UPDATE: Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. has a comment on the paper here: Comments On The Dessler 2011 GRL Paper “Cloud Variations And The Earth’s Energy Budget also, physicist Lubos Motl has an analysis here. The press release from TAMU/Dessler has been pushed to media outlets on Eurekalert, see update below.
UPDATE2: Dessler has made a video on the paper see it here And Steve McIntyre has his take on it with The stone in Trenberth’s shoe
I’ve been given an advance copy, for which I’ve posted excerpts below. This paper appears to have been made ready in record time, with a turnaround from submission to acceptance and publication of about six weeks based on the July 26th publication date of the original Spencer and Braswell paper. We should all be so lucky to have expedited peer review service. PeerEx maybe, something like FedEx? Compare that to the two years it took to get Lindzen and Choi out the door. Or how about the WUWT story: “Science has been sitting on his [Spencer’s] critique of Dessler’s paper for months”.
If anyone needs a clear, concise, and irrefutable example of how peer review in climate science is biased for the consensus and against skeptics, this is it.
I’m sure some thorough examination will determine if the maxim “haste makes waste” applies here for Dessler’s turbo treatise.
Cloud variations and the Earth’s energy budget
A.E. Dessler
Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX
Abstract: The question of whether clouds are the cause of surface temperature changes, rather than acting as a feedback in response to those temperature changes, is explored using data obtained between 2000 and 2010. An energy budget calculation shows that the energy trapped by clouds accounts for little of the observed climate variations. And observations of the lagged response of top-of-atmosphere (TOA) energy fluxes to surface temperature variations are not evidence that clouds are causing climate change.
Introduction
The usual way to think about clouds in the climate system is that they are a feedback — as the climate warms, clouds change in response and either amplify (positive cloud feedback) or ameliorate (negative cloud feedback) the initial change [e.g., Stephens, 2005]. In recent papers, Lindzen and Choi [2011, hereafter LC11] and Spencer and Braswell [2011, hereafter SB11] have argued that reality is reversed: clouds are the cause of, and not a feedback on, changes in surface temperature. If this claim is correct, then significant revisions to climate science may be required.
…
Conclusions
These calculations show that clouds did not cause significant climate change over the last decade (over the decades or centuries relevant for long-term climate change, on the other hand, clouds can indeed cause significant warming). Rather, the evolution of the surface and atmosphere during ENSO variations are dominated by oceanic heat transport. This means in turn that regressions of TOA fluxes vs. ΔTs can be used to accurately estimate climate sensitivity or the magnitude of climate feedbacks. In addition, observations presented by LC11 and SB11 are not in fundamental disagreement with mainstream climate models, nor do they provide evidence that clouds are causing climate change. Suggestions that significant revisions to mainstream climate science are required are therefore not supported.
Acknowledgments: This work was supported by NSF grant AGS-1012665 to Texas A&M University. I thank A. Evan, J. Fasullo, D. Murphy, K. Trenberth, M. Zelinka, and A.J. Dessler for useful comments.
h/t to Marc Hendrickx
=============================================================
UPDATE: Here is the press release from Texas A&M via Eurekalert:
Texas A&M prof says study shows that clouds don’t cause climate change
COLLEGE STATION, Sept. 6, 2011 — Clouds only amplify climate change, says a Texas A&M University professor in a study that rebuts recent claims that clouds are actually the root cause of climate change.
Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M atmospheric sciences professor considered one of the nation’s experts on climate variations, says decades of data support the mainstream and long-held view that clouds are primarily acting as a so-called “feedback” that amplifies warming from human activity. His work is published today in the American Geophysical Union’s peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Dessler studied El Niño and La Niña cycles over the past 10 years and calculated the Earth’s “energy budget” over this time. El Nino and La Nina are cyclical events, roughly every five years, when waters in the central Pacific Ocean tend to get warmer or colder. These changes have a huge impact on much of the world’s weather systems for months or even years.
Dessler found that clouds played a very small role in initiating these climate variations — in agreement, he says, with mainstream climate science and in direct opposition to some previous claims.
“The bottom line is that clouds have not replaced humans as the cause of the recent warming the Earth is experiencing,” Dessler says.
Texas is currently in one of the worst droughts in the state’s history, and most scientists believe it is a direct result of La Niña conditions that have lingered in the Pacific Ocean for many months.
Dessler adds, “Over a century, however, clouds can indeed play an important role amplifying climate change.”
“I hope my analysis puts an end to this claim that clouds are causing climate change,” he adds.
For more information about Dessler’s research, go to http://goo.gl/zFJmt
About Research at Texas A&M University:
As one of the world’s leading research institutions, Texas A&M is in the vanguard in making significant contributions to the storehouse of knowledge, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represents an annual investment of more than $630 million, which ranks third nationally for universities without a medical school, and underwrites approximately 3,500 sponsored projects. That research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state, nation and world.
eyesonu says:
September 7, 2011 at 9:36 am
Myrrh says:
September 7, 2011 at 3:08 am
Thanks for your comment. Please stay with us here at WUWT. I have been a compulsive ‘lurker’ here as well as several other sources of info re: climate issues. I have learned a lot. I have also gotten lost in some of the various arguments presented. I believe that this was possibly a result of my keeping an open mind and ultimately polluting it to some degree (confusion) with too much sorting of info (mental overload?).
Certainly know that feeling.., but you have to begin with an open mind on exploring arguments about which you don’t know anything or anything much, all the yo-yoing from one to the other because they both sound plausible. What came as a shock was the realisation that both pro and antis had taken stuff for granted which turned out to be complete fiction, and that this fiction had somehow been injected into the physics, and into the educational system as a whole, so that the arguments between the pro and antis ended up being premised on the same fiction, as here. I feel as if I’ve stepped into some alternative reality and get both sides taking umbrage with me..
The issues that you put forth in the above post correlates with my basic understanding (light and infrared) learned years ago. Please help keep me on track with the basic physics so as I can maintain my confidence in an objective evaluation of the current issues. I will admit that I am very skeptical with regards to sources that I accept with great confidence, but you have caught my attention. With regards to any discussion that you may offer, I will “trust but verify”. I appologize somewhat with that statement, but I ‘gotta be sure’.
