Note: This was a poster, and adopted into a blog post by the author, Ned Nikolov, specifically for WUWT. My thanks to him for the extra effort in converting the poster to a more blog friendly format. – Anthony
Expanding the Concept of Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect Using Thermodynamic Principles: Implications for Predicting Future Climate Change
Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. & Karl Zeller, Ph.D.
USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fort Collins CO, USA
Emails: ntconsulting@comcast.net kzeller@colostate.edu
Poster presented at the Open Science Conference of the World Climate Research Program,
24 October 2011, Denver CO, USA
http://www.wcrp-climate.org/conference2011/posters/C7/C7_Nikolov_M15A.pdf
Abstract
We present results from a new critical review of the atmospheric Greenhouse (GH) concept. Three main problems are identified with the current GH theory. It is demonstrated that thermodynamic principles based on the Gas Law need be invoked to fully explain the Natural Greenhouse Effect. We show via a novel analysis of planetary climates in the solar system that the physical nature of the so-called GH effect is a Pressure-induced Thermal Enhancement (PTE), which is independent of the atmospheric chemical composition. This finding leads to a new and very different paradigm of climate controls. Results from our research are combined with those from other studies to propose a new Unified Theory of Climate, which explains a number of phenomena that the current theory fails to explain. Implications of the new paradigm for predicting future climate trends are briefly discussed.
1. Introduction
Recent studies revealed that Global Climate Models (GCMs) have significantly overestimated the Planet’s warming since 1979 failing to predict the observed halt of global temperature rise over the past 13 years. (e.g. McKitrick et al. 2010). No consensus currently exists as to why the warming trend ceased in 1998 despite a continued increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Moreover, the CO2-temperature relationship shows large inconsistencies across time scales. In addition, GCM projections heavily depend on positive feedbacks, while satellite observations indicate that the climate system is likely governed by strong negative feedbacks (Lindzen & Choi 2009; Spencer & Braswell 2010). At the same time, there is a mounting political pressure for Cap-and-Trade legislation and a global carbon tax, while scientists and entrepreneurs propose geo-engineering solutions to cool the Planet that involve large-scale physical manipulation of the upper atmosphere. This unsettling situation calls for a thorough reexamination of the present climate-change paradigm; hence the reason for this study.
2. The Greenhouse Effect: Reexamining the Basics
Figure 1. The Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect as taught at universities around the World (diagram from the website of the Penn State University Department of Meteorology).
According to the current theory, the Greenhouse Effect (GHE) is a radiative phenomenon caused by heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere such as CO2 and water vapor that are assumed to reduce the rate of surface infrared cooling to Space by absorbing the outgoing long-wave (LW) emission and re-radiating part of it back, thus increasing the total energy flux toward the surface. This is thought to boost the Earth’s temperature by 18K – 33K compared to a gray body with no absorbent atmosphere such as the Moon; hence making our Planet habitable. Figure 1 illustrates this concept using a simple two-layer system known as the Idealized Greenhouse Model (IGM). In this popular example, S is the top-of-the atmosphere (TOA) solar irradiance (W m-2), A is the Earth shortwave albedo, Ts is the surface temperature (K), Te is the Earth’s effective emission temperature (K) often equated with the mean temperature of middle troposphere, ϵ is emissivity, and σ is the Stefan-Boltzmann (S-B) constant.
2.1. Main Issues with the Current GHE Concept:
A) Magnitude of the Natural Greenhouse Effect. GHE is often quantified as a difference between the actual mean global surface temperature (Ts = 287.6K) and the planet’s average gray-body (no-atmosphere) temperature (Tgb), i.e. GHE = Ts – Tgb. In the current theory, Tgb is equated with the effective emission temperature (Te) calculated straight from the S-B Law using Eq. (1):
where αp is the planetary albedo of Earth (≈0.3). However, this is conceptually incorrect! Due to Hölder’s inequality between non-linear integrals (Kuptsov 2001), Te is not physically compatible with a measurable true mean temperature of an airless planet. To be correct, Tgb must be computed via proper spherical integration of the planetary temperature field. This means calculating the temperature at every point on the Earth sphere first by taking the 4th root from the S-B relationship and then averaging the resulting temperature field across the planet surface, i.e.
where αgb is the Earth’s albedo without atmosphere (≈0.125), μ is the cosine of incident solar angle at any point, and cs= 13.25e-5 is a small constant ensuring that Tgb = 2.72K (the temperature of deep Space) when So = 0. Equation (2) assumes a spatially constant albedo (αgb), which is a reasonable approximation when trying to estimate an average planetary temperature.
Since in accordance with Hölder’s inequality Tgb ≪ Te (Tgb =154.3K ), GHE becomes much larger than presently estimated.
According to Eq. (2), our atmosphere boosts Earth’s surface temperature not by 18K—33K as currently assumed, but by 133K! This raises the question: Can a handful of trace gases which amount to less than 0.5% of atmospheric mass trap enough radiant heat to cause such a huge thermal enhancement at the surface? Thermodynamics tells us that this not possible.
