Has anyone seen the article in Wired Science “The Inside Story of Climate Scientists Under Siege”? http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/climate-desk-michael-mann/
To me, they brought it on themselves by not being open with their data and methods. Its not science unless it is in the open with data and methods for all to review.
Tripid
February 19, 2012 9:01 am
Also note the mention of the Heartland Institue memo’s without any mention of the possibility that one of the memo’s was faked. I only read Wired Science for physics and cosmology stories and this is why.
Q: Why are the geese flying north?
A: This time of year it starts warming up in the Southern U.S., resulting in overcrowding at golf courses in the region…
Snapple
February 19, 2012 9:23 am
Joe Bast could post a screen shot of the email his duped staffer allegedly sent. We could all see if the Climate Strategy document is on it. We could also see who got the email. Bast is telling his donors that he has contacted the FBI and police. Chicago FBI Special Agent Royden “Ross” Rice states that, based on media accounts, the FBI has no legal basis to investigate. http://www.legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2012/02/heartlands-hypocrisy.html
Heartland Institute Funnel of Funding Infographic
By Zachary Shahan On February 19, 2012
Skeptical Science has put together a nice infographic of the Heartland Institute’s funding sources and where the money goes based this week’s leaked documents (note, however, that nearly half of the Heartland Institute’s revenue, $14.26 million of its $33.9 million, comes from a single anonymous donor, according to the document). Some notes from Skeptical Science before showing the infographic:
These numbers come from the Heartland 2012 Budget and Fundraising Plan documents (in US dollars). Note that while some of the figures in this graphic have been confirmed, Heartland has not yet confirmed that all the numbers are correct. There is also no reason to doubt their veracity to this point. If any of the numbers are found to be in error, we will revise this graphic accordingly.
Although there are too many donations and programs to include in a single graphic, we selected some of the larger and more prominent contributors for the upper half of the graphic. Most of the programs and individuals in the lower half are potentially climate-related, with the exception of Operation Angry Badger, which we included because it potentially vlolates Heartland’s tax-exempt chartiable organizational status, and James Taylor, because he frequently writes climate “skeptic” blog posts for Forbes.
Apparently Anthony Watts hasn’t sufficiently corrected the record on how much was pledged and that it was for his new NOAA info website. Note: When trying to jam correct information through such thick skulls, he should use a larger hammer.
Because Heartland was not specific about what was fake and what was real, The Associated Press attempted to verify independently key parts of separate budget and fundraising documents that were leaked. The federal consultant working on the classroom curriculum, the former TV weatherman, a Chicago elected official who campaigns against hidden local debt and two corporate donors all confirmed to the AP that the sections in the document that pertained to them were accurate. No one the AP contacted said the budget or fundraising documents mentioning them were incorrect.
The “former TV weatherman” didn’t tell the AP the documents were incorrect? The SkepSci “infographic” shows “Watts Surface Stations” getting $88,000 when we already have Anthony stating only half of that was pledged.
Also note, the “genius” who wrote that piece saying $14.26 million is coming from a single anonymous donor, apparently didn’t notice the “infographic” shows only $3.9 million.
(Note: Honestly I don’t think I’ve ever even seen this “Planetsave” site before, it showed up when I Googled for fresh Heartland news. I can though tell from the “Other Planetsave Posts You May Like” that they are quite willing to unquestioningly join in any smearing against the “global warming deniers,” facts be damned.)
Eric (skeptic)
February 19, 2012 9:27 am
I would like Doug Cotton (or anyone else) to provide an alternative explanation to why radiational cooling is more effective when there are no clouds. Here is a conventional and widely accepted explanation: http://ryanhanrahan.wordpress.com/tag/radiational-cooling/
Calm winds and clear skies promote what we call radiational cooling. The longwave radiation emitted by earth into space is maximized on clear nights. On cloudy nights some of that radiation is absorbed by the clouds. A portion of that absorbed longwave radiation is emitted into space and a portion is re-emitted back to earth. On clear nights there are no clouds around to re-emit longwave energy back to earth. The more radiation escapes into space the cooler we get.
But according to Doug Cotton, the colder clouds cannot slow the warming of the warmer surface.
John Peter
February 19, 2012 9:29 am
So the oceans are doomed after all, notwithstanding Willis Eschenbach’s attempts to explain that the oceans are not turning acid. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17088154
Jacuzzi vents’ model CO2 future
“A UK scientist studying volcanic vents in the ocean says they hold a grave warning for future marine ecosystems.
These vents have naturally acidified waters that hint at how our seas might change if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.
They are conditions that would make it harder for corals and similar organisms to make the hard parts in their bodies.
Dr Jason Hall-Spencer’s work suggests our oceans could lose perhaps 30% of their biodiversity this century.”
and on it goes.
DirkH
February 19, 2012 9:33 am
Via a link posted by Nerd, I found this video by Dr. Robert Lustig, lecture about the American obesity epidemic and High Fructose Corn Syrup.
Now, I don’t consume sugary drinks but my teenage son does and the soft drinks here in Germany just say “sugar” (Zucker) on the ingredient list so I wanted to know whether it is legal to use HFCS in the highly regulated German food market.
So I consulted the wikipedia. I found that HFCS needs to be declared in Germany when there’s a fructose content above 5% in the syrup and simply writing “sugar” won’t do, so that was good. But what really astonished me is the difference between the German and the English wikipedia page about HFCS – while the German one talks freely about the problems associated with fructose metabolization, the English one is as clean from criticism as they are clean from CAGW criticism.
So that’s another area where the wikipedia is more than useless, except for seeing who plays what kind of games.
Nerd
February 19, 2012 9:35 am
4 months ago when Texas was going through exceptional drought and there was some concerns about La Nina continuing to make this terrible drought even worse during 2012 with reservoirs being low in some places. Since then, we have made a remarkable recovery for large part of Texas.
I’m wondering what could have made that happen despite La Nina in place?
Snapple says:
February 19, 2012 at 9:23 am
“Joe Bast could post a screen shot of the email his duped staffer allegedly sent. We could all see if the Climate Strategy document is on it. ”
Snapple, you don’t seem to believe their word, so why would you believe a screenshot? If you don’t know how to fake a screenshot and would like to learn it, contact me for an offer.
John Peter,
Clearly, Dr Hall-Spencer is a buffoon. Why give a pseudo-scientist like that publicity? He says:
“What we see as you swim along a gradient of carbon dioxide, up to levels we expect for the end of this century, is diversity loss. As you go along that gradient, species drop out of the system,” he told BBC News.
These natural vents have been emitting large quantities of CO2 for millions of years. Species have adapted to their local conditions. so obviously, there will be different species in different environments.
We can add this alarmist nonsense to the litany of grant-trolling scare stories that are quoted endlessly in the BBC by clueless nincompoops and scientifically illiterate, propaganda writing reporters.
Nothing – N-O-T-H-I-N-G – unusual is happening. These stories are no different than the scary ghost stories that children tell each other.
By definition, half the population is below average in intelligence. This is the kind of scare story that appeals to them. Fortunately, most readers of WUWT know BS when they see it. Not so for the BBC’s audience.
sunsettommy says: February 19, 2012 at 9:52 am
A lawsuit in the making?
This brand new blog entry at Jo Nova has put DeSmogblog on legal notice:
Heartland sends out first legal notice about stolen and faked documents http://joannenova.com.au/2012/02/heartland-sends-out-first-legal-notice-about-stolen-and-faked-documents/
____________
Great news, thanks Tommy.
Wouldn’t it be great if the warmists ended up funding Heartland through a big settlement?
These warmists make great opponents – compared to them, the Three Stooges look competent!
If the warmists had not caused our society to squander a trillion dollars on global warming fraud, it would actually be funny.
We continue to be influenced and governed by scoundrels and imbeciles.
The nytimes had a nice little human interest piece on the poor ice fishing season. They made it all the way to the second before last paragraph befor getting all global warmy.
So close.
DR
February 19, 2012 10:30 am
@DirkH
You may be interested in this http://flibe-energy.com/
I heard Kirk Sorensen interviewed on the Peter Schiff show last month dated 1/17/2012. Quite revealing how the thorium projects were mothballed in the early 70’s.
Eric (skeptic)
February 19, 2012 10:31 am
Nerd, a very strong eastern Pacific upper level ridge (orange in link below) has allowed continental upper troughs to extend down into the US southwest (light green) and, sometimes as cut off upper lows (separate patch of light green), sometimes not, drift eastward through Texas. The latest storm moving through the Carolinas was generated by one of those troughs. The latest Euro model http://weather.unisys.com/ecmwf/ecmwf.php?inv=0&plot=4p®ion=a is showing another upper trough doing that during this week (wed/thurs) but for now the NWS in San Antonio is ignoring that model even though it has been pretty good at this range this winter.
Genghis
February 19, 2012 10:56 am
Eric (Skeptic),
It is all about whether or not the system is in thermal equilibrium. That is the billion dollar question climate question.
For example try this little experiment.
Take 2 identical black metal bars and wrap half of one of the bars with shiny aluminum insulating tape. Put them both under a heat lamp for a few hours (until the temperature of the bar wrapped half with the tape quits increasing). Then measure the temperature of both bars, their temperature will be identical despite the fact that one of the bars has an albedo of 50%.
Sliding the reflecting tape off or on the metal bar will make no difference to its temperature, once it is in equilibrium. If the bar isn’t in equilibrium, the tape will slow the warm or cooling of the bar. That is all there is to it.
The real question is whether or not the Earth is in equilibrium. The Warmers claim that the Earth is below the equilibrium temperature.
I claim that the Sun shining on the Earth for millions of years guarantees that the Earth is in equilibrium.
Adam Gallon
February 19, 2012 10:56 am
Looking at the whinging by certain sectors, of the paltry $1.5m donated to a certain organisation. http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2012/02/tip-of-iceberg.html
“According to Gray, in the past four years DFID has spent £900 million on climate change projects with nearly two thirds of that being spent in the past financial year. A further £533 million has already been committed up to 2013. The biggest recipients, he says, are India and Indonesia, two countries considered to be rapidly emerging economies”
kadaka (KD Knoebel)
February 19, 2012 10:58 am
From DirkH on February 19, 2012 at 9:33 am:
Via a link posted by Nerd, I found this video by Dr. Robert Lustig, lecture about the American obesity epidemic and High Fructose Corn Syrup.
It wasn’t that long ago when the HFCS kerfuffle popped up in the US. Suddenly soda cans were proudly labeled “Made with SUGAR!” After the many decades of warnings about obesity and even diabetes from the sugar (generic term) in soda, I did find that rather humorous.
In trying to replace HFCS, some makers are swapping in “organic brown rice syrup,” which has turned out to potentially have dangerous levels of arsenic. Reminds me of how margarine was a healthier alternative to butter, until the dangers of trans-fats were discovered and the butter turned out to be better.
All such stuff amounts to finding safer ways to indulge in dangerous excessive consumption. Healthier living is still found in old wisdom, ‘Moderation in everything, even in moderation.’
Dirk,
While the high fructose syrup may be a factor, I think that growth hormones in meat and dairy products (banned in France, don’t know about other EU countries) are one of the reasons of American obesity. Not that you would hear much about it — the U.S. food lobby plays hand in hand with the Feds.
Nerd
February 19, 2012 11:22 am
Dirk,
High fructose syrup in high amount can give you fatty liver disease! Essentially, no different than drinking alcoholic beverages in large quantity. Yikes. Anyway, if you want to lose weight, get diabetes and heart disease under control, get glucose meter and test your blood 30-60 minutes after you eat something. If your blood sugar level goes above 120, ditch the food and try something else. Paleo Diet is a great one and not only that it was proven by multiple trial studies. Wheat Belly Diet is a pretty good complementary to that diet as it helps you understand why and how you get heart disease in the first place. High fructose isn’t the only carbohydrate source to worry about. Wheat/corn flour based products (pasta, bread, etc) are everywhere as well.
Widespread vitamin D deficiency is a huge concern that nobody seemed to be aware of. No thanks to CDC, it got swept under the rug. http://www.naturalnews.com/032202_vitamin_D_deficiency_disease.html To help you understand how important Vitamin D is for our health – (Note: it is not really a vitamin but a prohormone that get converted to powerful steroid hormone that acts as DNA repair and maintenance) – http://www.biochemj.org/bj/441/0061/bj4410061.htm
Once again, we get screwed by gov’t… Oh yeah, American Cancer Society recently tried to discredit vitamin D and telling us to stick to federal guideline. Right… you want us to get cancer so you get to charge high amount while I suffer miserably undergoing chemotherapy. How nice of you…
Once again, it’s all about money.
Eric (skeptic)
February 19, 2012 11:23 am
Genghis, interesting experiment but it only tests albedo changes. The atmosphere is only in equilibrium near the top and the efficiency of getting heat up to that level will determine the final temperature down at the surface. A metal bar experiment could represent that by heating the bars from the center and adding varying amounts of insulating material into the composition of one of the bars. Given an identical power flux into each bar, one bar would have a warmer center than the other.
Plunging to New Depths: http://www.glebedigital.co.uk/blog/?p=5435
“Plunge, by artist Michael Pinsky, imagines a time 1000 years in the future when the effects of runaway climate change have completely transformed the London we know today.
This latest piece of state-sponsored apocalism is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, the European Culture Programme, Trust Greenbelt, WWF-UK and the Big Give.
This ‘work of art’ invites visitors to look up and see ‘rings of blue fire’, erected at 28 metres above sea level on familiar icons across London in an attempt to create disturbing visions of apocalypse in the eye of the beholder.
“Artist Pinsky’s work illustrates how sea levels will have climbed by then, should we fail to heed the threat of ‘global warming’.”
The artwork, which resembles a series of chip shop fly killers, clearly suggests the level of knowledge and intelligence required to be an ‘artist’ in the early 21st century.
Sea levels are rising at approximately 15cm per century, so in a thousand years that’s a rise of around 1.5m.
Pinsky shows signs of his true colours elsewhere on his main website, refering to a work on green neon crosses:
“These objects that use siren-like attractive powers to kill and brutalize the unsuspecting fly. But who gets caught? The consumer or the fly?”
Perhaps Mr Pinsky isn’t aware of the apparent parapraxis in that statement. All hail the Age of Stupid!”
DirkH
February 19, 2012 11:51 am
Nerd says:
February 19, 2012 at 11:22 am
“Widespread vitamin D deficiency is a huge concern that nobody seemed to be aware of. No thanks to CDC, it got swept under the rug. http://www.naturalnews.com”
I regularly adapt my supplements; I’m taking D3 and Zinc Histidine ATM and looks like that works out perfectly – all the people around me coughed and sneezed in this winter and I’m just fine…
Alexander Feht says:
February 19, 2012 at 11:01 am
“While the high fructose syrup may be a factor, I think that growth hormones in meat and dairy products (banned in France, don’t know about other EU countries) are one of the reasons of American obesity. ”
Banned in all of the EU. Yes, maybe that’s a factor as well.
Reading more about fructose, I found out that our normal sugar here in Germany (made from sugar beet) is simply sucrose, that’s a fructose molecule connected to a glucose molecule. The bond between the two molecules is removed by our metabolism and the fructose and glucose are then processed separately. With 50% fructose content, sucrose is nearly as high as HFCS 55 (55%) in fructose content.
And we’ve been using this sugar beet sugar for ages. Dr. Lustig blames the introduction of HFCS in the 70ies, but our sucrose has existed for far longer. So that can’t be the decisive reason.
And by the way: the English wikipedia DOES contain the arguments against HFCS; under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hfcs
But when I went from the German page http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maissirup
I landed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_syrup
which doesn’t.
HankH
February 19, 2012 12:41 pm
Alexander Feht says:
February 19, 2012 at 11:01 am
Dirk,
While the high fructose syrup may be a factor, I think that growth hormones in meat and dairy products (banned in France, don’t know about other EU countries) are one of the reasons of American obesity. Not that you would hear much about it — the U.S. food lobby plays hand in hand with the Feds.
The combination of high levels of grown hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides in meat and dairy is also being shown a leading cause of breast and prostate cancer, among others. Believe it or not, chicken is as bad or worse than beef. The growth hormones encourage these hormone sensitive cancers to grow. The antibiotics suppress the body’s natural defenses against the cancer, and pesticides and other chemicals contribute to chromosomal damage that gets the cancer started.
Having battled cancer and kicked it to the corner, I no longer eat commercial farm raised meat or dairy products. I’m even careful to read the label on organic labeled products as many of them come from China and aren’t inspected by U.S. agencies to ensure that they’re really organic. In reality they’re often so full of undesirable chemicals that they’re worse for you. Anyway, I don’t want a repeat of the cancer experience so I choose my food carefully.
The deal with any sugars is moderation. Even “natural” sources of sugar such as fruits will break down into high levels of fructose. HFCS is no worse than Honey or Agave. Eating a wide variety of foods, and in moderation is the key.
Third Party
February 19, 2012 12:56 pm
Has an(y)one else noticed that on http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
we are once again in record low temperatures for the calendar date?
Here’s my question(s):
Why is there a global seasonal temp signal?
Why is it positive at some altitudes and negative at others?
Can these data be used to help show causality of CO2 to atmospheric temps in any way?
Can anyone help me with this. Per wiki, the total amount of energy generated by humans from oil, gas, coal, nuclear and biomass is ~125,000TWH per year.
This might seem like a large number, but it equates to ~0.03W/m2 of energy intensity that we are adding to the Earth’s energy budget. ~170W/m2 gets to the surface from the sun, or just over 5,600 times more than we are adding.
Surely, the maximum effect we can have on the system overall is the energy that we add to that system? Our first order effect is the energy, our second order effect is the waste heat. Some of that waste heat goes to creating CO2, making it a third order effect. How can a third order effect from a miniscule addition of energy result in Thermageddon?
Here’s the figures:
143,851TWH – 13%(amount for renewables) = 125150TWH
125150TWH / 8760 (hours in a year) = 14.286530TW = 14286530MW
14286530MW / 510926783 (Area of the world in km2) = 0.027962W / m2
Jimbo
February 19, 2012 1:04 pm
John Peter says:
February 19, 2012 at 9:29 am
So the oceans are doomed after all, notwithstanding Willis Eschenbach’s attempts to explain that the oceans are not turning acid. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17088154
Jacuzzi vents’ model CO2 future
“A UK scientist studying volcanic vents in the ocean says they hold a grave warning for future marine ecosystems.
You may have missed this:
“….a large scale, natural experiment in Papua New Guinea. There are several places at the eastern end of that country where carbon dioxide is continuously bubbling up through healthy looking coral reef, with fish swimming around and all that that implies. Coral Reef at Dobu Island with carbon dioxide bubbling through it
What that implies is that ocean acidification is no threat at all. If the most delicate, fragile, iconic ecosystem of them all can handle flat-out saturation with carbon dioxide, what is there to worry about? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/28/the-fishes-and-the-coral-live-happily-in-the-co2-bubble-plume/
Doomednotdoomed.
statmanUK
February 19, 2012 1:06 pm
Has anyone else wondered whether this whole ‘acidification’ of the world’s oceans due to increasing CO2 emission is the biggest load of bollax ever thought up by non-chemists? Look at the ‘latest research’ reported with gusto by the BBC here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17088154
Apparently volcanic vents deep under the seas surface is acidifying the ocean. Extrapolating this finding, researchers from the low grade UK uni Plymouth University conclude that 30% of all marine life on the sea bed could be killed by acidifying oceans.
Is this an example of good science? Or crap science? Please let me know!
Anybody else had trouble voting in the Weblog Awards?
I’ve tried three times over the last few days and the process seemed to go OK – but I never got the confirmatory email on any occasion.
kadaka (KD Knoebel)
February 19, 2012 1:17 pm
From Alexander Feht on February 19, 2012 at 11:01 am:
While the high fructose syrup may be a factor, I think that growth hormones in meat and dairy products (banned in France, don’t know about other EU countries) are one of the reasons of American obesity. Not that you would hear much about it — the U.S. food lobby plays hand in hand with the Feds.
I’ve noted on the ads for Perdue chicken and others that they say no growth hormones are used, with the fine print saying growth hormones aren’t permitted anyway. I Googled up an expanded listing (bold added): http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/id/QAA400066
Some people think that all commercially raised animals – cattle, hogs, sheep, and poultry – are fed hormones as growth promoters. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) does not permit the use of hormones in raising hogs or chickens, turkeys and other fowl. That is why the USDA does not allow the use of the term “no hormones added” on labels of pork or poultry products unless it is followed by a statement explaining that “Federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones.”
Hormones are still used as growth promoters in cattle and sheep. It’s estimated that two-thirds of the cattle raised in the U.S. are given hormones (usually testosterone or estrogens) to boost growth. Producers of beef and lamb may use the term “no hormones administered” on labels after satisfying the USDA that hormones were not used in raising the animals. If you eat beef or lamb, I urge you to look for such products.
So growth hormones in meat are rather easy to avoid.
More info on growth hormones is found in this Cornell University fact sheet: http://envirocancer.cornell.edu/factsheet/diet/fs37.hormones.cfm
Note that’s a 2000 document, page says it’s on a archival site, see the new one. I did, did searching through the pdf files… which lead right back to the same document except in pdf.
I can’t see anything there to worry about. And if someone says they’re worried about growth hormones in American poultry and pork, feel free to write them off as a raving nutter.
u.k.(us)
February 19, 2012 1:33 pm
Foxgoose says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Anybody else had trouble voting in the Weblog Awards?
I’ve tried three times over the last few days and the process seemed to go OK – but I never got the confirmatory email on any occasion.
==============
Same here, voted 4 or 5 times, never got the confirm email ?????
Marlow Metcalf
February 19, 2012 1:34 pm
My tiny understanding of how Wikipedia decides which position to publish is this. They do not do peer review. They go with what the vast majority opinion and facts of published work. When the vast majority of published work is that humans cannot change climate then Wikipedia will publish that. As to different opinion and information in different languages, I have no idea.
Kaboom
February 19, 2012 1:45 pm
@Smokey
If you published a story that a study has concluded that global warming causes half the population to be of below average intelligence you could probably get every major news outlet to run it – simply based on the fact that the editors today are part of that population half.
DirkH
February 19, 2012 1:47 pm
Marlow Metcalf says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:34 pm
“My tiny understanding of how Wikipedia decides which position to publish is this. They do not do peer review. They go with what the vast majority opinion and facts of published work. When the vast majority of published work is that humans cannot change climate then Wikipedia will publish that. As to different opinion and information in different languages, I have no idea.”
In my opinion, they publish the point of view that wins. For instance, once I read the article on Albert Einstein, and it was strangely worded at one point. I looked into the history and the talk page and it turned out that there had been a war raging for years between one guy who thought that Poncaré was the real inventor of general relativity and others who opposed him; in that case it resulted in a strangely compromising text, taking neither position clearly.
What position wins in such a war is determined by the warring factions, their standing in the wikipedia hierarchy, their numbers, their tactics, their strategy, how well they can damage the reputation of the opposing forces etc. The book of Sun Tzu comes in handy.
Reading more about fructose, I found out that our normal sugar here in Germany (made from sugar beet) is simply sucrose, that’s a fructose molecule connected to a glucose molecule. The bond between the two molecules is removed by our metabolism and the fructose and glucose are then processed separately. With 50% fructose content, sucrose is nearly as high as HFCS 55 (55%) in fructose content.
I’m semi-agnostic on the issue. Science News has had some intriguing articles over the last several decades on the subject, most recently one to the effect that fructose, in the presence of glucose prompts the pancreas to put out more insulin.