It was because such basic traditional physics had been distorted that gave me an anchor in all this. I can’t exactly recall, but I think it was a thread from Willis on missing heat that made me look at it first. As I’d learned when I began questioning the claims about Carbon Dioxide where the disinformation about its properties was widespread, people take the disinformation for granted much as we both do re infrared and visible.. I checked and checked and checked and.., to make sure my memory wasn’t playing me false, and learned an awful lot about CO2 I didn’t know before. That’s when the extent of manipulation became manifest, so it was a bit easier in some ways and a bit more more difficult in others to work out what was happening re the infrared and visible, because I now had the ‘re-education’ meme in play. Some scientists traditionally educated were reading Trenberth as if he was including thermal infrared at the surface and those not traditionally educated were totally affronted to be told that what they thought was real physics, that Light was Heat, was instead a recently introduced fiction. And I do now think these fictions were deliberately introduced, they all have the same ‘touch’ to them; slight deviations from norm, exchanging properties, tweaking of processes, laws taken out of context and a ready stream of ‘proofs’ which are cleverly illogical, experiments half done and so on. It has to be from ‘someone’ who knows traditional physics really well. And that’s just the few areas I’ve explored. The core basics so changed that a totally impossible world is described by them.
Over the past couple of years I have become quite skeptical of the arguments that have been put forth by the CAGW crowd and the lack of transparency and obvious gatekeeping tactics they have employed. Toss in the political spectrum and I am very alarmed.
Yes, this is what is so striking about it all. I was disillusioned early on in investigated it when the scientist I was in discussion about it, who was informing me about AGW because I wanted to know the arguments, refused to look at contradictions I’d found saying he didn’t need to, and, just dismissed the many examples coming to light about the bad practices, the hockey stick and pal influence and the history, when I found that the IPCC report in the early nineties had been changed by having the paragraph taken out which said AGW wasn’t realistic. The belief that AGW is based on real physics is so ingrained in those whose work involves it, he’s a teacher of physics, that I imagine it would be quite shattering even to admit the possibility that what he is teaching could be fiction – it’s easier I think for those like us on the sidelines, we can be a bit more objective. The political aspect could be make or break if he, and others like him, ever got to seriously think about the possibility that it could be fiction. I hope it would be make, because that it’s a fiction is something real, and reality in the end is grounding.
Many arguments seem to focus on fine details, and necessarily so. But I, while able to follow those, am trying to view issues from a basis of common sense and physics. At this point, should you have ‘missed the boat’ with regards to the above post, I have certainly have done so too.
Regards,
Well, I’m sure we’re on the boat, no need to fear rising sea levels.. 🙂 Thank you, I was beginning to think that no-one understood what I was saying here, and yes, I have been thinking of leaving this, the enormity of the illusion can be so disheartening.
Dave Springer says:
September 7, 2011 at 4:16 am
Manfred says:
September 6, 2011 at 10:04 pm
“Attempts over the last few years to stage a debate in Texas about the science of climate change have required flying a skeptic in from out of state.In one case, they had to import one from Canada.”
Tihs is Texas ! But sounds like a statistic from North Korea.
There are hundreds of peer reviewed papers opposing IPCC “wisdom”.
Anyone can follow the Hockey Stick discussion in Monfort’s book or at McIntyre’s climateaudit.org and everybody with a basic science education should be able to conclude that McIntyre is right and the Hockey Team is wrong. The errors are often enough just basic and embarrasing.
Everybody should be able to conclude that the investigations failed and that Gary North from Texas A&M shares significant responsibility. But discussion at Texas A&M is dead. What is going on ?
@Myrrh says:
September 7, 2011 at 3:08 am
“Sunlight at zenith provides an irradiance of just over 1 kilowatt per square meter at sea level. Of this energy, 527 watts is infrared radiation, 445 watts is visible light, and 32 watts is ultraviolet radiation.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared
Arstechnica has a seemly bizarre headline to highlight the Dessler paper that supposedly debunks the “climate contrarian” paper (or something like that).
Simplified model in recent climate paper doesn’t even conserve energy
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/09/simplified-model-in-recent-climate-paper-doesnt-even-conserve-energy.ars
“We’ve discussed how a recent paper by a prominent climate contrarian had set off an xaggerated response in some corners of the popular press that ultimately contributed to the resignation of the editor of the journal that published it. But the paper remained part of the scientific literature, which, as we commented at the time, “Should induce his critics to get more thorough criticisms formally published.” Apparently one was already in the works, and it was released over the weekend by Geophysical Research Letters. The paper focuses on the simplified model used in an attempt to indicate that clouds could force the climate, and shows that the model may not even be able to reproduce the conservation of energy.”
And just a reminder that WUWT covered an Arstechnica article in July:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/24/greenpeace-and-the-ipcc-the-edenhofer-excuse/
Ulric Lyons says:
September 7, 2011 at 6:21 pm
@Myrrh says:
September 7, 2011 at 3:08 am
“Sunlight at zenith provides an irradiance of just over 1 kilowatt per square meter at sea level. Of this energy, 527 watts is infrared radiation, 445 watts is visible light, and 32 watts is ultraviolet radiation.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared
Thank you, I know that page. I’ve read it and thought about it.
The AGWScience Fiction claim is that shortwave UV/Visible/Nr Ir convert to heat the land and oceans of the Earth (which they can’t), and that longwave, thermal IR doesn’t even reach the Earth’s surface and plays no part in heating the Earth, and only appears in the ‘energy budget’ as an effect from the Earth being heated by these shortwaves; the ‘shortwave in, longwave out’ meme. The arguments here take this as if it is real physics. It isn’t, it’s junk.
This has been introduced into the education system and now traditional teaching, and therefore real physical world understanding of the difference between Light and Heat energies from the Sun, has all but disappeared. It has certainly disappeared among those arguing here, they can’t tell the differnce, and they can’t tell that they are basing their arguments on a fiction.
