Who Are You Going To Believe – The Government Climate Scientists or The Data?
By Dr David M.W. Evans (republished here with permission, PDF link below)
We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data. Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message – here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.
What the Government Climate Scientists Say
Figure 1: The climate models. If the CO2 level doubles (as it is on course to do by about 2070 to 2100), the climate models estimate the temperature increase due to that extra CO2 will be about 1.1°C × 3 = 3.3°C.i
The direct effect of CO2 is well-established physics, based on laboratory results, and known for over a century.ii
Feedbacks are due to the ways the Earth reacts to the direct warming effect of the CO2. The threefold amplification by feedbacks is based on the assumption, or guess, made around 1980, that more warming due to CO2 will cause more evaporation from the oceans and that this extra water vapor will in turn lead to even more heat trapping because water vapor is the main greenhouse gas. And extra heat will cause even more evaporation, and so on. This amplification is built into all the climate models.iii The amount of amplification is estimated by assuming that nearly all the industrial-age warming is due to our CO2.
The government climate scientists and the media often tell us about the direct effect of the CO2, but rarely admit that two thirds of their projected temperature increases are due to amplification by feedbacks.
What the Skeptics Say
Figure 2: The skeptic’s view. If the CO2 level doubles, skeptics estimates that the temperature increase due to that extra CO2 will be about 1.1°C × 0.5 ≈ 0.6°C.iv
The serious skeptical scientists have always agreed with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2. The argument is entirely about the feedbacks.
The feedbacks dampen or reduce the direct effect of the extra CO2, cutting it roughly in half.v The main feedbacks involve evaporation, water vapor, and clouds. In particular, water vapor condenses into clouds, so extra water vapor due to the direct warming effect of extra CO2 will cause extra clouds, which reflect sunlight back out to space and cool the earth, thereby reducing the overall warming.
There are literally thousands of feedbacks, each of which either reinforces or opposes the direct warming effect of the extra CO2. Almost every long-lived system is governed by net feedback that dampens its response to a perturbation. If a system instead reacts to a perturbation by amplifying it, the system is likely to reach a tipping point and become unstable (like the electronic squeal that erupts when a microphone gets too close to its speakers). The earth’s climate is long-lived and stable— it has never gone into runaway greenhouse, unlike Venus — which strongly suggests that the feedbacks dampen temperature perturbations such as that from extra CO2.
What the Data Says
The climate models have been essentially the same for 30 years now, maintaining roughly the same sensitivity to extra CO2even while they got more detailed with more computer power.
- How well have the climate models predicted the temperature?
- Does the data better support the climate models or the skeptic’s view?
Air Temperatures
One of the earliest and most important predictions was presented to the US Congress in 1988 by Dr James Hansen, the “father of global warming”:
Figure 3: Hansen’s predictionsvi to the US Congress in 1988, compared to the subsequent temperatures as measured by NASA satellitesvii.
Hansen’s climate model clearly exaggerated future temperature rises.
In particular, his climate model predicted that if human CO2 emissions were cut back drastically starting in 1988, such that by year 2000 the CO2 level was not rising at all, we would get his scenario C. But in reality the temperature did not even rise this much, even though our CO2 emissions strongly increased – which suggests that the climate models greatly overestimate the effect of CO2 emissions.
A more considered prediction by the climate models was made in 1990 in the IPCC’s First Assessment Report:viii
Figure 4: Predictions of the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990, compared to the subsequent temperatures as measured by NASA satellites.
It’s 20 years now, and the average rate of increase in reality is below the lowest trend in the range predicted by the IPCC.
Ocean Temperatures
The oceans hold the vast bulk of the heat in the climate system. We’ve only been measuring ocean temperature properly since mid-2003, when the Argo system became operational.ix,x In Argo, a buoy duck dives down to a depth of 2,000 meters, measures temperatures as it very slowly ascends, then radios the results back to headquarters via satellite. Over three thousand Argo buoys constantly patrol all the oceans of the world.
Figure 5: Climate model predictionsxi of ocean temperature, versus the measurements by Argoxii. The unit of the vertical axis is 1022 Joules (about 0.01°C).
The ocean temperature has been basically flat since we started measuring it properly, and not warming as quickly as the climate models predict.
Atmospheric Hotspot
The climate models predict a particular pattern of atmospheric warming during periods of global warming; the most prominent change they predict is a warming in the tropics about 10 km up, the “hotspot”.
The hotspot is the sign of the amplification in their theory (see Figure 1). The theory says the hotspot is caused by extra evaporation, and by extra water vapor pushing the warmer wetter lower troposphere up into volume previously occupied by cool dry air. The presence of a hotspot would indicate amplification is occurring, and vice versa.
We have been measuring atmospheric temperatures with weather balloons since the 1960s. Millions of weather balloons have built up a good picture of atmospheric temperatures over the last few decades, including the warming period from the late 70’s to the late 90’s. This important and pivotal data was not released publicly by the climate establishment until 2006, and then in an obscure place.xiii Here it is:
Figure 6: On the left is the data collected by millions of weather balloons.xiv On the right is what the climate models say was happening.xv The theory (as per the climate models) is incompatible with the observations. In both diagrams the horizontal axis shows latitude, and the right vertical axis shows height in kilometers.
