Cooking the books
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Mr. John Cook, who runs a website puzzlingly entitled Skeptical Science” (for he is not in the least sceptical of the “official” position) seems annoyed that I won the 2011 televised debate with Dr. Denniss of the Australia Institute, and has published a commentary on what I said. It has been suggested that I should reply to the commentary. So, seriatim, I shall consider the points made. Mr. Cook’s comments are in Roman face: my replies are in bold face. Since Mr. Cook accuses me of lying, I have asked him to be good enough to make sure that this reply to his commentary is posted on his website in the interest of balance.
Chaotic climate
Cook: “Monckton launched his Gish Gallop by arguing that climate cannot be predicted in the long-term because it’s too chaotic because, [Monckton says],
‘the climate is chaotic…it is not predictable in the long-term…they [the IPCC] say that the climate is a coupled, non-linear, chaotic object, and that therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.’
… It’s really quite self-evident that Monckton’s statement here is incorrect.”
Reply: Paragraph 5 section 14.2.2.2 of the IPCC’s 2007 AR4 TAR report says:
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
My quotation from the IPCC, given from memory, was in substance accurate. Here and throughout, I shall ignore Mr. Cook’s numerous, disfiguring, ad-hominem comments.
Consensus
Cook: “Monckton proceeds to demonstrate his confusion about the causal relationship between science and consensus: [he says: ‘the idea that you decide any scientific question by mere consensus [is incorrect].’ … He suggests that somehow climate science is done by first creating a consensus when in reality the consensus exists because the scientific evidence supporting the anthropogenic global warming theory is so strong.”
Reply: This seems a quibble. Dr. Denniss had said he was satisfied with the science because there was a consensus. He had appealed repeatedly to consensus. Yet in the Aristotelian canon the argumentum ad populum, or headcount fallacy, is rightly regarded as unacceptable because the consensus view – and whatever “science” the consensus opinion is founded upon – may or may not be correct, and the mere fact that there is a consensus tells us nothing about the correctness of the consensus opinion or of the rationale behind that opinion.
Adding carbon dioxide to an atmosphere will cause warming, but we need not (and should not) plead “consensus” in aid of that notion: for it is a result long proven by experiment, and has no need of “consensus” to sanctify it. However, the real scientific debate is about how much warming extra CO2 in the air will cause. There is no “consensus” on that; and, even if there were, science is not done by consensus.
Mediaeval warm period
Cook: “Every single peer-reviewed millennial temperature reconstruction agrees that current temperatures are hotter than during the peak of the [Mediaeval Warm Period]. …
Reply: At www.co2science.org, Dr. Craig Idso maintains a database of papers by more than 1000 scientists from more than 400 institutions in more than 40 countries providing evidence that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was generally warmer than the present, sometimes by as much as 3-4 C°. Many of these papers provide millennial reconstructions.
Cook: “The climate scientists involved in creating those first millennial proxy temperature reconstructions are not under criminal investigation.”
Reply: The Attorney-General of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Mr. Cuccinelli, issued a press statement on May 28, 2010, repeating an earlier statement that –
“The revelations of Climategate indicate that some climate data may have been deliberately manipulated to arrive at pre-set conclusions. The use of manipulated data to apply for taxpayer-funded research grants in Virginia is potentially fraud. … This is a fraud investigation.”
Fraud, in the Commonwealth of Virginia as in most jurisdictions, is a criminal offence. The Attorney-General’s investigation is being conducted in terms of the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act 2000.
Is there a human fingerprint?
Cook: “The scientific literature at the time [of the 1995 Second Assessment Report of the IPCC] clearly demonstrated a number of ‘fingerprints’ of human-caused global warming.”
Reply: The scientists’ final draft of the 1995 Report said plainly, on five separate occasions, that no evidence of an anthropogenic influence on global climate was detectable, and that it was not known when such an influence would become evident.
However, a single scientist, Dr. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, rewrote the draft at the IPCC’s request, deleting all five statements, replacing them with a single statement to the effect that a human influence on global climate was now discernible, and making some 200 consequential amendments.
These changes were considered by a political contact group, but they were not referred back to the vast majority of the authors whose texts Dr. Santer had tampered with, and whose five-times-stated principal conclusion he had single-handedly and unjustifiably negated.
We now have the evidence of Prof. “Phil” Jones of the University of East Anglia, in one of the recently-released Climategate emails, that the warming of the past century falls well within the natural variability of the climate – consistent with the conclusion that Dr. Santer had negated.
The IPCC’s fraudulent statistical technique
Cook: “Monckton proceeds to make another bizarre claim about the IPCC reports which we’ve never heard before: that they use a ‘fraudulent statistical technique’ to inflate global warming’ … As long as the claim sounds like it could be true, the audience likely cannot determine the difference between a fact and a lie.”
Reply: Mr. Cook is here accusing me of lying. Yet my email address is well enough known and Mr. Cook could have asked me for my evidence for the fraudulent statistical technique before he decided to call me a liar. He did not do so. Like the hapless Professor Abraham, he did not bother to check the facts with me before making his malevolent and, as I shall now show, baseless accusation.
The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, 2007, carries in three places a graph in which the Hadley Center’s global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset from 1850-2005 is displayed with four arbitrarily-chosen trend-lines overlaid upon it. At each place where the altered graph is displayed, the incorrect conclusion is drawn that because trend-lines starting closer to the present have a steeper slope than those starting farther back, the rate of warming is accelerating and that we are to blame.
I wrote both to Railroad Engineer Pachauri (in 2009) and to a lead author of the 2007 report (in 2011), and visited both of them in person, to report this defective graph. They both refused to have it corrected, though neither was able to argue that the technique was appropriate. I have now had the data anonymized and reviewed by a statistician, who has confirmed that the technique is unacceptable. In the circumstances, the refusal of the two senior IPCC figures to correct the error constitutes fraud and, when the statistician has been shown the context of the data that he saw in an anonymized form, the police authorities in the relevant nations will be notified and prosecution sought.
Climate sensitivity
Cook: “Where Monckton gets this claim that the Australian government’s central climate sensitivity estimate to doubled CO2 is 5.1 C° is a complete mystery.
Reply: The “mystery” could and should have been cleared up by Mr. Cook simply asking me. The estimate is that of Professor Ross Garnaut, the Australian Government’s economic adviser on climate questions. It is on that figure that his economic analysis – accepted by the Australian Government – centres.
Cook: “Monckton also repeats a myth … that most climate sensitivity estimates are based on models, and those few which are based on observations arrive at lower estimates. The only study which matches Monckton’s description is the immensely-flawed Lindzen and Choi (2009).”
Reply: I am not sure what qualifications Mr. Cook has to find Professor Lindzen’s work “immensely flawed”. However, among the numerous papers that find climate sensitivity low are Douglass et al. (2004, 2007) and Coleman & Thorne (2005), who reported the absence of the projected fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas warming in the tropical mid-troposphere; Douglass & Christy (2009), who found the overall feedback gain in the climate system to be somewhat net-negative; Wentz et al. (2007), who found that the rate of evaporation from the Earth’s surface with warming rose thrice as fast as the models predicted, implying climate-sensitivity is overstated threefold in the models; Shaviv (2005, 2011), who found that if the cosmic-ray influence on climate were factored into palaeoclimate reconstructions the climate sensitivities cohered at 1-1.7 C° per CO2 doubling, one-half to one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate; Paltridge et al. (2009), who found that additional water vapor at altitude (caused by warming) tends to subside to lower altitudes, allowing radiation to escape to space much as before and greatly reducing the water vapor feedback implicit in a naïve application of the Clausius-Clapeyron relation; Spencer and Braswell (2010, 2011), who found the cloud feedback as strongly negative as the IPCC finds it positive, explicitly confirming Lindzen & Choi’s estimated climate sensitivity; Loehle & Scafetta (2011), who followed Tsonis et al. (2006) in finding that much of the warming of the period 1976-2001 was caused not by us but by the natural cycles in the climate system, notably the great ocean oscillations; etc., etc.
Cook: “Monckton at various times has claimed that climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 is anywhere between 0.2 and 1.6 C°.”
Reply: I have indeed done climate sensitivity estimates by a variety of methods, and those methods tend to cohere at a low sensitivity. The IPCC at various times has claimed that a central estimate of climate sensitivity is 3.8 C° (1995); 3.5 C° (2001); and 3.26 C° (2007); and its range of estimates of 21st-century warming in the 2007 report is 1.1-6.4 C°. Ranges of estimates are usual where it is not possible to derive an exact value.
Carbon pricing economics
Cook: “Monckton employs the common ‘skeptic’ trick of focusing on the costs of carbon pricing while completely ignoring the benefits.”
Reply: On the contrary: my analysis, presented in detail at the Los Alamos Santa Fe climate conference in 2011, explicitly calculates the costs of taxing, trading, regulating, reducing, or replacing CO2 and sets against the costs the cost of not preventing the quantum of “global warming” that will be reduced this century as a result of the “investment”. Yet again, if Mr. Cook had bothered to check I could have sent him my slides and the underlying paper.
Cook: “Economic studies consistently predict that the benefits [of carbon dioxide control] will outweigh the costs several times over.”
Reply: No, they don’t. True, the Stern and Garnaut reports – neither of them peer-reviewed – came to this conclusion by questionable methods, including the use of an absurdly low inter-temporal discount rate. However, if one were permitted to use the word “consensus”, one would have to point out that the overwhelming majority of economic studies on the subject (which are summarized in my paper) find the cost of climate action greatly exceeds the cost of inaction. Indeed, two review papers – Lomborg (2007) and Tol (2009) – found near-unanimity on this point in the peer-reviewed literature. Cook is here forced back on to the argument from consensus, citing only an opinion survey of “economists with climate expertise”. However, he does not say how many were interviewed, how they were selected, what weightings and other methods were used: and, in any event, the study was not peer-reviewed. Science is not, repeat not, repeat not done by opinion surveys or any form of head-count.
Abrupt warming
Cook: “Monckton proceeds to claim that abrupt climate change simply does not happen:
‘Ask the question how in science there could be any chance that the rate of just roughly 1 C° per century of warming that has been occurring could suddenly become roughly 5 C° per century as it were overnight. There is no physical basis in science for any such sudden lurch in what has proven to be an immensely stable climate.’
The paleoclimate record begs to differ. A stable climate is the exception, not the norm, at least over long timescales.”
Reply: Mr. Cook displays a graph of temperature changes over the past 450,000 years. At the resolution of the graph, and at the resolution of the proxy reconstructions on which it was based, it would be quite impossible to detect or display a 5 C° warming over a period of as little as a century.
Global temperatures have indeed remained stable over the past 100 million years, varying by just 3% either side of the long-term mean. That 3% is around 8 C° up or down compared with today, and it is enough to give us a hothouse Earth at the high end and an ice age at the low end.
However, very extreme temperature change can only happen in a very short time when conditions are very different from what they are today. For instance, at the end of the Younger Dryas cooling event, 11,400 years ago, temperature in Antarctica rose by 5 C° in just three years, according to the ice cores (which, over that recent period, still have sufficient resolution to allow determination of annual temperatures). No such lurch in temperatures has happened since, and none is reasonably foreseeable.
We now have confirmation from the UK Met Office that there has been no “global warming” to speak of for 15 years. That is hardly the profile of an imminent 5 C° increase in global temperature. Bottom line: a stable climate is the rule, not the exception: and nothing that we can do to alter the climate can cause a major change such as that which terminates ice ages. Remember Canute: our power is limited.
Human influence on the climate
Cook: “There has never before been a large human influence on the climate, so why should we expect it to behave exactly as it has in the past when only natural effects were at work?”
Reply: I did not say that the climate will behave “exactly” as it has in the past. We are capable of exerting some influence over it, but not very much. The notion that we can exercise a large influence is based on the mistaken idea that the initial warming from a doubling of CO2 concentration (which might be about 1 K) will be tripled by net-positive temperature feedbacks. This unfortunate assumption is what truly separates the IPCC from scientific reality. The IPCC makes the mistake of assuming that the feedback mathematics that apply to an electronic circuit (Bode, 1945) are also applicable to the climate. In two very important respects that the models are tuned to overlook, this is not so. First, precisely because the climate has proven temperature-stable, we may legitimately infer that major amplifications or attenuations caused by feedbacks have simply not been occurring.
Secondly, the Bode equation for mutual amplification of feedbacks in an electronic circuit has a singularity (just above the maximum temperature predicted by the Stern report, for instance, or by Murphy et al., 2009) at which the very strongly net-positive feedbacks that reinforce warming suddenly become just as strongly net-negative, dampening it. I have not yet heard of a convincing physical explanation for any such proposed behaviour as applied to the climate. But if we must use the Bode equation then it necessarily follows from the climate’s formidable temperature-stability that the feedback loop gain in the climate system is either zero or somewhat net-negative. A climate subject to the very strongly net-positive feedbacks imagined by the IPCC simply would not have remained as stable as it has.
Has Earth warmed as expected?
Cook: “Monckton … repeats … that Earth hasn’t warmed as much as expected … [He says} ‘If we go back to 1750 … using the Central England Temperature Record as a proxy for global temperatures … we’ve had 0.9 C° of warming …’. It should go without saying that the temperature record for a single geographic location cannot be an accurate proxy for average global temperature.”
Reply: Central England is at a latitude suitable to take the long-run temperature record as a fair proxy for global temperatures. However, if Mr. Cook were unhappy with that, he could and should have contacted me to ask for an independent verification of the 0.9 C° warming since 1750. Hansen (1984) found 0.5 C° of warming had occurred until that year, and there has been 0.4 C° of warming since, making 0.9 C°. Indeed, in another article on Mr. Cook’s website he himself uses a value of 0.8 C° in the context of a discussion of warming since 1970.
The significance, of course, is that the radiative forcings we have caused since 1750 are equivalent to those from a doubling of CO2 concentration, suggesting that the transient sensitivity to CO2 doubling is around 1 C°.
Cook: “… Human aerosol emissions, which have a cooling effect, have also increased over this period. And while 3 C° is the IPCC’s best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity, the climate system is not yet in equilibrium. Neglecting these two factors (aerosols and thermal inertia of the global climate), as Monckton and Lindzen have done, will certainly give you an underestimate of equilibrium sensitivity, by a large margin. This is how Monckton supports his lowball climate sensitivity claim – by neglecting two important climate factors.”
Reply: Once again, Mr. Cook has failed to check his facts with me. Of course my calculations include the effect of aerosols (which, however, is by no means as certain in its magnitude as Mr. Cook seems to think). And of course I have not ignored temperature feedbacks (which Mr. Cook mistakenly confuses with “the thermal inertia of the global climate”: actually, it is I who have been arguing that there is considerable homoeostasis in global temperatures, and he who had earlier been arguing that global climate was not stable). If I am right about temperature feedbacks (see above), then the equilibrium sensitivity will be about the same as the transient sensitivity – around 1 C°. And that, on most analyses, would actually be beneficial.
Cook: “The warming over the past 60 years is consistent with the IPCC climate sensitivity range and inconsistent with Lindzen and Monckton’s lowball climate sensitivity claims. Monckton claims the observational data supports his low sensitivity claims – reality is that observational data contradicts them.”
Reply: Warming from 1950 to date was 0.7 C°. Net forcings since 1950 were 1.8 Watts per square meter, using the functions given in Myhre (1998) for the major greenhouse gases and making due allowance for aerosols and other negative anthropogenic forcings. The transient climate-sensitivity parameter over the period was thus 0.4 Celsius degrees per Watt per square meter, consistent with the 0.5 derivable from Table 10.26 on page 803 of IPCC (2007) on each of the IPCC’s six emissions scenarios. In that event, the transient warming in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration over the present century would be 0.4(5.35 ln 2) = 1 C°, again using a function from Myhre (1998). Interestingly, the IPCC’s implicit central estimate of warming from CO2 this century is only 50% above this estimate, at 1.5 C°.
In short, even if the IPCC is right about the warming this century from CO2, that warming is simply not going to be enough to cause damage.
Lying
Cook: “Monckton spent almost the entire debate misrepresenting the scientific (and economic) literature at best, lying at worst.”
Reply: Now that readers have had a chance to hear both sides, they will be able to form a view on who was lying and who was not.
And the walls came tumbling down…I have always enjoyed your blog. Why? You counter accusations with logic and noise with actual facts and numbers. Is it any wonder why you won in 2011? Keep it up!!!
Anthony – I think it is time you provide some examples about the nature of consensus.
For example you could ask the following questions –
To prisoners – ask if they think they should be allowed to leave prison regardless of their crime?
To a class of High schoolers as them if they think the school day/week should be shorter?
To a class of 1st graders ask them if they would like candy for lunch everyday.
etc. I am sure you could acheive a 97% consesus on those questions…Just a matter of who you ask and what the vested interests are.
WRT the graph claiming to show acceleration; by coincidence, George Monbiot has been shilling an “Escalator” graph which claims to show the “skeptical” viewpoint:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47
I have challenged him to show where any noted (or minor) skeptic has created that graph which is, I’m certain, a strawman created for the purpose of misleading people about claims that skeptics actually make,
However I presume the graph CM refers to is this one beauty that I had cause to search out in my reply to George :
http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/graph-2-600×422.jpg
IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report, FAQ 3.1, Figure 1 (WG1, Ch 3, p. 253
Cristopher, you were multi-slandered, no doubt.
Mr. Cook appears to have brought a table knife to a gun fight. 🙂
Who is lying ???
Easy to tell !!!
Anyone citing “IPCC”
Nice work again Lord M.
Wonderful rebuttal! I do enjoy lord Monckton’s writing style.
Well said! Please, Lord Monckton, take some of these guys to court. There is surely a limit to overlooking the sins of others.
QED
Pearls before swine.
Under normal circumstances I would warn off anyone from visiting SS and especially recommend that anything read there be taken at face value or, Heaven forfend, quoted elsewhere.
But, accused of lying? I would do as Christopher did, at least. If I had a budget I would sue also.
Surely this questions the guys competence to debate in the first place. Rather than lying it looks as though he was just incompetent and should not have been attempting such a debate.
If it weren’t for argumentum ad hominem, argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam.they’d have no argumentum at all.
Thank you Lord Monckton,
You are providing a tremendous service to humanity by keeping the pressure up CAGW alarmists ,and you are quite good at listing the facts, knowns and unknowns of climate science. My hope is that the continued pressure from all sources will eventually be able to turn the tide and stop the insanity of regulations and of spending useless billions of dollars on a non-problem. We can then turn to providing low cost “carbon” based energy to humanity which will benifit all of mankind.
A good argument as always!
Thank you Christopher M.
Having read the response but having not considered it at length, my immediate impression is that it sets out good justification of the reasons why Lord Monckton expresses the views that he so eloquently expresses. That said, many of his remarks refer to ‘evidence’ / ‘authority; not clearly cited. It would be preferable for links to the underlying authority are provided.
I have not read all the Climategate emails but I am unaware of the particular email referred to below and I would certainly like to read it and consider its comments and context:
” We now have the evidence of Prof. “Phil” Jones of the University of East Anglia, in one of the recently-released Climategate emails, that the warming of the past century falls well within the natural variability of the climate…”
Bravo, sir!
But obviously you listened only to those heretical scientists that don’t believe in CAGW, you know people like Hansen. Wait that isn’t right…now to get my tongue out from my cheek…I think it may be stuck.
Good rebuttal
Wow. Monckton schools. What’s sad is the warmists don’t even seem to recognize that they lose all debates, especially with Monckton. If they did learn they might actually get better at the debate and maybe increase their chances of winning rather than whining. However, since they are trying to defend a false proposition, they should lose the debate every time.
A pity my Lord that you do not currently occupy a seat in the other place. Earlier on today there was a job going in Government that would suit you down to the ground.
It’s very obvious that Cook has proven that he is not familiar with the actual data presented by the alarmists, or that presented by skeptics of the IPCC process. Or could it be that he is intentionally obfuscating this debate? Tell me thats not true John!
I liked to engage ‘Skeptical Science’, sometimes more than the fine WUWT because I like the challenge of my beliefs and to avoid the modern ‘echo chamber’ phenomenon of seeking out only info which supports one’s beliefs.
I saw the ‘unreliable’ label (and agreed) but only recently came to the Orwellian world of the SS ‘mods’ (censors).
When I posted there recently, in a civil manner, information which contradicts the dogma, I engaged a number of other posters there.
Upon re-viewing the site a day later, not only were all the posts I had made removed ( and the post counts re-numbered ) any post that other posters had made which quoted or referred to my posts ( all in opposition ) were also removed – as if they had never existed!
Evidently I am now banned from SS.
While the blog can do as they choose, clearly it is not a place for free expression, nor a venue for the exchange of ideas and data. It is an echo chamber of the worst kind with an active filter to remove undesired echoes.
I highly recommend that WUWT remove ‘Skeptical Science’ from its blog roll – SS adds nothing to honest education about climate and the effect of radiative gasses.
BTW, the offending posts at SS were simply this observation that observed trends are all lower than the IPCC:
http://climatewatcher.blogspot.com/2012_02_01_archive.html#4077815931340751130
Very interesting. I’m surprised he didn’t roll out the ‘Monckton’ isn’t a Lord as well.
Do you have an estimate of the probability that Mr. Cook will post your reply?
The very title “Skeptical Science” of Cook’s web site is designed to deceive and is itself a lie.
Ed Reid says:
February 3, 2012 at 5:22 am
Mr. Cook appears to have brought a table knife to a gun fight. 🙂
And, he backed into it at that!
🙂
This man stood no chance.
But we are still confused about the science. Claims that doubling atmospheric CO2 will cause any temperature rise is confounded by all the ice core research which plainly demonstrates that temperature rises cause parallel rises in atmospheric CO2 as the oceans degas due to the higher temperatures. The delay between max temperature and the later max CO2 is 800-1500 years.
There are also the problems with the theory of the Greenhouse Effect. It is again claimed that radiated IR from the surface is adsorbed by the atmospheric CO2 which stores this heat and then re-radiates it from its place in the mid troposphere. Firstly heat cannot be stored. Any heat gained must be simultaneously be shared with the surroundings, ie, the CO2 will share its new heat with the other molecules it shares the atmosphere with. The re-radiated heat that increases surface heat is a problem insofar as the mid/upper troposphere is far colder than the surface and heat cannot flow up gradient, or from cold to hot,otherwise you could make a Perpetual Motion Machine. The 2nd law of thermodynamics is quite explicit in this, entropy must increase. If heat did flow up gradient then entropy would decrease. So presuming that the use of the Black Body SB equation is correct, another problem, then another mechanism for the extra heat must be found and adiabatic compression would fit the bill and certainly does not conflict with any thermodynamics laws and is clearly demonstrated by planetary atmospheres of the gas giants down to the running of a diesel engine.
Good, show the world what John Cook is.
What’s the … uhm… “consensus” on whether or not Mr. Cook will actually publish this rebuttal, in full, on his website?
What puzzles me is this. Cook et al are very fond of saying: ‘Lord Monckton says this and that..’ to which you, your Lordship, equally frequently have to respond: ‘If they wanted the answer they only have to e-mail me…’
Surely these critics are simply ‘afraid’ of the response – because it would demolish their argument. Much better (in their view) to get the accusation out in the public domain. To quote the analogy: ‘A lie can travel round the world before the truth has got its boots on..’
Time for some meaty slander charges…
If CO2 backradiated infrared there would not be a hole in the earthbound electromagnetic spectrum where that infrared should be!
If you can’t see it it is not there!
Very impressive rebuttal. Even tempered and with an appropriate tone.
>>>“Monckton employs the common ‘skeptic’ trick of focusing on the costs of carbon pricing while completely ignoring the benefits.”
Cost is a definitive factor. It costs what it costs. The reason alternative energy costs more is because it take more energy to create that energy, meaning it is inefficient and wasteful of resources. For instance, most solar plants cost out at about 40 cents/kWhr (minimum) over their lifetime when compared to about 8 cents/kWhr generation costs in the US. Sure, there is no oil/coal/gas at a solar plant, but multiples of that 8 cents was use to create the solar panels. When creating “energy”, the cost to create that energy is the defining factor of whether it is green or not. These people have it all backward!
It’s late, not sure if already been mentioned however, you should check out the Skeptical Science facebook page. A real hoot if you ask me!
Very well argued Sir. M=1 C=-1
“Since Mr. Cook accuses me of lying, I have asked him to be good enough to make sure that this reply to his commentary is posted on his website in the interest of balance.”
Not a chance in hell! I’ve just been on Cook’s site and his slanderous comments have already been forgotten. He is currently using the latest NASA GISS (alias Jim Hansen) STA plot that shows the Arctic is on fire. Not surprising, considering that the “data” is based on only 3 sites inside/near the Arctic Circle! He also fails to point out that the increase in Arctic temperature anomalies demonstrate that the GLOBE is not warming, especially in the light of the latest data from satellites: UAH Global Temperature Update for January 2012: -0.09 deg. C
There are two kinds of “smarts”. One is based on more or less on memory skills and the other is based on logical/critical thinking. In most Western education systems the former type is rewarded with higher grades on average.
My feeling is the memory based group are generally CAGW followers. Their learning skills have been based on reading and memorizing authority based material (e.g. IPCC, peer review, etc.). They really don’t have the ability to think through the issues.
You could see this in spades in Cook’s poor attempt to respond to Lord Monckton. Now, he gets to pay for his inability to think logically.
Sadly, rational argument and facts will not change the minds of CAGW enthusiasts. They believe through Faith alone!
In time the thruth will prevail, but what of these deluded experts and billionaires galavanting in the same cause? When the truth is out, how will they excuse themselves? – they will blame someone else and pass the buck. Will there be international forgiveness for the UN and all these fear mongers?
Is there anyone tracking these villains so that there can be a war crimes tribuneral for crimes against humanity? I propose that such a tribuneral could also make it a crime to deny that this crime ever took place.
Was the rebuttal posted on Skeptical Science? I suspect the proprieter of that blog is still licking his wounds…
Could you imagine watching a debate between Lord Monckton and Al Gore? Gore would be eaten alive! But of course, he’s a coward and wouldn’t allow such an event to occur.
In reading though the arguments, I started to lose track of which particular logical fallacy was being employed by John Cook. If anyone else had that problem:
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/taxonomy.html
Bravo Lord Monckton! Thank you for keeping up the fight for truth.
@Monckton
I couldn’t find Paragraph 14.2.2.2 in the 2007 report. Perhaps you could link to it?
I did find a similar paragraph in the Glossary though under “P”:
“Since knowledge of the climate system’s past and current states is generally imperfect, as are the models that utilise this knowledge to produce a climate prediction, and since the climate system is inherently nonlinear and chaotic, predictability of the climate system is inherently limited. Even with arbitrarily accurate models and observations, there may still be limits to the predictability of such a nonlinear system (AMS, 2000)”
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/annexessglossary-p-z.html
That’s a different conclusion to your quotation:
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
If you could link to your quotation that would be clear this up.
Thanks
Did Cook write any of that??
Isn’t it normal to target a rebuttal at the correct author?
They refuse to admit that the possibility of a debate exists. I’ve said this countless times – AGW is a RELIGION, not a science. Anytime we point out anything that contradicts the AGW crowd, they start screaming “BLASPHEMY!” (DENIER) and start chanting “Al… Gore… Al… Gore…” I gave the boot to an author I had friended on FaceBook earlier today, because she was repeating something she saw yesterday about how “the kind of people who deny climate change rely on a rodent for weather prediction” (appx.) I don’t have time for zealots. Period.
@SteveE
Here you go – http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/505.htm. 5th paragraph.
John says:
February 3, 2012 at 5:14 am
Anthony – I think it is time you provide some examples about the nature of consensus.
For example you could ask the following questions –
To prisoners – ask if they think they should be allowed to leave prison regardless of their crime?
To a class of High schoolers as them if they think the school day/week should be shorter?
To a class of 1st graders ask them if they would like candy for lunch everyday.
etc. I am sure you could acheive a 97% consesus on those questions…Just a matter of who you ask and what the vested interests are.
——————————————————————————————————————-
John,
Your arguments are not valid because they are not scientific questions based on a theory,
“Since Mr. Cook accuses me of lying, I have asked him to be good enough to make sure that this reply to his commentary is posted on his website in the interest of balance.”
No sign of it yet at the SS… Am I dipping my toe in the Reductio-ad-Hitlerum fallacy by using “the SS” in place of Skeptical Science???? :-).
John Marshall says (February 3, 2012 at 6:16 am): “The re-radiated heat that increases surface heat is a problem insofar as the mid/upper troposphere is far colder than the surface and heat cannot flow up gradient, or from cold to hot,otherwise you could make a Perpetual Motion Machine. The 2nd law of thermodynamics is quite explicit in this…”
The 2nd Law says only that the net flow is from warm to cool, which doesn’t preclude a bi-directional flow. A photon of infrared light doesn’t know if it came from a body warmer or colder than its destination; it will transfer its energy to the target regardless of the target’s temperature.
For a good overview of the so-called “greenhouse effect” from a self-described climate heretic, I recommend two articles by Willis Eschenbach:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/17/the-steel-greenhouse/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/27/people-living-in-glass-planets/
@Chance N
Thanks for that!
I think the next sentence puts Moncktons statement in context though:
“The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.”
I think that this shows that Monckton’s quotation of the IPCC report was taking it out of context.
Chance N. — Thanks for the link. SteveE– here’s the full paragraph from the IPCC working group that Moncton correctly quoted. The first 3 Working Group sentences are refreshingly candid in the limitations of trying to model the inherently chaotic climatic system. (BTW you’ll never hear the alarmist mongers like Hansen, Gore and Pachuri quote this admission of the limits of models). But the important part of the paragraph is the last 2 sentences that give away the plot– SEND US MORE MONEY FOR FURTHER STUDY. IPCC is like anything else– It’s all about the money boys! The quote from the IPCC Working Group :
” In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system�s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. This reduces climate change to the discernment of significant differences in the statistics of such ensembles. The generation of such model ensembles will require the dedication of greatly increased computer resources and the application of new methods of model diagnosis. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive, but such statistical information is essential.”
@SteveE and Chance N –
Uh, it appears the IPCC doesn’t agree with itself.
Although neither statement brings a high level of confidence to predictions of future climate.
Wrestling…pigs in mud…
I think most Americans know the concept.
You get dirty, pig likes it.
Enough said.
MAX
PS: Doesn’t detract from Lord M’s validity!
Climate Watcher says:
February 3, 2012 at 6:04 am
“Evidently I am now banned from SS.”
I suspect there are worse fates in life.:-)
Monckton I think your rebuttals of this type would be more effective if you put in-line links to the sources for various claims of sensitivity numbers, historical accounts, summary papers, etc… I realize many of them probably come from behind paywalls, but many do not. HTML is a powerful tool that helps the writer demonstrate the validity of what they’re saying by directly sourcing it in links attached to the very text that is saying it. Your writing style has never been in question to me, nor your grasp of reason, however the internet generation tends to expect that you link to what it is that makes you say what you’re saying. It makes it that much easier to examine the facts as presented. Since your arguments are so reasonable, this can only help convince those who read your posts of the rationality on which you have based your thoughts.
Gary Hladik says:
February 3, 2012 at 8:06 am
“The 2nd Law says only that the net flow is from warm to cool, which doesn’t preclude a bi-directional flow. A photon of infrared light doesn’t know if it came from a body warmer or colder than its destination; it will transfer its energy to the target regardless of the target’s temperature.”
It would be interesting to see if that could be, if it hasn’t already been, experimentally confirmed.
Lord Monckton – It seems to me that you have an unfair advantage over the people you are debating with. While your opponents must stand in front of the audience completely naked, you on the other hand are dressed in sharp attire. Hardly a level playing field. GK
Don’t expect John “I not only delete skeptical comments when they prove me wrong, I also make unmarked updates and then change comments to make it look as though the updates had always been there and the skeptical commenters were too dumb to see them” Cook to post your response.
mrsean2k — The proper response to that graph is one that shows alarmists extrapolating every trend to DOOOOOM! (e.g. an Ice Age based on 1940-1970, the Warmocalypse based on 1970-1998), with a second Y axis alongside the extrapolated temperature of $$$$$ (in absolute values) to show the grants they’ll demand.
