” But some of it is heating the air.
The best idea is to ignore the manner in which Climate Scientists talk about it dividing the fluxes that cannot exist without each other and speak about the net flow. This may make no one happy, but, is most realistic. The surface regime emits about 60 w/m2. The instant fluxes making up this amount are ~390 up and ~320 down. The ocean absorbs plenty of SW to create this balance.
PS: I was addicted to cocaine twice so, if you want to make fun of me for it I deserve it!!! As an absolute and not just because of this. Reading your bio didn’t give me the feeling you had been an addict so I apologize if this was a low blow.

Tallbloke,
That reminds me of a Greenhouse test with IR treated and NON-IR treated plastic covers of the same material and thickness to prove IR effectiveness. The actual numbers were close to 5 degrees difference between the IR treated cover and the non-IR cover. I was shocked. I then reread the specs and found the IR treated cover ALSO had a treatment to minimize condensation collecting on it. The reduced moisture condensing on the cover made most of the difference I believe!! None of the other Greenhouse covers treated for IR were that effective with the same thickness and type material!!

Once again, the crazy idea that downwelling longwave radiation (DLR, also called infra-red or IR, or “greenhouse radiation”) can’t heat the ocean has raised its ugly head on one of my threads.
There are lots of good arguments against the AGW consensus, but this one is just silly.
Look, folks, there’s lot’s of good, valid scientific objections against the AGW claims, but the idea that DLR can’t heat the ocean is nonsense. Go buy an infrared lamp, put it over a pan of water, and see what happens. It only hurts the general skeptical arguments when people believe and espouse impossible things …
The craziest, ugliest, silliest, nonsensical impossible thing (you set the tone, Willis, not me) is that an ocean which receives a net input of 200Wm can emit more than that and sustain the loss indefinitely. Conservation of energy is a bitch that isn’t going to budge.
This is ground control to Major Tom.
Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you….

Another bottom line. Trenberth (and Willis by association) are the ones who can’t find the missing heat from the last 50 years. I told y’all where it is. It’s distributed more or less uniformally in a spherical volume of space 100 light years in diameter surrounding the earth.
Keep spinning your wheels looking downward into the deep ocean if you must. I can lead a horse to water but I can’t make him drink. All I really ask is that you don’t reach into my wallet to cover the cost of your wild goose chase, K?

This link works
http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/media/publications-journals-nzjm-2005-107-lo.pdf

From tallbloke on August 16, 2011 at 12:38 am:

Radiative transfer is a quantum operation according to theory, a water molecule can’t pass part of a photon. If a water molecule emits a photon to it’s neighbor below and drops to a lower vibrational state it becomes ‘cooler’ that the molecule below, which will rise to displace it.

Dang it, tallbloke, I thought you were smarter than that. Guess you’re just not living up to your billing.
You’re examining two individual molecules. The top one passes a photon to the lower one, making the lower one “warmer.” Then what? Why would the lower one rise higher than the other? They are both affected by the same gravity, they have the same mass. Arguably, by acquiring that photon’s worth of energy and thus that much virtual mass, the lower one is infinitesimally more massive. So why would it rise?
Warmer water rises above cooler water because it’s less dense, there is less mass per unit volume. Density is an aggregate quality, takes more than one identical molecule each for two equal volumes to say one is more dense than another.
And why is warmer water less dense that cooler water (assuming both are above 4°C for fresh water and equal pressure)? Collisions. The warmer water has molecules that are more energetic, knocking the fellow molecules they impact farther away, leading to greater spacing than with cooler water. When thermal energy is transferred by collisions that’s known as heat conduction. The possibilities for conductive transfer of energy far outweigh those for radiative transfer in a liquid medium. If one molecule would gain energy by a radiative transfer, chances are excellent it will soon lose that energy to a cooler molecule by conductive transfer.
You’re looking at an unlikely form of energy transfer that effects a highly temporary energy increase, while arguing a molecule will rise above another identical molecule when acted on by gravity. I think you need some more thought about that mechanism you’ve proposed that “disproves” what Willis has said.

I’m with Bob_FJ.
I must say thogh I don’t ‘get’ the argument that a blanket around a human body simply slows cooling. That would be so if the body was set at an initial temperature and no longer warmed. But the body generates heat which it loses to the environment. A blanket will help prevent that loss true, but the air it traps and the blanket’s interior surface will be heated by the heat of the body. If the external temperature is ‘cold’ then the interior temperature will be warmer. That is warming, not slowing cooling.

