By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Joel Shore, who has been questioning my climate-sensitivity calculations, just as a good skeptic should, has kindly provided at my request a reference to a paper by Dr. Andrew Lacis and others at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies to support his assertion that CO2 exercises about 75% of the radiative forcings from all greenhouse gases, because water vapor, the most significant greenhouse gas because of its high concentration in the atmosphere, condenses out rapidly, while the non-condensing gases, such as CO2, linger for years.
Dr. Lacis writes in a commentary on his paper: “While the non-condensing greenhouse gases account for only 25% of the total greenhouse effect, it is these non-condensing GHGs that actually control the strength of the terrestrial greenhouse effect, since the water vapor and cloud feedback contributions are not self-sustaining and, as such, only provide amplification.”
Dr. Lacis’ argument, then, is that the radiative forcing from water vapor should be treated as a feedback, because if all greenhouse gases were removed from the atmosphere most of the water vapor now in the atmosphere would condense or precipitate out within ten years, and within 50 years global temperatures would be some 21 K colder than the present.
I have many concerns about this paper, which – for instance – takes no account of the fact that evaporation from the surface occurs at thrice the rate imagined by computer models (Wentz et al., 2007). So there would be a good deal more water vapor in the atmosphere even without greenhouse gases than the models assume.
The paper also says the atmospheric residence time of CO2 is “measured in thousands of years”. Even the IPCC, prone to exaggeration as it is, puts the residence time at 50-200 years. On notice I can cite three dozen papers dating back to Revelle in the 1950s that find the CO2 residence time to be just seven years, though Professor Lindzen says that for various reasons 40 years is a good central estimate.
Furthermore, it is questionable whether the nakedly political paragraph with which the paper ends should have been included in what is supposed to be an impartial scientific analysis. To assert without evidence that beyond 300-350 ppmv CO2 concentration “dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system would exceed the 25% risk tolerance for impending degradation of land and ocean ecosystems, sea-level rise [at just 2 inches per century over the past eight years, according to Envisat], and inevitable disruption of socioeconomic and food-producing infrastructure” is not merely unsupported and accordingly unscientific: it is rankly political.
One realizes that many of the scientists at GISS belong to a particular political faction, and that at least one of them used to make regular and substantial donations to Al Gore’s re-election campaigns, but learned journals are not the place for über-Left politics.
My chief concern, though, is that the central argument in the paper is in effect a petitio principii – a circular and accordingly invalid argument in which one of the premises – that feedbacks are strongly net-positive, greatly amplifying the warming triggered by a radiative forcing – is also the conclusion.
The paper turns out to be based not on measurement, observation and the application of established theory to the results but – you guessed it – on playing with a notorious computer model of the climate: Giss ModelE. The model, in effect, assumes very large net-positive feedbacks for which there is precious little reliable empirical or theoretical evidence.
At the time when Dr. Lacis’ paper was written, ModelE contained “flux adjustments” (in plain English, fudge-factors) amounting to some 50 Watts per square meter, many times the magnitude of the rather small forcing that we are capable of exerting on the climate.
Dr. Lacis says ModelE is rooted in well-understood physical processes. If that were so, one would not expect such large fudge-factors (mentioned and quantified in the model’s operating manual) to be necessary.
Also, one would expect the predictive capacity of this and other models to be a great deal more successful than it has proven to be. As the formidable Dr. John Christy of NASA has written recently, in the satellite era (most of which in any event coincides with the natural warming phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) temperatures have been rising at a rate between a quarter and a half of the rate that models such as ModelE have been predicting.
It will be helpful to introduce a little elementary climatological physics at this point – nothing too difficult (otherwise I wouldn’t understand it). I propose to apply the IPCC/GISS central estimates of forcing, feedbacks, and warming to what has actually been observed or inferred in the period since 1750.
Let us start with the forcings. Dr. Blasing and his colleagues at the Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center have recently determined that total greenhouse-gas forcings since 1750 are 3.1 Watts per square meter.
From this value, using the IPCC’s table of forcings, we must deduct 35%, or 1.1 Watts per square meter, to allow for negative anthropogenic forcings, notably the particles of soot that act as tiny parasols sheltering us from the Sun. Net anthropogenic forcings since 1750, therefore, are 2 Watts per square meter.
We multiply 2 Watts per square meter by the pre-feedback climate-sensitivity parameter 0.313 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, so as to obtain warming of 0.6 K before any feedbacks have operated.
Next, we apply the IPCC’s implicit centennial-scale feedback factor 1.6 (not the equilibrium factor 2.8, because equilibrium is thousands of years off: Solomon et al., 2009).