The “predigested” sucrose sounds like it should be metabolized just like real sucrose. However, it’s possible that sucrose leads to low levels of fructose in the bloodstream.
I think the last time I checked, I found that fructose is converted into glucose, and then it enters the long processing (Krebs Cycle, electron transport chain, etc) that I learned in high school biology when that was new knowledge.
If the enzyme that splits sucrose is slower than that which converts fructose to gluclose, then fructose would have a short dwell time in the blodstream. Consuming HFCS, OTOH, would likely flood the bloodstream with both fructose and glucose, so there would be a fructose spike.
I have not had time to look into the reaction rates of the two steps, if someone has time to do so, please be my guest.
By the way, one thing I learned along the way is that “invert sugar,” used mainly in pastery products, is sucrose decomposed to glucose and fructose by a heat process. (My recollection is fuzzy, a recheck is in order.) The goal is to make sugar sweeter in pastries.
Steve from Rockwood
February 19, 2012 1:52 pm
u.k.(us) says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:33 pm
Foxgoose says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Anybody else had trouble voting in the Weblog Awards?
I’ve tried three times over the last few days and the process seemed to go OK – but I never got the confirmatory email on any occasion.
==============
Same here, voted 4 or 5 times, never got the confirm email ?????
————————————————————————————
I had no problem. Maybe check your spam filter.
Genghis
February 19, 2012 2:01 pm
Eric (Skeptic)
I think you missed the point a little. If the system isn’t in thermal equilibrium, then yes albedo, GHG’s, insulation, etc. make a difference to the rate of temperature change in the system.
The point of the experiment was that the Earth after being heated by the sun for billions of years has to be in thermal equilibrium. Just like putting the putting the metal bars under the heat lamp for a few hours.
Marlow Metcalf
February 19, 2012 2:04 pm
Regarding Bovine Growth Hormon (BGH)
From the American Cancer Society http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerCauses/OtherCarcinogens/AtHome/recombinant-bovine-growth-hormone
“Before approving the use of rBGH in 1993, the FDA calculated a worst case scenario based on an infant drinking 1.5 liters (1.6 quarts) of milk daily, with complete absorption of intact IGF-1 protein and the maximum increase in IGF-1. Under these conditions, milk from rBGH-treated cows would contribute far less than 1% of the infant’s normal daily production of IGF-1. “
Current usage and regulatory status
Although the use of rBGH is still approved in the United States, demand for the product has decreased in recent years. Many large grocery store chains no longer carry milk from cows treated with rBGH. A United States Department of Agriculture survey conducted in 2007 found that less than 1 in 5 cows (17%) were being injected with rBGH.
Summary
The available evidence shows that the use of rBGH can cause adverse health effects in cows. The evidence for potential harm to humans is inconclusive. It is not clear that drinking milk produced using rBGH significantly increases IGF-1 levels in humans or adds to the risk of developing cancer. More research is needed to help better address these concerns.
The increased use of antibiotics to treat rBGH-induced mastitis does promote the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but the extent to which these are transmitted to humans is unclear.
The American Cancer Society (ACS) has no formal position regarding rBGH. Together with its advocacy affiliate, the ACS Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN), the Society supports open, fair and transparent regulatory oversight of products containing rBGH. The ACS also encourages continued and expanded scientific research and independent, credible assessment of potential relationships between the use of this substance in cows and human cancer risk. We support regulatory standards based on rigorous scientific evidence to minimize exposure to carcinogens, and we encourage the FDA to give the public information regarding known and suspected causes of cancer in the food system. The need for an effective FDA in ensuring the safety of our food supply, medicines, and consumer products has never been greater.
Steve from Rockwood says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:52 pm
I had no problem. Maybe check your spam filter.
==========================
I don’t think I have a spam filter.
I’m (a dinosaur) running “outlook express provided by Comcast”.
Maybe my security settings are too high?, I rarely get spam.
My vote went thru last year, and as far as I know, my settings are the same.
[Reply: Please email them and explain the problem. ~dbs, mod.]
It is worth following Gowers’s Weblog and the minor revolution he has started in scientific publishing. Its ramifications reach well beyond Elsevier and concern the entire scientific publishing system.
As far as I can see no “climate scientist” has joined in so far, they seem to be perfectly satisfied with the current paywalled/pal-reviewed setup.
However, we clearly need a reform, and it is getting urgent indeed. Results of publicly financed research should remain publicly accessible all the time. In fact we do not really need “publishers” any more, just some public repositories, preferably with proper revision control and easy anytime public backup (like github). The role of former publishers should be restricted to quality control, provided as a service, presumably for a subscription fee (or even free of charge if it was a community effort or was financed on taxpayer’s money). Repositories should support filtering according to evaluation lists and backlinks to them. That’s it.
Former journals would shrink to URL lists with a quality score assigned to each item and, of course, these evaluation lists themselves were also subject to evaluation.
Don Penman
February 19, 2012 2:26 pm
I did not get the email to confirm my vote on the weblog awards, I gave up in the end.
[Reply: They will answer your email. Please email them and explain the problem. ~dbs, mod.]
Marlow Metcalf
February 19, 2012 2:33 pm
In the category of “If I think of it then somebody has already built it”.
After watching a video of home well water catching fire it occurred to me that the well needs to be vented. Methane buildup has been happening before fracking. http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/wells/waterquality/methane.html
“VENTING
Minnesota rules require new wells to have a vented cap or cover. The well vent prevents a vacuum, and helps to release gases such as methane or hydrogen sulfide. However, older wells may not be vented. A variety of well caps are available that have a built-in vent on the underside of the cap. Separate down-turned vents are also available. It is important to install these caps and vents to properly vent the well, and to prevent flood water, contaminants, or insects and small animals from entering the well. Water storage tanks and water treatment tanks should also be vented. Vents should extend outside, above the ground surface, and away from any building.
METHANE REMOVAL AND TREATMENT
Methane will not be removed by common water treatment devices such as sediment filters, water softeners, or carbon filters. Most removal or treatment techniques involve aeration. A gas shroud, attached to a submersible pump in the well, may provide relief in some circumstances. Fittings that drain back or aerate water into the well have been used, but are not particularly effective, and may cause other problems such as well corrosion or plugging.
AERATION
Aeration is the process of mixing air into water and venting the gas to the outside atmosphere. Aeration can remove methane, as well as other gasses such as hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg smell)…….”
TP, land and vegetation distribution cause most of the seasonality (probably ocean circulation patterns too).
Yes, looking at correlation of absolute temp and log CO2 might tell us a lot.
Kev-in-UK
February 19, 2012 2:34 pm
Genghis says:
February 19, 2012 at 2:01 pm
Just thinkiong of your experiment there, for a minute – couldn’t the tinfoil act as a supposed GHG?, especially if not in direct thermal contact with the metal bar. i.e. with a bit of an air gap – it may reflect 50% of the incoming radiation – but also it will reflect 50% of the outgoing radiation from the bar back (assuming it has equal reflectivity on both sides of the foil!). If so, would that mean that equilibrium temp is identical for both bars?
sorry Kev-in-UK just washed my hands and I can’t do a thing with em.
Genghis
February 19, 2012 3:38 pm
Kev-in-UK, Yes both bars have exactly same equilibrium. The only difference due to albedo, insulation and the implied GHG effect is the time it takes to reach equilibrium.
I would make two points for this week’s Open Thread …..
[SNIP: This is already posted. You’ve tried to post it two or three additional times. That is called “thread-bombing”. Please review the site policy and refrain from this. -REP]
Britain is facing a “massive” rise in antibiotic-resistant blood poisoning caused by the bacterium E.coli – bringing closer the spectre of diseases that are impossible to treat.
Experts say the growth of antibiotic resistance now poses as great a threat to global health as the emergence of new diseases such as Aids and pandemic flu.
Professor Peter Hawkey, a clinical microbiologist and chair of the Government’s antibiotic-resistance working group, said that antibiotic resistance had become medicine’s equivalent of climate change.
Steve from Rockwood
February 19, 2012 4:56 pm
u.k.(us) says:
February 19, 2012 at 2:23 pm
Steve from Rockwood says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:52 pm
I had no problem. Maybe check your spam filter.
==========================
I don’t think I have a spam filter.
I’m (a dinosaur) running “outlook express provided by Comcast”.
Maybe my security settings are too high?, I rarely get spam.
My vote went thru last year, and as far as I know, my settings are the same.
[Reply: Please email them and explain the problem. ~dbs, mod.]
—————————————————————–
Seems as though Outlook Express has no spam filter. So the email response isn’t getting past your ISP, “Comcast”.
A way around this is to create a temporary email account on hotmail or gmail etc, then use that email to get your response. You can check these email accounts from your web-browser.
Cheers
Eric (skeptic) says: February 19, 2012 at 9:27 am I would like Doug Cotton (or anyone else) to provide an alternative explanation to why radiational cooling is more effective when there are no clouds
________________________________________________________________
It is well known that the moist adiabatic lapse rate in the atmosphere is less that the dry one. Clearly there can be more water vapour when there are clouds. So the atmosphere cools more slowly. This is basic physics.
However, it does not in general affect the rate of cooling of the surface.
The atmosphere is usually cooler than the surface at night and is also cooling faster even when relative humidity is high. So there is no feedback mechanism which adds thermal energy back into the surface in order to slow its rate of cooling. Any such mechanism would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If you think it happens, then you explain how and why, and produce some evidence that is not a circular argument based on the greenhouse conjecture.
Even if radiation from the surface is reduced because the temperature of the first millimetre of the air is closer to that of the surface, this can be compensated for by the rate of thermal energy transfer by diffusion and evaporation etc. This “balancing act” happens all day long. Hence you cannot say that, just because the power of radiation leaving the surface is diminished that the whole net rate of cooling of the surface is reduced. It isn’t because no thermal energy can be transferred from a cooler atmosphere to a warmer surface.
In any event, this is weather not climate. On a worldwide 24/7 basis relative humidity tends to average out and has in fact been slightly declining this century as was advised in a recent WUWT article.
.
John Greenfraud
February 19, 2012 5:23 pm
A question asked of Gavin Schmidt and his (partial) response. From http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/
[Question: In the letter, you say you want “an honest, fact-based debate about the policy responses to climate change.”
Since you (and by you I mean most the “signers” of this open letter) were invited to the climate
conferences sponsored by Heartland, and chose not to attend, does this mean that you all are now ready to engage in the Heartland climate conferences to debate the “deniers” and the “anti-climate” and “anti-science” people?]
[Response: If Heartland was actually interested in debating policy options I wouldn’t have any problem with them, and I would encourage others with ideas about policy to engage with them to their heart’s content……]
Notice the question was about debating climate science. He then responds he would debate ‘policy issues’, desperately trying to avoid the appearance that he is unwilling to debate AGW.
The way I see it, If someone wants to debate “policy options”, they go to a politician. If someone wants to debate AGW, they go to the scientists that are promoting it. That’s you Mr. Schmidt!
Schmidt must realize that given the amounts of taxpayer money that has been spent on this fraud, that the public is going to insist(demand) that he comes clean. Is it to much to ask that these climate scientists publicly defend and debate their work, openly and honestly? I think not. The political winds change quickly my friends, Schmidt can voluntarily answer questions now or he can do so under court order later, but the American public will have their answers, one way or the other.
jorgekafkazar
February 19, 2012 5:27 pm
LearDog says: “THIS story is hysterical.! Have at it! http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_19984502
Clearly ‘Hate Crimes’”
Why is this hysterical? Is decimation of sea otters by sharks intrinsically funny?
Doug Cotton says:
February 19, 2012 at 4:14 pm I would make two points for this week’s Open Thread …..
[SNIP: This is already posted
__________________________________________
I’m truly sorry, but at first I had a technical problem and the post did not appear, and then I do think you will find that you snipped it on the “snow” thread which is understandable, I guess, even though the title of that thread referred to no effect of CO2.
I have felt obliged to respond to Eric (Skeptic) and William Connelly who have each been thread bombing with fairly similar posts on various threads, but I will try to keep to Friday open threads in future.
But if you can find this post actually accepted anywhere, or if you can recover it if not, I’d appreciate it being transferred to this thread as it made a new point regarding the thermal “momentum” of core and mantle thermal energy.
jorgekafkazar
February 19, 2012 5:42 pm
paulhan says: “Can anyone help me with this. Per wiki, the total amount of energy generated by humans from oil, gas, coal, nuclear and biomass is ~125,000TWH per year.”
Which wiki do you mean? There are dozens of the things. If you mean Wankerpedia, say so.
edbarbar
February 19, 2012 5:45 pm
We need a cartoon from Josh for the ridiculous stance of Governor Jerry Brown in CA, who has demanded 30% of energy come from renewable sources. I was thinking a Junipero Serra Governor Brown whipping Californians to prostrate themselves before his Big Green God (preferably with a huge green pot brimming with $ nearby that says “Donations Not Voluntary.”)
Myrrh
February 19, 2012 5:47 pm
Nerd says:
February 19, 2012 at 11:22 am
Dirk,
High fructose syrup in high amount can give you fatty liver disease! Essentially, no different than drinking alcoholic beverages in large quantity. Yikes. Anyway, if you want to lose weight, get diabetes and heart disease under control, get glucose meter and test your blood 30-60 minutes after you eat something. If your blood sugar level goes above 120, ditch the food and try something else. Paleo Diet is a great one and not only that it was proven by multiple trial studies. Wheat Belly Diet is a pretty good complementary to that diet as it helps you understand why and how you get heart disease in the first place. High fructose isn’t the only carbohydrate source to worry about. Wheat/corn flour based products (pasta, bread, etc) are everywhere as well.
Widespread vitamin D deficiency is a huge concern that nobody seemed to be aware of. No thanks to CDC, it got swept under the rug. http://www.naturalnews.com/032202_vitamin_D_deficiency_disease.html To help you understand how important Vitamin D is for our health – (Note: it is not really a vitamin but a prohormone that get converted to powerful steroid hormone that acts as DNA repair and maintenance) – http://www.biochemj.org/bj/441/0061/bj4410061.htm
Once again, we get screwed by gov’t… Oh yeah, American Cancer Society recently tried to discredit vitamin D and telling us to stick to federal guideline. Right… you want us to get cancer so you get to charge high amount while I suffer miserably undergoing chemotherapy. How nice of you…
Once again, it’s all about money.
=======================
I’ve just posted on this, but from a different angle – that the UV scaremongering has created a vitamin D deficiency, there’s been a rise in rickets because mothers have been slathering young children with sunblock creams, but it’s worse than that :http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/monckton-responds-to-skeptical-science/#comment-895283
From which: http://www.rense.com/general48/sunlight1.htm
Eric (skeptic)
February 19, 2012 5:53 pm
Doug, thanks very much for the reply. If I can summarize your answer in two points, first, there are coincidental factors with clouds, the main one being humidity, so the atmosphere cools more slowly. Second there is no net effect (i.e. climate) from clouds and radiational cooling (or lack thereof) because the clouds are always cooler than the surface.
If I can ignore your second argument for a moment I would just further explain local observations. My observations are really very simple. There are 3 main weather stations (at airports DCA, IAD and BWI) within about 30-40 miles of each other. They all measure the extent of cloud layers and the height of each layer along with the weather. They report each hour. There are particular mornings when the stations have been cloud-free but one station or two get clouded over in the early morning but not the others. This is usually not associated with a major weather system, just what is sometimes called a “dirty high” although it can also occur with the clouds that precede a front.
Notably the effect is the same no matter what the elevation of the clouds are. They can be 5k, 10k, or 15k feet or 20k feet (usually clouds higher than that will impact all 3 stations equally). The effect is that the temperature stops dropping or drops more slowly at the cloudy station(s) than at the other station(s). The humidity (as measured by dew point) does not change much during this time, although in some cases, at the clear stations, the dewpoint will drop with temperature. But the fact that the temperature effect still exists with a cloud layer way up at 20k feet should indicate that there is no meaningful change in lapse rate from the surface to the boundary layer where the radiational cooling is taking place.
The radiation explanation is also suitable because the effect is the same at 5k up to 20k or higher, and only radiation can act instantly unlike the propagation of moisture from the clouds or similar effects.
Your second argument, that clouds don’t inhibit radiational cooling on a worldwide average basis is a little more difficult to answer because worldwide temperature indexes are corrupted with bad data (mostly heat island) and worldwide averages of clouds are woefully inadequate. I would only argue for now that if the local effect exists, then there could be a worldwide effect, namely that an average increase in diurnal clouds (with clear skies at night) would result in global cooling or that an average worldwide increase in high clouds (which are usually not diurnal) will result in global warming (both being conditional on many other factors).
George E. Smith;
February 19, 2012 6:00 pm
“”””” LearDog says:
February 19, 2012 at 9:01 am
THIS story is hysterical.! Have at it! http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_19984502
Clearly ‘Hate Crimes’ “””””
Paul Rogers is a well known lefty drinker of the global warming man made falling sky syndrome. when not sreading the gospell according to algoreipcc he appears on Belva Davis pbs whinefest.
I’m sure it is disconcerting .for these teddy bear cuddlers to see their pets lunched on by sharks
Hey if you are shark, one fur bag tastes just like anther. I’m sure the California Abalone population thinks it is just fine with them if the sharks eat the otters.
For the record, I like the sharks, the otters, and the Abalones: in that order.
In the WUWT article “Christy on Sierra Snowfall… “ there is a link to an SF Chronicle article “Study: Sierra snowfall… “
Christy said in the WUWT article that for the Sierra, there is “no trend, no effect from CO2”. (The Chronicle article quotes Mike Dettinger, a climatologist and research hydrologist at the Scripps Institute of the U.S. Geological Survey) Dettinger attempts to refute Christy by saying “snowpack has declined over three quarters of the western United States…” and that 60% is due to “greenhouse gases” (note that he does not say CO2).
Dettinger also said “…The number of inches or feet of snow on the ground can mean a variety of things, he said, depending on if it is fluffy powder or compacted, wet snow.” but does not correlate that to any of his own assertions about his assessment of the snowpack.
Is there any merit to Dettinger’s claim that “…over the last 50 years the southern Sierra snowpack has gotten larger while the northern Sierra pack has shrunk.”?
nb: The last time I was at Scripps here in San Diego, there was a large photo of Scripps
management shaking hands with algore and receiving a commendation from him for their work in propagating his agenda.
Doug Cotton – not sure if you’re planning to return to argo thread, please read my post to you.
George E. Smith;
February 19, 2012 6:37 pm
“”””” kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 19, 2012 at 10:58 am
From DirkH on February 19, 2012 at 9:33 am:
Via a link posted by Nerd, I found this video by Dr. Robert Lustig, lecture about the American obesity epidemic and High Fructose Corn Syrup.
It wasn’t that long ago when the HFCS kerfuffle popped up in the US. Suddenly soda cans were proudly labeled “Made with SUGAR!” After the many decades of warnings about obesity and even diabetes from the sugar (generic term) in soda, I did find that rather humorous. The problem with HFCS is that it doesn’t come from a bleeding tree in Vermont, and corn farmers can provide all of it anyone wants.
It used to be that Fructose was preferred over Glucose, because it doesn’t give the “sugar high” that glucose does; which of course is followed by the “sugar downer” that you have to sleep off.
Of course if you don’t get that upper-downer from your sugar, then you clearly aren’t using nearly enough of it; so swig on another Pepsi, until you feel good.
US obesity can be traced to one simple cause; they eat far too much food. There is one particular ethnic group, which will remain anonymous, who are just plain lard arses, even though they may be in the low income segment of the population. I eat the same food they do, because I like it, and I’m about 175, at 5’11”, which is actually high for me. There’s another also nameless ethnic group, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen a fat one. I also eat the same food they do, because I like it; actually they eat far more than I do.
I put sugar (raw or regular cane) in my tea and coffee, and nowhere else. I can’t stand ANY kind of store cookies; they all have hideous aftertastes from the various colored (blue, yellow, pink) plastic sugar substitutes; I’d rather have nothing in my coffee than that crap; and I hate the taste of coffee. Starbucks advertises they use no HFCS, but their cookies taste shitty too, and they have all of those plastic sugars available for their bad tasting coffee.
Don’t eat so much; it’s even cheaper.
William M. Connolley says: February 18, 2012 at 11:38 am (on the Snowfall thread) GW makes the world warmer; and this (to first order) makes for more WV and hence more precipitation.
________________________________________________________________
But, William, we have seen here at WUWT that measurements show that the relative humidity is declining. What that really does is make the adiabatic lapse rate greater, meaning a steeper temperature trend pivoting (long-term) about a mean of about 255 K somewhere up in the atmosphere. This natural temperature gradient in the atmosphere (being a function of the acceleration due to gravity) is what determines how much above the 255 K we expect the surface temperature to be. Hence we would actually expect less WV with increasing temperatures.
Oh yes, I do agree that long term the temperatures are increasing and the long-term trend from a few hundred years ago is increasing at a declining rate of increase that has reduced from 0.06 deg.C / decade to about 0.05 deg.C / decade pointing to a maximum in the long-term temperature trend within about 200 years. I worked that out from the plot at the foot of my Home page http://climate-change-theory.com
But where is the increasing WV you speak of, William? All the data shows is decreasing relative humidity correlating with global warming.
Didn’t I tell you that backradiation from cooler WV in the atmosphere cannot transfer thermal energy to the surface?
Duncan
February 19, 2012 6:38 pm
Just brought out a new “Big Oil” mug if anyone fancies em. Thought about using fruitier language but settled on where’s my bloody money? As the tag line.
Can’t do images as I’m crap. So crap it’s no surprise Big Oil haven’t paid up yet! http://www.uglymug.co.uk/Big_Oil_Conspiracy_-_Mug/p735934_5812190.aspx
Genghis says:
February 19, 2012 at 2:01 pm The point of the experiment was that the Earth after being heated by the sun for billions of years has to be in thermal equilibrium.
__________________________________________________________
You make a good point here. Of course there are minor variations from equilibrium of the order of 0.5% in TOA net radiative flux, but long-term over billions of years a temperature trend has been established from the core to the crust and then one from the surface to the mesopause, which is about -100 deg.C and above which things get a bit irrelevant.
But there will always be close thermal equilibrium at the surface/atmosphere interface due to diffusion which results from molecular collisions. So the two plots meet at the surface and this is seen when investigating underground temperatures in boreholes such as the 9Km deep one in Germany.
Now, my point is that, if the long-term equilibrium surface temperature were to be raised, say 3 deg.C, then the whole (roughly linear) temperature plot from the core to the surface would have to be raised at the surface end. Likewise, the natural adiabatic lapse rate in the atmosphere would have to adjust somehow, even though it is determined mostly by the acceleration due to gravity and the relative humidity, being steeper when the air is drier. There would be a massive amount of extra thermal energy that would have to be stored all the way from the core to the surface in order to fill the gap between the current temperature plot and the new one which would be 3 deg.C higher at the surface end. Need I say more? There is obviously a huge stabilising effect due to the huge amount of thermal energy under the surface and all the way down to that 5,700 deg.C core.
Myrrh says:
February 19, 2012 at 6:22 pm Doug Cotton – not sure if you’re planning to return to argo thread, please read my post to you
____________________________________________
Sorry, I couldn’t find it on the first Argo thread. A link to the post you mean would be handy.
I am going to keep to posting only on the Friday Open Threads (to avoid being off topic) so I will reply here if you post the link on this thread. (You can get it by clicking on the date and time line under your name.)
But please read first my various posts on last week’s Open Thread as well as this week’s here in case I have already covered your point.
ldd
February 19, 2012 8:07 pm
Open thread weekend and just under the wire, yea!