B) Role of Convection. The conceptual model in Fig. 1 can be mathematically described by the following simultaneous Equations (3),
where νa is the atmospheric fraction of the total shortwave radiation absorption. Figure 2 depicts the solution to Eq. (3) for temperatures over a range of atmospheric emissivities (ϵ) assuming So = 1366 W m-2 and νa =0.326 (Trenberth et al. 2009). An increase in atmospheric emissivity does indeed cause a warming at the surface as stated by the current theory. However, Eq. (3) is physically incomplete, because it does not account for convection, which occurs simultaneously with radiative transfer. Adding a convective term to Eq. (3) (such as a sensible heat flux) yields the system:
where gbH is the aerodynamic conductance to turbulent heat exchange. Equation (4) dramatically alters the solution to Eq. (3) by collapsing the difference between Ts, Ta and Te and virtually erasing the GHE (Fig. 3). This is because convective cooling is many orders of magnitude more efficient that radiative cooling. These results do not change when using multi-layer models. In radiative transfer models, Ts increases with ϵ not as a result of heat trapping by greenhouse gases, but due to the lack of convective cooling, thus requiring a larger thermal gradient to export the necessary amount of heat. Modern GCMs do not solve simultaneously radiative transfer and convection. This decoupling of heat transports is the core reason for the projected surface warming by GCMs in response to rising atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations. Hence, the predicted CO2-driven global temperature change is a model artifact!
Figure 2. Solution to the two-layer model in Eq. (3) for Ts and Ta as a function of atmospheric emissivity assuming a non-convective atmosphere. Also shown is the predicted down-welling LW flux(Ld). Note that Ld ≤ 239 W m-2.
Figure 3. Solution to the two-layer model in Eq. (4) for Ts and Ta as a function of atmospheric emissivity assuming a convective atmosphere (gbH = 0.075 m/s). Also shown is the predicted down-welling LW flux (Ld). Note that Ld ≤ 239 W m-2.
Figure 4. According to observations, the Earth-Atmosphere System absorbs on average a net solar flux of 239 W m-2, while the lower troposphere alone emits 343 W m-2 thermal radiation toward the surface.
C) Extra Kinetic Energy in the Troposphere.
Observations show that the lower troposphere emits 44% more radiation toward the surface than the total solar flux absorbed by the entire Earth-Atmosphere System (Pavlakis et al. 2003) (Fig. 4). Radiative transfer alone cannot explain this effect (e.g. Figs. 2 & 3) given the negligible heat storage capacity of air, no matter how detailed the model is. Thus, empirical evidence indicates that the lower atmosphere contains more kinetic energy than provided by the Sun. Understanding the origin of this extra energy is a key to the GHE.
3. The Atmospheric Thermal Enhancement
Previous studies have noted that the term Greenhouse Effect is a misnomer when applied to the atmosphere, since real greenhouses retain heat through an entirely different mechanism compared to the free atmosphere, i.e. by physically trapping air mass and restricting convective heat exchange. Hence, we propose a new term instead, Near-surface Atmospheric Thermal Enhancement (ATE) defined as a non-dimensional ratio (NTE) of the planet actual mean surface air temperature (Ts, K) to the average temperature of a Standard Planetary Gray Body (SPGB) with no atmosphere (Tgb, K) receiving the same solar irradiance, i.e. NTE = Ts /Tgb. This new definition emphasizes the essence of GHE, which is the temperature boost at the surface due to the presence of an atmosphere. We employ Eq. (2) to estimate Tgb assuming an albedo αgb = 0.12 and a surface emissivity ϵ = 0.955 for the SPGB based on data for Moon, Mercury, and the Earth surface. Using So = 1362 W m-2 (Kopp & Lean 2011) in Eq. (2) yields Tgb = 154.3K and NTE = 287.6/154.3 = 1.863 for Earth. This prompts the question: What mechanism enables our atmosphere to boost the planet surface temperature some 86% above that of a SPGB? To answer it we turn on to the classical Thermodynamics.
3.1. Climate Implications of the Ideal Gas Law
The average thermodynamic state of a planet’s atmosphere can be accurately described by the Ideal Gas Law (IGL):
PV = nRT (5)
where P is pressure (Pa), V is the gas volume (m3), n is the gas amount (mole), R = 8.314 J K-1 mol-1is the universal gas constant, and T is the gas temperature (K). Equation (5) has three features that are chiefly important to our discussion: a) the product P×V defines the internal kinetic energy of a gas (measured in Jules) that produces its temperature; b) the linear relationship in Eq. (5) guarantees that a mean global temperature can be accurately estimated from planetary averages of surface pressure and air volume (or density). This is in stark contrast to the non-linear relationship between temperature and radiant fluxes (Eq. 1) governed by Hölder’s inequality of integrals; c) on a planetary scale, pressure in the lower troposphere is effectively independent of other variables in Eq. (5) and is only a function of gravity (g), total atmospheric mass (Mat), and the planet surface area (As), i.e. Ps = g Mat/As. Hence, the near-surface atmospheric dynamics can safely be assumed to be governed (over non-geological time scales) by nearly isobaric processes on average, i.e. operating under constant pressure. This isobaric nature of tropospheric thermodynamics implies that the average atmospheric volume varies in a fixed proportion to changes in the mean surface air temperature following the Charles/Gay-Lussac Law, i.e. Ts/V = const. This can be written in terms of the average air density ρ (kg m-3) as
ρTs = const. = Ps M / R (6)
where Ps is the mean surface air pressure (Pa) and M is the molecular mass of air (kg mol-1). Eq. (6) reveals an important characteristic of the average thermodynamic process at the surface, namely that a variation of global pressure due to either increase or decrease of total atmospheric mass will alter both temperature and atmospheric density. What is presently unknown is the differential effect of a global pressure change on each variable. We offer a solution to this in & 3.3. Equations (5) and (6) imply that pressure directly controls the kinetic energy and temperature of the atmosphere. Under equal solar insolation, a higher surface pressure (due to a larger atmospheric mass) would produce a warmer troposphere, while a lower pressure would result in a cooler troposphere. At the limit, a zero pressure (due to the complete absence of an atmosphere) would yield the planet’s gray-body temperature.
