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.
Is this photon from a cold source something like the photoelectric effect? For those not familiar with it, if a photon has a high enough energy when hitting a particular metal, an electron can be ejected. But if the energy is too low, then no electron is ejected, regardless how many low energy photons may hit it. The low energy photon just does not react in any way with the metal. So is the same thing happening with a “cold” photon? IE, it may affect something colder but just “bounces off” a much warmer surface without warming it more?
And of course I changed Warmie’s name to Warmio in the middle of my comment. *sigh*
Warmio, Warmio, wherefore art thou Warmio?
I suppose I should have named them Mercury-o, Warmio, and Cooliet.
Werner Brozek says (February 5, 2012 at 9:36 pm): “So is the same thing happening with a “cold” photon? IE, it may affect something colder but just “bounces off” a much warmer surface without warming it more?”
A black body is both a perfect radiator and a perfect absorber of electromagnetic radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body
Only if you want to risk being Shaken and Speared. >:(
Gary Hladik says:
February 5, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Myrrh says (February 5, 2012 at 5:52 pm): “Nah. You’ve changed the 2nd law by creating this idea that heat can flow from a colder object to a hotter object…”
Thermodynamics says only that net flow is warmer to cooler. I’ve changed nothing.
“… (‘because photons travel in all directions’)…”
Well, I guess I’m saying that photons don’t change direction to avoid a target warmer than their source. Just to be clear, are you saying that a spherical black body, for example, radiates in all directions except toward a warmer spherical black body? Or something else? BTW, I’m hoping for more than just “because the 2nd Law says so.”
I originally intended to reply point by point, but I think we’d better get this straight first.
You have introduced something new, you’ve introduced that ‘photons radiate in all directions therefore there are photons going from the colder to the hotter and warming the hotter up’ – you’ve destroyed the 2nd law in that, which says that heat always flows from hotter to colder. For a start!
Then, you’ve not shown any proof that photons do this. Then you’ve not shown any mechanism which shows how that “net” from hotter to colder appears! Just suddenly it’s there, the colder to hotter somehow stops to make the flow net from hotter to colder.
That’s all gibberish.
“Well, I guess I’m saying that photons don’t change direction to avoid a target warmer than their source.”
Oh jolly dee, because you say so trumps the 2nd Law.
Climate-Change-Theory says:
February 5, 2012 at 6:53 pm
Gary & Myrrh: Suppose you have an electric radiator (over 1000 watts say) radiating onto a low watt light bulb which we will assume has “glass” which is transparent to IR. Clearly there is more energy being radiated in the direction of the bulb. Will the light bulb absorb some of that radiated energy and hence glow brighter?
Gary is claiming that the light bulb will heat up the radiator.
Gary Hladik says:
February 5, 2012 at 8:50 pm
BTW, Dr. Roy Spencer proposed a thought experiment with some similarities here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
The discussion thread was at least as informative as the article, although the signal-to-noise ratio was much lower. 🙂
For another look at it:
http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/43659.html for an overview
http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still for the detail
Smokey says:
February 5, 2012 at 7:20 pm
It is unclear to me whether the 2nd Law is only statistical, or an absolute Law.
I think what happened here could be another example of the AGW sleights of hand, where laws are taken out of context and properties of one thing given to another and so on. If you’re trying to work something out statistically about heat flow, in engines or whatever, you’d put a ‘stop’ into your calculations that it must obey the 2nd Law, which basically says that energy flows in one direction unless work is done to alter that. I think this ‘because photons travel in all directions’ is just ‘attached’ to the second law, claiming ‘statistics prove it’, and people take it seriously as if it is actually physical reality – hence all the arguments about it. But, no such process has ever been shown to actually happen and in the confusion of it people miss this and, when asked for it, can’t provide any such proof or provide any mechanism for how the process stops to give a net from hotter to colder.
It’s a typical AGWSF trick, like ‘carbon dioxide spontaneously diffuses and thoroughly mixes in the atmosphere’ (regardless that it’s one and a half times heavier than air..) and ‘visible light heats the land and oceans’ (regardless that water is transparent to visible light and light works on electronic transition levels not on vibrational molecular levels, kinetic, as does thermal infrared..). Sometimes they just exclude a natural phenomenon altogether, like taking out of their ‘energy budget’ the complete water cycle which brings down the temperature of earth by 52°C. And no one notices it’s missing!
