Roger Tattersall (aka Tallbloke) writes on his blog of a WUWT comment. Unfortunately WUWT gets so many comments a day that I can’t read them all (thank you moderators for the help). Since he elevated Dr. Robert Brown’s comment to a post it seems only fair that I do the same.
I saw this comment on WUWT and was so impressed by it that I’m making a separate post of it here. Dr Brown (who is a physicist at Duke University) quotes another commenter and then gives us all an erudite lesson. If Nikolov and Zeller feel they need to take any of the complaints on WUWT about the way they handle heat distribution from day to night side Earth seriously, they probably need to study this post carefully. this is also highly relevant to the reasons why Hans Jelbring used a simplified model for his paper, please see the new PREFACE added to his post for further elucidation.
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I can’t speak for your program, but I will stand by mine for correctly computing the ‘mean effective radiative temperature’ of a massless gray body as a perfect radiator. Remember, there is no real temperature in such of an example for there is no mass. It takes mass to even define temperature. (but most climate scientist have no problem with it and therefore they are all wrong, sorry)
I’d like to chime in and support this statement, without necessarily endorsing the results of the computation (since I’d have to look at code and results directly to do that:-). Let’s just think about scaling for a moment. There are several equations involved here:
is the total power radiated from a sphere of radius R at uniform temperature T. \sigma is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant and can be ignored for the moment in a scaling discussion. \epsilon describes the emissivity of the body and is a constant of order unity (unity for a black body, less for a “grey” body, more generally still a function of wavelength and not a constant at all). Again, for scaling we will ignore \epsilon.
Now let’s assume that the temperature is not uniform. To make life simple, we will model a non-uniform temperature as a sphere with a uniform “hot side” at temperature T + dT and a “cold side” at uniform temperature T – dT. Half of the sphere will be hot, half cold. The spatial mean temperature, note well, is still T. Then:
P’ = (4 \pi R^2) epsilon sigma ( 0.5*(T + dT)^4 + 0.5(T – dT)^4)
is the power radiated away now. We only care how this scales, so we: a) Do a binomial expansion of P’ to second order (the first order terms in dT cancel); and b) form the ratio P’/P to get:
P’/P = 1 + 6 (dT/T)^2
This lets us make one observation and perform an estimate. The observation is that P’ is strictly larger than P — a non-uniform distribution of temperature on the sphere radiates energy away strictly faster than it is radiated away by a uniform sphere of the same radius with the same mean temperature. This is perfectly understandable — the fourth power of the hot side goes up much faster than the fourth power of the cold side goes down, never even mind that the cold side temperature is bounded from below at T_c = 0.
The estimate: dT/T \approx 0.03 for the Earth. This isn’t too important — it is an order of magnitude estimate, with T \approx 300K and dT \approx 10K. (0.03^2 = 0.0009 \approx 0.001 so that 6(0.03)^2 \approx 0.006. Of course, if you use latitude instead of day/night side stratification for dT, it is much larger. Really, one should use both and integrate the real temperature distribution (snapshot) — or work even harder — but we’re just trying to get a feel for how things vary here, not produce a credible quantitative computation.
For the Earth to be in equilibrium, S/4 must equal P’ — as much heat as is incident must be radiated away. I’m not concerned with the model, only with the magnitude of the scaling ratio — 1375 * 0.006 = 8.25 W/m^2, divided by four suggests that the fact that the temperature of the earth is not uniform increases the rate at which heat is lost (overall) by roughly 2 W/m^2. This is not a negligible amount in this game. It is even less negligible when one considers the difference not between mean daytime and mean nighttime temperatures but between equatorial and polar latitudes! There dT is more like 0.2, and the effect is far more pronounced!
The point is that as temperatures increase, the rate at which the Earth loses heat goes strictly up, all things being equal. Hot bodies lose heat (to radiation) much faster than cold bodies due to Stefan-Boltzmann’s T^4 straight up; then anything that increases the inhomogeneity of the temperature distribution around the (increased) mean tends to increase it further still. Note well that the former scales like:
P’/P = 1 + 4 dT/T + …
straight up! (This assumes T’ = T + dT, with dT << T the warming.) At the high end of the IPCC doom scale, a temperature increase of 5.6C is 5.6/280 \approx 0.02. That increases the rate of Stefan-Boltzmann radiative power loss by a factor of 0.08 or nearly 10%. I would argue that this is absurd — there is basically no way in hell doubling CO_2 (to a concentration that is still < 0.1%) is going to alter the radiative energy balance of the Earth by 10%.
