From New Zealand Climate Change, this goes beyond “noble cause corruption”. This is outright malicious interference with the scientific process, and it’s damned ugly. I can’t imagine anyone involved in professional science who could stand idly by and not condemn this.
– Anthony
Climategate 2 and Corruption of Peer Review
The post here is a follow-up from my last post on some Climategate 2 emails, which I have tied together into a kind of narrative. Why should you read this? It is very simple. There are plenty of articles, views etc. out there claiming that the climategate 2 emails are being taken out of context. I have also seen Phil Jones has been saying that it is just the normal ‘to and fro’ of normal scientists going about their business etc. etc.
This is most certainly not the case in the emails that follow. There really is no hiding place for the authors, and no ambiguity. The emails will track how annoyance at the publication of a ‘contrary’ article in a journal develops into an attack on the editor, Chris de Freitas, an accomplished scientist. The attack includes a plot to see if they can get him sacked from his job at University of Auckland. Within the story, it is evident exactly what kind of ‘scientists’ the key authors are. The word scientist applied to these people has denigrated the meaning of the word.
Amongst those involved are Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Jim Salinger, Tom Wigley, Barrie Pittock, Mike Hulme + others. In addition Pachauri, the head of the IPCC is copied into many of the emails, meaning that he was fully aware that some of the key scientists in the IPCC were effectively out of control.
The post is very long, but please stick with it. The story unfolds, and is worth the effort if you really want to see what is going on. When quoting the emails, I do so minus annoying symbols such as >>>. Where I am commenting within the email text, I place the text as [this is my comments], and any bold text is my emphasis.
The starting point is email 2683, from 12 April 2003 when there is grumbling about a paper by Soon & Baliunas (S&B) published in the journal Climate Research (abreviated to CR in the emails). There is some discussion of the S&B study, and Mike Hulme discusses the potential of the paper on the thoughts of policymakers with Barrie Pittock:
Yes, this paper has hit the streets here also through the London Sunday Telegraph. Phil Jones and Keith Briffa are pretty annoyed, and there has been correspondence across the Atlantic with Tom Crowley and Ray Bradley. There has been some talk of a formal response but not sure where it has got to. Phil and Keith are really the experts here so I would leave that to them. Your blow by blow account of what they have done prompts me again to consider my position with Climate Research, the journal for whom I remain a review editor. So are people like Tim Carter, Nigel Arnell, Simon Shackley, Rob Wilby and Clare Goodess, colleagues whom I know well and who might also be horrified at this latest piece of primary school science that Chris de Freitas from New Zealand has let through (there are a good number of other examples in recent years and Wolfgang Cramer resigned from Climate Research 4 years ago because of it).
I might well alert these other colleagues to the crap science CR continues to publish because of de Freitas and see whether a collective mass resignation is appropriate. Phil Jones, I believe, is already boycotting reviews for that journal.
The first point to note is their concern is as much about the impact upon policy as it is about the science. This will become important for setting the context for the progressive process in which they eventually seek to destroy the career of the offending editor.We then get a response from Salinger, in response to Pittock’s call for someone to ‘take up the gauntlet’:
Dear Mike, Barrie, Neville et al
Saturday morning here and thanks for all your efforts. I note the reference to Chris de Freitas. Chris writes very voluminously to the NZ media and right wing business community often recycling the arguments of sceptics run overseas, which have been put to bed.
I, personally would support any of these actions you are proposing particularly if CR continues to publish dishonest or biased science. This introduces a new facet to the publication of science and we should maybe have a panel that ‘reviews the editors’. Otherwise we have the development of shonkey editors who then manipulate the editing to get papers with specific views published. Note the
immediacy that the right wing media (probably planned) used the opportunity!
Your views appreciated – but I can certainly provide a dossier on the writings of Chris in the media in New Zealand.
There are several points of note here. First of all, the positioning of de Freitas as being part of a right-wing, and there is even suggestion of a conspiracy. Finally, just to demonstrate that de Freitas is an ‘outsider’, Salinger will produce the evidence. Having a different view, it seems, is condemnation. Pittock then responds to Salinger:
Thanks for your comments and suggestions. I hope the co-editors of ‘Climate Research’ can agree on some joint action. I know that Peter Whetton is one who is concerned. Any action must of course be effective and also not give the sceptics an excuse for making de Freitas appear as a martyr – the charge should surely be not following scientific standards of review, rather than publishing contrarian views as such. If a paper is contested by referees that should at least be stated in any publication, and minimal standards of statistical treatment, honesty and clarity should be insisted on. Bringing the journal and publisher into disrepute may be one reasonable charge.