If photons travel at lightspeed, then there is zero subjective time elapsed between their emission and absorption, even if the photon travels across the entire visible universe. It is emitted and absorbed in the same instant, as the photon sees it.
Therefore, it is not inconcevable that the photon ‘knows’ whether it is traveling from a warmer to a cooler atom, or vice versa. If the latter, the photon may just continue on until it encounters a cooler atom than the one which emitted it, thus preserving the 2nd Law.
Experiments have shown that two photons emitted in opposite directions from the same atom ‘know’ the spin of the other, even though they are traveling away from each other at twice the speed of light [as viewed by an outside observer]. So they communicate with each other at lightspeed – or greater. Apparently, instantaneously.
Fascinating, in that there has to be something going on at that level which holds good to the 2nd Law. AGWSF will throw in that micro level is different from macro, but again without any back up that the law is broken on that level. And,
Werner Brozek says (February 5, 2012 at 9:36 pm): Is this photon from a cold source something like the photoelectric effect? For those not familiar with it, if a photon has a high enough energy when hitting a particular metal, an electron can be ejected. But if the energy is too low, then no electron is ejected, regardless how many low energy photons may hit it. The low energy photon just does not react in any way with the metal. So is the same thing happening with a “cold” photon? IE, it may affect something colder but just “bounces off” a much warmer surface without warming it more?
So it’s still going from hotter to colder, they won’t like that. But, AGWSF (science fiction) doesn’t know the difference between heat and light, between cooler and hotter photons; for them all photons are the same and they all convert to heat on meeting any kind of matter, that’s how they get shortwave visible from the Sun heating the oceans.
I think those arguing for the AGWSF fisics just don’t realise what they’re claiming re the 2nd Law, that they have to show how it is done because their claim is quite extraordinary and has not been shown to exist in all the empirical history of the 2nd law –
http://www.ftexploring.com/energy/2nd_Law.html
“Energy flows from a higher temperature to a lower temperature (heat flow).
Energy flows from a higher pressure to a lower pressure (expansion).
Energy flows from a higher voltage potential to a lower voltage potential (electric current).
Energy flows from a higher gravitational potential to a lower gravitational potential (falling objects).
Marbles and trucks roll downhill.
Water flows and falls from higher elevation to a lower elevation (downhill).
And last, but not least, chemical reactions proceed from higher concentrations of molecular bond energy to lower bond energies.”
They really don’t know they’ve overturned the natural order of the universe!
Myrrh says (February 6, 2012 at 2:54 am): “You have introduced something new, you’ve introduced that ‘photons radiate in all directions…”
OK, I think we’re zooming in on our area(s) of disagreement.
Two spherical black bodies, or reasonable facsimiles:
“Warmio”, with a constant internal heat source sufficient to maintain it indefinitely at a temperature of 900 degrees K when it’s alone in a vacuum chamber.
“Cooliet”, with a constant internal heat source sufficient to maintain it indefinitely at a temperature of 500 degrees K when it’s alone in a vacuum chamber.
Start with Cooliet alone in the experimental vacuum chamber
(1) I say Cooliet radiates energy in all directions. Agree or disagree?
Assuming “agree”, we now add Warmio to the chamber.
(2) I say Cooliet still radiates energy in all directions, including toward Warmio. Agree or disagree?
“For another look at it:
http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/43659.html for an overview
http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still for the detail”
Yes, I read the second one.
Smokey says (February 5, 2012 at 7:20 pm): “It is unclear to me whether the 2nd Law is only statistical, or an absolute Law.”
From Wiki, “Thermodynamic equilibrium is a condition of systems which are adequately described by only macroscopic variables. Every physical system, however, when microscopically examined, shows apparently random microscopic statistical fluctuations in its thermodynamic variables of state (entropy, temperature, pressure, etc.).”