Accordingly, after all feedbacks over the period have operated, a central estimate of the warming predicted by ModelE and other models favored by the IPCC is 1.0 K.
We verify that the centennial-scale feedback factor 1.6, implicit rather than explicit (like so much else) in the IPCC’s reports, is appropriate by noting that 1 K of warming divided by 2 Watts per square meter of original forcing is 0.5 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, which is indeed the transient-sensitivity parameter for centennial-scale analyses that is implicit (again, not explicit: it’s almost as though They don’t want us to check stuff) in each of the IPCC’s six CO2 emissions scenarios and also in their mean.
Dr. Lacis’ paper is saying, in effect, that 80% of the forcing from all greenhouse gases is attributable to CO2. The IPCC’s current implicit central estimate, again in all six scenarios and in their mean, is in the same ballpark, at 70%.
However, using the IPCC’s own forcing function for CO2, 5.35 times the natural logarithm of (390 ppmv / 280 ppmv), respectively the perturbed and unperturbed concentrations of CO2 over the period of study, is 1.8 Watts per square meter.
Multiply this by the IPCC’s transient-sensitivity factor 0.5 and one gets 0.9 K – which, however, is the whole of the actual warming that has occurred since 1750. What about the 20-30% of warming contributed by the other greenhouse gases? That is an indication that the CO2 forcing may have been somewhat exaggerated.
The IPCC, in its 2007 report, says no more than that between half and all of the warming observed since 1950 (and, in effect, since 1750) is attributable to us. Therefore, 0.45-0.9 K of observed warming is attributable to us. Even taking the higher value, if we use the IPCC/GISS parameter values and methods CO2 accounts not for 70-80% of observed warming over the period but for all of it.
In response to points like this, the usual, tired deus ex machina winched creakingly onstage by the IPCC’s perhaps too-unquestioning adherents is that the missing warming is playing hide-and-seek with us, lurking furtively at the bottom of the oceans waiting to pounce. However, elementary thermodynamic considerations indicate that such notions must be nonsense.
None of this tells us how big feedbacks really are – merely what the IPCC imagines them to be. Unless one posits very high net-positive feedbacks, one cannot create a climate problem. Indeed, even with the unrealistically high feedbacks imagined by the IPCC, there is not a climate problem at all, as I shall now demonstrate.
Though the IPCC at last makes explicit its estimate of the equilibrium climate sensitivity parameter (albeit that it is in a confused footnote on page 631 of the 2007 report), it is not explicit about the transient-sensitivity parameter – and it is the latter, not the former, that will be policy-relevant over the next few centuries.
So, even though we have reason to suspect there is a not insignificant exaggeration of predicted warming inherent in the IPCC’s predictions (or “projections”, as it coyly calls them), and a still greater exaggeration in Giss ModelE, let us apply their central estimates – without argument at this stage – to what is foreseeable this century.
The IPCC tells us that each of the six emissions scenarios is of equal validity. That means we may legitimately average them. Let us do so. Then the CO2 concentration in 2100 will be 712 ppmv compared with 392 ppmv today. So the CO2 forcing will be 5.35 ln(712/392), or 3.2 Watts per square meter, which we divide by 0.75 (the average of the GISS and IPCC estimates of the proportion of total greenhouse forcings represented by CO2) to allow for the other greenhouse gases, making 4.25 Watts per square meter.
We reduce this value by about 35% to allow for negative forcings from our soot-parasols etc., giving 2.75 Watts per square meter of net anthropogenic forcings between now and 2100.
Nest, multiply by the centennial-scale transient-sensitivity parameter 0.5 Kelvin per Watt per square meter. This gives us a reasonable central estimate of the warming to be expected by 2100 if we follow the IPCC’s and GISS’ methods and values every step of the way. And the warming we should expect this century if we do things their way? Well, it’s not quite 1.4 K.
Now we go back to that discrepancy we noted before. The IPCC says that between half and all of the warming since 1950 was our fault, and its methods and parameter values seem to give an exaggeration of some 20-30% even if we assume that all of the warming since 1950 was down to us, and a very much greater exaggeration if only half of the warming was ours.
Allowing for this exaggeration knocks back this century’s anthropogenic warming to not much more than 1 K – about a third of the 3-4 K that we normally hear so much about.
Note how artfully this tripling of the true rate of warming has been achieved, by a series of little exaggerations which, when taken together, amount to a whopper. And it is quite difficult to spot the exaggerations, not only because most of them are not all that great but also because so few of the necessary parameter values to allow anyone to spot what is going on are explicitly stated in the IPCC’s reports.