A link for pure raw nature at it’s best and a quiet place just to view 24/7. http://www.farmyou.com/falcon_cams/index.html
Bald Eagle egg laying time! First one laid on the 17th, expecting two more as this pair are very successful parents. 3-4 days in between each egg so could be tomorrow night for #2, between 5-8 pm in the evenings. They’ve improved the camera location this year and hopefully it will stay clear of streamed eaglet outputs. (think someone here put this up last year, iirc – a big thanks)
Paul Vaughan
February 19, 2012 8:23 pm
“Coal, not oilsands, causes global warming: study” http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120219/bc_coal_oilsands_climate_change_120219/20120219 “One of the world’s top climate scientists has calculated that emissions from Alberta’s oilsands are unlikely to make a big difference to global warming and that the real threat to the planet comes from burning coal.
“I was surprised by the results of our analysis,” said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate modeller, who has been a lead author on two reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “I thought it was larger than it was.””
“Burning all the oil in the world would only raise temperatures by less than one degree, the paper concludes.”
“In contrast, the paper concludes that burning all the globe’s vast coal deposits would create a 15-degree increase in temperature. Burning all the abundant natural gas would warm the planet by more than three degrees.”
“When only commercially viable oilsands deposits are considered, the temperature increase is only .03 degrees C.”
In regards to the Heartland documents I sent a complaint to the BBC about the Richard Black article. My complaint was :
{Complaint title:} The article was inaccurate as a document was fake
{Complaint:} The article by Richard Black lacked balance or journalistic
investigation. All documents were considered as real without any effort
to verify as such.
In fact at least one document has been declared a fake, did the
correspondent contact Heartland and ask them for a reaction, or did he
just print verbatim without verification?
I received the following response from the BBC which was signed off by Richard Black :
Thanks for your email. You will be pleased to know that I did indeed phone the Heartland Institute before writing the article.
However, the basis for your complaint is false as seven out of the eight documents have not been dismissed as fakes – in fact the Heartland Institute acknowledged they were real documents, emailed out from the Institute.
Best regards,
Richard Black
I find interesting two things :
First he says he phoned the Heartland Institute, he did not say he spoke to someone though, and he does not mention speaking to the them in his article. Lack of balance as usual from the BBC.
Secondly he dismisses my complaint as false, his argument is that seven out of eight documents are not false. But in fact my complaint stated that, my complaint was lack of balance, which he does not address as he knows he cannot respond. The journalistic hubris at the BBC knows no bounds.
Errors, maybe, 2010 manatee cold deaths at 279. Which would be above the 5 year average. There were 54 in 2009 or the five year averaging would have been somewhere lower. Accuracy at this is about as bad as volcano VEI.
Spike in manatee deaths in Florida blamed in part on record-setting cold http://www.ocala.com/article/20110105/ARTICLES/110109897
I appreciate that some do not fully understand what I have been writing, so hopefully this final post for the week will clarify what I’m getting at. I shall only post on the weekly Open threads in future and only answer questions which I feel are genuine and not already answered in my posts on this or last week’s open thread.. I am only going to discuss the physics of the atmosphere which has been a long-term study topic for me, based on 50 years studying physics.. You simply cannot explain how the Second Law of Thermodynamics operates for radiation if you try to calculate the effects of two-way radiation and take the “net” difference.
I have given an example with my thought experiment with a funnel which focuses radiation from a much larger plate at one end onto a smaller plate at the other end, each at the same temperature and with the same absorptivity. You have net radiation from large to small (agreed?) but the Second Law says you cannot have transfer of thermal energy, ie heat transfer. You can only get the computations to agree with reality if you don’t count any radiation from cold to hot and you only count all radiation from hot to cold. Whatever the temperatures, this funnel will not perform in accord with calculations which you do with net radiation calculated as a difference between the two-way radiative fluxes.
I keep talking about what happens when the Sun is already warming the surface every sunny morning. There is net radiation into the surface because it is warming. So how can extra radiation transfer thermal energy from the colder atmosphere so as to make the surface warm even faster? Obviously that would violate the Second Law. I don’t care if you don’t agree about what happens that evening when it is cooling. Some people can’t understand that thermal energy has to be added in order to slow a rate of cooling, like turning a tap on when the bath plug is out. But you should all be able to understand that the Second Law would be violated in the morning, and that is a part of the IPCC’s model calculations, now isn’t it? You cannot just take a 24 average “net” flow of energy and say all is OK. The Second Law has to apply between any two points at any particular time.
Eventually you will see that Claes Johnson, a well-published Professor of Applied Mathematics does in fact know how to do the relevant computations. It was he who explained the resonating process (which is not absorption that leads to conversion to thermal energy) as you can read in his Computational Blackbody Radiation and I am not going to plagiarise his excellent work. All I have done is explain when the resonating takes place and why it must be related to the overlap and non-overlap of the frequency plots for the source and target. Only when the source is hotter will it have non-overlapping higher frequencies which cannot resonate and which thus have to be converted to thermal energy, as happens with solar insolation.
Thermal energy does not transfer with radiation – only radiated energy which does not know what it is going to strike until it does. If (like solar radiation) it includes visible light then that portion will probably appear as light and be reflected as some colour. When they are not reflected, the invisible UV and the IR can be converted to thermal energy (as can that component of visible light which is not reflected) when there is the potential to be absorbed. But that potential (the absorptivity) is a measured empirical value which itself varies with temperatures of both the source and target. The reason it varies is because radiation from a cooler source never gets converted to thermal energy. In the empirical measurements, the radiation which is scattered may or may not get counted in the emissivity calculations and I suspect this possibility leads to errors. After all, it does not come back at the same angle as incident radiation, so they may not consider it part of the reflected component. But it had no effect on the temperature of the target. So what I am saying is, don’t hang your hat on such measured absorptivity (as William Connolly does) because you would need to know more about how it was calculated. So “heat” only appears to transfer by the following process: at the source some thermal energy is converted to radiation, so the temperature of the source drops. When that radiation hits a cooler target (which can absorb it) then it will be converted back to thermal energy, so the temperature of the target rises and we say there is “heat” transfer. But, if the radiation hits a warmer target the Second Law says it cannot be converted to thermal energy because the Law says there cannot be heat transfer.
* * * * * * * * *
Finally, don’t forget the backradiation from carbon dioxide when it absorbs IR from incident Solar radiation and sends it back to space, thus cooling. This has been the most avoided point in all my posts everywhere.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:17 pm So growth hormones in meat are rather easy to avoid.
Most of the things are easy to avoid when you know, what to avoid, why, and how.
When we came into the U.S. in 1980s, nobody told us about these things, and only in the end of 1990s, when I was already thrice fatter than I had been in Russia, I started connecting the points when I noticed in the local newspaper an article boasting that American beef producers doubled their yield of beef since 1980s by using growth hormones, without increasing the amount of feed.
Fowl in American supermarkets may not contain growth hormones (I doubt it — if it says so on the label, it ain’t necessarily so) but contains so many terrible things that even Russians banned American chicken (Russian wouldn’t buy American chicken even before the ban, so terrible is its taste; Tyson chicken is synonymous to “inedible” in Russia, they call it also “soap meat” and “Bush legs”).
I stopped getting fatter only after I stopped buying any beef and dairy products in supermarket. But I started to get a bit thinner only after I stopped buying their bread and pasta, also. American food lobby and the U.S. Congress in its pocket are killing our nation. Health care racket helps them to relieve the sick of their last remaining funds. Taxation and endless regulations prevent vertical mobility, entrepreneurship and individual freedom. We are a long way down the road to serfdom.
[SNIP: Sorry, but just a step too far. It’s better to not let THAT conversation get started. -REP]
If I can ignore your second argument for a moment I would just further explain local observations. My observations are really very simple. There are 3 main weather stations (at airports DCA, IAD and BWI) within about 30-40 miles of each other. They all measure the extent of cloud layers and the height of each layer along with the weather. They report each hour. There are particular mornings when the stations have been cloud-free but one station or two get clouded over in the early morning but not the others. This is usually not associated with a major weather system, just what is sometimes called a “dirty high” although it can also occur with the clouds that precede a front.
I think the main effect with clouds and radiational cooling is that the clouds reflect light (well, LWIR – longwave IR). This isn’t quite like the cold object radiating toward a warm object, but a mirror reflecting back to an object. Adiabatic lapse rates become less of an issue at night as convection dies down because the ground is no longer heating the air.
I don’t think I can find a good example in my weather data, but with the 10 minute sampling rate I use, it’s very easy to spot passing clouds or some wind activity disrupting radiational cooling.
One handy thing about living in New England is while I can see several aspects of radiational cooling by the ground, air temperature at Mt. Washington’s 6288 foot altitude generally has a much smaller diurnal change. Its temperature traces generally show the warmth of the air mass moving in.
You can watch some of this at:
Mt Washington: http://vortex.plymouth.edu/mwn24.gif (5°F change over the last 24 hours)
Concord NH: http://vortex.plymouth.edu/con24.gif (13°F change)
My site near Concord: http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wx/current.htm (tonight’s radiational cooling has be disrupted by wind mixing the surface layer. On a good summer night I often see something like an exponential fall off to the due point, then a slower rate as dew forms and releases its latent heat. In the winter, the dew/frost formation doesn’t slow radiational cooling as much because there’s less water vapor and less latent heat. When the dewpoint is below zero, frost formation barely slows the rate of fall at all. One thing that’s happening is there’s a sizable window that water vapor and CO2 don’t block, so the ground manages to radiate directly into space during cloudfree times (including daytime).
Notably the effect is the same no matter what the elevation of the clouds are. They can be 5k, 10k, or 15k feet or 20k feet (usually clouds higher than that will impact all 3 stations equally).
That’s all consistant with reflected ground radiation.
The effect is that the temperature stops dropping or drops more slowly at the cloudy station(s) than at the other station(s). The humidity (as measured by dew point) does not change much during this time, although in some cases, at the clear stations, the dewpoint will drop with temperature. But the fact that the temperature effect still exists with a cloud layer way up at 20k feet should indicate that there is no meaningful change in lapse rate from the surface to the boundary layer where the radiational cooling is taking place.
I don’t pay much attention to the lapse rate at night. With the declining convection and formation of the inversion, the only thing that can maintain it well is IR radiation from the top of the atmosphere and that should increase convection. However, I think the ground is able to radiate more thanks to its warmer temperature and transparent part range in the atmosphere.
… I shall only post on the weekly Open threads in future
Open threads are not a weekly feature. Check the post titles at my Guide to WUWT and the month-long tables of content it links to. Not to worry – open threads are frequent enough.
jorgekafkazar says:
February 19, 2012 at 5:27 pm
“LearDog says: “THIS story is hysterical.! Have at it! http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_19984502
Clearly ‘Hate Crimes’”
Why is this hysterical? Is decimation of sea otters by sharks intrinsically funny?”
No. Unless maybe you’re a ‘bad’ shark. What is funny about this story is that it seriously confuses the environmentalists because this problem is caused by their success. They saved the sea otters, the elephant seals and the sharks and now because there are so many elephant seals attracting so many sharks, the sharks are also eating too many sea otters.
The sea otter, elephant seal, and shark saving teams live in their own little specialized worlds. It was all supposed to be harmonious and balanced in Gaia! Now they are faced with a very inconvenient reality. Which Endangered Species gets controlled to save another.
With so many conservation success stories, these kind of inconvenient conflicts are popping up in many places with many species. But this one is high profile and in the heart of Ehrlichland.
JWR
February 19, 2012 10:51 pm
to Eric the sceptic
I would like to add to the answer of Dough on your question why with clouds the radiation is less efficient. It is simply shown in the models of the one slab atmosphere which I wrote down in: http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/IR-absorption.pdf
There are two versions: one with the one way heat flow as also advocated by Johnson and here by Dough and one with the two way heat flow, with the so-called back-radiation. The implementations give the same temperature distribution! But the two way implementation gives rise to spurious absorption.
It has to be avoided.
The same paper deals also with multi-layer models. The results are applied to so-called K&T diagrams showing that the huge back-radiation can not exists.
Richard Graves
February 19, 2012 11:19 pm
I like this comment by Mike Mann and almost agree with him for once! Not sure about the amiable bit but overeducated nerd totally lacking in common sense seems to sum him up perfectly
It was not the life Mann envisaged when he
began work on his post-graduate degree at Yale.
All Mann knew then was that he wanted to work
on big problems, that resonated outside
academia. At heart, he said, he was like one of
the amiable nerds on the television show Big
Bang Theory.
Myrrh
February 20, 2012 1:29 am
February 19, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Myrrh says:
February 19, 2012 at 6:22 pm
Doug Cotton – not sure if you’re planning to return to argo thread, please read my post to you
____________________________________________
Sorry, I couldn’t find it on the first Argo thread. A link to the post you mean would be handy.
===========
Doug – sorry, I had a brainstorm last night, it was very late… I’d responded to Stephen Wilde who was also trying to introduce real world physics into the discussion, convection and conduction, and got the two of you muddled up :http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/12/argo-and-the-ocean-temperature-maximum/#comment-897214
The chart from AR4 predicts a median temperature rise of 3.26 C caused by a doubling of he pre-industrial level of CO2 from 280 ppm to 560 ppm. However, this would imply that the current rise in temperature due to 390ppm is of the order of 1.56C; when it is half this figure. Since the current warming [from ALL sources] is about 0.7C, how do the IPCC, and cronies, justify their assumptions? It seems to me that this alone invalidates the claim that we face unpleasant GW from CO2.
If 3.26=k (ln560-ln280) then k =4.7. In which case the rise from 280ppm to current 390ppm should have been 4.7(ln390-ln280)=1.56C. How can anyone, be they in the Royal Society or elsewhere, argue against a factor of the order of 1.93, as used in the Modtran programme? such a value fits the data.
Do we need to go any further to show that current fears by the warmists are unfounded?
If we do then the fact that there are ample records that glaciers started to retreat [say late 18th century] long before mankind really got going burning fossil fuels about 70 years ago. This suggests to me that it is clear that some of the warming i.e. probably all the rise to 1940 is NOT due to CO2. My observations suggest that about half the warming to date in due to nature.
How do we convince others that spending our children and grandchildren’s inheritance on CO 2 abatement is a foolish waste of money? I bridle when I get an electric bill that tells me the raw price of electricity is 38% of my bill and that levies added, including GREEN levies, are half of this at 19%.. This with only 4% of the UK’s electricity from wind!
I really like this web site. Its so moderate and fair.
kadaka (KD Knoebel)
February 20, 2012 3:05 am
From Doug Cotton on February 19, 2012 at 7:13 pm:
Now, my point is that, if the long-term equilibrium surface temperature were to be raised, say 3 deg.C, then the whole (roughly linear) temperature plot from the core to the surface would have to be raised at the surface end. (…) There would be a massive amount of extra thermal energy that would have to be stored all the way from the core to the surface in order to fill the gap between the current temperature plot and the new one which would be 3 deg.C higher at the surface end. Need I say more? There is obviously a huge stabilising effect due to the huge amount of thermal energy under the surface and all the way down to that 5,700 deg.C core.
What is obvious is the Earth has about 6*10^24 kg of mass, a huge amount of thermal energy stored and more still being generated by various processes…
And about 20 feet or so (6 meters) below any land surface there are temperatures around 50°F all year long, exploitable for heating and cooling, while just a very tiny distance away, back on the surface of this sphere with a mean radius of 6371 km, the temperature can vary widely with the seasons or even be effectively permanently at a certain temp, like with the bitter cold of Antarctica. Using geothermal (ground source) heat pumps to tap the underground heat, it is possible to exclusively do heating, at a good savings versus other methods. But greater efficiency is found using the natural slow thermal diffusion rate of the ground for seasonal thermal storage, put the excess heat in the ground during summer when doing cooling, even store heat from solar thermal panels, then tap it in winter when doing heating.
Thus it is demonstrated that whatever great thermal energy is stored in the Earth, it is effectively sealed away and begrudgingly released at an exceedingly slow rate, and there can be no “…huge stabilising effect due to the huge amount of thermal energy under the surface and all the way down to that 5,700 deg.C core.”
Review this from the Wikipedia Geothermal gradient entry (I direct-linked the references):
Heat flows constantly from its sources within the Earth to the surface. Total heat loss from the earth is 44.2 TW (4.42 × 10^13 watts).[12] Mean heat flow is 65 mW/m2 over continental crust and 101 mW/m2 over oceanic crust.[12] This is approximately 1/10 watt/square meter on average, (about 1/10,000 of solar irradiation,) but is much more concentrated in areas where thermal energy is transported toward the crust by convection such as along mid-ocean ridges and mantle plumes.[13] The Earth’s crust effectively acts as a thick insulating blanket which must be pierced by fluid conduits (of magma, water or other) in order to release the heat underneath. More of the heat in the Earth is lost through plate tectonics, by mantle upwelling associated with mid-ocean ridges. The final major mode of heat loss is by conduction through the lithosphere, the majority of which occurs in the oceans due to the crust there being much thinner and younger than under the continents.[12][14]
An average of about a tenth of a watt per square meter can establish a huge stabilizing effect? With more that 60% of that heat loss from creating oceanic plate (see Reference 14) thus said heat flow is far from distributed evenly? Not likely.
And as there is this thermally distinctive zone through the atmosphere to the surface which extends to around six meters below the surface, followed by the distinctive geothermal gradient region, why would an extra 3°C in surface temps have to be accompanied by an increase in stored thermal energy all the way to the core? The answer is, it doesn’t, and the planet has been that much warmer in past Warm Periods like the Roman and Minoan ones without having such corresponding “to the core” increases. I mean, who would think all that mass could suddenly gain and lose that amount of energy before and after those geological eyeblinks? Couldn’t happen.
Myrrh says: February 20, 2012 at 1:29 am Doug – sorry, .. I’d responded to Stephen Wilde
______________________________________
That’s OK. Yes I have often said that the surface/atmosphere interface is entirely internal, not unlike the floor of the ocean. The only close thing to a blackbody is the whole Earth-plus-atmosphere system as seen from space beyond the thermosphere. A blackbody must be insulated from losses by conduction etc. The Earth’s surface loses more than half its thermal energy by evaporation, conduction, chemical processes and diffusion followed by convection. These processes bring about near thermal equilibrium and there is little energy left to radiate. In fact, correct application of SBL yields very low radiation when the temperature are, say, less than 3 degrees apart.
That (inaccurate) 255K temperature is just a mean and whatever it should be is sure to be found somewhere in the atmosphere. The natural adiabatic lapse rate ensures that the surface will be warmer than the mean, and nothing else (like WV or carbon dioxide and its colleagues) is needed to set the current surface temperatures. So much for that 33 degree C garbage!
Myrrh
February 20, 2012 4:08 am
Paul Vaughan says:
February 19, 2012 at 8:23 pm
“Coal, not oilsands, causes global warming: study” http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120219/bc_coal_oilsands_climate_change_120219/20120219
“One of the world’s top climate scientists has calculated that emissions from Alberta’s oilsands are unlikely to make a big difference to global warming and that the real threat to the planet comes from burning coal.
“I was surprised by the results of our analysis,” said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate modeller, who has been a lead author on two reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “I thought it was larger than it was.””
“Burning all the oil in the world would only raise temperatures by less than one degree, the paper concludes.”
===================================
This has only ever been anti-coal – it’s the other fossil fuel industries supporting the demonisation of coal (cheap fuel). All the while deflecting from their own involvement by accusing the sceptics of being funded by big oil, fossil fuels.
[snip . . kbmod]
Ric, thanks for the ideas. I generally agree but would quibble with the term “reflected” in “reflected ground radiation”. The clouds absorb IR and re-emit it in all directions. We can call it reflection but it isn’t. Reflection seems to be much more complicated: http://www.theoryofabsolutes.com/photonreflectionindepth.html
Doug, here’s a site that shows downwelling IR measurements but not quite real time (about 3 or 4 days of lag): http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/surfrad/dataplot.html I will choose State College PA since it has more chances of random clouds and State College has an automatic reporting system that reports 3 times an hour. With the two sources of data I will be able to verify that the downwelling IR is primarily determined by cloud cover. You agree with that in principle anyway.
The harder part will be for me to demonstrate that the variations in downwelling IR result in changes in temperature, or more specifically, changes in the drop in temperature at night. So far the largest complicating factor has been wind which advects warmer or colder air into State College. I will obviously have to choose windless nights with variable cloudiness.
Eric (skeptic)
February 20, 2012 5:35 am
Here’s a link to the State College weather data: http://www.weather.gov/data/obhistory/KUNV.html I’ll grab the data when they get to the right meteorological conditions (i.e. windless night with varying cloud cover)
kadaka (KD Knoebel)
February 20, 2012 5:35 am
From Alexander Feht on February 19, 2012 at 9:51 pm:
Fowl in American supermarkets may not contain growth hormones (I doubt it — if it says so on the label, it ain’t necessarily so) but contains so many terrible things that even Russians banned American chicken (Russian wouldn’t buy American chicken even before the ban, so terrible is its taste; Tyson chicken is synonymous to “inedible” in Russia, they call it also “soap meat” and “Bush legs”).
Originally published November 2, 2010 at 3:30 PM | Page modified November 3, 2010 at 11:42 AM Once-banned U.S. chicken legs return to Russia
By Will Englund The Washington Post
…
Once, long ago, U.S. chicken imports were at the top of the market here, plump and yellowish at a time when Russian chicken tended to be scrawny, bluish and scarce. This was the early 1990s, to be precise.
Back then nearly a million tons of leg quarters flowed across the Atlantic every year — chicken parts that don’t command very high prices in the breast-meat-craving United States but that nicely filled a Russian preference for dark meat. And they were cheap. Russians liked them so much that they took to calling them “Bush legs,” after the first President Bush.
But in the new pecking order, they come in close to the bottom. For the first nine months of this year, they were banned outright, on the grounds that the chlorine disinfectant used by U.S. producers is unhealthful.
Now, after a relentless full-court press by the U.S. industry, and hard-nosed bargaining over Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), they’re coming in again, washed with a different antimicrobial solution. But Russian shoppers complain about their water content and worry, after a campaign in the Russian media, about hormones and antibiotics.
You won’t find Bush legs in the supermarkets of Moscow or almost any other major city. Who gets them? Poor people in the boondocks, schoolchildren and patrons of fast-food outlets that sell chicken. (Except not one of the largest chains, Rostik’s-KFC, which despite its U.S. affiliation says it sells only Russian chicken.) Go to a wholesale market here, with enticing displays of Russian and Brazilian chicken, and if you ask around enough a sullen vendor eventually will pull a 15-kilogram box of U.S. chicken out of the back freezer.
…
The bans smell like politics:
…
On the other hand, U.S. producers point out that they lost about $400 million in Russian sales because of this year’s ban, which followed several others over the past decade — bans that coincided with the revival of Russia’s domestic poultry business.
…
Russia Seeks to Cleanse Its Palate of U.S. Chicken
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
Published: January 19, 2010
…
This has no doubt unnerved American producers, who gained a foothold in the Russian market in the early 1990s, in part, their Russian critics say, by swamping Russian producers with cheap chicken. Since then, Russian officials have angered American producers and officials with a raft of restrictions and quotas meant to help domestic producers.
The Kremlin has also used chicken as a diplomatic weapon with the United States, which, aside from poultry, has relatively little trade with Russia. Moscow imposed a similar ban in 2002, after the United States raised steel tariffs, and it banned several American chicken companies shortly after Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008, after accusing the United States of helping to instigate the violence.
…
But domestically, the restrictions, coupled with heavy government support of the poultry industry, appear to have worked.