To anyone who spends any time talking to the “climate faithful”, we recognize that pieces like that from Cook don’t need to be accurate. The faithful are given a fact by a sceptic – they then do a quick internet search and come across a poorly done hit piece like Cooks – They then quit reading and relax again. They will never check to see if a piece has been responded to or retracted. I have had people refence me to some of the most debunked hit pieces ever, as proof. People still bring out the Hockey stick as a “new nail in the coffin of skeptics”, without a clue about the years of debate surrounding it. The majority of the warmers will not look one second longer after they find a single comment that reinforces their position.
Or to put it more bluntly: sceptics are not debating science or facts, but are running up against a wall of ignorance. The majority of the sceptics, not all though, have become skeptics by having moments of confusion when something they hear doesn’t fit right with other claims they already heard. It doesn’t take much research to find this is not unusual in climate science…..and a sceptic is born.
A Warming beliver, is usually created when they read a nice general story that agrees with there general outlook. If you don’t believe me, start asking skeptics when they became skeptics…….then ask believers why they believe. The majority of the time you get a nice fact free answer like, “how can we not we have an effect”.
There is of course there are more science based warmers. Some truly want to discuss and find truth. I like them, sounds like scientists. But most are falling into the belief that this is an attack on science. They are defending science, not the scientists. They feel that to admit such a prominent branch of science was wrong, even a little bit or even just that they don’t know, will somehow destroy science and send the world backwards. But allowing climate science to continue unchallenged will do more to unsettle peoples faith in scientific trust.
For disclosure: I am an athiest. I used to work in the Canadian oilfield when younger for 4 years (and hated ever minute of it and have no love for it). I know work as an architectural consultant.
Joe Ryan says:
February 3, 2012 at 5:38 am
If it weren’t for argumentum ad hominem, argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam.they’d have no argumentum at all.
———————————————–
Brilliant! hahahaha I love it.
Joe Ryan says: (February 3, 2012 at 5:38 am)
“If it weren’t for argumentum ad hominem, argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam.they’d have no argumentum at all.”
That is very, very untrue. Since the warmist brigade has undue influence over a number of governments, they have argumentum ad baculum to use — agree with me, or I’ll hit you.
If I sound a bit frustrated in my comment above, it comes from trying to talk to people who refuse to spend any time doing any kind of research to confirm their opinions, but don’t hesitate for a second to trumpet their un-researched opinion from the rooftops…….and still have the audacity to call well researched people deniers.
My favorite money quote from these people is “thats just stupid, there is no way that is true, nobody is stupid enough to do that”…..reply “It is true, check it out, if you wait a second I will find it for you”……answer, ” I don’t have time, but you must have misread it or it was on a website sponsored by big oil. Besides how can we not be having and effect with that much CO2″.
Ah I always like reading Lord Monckton’s replies. Point by point evisceration of his opposition. I wonder if he plays chess? I’d love a game of chess960 with him some time if he does. Great analysis talents.
SteveE says:
February 3, 2012 at 8:08 am
“I think the next sentence puts Moncktons statement in context though:
“The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.””
Think about that. You have a chaotic system. You can’t predict its future state. Ok, you run a couple simulations to have samples of possible future states.
How large is the state space you’re sampling? This determines how many runs could be considered a representative sampling.
How large is the state space of all combinatorically possible future climates, including the ones that will not be reached – remember, we want to find out which ones can be reached and which ones cannot; that’s the reason they say probability distribution.
Running it, say, a million times obviously falls laughably short of the required number.
“In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
Seems pretty straight forward to me. The context is included in the statement.
Brandon C says:
February 3, 2012 at 9:07 am
I once read in a book, “You can walk New York to London on the ocean and pull gold coins out of forever but you cannot make people care.” Makes sense to me! Don’t sweat the small stuff…
I don’t know beans about climate science, but what has bugged me since the early ’90s was Al Gore’s claim of a consensus. Around that same, he started to downplay skeptic scientist critics by saying they were corrupt.
When neither of these two arguments are valid, AGW is obligated to prove itself in the face of skeptic criticism. Problem is, the mainstream media long ago took those first two points at face value without ever questioning them, and incorporated a third talking point – that journalists were not obligated to listen to skeptics because the science was settled and skeptic scientists were corrupt.
An entire AGW gravy train was created out of those three brilliantly simple talking points.
Bravo, I enjoyed reading that.
@ SteveE February 3, 2012 at 8:08 am
Quote from IPCC:
“The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.”
========================
That statement has little meaning.
A lot of weasel words / uncertainties in that one sentence: “the prediction” = guess; “the probability” = degree of ‘maybe’ or ‘chance’; “possible states” = chance; “model solutions” = another WAG based on assumptions incorporating previously mentioned weasel wording.
Perhaps it could have been written as such without altering the meaning of its context:
“The most we can hope for is a guess of the chance of the system’s future chance by the generation of ensembles of a WAG.”
Therefore Monckton’s statement would seem to be in context:
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
“Indeed, in another article on Mr. Cook’s website he himself uses a value of 0.8 C° in the context of a discussion of warming since 1970.”
Whew, who dares to argue with a man who has such details in his head! Monckton wins these debates because of this command. None of his adversaries has such reach- they fill in with foggy ad libbed selections from the compilation of crib notes by the consensus.
Science with Class is what Lord Monckton does. Always nice to read. I always learn a few new words from it too.
Anthony, you should add Skeptical Science link to your “Pro AGW Views” list…
REPLY: They used to be there, but they now occupy a category of their own on the right sidebar – Anthony
“@SteveE
Here you go – http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/505.htm. 5th paragraph.”
Good catch Steve. Monckton mistakenly cited the IPCC 2007 AR4. Not the older TAR.
“Paragraph 14.2.2.2 of the IPCC’s 2007 report says: “
Five bucks says Cook won’t publish this rebuttal on “Skeptical Science”.
I just looked – not yet. For those looking for wild rants in support of CAGW, his website is a good place to start.
While it’s mostly garbage, it’s always nice to know how the ‘black hats’ think, or rather, don’t..
Sorry, just saw that it is better placed in the “Unreliable” category… my mistake.
The combination of argument by popularity and by authority is rather a brain-twister, isn’t it? Popularity amongst authorities? Popular opinion is authoritative? Popular opinion as approved by authorities?
The bind moggles.
Above: The IPCC at various times has claimed that a central estimate of climate sensitivity is 3.8 C° (1995); 3.5 C° (2001); and 3.26 C° (2007)
This is an interesting trend. Chris -are there any other claims that over the years have grown less catastrophic? We could model this trend and possibly others and project that maybe their 2036 report will be actually close to reality. I think they are slowly learning from their over-hypes. Just too slowly.
The IPCC shows an enormous lack of understanding in the quoted sentence about probability. They are essentially flipping a coin with two heads and trying to tell us the resulting distribution tells us what to expect with a fair coin. Pure nonsense.
Anyone who reads that quote and finds it meaningful is either completely unaware of basic probability dynamics or willfully naive.
Mister Cook from “skeletal science” and his new recipe of bone soup.
Mix a stewed modélisation, ad a weather frog and a human finger (print)
into an old medieval warm tale and you get a bone soup – a clever story perfect for those craving a little taste of an ecological disaster
original recipe visible on this address
http://curledupkids.com/bonesoup.html
“Joe Ryan says:
February 3, 2012 at 5:38 am
If it weren’t for argumentum ad hominem, argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam.they’d have no argumentum at all.”
Just a little wordy for a Blues song.
Thank you Lord Monckton for doing what you do so well.
Re: Steve E, Chance N.
I think Lord M might have incorrectly referenced AR4, when it should have been TAR. See: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/505.htm . The paragraph/quote is there, verbatim.
In general a good rebuttal and, as always, an entertaining read. I’m not, myself, certain about the climate stability arguments. While there are bounds to the climate based on our understanding of the geological record, within those outside temperature boundaries, it appears shifts between climate states can occur with amazing speed (Lord M. cites the end of the Younger Dryas as an example; he could also have cited its onset). I’d be curious to see what understanding exists of how these prior climate shifts have occurred – what conditions initiated them? (I know there is a theory/hypothesis that the onset of the Younger Dryas resulted from the draining of Lake Aggasiz into the ocean, where the freshwater pulse impacted the Atlantic thermohaline circulation.) Lord M. says those conditions don’t exist today, but its not clear what that argument is based on.
HIstorical abrupt shifts in climate cut both ways: the suggestion that the recent, mild warming is either abrupt or unusual is undercut; at the same time, it opens the door to “warmaggedon” arguments that a modest increase in temperature could lead to more rapid temperature increases in the future (until the outer bounds are hit, presumably).
However, since we are still likely cooler than the MWP, and certainly cooler than the Holocene Optimum, it’s not readily apparent to me, that the warming experienced in the late 20th C. is unusual (or principally being driven by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions). Even so, its an interesting area that doesn’t get as much attention as it needs (beyond claims of alarmists that every change in the Arctic ice cover is, yet again, another tipping point…).
Re: Steve E, Chance N., Ian
I contacted Monckton and of course he authorized an update/correction and link is added to the 2007 TAR.
Thank to everyone for catching this.
Anthony
Cook: “Monckton employs the common ‘skeptic’ trick of focusing on the costs of carbon pricing while completely ignoring the benefits.”
This particular canard is, to my mind, the most laughable of all. Not only because, as Lord Monckton’s response demonstrates, it is wrong in this instance, but because in the several decades of this controversy the purveyors of alarmist hyperbole have only in the rarest circumstances been willing to suggest that they recognize that there are any positive human benefits to higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. From what I’ve seen those benefits, which have been widely and obviously demonstrated, most notably by the Idsos, are either denied or unrecognized in almost every calculation of the C/B ratios for the various assaults on liberty and prosperity that the alarmist community has been demanding we all accept, based on their application of the entirely ignorant “precautionary principle”. That makes this particular critique probably the ultimate example of the pot and the kettle that you will ever see.
Ian– correct. Moncton quoted properly, but has the wrong citation.
Well done Christopher !
@Dave Wendt,
That double standard gave me a chortle too. Such clear cognitive dissonance should be used as an example in psychology text books.
eyesonu says:
February 3, 2012 at 10:01 am
DirkH says:
February 3, 2012 at 9:36 am
SteveE says:
February 3, 2012 at 8:08 am
I think the next sentence puts Moncktons statement in context though:
‘The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.’
Where is the support for the theory that a bunch of inaccurate models will produce an accurate probability distribution of possible future climate states?
@mrsean2k
WRT the graph claiming to show acceleration; by coincidence, George Monbiot has been shilling an “Escalator” graph which claims to show the “skeptical” viewpoint:
Have you asked George if he’s seen this response
🙂
M’Lord, an excellent rebuttal framed in very moderate terms but, nevertheless, a swingeing put-down which was rather well-deserved. It was also a very educational read for which, many thanks.
Good lord, that was a smack down!
Is there any doubt that adapting to climate change will be a lot cheaper than trying to prevent it? Considering that whatever we do to prevent climate change will be the wrong thing, or will have unintended consequences, or will be negligible, it makes sense to wait and see if the climate starts warming again (or cools.) and then do what we can to adapt. Since they are claiming that aerosols are the reason the climate hasn’t warmed, it sounds like we may have already found a solution to global warming – should it become a problem – that doesn’t starve the world’s plant life.
Spending trillions to chase phantoms is irresponsible, especially when most of the money is not used to reduce CO2 but to create propaganda for public consumption. If they can make people feel guilty about their very existence, they won’t convince them to breath out less CO2 but they may convince them to pay more in taxes as an indulgence for their sins. The whole idea of “consensus” is not about the science, it is to convince the public that all the really cool people support them. It’s just a complete coincidence that all the really cool people stand to benefit in some way from the trillions that will be spent.
I do wish Lord Monckton would stop agreeing that carbon dioxide is having any effect, because it isn’t.
It has now been proven computationally and empirically that the energy contained in any radiation emitted spontaneously from a significantly cooler part of the atmosphere than the surface cannot be converted to thermal energy when it meets the surface. Only thermal energy adds to other thermal energy. So, without additional thermal energy there can be neither slowing of the cooling rate nor increasing of the warming rate.
For details see the first two pages of my site http://climate-change-theory.com for this is the truth of the matter and it must prevail.
Note in particular the evidence provided by infra-red cameras whose sensors cannot be warmed by radiation from the cold clouds.
Thank you Lord Monckton. I unfortunately lost a friendship last year over the CAGW scare. I fought the Middle School in Portola Valley, Ca (Corte Madera) for showing Al Gore’s movie and portraying it “As fact”. They have stopped showing it, but one of my alarmist friends personally attacked me for fighting(and winning, sort of…) that battle. I started comparing the two sites(WUWT, SS) and was a bit overwhelmed. We(I) need some help from you guys. It would be helpful if some of you could put together an easily referenced rebutal to that “thermometer” on the upper left hand of the SS website. They have thier “beginner” and “advanced” CAGW rebutal to the non alarmist view. I started fact checking(with my limited ability in this field) and found mistakes in their data. A little help with “fact checking” on their 10 point “thermometer” would help us that are less educated in the topic to debate our alarmists friends(not that we have many anymore). Thanks, Mark
2008:
web.archive.org/web/20080507024314/www.skepticalscience.com/ocean-and-global-warming.htm
“What the science says…
The notion that the ocean is causing global warming is ruled out by the observation that the ocean is warming (Levitus 2005). Internal climate changes such as El Nino and thermohaline variability stem from transfers of heat such as from the ocean to the atmosphere.
If the ocean was feeding atmospheric warming, the oceans would be cooling.”
2010:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/cooling-oceans.htm
“Claims that the ocean has been cooling are correct. Claims that global warming has stopped are not.”
What to make of this:
2008: “If the ocean was feeding atmospheric warming, the oceans would be cooling.”
2010: “Claims that the ocean has been cooling are correct.”
Anthony, you should add Skeptical Science link to your “Pro AGW Views” list…
REPLY: They used to be there, but they now occupy a category of their own on the right sidebar – Anthony
Anthony after seeing the above and because of the article on him recently there is another site you should add to the “Pro AGW Views” list although with the amount of comments that disappear it should be put into that new category you made, that is the Bad Astronomer at Discovery Mag. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/
Don’t know if it can added as it covers some astronomy also 🙂
GOOD LORD!! Bloody good show, Sir.
If Cook wasn’t “naked” before, he is now!
Excellent piece. Copied and saved.
….
Wait? What’s that?? I think I hear Cook praying!
WE HAVE A CONVERT! Opps, sorry. Just the dog snoring.
/sarc
Richard M says: “There are two kinds of “smarts”. One is based on more or less on memory skills and the other is based on logical/critical thinking. In most Western education systems the former type is rewarded with higher grades on average….”
Yes, at least two kinds, plus the ability to synthesize using the results of both. Feynman, in one of his books, mentioned visiting a university in South America where rote learning (your first kind of smarts), was the total objective. He bluntly told them so at a commencement address, much to their shock and horror. A student came up to him afterwards and agreed with him.
This evidently applies to a lot of universities in the US & UK, too!
I find it quite laughable when the Chicken Little CO2 AGW/CC Believing Alarmists, Call Christopher Monckton a ‘Climate Crank’ as our NZ’s own Chicken Little Hot-Topic Blog does. Even though he’s the one that often is right. While their Climate Change Icons they love to believe and dote on their every word turn out to be quite often 9 out of 10 the Real ‘Climate Cranks’. Al Gore, Hansen, Mann. Just to name a few!
Babsy says:
It would be interesting to see if that could be, if it hasn’t already been, experimentally confirmed.
It’s easier to grasp if you remember that the second law of thermal dynamics is applicable to kinetic energy transfer, which in itself is subject to the laws of motion.
Light is a very broad spectrum of electromagnetic energy and usually expressed as Watts per square meter per second. It’s a constant energy force and is therefore subject to the laws of energy conservation. If you have a closed system and keep putting energy in then it will accumulate to infinity. This can’t happen in our universe because it is an open system.
This means any energy flowing back to a radiating surface adds to the power of the emitting surface. You cannot destroy energy so any back radiation cannot just disappear.
Radio waves are just very long electromagnetic waves and this concept is applied to amplify a directional antennas output.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yagi-Uda_antenna
I think we should all be thankful for a free internet, without which none of us would have heard of Lord Monkton! or any of the sung and unsung heroes of this fight for our freedom. Thankfully they left this ten years too late, I would so like to see Lord Monkton leading a like minded party running the UK, I have escaped my country for Canada and watch despairingly as the socialist elite destroy it and most or europe with it, maybe this scam will destroy the old order, at least we now know who in the corridors of power can be trusted, few as they are!
A huge debt is owed to WUWT, Lord Monkton and all the sceptics who have fought for us.
Thank you.
Monckton, I love the way your classics always teach me new words.
I’ve now discovered what “Gish Gallop” means… found some interesting stuff. Google no. 1 is RationalWiki, set up to “debunk” “pseudosciences” to which global warming denialism belongs, of course. Then I found a little U-tube piece – well well, SkSci again.
A phrase haunts me over all this… “A lie travels halfway round the world before truth has got its pants on”. We’ve seen this happen, and this is how it happens: the liar, who of course is the expert in lying, publicly accuses his accusors of the very lies he himself practices, before they accuse him publicly… his accusations are believable because they draw on his own expertise of lying, and they are believed because he got there first.
Al Gore declared in his lying film that all scientists who disagreed with the “consensus” were either “kooks or crooks”. After that time, it became harder for scientists to disagree without risking their reputation, livelihood, and even wellbeing.
But we have an even greater phrase: “Truth Will Out”.
TRM says:
Indeed, Monckton is a very skilled debater, which is why he does so well with audiences who do not have the scientific background to see the errors in his arguments. With those who do have those scientific credentials, well, he is not regarded with anything near the worship that he seems to be regarded by most here.
As just a couple of examples of Monckton’s error –
Monckton of Brenchley says:
Actually, 0.4(5.35 ln 2) = 1.48°C, not 1°C as Monckton claims, which puts his estimate toward the lower end, but well within the range of 1.3°C to 2.6°C that the IPCC lists for transient climate responses in the various the 19 models for which this value was computed ( http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6-2-3.html#table-8-2 ), especially when one considers that the 2.6°C is a bit of an outliers with the next highest value being 2.2°C. So, Monckton’s estimate actually supports the IPCC values once the math is done correctly.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
For example, one of the methods that he uses, as has been discussed in past posts here, is to look at the total temperature increase attributable to the natural greenhouse effect (~33°C) and to compare this to the total radiative effect of ~100 W/m^2 that is attributed to all greenhouse gases. He claims that this gives a result for climate sensitivity that includes the effect of feedbacks. However, that claim is easily demonstrated to be incorrect…For example, his calculation assumes that none of the water vapor in that atmosphere is the result of feedbacks from the warming due to the non-condensable greenhouse gases, or in other words, that there is no water vapor feedback!!! It also assumes there is no ice-albedo feedback since the radiative effect of any change in albedo due to changes in ice or snow cover is not taken into account.
Perhaps these two examples can help you to understand why Monckton’s “point by point evisceration of his opposition” does not impress qualified scientists nearly as much as it impresses lay people like yourself.
Babsy says:
No…Scientists and engineers have been using the equations of radiative transfer for the last hundred years or so but nobody has ever bothered to experimentally verify them!
Seriously, statements like this are just bizarre!
As an update on my previous post, the values for the transient climate response in that IPCC table ( http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6-2-3.html#table-8-2 ) actually range from 1.2 to 2.6 C (I missed that 1.2 C value), with a mean +/- one standard deviation of 1.76 C +/- 0.35 C. So, Lord Monckton’s estimate of 1.48 C from the historical temperature record is within the one-standard deviation of the average from the 19 climate models in the IPCC AR4 report that reported this value.
Just to note, most scientists would also note that any sort of estimate like Monckton’s using the historical temperature data actually carries quite large error bars, mainly because of the uncertainty in the anthropogenic aerosol forcing. This is why the historical temperature record alone does not very tightly constrain equilibrium climate sensitivity (or transient climate response) and hence why other empirical data is used to get as tight a constraint as possible (which is, nonetheless, not as tight a constraint as we would like to have).
The burning question I have is did you write this over a nice cuppa Lord M as this would make you the perfect english gentleman if you did in my books, no matter what sh*t gets thrown at you you respond with dignity and a little humour.
John Marshall says:
February 3, 2012 at 6:16 am
////////////////////////////////////
As I have said many times before, it is one of the greatest PR scoops of all time that the public have a perception that the warmists can point to temperature charts and claim a correlation between CO2 and temperature. U say this because, in practice, there is no correlation either in the geological record or in the instrument record.
For sure, in the geological record there are some similarities but only to the extent that temperature controls CO2, not the other way around. As regards the instrument record there is only one small part where CO2 and temperature track (the late 20th century) but given that the rate of temperature change is no greater than the rate of change between about 1920 to 1940, rvrn thr late 20th century warming provides no real correlation.
Criminals in all walks of life always hate the truth.
Good job again, Mr Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
This debate needs many more point-by-point interchanges with exact quotes and exact literature citations.
In my opinion, it takes a lot of work to write that kind of thing: the temptation is always to paraphrase, and to refer to “the studies” without full citations of any reference. We bloggers do it all the time. You have done this well.
joel
I see you are unfamiliar with photonic osmosis, whereby you put a unidirectional screen between a cold and a hot place so that infrared photons can go from cold to hot, only.
It makes for very cold fridges !
very good rebuff btw of that pedantic preaching site that is skepticalscience.com
Ian says:
February 3, 2012 at 10:52 am
“…While there are bounds to the climate based on our understanding of the geological record, within those outside temperature boundaries, it appears shifts between climate states can occur with amazing speed…”
Or not. Check this out:
First plants cooled the Ordovician
Timothy M. Lenton, Michael Crouch, Martin Johnson, Nuno Pires and Liam Dolan
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n2/pdf/ngeo1390.pdf
“…Between 488 and 444 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, the climate cooled gradually , culminating in the abrupt onset of periods of temporary glaciation. These Late Ordovician glaciations are puzzling, because they occurred when atmospheric CO2 concentrations, as estimated by geochemical models2–4 and proxy data5–7, were roughly 14–22 times present-day atmospheric levels (PAL). Yet complex climate models8,9 suggest atmospheric CO2 levels had to drop to about 8 PAL to trigger glaciations at this time….”
Abrupt seems to measure about 10 million years. Note too, that dropping CO2 to something like 3200 ppm is cited as the key element here leading to glaciation. Looks like we’re doomed.
Joel Shore says:
February 3, 2012 at 2:15 pm
Why is it bizzare? If a molecule of CO2 absorbs a photon and it has a new energy state, what happens to the molecule after that? Does it spend eternity in the same energy state or does it emit a photon of its own and return to its previous energy state?
Dan says:
February 3, 2012 at 8:48 am
Joe Ryan says:
February 3, 2012 at 5:38 am
If it weren’t for argumentum ad hominem, argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam.they’d have no argumentum at all.
———————————————–
Brilliant! hahahaha I love it.
You missed out argumentum ad ignorantium
JimF says:
February 3, 2012 at 3:08 pm
“…Between 488 and 444 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, the climate cooled gradually , culminating in the abrupt onset of periods of temporary glaciation. These Late Ordovician glaciations are puzzling, because they occurred when atmospheric CO2 concentrations, as estimated by geochemical models2–4 and proxy data5–7, were roughly 14–22 times present-day atmospheric levels (PAL). Yet complex climate models8,9 suggest atmospheric CO2 levels had to drop to about 8 PAL to trigger glaciations at this time….”
This belief that only CO2 can change climate is nothing short of moronic.
It is unbelievably depressing to see this idiotic dogma remain entrenched in the climate science establishment as the unquestioned starting point of any climate “research”.
“”Cook: “Monckton spent almost the entire debate misrepresenting the scientific (and economic) literature at best, lying at worst.””
I’ve got your back Downunder, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, I’m on his case.
Regards,
Joel Shore: ” 0.4(5.35 ln 2) = 1.48°C, not 1°C”
Using excel I get log(5.35,2)=2.42, which comes to 0.97 when multiplied by 0.4
Correct me if for some reason I’ve misunderstood.
[“ln” is natural log (base e); while “log” is usually understood to be log base 10. Robt]
Mr Cook is a foot solider for academic fundamentalism.
He uses his website primarily to source contrary views, purely so as to negate them, regardless of whether we know they are true or not, and whether there is any uncertainty in the literature. It is pure academic fundamentalism; anything and everything that is against the central agenda is pre-emptively dismissed; that is, I suspect, what the website is set up for, to dismiss anything and everything that doesn’t suit The Cause. The long list of views against the central agenda is a giveaway, it is blatantly one sided and does not represent the state of the literature, it is simply designed to appeal to the prejudices of the readers.
Lord Monckton is my hero! keep up the good work
Thinking of my thoughts upon reading this, I must say that I, personally, grow dispirirted by these endless arguments with the warmistas, who are only interested in coin. The fact that they lose .. again, again and again, is not important to them as long as the money flows..
The money machine rolls on. I think we should still hammer away at the warmistas argments, but we should also attack their motives … and them personally, as they do us.
And I think Canada leads the way here .. I hope various nasty organizations habe their “charitable” status removed, and the government stops giving them money!!!
TimM says:
Tim,
What you are doing there is taking log_base2 of 5.35. What you are supposed to do is take log_base_e of 2 and multiply by 5.35. It looks like you just desperately tried to do something to get Monckton’s result. However, he was clear that he was using 5.35*ln(2)…and that makes sense as it gives the accepted value of ~3.7 W/m^2 for a doubling of CO2 levels.
Joel Shore (and Robt) – thanks for the clarification, I am now wiser. It makes me wonder (given the similarity of the result) if that’s what Monckton did as well.
I did try a search for log and ln on the PDF of Myhre (1998) to try and find a reference to the function but the PDF I found is just an image so the search was futile.
How come when the great orator enters the room, R. Gates and A Physicists beat it out the back door?
We see the real John Cook here, fumbling because he can’t just delete comments that he can’t answer, as they do on SkS and also SoD. You’ll find screen captures of just some of many of my posts which were deleted without reason on SkS on this Skeptical Science Errors page which has had about 7,750 views http://climate-change-theory.com/SkS_errors.html
Over the last 12 months or so I have had to set up nine different email addresses (and an extra ISP) to register that many times under different names on SkS, each time being banned when they worked out who I was. They even prevented opening of their whole website a couple of times, hence the need for another ISP.
by using “the SS” in place of Skeptical Science???? :-).
Gary Hladik says:
February 3, 2012 at 8:06 am
John Marshall says (February 3, 2012 at 6:16 am): “The re-radiated heat that increases surface heat is a problem insofar as the mid/upper troposphere is far colder than the surface and heat cannot flow up gradient, or from cold to hot,otherwise you could make a Perpetual Motion Machine. The 2nd law of thermodynamics is quite explicit in this…”
The 2nd Law says only that the net flow is from warm to cool, which doesn’t preclude a bi-directional flow. A photon of infrared light doesn’t know if it came from a body warmer or colder than its destination; it will transfer its energy to the target regardless of the target’s temperature.
For a good overview of the so-called “greenhouse effect” from a self-described climate heretic, I recommend two articles by Willis Eschenbach:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/17/the-steel-greenhouse/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/27/people-living-in-glass-planets/
=============
And what’s the mechanism that makes it a net hotter to colder?
Doug Cotton: Don’t fool your yourself. Your comments about back-radiation and such are not deleted because they can’t be answered. They are deleted because they are nonsense that has repeatedly been answered and such a level of cluelessness just adds noise to the discussion. No real respected scientists believe the nonsense that you peddle, and by nobody, I mean that AGW skeptics like Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, Willis Eschenbach, Robert Brown, … Heck, even Monckton doesn’t believe that sort of nonsense.
nc says:
February 3, 2012 at 5:08 pm
Good question, nc. Indeed, they (R. and A.) are never to be found when Lord Monckton takes critics to the woodshed–What could they say, except “Gosh, have we ever been taken in–big time!”
Losers.
Joel Shore says:
February 3, 2012 at 2:15 pm
And you want us to take you seriously here, Mr. Shore?
Consider (as refutation of your statement above):
http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/eserv/eth:1828/eth-1828-02.pdf
http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781439805336
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jctb.686/abstract
And there are plenty more.
But look on the bright side, Mr. Shore–if nobody had done the experimental verification as you claim, here’s your chance to shine! Go for it, I say!
RockyRoad: Is my sarcasm really that hard to detect?!?
Thanks for the references though. I’m sure our friend Babsy will enjoy them.
Purely in the interest of ad hominem fun, here is John Cook. Does anyone else detect the crazed look of a Soros supported maniac?
OK, I shouldn’t have said that. I have nothing against maniacs.☺
That’s the 2001 TAR
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/505.htm
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/
etc.
Joel Shore says:
February 3, 2012 at 5:44 pm
Of course a lot of people don’t yet believe what Claes Johnson, a well published Professor of Applied Mathematics has written in his Computational Blackbody Radiation which extends the work of Einstein and Planck in particular, and solves a dilemma which troubled Einstein all his life. It’s common for such scientists to be disbelieved in the early stages.
Maybe I wouldn’t believe it either if the climate records actually did show a human footprint, or if IR cameras like those microbolometers did actually form images of objects more than 30 degrees below zero. But, according to their manufacturers’ specifications, any IR radiation from significantly cooler sections of the atmosphere apparently doesn’t warm their sensors, which is exactly what Prof. Johnson would predict – and exactly why backradiation doesn’t warm the surface.
So how about you go and argue with him on his site if you think you can find fault with his assumptions, computations and/or conclusions? Come back and let us all know if you think you are the first in the world to do so.
You might also like to put up your argument as to why you think the Earth’s surface acts like a blackbody, and thus why my arguments on my Home page are considered faulty by yourself. No doubt you’ll find all your answers on SkS – or will you?
If you want to read a brief summary, or get a link to his document, you know where to look: http://climate-change-theory.com/RadiationAbsorption.html
But let’s agree to talk facts and figures on this site, shall we? Everyone here has heard enough comments from people like yourself in the past – just echoing the IPCC and SkS. What’s your motive – to push an agenda, or to seek the real truth?
Well done Lord Monckton.
You are the kind of statesman this world needs more of. Thank you for all of your efforts and hard work.
I have not bothered with Skeptical junk science in a number of years. I spent a short time there several years back and recall reading their claim that the climate system was not chaotic, their claims of course were ridiculous and unfounded and quite bluntly to anyone that had studied chaotic systems would recognize immediately they were ignorant fools. I could not find a method to successfully argue with people that did not understand what they were arguing about, a problem I still have today.
Kudos to Lord Monckton for presenting a rational and convincing rebuttal to the clownery of Mr. Cook. Although I sincerely doubt Mr. Cook has any clue what has been done to his argumentative rapport. Although I am certain with his limited skill of thought he will not be aware.
For anyone who feels I have slighted Mr Cook with ad hom assaults, yes I have, he deserves no better, nor do any of his fraudulent and ignorant friends.
Cheers to Lord Monckton!
Joel Shore @ February 3, 2:11 pm
Just to keep it to one simple point, you wrote in part of Christopher Monckton’s comments:
There may well be a water vapour feedback, but as I’ve asked of you before to no avail, if that is the case, would it not also be reasonable to expect a change in cloud cover? Also, according to the great prophet Trenberth, by far the greatest cooling effect from the surface is evapotranspiration, which is arguably augmented by thermals. (sometimes jointly AKA convection). So what happens if there is a small change there too? Would you please clarify in your great wisdom what the sign of these multiple joint interactions might be? Here are the numbers again according to the Trenberth 2009 energy balance cartoon, in W/m^2:
• Thermals = 17
• Evapotranspiration = 80
• Via radiation directly to space = 40
• Via radiation temporarily absorbed in the atmosphere and clouds = 23 (GHE)
• Disapearados = 1
Your clarifications to us mere mortals on this would be appreciated.