Light does not convert land and oceans of Earth to heat (KT97 etc), these are not thermal energies. Those arguing here are excluding the real source of heating the land and oceans, thermal infrared which is the actual, real, heat from the Sun which we feel as heat from the Sun; the real downwelling thermal infrared from the Sun, (not this ‘backradiation’ ‘downwelling’). It is physically absurd to say that shortwave, non-thermal energies are heating the Earth and the only thermal energy in the ‘budget’ is that ‘upwelling’ from the Earth produced by this fictional process where Light creates Heat.
But really, besides excluding the direct thermal infrared from the Sun to the Earth from these calculations and swapping the properties of heat and light energies, the main point I’m making here is that they’re arguing about an imaginary world, not this one. Trying to put real world figures into their imaginary world scenarios is just, ludicrous.
P.S. – in case missed re clouds – water is a great absorber of thermal infrared energy from the Sun, the clouds will absorbing it from the top down, even while Light is being reflected back from them. And, since Light won’t heat them anyway, what difference does it make if this is reflected back or not?
Manfred, You write that there are hundreds of peer reviewed papers opposing IPCC “wisdom”. Where would be a good place to find these articles?
It would be helpful if someone published an anthology of peer-reviewed articles from Nature, Science, EOS, or other journals with high standards (of scholarship, scientific rigor, intellectual integrity) that oppose IPCC wisdom. This should be easy enough to do.
Provided, of course, that these articles exist.
Myrrh says:
September 8, 2011 at 1:26 am
The AGWScience Fiction claim is that shortwave UV/Visible/Nr Ir convert to heat the land and oceans of the Earth
If a body absorbs photons of any wavelength whatsoever, that body is heated as the energy of the photons is transferred to the body. If you believe otherwise, It is you living in an alternate universe [same universe where there is no empty space between molecules of a real gas].
How many box tops do you have to send in to get a PhD? Do you have to send in more box tops to get a PhD in climatology or can you get away with a lot less? Do you have to ask the university sponsors to what not to write or is junk science good enough to squeak by? Climatology is a career killer, like a PhD in Astrology and UFOlogy? Space Aliens!! That’s the ticket! Who’s done a study on space aliens causing climate change? Dessler, pehaps?
Leif Svalgaard says:
September 8, 2011 at 10:38 am
Myrrh says:
September 8, 2011 at 1:26 am
The AGWScience Fiction claim is that shortwave UV/Visible/Nr Ir convert to heat the land and oceans of the Earth
If a body absorbs photons of any wavelength whatsoever, that body is heated as the energy of the photons is transferred to the body. If you believe otherwise, It is you living in an alternate universe [same universe where there is no empty space between molecules of a real gas].
Sigh. Why do all buy into this AGWScience Fiction meme? Photosynthesis is a chemical change, creating sugars, it does not create heat. These are electronic transitions for the shortwave, they might knock an electron, they do not have the oomph to move a molecule into resonant vibration, which does create heat. That’s what thermal infrared does. That’s how the heat, longwave, thermal infrared, heats things.
Unbelievable. You take out the all the real heat from the Sun that actually warm up, really heats, organic matter, and then spend decades trying to work out where the missing heat is..
Read the wiki extract on this I posted earlier, would you like me to find it for you again?
Yeah, stay in your wide empty space ideal atmosphere where molecules of gases are zipping through at a vast rate of knots and are hard dots with no volume.., bouncing off each other and mixing thoroughly in the atmosphere because there’s no attraction..
So how does sound travel in your empty space? Forget it, I’ve asked you before and you have no idea how ludicrous your ideal world is.
But I will give the story again. Same PhD who introduced me to AGWScience Fiction – later I asked him how carbon dioxide could be ‘thoroughly mixed and stay up in the atmosphere accumulating for hundreds and even thousands of years’, he gave me whole AGWScience Fiction spiel about ‘ideal gases’. Like you, he couldn’t see the disjunct between what he was saying and the real world traditional physics. Remember, there’s no effort to make AGWScience Fiction internally consistant, they’ll take bits from anywhere to build up their fantasy world, so it’s a mix of ideal gas laws and Brownian motion, quite interchangeable for them. First of all he denied that carbon dioxide could separate out from the atmosphere when I said that being heavier than air it would always tend to sink displacing air unless work was being done on it, when I gave some of the numerous examples from real life, volcanic venting, brewing, he took out his denial (he had moderator status). He still insisted that carbon dioxide would diffuse in air as per ideal gas scenario without any work being done. I wanted to be really sure I understood what he was saying, so I asked, if carbon dioxide is introduced into a room where it sinks displacing air to pool on the floor and nothing is changed in the room, no work done such as window opened or fan put on, was he saying that the carbon dioxide would diffuse to mix thoroughly, because I say it would remain pooled on the floor. He confirmed that was his, and he taught this, view. He said as per ideal gas the molecules of carbon dioxide would diffuse into the air in the room without any work being done to mix thoroughly from which it could then not be unmixed without work being done, because as ideal gas it would be moving at vast speeds through empty space and would bounce of all the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen and so mix up. I’m really, really, sorry you can’t see how ludicrous that is.
Gases have volume. They are subject to gravity, they have weight. They have weight relative to each other. That’s why methane rises and carbon dioxide sinks in air. They may well be moving at vast speeds, but they’re going no-where fast, the volume and weight of the fluid gases around constricts that movement, there’s a ton weight of it pressing down on every square foot.
The AGWScience fiction memes are so thoroughly ingrained that other scientists not familiar with how the fluid volumes of gases really work, take them as if they’re real physics. One such AGW climate boffin got himself funded to prove that methane even if it initially rose to the ceiling in a mine, would then as per AGW Ideal Gas Fiction, would then rush around until thoroughly mixed with the air, would diffuse into the air. His experiment failed to prove his fiction, the methane he introduced stayed layered at the ceiling. The only thing he could think of to account for this was that there was some extraneous source of methane getting into his mine which was layering up in the ceiling quicker than it could diffuse out, they couldn’t find any such source. He said they searched the place carefully. You probably can’t see how ludicrous his analysis was.
