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.
ptw;
cute moniker, and many of your comments are also good, but …
CO2 is used in extinguishers (not “retardants”) because it smothers the fire by squeezing out the oxygen, as a result of being much heavier (especially when cooled by expansion after exiting a pressure nozzle) and “sitting” on the burning surface. Nothing to do with heat capacity. Whatsoever.
Nice work – you sure as hell ‘tore him a new one’ there, m’Lud!
It couldn’t have happened to a ‘nicer’ guy, either. :0)
phinnie the woo says:
February 4, 2012 at 3:25 am
henryP
I quite agree
The sensitive issue of “CO2 is a GHG” is conflated with the fact it has great heat capacity and is used for fire retardants etc.
=====================
Carbon dioxide has for all practical purposes zilch heat capacity, even less than oxygen and nitrogen, which means that when getting heat it releases it instantaneously – you’re confusing with its heaviness I think. It is one and half times heavier than air so displaces oxygen to sink to the ground, that’s why it’s used in fires, it will sink pooling into a thick blanket as it displaces the oxygen – and without oxygen the fire will go out.
Water has a great heat capacity, which means it stores a great deal of thermal energy, taking longer to heat up and so longer to cool down. Carbon dioxide doesn’t have a great heat capacity, carbon dioxide can’t store heat.
Joel Shore says:
February 4, 2012 at 4:38 pm
David says:
The bottom line is the TOA observations do not support positive feedback from additional water vapor”
———————
The bottom line is that the scientists who study the scientific evidence on this don’t agree with you:
A Determination of the Cloud Feedback from Climate Variations over the Past Decade Science 10 December 2010: 1523-1527
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5917/1020.summary
The Radiative Signature of Upper Tropospheric Moistening
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5749/841 Brian Soden Darren Jackson
By the way, as a practical matter, the water vapor feedback are usually not thought of as including clouds, but rather clouds are considered separately. The cloud feedback is truly more uncertain, but it becomes very hard to explain the paleoclimate history if the cloud feedback turns out to be significantly negative.
=======================================================
Joel, not including clouds formation as a result of water vapor feedback is anything but practical if one’s goal is to understand climate. As far as understanding paleoclimate history, well that, like W/V feedback, depends on who does the data and how it is viewed.
The Dressler paper has been well criticized, but as you support Hansen without condition, even in his outlandish prediction of exponential ice melt, then I doubt you accept any criticism with Dressler. Just as with certain consistent errors of many paleoclimate papers, there is some general criticism of the positive W?V feedback papers which have some consistent errors. When you present one side, as if that is the only credentialed viewpoint, you, IPCC like, misrepresent the science. So folk can study this on their own, but the observations do not support your presented view.
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
Richard S. Lindzen1 and Yong-Sang Choi2
1Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, U. S. A.
2Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea
(Manuscript received 23 February 2011; revised 22 May 2011; accepted 22 May 2011)
© The Korean Meteorological Society and Springer 2011
Abstract: We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using
the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs)
and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA)
outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000-
2008) satellite instruments. Distinct periods of warming and cooling
in the SSTs were used to evaluate feedbacks. An earlier study
(Lindzen and Choi, 2009) was subject to significant criticisms. The
present paper is an expansion of the earlier paper where the various
criticisms are taken into account. The present analysis accounts for
the 72 day precession period for the ERBE satellite in a more
appropriate manner than in the earlier paper. We develop a method to
distinguish noise in the outgoing radiation as well as radiation
changes that are forcing SST changes from those radiation changes
that constitute feedbacks to changes in SST. We demonstrate that our
new method does moderately well in distinguishing positive from
negative feedbacks and in quantifying negative feedbacks. In contrast,
we show that simple regression methods used by several existing
papers generally exaggerate positive feedbacks and even show
positive feedbacks when actual feedbacks are negative. We argue that
feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics, and the tropical
feedbacks can be adjusted to account for their impact on the globe as
a whole. Indeed, we show that including all CERES data (not just
from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the
tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the
outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback
response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to
this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric
models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback
response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that
characterize these models. The results imply that the models are
exaggerating climate sensitivity.
Paltridge et al., 2009) found that specific humidity in the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) reanalysis declined between 1973 and 2007, particularly in the tropical mid and upper troposphere, the region that plays the key role in the water vapor feedback. If borne out, this result suggests potential problems in the consensus view of a positive water vapor feedback.
