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.
Myrrh says (February 10, 2012 at 4:50 pm): “2) I say Cooliet still radiates energy in all directions, including toward Warmio. Agree or disagree?
I can’t agree or disagree if I don’t know what EXACTLY is being radiated.
Tell me what Cooliette is radiating! Remember, you say they are at different temperatures, so, for example, does this affect the kinds of radiation, the different wavelengths?”
Actually, Myrrh, if you’re qualified to make any kind of contribution to the discussion, you should be able to tell me if black (or approximately black) bodies at different temperatures radiate energy with different distributions of wavelengths.
Hint. The Java applet at:
http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/ntnujava/index.php?topic=427.0
Joel Shore @ur momisugly February 10, 6:06 pm
Thanks Joel for your 5th major lecture. (and impressively promptly too)! Back in the days of black chalkboards, I remember a single lecturer who did expertly throw chalk-sticks at recalcitrant students, and for some reason I seem to think of him like I do of you. If I may timorously beg a single question:
This GHE thingy, and forcings, and positive feedbacks and stuff. Do they result in warming at the surface?
Thanking you in advance for a straight answer.
Gary Hladik says:
February 10, 2012 at 6:10 pm
Myrrh says (February 10, 2012 at 4:50 pm): “2) I say Cooliet still radiates energy in all directions, including toward Warmio. Agree or disagree?
I can’t agree or disagree if I don’t know what EXACTLY is being radiated.
Tell me what Cooliette is radiating! Remember, you say they are at different temperatures, so, for example, does this affect the kinds of radiation, the different wavelengths?”
Actually, Myrrh, if you’re qualified to make any kind of contribution to the discussion, you should be able to tell me if black (or approximately black) bodies at different temperatures radiate energy with different distributions of wavelengths.
Hint. The Java applet at:
http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/ntnujava/index.php?topic=427.0
———-
Gary – go stuff yourself. I took your question seriously, it’s obvious you didn’t.
Bob Fernley-Jones says:
Yes.
Myrrh says (February 11, 2012 at 1:42 am): “I took your question seriously, it’s obvious you didn’t.”
Thanks, Myrrh. You’ve been very helpful. I look forward to reading your comments on other threads at WUWT.
Joel Shore @ur momisugly February 11, 4:51 am
Your “yes” response appears to mean that ignoring any other effects, if there is an increase in CO2, an increase in surface T can be expected. Question 2:
With an increase in surface T, would it not be reasonable to expect a reactive increase in evapotranspiration, and that prima facie it would seem to have greater influence than EMR from the surface, in terms of feedbacks?
Monckton has yet to come to grips with the fact that the Second Law of Thermodynamics also applies to radiation, meaning there can be no radiative forcing by any GH effect. Hence, at night for example, the cooling of the surface cannot be slowed by any radiation from the cooler atmosphere. (In fact Prof Nahle’s experiment in Sept 11 proved the lower atmosphere cools faster than the surface at night, as I also found in my backyard.)
In order to slow the rate of cooling of the surface the radiation would have to add thermal energy, just as it would if it were to increase the rate of warming in the morning.
It cannot do this without heat transfer from cold to hot, which is against the Second Law. Johnson merely showed how and why the Second Law applies to radiation. I don’t ask you to accept any more than that simple statement which is also made by these German physicists in a peer-reviewed published paper over 100 pages in length which knocks the AGW conjecture for six.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
“Unfortunately, there is no source in the literature, where the greenhouse effect is introduced in harmony with the scientific standards of theoretical physics.”
Bob Fernley says …”WRT Myrrh, I don’t think you should compare me with his unique bizarre hypothesis on visible light. See my comment to Gary Hladick near above.”
Bob, the only statement in this regard that was curious to me is Myrrh assertion of observing heat resistance glass. I have seen a light meter behind two sheets of glass. In either case the visible light passing through is the same, yet the heat transferred through is different by several magnitudes. Please explain this so that I can fairly assert that the second law is only in regard to the NET transfence of energy and heat.