The beauty of considering P’/P in all of these discussions is that it loses all of the annoying (and often unknown!) factors such as \epsilon. All that they require is that \epsilon itself not vary in first order, faster than the relevant term in the scaling relation. They also give one a number of “sanity checks”. The sanity checks suggest that one simply cannot assume that the Earth is a ball at some uniform temperature without making important errors, They also suggest that changes of more than 1-2C around some geological-time mean temperature are nearly absurdly unlikely, given the fundamental T^4 in the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. Basically, given T = 288, every 1K increase in T corresponds to a 1.4% increase in total radiated power. If one wants a “smoking gun” to explain global temperature variation, it needs to be smoking at a level where net power is modulated at the same scale as the temperature in degrees Kelvin.
Are there candidates for this sort of a gun? Sure. Albedo, for one. 1% changes in (absolute) albedo can modulate temperature by roughly 1K. An even better one is modulation of temperature distribution. If we learn anything from the decadal oscillations, it is that altering the way temperature is distributed on the surface of the planet has a profound and sometimes immediate effect on the net heating or cooling. This is especially true at the top of the troposphere. Alteration of greenhouse gas concentrations — especially water — have the right order of magnitude. Oceanic trapping and release and redistribution of heat is important — Europe isn’t cold not just because of CO_2 but because the Gulf Stream transports equatorial heat to warm it up! Interrupt the “global conveyor belt” and watch Europe freeze (and then North Asia freeze, and then North America freeze, and then…).
But best of all is a complex, nonlinear mix of all of the above! Albedo, global circulation (convection), Oceanic transport of heat, atmospheric water content, all change the way temperature is distributed (and hence lost to radiation) and all contribute, I’m quite certain, in nontrivial ways to the average global temperature. When heat is concentrated in the tropics, T_h is higher (and T_c is lower) compared to T and the world cools faster. When heat is distributed (convected) to the poles, T_h is closer to T_c and the world cools overall more slowly, closer to a baseline blackbody. When daytime temperatures are much higher than nighttime tempratures, the world cools relatively quickly; when they are more the same it is closer to baseline black/grey body. When dayside albedo is high less power is absorbed in the first place, and net cooling occurs; when nightside albedo is high there is less night cooling, less temperature differential, and so on.
The point is that this is a complex problem, not a simple one. When anyone claims that it is simple, they are probably trying to sell you something. It isn’t a simple physics problem, and it is nearly certain that we don’t yet know how all of the physics is laid out. The really annoying thing about the entire climate debate is the presumption by everyone that the science is settled. It is not. It is not even close to being settled. We will still be learning important things about the climate a decade from now. Until all of the physics is known, and there are no more watt/m^2 scale surprises, we won’t be able to build an accurate model, and until we can build an accurate model on a geological time scale, we won’t be able to answer the one simple question that must be answered before we can even estimate AGW:
What is the temperature that it would be outside right now, if CO_2 were still at its pre-industrial level?
I don’t think we can begin to answer this question based on what we know right now. We can’t explain why the MWP happened (without CO_2 modulation). We can’t explain why the LIA happened (without CO_2 modulation). We can’t explain all of the other significant climate changes all the way back to the Holocene Optimum (much warmer than today) or the Younger Dryas (much colder than today) even in just the Holocene. We can’t explain why there are ice ages 90,000 years out of every 100,000, why it was much warmer 15 million years ago, why geological time hot and cold periods come along and last for millions to hundreds of millions of years. We don’t know when the Holocene will end, or why it will end when it ends, or how long it will take to go from warm to cold conditions. We are pretty sure the Sun has a lot to do with all of this but we don’t know how, or whether or not it involves more than just the Sun. We cannot predict solar state decades in advance, let alone centuries, and don’t do that well predicting it on a timescale of merely years in advance. We cannot predict when or how strong the decadal oscillations will occur. We don’t know when continental drift will alter e.g. oceanic or atmospheric circulation patterns “enough” for new modes to emerge (modes which could lead to abrupt and violent changes in climate all over the world).
Finally, we don’t know how to build a faithful global climate model, in part because we need answers to many of these questions before we can do so! Until we can, we’re just building nonlinear function fitters that do OK at interpolation, and are lousy at extrapolation.
rgb
R. Gates says:
January 7, 2012 at 9:32 am
Fred berple says:
“Why? Because the earth itself is a full-sized model. And if you ran the identical earth two times, time it would have a different climate.”
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I want to make sure I fully understand what you are implying by this, because if you are saying what I think you are, it highlights a fundamental error that many people make when they think about climate, natural variability, chaotic systems, etc.
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I’m with Fred on this to some extent but I would be more precise.
If you had 2 separate earths with nearly identical starting conditions the evolution of the climate over time would be different. But not too different.
The chaotic behavior of the system means that at any time the climates of the 2 earths will not be identical. But physical constraints such as energy will ensure they are not utterly different.
The GCMs should show the same kind of behavior, thus making comparisons difficult and conclusions regarding their reliability fraught with logical fallacies and misconceptions.
This is not what Foster & Rahmstorf 2011 did. They wanted to see what signal was left over when natural fluctuations were removed. Everyone knows that ENSO, volcanoes, solar cycles cause natural fluctuations in temperature, and cerrtainly over a period of time, they will average out to no long-term warming signal.