In reality there was no hotspot, not even a small one. So in reality there is no amplification – the amplification shown in Figure 1 does not exist.xvi
Outgoing Radiation
The climate models predict that when the surface of the earth warms, less heat is radiated from the earth into space (on a weekly or monthly time scale). This is because, according to the theory, the warmer surface causes more evaporation and thus there is more heat-trapping water vapor. This is the heat-trapping mechanism that is responsible for the assumed amplification in Figure 1.
Satellites have been measuring the radiation emitted from the earth for the last two decades. A major study has linked the changes in temperature on the earth’s surface with the changes in the outgoing radiation. Here are the results:
Figure 7: Outgoing radiation from earth (vertical axis) against sea surface temperature (horizontal), as measured by the ERBE satellites (upper left graph) and as “predicted” by 11 climate models (the other graphs).xvii Notice that the slope of the graphs for the climate models are opposite to the slope of the graph for the observed data.
This shows that in reality the earth gives off more heat when its surface is warmer. This is the opposite of what the climate models predict. This shows that the climate models trap heat too aggressively, and that their assumed amplification shown in Figure 1 does not exist.
Conclusions
All the data here is impeccably sourced—satellites, Argo, and weather balloons.xviii
The air and ocean temperature data shows that the climate models overestimate temperature rises. The climate establishment suggest that cooling due to undetected aerosols might be responsible for the failure of the models to date, but this excuse is wearing thin—it continues not to warm as much as they said it would, or in the way they said it would. On the other hand, the rise in air temperature has been greater than the skeptics say could be due to CO2. The skeptic’s excuse is that the rise is mainly due to other forces – and they point out that the world has been in a fairly steady warming trend of 0.5°C per century since 1680 (with alternating ~30 year periods of warming and mild cooling) where as the vast bulk of all human CO2 emissions have been after 1945.
We’ve checked all the main predictions of the climate models against the best data:
The climate models get them all wrong. The missing hotspot and outgoing radiation data both, independently, prove that the amplification in the climate models is not present. Without the amplification, the climate model temperature predictions would be cut by at least two thirds, which would explain why they overestimated the recent air and ocean temperature increases.
Therefore:
- The climate models are fundamentally flawed. Their assumed threefold amplification by feedbacks does not in fact exist.
- The climate models overestimate temperature rises due to CO2 by at least a factor of three.
The skeptical view is compatible with the data.
Some Political Points
The data presented here is impeccably sourced, very relevant, publicly available, and from our best instruments. Yet it never appears in the mainstream media – have you ever seen anything like any of the figures here in the mainstream media? That alone tells you that the “debate” is about politics and power, and not about science or truth.
This is an unusual political issue, because there is a right and a wrong answer and everyone will know which it is eventually. People are going ahead and emitting CO2 anyway, so we are doing the experiment: either the world heats up by several degrees by 2050, or it doesn’t.
Notice that the skeptics agree with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2; they just disagree just about the feedbacks. The climate debate is all about the feedbacks; everything else is merely a sideshow. Yet hardly anyone knows that. The government climate scientists and the mainstream media have framed the debate in terms of the direct effect of CO2 and sideshows such as arctic ice, bad weather, or psychology. They almost never mention the feedbacks. Why is that? Who has the power to make that happen?
About the Author
Dr David M.W. Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modeling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. Evans is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. The area of human endeavor with the most experience and sophistication in dealing with feedbacks and analyzing complex systems is electrical engineering, and the most crucial and disputed aspects of understanding the climate system are the feedbacks. The evidence supporting the idea that CO2 emissions were the main cause of global warming reversed itself from 1998 to 2006, causing Evans to move from being a warmist to a skeptic.
Inquiries to david.evans@sciencespeak.com.
Republished on www.wattsupwiththat.com
This document is also available as a PDF file here: TheSkepticsCase
============================================================
References
i More generally, if the CO2 level is x (in parts per million) then the climate models estimate the temperature increase due to the extra CO2 over the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm as 4.33 ln(x / 280). For example, this model attributes a temperature rise of 4.33 ln(392/280) = 1.46°C to the increase from pre-industrial to the current CO2 level of 392 ppm.
ii The direct effect of CO2 is the same for each doubling of the CO2 level (that is, logarithmic). Calculations of the increased surface temperature due to of a doubling of the CO2 level vary from 1.0°C to 1.2°C. In this document we use the midpoint value 1.1°C; which value you use does not affect the arguments made here.
iii The IPCC, in their last Assessment Report in 2007, project a temperature increase for a doubling of CO2 (called the climate sensitivity) in the range 2.0°C to 4.5°C. The central point of their model estimates is 3.3°C, which is 3.0 times the direct CO2 effect of 1.1°C, so we simply say their amplification is threefold. To be more precise, each climate model has a slightly different effective amplification, but they are generally around 3.0.
iv More generally, if the CO2 level is x (in parts per million) then skeptics estimate the temperature increase due to the extra CO2 over the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm as 0.72 ln(x / 280). For example, skeptics attribute a temperature rise of 0.72 ln(392/280) = 0.24°C to the increase from pre-industrial to the current CO2 level of 392 ppm.
v The effect of feedbacks is hard to pin down with empirical evidence because there are more forces affecting the temperature than just changes in CO2 level, but seems to be multiplication by something between 0.25 and 0.9. We have used 0.5 here for simplicity.