The thermal effect of pressure is vividly demonstrated on a cosmic scale by the process of star formation, where gravity-induced rise of gas pressure boosts the temperature of an interstellar cloud to the threshold of nuclear fusion. At a planetary level, the effect is manifest in Chinook winds, where adiabatically heated downslope airflow raises the local temperature by 20C-30C in a matter of hours. This leads to a logical question: Could air pressure be responsible for the observed thermal enhancement at the Earth surface presently known as a ‘Natural Greenhouse Effect’? To answer this we must analyze the relationship between NTEfactor and key atmospheric variables including pressure over a wide range of planetary climates. Fortunately, our solar system offers a suitable spectrum of celestial bodies for such analysis.
3.2. Interplanetary Data Set
We based our selection of celestial bodies for the ATE analysis on three criteria: 1) presence of a solid planetary surface with at least traces of atmosphere; 2) availability of reliable data on surface temperature, total pressure, atmospheric composition etc. preferably from direct measurements; and 3) representation of a wide range of atmospheric masses and compositions. This approach resulted in choosing of four planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, and four natural satellites – Moon of Earth, Europa of Jupiter, Titan of Saturn, and Triton of Neptune. Each celestial body was described by 14 parameters listed in Table 1.
For planets with tangible atmospheres, i.e. Venus, Earth and Mars, the temperatures calculated from IGL agreed rather well with observations. Note that, for extremely low pressures such as on Mercury and Moon, the Gas Law produces Ts ≈ 0.0. The SPGB temperatures for each celestial body were estimated from Eq. (2) using published data on solar irradiance and assuming αgb = 0.12 and ϵ = 0.955. For Mars, global means of surface temperature and air pressure were calculated from remote sensing data retrieved via the method of radio occultation by the Radio Science Team (RST) at Stanford University using observations by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft from 1999 to 2005. Since the MGS RST analysis has a wide spatial coverage, the new means represent current average conditions on the Red Planet much more accurately than older data based on Viking’s spot observations from 1970s.
Table 1. Planetary data used to analyze the physical nature of the Atmospheric Near-Surface Thermal Enhancement (NTE). Information was gathered from multiple sources using cross-referencing. The bottom three rows of data were estimated in this study using equations discussed in the text.
3.3. Physical Nature of ATE / GHE
Our analysis of interplanetary data in Table 1 found no meaningful relationships between ATE (NTE) and variables such as total absorbed solar radiation by planets or the amount of greenhouse gases in their atmospheres. However, we discovered that NTE was strongly related to total surface pressure through a nearly perfect regression fit via the following nonlinear function:
where Ps is in Pa. Figure 5 displays Eq. (7) graphically. The tight relationship signals a causal effect of pressure on NTE, which is theoretically supported by the IGL (see & 3.1). Also, the Ps–NTE curve in Fig. 5 strikingly resembles the response of the temperature/potential temp. (T/θ) ratio to altitudinal changes of pressure described by the well-known Poisson formula derived from IGL (Fig. 6). Such a similarity in responses suggests that both NTE and θ embody the effect of pressure-controlled adiabatic heating on air, even though the two mechanisms are not identical. This leads to a fundamental conclusion that the ‘Natural Greenhouse Effect’ is in fact a Pressure-induced Thermal Enhancement (PTE) in nature.
NTE should not be confused with an actual energy, however, since it only defines the relative (fractional) increase of a planet’s surface temperature above that of a SPGB. Pressure by itself is not a source of energy! Instead, it enhances (amplifies) the energy supplied by an external source such as the Sun through density-dependent rates of molecular collision. This relative enhancement only manifests as an actual energy in the presence of external heating. Thus, Earth and Titan have similar NTE values, yet their absolute surface temperatures are very different due to vastly dissimilar solar insolation. While pressure (P) controls the magnitude of the enhancement factor, solar heating determines the average atmospheric volume (V), and the product P×V defines the total kinetic energy and temperature of the atmosphere. Therefore, for particular solar insolation, the NTE factor gives rise to extra kinetic energy in the lower atmosphere beyond the amount supplied by the Sun. This additional energy is responsible for keeping the Earth surface 133K warmer than it would be in the absence of atmosphere, and is the source for the observed 44% extra down-welling LW flux in the lower troposphere (see &2.1 C). Hence, the atmosphere does not act as a ‘blanket’ reducing the surface infrared cooling to space as maintained by the current GH theory, but is in and of itself a source of extra energy through pressure. This makes the GH effect a thermodynamic phenomenon, not a radiative one as presently assumed!
Equation (7) allows us to derive a simple yet robust formula for predicting a planet’s mean surface temperature as a function of only two variables – TOA solar irradiance and mean atmospheric surface pressure, i.e.
Figure 5. Atmospheric near-surface Thermal Enhancement (NTE) as a function of mean total surface pressure (Ps) for 8 celestial bodies listed in Table 1. See Eq. (7) for the exact mathematical formula.