Note that radiation and absorption are reciprocal. If it cannot absorb, it cannot cool by emission. If you run your recording backwards, most of the basic laws of physics work exactly the same–emission becomes equivalent to absorption. As the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere near the surface is quite high when compared to that of CO2, I expect that most of the local greenhouse effect near the surface is due to photons emitted from the water vapor in the air. This is often referred to as ‘back-radiation.’ I believe the argument being made is that this radiation is being rejected (perhaps reflected) while the normal LWIR radiation emitted from surface is being allowed to pass. I don’t think nature is that selective.
Yes, something is warming the oceans–sunlight. As far as I could tell; that was not the issue; it was the misconception that LWIR from local greenhouse gas molecules could not return heat to the ocean even though these same molecules had been heated by similar LWIR photons emitted from the surface of the ocean.

Willis
Regarding your comment@Willis Eschenbach says:August 15, 2011 at 10:27 pm
commenting upon my comment richard verney says:August 15, 2011 at 6:18 pm
/////////////////////
I have more than 40 years sailing experience. I am well acquainted with the sea first hand.
I have reviewed many thousands of ships logs covering deep ocean voyages, and leaving aside passages through the doldrums,, I can assure you that the times when a ship on a deep ocean voyage experiences weather conditions of BF4 or less is probably less than 10%. Indeed, it is not uncommon to see just a few days of BF4 or less on a deep ocean voyage. The number of days when a ship experiences BF2 or less is probably 2 or 3% (or even less). Of course, this is just an average and I accept that every voyage will be different, and the same voyage will experience different weather conditions from month to month (depending when the voyage takes place) and even if the same voyage is performed in the same month, there will be differences from year to year according to the then prevailing weather.
You have to bear in mind that we are dealing with microns. Even at BF 2, these few microns are wind swept.
When we see spray (white horses), we are observing visible effects. This is much more than the top few microns of the ocean. We are seeing millimetres if not centimetres of turbulence.
Unfortunately, the human eye does not have the resolution to see microns of turbulence. If it did have that resolution, it would see that the top few microns is wind swept even at BF2.
I do not dispute that what goes up, at some stage goes down. Most of this wind swept spray evaporates and eventually leads to the cloud formation of your earlier post and in turn some of the evaporated water is returned to the ocean or over land as rain. I accept that some part of the wind swept spray may not be fully evaporated and may re-marry the ocean. However, by the time that it has remarried, it has probably already re-radiated the photon received from the DWR such that it is no longer in an excited state.
Even if you get through that ‘barrier’ you still have the problem that the top mm of the ocean is cooler than the layer immediately below it and whilst the turning of the ocean may be effective to mix heat contained in the top 1/2m or metre of the ocean but it is difficult to see how it can effectively turn over the top few microns. To what extent do ‘eddy’ currents overlap the top few microns of the medium and drag those few microns downwards.
I would like to see your scientific explanation of the processes involved on a micron level.

John Eggert says:
August 15, 2011 at 2:26 pm
“1: A continuously heated, flat plate at 15 C is on one side, a parallel, continuously cooled plate at -273C is 20 meters away.”
If you told us the capacitance in farads we could work out the size of the plates, which in turn would give us an idea of the magnitude of the radiation window.

‘Back radiation’ [‘DLR’] is Prevost Exchange Energy’: it can do no work because at equilibrium, it’s exactly offset by radiation from the opposite direction. That it appears to be higher under clouds is simply the result of higher emissivity. This, the oldest of the Radiation Laws, appears not to have been considered by IPCC researchers, nor have they apparently estimated gas emissivity from Hottel Charts, something I used to do when planning industrial heat treatment processes.
This and other major errors [‘cloud albedo effect’ cooling is really heating for thicker clouds, palaeo-data show warming of the ocean deeps started 2100 years before CO2 rose at the end of the last ice age, no check on thermochemical data for CO2-O2 mixtures which would have shown much lower CO2 ‘climate sensitivity’ ] should also have been picked up.
Miskolczi was forced to leave NASA in 2004 when he showed ‘back radiation’ is the artefact of a 1922 mathematical mistake. After commissioning work to find why ‘cloud albedo effect’ cooling wasn’t provable experimentally, NASA published a ‘surface reflection’ justification to claim it’s a small droplet effect. There’s no such physics.
A pattern is emerging. The latest claims, extra heat accumulation in the ocean deeps, double imaginary ‘cloud albedo effect’ cooling, appear to me to be a last ditch attempt to protect the high feedback CO2-AGW hypothesis for which there’s absolutely no experimental evidence.
Reportedly the UK Met. Office trying 50% solar, 50% CO2 in its weather forecasting for the UK; a straw in the wind?

