Open Thread Weekend

pat;
Yeah, there’s no saving ETS schemes. They are flawed and rotten at the root. Let’s start with the presumption that “allowances” are the governments’ property to allocate or sell …
All will suffer the fate of CCX. Only crooks like Gore will walk away with cash in hand.

@John West;
Actually, 2 errors: “up at bat its “The Mann” …”
That would be “it’s”, as in “it is”.
;p

Tallbloke, Tyndall found that oxygen and nitrogen were like a vacuum to absorption.
By the way, I saw your sugestion that I write a humorous post about my experiences with Wiki. I will see what I can do.

Bair polaire
You interpreted Spencers diagram incorrectly.
Spencers plate gets colder than the local air temperature when the plate, which is painted with a good emitting paint, can cool to the colder higher atmosphere by radiating thru the warmer but not very intensely emitting local air, even though the local air is heating the plate while it cools towards the colder higher atmosphere .
Once the cloud comes over the plate no longer cools as rapidly and because it is heated by the local air it warms up.
Cold cannot heat hot.

bair polaire says:
March 31, 2012 at 7:28 am
“Roy Spencer observes that his isolated aluminum plate got warmer just before sunrise and assumes the reason was middle level clouds coming over. His plate warmed from 73 F to 76F and he believes the clouds were just 50F. If this is right, than I was mistaken: A colder body can heat a warmer body – not just slow down the heat loss.
This effect should have been scientifically proven a long time ago. Did I miss something?”
What Dr. Spencer observes there doesn’t make much sense. His instrument is designed to infer a temperature assuming a blackbody spectrum. What he gets from above in IR when a cloud is overhead is a mixture of a blackbody spectrum – from liquid water droplets in the cloud – plus some line-based IR backradiation (from CO2 and gaseous water vapor). I think his instrument misinterprets.
The temperature he measures for the plate is probably correct as that is pure blackbody radiation.

Bomber_the_Cat says:
March 31, 2012 at 5:08 am
“However, the presence of greenhouse gases make the surface of the planet about 33K higher than it would otherwise be.”
If heard that before. My question is: How does the presence of greenhouse gases make the surface of the planet warmer.
“Less than one billionth of the Sun’s power reaches the Earth and by that time the amount of long wave infrared (longer than a wavelength of 4 micron) is negligible compared to the radiation that the Earth emits itself.”
Is it really true, that the sun is dimmer at the peak of the earth’s black body radiation (around 10 micron?)? I would like to see a graph comparing the sun’s incoming energy at the wavelength of the earth’s outgoing radiation peak. This graph from your link is misleading: they scaled down the sun’s energy by six decimal orders of magnitude:
http://scienceofdoom.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/blackbody_curve-sun-earth.jpg?w=500
“Measurements of back radiation are made by a network of monitoring stations around the globe. When these measurements are made at cold locations on a clear day, which means no water vapour is present because of the arctic conditions, we can see that back radiation is predominantly from the CO2 absorption band around 15 microns.”
OK. But that does not say that for the globe as a whole most of the back radiation comes from CO2. I would still assume most back radiation comes from clouds and water vapor. Figures?
4. Is there a good everyday life example of reduced heat loss through back radiation?
” Yes, it’s all around you.”
Could you name just one were I can easily observe reduced heat loss (and even warming by a colder source??) due to back radiation?
“You see, I think that sceptics should be better informed rather than looking foolish by arguing against that which can be easily proven, as some here choose to do. So, good luck to you.”
Not sure if skeptics look more foolish on average and in the long run than believers, but thank you anyway.