Joel Shore says:
February 3, 2012 at 2:15 pm
“A photon of infrared light doesn’t know if it came from a body warmer or colder than its destination”
The body which it strikes “knows” because the peak frequency of the radiation (hence its energy) is lower than its own peak emission frequency if the emitting body was cooler than the receiving body. The peak frequency of emission is proportional to the absolute temperature.
There cannot be any conversion of the energy in the radiation to thermal energy if the temperature of the emitting body was (significantly) less than that of the receiving body. That is why an atmospheric “greenhouse effect” is a physical impossibility.
This is why an IR camera which depends on radiation warming its sensors cannot form an image of a body (cloud etc) which is significantly cooler than its sensor. Have we told you enough times yet?
You really need to learn some basic physics – try the link on my site to Johnson’s Computational Blackbody Radiation which I have recommended (in another post) that you read, but perhaps I need to say, study.
Yes, you linked three papers on radiation experiments, two of which I would have had to pay to read and none of which you quoted in any detail – but, as far as I can see, at least one which I could read free acknowledged that a lot of radiation passes through a solid without being absorbed – as Johnson would expect – just being scattered. None seemed to have performed a simple experiment to see if actual backradiation from the atmosphere really does warm anything like a metal plate. The microbolometer IR cameras seem to demonstrate such an experiment would fail. (PS Don’t come back quoting IR cameras that measure low temperatures using the frequenct of the radiation as that’s irrelevant.)
.
Anthony,
Christopher Monckton is too modest. Why don’t you tell the good readers of WUWT about his big plan for countries like Australia and the UK? What’s needed is, he says, for the super rich to buy an existing TV station or set up a new one, employ the likes of Joanna Nova and hey presto, they’ll have ” free, fair and balanced coverage” just like you do in the US with Fox!
http://www.getup.org.au/minersmediaplan
What will he think of next?
@tempterrain
If it balances out the unquestioning warmist bias of the BBC, and the relentless pro warming/ socialist Labor bias of the Fairfax Press and ABC here in OZ, then I’ll be a very happy camper.
More power to the miners!
Lord Monckton says
Adding carbon dioxide to an atmosphere will cause warming, but we need not (and should not) plead “consensus” in aid of that notion: for it is a result long proven by experiment, and has no need of “consensus” to sanctify it.
I don’t actually agree with that. sorry. I don’t regard that as completely proven. Nobody has actually come to me with a balance sheet of how much radiative warming (24hrs/day) and radiative cooling (12 hrs per day) is caused by each GHG and how much cooling is caused by the CO2 by taking part in photo synthesis.
In fact, if such a balance sheet actually exists, it should have time somewhere in the dimensions?
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
Joel Shore
your egalitarian non discriminating sense of intelligence has dutifully commit the wrong mnemonic to the subject
I still think Monckton deserves a noble prize.
the forlorn ir photons (travelling the wrong way..) do not know they are travelling the wrong way and indeed make individually hot places still hotter.
the matter is settled at satisfaction, at the source of the transmission, with stats: there are MORE photons sent out from the hot place than out of the cold place, as a matter of, well as a matter of the definition of being hotter actually.
this does not deny the possibility of a phlogiston fridge with photonic osmosis screens
henryP
I quite agree
The sensitive issue of “CO2 is a GHG” is conflated with the fact it has great heat capacity and is used for fire retardants etc.
there is scant experimental evidence it is a major GHG though. Certainly less so than H2O and there is 100 times more H2O than CO2 in the air (0.5-4% volume) .H2O is more effective due to its properties (higher melting and boiling point, which allows water to easier create suspensions clouds)
Just like H2O , trace gas CO2 (0.04% volume) acts like punch balls or those pouche air seats that were popular in the 70s.
where as interaction between O2 and N2 is like billiard balls, when N2 and CO2 interact (exchange a photon) it is like CO2 gets a punch and then slowly hisses the punch away. the billiard ricocheting is for ever lost as the CO2 molecule hisses empty and energy radiates out in empty space.
So adding more punchballs losens the kinetic energy of the mix.
CO2 cools the atmosphere.
We all know that. CO2 is the major feeback for temperature regulation of planet earth: when atmosphere heats, CO2 is dissolved from ocean water and that cools the atmosphere.
now the picture changes of course when you use ONLY CO2 for your atmosphere. Then it acts a s a mantle as every CO2 molecule can only interact with other CO2 molecules.
JimF says:
February 3, 2012 at 3:08 pm
Check this out:
First plants cooled the Ordovician
Timothy M. Lenton, Michael Crouch, Martin Johnson, Nuno Pires and Liam Dolan
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n2/pdf/ngeo1390.pdf
“…Between 488 and 444 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, … Yet complex climate models8,9 suggest atmospheric CO2 levels had to drop to about 8 PAL to trigger glaciations at this time….”
———————————————————-
This study made me literally laugh. These people actually believe the stuff they are spouting. “Weathering” is a magical process, but sounds very scientific and the very use of the word allows to people to suspend rational judgement and believe CO2 magically controls the climate .
The Ordovician ice age is very easy to explain (and it has nothing to do with plants or CO2). In fact, the same explanation also works for the Carboniferous ice age and the glaciation of Antarctica 35 million years ago. … and Greenland’s glaciation and Siberia’s glaciation 156 Mya and Snowball Earth and so on and so on.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl/images/figure05_10.jpg
http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/9508/tempco2570mlefttoright.png
Lord Monckton & HenryP:
No one seems to have published a simple experiment showing backradiation warming something.
How easy it would be to have two metal plates insulated from the ground sitting there, one absorbing backadiation at night and the other shielded from the backradiation. Just compare the pair.
I find it really hard to believe that someone has not done such an obvious test, or, if not, why the IPCC would not have requested it? The whole thing looks very suspicious, but then, what doesn’t in this field?. Surely Lord Monckton could arrange such a simple experiment.
The specifications for those microbolometer IR cameras whose sensors are not warmed by radiation from a cloud at -35 deg.C for example, should be an encouragement.
“Adding carbon dioxide to an atmosphere will cause warming, but we need not (and should not) plead “consensus” in aid of that notion: for it is a result long proven by experiment, and has no need of “consensus” to sanctify it. ”
Not true. This is based on consensus not science. As many debates on this site has shown. CO2 slows the rate of cooling very slightly. It does not cause warming. (Despite a flawed deminishing consensus).
Joel Shore @ February 3, 2:11 pm
…For example, his calculation assumes that none of the water vapor in that atmosphere is the result of feedbacks from the warming due to the non-condensable greenhouse gases, or in other words, that there is no water vapor feedback!!!
=========================================
I will leave it for Monckton to express what is, or is not in his calculation, which is I think based on observations so includes whatever affects nature throws at it.
However it sounds like you assume water vapor and clouds have a net positive reinforcement to CO2 induced warming. This is nothing more then an assumption.
Any increase in water vapor is in and of itself a spectral modification of incoming TSI reducing SW radiation at the surface. Check any solar spectrum chart; It will show that about 98% of that energy lies between about 250 nm in the UV and 4.0 microns; with the remaining as 1% left over at each end. Such graphs often have superimposed on them the actual ground level (air Mass once) spectrum; that shows the amounts of that energy taken out by primarily O2, O3, and H2O, in the case of H2O which absorbs in the visible and near IR perhaps 20% of the total solar energy is capture by water VAPOR (clear sky) clouds are an additional loss over and above that !!
Water vapor and clouds have a far larger effect on the SWR entering the ocean, and on SWR reflecting back to space, then CO2 has on the residence time of LWIR in the atmosphere. A CO2 induced LWIR atmospheric warming primarily increases evaporation at the ocean surface, which increases water vapor and clouds, which reduce SWR entering the oceans. Several studies since 1979 have shown a limit on T in the tropics due to this observation.
CO2 operates on a well known small percentage of the LWIR in the atmosphere riding on the shoulders of water vapor. Water vapor and clouds effect a much larger portion of the TSI [than] CO2, and affect it not only at the LW spectrum in the atmosphere, but where it matters the most, at the SW spectrum entering the oceans. Oceans are a far stronger GHLiquid then anything in the atmosphere. Your assumption that water vapor is net positive to the entire ocean/land/atmosphere is not matched by observations.
@Doug Cotton:
Doug: It is hard to catalog all of the errors and misstatements you make here and on your website, but I will try to hit the highlights:
(1) Claim: Back-radiation does not warm a surface. Reality: In one sense this is true. If you have an object that is emitting radiation but not receiving energy from elsewhere (or from the conversion of some other form of energy into thermal energy) then it will indeed not warm due to back-radiation. It will simply cool more slowly since the net flow of heat is away from the body. However, the Earth is also receiving energy from the sun. Its steady-state temperature is determined by the balance between what it receives from the sun and what it radiates back into space. In such a case, an increase in back-radiation will indeed result in a higher steady-state temperature.
(2) Claim: Einstein did not believe in the particle (“photon”) nature of light. Reality: In fact, when Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize, the one thing that the citation specifically mentioned was his explanation of the photoelectric effect, which he explained by light having a particle nature with the quantum of energy being Planck’ constant h times the frequency.
(3) Claim: Claes Johnson has proven that back-radiation does not exist. Reality: Cleaes has not proven anything. Claes rejects a whole field of physics, statistical physics, which has successfully explained everything from thermodynamics (including the Second Law) to phase transitions to the behavior of steps and island growth on solid surfaces. He has tried to replace the well-understood way that the statistics of large numbers of particles naturally explains why the transition from the microscale to the macroscale leads to dissipation, entropy increasing, etc. by a new postulate: He proposes that dissipation occurs at macroscopic scales because it occurs at microscopic scales. And, he believes it occurs at microscopic scales because of an artifact that occurs in the numerical solution of partial differential equations by discretization, whereby this discretization introduces artificial viscosity and dissipation. Everybody else in the field of numerical analysis would say that this dissipation is an artifact of the numerical technique, but Claes believes it to be a fundamental physical principle governing the universe. It is sort of the ultimate example of someone believing models over reality, which is why it is so ironic that some “AGW skeptics” like you have embraced such nonsense! Claes claims to have shown that he can re-derive a few basic laws (like that governing the net radiative exchange between two blackbodies at different temperatures) with his new postulate, although I don’t think anybody has bothered to check his math in detail because his starting point is so nutty. He has not even come close to showing that he can explain everything that a century’s worth of statistical physics has explained, nor has he given any evidence that he can provide explanations of any experimental data that cannot be explained by the current theoretical framework.
(4) Claim: Claes’s arguments show that the greenhouse effect does not exist. Reality: One of the ironies of Claes’s work is even that if you believe it, he has not provided any evidence that the greenhouse effect does not exist. In fact, as I noted, he has re-derived the law for net radiative exchange between two blackbodies at different temperatures and it is this law that leads to the greenhouse effect existing. Whether or not you consider one of the terms in that equation to represent “back-radiation” is irrelevant! The equation still gives the same results if you don’t adopt that interpretation, and that result is a greenhouse effect.
Doug Cotton says:
Can you remind me of your and Claes’s background in physics? I’ll run down mine: * PhD from one of the top physics grad schools in the U.S. * Publications in some of the top physics journals in the world (e.g., Physical Review Letters), mostly in the field of statistical physics, which provides the underlying understanding of thermodynamics. * Practical physical modeling in industry for 13 years, including some calculations of radiative transfer. * Teaching of introductory physics at the university level, including thermodynamics.
I think you need to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
David says:
The simple point is that by counting the enter water vapor content of the atmosphere as being a forcing, he is implicitly making the assumption that none of the water vapor is there as a feedback, i.e., as a result of the temperature increase that occurs when you add in the non-condensable greenhouse gases.
The radiative effects of water vapor in the atmosphere can and are calculated using the same radiative transfer equations that have been well-verified in a variety of fields extending from remote sensing to more down-to-earth applications.
Bob Ferley-Jones says:
Yes, there is a cloud feedback also.
It is not hard to understand the basic effects of this because what convection (including evapotranspiration) do is maintain the lapse rate in the troposphere at close to the appropriate (dry or moist) adiabatic lapse rate. For those parts of the troposphere where the lapse rate is close to the dry adiabatic lapse rate, that means the lapse rate doesn’t change. For those parts of the troposphere where the lapse rate is close to the moist adiabatic lapse rate (which is itself a decreasing function of the temperature), the lapse rate does decrease a bit with rising temperatures, hence providing a negative feedback included in all of the climate models. This negative feedback offsets a part of the positive feedback due to water vapor…and, because the two feedbacks involve much of the same physics, models with a larger magnitude of lapse rate feedback also tend to have a larger magnitude of the water vapor feedback. As a result, the net effect of these two feedbacks is better constrained than each feedback individually.
Joel Shore says:
February 3, 2012 at 6:21 pm
Dear Joel,
For all the mathematical skill and scientific prowess that you possess and demonstrate for us here on WUWT I must sadly inform you that you *DID NOT* understand what I was thinking about when you quoted me here:
Joel Shore says:
February 3, 2012 at 2:15 pm
Have a wonderful weekend!
Babsy says:
February 4, 2012 at 6:22 am
Correction: My statement should have said: “I must sadly inform you that you *DID NOT* understand what I was thinking about when you quoted me here:”
Henry@Winnie the Pooh
It seems only a few people have actually discovered that O2 is sort of also a GHG, because it has very slight absorption in the same 14-16 region where H2O and CO2 also absorbs. But O2 is very high, 21%
Henry @ Doug Cotton
True. We only have the closed box experiments which only show the warming properties, not the cooling properties of a gas.
I say more CO2 is better and I have my (scientific) reasons for that.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
Say what?
Have you no concept of how optical or EM reflectors operate?
You’re mixing apples and orange; don’t confuse an energy level below a certain ‘threshold’ for an energy level which has no effect!
.
Joel:
Interesting reading your comments. Thank you.
As you have given your credentials, impressive.
I now have a couple of questions:
1. We all know that temps started rising at the end of the LIA, and have continued to rise to a fairly flat peak as of late. Whether that peak establishes a meaningful high will only be known in approx 60-100 years. With this said, what percentage of the rise since the LIA do you contribute to mainly C02 and what percentage do you contribute to Holocene climatic flucuations?
2. Has the warming trend established since the close of the LIA a few centuries ago been anything out of the ordinary when looked at within the whole of the Holocene?
3. Proxy data indicates that the Holocene Optimum was warmer than present. And it was warmer for 1,000’s of years. The resolution of the proxy data is such that it is not inconcieveable that those folks experienced spike temps much much higher than present. With that in mind, what is extraordinary about the current warm period?
Joel:
TSI has recently been shown to be very stable. Even during times of low sunspot activity.
However, even tho stable there is documented effects of sunspot/precipitation activity.
I am sure you know the papers, so I won’t post them all here.
We all know that the models concerning climate have a hard time with the H20 cycles etc. A very small change in the H20 cycle will have profound effects on temps as we also know that H20 dwarfs C02 as any kind of “climate” regulator.
Without the use of present satillites, and even there is disagreement of cloud coverage, realative humidity, etc….how do we know the effects of the H20 cycles on temperatures?
We can make assumptions, but when made with error bars displayed, the assumptions become mostly meaningless as the range concerning temperature is so wide that it virtually encompasses the temperature variations potentially experienced during the Holocen period.
Thank you in advance for you generous response.
Science has moved on past this elementary fact; are you not aware of commercial radiative coolers (which require a clear nighttiime sky for instance)?
Shore addressed this point further up, yet you bring up the same strawman; it isn’t so muc WARMING as it is a lessening of (the reduction of the rate of) COOLING due to the insertion of an EM active ‘element’ like a CH4, CO2 or H2O into the atmosphere.
Else, how do you explain Infrared Spectroscopy?
Molecular vibration and attendant EM absorption and re-radiation anyone?
Cotton?
Bueller?
.
Henry @Camburn
You honestly don’t think Joel is going to give you straight answers to those 3 questions?
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
Jim says: Science has moved on past this elementary fact;
In fact, very few people have understood it.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/monckton-responds-to-skeptical-science/#comment-884090
Neither have you, apparently.
Bill Illis says:
February 4, 2012 at 4:27 am
Yeah, it’s hard to find a geological paper these days that doesn’t crank up a GCM and do some CO2 estimating and arm-waving. I’m not sure if it’s just a matter of satisfying funding requirements or if they really believe that CO2 is the “god molecule” of Earth. I referenced the paper primarily to make the point that “abrupt” is a relative term, i.e. millions of years in this particular case.
However, I think the plant-geochemical weathering link is undoubtedly important. Plants molest rocks both chemically and mechanically, and their effect on geologic processes will be an interesting field of study.
Thanks for that link to the polar wandering diagram. I suppose that is a simplification from this:
Gondwanan palaeogeographyand palaeoclimatology
C. R. SCOTESE, 1’* A. J. BOUCOT 2 and W. S. MCKERROW 3
Now be aware that they say:
“…If Gondwana’s changing climates were solely the result of its changing latitudinal position then it would be a simple matter to predict expected climates through time. However, superimposed on this pattern of secular climatic change is a signal of global climatic change. During the 500 million years that Gondwana and its fragments existed, the Earth’s global climate system has shifted from ‘Ice House’ conditions to ‘Hot House’ conditions four times (Fig. 2) (Frakes et al., 1992)….”
Without a doubt the more of tracegas CO2 in the atmosphere the better, for it is a plant fertiliser.
Realclimate.org has no good answer how to maintain global plantlevels with a reduction of CO2.
Anyway just for the scientific curious it remains an amusing (yet trifling) matter whether CO2 can be apportioned for some benign warming.
I hope it does, but we remain unsure about this to this day.
the killimandjharro lost snow in the 1800s when global CO2 rise was not an issue.
fotos exist (or can be made to exist) of swimming polar bears , from floe to floe, in the 1800s as well.
Where does this leave us?
Well we need more CO2 to make the effects if there are, more visible.
For that, I propose to build more windmills as they are about the surest devices yet we have designed that contribute to more CO2 in the atmosphere.
cheers
Joel Shore says:
February 4, 2012 at 6:15 am
Re David says:
February 4, 2012 at 5:10 am
Your assumption that water vapor is net postive to the entire ocean/land/atmosphere is not matched by observations (Joel cuts out all the subtance of my comment as well as the time and comes up with a simplistic respnse not addressing any of the issues I brought up)
Joel responds “The radiative effects of water vapor in the atmosphere can and are calculated using the same radiative transfer equations that have been well-verified in a variety of fields extending from remote sensing to more down-to-earth applications.”
=====================================================================
Geez, I write a comment about water vapor feedback, which include clouds, albedo, further cloud induced reduction of allready significant water vapor (clear sky only) reduced surface insolation to the surface, , conduction, convection, evaporation, and your response is only in regard to the radiative effects of water vapor, as if that was the end all of the story, sheesh, such simplistic thinking, as if there is a consensous. The bottom line is the TOA observations do not support positive feedback from additional water vapor. Water vapor is not a linear response where the feedback is the same regardless of T or the current atmospheric W/V content, is it.
In my opinion, that none of you offend, full consideration of climate change on Earth, I think, is not related to the causes of which are the subject of endless and useless discussions. Basic or genuine and radical causes of these changes are consequences of established laws in the constellation of the solar system. Earth can not warm up or cool down and none of the factors on which you are discussing. These are much more powerful elements that generate the magnetic field of the Sun and planets, which in turn bring their warming effect of the very bowels of the heavenly bodies. Just need to know who and how to create the effects of magnetic fields. A little more clearly-known principle of electric-arc furnace. For the rest it needs the cooperation of those who offer something new. This is all so far is not effective if you want to find out the real causes of all phenomena in our sun
Babsy says (February 3, 2012 at 8:34 am): “It would be interesting to see if that could be, if it hasn’t already been, experimentally confirmed.”
With a modest outlay of cash, you can do the experiment yourself. Or, you could read Dr. Roy Spencer’s results from his own backyard experiment:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/08/help-back-radiation-has-invaded-my-backyard/
There are good reasons to be skeptical of global warming alarmism, but thermodynamics isn’t one of them.
Gary Hladik says:
February 4, 2012 at 3:22 pm
My comment wasn’t about thermodynamics. Its about quantum mechanics. It was about what happens to a CO2 molecule after it absorbs an IR photon. When does the molecule in the new excited energy state lose the extra energy by emission of a photon and return to its previous energy level? Thanks for the link. It will be interesting reading.
Myrrrh says (February 3, 2012 at 5:35 pm): “And what’s the mechanism that makes it a net hotter to colder?”
The earth (due to sunshine) is warmer than the upper atmosphere (cooled by radiation to space), so the net radiative flow (leaving out conduction and convection) is from surface to atmosphere, i.e. warmer to cooler. That doesn’t prevent the surface from receiving some of the atmosphere’s radiation, which keeps the surface temperature warmer than it would be in the absence of atmospheric infrared radiation.
Again, when a body emits a photon, the photon doesn’t know if its eventual destination is warmer or cooler than its source; it just…goes. If it helps, consider the “reverse commuter” who’s lucky enough to travel opposite the main freeway traffic flow in the morning. His destination suffers a net population loss during rush hour, yet its population is still one higher than it would be if he stayed home that day.
You don’t invoke consensus if you have proof! Think about it! If the theory of anthropogenic global warming is correct and the scientific evidence so overwhelming – then why would one seek consensus?. It does not and cannot make logical sense. The scientific evidence should be more than sufficient to counter any sceptical argument with respect to the proposed theory.
The fact that consensus has been invoked – implies that sufficient doubt exists in the substance of the proposition to warrant the calling for consensus to begin with. I can only arrive at the conclusion that one would seek consensus on a scientific issue because one cannot logically reason out a standpoint among a room full of critical minds.
Critical minds will seek-out all avenues of doubt and uncertainty. Science is fundamentally a works in progress – constantly being challenged with question after question after question.
It would seem to me that Consensus fundamentally strives for the opposite. It strives for certainty of opinion, a ‘collective take on things’ – whereas Science lives off doubt. This is the problem between Consensus and Science. I would argue that ‘Consensus’ strives for a solution to a perceived ‘problem’, whereas Science is always striving to understand the nature of a problem and whether the ‘perception’ of that problem is warranted or unwarranted, accurate or inaccurate.
Science is defined as the ‘state of knowing’. Science is concerned with facts, not opinions. Science is not concerned with predictions or projections – because they ultimately lie in the fields of uncertainty and assumption. These are not FACTS!
Personally, I would argue that one cannot arrive at a plausible conclusion about the elements which drive climate – unless a COMPLETE UNDERSTANDING of nature and the universe exists to begin with. Anything short of this understanding, in my opinion, cannot result in any rational determination of climate sensitivity because unless we have perfect knowledge of how the earth’s system operates and the processes at play – it simply can never be good enough to issue opinions and statements to the effect of ‘knowing’ what we ‘do not’.
Doug Cotton says (February 4, 2012 at 4:32 am): “No one seems to have published a simple experiment showing backradiation warming something.”
Dr. Roy Spencer has done something like that in his back yard:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/first-results-from-the-box-investigating-the-effects-of-infrared-sky-radiation-on-air-temperature/
“How easy it would be to have two metal plates insulated from the ground sitting there, one absorbing backadiation at night and the other shielded from the backradiation. Just compare the pair.”
As Dr. Spencer points out in the comment thread, it’s not trivial to “shield” something from infrared radiation, as the shield itself is also an IR source. Further, both targets would need to be shielded from contact with ambient air and from IR sources other than the sky, e.g. trees, caterpillars, the experimenter, etc.
BTW, the comment thread is well worth reading.
@Postman77 says:
February 4, 2012 at 3:54 pm
wOw! The Postman delivers!
David says:
The bottom line is that the scientists who study the scientific evidence on this don’t agree with you:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5917/1020.summary
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5749/841
By the way, as a practical matter, the water vapor feedback are usually not thought of as including clouds, but rather clouds are considered separately. The cloud feedback is truly more uncertain, but it becomes very hard to explain the paleoclimate history if the cloud feedback turns out to be significantly negative.
Joel
When you can show me empirical evidence of so-called backradiation on a humid night actually warming a plate of metal (or slowing its rate of cooling compared with an identical shielded plate) then we can all start to believe water vapour feedback (like the supposed carbon dioxide feedback) is real.
Whilever radiation from parts of the atmosphere colder than -35 degrees doesn’t even warm the highly sensitive sensors of a microbolometer IR camera, I’m more than somewhat doubtful that you will ever be able to show such – which would be in keeping with what Prof Johnson deduced that radiation from a significantly cooler source is merely scattered by a warmer surface and is not converted to thermal energy.
Noting Joel has not responded to either of my posts above.
Gary: Spencer’s test doesn’t have a “placebo.” He should have two identical boxes, one shielded from backradiation, the other not. Why not just use two metal plates in open air, but insulated from the surface? These would emulate the surface conditions, including the effect of molecular collisions transferring energy by diffusion between surface and air. Just place a large reflective shield about 1cm above one of the plates.
Joel Shore:
I see you quoted the following Dessler paper.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6010/1523.abstract
Do you really want to get into the mechanics etc of this paper and how poor they are?
The paper above is not showing anything of value….unfortuantely.
Camburn,
Joel can only attribute the warming since the LIA to CO2 as a matter of faith. He believes that somewhere in the middle of these charts that CO2 becomes a magical forcing agent, taking control and running the climate from there.
I would invite Joel to pick the year that CO2 takes over from whatever was causing the warming before CO2 started to rise. But I suspect I’d get the same response you’re getting.
Joel Shore @ February 4, 6:15 am
Joel, I’m flattered and surprised that you have responded to mine this time, although I’m not sure that you understood what the questions were, so I’ll re-phrase and expand on them:
First, I’ll repeat the numbers again according to the Trenberth 2009 energy balance cartoon, which no doubt will be repeated in AR5. (units = W/m^2):
• Thermals = 17; augmenting Evapotranspiration = 80; total; AKA “convection” = 97
• Via radiation directly to space = 40
• Via radiation temporarily absorbed in the atmosphere and clouds = 23 (GHE)
• Disapearados = 1
What to note here is that the combined surface heat loss transitorily attributable to absorption, (mostly in H2O vapour and CO2), is a small player compared with “convection”, let alone cloud cover. Your & IPCC dogma is that a small increase in CO2 will also result in increased water vapour, and hence a positive feedback. However, IF there is increased water vapour, then it is reasonable to conjecture both increased cloud cover, and increased “convection”. (= evapotranspiration + thermals). Thus since surface cooling from these latter thingies is over four times greater than the radiative effects that are your baby, why do you assume that any change in the assumed warming radiative effects would exceed the reactive collective effects of that much greater pool of cooling potential?
BTW, a year or more ago, I had some Email exchanges with Roy Spencer, enquiring as to why there seemed to be a dearth of study into “convective” effects, and my interpretation of his responses was that: Oh well, “convection” is certainly very important, but we are all too busy competing on the (arguably less important) radiative effects. This is evidenced by the “warfare” between Dessler and he, and their contradictory conclusions. OK, I expect you to ridicule Spencer, but may I point out that even that elitist Dessler has in the past generously conceded that Spencer is a credible climate scientist.
Just noting that, despite Joel Shore’s misdirection, Monckton’s comments above about 0.4 (5.35 Ln(2)) are quite accurate.
Most pro-AGW people have a problem with basic math which is why we have ended up in this controversy in the first place. They are mainly environmentalists who “feel” their way through the math rather than actually calculate it.
Now what does that say about climate models. First run turns up no real warming. Well, then Gavin Schmidt goes in and plays around with the parameters in the models and increases the effect. Second run doesn’t look much different so even more emotional-derived parameterizations are required.
Eventually, the climate model must represent what Gavin’s boss (James Hansen) says it should be so the final 44 times re-run re-parameterized climate model produces 3.0C per doubling. Voila, guaranteed 3.0C per doubling.
Mhyre 1998 was supposedly based on line-by-line transfer code results but it was really tuned to produce 3.0C per doubling.
Smokey says:
February 4, 2012 at 6:02 pm
Drill here. Drill now.
Bill Illis says:
Really…So you want to go on record as saying that 0.4 (5.35 Ln(2)) = 1. That’s an interesting position to take.
Well, we’ll take it from someone who believes that 0.4 (5.35 Ln(2)) = 1.
Yes, it is all a diabolical plot… a grand conspiracy. How’s your tinfoil hat working for you these days, Bill?
Camburn says:
Your questions are a complete hijack of this thread. Can we talk about one topic at a time? I’ll give you a little hint as to general gist though: The fact that fires can occur naturally is not an argument against the police determination on the basis of strong evidence that a particular fire was caused by arson.
Joel Shore says:
February 4, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Drill here. Drill now. And prosper.
MartinGAtkins:
Babsy is correct, but you should note that you started talking about emitted power, whereas Babsy was questioning if there was any empirical evidence that radiation from a cooler atmosphere can transfer thermal energy to a warmer surface. You change the subject to emitted power.
To explain, as I probably need to, if you shine two identical torches at a mirror it will indeed emit twice the power of one torch. But if there is perfect (100%) reflection there is no energy to be transferred, and thus no warming of the mirror.
The facts of life are that radiation from a (significantly) cooler source has a lower peak frequency than the peak frequency of the warmer receiving surface. Such radiation is scattered and does not lose any energy and so does not alter the thermal energy in the surface, whereas radiation which has a higher peak frequency (eg SW solar) is converted to thermal energy.
Gary Hladik says:
February 4, 2012 at 4:19 pm
“Doug Cotton says (February 4, 2012 at 4:32 am): “No one seems to have published a simple experiment showing backradiation warming something.”
Dr. Roy Spencer has done something like that in his back yard:
Sorry Gary, but Spencer’s experiment is flawed as some of the comments indicate. The most obvious problem is the lack of a control apparatus – a “placebo” if you like.
It is reasonably easy to shield backradiation with a shield having polished silver on the underside. If the shield is slightly sloped it will allowed warmed air to escape by convection. Other things such as radiation from humans can be avoided easily with longer cables to the sensing devices. So long as both sets of apparatus are used simultaneously, and then interchanged for a second experiment, that would seem OK to me – unlike his little drive down the mountain to make a second measurement at a later time, rather than using a phone to converse with another observer – well! Has he got no friends?
Henry@JoelShore
Here is something for you that you should think about.
So far, after evaluating the daily results from 20 weather stations balanced by +/- latitude and 70/30 sea/land, the score on my pool table for global warming is as follows:
MAXIMA: rising at a speed of 0.0385 degrees C per annum
MEANS : increasing at a speed of 0.0133 degrees C per annum
MINIMA: creeping up at 0.0048 degrees C per annum
HUMIDITY: decreasing at a rate of -0.02% RH per annum
PRECIPITATION: slight change at + 0.16 mm /month /year
The latest tables show that, over the past 4 decades, the rates of increase of temperatures on earth i.e. maxima, means (=average temperatures) and minima have risen at a ratio of about 8:3:1. Remember: these are the summaries of actual measured results from a number of weather stations all around the world….No junk science. No hypothesis. Every black figure on the tables is coming from a separate file of figures. Obviously I am able to provide these files of every black figure on the table.
As all the balls now lie on my table, surely, anyone must be able to understand that it was the rise of maximum temperatures (that occur during the day) that caused the average temperature and minima on earth to rise? This implies clearly that the observed warming over past 4 decades was largely due to natural causes. Either the sun shone a bit brighter or there were less clouds. There are different theories on that. Looking at the differences between the results from the northern hemisphere(NH) and the southern hemisphere (SH), what we see is happening from my dataset is that more (solar) heat went into the SH oceans and is taken away by water currents and/or weather systems to the NH. That is why the NH is warming and that is why the SH does not warm.
To understand more on why CO2 is good for you, read here:
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
ptw;
cute moniker, and many of your comments are also good, but …
CO2 is used in extinguishers (not “retardants”) because it smothers the fire by squeezing out the oxygen, as a result of being much heavier (especially when cooled by expansion after exiting a pressure nozzle) and “sitting” on the burning surface. Nothing to do with heat capacity. Whatsoever.