vi Hansen’s predictions were made in Hansen et al, Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol 93 No D8 (20 Aug 1988) Fig 3a Page 9347: pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988_Hansen_etal.pdf. In the graph here, Hansen’s three scenarios are graphed to start from the same point in mid-1987 – we are only interested in changes (anomalies).
vii The earth’s temperature shown here is as measured by the NASA satellites that have been measuring the earth’s temperature since 1979, managed at the University of Alabama Hunstville (UAH). Satellites measure the temperature 24/7 over broad swathes of land and ocean, across the whole world except the poles. While satellites had some initial calibration problems, those have long since been fully fixed to everyone’s satisfaction. Satellites are mankind’s most reliable, extensive, and unbiased method for measuring the earth’s air temperature temperatures since 1979. This is an impeccable source of data, and you can download the data yourself from vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt (save it as .txt file then open it in Microsoft Excel; the numbers in the “Globe” column are the changes in MSU Global Monthly Mean Lower Troposphere Temperatures in °C).
viii IPCC First Assessment Report, 1990, page xxii (www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_full_report.pdf) in the Policymakers Summary, Figure 8 and surrounding text, for the business-as-usual scenario (which is what in fact occurred, there being no significant controls or decrease in the rate of increase of emissions to date). “Under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, the average rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century is estimated to be about 0.3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2°C to 0.5°C).”
ix http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/marine/observations/gathering_data/argo.html
x Ocean temperature measurements before Argo are nearly worthless. Before Argo, ocean temperature was measured with buckets or with bathythermographs (XBTs) — which are expendable probes lowered into the water, transmitting temperature and pressure data back along a pair of thin wires. Nearly all measurements were from ships along the main commercial shipping lanes, so geographical coverage of the world’s oceans was poor—for example the huge southern oceans were not monitored. XBTs do not go as deep as Argo floats, and their data is much less precise and much less accurate (for one thing, they move too quickly through the water to come to thermal equilibrium with the water they are trying to measure).
xi The climate models project ocean heat content increasing at about 0.7 × 10^22 Joules per year. See Hansen et al, 2005: Earth’s energy imbalance: Confirmation and implications. Science, 308, 1431-1435, page 1432 (pubs.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi?id=ha00110y), where the increase in ocean heat content per square meter of surface, in the upper 750m, according to typical models, is 6.0 Watt·year/m2 per year, which converts to 0.7 × 10^22 Joules per year for the entire ocean as explained at bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/giss-ohc-model-trends-one-question-answered-another-uncovered/.
xii The ocean heat content down to 700m as measured by Argo is now available; you can download it from ftp://ftp.nodc.noaa.gov/pub/data.nodc/woa/DATA_ANALYSIS/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/DATA/basin/3month/ohc_levitus_climdash_seasonal.csv. The numbers are the changes in average heat for the three months, in units of 10^22 Joules, seasonally adjusted. The Argo system started in mid-2003, so we started the data at 2003-6.
xiii The weather balloon data showing the atmospheric warming pattern was finally released in 2006, in the US Climate Change Science Program, 2006, part E of Figure 5.7, on page 116 (www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-chap5.pdf).
There is no other data for this period, and we cannot collect more data on atmospheric warming during global warming until global warming resumes. This is the only data there is. Btw, isn’t this an obscure place to release such important and pivotal data – you don’t suppose they are trying to hide something, do you?
xv Any climate model, for example, IPCC Assessment Report 4, 2007, Chapter 9, page 675, which is also on the web at http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-2-2.html (Figure 9.1 parts c and f). There was little warming 1959 – 1977, so the commonly available 1959 – 1999 simulations work as well.
xvi So the multiplier in the second box in Figures 1 and 2 is at most 1.0.
xvii Lindzen and Choi 2009, Geophysical Research Letters Vol. 36: http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf. The paper was corrected after some criticism, coming to essentially the same result again in 2011: www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf.
xviii In particular, we have not quoted results from land thermometers, or from sparse sampling by buckets and XBT’s at sea. Land thermometers are notoriously susceptible to localized effects – see Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? by the same author: jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/corruption/climate-corruption.pdf.
A fantastic piece of work and very crisply executed, thank you very much.
Perhaps the New York Review of books would consider running this as a companion to this? I’m not holding my breath.
George E. Smith; says:
February 29, 2012 at 2:01 pm
@Myrrh
Maybe this can help you.
“HEAT” is transported by RADIATION, in exactly the same manner, as the dearly departed are transported to their afterlife, by coffins.
I haven’t heard that one before..
I usually hear that ‘all energy is the same and the matter converts it to heat’, to which my question – then what is the mechanism in the various matter which takes this undifferentiated energy and creates gamma, visible, radio etc.?
Back to your previous post:
Photons of ANY wavelength can be converted into “heat”; that’s the most common outcome, and photons of many wavelengths can be turned into electricity with near 100% efficiency; but not all with the same band gap photodiode. And as I stated above, any photon is emitted by precisely one particle, molecule or atom, and no single particle can have any Temperature assigned to it, so the photon knows nothing of any source Temperature.
