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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This post is also available as a PDF document here:
Unified_Theory_Of_Climate_Poster_Nikolov_Zeller
UPDATE: This thread is closed – see the newest one “A matter of some Gravity” where the discussion continues.
John Day, December 31, 2011 at 2:26 pm :
John, try this (or any intro textbook on gas kinetics):
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/kinetic/kintem.html
/dr.bill
palindrom says:
December 29, 2011 at 8:07 pm
Myrrh — hotrod has it right about the mixing. But here’s another point.
The source you quote gives the following properties of an ideal gas:
“1. An ideal gas is considered to be a “point mass”. A point mass is a particle so small, its mass is very nearly zero. This means an ideal gas particle has virtually no volume.
2. Collisions between ideal Gases are “elastic”. This means that no attractive or repulsive forces are involved during collisions. Also, the kinetic energy of the gas molecules remains constant since these interparticle forces are lacking.
(1) confuses mass with volume. An ideal gas has to be diffuse enough that the volume taken up by the molecules is a small fraction of the total. Air satisfies this condition pretty well.
(2) “Elastic” does not mean that there are no attractive or repulsive forces — otherwise there would be no collisions! — it means that the collisions preserve kinetic energy. So the “Also” phrase here is the tail that wags the dog. An example of an inelastic collision would be one in which some of the molecules’ KE were converted into other forms (e.g., excitation of a molecule’s energy levels). In air molecules, translational KE is frequently converted into rotational energy of the diatomic molecules, but this doesn’t affect the ideality of the gas to any great extent, since on average an equal amount of rotational energy is converted into kinetic.
Your source seems to have a rather shaky grasp on physics terminology.
far as I can see this is on par with the general basic ideal gas law, but there’s no need to get too picky for accuracy here because there’s no actual real consistency even when they refer back to ‘laws’.. 🙂 Ideal gas diffusion and Brownian motion both used to ‘prove’ the point with no awareness that these come from completely different set of circumstances… So my point was only that this is where their unrealistic picture of the atmosphere comes from – direct from ideal gas non-properties.
So, they really have a picture of the atmosphere above us as empty space of the basic ideal gas description, which is how they account for the volumeless molecules moving at great speeds because there’s nothing to stop them, and so thoroughly mixing and not being subject to gravity, so they have no weight, and so on – whereas, our real atmosphere is an actual fluid ocean of gas above us, it has volume, it has weight, molecules do not move at ideal speeds through this as if empty space – we have sound.
Sound is only possible because this gaseous ocean above us has real volume which means the molecules are not moving at high speeds but hang around on the spot as it were. When a sound travels through this it moves the molecules to hit the molecules next to it which then relaxes back to where it was, it is the energy of sound being passed along, and just like the ocean, the air stays where it is, it’s the wave that moves. Think mexican wave.
Air is real volume, it is volumes of air which travel as wind which arise from the differences between volumes of air. Within that real molecules are subject to gravity, they have real weight relative to each other, ideal gas doesn’t have this because it’s a maths thing like ‘average’, it doesn’t really exist.
It is really peculiar how this has been created to present a world totally imaginary, but argued for as if real.. So they think carbon dioxide diffuses into the atmosphere like an ideal gas and can’t separate out because ideal gas doesn’t have weight or rather that weight doesn’t matter because it acts like an ideal gas.
palindrom says:
December 29, 2011 at 8:28 pm
Myrrh @7:48 —
You know, of course, that it’s possible to tell empirically whether a gas is well-mixed or not, without regard to theory. CO2 is well-mixed. Methane isn’t as well-mixed in part because its lifetime in the atmosphere is of order a decade.
Look, I don’t have the reference to hand, but even the IPCC reports have 3-5 years residence time for carbon dioxide.
And, it still bugs me that the AIRS data is being fudged. They still haven’t released upper and lower troposphere – their conclusion however, is that ‘contrary to beliefs that CO2 is well-mixed it is lumpy’ Just don’t expect them to elaborate on that, because like the 3-5 years residence time it’s not needed for the propaganda.