Nice work – you sure as hell ‘tore him a new one’ there, m’Lud!
It couldn’t have happened to a ‘nicer’ guy, either. :0)
phinnie the woo says:
February 4, 2012 at 3:25 am
henryP
I quite agree
The sensitive issue of “CO2 is a GHG” is conflated with the fact it has great heat capacity and is used for fire retardants etc.
=====================
Carbon dioxide has for all practical purposes zilch heat capacity, even less than oxygen and nitrogen, which means that when getting heat it releases it instantaneously – you’re confusing with its heaviness I think. It is one and half times heavier than air so displaces oxygen to sink to the ground, that’s why it’s used in fires, it will sink pooling into a thick blanket as it displaces the oxygen – and without oxygen the fire will go out.
Water has a great heat capacity, which means it stores a great deal of thermal energy, taking longer to heat up and so longer to cool down. Carbon dioxide doesn’t have a great heat capacity, carbon dioxide can’t store heat.
Joel Shore says:
February 4, 2012 at 4:38 pm
David says:
The bottom line is the TOA observations do not support positive feedback from additional water vapor”
———————
The bottom line is that the scientists who study the scientific evidence on this don’t agree with you:
A Determination of the Cloud Feedback from Climate Variations over the Past Decade Science 10 December 2010: 1523-1527
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5917/1020.summary
The Radiative Signature of Upper Tropospheric Moistening
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5749/841 Brian Soden Darren Jackson
By the way, as a practical matter, the water vapor feedback are usually not thought of as including clouds, but rather clouds are considered separately. The cloud feedback is truly more uncertain, but it becomes very hard to explain the paleoclimate history if the cloud feedback turns out to be significantly negative.
=======================================================
Joel, not including clouds formation as a result of water vapor feedback is anything but practical if one’s goal is to understand climate. As far as understanding paleoclimate history, well that, like W/V feedback, depends on who does the data and how it is viewed.
The Dressler paper has been well criticized, but as you support Hansen without condition, even in his outlandish prediction of exponential ice melt, then I doubt you accept any criticism with Dressler. Just as with certain consistent errors of many paleoclimate papers, there is some general criticism of the positive W?V feedback papers which have some consistent errors. When you present one side, as if that is the only credentialed viewpoint, you, IPCC like, misrepresent the science. So folk can study this on their own, but the observations do not support your presented view.
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
Richard S. Lindzen1 and Yong-Sang Choi2
1Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, U. S. A.
2Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea
(Manuscript received 23 February 2011; revised 22 May 2011; accepted 22 May 2011)
© The Korean Meteorological Society and Springer 2011
Abstract: We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using
the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs)
and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA)
outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000-
2008) satellite instruments. Distinct periods of warming and cooling
in the SSTs were used to evaluate feedbacks. An earlier study
(Lindzen and Choi, 2009) was subject to significant criticisms. The
present paper is an expansion of the earlier paper where the various
criticisms are taken into account. The present analysis accounts for
the 72 day precession period for the ERBE satellite in a more
appropriate manner than in the earlier paper. We develop a method to
distinguish noise in the outgoing radiation as well as radiation
changes that are forcing SST changes from those radiation changes
that constitute feedbacks to changes in SST. We demonstrate that our
new method does moderately well in distinguishing positive from
negative feedbacks and in quantifying negative feedbacks. In contrast,
we show that simple regression methods used by several existing
papers generally exaggerate positive feedbacks and even show
positive feedbacks when actual feedbacks are negative. We argue that
feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics, and the tropical
feedbacks can be adjusted to account for their impact on the globe as
a whole. Indeed, we show that including all CERES data (not just
from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the
tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the
outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback
response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to
this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric
models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback
response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that
characterize these models. The results imply that the models are
exaggerating climate sensitivity.
Paltridge et al., 2009) found that specific humidity in the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) reanalysis declined between 1973 and 2007, particularly in the tropical mid and upper troposphere, the region that plays the key role in the water vapor feedback. If borne out, this result suggests potential problems in the consensus view of a positive water vapor feedback.
Now please note that none of these papers consider that relative residence time of the solar spectrum changes at the surface. Most importantly they do not consider the change in the balance of LWR vs. SWR entering the oceans, or the residence time there of. A relative reduction in SWR where the majority of energy contained therin bypasses the ocean surface and some one percent of which penetrates from 660 to 3,000 feet (200 to 900 meters) to the dysphotic zone (meaning “bad light”) has a far greater energy change within the earths total system, the effect of which can accumalate for days, weeks, months and years as long as the change persists due to the far greater heat capacity of the oceans, and said change may not manifest on the surface for years.
Where as a small increase in LWIR mostly results in a rapid increase in evaporation and conduction, and a much shorter overall residence time compared to the surface reduction in SWR. So it is well possible that an increase in atmospheric W/V leads to a short term increase in atmospheric T, but a long term decline in energy entering the oceans. Additionally the short term increase in atmospheric energy is likely reduced further by changes in cloud cover and therefore increased albedo.
Evaporation conduction of latent heat may vary far more then realized and set a limit on further tropical temperature increases. (Newell & Dopplick’s (1979) calculations that tropical temperatures cannot rise any further.) Observations since this paper have not contradicted it.)
L. Yu, X. Jin & R. A. Weller, OAFlux Project Technical Report (OA-2008-01) Jan 2008,
“Multidecade Global Flux Datasets from the Objectively Analyzed Air-sea Fluxes (OAFlux)
Project: Latent and Sensible Heat Fluxes, Ocean Evaporation, and Related Surface
Meteorological Variables”.
In comments to a couple of recent threads I tried to raise my objection to trying to reduce the energy budget of the planet to a simple measure of incoming versus outgoing radiation. The basis of those objections is that on Earth, unlike either a S/B blackbody or any of the planets or moons which are used to analogize the Earth, there are substantial energetics ongoing on the planet which are not captured by measurements of radiative flux. One of those energies is the chemical energy required to fuel life. Being beset by a bit of insomnia I decided to see if I could come up with an estimate of what that energy drain might amount to. Since human energy use was likely to be easier to find I decided to start there. At Wikipedia I found this graph
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Per_Person_Energy_Consumption.png
Although not entirely clear from the title this is strictly dietary energy. For those who might question the values shown I would point out that the numbers include not only what is consumed but what is wasted as well. Though slightly out of date the value per person per day is about 2800 kilocalories. From another source I found 1 kilocalorie=4184 joules which X 2800 X 365 X 7 billion yields by my reckoning 3 X 10^19 joules. Data on the energy uptake for the rest of life on the planet is harder to come by, but if we assume that it is only 1000 times human usage we end up with 3 X 10^22 joules. Those of you who have followed Mr. Tisdale’s continuing posts on OHC may recall that the GISS projection for increasing OHC anomaly due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere is 0.7 X 10^22 joules. AFAIK this ongoing subtraction from the energy provided by TSI is not accounted for in any of the calculations of the Earth’s radiative energy budget. At least I’ve never seen it appear in any of the cartoon schematics portraying that budget. If you know differently I am always open to being educated.
In addition to the subtraction due to life, some portion of TSI is converted to kinetic energy to drive the multitude of circulations occurring in the atmosphere and oceans, but I’m not sure I’d be up to that calculation even if I was fresh. However I do think we can safely assume that the value is not trivial and that the result would not show up in measurements of radiative flux
I could not locate John Cooks commentary on his website.
Does anyone have a link to the specific commentary Lord Monckton is replying to?
Doug Cotton says:
February 4, 2012 at 9:50 pm
“Babsy is correct, but you should note that you started talking about emitted power, whereas Babsy was questioning if there was any empirical evidence that radiation from a cooler atmosphere can transfer thermal energy to a warmer surface.”
To be clear, no, I wasn’t thinking that at all. What I was thinking was is there experimental data that demonstrates any difference in absorption of IR of the same wavelength in gasses of different temperatures. Specifically, does a volume of gas containing CO2 at 5*C absorb the same frequency IR as does a volume of gas at 15*C? Is there a difference? Probably not, but is there any experimental data to support the idea? Secondly, after a photon of IR has been absorbed by the CO2 molecule and said molecule now has a different energy state, for how long does the molecule retain the additional energy before it emits a photon and returns to its previous lower energy state? I’m wondering how long the heat is retained in the CO2 before it’s re-emitted to go somewhere else? Does the IR contribute to any ‘long term’ energy increase in the CO2 or does it simply bump up the energy, which is then ( or should be) quickly re-emitted as a new photon with the same wavelength as the previous one, and then continues it’s path into space?
Gentlemen, from your discussions to see that you have too much knowledge and data in this area under discussion. If this knowledge is used in finding the right purpose-radical and the real causes of phenomena in question, then you would be able to decipher all causes . That would be the end inadequate discussions. We have a saying for something that is spoken in vain, that no one of us is offended:
-beat the air ;waste one’s word ;shew the fat; flog a dead horse.
The main causes of all phenomena on the Sun and thus the Earth, not as insignificant as caused by civilization. They affect the much more subtle and subject laws of the Millennium, the changing course of the cycle. These cycles are unknown to us because we are convinced that we overcome the laws of heaven and many of these are convinced, as obsurdity.I remark that all this is the work of magnetic fields, and who generate them, and how to come to negotiate and not to waste time.
Joel Shore says:
February 4, 2012 at 7:17 pm
“Camburn says:
Noting Joel has not responded to either of my posts above.
Your questions are a complete hijack of this thread. Can we talk about one topic at a time? I’ll give you a little hint as to general gist though: The fact that fires can occur naturally is not an argument against the police determination on the basis of strong evidence that a particular fire was caused by arson.
Joel: This thread concerns climate and its dynamics.
Your answer was most difinitive. You did not answer one question.
Thank you.
John Cook’s followers at SkS seem to think John Cook would be willing to participate in an online written debate with Monckton as long as time is given to check and verify references and a neutral venue can be found (Judith?), although Cook himself hasn’t confirmed.
How about it, Lord Monckton, time to throw down the gauntlet?
Babsy says:
February 5, 2012 at 6:28 am
Pierrehumbert ( 2011), Infrared radiation and planetary temperature: Physics Today, states radiation lifetime ranging from a few milli-seconds to a few tenth of a second, and collision time 10^-7 s, suggesting that the thermal transfer process between non-ghgs and CO2 by molecular collisions, is far faster than the heat loss/gain by radiation for CO2. In other words CO2 gains heat by radiation from the surface, in turn heats the non-ghgs via collision.
But this may not be correct.
The equation specifying emission is εσT^4. Therefore an object say at 1000K will emit 10^12 times faster than if it was at 1K, far faster than radiation emission.
There is a formula that can help us determine the emission speed of CO2 at Earth like temperatures, say at 288K. (I will need to locate it, I don’t do the math myself)
AGW_Skeptic says:
Try here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/monckton-myth-17-denniss-debate-part1.html
and: http://www.skepticalscience.com/monckton-myth-17-denniss-debate-part2.html
Ooops a correction to my post at 7:26am
Should read
Dave Wendt says:
Data on the energy uptake for the rest of life on the planet is harder to come by, but if we assume that it is only 1000 times human usage we end up with 3 X 10^22 joules.
Henry@Dave
the figure I found is 0.023% of the total solar energy,
apparently that works out to 8 X 10^18 Joule per day.
1974 (Calvin in: Schenck, Progress in photobiology, Frankfurt)
There has been quite an increase in greenery since then,
which in fact I think I might even be able to correlate to some warming of the planet (heat entrapment)
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
So perhaps your figure is not that bad.
I have never seen a balance sheet either, showing me how much radiative cooling and radiative warming is caused by the CO2 and how much of cooling is caused by the CO2 by taking part in photo synthesis./
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
Joel Shore:
Any time you feel it is appropriate to address my questions from above, I am all ears.
Thank you in advance.
Baa Humbug says (February 5, 2012 at 7:26 am): “Pierrehumbert ( 2011)”
The article is reproduced in full at
http://climateclash.com/2011/01/15/g6-infrared-radiation-and-planetary-temperature/
Roger Pielke says “this is a very informative and valuable article” but has one quibble about its treatment of water vapor feedback:
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/comment-on-raymond-t-pierrehumberts-article-in-physics-today-titled-infrared-radiation-and-planetary-temperature/
Dr Roy Spencer’s backyard experiment is mentioned above but, in my view, is flawed, as explained in an earlier post.
So I went out yesterday and bought a $15 thermometer with a metal spike and conducted my own backyard experiment here in Sydney. I estimate that I shielded about three-quarters of any backradiation (probably roughly equivalent to removing all carbon dioxide and methane plus a bit of WV) and I found no evidence that any backradiation was slowing the rate of cooling of the ground. Just before sunrise the temperatures of the shielded and unshielded ground were each 21.7 deg.C.
Got $15 to try it yourself? The thermometer might be useful for your next barbecue anyway.
I’ve posted the readings at the foot of this page on my website http://climate-change-theory.com/RadiationAbsorption.html
Ian,
You asked what could have caused abrupt changes in the weather at the end of Ice Age – There is one possibility. Be prepared. It is a woozy one.
The plasma storm theory by Robert Schoch ( Ph.D.in Geology and Geophysics at Yale University) – http://www.robertschoch.com/plasma.html. For more information on plasma – http://www.scribd.com/doc/16839562/Characteristics-for-the-Occurrence-of-a-HighCurrent-ZPinch-Aurora-as-Recorded-in-Antiquity-2 and http://www.scribd.com/doc/55090077/Anthony-Peratt-Characteristics-for-the-Occurrence-of-a-High-Current-ZPinch-Aurora-as-Recorded-in-Antiquity
I just happened to come across it when I was doing a research on how you create sculptures out of granite blocks because there are some of them at Pyramids and temples in Egypt. Apparently, it never occurred to archaeologist on how they are created because granite is a very hard stone and it requires specialized tools these day to do the job. They believe the ‘primitive’ people used ‘primitive’ tools to create them. http://www.weltonrotz.com/ts.html Chris Dunn, an engineer, does not believe it. He measured everything and find it astounding that everything is done so accurately. http://www.gizapower.com/
Makes you question everything…
I do apologize for having made an error in calculating one of the climate sensitivities in this posting. I had transposed the result from a paper where sensitivities were rounded to the nearest Celsius degree, but the context to which I transposed it required greater precision. Fortunately, little rested on the error, but I am grateful to Joel Shore for having spotted it.
However, I disagree with him on the distinctionbetween forcings and feedbacks. In the paper from which I had drawn the forcings in an earlier posting here, the values I had used were indeed forcings, being denominated in Watts per square meter, and not feedbacks, which would have been denominated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin. There would of course be much water vapor in the atmosphere even in the absence of greenhouse gases, thanks to evaporation and thermal convection from the surface in the tropics, and this water vapor would cause a substantial forcing.
Gary Hladik says:
February 4, 2012 at 3:48 pm
Myrrrh says (February 3, 2012 at 5:35 pm): “And what’s the mechanism that makes it a net hotter to colder?”
The earth (due to sunshine) is warmer than the upper atmosphere (cooled by radiation to space), so the net radiative flow (leaving out conduction and convection) is from surface to atmosphere, i.e. warmer to cooler. That doesn’t prevent the surface from receiving some of the atmosphere’s radiation, which keeps the surface temperature warmer than it would be in the absence of atmospheric infrared radiation.
Again, when a body emits a photon, the photon doesn’t know if its eventual destination is warmer or cooler than its source; it just…goes. If it helps, consider the “reverse commuter” who’s lucky enough to travel opposite the main freeway traffic flow in the morning. His destination suffers a net population loss during rush hour, yet its population is still one higher than it would be if he stayed home that day.
Nah. You’ve changed the 2nd law by creating this idea that heat can flow from a colder object to a hotter object (‘because photons travel in all directions’) , then with total disjunct, you say that it still obeys the 2nd Law because you’ve introduced this idea of “net” and that this “net” will always be from hotter to colder. But, it’s all just an illogical jumble, where is the mechanism for that net to happen? What is stopping the colder from continuing heating the warmer to make it a net from warmer to colder?
You have introduced an entirely new idea into physics, where is the proof that in heat flow the colder is giving heat to the hotter?
I don’t think any of you who say this know just what it is you’re saying – if it’s true then who is to be awarded the Nobel Prize for such a momentous overturning of a Law..? Who is the first person to have said this?
http://science.kennesaw.edu/~rmatson/3380theory.html
“As used in science, I think that it is important to realize that, in spite of the differences (see below), these terms share some things in common. Both are based on tested hypotheses; both are supported by a large body of empirical data; both help unify a particular field; both are widely accepted by the vast majority (if not all) scientists within a discipline. Furthermore, both scientific laws and scientific theories could be shown to be wrong at some time if there are data to suggest so.”
So, where is the proof that in heat flow, heat is also going from the colder to the hotter, and, what is the mechanism which stops this to give a “net” flow of hotter to colder.?
I might as well tell you now that in exploring this, constantly lauded as modern statistically science ad nauseum, that it turns out to be most likely a ‘stop’ put into statistical calculations to avoid breaking the law… 🙂
Anyway, let’s have it. Show how these photons of heat are travelling from the colder to the hotter.
Gary & Myrrh: Suppose you have an electric radiator (over 1000 watts say) radiating onto a low watt light bulb which we will assume has “glass” which is transparent to IR. Clearly there is more energy being radiated in the direction of the bulb. Will the light bulb absorb some of that radiated energy and hence glow brighter?
No. Because it’s peak frequency (in the visible spectrum) is way above the peak frequency of the radiator. That’s all that matters. Read and understand what Prof Claes Johnsons has already proved. A summary and links are on my radiation page.
It is unclear to me whether the 2nd Law is only statistical, or an absolute Law.
If photons travel at lightspeed, then there is zero subjective time elapsed between their emission and absorption, even if the photon travels across the entire visible universe. It is emitted and absorbed in the same instant, as the photon sees it.
Therefore, it is not inconcevable that the photon ‘knows’ whether it is traveling from a warmer to a cooler atom, or vice versa. If the latter, the photon may just continue on until it encounters a cooler atom than the one which emitted it, thus preserving the 2nd Law.
Experiments have shown that two photons emitted in opposite directions from the same atom ‘know’ the spin of the other, even though they are traveling away from each other at twice the speed of light [as viewed by an outside observer]. So they communicate with each other at lightspeed – or greater. Apparently, instantaneously.
The odds are that I’m missing something. Can anyone educate me?
Myrrh says (February 5, 2012 at 5:52 pm): “Nah. You’ve changed the 2nd law by creating this idea that heat can flow from a colder object to a hotter object…”
Thermodynamics says only that net flow is warmer to cooler. I’ve changed nothing.
“… (‘because photons travel in all directions’)…”
Well, I guess I’m saying that photons don’t change direction to avoid a target warmer than their source. Just to be clear, are you saying that a spherical black body, for example, radiates in all directions except toward a warmer spherical black body? Or something else? BTW, I’m hoping for more than just “because the 2nd Law says so.”
I originally intended to reply point by point, but I think we’d better get this straight first.
Smokey (and others); Read my posts above and/or my ‘Radiation’ page at http://climate-change-theory.com
The “information” about the temperature of the source of the radiation is carried in the peak frequency of that radiation. This frequency is proportional to the absolute temperature of the source, as per Wien’s Displacement Law which is clearly explained in Wikipedia.
Doug Cotton
Doug Cotton says (February 5, 2012 at 7:46 pm): “The ‘information’ about the temperature of the source of the radiation is carried in the peak frequency of that radiation.”
I consulted the black body radiation simulator at
http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/ntnujava/index.php?topic=427.0
The default plot shows, among others, the emission spectra of three black bodies, one at 6,000 degrees K, radiation peak 483.0 nm (call this body “Hottie”), one at 5,500 degrees K, radiation peak 526.9 nm (call it “Warmie”), and one at 5,000 degrees K, radiation peak at 579.6 nm ( call it “Coolio”). Note that all three bodies radiate some energy at 900 nm.
Assume these three black bodies are in a vacuum, not touching, and each has an internal heat source sufficient to maintain it exactly at its particular temperature in the absence of the other two bodies. Hottie and Coolio each emit a 900 nm photon in the direction of Warmio. If I understand Doug Cotton’s web site correctly, he thinks Warmio will reflect Coolio’s photon and absorb Hottie’s. Doug, please correct me if I’m misunderstanding you.
I’m claiming that Warmio, having no way to distinguish the two from each other, will absorb both photons and the energy they carry.
BTW, Dr. Roy Spencer proposed a thought experiment with some similarities here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
The discussion thread was at least as informative as the article, although the signal-to-noise ratio was much lower. 🙂
Is this photon from a cold source something like the photoelectric effect? For those not familiar with it, if a photon has a high enough energy when hitting a particular metal, an electron can be ejected. But if the energy is too low, then no electron is ejected, regardless how many low energy photons may hit it. The low energy photon just does not react in any way with the metal. So is the same thing happening with a “cold” photon? IE, it may affect something colder but just “bounces off” a much warmer surface without warming it more?
And of course I changed Warmie’s name to Warmio in the middle of my comment. *sigh*
Warmio, Warmio, wherefore art thou Warmio?
I suppose I should have named them Mercury-o, Warmio, and Cooliet.
Werner Brozek says (February 5, 2012 at 9:36 pm): “So is the same thing happening with a “cold” photon? IE, it may affect something colder but just “bounces off” a much warmer surface without warming it more?”
A black body is both a perfect radiator and a perfect absorber of electromagnetic radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body
Only if you want to risk being Shaken and Speared. >:(
Gary Hladik says:
February 5, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Myrrh says (February 5, 2012 at 5:52 pm): “Nah. You’ve changed the 2nd law by creating this idea that heat can flow from a colder object to a hotter object…”
Thermodynamics says only that net flow is warmer to cooler. I’ve changed nothing.
“… (‘because photons travel in all directions’)…”
Well, I guess I’m saying that photons don’t change direction to avoid a target warmer than their source. Just to be clear, are you saying that a spherical black body, for example, radiates in all directions except toward a warmer spherical black body? Or something else? BTW, I’m hoping for more than just “because the 2nd Law says so.”
I originally intended to reply point by point, but I think we’d better get this straight first.
You have introduced something new, you’ve introduced that ‘photons radiate in all directions therefore there are photons going from the colder to the hotter and warming the hotter up’ – you’ve destroyed the 2nd law in that, which says that heat always flows from hotter to colder. For a start!
Then, you’ve not shown any proof that photons do this. Then you’ve not shown any mechanism which shows how that “net” from hotter to colder appears! Just suddenly it’s there, the colder to hotter somehow stops to make the flow net from hotter to colder.
That’s all gibberish.
“Well, I guess I’m saying that photons don’t change direction to avoid a target warmer than their source.”
Oh jolly dee, because you say so trumps the 2nd Law.
Climate-Change-Theory says:
February 5, 2012 at 6:53 pm
Gary & Myrrh: Suppose you have an electric radiator (over 1000 watts say) radiating onto a low watt light bulb which we will assume has “glass” which is transparent to IR. Clearly there is more energy being radiated in the direction of the bulb. Will the light bulb absorb some of that radiated energy and hence glow brighter?
Gary is claiming that the light bulb will heat up the radiator.
Gary Hladik says:
February 5, 2012 at 8:50 pm
BTW, Dr. Roy Spencer proposed a thought experiment with some similarities here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
The discussion thread was at least as informative as the article, although the signal-to-noise ratio was much lower. 🙂
For another look at it:
http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/43659.html for an overview
http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still for the detail
Smokey says:
February 5, 2012 at 7:20 pm
It is unclear to me whether the 2nd Law is only statistical, or an absolute Law.
I think what happened here could be another example of the AGW sleights of hand, where laws are taken out of context and properties of one thing given to another and so on. If you’re trying to work something out statistically about heat flow, in engines or whatever, you’d put a ‘stop’ into your calculations that it must obey the 2nd Law, which basically says that energy flows in one direction unless work is done to alter that. I think this ‘because photons travel in all directions’ is just ‘attached’ to the second law, claiming ‘statistics prove it’, and people take it seriously as if it is actually physical reality – hence all the arguments about it. But, no such process has ever been shown to actually happen and in the confusion of it people miss this and, when asked for it, can’t provide any such proof or provide any mechanism for how the process stops to give a net from hotter to colder.
It’s a typical AGWSF trick, like ‘carbon dioxide spontaneously diffuses and thoroughly mixes in the atmosphere’ (regardless that it’s one and a half times heavier than air..) and ‘visible light heats the land and oceans’ (regardless that water is transparent to visible light and light works on electronic transition levels not on vibrational molecular levels, kinetic, as does thermal infrared..). Sometimes they just exclude a natural phenomenon altogether, like taking out of their ‘energy budget’ the complete water cycle which brings down the temperature of earth by 52°C. And no one notices it’s missing!
If photons travel at lightspeed, then there is zero subjective time elapsed between their emission and absorption, even if the photon travels across the entire visible universe. It is emitted and absorbed in the same instant, as the photon sees it.
Therefore, it is not inconcevable that the photon ‘knows’ whether it is traveling from a warmer to a cooler atom, or vice versa. If the latter, the photon may just continue on until it encounters a cooler atom than the one which emitted it, thus preserving the 2nd Law.
Experiments have shown that two photons emitted in opposite directions from the same atom ‘know’ the spin of the other, even though they are traveling away from each other at twice the speed of light [as viewed by an outside observer]. So they communicate with each other at lightspeed – or greater. Apparently, instantaneously.
Fascinating, in that there has to be something going on at that level which holds good to the 2nd Law. AGWSF will throw in that micro level is different from macro, but again without any back up that the law is broken on that level. And,
Werner Brozek says (February 5, 2012 at 9:36 pm): Is this photon from a cold source something like the photoelectric effect? For those not familiar with it, if a photon has a high enough energy when hitting a particular metal, an electron can be ejected. But if the energy is too low, then no electron is ejected, regardless how many low energy photons may hit it. The low energy photon just does not react in any way with the metal. So is the same thing happening with a “cold” photon? IE, it may affect something colder but just “bounces off” a much warmer surface without warming it more?
So it’s still going from hotter to colder, they won’t like that. But, AGWSF (science fiction) doesn’t know the difference between heat and light, between cooler and hotter photons; for them all photons are the same and they all convert to heat on meeting any kind of matter, that’s how they get shortwave visible from the Sun heating the oceans.
I think those arguing for the AGWSF fisics just don’t realise what they’re claiming re the 2nd Law, that they have to show how it is done because their claim is quite extraordinary and has not been shown to exist in all the empirical history of the 2nd law –
http://www.ftexploring.com/energy/2nd_Law.html
“Energy flows from a higher temperature to a lower temperature (heat flow).
Energy flows from a higher pressure to a lower pressure (expansion).
Energy flows from a higher voltage potential to a lower voltage potential (electric current).
Energy flows from a higher gravitational potential to a lower gravitational potential (falling objects).
Marbles and trucks roll downhill.
Water flows and falls from higher elevation to a lower elevation (downhill).
And last, but not least, chemical reactions proceed from higher concentrations of molecular bond energy to lower bond energies.”
They really don’t know they’ve overturned the natural order of the universe!
Myrrh says (February 6, 2012 at 2:54 am): “You have introduced something new, you’ve introduced that ‘photons radiate in all directions…”
OK, I think we’re zooming in on our area(s) of disagreement.
Two spherical black bodies, or reasonable facsimiles:
“Warmio”, with a constant internal heat source sufficient to maintain it indefinitely at a temperature of 900 degrees K when it’s alone in a vacuum chamber.
“Cooliet”, with a constant internal heat source sufficient to maintain it indefinitely at a temperature of 500 degrees K when it’s alone in a vacuum chamber.
Start with Cooliet alone in the experimental vacuum chamber
(1) I say Cooliet radiates energy in all directions. Agree or disagree?
Assuming “agree”, we now add Warmio to the chamber.
(2) I say Cooliet still radiates energy in all directions, including toward Warmio. Agree or disagree?
“For another look at it:
http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/43659.html for an overview
http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still for the detail”
Yes, I read the second one.
Smokey says (February 5, 2012 at 7:20 pm): “It is unclear to me whether the 2nd Law is only statistical, or an absolute Law.”
From Wiki, “Thermodynamic equilibrium is a condition of systems which are adequately described by only macroscopic variables. Every physical system, however, when microscopically examined, shows apparently random microscopic statistical fluctuations in its thermodynamic variables of state (entropy, temperature, pressure, etc.).”
For context, read the page at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
“Experiments have shown that two photons emitted in opposite directions from the same atom ‘know’ the spin of the other, even though they are traveling away from each other at twice the speed of light [as viewed by an outside observer]. So they communicate with each other at lightspeed – or greater. Apparently, instantaneously.”
I looked that up and found this page:
http://library.thinkquest.org/C008537/cool/bellsinequality/bellsinequality.html
Weird stuff, eh? BTW, the example was the decay of a neutral pion into two photons of opposite spin.
Not sure how Bell’s Inequality relates to this thread, unless we can identify a physical property of the photon that encodes the temperature of its source.
Myrrh says:
February 6, 2012 at 2:54 am
It’s a typical AGWSF trick, like ‘carbon dioxide spontaneously diffuses and thoroughly mixes in the atmosphere’ (regardless that it’s one and a half times heavier than air..)
===================================================================
So you think you know how to separate gases gravitationally? All the argon stays low? O2 and N2 don’t weigh the same–why don’t they separate out? Do you think you can put CO2 in the bottom of a big vertical pipe, and He in the top, and they won’t mix? That’s funny.
CO2 certainly does diffuse spontaneously, and the extent to which it does not thorougly mix in the atmosphere has little to do with its molecular weight. O3 is heavier than O2, but it manages to diffuse eventually. Gravity becomes a negligible force against mixing once the wind has stirred things up. It is always negligible against molecular diffusion. –AGF
Gary Hladik,
I’m still reading this fascinating email exchange that you linked to through John O’Sullivan. Will respond when I’ve finished.
Gary Hladik says:
February 5, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Thermodynamics says only that net flow is warmer to cooler. I’ve changed nothing.
Mr. Hladik, I think you confuse heat transfer and thermodynamics.
Zeroth law: if A = C and B= C then A=B
1st law : Q=U+ W
2nd law: S=Q/T
3rd law : S=0 if T=0K
These are simple but none say anything about net flow.
mkelly says (February 6, 2012 at 1:22 pm): “Mr. Hladik, I think you confuse heat transfer and thermodynamics…These are simple but none say anything about net flow.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer
“When an object is at a different temperature from another body or its surroundings, heat flows so that the body and the surroundings reach the same temperature, at which point they are in thermal equilibrium. Such spontaneous heat transfer always occurs from a region of high temperature to another region of lower temperature, as required by the second law of thermodynamics.” [emphasis added]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
“Second Law…When two isolated systems in separate but nearby regions of space, each in thermodynamic equilibrium in itself (but not necessarily in equilibrium with each other at first) are at some time allowed to interact, breaking the isolation that separates the two systems, allowing them to exchange matter or energy, they will eventually reach a mutual thermodynamic equilibrium.”
As I understand it, net transfer of heat from warmer to cooler (establishing equilibrium) is an inescapable consequence of the 2nd Law.
But I don’t really care if it’s technically thermodynamics or something else. Radiative transfer of energy from a cooler to a warmer body doesn’t violate known laws of physics, because the net flow is warmer to cooler, in the direction of establishing equilibrium.
Gary Hladik says:
February 6, 2012 at 1:56 pm
Radiative transfer of energy from a cooler to a warmer body doesn’t violate known laws of physics, because the net flow is warmer to cooler, in the direction of establishing equilibrium.
========================================================================
Smokey’s reference proves you wrong, as far as I can tell — see Latoure at http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still?showall=1
–AGF
agfosterjr says (February 6, 2012 at 2:51 pm): “Smokey’s reference proves you wrong, as far as I can tell.”
That reference asserts “The hot plate reflects, transmits or scatters colder radiation, just like my roof does for cold radio waves.”
