I’m taking the rest of the weekend off – for two reasons:
1. With 100million views under my belt, I’ve earned it.
2. I’m rebuilding my home personal computer as it is becoming flakey, and such things take three times as long as you figure. Windows doesn’t take well to new mobos, and backup/prep must be done. So I’ll be down anyway.
Talk quietly amongst yourselves on any topic within site policy – don’t make me come back here until late Sunday night whenI start my regular work week. 😉 – Anthony
UPDATE: Sunday AM – My computer rebuild went well, and I learned some valuable things that I’ll share in an upcoming post. I went from an old AMDx2 64 dual core to a Intel I5 quad core CPU, doubled my memory speed, doubled my video card speed, and went from a SATA2 to SATA3 SSD. I can blog even faster now. Speaking of which, my email load this morning contained two stories (one quite dramatic) that I’ve put on auto-scheduled publishing that will appear soon. I’m still taking the rest of the day off though. – Anthony
Tallbloke says
This is the only logic which can account for simultaneously dropping sea levels and rising OHC.
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I recollect a bunch of satellite measurements which put a lot of rain onto the continents over the last few years. Gravimetric measuremts perhaps.
R. Gates
“Stick your hand in the flow of water from your shower head and tell me where all the little droplets are going to wind up.”
In the drain.
Tallbloke says
Six mm of world ocean is equivalent to a couple of thousand cubic kilometers of water IIRC.
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Well it amounts to 12 mm on land. Obviously we don’t see 12mm of water everywhere, but I don’t have a feel for what this represents in terms of increased soil moisture and aquifer recharging.
Christian Bultmann says:
January 7, 2012 at 7:16 pm
“R. Gates
“Stick your hand in the flow of water from your shower head and tell me where all the little droplets are going to wind up.”
In the drain.”
Not if it’s the government’s hand.
(And geo-engineering would have to be the largest statist project ever.)
Orson Olson says:
“WHERE IS THE BOOK ON THE FACT THAT PALEOCLIMATE EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT delta-T LEADS delta-CO2?”
Orson, there are numerous graphs from both hemispheres showing that ΔT leads ΔCO2. Here is one, from the Vostok ice core record:
http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/paleo/400000yearslarge.gif
Ice cores from both hemispheres show the same thing: CO2 lags temperature. Typical lag time following temperature rises: 800 ±200 years.
R. Gates,
Good question. The divergence is partly overstaded (local warming, confirmation bias), but it’s likely a smaller part. The rest is explained by the thermal inertia of the ocean/ice system. The series of relatively strong cycles after the colder 19th century caused some warming, but much of the power of these cycles was spent on raising the energy of the oceans/ice. When oceans are already warmer and ice extent is less, two strong cycles (21 and 22) caused more warming much more easily. The SC23 was actually very weak, but it caused little to no cooling due to the high energy content of the oceans and little ice extent. The fit is surprisingly good, considering it’s only one factor – the sun cycle (or oscillation).
DirkH says:
January 7, 2012 at 6:22 pm
Sure but not all of the energy would be radiated out. What happens to the energy conducted from the surface to the N2 O2? As soon as N2 O2 warm up, they rise away from the surface but still retaining their energy. They are replaced at surface level by cooler N2 O2 from above.
At night the ground cools and so does the N2 O2 at ground level but the previously warmed N2 O2 molecules cannot descend down because they are warmer than the N2 O2 below (Temp inversion).
So no, the temp wouldn’t get to 100,000 but it would get close to whatever the highest surface temp is. (given enough time as conduction is a slow process)
So unless you can show that N2 O2 can conductively cool as quickly as they conductively warm, the mean temp would be higher than a no atmosphere situation because N2 O2 are Low Emissivity gasses.
Therefore, to cool the system quicker, we would need to introduce High Emissivity gasses.
Baa Humbug says:
January 7, 2012 at 7:26 pm
“As soon as N2 O2 warm up, they rise away from the surface but still retaining their energy. They are replaced at surface level by cooler N2 O2 from above.”
VERY good! I haven’t thought of that!
Camburn says
7. This is something that can be measured/observed on a short time span. Sea level recovery has not been apparant by either Evistat nor Colorado, hence the volume of water has to have shrunk.
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Nit quite. Envisat is heading back to the long term trend.
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/en/news/ocean-indicators/mean-sea-level/
Tallbloke says
Gates: consider this. To measure the sea surface to within a few mm using satellites, you need to know where the satellites are in space, to within a few mm.
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But we known the satellites can pick up local variations in sea level due to air pressure, el niño etc., So maybe the people who run satellites and build instrumentation know a tad more than Daly.