David @ur momisugly February 11, 9:08 pm
Hi David,
I’m not sure that I understand your question, but it has been pointed out to Myrrh that ordinary home window glass is a little opaque to infrared, and very transparent to visible light. There is also higher quality glass that is infrared blocking, although if tinted, or reflective surfaced or laminated, it may also be more opaque to visible light such as in automotive applications.
Myrrh’s single person long-standing crusade is that visible light is non-thermal. (or cannot result in heating). It has been suggested to him, (unsuccessfully amongst other things), that he should conduct tests with infrared blocking glass, since he claims that only infrared is thermal. (although, possibly as a result of semantic confusion caused by some climatologists and physicists referring to infrared as if it is exclusively thermal EMR…. groan)
I nowadays only skip through Myrrh’s posts, and only read some bits if I happen to spot something else interesting that he might discuss. Thus I may have missed something of his and the context of your question.
If you could elaborate, I’m happy to respond.
Thank you Bob. Yes I was refering to standing behing one sheet of glass with 1/2 treated to block LWIR and the other half not treated. On the other side is a sun lamp. Placing my hand next to the treated glass I detect no heat. Placing my hand next to the untreated glass, I feel the heat radiating from the sun lamp. Yet the visible light is the same, so the physical operation of heat detection within the human body appears to feel no heat from the visible light.
I do not accept Myrrh thesis. My thought in regard to the oceans is that in the case of SWR insolation is absorbed, over the surface level solar spectrum, at different depths all the way up to 660 to 3,000 feet (200 to 900 meters), where only about 1 percent of sunlight penetrates. This layer is known as the dysphotic zone (meaning “bad light”). I would love to see a chart on the ocean residence time of various solar spectrum, nd athe amount of solar spectrum change from solar cycle to solar cycle..
Bob Fernley-Jones says:
I’ve explained this to you about 10 times in this thread now: Convection (evapotranspiration and thermals) would change in such a way as to keep the lapse rate at the (appropriate) adiabatic lapse rate, which means that indeed the whole troposphere warms, including the surface.
Doug Cotton says:
We have written a comment on that paper explaining why their argument regarding the Second Law is wrong: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/upload/2010/05/halpern_etal_2010.pdf and how all models of the greenhouse effect have the heat flow from warm to cold in agreement with the Second Law. Nobody believes G&T, not even physicists who are “skeptics” like Fred Singer, Robert Brown, etc. It is utter garbage. The only interested question regarding that paper is whether G&T were really that deluded to believe what they wrote or whether they were engaged in intentional deception.
David @ur momisugly February 12, 3:57 am
I’m a bit puzzled by your findings David. Using your hand as a sensor, it should still feel some heat behind the IR blocking glass, because some 50% of the solar energy will still get through. Try walking on a black pavement in hot sun with bare feet and compare with a light coloured surface. The black surface absorbs most visible light, whereas lighter colours are more reflective. The Earth’s surface is considered to have an absorbancy close to unity in the infrared, regardless of colour. (black)
Joel Shore @ur momisugly February 12, 5:47 am
Although you have not directly answered my question 2, are you saying yes to it? I’ve added bold emphasis to the last bit to make sure that you understand it.
Bob_FJ says:
February 12, 2012 at 4:29 pm
David @ur momisugly February 12, 3:57 am
I’m a bit puzzled by your findings David. Using your hand as a sensor, it should still feel some heat behind the IR blocking glass, because some 50% of the solar energy will still get through. Try walking on a black pavement in hot sun with bare feet and compare with a light coloured surface. The black surface absorbs most visible light, whereas lighter colours are more reflective. The Earth’s surface is considered to have an absorbancy close to unity in the infrared, regardless of colour. (black)
———————-
It is hard to know how senstive my hand was, and I do not know the energy spectrum emitted from the lamp, which may be set up to show the heat blocking charteristic as much as possible. (They were selling the product) Yes I have thought of the color albedo effect, and it would appear intuitive that this is a charteristic of reaction to the visible light spectrum, although to be fair I do not know if the LWIR is relatively affected by the color of the material it encounters; I would not think so. perhaps my white hand was reflecting a large portion of a particular visible spectrum.