Which raises the question of how his roof can tell the difference between a “cool” radio wave and a “hot” radio wave of the same wavelength. In terms of my three black bodies (February 5, 2012 at 8:50 pm and 10:05 pm) , with hot Mercury-o, warm Warmio, and cool Cooliet, he’s apparently claiming that Warmio will accept the 900 nm photon from Mercury-o and reject the 900 nm photon from Cooliet. It’s unclear what method the black body uses to tell them apart.
Gary Hladik says:
February 6, 2012 at 12:11 pm
Myrrh says (February 6, 2012 at 2:54 am): “You have introduced something new, you’ve introduced that ‘photons radiate in all directions…”
OK, I think we’re zooming in on our area(s) of disagreement.
Two spherical black bodies, or reasonable facsimiles:
“Warmio”, with a constant internal heat source sufficient to maintain it indefinitely at a temperature of 900 degrees K when it’s alone in a vacuum chamber.
“Cooliet”, with a constant internal heat source sufficient to maintain it indefinitely at a temperature of 500 degrees K when it’s alone in a vacuum chamber.
Start with Cooliet alone in the experimental vacuum chamber
(1) I say Cooliet radiates energy in all directions. Agree or disagree?
Assuming “agree”, we now add Warmio to the chamber.
(2) I say Cooliet still radiates energy in all directions, including toward Warmio. Agree or disagree?
I’ll give you an example of how heat flows from hotter to colder. You pick up a handful of snow to form it into a snowball, your hands gets cold. What’s happening? Are your hands cold because you can feel the cold of the snow? No, what is happening is the heat is spontaneously flowing out of your hands into the snowball, you are feeling the loss of heat in your hand, the snowball is sucking the heat out of you. Don’t hold on too long..
Now, what does Cooliet do when you move Warmio in?
Monckton of Brenchley says:
No problem…And, in one sense I agree with you that “little rested on the error” since, as I have noted, the uncertainties (most notably in the aerosol forcing) make it hard to constrain the climate sensitivity or transient climate response on the basis of the historical temperature record.
On the other hand, I find your statement somewhat curious since you clearly seemed to feel it was important when the transient climate sensitivity that you computed was lower than what the IPCC claimed it to be. Now that your corrected arithmetic shows it to be in the IPCC range, you seem to have de-valued its importance.
So, I would say the only reason that “little rested on the error” is that your arguments were never very convincing to begin with.
We’ve discussed this “red herring” before. In the context of what Trenberth and Kiehl were interested in studying, all of the effects of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are taken to be forcings. However, in the context of a particular experiment in changing the greenhouse gas concentrations, the question becomes if, say, we remove the non-condensable greenhouse gases, how much of the water vapor also ends up being taken out of the atmosphere. You are assuming that all the water vapor in the atmosphere would remain in the atmosphere, an unlikely assumption that is equivalent to assuming there is no water vapor feedback.
If one has a temperature change in Kelvin and multiplies this by a feedback value in Watts per square meter per Kelvin then one gets a forcing in units of Watts per square meter. (One has to do this in a self-consistent way since a feedback feedbacks on itself…i.e., the water vapor feedback will react to a temperature change caused by water vapor in addition to one caused by, say, a CO2 increase.)
The computer modeling of Lacis et al. suggests that most of the water vapor and its forcing do in fact disappear when one removes the non-condensable greenhouse gases. And, of course, this isn’t just an abstract result from models but is a notion based on basic physical reasoning…And, the fact that the models are handling the water vapor feedback quite well (and that “turning off” the water vapor feedback yields much poorer agreement with empirical satellite data) has now been confirmed in multiple studies:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5917/1020.summary
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5749/841
And, regardless of this, the fact that your calculation makes the implicit assumption that the water vapor is all a forcing and not a feedback means that the calculation is not a calculation of the climate sensitivity in the presence of the water vapor feedback…It is a calculation of the sensitivity in the absence of the feedback because it assumes that the level of water vapor does not change as the temperature changes due to changes in non-condensable greenhouse gases! I.e., it assumes what you claim to show and is hence a completely circular argument.
Bob Fernley-Jones says:
You have this weird way of responding to my posts by just ignoring what I wrote. So, I will tell you again: I have explained what convection does. You are hampered by a picture where you are trying to figure out the surface temperature by starting with the surface radiation balance. That is a very poor way to do it. What one should start with is the top-of-the-atmosphere radiative balance, which tells you what has to happen to the temperature in the mid- and upper-troposphere where most of the radiation escapes to space. One then can work down to figure out what happens at the surface by noting that the effect of convection is to keep the lapse rate at approximately the appropriate adiabatic lapse rate.
So, in other words, it is already understood what the effect of convection is. You remain ignorant of what this effect is because you are thinking about the problem in the wrong way.
David says:
This data is in fact already contradicted by other better data: The satellite data clearly shows the opposite of what the reanalysis shows for the long-term trends and, furthermore, both the satellite and the reanalysis data show a positive water vapor feedback when you look at fluctuations on shorter time scales. The long-term trends in the reanalysis data are KNOWN to be bad because of instrumentation issues and the like.
It really is a matter of cherry-picking data known to be bad and ignoring data known to be better in order to arrive at a desired conclusion.
Doug Cotton says:
The fact is that you are just making up physics to suit what you want to believe. Your version of physics is contradicted by over 100 years of empirical data and the use of the equations of radiative transfer. It is complete nonsense and the sort of things that make “AGW skeptics” look like anti-science clowns, which is why people like Spencer, Willis, and even Monckton are trying to dispel such silly notions. If you want AGW skeptics to look as scientific as Young Earth Creationists to the scientific community, then I recommend continuing to spout the nonsense that you are spouting; if not, you may want to reconsider.
Gary Hladik,
My original question was whether the 2nd Law is only a statistical Law, or an absolute Law.
After reading your citations, and Doug Cotton’s radiation explanation, it is beginning to appear to me that the 2nd Law is absolute. A colder object cannot warm a warmer object. Looking at it from the perspective of single atoms might help.
Suppose a single atom at 600K was in the middle of an ideal vacuum container, and surrounded by one billion atoms at 300K, all arranged in a spherical shell a small distance away from the warmer central atom. [All held in place by laser tweezers, or a science fiction tractor beam.☺]
So now we have a warmer atom surrounded by an almost solid shell of cooler atoms, and all the cooler atoms are emitting photons with wavelengths equal to their absolute temperatures. With a billion atoms, a large number of their photons will hit the warmer central atom.
Will the total radiative emissions of one billion atoms be sufficient to raise the temperature of the warmer central atom to, say, 601K? The answer appears to be no, even though there are large numbers of photons from the cooler atom shell hitting the central, warmer atom.
The reason may be that each photon “knows” that it was emitted from a cooler atom, and therefore the warmer atom is invisible to it. If that is so, then the “back radiation” hypothesis would seem to be falsified.
Now I am re-thinking the entire issue. It is clear from numerous measurements that AGW has no measurable effect, so it must be very small. But now it appears that AGW caused by GHG’s may not exist at all. I haven’t made up my mind; I’ll have to give this a lot more thought. But I’ve always been more comfortable with the idea that the Second Law is absolute on all levels [that’s why I used atoms in my gedanken experiment].
The whole “there is no AGW” conjecture can be completely falsified by showing even one example of a warmer object being heated by cooler objects. Anyone supporting the “back radiation” hypothesis should be looking for a testable example.
Myrrh says (February 6, 2012 at 5:08 pm): “I’ll give you an example of how heat flows from hotter to colder.”
That’s an example of heat transfer by conduction. Not really relevant, since we’re discussing transfer by radiation only, but I appreciate the attempt.
“Now, what does Cooliet do when you move Warmio in?”
Well, to repeat, I think spherical black body Cooliet continues radiating in all directions. What do you think? Quid pro quo, Clarice. 🙂
It would be helpful if you would agree or disagree with each of my questions above, so we can identify exact points of contention. Let’s start with the easy one: I say Cooliet when alone in the test chamber radiates energy in all directions. Agree or disagree?
Smokey says:
The deficiencies in your knowledge could be remedied by actually finding an introductory physics textbook and reading the section that deals with the Second Law. This is the textbook that I currently teach out of and it has a very nice explanation of the Second Law: http://www.amazon.com/College-Physics-Strategic-Approach-Workbooks/dp/0321602285/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328581890&sr=8-1
Joel Shore and Gary Hladik:
When you can demonstrate an actual experiment showing a cooler body radiating and actually warming a (significantly) warmer body (or slowing its rate of cooling) then it will be new physics. Established physics says energy is conserved and thus this cannot happen.
If your warmer body gets warmed more, then it radiates more back, effectively increasing the frequency of the radiation it received. (Wow!) Then the cooler body will warm more, as well as some other cooler bodies around, and they will all radiate and warm the warmer one even more. And the iterations continue indefinitely, according to your guess which is not in standard physics.
Why do you think microbolometer IR cameras (which depend on warming of their sensors) cannot measure down to the much lower frequency radiation (ie much colder temperatures) which the original IR cameras can detect when they only have to measure frequency and then calculate temperature from frequency?
Now go and show exactly where you think there is an error in Claes Johnson’s mathematics, bearing in mind that he is a professor of applied mathematics. Just comments on his computations is all I want to hear http://www.csc.kth.se/~cgjoh/blackbodyslayer.pdf
PS That article about carbon dioxide lies in Germany’s leading newspaper must be a bit of a bother for you.
Joel Shore,
A while back I read Peter Atkins’ Four Laws. That was pretty comprehensive. However, as usual you’re changing the subject. As I concluded above:
The whole “there is no AGW” conjecture can be completely falsified by showing even one example of a warmer object being heated by cooler objects. Anyone supporting the “back radiation” hypothesis should be looking for a testable example.
No doubt you are desperate to falsify the “there is no AGW” claim. Now’s your chance. As always, make any attempts empirically testable and reproducible. No models, and no assumptions based on radiative physics suppositions. As Latour convincingly argues, that doesn’t even apply here.
PS Gary shows his lack of knowledge of physics when he says “Which raises the question of how his roof can tell the difference between a “cool” radio wave and a “hot” radio wave of the same wavelength”
Wien’s Displacement Law states that the peak frequency is proportional to the absolute temperature of the emitter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien's_displacement_law
I trust Gary at least knows the connection between wavelength and frequency and has thus now learnt a bit of basic physics, namely that you cannot have “cool” and “hot” radiation of the same wavelength.
Doug Cotton says (February 6, 2012 at 7:25 pm): “I trust Gary at least knows the connection between wavelength and frequency and has thus now learnt a bit of basic physics, namely that you cannot have “cool” and “hot” radiation of the same wavelength.”
Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner!
So when Doug looks back at the Mercury-o/Warmio/Cooliet experiment, he will answer, “Shucks, Gary, Warmio can’t tell the difference between that 900 nm photon from hot Mercury-o and the 900 nm photon from cool Cooliet (there is no difference), so it will absorb both.”
Right, Doug?
Smokey says:
Anyone supporting the “back radiation” hypothesis should be looking for a testable example.
Henry@Smokey
Well, I think I can proof that many GHG’s are cooling the atmosphere by back radiating or re-radiating sunshine in the specific wavelengths where absorption takes place.
For proof that this does happen, see here:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X/644/1/551/64090.web.pdf?request-id=76e1a830-4451-4c80-aa58-4728c1d646ec
They measured the re-radiation from GHG’s as it bounced back to earth from the moon. So the direction was sun-earth-moon-earth. E.g., for CO2, follow the green line in fig. 6, bottom. Note that it already starts at 1.2 um, then one peak at 1.4 um, then various peaks at 1.6 um and 3 big peaks at 2 um. You can see that it all comes back to us via the moon in fig. 6 top & fig. 7. Note that even methane cools our atmosphere by re-radiating in the 2.2 to 2.4 um range.
So conversely, in the areas where we have places in the molecule where absorption takes place which lie in earth’s emission spectrum, we may assume that the same thing happens causing warming.
For more on that here:
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
the problem is that I have never seen a balance sheet showing me the net effect of the cooling and warming effect of each of the GHG’s, in the right dimensions. For example, seeing that the sun only shines 12 hours per day (due to earth’s rotation) and earth shines 24 hours per day, the units on this balance sheet must include “time” somewhere….
Also, in the case of CO2, it is also cooling the atmosphere by taking part in photosynthesis: in 1974 someone calculated that 0.023% of the energy we get from the sun is used for photosynthesis.
That is probably a lot more now.
Anyway, careful analyses of the daily results of weather stations, reveals that the observed warming was not due to an increase in GHG’s!
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
Doug Cotton says:
It is demonstrated every day by scientists and engineers around the world when they use the equations of radiative transfer to correctly calculate, say, the steady-state temperature of an object. And, no, it doesn’t violate energy conservation.
You could make the same argument to prove that blankets are impossible…Or insulation in your house is impossible. That should give you a clue that your claim that there is a violation of energy conservation is wrong.
I could think of lots of reasons why this could be the case but without a specific reference to what you are talking about, it is kind of hard to decide which explanation is likely correct. So, can you give me a specific cite to go on?
If one starts with an assumption not constrained by reality, one can use mathematics to derive anything. For example, if I start with the assumption that the Earth has the same mass as the sun, I can derive the fact that gravitational acceleration at the Earth’s surface is much, much larger than the claimed 9.80 m/s^2. That does not prove that it is….It (along with the experimental observation that the Earth’s gravitational acceleration at the surface is about 9.8 m/s^2) just shows that my assumption is bad.
Claes has made a bad assumption in assuming that over 100 years of statistical physics is wrong and that an artifact of the numerical solution of partial differential equations is actually a fundamental element of the natural world…i.e., that the natural world doesn’t obey the partial differential equations but rather a certain discretization of those equations. I don’t care if his computations based on this assumption are completely correct…His result is incorrect because his assumption is wrong.
Furthermore, Claes has used the assumption to re-derive the equation for the radiative exchange of two blackbodies…and (THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART) he gets exactly the same mathematical result as everyone else gets; he just claims a different interpretation of the terms. (I.e., he claims that you can’t separate things out into a forward and backward radiation term…That there is just one forward radiation term that depends on the temperature of both bodies.) However, that is irrelevant. The greenhouse effect comes out of the equation, not out of an interpretation of what the different terms in the equation represent. Hence, he has not disproved the greenhouse effect…He has just re-derived it but given a slightly different meaning to the terms in the equation. Even if he were right in his derivation, it would change absolutely nothing. That’s the irony of his whole nonsensical argument!!!
Smokey says:
I am not changing the subject. I am suggesting that you need to educate yourself about our modern understanding of the 2nd Law. I am not familiar with Atkins’ book so I don’t know if it didn’t discuss this issue or if you didn’t absorb it. I recommended an introductory physics textbook that I know does a good job of discussing the 2nd Law, although I imagine that many others would be fine.
Smokey says (February 6, 2012 at 6:07 pm): “Looking at it from the perspective of single atoms might help.”
I’m uncomfortable discussing the “temperature” of a single atom, as I always think of temperatures in terms of bulk matter. In a gas, for example, temperature is related to the average kinetic energy of the atoms/molecules:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature#Kinetic_theory_of_gases
In the animation, the “atoms” have a range of kinetic energies. A single atom’s kinetic energy is always changing due to collisions.
Let’s take a very simplified look at two small packets of the earth’s atmosphere: one low temp (packet L, could be high altitude), one high (H, maybe low altitude). The average kinetic energy of the molecules in L is lower than in H. Assume an ordinary molecule of CO2 in L absorbs a 15 um photon (from anywhere) or collides with a neighbor, exciting a CO2 vibrational mode.
http://www.wag.caltech.edu/home/jang/genchem/infrared.htm
Usually the excited state will be lost to collision, but sometimes the CO2 will emit a 15 um photon in a random direction, in this case toward H. The photon reaches packet H and excites a CO2 molecule. This molecule collides with a nearby nitrogen molecule, transforming the energy of its molecular vibration into kinetic energy of the nitrogen, and raising the temperature of packet H by a tiny increment. In other words, radiative energy from a lower temp gas (L) has “warmed” a higher temp gas (H) to a temperature minutely higher than it would otherwise be.
Of course the net radiative flow is from H to L, but the gross flow is bidirectional.
Smokey says (February 6, 2012 at 6:07 pm): “The whole “there is no AGW” conjecture can be completely falsified by showing even one example of a warmer object being heated by cooler objects.”
Check out Anthony’s infrared photo at the top of this page:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/13/a-conversation-with-an-infrared-radiation-expert/
Notice that it shows areas with temps lower than ambient air temp (presumably also camera temp, unless it was warmed even more by Anthony’s hands), as brighter than the sky, which is < -20 degrees C. If these low temp areas transferred no energy to the "warmer" camera, they would appear as black as the sky.
As I keep repeating, there are good reasons to doubt the "C" and the "A" in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming alarmism, but "No, Virginia" disbelief in the so-called "greenhouse effect" isn't one of them.
Joel Shore says:
“I am not familiar with Atkins’ book so I don’t know if it didn’t discuss this issue…”
So you’re commenting on something you don’t know anything about. That’s even worse than changing the subject – which you are still doing, as usual. Your claim that CO2 is heating the planet is a conjecture, nothing more. What you are still not responding to is my statement:
Verifiable, testable, real world examples of back radiation are non-existent. That makes CO2=AGW a conjecture. It may or may not have validity, but the planet apparently doesn’t think CO2 has much, if any effect on temperature.
Gary Hladik,
That question was answered in the link that you had originally provided. Thanks for that, I learned a few things.
The “back radiation” question essentially comes down to: can a cooler object raise the temperature of a warmer object via radiation? There may be verifiable examples of that happening, but I have not been able to locate a single one. And Dr Latour refuted the IR camera issue in that link, at least to my satisfaction.
I recommend reading that email exchange between Spencer and Latour, and the comments. You will find that neither side has definitive evidence. But since the back radiation claim is made by the alarmist crowd, the onus is on them to provide verifiable, testable and falsifiable evdidence showing that a cooler object can heat a warmer object through radiation. So far, they have completely failed. Thus, AGW is only a conjecture; not a hypothesis, and most certainly not a theory.
Gary H says:
“Assume an ordinary molecule of CO2 in L absorbs a 15 um photon (from anywhere) or collides with a neighbor, exciting a CO2 vibrational mode.”
That is getting away from my original question of “back radiation”. Can a cooler object heat a warmer object via radiation? That is why I used atoms as an example. No one has provided any evidence that back radiation from cooler to warmer is ever the case. If a cooler atom of CO2 emits a photon, can that photon heat up a warmer CO2 atom down the line? Or does the photon from the cooler atom “know” that it cannot heat a warmer atom? [That’s why you can’t say “(from anywhere)”. The question is: can a photon from a cooler atom ever heat a warmer atom?]
The fact that a photon can change the vibrational state of an atom is not in dispute. It is also not an answer to my question. I’m only questioning the apparent claim of cooler back radiation heating a warmer atmosphere. As shown in my link above, the planet is saying “No.” The planet is making it very clear to us that CO2 is a non-issue.
The wild-eyed alarmist predictions all center around “carbon”, but the planet is showing that CO2=AGW conjecture is of no consequence. In fact, it should be discarded. CO2 may provide some small insulation effect, but reducing CO2 emissions is completely stupid from a cost/benefit perspective. The warmists cannot see that, but that is because their perspective is religious, not scientific.
back radiation” hypothesis should be looking for a testable example.
Gary Hladik says:
February 6, 2012 at 6:14 pm
Myrrh says (February 6, 2012 at 5:08 pm): “I’ll give you an example of how heat flows from hotter to colder.”
That’s an example of heat transfer by conduction. Not really relevant, since we’re discussing transfer by radiation only, but I appreciate the attempt.
“Now, what does Cooliet do when you move Warmio in?”
Well, to repeat, I think spherical black body Cooliet continues radiating in all directions. What do you think? Quid pro quo, Clarice. 🙂
It would be helpful if you would agree or disagree with each of my questions above, so we can identify exact points of contention. Let’s start with the easy one: I say Cooliet when alone in the test chamber radiates energy in all directions. Agree or disagree?
=====================
My point is that this example by conduction is what happens at heat transfer, unless you can show that the 2nd Law breaks down for radiation then you are making things up. This is greater energy affecting another with lower energy, the cooler is at the receiving end.
Do you know what radiated heat is? If your hands aren’t too cold, turn on the stove and hold them above the now warming hot plate, the heat you’re feeling beginning to thaw out your hands is thermal infrared, it’s invisible, the hot plate hasn’t got hot enough to produce visible light, that’s exactly the same heat energy we get from the Sun, that warms us up. Now unless you can show that your icy mitts are a) capable of radiating heat energy to another object warmer than itself and b) that they are doing this while they are otherwise engaged receiving all that heat energy from the hot plate, that stream of thermal infrared from the hotter to the colder, then you’re not showing anything to prove what you say.
Smokey says (February 7, 2012 at 11:20 am): “And Dr Latour refuted the IR camera issue in that link, at least to my satisfaction.”
Actually, far from refuting it, he confirmed it, e.g. when he wrote “I accept radiation detector surfaces need not be colder than the incident radiation to detect and measure cold radiation.” If the emitted radiation from the cooler source is not depositing energy in the detector (i.e. “warming” it), how does Dr. Latour think the detector detects the source?
BTW, Dr. Latour’s term “cold radiation” should be re-phrased as “radiation from a colder source”. As I’ve been trying to point out all along, and as even Doug Cotton agrees above, you can’t tell if a given IR photon came from a “warm” or a “cool” source. Another example of Dr. Latour’s fuzzy thinking is his “I see ice” remark; it’s utterly irrelevant, since he sees ice by reflected, not emitted light.
Smokey, since you seem less emotional than some others on this thread, could you be a lamb and address the Mercury-o/Warmio/Cooliet thought experiment described earlier in the thread? Just let us know if you think Warmio would treat the 900nm photons from Mercury-o and Cooliet differently, and if so, why.
Myrrh says (February 7, 2012 at 1:13 pm): “My point is that this example by conduction is what happens at heat transfer, unless you can show that the 2nd Law breaks down for radiation then you are making things up.”
I have never claimed radiation violates the 2nd Law by, for example, allowing net transfer of energy from a cooler to a warmer body. I’m only saying that radiative transfer can be bidirectional, which doesn’t violate the 2nd Law in any way. This is in fact confirmed daily by IR cameras, including the example I gave above, which demonstrates energy transfer from a cooler to a warmer body.
Myrrh, could you please, pretty please address the Warmio/Cooliet questions I asked earlier?
1. When alone in the test chamber, Cooliet radiates energy in all directions. Agree or disagree?
If agree,
2. When Warmio is added to the chamber, Cooliet continues to radiate some energy in the direction of Warmio. Agree or disagree?
Smokey says:
That statement is even more bizarre than you usual statements! Was I supposed to telepathically infer that you were basing your incorrect knowledge of the Second Law on Atkin’s book and only comment if I had actually read Atkins’ book?
Is there a universe where your logic actually makes any sense whatsoever?!?
Furthermore, you were talking about the Second Law. It is something that I happen to know a bit about and so I was suggesting references you could use to replace your mistaken ideas with correct physical knowledge. If you would prefer instead to talk about the Second Law out of ignorance, then there is little that I can do to stop you.
[SNIP: Joel, you don’t normally stoop to name-calling. Address this some other way. -REP]
Smokey says (February 7, 2012 at 12:24 pm): “That is getting away from my original question of ‘back radiation’.”
Actually, I was trying to keep it relevant to the question of so-called “back radiation”, which is why I used CO2 (H2O would have worked, too). I could give endless examples, but it appears your fundamental objection to the concept is a suspicion that an individual photon “knows” the temperature of the macroscopic body that emitted it. So I can only repeat, what physical property of photons encodes this information?
J. Fischer says somewhere or other:
“The net flow of energy is always from hotter to colder; that’s basic thermodynamics. That does not make warm bodies invisible to cooler ones.”
I’m not convinced that is totally correct. But we are in agreement if you delete the word “net”.
I provided a thought experiment:
I could refine that thought experiment, but it’s good enough as it is. If you believe that the central atom would continue to get hotter from the billions of close by, cooler atoms emitting photons, please explain how that would work. And explain why that would not violate the 2nd Law.
I used atoms specifically to avoid giving wiggle room, such as using the word “net”. In this thought experiment, the ‘net’ number of photons – each carrying energy – would far exceed the number being emitted from the central atom. Thus, the central atom would keep increasing in temperature, far beyond its 600K. So tell me whether the central atom heats up, or whether it remains at or below 600K.
Joel Shore @ February 6, 2012 at 5:28 pm
Thanks Joel for your two lectures about lapse rates etc, however, I’d much prefer that you address the questions that I repeatedly asked, and for your convenience I’ll repeat the most recent elaboration, in part, and I’ll add a few words in [ ] to see if that helps:
Joel,
Further to my; February 7, 8:18 pm
Please do not be scared of offending the great prophet Trenberth. If you think that his heat loss numbers from the surface are crap, please say so, and clearly explain why. Cut-out the waffle/obtuse diversions and come to the crux of the matter. Please; I can’t find any ambiguity in my enquiries to you, which you have repeatedly avoided addressing!
Smokey says (February 7, 2012 at 6:29 pm): “I used atoms specifically to avoid giving wiggle room, such as using the word “net”. In this thought experiment, the ‘net’ number of photons – each carrying energy – would far exceed the number being emitted from the central atom. Thus, the central atom would keep increasing in temperature, far beyond its 600K. So tell me whether the central atom heats up, or whether it remains at or below 600K.”
The “thought experiment” is fairytale physics, but in this fairyland if the atom keeps absorbing fairyons–er, photons–faster than emitting them, as the conditions stipulate, the atom’s “temperature” (whatever that means for a single atom of Imaginium) will have to go up, or it’ll violate conservation of energy. Which leaves us with a dilemma: violate a law we all claim to uphold (conservation), or violate a controversial interpretation of physics (take the “net” out of radiative energy flow). Tough choice.
All these thought experiments have been fun. Who’s up for another one?
I say Godzilla can beat King Kong. Agree or disagree? 🙂
Or how about we play Counterfactual:
Smokey says:
The 2nd Law applies to macroscopic systems. It is not a statement of how things behave on the microscopic level. In fact, the modern understanding of the 2nd Law is how it elegantly explains the apparent paradox that on the atomic scale, collisions and such are reversible, but somehow when you go to the macroscopic scale, you get irreversibility, e.g., heat only spontaneously going from hot to cold, mechanical energy being converted into thermal energy by friction but never the reverse, etc. The paradox is resolved by considering how astronomically improbable it becomes to see heat flowing from cold to hot once you consider the statistics of the large numbers of atoms and molecules involved.
If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the 2nd Law, pure and simple. You will instead have what I call a “magical” view of the Second Law which will bear little resemblance to how physicists understand it. Read a textbook and learn how the physical universe actually works.
Bob Fernley-Jones says:
I have addressed this. You just don’t seem to understand the answer. I am lecturing you about lapse rates, etc. because you have to understand the role of convection in order to understand how convection will change in response to a change in radiative forcing due to a change in CO2 or H2O. As I explain to you over and over again, you are hampered in your thinking by being too concerned with the surface balance without understanding how it is determined. The correct way to figure out what is going to happen to the surface temperature is to look at the top-of-the-atmosphere radiative balance, which tells you how the temperature of the part of the atmosphere radiating back into space is going to change…and then to use what we know about how convection drives the lapse rate back to the adiabatic lapse rate in order to understand how the surface temperature changes. If you can’t understand this basic notion, then it is hopeless for you to understand and you will be lost in a morass of ignorance.
As for clouds: Your simple picture of an increase in cloud cover due to increased water vapor is too naive. Whether condensation of water vapor occurs depends not only on concentration of water vapor but also on the air temperature…i.e., the saturation vapor pressure of water increases with increasing temperature. In fact, the predictions from climate models (and the data we see so far) is that the increase in water vapor and in temperature will be such that the relative humidity will, on average over the globe, remain about constant or even decrease a little bit. So, this would imply that cloudiness might in fact, if anything, decrease. The reality is more complicated…as it depends what happens on local scales and with different types of clouds (since low clouds have a net cooling effect but high clouds have a net warming effect).
However, the evidence based on what we do know about clouds and based on paleoclimate and other studies is that clouds are unlikely to save us by providing a strong negative feedback. That said, the uncertainties involving the cloud feedback are such that it is certainly the best hope that AGW skeptics have for something miraculously saving us from the worst effects of increasing GHGs, which is why talking about just about anything else (like the greenhouse effect not existing) is a diversion from scientific arguments that have any potential merit.
Joel Shore says:
February 8, 2012 at 8:01 am
“That said, the uncertainties involving the cloud feedback are such that it is certainly the best hope that AGW skeptics have for something miraculously saving us from the worst effects of increasing GHGs, ”
Of which, [the worst effects of increasing GHGs] there are none. Calm yourself, Joel.
Joel Shore says:
February 8, 2012 at 8:01 am
The correct way to figure out what is going to happen to the surface temperature is to look at the top-of-the-atmosphere radiative balance, which tells you how the temperature of the part of the atmosphere radiating back into space is going to change…and then to use what we know about how convection drives the lapse rate back to the adiabatic lapse rate in order to understand how the surface temperature changes. If you can’t understand this basic notion, then it is hopeless for you to understand and you will be lost in a morass of ignorance….
As for clouds: Your simple picture of an increase in cloud cover due to increased water vapor is too naive…In fact, the predictions from climate models (and the data we see so far) is that the increase in water vapor and in temperature will be such that the relative humidity will, on average over the globe, remain about constant or even decrease a little bit.
I strongly disagree: The simplified “physics” you (the CAGW community) are trying to assume correct within the artificial CGM atmospheres has been proven wrong: You (the collective CAGW community) have never shown model results that reflect the actual flatline of measured global temperatures of the past 15 years. At best, one modeler claims that 3% of the results show this result, but cannot name the published results nor the actual mode runs and trial dates proving that claim. The remaining 97% of modeled results are, however, loudly claimed to predict the next 1000 years of climate to a 1/4 of degree accuracy, despite varying from the present real world 15 years by over 1.0 degree.
Odd that discrepancy there.
Please explain it, using the simplified physics of your modeled realty.
Your model assumptions and simplified physics in each cell at each temperature and each pressure gradient are proved wrong. Therefore, the model results cannot be trusted,since they solely rely on “re-calibration” (also known as post-analysis fudging” of nebulous assumptions about aerosol levels and sootlevel changes that are (conveniently) input to fit the model results needed to explain the soot levels assumed. Show me the actual measured (worldwide) decline in soot, pollution, and aerosol levels from 1950 through 2010: we know specific cities have been cleaned up. Los Angelos basin, Pittsburgh, London, the Rhineland, the Ruhr Valley are absolute examples of local changes over small local regions. But worldwide? What measured data do you have? Does anyone have?
Over the past 150 years, over only one short 25 year period of time have both CO2 and temperature risen at the same time. Outside of that specific “calibration:” period between 1973 and 1998 that fits your simplified theory of delta CO2 => delta temp,
CO2 has been steady, temperatures fell.
CO2 has been steady, temperatures were steady.
CO2 has been steady, temperatures rose.
CO2 has risen, temperatures declined.
CO2 has risen, temperatures rose.
CO2 has risen, temperatures have been steady.
Re Joel Shore at 801:
“That said, the uncertainties involving the cloud feedback are such that it is certainly the best hope that AGW skeptics have for something miraculously saving us from the worst effects of increasing GHGs, which is why talking about just about anything else (like the greenhouse effect not existing) is a diversion from scientific arguments that have any potential merit.”
=====================================================================
Your seemingly solid approach to the subject crumbles to pieces with such statements. There is not the slightest shred of scientific rationale for taking such a pessimistic and irrational attitude: the presumption that change is bad. Like your cloud responses, it depends on where you live. Climate change brought the decline of Islamic Civilization and the flourishing of European. In Hellenistic times the population of North Africa exceeded that of Europe if a census of notable Greek and Roman thinkers is any indication. Two of the famous Classical flat earthers haled from Africa–none from Europe. Camel caravans replaced horses in the 3rd Century BC. Deserted desert cities like Leptis Magna supplied the Roman wheat dole.