The stomata of plants, being on the lower side of the leaves, are about a half-millimeter lower in elevation. Surely you aren’t claiming that this is a significant effect. I’d think keeping rainwater out would be a much more important driver.
Water lily leaves have their stomata on the top.. 🙂
Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, one and a half times heavier, it will always sink through air displacing oxygen and nitrogen to come to the ground, it also comes down in rain which is carbonic acid, but what is important here is that because heavier than air it does not readily rise in air. Local winds, movement of animals, heat and so on will move it around and a plant that wants to catch it will evolve adapting to this, so the underside of the leaves the best chance of getting carbon dioxide for photosynthesis.
Robert Brown says:
December 30, 2011 at 7:19 am
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.
Hmm, I prefer to go with the paid physicists who taught me..
Water is transparent to visible light. Visible light direct from the Sun is tiny, it works on the electronic transition level which means that it doesn’t move the whole molecule into vibration, which is what heat is, it works by hitting or not hitting electrons, but being absorbed or not being absorbed by electrons.
In the atmosphere (contrary to the claim that the atmosphere is transparent to visible light), visible light hits and bounces off the electrons of the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen, this means that briefly the electrons absorb visible light’s energy before chucking it out – think pinball machine because that’s how we get our blue sky, blue light is even more nervily highly energetic than red and more apt to get bounced around the sky.
Water is transparent to visible light, which means the electrons of water don’t absorb the energy,and so visible light doesn’t even get to play with them as it does in the atmosphere, it is transmitted through.
What is erroneously claimed for visible light in the atmosphere is actually true for visible light in the oceans. It cannot heat water because it is transmitted through water without being absorbed on any level.
In the real world I live in this is very well known, for example in producing visible light for photosynthesis to extend growing conditions for plants without burning them up – the object of the exercise being to take out of lamps that which heats the plants…
Thermal infrared, heat energy, thermal energy on the move direct from the Sun by radiation does have the oomph to move whole molecules into vibration, to raise the temperature , to heat them up.
This is basic real world physics.
I’m sorry that this has become practically impossible for so many to understand because the actual basic physics has been perverted in the education system to facilitate confusion necessary to sell the AGW meme.
Go on, heat a cup of water with a blue led light, let us know when it’s hot enough for you to make a coffee..
@John Wilkes Booth says:
December 29, 2011 at 8:10 am
BZZT! Sorry, but you win The Big Loser in Debate Award for 2011. Not only do you not know anything about these people, nor about the content of their respective specializations, but you even impugn at least one university. Attack the paper, Loser, not the people. As a result, I’ll just put you on my “ignore” list as a contemptible troll.
And your buddy (or just another screen name?) Kevin Kilty (@December 29, 2011 at 10:10 am) backs you up with this hilarious entry: “…Take as an example a Ph.D. in Transportation. It is a civil engineering degree, but it focusses narrowly and doesn’t put much if any emphasis on thermodynamics, or fluids, or any of a range of other engineering and scientific topics, even at the introductory level….” Yeah, well, with a PhD of that nature, one could aspire to be the Chairman of the IPCC, the world’s most important body deliberating on the advancing horrors of Global Whatever. Oh, wait, a Railway Engineer from a formidable university in India already got the job! Darn it! Anyway, I’ll ignore him too, as Living Proof of the Left Hand Side of the Bell Curve.
