The punch line from Rex Murphy’s recent editorial in the National Post will upset sensitive readers who still think Gore is the messiah rather than a barker.
Gore’s meltdown might just be the moment when the people of the planet saw the carney show for what it was.
Heh. He is of course referring to this.
Read the entire brilliant editorial here
Jesse Fell says:
August 22, 2011 at 4:03 pm
Convection.
WOW! I’m from Canada and I’ve watched his show a few time, but I never figured Rex would be this blatant about it. Seriously, if it’s gone this far, you know the great unprecedented man made global warming hoax has run out of gas.
Jesse Fell says:
August 22, 2011 at 2:01 pm
one of my favorite books — “Travels with Charlie” — and feel no guilt. Until then, I’m staying home.
Greetings Jesse,
I’ll let others comment on the errors in your list and only say you do need to examine everything more carefully – even Steinbeck. He apparently made up stuff too:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/books/steinbecks-travels-with-charley-gets-a-fact-checking.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
I find it telling that a man who has two plus decades of debate experience.Many speaking experiences in front of large audiences.Avoids all debate challenges from various “deniers”.
He has had many opportunities to destroy the skeptics opposition. If he was correct. But he never considered the angle. That if he destroys them in a debate, he would be able to crow over it. That he would be able to destroy the skeptics credibility. That he and other AGW believers would not have to deal with skeptics again.
But he never tried, and even NOW he is still not going to try. After all the indications that the AGW hypothesis is thoroughly exposed as being completely unverified in the few testable predictions/projections it has made. After the crashing of the carbon markets. After the Climategate revelations. After the various polling indicators of a waning interest in his message.
Even now Gore is STILL avoiding even a single debate. It is plain that he deep inside himself does not really believe the robustness of the AGW hypothesis. It was always about the money,the preening on the stage and the fame he craves.
He buys a mansion on the west coast. He buys a Houseboat. He has a large “carbon footprint”. But he wants us to send him carbon offsets to his company. So he can rationalize his profligate lifestyle.
The man will never make a stand for what he believes out in the open. In a public debate. In a forum or blog. Because he KNOWS that he would be utterly destroyed.
As far as I am concerned, he is a creep.
Jessie Feel,
How can you be that easily duped by the “hockey stick” paper?
I knew it was crap before I read the abstract.Just looking at his NORTHERN HEMISPHERE temperature reconstruction chart was enough.To tell me that it was junk.
Do you know that other fields of research has decades ago verified a very warm MWP and the cold LIA? The HS chart denies their existence.
I think you need to broaden your research horizons.
RockyRoad says:
August 22, 2011 at 6:50 pm
I’m hoping I’ll get some red tomatoes out of my garden this summer (17 big beautiful plants 5′ tall) but I’m not betting on it. I hate frozen green tomatoes.
My situation exactly; except I only have 14 big beautiful plants 5′ tall. Now the funny part is that about a mile away from my place is a lane called ‘Rocky Road.’ I hate green tomatoes too.
anothernonbob says: (August 22, 2011 at 9:24 am)
I remember reading in Bob Beckman’s book, The Downwave, on economic cycles, that in the good times, people embrace crazy extremes of religion, and in the bad times, go back to the conventional ones…
I did not read the book, Bob; but I did think the thought — and believe it.
Jesse Fell says:
August 22, 2011 at 2:01 pm
– Nights are staying warmer, world-wide, a change that makes heat waves such as the one in Europe in 2003 particularly deadly to the old and the sick
Ah yes, the French heatwave of 2003 wich killed about 14.000 mainly elderly people, three years later a similair heatwave hit France and did kill only a small number of people, the difference between the two heatwaves was that the 2003 heatwave struck in august wich is the tradtional holiday month and the country basically shuts down, including physicians and hospitals wich are running a bare minimum.
The Health Minister Jean-François Mattei got the blame for failing to return from his vacation when the heat wave became serious, and his aides for blocking emergency measures in public hospitals (such as the recalling of physicians)
As one French Red Cross official said: “These thousands of elderly victims didn’t die from a heat wave as such, but from the isolation and insufficient assistance they lived with day in and out, and which almost any crisis situation could render fatal.”, “The French family structure is more dislocated than elsewhere in Europe, and prevailing social attitudes hold that once older people are closed behind their apartment doors or in nursing homes, they are someone else’s problem.”
A lot of those 14.000 people would have not died if the heatwave had struck a month later or earlier like in 2006.
And the climate hippies, united, regurgitate: Back in the day of our earlier years, back when we couldn’t afford gas and electricity, we were so much colder, but today, when we’ve been sucker punched into capitalism over and over again, we are so much warmer. Even the newly manufactured tents are so much warmer than fifty year old rubbish open sided flap tents. OMG! Global warming is real, and it’s man made!