‘Energy and Environment’ is another journal with low standards for sceptics, but if my recollection is correct this is implicit in their stated policy of stirring different points of view – the real test for both journals may be whether they are prepared to publish refutations, especially simultaneously with the sceptics’ papers so that readers are not deceived.
On that score you might consider whether it is possible to find who de Freitas got to review various papers and how their comments were dealt with. I heard second hand that Tom Wigley was very annoyed about a paper which gave very low projections of future warmings (I forget which paper, but it was in a recent issue) got through despite strong criticism from him as a reviewer.
Here we have our first indications that de Freitas may be about to face problems.
Excerpts:
People with bona fide scientific background should not review articles, as they might actually accept them for publication.
…
… is it not partially the responsibility of climate science to make sure only satisfactorily [agreeing with their views] peer-reviewed science appears in scientific publications?
…
We Australasians (including Tom as an ex pat) have suggested some courses of action. Over to you now in the north to assess the success of your initiatives, the various discussions and suggestions and arrive on a path ahead. I am happy to be part of it.
Again, good science is the science that agrees with their own views. Bad science is to take an opposing view. ‘Purity of science’ is taken to mean ‘agreeing with my views’. Again, this is disturbing, but more disturbing is the moral righteousness that leads towards the comment that Salinger is happy to be part of it.
…
Also assessing copyright as the ‘other’ Soon/Baliunas paper in Energy and Env. is essentially the same as that in CR. Hans wanted to try this first, but didn’t want to tell all what he was doing. Fears a backlash if de Freitas gets removed without due cause. So let’s all try and keep the emails down, and hope we can report something to all once the correspondence Hans initiates gets replies.
Here, they are trying to get de Freitas through other means, which is copyright violation.
…
This is all very tragic. I will, if I have time, try to finish the story, or others may want to take it forwards if they have the time or inclination. What I do know is that this particular case appears to be one of the most clear and damning I have yet seen with regards to the ‘team’ seeking to stifle debate, and ultimately destroy the scientific process. It is just all the more shocking for the tribalistic hounding of Chris de Freitas.
Read the full article here.
If you would like to see the next section of the story, it can be found here. It is even more damning, an excerpt:
email 4808.
Phil Jones is following up on the email of Mann, in which he proposes writing a letter to the other editors of Climate Resarch, asking for the editors to resign in protest at de Freitas being an editor.
Did anything ever come of this? [the email to the CR editors]
Clare Goodness was in touch w/ me indicating that she had discussed the matter w/ Von Storch, and that DeFrietas would be relieved of his position. However, I haven’t heard anything. A large segment of the community I’ve been in contact with feels that this event has already done its damage, allowing Baliunas and colleagues to attempt to impact U.S. governmental policy, w/ this new weapon in hand–the appearance of a legitimate peer-reviewed document challenging some core assertions of IPCC to wave in congress. They appear to be making some headway in using this to influence U.S. policy, which makes our original discussions all the more pressing now.
In this context, it seems important that either Clare and Von Storch take imminent action on this, or else actions of the sort you had mentioned below should perhaps be strongly considered again. Non-action or slow action here could be extremely damaging.I’ll forward you some emails which will indicate the damage that the publication has already caused.
Thanks very much for all your help w/ this to date, and for anything additional you may be able to do in this regard to move this forward.
UPDATE: Dr. Chris de Freitas has responded here, well worth a read.
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Joel Shore said:
“How hard is it to understand that there is not simply one altitude but it depends on wavelength…very sensitively in fact. And, even then, of course, what you have is a probabilistic distribution function showing the probability vs. height of emission (and angle of emission…unless you integrate over angle) that a photon could escape to space without being absorbed again.”
Hard enough that not you or anyone else has been able to explain how ten, one hundred, one thousand, or even >900, 000 ppm additional CO2 in a planet’s atmosphere will predictably and, measurably affect its surface temperature.
Regarding lapse rate, you are the ones who are violating energy conservation by starting your hypothesis by assuming there would be an isothermal troposphere absent radiative forcing.