The Stern Report in 2006 took the IPCC’s central estimate of 3 K warming over the 20th century and said that the cost of not preventing that warming would be 3% of 21st-century GDP. But GDP tends to grow at 3% a year, so, even if the IPCC were right about 3 K of warming, all we’d lose over the whole century, even on Stern’s much-exaggerated costings (he has been roundly criticized for them even in the journal of which he is an editor, World Economics), would be the equivalent of the GDP growth that might be expected to occur in the year 2100 alone. That is all.
To make matters worse, Stern used an artificially low discount rate for inter-generational cost comparison which his office told me at the time was 0.1%. When he was taken apart in the peer-reviewed economic journals for using so low a discount rate, he said the economists who had criticized him were “confused”, and that he had really used 1.4%. William Nordhaus, who has written many reviewed articles critical of Stern, says that it is quite impossible to verify or to replicate any of Stern’s work because so little of the methodology is explicit and available. And how often have we heard that before? It is almost as if They don’t want us to check stuff.
The absolute minimum commercially-appropriate discount rate is equivalent to the minimum real rate of return on capital – i.e. 5%. Let us oblige Stern by assuming that he had used a 1.4% discount rate and not the 0.1% that his office told me of.
Even if the IPCC is right to try to maintain – contrary to the analysis above, indicating 1 K manmade warming this century – that we shall see 3 K warming by 2100 (progress in the first one-ninth of the century: 0 K), the cost of doing nothing about it, discounted at 5% rather than 1.4%, comes down from Stern’s 3% to just 0.5% of global 21st-century GDP.
No surprise, then, that the cost of forestalling 3 K of warming would be at least an order of magnitude greater than the cost of the climate-related damage that might arise if we just did nothing and adapted, as our species does so well.
But if the warming we cause turns out to be just 1 K by 2100, then on most analyses that gentle warming will be not merely harmless but also beneficial. There will be no net cost at all. Far from it: there will be a net economic benefit.
And that, in a nutshell, is why governments should shut down the UNFCCC and the IPCC, cut climate funding by at least nine-tenths, de-fund all but two or three computer models of the climate, and get back to addressing the real problems of the world – such as the impending energy shortage in Britain and the US because the climate-extremists and their artful nonsense have fatally delayed the building of new coal-fired and nuclear-fired power stations that are now urgently needed.
Time to get back down to Earth and use our fossil fuels, shale gas and all, to give electricity to the billions that don’t have it: for that is the fastest way to lift them out of poverty and, in so doing, painlessly to stabilize the world’s population. That would bring real environmental benefits.
And now you know why building many more power stations won’t hurt the climate, and why – even if there was a real risk of 3 K warming this century – it would be many times more cost-effective to adapt to it than to try to stop it.
As they say at Lloyds of London, “If the cost of the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure.” And even that apophthegm presupposes that there is a risk – which in this instance there isn’t.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
===========================================================
Part 1 of Sense and Sensitivity can be found here
@wayne says:
That won´t ever happen, there is too much behind. It began long time ago, not this particular issue but all those “principles” for making possible “global governance”, including the existence of the UN itself. Don´t forget that all these have been already implemented like “binding agreements” signed by all countries. Any change would involve a major change since the “french revolution”….perhaps is what 2012 is all about….
“Models cannot substitute for well confirmed physical hypotheses. Models produce only simulations which are reproductions of reality. Physical hypotheses describe natural regularities and can be used for prediction.”
Bingo! Give that poster a cigar!
The constant drum beat of “well understood processes” in models is a contradiction. You don’t need to “Model” gravity, or the speed of light, they are directly testable, they are “well understood”. Once you make a model you have admitted that the processes you are depicting are NOT well understood, but you THINK you know how they work.
As Lord Monkton pointed out, any model that introduces a fudge factor you have even less ground for claiming the process is well understood.
markus (Jan. 16, 2012 at 11:28 pm):
All of the premises to a correct argument are true but the premise in which a given forcing “forces” the equilibrium temperature to rise by a prescribed amount is untestable from the lack of observability of the equilibrium temperature. It follows that the IPCC’s conjecture of a relatively high numerical value for the equilibrium climate sensitivity and Lord Monckton’s conjecture of a relatively low value are both untestable, thus lying outside science. In order for it to join the sciences, global climatology must be reframed via replacement of the unobservable equilibrium temperature by an observable variable such as a temperature.
pochas (Jan 16, 2012 at 11:25 pm):
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Currently, it would be impossible to statistically validate the contention that an increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration causes the spatially and temporally averaged global surface air temperature to rise. This would be impossible because climatologists have not yet seen fit to define the statistical population that would be sampled in testing this contention. Climatologists act as though they have confused the idea of a “statistical ensemble” with the idea of a “statistical population,” thus reaching the erroneous conclusion that this contention can be tested.