LazyTeenager:
Envisat has a longggg way to go to get back to the long term trend.
You are clutching at a straw man here.
R. Gates says:
January 7, 2012 at 11:52 am
“How do skeptics to AGW explain this?”
Natural variability, in a very poorly quantified, highly complex stochastic climate system.
Now, get your hand out of my pocket and pay for your own irrational concerns about an additional 80 ppm of plant food added to our CO2 starved atmosphere.
Warmist Regards!
MtK
Janice says:
January 7, 2012 at 7:01 pm
While your question to R. Gates seems well intentioned, I question the part where you say
“perhaps much less than a hundred years”
You use the phrase “massive glaciers” when it seems you mean ice sheets such as the Laurentide Ice Sheet rather than, say mountain valley glaciers. While some of the latter at low latitude and low elevation may have melted in less than 100 years (your term; I have no information), it seems that the Laurentide ice was with us for a long time. Perhaps you can provide more information with places and time frames.
LazyTeenager@7:42
I forgive you for being a young feller/woman who has not had the schooling to learn about error bars etc.
You can’t reduce the error bars of the results by ignoring the error bars of the placement of the collection device.
You are most kind to post on this blog so that us older folks can share our wisdom and knowledge with you, knowing that you are most certainly a receptive learner.
I hatre my computer – do you think you can come over and fix mine?
LOL
Am I being just a little too skeptical in suggesting that China might have an ulteria motive in anouncing their proposed $1.50 carbon abatement tax.
When one looks at the level of earnings they achieve with solar and wind generation componentry, it is very much in their interests to come up with a ‘me too’ moment, to provide encouragement to the ‘intellectual giants’ of Australia, the EU, etc.
China, must surely surmise the western world will at some stage regain a modicum of common sense – one can’t blame them for making the most of this madness while it lasts.
Msrkus says
I filled 3 1ltr drink bottles, 1 x dry air, 1 x 1/2 water, 1 x Co2. With little stick thermos on each bottle, I warmed them by a radiator to the same temp.
Temp was lost first by the Co2, followed by the water, then the dry air (which took twice as long to cool as the Co2.
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I don’t understand your experiment. It sounds like you had one bottle half filled with liquid water.
This experiment is not easy to do properly. There are complications that need to be addressed:
1. The plastic bottle may not allow IR radiation pass through its walls. Check the absorption spectrum of the PET (most likely).
2. check the bottle with the water in it is not producing a mini water cycle.
3. The thermal capacity of the thermometer may exceed that of the gas in the bottle.
And so on.
Regarding the question of Ice or Not Ice, see Robert Frost’s take on . . .
‘A Hillside Thaw’
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/robertfrost/12117
DirkH says
Has this ever been demonstrated? I don’t dispute that CO2 absorbs IR; but I hold that it instantly re-emits it. Any valid experimental setup should NOT use standard glass jars. CO2 is an IR fog.
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Almost right. I believe the CO2 absorbs the IR, but the collision rate with other gas molecules is much higher than the IR excited state lifetime, so that energy is transferred to the bath gas. A ground state CO2 then absorbs energy from the bath gas and re-emits the IR.
Things to check:
1. Lifetime of IR excited state
2. Time between collisions in gas.
3. Boltzmann intensity distribution of CO2 emission lines. This will be a direct measure of the temperature at which emission occurs. If the inferred temperature matches the actual air temperature then the energy of the original IR photon must have equilibrated with its environment.
If that all checks out the case is closed.
R. Gates
I am amazed when people professing to follow this site and some ability in reading graphs can still state:
However, there does appear to be a great divergence in correlation in the later part of the 20th century (after about 1980) between solar activity ( as measured any number of ways) and global temperatures. How do skeptics to AGW explain this?
after studying this sequence of graphs provided kindly by Anthony .
In any part down the sliding to an ice age recent history to our times, there are ups and downs as large as the late twentieth century, and the observation can be made : what goes down will come up, albeit take its time to do so. Maybe sir, you should check your glasses.
Orson Olson says
I would love to have this book of scientific documentation to point AGW-Believers to….
THIS is simp,y one of the weak points in the AGW-skeptic briefing.
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It won’t help you.
What you need is evidence that temperature is leading CO2 now. Or at least since some time before the industrial age.
Since there are feedback loops involved cause and effect become self referential and so both CO2 or ocean temperatures can be first causes depending on the circumstance.
The problems that arise from this particular debating point are:
1. A CO2 increase now implies a temperature increase 800 years ago. DirkH (I think) suggested the MWP to account for that, but the timing is not quite right.
2. The previous interglacials had the ocean out gassed at 300pm but we are now at 390ppm and still rising.
So great little debating point but a little lame as far as the truth is concerned.
DirkH – “Meaning that now half of them come back down, that’s the greenhouse effect, explaining those 33 centigrade of warming. ”
I am assuming you are referring to the difference between the 255 K S-B temp and the actual 288 K temperature. Convection accounts for the lions share of heating the atmosphere and LWR through CO2 only accounts for a tiny portion of atmospheric heating.
In your example CO2 LW radiation doesn’t even heat the atmosphere at all (if half is going out to space and half is going back to the surface).
Convection is the primary method for heating the atmosphere and averaging out the temperature over the globe.
ferd berple says:
January 7, 2012 at 5:08 pm:
I spent nearly 20 years sailing the Pacific and Indian Oceans on a 40 foot sailboat. We visited hundreds of remote coral atolls. Most of our charts were copies of British Admiralty Charts, drawn 150-250 years ago, drawn by the likes of Cook, Bligh, Vancouver, Flinders, etc. These areas have never been resurveyed as they are too remote.
If there has been any significant sea level rise over the past 150-250 years, it would be apparent in the charts.
Yes, it is worth visiting Google Earth and comparing some of Cooks Charts which can be found on the internet such as Botany Bay Australia and Cook Strait in New Zealand and seeing how remarkably similar they. You do have to make some allowances for such things as estuary silting and reclaiming of land and of course the rudimentary equipment that Cook was using. For instance he did miss Wellington Harbour on his chart of Cook Strait but he also missed Sydney Harbour which was just up the road after “discovering” Australia.
But if we get as much coastline change as you can see from these comparisons from sea level rises in the next 250 years I do not think our grandchildren’s grandchildren have much to worry about.
I recall that there was also a study done some-where comparing the old explorers’ records of observed weather to determine whether extreme events have also changed that much:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1218474/How-Captain-Cooks-ship-logs-helping-scientists-chart-global-climate-change.html
Interestingly not long before Capt Cook landed in Botany Bay and “found” Australia he observed “three water spouts at once, two were between us and the shore and one at some distance upon our larboard quarter.”
When seen these days naturally they are put down to yet another sign of global warming:
Google – Massive Waterspouts Form Off Australia Coast (VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…/waterspouts-2011-australia-video_n_86...
30 May 2011 – Unbelievable waterspouts off Australian coast – good video …. Global warming must be to blame for these water spouts, as no one has seen one in fifty years. …
Very strange that Capt Cook managed to see three in exactly the same place in 1770.
Baa Humbug;
Here is the conundrum:-
According to the GH Theory, the atmosphere is heated FROM THE INSIDE by the surface. Imagine the atmosphere as a box with the earth surface as the heater.
If I want to keep the inside of the box as cool as possible, I would “paint” the box with HEP. But since I can’t paint the atmosphere, the next best thing I could do is to infuse the atmosphere with High Emissivity gas molecules……CO2
What is wrong with the above?>>>
I’m not arguing the point you are trying to make, I think it very possible that CO2 may wind up proving to have a cooling effect when all is said and done. That said, your analogy doesn’t work very well because CO2 doesn’t exist in the atmosphere as a thin layer. It exists in a laer thousands of feet thick.
On top of that, the effects of CO2 change with altitude and with latitude. Why? Glad you asked.
At sea level in the tropics, water vapour can hit on the order of 40,000 parts per million (ppm). Since the absorption spectrum of water vapour and CO2 overlap, the effects of CO2 are pretty much zippo compared to water vapour. True, CO2 is a more efficient absorber of LW than water vapour, but when you’re outnumbered 40,000 to 400, muskets beat machine guns every time. As you rise in altitude however, or in latitude, temperatures fall. By the time you get to temps like 0 degrees C or colder, water vapour concentrations fall to near zero. Hence the expression, sure itz forty below, but itz a dry cold…
So, if you want CO2 to be your coat of paint, you have to figure out how to model the effects of a coat of paint that is (literaly) mostly air, and literaly, thicker in some places than in others. THEN you have to figure in the fact that in the latitudes that are cold (and hence permit CO2 to dominate over water vapour) there’s WAY less LW to absorb and re-radiate in the first place.
But if you can figure out how to model all those factors first, the rest ought to be simple by comparison. By simple of course, I’m thinking somewhere on the order of a 1000+ core compute cluster and less than a hundred thousand lines of code. Can’t help you with the code, but I do sell compute clusters….
Alan S. Blue,
Thank you kindly for your lengthy comments. Much to think about…