“There has been a rapid rise in production consisting of 15 to 16 percent per year,” said Andrei N. Teriokhin, head of the Association of Russian Poultry Market Operators. Domestic production now accounts for 75 percent of demand.
“In the next four to five years,” Mr. Teriokhin said, “Russia will be able to support itself.”
…
And with politics comes propaganda, as in a FUD campaign boosting Russian poultry by raising suspicion about the cheaper American chicken. An example from the NY Times piece:
“This bird was running around yesterday,” said a burly vendor named Mikhail, pointing out a chicken that was clearly freshly plucked. “They showed us on television where those Bush legs come from,” he said. “They are all American military surplus.”
The rest of the WaPo piece is interesting. A poultry magnate who’s a member of the upper house of the Russian Parliament and a “former” political operative, brushes off that eight out of ten domestic chicken samples bought in Moscow had salmonella. They’re kidding, right? Here in the US they’ll recall a million pounds of meat on a positive finding of salmonella at a factory, and if 8 of 10 were found contaminated at a supermarket then that place would get closed right quick. Those boxes of deep-frozen American chicken legs sure sound a whole lot healthier.
I’m sorry, but there are too many contradictions from what you said. As you stated, you left in the 1980’s. Have you been keeping track of what happens there by following the Russian state-run media and accidentally got infected by the Soviet-style propaganda? Or by communicating with friends and family still there who’ve come to accept the anti-American fabrications?
Eric (skeptic) says:
February 20, 2012 at 5:32 am
> Ric, thanks for the ideas. I generally agree but would quibble with the term “reflected” in “reflected ground radiation”. The clouds absorb IR and re-emit it in all directions. We can call it reflection but it isn’t.
I’ll still call it reflection as in albedo. A big difference is that sunlight reflecting (i.e. photons match the wavelength emitted by the Sun, not the blackbody spectrum of the cloud) off cloud tops involves short wavelengths. The LWIR hitting the bottom of the clouds doesn’t “see” the cloud droplets as well as the solar SW light. I’m not sure how different the albedo is. (And I’m referring to the shorter IR that isn’t blocked by water vapor and other GHGs.)
> Reflection seems to be much more complicated: http://www.theoryofabsolutes.com/photonreflectionindepth.html
Cool site, I’ll try to spend some time with it tonight.
> Doug, here’s a site that shows downwelling IR measurements but not quite real time (about 3 or 4 days of lag): http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/surfrad/dataplot.html
Wow, another cool site – two gold stars for the day. I won’t mention anything about its display of downwelling IR lest I’m reminded I don’t understand basic physics. (Damn high school physics class only talked about index of refraction, polarization, the Brewster angle, and stuff like that. I guess those must be pre-basics.)
> The harder part will be for me to demonstrate that the variations in downwelling IR result in changes in temperature, or more specifically, changes in the drop in temperature at night. So far the largest complicating factor has been wind which advects warmer or colder air into State College. I will obviously have to choose windless nights with variable cloudiness.
The best radiational cooling is when a Canadian high pressure system is centered on the area. Of course, there are no clouds then. You might look for nights when a warm front is a couple hundred miles away, there are often some clouds with that. They tend to be stratiform clouds. You can also look for upper level lows that don’t have surface frontal systems. New England TV mets usually mention them, but we have good TV mets. Watching IR satellite photos and looking for clouds where there aren’t weather fronts on synoptic maps is a good way to look for that. The best case is some stray cumulus clouds above decent snow pack, that’s pretty rare.
Allan MacRae
February 20, 2012 6:23 am
Andrew Weaver’s recent “road-to-Damascus” statement is apparently more political than scientific – he appears to be shifting his position in response to changes in the political wind.
Why do I say this? Because Weaver’s conclusion is not new. This statement, which we wrote and published in 2002, puts it in context:
“The middle range forecast of future warming, based on expected growth in fossil fuel use without any curbs, is for a 1º C increase between now and 2050. The Kyoto Protocol would reduce that increase by an insignificant 0.06º C.”
So how did we know all this “recent” wisdom as early as 2002? Because it was not new even then – it was the state of actual climate science, before it was usurped and perverted for political and economic gain by the global warming gang.
What else did we say in this article?
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
I hope that was clear enough, even for our idiot politicians.
_________________________
CTV News write-up of Weaver’s Nature paper: http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/SciTech/20120219/coal-climate-change-study-120219/
“When only commercially viable oilsands deposits are considered, the temperature increase is only .03 degrees C.”
Our PEGG paper of 2002: http://www.apegga.org/members/publications/peggs/Web11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
Kyoto is Ineffective
Computer simulations of climate have yielded wide-ranging forecasts of future temperature increases from rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations, based on projections of future energy use. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has compiled these simulations. The middle range forecast of future warming, based on expected growth in fossil fuel use without any curbs, is for a 1º C increase between now and 2050. The Kyoto Protocol would reduce that increase by an insignificant 0.06º C.
@ kadaka:
As to the ban, there certainly is a politicized commercial factor there but the crux of the problem is that Tyson “chicken” doesn’t taste like real chicken. Russians know that, Europeans know that, even in India, where there are many really hungry people, American “artificial” chicken doesn’t sell. It has a repulsive, chemical taste. Only people who never tasted anything better than McDonald’s food or Carnival cruise “stuff”, can eat that [snip].
I regularly visit Russia. I read Russian forum debates. I hear what people say there about American chicken, and I’ve tasted Tyson chicken myself. No more, thank you! It does taste like soap.
pauline
February 20, 2012 11:18 am
Foxgoose says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Anybody else had trouble voting in the Weblog Awards?
I’ve tried three times over the last few days and the process seemed to go OK – but I never got the confirmatory email on any occasion.
Neither have I and have tried a few times
[Reply: email them. This year there are numerous complaints similar to yours. Possibly the process has been internally compromised. ~dbs, mod.]
Foxgoose says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Anybody else had trouble voting in the Weblog Awards?
I’ve tried three times over the last few days and the process seemed to go OK – but I never got the confirmatory email on any occasion.
I had the same trouble, and eventually did a text search of my email files. Lo and behold, a post-dated verification email was there (future-dated) that my email client didn’t know how to display (I suppose) . Search for “Bloggi” and see what comes up.
Weaver’s article/position still takes CO2 forcing for granted. The statement that burning all the known coal reserves would warm the planet 15K is just the most ludicrous of his conclusions.
The man is systemically and systematically deluded.
Myrrh
February 20, 2012 1:00 pm
February 20, 2012 at 4:08 am
Paul Vaughan says:
February 19, 2012 at 8:23 pm
“Coal, not oilsands, causes global warming: study” http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120219/bc_coal_oilsands_climate_change_120219/20120219
“One of the world’s top climate scientists has calculated that emissions from Alberta’s oilsands are unlikely to make a big difference to global warming and that the real threat to the planet comes from burning coal.
“I was surprised by the results of our analysis,” said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate modeller, who has been a lead author on two reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “I thought it was larger than it was.””
“Burning all the oil in the world would only raise temperatures by less than one degree, the paper concludes.”
===============
This is the oil industry which helped create CRU, which then tampered with New Zealand temperature records, in order to mobilise the greens against coal and so was born AGW and demonisation of carbon dioxide. Now trying to backtrack a bit, to distance themselves from coal fossil fuels, because they’ve been too successful anti-coal and the greenies are interfering in their new oil ventures.
It’s not the sceptics funded by big oil, but the greens. They’ve always been anti-coal because that’s the oil industry’s agenda. http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/06/bp-greenpeace-big-oil-jackpot.html
“According to the Washington Post the green group Nature Conservancy – which encourages ordinary citizens to personally pledge to fight climate change – “has accepted nearly $10 million in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations over the years.”
Gee, didn’t Greenpeace build an entire ExxonSecrets website to expose the allegedly diabolical fact that, over a 9-year-period (1998-2006) ExxonMobil donated a grand total of $2.2 million to a conservative think tank?
$10 million versus $2 million. Who do we suppose has the cozier relationship with big oil?”
And Donna’s look at the subject with Heartland in mind: http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/02/17/big-oil-money-for-me-but-not-for-thee/
“The Sierra Club takes fossil fuel money. So does the Nature Conservancy and Rajendra Pachauri’s sustainability conference. So why is the Heartland Institute being torn to pieces for the same behaviour?”
And further:
“Two weeks ago Time magazine revealed that,
between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from…Chesapeake Energy – one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S… [backup link here]
In other words, what Time describes as the “biggest and oldest environmental group” in America felt morally justified in taking $25 million smackaroos from a fossil fuel company so that it could campaign against other fossil fuel companies – those that sell coal. A search of the BBC and the Guardian‘s website reveals absolutely no coverage of that news story. Not one word (see here and here).”
Andrew Weaver is one of ‘useful idiots’ for the oil industry, like Hansen and his death trains, it’s always been about anti-coal and here now they’ve found themselves the victims of their own success and trying to put a distance between ‘coal fossil’ fuels and ‘oil fossil’ fuels, because the greens are objecting to their new source of oil wealth.
Too funny.
How do you fit into this Paul?
Another link on this theme. http://www.disinfo.com/2012/02/how-the-sierra-club-learned-to-stop-worrying-about-the-99-and-love-wall-street/
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 20, 2012 at 3:05 am
___________________________________
I note that you do not understand the physics involved in the conduction process from the core to the surface as I explained in my post, and why the whole temperature plot would have to be raised.
Please go back to my post and try to follow why there is a huge stabilising effect. It has nothing whatever to do with the slow terrestrial heat flow.
See also the ‘Explanation’ page on my website.
If anyone else wishes to comment on my posts please at least read them in detail and try to understand the physics. If I haven’t explained clearly enough I am happy to try again, but kadaka obviously just didn’t try and spoke about something else of which I am fully aware of course.
Eric (skeptic) says:
February 20, 2012 at 5:32 am
_________________________________
I have read plenty of papers on downwelling radiation measures thanks, and don’t doubt that they fluctuate with humidity. What is your point? Have I not made it clear that any such radiation has absolutely no effect on climate?
PS kadaka The Earth can tolerate relatively small variations in a 1000 year cycle, but the stabilised surface temperature can draw temperatures back towards the long-term mean of such trends. There cannot be a runaway warming effect in time frames that short. It seems 2 degrees C is about the maximum it can vary from the mean. The mechanism is described on my Explanation page on my website,
However, for a whole new equilibrium to be established, let’s say 5 degrees warmer, the whole underground plot has to shift partly by banking up the terrestrial flow and maybe by inward flow. This would take perhaps hundreds of thousands of years.
There is clear evidence that temperature plots in hundreds of bore holes all extrapolate to base surface temperatures all over the world. This is not by chance. It is because sub-surface and atmospheric trends have to meet at the surface because of the thermal equilibrium established at that inteface most by diffusion – see Wiki “Heat Transfer.” The process of conduction ensures that the trend is set by the core temperature and the surface temperatures and there is a feedback mechanism in conduction that enables this.
Myrrh
February 20, 2012 2:44 pm
Is there a reason for the change to the front page – that it no longer the all the previous posts below the latest, and now without the “older posts” back button?
Do you, Eric, kadaka, or anyone, seriously believe that, when you turn on an electric radiator you could actually make it warm faster by holding a mirror beside it and reflecting its own radiation back onto itself? Try it if you do and time how long it takes to get to its maximum with or without the mirror. When it reaches its maximum, can you then make it hotter still with the mirror?
Backradiation would be even less effective than a mirror because it usually has lower frequencies than those originally emitted by the surface. It is ludicrous to imagine energy can be created this way. The Second Law of Thermodynamics would be so obviously violated.
Yet the IPCC says backradiation should be about a quarter as powerful as the Sun at noon. Well I know the Sun can heat sand on the beach until it blisters my feet, but when I tested the effect of backradiation on sand there was not even a tenth of a degree difference between it and the shielded sand in an identical wide necked vacuum flask.
Yet the IPCC says backradiation should be about a quarter as powerful as the Sun at noon. Well I know the Sun can heat sand on the beach until it blisters my feet, but when I tested the effect of backradiation on sand there was not even a tenth of a degree difference between it and the shielded sand in an identical wide necked vacuum flask.
I reviewed your “backyard experiment,” it has an obvious glaring error:
“Tape the screens together (along the long sides) to make a large square and suspend them (eg with piles of bricks in the corners) so they are only about 15cm above the top of one of the the flasks and centrally positioned of course. There should be a slight dish effect in the screens so warm air can escape by convection around the sides.”
You have established no valving effect. If warm air can leave, then warm air can enter. Thus the surrounding area having a decreased rate of cooling due to backradiation can distribute its retained heat to your wide-mouthed soup Thermos hiding under the two taped-together windscreen shields (windshield sunscreens).
Do you, Eric, kadaka, or anyone, seriously believe that, when you turn on an electric radiator you could actually make it warm faster by holding a mirror beside it and reflecting its own radiation back onto itself? Try it if you do and time how long it takes to get to its maximum with or without the mirror. When it reaches its maximum, can you then make it hotter still with the mirror?
*groan*
If I would place an electric radiator inside a thermally reflective box, of course I would expect the radiator to reach its maximum temperature faster. If it was surrounded by only half of a thermally-reflective box, reflecting back half of the emitted thermal radiation, I would still expect it to reach its maximum temperature faster than without the half a box.
Here’s an experiment for you to consider. Suspend two identical electric heating elements in two otherwise identical uninsulated vacuum chambers, the difference is one has a black interior coating while the other has a normal thermally reflective silver finish. The radiation emitted from the one element will hit the black surface, be transformed to heat that is absorbed by the heavy metal housing, which will then be released by the housing to the surrounding environment by the normal processes.
The elements are in vacuum so there is no convection, there is only negligible conduction by the electrical leads the elements are hanging from. You’re left with radiation to consider.
By what you’ve said, the element in the silvery chamber cannot possibly obtain maximum temperature faster than the element in the black chamber. You do not believe an electric radiator could be made to warm faster by reflecting its own radiation back onto itself. Thus the element in the silvery chamber cannot be made to warm faster by reflecting its own radiation back onto itself.
Thus by your reasoning, the element in the chamber retaining more thermal energy cannot possibly obtain maximum temperature faster than the element in the chamber that is shedding more thermal energy. Does that sound about right to you?
Kadaka: The problem you envisage with the backyard experiment is a red herring. Any such warm air would rise rather than fall to the sand. Think, man, think.
You are also wrong about the radiator. I have not said anything about a surrounding box which might trap and prevent warm air escaping by convection. Take the radiator outside with a long chord and just use a mirror at the side (as I said) not at the top.
Now read my next post.
This page http://mit.edu/16.unified/www/FALL/thermodynamics/notes/node133.html explains how reflected radiation is broken into two components …
(1) The specular (mirror-like) reflection where angle of incidence = angle of reflection.
(2) The “diffuse” reflection which is deflected at any random angle..
Here the second component is what I prefer to call deflected (or scattered) radiation, as the process is very different from specular reflection. But whatever you call it, it obviously does exist.
This is the process I have been talking about all along. As far as energy is concerned, as I have always said, it is the same as reflection and thus has no effect whatsoever on the temperature of the target, in this case the surface.
This diffuse reflection is what happens when the target is warmer than the source. If such radiation were absorbed and converted to thermal energy there would be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That is why you need to know the temperatures of both source and target before you can know the overall absorptivity and emissivity. These factors will be affected by this diffuse reflection, which cuts in when the target starts to get warmer than the source.
Thus, all radiation from a cooler atmosphere undergoes diffuse reflection when it strikes a warmer surface. This is why an atmospheric radiative greenhouse effect is a physical impossibility.
(continued from my last post)
I am of course aware that “diffuse” reflection is usually applied to reflection of light which appears to be diffused because of a rough surface. On a microscopic scale, the rough surface may well comprise many small smooth surfaces which simply produce specular reflection at various angles.
So, strictly speaking, the “rejection” of low frequency radiation (from a cooler source) which meets a warmer surface and then resonates and is scattered is yet another different process. But it helps to think of it as diffuse reflection because the end result is the same. My main point is that it can have no effect on the surface temperature because it is as good as reflected.
When IR from the atmosphere strikes a rough Earth surface, you would not be able to distinguish between this scattered radiation and diffuse reflection. In general you will measure inflated values of emissivity as a result. I would suggest that true absorptivity should be expressed as a function of both source and target temperatures. Then its measure should reflect the proportion of the radiation from a source at that temperature which is actually absorbed and converted to thermal energy. In the case of a target temperature greater than a source temperature the absorptivity would thus always be zero.
So this is where models go wrong because they use mean absorptivity measurements which disregard the temperatures of source and target and probably include a lot of scattered radiation anyway. Thus the models end up assuming thermal energy is transferred to the warmer atmosphere simply because they do not rate absorptivity for the relevant temperatures as being zero. Thus they assume violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and are of course wrong as a result. There can be no radiative Greenhouse effect.
(continued)
In calm conditions on a clear day we have the Sun (and only the Sun) warming the surface. Its high frequency (high energy) radiation right across its spectrum can be converted to thermal energy (if not already reflected) and this energy flows by conduction deeper into the land surfaces. The radiation itself already penetrates a fair way into the oceans before it is converted to thermal energy in the depths. Meanwhile thermal energy is also escaping the surface more or less as fast as conduction in the land and convection in the oceans will allow it to get back to the surface.
In the morning the rate of warming exceeds the rate of cooling, and vice versa in the evening. In summer the longer hours of daylight may trap some energy that cannot escape before the next morning. This trapped energy may build up as the middle of summer approaches, but escape by the next winter as daylight hours reduce and there is more time for cooling at night.
Now, looking at the cooling process, at least half (maybe 70%) of the thermal energy escapes to the atmosphere by evaporation, chemical processes and diffusion, which involves molecular collisions between the surface and the adjoining air, as in conduction in solids. The remaining energy will be radiated.
However, experiments in such conditions show that the lower atmosphere is always cooler than the surface, and cools faster than the surface at night. Radiation can never transfer heat from a cooler source to a warmer target and neither can diffusion. So these processes can never make the atmosphere warmer than the surface. The Sun also usually warms the surface faster than the lower atmosphere, so it is only very unusual weather conditions which might leave the surface cooler than the adjoining air. The air which is warmed in the morning will rise by convection.
The radiation from the surface may escape to space, but most will be absorbed by some molecules in the atmosphere. These molecules are likely to be warmed and may share some of the thermal energy with other molecules, or simply radiate it in all directions in small bursts.
The radiation which is emitted by the cooler atmosphere will have frequencies which are generally lower than the original radiation from the surface. If some of this radiation gets to the warmer surface it cannot be converted to thermal energy. Instead it is simply scattered by the surface without leaving any energy behind. Its energy cannot be converted back to thermal energy until it collides with something cooler than the original layer of the atmosphere from which it was emitted. Such cooler air will usually be higher up. It may even escape to space and only warm some cooler object in space maybe years later. So each time any radiation goes back to the surface it will have absolutely no effect on the surface temperature, but will instead make it further towards space on the next trip up, if indeed it doesn’t escape altogether. Clearly there can be no Greenhouse effect.
Footnore: In situations when the relative humidity is high, the moist adiabatic lapse rate is lower than the dry one, so such humidity (as well as clouds) can slow the rate of cooling of the atmosphere, but this can never lead to any thermal energy going back into the surface, so the rate of cooling of the surface need not be slower. In a sense, thermal energy is falling over a smaller temperature step, but it still falls over at the same rate. The air we stand in may well feel warmer partly because there is less evaporation off our skin. In any event, these are just weather conditions which average out and do not relate to or affect climate.
kadaka (KD Knoebel)
February 21, 2012 6:00 am
From Doug Cotton on February 20, 2012 at 10:10 pm:
Kadaka: The problem you envisage with the backyard experiment is a red herring. Any such warm air would rise rather than fall to the sand. Think, man, think.
I’m thinking I live in the real world, your experiment is outdoors and there’s something called wind which can move the warm air sideways and under your cover.
Putting the wind issue aside, I can see an additional flaw. The outgoing longwave infrared originates from the ground, as it gives off its retained thermal energy. You said of those windshield sunscreens: “These have low emissivity and will generally disperse most upward radiation from the surface because of their rough surface.” But the dispersal pattern will be downward. Near the center of the cover, where your sand-filled Thermos resides, most to nearly all of the longwave will be returned to the same general area.
So you are attempting to show that back radiation cannot have a warming effect, actually a slowing of the net cooling rate, by blocking the returning longwave, with a setup that is preventing much of the longwave from escaping in the first place thus slowing down the net cooling rate. Thus your cover is producing about the same effect as the back radiation should have, and you are not noticing any great temperature difference between each Thermos. Which would be expected, and is not disproving the “warming” effect of back radiation at all.
You are also wrong about the radiator. I have not said anything about a surrounding box which might trap and prevent warm air escaping by convection. Take the radiator outside with a long chord and just use a mirror at the side (as I said) not at the top.
You were talking about returning a portion of the emitted thermal radiation to the source by using a mirror. I was talking about returning the emitted thermal radiation to the source by using a full and a partial thermally reflective enclosure. If you wish to bring convection into this, the half of a box would allow it, and I would still expect the radiator to reach maximum temperature sooner than without it.
And why the specification of a mirror? Common mirrors have the reflective coating applied to the back of the glass, which would overwhelmingly be common window glass (float glass). Thus the spectral qualities of the glass are the first thing to consider. Window glass is opaque to longwave infrared with a transmittance of only 0.02 (ref) for 4mm (5/32″) thickness, and a thermal emissivity given as 0.95 (ref) with thickness not specified.
So with your little radiator and mirror experiment, the glass of the mirror will be absorbing virtually all the longwave and emitting it in a diffuse pattern. Thus your proposed experiment would not work as advertised and cannot be used to disprove what you have stated it would disprove. The correct experiment would use a true thermally reflective material with a low thermal emissivity such as aluminum foil which is specified as 0.03 to 0.05.
Now read my next post.
What would be the point? You’re not discussing, virtually every reply sums up to “You’re ignorant of the physics, the Second Law forbids it.”
And a total of four reply posts later, you still have not deigned to respond to my vacuum chamber experiment.
Regarding the backyard experiment, I measured the air temperature and it was always cooler than the surface, and cooling faster. So it could not transfer thermal energy by diffusion to the warmer sand. If it were transferring any by radiation, so too would similar air above the unshielded sand. But the unshielded sand still had far more radiation from the rest of the atmosphere within view.
The shield was significantly convex from below which would tend to reflect more of the upward raiation away from the samd, though I accept that some would have been reflected onto the sand. However, considering the area of the local ground under the shield compared with the whole area of the atmosphere above, I suggest the radiative flux from that small part of the ground would be negliglible in comparison.
I accept your point about the glass in the mirror. So go and try it with perhaps a shiny sheet of aluminium. It still won’t have any effect on the rate at which the radiator warms.
Regarding your vacuum chamber experiment, yes it does sound right to me. You can have any amount of radiation reflecting around containing any amount of radiative flux without that energy being converted to thermal energy. Any vacuum flask with hot coffee and internal reflective walls proves my point because the coffee does not get any hotter.
Now, maybe you should consider my two points:
(1) Take a parabolic car headlamp and remove the globe and front glass. Suspend a very small piece of metal at the focal point where the globe would have been. Cut a flat circular piece of the same metal material to fit where the front glass was. Ensure everything is at the same temperature (say 25 deg.C) in an air conditioned room. Then fit the circular piece of metal so it covers the hole where the glass was. The radiation from that sheet should be focused mostly towards the small piece of metal at the focal point. Clearly there is a greater flux of radiation from the larger piece of metal than from the small piece, so there is a net radiative flux towards the small piece. Will it get warmer? I say no because that would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. So what happens to the radiation which hits it? I say it must be scattered and not converted to thermal energy. Now, cool the circular plate by setting the air conditioner to, say, 22 deg.C. Heat will transfer from the small warmer piece to the larger metal one, but net radiation will still be from the much larger piece towards the smaller one. So net radiative flow does not necessarily have the same direction as heat flow.