This is a very well known hazard in mining, and up until very recently a new mine was tested for this by someone covered with wet towels and carrying a candle on a long stick entering and setting fire to any methane so layered, it could be very dramatic if found. Why didn’t this guy revert back to the real world physics explanation of this, that his experiment showed that methane was lighter than air and would pool in a layer at the ceiling? Because the fiction meme is so ingrained the real reason can’t be comprehended. You’ve, generic, lost ‘the picture’ of the real world. There’s an ocean of fluid gas above us, our atmosphere, pressing down on us. It’s not empty space. Wind is volumes of this on the move.
Same here with the heat from the Sun. You’ve taken out the real heat which comes direct to us on Earth from the Sun! Light is not the Sun’s Heat energy, Light ain’t going to keep you warm on a cold winters night. The same invisible thermal infrared heat we get from a fire is what will warm you up. What a travesty.
You all really need to step back into reality. It’s here you’ll find the missing heat.
And then you can bring in convection..
And, I’ve shown how this is a well organised con, by the comparison of the NASA pages.
I can only hope that one of you arguing ‘climate science’ will take this on board, how hard can it be to bring thermal infrared heat back in your next papers? Surely Trenberth will be delighted you’ve found it for him?
Jesse Fell says:
September 8, 2011 at 7:35 am
Manfred, You write that there are hundreds of peer reviewed papers opposing IPCC “wisdom”. Where would be a good place to find these articles?
Provided, of course, that these articles exist.
———–
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/15/reference-450-skeptical-peer-reviewed-papers/
http://www.thegwpf.org/science-news/2816-900-peer-reviewed-papers-supporting-skepticism-of-qman-madeq-global-warming-agw-alarm.html
and numerous papers rejected by climategate affiliated reviewers uncounted.
Myrrh says:
September 8, 2011 at 12:41 pm
“If a body absorbs photons of any wavelength whatsoever, that body is heated as the energy of the photons is transferred to the body.”
Sigh. Why do all buy into this meme?
Because that is the way nature works. Even Herschel knew this when he discovered infrared radiation in 1800: http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/classroom_activities/herschel_bio.html
Myrrh says:
September 8, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Sigh. Why do all buy into this meme?
Hey Myrrh, you bought any of that window film which blocks 95% of IR and 30% of visible but still transmits 44% of the solar energy yet?
Uh, pointing out the obvious I guess, Leif, but Herschel used bulbs in his experiment, which have a fixed volume. It only matters if you are looking at temperature instead of energy, but temperature is sort of the general concern…
Mark
Shrug, well, at least Herschel found it, which is more than you’ve managed to do.
Now show me a modern up to date reading of the temperatures of the visible range and the invisible.
And what on earth are you babbling about tallbloke? In the real world there are industries involved in actually making and selling and profitting by, because they work, screenings on windows to keep out heat, thermal infrared. In your fantasy world, thermal infrared doesn’t make it through your ‘greenhouse glass’ atmosphere..
..regardless that it’s the actual HEAT energy on the move we feel from the Sun.., so we know it does.
Don’t shoot the messenger.
I can only suggest that you spend some time at looking around the market place at lights, especially those for plant growing, which also knowing that water is a great absorber of thermal energy makes lights that will give the blues and reds necessary for growth and chemical uses of their energies and take out the thermal infrared by cooling it off with water SO THEY DON’T BOIL. Look at the bulbs produced to give maximum light and minimal heat, LED’s. As long as you believe the AGWScience Fiction meme that Light is Heat, that you continue to reject they have deliberately swapped the properties, you won’t make any sense of the industries around you anymore than you’re making sense of the climate ‘energy’ budget.
Forget it, I’ve given you enough examples. If you can’t grasp scale of energies and so the difference between electronic transitions on electron scale and resonant vibration on molecular then all ‘absorption’ will continue to be the same for you, and in general that different properties have different characteristics, it’s a bit pointless to argue about it. I’m about to switch off the light in my study, the non-thermal visible which does not feel hot because it does not heat me, will stop, the invisible thermal infrared radiated heat will keep going for a while until the bulb cools down, I’ll still be able to feel it.
In the real world. Come on, I’ve given you industry uses viable because they know the difference, they even build saunas heating the person with thermal infrared because the body absorbs it, high water content, give me proof that blue visible electromagnetic energy as from the Sun can heat water. You can’t, you won’t find it anywhere because it can’t. So you don’t get the difference between reflective and absorptive.
Short wave electromagnetic from the Sun creating heat, Light heating the Earth, turning physics upside down – who came up with that meme? But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Fight back.
Get real, the invisible heat we feel direct from the Sun is thermal infrared, if we can feel it then it is reaching Earth’s surface. Until you put it back into the ‘energy’ budget…
Myrrh says:
September 8, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Get real, the invisible heat we feel direct from the Sun is thermal infrared, if we can feel it then it is reaching Earth’s surface.
Most of the energy that is absorbed by the Earth is in the visible, because that is where the energy is. You are misunderstanding the issue by thinking about what you feel. The feeling has to do with how deep into your body the radiation penetrates and infrared penetrates deeper so you feel it more. In general, the longer the wave length, the more transparent your body is. Radio waves go straight through you, for example. All of this has been know for many decades, even centuries. There is no conspiracy trying to keep ‘the truth’ from you.
mark t says:
September 8, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Uh, pointing out the obvious I guess, Leif, but Herschel used bulbs in his experiment, which have a fixed volume.
‘Fixed Volume’ has nothing to do with anything. Here you can learn more about thermometers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermometer
Myrrh says:
September 8, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Short wave electromagnetic from the Sun creating heat, Light heating the Earth, turning physics upside down – who came up with that meme? But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Heating occurs when energy of any wavelength is absorbed by a medium, so light heats the ground because the ground is not transparent. You do not need to fool all the people, just yourself. No wonder skepticism has a hard time getting the upper hand: with friends like you, who needs enemies.
With your kind of arguments one might also believe that candles do not emit light, but rather suck up the dark, to wit: the wick becomes black.
Myrrh says:
September 8, 2011 at 5:26 pm
And what on earth are you babbling about tallbloke? In the real world there are industries involved in actually making and selling and profitting by, because they work, screenings on windows to keep out heat, thermal infrared. In your fantasy world, thermal infrared doesn’t make it through your ‘greenhouse glass’ atmosphere..
