Open Thread Weekend

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).

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.

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.
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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?

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.
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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
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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.

“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.

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.
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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.

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?

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.

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
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Sorry, I couldn’t find it on the first Argo thread. A link to the post you mean would be handy.
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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