The figure I’ve seen is 10% efficiency for visible light. But we’re not talking about producing electricity, we’re talking about visible light physically heating land and oceans. How is it doing this?
But we’re really not going to get anywhere, I still can’t understand what you mean. A photon is a particle.
“In physics, a photon is an elementary particle, the quantum of light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation, and the force carrier for the electromagnetic force. The effects of this force are easily observable at both the microscopic and macroscopic level, because the photon has no rest mass; this allows for interactions at long distances. Like all elementary particles, photons are currently best explained by quantum mechanics and exhibit wave–particle duality, exhibiting properties of both waves and particles. For example, a single photon may be refracted by a lens or exhibit wave interference with itself, but also act as a particle giving a definite result when its position is measured.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon
George, I’m giving up on this discussion. We obviously have no shared understanding of properties or terms.
Just one last thing. You really appear to dislike heat, well, it obviously doesn’t bother you that the heat we get from direct from the Sun is excluded from your ‘energy budget’, so maybe that’s why you have such antipathy towards it. Because this has been so thoroughly introduced into the ‘general’ education system, it becomes difficult to find any references to sensible figures, most pages on the internet are skewed to either promoting or not the rocking the boat of the fictional fisics of the ‘energy budget – where the heat direct from the Sun doesn’t reach us and visible light heats land and oceans’. You often put down heat, thermal infrared, by your cold water bottle example. Just a couple of things to add to the mix:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared
“Humans at normal body temperature radiate chiefly at wavelengths around 12 μm (micrometres), as shown by Wien’s displacement law.”
However, that figure not one I see commonly, it’s usually around 9/10, and we have an internal temp considerably higher than your bottle of cold water.
http://science.hq.nasa.gov/kids/imagers/ems/infrared.html
“Humans, at normal body temperature, radiate most strongly in the infrared at a wavelength of about 10 microns.
There are various thermal readers of one kind or another and some are used in disaster situations, earthquakes and such searching for bodies, and a way of testing these and to get used to using them is to fill a bottle with hot water and bury it.
As I’ve said, it’s not easy to find coherent information on the net about any of this anymore, it’s been so thoroughly compromised by the strange fisics produced to sell AGW, but are you sure your cold water bottle microns figure is right?
As an aside. We absorb heat from the Sun from around 3-50 microns, but our best absorption is at around 9.7, this matches water’s resonant absorption, which is how we get warmed up by the Sun, internally by the water in us being heated up as the infrared penetrates a few inches.
I forgot that dissolved salt lowered the freezing point, and I didn’t know that salt water just keeps getting denser as it cools. (So in order for sea-ice to float, the salt must get ejected during the freezing process?)
Anyway, my scientific reputation is now below 0 and well down into the minus figures. Do you think I could get a job with the ICPP?
Agile Aspect says:
February 29, 2012 at 4:44 pm
Okay, I see. I thought it was an odd question since it was wide open.
Also, in the future, it would be helpful to the reader if you specified the frequency range of the of UV you’re describing.
For instance, the UV bandwidth for generating vitamin D in your skin is opaque to glass (or Sun screen) but the UV from higher energy bands may not be opaque (I’d have to look up the frequency response of glass.)
Wasn’t the point, I giving information to Doug specific to his misconception about it and to give some of its actual effects generally (leaving you free to answer his main theme). He believes the AGWSF fisics comic cartoon energy budget (KT97 and variations), which claims that the Earth is not heated by the thermal energy direct from the Sun because it doesn’t reach the surface, and, that instead it is heated by Visible and the two shortwaves adjacent – UV and Near Infrared.
What this strange fisics created to support the AGW sell has done is to take properties and processes from real physics and misattribute them, or just generally garble them, they’re not too fussed, quite happy to use conflicting explanations. The name of their game is confuse and conquer.
Doug gives UV burning the skin as proof that these shortwaves (light in trad physics) really heat the Earth’s land and oceans as in the comic cartoon, that they are powerful energies. I gave UV working on DNA level, vit D production and tanning via melanin, and, water as transparent medium, killing bacteria it’s tranmitted through water, and Lake Tahoe, one of the world’s most transparent lakes to UV.
They can’t seem to stop thinking of Light as heat. They still resort to telling me how well educated they are so I should believe them, though they never come back with details I’ve requested, (method and empirical proof that blue light as from the Sun heats water, for example), but I stopped taking any of their claims to superior education seriously when I got this reply as I began investigated light and heat in this weird world they’re in:
—————————————–
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/28/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-atmospheric-windows/#comment-610576
Ira Glickstein, PhD says:
March 1, 2011 at 6:11 am
Myrrh says:
February 28, 2011 at 4:31 pm
I’m really at a loss to understand any of this. How on earth does Visible light and near short wave heat the Earth
Myrrh, you really need to get outside more and sit in the Sunshine and feel the warmth! That is how visible and near-visible (“shortwave”) light warms he Earth.
If you don’t or cannot get outside, turn on an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb and hold yourhand near it (not too close, you will get burned). Feel the heat? That is shortwave light because the filament is heated to temperatures similar to the Sun’ surface. You can tell it is shortwave because you can see the light.
——————————————————
See my problem? An incandescent light bulb gives around 5% visible light and 95% heat.
They’ve got something against heat.. You’ll often find in descriptions of different light bulbs now being made which produce more visible as, ‘without the waste product of heat’.