CAGW is in no way based on thermodynamics or any sort of science. It is an emotional mindset, based on the premise, always assume the worst. Until you learn the truth of that statement you are doomed to wallow in nonsensical ignorance. There is not a competent scientist on the planet who takes this doomsday science seriously. –AGF
addressing!
Gary Hladik says:
February 7, 2012 at 10:04 pm
Smokey says (February 7, 2012 at 6:29 pm): “I used atoms specifically to avoid giving wiggle room, such as using the word “net”. In this thought experiment, the ‘net’ number of photons – each carrying energy – would far exceed the number being emitted from the central atom. Thus, the central atom would keep increasing in temperature, far beyond its 600K. So tell me whether the central atom heats up, or whether it remains at or below 600K.
“The “thought experiment” is fairytale physics, but in this fairyland if the atom keeps absorbing fairyons–er, photons–faster than emitting them, as the conditions stipulate, the atom’s “temperature” (whatever that means for a single atom of Imaginium) will have to go up, or it’ll violate conservation of energy. Which leaves us with a dilemma: violate a law we all claim to uphold (conservation), or violate a controversial interpretation of physics (take the “net” out of radiative energy flow). Tough choice.
“All these thought experiments have been fun. Who’s up for another one?”
==================
I’ll ask again, what is the mechanism which puts a stop to the colder warming the hotter to get this ‘modern science’s imaginary 2nd law “net”‘?
Smokey says (February 7, 2012 at 6:29 pm): “I used atoms specifically to avoid giving wiggle room, such as using the word “net”. In this thought experiment, the ‘net’ number of photons – each carrying energy – would far exceed the number being emitted from the central atom. Thus, the central atom would keep increasing in temperature, far beyond its 600K. So tell me whether the central atom heats up, or whether it remains at or below 600K.”
And of course only now I realize that Smokey’s example, stripped of its fantasy elements, is basically Willis Eschenbach’s “Steel Greenhouse” again. The central “atom” is the planet, the “billions of atoms” surrounding it are the steel shell, and the “photons” from these atoms are the thermal radiation from the steel shell. The only difference in Smokey’s example is (apparently) a weak heat source going to the shell. As Willis explains in his article, when the shell is added, the central planet/atom’s temperature rises until it’s in radiative equilibrium again.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/17/the-steel-greenhouse/
Joel Shore says:
February 6, 2012 at 5:16 pm
“The computer modeling of Lacis et al. suggests that most of the water vapor and its forcing do in fact disappear when one removes the non-condensable greenhouse gases. And, of course, this isn’t just an abstract result from models but is a notion based on basic physical reasoning…”
Lacis et al.’s suggestion of disappearing water vapor is BS. Leaving aside for the moment the question of why we should suspect that GCMs, which have never demonstrated an ability to simulate the behavior of WV in the real world, should be trusted to simulate a totally imaginary and impossible situation with complete competence, there is daily contradiction of this notion right here in the real world at the South Pole. The temps there are below the CW number for the planet completely without atmosphere that is the basis of the 33 degrees suggested as the GHE for almost all of the year. In the dead of Winter they are at or below 200K, 50-70 degrees below that number, but H2O never disappears there and, even though it is greatly diminished, it still dominates the radiative effects of CO2 by a 2 to 1 margin
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI3525.1
http://journals.ametsoc.org/action/showFullPopup?id=i1520-0442-18-20-4235-f09&doi=10.1175%2FJCLI3525.1
http://journals.ametsoc.org/action/showFullPopup?id=i1520-0442-18-20-4235-f08&doi=10.1175%2FJCLI3525.1
Gary H says:
“Smokey, since you seem less emotional than some others on this thread, could you be a lamb and address the Mercury-o/Warmio/Cooliet thought experiment described earlier in the thread? Just let us know if you think Warmio would treat the 900nm photons from Mercury-o and Cooliet differently, and if so, why.”
If I knew the answer to that question, I would be a happy camper. I like the thought of an absolute 2nd Law, but it appears that the 2nd may be only statistical. I’m reading The Hidden Reality by Prof Brian Greene, and that seems to be his conclusion. So it seems there are different versions of Laws. The Second isn’t as much a Law as a function of entropy.
Joel Shore says:
February 8, 2012 at 7:43 am
Smokey says:
And explain why that would not violate the 2nd Law.
The 2nd Law applies to macroscopic systems. It is not a statement of how things behave on the microscopic level. In fact, the modern understanding of the 2nd Law is how it elegantly explains the apparent paradox that on the atomic scale, collisions and such are reversible, but somehow when you go to the macroscopic scale, you get irreversibility, e.g., heat only spontaneously going from hot to cold, mechanical energy being converted into thermal energy by friction but never the reverse, etc. The paradox is resolved by considering how astronomically improbable it becomes to see heat flowing from cold to hot once you consider the statistics of the large numbers of atoms and molecules involved.
If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the 2nd Law, pure and simple. You will instead have what I call a “magical” view of the Second Law which will bear little resemblance to how physicists understand it. Read a textbook and learn how the physical universe actually works.
=============
And the usual trick of linking to a page which doesn’t have the information on it, and continuing to not show any proof that such an elegant reversibility exists nor show any mechanism for it to suddenly go from reversibility to irreversibility. Joel appears to be one of those most modern scientists who make up scenarios and claim their models prove them, here they call it statistics. Statistics based on no empirical data just as their models are based on no empirical data, just whatever they feel like imagining.
So when Joel says: “The paradox is resolved by considering how astronomically improbable it becomes to see heat flowing from cold to hot once you consider the statistics of the large numbers of atoms and molecules involved.”
One has to ask, but, if there are large numbers of photons being sent from a vast colder body to a much smaller hot body, then surely that means the much small less numerically significant hot body will be overwhelmed and will begin to get even hotter?
Certainly that’s what Spencer claimed in Yes Virginia. And unless Joel can provide the mechanism which stop this then a cup of hot coffee placed on a bath of frozen water will get hotter and hotter with so many photons travelling to it from the larger body of cold.
AGWSF has an active imagination and creates all kinds of things by taking laws and processes out of context from real science. There is of course a real net in heat transfer, as heat flow excites the first molecules of something into vibration making them jiggle faster and faster, kinetic energy, which then spreads to the next molecules and so in the process the first lose heat to the second and so on as the first then gains more and passes it on, the real net here being the actual events of gains and losses in the process of heating up something. And I imagine there is a statistical method in use in applied science which will take into account the materials and conductivity and heat capacity, water for example with its very high heat capacity will take in a load more heat energy than most things and so take longer to raise its temperature, and so take longer to lose it. And I imagine there probably some computer working on such things which will have the ‘stop’ put in that it must obey the always flows from hotter to colder. But, to join these to the quantum world and claim that photons actually are reversible in flowing from cold to hot?? Where is this shown?
Nope, what they have done is even stranger than that, as you see Joel claim it is so elegant…
If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the 2nd Law, pure and simple. You will instead have what I call a “magical” view of the Second Law which will bear little resemblance to how physicists understand it. Read a textbook and learn how the physical universe actually works.”
What they’ve done here? They’ve obviously cherry picked, why isn’t friction time reversible? It’s only another example of bouncing off a wall. And they’ve decided that all fundamental laws are time reversible, and the only reason it doesn’t reverse is because they say that it would take too many coincidences to make it reverse!! So, they claim from this amazing powers of reasoning that the 2nd Law is only a statistical law. Missing the point of the real 2nd Law as I gave in an above post.
Now, don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that the basic laws aren’t time reversible.. But, I think using ‘too many coincidences’ as justification for it not happening very sloppy thinking indeed, there’s nothing elegant in that at all, that’s no explanation at all of why it isn’t reversible on a macro level, nor any proof that on a macro level it isn’t reversible..
And to use that justification to then claim the 2nd Law is only ‘statisical’ is just too absurd. All they have done is add the world “net” into the 2nd Law and claimed it is so because of this ‘reasoning’, calling it ‘modern statitistical science’ and based on ‘there would be far to many coincidences necessary for it to be otherwise’ How the feck is that a LAW?. It is irrelevant to the 2nd Law.
And, what is worse here, is that they pretend this so-called reasoning is oh so vastly superior to anything from ‘old’ physics and we’re just too stupid to understand it…
So, Joel, as I’ve said to you before, I do understand what you’re saying and what I’m saying still stands, unless you can provide proof that any photon of heat flows from colder to hotter in heat transfer, then you are breaking the real 2nd Law and you cannot use your imaginary ‘net’ addition to the the 2nd Law to claim ‘backradiation’ to Earth of heat from the colder atmosphere to the hotter surface.
And moreover, again, if you still claim this is what is actually happening without giving any proof that photons behave in this way on the physical real level you still have to provide a mechanism which takes it from reversibility to irreversibillity – otherwise there is no stopping it in greater numbers. And a someone said, when we want to warm ourselves up all we have to do is step into our fridge… 🙂
Myrrh, what do you say to Latour’s example of the visibility of ice? (photon traveling from cold ice to warm eyeball) –AGF
Smokey says:
February 8, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Gary H says:
“Smokey, since you seem less emotional than some others on this thread, could you be a lamb and address the Mercury-o/Warmio/Cooliet thought experiment described earlier in the thread? Just let us know if you think Warmio would treat the 900nm photons from Mercury-o and Cooliet differently, and if so, why.”
If I knew the answer to that question, I would be a happy camper. I like the thought of an absolute 2nd Law, but it appears that the 2nd may be only statistical. I’m reading The Hidden Reality by Prof Brian Greene, and that seems to be his conclusion. So it seems there are different versions of Laws. The Second isn’t as much a Law as a function of entropy.
Smokey – I’m going to give a comparison here sparked by your post.
First a bit more from the page I gave earlier about the 2nd Law, from an engineer:
———–
http://www.ftexploring.com/energy/2nd_Law.html
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Or Energy is Forever, but Not Exactly
“How Everything Happens
Energy makes everything happen, and every time something happens, there is an energy change. There are two important natural “laws of energy” that describe what happens to the energy involved in every change. We call them “laws” because countless observations and thousands of experiments have shown them to always predict what will happen.
Ponder that for a moment – how everything happens. It means we don’t understand much, if we don’t understand both the first and second laws of Energy.
These next few pages will give you an overview of the famous, but often misunderstood, 2nd Law.
Beyond the First Law
The First Law of Thermodynamics tells us energy is conserved. The total amount never changes. But something does change. I will call it “re-usability”, for now. It’s not an official text book word, but pretty good for communicating the basic idea.
Remember that there has to be an energy transfer for something to happen; energy changes form or moves from place to place (heat flow, for example). As energy moves and changes, the total amount of energy stays the same, constant forever as far as we know.
That sounds good doesn’t it?
Energy is forever.
But wait! If it’s forever, why are all these do-gooders telling us we need to conserve energy by using less? Can’t we just keep using it over and over? Why shouldn’t everyone drive to work alone in a 300 horsepower car?
The Rest of the Story…
Alas, my friends, there is always a rub, and when it comes to energy, the rub is described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The first law would be quite happy to let us re-use energy over and over. The first law is happy as long as energy is conserved. It’s the happy law.
The second law may seem a little less happy to some. It describes the aftermath of every energy change that makes something happen. The second law says that each time energy gets transferred or transformed, some of it, and eventually all of it, gets less useful. That’s the truth. It gets less useful, until finally, it becomes mostly useless (at least as far as its ability to make things happen is concerned).
All of the energy we use ends up, sooner or later, as what we engineers like to call “low-grade” energy. This low-grade energy is only good for warming the air around us a little bit. We can’t use it to do things we consider useful, like generate electricity or make a car go. Inevitably, most of it gets radiated out into the vast cold universe, lost to us forever.
To understand this, it is helpful to start with another aspect of the Second Law. Let’s call it “the direction energy moves” aspect.
The Direction Energy Always Goes
The second law tells us which way energy naturally flows when not blocked or “pushed” by other mechanisms. It says energy has an absolute unfailing tendency to go from “more concentrated” to “less concentrated”. It sort of “spreads out” and gets “diluted”. That’s a good way for beginners to think about it.
Energy flows from a higher temperature to a lower temperature (heat flow).
Energy flows from a higher pressure to a lower pressure (expansion). etc.
……
Read the following at least 3 times:
It is only about energy.
It is only about energy changes.
It is only about the condition of the energy before and after the change.
To be sure, there are interesting concepts about organizational disorder, probability, complexity, and things getting messy (and the propagation of misinformation about thermodynamic entropy). But it is incorrect to create metaphors and analogies from thermodynamic entropy to explain those concepts, and it only misleads beginners. Relax, you don’t need them to explain this concept to students.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics absolutely does NOT say everything tends toward disorder (or decay)!
It is not a universal law of messiness. It is only about energy changes. Isn’t that nice? We can all relax. My messy desk and your wrinkled shirt are not predicted or measured by entropy formulas and the 2nd Law of thermodynamics. ”
————————————–
My bold. Taking Laws out of context, creating all kinds of scenarios out of what one imagines entropy to mean can be fun, but when this imagined ‘far superior mathematics’ as it thinks itself takes the 2nd law out of context and then says the 2nd Law is proved to be wrong because of it… You are not dealing with any kind of scientific logic.
I don’t know what Prof Green has to say about entropy, I began looking for it and the first thing I found was the following, and I thought It a good example of fun thinking and then spotted something which shows how easily the change from fun thinking to ‘this is a fact’ happens, practically seamlessly..
—————————-
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/04/134265287/brian-greene-on-em-the-hidden-reality-em
FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Tell us about this – one of the kinds of universes that you have in there is the holographic universe – hard to imagine, for many of us.
Prof. GREENE: Yes. That is, in many ways, the strangest proposal of all, but it is one that may have the chance of being tested in the next few years. In fact, we’re doing tests right now at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Experiments there are actually probing this idea.
And the idea is this: All that we know about in this three-dimensional world around us, this proposal suggests, may actually be a holographic-like projection of laws of physics that exist on a thin-bounding surface that surrounds us. Just like an ordinary hologram, that’s a piece of thin plastic. You illuminate it the right way, it creates a realistic, three-dimensional image.
The math of string theory and the math of black hole physics suggest that everything we know about may be a similar holographic projection of fundamental information that exists on a large surface that surrounds us. Now, you may wonder: Where does this crazy idea come from?
(Soundbite of laughter)
FLATOW: You noticed the silence.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Prof. GREENE: It comes from an interesting puzzle, which comes from black holes. When you throw something into a black hole, we know it disappears. But the puzzle has been: What happens to the information that the object may contain? Let’s say you throw your laptop or your iPad, whatever, you throw it into a black hole. Where does the information that that object contains go? Now, one suggestion from Stephen Hawking a long time ago is it simply disappears. The problem is, that conflicts with quantum mechanics. It creates tension with quantum mechanics.
So people like Leonard Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft, you know, they study this for a long time. And they concluded that what actually happens to the information is it gets smeared out on the surface of the black hole.
FLATOW: Mm-hmm.
Prof. GREENE: So your iPad, whatever, it goes into the black hole, but a copy of the information is smeared on the surface. That means that information on a bounding surface can describe a three-dimensional object that lives inside. And we believe what’s true for black holes may be true for space more generally. We may be three-dimensional objects described, just like your iPad, that go into a black hole by information on a big, two-dimensional surface that surrounds us.
FLATOW: Do you think we’ll ever know the real answer to any of this?
Prof. GREENE: Well, this particular proposal allows us to perform certain calculations that are otherwise completely impenetrable, to do with what will happen when gold nuclei slam into each other at very high speeds – which is what happens at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider out there in Long Island. The calculations are too hard to do in the traditional rote. But if you use this holographic version to translate the calculations into this bounding surface on the interior of this framework, you can do the math.
———————
Greene goes from “they concluded that what actually happens to the information is it gets smeared out on the surface of the black hole.” To ” And we believe what’s true for black holes may be true for space more generally. We may be three-dimensional objects described, just like your iPad, that go into a black hole by information on a big, two-dimensional surface that surrounds us.” Without stopping to question whether ‘the information from an ipad gets smeared onto two dimensional surfaces around us’, it’s become true because someone spent a ‘long time thinking about it” – therefore it must be true and now they can do the maths..
Anyway, what I’ve discovered in these AGW arguments, is stuff is always being taken out of context, and lot’s of fun thinking should have stayed fun thinking, but instead became the new ‘true’ because someone thunk it, and now putting them all together one gets an Alice through the looking glass of impossible physics defended as if actual reality such as carbon dioxide turned into a super molecule able to defy gravity and demonised as toxic, without most of those promoting it knowing why they’re spouting junk physics, as Latour called it.
agfosterjr says:
February 8, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Myrrh, what do you say to Latour’s example of the visibility of ice? (photon traveling from cold ice to warm eyeball) –AGF
Is it a photon of heat? No distinction made in AGWScience Fiction between heat and light because if it were then properties and processes from the real world would have to be brought in. They’ve reduced everything to ‘all energy is the same’, ‘all photons create heat’ and all reduced to ‘radiation’, and like taking out the Water Cycle from their AGW energy budget, it’s all done to reduce the ‘science’ to sound bite propaganda. It is remarkably cleverly done, those bits I’ve spotted where they’ve taken laws out of context and attributed properties of one thing to another – visible light now heats the land and oceans, and thermal infrared, the direct heat we actually feel from the Sun, doesn’t even reach us..
Latour made the point that ‘climate scientists’ think they know better than the engineers and so on, the applied scientists, but it’s even more confusing than that because these fictional fisics ideas have been deliberately introduced into the education system for the last decades, so even scientists who are good at what they do in a different field will have picked up some of this nonsense and simply think it real because it’s become ‘well-known’, so when an applied scientist from the field concerned tries to put them right they think he’s making up a new physics! Really, it’s an enormous mess.
I think that’s why so many are ‘anti’ CAGW, but not AGW itself, because they believe such things without investigating properly. And, that’s not unexpected, we, humans, have ‘always’ appreciated that we have diverse gifts, we take delegating stuff to those who are interested for granted. That’s how AGW propaganda has been so successfully spread, the biggest meme was that there was scientific consensus, so people didn’t question it, why should they? We have an inbuilt quality of co-operation (even to the point of self-sacrifice, the dying for a cause) which has enabled us to survive, and creatively, this is also our greatest weakness as our history shows over and over again, because the unscrupulous can exploit this.
Joel Shore @ February 8, 8:01 am
Thanks Joel for your THIRD lecture about various topics, however, I’d much prefer that you address the questions that I repeatedly asked. Last time I expanded it a bit for you, perhaps too much for you, so I’ll try a short version with units of W/m^2 :
According to the Trenberth cartoon, the portion of heat that leaves the surface via radiation, and which is absorbed by the atmosphere and clouds, is 23. The other important portion of heat loss which has radiative consequences in the atmosphere, and associations with the concept of feedbacks and climate sensitivity is (Thermals + Evapotranspiration) amounting to 97.
Why do you infer that a small change in CO2 results in a bigger change in feedbacks in the 23 than it would with the 97, that being a much greater pool of energy? (when BTW, there seems to be little research into the latter)
Also, in your go-nowhere-waffle on possible cloud cover and water vapour level changes, yes, most of us know that there are uncertainties, and I pointed out the conflicts between Dessler and Spencer as an example.
Perhaps you should go back to my previous post for more information:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/monckton-responds-to-skeptical-science/#comment-887133
Oh and I also wonder if you are afraid of upsetting Trenberth by contradicting his data:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/monckton-responds-to-skeptical-science/#comment-887185
Myrrh says (February 8, 2012 at 12:43 pm): “I’ll ask again, what is the mechanism which puts a stop to the colder warming the hotter to get this ‘modern science’s imaginary 2nd law “net”‘?
Not sure if I understand the question, but I think Myrrh is asking why a warm body, if it does receive “back radiation” from a nearby cooler body, doesn’t increase its temperature indefinitely. As countless others have tried to explain, as the warmer body’s temp increases, its radiative output increases until it matches the inputs. Then the system is in thermal equilibrium.
Myrrh, does a hypothetical spherical black body with a temperature of 900 degrees K radiate energy in all directions?
Smokey says (February 8, 2012 at 2:11 pm): “If I knew the answer to that question, I would be a happy camper.”
Fair enough. Bear in mind, though, that if you think a black body can distinguish between two otherwise identical photons emitted from sources with different temperatures, you’re postulating a so far unknown ‘temp of origin’ property of the photon. Proof of such a property would be worth at least a Nobel Prize, which is why I’m shocked that Latour and Johnson haven’t physically performed Dr. Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” thought experiment and claimed their prize.
agfosterjr says (February 8, 2012 at 3:38 pm): “Myrrh, what do you say to Latour’s example of the visibility of ice? (photon traveling from cold ice to warm eyeball) –AGF”
Just a nitpick, but the full path is from (say) warm light bulb to cold ice to warm eyeball. Our eyes see ice by reflected, not emitted light.
A properly calibrated infrared camera, on the other hand…
agfosterjr @ February 8, at 3:38 pm
AND
Gary Hladik @ February 8, 7:37 pm
That is by no means a nitpick!!!! Another way of expressing it is that emitted light from ice is in the far infrared, which cannot be seen by the unaided eye.
But then, maybe agfosterjr was just teasing Myrrh?
I suspect so.
Bob Fernley-Jones says (February 8, 2012 at 11:00 pm): “But then, maybe agfosterjr was just teasing Myrrh? I suspect so.”
And he got a rambling three paragraph response. I was kind of hoping for the “elevator speech” version of the new physics. 🙂
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/13/a-matter-of-some-gravity/
Gary Hladik says:
February 8, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Myrrh says (February 8, 2012 at 12:43 pm): “I’ll ask again, what is the mechanism which puts a stop to the colder warming the hotter to get this ‘modern science’s imaginary 2nd law “net”‘?
Not sure if I understand the question, but I think Myrrh is asking why a warm body, if it does receive “back radiation” from a nearby cooler body, doesn’t increase its temperature indefinitely. As countless others have tried to explain, as the warmer body’s temp increases, its radiative output increases until it matches the inputs. Then the system is in thermal equilibrium.
No, I’m asking how does that not make the net from cooler to hotter – because that makes the net flow from cooler to hotter.
Myrrh, does a hypothetical spherical black body with a temperature of 900 degrees K radiate energy in all directions?
Well, since it’s come up in another form, I’ll stop avoiding getting involved in your thought experiment. Radiating what?
Bob Fernley-Jones says:
February 8, 2012 at 11:00 pm
agfosterjr @ February 8, at 3:38 pm
Myrrh, what do you say to Latour’s example of the visibility of ice? (photon traveling from cold ice to warm eyeball) –AGF
AND
Gary Hladik @ February 8, 7:37 pm
Just a nitpick, but the full path is from (say) warm light bulb to cold ice to warm eyeball. Our eyes see ice by reflected, not emitted light.
That is by no means a nitpick!!!! Another way of expressing it is that emitted light from ice is in the far infrared, which cannot be seen by the unaided eye.
But then, maybe agfosterjr was just teasing Myrrh?
I suspect so.
I was going to ask what Latour had actually said, but then decided just to take it as a springboard to bring up the fact that they can’t ‘see’ any difference between heat and light photons, which as you can see from Gary’s response, they can’t.
I suspect that Gary is of the school of fisics as the reply I got some time ago about this aspect:
————————————————————————————————————————
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/28/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-atmospheric-windows/#comment-610576
Ira Glickstein, PhD says:
March 1, 2011 at 6:11 am
Myrrh says:
February 28, 2011 at 4:31 pm
I’m really at a loss to understand any of this. How on earth does Visible light and near short wave heat the Earth?
Myrrh, you really need to get outside more and sit in the Sunshine and feel the warmth! That is how visible and near-visible (“shortwave”) light warms he Earth.
If you don’t or cannot get outside, turn on an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb and hold yourhand near it (not too close, you will get burned). Feel the heat? That is shortwave light because the filament is heated to temperatures similar to the Sun’ surface. You can tell it is shortwave because you can see the light.”
————————————————————————————————————————
Compare with reality – that thermal infrared, heat, is invisible and, that an incandescent lightbulb emits around 95% heat, thermal infrared, invisible, to 5% visible light.
When you turn off the lightbulb, the visible light disappears, the thermal infrared keeps going, we can still feel the heat transferred by radiation. That’s the same as the heat we feel from the Sun, which is actually capable of heating oceans as it heats us. Water is transparent to visible..
What AGWScience Fiction has done is turned the world into a imaginary fantasy world with its own fisics of impossible properties – the problem is that those like Gary arguing for it don’t understand this, they think they’re describing real properties and processes.
If you’ve any interest in this aspect, I found a little while back that NASA’s education pages have been corrupted to this fictional world – someone tried to get rid of the kid’s page on infrared which taught we couldn’t see thermal, longwave, but could feel it as heat from the Sun and that near infrared wasn’t hot, we couldn’t feel it – the page disappeared for a while, but someone’s got it back so it’s still a reference for us in the change in education about this.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/28/spencer-and-braswell-on-slashdot/#comment-711614
In reading this discussion I assume a clearer picture of the warring sides firmly entrenched in unnecessary dug trenches. And why do they use trenches when they were fighting maneuver and not live ammunition.
Is it possible to stop this “war”, inadequately disposed arms, prepared to make arguments regarding the legality of the relevant natural phenomena around us, what are the consequences of mutual effects of celestial bodies (the Sun and planets).
Let us first of gravity and its impact on the creation of intermediate electro field around the planet.
How now proton nuclei produce magnetic fields?
What happens now, the interaction between electro-magnetic fields and how they affect the proton nuclei in motion?
Whether as a result of the interactions between them can occur thermal energy with their changing cycles?
The influence of sunlight and the composition of our atmosphere is irrelevant factor in climate change.
Is not this more natural than to use some models based on assumptions and some nebulous facts?
Disclaimer: I don’t know squat about thermodynamics. Continue reading at your own risk.
Certainly like all good science, it should remain descriptive. When I first heard about deep space radiation I thought it was ridiculous. After buying a thermometer gun and studying frost formation I got a kindergarten education. I can confirm what all meteorologists know: frost forms on clear nights, not cloudy nights. I have even see frost form on one side of cars and not the other–the sky was half clear and half cloudy.
When I first heard the claim that leaves can act as heat sinks, radiatiing energy to space, I thought it was ridiculous. Now I suppose it’s true. We all know that the Apollo 13 spacecraft, in spite of receiving more radiation on its surface than any desert ever collected, left its occupants in danger of freezing.
Water is about 99% transparent to light–it makes it down hundreds of feet, but it’s dark deep down. The only way the sun can heat water at depth is by light. After all, eyes evolved in the depths to help critters play hide and seek, making use of what little radiation was available. Of course any thermodynamic argument against evolution is nonsense at the outset, having no chance of being descriptive.
I don’t know how to distinguish between emitted and reflected light. The GW claim is that CO2 absorbs and re-emits IR. How does re-emission differ from reflection?
My tentative understanding of this stuff is that nature tends toward equilibrium at any given wavelength, and T can only be defined by wavelength. Feel free to educate me. –AGF
Nikola Milovic says:
February 9, 2012 at 5:37 am
In reading this discussion I assume a clearer picture of the warring sides firmly entrenched in unnecessary dug trenches. And why do they use trenches when they were fighting maneuver and not live ammunition.
Nikola – my arguments are against both sides.. Because they use the same fictional fisics to describe our world, and, this has become norm in the education system over the last decades. So we have impossible physics claims of carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere for hundreds and even thousands of years, but in the real world carbon dioxide is heavier than air and displaces air continually, when it’s not coming down in the water cycle – which this ridiculous fisics has taken out of the energy budget (Kiehl/Trenberth 97 and variations on an Alice through the looking glass world). This who thinkg began as a scam, but, I think the physics of these claims important, I’m really saddened to think the advances we’ve made in science has been denied this generation. As far as ‘climate change’ is concerned, we’re in the end of our interglacial, and we have a very good idea from geology just what that means to us…
So, “The influence of sunlight and the composition of our atmosphere is irrelevant factor in climate change.”
I’ve read your previous posts, but don’t understand what you mean (I’m not a scientist so please don’t use mathematics to reply to me…), can you explain it more simply for me?
agfosterjr says:
February 9, 2012 at 9:42 am
Certainly like all good science, it should remain descriptive.
There i agree with you… 🙂
When I first heard about deep space radiation I thought it was ridiculous. After buying a thermometer gun and studying frost formation I got a kindergarten education. I can confirm what all meteorologists know: frost forms on clear nights, not cloudy nights. I have even see frost form on one side of cars and not the other–the sky was half clear and half cloudy.
What everyone who grows stuff knows, not just meteorolgists. On clear frosty nights where is this ‘insultating blanket of carbon dioxide’ when we need it for our plants??
When I first heard the claim that leaves can act as heat sinks, radiatiing energy to space, I thought it was ridiculous. Now I suppose it’s true.
Not sure what you mean here, plants transpire, sweat.., releasing heat in doing so, this is part of the photosynthesis cycle.
We all know that the Apollo 13 spacecraft, in spite of receiving more radiation on its surface than any desert ever collected, left its occupants in danger of freezing.
Only when their electrics broke down – their spacecraft was well protected from taking in the great heat of the Sun they were exposed to, so that wasn’t available to them as a heat source as they kept losing heat.
Water is about 99% transparent to light–it makes it down hundreds of feet, but it’s dark deep down. The only way the sun can heat water at depth is by light.
Visible light can’t heat water, because water doesn’t absorb visible light, that’s what transparent to visible means, that it doesn’t absorb the energy and since it doesn’t it can’t be heated by it. Heat heats water, and that’s the invisible thermal infrared from the Sun. The ‘energy budget’ that most both pro and con AGW use is the same junk science for teaching that short wave the main heat for land and oceans. It’s simply ludicrous.
After all, eyes evolved in the depths to help critters play hide and seek, making use of what little radiation was available. Of course any thermodynamic argument against evolution is nonsense at the outset, having no chance of being descriptive.
Without visible light being available in the ocean we wouldn’t have life develop as we know it. The primitive bacteria which first used visible light for photsynthesis, for chemical energy not heat energy, evolved to be the plant life we have now. Some 90% of the oxygen is still produced by photosynthesis in the oceans. Visible light isn’t a heat energy, thermal infrared direct from the Sun is, this is what we feel as heat from the Sun and it warms us up because we are mostly water – and water is the great absorber of heat energy. It’s thermal infrared direct from the Sun which heats up oceans and land, it’s invisible, we feel it as heat because it is heat. It’s the Sun’s massive thermal energy on the move from the hotter Sun to the colder us.
I don’t know how to distinguish between emitted and reflected light. The GW claim is that CO2 absorbs and re-emits IR. How does re-emission differ from reflection?
I await their answer..
My tentative understanding of this stuff is that nature tends toward equilibrium at any given wavelength, and T can only be defined by wavelength. Feel free to educate me. –AGF
Temperature relates to the kinetic energy of a body, water has a very high heat capacity, it takes in a lot of heat energy before we can see a change in temperature, so a good holder of heat energy, and loses it more slowly. Carbon dioxide has zilch ability to hold onto heat energy, it releases it practically instantly – more nonsense claimed for it by AGWSF fisics saying it ‘traps’ heat.
All their claims about the basics are really junk science, not just messing with laws but changing properties and giving the properties of one thing to another – they, for the most part, don’t know what nonsense they’re spouting because the education system has been corrupted by the green agenda for some decades now.