[Moderator’s Note: You can safely ignore John Wilkes Booth. Really. Don’t let him disturb your New Year. -REP]
@ur momisugly John Day: December 31, 2011 at 2:26 pm
@ur momisugly dr.bill
John, have to agree with you, sorry dr.bill. Dr.bill, you seem to speaking of a gas out of LTE. You should really read that link to Dr. Vonk’s posts John Day gave but you’ll have to ignore the formatting defects. It seems #4’s exact energy level that is excluded and that is also why there are no purely vibrational OR electronic transfers, they always include a small rotational energy level component also. Upon re-emission these rotational levels are not included, just the exact jump between the vibrational or electronic levels. That is key in equipartition across all degrees of freedom the way I have read, but it hard to find sites on the web delving deep enough in these picky aspects to get a proper viewpoint.
wayne, December 31, 2011 at 6:40 pm :
Hi Wayne,
It’s been a while. Hope all’s well with you. I’ll surmise that John’s livelihood doesn’t depend on the accuracy of his knowledge of such things, but mine does, so I’ll stick with my original statement. It’s just basic Physics, and it’s pointless to get into a “this guy said, the other guy said” thing about it. The derivation is at the link I gave earlier, and it’s in every Physics book on the subject, going back forever. Click on the “Show” button to get the details. I’m done with it…
/dr.bill
@Mike Weatherford says:
December 29, 2011 at 2:09 pm “…The only flaw I find in the article is the failure to include the discussion of gravity as a factor in gas pressure….”
But they do talk about gravity:
3.1. Climate Implications of the Ideal Gas Law
“…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….” {Interesting. The subscripts don’t copy and paste correctly.}
@hotrod (larry L) says:
December 29, 2011 at 3:00 pm “…we assume that atmospheric mass is more or less constant over geological time. But is that is a valid assumption?…”
Maybe not. Thanks to Crosspatch and others, read these two articles (short, entertaining, and really raising my geologist’s eyebrows):
Earth’s atmosphere before the age of dinosaurs
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/archive/ci/30/i12/html/12learn.html
Was the Atmospheric Pressure Different at the Time of Dinosaurs?
http://levenspiel.com/octave/dinosaurs.htm
The upshot of these two articles is that the Earth’s atmosphere was far more dense, mainly due to CO2, for much of its history. Much of the CO2 is now caught up in rocks and sediments and to a lesser degree, in coal and such. Much of the rest of it is dissolved in the ocean. The Earth’s atmospheric pressure has declined as the CO2 was removed from the gaseous state to its present 1 bar.
In fact, we are in a situation where CO2 is in short supply, close to the point where plants cannot live. When they die, we die. Too bad we don’t have a Carl Sagan or other who can get this notion across to people in general. A lot of the rampant global warming and environmental radicalism would come to a screeching halt.
“Joel Shore
I hate to be defending this silly paper…but they did not make the factor of two error that you seem to think they did. Their integration is correct for what they are trying to do, but what they are trying to do is silly: I.e., they are calculating what the average surface temperature of the Earth would have to be if radiative balance had to be satisfied locally, i.e., if the local temperature were determined by the local (and instantaneous) insolation. It is a pretty silly approximation but they have done the calculation correctly as near as I can tell and have obtained about the same answer that Gerlich and Tscheuschner obtained for the same calculation (except neglecting the 3 K background temperature). And, they have gotten an answer that obeys Holder’s Inequality, whereas your proposed result does not.
Their result is wrong because it is too naive conceptually, not because they made any calculation error.
”
Joel,
Look at this again! They integrate over a hemisphere (0 – 1 for u= cosTHETA and 0-2pi for phi and they divide by 4*pi – the area value for a unit radius sphere. Theta ranges from 0 to pi/2, not 0 to pi. The integration is not over the entire sphere. What is being integrated is the incoming power per unit area adjusted by the cosine of the angle wrt the zenith which gives the temperature of each incremental area of the surface times that surface area. You cannot divide an integration over a hemisphere by the area of a whole sphere and get the right answer.
I’m not sure what holder’s inequality is or why it might be relevent but the wiki article on it says it’s a <= proposition not a << proposition as they state. It also suggests that the lambertian disk approximation isn't even approximately right. Just look at the value for the very simple case of uniform albedo and emissivity just assume it with a high rotation rate on the equinox day. Except for the cosine curve pole to pole the power distribution would be totally uniform. It would also claim the average T would be 150 K for an airless body. Considering over half the surface T would be over 300k , even 0K for the rest of the sphere would not be sufficient for the average surface T to be only 150k.