The incomprehensible garbage you offer to explain lapse rate is where you and your
AGW cohorts, be they PhD’s or preschoolers, demonstrate some of your most arrogant ignorance of the the physical behavior of gasses; particularly the inseparable interdependence of their pressure and temperature, and the distribution of pressure and temperature that results when gas molecules are pressurized by acceleration. While this may be rocket science, it is not at all new, and also unlike your hypothesis, it has been demonstrated to be true. I suggest you try looking into some fundamental physics, particularly fluid mechanics.
BigWaveDave says:
I have made no such assumption. I am not even sure what you mean about “absent radiative forcing”. If you mean that there is an assumption that there would be an isothermal atmosphere if the earth was in radiative balance (e.g., greenhouse gas concentrations and other forcings had been constant long enough for the earth to be in balance), nobody would make such a stupid assumption.
If you mean that there is an assumption that the troposphere would be isothermal if the atmosphere did not have any components in it that absorbed some of the IR radiation emitted from the earth’s surface, what the temperature distribution of the atmosphere would be in this case is irrelevant. The average surface temperature would be constrained by the condition that the surface would have to radiate back out into space only as much radiation as it absorbs from the sun, which means it would be at least 33 C colder. That’s true regardless of the temperature distribution of the atmosphere that would result.
You descend into utter nonsense here. There is no unique relationship between temperature and pressure. The ideal gas law for a fixed number of molecules of gas involves 3 variables, pressure, density, and temperature. You can’t uniquely determine the temperature from the pressure. If you want to assume that the bottom part of the atmosphere is at the (appropriate) adiabatic lapse rate, that still does not get you the surface temperature, it only gets you the DIFFERENCE in temperature between two heights in this lower region of the atmosphere (which, in practice, we call the troposphere).
If you claim to be able to uniquely calculate the surface temperature on the basis of such simple thermodynamics / fluid mechanics, without reference to the radiative properties of the atmosphere, then by golly, why don’t you just do it (or at least describe in detail the method about which one goes about doing it in a way that makes it clear that it will give a unique answer)?
Joel Shore,
You say:
“f you mean that there is an assumption that the troposphere would be isothermal if the atmosphere did not have any components in it that absorbed some of the IR radiation emitted from the earth’s surface, what the temperature distribution of the atmosphere would be in this case is irrelevant. The average surface temperature would be constrained by the condition that the surface would have to radiate back out into space only as much radiation as it absorbs from the sun, which means it would be at least 33 C colder. That’s true regardless of the temperature distribution of the atmosphere that would result.”
The question is what is the reason for the temperature lapse. I’m saying it is because the atmospheric pressure is highest at Earth’s surface. The average surface temperature has nothing to do with that.
“There is no unique relationship between temperature and pressure.”
I never said there was. did I? What I’m saying is that pressure affects temperature and temperature affects pressure, and both depend on the energy content.
I’m also saying that “Climate Science” has developed in ignorance of Fluid Mechanics.
I have explained above the reasons that the environmental lapse rate would be close to the adiabatic lapse rate in the bottom part of the atmosphere (i.e., that the adiabatic lapse rate represents the largest lapse rate one can have without becoming unstable to convection). So, now the answer to your question is to look at what determines the adiabatic lapse rate…and, indeed, it is determined by the fact that as a parcel of air rises up adiabatically through the atmosphere, it expands because the pressure decreases and as it expands its temperature drops (because by expanding it does positive work on the surrounding air). So, yes, the fact that pressure increases with height at a certain rate is what causes the temperature to decrease with height at a certain rate when the lapse rate is equal to the adiabatic lapse rate.
And, in doing so, you are betraying only your own ignorance about this field of science. Climate science is not ignorant of this…far from it. The adiabatic lapse rate is discussed in Chapter 2 of Ray Pierrehumbert’s “Principles of Planetary Climate” (and Chapter 2 is in some sense the first chapter since Chapter 1 is an overview of “The Big Questions”). It is in Appendix C of Dennis L Hartmann’s “Global Physical Climatology” and in Chapter 2 of Richard Goody’s “Principles of Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry”. These are the 3 textbooks that I happen to have…but if you can find a textbook covering the basics of climate science that does not have a discussion of the adiabatic lapse rate, I’d be quite surprised.
Joel Shore;
The pressure does not increase with height.