Figure 6. Temperature/potential temperature ratio as a function of atmospheric pressure according to the Poisson formula based on the Gas Law (Po = 100 kPa.). Note the striking similarity in shape with the curve in Fig. 5.
where NTE(Ps) is defined by Eq. (7). Equation (8) almost completely explains the variation of Ts among analyzed celestial bodies, thus providing a needed function to parse the effect of a global pressure change on the dependent variables ρ and Tsin Eq. (6). Together Equations (6) and (8) imply that the chemical composition of an atmosphere affects average air density through the molecular mass of air, but has no impact on the mean surface temperature.
4. Implications of the new ATE Concept
The implications of the above findings are numerous and paradigm-altering. These are but a few examples:
Figure 7. Dynamics of global temperature and 12-month forward shifted cloud cover types from satellite observations. Cloud changes precede temperature variations by 6 to 24 months and appear to have been controlling the latter during the past 30 years (Nikolov & Zeller, manuscript).
A) Global surface temperature is independent of the down-welling LW flux known as greenhouse or back radiation, because both quantities derive from the same pool of atmospheric kinetic energy maintained by solar heating and air pressure. Variations in the downward LW flux (caused by an increase of tropospheric emissivity, for example) are completely counterbalanced (offset) by changes in the rate of surface convective cooling, for this is how the system conserves its internal energy.
B) Modifying chemical composition of the atmosphere cannot alter the system’s total kinetic energy, hence the size of ATE (GHE). This is supported by IGL and the fact that planets of vastly different atmospheric composition follow the same Ps–NTE relationship in Fig. 5. The lack of impact by the atmospheric composition on surface temperature is explained via the compensating effect of convective cooling on back-radiation discussed above.
C) Equation (8) suggests that the planet’s albedo is largely a product of climate rather than a driver of it. This is because the bulk of the albedo is a function of the kinetic energy supplied by the Sun and the atmospheric pressure. However, independent small changes in albedo are possible and do occur owning to 1%-3% secular variations in cloud cover, which are most likely driven by solar magnetic activity. These cloud-cover changes cause ±0.7C semi-periodic fluctuations in global temperature on a decadal to centennial time scale as indicated by recent satellite observations (see Fig. 7) and climate reconstructions for the past 10,000 years.
Figure 8. Dynamics of global surface temperature during the Cenozoic Era reconstructed from 18O proxies in marine sediments (Hansen et al. 2008).
Figure 9. Dynamics of mean surface atmospheric pressure during the Cenozoic Era reconstructed from the temperature record in Fig. 8 by inverting Eq. (8).
D) Large climatic shifts evident in the paleo-record such as the 16C directional cooling of the Globe during the past 51 million years (Fig. 8) can now be explained via changes in atmospheric mass and surface pressure caused by geologic variations in Earth’s tectonic activity. Thus, we hypothesize that the observed mega-cooling of Earth since the early Eocene was due to a 53% net loss of atmosphere to Space brought about by a reduction in mantle degasing as a result of a slowdown in continental drifts and ocean floor spreading. Figure 9 depicts reconstructed dynamics of the mean surface pressure for the past 65.5M years based on Eq. (8) and the temperature record in Fig. 8.
5. Unified Theory of Climate
The above findings can help rectify physical inconsistencies in the current GH concept and assist in the development of a Unified Theory of Climate (UTC) based on a deeper and more robust understanding of various climate forcings and the time scales of their operation. Figure 10 outlines a hierarchy of climate forcings as part of a proposed UTC that is consistent with results from our research as well as other studies published over the past 15 years. A proposed key new driver of climate is the variation of total atmospheric mass and surface pressure over geological time scales (i.e. tens of thousands to hundreds of millions of years). According to our new theory, the climate change over the past 100-300 years is due to variations of global cloud albedo that are not related to GHE/ATE. This is principally different from the present GH concept, which attempts to explain climate changes over a broad range of time scales (i.e. from decades to tens of millions of years) with the same forcing attributed to variations in atmospheric CO2 and other heat-absorbing trace gases (e.g. Lacis et al. 2010).
Earth’s climate is currently in one of the warmest periods of the Holocene (past 10K years). It is unlikely that the Planet will become any warmer over the next 100 years, because the cloud cover appears to have reached a minimum for the present levels of solar irradiance and atmospheric pressure, and the solar magnetic activity began declining, which may lead to more clouds and a higher planetary albedo. At this point, only a sizable increase of the total atmospheric mass can bring about a significant and sustained warming. However, human-induced gaseous emissions are extremely unlikely to produce such a mass increase.
Figure 10. Global climate forcings and their time scales of operation according to the hereto proposed Unified Theory of Climate (UTC). Arrows indicate process interactions.
6. References
Kopp, G. and J. L. Lean (2011). A new, lower value of total solar irradiance: Evidence and climate significance, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L01706, doi:10.1029/2010GL045777.
Kuptsov, L. P. (2001) Hölder inequality, in Hazewinkel, Michiel, Encyclopedia of Mathematics, Springer, ISBN 978-1556080104.
Lacis, A. A., G. A. Schmidt, D. Rind, and R. A. Ruedy (2010). Atmospheric CO2: Principal control knob governing earth’s temperature. Science 330:356-359.
Lindzen, R. S. and Y.-S. Choi (2009). On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data. Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L16705, doi:10.1029/2009GL039628.