Fellows,
I will explain the gray-body temperature calculation and the Holder’s inequality in my official reply next week. Theoretical results from Eq. 2 actually match pretty well recent spatial retrievals of Moon’s surface temperature by NASA’s Diviner Lunar Orbiter. The GH effect is indeed MUCH larger than 33K. …No need to waste your energy on this now.
Instead, think about how is it possible for Equation 8 in our paper to predict so accurately mean surface temperatures of planets over such a broad range of atmospheric and radiative environments by using ONLY 2 independent variables – average surface pressure and TOA solar irradiance?
cba says:
December 31, 2011 at 8:50 pm
Except for the cosine curve pole to pole the power distribution would be totally uniform.
>>
Hate to say it but in this case Joel is right. By that statement from you it appears you are missing the cosine curve in the horizontal dimension. Remember, this is massless view and every point on the backside is logically zero, there is no incoming or outgoing radiation, the sphere has no mass and cannot store energy, it can be either stationary or rotating, same results. But by dropping the horizontal cosine you should be getting ~179K instead of ~154K. Hope that helps you to understand exactly what is being said, it is no more or less nonsensical than Kiehl and Trenberth’s conjecture and per most current climate scientists and by the IPCC. I agree, what the IPCC says in the reports on this matter of radiation is totally meaningless without mass.
@ur momisugly dr.bill
Hi back. It has been a while, in fact all of the way back to a white planet and a black identical planet at the same distance from a sun and its temperature. Right? lol! Now try that example on Dr. Nikolov & Zeller’s new theory. I might have been correct after all! Back then, it was just a gut physics feeling.
On rotation. I think we are just passing each other in terms, and some missing terms. I re-read all of the topics on hyperphysics links again, have many times. I was speaking with my mind on a glass of water equalized at a temperature. Put it in the microwave, it causes rotational energies to be absorbed, and the temp goes up. Stop right there. Missing term, thermalization. Neither of us ever said that word and that seems the only misunderstanding. At the higher temperature is will have more both translational and rotational energy due to some rotational energy thermalizing by equipartition, the relative ratio keeping the same within a small temperature range (ratio is specific heat related). You seem to be saying that the additional rotational energy at the new equilibrium will not be seen in temperature rise and on that I agree. Doesn’t that clear the air?
Joel Shore:
At December 31, 2011 at 2:32 pm you say to me:
“But, since you asked the question seemingly about their larger hypothesis: Convection does not explain how the Earth and its atmosphere could be absorbing 240 W/m^2 but emitting 390 W/m^2, unless you are suggesting that convection transfers heat from the colder atmosphere to the warmer Earth surface, which would of course really violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
I asked no such question, and you are talking nonsense.
I can do no more than to quote my response to your spouting such drivel that I gave on the other thread. I quote it here to avoid others needing to find it.
Richard
Richard S Courtney says:
December 31, 2011 at 11:05 pm
Joel Shore:
It is reasonable for you to evangelise your faith in the AGW hypothesis.
And it is reasonable for you to dispute the Jelbring Hypothesis.
But it is NOT reasonable for you to defend your faith by misrepresenting anything – including the Jelbring Hypothesis – which challenges your faith. And that is what you are doing in this thread.
Firstly, at December 31, 2011 at 2:16 pm and again at December 31, 2011 at 2:16 pm, you attempt to refute the hypothesis by asking:
“Look, you have 240 W/m^2 of energy coming in and 390 W/m^2 going out. Where is the extra 150 W/m^2 coming from? Be specific.”