Are you totally ignorant the atmosphere, as well as fluid mechanics?.
Pierrehumbert in my humble opinion is a just another commie. Sad to see he’s at UC. Dennis L Hartmann is a lead IPCC author at the Durban meet, appears to be a kisser. In Goody’s book “All aspects of the lower and middle atmospheres, except for large-scale dynamics, are treated in a connected account as ultimate consequences of the solar radiation falling on the planet”, according to Amazon’s book description.
Any discussion of lapse rate that claims the lapse rate in the troposphere is due to radiative forcing as opposed to the pressure distribution by gravity in a compressible fluid is baseless.
I have found reasonable explanations of the physics in “Elementary Fluid Mechanics” by John K Vennard, “Handbook of Physics” by E. U. Condon and “The General Circulation of the Tropical Atmosphere and Interactions with Extratropical Latitudes” Vol.1 and Vol. 2 by Reginald E. Newell, John W. Kidson, Dayton G. Vincent and George J. Boer, to name a few.
Oh come on…That was a typo as is clear from the sentence before where I said it correctly in the context of a rising parcel of air. Don’t be ridiculous.
I personally am not interested in your opinions of every textbook author’s ideology or any other such thing (although the fact that you hold views to consider someone with views within the normal sphere of U.S. political discussion to be a “commie” goes a long way to explaining why your strong ideological viewpoint has distorted whatever scientific judgement you might have). That is not what we were addressing here. What we were talking about is whether climate textbooks discuss what sets the adiabatic lapse rate. You may a statement about climate science that was clearly wrong and based on your own ignorance of the subject.
Your statement is clearly too strong to be correct (especially if you are using “radiative forcing” to mean all radiative effects). How then do you explain the lapse rate in the stratosphere? As I have explained above, the adiabatic lapse rate is set by what you describe but the adiabatic lapse rate is only a stability limit on the adiabatic lapse rate. Depending on the vertical distribution of radiative heating and cooling, the actual lapse rate may be anything lower than the (appropriate) adiabatic lapse rate.
But, this does not put us in any particular disagreement about what determines the lapse rate of the troposphere, say, under an increase in greenhouse gases: Since the troposphere is strongly heated from below and cooled from above, the lapse rate does tend to be at the (appropriate) adiabatic lapse rate…and the role of increasing greenhouse gases is, to the first approximation, not to change the lapse rate at all but just to warm the entire troposphere uniformly. (To a better approximation, it turns out that on a global scale the effect of increasing greenhouse gases is to cause the lapse rate to decrease a bit because in the tropics the lapse rate tends to be close to the moist adiabatic lapse rate (MALR) and the MALR decreases as the temperature increases.)
Just to be clear, when I say, “the actual lapse rate may be anything lower than the (appropriate) adiabatic lapse rate”, I mean that the temperature can decrease with increasing height more slowly than the adiabatic rate…or it can even increase with height, as it does in the stratosphere.
Joel Shore:
I thought it was clear that we were both discussing the temperature lapse rate in the troposphere.
You say: “What we were talking about is whether climate textbooks discuss what sets the adiabatic lapse rate”
Your textbooks, whether written by political activists, or not, are all relatively new, and I’m curious why there has been an abandonment of known principles.
What do your textbooks say is the reason for the lapse rate?
Do they discuss a relationship between gravity and the adiabatic lapse rate, or not?
You say: “But, this does not put us in any particular disagreement about what determines the lapse rate of the troposphere, say, under an increase in greenhouse gases: Since the troposphere is strongly heated from below and cooled from above, the lapse rate does tend to be at the (appropriate) adiabatic lapse rate…and the role of increasing greenhouse gases is, to the first approximation, not to change the lapse rate at all but just to warm the entire troposphere uniformly. (To a better approximation, it turns out that on a global scale the effect of increasing greenhouse gases is to cause the lapse rate to decrease a bit because in the tropics the lapse rate tends to be close to the moist adiabatic lapse rate (MALR) and the MALR decreases as the temperature increases.)”
About half the atmosphere is, at any time, being heated directly by the sun, so what do you mean by “the troposphere is strongly heated from below”? Are you saying the atmosphere gets warmer at night?
BigWaveDave says:
I thought I made this clear. Yes, the textbook discusses what everybody agrees determines the adiabatic lapse rate. There is no argument on this. It is accepted science by everyone.