(2) Carbon dioxide absorbs IR radiation coming from the Sun and there will thus be some backradiation to space. As about half the Sun’s radiation is in the IR spectrum, this causes a quite significant cooling effect.
PS I will re-do my backyard experiment with a sheet of glass with the windscreen shields on top of it just to help overcome objections such as yours. The glass should absorb upward radiation from the ground. I will slope the glass just a little to allow escape of air by convection. When are you going to try it yourself? Seeing is believing.
Guys, you can stop worrying about endless warming going up forever with carbon dioxide levels. It can’t happen.
The whole Earth system (including atmosphere) has to emit very close to the flux it receives from the Sun. So there will be some temperature – let’s say 255K – which is a mean and is somewhere up in the atmosphere.
The natural adiabatic lapse rate is determined, not by carbon dioxide, but by the acceleration due to gravity, the mass of the atmosphere and, to some extent, relative humidity which mostly averages out. The lapse rate sets the gradient of the atmospheric temperature plot which has to swivel about the 255K mean, so the surface end is warmer and the TOA colder. The drop in temperatures between the surface and the tropopause has been very close to constant in all the years of records shown on the NASA site since the end of 2002.
My point is that the mean surface temperature is dictated by these two values – the 255K (or whatever the exact figure is) and the lapse rate. Carbon dioxide cannot affect either, so neither are under mankind’s control.
Both the surface and the atmosphere will simply shed energy faster if they get a little warmer, thus tending back to the mean.
Don’t try to tell me there is a long term TOA net radiative flux difference. The net radiative flux varies between about 99.5% and 100.5% of incoming radiation. This is just random noise or short-term cycles. Longer natural cycles may have to do with variations in the effective power from solar radiation (affecting that 255K figure) and maybe the thermal energy generated under the surface. Small variations in the latter over many thousands of revolutions of the Earth could have a cumulative effect. The very fact that the terrestrial heat flow is low means that the massive quantity of thermal energy from the surface down to the core stays fairly much the same and brings about a stabilising effect as I have explained on the ‘Explanation’ page of my website. . This also is an additional comfort, so relax!
I just wrote this reply to a comment on another website, and I feel it may help people here …he wrote: The obvious effect of this is that the radiative cooling of the hotter body will be slowed down by the presence of the cooler body, because some of the energy is being returned. This is completely different than there being a NET transfer of heat from the cooler body to the hotter body, which I agree is not possible.
No it’s not completely different. While the energy is still in the radiation it is not equivalent to thermal energy because it has not yet been converted. It cannot affect the temperature of the target unless and until it is converted to thermal energy. Only thermal energy can be added to other thermal energy with a resulting temperature change. You can only slow a rate of cooling by adding thermal energy. Hence the original thermal energy from the cooler body would have to end up being thermal energy in the warmer one before having any effect on temperature. Hence the 2nd Law would be violated.
My funnel experiment focuses more radiation from a large object onto a small one at the same temperature and made of the same metal material. What happens? Think about it. The only way the 2nd Law can apply is if you always disregard the radiation from cold to hot and only consider the radiation from hot to cold.
Any radiation from cold to hot merely resonates – as it can because the hotter body can always itself radiate at all the frequencies in the cooler body emission. It is as good as if diffuse reflection had happened – no energy is left behind and there is no effect on the temperature of the hotter body.
In case I am still not convincing someone, the AGW models assume backradiation works 24 hours a day – right? So they assume it also “works” when the temperature of the surface is getting hotter on a clear sunny morning and net radiation is into the surface. The assume that, not only does it slow the rate of cooling in the evening, but it still does something in the morning, namely increases the rate of warming.
Now if that is not adding thermal energy from a cooler atmosphere to a warmer surface then I’m a monkey’s uncle. So it is violating the Second Law. It is also doing so if it slows the rate of cooling as I explained above.
Is anyone aware of published experiments of absorptivity which use sources of spontaneous emission which are themselves around 10 deg.C to -60 deg.C, like typical atmospheric temperatures?
This* indicates that absorptivity is actually determined not by any warming effect, but by measuring reflected radiation in the visible spectrum.
I am saying that absorptivity cuts out (ie goes to zero) when the source becomes cooler than the target, which of course is not the case by a long shot when making these measurements using much higher frequency radiation than that contained in all spontaneous radiation from the atmosphere. Hence, for proponents of the radiative greenhouse conjecture to use such measures of absorptivity (close to unity) and thus assume the surface absorbs “backradiation” is a complete abuse of physics.
* http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/reports/arc/cp/0601.pdf.
Has anone else noticed that on
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
we are once again in record low temperatures for the calendar date?
Global Warming Denier Poster
I see alot of this sort of thing on Facebook, so I though I’d make my own version.
http://www.minnesotansforglobalwarming.com/m4gw/2012/02/global-warming-denier-poster.html
Has anyone seen the article in Wired Science “The Inside Story of Climate Scientists Under Siege”? http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/climate-desk-michael-mann/
To me, they brought it on themselves by not being open with their data and methods. Its not science unless it is in the open with data and methods for all to review.
Also note the mention of the Heartland Institue memo’s without any mention of the possibility that one of the memo’s was faked. I only read Wired Science for physics and cosmology stories and this is why.
THIS story is hysterical.! Have at it!
http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_19984502
Clearly ‘Hate Crimes’
Just tried to get onto http://www.numberwatch.co.uk and Firefox keeps locking up. What’s up?
Q: Why are the geese flying north?
A: This time of year it starts warming up in the Southern U.S., resulting in overcrowding at golf courses in the region…
Joe Bast could post a screen shot of the email his duped staffer allegedly sent. We could all see if the Climate Strategy document is on it. We could also see who got the email. Bast is telling his donors that he has contacted the FBI and police. Chicago FBI Special Agent Royden “Ross” Rice states that, based on media accounts, the FBI has no legal basis to investigate.
http://www.legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2012/02/heartlands-hypocrisy.html
Apparently not everyone has gotten the memo:
http://planetsave.com/2012/02/19/heartland-institute-funnel-of-funding-infographic/
Apparently Anthony Watts hasn’t sufficiently corrected the record on how much was pledged and that it was for his new NOAA info website. Note: When trying to jam correct information through such thick skulls, he should use a larger hammer.
The “former TV weatherman” didn’t tell the AP the documents were incorrect? The SkepSci “infographic” shows “Watts Surface Stations” getting $88,000 when we already have Anthony stating only half of that was pledged.
Also note, the “genius” who wrote that piece saying $14.26 million is coming from a single anonymous donor, apparently didn’t notice the “infographic” shows only $3.9 million.
(Note: Honestly I don’t think I’ve ever even seen this “Planetsave” site before, it showed up when I Googled for fresh Heartland news. I can though tell from the “Other Planetsave Posts You May Like” that they are quite willing to unquestioningly join in any smearing against the “global warming deniers,” facts be damned.)
I would like Doug Cotton (or anyone else) to provide an alternative explanation to why radiational cooling is more effective when there are no clouds. Here is a conventional and widely accepted explanation: http://ryanhanrahan.wordpress.com/tag/radiational-cooling/
But according to Doug Cotton, the colder clouds cannot slow the warming of the warmer surface.
So the oceans are doomed after all, notwithstanding Willis Eschenbach’s attempts to explain that the oceans are not turning acid.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17088154
Jacuzzi vents’ model CO2 future
“A UK scientist studying volcanic vents in the ocean says they hold a grave warning for future marine ecosystems.
These vents have naturally acidified waters that hint at how our seas might change if atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.
They are conditions that would make it harder for corals and similar organisms to make the hard parts in their bodies.
Dr Jason Hall-Spencer’s work suggests our oceans could lose perhaps 30% of their biodiversity this century.”
and on it goes.
Via a link posted by Nerd, I found this video by Dr. Robert Lustig, lecture about the American obesity epidemic and High Fructose Corn Syrup.
Now, I don’t consume sugary drinks but my teenage son does and the soft drinks here in Germany just say “sugar” (Zucker) on the ingredient list so I wanted to know whether it is legal to use HFCS in the highly regulated German food market.
So I consulted the wikipedia. I found that HFCS needs to be declared in Germany when there’s a fructose content above 5% in the syrup and simply writing “sugar” won’t do, so that was good. But what really astonished me is the difference between the German and the English wikipedia page about HFCS – while the German one talks freely about the problems associated with fructose metabolization, the English one is as clean from criticism as they are clean from CAGW criticism.
So that’s another area where the wikipedia is more than useless, except for seeing who plays what kind of games.
4 months ago when Texas was going through exceptional drought and there was some concerns about La Nina continuing to make this terrible drought even worse during 2012 with reservoirs being low in some places. Since then, we have made a remarkable recovery for large part of Texas.
I’m wondering what could have made that happen despite La Nina in place?
Register and Grauniad report about Indians planning to build a Thorium reactor.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/01/india-thorium-nuclear-plant
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/02/india_unveils_thorium_reactor/
THIS IS NOT YOUR FATHERS GPS
“The Geospatial Revolution Project”
Blow you mind, view this video. The same tools may be used for truth or deception. Knowledge is power.
http://youtu.be/OEWKTaY2ahg
from this site…
http://www.geoeye.com/GeoEye101/what-is-geospatial/geospatial-revolution.aspx
Snapple says:
February 19, 2012 at 9:23 am
“Joe Bast could post a screen shot of the email his duped staffer allegedly sent. We could all see if the Climate Strategy document is on it. ”
Snapple, you don’t seem to believe their word, so why would you believe a screenshot? If you don’t know how to fake a screenshot and would like to learn it, contact me for an offer.
John Peter,
Clearly, Dr Hall-Spencer is a buffoon. Why give a pseudo-scientist like that publicity? He says:
“What we see as you swim along a gradient of carbon dioxide, up to levels we expect for the end of this century, is diversity loss. As you go along that gradient, species drop out of the system,” he told BBC News.
These natural vents have been emitting large quantities of CO2 for millions of years. Species have adapted to their local conditions. so obviously, there will be different species in different environments.
We can add this alarmist nonsense to the litany of grant-trolling scare stories that are quoted endlessly in the BBC by clueless nincompoops and scientifically illiterate, propaganda writing reporters.
Nothing – N-O-T-H-I-N-G – unusual is happening. These stories are no different than the scary ghost stories that children tell each other.
By definition, half the population is below average in intelligence. This is the kind of scare story that appeals to them. Fortunately, most readers of WUWT know BS when they see it. Not so for the BBC’s audience.
Fakegate and post-modern journalism.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/fakegate-and-post-modern-journalism/
Pointman
A lawsuit in the making?
This brand new blog entry at Jo Nova has put DeSmogblog on legal notice:
Heartland sends out first legal notice about stolen and faked documents
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/02/heartland-sends-out-first-legal-notice-about-stolen-and-faked-documents/
sunsettommy says: February 19, 2012 at 9:52 am
A lawsuit in the making?
This brand new blog entry at Jo Nova has put DeSmogblog on legal notice:
Heartland sends out first legal notice about stolen and faked documents
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/02/heartland-sends-out-first-legal-notice-about-stolen-and-faked-documents/
____________
Great news, thanks Tommy.
Wouldn’t it be great if the warmists ended up funding Heartland through a big settlement?
These warmists make great opponents – compared to them, the Three Stooges look competent!
If the warmists had not caused our society to squander a trillion dollars on global warming fraud, it would actually be funny.
We continue to be influenced and governed by scoundrels and imbeciles.
The nytimes had a nice little human interest piece on the poor ice fishing season. They made it all the way to the second before last paragraph befor getting all global warmy.
So close.
@DirkH
You may be interested in this
http://flibe-energy.com/
I heard Kirk Sorensen interviewed on the Peter Schiff show last month dated 1/17/2012. Quite revealing how the thorium projects were mothballed in the early 70’s.
Nerd, a very strong eastern Pacific upper level ridge (orange in link below) has allowed continental upper troughs to extend down into the US southwest (light green) and, sometimes as cut off upper lows (separate patch of light green), sometimes not, drift eastward through Texas. The latest storm moving through the Carolinas was generated by one of those troughs. The latest Euro model http://weather.unisys.com/ecmwf/ecmwf.php?inv=0&plot=4p®ion=a is showing another upper trough doing that during this week (wed/thurs) but for now the NWS in San Antonio is ignoring that model even though it has been pretty good at this range this winter.
Eric (Skeptic),
It is all about whether or not the system is in thermal equilibrium. That is the billion dollar question climate question.
For example try this little experiment.
Take 2 identical black metal bars and wrap half of one of the bars with shiny aluminum insulating tape. Put them both under a heat lamp for a few hours (until the temperature of the bar wrapped half with the tape quits increasing). Then measure the temperature of both bars, their temperature will be identical despite the fact that one of the bars has an albedo of 50%.
Sliding the reflecting tape off or on the metal bar will make no difference to its temperature, once it is in equilibrium. If the bar isn’t in equilibrium, the tape will slow the warm or cooling of the bar. That is all there is to it.
The real question is whether or not the Earth is in equilibrium. The Warmers claim that the Earth is below the equilibrium temperature.
I claim that the Sun shining on the Earth for millions of years guarantees that the Earth is in equilibrium.
Looking at the whinging by certain sectors, of the paltry $1.5m donated to a certain organisation.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2012/02/tip-of-iceberg.html
“According to Gray, in the past four years DFID has spent £900 million on climate change projects with nearly two thirds of that being spent in the past financial year. A further £533 million has already been committed up to 2013. The biggest recipients, he says, are India and Indonesia, two countries considered to be rapidly emerging economies”
From DirkH on February 19, 2012 at 9:33 am:
It wasn’t that long ago when the HFCS kerfuffle popped up in the US. Suddenly soda cans were proudly labeled “Made with SUGAR!” After the many decades of warnings about obesity and even diabetes from the sugar (generic term) in soda, I did find that rather humorous.
In trying to replace HFCS, some makers are swapping in “organic brown rice syrup,” which has turned out to potentially have dangerous levels of arsenic. Reminds me of how margarine was a healthier alternative to butter, until the dangers of trans-fats were discovered and the butter turned out to be better.
All such stuff amounts to finding safer ways to indulge in dangerous excessive consumption. Healthier living is still found in old wisdom, ‘Moderation in everything, even in moderation.’
Dirk,
While the high fructose syrup may be a factor, I think that growth hormones in meat and dairy products (banned in France, don’t know about other EU countries) are one of the reasons of American obesity. Not that you would hear much about it — the U.S. food lobby plays hand in hand with the Feds.
Dirk,
High fructose syrup in high amount can give you fatty liver disease! Essentially, no different than drinking alcoholic beverages in large quantity. Yikes. Anyway, if you want to lose weight, get diabetes and heart disease under control, get glucose meter and test your blood 30-60 minutes after you eat something. If your blood sugar level goes above 120, ditch the food and try something else. Paleo Diet is a great one and not only that it was proven by multiple trial studies. Wheat Belly Diet is a pretty good complementary to that diet as it helps you understand why and how you get heart disease in the first place. High fructose isn’t the only carbohydrate source to worry about. Wheat/corn flour based products (pasta, bread, etc) are everywhere as well.
Widespread vitamin D deficiency is a huge concern that nobody seemed to be aware of. No thanks to CDC, it got swept under the rug. http://www.naturalnews.com/032202_vitamin_D_deficiency_disease.html To help you understand how important Vitamin D is for our health – (Note: it is not really a vitamin but a prohormone that get converted to powerful steroid hormone that acts as DNA repair and maintenance) – http://www.biochemj.org/bj/441/0061/bj4410061.htm
Once again, we get screwed by gov’t… Oh yeah, American Cancer Society recently tried to discredit vitamin D and telling us to stick to federal guideline. Right… you want us to get cancer so you get to charge high amount while I suffer miserably undergoing chemotherapy. How nice of you…
Once again, it’s all about money.
Genghis, interesting experiment but it only tests albedo changes. The atmosphere is only in equilibrium near the top and the efficiency of getting heat up to that level will determine the final temperature down at the surface. A metal bar experiment could represent that by heating the bars from the center and adding varying amounts of insulating material into the composition of one of the bars. Given an identical power flux into each bar, one bar would have a warmer center than the other.
Plunging to New Depths:
http://www.glebedigital.co.uk/blog/?p=5435
“Plunge, by artist Michael Pinsky, imagines a time 1000 years in the future when the effects of runaway climate change have completely transformed the London we know today.
This latest piece of state-sponsored apocalism is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, the European Culture Programme, Trust Greenbelt, WWF-UK and the Big Give.
This ‘work of art’ invites visitors to look up and see ‘rings of blue fire’, erected at 28 metres above sea level on familiar icons across London in an attempt to create disturbing visions of apocalypse in the eye of the beholder.
“Artist Pinsky’s work illustrates how sea levels will have climbed by then, should we fail to heed the threat of ‘global warming’.”
The artwork, which resembles a series of chip shop fly killers, clearly suggests the level of knowledge and intelligence required to be an ‘artist’ in the early 21st century.
Sea levels are rising at approximately 15cm per century, so in a thousand years that’s a rise of around 1.5m.
Pinsky shows signs of his true colours elsewhere on his main website, refering to a work on green neon crosses:
“These objects that use siren-like attractive powers to kill and brutalize the unsuspecting fly. But who gets caught? The consumer or the fly?”
Perhaps Mr Pinsky isn’t aware of the apparent parapraxis in that statement. All hail the Age of Stupid!”
Nerd says:
February 19, 2012 at 11:22 am
“Widespread vitamin D deficiency is a huge concern that nobody seemed to be aware of. No thanks to CDC, it got swept under the rug. http://www.naturalnews.com”
I regularly adapt my supplements; I’m taking D3 and Zinc Histidine ATM and looks like that works out perfectly – all the people around me coughed and sneezed in this winter and I’m just fine…
Alexander Feht says:
February 19, 2012 at 11:01 am
“While the high fructose syrup may be a factor, I think that growth hormones in meat and dairy products (banned in France, don’t know about other EU countries) are one of the reasons of American obesity. ”
Banned in all of the EU. Yes, maybe that’s a factor as well.
Reading more about fructose, I found out that our normal sugar here in Germany (made from sugar beet) is simply sucrose, that’s a fructose molecule connected to a glucose molecule. The bond between the two molecules is removed by our metabolism and the fructose and glucose are then processed separately. With 50% fructose content, sucrose is nearly as high as HFCS 55 (55%) in fructose content.
And we’ve been using this sugar beet sugar for ages. Dr. Lustig blames the introduction of HFCS in the 70ies, but our sucrose has existed for far longer. So that can’t be the decisive reason.
And by the way: the English wikipedia DOES contain the arguments against HFCS; under
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hfcs
But when I went from the German page
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maissirup
I landed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_syrup
which doesn’t.
The combination of high levels of grown hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides in meat and dairy is also being shown a leading cause of breast and prostate cancer, among others. Believe it or not, chicken is as bad or worse than beef. The growth hormones encourage these hormone sensitive cancers to grow. The antibiotics suppress the body’s natural defenses against the cancer, and pesticides and other chemicals contribute to chromosomal damage that gets the cancer started.
Having battled cancer and kicked it to the corner, I no longer eat commercial farm raised meat or dairy products. I’m even careful to read the label on organic labeled products as many of them come from China and aren’t inspected by U.S. agencies to ensure that they’re really organic. In reality they’re often so full of undesirable chemicals that they’re worse for you. Anyway, I don’t want a repeat of the cancer experience so I choose my food carefully.
The deal with any sugars is moderation. Even “natural” sources of sugar such as fruits will break down into high levels of fructose. HFCS is no worse than Honey or Agave. Eating a wide variety of foods, and in moderation is the key.
Has an(y)one else noticed that on
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
we are once again in record low temperatures for the calendar date?
Here’s my question(s):
Why is there a global seasonal temp signal?
Why is it positive at some altitudes and negative at others?
Can these data be used to help show causality of CO2 to atmospheric temps in any way?
“Agave”?
Distilled Nectar of the Gods
Can anyone help me with this. Per wiki, the total amount of energy generated by humans from oil, gas, coal, nuclear and biomass is ~125,000TWH per year.
This might seem like a large number, but it equates to ~0.03W/m2 of energy intensity that we are adding to the Earth’s energy budget. ~170W/m2 gets to the surface from the sun, or just over 5,600 times more than we are adding.
Surely, the maximum effect we can have on the system overall is the energy that we add to that system? Our first order effect is the energy, our second order effect is the waste heat. Some of that waste heat goes to creating CO2, making it a third order effect. How can a third order effect from a miniscule addition of energy result in Thermageddon?
Here’s the figures:
143,851TWH – 13%(amount for renewables) = 125150TWH
125150TWH / 8760 (hours in a year) = 14.286530TW = 14286530MW
14286530MW / 510926783 (Area of the world in km2) = 0.027962W / m2
You may have missed this:
Doomednotdoomed.
Has anyone else wondered whether this whole ‘acidification’ of the world’s oceans due to increasing CO2 emission is the biggest load of bollax ever thought up by non-chemists? Look at the ‘latest research’ reported with gusto by the BBC here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17088154
Apparently volcanic vents deep under the seas surface is acidifying the ocean. Extrapolating this finding, researchers from the low grade UK uni Plymouth University conclude that 30% of all marine life on the sea bed could be killed by acidifying oceans.
Is this an example of good science? Or crap science? Please let me know!
Yet another study shows shale gas is safe.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/yet-another-study-shows-shale-gas-is-perfectly-safe/
Anybody else had trouble voting in the Weblog Awards?
I’ve tried three times over the last few days and the process seemed to go OK – but I never got the confirmatory email on any occasion.
From Alexander Feht on February 19, 2012 at 11:01 am:
I’ve noted on the ads for Perdue chicken and others that they say no growth hormones are used, with the fine print saying growth hormones aren’t permitted anyway. I Googled up an expanded listing (bold added):
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/id/QAA400066
So growth hormones in meat are rather easy to avoid.
More info on growth hormones is found in this Cornell University fact sheet:
http://envirocancer.cornell.edu/factsheet/diet/fs37.hormones.cfm
Note that’s a 2000 document, page says it’s on a archival site, see the new one. I did, did searching through the pdf files… which lead right back to the same document except in pdf.
I can’t see anything there to worry about. And if someone says they’re worried about growth hormones in American poultry and pork, feel free to write them off as a raving nutter.
Foxgoose says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Anybody else had trouble voting in the Weblog Awards?
I’ve tried three times over the last few days and the process seemed to go OK – but I never got the confirmatory email on any occasion.
==============
Same here, voted 4 or 5 times, never got the confirm email ?????
My tiny understanding of how Wikipedia decides which position to publish is this. They do not do peer review. They go with what the vast majority opinion and facts of published work. When the vast majority of published work is that humans cannot change climate then Wikipedia will publish that. As to different opinion and information in different languages, I have no idea.
@Smokey
If you published a story that a study has concluded that global warming causes half the population to be of below average intelligence you could probably get every major news outlet to run it – simply based on the fact that the editors today are part of that population half.
Marlow Metcalf says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:34 pm
“My tiny understanding of how Wikipedia decides which position to publish is this. They do not do peer review. They go with what the vast majority opinion and facts of published work. When the vast majority of published work is that humans cannot change climate then Wikipedia will publish that. As to different opinion and information in different languages, I have no idea.”