————————
A p.s. to Smokey – besides all the messing with the 2nd Law, there’s also another phenomenon at play in ‘modern’ science, maybe you already know it, but if not, it’s a fascinating look at the absurdities people go to in their supposed scientific reasoning, postmodernism takes subjectivity as its base science premise so the variations can be very entertaining. 🙂 A good place to start is with the man who posted a spoof by using its ‘language’ – which spawned a huge backlash and endless discussions since: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/index.html
Here’s one which sets the scene: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html
We do see this in the CAGW campaign, that the facts of real science don’t matter because the ’cause’ takes precedence, its view of the science is what science should be because their subjective reality creates it. There’s a look here at one such postmodernist bemoaning having to deal with old school scientists sceptics – Michael Duffy looks at Clive hamilton not believing that sceptics care about the graphs, but are just anti-environmentalists: http://themichaelduffyfiles.blogspot.com/2009/05/clive-hamilton-ian-plimer-climate.html
Myrrh says (February 9, 2012 at 2:21 am): “Not sure if I understand the question, but I think Myrrh is asking why a warm body, if it does receive ‘back radiation’ from a nearby cooler body, doesn’t increase its temperature indefinitely. As countless others have tried to explain, as the warmer body’s temp increases, its radiative output increases until it matches the inputs. Then the system is in thermal equilibrium.
No, I’m asking how does that not make the net from cooler to hotter – because that makes the net flow from cooler to hotter.”
Even though the radiative flow is bidirectional, more energy flows from the hotter body toward the cooler body than vice versa. Myrrh, do you understand the difference between “net” and “gross”, as for example applied to business income?
“Myrrh, does a hypothetical spherical black body with a temperature of 900 degrees K radiate energy in all directions?
Well, since it’s come up in another form, I’ll stop avoiding getting involved in your thought experiment. Radiating what?”
Electromagnetic radiation, as illustrated by the default diagram at the top of this page, showing the emission spectra of several black bodies at various temperatures:
http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/ntnujava/index.php?topic=427.0
Myrrh, I have to ask: what do you think it’s radiating, if anything?
Myrrh, if light can’t heat water, what happens to its energy? It just disappears? Don’t you believe in conservation of matter and energy? –AGF
Test question for anyone: how efficient is an electric heater? (there is only one answer) –AGF
agfosterjr says:
February 9, 2012 at 3:24 pm
Test question for anyone: how efficient is an electric heater? (there is only one answer) –AGF
No – there are tens of millions of electric heaters in the world today, and for each there is a different efficient. And a different effectiveness.
For the woman I spoke with the other night who was buying one at the hardware store at 10:00 pm when her furnace failed, I’d give her effectiveness – and efficiency – at 100%. It kept her children safe that night until the gas furnace repaired.
For the steelmaker who has to use electric furnaces to melt alloys i a vacuum to preserve their chemical ratios and maintain precise heat treatment temperatures for hours as the molten metals cooldown after fabrication and welding … I’d say their effectiveness – and their efficiency – is 100%. Nothing else can do that job.
For those users who leave doors open and who try to heat their homes from an electric stove? Not quite as efficient. Not quite as effective either. For those who use electric heaters and an air conditioner to reduce humidity in controlled areas? Not 100% efficient. But very effective.
Not bad. Anyone else? –AGF
Gary Hladik says:
February 9, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Myrrh says (February 9, 2012 at 2:21 am): “Not sure if I understand the question, but I think Myrrh is asking why a warm body, if it does receive ‘back radiation’ from a nearby cooler body, doesn’t increase its temperature indefinitely. As countless others have tried to explain, as the warmer body’s temp increases, its radiative output increases until it matches the inputs. Then the system is in thermal equilibrium.
No, I’m asking how does that not make the net from cooler to hotter – because that makes the net flow from cooler to hotter.”
Even though the radiative flow is bidirectional, more energy flows from the hotter body toward the cooler body than vice versa. Myrrh, do you understand the difference between “net” and “gross”, as for example applied to business income?
Let me repeat my argument. There are two problems here, a) the first is critical to your claim, you haven’t shown that heat flows from colder to hotter. And, b) even if you are able to show that this can happen, you haven’t provided a mechanism which stops the process to bring it to the claimed ‘net’ of flowing from hotter to colder which you say in claiming that your scenario doesn’t violate the 2nd Law.
All you keep repeating is that ‘photons flow in all directions’, so bloody what?! That’s irrelevant here, it’s irrelevant because you haven’t shown that this is what is actually happening in heat flow.
Unless you can show that this is actually what is happening, your ‘net’ has no basis. All you are basing your ‘net’ on is some airy fairy idea that has come out of someone’s imagination without any proof that such a thing is actually happening.
And, if and when you can show that this is what is happening, you then have to provide some mechanism for it to become a net from hotter to colder to comply with the 2nd Law. Because until you do, a cup of hot coffee in antarctica will keep getting hotter and hotter.
In other words, you have no basis for making such a claim in the first place.
“Myrrh, does a hypothetical spherical black body with a temperature of 900 degrees K radiate energy in all directions?”
Well, since it’s come up in another form, I’ll stop avoiding getting involved in your thought experiment. Radiating what?”
Electromagnetic radiation, as illustrated by the default diagram at the top of this page, showing the emission spectra of several black bodies at various temperatures:
http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/ntnujava/index.php?topic=427.0
Spell it out, describe it in words, I want to know exactly what you’re saying before we go any further.
We so far have Warmio and Cooliette radiating at different temperature, what are they radiating? Please translate it into Centrigrade, I have zilch familiarity with K.
Myrrh, I have to ask: what do you think it’s radiating, if anything?
I’m waiting for you to tell me since a black body doesn’t exist in nature…
Myrrh says (February 9, 2012 at 12:54 pm): “Visible light can’t heat water, because water doesn’t absorb visible light, that’s what transparent to visible means, that it doesn’t absorb the energy and since it doesn’t it can’t be heated by it.”
Pure water isn’t 100% transparent to visible light:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Water_absorption_spectrum.png
Of course oceans, lakes, and rivers are far from pure water, and full of things that absorb visible light. If Myrrh were correct that the ocean absorbs no energy from the sun at “visible” wavelengths, we could see the bottom of the Challenger Deep from the surface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_Deep
“Visible light isn’t a heat energy, thermal infrared direct from the Sun is…”
They both are. Otherwise a visible-light laser (e.g. green), which doesn’t emit in the infrared, couldn’t light a match or burn through a target:
Check out some of the other laser videos on YouTube, using blue, green, red, and infrared lasers.
I think I’m beginning to understand Myrrh’s confusion. The electromagnetic spectrum is huge, mostly invisible to the naked eye, and has apparently diverse effects on matter. However, all these effects involve the same process, i.e. transfer of energy via electromagnetic radiation. Hopefully the simplified example of the laser will dispel some of Myrrh’s misconceptions.
I had a 500 mw green laser that would easily pop balloons, burn cardboard, etc. [It burned out after about an hour’s total use; made in China.]
Here is a 1,100 milliwatt purple laser. And for those so inclined, a death ray.
Myrrh says (February 9, 2012 at 4:32 pm): “Please translate it into Centrigrade, I have zilch familiarity with K.”
That explains a lot.
“Myrrh, I have to ask: what do you think it’s radiating, if anything?
I’m waiting for you to tell me since a black body doesn’t exist in nature…”
Well, I did tell you, and even linked to a web page. But hey, let’s try again with a real-life example that acts much like a (non-existent) black body:
1. Our sun, acting approximately as a black body at 5,800 degrees K (5,527 degrees C), radiates electromagnetic energy in all directions. Agree or disagree?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight
2. If the sun isn’t radiating electromagnetic energy as described above, what do you think it’s radiating, if anything?
We’ll stop there for now, but for those of you still reading (yes, both of you), I intend to repeat my three body thought experiment with our sun as Warmio, Sirius A (9,940 degrees K) as Mercury-o, and Proxima Centauri (3,042 degrees K) as Cooliet.
agfosterjr says:
February 9, 2012 at 2:51 pm
Myrrh, if light can’t heat water, what happens to its energy? It just disappears? Don’t you believe in conservation of matter and energy?
What happens when you switch off a light?
The problem for us chickens with AGWScience Fiction’s meme producing department, is that they have an objective they work to, to provide supporting material for their claim that ‘greenhouse gases heat the Earth which would be 33°C colder without them, and, carbon dioxide being such a greenhouse gas will heat the Earth more and more the more of it accumulates in the atmosphere from man-made emissions’.
To this end, they have taken out everything that could possibly contradict that scenario, for example including taking out the whole of the Water Cycle without which the Earth would be around 67°C, industry standard figures, which means that water vapour, as the main greenhouse gas, actually cools the Earth by 52°C to bring it down to the 15°C we have. Think deserts, without the water cycle cooling deserts we end up with extreme heat. In taking out the water cycle which falsifies their claims, they have also taken out convection, it is no longer of any importance to them..
Here, re ‘light’, the object is to simplify the ‘energy budget’ to show that thermal infrared exists only in the heated Earth’s upwelling and in the ‘backradiation’ from greenhouse gases in the atmosphere radiating this back to Earth, which is the mechanism they have chosen to show how increases of carbon dioxide will create huge global warming from an increase in this backradiation. From which we have these arguments about the 2nd Law, because they are saying that cooler atmosphere will increase the temperature of the Earth by sending ‘photons’ back to heat the warmer Earth radiating out thermal infrared. To this end, they have had to exclude all thermal infrared which we get from the Sun, this is in the real world what we feel as heat from the Sun, it is invisible. In it’s place they make the claim that it is only shortwave radiation which reaches the surface of the Earth and heats it up from which state the Earth radiates out thermal infrared which then gets back radiated. In bog standard real world physics, short wave don’t do this, it is the thermal energy from the Sun, the Sun’s heat, thermal infrared, which is the main heating agent of matter. In real world physics, this difference of category is simply called Light and Heat.
Light, we cannot even feel. If we can’t feel it, how then is it heating us up? It can’t, the study of Light is optics, the study of Heat is thermodynamics, that should give one an inkling that there’s something not quite right in the AGWSF ‘energy budget’… Heat is transferred in three ways, conduction, convection and radiation. Heat and thermal infrared, radiation, are synonymous, the thermal infrared radiation coming to us from the Sun is Heat, not Light, it is the Sun’s thermal energy on the move from the hotter to the colder, etc. They’ll try and bamboozle by saying that its ‘all radiation and doesn’t become heat until etc.’ because they don’t want you to explore this in classic physics which says it is the Sun’s thermal energy on the move to us as radiated heat.
AGWSF had to create an imaginary ‘all radiated energy is the same and it all creates heat’ so they can push this idea of carbon dioxide ‘warming’ the Earth only from that which the Earth radiates, they have created a fictional fisics that Light is a Heat energy. They have given the properties of thermal infrared, heat, direct from the Sun, to their fictional fisics ‘solar/shorwave/visible/. The greenhouse cartoon.
Most of the arguments you will find here and elsewhere between pro and con AGW work from the basis of this fictional world created the AGWSF’s ‘science’ department. It has been introduced into the education system, so a whole generation now think that shortwave visible Light from the Sun heats the Earth, the floor of their greenhouse cartoon, and, that no thermal infrared, heat, from the Sun reaches the surface, only that sent up by the heated surface which then gets ‘trapped’ by greenhouse gases.
The arguments pro this fictional energy budget of an imaginary world become quite convoluted as the AGWSF department dealing with this has become quite expert in ducking and diving by mixing up properties and taking laws out of context…, and producing half-arsed ‘experiments’ to prove their fictional fisics.. Anthony took at look at one of Gore’s, the magicians sleight of hand. Because these take in a huge range of science disciplines, it’s not easy to spot. But if you read enough of the arguments you’ll find applied scientists will spot them in their own field, some of these have already been collated, Jo Nova and Lucy Skywalker among many others, and of course on this site if you look through the discussions you’ll see the main arguments, but, there is a great reluctance to confront the fact that the actual basics of the ‘energy budget’ is fictional fisics in the detail. It’s not an easy thing to contemplate.
So, if Light can’t heat water what happens to its energy is explored mainly through optics, by Light we see the world as the colours we see are those reflecting back from an object into our eyes, and through biology, the Light energy becomes chemical energy in the production of sugars in photosynthesis, and now we have a proliferation of Light energies being used to create electricity, in photovoltaic cells, and not to be confused with the thermal infrared heat from the Sun systems which heat water. Although there are some trying to marry the two together to better produce electricity. Extending that to the short wave either side of Visible, UV and Near IR, (the Solar of their energy budget), UV enables Vitamin D production in our bodies and both have uses in industry. UV excellent for zapping water to purify it by killing the bacteria for example, near infrared in use in your remote control, and much more. Industry of course, just about, still understands the differences between Heat and Light, it’s only in these arguments where you find such adamant belief that Light is Heat confusion. Through all being reduced to ‘photons’ creating heat, etc.
If water absorbed visible light and heated up by this, we would not have the life that we see around us, life began in the oceans by bacteria taking different colours of visible light for growth, and these evolved into the plant life we have and us. We can see under water because water doesn’t absorb light, stuff in the oceans can, pigments and in photosynthesis etc., but visible energy isn’t used to heat the oceans.
Bob Fernley-Jones says:
…Because I understand the role of convection and have tried to explain it to you multiple times to no avail. You have alas shown no capability to go beyond the thought “Convection…big” and thus you will remain hung up in your ignorance and your mistaken belief that everybody is as ignorant about convection as you.
This isn’t the only thread where you have displayed this complete lack of understanding. In the threads about N&Z, you were completely incapable of understanding the difference between how N&Z treated convection and how it should be correctly treated even though it is very basic and straightforward stuff. All that I can conclude is, like Myrrh, you are incapable of understanding anything that goes against what you want to believe.
Smokey says (February 9, 2012 at 5:44 pm): “I had a 500 mw green laser that would easily pop balloons, burn cardboard, etc. [It burned out after about an hour’s total use; made in China.]
Here is a 1,100 milliwatt purple laser. And for those so inclined, a death ray.”
Smokey, stay away from my grandkids. Seriously. Or I’ll hit you with…er…
I was going to threaten him with a baseball bat, but we all know I’d have to pre-heat the bat above his body temp to do any damage. 🙁
Oh, do stop with the lasers, how is that like Visible light from the Sun? And Gary, if you can’t explain what you’re talking about in English, then you don’t know what you’re talking about, so some great scientist said, I paraphrase…
So, prove that heat travels from colder to hotter.
Gary Hladik says:
Yeah…Good luck with that! Myrrh has shown himself to be remarkably impervious to any knowledge that might threaten what he has decided that he wants to believe. I now just ignore his posts as it is really completely useless to try to engage with him.
Myrrh says (February 9, 2012 at 6:09 pm): “Oh, do stop with the lasers, how is that like Visible light from the Sun?”
Whoa!
Myrrh, how is green light from a laser pointer different from the green component of sunlight? More specifically, how is a 532 nm photon from a green laser pointer different from a 532 nm photon from the sun?
“And Gary, if you can’t explain what you’re talking about in English, then you don’t know what you’re talking about, so some great scientist said, I paraphrase…”
Since I’ve used nothing but English, I interpret this as a complaint about unfamiliar technical terms (e.g. “Kelvin”) and concepts. I’ve tried to put it in layman’s terms (I’m pretty much a layman myself), but discussion of radiative energy transfer absolutely requires a minimal scientific background.
So let’s start at the beginning. It’s a warm summer evening in ancient Greece…
“So, prove that heat travels from colder to hotter.”
Net radiative energy transfer is from a warmer body to a cooler one. Gross radiative energy transfer is bidirectional. Net traffic flow in the morning rush hour is from houses to businesses, but gross traffic flow is in both directions (e.g. homeward bound graveyard shift). A profitable business has a net cash flow in, but its gross cash flow is both in and out. The sentence “prove that heat travels from colder to hotter” is a gross oversimplification, because I’ve always agreed that net flow is warmer to colder. 🙂
Myrrh says:
February 9, 2012 at 6:03 pm
agfosterjr says:
February 9, 2012 at 2:51 pm
Myrrh, if light can’t heat water, what happens to its energy? It just disappears? Don’t you believe in conservation of matter and energy?
What happens when you switch off a light?
==============================================================
The energy is interrupted. No connection whatever to light absorbed in water, which is necessarily converted to heat. And you also think CO2 hangs around the surface because it’s heavy. You really don’t have much of a scientific background, do you?
But we are all ignorant, and in many ways. All electric heaters are 100% efficient, but few figure that out. To claim the contrary one must provide an alternative form of energy waste besides heat. Motors, transformers, etc., lose energy to heat; so what does a heater lose energy to? Nothing.
Light doesn’t hurt at natural levels, but I’m sure you’re unaware that lenticular microscopic magnification is limited primarily by the heat involved in providing sufficient light to supply the magnification. That is, for every multiple of enlargement you need an equivalent multiplication of illumination. But this illumination necessarily involves heat which destroys the sample to be viewed. Lasers are just intense light, and they can burn holes right through you.
Cold clouds prevent frost, and CO2 heats things up, or at least tries to. It also cools the upper atmosphere. But you probably deny that too. Skeptics like you don’t help our cause at all.
–AGF
Joel Shore says (February 9, 2012 at 6:22 pm): “Yeah…Good luck with that! Myrrh has shown himself to be remarkably impervious to any knowledge that might threaten what he has decided that he wants to believe. I now just ignore his posts as it is really completely useless to try to engage with him.”
As a veteran of many internet argu–er, discussions, I had no illusions about convincing anyone. I joined and continued the discussion for the following reasons:
(1) To test and clarify my own general understanding of radiative energy transfer (“that which does not refute my hypothesis makes it stronger”). Plus, over the last few days I’ve consulted a number of sources and learned a lot of neat stuff.
(2) To gain a better understanding of a particular fringe view of physics. Thank you very much, Joel, for your “elevator” version of Claes Johnson’s “theory”. And thank you, Myrrh, Doug, Smokey, and everyone else for contributing to the discussion (some more than others).
(3) To discover the most effective “layman’s arguments” for/against this fringe physics. I posed my questions both to identify believers’ fundamental tenets and to see which questions would not be answered–I assumed those were the most effective arguments against. Smokey was very helpful with the former (photons may “know” the temperature of their source), and Myrrh has so far been helpful with the latter. Again, thanks to all participants.
(4) To have fun. I even got to link to a relevant Big Bang Theory clip. I’m going to hit “Post Comment” and go watch it again. 🙂
Gary Hladik @ February 9, 5:13 pm
Gary,
I and others like you, some months ago, thought that we could convince Myrrh that his/her crusade that visible light was not thermal EMR was crap, and we thought that it could easily be demonstrated as being wrong. This was despite other earlier victims cautioning that that Myrrh was impervious to scientific logic in this area, and had persisted on it over a long period.
May I recommend from my experience, that you not engage with Myrrh on this matter, and employ your time on more useful stuff. (although apart from this quirk, he/she does sometimes come-up with some other interesting stuff).
The logical stuff you have presented to Myrrh has been tried by others to no avail, and some other things that come immediately to mind are:
• The total solar spectrum is commonly measured In W/m^2. Why pray when visible light almost disappears at around 100m depth in the oceans, does that energy, according to Myrrh, just vanish. (uh? what about conservation of energy?)
• IR blocking glass, e.g. automotive is available, and Myrrh was invited to conduct an experiment, but maybe he/she can’t afford the cost and effort?
• When one walks barefoot on tarmac (blacktop pavement) on a hot day, it can be painfully hot because black in visible light is highly absorptive to visible light. Whilst say white sand is typically cooler because it reflects a lot of visible light, whilst still being black to IR.
But then, some physicists/climatologists exclusively refer to long-wave radiation as thermal radiation….. groan
Bob Fernley-Jones says (February 9, 2012 at 8:33 pm): ” Gary, I and others like you, some months ago, thought that we could convince Myrrh…”
Your first mistake. 🙂 BTW, was it this thread? Some WUWT posters have the patience of Job:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/13/a-conversation-with-an-infrared-radiation-expert/
As I responded to Joel, I didn’t go into the current discussion thinking I might convince anyone. I went into it for what I could get out of it, though I had a small net gain on a large gross investment. 🙂
“May I recommend from my experience, that you not engage with Myrrh on this matter, and employ your time on more useful stuff.”
I appreciate the advice. As I see it, both you and Myrrh have contributed to my education, though in different ways. 🙂
Joel Shore @ February 9, 6:03 pm
Putting aside your gobbledegook and cherry picking, perhaps I’ll try a different quick approach. According to the Trenberth cartoon, with units of W/m^2:
• HEAT loss from the surface via radiation; absorbed by the atmosphere and clouds = 23
• HEAT loss from the surface via thermals + evapotranspiration = 97
The latter 97 resolves into radiative effects at various levels in the sky.
You continue to evade my core questions. Can I thus interpret that you think the Trenberth claims are crap?
Oh BTW you also made some claims of what you think I understand about N & Z’s treatment of convection. BUT, I have no recollection of discussing it, and hold an open mind on their theory, having raised a few queries and having made a suggestion for fuller justifications, and still waiting for their part 2.
WRT Myrrh, I don’t think you should compare me with his unique bizarre hypothesis on visible light. See my comment to Gary Hladick near above.
Gary Hladik @ February 9, 9:11 pm
Gary, if you persist, I suspect you will need more than the patience of Job. You have been warned, just as I and others have, and I guess that was on more than four threads, over a long period!
Gary Hladik says:
February 9, 2012 at 7:51 pm
You tend to treat the energy being transmitted by EM radiation as if it were thermal energy itself. Not so, of course, and hence you can’t just take a difference between two beams of light or other radiation and talk about net radiation. For a start the beams are really at all difference angles and may or may not be polarised. They do not normally cancel out.
When considering temperatures, it is invalid to add or subtract any energy in radiation until it is converted to thermal energy. Then you can add that thermal energy to whatever is already there. But you cannot assume all radiation will be converted to thermal energy when it strikes something. It can be transmitted, reflected, diffracted, deflected or scattered. It will only be converted to thermal energy if its peak frequency is above the peak frequency being emitted by the surface it strikes. So it has to come from a warmer source. If this were not so, then indeed any radiation could heat anything: so just stand outside at night and enjoy a hot “shower” in all that radiation going up and down. The longer you stand there the more you would absorb.
Hence thermal energy is not carried along in both directions when there are opposing beams of radiation. Only radiated energy is carried along. Thermal energy merely appears to be transferred but in fact it simply reappears only in a colder surface when the radiated energy is converted to thermal energy. At no point was it in existence anywhere along the way, so in that sense it does not travel. It is a bit like your voic being broadcast on radio waves and only appearing under certain conditions in a radio receiver.
Laser emission is actually difference, because it is stimulated emission. We do find that, for example, 10.6 micron carbon dioxide lasers can melt metal when cutting it. This could not be done with normal spontaneous emission from carbon dioxide at atmospheric temperatures. Why is it so? My best guess is that it is because the intensity is such that the photons arrive faster than the resonating frequencies of the metal, so it can’t re-emit fast enough and has to convert the surplus to thermal energy because of the “chaos” created. Effectively the metal is then also undergoing stimulated emission, but the extra photons continue inwards and must cause warming.
Joel Shore @ February 9, 6:22 pm
CC Gary Hladik
Joel,
I agree with you concerning Myrrh’s preposterous conviction about visible light not being thermal EMR, but he does sometimes come-up with some other interesting points.
We have some expressions in Oz for people who talk too much, such as:
• …talks like a threshing machine.
• …has verbal diarrhoea.
I suspect that Myrrh suffers from a condition of keyboard diarrhoea, and as a consequence one might go past his good points buried in a mountain of verbiage.
(continued)
Because the energy in radiation from a cooler atmosphere cannot be converted to thermal energy when it strikes a (significantly) warmer surface, you have no thermal energy to affect either the rate of cooling each evening or the rate of warming each sunny morning.
So any such radiation from the atmosphere cannot in any way affect the temperature of the surface, or indeed the warmer areas of the atmosphere below the cooler level from which it was emitted. OK, there may be some rare weather conditions that result in warmer air a little above the surface, but these situations would be insignificant and have been happening since the Earth formed.
It should be clear from the above that a radiative greenhouse effect is a physical impossibility in the atmosphere..
If you don’t accept this, then you need to set up or find some experiment which actually demonstrates the opposite and actually shows thermal energy appearing to transfer from a cooler body to a warmer one. There is no middle ground. Either it happens or it doesn’t. You could have metal plates isolated in a vacuum container or some similar set up. As far as I can determine, this has never been achieved, yet the IPCC are in effect saying it is happening al the time as their “backradiation” slows the rate of cooling of the surface, and must also increase the rate of any warming.
The IPCC propagates this garbage, so they should attempt to prove it empirically. Their faces will be the only things warming.
Doug Cotton says (February 9, 2012 at 10:16 pm): “Laser emission is actually difference [different], because it is stimulated emission. We do find that, for example, 10.6 micron carbon dioxide lasers can melt metal when cutting it. This could not be done with normal spontaneous emission from carbon dioxide at atmospheric temperatures.”
(With apologies to Joel and Bob) So, Doug, you’re saying that a 10.6 micron photon “stimulated” from a CO2 molecule is somehow different from a 10.6 micron photon “spontaneously” emitted from the same molecule? And the target can tell the difference, absorbing energy from one but not the other?
Doug Cotton says (February 9, 2012 at 10:45 pm): “Because the energy in radiation from a cooler atmosphere cannot be converted to thermal energy when it strikes a (significantly) warmer surface…”
“Significantly warmer”? Careful, Doug. If you admit that radiation can warm something that starts even .01 degrees warmer than the source, your whole position crumbles. It’s like the proverbial woman who’ll sleep with her date for a million dollars but not for fifty. We know what she is, she’s just haggling over the price. 🙂
“If you don’t accept this, then you need to set up or find some experiment which actually demonstrates the opposite and actually shows thermal energy appearing to transfer from a cooler body to a warmer one. There is no middle ground. Either it happens or it doesn’t.”
As I pointed out before, neither I nor Dr. Spencer has anything to gain by actually performing his “Yes, Virginia” thought experiment. We would only confirm what (nearly) everybody already knows, and are unlikely to convince fringe physics fans who already den–er, disbelieve other “experiments” such as lasers and infrared cameras.
On the other hand, Dr. Latour, Claes Johnson, et al. have everything to gain and absolutely nothing to lose by performing the experiment. If it works as they expect, Nobel Prize and scientific immortality await.
Excelsior!
Ah yes, the don’t talk to Myrrh, because you’re scared to face the reality that you’ve been conned, big time. I bet you’d censor if you could… In fact I came across such a couple of days ago done by someone I’ve argued with about it here, on his own blog he took an answer I had given him here and edited it to make it say ‘I was stumped’ by his question – all I was showing by my two question marks was disbelief that anyone so involved in ‘science’ could think such a thing – he removed my explanation and presented the altered version in a post to someone who said they agreed with me.
So, you just carry on being duped, thinking that no heat reaches us from the Sun and that visible light which works on an electronic transition level heats oceans and land, but maybe there’s someone who will read this who can take that on board and do something with it, the brainwashing of our children through greenie education appears to have very successful. The natural world around is becoming a closed book to you.
Bob Fernley-Jones says:
No…Trenberth’s numbers are fine. It is your huge jump from these numbers to the things that you have been saying that are the problem.
First of all, let’s get Trenberth’s numbers clear: I agree that the surface loses 97 W/m^2 through thermals + evapotranspiration but the net amount it loses due to radiation is 63 W/m^2, with emissions of 396 W/m^2 and absorptions of 333 W/m^2 ( http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/images/radiation_budget_kiehl_trenberth_2008_big_jpg_image.html ).
However, a this shows us what is happening in the current climate. The relevant question is what will happen if we then increase the greenhouse effect. You seem to think that convection (thermals + evapotranspiration) will compensate so you won’t get significant warming. You are wrong because you fail to understand how convection operates, which is to push the lapse rate down toward the adiabatic lapse rate but not beyond. This tells us to what extent convection can compensate. And, the answer is that convection does reduce the greenhouse effect by what it would be in the absence of convection (by about a factor of 2) but it can’t reduce it any further because of the fact that the atmosphere is only unstable to convection as long as the lapse rate exceeds the adiabatic lapse rate. In order for convection to be able to eliminate the greenhouse effect, it would have to be able to push the lapse rate down to zero (i.e., an isothermal profile), as Nikolov and Zeller made it do in their fantasy model.
Let me remind you of our discussion: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/22/unified-theory-of-climate-reply-to-comments/#comment-874616
It is silly to be open-minded about things that are nonsense…Are you also open-minded about the possibility that the Earth is flat, the moon is made out of green cheese, or that the Earth is only 6000 years old? That is equivalent to being open minded on the issue of whether Nikolov and Zeller included convection correctly in the simplest radiative model of the greenhouse effect. It is clear that they didn’t because they essentially tell you that they didn’t (by telling you that they put it in in such a way as to drive the atmospheric temperature profile to be uniform with height). And, it is clear that this mistake is what caused them to conclude that convection gets rid of the radiative greenhouse effect because almost any elementary book in climate science (such as Ray Pierrehumbert’s) will clearly tell you that having a temperature profile where the temperature is colder at the effective radiating level than it is at the surface is a necessary condition to get the radiative greenhouse effect.
Murrh says for me :
February 9, 2012 at 11:24 am
I’ve read yuo previous posts, but don’t understand what you mean(……) ,can you explain it more simply for me?
Here my short explanation:
Regarding the debate about the causes of climate change on Earth, it is my opinion that these phenomena on the Sun with all the accompanying cycles (sunspots, the reconnection of magnetic poles of the Sun, etc..). Need to know:
-the greater mass of celestial bodies (like our Earth), under the effect of internal gravitational forces, creating the discontinuitets of mass, where the protons warp .. The greater depth below the crust, the protons have more mass deformation which is why they lose electrons from the first outer shell and a still from the following shell.This phenomenon leads to the case that the core becomes a neutron-proton means positive charged . Fleed electrons go to the surface of the body and form electric field. Because other factors (we will explain them here), a celestial body has its revolution around the sun and his own spin. The cores give its orientation to the electric field and become magnets. These two powerful magnets (the Sun and Earth) mutualy reacting conduct heat passing through the mass . How? We know what happens in the highly charged body in motion through a magnetic field and the magnet to be rotated in the electric field.
These phenomena are complemented until a certain regularity in all this.
And why the phenomena occurring in the sun with sun spots and other phenomena, it is a separate issue that I have some important data, not only for this discussion. It is very important and this issue can be discassed under contractual obligations.
My conclusion :
All in connection with climate change is under the influence of Sun’s phenomena .
Excuse me for my bad English.
Myrrh says (February 10, 2012 at 3:46 am): “Ah yes, the don’t talk to Myrrh, because you’re scared to face the reality that you’ve been conned, big time.”
Well, I’m still here, but I understand the others’ frustration. It’s just not possible to have a dialog with a pre-recorded TV show. If Myrrh wants to be taken seriously, he could start by answering just one of the questions I’ve asked in this thread (surely he’s not “scared to face” questions). Let’s start with an easy one:
Our sun emits electromagnetic radiation in all directions. Agree or disagree?
Nikola Milovic says:
February 10, 2012 at 10:11 am
Here my short explanation:
Regarding the debate about the causes of climate change on Earth, it is my opinion that these phenomena on the Sun with all the accompanying cycles (sunspots, the reconnection of magnetic poles of the Sun, etc..). Need to know:
-the greater mass of celestial bodies (like our Earth), under the effect of internal gravitational forces, creating the discontinuitets of mass, where the protons warp .. The greater depth below the crust, the protons have more mass deformation which is why they lose electrons from the first outer shell and a still from the following shell.This phenomenon leads to the case that the core becomes a neutron-proton means positive charged . Fleed electrons go to the surface of the body and form electric field. Because other factors (we will explain them here), a celestial body has its revolution around the sun and his own spin. The cores give its orientation to the electric field and become magnets. These two powerful magnets (the Sun and Earth) mutualy reacting conduct heat passing through the mass . How? We know what happens in the highly charged body in motion through a magnetic field and the magnet to be rotated in the electric field.
These phenomena are complemented until a certain regularity in all this.
And why the phenomena occurring in the sun with sun spots and other phenomena, it is a separate issue that I have some important data, not only for this discussion. It is very important and this issue can be discassed under contractual obligations.
My conclusion :
All in connection with climate change is under the influence of Sun’s phenomena .
Excuse me for my bad English.