Climate hippies, united: Dismantle the capitalism that brought you your evil coziness, go poor!
:p
Jesse I live on Anglesey which has in the last 3 winters suffered snow and last year we were snowed in for 9 days for the first time in over 30 years and we had snow fall on some peaks [OK short lived ] last month so is there a problem with the warming theory or do I not live in a cooler place ?
Ric Werme,
Yes, convection currents are responsible for most of the heat transfer out of the troposphere. From there, however, heat is transferred almost entirely by radiation, and as the amount of CO2 in the upper atmosphere increases, more and more heat will back up at the surface of the Earth before the Earth restores its heat balance (heat energy reaching the Earth = heat energy leaving the Earth). It’s what’s happening in the upper atmosphere that will be crucial from now on.
Which brings up another (minor, but fun) point: “greenhouse gases” is not a very good description of CO2, methane, water vapor, et al. Greenhouses trap heat primarily by not allowing warm air to blow away; clear glass is not a barrier to IR. A better metaphor was made by John Tyndale, one of the early researchers in climate science. He said that CO2 etc. act like a dam; just as a dam causes a local back up of water which must rise to the level of the spillway before water can resume flowing downstream, so these gases interfere with the Earth’s attempt to shed the heat that it receives from the sun, causing a local backup of heat at the Earth’s surface. Without the naturally occurring greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the Earth’s surface temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit, or somewhat less.
An advantage of adopting Tyndale’s metaphor would be, that instead of blaming global warming on green house gases, we could blame it on “those dam gases.”
Jesse Fell says:
August 22, 2011 at 4:03 pm
“And, since it is undisputed that atmospheric CO2 absorbs heat energy radiated from the surface of the Earth in the form of infrared radiation, and then, becoming warm itself, sends some of this heat back to the surface of the Earth, again in the form of infrared radiation — how could the addition of billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere annually NOT be damming up heat at the Earth’s surface? What principle or force is intervening to prevent what the nature of CO2 tells to expect to happen?”
Fair question. Over the ocean the principle or force is evaporation. Downwelling longwave radiation is totally absorbed by water in a skin layer barely a millionth of a meter deep. The energy isn’t transferred deeper than but rather goes to raising the evaporation rate. When water turns from liquid to vapor it absorbs an inordinate amount of energy in the process but, and here’s the key, it doesn’t get warmer after absorbing that energy. The energy is called “latent heat of vaporization”. It’s “latent” because it isn’t detectable with a thermometer. Heat that can be measured with a thermometer is called “sensible heat”. It’s a great deal of energy. The latent heat needed to turn a gram of liquid water into a gram water vapor, with no change in temperature, is about 1000 times the energy it takes to warm a gram of water by one degree fahrenheit.
So without heating the air or the ocean the downwelling radiation is carried back aloft in rising water vapor until such time as adiabatic cooling causes its temperature to fall below the dew point and a cloud is born. Upon condensation into liquid water again the latent heat is released into the environment as sensible heat. The key here is that the energy, or very little of it, sticks around near the surface but is rather transported efficiently and imperceptably thousands of feet off the surface to the cloud deck. Now those same greenhouse gases that tend to impede radiation leaving the surface headed for outer space now impede the radiation coming from the warm cloud from making it back down to the surface.
Over dry land it doesn’t work that way of course. The energy in the downwelling longwave radiation is absorbed by the land surface and stays there raising its sensible temperature or, for the purist, slowing down the cooling rate of the surface which pretty much amounts to the same thing as warming it because you end up with a surface that’s warmer that it woudl be without the GHG.
Just to add to Dave Springer’s comment, once the latent heat becomes sensible heat, it heats all atmospheric gases including the CO2. The additional CO2 in the atmosphere can radiate this energy to space that would not have been radiated with less CO2. This is the cooling effect of GHGs. Since we now know that the radiation from the atmosphere has not changed as predicted by warmists I think it’s safe to say the cooling effect is an equal and opposite effect to the commonly understood GHE.
The cooling effect works not only on latent heat, but also on heat directly conducted to the atmosphere and heat absorbed from the sun by the atmosphere.
As warmists like to say, it’s simple physics. Well, now you know the rest of the story.
The author of the article writes: “…there simply hasn’t been any signal that his White House is giving the great Gore crusade anything but the barest of rhetorical support.”
It’s true that rhetorical support by the Obama administration is sparse.