McKitrick, R. R. et al. (2010). Panel and Multivariate Methods for Tests of Trend Equivalence in Climate Data Series. Atmospheric Science Letters, Vol. 11, Issue 4, pages 270–277.
Nikolov, N and K. F. Zeller (manuscript). Observational evidence for the role of planetary cloud-cover dynamics as the dominant forcing of global temperature changes since 1982.
Pavlakis, K. G., D. Hatzidimitriou, C. Matsoukas, E. Drakakis, N. Hatzianastassiou, and I. Vardavas (2003). Ten-year global distribution of down-welling long-wave radiation. Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 3, 5099-5137.
Spencer, R. W. and W. D. Braswell (2010). On the diagnosis of radiative feedback in the presence of unknown radiative forcing, J. Geophys. Res., 115, D16109, doi:10.1029/2009JD013371
Trenberth, K.E., J.T. Fasullo, and J. Kiehl (2009). Earth’s global energy budget. BAMS, March:311-323
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UPDATE: This thread is closed – see the newest one “A matter of some Gravity” where the discussion continues.
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Karl,
I do not have the slightest idea what all this means. Could you write it up as if you are giving the article to the, say, the Smithsonian Magazine. See you at a reunion some time! ’65,’65,’65
“Arthur Rörsch, The Netherlands says:
December 30, 2011 at 4:57 am”
Pretty much a summary of my recent work.
And I agree that it is based on past knowledge that seems to have been forgotton.
The point where it all went wrong was when someone in a position of power within climatology decided that the composition of the atmosphere was more important for surface temperature than atmospheric pressure.
That seems to have entered the zeitgeist unchallenged and it has been downhill for climate science ever since.
“CO2 can do NOTHING to change that. At best it can crank the water cycle a trivial fraction of a percent faster and well below the error bars in what we measure”
At last. I have spent the past four years trying to explain why that is so !!
I must say Figure 5 is intriguing……It should be make or break for this paper?
Claes Johnson is Professor in Applied Physics. At the end of his paper here;
http://www.csc.kth.se/~cgjoh/climatethermoslayer.pdf
he has a very good citation;
“If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is
in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations, then so much the worse
for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation,
well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But
if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics,
I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation”
(Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington in The Nature of the Physical World, 1915)
And another;
“…no one knows what entropy is, so if you in a debate use this concept,
you will always have an advantage.” (von Neumann to Shannon)
I like that one.
And;
“Every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an elementary
course in thermodynamics.” (Mathematician V. Arnold)
And finally;
“A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its
premises, the more different kinds of things it relates to, and the
more extended its area of applicability. This was therefore the deep
impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the
only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will
never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its
basic concepts.” (Einstein)
The last one is a good point; I would say; Clean the paper up, remove all talk that
fuzzy the main argument and that gives opponents the change to discuss this and that.
Focus on the main message?
Again, this statement shows profound ignorance at several levels. First of all, Claes has not proven anything. The starting point for his nonsensical derivation is to replace a century of statistical physics with a bizarre assumption that something that every other applied mathematician would tell you is an artifact of doing numerical approximations of differential equations is some fundamental universal law of nature. (Talk about believing models over reality!!!!) In particular, he wants to replace the deep notion of how dissipation and irreversibility in general arises at the macroscopic level from the statistics of large numbers of particles undergoing reversible interactions at the microscopic level with the silly notion that one gets dissipation at the macroscropic level simply because it exists at the microscopic level (because it does in a particular way that numerical methods approximate the equations). This notion is completely without foundation and he has not shown that he can derive a century’s worth of results from statistical physics, let alone that he can go further than statistical physics can.
Second of all, even if you buy Claes’s nonsense, he still ends up with an equation that says that the amount of heat transferred by radiation between a warmer body and a cooler body depends on the temperature of the cooler body as well as the warmer body, which is the basis of the greenhouse effect. You can’t make the greenhouse effect disappear by just putting a different “spin” on the meaning of the terms in an equation. It is the equation itself that gives the greenhouse effect.
Am I misreading things, or is it not significant that the USFS has allowed such questioning of GH theory? Federal employees like Hansen you say?
E.M.Smith says:
December 30, 2011 at 2:07 am
Always a delight to read your posts Sir.
Myrrh said something like “Water is transparent to visible light, therefore, visible light does not heat the oceans, for example.” What this indicates is that Myrrh should not participate in discussions with “paid scientists” unless/until he learns some basic physics.
FWIW, let’s correct this. Water is not transparent to visible light. It is simply more transparent than, say, rock. Visible light incident on the air/water surface is partially reflected and partially transmitted. One can easily derive the reflection and transmission coefficient (the fraction of the incident flux that goes either way) as a function of angle, and even do things like predict the polarization of the reflected wave and transmitted wave. The derivations are in e.g. J. D. Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics or my own online textbook of electrodynamics.
The reflected part is a major contributor to the “mean albedo” of the planet because the atmosphere really is mostly transparent to visible light. I say “mostly”, because visible light actively and immediately heats the atmosphere is as well — not all of the energy that is incident on the upper atmosphere makes it all the way down to the surface, and the difference (absorbed by the atmosphere) contributes to its energy content and hence temperature.
The transmitted light — the part that goes down into the oceans through their “transparent” surfaces is pretty much 100% absorbed by the oceans. Let’s reduce it to simple terms that are easy to understand. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Just beneath the surface of the see, at midday, one can easily see things just beneath the surface of the water — a significant fraction of the intensity of sunlight above the surface is transmitted down into the water where it can light up a (say) fish. One can easily see the fish swimming beneath the surface — not quite as bright as the fish would be pulled out of the water and directly illuminated, but hardly “dark” and most certainly not as bright.