Thank you Nikola – I’ve seen some discussions here about the Sun and how this affects global climate, re sunspots and so on, but I’ve not followed them in any depth. Several of them end up being arguments about the process, but I don’t know enough about it to say whether they would interest you or not. You can always try submitting a story here, at the top of the page: http://wattsupwiththat.com/submit-story/
I’m sure if Anthony decides to publish it he will somehow arrange for help with the English.
I sort of took the Sun as we see it, until I read this page: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Sun
I might have been able to follow the discussions better if I’d read it earlier… 🙂
I was particularly taken by the following, I just hadn’t appreciated how we’re all in the Sun’s ‘enclosure’:
“The corona is the extended outer atmosphere of the Sun, which is much larger in volume than the Sun itself. The corona continuously expands into space forming the solar wind, which fills all the Solar System. The heliosphere, which is the cavity around the Sun filled with the solar wind plasma, extends from approximately 20 solar radii (0.1 AU) to the outer fringes of the Solar System. Its inner boundary is defined as the layer in which the flow of the solar wind becomes superalfvénic—that is, where the flow becomes faster than the speed of Alfvén waves. Turbulence and dynamic forces outside this boundary cannot affect the shape of the solar corona within, because the information can only travel at the speed of Alfvén waves. The solar wind travels outward continuously through the heliosphere, forming the solar magnetic field into a spiral shape, until it impacts the heliopause more than 50 AU from the Sun. In December 2004, the Voyager 1 probe passed through a shock front that is thought to be part of the heliopause. Both of the Voyager probes have recorded higher levels of energetic particles as they approach the boundary.”
That, and I hadn’t appreciated before the vastness of the Sun, “accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System” – it made me recall the first arguments I heard between pro and anti AGW, the pro saying that the Sun’s effect on the Earth in its changes, like sunspots, was insignificant while saying that a rise of a trace gas, which even doubling would still be a trace gas, would create run away global warming!
Anyway, good luck with it.
agfosterjr says (February 9, 2012 at 3:24 pm): “Test question for anyone: how efficient is an electric heater? (there is only one answer) –AGF”
Heh heh. Good one.
One good question deserves another. This one I probably would have answered differently before participating in this discussion:
Is it possible, in principle to use a solar furnace to reach a temperature greater than that of the sun’s “black body” temp, about 5,800 degrees K? Obviously there are practical obstacles, but in principle?
Gary Hladik says:
February 10, 2012 at 1:59 pm
Myrrh says (February 10, 2012 at 3:46 am): “Ah yes, the don’t talk to Myrrh, because you’re scared to face the reality that you’ve been conned, big time.”
Well, I’m still here, but I understand the others’ frustration. It’s just not possible to have a dialog with a pre-recorded TV show. If Myrrh wants to be taken seriously, he could start by answering just one of the questions I’ve asked in this thread (surely he’s not “scared to face” questions). Let’s start with an easy one:
Our sun emits electromagnetic radiation in all directions. Agree or disagree?
You’re still not engaging with me on this. When I asked “radiating what”, you come back with it re-worded and still in the increasingly irritating supercilious manner, but now you’ve gone from talking about Warmio and Cooliette to the the Sun!. If you’ve got something to say, say it.
2) I say Cooliet still radiates energy in all directions, including toward Warmio. Agree or disagree?
I can’t agree or disagree if I don’t know what EXACTLY is being radiated.
Tell me what Cooliette is radiating! Remember, you say they are at different temperatures, so, for example, does this affect the kinds of radiation, the different wavelengths?
Is one of their temps as hot as the Sun? If not, why bring the Sun into this?
Joel Shore @ February 10, 7:06 am
Oh dear Joel; more waffle…. have you heard of Ockham’s Razor? (AKA Occam’s)
Firstly, of the 63 W/m^2 of EMR heat loss from the surface, that you identify, 40 is claimed to be radiated directly to space, and is therefore unimportant to this discussion. (Only 23 is claimed to have radiative effects within the atmosphere). In an attempt to make it all even simpler for you to understand, let’s consider just the evapotranspiration (E-T) surface cooling; claimed by Trenberth to be 80, and put aside the 17 cooling from thermals. This means that (E-T) cooling is ~3.5 times greater than from the EMR from the surface that has a radiative effect within the atmosphere. (that may result in feedbacks with increasing co2). According to Trenberth, the (E-T) heat loss escapes to space, presumably resulting from its radiative effects within the atmosphere rather higher up.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that some increase in CO2 results in positive feedback of X. That would prima facie result in a warming, and it is not outlandish to suggest that because of such warming there would be a reactive increase in (E-T). However, the proportional increase required would only need to be 1/3.5, (~29%), for there to be a net result of zero. (the prima facie positive feedback would be matched by a negative feedback)
I’d better stop there so that it does not get too complicated for you.
Bob Fernley-Jones says:
And, therein is where you start to not have a clue. Nobody is arguing the point about whether or not the temperature structure in the atmosphere (e.g., the actual lapse rate in the troposphere) is determined mainly by radiation or convection. It is determined mainly by convection. In fact, if you actually read some textbooks to understand climate science instead of thinking that your background as a retired engineer somehow makes you so brilliant that you have no need to learn the science before you comment on it, you would know of calculations that demonstrate this. For example, in L. Danny Harvey’s book “Global Warming: The Hard Science”, he demonstrates that a 10 W/m^2 increase in surface radiative forcing (i.e., radiation between the atmosphere and the surface) leads to a warming of only about 0.1 C…and it is exactly because convection can compensate for almost all of the radiative forcing change between the atmosphere and the surface.
And, here is where you go totally into misunderstanding. The issue is not that an increase in CO2 leads to an increase in radiative forcing at the surface. The issue is that it leads to an increase in radiative forcing at the top of the atmosphere; that is, the Earth + atmosphere ends up out of radiative balance and it must warm until radiative balance is restored. And, because convection is so much the dominant player in the troposphere, we know how this warming is distributed with altitude: namely, that the warming occurs so that the lapse rate continues to generally be at the (appropriate) adiabatic lapse rate.
Ockham’s razor does not say one should abandon science for simple explanations that are wrong. After all, “God created the Earth 6000 years ago” is probably a good bit simpler than the complicated evolution of the universe, the Earth, and life that we know has actually occurred. However, we don’t believe it to be the more compelling scientific explanation because of the science that we have learned.
And, in fact, I would say that the explanation of how the atmosphere actually works is actually simpler once you understand the correct science than if you try to intuit it by incorrect reasoning. You are trying to figure out what is happening at the surface by getting into a morass of complication of trying to understand a surface energy balance that involves both radiative and convective transport.
The simpler way to understand what happens at the surface is to understand that the top-of-the-atmosphere balance is what should be considered since this necessarily involves only radiation. Once you have solved for this balance, then basic principles, like the fact that the role of convection is to keep the lapse rate in the troposphere close to the adiabatic lapse rate, then allow you to much more easily understand what is going to happen at the surface.
It is amazing to see so much arrogance and ignorance and such stunning displays of the Dunning Kruger Effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect ) on regular display here!
Myrrh says (February 10, 2012 at 4:50 pm): “2) I say Cooliet still radiates energy in all directions, including toward Warmio. Agree or disagree?
I can’t agree or disagree if I don’t know what EXACTLY is being radiated.
Tell me what Cooliette is radiating! Remember, you say they are at different temperatures, so, for example, does this affect the kinds of radiation, the different wavelengths?”
Actually, Myrrh, if you’re qualified to make any kind of contribution to the discussion, you should be able to tell me if black (or approximately black) bodies at different temperatures radiate energy with different distributions of wavelengths.
Hint. The Java applet at:
http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/ntnujava/index.php?topic=427.0
Joel Shore @ February 10, 6:06 pm
Thanks Joel for your 5th major lecture. (and impressively promptly too)! Back in the days of black chalkboards, I remember a single lecturer who did expertly throw chalk-sticks at recalcitrant students, and for some reason I seem to think of him like I do of you. If I may timorously beg a single question:
This GHE thingy, and forcings, and positive feedbacks and stuff. Do they result in warming at the surface?
Thanking you in advance for a straight answer.
Gary Hladik says:
February 10, 2012 at 6:10 pm
Myrrh says (February 10, 2012 at 4:50 pm): “2) I say Cooliet still radiates energy in all directions, including toward Warmio. Agree or disagree?
I can’t agree or disagree if I don’t know what EXACTLY is being radiated.
Tell me what Cooliette is radiating! Remember, you say they are at different temperatures, so, for example, does this affect the kinds of radiation, the different wavelengths?”
Actually, Myrrh, if you’re qualified to make any kind of contribution to the discussion, you should be able to tell me if black (or approximately black) bodies at different temperatures radiate energy with different distributions of wavelengths.
Hint. The Java applet at:
http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/ntnujava/index.php?topic=427.0
———-
Gary – go stuff yourself. I took your question seriously, it’s obvious you didn’t.
Bob Fernley-Jones says:
Yes.
Myrrh says (February 11, 2012 at 1:42 am): “I took your question seriously, it’s obvious you didn’t.”
Thanks, Myrrh. You’ve been very helpful. I look forward to reading your comments on other threads at WUWT.
Joel Shore @ February 11, 4:51 am
Your “yes” response appears to mean that ignoring any other effects, if there is an increase in CO2, an increase in surface T can be expected. Question 2:
With an increase in surface T, would it not be reasonable to expect a reactive increase in evapotranspiration, and that prima facie it would seem to have greater influence than EMR from the surface, in terms of feedbacks?
Monckton has yet to come to grips with the fact that the Second Law of Thermodynamics also applies to radiation, meaning there can be no radiative forcing by any GH effect. Hence, at night for example, the cooling of the surface cannot be slowed by any radiation from the cooler atmosphere. (In fact Prof Nahle’s experiment in Sept 11 proved the lower atmosphere cools faster than the surface at night, as I also found in my backyard.)
In order to slow the rate of cooling of the surface the radiation would have to add thermal energy, just as it would if it were to increase the rate of warming in the morning.
It cannot do this without heat transfer from cold to hot, which is against the Second Law. Johnson merely showed how and why the Second Law applies to radiation. I don’t ask you to accept any more than that simple statement which is also made by these German physicists in a peer-reviewed published paper over 100 pages in length which knocks the AGW conjecture for six.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
“Unfortunately, there is no source in the literature, where the greenhouse effect is introduced in harmony with the scientific standards of theoretical physics.”
Bob Fernley says …”WRT Myrrh, I don’t think you should compare me with his unique bizarre hypothesis on visible light. See my comment to Gary Hladick near above.”
Bob, the only statement in this regard that was curious to me is Myrrh assertion of observing heat resistance glass. I have seen a light meter behind two sheets of glass. In either case the visible light passing through is the same, yet the heat transferred through is different by several magnitudes. Please explain this so that I can fairly assert that the second law is only in regard to the NET transfence of energy and heat.
David @ February 11, 9:08 pm
Hi David,
I’m not sure that I understand your question, but it has been pointed out to Myrrh that ordinary home window glass is a little opaque to infrared, and very transparent to visible light. There is also higher quality glass that is infrared blocking, although if tinted, or reflective surfaced or laminated, it may also be more opaque to visible light such as in automotive applications.
Myrrh’s single person long-standing crusade is that visible light is non-thermal. (or cannot result in heating). It has been suggested to him, (unsuccessfully amongst other things), that he should conduct tests with infrared blocking glass, since he claims that only infrared is thermal. (although, possibly as a result of semantic confusion caused by some climatologists and physicists referring to infrared as if it is exclusively thermal EMR…. groan)
I nowadays only skip through Myrrh’s posts, and only read some bits if I happen to spot something else interesting that he might discuss. Thus I may have missed something of his and the context of your question.
If you could elaborate, I’m happy to respond.
Thank you Bob. Yes I was refering to standing behing one sheet of glass with 1/2 treated to block LWIR and the other half not treated. On the other side is a sun lamp. Placing my hand next to the treated glass I detect no heat. Placing my hand next to the untreated glass, I feel the heat radiating from the sun lamp. Yet the visible light is the same, so the physical operation of heat detection within the human body appears to feel no heat from the visible light.
I do not accept Myrrh thesis. My thought in regard to the oceans is that in the case of SWR insolation is absorbed, over the surface level solar spectrum, at different depths all the way up to 660 to 3,000 feet (200 to 900 meters), where only about 1 percent of sunlight penetrates. This layer is known as the dysphotic zone (meaning “bad light”). I would love to see a chart on the ocean residence time of various solar spectrum, nd athe amount of solar spectrum change from solar cycle to solar cycle..
Bob Fernley-Jones says:
I’ve explained this to you about 10 times in this thread now: Convection (evapotranspiration and thermals) would change in such a way as to keep the lapse rate at the (appropriate) adiabatic lapse rate, which means that indeed the whole troposphere warms, including the surface.
Doug Cotton says:
We have written a comment on that paper explaining why their argument regarding the Second Law is wrong: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/upload/2010/05/halpern_etal_2010.pdf and how all models of the greenhouse effect have the heat flow from warm to cold in agreement with the Second Law. Nobody believes G&T, not even physicists who are “skeptics” like Fred Singer, Robert Brown, etc. It is utter garbage. The only interested question regarding that paper is whether G&T were really that deluded to believe what they wrote or whether they were engaged in intentional deception.
David @ February 12, 3:57 am
I’m a bit puzzled by your findings David. Using your hand as a sensor, it should still feel some heat behind the IR blocking glass, because some 50% of the solar energy will still get through. Try walking on a black pavement in hot sun with bare feet and compare with a light coloured surface. The black surface absorbs most visible light, whereas lighter colours are more reflective. The Earth’s surface is considered to have an absorbancy close to unity in the infrared, regardless of colour. (black)
Joel Shore @ February 12, 5:47 am
Although you have not directly answered my question 2, are you saying yes to it? I’ve added bold emphasis to the last bit to make sure that you understand it.
Bob_FJ says:
February 12, 2012 at 4:29 pm
David @ February 12, 3:57 am
I’m a bit puzzled by your findings David. Using your hand as a sensor, it should still feel some heat behind the IR blocking glass, because some 50% of the solar energy will still get through. Try walking on a black pavement in hot sun with bare feet and compare with a light coloured surface. The black surface absorbs most visible light, whereas lighter colours are more reflective. The Earth’s surface is considered to have an absorbancy close to unity in the infrared, regardless of colour. (black)
———————-
It is hard to know how senstive my hand was, and I do not know the energy spectrum emitted from the lamp, which may be set up to show the heat blocking charteristic as much as possible. (They were selling the product) Yes I have thought of the color albedo effect, and it would appear intuitive that this is a charteristic of reaction to the visible light spectrum, although to be fair I do not know if the LWIR is relatively affected by the color of the material it encounters; I would not think so. perhaps my white hand was reflecting a large portion of a particular visible spectrum.
David@ February 12, 9:28 pm
Oh yes indeed David, that is a very good point that I had overlooked. Maybe your opportunity has gone to check it out, but if you could pigment your hand black you would probably resolve the conundrum.
I remember long ago that amongst some conflicts with a chemistry lecturer who treated us young rebellious engineers with utter contempt, that a perfect way to turn your hand very, very black, was to wet it with silver nitrate (nitride?) solution. However, it takes a long time to lose the consequent embarrassments in public.
David and Bob;
interesting point from a recent article about colours of skin:
It seems that black skin is shiny white in the UV, while light skin is deep black. I.e., melanin reflects UV, thereby protecting the skin’s DNA, etc. But the effect in a UV camera is to switch the dark/light shades!
You’re quoting of the IPCC is deceptive. The chapter states that several radiative forcing amounts were investigated, corresponding with different amounts of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere (as it turns out, how much we emit depends on societal factors, so they decided to cover a number of possible scenarios). So, from the get-go, they are saying that increased CO2 causes increased warming in the Troposphere, an idea supported by basic physics. The climate response to this warming, however, was difficult to predict in 2001 (which is the IPCC report you cite), and is dependent on climate sensitivity and dynamic interactions in the climate system. So if you ask the question, “how will ENSO react to global warming?” we couldn’t (and can’t yet) answer with tremendous certainty. This does not imply, at all, that climate change isn’t happening or that we can’t (today) predict, in a general sense, how it will affect the hadley cells, glaciers, sea level, and, ultimately, humanity. Yes, the science could be better, but it could always be better. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
TM says:
“… increased CO2 causes increased warming in the Troposphere, an idea supported by basic physics.”
Basic physics is insufficient. The prediction of a warming Troposphere, the so-called “fingerprint of global warming”, has been falsified by empirical observations.
Smokey,
Oh c’mon….. don’t confuse us with observational data!
Joel Shore,
As a profound wizard of radiation, could you please provide some entertainment to Smokey and me and others, as to why we are so naïve in this matter?
Brian H @ February 14, 2012 at 1:51 am
Isn’t nature wonderful? Vitamin D is thus miraculously balanced for UV human exposure by latitude. Too little and we get osteoporosis and too much then something else nasty happens that I can’t remember at the moment.
Nah. Vit D overdosing is almost impossible. The couple of recorded cases were victims of manufacturing errors resulting in doses 1000X normal (for about a year), and a couple of weeks off the super-doses cleared the symptoms. Excess sunshine UV just kills skin (sunburn) and sets off melanoma etc. That’s what the melanin is protecting against, not D.
Doug – I’ve just posted something to you on the open thread, I think it’s this number comment: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/11/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-894335
In part here:
Doug Cotton says:
February 15, 2012 at 4:18 pm
When solar radiation (UV, visible and IR etc) travels through space we do not know what its end effect will be until it strikes something. We will observe its effect and say – there’s some light from the Sun – but it may be more light if it hits a white surface than a dark surface, as a camera exposure meter will confirm. It may generate thermal energy (more or less depending on what it strikes) or it may appear as light as it starts to penetrate the oceans, but end up as thermal energy in the deeper depths. Of course some will be reflected or scattered and strike another target sooner or later, and another etc.
==========
Doug, sorry, I couldn’t get back to this earlier, but I’ll pick up from the above you wrote because this clearly shows the problem which creates the confusion, as I see it.
The meme, and it is a meme, produced by the AGWScience Fiction meme producing department, has reduced all electromagnetic energy to a non-differentiated something to better sell it’s propaganda that carbon dioxide has supermolecule powers to change the climate and it’s therefore human’s fault for overproducing it, etc. From this, and from this meme alone, we get the reasoning you’ve given here. Please, take a bit of time to think about, I’m not the cleverest here at explaining such subtleties, so bear with me.
What you are saying is that there is no differences in electromagnetic energy from the Sun, which means that you would have to show how each subject converts that into the particular wavelengths which have the effects these have, this is nowhere shown as happening in the physical world.
……..
WE DO KNOW, how these different packages of energy will interact with the world of matter around us.
…….
You are right about backradiation – and you are quite right to insist on experimental, empirical proof that this is what is actually happening, and you are right that you will never be provided with this because it doesn’t exist – now, as shocking as this is to you, you are doing the same thing with regard to the claims for electromagnetic energy. You cannot prove your scenario, it has never been observed, there are no such mechanisms in place in which matter first creates the particular wavelengths before using them, or before they can have a particular effect on matter.
……
All electromagnetic energy is not the same! For goodness sake, you only have to look at all the many many descriptions and pictures of the differences to see that, they all have different names even! But, once a fictional meme is ‘fixed’, the blindingly obvious becomes invisible..
UV rays direct from the Sun are distincly different from visible light and thermal infrared. There are some overlaps in this, some packages will have properties that are similar to another otherwise completely different package, wavelength, of properties. UV and Visible both work on the electron scale on meeting matter – for one reason because of their size. SIZE is a distinct property and varies with the different packages, do you know how big radio waves are, how small gamma rays are? Until you can appreciate the differences, you cannot say anything about them or how they react on meeting matter.
……..
So, unless you can show in all matter the different mechanisms in place which convert this AGW meme ‘non-differentiated electromagnetic energy’ into its constituent parts and properties and processes, then I suggest you go back to traditional physics on this and see this as the Sun producing different product packages each with their own effects on meeting the diversity of matter around us.
When solar radiation (UV, visible and IR etc) travels through space we do not know what its end effect will be until it strikes something.
Wrong! We do know, we have tons and tons and tons of knowledge about how the different properties of the different wavelengths interact with all the diversity of matter around us.
Brian H @ February 15, 12:36 am
OK, I hesitated to respond, but since it seems that we can wander off-topic here, could I answer your claims above?
There is a consensus understanding that we peoples of the Earth originated in Africa, and today that their current indigenous population has “black” skins. On the other hand their millennial descendants that apparently migrated to the colder NH regions have pale skins, yet according to you, as I read it, there is zero benefit in evolving pale skins.
However, pale skins promote generation of vitamin D, which is essential to avoid osteoporosis.
Wot thinkest thou?
Bob_FJ;
not sure how you “read” that. Pale allows more UV, helps produce adequate Vitamin D. Dark protects cells and DNA, while still permitting enough Vitamin D to be produced (sun is strong and direct 12 months a year in the tropics).
Skins paled as we came out of Africa and headed North, to better absorb the UV which in the northern regions is weaker, and much harder to get in winter. This is a good page on the subject, but particularly notice this: http://www.rense.com/general48/sunlight1.htm
“But these trials of the health benefits of vitamin D supplements are exceptional. Few trials have been made of vitamin D for treatment of diseases other than bone disease because the vitamin cannot be patented and drug companies cannot justify expensive trials which will not lead to profits. However trials of several compounds similar to vitamin D have begun recently for treatment of cancer because these compounds can be patented.”
Sceptics of AGW are already aware of the technique of disinformation from vested interests, something to bear in mind when investigating health remedies – pharmaceutical companies aren’t interested in healing, only in producing something that will ‘alleviate’ symptoms, so keep taking the tablets their mantra.
More on this UV is good for us theme.
http://anthro.palomar.edu/adapt/adapt_4.htm
The following reminded me of something:
“Hippocrates, who is hailed as the father of modern medicine, but whose curative ideas are ignored by our drug-happy culture, built the sanitarium of Hippocrates on the Island of Cos with a large solarium attached to heal with sun rays.
Sol est remediorum maximum – The sun is the best remedy -Pliny the Elder”
(from http://www.raw-food-health.net/sunrays.html)
I don’t recall which ancient Greek said it, but one of them said that doctors were a waste of time if one was ill, the best remedy was to go on a fast. Just in the last few months there’s been a lot on people curing their type 2 diabetes by following a ‘starvation’ diet for a month, starvation being around 500 calories a day for women and 800 for men. The body somehow resets insulin production and no more medication necessary. I don’t know if any type 1 diabetics have tried it, this is found among those under 30 and of ‘childhood’ origin and the process itself not developing properly. Anyway, the Daily Mail has been covering this quite extensively, check it out online if interested.
Myrrh @ February 17, 4:45 am
Thank you for your very interesting links, and I extract the following from towards the end of the first, with my bold emphasis added. Ah, so us CAGW sceptics are not alone in disagreeing with an establishment consensus. (Church) The evidence presented would appear to show that the consensus is in error, but of course there is far too much vested interest in that church.
Unless of course ALL THE AUTHORS have a covert interest in producing and/or selling cod liver oil?
🙂 time to buy stocks?
Or stock up on it, there’s a shortage of cod..
The consensus probably began around the time that sun-blocking creams took over from sun-tanning products. It’s amazing how quickly a consensus can be built when patents run out, or, stocks of flu vaccines have to be shifted. Problem is, we’re stuck with the consequences. My dentist thinks fluoride strengthens tooth enamel.
And I’ve seen a good account of the history advertising was put to use to demonise hemp, had to be done with a name change to marijuana and associated with ‘young white females degenerated by association with blacks taking drugs’, it was a while ago… It’s a cure for cancer, among many other medicinal uses, and makes great cloth, (the original levi jeans), rope, and farmers used it for motor fuel. A lot of industry interests against it at the time.
Maybe ‘consensus’ in all these schemes can be seen for what it is here, artificially manufactured, if more people can wake up to the AGW consensus. It affects us all, we’ve all been duped one way or another by it, except for those knowingly doing the duping, and the reaction against might have momentum because of the great tax rip off and higher fuel prices.
Until then, we can but spread the word.
Bob_FJ says:
Your question looks like a bunch of buzzwords strung together but I will try to answer the gist of what I think you are asking: The temperature distribution within the troposphere, i.e., how the temperature varies with height, is indeed determined most strongly by convection. In fact, you have identified one reason why Nikolov & Zeller’s claim that convection is included incorrectly in climate models is nonsense. The way that is included in at least some of the models takes advantage of the fact that the role of convection in forcing the temperature distribution to the adiabatic lapse rate is dominant.
Nikolov and Zeller, by contrast, incorporate convection completely incorrectly by assuming that it drives the temperature distribution with height to be isothermal! This alone should tell you that they haven’t a clue what they are doing.
It is also important to note that the lapse rate alone does not determine the temperature at the surface. You need another constraint and that constraint is provided by the radiative balance at the top of the atmosphere…i.e., the fact that the temperature has to be on average ~255 K at the effective radiating level. Of course, the location of the effective radiating level is determined by the concentration of elements in the atmosphere that absorb (and emit) IR radiation, in other words, greenhouse gases and clouds.
This is all basic physics that you can read about in a textbook and learn real science rather than clinging to garbage. On the other hand, the garbage may be more to you liking if what you really want is just confirmation of what you want to believe for ideological reasons.
Your call.
Joel Shore February 19, 10:19 am
Joel, you should pay more attention to what the question actually was, and not discuss other issues. Whilst it is certainly important to understand about lapse rates etc, the primary issues with climate change are the surface temperature, near surface temperature, and surface rainfall. (Your repeated divergences to higher tropospheric effects, even throwing in Nikolov and Zeller’s new not yet fully explained hypothesis, does not help the discussion).
I have repeatedly asked you about the Trenberth energy balance cartoon, which shows that heat loss from the surface is over 4 times greater from “convection”, (thermals + evapotranspiration), than via radiative loss that does not escape directly to space. Of the Trenberth numbers, (17 + 80) & 23 W/m^2, you have stated, my bold:
Paraphrasing question 2 (a la Trenberth) again:
Evapotranspiration alone is ~3.5 times greater than the surface radiation that results in heating of the atmosphere and clouds. It is entirely reasonable to speculate that if there is an increase in surface temperature, then there would be a reactive increase in evapotranspiration. The latter negative feedback need only be a small fraction of the energy source involved for it to balance out the alleged CO2 driven positive feedback arising from its much lesser energy source.
Of course I cannot advise the respective magnitudes, just as your repeated divergent advice gives no indication of scale. I’ve also pointed out that there is an apparent lack of research on evapotranspiration, whilst everyone seems to compete on the lesser radiative effects.
I hope you understand the question better now, and would appreciate your advice.
Bob_FJ says:
It is only reasonable to assert this if one is making an argument out of ignorance rather than an argument based on understanding the physics involved.
The only lack of research on this is a lack of research by you to understand what is known. That would be sort of excusable if you had to go and read that research by yourself but since I am spoon-feeding it to you and yet you are still ignoring it as “repeated divergences”, one can only assume that this can be attributed to your apparent difficulty of grasping anything that might challenge what you want to believe.
It is clear that you would prefer to remain ignorant and say in essence, “Whoa is us! We don’t understand anything about evapotranspiration and therefore it must entirely cancel out any radiative effects that I don’t like.” Fine…If by “we” you mean only yourself, then you are correct.
Joel Shore says:
February 19, 2012 at 6:40 pm
“The only lack of research on this is a lack of research by you to understand what is known.”
What we do know is that total wind has increased by 30% over 150 years.
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/global/fletcher.htm
Now, Joel, what does that do to evapotranspiration. Entirely rethorical question, you don’t have to answer.
DirkH @ February 19, 10:09 pm
Gee Dirk, don’t expect a direct (non-evasive) answer from Joel to your lucid statement!
That is a big paper that you cite to wade through, but what I can say from experience of nature as a now retired ardent back-country/ cross-country snow skier in Oz is that I have frequently observed the effect of wind on the sublimation and melting of snow, such as on predominantly windwardly exposed slopes, or more generally when there has been a period of particularly high winds. (more noticeably towards the end of the season)
An analogy is the cooling system on automobiles where airflow through the conventional cooling radiator is encouraged by venting and with a cooling fan.
If Joel reads this, I hope he does not get too confused…. It is a tad complicated for an academic physicist.
Bob_FJ says:
February 19, 2012 at 4:20 pm
Paraphrasing question 2 (a la Trenberth) again:
Evapotranspiration alone is ~3.5 times greater than the surface radiation that results in heating of the atmosphere and clouds. It is entirely reasonable to speculate that if there is an increase in surface temperature, then there would be a reactive increase in evapotranspiration. The latter negative feedback need only be a small fraction of the energy source involved for it to balance out the alleged CO2 driven positive feedback arising from its much lesser energy source.
Of course I cannot advise the respective magnitudes, just as your repeated divergent advice gives no indication of scale. I’ve also pointed out that there is an apparent lack of research on evapotranspiration, whilst everyone seems to compete on the lesser radiative effects.
===============
The research is well established, evotranspiration by its name shows it is the Water Cycle (evaporation and transpiration), and this has the effect of lowering temperature by 52°C from the 67%deg;C it would be in our atmosphere without water.
Earth without any atmosphere: -18°C
Earth with atmosphere as we have it: 15°C
Earth with our atmosphere but minus water: 67°C
Think deserts, without the water cycle, without evotranspiration, that would be the temperature of Earth.
Conclusion: water vapour the main greenhouse gas cools the Earth.
Note the sleight of hand here: what they have done is take the difference between -18°C which is temp for Earth without an atmosphere and used the difference between that and the final temperature of 15°C, 33°C, to claim that ‘greenhouse gases add warming’; this deliberately takes out the water cycle because they would have no story to claim that greenhouse gases warm the planet if they included it.
They’ve taken out the Water Cycle, and, carbon dioxide is fully part of that.
Carbon dioxide and water vapour spontaneously join up again to form carbonic acid – all rain is pure clean carbonic acid, as is fog, dew. As the lighter than air anyway, but even lighter because absorbing heat from the Earth’s surface, water vapour rises and condenses out into rain or ice in the colder heights of the troposphere, it is doing so together with carbon dioxide. Any ‘warming’ carbon dioxide does is insignificant against the Great Cooling of the Water Cycle.
Any ‘warming’ carbon dioxide does is insignificant against the Great Cooling of the Water Cycle.
Your discussion for me all the more appropriate debate among gynecologists to discuss the normal conception in the womb and does not know that it is ectopic conception. And so these discussions are experiencing a shortage of the real causes that lead to climate change.
Return to the laws of nature.
Nikola – this debate isn’t about climate change, it’s about the claim that ‘carbon dioxide creates global warming and it’s all man’s fault and it will be a disaster’ – ‘climate change’ is what it’s now called because they had to change it when global warming stopped but the propaganda had to continue…
They created a fictional science to promote the AGW scare, most of the arguments are about this.
ALL,
I’m moving my comments to another more appropriate thread here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/18/the-world-wont-stop-having-climate-cycles-just-because-they-are-inconvenient/#comment-898199
Well, I must thank Christopher Monckton and many commenters for a good chuckle.
Monckton’s article criticises and rebuts comments in a post he attributes to John Cook of Skeptical Science, mentioning Cook’s name over and over again. Scores of comments follow, dumping on John Cook and congratulating Monckton for besting him.
The hilarious thing is that the SkS post was not written by John Cook.
So not only did Monckton fail to get the simplest, most basic fact of his reply right*, his legion of followers – all of them – blindly followed his lead. Not one of them appears to have done the properly skeptical thing and checked the source for Monckton’s post above.
If you can imagine lemmings high-fiving each other as they plummet, that’s what’s making me guffaw.
(If you want something more substantive, SkS has provided a link to Monckton’s article above, and a rebuttal – not sure if I’m allowed to post links to SkS – the title is “Monckton Misrepresents Scientists’ Own Work (Part 1)”. That post brought me here)
* Well, Monckton did get his own name right, so maybe I was a bit over the top there. 😉