Yes, the solar heating does disappear at night…and as a consequence of that you can get what is called a “radiation inversion” or “night inversion” at night: http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter3/rad_invers.html and http://www.forestencyclopedia.net/p/p443 , where, near the surface of the earth, the lapse rate is nowhere near the adiabatic lapse rate…and, in fact, the temperature even increases with increasing height.
Joel Shore saie: “I thought I made this clear. Yes, the textbook discusses what everybody agrees determines the adiabatic lapse rate. There is no argument on this. It is accepted science by everyone”.
I’m not sure what you are calling accepted science by everyone. Could you please explain what this is?
“Yes, the solar heating does disappear at night…and as a consequence of that you can get what is called a “radiation inversion” or “night inversion” at night: http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter3/rad_invers.html and http://www.forestencyclopedia.net/p/p443 , where, near the surface of the earth, the lapse rate is nowhere near the adiabatic lapse rate…and, in fact, the temperature even increases with increasing height.”
But what you had said was “the troposphere is strongly heated from below and cooled from above, the lapse rate does tend to be at the (appropriate) adiabatic lapse rate” So do you agree that the atmosphere is heated by the sun during the day?
As I said in a previous post (with corrected typo in brackets): The adiabatic lapse rate is “determined by the fact that as a parcel of air rises up adiabatically through the atmosphere, it expands because the pressure decreases and as it expands its temperature drops (because by expanding it does positive work on the surrounding air). So, yes, the fact that pressure [de]creases with height at a certain rate is what causes the temperature to decrease with height at a certain rate when the lapse rate is equal to the adiabatic lapse rate.” I’ll add that, in particular, the dry adiabatic lapse rate is given by g/c_p where g = gravitational acceleration and c_p = specific heat at constant pressure.
Yes…but I am not sure what you point is.
Joel Shore says:
.
Isn’t the positive work being done on the parcel that rises? Won’t surrounding air descend to fill the void left by a rising parcel? What happens to the temperature of air that descends?
What is it the “greenhouse effect” is supposed to be doing?
BigWaveDave says:
The air that descends warms. (But, no, this fact is not going to get you around having to satisfy energy conservation as some people seem to believe.)
It is warming the entire troposphere (and also raising the tropopause as it turns out). To first order it is not changing the lapse rate. (I’ve already discussed this above.) To second order, there are some small changes in the lapse rate, primarily because the moist adiabatic lapse rate is a decrease function of the temperature.
Joel Shore,
Isn’t energy conservation covered in this context by the earth losing all the heat it receives from the sun?
It sounds like you are saying is that CO2 is doing all sorts of bad things, but you don’t know what, or how much CO2 is doing.
BigWaveDave says:
December 7, 2011 at 1:54 am
The Earth has been the recipient of some ginormous number way beyond quadrillion (> 10^16) watts of energy in its lifetime of 4.5 X 10^9 years. Seems strange to me that the Earth wouldn’t be viewed as the perfect black body radiator because if it isn’t, we couldn’t be having this conversation as the Earth would still be a glowing ball of molten rock as it was in its infancy. CO2 isn’t a problem. I like CO2. It makes plants grow which cows eat. That makes them taste good to me. YUM!
BigWaveDave says:
Yes…But my point is that any claims that the earth’s surface could be warmer then 255 K even in the absence of an IR-absorbing atmosphere because of pressure or something of that sort violate energy conservation. (I don’t know if you are making such a claim because you haven’t really been forthcoming on exactly what your point here is in this discussion, but you seem to be hinting at it.) The reason it violates energy conservation is that an earth with a surface temperature of greater than 255 K is emitting more energy than it receives from the sun. The only way for such a situation to be sustainable is if the atmosphere absorbs some of that emitted radiation, so that the earth/atmosphere system as seen from seen from space is only emitting as much radiation as a 255 K blackbody (albeit with a different spectrum from such a blackbody)…i.e., there is a greenhouse effect.
Babsy says:
The Earth’s surface is very close to a perfect blackbody radiator (emissivities generally within a percent or so of 1 over the relevant spectral range). However, that surface is at an average temperature of ~15 C (298 K), which turns out to mean it is radiating ~390 W/m^2. This is in fact far more than the amount that the Earth system (both surface and atmosphere) are absorbing from the sun, which is a bit under 240 W/m^2. So, in fact, the question, given the Earth’s empirically-measured surface temperature, is not why the Earth isn’t continuing to heat up but rather why it is not rapidly cooling down.