In my opinion, they publish the point of view that wins. For instance, once I read the article on Albert Einstein, and it was strangely worded at one point. I looked into the history and the talk page and it turned out that there had been a war raging for years between one guy who thought that Poncaré was the real inventor of general relativity and others who opposed him; in that case it resulted in a strangely compromising text, taking neither position clearly.
What position wins in such a war is determined by the warring factions, their standing in the wikipedia hierarchy, their numbers, their tactics, their strategy, how well they can damage the reputation of the opposing forces etc. The book of Sun Tzu comes in handy.
DirkH says:
February 19, 2012 at 11:51 am
I’m semi-agnostic on the issue. Science News has had some intriguing articles over the last several decades on the subject, most recently one to the effect that fructose, in the presence of glucose prompts the pancreas to put out more insulin.
The “predigested” sucrose sounds like it should be metabolized just like real sucrose. However, it’s possible that sucrose leads to low levels of fructose in the bloodstream.
I think the last time I checked, I found that fructose is converted into glucose, and then it enters the long processing (Krebs Cycle, electron transport chain, etc) that I learned in high school biology when that was new knowledge.
If the enzyme that splits sucrose is slower than that which converts fructose to gluclose, then fructose would have a short dwell time in the blodstream. Consuming HFCS, OTOH, would likely flood the bloodstream with both fructose and glucose, so there would be a fructose spike.
I have not had time to look into the reaction rates of the two steps, if someone has time to do so, please be my guest.
By the way, one thing I learned along the way is that “invert sugar,” used mainly in pastery products, is sucrose decomposed to glucose and fructose by a heat process. (My recollection is fuzzy, a recheck is in order.) The goal is to make sugar sweeter in pastries.
u.k.(us) says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:33 pm
Foxgoose says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Anybody else had trouble voting in the Weblog Awards?
I’ve tried three times over the last few days and the process seemed to go OK – but I never got the confirmatory email on any occasion.
==============
Same here, voted 4 or 5 times, never got the confirm email ?????
————————————————————————————
I had no problem. Maybe check your spam filter.
Eric (Skeptic)
I think you missed the point a little. If the system isn’t in thermal equilibrium, then yes albedo, GHG’s, insulation, etc. make a difference to the rate of temperature change in the system.
The point of the experiment was that the Earth after being heated by the sun for billions of years has to be in thermal equilibrium. Just like putting the putting the metal bars under the heat lamp for a few hours.
Regarding Bovine Growth Hormon (BGH)
From the American Cancer Society
http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerCauses/OtherCarcinogens/AtHome/recombinant-bovine-growth-hormone
“Before approving the use of rBGH in 1993, the FDA calculated a worst case scenario based on an infant drinking 1.5 liters (1.6 quarts) of milk daily, with complete absorption of intact IGF-1 protein and the maximum increase in IGF-1. Under these conditions, milk from rBGH-treated cows would contribute far less than 1% of the infant’s normal daily production of IGF-1. “
Current usage and regulatory status
Although the use of rBGH is still approved in the United States, demand for the product has decreased in recent years. Many large grocery store chains no longer carry milk from cows treated with rBGH. A United States Department of Agriculture survey conducted in 2007 found that less than 1 in 5 cows (17%) were being injected with rBGH.
Summary
The available evidence shows that the use of rBGH can cause adverse health effects in cows. The evidence for potential harm to humans is inconclusive. It is not clear that drinking milk produced using rBGH significantly increases IGF-1 levels in humans or adds to the risk of developing cancer. More research is needed to help better address these concerns.
The increased use of antibiotics to treat rBGH-induced mastitis does promote the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but the extent to which these are transmitted to humans is unclear.
The American Cancer Society (ACS) has no formal position regarding rBGH. Together with its advocacy affiliate, the ACS Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN), the Society supports open, fair and transparent regulatory oversight of products containing rBGH. The ACS also encourages continued and expanded scientific research and independent, credible assessment of potential relationships between the use of this substance in cows and human cancer risk. We support regulatory standards based on rigorous scientific evidence to minimize exposure to carcinogens, and we encourage the FDA to give the public information regarding known and suspected causes of cancer in the food system. The need for an effective FDA in ensuring the safety of our food supply, medicines, and consumer products has never been greater.
“How can 30% of nickel in Rossi’s reactor be transmuted into copper?”
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=473
Genial
V.
Steve from Rockwood says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:52 pm
I had no problem. Maybe check your spam filter.
==========================
I don’t think I have a spam filter.
I’m (a dinosaur) running “outlook express provided by Comcast”.
Maybe my security settings are too high?, I rarely get spam.
My vote went thru last year, and as far as I know, my settings are the same.
[Reply: Please email them and explain the problem. ~dbs, mod.]
It is worth following Gowers’s Weblog and the minor revolution he has started in scientific publishing. Its ramifications reach well beyond Elsevier and concern the entire scientific publishing system.
As far as I can see no “climate scientist” has joined in so far, they seem to be perfectly satisfied with the current paywalled/pal-reviewed setup.
However, we clearly need a reform, and it is getting urgent indeed. Results of publicly financed research should remain publicly accessible all the time. In fact we do not really need “publishers” any more, just some public repositories, preferably with proper revision control and easy anytime public backup (like github). The role of former publishers should be restricted to quality control, provided as a service, presumably for a subscription fee (or even free of charge if it was a community effort or was financed on taxpayer’s money). Repositories should support filtering according to evaluation lists and backlinks to them. That’s it.
Former journals would shrink to URL lists with a quality score assigned to each item and, of course, these evaluation lists themselves were also subject to evaluation.
I did not get the email to confirm my vote on the weblog awards, I gave up in the end.
[Reply: They will answer your email. Please email them and explain the problem. ~dbs, mod.]
In the category of “If I think of it then somebody has already built it”.
After watching a video of home well water catching fire it occurred to me that the well needs to be vented. Methane buildup has been happening before fracking.
http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/wells/waterquality/methane.html
“VENTING
Minnesota rules require new wells to have a vented cap or cover. The well vent prevents a vacuum, and helps to release gases such as methane or hydrogen sulfide. However, older wells may not be vented. A variety of well caps are available that have a built-in vent on the underside of the cap. Separate down-turned vents are also available. It is important to install these caps and vents to properly vent the well, and to prevent flood water, contaminants, or insects and small animals from entering the well. Water storage tanks and water treatment tanks should also be vented. Vents should extend outside, above the ground surface, and away from any building.
METHANE REMOVAL AND TREATMENT
Methane will not be removed by common water treatment devices such as sediment filters, water softeners, or carbon filters. Most removal or treatment techniques involve aeration. A gas shroud, attached to a submersible pump in the well, may provide relief in some circumstances. Fittings that drain back or aerate water into the well have been used, but are not particularly effective, and may cause other problems such as well corrosion or plugging.
AERATION
Aeration is the process of mixing air into water and venting the gas to the outside atmosphere. Aeration can remove methane, as well as other gasses such as hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg smell)…….”
TP, land and vegetation distribution cause most of the seasonality (probably ocean circulation patterns too).
Yes, looking at correlation of absolute temp and log CO2 might tell us a lot.
Genghis says:
February 19, 2012 at 2:01 pm
Just thinkiong of your experiment there, for a minute – couldn’t the tinfoil act as a supposed GHG?, especially if not in direct thermal contact with the metal bar. i.e. with a bit of an air gap – it may reflect 50% of the incoming radiation – but also it will reflect 50% of the outgoing radiation from the bar back (assuming it has equal reflectivity on both sides of the foil!). If so, would that mean that equilibrium temp is identical for both bars?
Hey Smokey I need your graphical expertise can you link the graph showing that we are at near record lows for Co2 geologically speaking?
PaulID says:
February 19, 2012 at 3:03 pm
try this
http://www.biocab.org/Geological_Timescale.jpg
PaulID,
I suppose you mean this one.
[Reply: Please email them and explain the problem. ~dbs, mod.]
===========
Done.
Updates will be added if needed.
I’m not holding my breath 🙂
yes I do smokey and Kiv-in-UK you two are the graphical gods and thank you so much.
sorry Kev-in-UK just washed my hands and I can’t do a thing with em.
Kev-in-UK, Yes both bars have exactly same equilibrium. The only difference due to albedo, insulation and the implied GHG effect is the time it takes to reach equilibrium.
Volker Doormann says:
February 19, 2012 at 2:20 pm
““How can 30% of nickel in Rossi’s reactor be transmuted into copper?”
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=473
”
More about the Widom-Larsen theory:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Widom-Larsen.php
I would make two points for this week’s Open Thread …..
[SNIP: This is already posted. You’ve tried to post it two or three additional times. That is called “thread-bombing”. Please review the site policy and refrain from this. -REP]
Has anyone seen that disease is the new climate change: http://www.independent.com/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/experts-fear-diseases-impossible-to-treat-7216662.html
u.k.(us) says:
February 19, 2012 at 2:23 pm
Steve from Rockwood says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:52 pm
I had no problem. Maybe check your spam filter.
==========================
I don’t think I have a spam filter.
I’m (a dinosaur) running “outlook express provided by Comcast”.
Maybe my security settings are too high?, I rarely get spam.
My vote went thru last year, and as far as I know, my settings are the same.
[Reply: Please email them and explain the problem. ~dbs, mod.]
—————————————————————–
Seems as though Outlook Express has no spam filter. So the email response isn’t getting past your ISP, “Comcast”.
A way around this is to create a temporary email account on hotmail or gmail etc, then use that email to get your response. You can check these email accounts from your web-browser.
Cheers
Eric (skeptic) says: February 19, 2012 at 9:27 am
I would like Doug Cotton (or anyone else) to provide an alternative explanation to why radiational cooling is more effective when there are no clouds
________________________________________________________________
It is well known that the moist adiabatic lapse rate in the atmosphere is less that the dry one. Clearly there can be more water vapour when there are clouds. So the atmosphere cools more slowly. This is basic physics.
However, it does not in general affect the rate of cooling of the surface.
The atmosphere is usually cooler than the surface at night and is also cooling faster even when relative humidity is high. So there is no feedback mechanism which adds thermal energy back into the surface in order to slow its rate of cooling. Any such mechanism would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If you think it happens, then you explain how and why, and produce some evidence that is not a circular argument based on the greenhouse conjecture.
Even if radiation from the surface is reduced because the temperature of the first millimetre of the air is closer to that of the surface, this can be compensated for by the rate of thermal energy transfer by diffusion and evaporation etc. This “balancing act” happens all day long. Hence you cannot say that, just because the power of radiation leaving the surface is diminished that the whole net rate of cooling of the surface is reduced. It isn’t because no thermal energy can be transferred from a cooler atmosphere to a warmer surface.
In any event, this is weather not climate. On a worldwide 24/7 basis relative humidity tends to average out and has in fact been slightly declining this century as was advised in a recent WUWT article.
.
A question asked of Gavin Schmidt and his (partial) response. From http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/
[Question: In the letter, you say you want “an honest, fact-based debate about the policy responses to climate change.”
Since you (and by you I mean most the “signers” of this open letter) were invited to the climate
conferences sponsored by Heartland, and chose not to attend, does this mean that you all are now ready to engage in the Heartland climate conferences to debate the “deniers” and the “anti-climate” and “anti-science” people?]
[Response: If Heartland was actually interested in debating policy options I wouldn’t have any problem with them, and I would encourage others with ideas about policy to engage with them to their heart’s content……]
Notice the question was about debating climate science. He then responds he would debate ‘policy issues’, desperately trying to avoid the appearance that he is unwilling to debate AGW.
The way I see it, If someone wants to debate “policy options”, they go to a politician. If someone wants to debate AGW, they go to the scientists that are promoting it. That’s you Mr. Schmidt!
Schmidt must realize that given the amounts of taxpayer money that has been spent on this fraud, that the public is going to insist(demand) that he comes clean. Is it to much to ask that these climate scientists publicly defend and debate their work, openly and honestly? I think not. The political winds change quickly my friends, Schmidt can voluntarily answer questions now or he can do so under court order later, but the American public will have their answers, one way or the other.
LearDog says: “THIS story is hysterical.! Have at it!
http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_19984502
Clearly ‘Hate Crimes’”
Why is this hysterical? Is decimation of sea otters by sharks intrinsically funny?
If all the coal in the world was burned the global temperature would go up 15-degrees.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/coal-the-true-climate-change-bad-guy-analysis-shows/article2343528/
It’s worse than we thought.
Doug Cotton says:
February 19, 2012 at 4:14 pm
I would make two points for this week’s Open Thread …..
[SNIP: This is already posted
__________________________________________
I’m truly sorry, but at first I had a technical problem and the post did not appear, and then I do think you will find that you snipped it on the “snow” thread which is understandable, I guess, even though the title of that thread referred to no effect of CO2.
I have felt obliged to respond to Eric (Skeptic) and William Connelly who have each been thread bombing with fairly similar posts on various threads, but I will try to keep to Friday open threads in future.
But if you can find this post actually accepted anywhere, or if you can recover it if not, I’d appreciate it being transferred to this thread as it made a new point regarding the thermal “momentum” of core and mantle thermal energy.
paulhan says: “Can anyone help me with this. Per wiki, the total amount of energy generated by humans from oil, gas, coal, nuclear and biomass is ~125,000TWH per year.”
Which wiki do you mean? There are dozens of the things. If you mean Wankerpedia, say so.
We need a cartoon from Josh for the ridiculous stance of Governor Jerry Brown in CA, who has demanded 30% of energy come from renewable sources. I was thinking a Junipero Serra Governor Brown whipping Californians to prostrate themselves before his Big Green God (preferably with a huge green pot brimming with $ nearby that says “Donations Not Voluntary.”)
Nerd says:
February 19, 2012 at 11:22 am
Dirk,
High fructose syrup in high amount can give you fatty liver disease! Essentially, no different than drinking alcoholic beverages in large quantity. Yikes. Anyway, if you want to lose weight, get diabetes and heart disease under control, get glucose meter and test your blood 30-60 minutes after you eat something. If your blood sugar level goes above 120, ditch the food and try something else. Paleo Diet is a great one and not only that it was proven by multiple trial studies. Wheat Belly Diet is a pretty good complementary to that diet as it helps you understand why and how you get heart disease in the first place. High fructose isn’t the only carbohydrate source to worry about. Wheat/corn flour based products (pasta, bread, etc) are everywhere as well.
Widespread vitamin D deficiency is a huge concern that nobody seemed to be aware of. No thanks to CDC, it got swept under the rug. http://www.naturalnews.com/032202_vitamin_D_deficiency_disease.html To help you understand how important Vitamin D is for our health – (Note: it is not really a vitamin but a prohormone that get converted to powerful steroid hormone that acts as DNA repair and maintenance) – http://www.biochemj.org/bj/441/0061/bj4410061.htm
Once again, we get screwed by gov’t… Oh yeah, American Cancer Society recently tried to discredit vitamin D and telling us to stick to federal guideline. Right… you want us to get cancer so you get to charge high amount while I suffer miserably undergoing chemotherapy. How nice of you…
Once again, it’s all about money.
=======================
I’ve just posted on this, but from a different angle – that the UV scaremongering has created a vitamin D deficiency, there’s been a rise in rickets because mothers have been slathering young children with sunblock creams, but it’s worse than that :http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/monckton-responds-to-skeptical-science/#comment-895283
From which: http://www.rense.com/general48/sunlight1.htm
Doug, thanks very much for the reply. If I can summarize your answer in two points, first, there are coincidental factors with clouds, the main one being humidity, so the atmosphere cools more slowly. Second there is no net effect (i.e. climate) from clouds and radiational cooling (or lack thereof) because the clouds are always cooler than the surface.
If I can ignore your second argument for a moment I would just further explain local observations. My observations are really very simple. There are 3 main weather stations (at airports DCA, IAD and BWI) within about 30-40 miles of each other. They all measure the extent of cloud layers and the height of each layer along with the weather. They report each hour. There are particular mornings when the stations have been cloud-free but one station or two get clouded over in the early morning but not the others. This is usually not associated with a major weather system, just what is sometimes called a “dirty high” although it can also occur with the clouds that precede a front.
Notably the effect is the same no matter what the elevation of the clouds are. They can be 5k, 10k, or 15k feet or 20k feet (usually clouds higher than that will impact all 3 stations equally). The effect is that the temperature stops dropping or drops more slowly at the cloudy station(s) than at the other station(s). The humidity (as measured by dew point) does not change much during this time, although in some cases, at the clear stations, the dewpoint will drop with temperature. But the fact that the temperature effect still exists with a cloud layer way up at 20k feet should indicate that there is no meaningful change in lapse rate from the surface to the boundary layer where the radiational cooling is taking place.
The radiation explanation is also suitable because the effect is the same at 5k up to 20k or higher, and only radiation can act instantly unlike the propagation of moisture from the clouds or similar effects.
Your second argument, that clouds don’t inhibit radiational cooling on a worldwide average basis is a little more difficult to answer because worldwide temperature indexes are corrupted with bad data (mostly heat island) and worldwide averages of clouds are woefully inadequate. I would only argue for now that if the local effect exists, then there could be a worldwide effect, namely that an average increase in diurnal clouds (with clear skies at night) would result in global cooling or that an average worldwide increase in high clouds (which are usually not diurnal) will result in global warming (both being conditional on many other factors).
“”””” LearDog says:
February 19, 2012 at 9:01 am
THIS story is hysterical.! Have at it!
http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_19984502
Clearly ‘Hate Crimes’ “””””
Paul Rogers is a well known lefty drinker of the global warming man made falling sky syndrome. when not sreading the gospell according to algoreipcc he appears on Belva Davis pbs whinefest.
I’m sure it is disconcerting .for these teddy bear cuddlers to see their pets lunched on by sharks
Hey if you are shark, one fur bag tastes just like anther. I’m sure the California Abalone population thinks it is just fine with them if the sharks eat the otters.
For the record, I like the sharks, the otters, and the Abalones: in that order.
In the WUWT article “Christy on Sierra Snowfall… “ there is a link to an SF Chronicle article “Study: Sierra snowfall… “
Christy said in the WUWT article that for the Sierra, there is “no trend, no effect from CO2”. (The Chronicle article quotes Mike Dettinger, a climatologist and research hydrologist at the Scripps Institute of the U.S. Geological Survey) Dettinger attempts to refute Christy by saying “snowpack has declined over three quarters of the western United States…” and that 60% is due to “greenhouse gases” (note that he does not say CO2).
Dettinger also said “…The number of inches or feet of snow on the ground can mean a variety of things, he said, depending on if it is fluffy powder or compacted, wet snow.” but does not correlate that to any of his own assertions about his assessment of the snowpack.
Is there any merit to Dettinger’s claim that “…over the last 50 years the southern Sierra snowpack has gotten larger while the northern Sierra pack has shrunk.”?
nb: The last time I was at Scripps here in San Diego, there was a large photo of Scripps
management shaking hands with algore and receiving a commendation from him for their work in propagating his agenda.
Don;t know if this was already mentioned and I missed it, but Desmogblog’s been digging themselves deeper:
http://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-demands-desmogblog-remove-climate-strategy-document
Doug Cotton – not sure if you’re planning to return to argo thread, please read my post to you.
“”””” kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 19, 2012 at 10:58 am
From DirkH on February 19, 2012 at 9:33 am:
Via a link posted by Nerd, I found this video by Dr. Robert Lustig, lecture about the American obesity epidemic and High Fructose Corn Syrup.
It wasn’t that long ago when the HFCS kerfuffle popped up in the US. Suddenly soda cans were proudly labeled “Made with SUGAR!” After the many decades of warnings about obesity and even diabetes from the sugar (generic term) in soda, I did find that rather humorous. The problem with HFCS is that it doesn’t come from a bleeding tree in Vermont, and corn farmers can provide all of it anyone wants.
It used to be that Fructose was preferred over Glucose, because it doesn’t give the “sugar high” that glucose does; which of course is followed by the “sugar downer” that you have to sleep off.
Of course if you don’t get that upper-downer from your sugar, then you clearly aren’t using nearly enough of it; so swig on another Pepsi, until you feel good.
US obesity can be traced to one simple cause; they eat far too much food. There is one particular ethnic group, which will remain anonymous, who are just plain lard arses, even though they may be in the low income segment of the population. I eat the same food they do, because I like it, and I’m about 175, at 5’11”, which is actually high for me. There’s another also nameless ethnic group, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen a fat one. I also eat the same food they do, because I like it; actually they eat far more than I do.
I put sugar (raw or regular cane) in my tea and coffee, and nowhere else. I can’t stand ANY kind of store cookies; they all have hideous aftertastes from the various colored (blue, yellow, pink) plastic sugar substitutes; I’d rather have nothing in my coffee than that crap; and I hate the taste of coffee. Starbucks advertises they use no HFCS, but their cookies taste shitty too, and they have all of those plastic sugars available for their bad tasting coffee.
Don’t eat so much; it’s even cheaper.
William M. Connolley says: February 18, 2012 at 11:38 am (on the Snowfall thread)
GW makes the world warmer; and this (to first order) makes for more WV and hence more precipitation.
________________________________________________________________
But, William, we have seen here at WUWT that measurements show that the relative humidity is declining. What that really does is make the adiabatic lapse rate greater, meaning a steeper temperature trend pivoting (long-term) about a mean of about 255 K somewhere up in the atmosphere. This natural temperature gradient in the atmosphere (being a function of the acceleration due to gravity) is what determines how much above the 255 K we expect the surface temperature to be. Hence we would actually expect less WV with increasing temperatures.
Oh yes, I do agree that long term the temperatures are increasing and the long-term trend from a few hundred years ago is increasing at a declining rate of increase that has reduced from 0.06 deg.C / decade to about 0.05 deg.C / decade pointing to a maximum in the long-term temperature trend within about 200 years. I worked that out from the plot at the foot of my Home page http://climate-change-theory.com
But where is the increasing WV you speak of, William? All the data shows is decreasing relative humidity correlating with global warming.
Didn’t I tell you that backradiation from cooler WV in the atmosphere cannot transfer thermal energy to the surface?
Just brought out a new “Big Oil” mug if anyone fancies em. Thought about using fruitier language but settled on where’s my bloody money? As the tag line.
Can’t do images as I’m crap. So crap it’s no surprise Big Oil haven’t paid up yet!
http://www.uglymug.co.uk/Big_Oil_Conspiracy_-_Mug/p735934_5812190.aspx
Genghis says:
February 19, 2012 at 2:01 pm
The point of the experiment was that the Earth after being heated by the sun for billions of years has to be in thermal equilibrium.
__________________________________________________________
You make a good point here. Of course there are minor variations from equilibrium of the order of 0.5% in TOA net radiative flux, but long-term over billions of years a temperature trend has been established from the core to the crust and then one from the surface to the mesopause, which is about -100 deg.C and above which things get a bit irrelevant.
But there will always be close thermal equilibrium at the surface/atmosphere interface due to diffusion which results from molecular collisions. So the two plots meet at the surface and this is seen when investigating underground temperatures in boreholes such as the 9Km deep one in Germany.
Now, my point is that, if the long-term equilibrium surface temperature were to be raised, say 3 deg.C, then the whole (roughly linear) temperature plot from the core to the surface would have to be raised at the surface end. Likewise, the natural adiabatic lapse rate in the atmosphere would have to adjust somehow, even though it is determined mostly by the acceleration due to gravity and the relative humidity, being steeper when the air is drier. There would be a massive amount of extra thermal energy that would have to be stored all the way from the core to the surface in order to fill the gap between the current temperature plot and the new one which would be 3 deg.C higher at the surface end. Need I say more?