As one descends in the water column towards the bottom of the sea, it gets dark. Very dark. Even a few hundred meters down only a tiny fraction of the light intensity that was transmitted into the surface remains.
Where does all of the power in that light go (power is energy per unit time)? It was absorbed by the water in between the surface and the depths. This power continuously heats the water. This is one of many reasons that the surface waters of the ocean and lakes in summertime are “warm”. Especially warm compared to the mean temperature of the oceans, ~4C. In the tropics, light incident at close to right angles maximally penetrates the water and delivers a significant amount of incident visible light solar energy into heating the top 100-500 meters of water, with the most heat delivered close to the surface and less and less delivered to the depths. This warmer water is less dense than the colder water beneath and remains at the surface; the ocean’s thermal profile is highly stratified with a thermocline between warm surface waters and the comparatively uniformly cool and dense waters beneath ~1 km. In these cooler waters, things like salinity regulate density and hence convection; near the surface there is still thermally driven convection and turbulence. At the poles sunlight hits the water at a more grazing angle and much more of it is reflected, just as it gets dark underwater faster than it gets dark above the surface of the water in the approaching afternoons. Less light transmitted means less warming.
I agree with several of the previous posters who note that the article above is just a step towards a unified climate model, and that the oceans are an important meso-scale moderator with contributions over non-Markovian time scales on the order of years to as long as 1000 years (estimated to be the thermal “mixing”, or equilibration time, to the extent that a non-equilibrium system can be said to have one). I’m not convinced that greenhouse gases are as irrelevant as they claim — although their demonstration of the scaling of planetary temperatures independent of atmospheric composition is a powerful argument, I’d like to see more of the details and something beyond an empirical fit curve. They hint that perhaps the curve can be derived, but that isn’t the same as deriving it. I agree, however, that the modulation produced by GHGs (including water vapor) is a secondary variation around a base temperature that is very likely stably determined by density as they assert.
The most important contribution of this paper is that it restores some of the missing physics (physics I was just beginning to realize was being omitted myself, as I’m still a bit new to this game). The details of convective transfer up to the top of the troposphere are, I think, of great interest and should probably be the focus of further work. This paper may well have found the basis for (say) 94 to 98% of average global temperature, but the remaining 2-6% — and its distribution — appear sufficient to produce ice ages, interglacial periods, and one a shorter time frame MWPs and LIAs.
I would hold off on asserting a “unified” theory of climate unless and until it can do things like a) predict coarse-grained global temperatures; b) predict the spatial distribution of coarse-grained (averaged over some interval) temperatures — a good model should be able to explain and predict NH heating and SH cooling and tropical whatever, if not variations on at least a continental/oceanic scale. One of the biggest problems with the current CAGW nonsense has been the rush to assert “settled” science when the supersimplified models were laughably unable to predict the observed variations. This is an obviously better model if only because it contains and obviously neglected term (and hence is a more general model). It appears that this terms is significant. It is not yet clear that the model is yet complete or sufficient to explain all of the observations, and in particular it has yet to be shown that GCMs built using this improved model are in better agreement with the observational data on the same time scales as the existing GCMs.
This latter condition is a low bar (given the poor agreement of the latter already) but it is an important bar, if only because it is a great opportunity to “debug” the model and determine what the parameters need to be in order to be quantitatively predictive.
I am generally very cynical of multivariate models, because multivariate models with empirically determined parameters are really nothing but thinly disguised nonlinear function fits, and I’ve been in that game — covariances abound and it is often easy to fit the same base data with two completely different models very nearly equally well — especially in a noisy system with huge error bars. Two things make models “believable” — a sound basis in physics (where the basis of this model is better than that of any model neglecting convection from the beginning, because this model includes radiation-only models as a special parametric case), and the ability to predict new things.
This one has both of these to some extent — better physics and the “prediction” of a correlation of planetary mean temperatures independent of atmospheric mix. This is, truly, a startling and profound observation — scaling laws always are as they can change everything. What it still lacks is any demonstration that it can do a better job of “predicting” global average temperatures over (say) the last thousand years, including the variations!
And yeah, it isn’t going to succeed in that without the solar connection being included, correctly, and quantitatively. One more missing piece of physics (where some of the physics itself may be obscure).
rgb
Chesty Puller says: The authors fail to realize that radiative energy leaving the earth’s surface is travelling at approximately 186,000 miles per second or for you European cats that’s about 300 million meters per second. Convective updrafts travel even in the most severe convective cells fail to reach 100 meters per second.
Atmospheric greenhouse warming is a result of impedance in the free radiative path from surface to space. Greenhouse gas molecules intercept the radiation and essentially reflect about half of it back at the source. The authors are correct that this may result in greater rate of convection but that is acheived through a greater surface temperature which condutively heats the air to a greater degree making it that much lighter which in turn makes it rise faster. At the same time the higher surface temperature also increases the motive force of radiative transfer and more of it gets squeezed through the impedance of the greenhouse gases just like when you increase the pressure of water more of it will make through a pipe whose diameter remained constant.
Well, yes, but in nearly any laboratory situation where both radiative cooling and convective cooling are enabled (good thermal contact with a disequilibrated fluid), convection tends to dominate.