And you compound that at December 31, 2011 at 3:13 pm saying;
“Just to add a bit more specificity to my last comment: If you propose that energy is coming from the gravitational field, that means that the gravitational potential energy is decreasing (at some rate like 150 W/m^2 of earth’s surface). What is causing this large decrease in gravitational potential energy?”
Only you has mentioned the radiative energy imbalance of 150 W/m^2 suggested by Kiehl & Trenberth, and only you has suggested that the imballance “is coming from the gravitational field”.
The answer to your question, of course, is that the radiative energy imbalance of 150 W/m^2 results from back radiation. But so what?
I remind that I wrote at December 31, 2011 at 12:56 am
“The Jelbring Hypothesis (now also presented by Nikolov & Zeller) amounts to the following.
‘All the radiative, convective and evaporative effects in a planet’s atmosphere adjust such that the atmosphere obtains a temperature lapse rate close to that defined by –g/cp, and this lapse rate defines the planet’s average surface temperature. The average surface temperature is observed to agree with the Jelbring Hypothesis on each planet with a substantial atmosphere that has a mass which varies little through the year.’
Clearly, some atmospheric effects (e.g. convection) do adjust in response to gravity. At issue is whether the interaction of all the radiative, convective and evaporative effects provides the suggested adjustment.”
So, the hypothesis says that any effect of your asserted very, very disputable “extra 150 W/m^2” is to increase evaporation and conduction that cool the surface such that –g/cp is maintained.
So, what relevance of any kind does your question have to any consideration of the hypothesis? Be specific.
Secondly, at December 31, 2011 at 2:16 pm you assert:
“Apparently, violating the Law of Conservation of Energy is not a substantial enough flaw for you guys!”
Where have we guys who support and adhere to the scientific method violated the Law of Conservation of Energy? Be specific.
Richard
PS I again remind that I do not know if the Jelbring Hypothesis is right or wrong. I am writing to object to your behaviour that is very wrong.
Richard S Courtney said:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/29/unified-theory-of-climate/#comment-848293
“But the IPCC AR4 said “committed warming” (i.e. warming certain to occur because it was already ‘in the pipeline’) would be 0.2 C per decade averaged over the first two decades of this century:”
No it didn’t; it said .1C/decade:
“Committed climate change (see Box TS.9) due to atmospheric composition in the year 2000 corresponds to a warming trend of about 0.1°C per decade over the next two decades, in the absence of large changes in volcanic or solar forcing. About twice as much warming (0.2°C per decade) would be expected if emissions were to fall within the range of the SRES marker scenarios.”
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/tssts-5-1.html
“So, the warming you cite as having happened is less than a tenth of that which the IPCC said was certain to happen over that period”
He said that the warming was .18C/decade since Jan 1999 (according to UAH), you say it should be .2C/decade and therefore actual temps are less than a tenth of what should have happened. Huh? That’s a .02C/decade difference. That’s really close agreement.
There ae no maybes about it, the Earth’s atmosphere was originally about 90 to 100 bar of pressure.
The Earth’s first atmosphere was dominated by hydrogen and helium from the nebula and vaporized rock. This first atmosphere was very quickly transformed into the second atmosphere overwhelmingly composed of carbon dioxide. The article’s conjecture saying “CO and CH4, combined with oxygen to form CO2”and “All this took about half of Earth’s lifetime, and it left the atmosphere depleted of oxygen” makes no sense at all. The BIF (banded iron formations) occur in varves and at various episodes between about 3.7Gya to ~2.2Gya and again about 1.8/1.9Gya.
The earliest forms of life were anaerobic, meaning they could not exist in the presence of an atmosphere having free oxygen as described in the article. Observation of these and other factors seem to clearly rule out the possibility that free oxygen was present in the second atmosphere in any other than trace amounts until cyanobacteria released it in the process of respirating carbon dioxide.
Also, the origin of the Earth’s water is still subject to considerable current research. The article comments on the synthesis of the Earth’s water in the early atmospheric chemistry. The article does not comment on the research underway in an effort to identify the isotopic origns of water from the nebula and cometary impacts versus chemical synthesis in the early environment of the Earth.