And even then, giving such examples, they still think visible heats land and oceans.
They think carbon dioxide diffuses into the atmosphere as if an ideal gas in a vacuum, no sense at all of weight/ gravity, attraction or volume – that’s all been taken out to reduce the sell to radiation only.
I suppose I just never thought that this sort of brainwashing could happen in bog standard science in the West, but it has.
So what you’re telling me is that there was no good reason for the government to change the composition of my asthma inhaler so that it’s practically useless?
Reblogged this on A TowDog and commented:
After you read, this should be stashed away behind glass to be broken whenever climate drones attack.
itsnotnova says:
February 29, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Physics disagrees with you. The heat transfer rate depends on the temperature of both bodies. A warmer lower body (lower ocean) reduces the amount of heat transferring from above.
I read the link and I do not see a problem with what I said. Let us assume the ocean was at 4.00 C and the atmosphere was at 15.0 C. Then net heat would go from the atmosphere to the ocean, right? Now if the ocean warmed to 4.01 C, the same thing would happen, right? It is only when the ocean got over 15.0 C that the ocean would warm the air, right? However I do agree that if the ocean reached 12.0 C, the air would lose heat at a slower rate than if the ocean was at 4.00 C. Now if your point was that the air loses heat slower if the ocean was at 4.01 C instead of 4.00 C, I guess in theory that would be the case, but you could not measure it.
But my point was that if the ocean reached 4.01 C, it would not cool back to 4.00 C later and release a whole bunch of heat to warm the air. So why worry about a minor heating of the deep ocean, even if this is where the heat is in fact going to?
George E. Smith; says:
February 26, 2012 at 8:43 pm
Beer’s law relates to the ABSORPTION of the dilute solution; it DOES NOT apply to the ENERGY TRANSMISSION of the sample; and in the atmosphere, the ABSORBING CO2, doesn’t hold onto the LWIR forever, but it re-emits a similar but not identical photon to the one that got absorbed.
;————————————————————————————————————————-
They aren’t claiming Beer’s Law is valid.
And absorption has no dimensions and needs to be related to the temperature residues (or the so-called temperature “anomaly” which has units of temperature.)
Hence the need for a climate model.
Since the Sun is huge lamp whose radiation is in phase, and the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere is dilute (0.04% by volume), it’s perfectly valid starting point for building a model if one wants to relate absorption to temperature residues.
But any exponential would work which solves the differential dc/dT = k*c where T is the residue and k comes from where the Sun doesn’t shine.
RoHa says:
February 29, 2012 at 7:51 pm
<i?"So in order for sea-ice to float, the salt must get ejected during the freezing process?
Yes.
itsnotnova @ur momisugly February 29, 3:07 am
I’ve only had time to glance through your website article, but I see that Bart is discussing it with you in a way that suggests that your reasoning may be flawed, so I think I’ll leave it to his capable hands. Additionally, as an engineer, I find the proposition of heating the abyss ALONE does not pass my lifelong test for reasonableness. Consequently, I’ll repeat my 2nd comment to RoHa below, but with the addition of your nom de blog in bold:
It adds to earlier comments, to which none of the usual suspects have responded, for instance: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/26/the-skeptics-case/#comment-907990
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/26/the-skeptics-case/#comment-907059
It looks like R. Gates is taking a break, so is there any chance that you could respond instead?
Myrrh says:
February 29, 2012 at 8:02 pm
They can’t seem to stop thinking of Light as heat.
That’s because it is! When I used green (532nm) light in my lab Laser Induced Incandescence experiment I heated soot particles to about 4000ºC.
Werner Brozek says:
February 29, 2012 at 8:04 am
Peridot says:
February 29, 2012 at 4:18 am
Things were different? In what way, please? Life was pretty similar…
Life was similar from the beginnings of life until around 1750. But then the industrial revolution began and man, due to burning of fossil fuels, added much more CO2 into the air than ordinary respiration would account for. So before 1750, increases in atmospheric CO2 had all natural causes such as oceans heating up due to Milankovitch cycles or volcanoes emitting CO2. But now mankind is adding to the natural balance by driving cars and heating homes, etc. However our net additions are not harming the planet in any way.
Thank you but my original problem is not answered, namely – if higher concentrations of CO2 in the past FOLLOWED temperature rises in the oceans and atmosphere and caused no such rises why should a tiny rise in CO2 be caused by ANY emissions now, ours included, let alone a temperature rise? The two things seem to be in total opposition to each other. Is there a definitive answer that allows for both to be correct or do people have to choose?
Reblogged this on Andrew J. Patrick and commented:
As succinct an argument as one can make about how the case for AGW is non-empircal.
“”””” Phil. says:
March 1, 2012 at 11:26 am
Myrrh says:
February 29, 2012 at 8:02 pm
They can’t seem to stop thinking of Light as heat.
That’s because it is! When I used green (532nm) light in my lab Laser Induced Incandescence experiment I heated soot particles to about 4000ºC. “””””
Well I have to say That I am far more pedantic than either you, Phil, or Myrrh
In MY view, “Light” is NOT “heat”, and neither one of them is “Electromagnetic Radiation.”