There is obviously a huge stabilising effect due to the huge amount of thermal energy under the surface and all the way down to that 5,700 deg.C core.
Eric (Skeptic) at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/19/open-thread-weekend-8/#comment-897255
My post to William Connolly may be treated as a response to yourself also on this point …
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/19/open-thread-weekend-8/#comment-897280
Myrrh says:
February 19, 2012 at 6:22 pm
Doug Cotton – not sure if you’re planning to return to argo thread, please read my post to you
____________________________________________
Sorry, I couldn’t find it on the first Argo thread. A link to the post you mean would be handy.
I am going to keep to posting only on the Friday Open Threads (to avoid being off topic) so I will reply here if you post the link on this thread. (You can get it by clicking on the date and time line under your name.)
But please read first my various posts on last week’s Open Thread as well as this week’s here in case I have already covered your point.
Open thread weekend and just under the wire, yea!
A link for pure raw nature at it’s best and a quiet place just to view 24/7.
http://www.farmyou.com/falcon_cams/index.html
Bald Eagle egg laying time! First one laid on the 17th, expecting two more as this pair are very successful parents. 3-4 days in between each egg so could be tomorrow night for #2, between 5-8 pm in the evenings. They’ve improved the camera location this year and hopefully it will stay clear of streamed eaglet outputs. (think someone here put this up last year, iirc – a big thanks)
“Coal, not oilsands, causes global warming: study”
http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120219/bc_coal_oilsands_climate_change_120219/20120219
“One of the world’s top climate scientists has calculated that emissions from Alberta’s oilsands are unlikely to make a big difference to global warming and that the real threat to the planet comes from burning coal.
“I was surprised by the results of our analysis,” said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate modeller, who has been a lead author on two reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “I thought it was larger than it was.””
“Burning all the oil in the world would only raise temperatures by less than one degree, the paper concludes.”
“In contrast, the paper concludes that burning all the globe’s vast coal deposits would create a 15-degree increase in temperature. Burning all the abundant natural gas would warm the planet by more than three degrees.”
“When only commercially viable oilsands deposits are considered, the temperature increase is only .03 degrees C.”
The FWS number of Florida Manatee cold related deaths in 2011 came in high at 112. If you recall there were 244 cold deaths in 2010, which was almost ten times the five year average of 27.
http://www.myfwc.com/research/manatee/rescue-mortality-response/mortality-statistics/
Please excuse me for not updating more. I stay extremely busy. And not enough guitar, but am rock and roll ready… (debatable)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K54yXBWX5fs&feature=youtube_gdata_player
In regards to the Heartland documents I sent a complaint to the BBC about the Richard Black article. My complaint was :
{Complaint title:} The article was inaccurate as a document was fake
{Complaint:} The article by Richard Black lacked balance or journalistic
investigation. All documents were considered as real without any effort
to verify as such.
In fact at least one document has been declared a fake, did the
correspondent contact Heartland and ask them for a reaction, or did he
just print verbatim without verification?
I received the following response from the BBC which was signed off by Richard Black :
Thanks for your email. You will be pleased to know that I did indeed phone the Heartland Institute before writing the article.
However, the basis for your complaint is false as seven out of the eight documents have not been dismissed as fakes – in fact the Heartland Institute acknowledged they were real documents, emailed out from the Institute.
Best regards,
Richard Black
I find interesting two things :
First he says he phoned the Heartland Institute, he did not say he spoke to someone though, and he does not mention speaking to the them in his article. Lack of balance as usual from the BBC.
Secondly he dismisses my complaint as false, his argument is that seven out of eight documents are not false. But in fact my complaint stated that, my complaint was lack of balance, which he does not address as he knows he cannot respond. The journalistic hubris at the BBC knows no bounds.
Errors, maybe, 2010 manatee cold deaths at 279. Which would be above the 5 year average. There were 54 in 2009 or the five year averaging would have been somewhere lower. Accuracy at this is about as bad as volcano VEI.
Spike in manatee deaths in Florida blamed in part on record-setting cold
http://www.ocala.com/article/20110105/ARTICLES/110109897
I appreciate that some do not fully understand what I have been writing, so hopefully this final post for the week will clarify what I’m getting at. I shall only post on the weekly Open threads in future and only answer questions which I feel are genuine and not already answered in my posts on this or last week’s open thread.. I am only going to discuss the physics of the atmosphere which has been a long-term study topic for me, based on 50 years studying physics..
You simply cannot explain how the Second Law of Thermodynamics operates for radiation if you try to calculate the effects of two-way radiation and take the “net” difference.
I have given an example with my thought experiment with a funnel which focuses radiation from a much larger plate at one end onto a smaller plate at the other end, each at the same temperature and with the same absorptivity. You have net radiation from large to small (agreed?) but the Second Law says you cannot have transfer of thermal energy, ie heat transfer. You can only get the computations to agree with reality if you don’t count any radiation from cold to hot and you only count all radiation from hot to cold. Whatever the temperatures, this funnel will not perform in accord with calculations which you do with net radiation calculated as a difference between the two-way radiative fluxes.
I keep talking about what happens when the Sun is already warming the surface every sunny morning. There is net radiation into the surface because it is warming. So how can extra radiation transfer thermal energy from the colder atmosphere so as to make the surface warm even faster? Obviously that would violate the Second Law. I don’t care if you don’t agree about what happens that evening when it is cooling. Some people can’t understand that thermal energy has to be added in order to slow a rate of cooling, like turning a tap on when the bath plug is out. But you should all be able to understand that the Second Law would be violated in the morning, and that is a part of the IPCC’s model calculations, now isn’t it? You cannot just take a 24 average “net” flow of energy and say all is OK. The Second Law has to apply between any two points at any particular time.
Eventually you will see that Claes Johnson, a well-published Professor of Applied Mathematics does in fact know how to do the relevant computations. It was he who explained the resonating process (which is not absorption that leads to conversion to thermal energy) as you can read in his Computational Blackbody Radiation and I am not going to plagiarise his excellent work. All I have done is explain when the resonating takes place and why it must be related to the overlap and non-overlap of the frequency plots for the source and target. Only when the source is hotter will it have non-overlapping higher frequencies which cannot resonate and which thus have to be converted to thermal energy, as happens with solar insolation.
Thermal energy does not transfer with radiation – only radiated energy which does not know what it is going to strike until it does. If (like solar radiation) it includes visible light then that portion will probably appear as light and be reflected as some colour. When they are not reflected, the invisible UV and the IR can be converted to thermal energy (as can that component of visible light which is not reflected) when there is the potential to be absorbed. But that potential (the absorptivity) is a measured empirical value which itself varies with temperatures of both the source and target. The reason it varies is because radiation from a cooler source never gets converted to thermal energy. In the empirical measurements, the radiation which is scattered may or may not get counted in the emissivity calculations and I suspect this possibility leads to errors. After all, it does not come back at the same angle as incident radiation, so they may not consider it part of the reflected component. But it had no effect on the temperature of the target. So what I am saying is, don’t hang your hat on such measured absorptivity (as William Connolly does) because you would need to know more about how it was calculated.
So “heat” only appears to transfer by the following process: at the source some thermal energy is converted to radiation, so the temperature of the source drops. When that radiation hits a cooler target (which can absorb it) then it will be converted back to thermal energy, so the temperature of the target rises and we say there is “heat” transfer. But, if the radiation hits a warmer target the Second Law says it cannot be converted to thermal energy because the Law says there cannot be heat transfer.
* * * * * * * * *
Finally, don’t forget the backradiation from carbon dioxide when it absorbs IR from incident Solar radiation and sends it back to space, thus cooling. This has been the most avoided point in all my posts everywhere.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:17 pm
So growth hormones in meat are rather easy to avoid.
Most of the things are easy to avoid when you know, what to avoid, why, and how.
When we came into the U.S. in 1980s, nobody told us about these things, and only in the end of 1990s, when I was already thrice fatter than I had been in Russia, I started connecting the points when I noticed in the local newspaper an article boasting that American beef producers doubled their yield of beef since 1980s by using growth hormones, without increasing the amount of feed.
Fowl in American supermarkets may not contain growth hormones (I doubt it — if it says so on the label, it ain’t necessarily so) but contains so many terrible things that even Russians banned American chicken (Russian wouldn’t buy American chicken even before the ban, so terrible is its taste; Tyson chicken is synonymous to “inedible” in Russia, they call it also “soap meat” and “Bush legs”).
I stopped getting fatter only after I stopped buying any beef and dairy products in supermarket. But I started to get a bit thinner only after I stopped buying their bread and pasta, also. American food lobby and the U.S. Congress in its pocket are killing our nation. Health care racket helps them to relieve the sick of their last remaining funds. Taxation and endless regulations prevent vertical mobility, entrepreneurship and individual freedom. We are a long way down the road to serfdom.
[SNIP: Sorry, but just a step too far. It’s better to not let THAT conversation get started. -REP]
Eric (skeptic) says:
February 19, 2012 at 5:53 pm
I think the main effect with clouds and radiational cooling is that the clouds reflect light (well, LWIR – longwave IR). This isn’t quite like the cold object radiating toward a warm object, but a mirror reflecting back to an object. Adiabatic lapse rates become less of an issue at night as convection dies down because the ground is no longer heating the air.
I don’t think I can find a good example in my weather data, but with the 10 minute sampling rate I use, it’s very easy to spot passing clouds or some wind activity disrupting radiational cooling.
One handy thing about living in New England is while I can see several aspects of radiational cooling by the ground, air temperature at Mt. Washington’s 6288 foot altitude generally has a much smaller diurnal change. Its temperature traces generally show the warmth of the air mass moving in.
You can watch some of this at:
Mt Washington: http://vortex.plymouth.edu/mwn24.gif (5°F change over the last 24 hours)
Concord NH: http://vortex.plymouth.edu/con24.gif (13°F change)
My site near Concord: http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wx/current.htm (tonight’s radiational cooling has be disrupted by wind mixing the surface layer. On a good summer night I often see something like an exponential fall off to the due point, then a slower rate as dew forms and releases its latent heat. In the winter, the dew/frost formation doesn’t slow radiational cooling as much because there’s less water vapor and less latent heat. When the dewpoint is below zero, frost formation barely slows the rate of fall at all. One thing that’s happening is there’s a sizable window that water vapor and CO2 don’t block, so the ground manages to radiate directly into space during cloudfree times (including daytime).
That’s all consistant with reflected ground radiation.
I don’t pay much attention to the lapse rate at night. With the declining convection and formation of the inversion, the only thing that can maintain it well is IR radiation from the top of the atmosphere and that should increase convection. However, I think the ground is able to radiate more thanks to its warmer temperature and transparent part range in the atmosphere.
Doug Cotton says:
February 19, 2012 at 9:32 pm
Open threads are not a weekly feature. Check the post titles at my Guide to WUWT and the month-long tables of content it links to. Not to worry – open threads are frequent enough.
Andrew Weaver has a new study and guess what….oilsands are not the bad guy any more.
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/SciTech/20120219/coal-climate-change-study-120219/
This could be huge. Has he gone rogue? What will the hockey team have to say?
jorgekafkazar says:
February 19, 2012 at 5:27 pm
“LearDog says: “THIS story is hysterical.! Have at it!
http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_19984502
Clearly ‘Hate Crimes’”
Why is this hysterical? Is decimation of sea otters by sharks intrinsically funny?”
No. Unless maybe you’re a ‘bad’ shark. What is funny about this story is that it seriously confuses the environmentalists because this problem is caused by their success. They saved the sea otters, the elephant seals and the sharks and now because there are so many elephant seals attracting so many sharks, the sharks are also eating too many sea otters.
The sea otter, elephant seal, and shark saving teams live in their own little specialized worlds. It was all supposed to be harmonious and balanced in Gaia! Now they are faced with a very inconvenient reality. Which Endangered Species gets controlled to save another.
With so many conservation success stories, these kind of inconvenient conflicts are popping up in many places with many species. But this one is high profile and in the heart of Ehrlichland.
to Eric the sceptic
I would like to add to the answer of Dough on your question why with clouds the radiation is less efficient. It is simply shown in the models of the one slab atmosphere which I wrote down in:
http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/IR-absorption.pdf
There are two versions: one with the one way heat flow as also advocated by Johnson and here by Dough and one with the two way heat flow, with the so-called back-radiation. The implementations give the same temperature distribution! But the two way implementation gives rise to spurious absorption.
It has to be avoided.
The same paper deals also with multi-layer models. The results are applied to so-called K&T diagrams showing that the huge back-radiation can not exists.
I like this comment by Mike Mann and almost agree with him for once! Not sure about the amiable bit but overeducated nerd totally lacking in common sense seems to sum him up perfectly
It was not the life Mann envisaged when he
began work on his post-graduate degree at Yale.
All Mann knew then was that he wanted to work
on big problems, that resonated outside
academia. At heart, he said, he was like one of
the amiable nerds on the television show Big
Bang Theory.
February 19, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Myrrh says:
February 19, 2012 at 6:22 pm
Doug Cotton – not sure if you’re planning to return to argo thread, please read my post to you
____________________________________________
Sorry, I couldn’t find it on the first Argo thread. A link to the post you mean would be handy.
===========
Doug – sorry, I had a brainstorm last night, it was very late… I’d responded to Stephen Wilde who was also trying to introduce real world physics into the discussion, convection and conduction, and got the two of you muddled up :http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/12/argo-and-the-ocean-temperature-maximum/#comment-897214
Mike Mann Big Bang theory quote is from Grauniad
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/17/michael-mann-climate-war
The chart from AR4 predicts a median temperature rise of 3.26 C caused by a doubling of he pre-industrial level of CO2 from 280 ppm to 560 ppm. However, this would imply that the current rise in temperature due to 390ppm is of the order of 1.56C; when it is half this figure. Since the current warming [from ALL sources] is about 0.7C, how do the IPCC, and cronies, justify their assumptions? It seems to me that this alone invalidates the claim that we face unpleasant GW from CO2.
If 3.26=k (ln560-ln280) then k =4.7. In which case the rise from 280ppm to current 390ppm should have been 4.7(ln390-ln280)=1.56C. How can anyone, be they in the Royal Society or elsewhere, argue against a factor of the order of 1.93, as used in the Modtran programme? such a value fits the data.
Do we need to go any further to show that current fears by the warmists are unfounded?
If we do then the fact that there are ample records that glaciers started to retreat [say late 18th century] long before mankind really got going burning fossil fuels about 70 years ago. This suggests to me that it is clear that some of the warming i.e. probably all the rise to 1940 is NOT due to CO2. My observations suggest that about half the warming to date in due to nature.
How do we convince others that spending our children and grandchildren’s inheritance on CO 2 abatement is a foolish waste of money? I bridle when I get an electric bill that tells me the raw price of electricity is 38% of my bill and that levies added, including GREEN levies, are half of this at 19%.. This with only 4% of the UK’s electricity from wind!
I really like this web site. Its so moderate and fair.
From Doug Cotton on February 19, 2012 at 7:13 pm:
What is obvious is the Earth has about 6*10^24 kg of mass, a huge amount of thermal energy stored and more still being generated by various processes…
And about 20 feet or so (6 meters) below any land surface there are temperatures around 50°F all year long, exploitable for heating and cooling, while just a very tiny distance away, back on the surface of this sphere with a mean radius of 6371 km, the temperature can vary widely with the seasons or even be effectively permanently at a certain temp, like with the bitter cold of Antarctica. Using geothermal (ground source) heat pumps to tap the underground heat, it is possible to exclusively do heating, at a good savings versus other methods. But greater efficiency is found using the natural slow thermal diffusion rate of the ground for seasonal thermal storage, put the excess heat in the ground during summer when doing cooling, even store heat from solar thermal panels, then tap it in winter when doing heating.
Thus it is demonstrated that whatever great thermal energy is stored in the Earth, it is effectively sealed away and begrudgingly released at an exceedingly slow rate, and there can be no “…huge stabilising effect due to the huge amount of thermal energy under the surface and all the way down to that 5,700 deg.C core.”
Review this from the Wikipedia Geothermal gradient entry (I direct-linked the references):
An average of about a tenth of a watt per square meter can establish a huge stabilizing effect? With more that 60% of that heat loss from creating oceanic plate (see Reference 14) thus said heat flow is far from distributed evenly? Not likely.
And as there is this thermally distinctive zone through the atmosphere to the surface which extends to around six meters below the surface, followed by the distinctive geothermal gradient region, why would an extra 3°C in surface temps have to be accompanied by an increase in stored thermal energy all the way to the core? The answer is, it doesn’t, and the planet has been that much warmer in past Warm Periods like the Roman and Minoan ones without having such corresponding “to the core” increases. I mean, who would think all that mass could suddenly gain and lose that amount of energy before and after those geological eyeblinks? Couldn’t happen.
Myrrh says: February 20, 2012 at 1:29 am
Doug – sorry, .. I’d responded to Stephen Wilde
______________________________________
That’s OK. Yes I have often said that the surface/atmosphere interface is entirely internal, not unlike the floor of the ocean. The only close thing to a blackbody is the whole Earth-plus-atmosphere system as seen from space beyond the thermosphere. A blackbody must be insulated from losses by conduction etc. The Earth’s surface loses more than half its thermal energy by evaporation, conduction, chemical processes and diffusion followed by convection. These processes bring about near thermal equilibrium and there is little energy left to radiate. In fact, correct application of SBL yields very low radiation when the temperature are, say, less than 3 degrees apart.
That (inaccurate) 255K temperature is just a mean and whatever it should be is sure to be found somewhere in the atmosphere. The natural adiabatic lapse rate ensures that the surface will be warmer than the mean, and nothing else (like WV or carbon dioxide and its colleagues) is needed to set the current surface temperatures. So much for that 33 degree C garbage!
Paul Vaughan says:
February 19, 2012 at 8:23 pm
“Coal, not oilsands, causes global warming: study”
http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120219/bc_coal_oilsands_climate_change_120219/20120219
“One of the world’s top climate scientists has calculated that emissions from Alberta’s oilsands are unlikely to make a big difference to global warming and that the real threat to the planet comes from burning coal.
“I was surprised by the results of our analysis,” said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate modeller, who has been a lead author on two reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “I thought it was larger than it was.””
“Burning all the oil in the world would only raise temperatures by less than one degree, the paper concludes.”
===================================
This has only ever been anti-coal – it’s the other fossil fuel industries supporting the demonisation of coal (cheap fuel). All the while deflecting from their own involvement by accusing the sceptics of being funded by big oil, fossil fuels.
[snip . . kbmod]
Up for review: Assessing climate model software quality.
Ric, thanks for the ideas. I generally agree but would quibble with the term “reflected” in “reflected ground radiation”. The clouds absorb IR and re-emit it in all directions. We can call it reflection but it isn’t. Reflection seems to be much more complicated: http://www.theoryofabsolutes.com/photonreflectionindepth.html
Doug, here’s a site that shows downwelling IR measurements but not quite real time (about 3 or 4 days of lag): http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/surfrad/dataplot.html I will choose State College PA since it has more chances of random clouds and State College has an automatic reporting system that reports 3 times an hour. With the two sources of data I will be able to verify that the downwelling IR is primarily determined by cloud cover. You agree with that in principle anyway.
The harder part will be for me to demonstrate that the variations in downwelling IR result in changes in temperature, or more specifically, changes in the drop in temperature at night. So far the largest complicating factor has been wind which advects warmer or colder air into State College. I will obviously have to choose windless nights with variable cloudiness.
Here’s a link to the State College weather data: http://www.weather.gov/data/obhistory/KUNV.html I’ll grab the data when they get to the right meteorological conditions (i.e. windless night with varying cloud cover)
From Alexander Feht on February 19, 2012 at 9:51 pm:
Strangely enough, I was able to Google a much more “balanced” piece about the recent ban, which even flips around “Bush legs” from what you said:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2013327523_bushlegs03.html
The bans smell like politics:
Russian poultry industry needs a boost, American chicken gets banned, America cries foul, ban gets lifted.
Even the NY Times agrees politics are involved:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/world/europe/20russia.html
And with politics comes propaganda, as in a FUD campaign boosting Russian poultry by raising suspicion about the cheaper American chicken. An example from the NY Times piece:
The rest of the WaPo piece is interesting. A poultry magnate who’s a member of the upper house of the Russian Parliament and a “former” political operative, brushes off that eight out of ten domestic chicken samples bought in Moscow had salmonella. They’re kidding, right? Here in the US they’ll recall a million pounds of meat on a positive finding of salmonella at a factory, and if 8 of 10 were found contaminated at a supermarket then that place would get closed right quick. Those boxes of deep-frozen American chicken legs sure sound a whole lot healthier.
I’m sorry, but there are too many contradictions from what you said. As you stated, you left in the 1980’s. Have you been keeping track of what happens there by following the Russian state-run media and accidentally got infected by the Soviet-style propaganda? Or by communicating with friends and family still there who’ve come to accept the anti-American fabrications?
Eric (skeptic) says:
February 20, 2012 at 5:32 am
> Ric, thanks for the ideas. I generally agree but would quibble with the term “reflected” in “reflected ground radiation”. The clouds absorb IR and re-emit it in all directions. We can call it reflection but it isn’t.
I’ll still call it reflection as in albedo. A big difference is that sunlight reflecting (i.e. photons match the wavelength emitted by the Sun, not the blackbody spectrum of the cloud) off cloud tops involves short wavelengths. The LWIR hitting the bottom of the clouds doesn’t “see” the cloud droplets as well as the solar SW light. I’m not sure how different the albedo is. (And I’m referring to the shorter IR that isn’t blocked by water vapor and other GHGs.)
> Reflection seems to be much more complicated: http://www.theoryofabsolutes.com/photonreflectionindepth.html
Cool site, I’ll try to spend some time with it tonight.
> Doug, here’s a site that shows downwelling IR measurements but not quite real time (about 3 or 4 days of lag): http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/surfrad/dataplot.html
Wow, another cool site – two gold stars for the day. I won’t mention anything about its display of downwelling IR lest I’m reminded I don’t understand basic physics. (Damn high school physics class only talked about index of refraction, polarization, the Brewster angle, and stuff like that. I guess those must be pre-basics.)
> The harder part will be for me to demonstrate that the variations in downwelling IR result in changes in temperature, or more specifically, changes in the drop in temperature at night. So far the largest complicating factor has been wind which advects warmer or colder air into State College. I will obviously have to choose windless nights with variable cloudiness.
The best radiational cooling is when a Canadian high pressure system is centered on the area. Of course, there are no clouds then. You might look for nights when a warm front is a couple hundred miles away, there are often some clouds with that. They tend to be stratiform clouds. You can also look for upper level lows that don’t have surface frontal systems. New England TV mets usually mention them, but we have good TV mets. Watching IR satellite photos and looking for clouds where there aren’t weather fronts on synoptic maps is a good way to look for that. The best case is some stray cumulus clouds above decent snow pack, that’s pretty rare.
Andrew Weaver’s recent “road-to-Damascus” statement is apparently more political than scientific – he appears to be shifting his position in response to changes in the political wind.
Why do I say this? Because Weaver’s conclusion is not new. This statement, which we wrote and published in 2002, puts it in context:
“The middle range forecast of future warming, based on expected growth in fossil fuel use without any curbs, is for a 1º C increase between now and 2050. The Kyoto Protocol would reduce that increase by an insignificant 0.06º C.”
So how did we know all this “recent” wisdom as early as 2002? Because it was not new even then – it was the state of actual climate science, before it was usurped and perverted for political and economic gain by the global warming gang.