However regulatory support is stifling. Just look at the ban on off shore drilling (where they even altered scientific findings to get the results they wanted), effectively shutting down Yucca Mountain by having the NRC chief Commisioner refuse to allow a vote on whether to continue, and having the EPA promulgate new rules that will shut down multiple coal fired electric plants.
Obama is keeping his promise that electricity rates will “necessarily skyrocket” under his plans:
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/11/02/obama-ill-make-energy-prices-skyrocket/
David Springer and Richard M,
It is refreshing to read a post on this site that deals with science, and that doesn’t begin by telling me that Al Gore forgets to turn off the lights when he leaves a room. Thank you, gentlemen.
Yes, evaporation creates a “heat elevator” that conveys heat, in latent form, to the upper atmosphere. But it seems wishful thinking to argue that all condensation, which releases the latent heat, occurs at a high enough altitude to have no effect on climate. A good deal of condensation occurs well within the troposphere; I have never been in the stratosphere, but I have often looked down on clouds from an airplane window. And I have often been in fogs.(Naturally — I’m a liberal.)
And when the heat elevator releases the latent heat at the top of the troposphere, it is radiated in all directions, one of those directions being down. Another direction is up, into the stratosphere, where further heat transfer occurs almost entirely by radiation.
Here is where we are building a “heat dam” such as was described by John Tyndale, one of the first researchers into greenhouse gases. The amount of CO2 in the stratosphere is increasing, as is the altitude of the “skin” — the outer layer of the atmosphere from which outgoing long wave radiation can finally make a clean escape into outer space. Both of these factors — rising CO2 levels in the stratosphere, and the increasing altitude of the atmospheric skin — in effect raise the heat dam; with the result that heat has to back up more and more down below before it reaches the spillway. The backup is global warming.
Over time, the Earth will release as much radiative heat energy into space as it receives from the sun. But by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we require the Earth’s surface to warm up more and more to achieve this.
And as I write all of this, I remember, uneasily, a few couplets by Alexander Pope:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
I hope that we can all keep drinking, amicably, until we are darn sure that we are sober.
Jesse Fell says:
“A little learning is a dangerous thing…”
That applies to you, Skippy. Your ‘CO2 dam” doesn’t hold water: click click click
Temperature sensitivity to CO2 must be extremely small, otherwise ΔT would closely track ΔCO2. But it doesn’t, and as we know the only clear correlation is that CO2 follows changes in temperature, so your entire premise is wrong.
Jesse, everything you stated occurred before we started adding CO2 to the atmosphere. And, as we all know, the primary GHG is H2O. What needs to be understood is the change in effect by adding a small amount of CO2 (small relative to the entire atmosphere).
You claim energy would be radiated downward offsets the energy radiated to space, BUT that heat would have stayed in the atmosphere without the addition of CO2. The fact it radiates it downward just means a slight redistribution of energy. However, the energy that is radiated to space is a net loss of energy.
The effect is essentially the opposite of the GHE. With the GHE energy that would have been radiated to space is kept in the atmosphere. With the cooling effect I mentioned we have energy that would have been kept in the atmosphere that gets radiated outward. You can’t argue for just half of the physics to hold. It’s all or nothing.
The key empirical data is the fact that the energy radiated to space has NOT changed. It appears physics is working as it should.
Richard M says
the key empirical data —-NOT changed
Henry@richard M
not bad observation, but as we know more heat came in (maxima rising)
it means something has absorbed that extra heat that came in
where did it go?
I think I figured it out. What do you think??
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
Jesse says,
“And, since it is undisputed that atmospheric CO2 absorbs heat energy radiated from the surface of the Earth in the form of infrared radiation, and then, becoming warm itself, sends some of this heat back to the surface of the Earth, again in the form of infrared radiation — how could the addition of billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere annually NOT be damming up heat at the Earth’s surface? What principle or force is intervening to prevent what the nature of CO2 tells to expect to happen?”
Answer: the basic laws of thermodynamics.
1. Yes CO2 absorbs IR, but it equally re-radiates IR – back into space. As the troposphere is invariably COLDER than the earth’s surface it is impossible for the colder CO2 in the troposphere to ‘heat’ the warmer earth’s suface by back radiation. Otherwise, dear sir, we could generate infinite energy from a light bulb using a mirror to reflect its energy back to the filament, which, according the the ‘GHT’, will cause the filament to warm even more, thus radiating more, reflected back and heating it yet more etc etc in an escalating temperature rise. THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN IN THE REAL UNIVERSE. Or another example: when your pour hot coffee into a Dewar flask, the GHT, as you explain it, will cause the coffee to boil in the flask by reflecting back the radiation from the hot liquid. Again this does not happen in the real universe.
