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.
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 @ur momisugly 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 @ur momisugly 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 @ur momisugly 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 @ur momisugly 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 @ur momisugly 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!