Lets be mindful of our definitions and look carefully at what is happening at different wavelengths of radiant energy. The phrase “Downwelling Longwave Radiation (DLR)” is often used in the context and implied as ‘backradiation from CO2 as a GHG’. The two are NOT identical.
Hence the opening statement – ‘downwelling longwave radiation (DLR also called infra-red or IR, or ‘greenhouse radiation’) – lumps together things which should be considered separately.
First – Does inbound sunlight warm the ocean? Well of course. And that Inbound solar radiant energy includes a mix of UV (very short), visible, and longer wave IR. Yes, inbound sunshine contains IR, but there is virtually NO overlap of those IR wavelengths with the ‘greenhouse radiation’ wavelengths. You can’t just lump them together, which is why one must be careful of ‘heat lamp’ experiments that could include wavelengths other than GHG ‘backradiation from CO2’.
Next – In their paper, Kiehl and Trenberth 1997, the authors include the famous figure with 390 W m-2 upward Surface Radiation, and 324 Wm-2 Back Radiation. That gives (390 UP minus 324 Down), for a NET of 390 – 324 = 66 W m-2 UPward. Very difficult to heat a surface, either land or ocean, with a net upward loss of heat toward space. (we lose a little on every sale, but we make up for it on volume ::chuckle::)
CLOUDS – How did K&T 1997 get to 324 W m-2 backradiation”? From their abstract – “We find that for the clear sky case the contribution due to water vapor to the total longwave radiative forcing is 75 W·m-2, while for carbon dioxide it is 32 W·m-2. Clouds alter these values, and the effects of clouds on both the longwave and shortwave budget are addressed.” The backradiation from CO2 is only 32 W·m-2, or roughly 10% of the 324 total backradiation cited by K&T. The lion’s share of the 324 backradiation is from liquid H2O in the clouds. Once again we see that “Downwelling Longwave Radiation (DLR)” is NOT equivalent to ‘backradiation from CO2 as a GHG’. We must be careful of the wavelengths.
Finally, what about some real measurement data? Measured results cited in Evans and Puckring 2005, show CO2 backradiation of 31 to 35 W m-2 for clear sky winter time results (Ontario, Canada), which is a pretty good match for the K&T value. However at that same location, in summer with higher air temperatures and higher humidity, the H2O values went up, but the CO2 backradiation value DROPS to 10.5 W m-2. If the overlap of H2O and CO2 absorption/emission in air caused the CO2 value to drop with summertime humidity in Canada, I can only surmise that the CO2 backradiation over the ocean must be 10 or lower due to the high humidity. Similar backradiation tests in the very low humidity Antarctic showed that CO2 backradiation results there were always 2 to 2 1/2 times LOWER than H2O.
In conclusion – If the H2O as vapor (humidity) in the air is enough to absorb significantly in the CO2 wavelengths, the liquid surface must be an even better absorber, which makes it easy to believe that absorption of the CO2 wavelengths happens in a ‘thin layer’ at the surface.
If the backradiation of CO2 is on the order of 10 W m-2 to the Ocean, it would be difficult to conclude that CO2 as a GHG is doing much to heat the Oceans. And even more difficult to believe that the man-made part of that 10 W m-2 is doing much of anything significant to change the ocean energy balance.
respectfully,
Dave

Willis
regarding: @Willis Eschenbach says:August 15, 2011 at 10:33 pm commenting on my comment
richard verney says:August 15, 2011 at 7:12 pm
////////////////////////////////////////////
I understand why to a layman one may give a superficial explanation which concentrates on the overall effect rather than the minute detail of the processes involved.
However, when discussing scientific principles with an audience of scientists, precision is paramount. This is a scientific blog and at least those posting what purport to be scientific articles or discussion of scientific effects, should strive themselves to be accurate.
You dismiss this as a question of semantics, it is not. It is a matter of fundamental (or first) principle going to one of the root issues at the foundation of the AGW theory/conjecture.
One of the reasons why it is so fundamental is that CO2 is not the dominant (so called) green house gas. It is well accepted that water vapour is the dominant greenhouse gas. This is material since over the oceans there is on average much more water vapour in the atmosphere when compared with the atmoshere over land. Any increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere above the oceans is completely dwarfed by the naturally occuring high levels of water vapour immediately above the oceans. This is a significant point which is overlooked and is a significant point which is masked when dealing with average conditions. The warmists tend to concentrate on notional average conditions, and when this is done, one fails to see the proper picture since one is not looking at what ia actually occuring in non average conditions. Materially, at times it is the non average condition which leads the way and is the dominamnt factor which needs to be closely and carefully examined.
It is clear from the above that if DWLWIR does not heat the oceans, the reduction in the rate of cooling is predominatly being controlled by the high levels of water vapour above the oceans not by any increase in concentration of CO2 AND the high levels of water vapour are natural (ie., naturally occuring) being the result of solar energy being received by the oceans, ie the effects of sunlight warming the oceans.
It follows from this that the overwhelming probability as to why the oceans have been warming these lasts 30 or 40 years is due to an increase in solar energy received by the oceans very probably due to a reduction in cloudiness (in passing, it appears that the oceans have not been warming these past 8 years or so).
Whilst I am very sceptical of the entire GHG theory/conjecture, I can envisage that changes in CO2 concentrations may have some modest effect over land, however, over the oceans it has all but no effect, simply because the oceans (unlike the land), as a by product of the solar energy they receive, create their own ‘greenhouse gas’ atmosphere immediately above them (ie. WATER VAPOUR) and this water vapour completely dwarfs the effect that might overwise be observed as the result of a 100ppm rise in CO2 levels.
I will revert seperately on the point you raise in the final paragraph. .