For context, read the page at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
“Experiments have shown that two photons emitted in opposite directions from the same atom ‘know’ the spin of the other, even though they are traveling away from each other at twice the speed of light [as viewed by an outside observer]. So they communicate with each other at lightspeed – or greater. Apparently, instantaneously.”
I looked that up and found this page:
http://library.thinkquest.org/C008537/cool/bellsinequality/bellsinequality.html
Weird stuff, eh? BTW, the example was the decay of a neutral pion into two photons of opposite spin.
Not sure how Bell’s Inequality relates to this thread, unless we can identify a physical property of the photon that encodes the temperature of its source.
Myrrh says:
February 6, 2012 at 2:54 am
It’s a typical AGWSF trick, like ‘carbon dioxide spontaneously diffuses and thoroughly mixes in the atmosphere’ (regardless that it’s one and a half times heavier than air..)
===================================================================
So you think you know how to separate gases gravitationally? All the argon stays low? O2 and N2 don’t weigh the same–why don’t they separate out? Do you think you can put CO2 in the bottom of a big vertical pipe, and He in the top, and they won’t mix? That’s funny.
CO2 certainly does diffuse spontaneously, and the extent to which it does not thorougly mix in the atmosphere has little to do with its molecular weight. O3 is heavier than O2, but it manages to diffuse eventually. Gravity becomes a negligible force against mixing once the wind has stirred things up. It is always negligible against molecular diffusion. –AGF
Gary Hladik,
I’m still reading this fascinating email exchange that you linked to through John O’Sullivan. Will respond when I’ve finished.
Gary Hladik says:
February 5, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Thermodynamics says only that net flow is warmer to cooler. I’ve changed nothing.
Mr. Hladik, I think you confuse heat transfer and thermodynamics.
Zeroth law: if A = C and B= C then A=B
1st law : Q=U+ W
2nd law: S=Q/T
3rd law : S=0 if T=0K
These are simple but none say anything about net flow.
mkelly says (February 6, 2012 at 1:22 pm): “Mr. Hladik, I think you confuse heat transfer and thermodynamics…These are simple but none say anything about net flow.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer
“When an object is at a different temperature from another body or its surroundings, heat flows so that the body and the surroundings reach the same temperature, at which point they are in thermal equilibrium. Such spontaneous heat transfer always occurs from a region of high temperature to another region of lower temperature, as required by the second law of thermodynamics.” [emphasis added]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
“Second Law…When two isolated systems in separate but nearby regions of space, each in thermodynamic equilibrium in itself (but not necessarily in equilibrium with each other at first) are at some time allowed to interact, breaking the isolation that separates the two systems, allowing them to exchange matter or energy, they will eventually reach a mutual thermodynamic equilibrium.”
As I understand it, net transfer of heat from warmer to cooler (establishing equilibrium) is an inescapable consequence of the 2nd Law.
But I don’t really care if it’s technically thermodynamics or something else. Radiative transfer of energy from a cooler to a warmer body doesn’t violate known laws of physics, because the net flow is warmer to cooler, in the direction of establishing equilibrium.
Gary Hladik says:
February 6, 2012 at 1:56 pm
Radiative transfer of energy from a cooler to a warmer body doesn’t violate known laws of physics, because the net flow is warmer to cooler, in the direction of establishing equilibrium.
========================================================================
Smokey’s reference proves you wrong, as far as I can tell — see Latoure at http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still?showall=1
–AGF
agfosterjr says (February 6, 2012 at 2:51 pm): “Smokey’s reference proves you wrong, as far as I can tell.”
That reference asserts “The hot plate reflects, transmits or scatters colder radiation, just like my roof does for cold radio waves.”
Which raises the question of how his roof can tell the difference between a “cool” radio wave and a “hot” radio wave of the same wavelength. In terms of my three black bodies (February 5, 2012 at 8:50 pm and 10:05 pm) , with hot Mercury-o, warm Warmio, and cool Cooliet, he’s apparently claiming that Warmio will accept the 900 nm photon from Mercury-o and reject the 900 nm photon from Cooliet. It’s unclear what method the black body uses to tell them apart.