Now please note that none of these papers consider that relative residence time of the solar spectrum changes at the surface. Most importantly they do not consider the change in the balance of LWR vs. SWR entering the oceans, or the residence time there of. A relative reduction in SWR where the majority of energy contained therin bypasses the ocean surface and some one percent of which penetrates from 660 to 3,000 feet (200 to 900 meters) to the dysphotic zone (meaning “bad light”) has a far greater energy change within the earths total system, the effect of which can accumalate for days, weeks, months and years as long as the change persists due to the far greater heat capacity of the oceans, and said change may not manifest on the surface for years.
Where as a small increase in LWIR mostly results in a rapid increase in evaporation and conduction, and a much shorter overall residence time compared to the surface reduction in SWR. So it is well possible that an increase in atmospheric W/V leads to a short term increase in atmospheric T, but a long term decline in energy entering the oceans. Additionally the short term increase in atmospheric energy is likely reduced further by changes in cloud cover and therefore increased albedo.
Evaporation conduction of latent heat may vary far more then realized and set a limit on further tropical temperature increases. (Newell & Dopplick’s (1979) calculations that tropical temperatures cannot rise any further.) Observations since this paper have not contradicted it.)
L. Yu, X. Jin & R. A. Weller, OAFlux Project Technical Report (OA-2008-01) Jan 2008,
“Multidecade Global Flux Datasets from the Objectively Analyzed Air-sea Fluxes (OAFlux)
Project: Latent and Sensible Heat Fluxes, Ocean Evaporation, and Related Surface
Meteorological Variables”.
In comments to a couple of recent threads I tried to raise my objection to trying to reduce the energy budget of the planet to a simple measure of incoming versus outgoing radiation. The basis of those objections is that on Earth, unlike either a S/B blackbody or any of the planets or moons which are used to analogize the Earth, there are substantial energetics ongoing on the planet which are not captured by measurements of radiative flux. One of those energies is the chemical energy required to fuel life. Being beset by a bit of insomnia I decided to see if I could come up with an estimate of what that energy drain might amount to. Since human energy use was likely to be easier to find I decided to start there. At Wikipedia I found this graph
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Per_Person_Energy_Consumption.png
Although not entirely clear from the title this is strictly dietary energy. For those who might question the values shown I would point out that the numbers include not only what is consumed but what is wasted as well. Though slightly out of date the value per person per day is about 2800 kilocalories. From another source I found 1 kilocalorie=4184 joules which X 2800 X 365 X 7 billion yields by my reckoning 3 X 10^19 joules. Data on the energy uptake for the rest of life on the planet is harder to come by, but if we assume that it is only 1000 times human usage we end up with 3 X 10^22 joules. Those of you who have followed Mr. Tisdale’s continuing posts on OHC may recall that the GISS projection for increasing OHC anomaly due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere is 0.7 X 10^22 joules. AFAIK this ongoing subtraction from the energy provided by TSI is not accounted for in any of the calculations of the Earth’s radiative energy budget. At least I’ve never seen it appear in any of the cartoon schematics portraying that budget. If you know differently I am always open to being educated.
In addition to the subtraction due to life, some portion of TSI is converted to kinetic energy to drive the multitude of circulations occurring in the atmosphere and oceans, but I’m not sure I’d be up to that calculation even if I was fresh. However I do think we can safely assume that the value is not trivial and that the result would not show up in measurements of radiative flux
I could not locate John Cooks commentary on his website.
Does anyone have a link to the specific commentary Lord Monckton is replying to?
Doug Cotton says:
February 4, 2012 at 9:50 pm
“Babsy is correct, but you should note that you started talking about emitted power, whereas Babsy was questioning if there was any empirical evidence that radiation from a cooler atmosphere can transfer thermal energy to a warmer surface.”
To be clear, no, I wasn’t thinking that at all. What I was thinking was is there experimental data that demonstrates any difference in absorption of IR of the same wavelength in gasses of different temperatures. Specifically, does a volume of gas containing CO2 at 5*C absorb the same frequency IR as does a volume of gas at 15*C? Is there a difference? Probably not, but is there any experimental data to support the idea? Secondly, after a photon of IR has been absorbed by the CO2 molecule and said molecule now has a different energy state, for how long does the molecule retain the additional energy before it emits a photon and returns to its previous lower energy state? I’m wondering how long the heat is retained in the CO2 before it’s re-emitted to go somewhere else? Does the IR contribute to any ‘long term’ energy increase in the CO2 or does it simply bump up the energy, which is then ( or should be) quickly re-emitted as a new photon with the same wavelength as the previous one, and then continues it’s path into space?