Dave in Delaware says:
August 16, 2011 at 5:33 am
Lets be mindful of our definitions and look carefully at what is happening at different wavelengths of radiant energy. The phrase “Downwelling Longwave Radiation (DLR)” is often used in the context and implied as ‘backradiation from CO2 as a GHG’. The two are NOT identical.
Hence the opening statement – ‘downwelling longwave radiation (DLR also called infra-red or IR, or ‘greenhouse radiation’) – lumps together things which should be considered separately.
Ah thank you – another apparent sleight of hand meme which has confused many here. Downwelling should only refer to thermal infrared direct from the Sun, and uwelling direct from the Earth, seems a move to sidestep the arguments about ‘backradiation’, of which there are many and already proved nonsense.
AGWScience fiction meme now widespread in the education system has always claimed there is no or no signifcant downwell infrared direct from the Sun, as in KT97.
Which NASA is now promoting contrary to its previous real science fact teaching that the heat we feel from the Sun is thermal infrared. Therefore it must be reaching the surface…
As some mention has already been made by others here, Visible light is transmitted through water – it does not heat it. The KT97 is therefore actually saying that the Sun isn’t heating our Earth at all! Visible, Light, can’t and Thermal IR (Heat) they claim doesn’t reach us..
So what’s the energy budget all about?

From tallbloke on August 16, 2011 at 6:03 am:

It’s true Willis doesn’t say anything about co2, but the implication is pretty obvious IMO. There is no trend in precipitation so far as anyone knows, so a warming ocean seems to be down to the increase in co2 according to the arguments Willis presented.

Same mistake, different part. On this one, I’m a bit guilty as well. Willis has stuck consistently to how he worded it in Argument 3:

DLR heating of the top mm of the ocean reduces those differences and thus delays the onset of that oceanic overturning by slowing the night-time cooling of the topmost layer, and it also slows the speed of the overturning once it is established. This reduces the heat flow from the body of the upper ocean, and leaves the entire mass warmer than it would have been had the DLR not slowed the overturning.

The DLR effect is discussed as with or without, on or off. Increases are not mentioned. Actually I see nothing mentioning global warming, anthropogenic or otherwise. The closest he’s come to talking about a “warming ocean” is the ocean is warmer with heating from DLR than if there was no heating from DLR.
So no increasing, no “warming ocean,” no call for invoking CO2 increases.

One difference between Dr. Pratt’s post on Climate Etc. and Wilis’ is that at the surface Dr. Pratt emphasizes the conduction plays a larger role than radiation at the skin layer. The change in conduction is still due to reduction in the net radiation flux, but the mechanism limiting the rate of cooling at the surface is primarily the change in conduction due to the increase in air temperature.
In the tropical ocean some one listed the percentage of heat loss was 5% for conduction, 25% for radiation and 70% for evaporation. In a colder ocean the percentages would be closer to 10% conduction, 25% radiation and 65% evaporation. You could find more accurate numbers, but the radiative heat loss would be fairly constant with conduction and evaporation responding more to the temperature difference than radiation.
So the take away is that an increase in DWLR decreases the radiation flux, increasing the air temperature, reducing conductive heat loss. It makes perfectly good sense, since the CO2 and water vapor respond to the DWLR just as they would to the OLR.
It may seem to be picking nits, but Dr. Pratt’s position is more realistic while not violating any laws of physics. Surface warming is a response to a warming atmosphere caused by a reduction in net radiative cooling flux.