We’ll have to discuss fitting multivariate nonlinear functions sometime. Especially in systems with substantial covarance, multiple cycles interacting (not just ENSO) and chaotic noise. Especially on a thirty or forty year baseline. Seriously, are you trying to suggest that those results mean anything at all? I spent several years working through fits of different parametric nonlinear forms to data, over and over again, and learned quite well that one can not just sometimes but often, usually, frequently, get whole families of equally good fits with sets of parameters that have wildly different physical interpretations, because if there is covariance, there is more than one way to skin a cat, or get the same signal from very different underlying assumptions.
Also, how in the world could everyone know that ENSO, volcanoes, solar cycles, average out to no long-term warming (or cooling) signal when historically then have done nothing else? That’s precisely what is wrong with the current CAGW theory. A glance at the correct (not MBH, the correct) global (coarse grain) average temperature over the Holocene shows that it has never been constant — it is always going up, going down, and the natural variability of precisely the oscillations, volcanoes, and solar variation matches or exceeds today’s temperature excursion, many times in the past. Sadly, you’re probably correct. Something that “everybody knows” who believes in the religion of CAGW isn’t actually true, and reasoning from false premises of course can lead one to all sorts of false conclusions.
rgb
Kelvin Vaughan says:
January 7, 2012 at 2:04 am
LazyTeenager says:
January 6, 2012 at 7:27 pm
The radiators are not aimed at the floor. So tilt them over a bit. Ensure the carpet is a dark colour, ensure the radiators are a dark colour, raise the temperature of the radiators.
I’ve done that now and they are still not radiating, or if they are the radiation is minute compared to the convection. Do you think it I double the CO2 in my rooms they will start radiating. I can’t increase their temperature as the boiler is working flat out?
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Sounds like you are using those steam/hot water radiators. They probably don’t radiate much IR and do most of their work by convection.
Suggest unbolting radiator and replumbing it so it lies on floor. Conduction will then heat floor. Even better bolt radiator to chair.
Doubling CO2 will have opposite effect to that desired, though effect too small to be distinguishable in small room. Increasing CO2 will cause rate of radiation to environment to fall, making it cooler, while radiator will get hotter.
Advise against trying to increase CO2 level to high levels as suffocation will result causing death.
R. Gates says:
January 7, 2012 at 10:04 am
I will be curious to see if and how our abililty to feed billions of people may be affected by these higher temperatures. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Let me make the following prediction about how our abililty to feed billions of people may be affected by increased CO2 regardless of temperature: It will be enhanced. Lets run some numbers using my back of the envelope super computer model for plant photosynthesis to explore why. Plants synthesize sugar from CO2. I chose glucose, C6 H12 O6.
Starting with atomic weight:
H=1
C=12
O=16
Molecular weight of
glucose=180
CO2=44
Therefore 1Kg of C will produce 3.6Kg of CO2 and 2.5Kg of glucose.
Atmospheric volume by content for CO2 :
@ur momisugly 300ppm= 6,222 M^3 of air contain 1 Kg of C or 2.5Kg glucose equivalent
@ur momisugly 400ppm= 4,666 M^3 of air contain 1 Kg of C ”
@ur momisugly 500ppm= 3,733 M^3 of air contain 1 Kg of C ”
Plants passively scavenge the air for CO2 by opening their stoma and waiting for CO2 to blunder in.
While they wait they lose water from their stoma by evapo-transpiration. The more CO2 is blundering around the more efficiently they can scavenge, the more time they can close their stoma, and the less water they lose. My plants call that a Win Win.
As temperatures go up (expressed in the records as higher T min) the effect will be a lengthened frost free growing season in those areas subject to frost. Win Win.
In areas subject to drought plants will have an increased water use efficiency tolerance to drought. Win Win.
Crop yields have trended up as CO2 has trended up. Coincidence? Proven by experiment.
So cheer up. The Biosphere is a marvelous thing. As to more CO2?… MORE SUGAR!
Tallbloke says
Momentum is a product of mass and velocity. Or it was when I learned classical mechanics. If photons are exempt from classical mechanics I’d like an explicit explanation please.
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Tallbloke, Your definition of momentum is not fundamental. Momentum is the measure of how much impact a collision produces or in other words how much the collision changes the motion of another particle. It just happens that momentum can be calculated for material particles from the mass velocity product.
For photons momentum has a different relationship namely moment = Planck constant / wavelength. You can figure out from this what happens to a material particle when a photon collides with it.
You could if you like derive a “mass” from this by applying momentum = mass x velocity but it’s kinda wrong. Relativity and all that.
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Expanding on my original objection that temperature is due to mass.
I’ ll reiterate: it’s not.
Temperature is fundamentally related to energy.