Here’s what we know…
1…CO2 in the atmosphere at increased amounts…
produces more plant growth
2…More plant growth allows, produces, more food for we 7billion.
which is good
3…But we seven need to control “taking” the land
which endangers the 7million species (under our “control”)
So…
4…Recognizing another one or two degrees C is helpful…. Do this..!
Put more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Put more into the atmos…
Monckton of Brenchley says:
Really? Where?
You had assumed that of the water vapor that is in our present day atmosphere, all of it would still be there if CO2 was removed from the atmosphere. I.e., you had assumed that the water vapor that is in our atmosphere is not a result of the water vapor feedback. That is why your calculation found that there is no positive feedback from water vapor: because you assumed there was none.
No…It does not assume the feedbacks are high. The values of the feedbacks emerge from the model based on the physics that is put into it. That is not to say that these values are gospel…particularly, the one for clouds. It would be interesting to have this modeling calculation repeated with other climate models that incorporate cloud physics differently and see how robust the results are to such details. However, the argument is not circular in the way that your argument is circular. (Actually, “circular” is somewhat euphemistic in describing your argument: It is really just plain wrong to claim that you have done a calculation of the climate sensitivity that includes feedbacks when the calculation clearly does not include the feedbacks due to water vapor, clouds, or ice-snow albedo.)
It is a silly argument to suggest that all models must represent all relevant physical processes perfectly to be useful! If that standard was applied across all scientific fields, it would essentially send us back to the Stone Age.
As for flux adjustments, as I understand it, they are becoming less and less common in the models…and there is no evidence that having or not having such adjustments in the models have a significant effect on the results.
The argument that one would need to be able to model everything correctly down to the fraction of a W/m^2 in order for the models to be credible is another argument that sounds good unless you have ever actually done modeling. The fact is that physically-based models generally will do a much better job getting trends right than the absolute magnitude of their errors. For example, when I worked in industry and modeled the propagation of light in materials, I often made predictions for changes that were smaller than the absolute error between the model and the data…and these predictions turned out to be highly reliable.
Gina Becker says:
No…Only if the water vapor feedback gets sufficient strong, like it likely did on Venus (due to its being closer to the sun and hence receiving more solar insolation), does it spiral out of control.
For example, the infinite geometric series 1 + (1/2) + (1/4) + (1/8) + … does not “spiral out of control” but rather converges to the value of 2.
cohenite says:
The fact that one paper says something does not make all the other papers that say something else wrong. You can always cherrypick a bad paper to support your point of view. On the other hand, I am not even convinced that this paper contradicts anything that I said. Feedbacks can go both ways.
Joel Shore says:
January 17, 2012 at 1:46 pm
“No…Only if the water vapor feedback gets sufficient strong, like it likely did on Venus (due to its being closer to the sun and hence receiving more solar insolation), does it spiral out of control.”
That’s assuming that there ever was much water on Venus, an assumption for which there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of “robust” evidence in support. The work I’ve seen cited as proof of this notion
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008JGRE..11300B24H
Felsic highland crust on Venus suggested by Galileo Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer data
says this in its abstract
“We evaluated the spatial variation of Venusian surface emissivity at 1.18 μm wavelength and that of near-surface atmospheric temperature using multispectral images obtained by the Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS) on board the Galileo spacecraft. The Galileo NIMS observed the nightside thermal emission from the surface and the deep atmosphere of Venus, which is attenuated by scattering from the overlying clouds. To analyze the NIMS data, we used a radiative transfer model based on the adding method. Although there is still an uncertainty in the results owing to the not well known parameters of the atmosphere, our analysis revealed that the horizontal temperature variation in the near-surface atmosphere is no more than +/-2 K on the Venusian nightside and also suggests that the majority of lowlands likely has higher emissivity compared to the majority of highlands. One interpretation for the latter result is that highland materials are generally composed of felsic rocks. Since formation of a large body of granitic magmas requires water, the presence of granitic terrains would imply that Venus may have had an ocean and a mechanism to recycle water into the mantle in the past.”
“Although there is still an uncertainty in the results owing to the not well known parameters of the atmosphere….”
“One interpretation for the latter result …”
“the presence of granitic terrains would imply that Venus may have had an ocean …”
That doesn’t strike me as a ringing proof and the authors are honest enough to characterize their work as merely suggestive, a bar they manage to clear but not by much. I’d say the question of the past presence of water on Venus is still very open and even if we had solid evidence for its past existence we would have no basis to even speculate about what role it played in the planet arriving at its current state.
This particular post, particularly via its commentary, is of extraordinary educational value. The science is strongly present, the petty bickering minimal, the general tone pleasant and the standard high (IMHO).