Gentlemen, from your discussions to see that you have too much knowledge and data in this area under discussion. If this knowledge is used in finding the right purpose-radical and the real causes of phenomena in question, then you would be able to decipher all causes . That would be the end inadequate discussions. We have a saying for something that is spoken in vain, that no one of us is offended:
-beat the air ;waste one’s word ;shew the fat; flog a dead horse.
The main causes of all phenomena on the Sun and thus the Earth, not as insignificant as caused by civilization. They affect the much more subtle and subject laws of the Millennium, the changing course of the cycle. These cycles are unknown to us because we are convinced that we overcome the laws of heaven and many of these are convinced, as obsurdity.I remark that all this is the work of magnetic fields, and who generate them, and how to come to negotiate and not to waste time.
Joel Shore says:
February 4, 2012 at 7:17 pm
“Camburn says:
Noting Joel has not responded to either of my posts above.
Your questions are a complete hijack of this thread. Can we talk about one topic at a time? I’ll give you a little hint as to general gist though: The fact that fires can occur naturally is not an argument against the police determination on the basis of strong evidence that a particular fire was caused by arson.
Joel: This thread concerns climate and its dynamics.
Your answer was most difinitive. You did not answer one question.
Thank you.
John Cook’s followers at SkS seem to think John Cook would be willing to participate in an online written debate with Monckton as long as time is given to check and verify references and a neutral venue can be found (Judith?), although Cook himself hasn’t confirmed.
How about it, Lord Monckton, time to throw down the gauntlet?
Babsy says:
February 5, 2012 at 6:28 am
Pierrehumbert ( 2011), Infrared radiation and planetary temperature: Physics Today, states radiation lifetime ranging from a few milli-seconds to a few tenth of a second, and collision time 10^-7 s, suggesting that the thermal transfer process between non-ghgs and CO2 by molecular collisions, is far faster than the heat loss/gain by radiation for CO2. In other words CO2 gains heat by radiation from the surface, in turn heats the non-ghgs via collision.
But this may not be correct.
The equation specifying emission is εσT^4. Therefore an object say at 1000K will emit 10^12 times faster than if it was at 1K, far faster than radiation emission.
There is a formula that can help us determine the emission speed of CO2 at Earth like temperatures, say at 288K. (I will need to locate it, I don’t do the math myself)
AGW_Skeptic says:
Try here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/monckton-myth-17-denniss-debate-part1.html
and: http://www.skepticalscience.com/monckton-myth-17-denniss-debate-part2.html
Ooops a correction to my post at 7:26am
Should read
Dave Wendt says:
Data on the energy uptake for the rest of life on the planet is harder to come by, but if we assume that it is only 1000 times human usage we end up with 3 X 10^22 joules.
Henry@Dave
the figure I found is 0.023% of the total solar energy,
apparently that works out to 8 X 10^18 Joule per day.
1974 (Calvin in: Schenck, Progress in photobiology, Frankfurt)
There has been quite an increase in greenery since then,
which in fact I think I might even be able to correlate to some warming of the planet (heat entrapment)
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
So perhaps your figure is not that bad.
I have never seen a balance sheet either, showing me how much radiative cooling and radiative warming is caused by the CO2 and how much of cooling is caused by the CO2 by taking part in photo synthesis./
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
Joel Shore:
Any time you feel it is appropriate to address my questions from above, I am all ears.
Thank you in advance.
Baa Humbug says (February 5, 2012 at 7:26 am): “Pierrehumbert ( 2011)”
The article is reproduced in full at
http://climateclash.com/2011/01/15/g6-infrared-radiation-and-planetary-temperature/
Roger Pielke says “this is a very informative and valuable article” but has one quibble about its treatment of water vapor feedback:
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/comment-on-raymond-t-pierrehumberts-article-in-physics-today-titled-infrared-radiation-and-planetary-temperature/
Dr Roy Spencer’s backyard experiment is mentioned above but, in my view, is flawed, as explained in an earlier post.
