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.
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 @ur momisugly 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.”
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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?”
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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