There really is no such thing as a ‘greenhouse effect’ in the atmosphere. CO2 actually causes minor cooling by blocking out half the IR (within its absorbtion bands) from the sun and sending it back into space. Also CO2 is an integral part of photosynthesis which itself COOLS the earth’s surface as it turns CO2 and WATER into sugar plus oxygen. Plants, for example, draw up water (liquid) during the process and transpire it as vapour from its leaves absorbing latent heat and therefore causing surface cooling. The more CO2 there is the more this takes effect.
Then you need to understand that CO2 levels are currently very low indeed by earth’s long history. Yes, they are rising, but from a dangerously low base level. If CO2 levels were to fall to around 180ppm then all life on earth would die except for for bacteria as photosynthesis would stop. The last time they were as low as today was 300 million years ago.
Difficult to go into detail here but can be contacted at philip.foster17 at ntlworld.com
Richard M,
Again, I appreciate your avoidance of the ad hominem approach, and your preference for actually talking about the science.
You write: “You claim energy would be radiated downward offsets the energy radiated to space, BUT that heat would have stayed in the atmosphere without the addition of CO2.”
What I’ve read is that the crucial stuff is happening at the outer edge of the atmosphere — the jumping off point for outgoing longwave radiation (IR). Here, the CO2 and all gases are quite cold, and absorb of lot of IR from below before they become significant radiators of heat into space. The amount and altitude of these gases at the jumping off point are both increasing, which means that the amount of heat from below that this last layer absorbs before it emits much IR is also increasing. Thus, we are adding thickness to this outer blanket as we add CO2 to the atmosphere. Here is what is causing the backup behind Tyndall’s dam.
With that, I sign off from this discussion. To achieve fuller sobriety, however, I intend to curl up with the following books:
— Principles of Atmospheric Science, buy John E. Frederick
— What We Know About Climate Change, by Kerry Emmanuel
These books are not as relaxing as “Travels with Charlie”, but, as Steinbeck’s son once said, “I think Dad just made a lot of that stuff up.”
When did the 1750-1870 tail of the LIA get to be the “ideal” climate? If there’s anything that gets and holds us well above that period, coldest in the last 10,000 years, bring it on!
Unfortunately, the CO2 mechanism is a dollar short and about 800 yrs late, on average. The current rise is probably a delayed reaction from the MWP.
Jesse Fell asks:
….how could the addition of billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere annually NOT be damming up heat at the Earth’s surface? What principle or force is intervening to prevent what the nature of CO2 tells to expect to happen?
Transformed to involve the major “ghg”: how could the integrated addition of billions of tons of water vapor to the atmosphere annually, and occurring in some measure 24/7, not be damming up the Earth’s surface heat. What principle or force is intervening to prevent what the nature of water vapor tells us to expect to happen? Hint, see Willis Eschenbach’s “thermostat” schema.
Why does the CO2 = CAGW “physics” not ever yield an empirically confirmed prediction?
Jesse Fell
Your list looks like “it has warmed” , which is a given.
The question is is the warming enough to be a problem for mankind ?
Even whether mankind caused any of the warming is an issue which is important only to climatologists.
The warming after the little ice age began immediately and has continued until today but is only 1/2 ° C per century. Since it started in 1860 I doubt that CO2 caused it but since it is so slow who cares? Superimposed on that is a 60 year PDO sine wave that causes the illusion of warming or cooling.
The 1940 to 1978 natural cooling caused fears of a little ice age.
The 1978 to 1998 natural warming was right on schedule and can be easily explained by excess El Nino’s.
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/PDO.latest
So the whole CAGW scare story hangs on warming which is natural and so slow it is not a problem.
Perhaps Gore’s rant will turn out to be his “Howard Dean” moment.
Jesse Fell says:
August 23, 2011 at 1:02 pm
“What I’ve read is that the crucial stuff is happening at the outer edge of the atmosphere — the jumping off point for outgoing longwave radiation (IR). Here, the CO2 and all gases are quite cold, and absorb of lot of IR from below before they become significant radiators of heat into space. The amount and altitude of these gases at the jumping off point are both increasing, which means that the amount of heat from below that this last layer absorbs before it emits much IR is also increasing. Thus, we are adding thickness to this outer blanket as we add CO2 to the atmosphere. Here is what is causing the backup behind Tyndall’s dam.”
Jesse, there is no hot spot in the upper troposphere. There is no dam. The upper troposphere is not heating up faster than the surface like the climate model indicate. If Co2 and the rest of the “GHS” were so good at damming “heat”, we would not need Fiberglass insulation in our walls. The CO2 drives the climate hypotheses doesn’t make sense especially when you dig into the sensitivity, amplification and positive feedback part.