And, the answer is that the Earth’s atmosphere is not transparent to the IR radiation emitted by its surface. So, a lot of that radiation ends up being absorbed by the atmosphere…and while the atmosphere also emits radiation, it emits less radiation back into space than the surface emits. (In particular, the Earth emits the same amount of radiation as a blackbody at 255 K would emit…although the spectrum is not really that of a blackbody of that temperature but rather closer to the spectrum of a blackbody at the 298 K surface temperature with “bites” taken out of it at the wavelengths where the radiation is most strong absorbed: http://www.barrettbellamyclimate.com/userimages/MODA.jpg ) This is what we call “the greenhouse effect”.
Joel Shore says:
This is false. Earth’s surface isn’t a black body, and it isn’t radiating directly to space. If there were the same mass of atmosphere with no IR absorbing gasses in the atmosphere, Earth’s surface temperature would still be higher than the equilibrium temperature.
Part of your greenhouse fallacy appears to be rooted in a tacit assumption that the atmosphere is like a static bubble, and radiation is the only means of heat transfer, since the two primary means, conduction and convection , aren’t even mentioned..
Another part is that all matter radiates at its temperature.
A third part is that trapping IR is a square peg in the round hole of how a greenhouse works; which is by trapping convection,
re post by: Joel Shore says: December 6, 2011 at 4:32 pm
It strike me that you are talking about these issues as if your points were well established science, when in fact the issue is vastly more complicated and not well understood at all.
As to BigWaveDave’s first point in this particular post and Joel’s reply – obviously energy conservation has to be satisfied – but any discussion of this issue must include not only the uprising air, but also the dynamic flow as Dave states, e.g., you can’t ignore the fact that as air rises and cools, other air moves in to fill the vacated spot, which means air is also descending and warming.
On the second issue, it appears that real world data shows that changes in tropopause height is primarily a function of a cooling stratsophere, and not a warming troposphere. For example, see: Variability and trends in the global tropopause estimated from radiosonde data[PDF] DJ Seidel… – JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH- …, 2006 from noaa.gov http://tinyurl.com/c5owcsv
It ought to also be noted that with the exception of the tropics, there are commonly more than one tropopause, especially around the subtropical jet. See: Observational characteristics of double tropopauses [PDF] WJ Randel, DJ Seidel… – J. Geophys. Res, 2007 – arl.noaa.gov http://tinyurl.com/7r6kcpf
@joel Shore
It also seems that far too many people conveniently forget that the Earth itself constantly generates heat – and this internal heat gets utterly neglected in ‘climate science’ hypotheses, models, and arguments. Obviously it radiates towards the surface and then is transferred into the atmosphere also – and it’s not insignificant. Occasionally we get a few visual reminders – such as Eyjafjallajokull (and activity at Katla has experts worrying that we may soon see the largest volcanic eruption in a century), Mt. Saint Helens, Pinatubo in 1991, or Krakatoa back in 1883. Those are just the spot visual reminders, however. The entire crust is heated from within.
Quite simply, even absent atmosphere and sun, our Earth wouldn’t be just a cold ball of rock with a temperature equivalent to that of space.
BigWaveDave says:
Like I said above, emissivities of terrestrial surfaces in the infrared are so close to 1 that treating the earth as a blackbody is a very good assumption. It is off by at most 1 or 2%, not nearly enough to explain the discrepancy that I speak of between ~240 W/m^2 received and ~390 W/m^2 emitted by the earth’s surface. (Furthermore, to the extent that the earth’s surface temperature is not uniform, it will actually emit more than a uniform surface of the same average temperature would.)
And, the only reason that the earth’s surface isn’t radiating directly into space is that the atmosphere contains IR-absorbing gases. As for your statement that the Earth’s surface temperature would still be higher, that notion violates energy conservation to have the earth emitting significantly more than it receives from the sun for any significant period of time.
No…I don’t assume that at all. But unless you are proposing that convection and conduction transfer heat from the colder atmosphere to the warmer surface, in violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, considering conduction and convection just makes the discrepancy that I spoke of above between what energy the earth’s surface receives and what it emits even worse. Or, are you proposing that in the absence of IR-absorbing gases, the Earth’s atmosphere is warmer than the surface and it supplies the missing energy via conduction and convection and, if so, what causes it to be warmer?