So I went out yesterday and bought a $15 thermometer with a metal spike and conducted my own backyard experiment here in Sydney. I estimate that I shielded about three-quarters of any backradiation (probably roughly equivalent to removing all carbon dioxide and methane plus a bit of WV) and I found no evidence that any backradiation was slowing the rate of cooling of the ground. Just before sunrise the temperatures of the shielded and unshielded ground were each 21.7 deg.C.
Got $15 to try it yourself? The thermometer might be useful for your next barbecue anyway.
I’ve posted the readings at the foot of this page on my website http://climate-change-theory.com/RadiationAbsorption.html
Ian,
You asked what could have caused abrupt changes in the weather at the end of Ice Age – There is one possibility. Be prepared. It is a woozy one.
The plasma storm theory by Robert Schoch ( Ph.D.in Geology and Geophysics at Yale University) – http://www.robertschoch.com/plasma.html. For more information on plasma – http://www.scribd.com/doc/16839562/Characteristics-for-the-Occurrence-of-a-HighCurrent-ZPinch-Aurora-as-Recorded-in-Antiquity-2 and http://www.scribd.com/doc/55090077/Anthony-Peratt-Characteristics-for-the-Occurrence-of-a-High-Current-ZPinch-Aurora-as-Recorded-in-Antiquity
I just happened to come across it when I was doing a research on how you create sculptures out of granite blocks because there are some of them at Pyramids and temples in Egypt. Apparently, it never occurred to archaeologist on how they are created because granite is a very hard stone and it requires specialized tools these day to do the job. They believe the ‘primitive’ people used ‘primitive’ tools to create them. http://www.weltonrotz.com/ts.html Chris Dunn, an engineer, does not believe it. He measured everything and find it astounding that everything is done so accurately. http://www.gizapower.com/
Makes you question everything…
I do apologize for having made an error in calculating one of the climate sensitivities in this posting. I had transposed the result from a paper where sensitivities were rounded to the nearest Celsius degree, but the context to which I transposed it required greater precision. Fortunately, little rested on the error, but I am grateful to Joel Shore for having spotted it.
However, I disagree with him on the distinctionbetween forcings and feedbacks. In the paper from which I had drawn the forcings in an earlier posting here, the values I had used were indeed forcings, being denominated in Watts per square meter, and not feedbacks, which would have been denominated in Watts per square meter per Kelvin. There would of course be much water vapor in the atmosphere even in the absence of greenhouse gases, thanks to evaporation and thermal convection from the surface in the tropics, and this water vapor would cause a substantial forcing.
Gary Hladik says:
February 4, 2012 at 3:48 pm
Myrrrh says (February 3, 2012 at 5:35 pm): “And what’s the mechanism that makes it a net hotter to colder?”
The earth (due to sunshine) is warmer than the upper atmosphere (cooled by radiation to space), so the net radiative flow (leaving out conduction and convection) is from surface to atmosphere, i.e. warmer to cooler. That doesn’t prevent the surface from receiving some of the atmosphere’s radiation, which keeps the surface temperature warmer than it would be in the absence of atmospheric infrared radiation.
Again, when a body emits a photon, the photon doesn’t know if its eventual destination is warmer or cooler than its source; it just…goes. If it helps, consider the “reverse commuter” who’s lucky enough to travel opposite the main freeway traffic flow in the morning. His destination suffers a net population loss during rush hour, yet its population is still one higher than it would be if he stayed home that day.
Nah. You’ve changed the 2nd law by creating this idea that heat can flow from a colder object to a hotter object (‘because photons travel in all directions’) , then with total disjunct, you say that it still obeys the 2nd Law because you’ve introduced this idea of “net” and that this “net” will always be from hotter to colder. But, it’s all just an illogical jumble, where is the mechanism for that net to happen? What is stopping the colder from continuing heating the warmer to make it a net from warmer to colder?
You have introduced an entirely new idea into physics, where is the proof that in heat flow the colder is giving heat to the hotter?
I don’t think any of you who say this know just what it is you’re saying – if it’s true then who is to be awarded the Nobel Prize for such a momentous overturning of a Law..? Who is the first person to have said this?
http://science.kennesaw.edu/~rmatson/3380theory.html
“As used in science, I think that it is important to realize that, in spite of the differences (see below), these terms share some things in common. Both are based on tested hypotheses; both are supported by a large body of empirical data; both help unify a particular field; both are widely accepted by the vast majority (if not all) scientists within a discipline. Furthermore, both scientific laws and scientific theories could be shown to be wrong at some time if there are data to suggest so.”