“LIGHT” is “The Human eye response to Electromagnertic radiation generally in the wavelength range of 400 to 700 (maybe 800) nm wavelength.” And for that reason it has its own set of units of “measurement”, such as Lumens, Candela; quantities such as luminance, luminous Intensity, Illuminance, etc ; all of which are different from radiance, radiant intensity, irradiance, etc which ARE units of electromagnetic radiation, which is a form of energy able to propagate through a vaccuum, in the total absence of physical materials
And “heat” also despite Myrr’s protestations is NOT electromagnetic radiation either; no matter what the wavelength of the radiation is.
But all that aside; back to Phil’s point; and Myrrh, if you choose to ignore anything or everything I say, I urge you to listen carefully to Phil; because you ignore his teaching at your own peril.
And to reinforce what Phil just said (in essence), photons at visible wavelengths DO create “heat” when absorbed by ordinary materials, which cannot convert their EM energy to some other energy form.
And Myrrh, if you read carefully what Dr Leif Svalgaard has noted here on several occasions, the TSI; Total Solar Irradiance, is routinely measured with a cavity calorimeter, that is essentially a bucket which captures photons no matter what their wavelength (or frequency) and also no matter what their source, or the Temperature of any such source, and it CONVERTS all of that energy into “HEAT”, which will raise the Temperature of that calorimeter, and some sensor will record the Temperature rise. That’s why they call it “TOTAL” solar irradiance, because it measures all wavelengths and the heating effect of all of them.
When scientists don’t use the correct terminology, specially in communicating with lay persons, we do them a disservice by confusing scientific concepts with ordinary everyday lay concepts, which may have quite different connotations. We flippantly use erroneous “Science slang” such as the word “brightness” for example, when we fully know what we mean, which is either Radiance, or Luminance; but the lay person cannot appreciate that we don’t mean candle power or some other quantity, even candela.
Which is why I choose pedantry over sloppy communication (when I think about it)
Phil. says:
March 1, 2012 at 11:26 am
Myrrh says:
February 29, 2012 at 8:02 pm
They can’t seem to stop thinking of Light as heat.
That’s because it is! When I used green (532nm) light in my lab Laser Induced Incandescence experiment I heated soot particles to about 4000ºC.
Yeah right, the Sun’s a laser. We’re just imagining we’re here, the Earth was burned to a crisp 4.5 billion years ago.
In traditional physics, note, traditional because very well understood, tested and proved empirically, there are two distinct categories among the different wavelengths that emanate from the Sun, Light and Heat.
The one called Light is visible and the light waves either side – see my explanation above of the difference between ir cameras. Some critters can see UV and near infrared, insects see it reflected off flowers, snakes see it reflected off things they like to eat. Light waves are tiny, they go bouncy bouncy all over the place. That’s how we see the world and colours and our blue sky, the more energetic blue is scattered more as it has more encounters. They are not hot, we cannot feel them at all.
They work on electronic transitions, for example, in the atmosphere visible light is absorbed briefly by the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, which then spit them back out again – this is called reflection/scattering. Think pin ball machine.
There are mediums transparent to visible light (read the previous paragraph again, note, the atmosphere is not such a medium, even though it is claimed to be in the AGW comic cartoon energy budget greenhouse).
So, water is a transparent medium for visible light – this means the molecules of water do not absorb visible, not even on an electron scale as in the atmosphere. Water simply transmits visible light through, that’s why we can see underwater, by refraction.. See OPTICS to further understand Light here. Transmits is a technical term. It means that water does not absorb visible light.
Heat from the Sun is the Sun’s thermal energy on the move to us, radiating out in huge heat waves – these work on vibrational levels on meeting matter, heat moves the whole molecules into vibrational states and so heats them up. Water is particularly good absorber of HEAT on the vibrational resonance level.
It is the Heat waves, the thermal infrared from the Sun, which heat up the Earth’s land and oceans.
Light waves from the Sun can’t do this.
It’s tough,if we’ve been taught something that is not true and have had no reason to question it. This becomes our paradigm through which we view the world and so try to fit everything we then learn into that, to try and make it fit logically because we always try to make sense of the world. But, we only have to look around our world, at the industries which understand the difference between light and heat, at our textbooks still teaching traditional physics which is that the heat we feel from the Sun is the invisible thermal infrared and that it is distinctly different from Light waves. Although these are getting harder to find.
Just as gamma rays are distincly different from radio waves. These have different properties, different sizes, different wavelengths, they interact with matter in different ways. Some sets can be made where they have similar behaviours, but, they are distinctly different from each other. One needs to understand these differences to see how distorted Ira’s answer was..
An incandescent lightbulb gives off 5% visible which we cannot feel, and 95% invisible thermal infrared which is heat, which we can feel – because it’s moving our molecules into vibration and making us hotter.
Light gets reflected off us, that’s what visible and near infrared cameras capture.
The main uses of Light is in seeing the world and in photosynthesis – without the energy of the visible blue and red particularly we wouldn’t have life as we know it, and photosynthesis is the conversion of visible light to chemical energy, not heat energy.
It’s an amazingly simply con this, take a look at the comic cartoon energy budget and see what they have done in the basics.