Don’t shoot the messenger.
I already explained to you on the radiating the ocean thread that around half the heat content of the ocean is due to absorbed visible and half due to near IR. Longer wavelengths do not penetrate water so ‘back radiation’ from the atmosphere doesn’t heat the bulk of the ocean. A substantial amount of the near IR wavelengths from the Sun are absorbed in the atmosphere however, where there is lots of water in very finely divided quantities.
I’m not shooting the messenger, I’m patiently trying to tell him the directions to where he’s taking his message, because he keeps ending up in a blind alley.
Because you keep using the AGWScience Fiction premise that has given the properties of thermal energy to visible you keep getting confused by words like ‘absorption’ and ‘penetration’. Water is a great absorber of thermal infrared radiation. It moves the molecules into vibration because of resonant matching. What is the problem here? You can’t even see the disjunct in your own premises.
The water in clouds is trapping heat from the upwelling thermal ir from the Earth, that’s because of the water content, right? Or have you got some other explanation? Actually, I don’t recall this bit as explained, but that’s par for the course in AGWScience Fiction Inc’s memes, they miss bits out so connections are harder to spot.
But if you do admit in AGWSF that the water in clouds is that which absorbs thermal infrared from the upwelling, how do you account for it not doing this to the thermal infrared downwelling direct from the Sun, and ditto heating the oceans? For that you have to go to yet another false meme with no reality in real world physics, that the thermal infrared from the Sun doesn’t reach the Earth’s surface.
And here’s where I’ve already pointed out this disjunct in the NASA example, traditional teaching is being obliterated and that meme is being given as a real world physical fact. This is a con. All I’m doing here is pointing out how they’ve done it, the sleight of hand.
And, I really don’t know what more I can say here, you keep arguing back with AGWScience memes which twist the properties of the world around you and reject all the examples of this manipulation, that I’ve found. You continue to argue using words like ‘absorb’ and ‘penetration’ in the deliberately created confusion from these memes. And, you won’t do the one thing I’ve been asking you, generic, to do to back up your claims. Give me some actual proof, physical actual that blue visible light from the Sun can heat water. Use LED or something. Until you can grasp that this isn’t a thermal energy like longwave infrared which does have the power to move water molecules into vibration to convert to heat, we’ll keep going round in circles.
I expect better engagement in this from people on a science blog. I’ve given you mechanisms from real physics which show how the different electromagnetic waves operate, I’ve given you explanations from the well known and understood physics of light and reflection in optics, I’ve given you industries which understand the difference in properties and how to use them for which your fictional science can’t explain. Your fictional science can’t explain how solar panels work.. I’ve given you examples of the deliberately introduced changes of the fictional science introduced into the education system. I’ve given you examples of real world properties, tried and tested, and internally coherent in properties and processes, effects. You’ve come back with nothing that makes even a smidgin of sense against all this.
At least the AGWscientist who was told that gases do separate out in our atmosphere and being given the example of methane in a mine separating out to layer at the ceiling because lighter than air, went out and tested it. Kudos.
That he still tried to find another reason for his failure to prove traditional teaching wrong, scrabbling around to find something to fit in with his fictional science meme, is understandable, it’s what you’re doing here, it’s that firmly ingrained in some through the mis-education from AGW manipulation. That what he found fully fitted in with the traditional physics understanding, internally coherent, of the properties of gases, could have been the first step back through the mirror from the impossible fictional worlds Alice found, where AGWScience Fiction Inc’s memes are generated.
Anyway, I’m not going through any more explanations, you’ll just have to think about what I’ve said so far and make up your own minds, and I’m still waiting for you to prove that blue visible from the sun heats water, but for this discussion:
The invisible heat on the move energy we feel from the Sun is thermal infrared, the AGWScience fiction claim is that this doesn’t reach Earth directly from the Sun, which is contrary to internally coherent traditional physics teaching and contrary to our observations, this must be put back into the energy budget. The missing heat you’ve all been looking for, the travesty is that AGWScience Fiction Inc has corrupted the physics by taking it out*.
Then, that directed, directional from the Sun taking 8 minutes to reach us, powerful heat energy is of a different order from the ambient thermal infrared upwelling from the heated Earth, which is around the same in micron terms as we radiate out, so, the arguments re clouds has to take this into consideration. The direct thermal infrared downwelling from the Sun can be trapped by clouds, preventing it from reaching the surface.
The reflected visible from the top of the clouds will only be cooling as a secondary effect, for example when plants having used it for the chemical process of photosynthesis in the primary use of its energies which do not create heat, but which would later create heat as the sugars made were burned by the plant for growth (at which time the heat is transpired away, water released from the plant carrying the heat away, just as we sweat to maintain working temps). The thermal infrared direct downwelling from the Sun will be to some extent or other prevented from reaching the surface in full force which, as its primary effect is direct heating of organic matter, will contribute to the cooling.
Much like our summer here, we’ve had a lot of cloud cover which has prevented much heat and light getting through and it has been the coldest for a couple of decades. When the clouds clear the Sun gives us our expected summer weather, the Sun’s there, but we’ve not been getting it. The plants around which flower later, summer flowering, have been doing badly, the earlier spring flowering were fine, lots of light and heat. Maybe this has something to do with all the volcanic activity from Iceland, (still ongoing?). The harvest in england and ireland poor and delayed. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0901/1224303293783.html
*It has to corrupt the physics to sell its concept of AGW, so it limits what it allows you to think about. So by the false claim that thermal infrared direct from the Sun doesn’t reach earth you’re arguing on a premise that is fantasy, that shortwave heats the land and oceans and the only thermal ir is in the upwelling from this, which gives you only upwelling thermal ir to argue about..
@ur momisugly LazyTeenager says:
September 6, 2011 at 3:28 pm
Lazy T, if you are still following this thread I have some links to solar standards and GHG DLR papers that will be of assistance to show the distinction but if I get no response from you I won’t bother going through with the exercise here (and it’s late now in NZ so I’m not doing it tonight anyway).