Gary Hladik says:
February 6, 2012 at 12:11 pm
Myrrh says (February 6, 2012 at 2:54 am): “You have introduced something new, you’ve introduced that ‘photons radiate in all directions…”
OK, I think we’re zooming in on our area(s) of disagreement.
Two spherical black bodies, or reasonable facsimiles:
“Warmio”, with a constant internal heat source sufficient to maintain it indefinitely at a temperature of 900 degrees K when it’s alone in a vacuum chamber.
“Cooliet”, with a constant internal heat source sufficient to maintain it indefinitely at a temperature of 500 degrees K when it’s alone in a vacuum chamber.
Start with Cooliet alone in the experimental vacuum chamber
(1) I say Cooliet radiates energy in all directions. Agree or disagree?
Assuming “agree”, we now add Warmio to the chamber.
(2) I say Cooliet still radiates energy in all directions, including toward Warmio. Agree or disagree?
I’ll give you an example of how heat flows from hotter to colder. You pick up a handful of snow to form it into a snowball, your hands gets cold. What’s happening? Are your hands cold because you can feel the cold of the snow? No, what is happening is the heat is spontaneously flowing out of your hands into the snowball, you are feeling the loss of heat in your hand, the snowball is sucking the heat out of you. Don’t hold on too long..
Now, what does Cooliet do when you move Warmio in?
Monckton of Brenchley says:
No problem…And, in one sense I agree with you that “little rested on the error” since, as I have noted, the uncertainties (most notably in the aerosol forcing) make it hard to constrain the climate sensitivity or transient climate response on the basis of the historical temperature record.
On the other hand, I find your statement somewhat curious since you clearly seemed to feel it was important when the transient climate sensitivity that you computed was lower than what the IPCC claimed it to be. Now that your corrected arithmetic shows it to be in the IPCC range, you seem to have de-valued its importance.
So, I would say the only reason that “little rested on the error” is that your arguments were never very convincing to begin with.
We’ve discussed this “red herring” before. In the context of what Trenberth and Kiehl were interested in studying, all of the effects of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are taken to be forcings. However, in the context of a particular experiment in changing the greenhouse gas concentrations, the question becomes if, say, we remove the non-condensable greenhouse gases, how much of the water vapor also ends up being taken out of the atmosphere. You are assuming that all the water vapor in the atmosphere would remain in the atmosphere, an unlikely assumption that is equivalent to assuming there is no water vapor feedback.
If one has a temperature change in Kelvin and multiplies this by a feedback value in Watts per square meter per Kelvin then one gets a forcing in units of Watts per square meter. (One has to do this in a self-consistent way since a feedback feedbacks on itself…i.e., the water vapor feedback will react to a temperature change caused by water vapor in addition to one caused by, say, a CO2 increase.)
The computer modeling of Lacis et al. suggests that most of the water vapor and its forcing do in fact disappear when one removes the non-condensable greenhouse gases. And, of course, this isn’t just an abstract result from models but is a notion based on basic physical reasoning…And, the fact that the models are handling the water vapor feedback quite well (and that “turning off” the water vapor feedback yields much poorer agreement with empirical satellite data) has now been confirmed in multiple studies:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5917/1020.summary
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5749/841
And, regardless of this, the fact that your calculation makes the implicit assumption that the water vapor is all a forcing and not a feedback means that the calculation is not a calculation of the climate sensitivity in the presence of the water vapor feedback…It is a calculation of the sensitivity in the absence of the feedback because it assumes that the level of water vapor does not change as the temperature changes due to changes in non-condensable greenhouse gases! I.e., it assumes what you claim to show and is hence a completely circular argument.
Bob Fernley-Jones says:
You have this weird way of responding to my posts by just ignoring what I wrote. So, I will tell you again: I have explained what convection does. You are hampered by a picture where you are trying to figure out the surface temperature by starting with the surface radiation balance. That is a very poor way to do it. What one should start with is the top-of-the-atmosphere radiative balance, which tells you what has to happen to the temperature in the mid- and upper-troposphere where most of the radiation escapes to space. One then can work down to figure out what happens at the surface by noting that the effect of convection is to keep the lapse rate at approximately the appropriate adiabatic lapse rate.