Symmetric diatomic molecules like O_2 and N_2 are not electrically-polarized and do not have any vibrational or rotational excitations that are electrically-polarized and, as a result, they do not couple to the electromagnetic field at infrared frequencies of relevance. This means that they do not emit or absorb infrared radiation. (You can sort of think of them as having emissivity of 0.) There can be some emission and absorption via collisions between molecules but this is much too small to be of significance at the earth’s atmospheric pressures. So, for all intents and purposes, they are not absorbers of terrestrial radiation.
This is the only thing that you have said that is not incorrect., However, it is also well-known that the analogy between the greenhouse effect and an actual greenhouse is limited. Both work by preventing some thermal energy from escaping but the mechanisms by which they do this are, as you note, different since a greenhouse works mainly by preventing convection of heat out of it.
Rational Debate says:
All the basics that I am talking about here are well-established science.
Like I explained to BigWaveDave, unless you are proposing there is significant heat transfer FROM the atmosphere TO the earth, this is only going to increase the discrepancy between what the earth surface receives and what it emits…And, now that I think about it some more, I realize that such a statement is in fact too kind: The 240 W/m^2 represents all the solar energy absorbed, be it absorbed by the Earth or by the atmosphere. So even, if by some magic, all of the energy that the atmosphere absorbed were transferred to the Earth’s surface, you still have the 240 W/m^2 vs. 390 W/m^2 discrepancy!
Really, if one wants to consider the surface energy balance and assume that there is no net transfer of energy FROM the atmosphere TO the surface, then you have to explain the discrepancy between the ~161 W/m^2 that the surface absorbs from the sun and the ~390 W/m^2 it emits radiatively.
Yes…It is insignificant. It is a small fraction of a W/m^2, which puts it way smaller than anything we are discussing here.
re post by: Joel Shore says: December 3, 2011 at 7:44 pm
Just to pick a nit – “worse” and “worth” aren’t homophones. Homephones are words that sound alike but either mean or are spelled differently. “One” and “won” for example.
Worse & worth would appear to simply be a mental slip, Freudian perhaps, but they’re sure not homophones by a long stretch.
Joel Shore says::
The discrepancy you speak of is a fiction created by your unphysical calculation of 390 w/m^2 radiation leaving Earth’s surface based on a fictitious average surface temperature. . The surface radiates only a small portion of of its energy directly to space. Earth’s surface is primarily cooled by convection in the atmosphere which carries the heat to where it radiates to space,. It also doesn’t radiate uniformly. Much of the radiation emits from the poles, far from where it is received.
BigWaveDave says:
(1) I am not sure what basic piece of physics you are confused about here. The earth’s surface is, for all intents and purposes, a blackbody in the relevant part of the spectrum at which the emission occurs. Hence, it does emit ~390 W/m^2 on average. ***That is independent of convection.*** Radiative emission is based on the temperature of the surface…It is not based on what other heat transfer processes may be occurring (except in so far as that heat transfer process affects what the surface temperature is). And, yes, only a small portion of that escapes directly to space, but that is because the greenhouse effect exists, i.e., because the atmosphere contains elements that absorb the terrestrial radiation. If it didn’t, then the whole 390 W/m^2 would be emitted directly out into space. Where else could it go?
(2) Where the earth emits from is not relevant. If the average temperature of a blackbody is 298 K, then it will emit AT LEAST 390 W/m^2. The more non-uniform the surface temperature is, the larger the emission will be above the value that is derived from applying the S-B Equation using the average temperature. The reason is that for any distribution of temperature T, the average of T^4 is greater than (average T)^4. This is the result of a basic mathematical theorem that makes use of the fact that the graph of T^4 vs. T is a strictly increasing function and is concave up (i.e., has positive second derivative).
Joel Shore’
It is you who are confused by making the absurd assumption that Earth’s surface loses heat by only radiation at a rate equivalent to its average temperature. The Earth loses heat to space at a rate equal to the heat the Earth with its atmosphere receives from the sun. The atmosphere is heated mostly by the sun and a little by the surface. There is no physical basis for your S-B mathematical construct at the surface.