FWIW (others that may be reading this), I’ve been investigating heating effect in the context of geologic materials and “Earth’s global energy budget” Trenberth, Fasullo and Kiehl 2009 here:-
http://www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz/2011/08/just-one-fact/#comment-64413
Anyone wanting to pursue that topic is welcome to check in. It’s a work in progress and I’m not an expert so there will be errors (corrected in following comments as much as I can) but think I go beyond what climate science does by looking for answers in other disciplines (e.g. medical physics and radiology which is probably about one or two light-years ahead of climate science in respect to radiation and have a parallel set of terminology: the solar spectrum is “low” linear energy transfer (LET) radiation and penetration is “track length”. Obviously they are more interested in ionizing radiation than non-ionizing.
# Myrrh says:
September 9, 2011 at 2:56 am
I been trying to read all comments top down in this thread and have not caught up with all the discussion leading up to this so I apologize if what follows has already been raked over.
Blue light by itself will not have power of sufficient intensity to do much water heating and neither will any other narrow band of radiated solar energy, but concentrate a range of the spectrum say with a magnifying glass and different story.
I think you are fixated on what is more a convention than a fact i.e. Nr IR is useful as a heating agent but regarding it as “heat” is a misnomer. Heat is only manifest in the material that is intercepted by the radiation so any industrial or commercial application (sauna’s, food) is tuned to the materials with power intensity sufficient to be effective.
Here’s proof that a part of the solar spectrum other than infrared is a heating agent. I live in New Zealand where UV levels are among the highest in the world mid-summer (often described as “harsh” by surprised foreigners and some locals too). Being of light skin I can attest to the heating effects of UV and can discern when the UVB kicks in (between 11am and 4pm) So it is the characteristics of the material being irradiated that are important and in the case of UV, the heating effects on skin of UVA and UVB are quite different, see here:-
Understanding UVA and UVB
http://www.skincancer.org/understanding-uva-and-uvb.html
So here we have radiation from the solar spectrum other than infrared having real heating effect to the extent that it burns my skin. I would not incur the same injury if exposed to solar infrared for the same period as I would if exposed to ultraviolet.
Neither do I get burnt by exposure to GHG DLR at night but Trenberth, Fasullo and Kiehl make no distinction in their Earth’s Energy Budget diagram where they ascribe 161 W.m2 to solar SW and 333 W.m2 to GHG DLR. as if they had the same heating effectiveness on materials respectively (e.g. water – duh!) and interchangeable by virtue of W.m2 units. In reality GHG DLR is a spent force in terms of heating effect and not comparable to direct or diffuse solar (an electrical analogy would be “apparent” power.- not “real” power i.e. it doesn’t “heat the earth” as AGW proponents so often inform us)
As with Lazy Teenager just up-thread, I invite you Myrrh to check in to the following thread to pursue this topic further.
http://www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz/2011/08/just-one-fact/#comment-64413
Manfred,
Thanks for the links to the “peer-reviewed” research articles. I haven’t had time to give the list and articles more than a cursory glance, but I do have a few observations:
1) It’s not at all clear that all of these articles debunk the AGW thesis as you maintain. For example, one article, published in Nature, begins: “The most important anthropogenic influences on climate are the emission of greenhouse gases1 and changes in land use, such as urbanization and agriculture2.” That is to say, forces other than green house gases can be working to change to climate — something that no one denies. Still, this article states that the emission of green house gases is one of the two most important anthropogenic influences on climate. I wonder how many other of these articles simply qualify, rather than debunk, the AGW thesis.
2) A number of articles are written by Patrick J. Michaels, whose misrepresentation of James Hansen’s testimony before Congress has fairly been described as “fraudulent” and “dishonest”. Michaels is not a top ranked scientist, either; Richard Lindzen once said the Michaels “doesn’t know physics, and he needs to.”
3) Other articles are by S. Fred Singer, whose theories lack a sound underpinning of physics altogether. Singer presents the sad case of a competent scientist turned crank.
4) Only a few of the articles were published in journals such as Nature, Science, and EOS — whose standards of peer-reviewing are well known and rigorous.
5)) Many of the articles were published in journals not devoted specifically to climate change and related issues. Are the editors of these journals competent to judge the quality of articles on subjects outside of their area of expertise?
6) Some of the articles are written by people who are not even climate scientists — such as the redoubtable Steven McIntyre.
So, all in all, this list strikes me as a good deal less impressive than you mean it to be. But I will continue to check it out.
Richard C (NZ) says:
September 9, 2011 at 6:43 am
# Myrrh says:
September 9, 2011 at 2:56 am
“Give me some actual proof, physical actual that blue visible light from the Sun can heat water.”
I been trying to read all comments top down in this thread and have not caught up with all the discussion leading up to this so I apologize if what follows has already been raked over.
I think you are fixated on what is more a convention than a fact ..
Apologies for splitting your paragraphs, but the change of emphasis is necessary for my reply.
What I am fixated about is the fact that AGWScience Fiction Inc, as my mnemonic for this phenomenon, is deliberately, and I think with malice aforethought, teaching that Light is Heat, as per KT97. This has two immediate effects, it is dumbing the education of the masses and it is keeping anti AGW’s caught in false arguments, because, it appears, no one else has noticed this change, this manipulation, of basic standard traditional, well-known, tried and tested, real world physics…
My discovery of this has been spread over several discussions, and now complicated to summerise. I think, the confusions are deliberately manufactured, by taking laws out of context, changing properties and processes and so on. The basic problem here, and what I am fixated about, is that thermal infrared, Heat, from the Sun has been taken out of the ‘energy budget’ as the ‘mechanism’ for heating the Earth’s land and oceans, and replaced by Light, a.k.a Solar/Sunlight/Visible. “Solar” is defined in the AGWSF energy budget as Visible and the two shortwaves either side of UV and NR IR, (one needs to be aware of the term ‘sunlight’ adding to the confusion), it is often shortened to ‘shortwave in, longwave out’. See, how complicated already.. all the asides and brackets needed to give a summary.