These are two of a number of possible examples why this article must be used with caution.
Carbon dioxide is indeed in short supply from the point of view of the biosphere.
Richard S Courtney says:
(1) How do radiative effects adjust themselves?
(2) It is already understood why the lapse rate in an atmosphere strongly heated from below and cooled from above is close to the adiabatic lapse rate: A lapse rate larger than the adiabatic lapse rate is unstable to convection and thus convection does indeed adjust itself to maintain such a lapse rate. That is well-understood science.
(3) The lapse rate does not uniquely determine the surface temperature for the same reason that the slope m of a line y=m*x + b does not allow you to uniquely determine the value of y for any given value of x: You need to know “b” (which you can get by knowing the value of y for one particular value of x). In practice, what the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere do is set the “effective radiating level” at which radiation can escape to space…and the average temperature at this particular level is determined trivially from the total amount of radiation absorbed by the planet and its atmosphere from the sun (assuming that there is not significant heat flow from the planetary interior or that the planet is not undergoing continual gravitational collapse, as these would represent additional sources of energy).
As I have explained, you can’t evoke evaporation and conduction because the extra 150 W/m^2 that I am talking about means that the planet’s surface is already emitting more energy than it could if there were not a greenhouse effect. Evaporation and conduction only make the problem worse, unless you are proposing that evaporation and conduction transfer 150 W/m^2 FROM the atmosphere TO the surface!
Ned Nikolov says:
One reason it is possible is because your N_TE contains 4 free parameters! Another reason it is possible is that your Equation (8) contains two more free parameters!
cba says:
Okay…I am beginning to believe that you are right. It looks like they have made multiple errors in their calculation:
(1) The factor of 2 error that you note.
(2) The error in not including the longitudinal obliquity.
They have also assumed that the albedo due to clouds changes…which is not the usual assumption made to calculate the greenhouse effect alone, although might be justified by their considering all atmospheric effects. By coincidence, they arrived at nearly the same answer as Gerlich and Tscheuschner got by doing a calculation that is “correct” (given some rather bizarre and unphysical assumptions, as I have discussed above), so I thought they had probably done this correctly…but it looks like I was wrong. This paper is worse than I thought.
Joel,
Your understanding is substantially flawed in many respects.
Please stop.
It wouldn’t be the first time that multiple fatally disastrous errors have compounded to give an apparently correct result for something. However, the notion that there is no thermal storage means that where ever there is no incoming solar, the temperature must immediately drop to 0K (or 2.7K) on the unlit hemisphere will result in an overall average temperature that is essentially half that of the lit side average temperature.
There will be a fundamental difference between the Moon & Mercury compared to an airless Earth or Mars in that the rotation rates are drastically different. Earth and Mars are roughly 24hrs while the Moon is almost 30 times that and Mercury is even longer. This permits the Moon and Mercury lit sides to reach an equilibrium radiative temperature whereas even an airless Earth or Mars would provide a far more even distribution of absorbed power and hence a more uniformly distributed temperature. Once this happen, the T^4 values related to power can be approximated well by just using T due to the differences being small. (Series expansion of the funtion approximates a linear result for small variations as higher order terms become much smaller).
Wow! This has become the best thread I have read for some time. If this is an indication of discussions to come in 2012, it is going to be a great year. Even the trolls are behaving and contributing useful opinion. If nothing else, this discussion clearly illustrates, how unsettled the science really is. Happy New year everyone… Y’all deserve it. GK
It is advised to make a spreadsheet in which you divide the earth surface along longitude and latitude circles, and calculate the temperature for each part of the surface using the black body.
This way you perform manually the integral shown in this document, and the result is very different, around 250K.