David@ur momisugly February 12, 9:28 pm
Oh yes indeed David, that is a very good point that I had overlooked. Maybe your opportunity has gone to check it out, but if you could pigment your hand black you would probably resolve the conundrum.
I remember long ago that amongst some conflicts with a chemistry lecturer who treated us young rebellious engineers with utter contempt, that a perfect way to turn your hand very, very black, was to wet it with silver nitrate (nitride?) solution. However, it takes a long time to lose the consequent embarrassments in public.
David and Bob;
interesting point from a recent article about colours of skin:
It seems that black skin is shiny white in the UV, while light skin is deep black. I.e., melanin reflects UV, thereby protecting the skin’s DNA, etc. But the effect in a UV camera is to switch the dark/light shades!
You’re quoting of the IPCC is deceptive. The chapter states that several radiative forcing amounts were investigated, corresponding with different amounts of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere (as it turns out, how much we emit depends on societal factors, so they decided to cover a number of possible scenarios). So, from the get-go, they are saying that increased CO2 causes increased warming in the Troposphere, an idea supported by basic physics. The climate response to this warming, however, was difficult to predict in 2001 (which is the IPCC report you cite), and is dependent on climate sensitivity and dynamic interactions in the climate system. So if you ask the question, “how will ENSO react to global warming?” we couldn’t (and can’t yet) answer with tremendous certainty. This does not imply, at all, that climate change isn’t happening or that we can’t (today) predict, in a general sense, how it will affect the hadley cells, glaciers, sea level, and, ultimately, humanity. Yes, the science could be better, but it could always be better. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
TM says:
“… increased CO2 causes increased warming in the Troposphere, an idea supported by basic physics.”
Basic physics is insufficient. The prediction of a warming Troposphere, the so-called “fingerprint of global warming”, has been falsified by empirical observations.
Smokey,
Oh c’mon….. don’t confuse us with observational data!
Joel Shore,
As a profound wizard of radiation, could you please provide some entertainment to Smokey and me and others, as to why we are so naïve in this matter?
Brian H @ur momisugly February 14, 2012 at 1:51 am
Isn’t nature wonderful? Vitamin D is thus miraculously balanced for UV human exposure by latitude. Too little and we get osteoporosis and too much then something else nasty happens that I can’t remember at the moment.
Nah. Vit D overdosing is almost impossible. The couple of recorded cases were victims of manufacturing errors resulting in doses 1000X normal (for about a year), and a couple of weeks off the super-doses cleared the symptoms. Excess sunshine UV just kills skin (sunburn) and sets off melanoma etc. That’s what the melanin is protecting against, not D.
Doug – I’ve just posted something to you on the open thread, I think it’s this number comment: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/11/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-894335
In part here:
Doug Cotton says:
February 15, 2012 at 4:18 pm
When solar radiation (UV, visible and IR etc) travels through space we do not know what its end effect will be until it strikes something. We will observe its effect and say – there’s some light from the Sun – but it may be more light if it hits a white surface than a dark surface, as a camera exposure meter will confirm. It may generate thermal energy (more or less depending on what it strikes) or it may appear as light as it starts to penetrate the oceans, but end up as thermal energy in the deeper depths. Of course some will be reflected or scattered and strike another target sooner or later, and another etc.
==========
Doug, sorry, I couldn’t get back to this earlier, but I’ll pick up from the above you wrote because this clearly shows the problem which creates the confusion, as I see it.
The meme, and it is a meme, produced by the AGWScience Fiction meme producing department, has reduced all electromagnetic energy to a non-differentiated something to better sell it’s propaganda that carbon dioxide has supermolecule powers to change the climate and it’s therefore human’s fault for overproducing it, etc. From this, and from this meme alone, we get the reasoning you’ve given here. Please, take a bit of time to think about, I’m not the cleverest here at explaining such subtleties, so bear with me.
What you are saying is that there is no differences in electromagnetic energy from the Sun, which means that you would have to show how each subject converts that into the particular wavelengths which have the effects these have, this is nowhere shown as happening in the physical world.
……..
WE DO KNOW, how these different packages of energy will interact with the world of matter around us.
…….