The ‘energy budget’ now taken as ‘real physics fact’ both by antis and pro AGW and is practically ingrained by this change of physics, from real to fiction, by the introduction of this AGW fiction physics meme that only shortwave, visible light from the sun, converts the land and oceans to heat, so raising the temperature of the Earth to give off longwave, thermal infrared. It is widely taught in schools and as can be seen here and all the discussions dealing with the ‘energy budget’, this is taken to be real physics fact. People, even scientists with PhD’s.., now think that Light from the Sun directly converts to heat the Earth’s land and oceans, and, that the real Heat from the Sun doesn’t even reach the Earth’s surface and plays no part directly heating the Earth’s land and oceans.
Descriptions and bringing into discussions how near IR and blue visible work are examples, I’m not fixated about these individually, I’m extremely concerned that the totality of the misunderstanding about these coming out of the basic change of physics has so dumbed down those believing it that they no longer have any real concept of the world around them – they live in a totally fictional world, and their arguments are about this totally fictional world, regardless they think they’re bringing in ‘real world’ facts and data to prove or disprove their arguments.
I’m concerned, therefore, that because the real understanding of physical properties has been turned upside down and jumbled up so completely that anyone, everyone, buying into the AGWScience Fiction Inc’s manufactured fictional physics, now no longer has any concept of how the world around us really works on a fundamental, basic, physical level. (The other area I’ve explored where this fictional physics has also been ingrained is in carbon dioxide, by saying it acts in our atmosphere as an ideal gas all kinds of ridiculous claims are made about it, won’t go further into this here, but they think the atmosphere around them is empty space with molecules rushing at great speeds through this actual empty space, therefore molecules of carbon dioxide diffuse immediately into the atmosphere where they get mixed up thoroughly and can’t be unmixed.., there is no appreciation of volume and weight of the fluid gaseous ocean of air above us, they can’t hear me.)
Blue light by itself will not have power of sufficient intensity to do much water heating and neither will any other narrow band of radiated solar energy, but concentrate a range of the spectrum say with a magnifying glass and different story.
Yeah.., I’ve had the ‘but lasars..’. There is a lack of comprehension about this firstly because the AGWSF meme is that visible light is ‘powerful’ because it is ‘high energy’ mistaking the heat creating it for its own, the ‘peak’ of power from the Sun – intensity isn’t understood, really, this is not understood, AGWSF has deliberately taken out all sense of scale and relationship between properties. I’ve tried to explain the difference in various ways, but the idea created by this meme of ‘peak energy’ is difficult to overturn because of the continuous bombardment of the false meme about it. So I get planckian diagrams thrown back at me as if that proves that ‘peak’ equals power to change to heat, because obviously to them, it is the peak of great power.. Even going down to electronic transitions on the electron scale and rotational vibrations on molecular differences between the properties is difficult to convey, because ‘absorbed’ to them means ‘heat is created’, and even if they accept that chemical changes, such as in photosynthesis, do not create heat, the other electronic translations resulting in light emissions only confuse them more, because they think light creates heat, that sunlight has the power to heat the oceans, that blue visible light because it ‘penetrates’ deeper before being ‘absorbed’ therefore heats the oceans deeper..
..then, if I say, but water is transparent to visible light and if you say that the atmosphere is transparent to visible light and therefore doesn’t heat it, how can you claim that visible light can be heating the oceans? Either it is not heating the oceans or visible light is heating the air, because electonic transitions is the way that visible light is scattered, which is when the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen absorb the light and send it back out again, reflection. Having no sense of scale, I get the water absorption diagram shown me, which I show to point out how visible is insignificant in absorption compared with the practically 100% absorption and ‘therefore heating’ of infrared.. In real physics the atmosphere is not transparent to visible light because reflection is shows absorption, on an electronic transition scale, and water is transparent to visible light because the molecules do not allow the visible to join in, it is delayed a bit as it tries and then passed on – this is called transmission, i.e. the opposite of absorption..
Do you see the problem?
…i.e. Nr IR is useful as a heating agent but regarding it as “heat” is a misnomer. Heat is only manifest in the material that is intercepted by the radiation so any industrial or commercial application (sauna’s, food) is tuned to the materials with power intensity sufficient to be effective.
Nr IR is not a thermal energy, it is not hot. We cannot feel it as hot anymore than we can feel Visible or UV as hot, it doesn’t have the power to move our molecules into vibration. The change from reflective to thermal infrared is difficult to pinpoint and different disciplines use their own for their convenience, and UV is, I’ve found, best avoided to bring my point across because that is immediately associated with ‘power to heat’, because we can get sunburned.. It doesn’t penetrate further than the first layer of our three layers of skin, before it is reflected back, near infrared can penetrate deeper before it is reflected back, visible inbetween these, near infrared cameras understand this… they take a picture of the reflected infrared bouncing off the subject just as visible cameras take pictures of the visible light bouncing off subjects. Thermal infrared cameras are different, they are measuring the heat radiating out from the subject, not light – light here puts near infrared into the same physics category as the other shortwave visible and uv, reflective not absorptive, the core difference between electronic transitions on the electron scale and vibrational resonance of molecules. Discussing these in any depth is often a distraction too far, it’s the actual simple concept of the difference between Visible and Heat energies from the Sun which has been overturned here, the properties of Heat from the Sun have been given to Visible. That is the key problem here, all else follows.
But as you say, “Blue light by itself will not have power of sufficient intensity to do much water heating and neither will any other narrow band of radiated solar energy”, therefore, it should be taken out of the ‘energy budget’ as it cannot be the primary heating mechanism of the Earth’s land and oceans.
The primary heating mechanism is the Heat radiated out from the Sun, this the invisible thermal infrared which is heat energy on the move. It is there flowing out from hot to cold around it whether anyone is able to receive or perceive it, or not. It takes eight minutes to get to us at the surface of the Earth, it has been taken out of the AGWSF ‘energy budget’, which the majority here, and now inculcated in the education system, take to be real world physics properties, not realising this is absolute made up fiction, creating a completely different world to the one we actually physically inhabit.