What else did we say in this article?
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
I hope that was clear enough, even for our idiot politicians.
_________________________
CTV News write-up of Weaver’s Nature paper:
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/SciTech/20120219/coal-climate-change-study-120219/
“When only commercially viable oilsands deposits are considered, the temperature increase is only .03 degrees C.”
Our PEGG paper of 2002:
http://www.apegga.org/members/publications/peggs/Web11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
Kyoto is Ineffective
Computer simulations of climate have yielded wide-ranging forecasts of future temperature increases from rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations, based on projections of future energy use. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has compiled these simulations. The middle range forecast of future warming, based on expected growth in fossil fuel use without any curbs, is for a 1º C increase between now and 2050. The Kyoto Protocol would reduce that increase by an insignificant 0.06º C.
Over at Bishop Hill, Andrew Montford has a very interesting article on how policy can be created by the judicious control of scientific “evidence” and a little self-interested zealotry..
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/2/20/the-entrepreneur.html
@ kadaka:
As to the ban, there certainly is a politicized commercial factor there but the crux of the problem is that Tyson “chicken” doesn’t taste like real chicken. Russians know that, Europeans know that, even in India, where there are many really hungry people, American “artificial” chicken doesn’t sell. It has a repulsive, chemical taste. Only people who never tasted anything better than McDonald’s food or Carnival cruise “stuff”, can eat that [snip].
I regularly visit Russia. I read Russian forum debates. I hear what people say there about American chicken, and I’ve tasted Tyson chicken myself. No more, thank you! It does taste like soap.
Foxgoose says:
February 19, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Anybody else had trouble voting in the Weblog Awards?
I’ve tried three times over the last few days and the process seemed to go OK – but I never got the confirmatory email on any occasion.
Neither have I and have tried a few times
[Reply: email them. This year there are numerous complaints similar to yours. Possibly the process has been internally compromised. ~dbs, mod.]
I had the same trouble, and eventually did a text search of my email files. Lo and behold, a post-dated verification email was there (future-dated) that my email client didn’t know how to display (I suppose) . Search for “Bloggi” and see what comes up.
Weaver’s article/position still takes CO2 forcing for granted. The statement that burning all the known coal reserves would warm the planet 15K is just the most ludicrous of his conclusions.
The man is systemically and systematically deluded.
February 20, 2012 at 4:08 am
Paul Vaughan says:
February 19, 2012 at 8:23 pm
“Coal, not oilsands, causes global warming: study”
http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120219/bc_coal_oilsands_climate_change_120219/20120219
“One of the world’s top climate scientists has calculated that emissions from Alberta’s oilsands are unlikely to make a big difference to global warming and that the real threat to the planet comes from burning coal.
“I was surprised by the results of our analysis,” said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate modeller, who has been a lead author on two reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “I thought it was larger than it was.””
“Burning all the oil in the world would only raise temperatures by less than one degree, the paper concludes.”
===============
This is the oil industry which helped create CRU, which then tampered with New Zealand temperature records, in order to mobilise the greens against coal and so was born AGW and demonisation of carbon dioxide. Now trying to backtrack a bit, to distance themselves from coal fossil fuels, because they’ve been too successful anti-coal and the greenies are interfering in their new oil ventures.
It’s not the sceptics funded by big oil, but the greens. They’ve always been anti-coal because that’s the oil industry’s agenda.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/06/bp-greenpeace-big-oil-jackpot.html
“According to the Washington Post the green group Nature Conservancy – which encourages ordinary citizens to personally pledge to fight climate change – “has accepted nearly $10 million in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations over the years.”
Gee, didn’t Greenpeace build an entire ExxonSecrets website to expose the allegedly diabolical fact that, over a 9-year-period (1998-2006) ExxonMobil donated a grand total of $2.2 million to a conservative think tank?
$10 million versus $2 million. Who do we suppose has the cozier relationship with big oil?”
And Donna’s look at the subject with Heartland in mind: http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/02/17/big-oil-money-for-me-but-not-for-thee/
“The Sierra Club takes fossil fuel money. So does the Nature Conservancy and Rajendra Pachauri’s sustainability conference. So why is the Heartland Institute being torn to pieces for the same behaviour?”
And further:
“Two weeks ago Time magazine revealed that,
between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from…Chesapeake Energy – one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S… [backup link here]
In other words, what Time describes as the “biggest and oldest environmental group” in America felt morally justified in taking $25 million smackaroos from a fossil fuel company so that it could campaign against other fossil fuel companies – those that sell coal. A search of the BBC and the Guardian‘s website reveals absolutely no coverage of that news story. Not one word (see here and here).”
Andrew Weaver is one of ‘useful idiots’ for the oil industry, like Hansen and his death trains, it’s always been about anti-coal and here now they’ve found themselves the victims of their own success and trying to put a distance between ‘coal fossil’ fuels and ‘oil fossil’ fuels, because the greens are objecting to their new source of oil wealth.
Too funny.
How do you fit into this Paul?
Another link on this theme.
http://www.disinfo.com/2012/02/how-the-sierra-club-learned-to-stop-worrying-about-the-99-and-love-wall-street/
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 20, 2012 at 3:05 am
___________________________________
I note that you do not understand the physics involved in the conduction process from the core to the surface as I explained in my post, and why the whole temperature plot would have to be raised.
Please go back to my post and try to follow why there is a huge stabilising effect. It has nothing whatever to do with the slow terrestrial heat flow.
See also the ‘Explanation’ page on my website.
If anyone else wishes to comment on my posts please at least read them in detail and try to understand the physics. If I haven’t explained clearly enough I am happy to try again, but kadaka obviously just didn’t try and spoke about something else of which I am fully aware of course.
Eric (skeptic) says:
February 20, 2012 at 5:32 am
_________________________________
I have read plenty of papers on downwelling radiation measures thanks, and don’t doubt that they fluctuate with humidity. What is your point? Have I not made it clear that any such radiation has absolutely no effect on climate?
PS kadaka The Earth can tolerate relatively small variations in a 1000 year cycle, but the stabilised surface temperature can draw temperatures back towards the long-term mean of such trends. There cannot be a runaway warming effect in time frames that short. It seems 2 degrees C is about the maximum it can vary from the mean. The mechanism is described on my Explanation page on my website,
However, for a whole new equilibrium to be established, let’s say 5 degrees warmer, the whole underground plot has to shift partly by banking up the terrestrial flow and maybe by inward flow. This would take perhaps hundreds of thousands of years.
There is clear evidence that temperature plots in hundreds of bore holes all extrapolate to base surface temperatures all over the world. This is not by chance. It is because sub-surface and atmospheric trends have to meet at the surface because of the thermal equilibrium established at that inteface most by diffusion – see Wiki “Heat Transfer.” The process of conduction ensures that the trend is set by the core temperature and the surface temperatures and there is a feedback mechanism in conduction that enables this.
Is there a reason for the change to the front page – that it no longer the all the previous posts below the latest, and now without the “older posts” back button?
Eric – don’t waste your time. The only thing that will possibly convince you that backradiation has no effect is doing your own backyard experiment as I outline here …
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/11/open-thread-weekend-7/#comment-897444
Do you, Eric, kadaka, or anyone, seriously believe that, when you turn on an electric radiator you could actually make it warm faster by holding a mirror beside it and reflecting its own radiation back onto itself? Try it if you do and time how long it takes to get to its maximum with or without the mirror. When it reaches its maximum, can you then make it hotter still with the mirror?
Backradiation would be even less effective than a mirror because it usually has lower frequencies than those originally emitted by the surface. It is ludicrous to imagine energy can be created this way. The Second Law of Thermodynamics would be so obviously violated.
Yet the IPCC says backradiation should be about a quarter as powerful as the Sun at noon. Well I know the Sun can heat sand on the beach until it blisters my feet, but when I tested the effect of backradiation on sand there was not even a tenth of a degree difference between it and the shielded sand in an identical wide necked vacuum flask.
Doug Cotton said February 20, 2012 at 3:15 pm:
From Doug Cotton on February 20, 2012 at 4:56 pm:
I reviewed your “backyard experiment,” it has an obvious glaring error:
“Tape the screens together (along the long sides) to make a large square and suspend them (eg with piles of bricks in the corners) so they are only about 15cm above the top of one of the the flasks and centrally positioned of course. There should be a slight dish effect in the screens so warm air can escape by convection around the sides.”
You have established no valving effect. If warm air can leave, then warm air can enter. Thus the surrounding area having a decreased rate of cooling due to backradiation can distribute its retained heat to your wide-mouthed soup Thermos hiding under the two taped-together windscreen shields (windshield sunscreens).
*groan*
If I would place an electric radiator inside a thermally reflective box, of course I would expect the radiator to reach its maximum temperature faster. If it was surrounded by only half of a thermally-reflective box, reflecting back half of the emitted thermal radiation, I would still expect it to reach its maximum temperature faster than without the half a box.
Here’s an experiment for you to consider. Suspend two identical electric heating elements in two otherwise identical uninsulated vacuum chambers, the difference is one has a black interior coating while the other has a normal thermally reflective silver finish. The radiation emitted from the one element will hit the black surface, be transformed to heat that is absorbed by the heavy metal housing, which will then be released by the housing to the surrounding environment by the normal processes.
The elements are in vacuum so there is no convection, there is only negligible conduction by the electrical leads the elements are hanging from. You’re left with radiation to consider.
By what you’ve said, the element in the silvery chamber cannot possibly obtain maximum temperature faster than the element in the black chamber. You do not believe an electric radiator could be made to warm faster by reflecting its own radiation back onto itself. Thus the element in the silvery chamber cannot be made to warm faster by reflecting its own radiation back onto itself.
Thus by your reasoning, the element in the chamber retaining more thermal energy cannot possibly obtain maximum temperature faster than the element in the chamber that is shedding more thermal energy. Does that sound about right to you?
Kadaka: The problem you envisage with the backyard experiment is a red herring. Any such warm air would rise rather than fall to the sand. Think, man, think.
You are also wrong about the radiator. I have not said anything about a surrounding box which might trap and prevent warm air escaping by convection. Take the radiator outside with a long chord and just use a mirror at the side (as I said) not at the top.
Now read my next post.
This page http://mit.edu/16.unified/www/FALL/thermodynamics/notes/node133.html explains how reflected radiation is broken into two components …
(1) The specular (mirror-like) reflection where angle of incidence = angle of reflection.
(2) The “diffuse” reflection which is deflected at any random angle..
Here the second component is what I prefer to call deflected (or scattered) radiation, as the process is very different from specular reflection. But whatever you call it, it obviously does exist.
This is the process I have been talking about all along. As far as energy is concerned, as I have always said, it is the same as reflection and thus has no effect whatsoever on the temperature of the target, in this case the surface.
This diffuse reflection is what happens when the target is warmer than the source. If such radiation were absorbed and converted to thermal energy there would be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That is why you need to know the temperatures of both source and target before you can know the overall absorptivity and emissivity. These factors will be affected by this diffuse reflection, which cuts in when the target starts to get warmer than the source.
Thus, all radiation from a cooler atmosphere undergoes diffuse reflection when it strikes a warmer surface. This is why an atmospheric radiative greenhouse effect is a physical impossibility.
(continued from my last post)
I am of course aware that “diffuse” reflection is usually applied to reflection of light which appears to be diffused because of a rough surface. On a microscopic scale, the rough surface may well comprise many small smooth surfaces which simply produce specular reflection at various angles.
So, strictly speaking, the “rejection” of low frequency radiation (from a cooler source) which meets a warmer surface and then resonates and is scattered is yet another different process. But it helps to think of it as diffuse reflection because the end result is the same. My main point is that it can have no effect on the surface temperature because it is as good as reflected.
When IR from the atmosphere strikes a rough Earth surface, you would not be able to distinguish between this scattered radiation and diffuse reflection. In general you will measure inflated values of emissivity as a result. I would suggest that true absorptivity should be expressed as a function of both source and target temperatures. Then its measure should reflect the proportion of the radiation from a source at that temperature which is actually absorbed and converted to thermal energy. In the case of a target temperature greater than a source temperature the absorptivity would thus always be zero.
So this is where models go wrong because they use mean absorptivity measurements which disregard the temperatures of source and target and probably include a lot of scattered radiation anyway. Thus the models end up assuming thermal energy is transferred to the warmer atmosphere simply because they do not rate absorptivity for the relevant temperatures as being zero. Thus they assume violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and are of course wrong as a result. There can be no radiative Greenhouse effect.
(continued)
In calm conditions on a clear day we have the Sun (and only the Sun) warming the surface. Its high frequency (high energy) radiation right across its spectrum can be converted to thermal energy (if not already reflected) and this energy flows by conduction deeper into the land surfaces. The radiation itself already penetrates a fair way into the oceans before it is converted to thermal energy in the depths. Meanwhile thermal energy is also escaping the surface more or less as fast as conduction in the land and convection in the oceans will allow it to get back to the surface.
In the morning the rate of warming exceeds the rate of cooling, and vice versa in the evening. In summer the longer hours of daylight may trap some energy that cannot escape before the next morning. This trapped energy may build up as the middle of summer approaches, but escape by the next winter as daylight hours reduce and there is more time for cooling at night.
Now, looking at the cooling process, at least half (maybe 70%) of the thermal energy escapes to the atmosphere by evaporation, chemical processes and diffusion, which involves molecular collisions between the surface and the adjoining air, as in conduction in solids. The remaining energy will be radiated.
However, experiments in such conditions show that the lower atmosphere is always cooler than the surface, and cools faster than the surface at night. Radiation can never transfer heat from a cooler source to a warmer target and neither can diffusion. So these processes can never make the atmosphere warmer than the surface. The Sun also usually warms the surface faster than the lower atmosphere, so it is only very unusual weather conditions which might leave the surface cooler than the adjoining air. The air which is warmed in the morning will rise by convection.
The radiation from the surface may escape to space, but most will be absorbed by some molecules in the atmosphere. These molecules are likely to be warmed and may share some of the thermal energy with other molecules, or simply radiate it in all directions in small bursts.
The radiation which is emitted by the cooler atmosphere will have frequencies which are generally lower than the original radiation from the surface. If some of this radiation gets to the warmer surface it cannot be converted to thermal energy. Instead it is simply scattered by the surface without leaving any energy behind. Its energy cannot be converted back to thermal energy until it collides with something cooler than the original layer of the atmosphere from which it was emitted. Such cooler air will usually be higher up. It may even escape to space and only warm some cooler object in space maybe years later.
So each time any radiation goes back to the surface it will have absolutely no effect on the surface temperature, but will instead make it further towards space on the next trip up, if indeed it doesn’t escape altogether. Clearly there can be no Greenhouse effect.
Footnore: In situations when the relative humidity is high, the moist adiabatic lapse rate is lower than the dry one, so such humidity (as well as clouds) can slow the rate of cooling of the atmosphere, but this can never lead to any thermal energy going back into the surface, so the rate of cooling of the surface need not be slower. In a sense, thermal energy is falling over a smaller temperature step, but it still falls over at the same rate. The air we stand in may well feel warmer partly because there is less evaporation off our skin. In any event, these are just weather conditions which average out and do not relate to or affect climate.
From Doug Cotton on February 20, 2012 at 10:10 pm:
I’m thinking I live in the real world, your experiment is outdoors and there’s something called wind which can move the warm air sideways and under your cover.
Putting the wind issue aside, I can see an additional flaw. The outgoing longwave infrared originates from the ground, as it gives off its retained thermal energy. You said of those windshield sunscreens: “These have low emissivity and will generally disperse most upward radiation from the surface because of their rough surface.” But the dispersal pattern will be downward. Near the center of the cover, where your sand-filled Thermos resides, most to nearly all of the longwave will be returned to the same general area.
So you are attempting to show that back radiation cannot have a warming effect, actually a slowing of the net cooling rate, by blocking the returning longwave, with a setup that is preventing much of the longwave from escaping in the first place thus slowing down the net cooling rate. Thus your cover is producing about the same effect as the back radiation should have, and you are not noticing any great temperature difference between each Thermos. Which would be expected, and is not disproving the “warming” effect of back radiation at all.
You were talking about returning a portion of the emitted thermal radiation to the source by using a mirror. I was talking about returning the emitted thermal radiation to the source by using a full and a partial thermally reflective enclosure. If you wish to bring convection into this, the half of a box would allow it, and I would still expect the radiator to reach maximum temperature sooner than without it.
And why the specification of a mirror? Common mirrors have the reflective coating applied to the back of the glass, which would overwhelmingly be common window glass (float glass). Thus the spectral qualities of the glass are the first thing to consider. Window glass is opaque to longwave infrared with a transmittance of only 0.02 (ref) for 4mm (5/32″) thickness, and a thermal emissivity given as 0.95 (ref) with thickness not specified.
So with your little radiator and mirror experiment, the glass of the mirror will be absorbing virtually all the longwave and emitting it in a diffuse pattern. Thus your proposed experiment would not work as advertised and cannot be used to disprove what you have stated it would disprove. The correct experiment would use a true thermally reflective material with a low thermal emissivity such as aluminum foil which is specified as 0.03 to 0.05.
What would be the point? You’re not discussing, virtually every reply sums up to “You’re ignorant of the physics, the Second Law forbids it.”
And a total of four reply posts later, you still have not deigned to respond to my vacuum chamber experiment.
Regarding the backyard experiment, I measured the air temperature and it was always cooler than the surface, and cooling faster. So it could not transfer thermal energy by diffusion to the warmer sand. If it were transferring any by radiation, so too would similar air above the unshielded sand. But the unshielded sand still had far more radiation from the rest of the atmosphere within view.
The shield was significantly convex from below which would tend to reflect more of the upward raiation away from the samd, though I accept that some would have been reflected onto the sand. However, considering the area of the local ground under the shield compared with the whole area of the atmosphere above, I suggest the radiative flux from that small part of the ground would be negliglible in comparison.
I accept your point about the glass in the mirror. So go and try it with perhaps a shiny sheet of aluminium. It still won’t have any effect on the rate at which the radiator warms.
Regarding your vacuum chamber experiment, yes it does sound right to me. You can have any amount of radiation reflecting around containing any amount of radiative flux without that energy being converted to thermal energy. Any vacuum flask with hot coffee and internal reflective walls proves my point because the coffee does not get any hotter.
Now, maybe you should consider my two points:
(1) Take a parabolic car headlamp and remove the globe and front glass. Suspend a very small piece of metal at the focal point where the globe would have been. Cut a flat circular piece of the same metal material to fit where the front glass was. Ensure everything is at the same temperature (say 25 deg.C) in an air conditioned room. Then fit the circular piece of metal so it covers the hole where the glass was. The radiation from that sheet should be focused mostly towards the small piece of metal at the focal point. Clearly there is a greater flux of radiation from the larger piece of metal than from the small piece, so there is a net radiative flux towards the small piece. Will it get warmer? I say no because that would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. So what happens to the radiation which hits it? I say it must be scattered and not converted to thermal energy. Now, cool the circular plate by setting the air conditioner to, say, 22 deg.C. Heat will transfer from the small warmer piece to the larger metal one, but net radiation will still be from the much larger piece towards the smaller one. So net radiative flow does not necessarily have the same direction as heat flow.
(2) Carbon dioxide absorbs IR radiation coming from the Sun and there will thus be some backradiation to space. As about half the Sun’s radiation is in the IR spectrum, this causes a quite significant cooling effect.
PS I will re-do my backyard experiment with a sheet of glass with the windscreen shields on top of it just to help overcome objections such as yours. The glass should absorb upward radiation from the ground. I will slope the glass just a little to allow escape of air by convection. When are you going to try it yourself? Seeing is believing.
Guys, you can stop worrying about endless warming going up forever with carbon dioxide levels. It can’t happen.
The whole Earth system (including atmosphere) has to emit very close to the flux it receives from the Sun. So there will be some temperature – let’s say 255K – which is a mean and is somewhere up in the atmosphere.
The natural adiabatic lapse rate is determined, not by carbon dioxide, but by the acceleration due to gravity, the mass of the atmosphere and, to some extent, relative humidity which mostly averages out. The lapse rate sets the gradient of the atmospheric temperature plot which has to swivel about the 255K mean, so the surface end is warmer and the TOA colder. The drop in temperatures between the surface and the tropopause has been very close to constant in all the years of records shown on the NASA site since the end of 2002.
My point is that the mean surface temperature is dictated by these two values – the 255K (or whatever the exact figure is) and the lapse rate. Carbon dioxide cannot affect either, so neither are under mankind’s control.
Both the surface and the atmosphere will simply shed energy faster if they get a little warmer, thus tending back to the mean.
Don’t try to tell me there is a long term TOA net radiative flux difference. The net radiative flux varies between about 99.5% and 100.5% of incoming radiation. This is just random noise or short-term cycles. Longer natural cycles may have to do with variations in the effective power from solar radiation (affecting that 255K figure) and maybe the thermal energy generated under the surface. Small variations in the latter over many thousands of revolutions of the Earth could have a cumulative effect. The very fact that the terrestrial heat flow is low means that the massive quantity of thermal energy from the surface down to the core stays fairly much the same and brings about a stabilising effect as I have explained on the ‘Explanation’ page of my website. . This also is an additional comfort, so relax!
I just wrote this reply to a comment on another website, and I feel it may help people here …he wrote:
The obvious effect of this is that the radiative cooling of the hotter body will be slowed down by the presence of the cooler body, because some of the energy is being returned. This is completely different than there being a NET transfer of heat from the cooler body to the hotter body, which I agree is not possible.
No it’s not completely different. While the energy is still in the radiation it is not equivalent to thermal energy because it has not yet been converted. It cannot affect the temperature of the target unless and until it is converted to thermal energy. Only thermal energy can be added to other thermal energy with a resulting temperature change. You can only slow a rate of cooling by adding thermal energy. Hence the original thermal energy from the cooler body would have to end up being thermal energy in the warmer one before having any effect on temperature. Hence the 2nd Law would be violated.
My funnel experiment focuses more radiation from a large object onto a small one at the same temperature and made of the same metal material. What happens? Think about it. The only way the 2nd Law can apply is if you always disregard the radiation from cold to hot and only consider the radiation from hot to cold.
Any radiation from cold to hot merely resonates – as it can because the hotter body can always itself radiate at all the frequencies in the cooler body emission. It is as good as if diffuse reflection had happened – no energy is left behind and there is no effect on the temperature of the hotter body.
In case I am still not convincing someone, the AGW models assume backradiation works 24 hours a day – right? So they assume it also “works” when the temperature of the surface is getting hotter on a clear sunny morning and net radiation is into the surface. The assume that, not only does it slow the rate of cooling in the evening, but it still does something in the morning, namely increases the rate of warming.
Now if that is not adding thermal energy from a cooler atmosphere to a warmer surface then I’m a monkey’s uncle. So it is violating the Second Law. It is also doing so if it slows the rate of cooling as I explained above.
Is anyone aware of published experiments of absorptivity which use sources of spontaneous emission which are themselves around 10 deg.C to -60 deg.C, like typical atmospheric temperatures?
This* indicates that absorptivity is actually determined not by any warming effect, but by measuring reflected radiation in the visible spectrum.
I am saying that absorptivity cuts out (ie goes to zero) when the source becomes cooler than the target, which of course is not the case by a long shot when making these measurements using much higher frequency radiation than that contained in all spontaneous radiation from the atmosphere.
Hence, for proponents of the radiative greenhouse conjecture to use such measures of absorptivity (close to unity) and thus assume the surface absorbs “backradiation” is a complete abuse of physics.
* http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/reports/arc/cp/0601.pdf.