What seems obvious to me, as an overall summation, is that the SCIENCE IS NOT SETTLED.
Perhaps it never can be.
Even maintainng a rigorous scientific approach, there seem to be too many variables and too few scientific laws and rules which can be said to be clearly applied with any expectation of a convincing conclusion.
This, together with the unfortunate polarisation that has developed outside of the science, which now blocks, or contaminates a sane, clearthinking approach to the debate, produces what seems to be an endless, almost futile excercise.
Re: the condensing ones were removed.
Myrrh says:
January 16, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Werner, cohenite and our good host, I have expanded on this theme:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/17/thanks-and-apologies/#comment-867753
Does CO2 actually control the level of water vapour?
In November 2011, NCEP Reanalysis provided a water vapour anomaly of just 0.09 kg/m2 or 0.3% above the 1949 to 2011 average.
So the longest dataset available says that water vapour does not vary by 7%/1.0C (Clausius Clapeyron relation) or by CO2 (Lacis and GISS Model E).
It varies according to the ENSO pure and simple and with a very tiny 0.X%/1.0C increase in temperatures. CO2 has nothing to so with it.
http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/5716/ensotempsvstcwvnov11.png
———–
Water Vapour in the atmosphere cycles in and out of the atmosphere each 9 days.
CO2 cycles in and out of the atmosphere each 4 years.
The permanent atmospheric gases are the non-chemically reactive ones like N2 and Argon. Even Oxygen must have a cycle in and out number.
If an atmosphere is devoid of any greenhouse gases, how does it cool?
RIII;
unfortunately, incoherent. Don’t hang your opposition to AGW on this; you’ll get slaughtered.
To get the GrammarNasty stuff out of the way first, “whence” makes no sense there. It means “from where”.
Then you go on to get the rest completely wrong. Most of the energy that warms the Earth comes in as SW (shortwave) visible light (our eyes consider it “visible” because it’s the most potent and dominant part of the local Sun’s spectrum, so we’re adapted to use it. By the way, other animals with special priorities use more wavelengths, both shorter and longer, as well.) It is SW, centered on the yellow-green area, because it comes from a ~5-6,000K source, the Sun. A light filament, e.g., at those temperatures shines in the same bands.
But most outgoing is in the near infrared because that’s the wavelength suited to/emitted by cooler objects, around 270-300K. So the “absorption bands” of GHGs are important mainly re outgoing radiation. There’s not much relevant LW incoming.
Ignore Myrrh. The rest of us do.
It would have to heat the surface, which of course in such circumstances can then radiate the extra heat energy directly to space unhindered.
Lord Monckton points out:
“The paper turns out to be based not on measurement, observation and the application of established theory to the results but – you guessed it – on playing with a notorious computer model of the climate: Giss ModelE. The model, in effect, assumes very large net-positive feedbacks for which there is precious little reliable empirical or theoretical evidence.”
Clearly the people who produced the model or simulation have a predetermined forcing target to aim at which would be acceptable to the IPPC and then apply the appropriate multiplying factor to obtain this figure.
Civil engineers apply generous safety factors when designing structures for obvious reasons, after all no one will thank them when the building falls down. A lecturer/professor on the theory of structures in my day referred to them as factors of ignorance and they seem to be generously applied to warmist climate models.
If an atmosphere is devoid of any greenhouse gases, how does it cool?
Brian H says:
January 17, 2012 at 9:12 pm
Richard111 says:
January 16, 2012 at 12:19 am
…
What I have learnt elsewhere is that ALL “greenhouse gases” have absorption/emission bands in the near infrared whence only incoming solar radiation is effective
RIII;
unfortunately, incoherent. Don’t hang your opposition to AGW on this; you’ll get slaughtered.
To get the GrammarNasty stuff out of the way first, “whence” makes no sense there. It means “from where”.
Then you go on to get the rest completely wrong. Most of the energy that warms the Earth comes in as SW (shortwave) visible light (our eyes consider it “visible” because it’s the most potent and dominant part of the local Sun’s spectrum, so we’re adapted to use it. By the way, other animals with special priorities use more wavelengths, both shorter and longer, as well.) It is SW, centered on the yellow-green area, because it comes from a ~5-6,000K source, the Sun. A light filament, e.g., at those temperatures shines in the same bands.
But most outgoing is in the near infrared because that’s the wavelength suited to/emitted by cooler objects, around 270-300K. So the “absorption bands” of GHGs are important mainly re outgoing radiation. There’s not much relevant LW incoming.
Ignore Myrrh. The rest of us do
====================================
Where is the empirical proof that Visible light from the Sun can heat oceans and land? Where? Please, don’t ignore me…, go fetch.