So, in other words, it is already understood what the effect of convection is. You remain ignorant of what this effect is because you are thinking about the problem in the wrong way.
David says:
This data is in fact already contradicted by other better data: The satellite data clearly shows the opposite of what the reanalysis shows for the long-term trends and, furthermore, both the satellite and the reanalysis data show a positive water vapor feedback when you look at fluctuations on shorter time scales. The long-term trends in the reanalysis data are KNOWN to be bad because of instrumentation issues and the like.
It really is a matter of cherry-picking data known to be bad and ignoring data known to be better in order to arrive at a desired conclusion.
Doug Cotton says:
The fact is that you are just making up physics to suit what you want to believe. Your version of physics is contradicted by over 100 years of empirical data and the use of the equations of radiative transfer. It is complete nonsense and the sort of things that make “AGW skeptics” look like anti-science clowns, which is why people like Spencer, Willis, and even Monckton are trying to dispel such silly notions. If you want AGW skeptics to look as scientific as Young Earth Creationists to the scientific community, then I recommend continuing to spout the nonsense that you are spouting; if not, you may want to reconsider.
Gary Hladik,
My original question was whether the 2nd Law is only a statistical Law, or an absolute Law.
After reading your citations, and Doug Cotton’s radiation explanation, it is beginning to appear to me that the 2nd Law is absolute. A colder object cannot warm a warmer object. Looking at it from the perspective of single atoms might help.
Suppose a single atom at 600K was in the middle of an ideal vacuum container, and surrounded by one billion atoms at 300K, all arranged in a spherical shell a small distance away from the warmer central atom. [All held in place by laser tweezers, or a science fiction tractor beam.☺]
So now we have a warmer atom surrounded by an almost solid shell of cooler atoms, and all the cooler atoms are emitting photons with wavelengths equal to their absolute temperatures. With a billion atoms, a large number of their photons will hit the warmer central atom.
Will the total radiative emissions of one billion atoms be sufficient to raise the temperature of the warmer central atom to, say, 601K? The answer appears to be no, even though there are large numbers of photons from the cooler atom shell hitting the central, warmer atom.
The reason may be that each photon “knows” that it was emitted from a cooler atom, and therefore the warmer atom is invisible to it. If that is so, then the “back radiation” hypothesis would seem to be falsified.
Now I am re-thinking the entire issue. It is clear from numerous measurements that AGW has no measurable effect, so it must be very small. But now it appears that AGW caused by GHG’s may not exist at all. I haven’t made up my mind; I’ll have to give this a lot more thought. But I’ve always been more comfortable with the idea that the Second Law is absolute on all levels [that’s why I used atoms in my gedanken experiment].
The whole “there is no AGW” conjecture can be completely falsified by showing even one example of a warmer object being heated by cooler objects. Anyone supporting the “back radiation” hypothesis should be looking for a testable example.
Myrrh says (February 6, 2012 at 5:08 pm): “I’ll give you an example of how heat flows from hotter to colder.”
That’s an example of heat transfer by conduction. Not really relevant, since we’re discussing transfer by radiation only, but I appreciate the attempt.
“Now, what does Cooliet do when you move Warmio in?”
Well, to repeat, I think spherical black body Cooliet continues radiating in all directions. What do you think? Quid pro quo, Clarice. 🙂
It would be helpful if you would agree or disagree with each of my questions above, so we can identify exact points of contention. Let’s start with the easy one: I say Cooliet when alone in the test chamber radiates energy in all directions. Agree or disagree?
Smokey says:
The deficiencies in your knowledge could be remedied by actually finding an introductory physics textbook and reading the section that deals with the Second Law. This is the textbook that I currently teach out of and it has a very nice explanation of the Second Law: http://www.amazon.com/College-Physics-Strategic-Approach-Workbooks/dp/0321602285/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328581890&sr=8-1
Joel Shore and Gary Hladik:
When you can demonstrate an actual experiment showing a cooler body radiating and actually warming a (significantly) warmer body (or slowing its rate of cooling) then it will be new physics. Established physics says energy is conserved and thus this cannot happen.