You are right about backradiation – and you are quite right to insist on experimental, empirical proof that this is what is actually happening, and you are right that you will never be provided with this because it doesn’t exist – now, as shocking as this is to you, you are doing the same thing with regard to the claims for electromagnetic energy. You cannot prove your scenario, it has never been observed, there are no such mechanisms in place in which matter first creates the particular wavelengths before using them, or before they can have a particular effect on matter.
……
All electromagnetic energy is not the same! For goodness sake, you only have to look at all the many many descriptions and pictures of the differences to see that, they all have different names even! But, once a fictional meme is ‘fixed’, the blindingly obvious becomes invisible..
UV rays direct from the Sun are distincly different from visible light and thermal infrared. There are some overlaps in this, some packages will have properties that are similar to another otherwise completely different package, wavelength, of properties. UV and Visible both work on the electron scale on meeting matter – for one reason because of their size. SIZE is a distinct property and varies with the different packages, do you know how big radio waves are, how small gamma rays are? Until you can appreciate the differences, you cannot say anything about them or how they react on meeting matter.
……..
So, unless you can show in all matter the different mechanisms in place which convert this AGW meme ‘non-differentiated electromagnetic energy’ into its constituent parts and properties and processes, then I suggest you go back to traditional physics on this and see this as the Sun producing different product packages each with their own effects on meeting the diversity of matter around us.
When solar radiation (UV, visible and IR etc) travels through space we do not know what its end effect will be until it strikes something.
Wrong! We do know, we have tons and tons and tons of knowledge about how the different properties of the different wavelengths interact with all the diversity of matter around us.
Brian H @ur momisugly February 15, 12:36 am
OK, I hesitated to respond, but since it seems that we can wander off-topic here, could I answer your claims above?
There is a consensus understanding that we peoples of the Earth originated in Africa, and today that their current indigenous population has “black” skins. On the other hand their millennial descendants that apparently migrated to the colder NH regions have pale skins, yet according to you, as I read it, there is zero benefit in evolving pale skins.
However, pale skins promote generation of vitamin D, which is essential to avoid osteoporosis.
Wot thinkest thou?
Bob_FJ;
not sure how you “read” that. Pale allows more UV, helps produce adequate Vitamin D. Dark protects cells and DNA, while still permitting enough Vitamin D to be produced (sun is strong and direct 12 months a year in the tropics).
Skins paled as we came out of Africa and headed North, to better absorb the UV which in the northern regions is weaker, and much harder to get in winter. This is a good page on the subject, but particularly notice this: http://www.rense.com/general48/sunlight1.htm
“But these trials of the health benefits of vitamin D supplements are exceptional. Few trials have been made of vitamin D for treatment of diseases other than bone disease because the vitamin cannot be patented and drug companies cannot justify expensive trials which will not lead to profits. However trials of several compounds similar to vitamin D have begun recently for treatment of cancer because these compounds can be patented.”
Sceptics of AGW are already aware of the technique of disinformation from vested interests, something to bear in mind when investigating health remedies – pharmaceutical companies aren’t interested in healing, only in producing something that will ‘alleviate’ symptoms, so keep taking the tablets their mantra.
More on this UV is good for us theme.
http://anthro.palomar.edu/adapt/adapt_4.htm
The following reminded me of something:
“Hippocrates, who is hailed as the father of modern medicine, but whose curative ideas are ignored by our drug-happy culture, built the sanitarium of Hippocrates on the Island of Cos with a large solarium attached to heal with sun rays.
Sol est remediorum maximum – The sun is the best remedy -Pliny the Elder”
(from http://www.raw-food-health.net/sunrays.html)
I don’t recall which ancient Greek said it, but one of them said that doctors were a waste of time if one was ill, the best remedy was to go on a fast. Just in the last few months there’s been a lot on people curing their type 2 diabetes by following a ‘starvation’ diet for a month, starvation being around 500 calories a day for women and 800 for men. The body somehow resets insulin production and no more medication necessary. I don’t know if any type 1 diabetics have tried it, this is found among those under 30 and of ‘childhood’ origin and the process itself not developing properly. Anyway, the Daily Mail has been covering this quite extensively, check it out online if interested.