You can’t fetch, because it doesn’t exist. Your ad homs in show the paucity of your argument.
RichardIII – in the real world the difference between light and heat is very well known, empirical knowledge of the real world and real properties and processes – look up hydroponics where a great amount of effort has been expended on producing lamps which will provide plants with light and not heat… Plants utilise visible light for photosynthesis, this is a chemical energy through chlorphyll creating sugars, it is not a thermal energy creating heat.
Visible light is tiny compared with thermal infrared, the difference between near infrared and thermal is microscopic to pin head size – visible is even small than near infrared.
Don’t be conned by the AGWSF meme of visible light having ‘greater energy’ – more energetic it may well be, but its travelling at the same speed as longer waves – so size matters when these meet matter. Visible light works on an electronic transition level, and, blue being even more nervy than the other visibles gets knocked around the atmosphere even more – the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen reflect/scatter it, think pin ball machine. How do these molecules do that? By the electrons briefly absorbing the visible and bouncing it back out the way it came, blue sky.
When they tell you that atmosphere is transparent to visible light, they’re obviously telling fibs because the electrons of the atmospheric molecules do absorb it! And to compound the fib, they tell you that the oceans absorbs visible – but water transmits visible through without being absorbed by the electrons.
Water is transparent to visible light, it doesn’t even get to play with the electrons of a water molecule, it is transmitted through without being absorbed. And, these are tiny, tiny, tiny, they don’t have the oomph to move a molecule of water into vibrational modes to kinetic energy..
The heat you feel from the Sun, all the heat you feel, comes from the invisible thermal infrared, the thermal energy (heat) of the Sun on the move to us by radiation. That’s what thermal infrared is, the heat from the Sun. You cannot feel the light from the Sun, visible.
This is a sleight of hand produced by the AGWScience Fiction department – deliberately changing the properties, giving to visible the property of thermal.
You try asking them, ask they to show empirical method and example of blue light from the Sun heating land and water. They can’t.
So, ignore me if you want, but check it out for yourself..
Myrrh – we went through all that stuff about visible light heating water in a previous thread on WUWT. Leif Svalgaard, if my memory is correct, went into absolutely minute scientific detail to explain the entire mechanism of how the energy of visible light is absorbed in the first ~100m of water and thus heats it.
“Myrrh says:
January 18, 2012 at 4:36 pm
Don’t be conned by the AGWSF meme of visible light having ‘greater energy’ – more energetic it may well be, but its traveling at the same speed as longer waves ”
“When they tell you that atmosphere is transparent to visible light, they’re obviously telling fibs”
Myrrh, please do not contradict yourself. Does visible light have more energy or does it not? Speed does not matter as far as photon energy is concerned. The energy of a photon is given by E = hf where h is Planck’s constant and f is the frequency, so it is NOT a con that visible light has more energy than infrared.
And the atmosphere IS transparent to visible light. If it wasn’t, you could not see the moon or the stars.
Earlier, you said:
“carbon dioxide is heavier than air. One and a half times heavier. Therefore, it will always displace air in the atmosphere to come down to the ground unless work is done on it, and so also will not readily rise up into the atmosphere.”
You say CO2 is heavier than air (true) so it falls (not true.) The laws of buoyancy do NOT operate for gases in the earth’s atmosphere. If they did, why is ozone (O3) so high up? And how do chlorofluorocarbons make it to the stratosphere? Yes, there is some “lumpiness”, but it has nothing to do with its mass. It has to do with where CO2 is produced and used up and how long it takes to reach equilibrium throughout the atmosphere.
You say: “So, ignore me if you want, but check it out for yourself.”
P.S. In case you are interested, I am a retired chemistry and physics teacher so I did not have to check the above out for myself.
P.S. I see you posted that other part on the other thread. I hope it gets noticed. However people sometimes tend to ignore extremely long submissions. Perhaps try to be more concise and do not say things that are easily refuted. 🙂
@ur momisugly Brian H. “Most of the energy that warms the Earth comes in as SW (shortwave) visible light”.
Here I was thinking that the ‘most’ incoming energy was at UV frequencies. In real life, once you filter out the UV the remainder is relatively cool.
RE: Ken McMurtrie says:(January 18, 2012 at 11:09 pm)
“Here I was thinking that the ‘most’ incoming energy was at UV frequencies. In real life, once you filter out the UV the remainder is relatively cool.”
Here is a typical solar radiation plot showing the exponential drop in solar radiation at wavelengths shorter than the peak energy emission in the green light region.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_Spectrum.png
For reference, power in watts is a measure of energy flow in joules/sec.