If your warmer body gets warmed more, then it radiates more back, effectively increasing the frequency of the radiation it received. (Wow!) Then the cooler body will warm more, as well as some other cooler bodies around, and they will all radiate and warm the warmer one even more. And the iterations continue indefinitely, according to your guess which is not in standard physics.
Why do you think microbolometer IR cameras (which depend on warming of their sensors) cannot measure down to the much lower frequency radiation (ie much colder temperatures) which the original IR cameras can detect when they only have to measure frequency and then calculate temperature from frequency?
Now go and show exactly where you think there is an error in Claes Johnson’s mathematics, bearing in mind that he is a professor of applied mathematics. Just comments on his computations is all I want to hear http://www.csc.kth.se/~cgjoh/blackbodyslayer.pdf
PS That article about carbon dioxide lies in Germany’s leading newspaper must be a bit of a bother for you.
Joel Shore,
A while back I read Peter Atkins’ Four Laws. That was pretty comprehensive. However, as usual you’re changing the subject. As I concluded above:
The whole “there is no AGW” conjecture can be completely falsified by showing even one example of a warmer object being heated by cooler objects. Anyone supporting the “back radiation” hypothesis should be looking for a testable example.
No doubt you are desperate to falsify the “there is no AGW” claim. Now’s your chance. As always, make any attempts empirically testable and reproducible. No models, and no assumptions based on radiative physics suppositions. As Latour convincingly argues, that doesn’t even apply here.
PS Gary shows his lack of knowledge of physics when he says “Which raises the question of how his roof can tell the difference between a “cool” radio wave and a “hot” radio wave of the same wavelength”
Wien’s Displacement Law states that the peak frequency is proportional to the absolute temperature of the emitter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien's_displacement_law
I trust Gary at least knows the connection between wavelength and frequency and has thus now learnt a bit of basic physics, namely that you cannot have “cool” and “hot” radiation of the same wavelength.
Doug Cotton says (February 6, 2012 at 7:25 pm): “I trust Gary at least knows the connection between wavelength and frequency and has thus now learnt a bit of basic physics, namely that you cannot have “cool” and “hot” radiation of the same wavelength.”
Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner!
So when Doug looks back at the Mercury-o/Warmio/Cooliet experiment, he will answer, “Shucks, Gary, Warmio can’t tell the difference between that 900 nm photon from hot Mercury-o and the 900 nm photon from cool Cooliet (there is no difference), so it will absorb both.”
Right, Doug?
Smokey says:
Anyone supporting the “back radiation” hypothesis should be looking for a testable example.
Henry@Smokey
Well, I think I can proof that many GHG’s are cooling the atmosphere by back radiating or re-radiating sunshine in the specific wavelengths where absorption takes place.
For proof that this does happen, see here:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0004-637X/644/1/551/64090.web.pdf?request-id=76e1a830-4451-4c80-aa58-4728c1d646ec
They measured the re-radiation from GHG’s as it bounced back to earth from the moon. So the direction was sun-earth-moon-earth. E.g., for CO2, follow the green line in fig. 6, bottom. Note that it already starts at 1.2 um, then one peak at 1.4 um, then various peaks at 1.6 um and 3 big peaks at 2 um. You can see that it all comes back to us via the moon in fig. 6 top & fig. 7. Note that even methane cools our atmosphere by re-radiating in the 2.2 to 2.4 um range.
So conversely, in the areas where we have places in the molecule where absorption takes place which lie in earth’s emission spectrum, we may assume that the same thing happens causing warming.
For more on that here:
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
the problem is that I have never seen a balance sheet showing me the net effect of the cooling and warming effect of each of the GHG’s, in the right dimensions. For example, seeing that the sun only shines 12 hours per day (due to earth’s rotation) and earth shines 24 hours per day, the units on this balance sheet must include “time” somewhere….
Also, in the case of CO2, it is also cooling the atmosphere by taking part in photosynthesis: in 1974 someone calculated that 0.023% of the energy we get from the sun is used for photosynthesis.
That is probably a lot more now.
Anyway, careful analyses of the daily results of weather stations, reveals that the observed warming was not due to an increase in GHG’s!
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming