I’m taking a blog holiday this weekend. Right now I’m watching the History channel 2 (H2) while some off the rails eco-scientist explains to us why we are all going to die because of “what might happen if a gigantic methane-gas explosion occurred in the Pacific.” Methane Explosion (2007) watch the video:
I had to laugh at the YouTube description (bold mine):
History Channel “Mega Disasters” series. This explores the controversial paper published by Northwestern University’s Gregory Ryskin. His thesis: the oceans periodically produce massive eruptions of explosive methane gas… enough to cause global catastrophe on a regular basis!
Discuss the methane explosions or whatever you like, within site policy. If you want to submit a guest post, flag a moderator.
WUWT will return to its regularly scheduled programming Sunday evening.
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WUWT has never done a post on Graphene.
I have one if you want to use it as a guest post. It’s short. But it is a good outline of Graphene. I can submit it to you for review to see if it meets WUWT standards.
This is an introductory video to Graphene.
David Ball says:
February 12, 2012 at 8:31 am
Regarding exploding methane pockets; Is there not lightning on Titan?
—–
Actually, it seems like there isn’t much, if any lightning on Titan.
http://planetary.org/blog/article/00003040/
But even if there was, it wouldn’t cause explosions because Titan doesn’t have any oxygen for the methane to burn with.
Steve from Rockwood says:
February 12, 2012 at 9:46 am
“DirkH, thanks for the links. I so want to believe Mörner but I have to say it’s looking bad for his claims of no sea-level rise and no trend since 1850. See the graph below from the link you provided. OK, so the trend is 1.7 mm per year and not 3.2. But a trend is still a trend.
http://climatesanity.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/nasa-sea-level-data-ground2.jpg
”
Yes, 17mm a decade or 17 cm a century. While the alarmists warn of a meter, 5 meters, 70 meters until 2100, depending on how alarmist they are.
Don’t you think that it’s rather easy to adapt to a sea level rise of 17 cm in a century? That’s a piece of cake compared to the meters of snow falling on the villages in Rumania right now IMHO…
The argument of the alarmist scientists was not to fear the 3.2 mm/year but that sea level rise would accelerate. Well, it doesn’t look like it. Now, why don’t the alarmists throw some parties; humanity’s saved again! I have yet to see my first alarmist with a smile on his face, come to think of it, not one of the Waldsterben (forest death through acid rain hysteria in Germany in the 80ies) guys of the 80ies was delighted when their prophecies turned out to be wrong…
David Ball says:
February 12, 2012 at 10:32 am
Oh, absolutely! Your father and Alan Carlin were the two people I most wanted to meet at the ICCC last year in Washington DC. We had a good chat about the state of the lawsuits and motives behind them.
Despite my comments on Doug Cotton’s list, I don’t see the Greenhouse Effect (or whatever it should be called) as a major player in future climate change. The dichotomy between CO2 concentrations and the temperature over the last 50 years is just too great. I suspect that any decrease in heat transport due to GHGs can be offset by convection. I don’t know enough about either effect to quantify it, but given sail plane pilots and birds can use convection above parking lots and dark agricultural fields says convection is transporting a lot of heat. The IR spectrum still has plenty of space for letting heat radiate out from the surface unimpeded. I’d like to see if that could be exploited in a blackbody radiator to provide summertime cooling at night and maybe during the day. My guess is it would have to be too big to be able to shade it from the sun (and the shades) during the day.
Learning more about radiative physics of GHGs and how they transfer energy between their molecules and to adjacent molecules of nitrogen and oxygen is at the top of list of things I haven’t had time to learn about.
Very amusing alarmism from 1988. Watch the full first part to get a slew of contradicting hypotheses. Sounds exactly like the flip-flopping of the alarmists from today.
Individual particles can flow from a colder to a warmer source, it’s just that more of them will flow the other way, so there’s no net heating. But the warmists’ point about reradiation isn’t refuted.
Dirk H,
Amazing video, thanks for posting. I liked the part where they say that CO2 = global warming must be mistaken.☺
Stephen Schneider was on the imminent ice age bandwagon back then, and he was quoted a couple of times. Climate alarmists will say anything if there’s something in it for them, and honest science be damned. Just like today.
Apparently this site is little more than a source of viruses:
http://notrickszone.com/2012/02/12/leftist-german-taz-daily-article-on-vahrenholt-climate-skeptics-are-like-viruses/
Tis actually a poor choice of extreme metaphors as viruses are rather difficult to stop and the term ‘viral’ does describe how far and wide sites like this have spread the message.
But responses like this tell us that somebody is getting more desperate. Next up I suppose we’ll hear about lizard-brained Big Oil-fed planet-hating viruses that prey on ‘the children.’
DirkH says:
February 12, 2012 at 1:02 pm
Thanks for post that video!!! Too much. So the greenhouse effect should be greater in the tropics than in the Arctic? And it causes global cooling!
This thing is such a classic that it really needs to be spread far and wide.
The wheels of Real Climate are beginning to come off – they are starting to consume their own. Too funny.
[Moderator’s Note: John, this does not seem to be a response to anything else on this thread. Could you elaborate, perhaps, and supply a link to whatever it is you are referring to? -REP]
On the subject of catastrophic methane gas releases.
CH4 is much lighter than CO2, which the History channel shows erupting in Africa.
If the same thing happened in the lake with CH4, it would have risen skyward, and nobody would have suffocated.
If it had ignited, it would have made an explosion, but most likely a fireball. It is hard to get methane gas to ignite explosively in an open environment. Too close to the source, and there isn’t enough oxygen, too far away, burning, but no explosion.
Anthony Scalzi says:
February 12, 2012 at 11:14 am
Hmm. Was just reading about this.
http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/3546/oxygen-moves-from-enceladus-to-titan
Ric Werme says:
February 12, 2012 at 6:41 am
I thought I was clear that I was talking from heat from solid ground to gaseous atmosphere
__________________________________________
Well I knew I was clear that I was talking about the opposite, so it was yourself who went off on a tangent.
You have not addressed the set of “10 steps” that I made at all.
Maybe you can state why you and the IPCC believe that while solar radiation is warming a certain area of the land surface or the ocean on a sunny morning (so the temperatureof the surface is increasing and there is net radiation going into the surface) then the additional backradiation from a cold atmosphere (also going into the surface) is claimed to do more warming and so transfer additional heat.
Answer that my friend, bearing in mind that the Second Law of Thermodynamics says it cannot because heat cannot be transferred from cold to hot. (Heat transfer is not radiation transfer, by the way.).
Then I suggest you read the first two pages of my website http://climate-change-theory.com and the linked page to Prof Claes Johnson’s Computational Radiation Theory.” as well as all the paper by Prof Nahle regarding the invalidity of backradiation measurements.
Note also another post I am about to write below this.
Anthony Scalzi says:
February 12, 2012 at 11:14 am
Of course Mr. Scalzi is correct. There is not enough oxygen for the methane to ignite. Interesting that there is oxygen there at all, however.
I have posted my “10 steps” post http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/11/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-890609 on many other forums (both for and against AGW) with a genuine desire to see if anyone can raise a valid counter argument. The following may help explain and reinforce what I have written there.
Firstly, the actual amount of backradiation must be grossly overstated because the emissivity of the atmosphere is only about 20% I understand and it is colder than the surface and emitting in all directions into a full sphere rather than a hemisphere. So how could NASA’s energy diagram possibly be right in showing similar values for emission from the surface as from the atmosphere. I postulate that the instruments calculate the radiative flux from the temperature assuming emissivity is unity and emission into a hemisphere.
But, whatever the amount of backradiation, it cannot transfer thermal energy from the colder atmosphere to the warmer surface as this would imply a heat transfer from cold to hot, which is against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. When the surface is warming on a sunny morning, for example, and net radiative flux is into the surface, how can additional heat be transferred from the colder atmosphere to the warmer surface against the Second Law. It can’t and all such radiation is reflected or (mostly) scattered and thus leaves no energy behind.
It follows that, since backradiation cannot add thermal energy to a warmer surface, then it cannot increase the rate of warming in the morning or slow the rate of cooling in the evening.
Backradiation is after all low energy radiation spontaneously emitted from a cold source. The peak frequency of the strongly attenuated spectrum is proportional to the absolute temperature (Wien’s Displacement Law) and such frequencies are usually lower than those in the radiation from the surface. Surface molecules “recognise” this and reject the low energy radiation which does not have enough energy to be converted to thermal energy. (See Prof Claes Johnson Computational Blackbody Radiation) http://www.csc.kth.se/~cgjoh/blackbodyslayer.pdf
We see examples of this in radio broadcasts where we know the radiation is even lower frequency than that in backradiation. It is of course artificially generated, but its frequency corresponds to much lower temperatures than normally experienced on earth or in the troposphere. For this very reason it is scattered by the surface and by the atmosphere and is not converted to thermal energy because it is “colder” even than the backradiation. If this were not the case, then it would have been quickly quenched as all its energy would have been used up warming whatever it struck. So it would not travel the distances that we know it does. Basically the same happens to backradiation and it just keeps getting scattered off molecules in both the atmosphere and the surface until it happens by chance to escape to space.
So the (latest version of) the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is (like the first version) a physical impossibility.
As it is an open thread,,
There was an article a couple of weeks back on WUWT about lunar temperatures. There was some discussion and arguement about the observed temperatures. My point is that with a body with no atmosphere and no free water and the only influences being
1- Solar radtaion
2- Radiactive decay
3- Heat emiited by the core
how can it be so difficult to expain the temperaure of the moon?
If this is a problem then measuring the temperature of the Earth and the degree of influence due to specifc factors is of insurmountable complexity. However we do know if the Sun diminshes, the Earth will be an iceball.
I’m under the impression that the CO2 (hint CO2 is NOT methane, and is not explosive; having allready done that) in that African lake was ejected from some volcanic vent under the lake, which lake is not that deep. CO2 takes something like 56 atmospheres of pressure to turn into a solid at around room Temperature or whatever (I’ll let you wikigigglers find the real numbers), so that would take say 56 times 34 feet of water or 1904 feet of water pressure to condense the CO2. So naturally CO2, which incidently is NOT methane, would of course escape quite naturally as it came from the volcanic vent, and most certainly as it exited from even a thousand feet of lake, it would do so with some considerable kinetic energy from the expansion, and buoyancy.
But then methane is not CO2, so it wouldn’t really do the same thing. So what is the liquifaction or solidification pressure of CH4 at around 4deg C or whatever they say the deep ocean Temperature actually is away from sulphur vents or black smokers.
The good professor doesn’t know where these CH4 deposits are, so how does he know what they arechemically or physically, and what is their state.
“”””” JC says:
February 11, 2012 at 5:16 pm
I have heard an argument claiming to refute the greenhouse effect itself on the basis of basic thermodynamics: The surface of the earth is warm; space is cold. Therefore, CO2 molecules can’t reradiate toward the surface. This argument seems sensible on its face. Is it easily refuted? “””””
Yes it is JC.
Electromagnetic radiation IS NOT HEAT. Thermodynamics and the laws of thermodynamics relate to macroscopic scale systems. No matter what the wavelength of the EM radiation, whether power line, 60 Hz radiation, or 1 micron wavelength near infra-red radiation, or one angstom gamma radiation, EM radiation is not heat, and it can go anywhere it darn well pleases.
The sun and the moon both subtend the same solid angle as seen from earth even though they are of different sizes, so the mean radiation from earth, going in all directions sends about the same amount of radiant energy to the sun, which is hotter than earth, as it does the moon which is colder than earth.
It is “heat” which is a purely mechanical kinetic energy of physical massive particles, which cannot unaided flow freely from cold to hot, as restricted by the second law, and the second law relates to cyclic systems, so there is a presumption that there is a bi-directional path possible, and the net heat flow will be from hot to cold, sans any other interference; like a refrigerator for example. Work must be done to transport heat from cold to hot.
“No cyclic machine can have no other effect, than to transport heat from a source at one Temperature to a sink at some higher Temperature.”
That is a crude English translation from the German, of Rudolph Clausius statement of the second law of thermodynamics. The “other effect” would be doing work to get heat to go from cold to hot..
But CO2 will radiate isotropically in any direction; that is the emitted photon has no directional bias, so it can go back to the surface just as easily as being lost to space. The key point is if the surface is hotter (it may not be), then the surface is also radiating, and likely more than the CO2, so there won’t be a net flow of EM radiation from the CO2 to the surface either, but a flow from the CO2 to the surface is a sure thing; but less than comes backup from the surface.There are some complications, like the CO2 emission is 4pi isotropic, while the surface emission is just 2pi and likely more Lambertian than isotropic. But no matter, the CO2 can’t warm the surface; but the sun can, and does.
Read a strangely worded item in “Earthweek”, a Warmist section in our Sunday newspaper. Under “Amped ocean influence” it talks about about a writing in the journal “Natural Climate Change”, saying that El Nino and La Nina will have an ongoing increased role in causing weather disasters … . It also said New Zealanders … should expect more extreme events, such as flooding and drought. But the last paragraph states, “The intensity and frequency of such occurrences are likely to be at least similar to what had been seen over the past three decades.” Earthweek doesn’t even agree with itself here.
Diamond has about twice the thermal conductivity of silver or copper at room Temperatures.
Type II-a diamond has a low Temperature thermal conductivity of 100 W degC^-1.cm^-1 which is much higher than at room Temperature.
if you take a rod of type II-a diamond that is say 93 million miles long; 1.5 E16 cm and one squ cm crossection, and you put one end on the sun at 6,000 K and the other on earth at 300 K you have a Temperature difference of 5700 K so the heat conduction would be:-
100 x 5700 / 1.5 E 16 = 3.8 08 E -8 W / cm^2, or 380 microWatts per square metre
Well if it was copper it would be 1/25th of that since copper is only 4 W k^-1 cm^-1 at room temperature.
So even with the very best thermal conductance known, and ignoring a few practical problems you cannot get any amount of “heat” from the sun; so we make it all here on earth out of good solar energy by wasting it all.
Doug Cotton says:
February 12, 2012 at 3:09 pm
> Ric Werme says:
> February 12, 2012 at 6:41 am
I hope this formats ok at WUWT with no wordwrapping. If not, I might
recast things to have a single response block. Lines prefixed with 0 or
2 angle brackets are my typing.
>> I thought I was clear that I was talking from heat from solid ground to
>> gaseous atmosphere
> Well I knew I was clear that I was talking about the opposite, so it was
> yourself who went off on a tangent.
I’m happy to take your word for it.
> You have not addressed the set of “10 steps” that I made at all.
Quite right, and I won’t have time to do them justice any time soon.
Besides the talk next weekend I hope to have time to write a post on the
50th anniversary of a nor’easter that destroyed my grandparent’s summer
home.
> Maybe you can state why you and the IPCC believe that while solar
> radiation is warming a certain area of the land surface or the ocean on
> a sunny morning (so the temperature of the surface is increasing and
> there is net radiation going into the surface) then the additional
> backradiation from a cold atmosphere (also going into the surface) is
> claimed to do more warming and so transfer additional heat.
As an electrical engineer (at least according to the diploma),
ultimately I’ll fall back to looking at electrons. Similarly, radiative
flux is all about photons. The back radiation, like the Sun, is a
source of photons, and when the photons hit an object they either
reflect, refract, or get absorbed.
So on a sunny morning, solar photons hit the ground and most get
absorbed. GHG molecules release photons in all directions, but some of
those reach the ground and most of those get absorbed. However, the
ground is radiating a much higher IR flux and is a lot more effective at
heating the GHGs (or at least raising them to an excited state, you may
have to explain exactly what happens when a GHG molecule captures a
photon, I’ve seen several different accounts).
About the only effect of the GHGs is to add a little flux to the solar
radiation and the morning temperature will rise very slightly faster than
it would without the GHGs.
I have no idea what the IPCC thinks, except that it’s not pretty.
In another regime, I can feel the same sort of effect when I come home
after a winter vacation. The house has sat for a week or so at, say 50F
or 10C, and even after the thermostat is satisfied it’s back to a normal
temperature, the house still feels cold because the walls are still cold
and not radiating their normal flux. When they do warm up, I still
radiate more to them than they do to me, but the extra flux means I’m
not cooling as quickly as before.
> Answer that my friend, bearing in mind that the Second Law of
> Thermodynamics says it cannot because heat cannot be transferred from
> cold to hot. (Heat transfer is not radiation transfer, by the way.).
Of course net heat cannot be transferred from cold to hot (without heat
engines an other devices that are compliant with physical laws). I’m
not sure about your heat versus radiation, but I’ll note that the heated
ground heats the surface air by conduction (ground molecules and air
molecules bouncing off each other), and that’s really the primary way
surface air warms up in the morning.
Well, some days it’s obvious on my temperature traces that a cold front
blows through in the morning and scours out the inversion, so in that
case the surface air warms as it mixes with warmer air advecting in.
The air behind a cold front is often warmer than the air below a morning
inversion. Warm fronts generally don’t have enough “grip” to break up a
decent inversion.
> Then I suggest you read the first two pages of my website
> http://climate-change-theory.com and the linked page to Prof Claes
> Johnson’s Computational Radiation Theory.” as well as all the paper by
> Prof Nahle regarding the invalidity of backradiation measurements.
I looked at some of that this morning, and want to get back to it when I have
time. What’s the difference between http://climate-change-theory.com and
http://earth-climate.com/ ?
I just took a quick look at
http://claesjohnson.blogspot.com/2011/08/how-to-fool-yourself-with-pyrgeometer.html
He seems to think differently than I do, perhaps it’s because Kirchoff’s
laws of current and voltage are easier to grok than Kirchoff’s law of
thermal radiation. (The former are first day items in an electrical
engineering curriculum. Most students will have known them for the
previous decade.) Perhaps physicists have trouble breaking net flow of
a flux into its component parts. Seems unlikely, you guys have vector
math down pat. Perhaps part of the confusion is that this isn’t really
a vector math problem. EEs with a physics mindset can treat current
flow in a wire as a vector, and either vector or scalar currents all add
up to zero. Hmm, I may be all wet on the vector analogy. Not worth
analyzing tonight.
I think the issue is much less a disagreement about the physics than it
is a perception of how to describe the physics.
> Note also another post I am about to write below this.
You seem to think the same way Johnson does. You say:
> It follows that, since backradiation cannot add thermal energy to a
> warmer surface, then it cannot increase the rate of warming in the
> morning or slow the rate of cooling in the evening.
Part of the problem may be deciding what is and what isn’t part of
the system. Engineers do systems. In the morning, the system is at
least the GHG (source of backradiation), the ground (source of
radiation) and the Sun (6×10^-5 steradians of a lot of radiation). And
the rest of the sky, otherwise we’ll only get hotter until we reach the
Sun’s temperature, and that assumes the Sun stops generating heat!)
I would say:
Although backradiation delivers thermal energy to a warmer surface, the
warmer surface must radiate more thermal energy and will cool. Back
radiation can increase the rate of warming in the morning where the
Sun’s input overwhelms the cooling, or slow the rate of cooling in the
evening, however, for the system to reach thermal equilibrium, the warmer
objects must cool and the colder objects must warm.
Congratulations Anthony Watts! Perhaps I’m the only one who overlooked this?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2012/01/27/watts-up-who-killed-climated-change/
[REPLY: Thank you for noticing. It was discussed here at WUWT. -REP]
George E. Smith; says:
February 12, 2012 at 5:57 pm
Bummer. How about if use isotopically pure diamond? Wikipedia says
The 12C isotopically pure … diamond gives a 50% higher thermal conductivity than the already high value of 900-2000 W/(m·K) for a normal diamond, which contains the natural isotopic mixture of 98.9% 12C and 1.1% 13C. This is useful for heat sinks for the semiconductor industry.
Nothing about transporting solar heat. Oh, well.
I’ve always wanted a rod of that stuff, can you save me about 25 cm worth? And what happens if I stick one end in a candle flame, anyway? 🙂
> Ric Werme says:
> February 12, 2012 at 6:41 am
(1) when the photons hit an object they either reflect, refract, or get absorbed.
(2) About the only effect of the GHGs is to add a little flux to the solar radiation and the morning temperature will rise very slightly faster than it would without the GHGs.
(3) Of course net heat cannot be transferred from cold to hot
_________________________________________________________
In (1) you demonstrate the basic flaw in the GH conjecture. Radiation can also be scattered without leaving any energy behind, rather like reflection, but a different process. That is what happens to radiation from a colder source when it meets a warmer target. That is how and why the Second Law (that no heat transfers) works in nature.
Your (2) and (3) are self-contradictory, with (2) being wrong and (3) being right.
Have you ever thought about why radio waves are not absorbed and converted to thermal energy within a few hundred metres of the broadcasting tower, rather than travelling maybe even around the world? See the end of my post today for the reason – which is closely related to why backradiation is also not converted to thermal energy.
.
To everyone:
George E. Smith; says:
February 12, 2012 at 5:25 pm
the CO2 can’t warm the surface; but the sun can, and does.
_________________________________________________
George, whilst I do of course agree with your conclusion above, the reasons you give are not correct. It is important that all we physics people get the right message across.
Thermal energy is not radiated energy. Radiation can go in all directions, but “heat” is not energy itself and does not actually travel itself or in any way cancel out due to opposing radiation as will be explained below.
When two bodies at different temperatures radiate towards each other they are of course converting thermal or other energy into radiation. Assuming the bodies are not transparent to each other’s radiation, that radiation will be either converted to thermal energy or scattered without leaving any energy behind.
Thus “heat” only appears to travel, rather like sound being broadcast on radio waves. You see the temperature increase and say heat has travelled, but in fact thermal energy has just been “produced” on the spot by conversion of radiated energy- and we then say “Ah, we have heating happening.” We attribute some of it to what appears to be a particular hotter source, but of course the target body already has a temperature resulting from lots of radiation, conduction etc from lots of warmer sources.
The conversion to thermal energy only happens if the peak frequency of the received radiation is (significantly) greater than the peak frequency of the target. As these peak frequencies are proportional to the absolute temperatures (by Wien’s Displacement Law) we only observe conversion to thermal energy when the emitter was warmer than the target.
The important thing is that it does not matter what radiation was being sent the other way. If you could block the radiation from the cooler body with a filter that still allowed the other radiation from the warmer body to pass through you would still see the same amount of warming..
This is the correct reason why radiation from a cooler atmosphere cannot be converted to thermal energy in a warmer surface.