Mike Jonas says:
January 18, 2012 at 7:02 pm
Myrrh – we went through all that stuff about visible light heating water in a previous thread on WUWT. Leif Svalgaard, if my memory is correct, went into absolutely minute scientific detail to explain the entire mechanism of how the energy of visible light is absorbed in the first ~100m of water and thus heats it.
=============================
Leif thinks the atmosphere around us is empty space…
Put on the stove, before you see any visible light you can feel the heat, the more energy that goes into the heating the stove the more invisible heat, thermal infrared, you can feel from it.
That’s exactly the thermal energy we get from the Sun, that leaves the Sun in the form of radiation, that radiation is thermal infrared, it reaches us in the same time as visible light, around eight minutes. That’s a bloody big stove up in the sky…
Visible light is a very small part of the spectrum, produced by the great heat of the Sun, and just like an incandescent light bulb or heating up steel, the majority of the energy radiating out is invisible heat. Only 5% of the radiated energy from the light bulb is visible light, 95% is heat, the invisible thermal infrared.
That great invisible thermal infrared, radiant heat, you feel from the stove or from a fire or direct from the Sun travelling to you in straight lines is what warms you up! Visible light doesn’t do this.
Water is A TRANSPARENT MEDIUM FOR VISIBLE LIGHT. Even if it wasn’t, even if it wasn’t transmitted through but as in the atmosphere was absorbed on the electron level, it would be bounced out, be reflected/scattered, without heating, the energy going into movement.
It takes thermal energy to move whole molecules into vibrational states, which is heat, heat is the movement of whole molecules, kinetic energy. The tiny visible light isn’t capable of doing that. Leif explained nothing, he was giving a description of vibrational translations which is the property of thermal energy! Just as here, giving the properties of thermal energy, thermal infrared, to visible light. He was bullsh*tt*ing.
OK? Don’t confuse ‘absorption’ of visible light in oceans, which is how it’s generally described, with the power to heat up matter by getting the molecules into vibration when the more powerful heat energy is absorbed. This ‘absorption of visible light in oceans’ is better described as attentuation, not absorption in the technical sense as basic description of absorption of heat and light energies either on vibrational or electronic transition levels. Now read further down the page where it gives the difference between Visible/UV and Thermal Infrared:
That’s the difference between Heat and Light.
The main benefits we get from Light is being able to see the world around us as different pigments absorb the different colours and reflect out what they don’t absorb, and, in the chemical energy of chlorophyll using visible light to create sugars – these are not creating heat! They are not moving the molecules into vibrational states which is what heat is!
The different things that can and will happen when visible light hits matter are in the section immediately below, on electronic transitions – four possibles: the second is visible light hitting the electrons of the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in our atmosphere and being bounced back out, this is reflection/scattering and is what gives us our blue sky, the third is what happens when visible light meets water, it is transmitted through, it doesn’t even get to play with the electrons.
UV-Vis: Electronic transitions continued: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_and_translucency
Werner Brozek says:
January 18, 2012 at 9:20 pm
“Myrrh says:
January 18, 2012 at 4:36 pm
Don’t be conned by the AGWSF meme of visible light having ‘greater energy’ – more energetic it may well be, but its traveling at the same speed as longer waves ”
“When they tell you that atmosphere is transparent to visible light, they’re obviously telling fibs”
Myrrh, please do not contradict yourself. Does visible light have more energy or does it not? Speed does not matter as far as photon energy is concerned. The energy of a photon is given by E = hf where h is Planck’s constant and f is the frequency, so it is NOT a con that visible light has more energy than infrared.
Shrug, if you think tiny nervy highly energetic in movement is the same as power to do work..
UV is even more highly energetic than visible light, according to you then it is has even more energy, so, put on a shirt and you stop it. Yeah, that’s real power, the greater energy to change matter stopped by a t-shirt..
And the atmosphere IS transparent to visible light. If it wasn’t, you could not see the moon or the stars.
?! Yeah right, you can see the moon and starts in the daytime….
Light pollution from street and building lights are a very real problem for any wanting to observe the sky at night.
Transparent is a technical term. Just as is absorption and transmission. The atmosphere is not transparent to visible light because its energy is absorbed on the electron transition level and reflected/scattered. See the above post on transparency and translucency. That’s why you see blue sky and not moon and stars.
Earlier, you said:
“carbon dioxide is heavier than air. One and a half times heavier. Therefore, it will always displace air in the atmosphere to come down to the ground unless work is done on it, and so also will not readily rise up into the atmosphere.”