First they’ve taken out the great Water Cycle which cools our Earth, think deserts, without water our Earth with our atmosphere but without water would be like these. The water cycle brings the temp down from 67°C to the 15°C, that is a 52°C cooling, down from 67°C to the 15°C, that is a 52°C cooling.
The sleight of hand here is that they’ve taken the final temperature, 15°C, and the difference between that and the temp of the Earth with no atmosphere at all, -18°C, and simply claim that this 33°C difference is the result of ‘greenhouse gas warming’ – they taken out the major player in our Sun/Earth energy exchange, a whole chunk worth 52°C of water taking away heat from the Earth cooked by the Sun’s thermal energy. They’ve taken out a whole chunk of the process!
Second, what is the Water Cycle cooling? Our land and oceans heated up primarily from the direct heat of the Sun, they taken that out too. They say this heat doesn’t reach the Earth’s surface. But we can feel it..
Third, they’ve given the properties of Heat direct from the Sun, the effect it has on organic matter of heating it up, to shortwave Light from the Sun, which doesn’t do this.
Simple swapsies. There are more such, and fiddles with laws taken out of context and so on. But, if you can get your heads around the sleight of hand of these basics, you’ll re-arrange your brains back into sinc with the true physical reality around you.
And welcome back, we need you.
You’ll look at the light from the Sun and know it isn’t heat, that the heat you’re feeling from the Sun is the invisible thermal infrared, the Sun’s thermal energy on the move to us travelling in wave form.
And you’ll be able to understand incandescent lightbulbs.
Peridot says:
March 1, 2012 at 11:39 am
why should a tiny rise in CO2 be caused by ANY emissions now
Are you suggesting that mankind is NOT adding to the CO2 in the atmosphere by driving cars and heating homes over the last hundred years?
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
There might be a couple of instances where this article can be challenged but the overall picture, evidence and conclusion would be difficult for the warmists to legitimately debate. All the world-wide carbon control responses to the projected global warming “problems” have been based on computer modelling. It is clearly shown that that modelling fails to meet reality outcomes. They can call the climate variations by any name they choose, “climate change” at the moment, but the observed changes are do not support the CAGW theories.
Bart says:
“Correct. And, the graph after it goes until 2012. What is your point?”
That the graph didn’t include more recent data.
“So you claim.”
Search my site, prove otherwise. You made the call – now back it up with some evidence.
“But, you don’t use bad data, and XBT data is inferior.”
For the time before Argo was invented, XBT was all they had. Does that mean when new technology eventually replaces Argo, you would want to throw our the Argo data too?
Wishing the data away because it doesn’t agree with you is not good scientific method.
“OK, fine. In that case, the prior data supports the contention that heat content rose in the latter third of the 20th century, and has now ceased. You would have been better off letting sleeping dogs lie.
The entire set of data suggests that there was an abrupt change of state near the turn of the century which was never anticipated, and for which there is no explanation under the AGW paradigm.”
Uncertainty is not rise for celebration. Having a larger than expected spike in the data is not reassuring, although in the following few years as the variability produces a lower than expected amount, it does give “some people” reason to speculate that “warming has stopped”.
“Well, isn’t that convenient. The heat is in the one place we can’t see it, and nobody has a clue how it got there. By, by gum, you’re just sure it is there, and you want us to accept it on faith.”
No it’s actually inconvenient. It’s be much better for all involved if we knew with 100% certainty where all ocean currents and flows led. We don’t. That science for you – dealing with uncertainty is what it’s all about.
“The “outline” is, to put it gently, underwhelming. You got your choir stoked, though, so I guess you’d probably consider that a success.”
Underwhelming you say, but then don’t follow it up with an actual argument as to why.
“You are quibbling. It is nowhere near the expectation under the AGW hypothesis. And, what does it mean when you say “I am certain” and then couple that with “significant or not”? Are you certain or not?”
I’m not quibbling, I’m certain the data for both show positive linear regression. That is they both 100% show warming. What the statistical significance is I have no idea and am not about to calculate it.
My purpose for showing it is to demonstrate that Evans/Nova’s use of the data to indicate no warming is 100% incorrect. That is something I am 100% sure of.
“Nine years is a long time. There is a LOT of catching up to do to validate the climate models. I’m sorry to inform you, it’s not going to happen.”
You just told me that “there was an abrupt change of state near the turn of the century”; perhaps the models have to catch up the data?
Either way, the data doesn’t support the notion that the oceans have stopped warming.
“I do not have to. The onus is on you to prove the AGW hypothesis.”
Yes you do. You are the one stating that the data is incorrect hence you should discard it. You need to establish why the data should be discarded. “Because it goes upwards and you can’t explain why” is not good enough.
The AGW hypothesis is an entirely different question.
“Cooling also fits well within the laws of physics due to the presence of feedbacks. “
You haven’t countered my observation, you’ve simply started a different argument.
Let’s go back – I said “It also seems strange that you accept the data quite readily when short term cooling is observed, but when warming return you have problems accepting the data even though it fits in well with the laws of physics.”
“No, it disagrees with the expectations from the AGW hypothesis.”
You said “But, it is not due to any recent (in the past decade or more) surface heating. There is no storage of latent GHG warming happening.”
And I showed how that statement is incorrect. http://itsnotnova.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/ocean-heat-content-700-vs-2000.gif
Having faltered on that account you now change your statement to a comparison to “the AGW hypothesis” – I’ll assume that you mean Hansen’s models as stated in the article.
