With apologies to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, here’s a a comment worth repeating from the Hit and Misses thread.
What I find interesting about the entire email corpus is the focus on the minutia of the statistics and the different proxies. In none of the emails from the core team members do we see any physics of radiation. It seems that if it were your role to “prove” the positive feedback of CO2 you would want to actually do some physics of radiative and convective transfer of energy in the atmosphere. This is where the rubber meets the road.
It seems that the entire consensus group have taken an assumption (positive feedback of CO2 increase) and are going deeper and deeper into the details of the proxies in order to show what the results of their assumption are.
I think that this is why as a discipline, more and more physicists are dismissing AGW.
Dr Burns says:
November 26, 2011 at 11:09 pm
Incorrect start – most of Australia don’t read the SNH.
Wider view at (e.g.) http://blogs.news.com.au/couriermail/andrewbolt/
However, isn’t there so much heterogeneity of CO2 content in the atmosphere that you’d come up with all sorts of results, but what would it show for certain except there’s heterogeneity of CO2 content in the atmosphere?
The measurements would be of the bandpass of the spectrum of CO2. When an IR absorber like CO2 is absorbing energy at a certain concentration (the probability of the intercept of any particular IR photon is proportional to the statistics of cross sectional area of the gas but only at the wavelength that the molecule absorbs) the theory is that as CO2 concentrations increase the spread of the wavelengths that can be absorbed) Up until saturation this is pretty much a gaussian curve centered at the wavelength of the vibrational mode under study. Where it gets interesting is when the gaussian shape is shifted to a Lorentzian shape due to increasing pressure, temperature, and concentration in the atmosphere. The Lorenz shape has the “wings” of absorption which is a further broadening of the gaussian probability of the intercept of an IR photon.
At the end of the day, this is what the question is all about. How much is the gaussian/lorentz shape broadened due to an increase in concentration from 0.028% to 0.039% of the atmosphere as well as at what altitude does desaturation occur. As as altitude increases, pressure and temperature declines, which both have the effect (assuming a constant proportional partial pressure of CO2) of narrowing the absorption lines (like beginning to open a blind to let more light into a room) (the Lorentz/gaussian shape). When the desaturation altitude is reached the blinds (CO2 concentration is no longer high enough to stop all radiation at even the peak of the gaussian curve) become more transparent to the wavelength transiting. At what altitude does this occur for the CO2 bands that are fully saturated at sea level?.
In theory all of this was measured during the USAF high altitude research flights of the 40’s through 1960’s for the purpose of designing infrared heat seekers for antiaircraft missiles. I have a bit of the derived data as I bought a library from Morton Thiokol when they pulled out of Huntsville in the 1990’s and a lot of their technical data related to measuring the temperature of a rocket plume was all from IR sensors and so they had a lot of this literature. At some point this goes into the classified world but everything that I am talking about is available or known from public documents. I even have records of experiments done on sea level extinction coefficients for IR energy done in the 1930’s in China.
There is nothing that I am talking about here that has not been measured before, to high accuracy. To see where the differences are from then to now should be a fairly straightforward task.
To put this in proper context, I don’t know what the effect of CO2 is on the absorption spectra of CO2 and then what that effect is on the climate, and damned if anyone from the consensus climate science community does either, that is the point!
It is absolutely possible to get direct quantitive and qualitative data on the subject (as it was 50 years ago) and why this is not being done and why the climate alchemists continue to be funded to the exclusion of physical scientists and relied upon for their analysis of bug farts and tree rings is simply another indication of the rot in public policy these days.
The best part of this is that it is 100% replicable by any competent scientist in the field with fairly modest resources. The even better part is that it is possible that we still have the direct field data from an era when the scientists say that is good (CO2 at a concentration of less than 300 ppm). I have been working with data from the 1960’s (Lunar Orbiter and Nimbus I,II, and II) for several years now and our fathers and grandfathers were damned good experimental scientists and we should be able to do the proper comparative analysis. We found ourselves that if you go behind the derived product data to the original, that it is highly likely that it is of higher quality that the derived products.
Until the analysis of the direct data is undertaken and we quit fooling around with the proxies, we are never going to gain an accurate understanding of the issue.
Re email servers:
It is highly likely that a single unix server was used for email with people using desktop clients (eg outlook or similar) to pull from that.
NOW the thing about such email servers is that they can EASILY be set up to place a COPY of EVERY email passing through into a continuous stream file – this is simply a file the can be used later as an audit trail. The users of the system do not even know that every email sent and received has had a copy stashed. Pulling such a file apart later is a tedious and boring process, but quite possible.
My speculation is that this is what has happened.
Guys – in all seriousness, consult the initial testimony of the UEA IT staff on this back in 2009:
http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/MR%2018%20Dec%20final%20IT%20Personnel.pdf
One of the IT staff states confidently that it was a “sophisticated hack” but provides no evidence.
However most of the other participants treat the possibility of a leak very seriously.
Now I know there are many other computing types here other than me, including some that have also provided network support commercially – read this testimony; what do you see?
My reaction now is the same as it was when I first read this report nearly two years ago:
i) The CRU IT infrastructure is (was) nothing short of crazy with unaccounted for data and means for access to it scattered all over the place.
ii) Imagine an external hacker footprinting that mess? I’m not even sure it would be possible without intimate knowledge of the internal workings of CRU and especially its scattered IT “policy”.
Given the technology available to individual citizens over the counter compared to what was available in the 1930’s, I would think this would be a doable experiment for a private citizen with access to an airplane. What altitude are we talking about? Would a balloon be able to perform the required data collection? What about a sounding rocket launched from, say, the Black Rock desert?
And to be honest, if this were so simple an experiment to perform, and if it were to validate the AGW I would assume that it would have been done and published. My guess from the fact that it hasn’t been published is that maybe it has been done but didn’t validate the hypothesis and so has been suppressed.
Hehe, re: backup server
Maybe that explains why 0626.txt is in this batch.
@kim2ooo says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:55 pm
….”Soooooooo…. Paleontology – ” paleoclimates” doesn’t / don’t need /require physics? AND modelers do?
I think you have this bassaskwards :)”
Everyone needs physics!!!!! 🙂
By the way, Mr. Mann started out Yale grad. school in Theoretical Nuclear Physics prior to switching over to geophysics dept.
the point of 0626 being in this batch might be a message: “I got a lot more than just your email, folks, I have everything on your computers … code, drafts, data, Pr0n, everything.
“Ian W says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:57 pm
To that you have to add that as water vapor (feedback?) increases as a percentage of a volume of air so the enthalpy of that volume increases. So the heat energy required to raise that volume of air increases by up to ~10 times.”
This is too high. The percent water vapor in the atmosphere can vary from close to 0% to about 4%. The specific heat capacity of air is 1.0. Let us assume the specific heat capacity of water vapor is 2.0. So if the air has 4% water vapor, the average specific heat capacity is 1.04. I know the molar mass of water is 18 and not 29, but if we just assume they are the same, then the mass of the atmosphere with 4% water vapor is 4% larger than if there is 0% water vapor. (I am also generously assuming water vapor exists evenly throughout the atmosphere and does not condense out.) Then applying mct(moist air) = mct(dry air), we find that the mc for the moist air is 8% larger than for dry air. So to balance things out, the dry air has to have a temperature change that is 8% larger than the moist air. In other words, if moist air goes up by 1.00 degrees C, the dry air, with the same energy input, would go up by 1.08 degrees C. So unless I am missing something, I would say the difference is 8% at the most.
I suggest that you check your assumptions about saturated air and read http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/enthalpy-moist-air-d_683.html and use the formulae there
“Dennis Ray Wingo says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:57 pm … ”
Thank You… Comment of the year for me. Sums it all up, succinctly and definitively. When there are billions, nay, hundreds of billions of dollars being extracted from global tax-payers because of AGW, there is no excuse for failing to do what you suggest. Donning my tinfoil hat, I can only come up with one reason. There is a conspiracy to prevent the truth of the matter being conclusively known.
@ur momisugly Katabasis
http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/MR%2018%20Dec%20final%20IT%20Personnel.pdf
Interesting. What about that part how BBC evidently knew before the leak OR realClimate? (Nov 12)
They should follow Occam’s razor, 1) simple inside leak, or 2) very sophisticated unbelivable hack…. inside leak.
Until those 5,000 ppm of CO2 in Martian atmosphere does not create any measurable “greenhouse effect”, that 100 ppm of allegedly anthropogenic one should be beyond serious discussion. We have plenty of natural mechanisms to be blamed for both warming or cooling.
Anthony, shouldn’t it be “steenkin” instead of “steekin” in the title? 😉
[Fixed, thanks. ~dbs]
Steven Mosher,
I have enjoyed your contribution to the debate for a number of years, but your recent decent into condescending arrogance in defence of your “lukewarmism” is wearing very thin with me as well.
davidmhoffer is quite correct in his response to your defence of rattus, it is BS.
Perhaps you should emulate bender (who always had a point when he was being acerbic)
and take some time to regain your composure.
crosspatch, tried that. It seems they don’t want this particular mission creep.
“In other words, if there existed a correlation between church of England attendance and the temperature record over a cherry picked calibration period, they could not resist including it in their reconstructions. ”
Or, perhaps, pirates?
http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/
Personally, I am paying careful attention to this. Global temperatures, as we all know, have peskily refused to go up for the last 12-13 years (since the 1998 peak) and are very likely actually edging down. Now they COULD be following the solar cycle — the 20th century represented a 9000 year Grand Maximum peak in solar activity, according to the proxy record as (re)published on the solar archives site, and the sun appears to be returning to its “normal” much less active state. However, conceptually this involves the use of all of that pesky physics (including the numerous bits that we haven’t really worked out yet or don’t correctly include in the GCMs). Or, it COULD be that the effect of the recent growth in the number of pirates especially from Somalia is finally being felt and we are being pulled back from the brink of disaster.
It’s enough to make me want to take my boat out to sea with a jolly roger flying overhead and see if I can pillage a dinghy or two. We all need to do our duty here. If only we could get the IPCC to see — the correlation between global temperatures and the number of pirates is far too strong to be “just chance”. If we could get a number of countries in the developing world to convert their legitimate navies in to privateers and outright pirates, I am certain that the effects on global temperature would be immediate and profound, especially if the next solar cycle continues to regress towards the mean or even overshoots to a Grand Minimum a la Maunder minimum.
Just remember, it is pirates, not the sun, or CO_2, or space aliens, or the solar system moving through bands of diffuse dark matter that cause a distributed local heating through physical mechanisms not yet well understood.
rgb
Uhm, those people are paleo scientists.
“The oft attributed phrase “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” is as corrupted and false as Michael Mann’s infamous ‘hockey stick’ ”
Or rather, it is the correct quote of the JOKE misquote from Blazing Saddles, which was a very different context…;-)
steven mosher says:
November 26, 2011 at 8:05 pm
“paleo climate does in fact help us constrain the boundaries of the ECR.”
The climate is never at equilibrium. It is continually being juked around by innumerable inside and outside influences. ECR (Equilibrium Climate Response) is simply an attempt by the AGW ignoramuses to claim that the paleo temperature range is due only to CO2.
@Dennis Ray Wingo:
Would this experiment be easier to perform in the lab?
Say a 10m tube, energy emitter at one end, temperature sensors and spectral receivers at the other end.
Vary the energy source, pressure and the tube contents (CO2 and water vapour etc).
We would then have a repeatable measure of CO2 absorption in a variety of atmospheres.
Field studies could constructed to use balloons to measure CO2 and water vapour etc values for every 1000 feet of altitude (by taking samples).
Ok so I saw the passworrd protected folders mentioned here, and it occurred to me that perhaps the reason FOIA has released the email the way it has because the folders were password protected one inside another, and they caked the first password two years ago and then this one now, but they gave up on the next one and so released it too in the hope that someone would be able to crack it. I know this is off topic but I just had that thought when someone on this thread mentioned the password folders.
99 comments and only one (by Davidson) states the obvious? “The team” doesn’t use physics because the physics contradicts their thesis.
Speedy Mannzales?
Dennis Ray Wingo @ur momisugly Nov 27, 1:18 am
“At the end of the day, this is what the question is all about. How much is the gaussian/lorentz shape broadened due to an increase in concentration from 0.028% to 0.039% of the atmosphere as well as at what altitude does desaturation occur. As as altitude increases, pressure and temperature declines, which both have the effect (assuming a constant proportional partial pressure of CO2) of narrowing the absorption lines (like beginning to open a blind to let more light into a room) (the Lorentz/gaussian shape). When the desaturation altitude is reached the blinds (CO2 concentration is no longer high enough to stop all radiation at even the peak of the gaussian curve) become more transparent to the wavelength transiting. At what altitude does this occur for the CO2 bands that are fully saturated at sea level?.”
This touches on another important point that I never see addressed. As CO2 concentrations increase, the absorption of IR at ground level only increases logarithmically since the principal spectral lines are all saturated and only the wings and very weak lines come into play. But at the altitude you describe as “the blinds become transparent” the radiation to space by the CO2 increases linearly with concentration since it will always occur from the strongest spectral lines. The net effect should be extra cooling of the atmosphere, not extra heating.