To put it another way, much of the thermal energy leaving the earth’s surface travels at 3×10^8 m/sec for a distance of 10^{-10} meters (one Angstrom), where it is picked up by a fluid molecule that has just collided with a molecule of the surface. That molecule is now “warmer”, and — surrounded by many other “warmer” molecules — is less dense and hence displaced upward. As it rises, it transports the heat it absorbed upwards. Much of the earth’s surface is not only in contact with a fluid, it is wet. Those fluid molecules that whack into it often carry away water. The water evaporatively cools the surfaces and yes, carries heat into the surrounding gas where it is rapidly lifted up, carrying heat with it.
As this warmer gas is uplifted, it penetrates through the “blanket”! The model of a “simple blanket” is therefore fundamentally, deeply flawed. One isn’t only looking at a surface and a blanket and a single channel, one is looking at a mix of three different cooling mechanisms at the surface and three different heat transfer and exchange mechanisms that operate all the way through the troposphere, followed by a relatively static (but still apparently long-time-scale variable) “blanket” in the stratosphere. In the end, quite a bit of the heat given off by the surface goes through most of the blanket by non-radiative means.
I actually think that this is a lot harder than rocket science. Rockets are actually rather simple.
rgb
E.M.Smith says:
December 30, 2011 at 2:07 am
Re loss of all that oxygen to space:
http://bing.search.sympatico.ca/?q=oxygen%20content%20of%20earth%20rocks&mkt=en-ca&setLang=en-CA
The earth’s crust, 5 to 30km or so thick is composed of 47% oxygen. Chiefio, you are right, we needn’t be getting ourselves into a knot about how much atmos must have been lost to space. This is why one can’t just go with rarified physics to explain all. Geological input tends to get overwelmed by physicists’-how-hard-can-it-be-to-do- paleoclimatology, etc…with the results we have been getting from such as the hockey team leading to having to keep moving the goalposts.
I find the complicating factor, wrt atmospheric pressure and volume changes to be the ever present water content. It can be regarded as large compression spring, in the atmos. Slight changes in pressure causes a continuous phase change from vapor to liguid and back again. This causes a volume change of 1600 to 1. Far greater than any non condensing gas change volume. Compression of vapor water also causes a large additional release of enthalpy heat energy and vise versa. These are enormous inputs and I am not sure of the value of gas analysis without careful steam table input quantification. A tough nut to crack.
Agreed. However, scientist do not set policy. Government and the people’s perception of science issues do. This is the frustration I was venting. GK
Robert Brown says:
Such physics is not missing from any models that are used for quantitative calculations. It is only missing from the simplest models used to qualitatively demonstrate the greenhouse effect. Furthermore, the authors of this post do not include it in the correct manner. There is no contribution whatsoever of this paper to science.
@Arthur Roersch
> Is this a new paradigm and/or a unified theory of climate? I do not think so.
> …
> The essence of the scientific greenhouse theory is based on the
> description of the radiation transfer process …
In your own words above you say GHE is based on radiative issues. But N&Z have made the bold claim that GHE does not depend directly on radiative issues. (Other than the implicit enhancement in pressure caused by solar irradiation).
@N&Z
“…our results suggest that the GH effect is a thermodynamic phenomenon, not a radiative one as presently assumed.
Yes, lapse rate is already understood as “decrease of pressure cools the air at higher altitude”, but the GHE is not exclusively based on that priniciple, so I think that qualifies the N&Z claim as ‘new’.
I think they can also claim ‘unified’ (or at least major steps in that direction) because their theory broadens the surface temps discussion to other planets, simplifying everything with plain thermodynamics, and offers plausible explanations for historical anomalies.
@John Day
See another blog on WUTW by Ira Glickstein “Unified Climate Theory may Confuse Cause and Effect’ and a comment by Willis Eschenbach, with which I both largely agree.
Arthur Rorsch
Joel Shore said:
December 30, 2011 at 6:11 am
Yep, yours!
More to follow.
I am amused by people talking about the atmosphere “expanding” and forgetting the “where to?”. Air can’t actually go anywhere, gravity creates a closed container. If the atmosphere expands above you, it’s still -on top of you- and you are still feeling its full force of pressure from gravity.
Local atmospheric expansion will absorb some of the heat energy as it works against gravity, and contraction will release heat. This is why high pressure systems increase the local temperature, as they are systems of falling air that get compressed as they drop (conversely for low pressure systems, and why high pressure is less cloudy and less raining, absorbing moisture, while low pressure systems are the opposite).
We could increase the atmosphere to 10 times its height above the Earth, decreasing the density, and the pressure at Earth’s surface would still be 1 bar.
kwik (Dec. 30, 2011 at 6:08):
The second law is nothing more than an application of the principle of logical reasoning that has been called “entropy maximization.” Under this principle, numerical values are assigned to the probabilities of the ways in which an outcome can occur for a statistical event by maximization of the missing information per event or “entropy,” under constraints expressing the available information. Through applications of entropy maximization, the theorist ensures that probability values express all of the available information but no more.
Thermodynamics is a consequence from an application of entropy maximization in which the ways in which an outcome can occur are the microstates of the referenced physical system and the constraint on entropy maximization is energy conservation. The entropy is the missing information per event about the microstate of the system. The continuing mystification of university students regarding the origins of thermodynamics can be traced to a lack of training in logic in the curriculum of higher education.