So, where is the proof that in heat flow, heat is also going from the colder to the hotter, and, what is the mechanism which stops this to give a “net” flow of hotter to colder.?
I might as well tell you now that in exploring this, constantly lauded as modern statistically science ad nauseum, that it turns out to be most likely a ‘stop’ put into statistical calculations to avoid breaking the law… 🙂
Anyway, let’s have it. Show how these photons of heat are travelling from the colder to the hotter.
Gary & Myrrh: Suppose you have an electric radiator (over 1000 watts say) radiating onto a low watt light bulb which we will assume has “glass” which is transparent to IR. Clearly there is more energy being radiated in the direction of the bulb. Will the light bulb absorb some of that radiated energy and hence glow brighter?
No. Because it’s peak frequency (in the visible spectrum) is way above the peak frequency of the radiator. That’s all that matters. Read and understand what Prof Claes Johnsons has already proved. A summary and links are on my radiation page.
It is unclear to me whether the 2nd Law is only statistical, or an absolute Law.
If photons travel at lightspeed, then there is zero subjective time elapsed between their emission and absorption, even if the photon travels across the entire visible universe. It is emitted and absorbed in the same instant, as the photon sees it.
Therefore, it is not inconcevable that the photon ‘knows’ whether it is traveling from a warmer to a cooler atom, or vice versa. If the latter, the photon may just continue on until it encounters a cooler atom than the one which emitted it, thus preserving the 2nd Law.
Experiments have shown that two photons emitted in opposite directions from the same atom ‘know’ the spin of the other, even though they are traveling away from each other at twice the speed of light [as viewed by an outside observer]. So they communicate with each other at lightspeed – or greater. Apparently, instantaneously.
The odds are that I’m missing something. Can anyone educate me?
Myrrh says (February 5, 2012 at 5:52 pm): “Nah. You’ve changed the 2nd law by creating this idea that heat can flow from a colder object to a hotter object…”
Thermodynamics says only that net flow is warmer to cooler. I’ve changed nothing.
“… (‘because photons travel in all directions’)…”
Well, I guess I’m saying that photons don’t change direction to avoid a target warmer than their source. Just to be clear, are you saying that a spherical black body, for example, radiates in all directions except toward a warmer spherical black body? Or something else? BTW, I’m hoping for more than just “because the 2nd Law says so.”
I originally intended to reply point by point, but I think we’d better get this straight first.
Smokey (and others); Read my posts above and/or my ‘Radiation’ page at http://climate-change-theory.com
The “information” about the temperature of the source of the radiation is carried in the peak frequency of that radiation. This frequency is proportional to the absolute temperature of the source, as per Wien’s Displacement Law which is clearly explained in Wikipedia.
Doug Cotton
Doug Cotton says (February 5, 2012 at 7:46 pm): “The ‘information’ about the temperature of the source of the radiation is carried in the peak frequency of that radiation.”
I consulted the black body radiation simulator at
http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/ntnujava/index.php?topic=427.0
The default plot shows, among others, the emission spectra of three black bodies, one at 6,000 degrees K, radiation peak 483.0 nm (call this body “Hottie”), one at 5,500 degrees K, radiation peak 526.9 nm (call it “Warmie”), and one at 5,000 degrees K, radiation peak at 579.6 nm ( call it “Coolio”). Note that all three bodies radiate some energy at 900 nm.
Assume these three black bodies are in a vacuum, not touching, and each has an internal heat source sufficient to maintain it exactly at its particular temperature in the absence of the other two bodies. Hottie and Coolio each emit a 900 nm photon in the direction of Warmio. If I understand Doug Cotton’s web site correctly, he thinks Warmio will reflect Coolio’s photon and absorb Hottie’s. Doug, please correct me if I’m misunderstanding you.
I’m claiming that Warmio, having no way to distinguish the two from each other, will absorb both photons and the energy they carry.
BTW, Dr. Roy Spencer proposed a thought experiment with some similarities here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
The discussion thread was at least as informative as the article, although the signal-to-noise ratio was much lower. 🙂