Fundamentallty ,at the microscopic level , it is the average KINETIC energy of particles in a randomly moving collection of particles. Mass only comes into this in so far as it relates to energy.
Just to illustrate further, if you have a mixture of gases with two different molecules, say radon and helium, then there is a single well-defined temperature. Mass does not come into it at all. But energy does.
For a physicist to endorse a claim that temperature is related to mass says something. It should make you skeptical.
u.k.(us) says:
January 7, 2012 at 1:27 pm
Bill Illis says:
January 7, 2012 at 3:55 am
“Now throw in Venus’ thick atmosphere and strong winds spreading the energy around to the darkside and we can explain Venus temperatures to the T.”
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I just read……somewhere…… that Venus has no wind.
Was it just more mis-information, or what ?
I always read your comments carefully, but after a bit of research it seems the winds on Venus are rather weak. (at the surface).
Please be more careful, I read your stuff.
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Some atmospheric layers on Venus have winds of 700 km/hr.
The surface winds are lower because the pressure is so high. At 10 km/hour, 90 bar pressure, that is still a massive movement of mass. AND it is faster than the rotation rate in fact so indeed the energy is being moved to the dark side.
R. Gates water drop on the table. You are right about the model getting the direction of the water flow right and that eventually the water will fall off the edge. The trouble is, like the climate models, they assume the tilting of the table, i.e. they observe that the Globe has warmed and so they assume that it must be CO2 – the reason? Because what else could it be! Lets see what else it could be. We observed the water drop flowing westerly across the table, impeded somewhat by all the inter-molecular sticky forces. This would happen if there were an easterly wind. This would happen if there were an extremely powerful magnetic gradient pulling paramagnetic water in a westerly direction. This would happen if CO2 managed to tip the table insignificantly (insufficient to overcome the bonding with the table) in a westerly direction and the wind blew from the east.
pompousgit says.
January 6, 2012 at 2:14
No need to change any rules. The lesson here is that even obeying a simple set of rules, the ant takes us into irreducible (so far) complexity of
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But you just explained to us that the behavior eventually becomes simple.
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The “simple” rules quantum physics can predict the behaviour of hydrogen, but beyond that you are in “ant country”.
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No. I would say your knowledge of this is 50 years out of date.
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The “simple” rules of chemistry can predict the behaviour of only the simplest of biological chemistry. Beyond that, you are in “ant country”.
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No. I would say you knowledge of this is 25 years out of date.
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Climate depends on the “simple” rules of physics, chemistry and biology. It is well and truly into “ant country”.
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False analogy.
AndyG55 says
Raising the height also increases the surface area of the radiating area, by a factor in relation to the sSQUARE of the change in height.
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No. It’s by a factor of twice the change in height. Differential calculus you know.
Phil’s dad says
I’m not seeing this as “based on less ice in the Arctic”.
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I’ll’ defer to you that one.
major9985 says:
January 7, 2012 at 8:30 am
If you want to claim that CO2 did not play a part in all these temperature changes, then you need to read these scientific papers and email them your reasons why they are wrong.
“GEOCARB III: A REVISED MODEL OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 OVER PHANEROZOIC TIME” ROBERT A. BERNER (http://earth.geology.yale.edu/~ajs/2001/Feb/qn020100182.pdf).
“CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate” — D. Royer et al, GSA Today, March 2004 (http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/GSA_Today.pdf)
“CO2 forced climate thresholds during the phanerozoic”, Dana L. Royer 2005 (http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/PhanCO2(GCA).pdf)
Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature”, Andrew A. Lacis, Gavin A. Schmidt, David Rind and Reto A. Ruedy, 2010 (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/356.abstract)
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“GeoCarb III” has CO2 at 4700 ppm 440 Mya, a time when temperatures were about -5C from today.
“CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate” is spectacular in that the actual numbers they used are almost exactly 1.5C per doubling over the entire timeframe yet they say it is almost certainly more than 3.0C per doubling.
“CO2 forced climate thresholds during the phanerozoic” relies on the Paleosol estimates of CO2 which were recently shown to be useless since the seasonal variation in the values are huge.
“Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature”, assumes that CO2 controls 90% of the water vapour when it could easily be the other way around.
Tallbloke says
. Ira Glickstein has made a fundamental error in assuming the gradient caused will dissipate to surroundings. All the surroundings at a given altitude are subject to the same gravitational compression and heating, so there is nowhere for the effect to dissipate to.
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Tallbloke,I am pretty sure Ira got it right. And Kevin Kilty says similar stuff and Kevin knows what he is talking about better than most here.
The temperature profile in the atmosphere is due to convection and not due to the static pressure per se. There is a lot of confusion around the ideal gas law and adiabatic heating due to changes in gas volume. Compressed at high pressure and compression as a process are being mixed up.
Conservation of energy plays its part in the atmospheric temperature profile. When air rises it gains gravitational energy, which it obtains by taking heat energy out of the gas. When air falls it looses gravitational energy and the loss is converted into thermal energy of the gas. It’s this circulation which sets the temperature profile.
Since rise and fall of air are associated with volume changes the energy changes involved can be inferred from the work done and this brings in the pressure. But the pressure fundamentally is derived from gravity as well.
So all roads lead to gravity and the energy changes associated with it.
In short do not misapply pV = nRT.
“”””” wayne says:
January 6, 2012 at 10:02 pm
George E. Smith; says:
January 6, 2012 at 6:00 p “””””
Sorry about so many typos in my post Wayne, but I think you got most of it. By the way, I’m not in disagreement with Prof Brown; merely wanted to point out that the cyclic analysis has been pointed out by many people many times, and that it always results in the cooling rate being higher than that derived from simply averaging the Temperature.
As to the cubic term, that will convert to a term at the fundamental frequency and an overtone at three times the frequency, both of which integrate to zero over a complete cycle.
cos(3a) =3cos(a)-4cos^3(a)
Maybe the sign is reversed on that: Cos(3a) = 4cos^3(a) -3cos(a)
Frank K. says:
January 7, 2012 at 1:09 pm
“PS: Let me know when NCAR goes off the grid…”
Thats a good one! Gave me a laugh!
Let us add NOAA, NASA, The White House, Pentagon, yes, ALL the big Government organisations should let us now when they are running permanently on Wind Mills and solar cells.
Of course they can do logging, but only from their own non-subsidised forest, using horses.
Maximum power-output from each horse is…. 1 hp.
Mr. Gates, your statements about modeling are built on several faulty assumptions and presumptions about modeling, but this post will be about just one: you can have useful information about the effect of one variable (call it an independent variable) on the modeled variable (call it the dependent variable) by holding all other variable constant. The presumption that all other variables can be held constant is a heroic and faulty assumption. Consider a Keynesian economic model where Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is directly related to Consumption (C), Investment (I), Government Expenditures (G)and Net Exports (X). The model tells us that by increasing G, and holding all other variable constant, you can increase GDP. But what if the increased borrowing necessitated by increasing G causes interest rates to rise, and that rise in interest rates causes Investment to fall. Thus you have not increased GDP, you have merely shifted the components of GDP. And it can get much worse, what if a huge G stimulus produces such a fear of deficits and future deficits that demand in Investment sector (and maybe in the Consumption sector) stalls, and interest rates actually fall. What if Keynesian economics is the cause of the Liquidity Trap instead of being the solution to it? Since Investment is the route to increased productivity, growth, and wage increases, your increased G could actually have a negative impact on GDP. What if increased G, the impact on the deficit, and the resulting increased in regulations dampen the activity of entrepreneurs who must each year create millions of jobs to offset job losses due to changes in consumer preferences and technological advances? Your increased G could actually lead to job losses.
Of course, there could be problems in a Supply Side model of the economy. What if your tax decrease to stimulate investment and entrepreneurship leads to resentment so that protests cause diversion of resources and destruction of wealth? Or perhaps the propect of tax decreases stimulates individuals and groups to pursue rent-seeking activities which Supply Siders perceive to undermine the health of the economy.
In climate models, what if increased CO2 influences other atmospheric conditions? What if increased CO2 affects plant growth, and that plant growth has more of an impact on land climate than the absorption properties of CO2? What if the increased CO2 causes an increase in algae in the ocean which decreases the opacity of the ocean which causes more of an impact on climate than the absorption properties of CO2?
And the examples could continue on and on. A presumptuous model can cause more harm than good.
I have Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, focusing on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for my dissertation, and currently have over 20 years of experience in industrial CFD applications. Even models that I work with that have 10 – 100 million cells are an order of magnitude less complex (physically) than a typical climate model, where large doses of empiricism are required to obtain any kind of solution. My education, intuition, and experience suggests to me that climate models have a long way to go before they can be truly useful. Should we keep funding their development? Sure! But please don’t tell me that the solution of a given climate model is evidence of global warming (or anything else). And, more importantly, please don’t attempt to destroy our economy based on these numerical solutions
Beautifully said, sir, and I agree. The Navier-Stokes equation all by itself is a marvel of complexity so great that several of its formal mathematical properties have yet to be proven, and that’s before you add in the additional complexity of the land and radiation and a whole different coupled NS equation describing the ocean, all with time scales ranging from hours to order of tens of centuries (plus whatever unknown timescales modulate the Sun and possibly even Galactic state) and in the very milieu where it was discovered that the solutions are sensitive all the way down to the smallest length scales (butterfly effect). This is a hard problem, not settled science. Remove just those two words from the public debate — honestly acknowledge the uncertainties, honestly acknowledge the fact that the upper reaches of possible climate sensitivity are already solidly contradicted by the data, and:
a) The “Catastrophe” disappears. We have modest AGW of perhaps 1C over the next century, if we don’t slip into cooling, following the return of the sun not even to a Grand Minimum but simply back to normal after the 11,000 year Grand Maximum of the 20th century. It will take another 20 years — at least one more solar cycle and the rest of this one — for the Earth’s climate system to regress back towards its “normal” behavior from when the Sun is doing Grand Max or Grand Min stuff — timescale clearly visible in the climate record, at least two full solar cycles and a long tail because this still doesn’t equilibrate the longer period oscillations.
b) The political motivation for the IPCC and all the silly, expensive measures designed to urgently “control” CO_2 as if it were a pollutant goes away. There’s no need to panic. In fact, there’s little need to “do” anything at all, beyond simple things like continue to fund aggressive development of solar and fusion technologies (which we should do in any event as part of planning for a steady state world civilization that cannot rely on finite fuel resources) and continue to develop fuel efficient energy sources (cars and so on) where we can, simply because buying gas for my 45 miles per gallon Prius beats the hell out of buying gas for my 13 mile per gallon Excursion (yes, I have both:-).
Peak Oil is very controversial, and may or may not ever occur, but one thing that damn sure has occurred and is occurring is deliberate global manipulation of supply to ensure the highest possible prices for gasoline and the consequent highest possible profits for the entire gasoline production chain. The progress of our economy is tightly tied to the cost of energy. When the supply is manipulated (and easily manipulable!) by forces and multinational agents over whom we have little control, our entire lifestyle is vulnerable. Getting off of oil (and sure, ensuring an adequate domestic supply) is a matter of national security as well as sheer common sense. The recession several years ago was triggered in part by spiralling oil prices that rose faster than personal incomes could accommodate them (as well as my several other proximate factors that were probably more important). You can almost watch the market today (and over the last 20+ years) move in counterpoint to oil prices as Iran plays games with the the Straits of Hormuz, as Libya and Egypt have revolutions, as Kuwait and/or Iraq go offline due to wars, as OPEC manipulates the supply.
So here’s my solution to the CAGW problem. Do nothing. It is a non-problem. It is not unlike using the (true) assertion that CRT-based TV screens cause cancer and cataracts would have been twenty years ago, to push the political agenda of taxing CRT production and utilization. Piffle — first of all the effect is small, second it is partly ameliorated by lead in the screens (itself undesirable sure, it’s an imperfect world) but — do nothing and wait a bit, and behold — no CRT based TV screens are left in the known universe because they have been supplanted by a newer, better technology. Taxing CRTs in the meantime would have served no useful purpose save crippling our entire economy.
The government did not sit by idle, by the way. I know for a fact that the government funded a huge amount of the research that led to flatscreen technologies. My primary colleague in the physics department for 25 years was also an ARO research directory and he personally funded some of it, including some of the very first work done in that direction. Our government can make a difference with sensible investment, but not if we are creating an entire absurd international shadow economy around carbon.
Here’s a suggestion for the UN. Forget the carbon tax and carbon trading. Make your point up front. To reduce the global instability of the world (and hence reduce the chances of war, the UN mission) three things must happen:
a) The gap between the third world and the first world must continue to narrow. People trapped in a hopeless cycle of poverty and oppression are willing to fight to improve their lot (reasonably, actually). People who are comfortably well off and who have hope for the future are not.
b) The education gap worldwide must be narrowed. The Internet is working miracles in this regard, but it absolutely needs help. Educated people can remake the economies of their own countries, and engagement in a global society reduces the kind of isolationist gap that leads to nationalism and warmongering. It’s hard to hate a culture when you watch its TV shows, listen to its music, blog and chat with its people. The information bazaar is perhaps the greatest force for peace the world has ever seen.
c) Tyrants must be actively opposed. Sorry world, but kings and dictators are so 20th century. A free, democratic country is very unlikely to go to war against another free, democratic country. In fact, thinking back on it I can’t recall a major case of it happening in the last 100 years, perhaps longer. Free countries are natural allies, and are natural trading partners. Even sort of free countries like China are relatively unlikely to go to war. Democratic societies need to be willing to set limits — as they did during the Arab Spring uprisings — and take multilateral action to support the gradual attrition of the handful of remaining nonfree governments.
Re a), it absolutely helps to extend a helping hand and help build up the economies of third world countries, give them a leg up to the first world. I grew up in India because my father worked for Ford Foundation. The Ford and Rockefeller foundation, US AID, and a few other organizations played a key role in the Green Revolution in India that took a country in which millions of people starved to death in droughts in the early 20th century and made it into a food exporting country, which it remains today. In the meantime, India has lifted itself up where only the weight of its population is keeping it from being a full member of the first world.
If the UN wants tax money from me, I’m not completely unwilling. But I want to see that money laid out honestly — targeted on a), b), and c) above. This is the really absurd thing about IPCC and the kind of money that is being kicked around. It is tens to hundreds of billions of dollars! A tenth of that, spent wisely, would make a huge difference in the real lives of real people. It would prevent starvation, break the cycle of poverty, uplift people with education to where they can build not only democratic government but local prosperity in a balanced economy. Spending it limiting CO_2 production instead is an absolute travesty. It is shameful. It is despicable.
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I too am in the nonlinear modeling game, albeit in a very different regime, and stand in awe of attempts to model
Oops, sorry, left a tag at the end then from the cut and paste, and a spurious “my” in the text above. A modest suggestion to Anthony and the moderators. You might one day take a peek at the interface of Goodreads or even Slashdot. They both have the “preview post” functionality that would let people fix things before they post. If it is there in this interface, I don’t see it.
[Reply] Unfortunately there is no preview on wordpress. I’ll fix the typos when i have a moment. TB – mod
If you had 2 separate earths with nearly identical starting conditions the evolution of the climate over time would be different. But not too different.
This is precisely where you are mistaken. You obviously do not understand bistability and hysteresis at all, and if you understand chaotic systems with poincare attractors, you understand them very poorly, sir.
I, on the other hand, have published papers studying bistable systems in detail. Open systems can very, very easily have two or more completely distinct modes both of which are locally stable and both of which are in energy balance. Your remark is an example of how the entire warmist crowd linearizes the hell out of everything.
And at the same time, they don’t! All of the FUD concerning “tipping points” is exactly what? Concern that we can “suddenly” flip over to a much warmer state.
The Earth is — as I’ve pointed out — not just bistable, it is multistable. In fact, it is so multistable that the climate itself probably is rather chaotic. Yes, there are physical bounds beyond which the Earth cannot be driven and remain in energy balance, but again sir, look at the thermal record of the Earth!. Those bounds have at least two distinct major attractors — cold phase ice age and warm phase interglacial. They are separated by some 5-10C, and are clearly hysteretic — cold phase is locally stable against brief warmings because of the vast mass of high-albedo glaciation, and warm phase is locally stable against brief coolings because it takes time to build up glacial mass. There is a fractal scheme of multistable variation around locally stable conditions visible within the cold phase and warm phase attractors, where the average global temperature jumps up or down by order of 2C around an ill-defined “mean”. The current warm excursion — clearly correlated with an 11,000 year Grand Solar Maximum not unlike the one that began the Holocene — is well within the range of normal multistable variation in the warm phase, and even a cursory glance at e.g. Tisdale’s SST data and analysis reveals the strong coupling between oscillation peaks and shifts to new attractor combinations.
What you are saying is true only if you don’t advance the timeseries very far! In fact, only if you don’t advance it far enough for the first Lyupanov exponent to split off the behavior significantly. Which is, incidentally, precisely why the GCMs have no skill — they do all right for next year, or two years from now, because the weather today is probably going to be like the weather yesterday, the climate next year is probably going to be like the climate this year; one can linearly extrapolate current trends on even a nonlinear function for a while. But then all of those nasty causal effects that your model left out or didn’t initialize correctly, all of those ignored butterfly wingbeats start to add up.
Interestingly, GCMs often try to get around this problem by running ensembles to get an idea of the accessible downstream phase space, and then average over the ensemble to make their predictions (with some sort of “error bar” estimate). To the extent that these fail of five year, ten year, twenty year predictions, it means that they are very probably leaving out important physics. And none of them, ensemble or otherwise, could be initialized with data in the 1800s and predict the evolution of climate through today with the slightest bit of skill, or take the data today and run the models backwards to hindcast the temperature in the LIA.
Why not simply acknowledge this, instead of defending the indefensible? GCMs are not “worthless” — they are wonderful things to work on, and perhaps one day they will start to have long range predictive value, but one has only to look at e.g. Hansen’s papers and the alarmist predictions over the years to see that the actual climate has long since deviated from those predictions. I’m still waiting for warmist papers to be published that honestly acknowledge that the 5C outer bounds of climate sensitivity are at this point absurdly contradicted by the actual data, and that perhaps 2C is an upper bound — not terribly likely, but perhaps 10% likely — at this point, with 1C or less the most likely.
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For a physicist to endorse a claim that temperature is related to mass says something. It should make you skeptical.
You mean, for a physicist to assert something like:
U = 1/2 m _avg = 1/2 kT
for the internal energy of particles in a gas, which is (incidentally) the defining relation for temperature via the equipartition theorem? For somebody to assert that temperature is not related to mass should make you very skeptical. Molar heat capacity, anyone?
Not that I completely disagree with your point, by the way — it all depends on context, and IIRC the context you are referring to is one where I had doubts as well. But let’s not overreach with our arguments, shall we?