And your claim of not meeting projections may well depends on what start date you wish to cherry pick. http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/fake-predictions-for-fake-skeptics/
“We do not see indications of the flux in the upper levels. … “
Just because you personally don’t know or understand the mechanism for how the deeper ocean gained warmth doesn’t mean the data should be discarded.
“Despite your desperate handwaving and pounding on the table, you have no evidence to support the hypothesis.”
The science disgrees with you.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1375.html
Bart replies to ‘itsnotnova’:
“The onus is on you to prove the AGW hypothesis.”
That is exactly right. But the alarmist crowd always does whatever they can to avoid the scientific method. Per the scientific method skeptics have nothing to prove, because AGW is not the skeptics’ conjecture.
The central conjecture in the entire debate from the very beginning has been the claim that an increase in CO2 will cause catastrophic runaway global warming [CO2=CAGW]. But if 2xCO2 only resulted in ≈1°C warming or less, it would be a net benefit to humanity, the biosphere, and agriculture. So the alarmist cult has no choice in the matter: they must try to alarm the public with their evidence-free claims of CO2=CAGW [by ‘evidence’ I mean testable, empirical evidence per the scientific method].
Therefore, the AGW
hypothesisconjecture is always the issue being debated. And the onus is entirely on the purveyors of CAGW to defend their conjecture. Skeptics have nothing to prove: Ei incumbit probatio, qui dicit, non qui negat; cum per rerum naturam factum negantis probatio nulla sit. – The proof lies upon him who affirms, not upon him who denies; since, by the nature of things, he who denies a fact cannot produce any proof. It is akin to proving a negative. Regarding the conjecture that CO2 produced by human emissions is causing “unprecedented” global warming: the onus is upon those who say so. As to the claim that there has been an alarming late 20th century spike in global temperatures: the onus lies on those who say so. And as we shall see, that claim has been falsified.The “alarming late 20th century spike in global temperatures” is simply an artefact of using a zero baseline chart like this. It is deceptive because it uses a short time period. It does not show the temperature trend in its long term, real world context.
Zero baseline charts are fine for anomalies, but they misrepresent reality when used to show rising short term temperatures. They deceive the eye. Yes, the planet has been warming naturally since the LIA. But there is no discernable “fingerprint” of human CO2 emissions.
When a chart is used properly to show a long term trend without tying it to an arbitrary baseline, we see that the trend from the LIA has been exactly the same since the 1600’s. There is no change in the upward trend between times when CO2 was 280 ppmv, and when CO2 was 390 ppmv. Certainly there has been no accelerated warming, which is the central claim of the alarmist crowd. Therefore, the effect of CO2 on global temperatures, if any, is too insignificant to measure, and CO2 can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes.
By using the correct chart showing the trend since the LIA, it becomes apparent that nothing unusual is happening. With no change in trend either before or after the rise in CO2, the conjecture that anthropogenic CO2 emissions cause global warming is falsified.
Bart and Smokey, Re ARGO stuff,
You may find this discussion over at Tallbloke’s, where the aspects of “data corrections” etc are discussed. Deja vu? more of the creeping anticlockwise rotation and things are worse than we thought?
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/argo-the-mystery-of-global-warmings-missing-heat/#more-5052
Werner Brozek says:
“I read the link and I do not see a problem with what I said. Let us assume the ocean was at 4.00 C and the atmosphere was at 15.0 C. Then net heat would go from the atmosphere to the ocean, right? Now if the ocean warmed to 4.01 C, the same thing would happen, right?”
Almost. The rate of heat transfer would be slower because the difference between the two bodies has decreased. The net transfer would still be from the atmosphere to the ocean, but at a reduced rate, hence the atmosphere would be warmer than if the ocean was at 4.00 C.
“It is only when the ocean got over 15.0 C that the ocean would warm the air, right?”
In terms of net heat transfer, correct, the net transfer would from ocean to atmosphere.
I know you were only using a value of 4 as an example, but are you aware of actual surface temperature are of the ocean?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Weeklysst.gif
itsnotnova says:
February 29, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Werner Brozek says:
“All the presumed excess heat from CO2 would just dissipate into the deep ocean, never to return until the deep ocean reached a higher temperature than the atmosphere. “
Physics disagrees with you.
itsnotnova says:
March 1, 2012 at 8:11 pm
“It is only when the ocean got over 15.0 C that the ocean would warm the air, right?”
In terms of net heat transfer, correct, the net transfer would from ocean to atmosphere.
So which is it? Does physics disagree with me on the 1:32 pm post?
(By the way, my reference to the 4.00 C was because I had the deep ocean in mind.)
@Werner Brozek, You seemed to have overlooked the first part of my post.
@Werner Brozek, oh and the temperature of the deep ocean is in contact with upper layers. Same theory applies – a warmer deeper ocean reduces how fast heat will move from upper to lower.
The temperature of the water where it meets the atmosphere is usually much higher.
RoHa @ur momisugly February 29, 7:51 pm
You asked if you might qualify for a job at the IPCC. Sorry to disappoint you, but I very much doubt it because you ask too many questions, and I’ve not detected any Greenie or Tree-hugging tendencies in your comments.