@joel Shore,
May I add that in climate modelling much attention is given to thermodynamics. See e.g. the 800 page handbook General Circulation Model Development; past present and future” ed. David A. Randall (AP 2000) and in this chapter 22 by R. Johnson “Entropy, the Lorenz cycle and climate” and there in section IV “The classical concept of the Carnot Cycle and the Driftless Climate state”.
Sorry to say so, I get a bit annoyed by people inventing the wheel again with ‘new’ models, whereas there is background information available from the serious scientific literature.
In my opinion, the problems with which atmospheric scientists still wrestle is with the working of the thermodynamic laws, in dynamic processes which proceed far from the thermodynamic equilibrium, which are located in the top of the troposphere.
Arthur
“We could increase the atmosphere to 10 times its height above the Earth, decreasing the density, and the pressure at Earth’s surface would still be 1 bar”
Correct.
But expanding the atmosphere upwards or contracting it downwards alters the height of the tropopause and thus effects a surface pressure redistribution involving the shifting of the permanent climate zones, changes in cloudiness and global albedo, changes in the speed and size of the water cycle and changes in the rate of energy flow through the system.
That is how one can move from this paper to a truly Unified Climate Theory:
http://climaterealists.com/attachments/ftp/TheUnifyingTheoryofEarthsClimate.pdf
from 8th January 2009. Revised 4th September 2011
Ok, I saw those comments => (paraphrasing Willis) “I don’t undestand the article, therefore it must be nonsense.”
Perhaps the problem that you and Willis share is that you’re trying to understand it top-down, from the beginning. I invite you to start near the bottom, at the following sentence, which is the crux of the argument, and work your way back to the top:
@N&Z
> Equations (5) and (6) imply that pressure directly controls
> the kinetic energy and [thus the] temperature of the atmosphere.
Chesty Puller says – December 29, 2011 at 4:02 pm
The authors fail to realize that radiative energy leaving the earth’s surface is travelling at approximately 186,000 miles per second or for you European cats that’s about 300 million meters per second. Convective updrafts travel even in the most severe convective cells fail to reach 100 meters per second.
Is that really all you can do to contribute to a fascinating scientific debate here that has already attracted hundreds of intelligent comments?
When I search for my cat in the garden after dark I use a device (a torch) that fires photons at 186,000 miles per second. I don’t think of that as anything special (because it isn’t) and the physics involved is certainly no more technologically significant than our outside brazier that burns logs and keeps us warm on a UK summer evening after a barbecue.
What tosh you do talk, mate. And, by the way, those of us who are from the UK are quite comfortable with Imperial measures. We invented them. So there’s no need to be so smart and condescending.
Could we now please now get back to the scientific debate that this blog has generated and to which you have contributed zilch.
Anthony:
In the abstract to their paper Nikolov & Zeller wrongly claim;
“We show via a novel analysis of planetary climates in the solar system that the physical nature of the so-called GH effect is a Pressure-induced Thermal Enhancement (PTE), which is independent of the atmospheric chemical composition.”
Their analysis is NOT novel.
It is a repeat of the Jelbring Hypothesis
(ref. Jelbring H, ‘The Greenhouse Effect as a function of atmospheric Mass’, Energy & Environment,• Vol. 14, Nos. 2 & 3, (2003)).
Jelbring’s 2003 paper can be read at
http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/FunctionOfMass.pdf
In my opinion, the fact that the paper by Nikolov & Zeller is a repeat of much earlier work deserves mention at the top of this thread.
Happy New Year to you and your family.
Richard
Wow — the Jelbring hypthosis certainly does appear to be essentially the same work. The current Unified Climate Theory discussion being an elaboration to extend and independently validate the concept.
It seems to me that the easiest way to quantify the radiation driven GE (green house effect) is to use the Jelbring hypthosis to compute the gravity field lapse rate GE and subtract that from the total observed GE. What is left must include other special case energy transfer processes such as the presence of water vapor and clouds and the green house gas GE.
Such a calculation would put an absolute upper limit on how much of the GE can be ascribed to the radiative processes (which I suspect will be trivial).
Thanks for bringing that to our attention Richard!
PS. how did the original paper get ignored or pushed under the rug? It would be interesting to dig through the climate gate emails to see if any of them mention the Jelbring paper!
Larry
@RichardSCourtney
> Their analysis is NOT novel. It is a repeat of the Jelbring Hypothesis
Similar hypothesis => “… the atmospheric mass exposed to a gravity field is the cause of the substantial part of GW”
But I think the N&Z regression analysis of planetary surface temps (Eq 8 and Fig 5) still stands as ‘novel’.
😐
G. Karst says:
December 30, 2011 at 9:00 am
jorgekafkazar says:
December 29, 2011 at 5:21 pm
“G. Karst: have no fear. the media may ignore it, but most scientists will not,…”
Agreed. However, scientist do not set policy. Government and the people’s perception of science issues do. This is the frustration I was venting. GK
G. Karst: have no fear. the media may ignore it, but policy makers watch this site very carefully, including those who know they know little about climate.
You know, this article has a major error in the very first line:
Recent studies revealed that Global Climate Models (GCMs) have significantly overestimated the Planet’s warming since 1979 failing to predict the observed halt of global temperature rise over the past 13 years.
In fact, UAH lower temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.18 C/decade over the last 13 years (Jan-1999 to Oct-2011).
And its doubtful that that is even a climatologically relevant interval.