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BTW, in the previous section I was referring to a “1D” gas and something happened to the “v”, and “^2” — I’ll try again for a 3d gas and see if I can figure out what ate the characters:
U = 3/2 m v-squared-average = 3/2 kT
where k is Boltzmann’s constant, T is the temperature in degrees absolute, and U is the internal average kinetic energy of a monatomic gas at thermal equilibrium. Note well the prominent role of “m”.
Incidentally, this is (in part) why low-E windows are filled with Argon gas instead of air, or worse, Helium. Not only does mass matter in temperature, mass matters — a great deal — in macroscopic heat transport. You can look the physics up on the web at your convenience.
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Damn, I wish I had an editor that worked on old posts. “average kinetic energy PER MOLECULE”… multiply by N to get the total for the gas, massage in straightforward ways to get PV = NkT, our old friend the ideal gas law. We can continue intro level thermo (which I teach) at your convenience. Of course this problem is not intro level thermo. As I keep saying and will say again, it is a hard problem, not settled science. Even CAGW could be true, it is just far, far from proven or the most reasonable extrapolation of the data so far.
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The temperature profile in the atmosphere is due to convection and not due to the static pressure per se. There is a lot of confusion around the ideal gas law and adiabatic heating due to changes in gas volume. Compressed at high pressure and compression as a process are being mixed up.
Conservation of energy plays its part in the atmospheric temperature profile. When air rises it gains gravitational energy, which it obtains by taking heat energy out of the gas. When air falls it looses gravitational energy and the loss is converted into thermal energy of the gas. It’s this circulation which sets the temperature profile.
Since rise and fall of air are associated with volume changes the energy changes involved can be inferred from the work done and this brings in the pressure. But the pressure fundamentally is derived from gravity as well.
So all roads lead to gravity and the energy changes associated with it.
In short do not misapply pV = nRT.
This I partly agree with. Yes to temperature profile and convection — you could easily have a gas with a uniform temperature and a pressure gradient. No to conservation of energy and heat. The first law balances heat, internal energy, and work, and one has to account for work done not just by gravity but by/on the surrounding air, and it is not a closed system so it isn’t really adiabatic while all of this is going on. Rising air in sunlight is continuously heated as it is rising, for example. Finally, you are misrepresenting the force that pushes up the warmer air — it is just Archimedes Principle — buoyance force. Just as a fishing bobber doesn’t change temperature as it rises to the surface of the water, there is no necessary relationship between gravity, uplifting air masses, and work being done by gravity altering the temperature of the air mass.
All summing up to — it is more complicated than all of this, which is why God invented Navier-Stokes for describing the thermal physics of fluids. Everybody seems to want to oversimplify this problem, so it is probably worth putting an actual link to the wikipedia page into this thread:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations
Read it and weep. This is not quite the proper framework for evaluating the time evolution of the atmosphere. That is, it is the starting point — the atmosphere is much more complicated. And y’know? We can’t even solve the NS equation. Check out the Hopf fibration at the bottom, BTW, that’s a very simple example of the kind of complexity that can arise in 3d systems under the simple, symmetric forms of the NS equation.
Let me say it one final time:
This is a Hard Problem_tm, not settled science. Anybody that tells you otherwise is selling something. And that goes both ways — skeptics need to be aware that CAGW could be right! IMO it probably is not — and the data suggests no need to panic and as I’ve pointed out above, there is almost certainly time for the “CO_2 problem” to resolve itself if we do nothing, driven by pure economics and advances in physics (and in the meantime, there are better ways to spend our money than trying to “sequester” CO_2 or transfer “Carbon Taxes” to China).
Either way, as I noted above I agree that it isn’t just PV = NkT that is responsible for the thermal profile or equilibrium temperature of planets, although it is also quite true that a system with more atmospheric mass will have a higher heat capacity in that mass and will respond very differently to forcings compared to an atmosphere (like Mars) with less mass. And ditto the presence of an ocean with an enormous heat capacity will make a big difference as well. So it wouldn’t be completely crazy to find that there are certain ways where temperature does corrrelate with the mass density of the atmosphere.
Look at the problem of e.g. understanding Jupiter’s atmosphere, which radiates more energy than it receives. Look at the other gas giants, look at Venus. Do you think that we understand all of this yet?
Did I mention that this was a hard problem?
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Robert Brown says:
January 8, 2012 at 8:18 am
If you had 2 separate earths with nearly identical starting conditions the evolution of the climate over time would be different. But not too different.>>>
This is precisely where you are mistaken. You obviously do not understand bistability and hysteresis at all, and if you understand chaotic systems with poincare attractors, you understand them very poorly, sir. >>>>
Is it fair to say that the two systems would oscillate within the same parameters but the probability of them being synchronized is nil?
Thanks for bringing your expertise to the forum. Extremely edifying and enjoyable.
Dr. Robert Brown
thanks for taking the time to add your comments clarifying your thoughts, great post & whole heartedly agree with your POV.
PS. yes, you get the point across quite well that this is not a simple problem 🙂