Visible light, in the real world’s energy budget, can certainly be included in the ‘thermal out’ through the intermediary of Life itself, for example via photosynthesis by the absorption of visible and the chemical not-heat-creating conversion into sugars using that visible energy and the next step of burning the sugar for life and in doing so releasing heat which is transpired by the plants, i.e., the plant releases the heat through releasing water – water being the great absorber of heat the plant ‘sweats’ it away.
So anyway, the first thing that has to be put right here is to give the Sun’s heat energy back to thermal infrared as the primary mechanism of converting land and oceans and us carbon life all to heat, the outgoing thermal infrared is a secondary heating of the atmosphere, it doesn’t carry the same uni-directional power as it does from the Sun direct to us, around 10 microns against the full spectrum of thermal from the Sun direct.
Next, this discussion is about role of clouds, the thermal infrared heat direct from the Sun will be trapped/blocked by clouds on the way down from the Sun, because clouds are water and water is the great absorber of thermal energy. It has the greatest heat capacity of the common atmosphere and earth stuff, that is, to ‘store’ heat – it takes longer to heat up and longer to cool down than nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide which have lower heat capacities, these heat up quicker and cool down quicker, and carbon dioxide even quicker than nitrogen and oxygen, practically instant. So, this has to be added to the cooling effect of clouds on the Earth because when not being heated by the Sun this heat will also be to colder (and the colder the quicker so up rather than down). Also bearing in mind here the weird and wonderful properties of water, it can store more energy than appears as heat, somewhere I posted a link about that, can’t remember off hand, and of course anyway, clouds as the primary agent of cooling the Earth in the Water Cycle, the Earth would be 67°C without the water vapour taking away the heat, so that’s on the first to do list.
That’s really important, the AGWSF meme has taken the primary cooling of the Earth via the greenhouse gas water vapour out of the ‘energy budget’ entirely, just as it has by taking out the primary heat in mechansim of the thermal infrared. The two primary regulatory mechanisms of heat in and cold out both deliberately excluded. None of the rest is going to make any kind of sense until we can get these arguments out of the AGWScience Fiction trap creating an alternative word, and back to our real physical reality.
Thanks for your site link, I’ll take a look over the weekend.
Richard – I’ve posted a link to your page of my previous post and some extracts from it. I’ve also added this:
I’ve given this page before in discussions, it has a presentation of the differences in the way UV/Visible (and therefore Near IR which is also in the reflective light category) and thermal energies work, some extracts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_and_translucency
“Mechanisms of selective light wave absorption include:
Electronic: Transitions in electron energy levels within the atom (e.g., pigments). These transitions are typically in the ultraviolet (UV) and/or visible portions of the spectrum.
Vibrational: Resonance in atomic/molecular vibrational modes. These transitions are typically in the infrared portion of the spectrum.
UV-Vis: Electronic transitions
When photons (individual packets of light energy) come in contact with the valence electrons of atom, one of several things can and will occur:
*An electron absorbs all of the energy of the photon and re-emits it with different color. This gives rise to luminescence, fluorescence and phosphorescence.
*An electron absorbs the energy of the photon and sends it back out the way it came in. This
results in reflection or scattering.
*An electron cannot absorb the energy of the photon and the photon continues on its path. This results in transmission (provided no other absorption mechanisms are active).
*An electron selectively absorbs a portion of the photon, and the remaining frequencies are transmitted in the form of spectral color.
[The second is what happens to visible in our atmosphere where we see the sky blue because reflected by the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen, it is briefly absorbed by the electron and then sent out again. The atmosphere therefore not transparent to visible. The third is what happens to visible in water, which is a transparent medium for visible, it is not absorbed but passed through, transmitted. We can see this effect in clear water and glass, the light is transmitted through and reflects back from whatever the water is covering.]
Infrared: Bond stretching
The primary physical mechanism for storing mechanical energy of motion in condensed matter is through heat, or thermal energy. Thermal energy manifests itself as energy of motion. Thus, heat is motion at the atomic and molecular levels. The primary mode of motion in crystalline substances is vibration. Any given atom will vibrate around some mean or average position within a crystalline structure, surrounded by its nearest neighbors.
When a light wave of a given frequency strikes a material with particles having the same or (resonant) vibrational frequencies, then those particles will absorb the energy of the light wave and transform it into thermal energy of vibrational motion.”
[This is how water absorbs thermal infrared. How our bodies are warmed up internally. This is different from UV, which does not warm us up because it doesn’t have the mechanism to do this, it is a light energy working on the electron level, not on the resonance vibrational. The body uses it for the chemical conversion of Vitamin D for example.]
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These are the primary differences between what is simply called in traditional physics, Heat and Light. “Sunlight” actually should refer to Light, the visible light from the Sun, and heat, to Heat, the invisible thermal infrared. This should be borne in mind when reading older discussion on the subject pre AGWScience Fiction manipulation. Since AGWSF there has also been an editing of older pages on the subject, by small tweaks such as using the word ‘sunlight’ ambiguously for example, when Sun would actually make physics sense and sunlight doesn’t. Wiki pages have such, and even the NASA page I’ve also referenced previously. It is too general a word to use in a physics explanation, saying that ‘all radiation from the Sun is light waves’ doesn’t cut it.. I’ve noticed it is used a lot in AGW story telling of physics and the effect is always confusion for those who do not know the difference and who believe the fiction meme that sunlight, which we all generally think of as visible, is heat from the Sun. Sad and deplorable.
I did a comparison of pre and post manipulation teaching about this on NASA pages. Can’t recall where I now posted it.. If I can find it again reasonably quickly I’ll post it here, otherwise I’ll post to your linked page.
Tracked it down.. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/28/spencer-and-braswell-on-slashdot/#comment-711886
From which the conclusion: “To put into science terms, if a new idea contradicting well known and understood and tried and tested real physics as taught traditionally is being promoted, then the promoters must provide proof that the traditional teaching is wrong and the new idea right. Eliminating the traditional teaching from the education system does not constitute proof…”
I’ve narrowed this down to requesting proof that blue visible light from the Sun can heat water, because if this cannot be shown by properties and process and observation then it cannot be converting to heat the oceans of the Earth. I know they can’t.., but hopefully it will trigger at least some to explore and think it through themselves.