I do not find it anymore, but one or two years ago I found such a spreadsheet on a forum, following a heated discussion about the very same subject: estimating average temperature of earth without atmosphere to estimate the greenhouse effect.
Ned Nikolov says:
December 31, 2011 at 9:21 pm
I will explain the gray-body temperature calculation and the Holder’s inequality in my official reply next week. Theoretical results from Eq. 2 actually match pretty well recent spatial retrievals of Moon’s surface temperature by NASA’s Diviner Lunar Orbiter. The GH effect is indeed MUCH larger than 33K.>>>>
I’m looking forward to it! I’ve been harping on the issue of averaging T instead of the fourth root of T in regard to energy balance for a long time now. It wasn’t until this thread that I had my “duh!” moment and realised that the calculation of GH was subject to the exact same colossal math error.
We have been collectively making the precise same error in attempting to trend T in order to determine if earth’s energy balance is positive or negative. Just as one cannot calculate the GH effect based on the average of T, one cannot calculate the energy balance based on the average of T.
So invested have we become in trending T, that even the satellite records, which directly measure P, are then converted, on a point by point basis, to T, and then averaged. Since the goal was to determine what the over all energy balance is, why would we convert from P to T? Trend in P is what we are trying to determine! So instead of averaging P and trending it, we first convert to T, which is NOT directly proportional, average it, and then draw conclusions about average P!
I’ve provided examples in multiple threads that demonstrate that it is possible to have a positive trend in T accompanied by a negative trend in P, making the trending of average T to determine what is happening from an overall energy balance perspective absolutely ludicrous. I haven’t gotten much traction on that point, but am fervently hoping that you do.
Averaging T rather than the fourth root of T amounts to the biggest math error in human history, and the mess it makes of GH calculations should be blindingly obvious to anyone who understands SB Law. The exact same is true regarding the insanity of averaging T across the globe over time and believing that the resulting trend has any value at all in determining earth’s overall energy balance.
thankyou thankyou thankyou!
Robert Murphy:
Your post at January 1, 2012 at 4:19 am said;
“Richard S Courtney said:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/29/unified-theory-of-climate/#comment-848293
“But the IPCC AR4 said “committed warming” (i.e. warming certain to occur because it was already ‘in the pipeline’) would be 0.2 C per decade averaged over the first two decades of this century:”
No it didn’t; it said .1C/decade:
“Committed climate change (see Box TS.9) due to atmospheric composition in the year 2000 corresponds to a warming trend of about 0.1°C per decade over the next two decades, in the absence of large changes in volcanic or solar forcing. About twice as much warming (0.2°C per decade) would be expected if emissions were to fall within the range of the SRES marker scenarios.”
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/tssts-5-1.html
“So, the warming you cite as having happened is less than a tenth of that which the IPCC said was certain to happen over that period”
He said that the warming was .18C/decade since Jan 1999 (according to UAH), you say it should be .2C/decade and therefore actual temps are less than a tenth of what should have happened. Huh? That’s a .02C/decade difference. That’s really close agreement.”
OK. Two points.
Firstly, the IPCC said, and you quote from the link I provided,
“About twice as much warming (0.2°C per decade) would be expected if emissions were to fall within the range of the SRES marker scenarios.”
The emissions HAVE fallen “within the range of the SRES marker scenarios” so my statement was and is correct.
Secondly, as you say, “he” did say “the warming was .18C/decade since Jan 1999 (according to UAH)”.
But – in fact – that warming was NEGATIVE and not positive. Even this warmist site shows about -0.18C or less.
http://chartsgraphs.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/enhanced-uah-channel-5-temperature-anomaly-trend-chart/
There is complete disagreement. The IPCC says it was certain to warm: it cooled.
Richard
G. Karst says:
No…What this thread illustrates is that there is almost no limit to the scientific nonsense that people will cling onto in order to believe what they want to believe! It does not illustrate that the science is unsettled any more than similar debate on a creationist website illustrates how unsettled the science of evolution is.