You say CO2 is heavier than air (true) so it falls (not true.) The laws of buoyancy do NOT operate for gases in the earth’s atmosphere. If they did, why is ozone (O3) so high up? And how do chlorofluorocarbons make it to the stratosphere? Yes, there is some “lumpiness”, but it has nothing to do with its mass. It has to do with where CO2 is produced and used up and how long it takes to reach equilibrium throughout the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, one and half times heavier, it will therefore always sink to the ground by displacing the lighter oxygen and nitrogen molecules. This is so empirically well known in the real world around us, in breweries, in mining, in venting from volcanic sources..
Do your own experiment, mix some vinegar with bicarb of soda and pour the result onto a lit candle – you will put it out because carbon dioxide is heavier and displacing oxygen will sink to pool on the ground. Methane is lighter than air – that’s why methane rises in air, a danger in mines where it can layer at the ceiling. The old fashioned way of getting rid of it in a new mine was for an intrepid miner to cover himself in wet towels and enter carrying a lit candle at the end of a long pole. We know about these things, because we know about the real properties of gases. We know what they can and can’t do. Carbon dioxide can’t trap heat, look up heat capacity, carbon dioxide can’t accumulate in the atmosphere for hundreds and thousands of years, look up gravity, (that’s were relative weight comes from), and, carbon dioxide is fully part of the water cycle and so is constantly being mopped up by water vapour to come down to the ground. Etc. Etc.
You say: “So, ignore me if you want, but check it out for yourself.”
P.S. In case you are interested, I am a retired chemistry and physics teacher so I did not have to check the above out for myself.
Then you should know what you’re saying is bullshit pure and simple, and if you were teaching it then all your students learned the same bull, they have no idea how the world around them works..
P.S. I see you posted that other part on the other thread. I hope it gets noticed. However people sometimes tend to ignore extremely long submissions. Perhaps try to be more concise and do not say things that are easily refuted. 🙂
Easily refuted? Real life empirical evidence supports me. Prove your claims.
What’s worse here, than you not understanding, is because the AGWScience Fiction department has corrupted the teaching about the real world, by such swapsies as giving the properties of one thing to another and taking laws out of context, a whole generation of children have been taught utter gibberish. How can they have any understanding of water vapour being lighter than air and so rising up through air, without understanding evaporation how can they ever understand the Water Cycle? Not a problem for you, AGWSF has taken the water cycle out of the energy budget.., you don’t have to wonder how our weather works, it’s all radiation, no convection in your fictional world.
@ur momisugly Spector re UV spectrum energy.
Thanks for that. This comes as a surprise as the UV component, especially at sea level is relatively low energy.
All the scientific explanations that I can bring to mind simply say that the solar energy is received by the Earth at UV frequencies and radiated back to the atmosphere in the IR range.
It might well be that energy is re-radiated in the IR spectrum, but what we see here is that much IR energy also arrives at the earth surface, except that filtered by H2O substantially.
The UV component is quite small yet gets much attention as a health hazard for eyes and skin. And is the only incoming wavelength usually mentioned in explaining climate principles.
Interesting to note the CO2 absorption is confirmed to be minimal, compared to H2O, for the incoming IR. Can one assume it would be the same ratio for the outgoing IR.
Also it seems that the majority of outgoing IR will escape through the atmosphere, except for the little absorbed by the CO2 and maybe 30% absorbed by the H2O.
Do you know of a simple reference to the spectrum of the re-radiated IR. Not likely accurate given the variability of the earth’s surface properties. However, presumable someone has had a go at an average?
Once again, thanks for setting me on the right path. A very useful visualization!
“Myrrh says:
January 19, 2012 at 3:18 am
Then you should know what you’re saying is bullshit pure and simple”
I just have five questions for you. And be sure that any answer you give to any of the questions cannot be contradicted by anything you said on this thread.
If you put a radio under a pillow, you can still hear it. Why can weak radio waves go through a pillow and why can strong x-rays go through a pillow but visible light, that is in between in energy, cannot penetrate a pillow?
How do chlorofluorocarbons make it to the stratosphere?
How does the first 100 m of the ocean get heated?
Why does smoke, which contains a lot of “heavy” CO2, rise from chimneys?
Why can an airplane be seen in the sky both in the daytime and at night?
Let’s make test to solve meaning of backradiation. Now we have winter in Finland. Snowcover is about 30 cm and it’s -2 celsius. Upper atmosphere radiates 150W/m2 downwards if I block that radiation with mirror made from polyurethane and is coated with foil both sides, I’ll put it 1 meter above snowy surface. That cover radiates 200w downvards. Radiation increase is 50w/m2 but the temperature remains the same. If i put heating element to snow and 50W power snow start’s to melt. If you want, that I believe that that radiation wich comes down from upper atmosphere can make earth warmer, you have to make some epirical test that it increases temperature and prove I’m wrong. Otherwise climate sensitivity to CO2=0.