bair polaire says:
March 31, 2012 at 8:52 am
“Could you name just one were I can easily observe reduced heat loss (and even warming by a colder source??) due to back radiation?”
Even though Spencer’s temperature readings for those moments where he observed the cloud overhead don’t make much sense, I think the slight waming of the plate in his box (which was designed to let through IR but isolate from convective effects) before sunrise shows that it can happen – moments where a sufficiently cooled down object, emitting relatively little IR blackbody radiation itself, can receive more IR from the sky (blackbody radiation from droplets in clouds plus CO2 / water vapor emissions) and so temporarily gain energy and heat up.
The blackbody radiation power emitted by an object rises with the 4th power of the absolute temperature according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law, so an object at +40 C emits three times the energy of an object at -40 C. So it should be much easier to observe in very cold objects. This necessarily means that a hypothetically increased greenhouse gas induced warming MUST reduce temperature differentials across the globe as it would be three times as efficient in winter time Siberia than in daytime Spain, for instance; I say “hypothetically increased warming” because variations in water vapor totally thwart any attempt at measuring the effect of CO2. Water vapor travels in huge plumes and has an average residence time of two weeks in the atmosphere. Is is not well-mixed.
Nice page about water vapour in the atmosphere
http://204.38.191.104/robinson/9cl1.htm
“Sequential water vapor images viewed in rapid succession to detect motion show water vapor transported horizontally as huge swirling plumes, often originating in the tropics and moving into higher latitudes.
A typical water vapor plume is thousands of kilometers long and several hundred kilometers wide. Plumes supply moisture to hurricanes, clusters of thunderstorms, and winter storms. In spring and summer, such water vapor plumes have been associated with exceptionally heavy rain and flash floods.”

Any here who can show and tell how shortwave from the Sun heats land and oceans, go ahead, let’s hear it.

ottot beat me to it, but this is VERY 1984ish:
“Climate Change Skepticism a Sickness That Must be “Treated,” Says Professor”
http://www.infowars.com/climate-change-skepticism-a-sickness-that-must-be-treated-says-professor/
Here’s her bio: http://sociology.uoregon.edu/faculty/norgaard.php

$21 for 45 minutes of recharging an EV in Chicago.
http://mobile.chicagotribune.com/p.p?m=b&a=rp&id=1879920&postId=1879920&postUserId=54&sessionToken&catId=5551&curAbsIndex=1&resultsUrl=DID%3D6&DFCL=1000&DSB=rank%23desc&DBFQ=userId%3A54&DFC=cat1%2Ccat2%2Ccat3&DL.w&DL.d=10&DQ=sectionId%3A5551&DPS=0&DPL=3

bair polaire says:
March 31, 2012 at 10:51 am
“(And I don’t agree with DirkH that Spencer’s measurement shows that a colder body can heat up a warmer body. If this were the case it would be a well documented effect, not a single temperature reading in one guy’s backyard.)”
You misunderstand me. I speculate that the IR meter of Spencer, trying to give an effective temperature for a mixture of blackbody radiation and line radiation when pointed at clouds overhead, gives a wrong reading.
But Andrew Judd’s explanation also makes sense.
I agree with the notion that a cold object cannot make a warmer object even warmer. The net flow of energy is from the warmer object.

(Love these discussions–just proves that Anthony can and should take a day off every week and “let the mice play”. He should know his blog is in good hands and we expect him to enjoy some burnout prevention. Now, back to science.)

Is there a good chart that combines the last decade of cooling with the increase of CO2 during the same period? Basically WoodforTrees with CO2?

DirkH says:
March 31, 2012 at 11:21 am
I agree with the notion that a cold object cannot make a warmer object even warmer. The net flow of energy is from the warmer object.
What’s the mechanism that makes it net hotter to colder?

Myrrh says:
March 31, 2012 at 12:01 pm
“What’s the mechanism that makes it net hotter to colder?”
Blackbody radiation.

New climatology animation:
Total Cloud Cover
http://i42.tinypic.com/4rf6h2.png
For comparison:
Low Level Cloud Cover
http://i52.tinypic.com/auw1s0.png
Monthly Maximum of Daily Precipitation
http://i41.tinypic.com/34gasr7.png
Column-integrated Water Vapor Flux with their Convergence:
http://i51.tinypic.com/126fc77.png
Evaporation Minus Precipitation
http://i43.tinypic.com/2isvynb.png
Precipitation
http://i42.tinypic.com/2njypw9.png
Precipitable Water
http://i52.tinypic.com/9r3pt2.png
Credit: Climatology animations have been assembled using JRA-25 Atlas [ http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/gmd/jra/atlas/eng/atlas-tope.htm ] images. JRA-25 long-term reanalysis is a collaboration of Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) & Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI).
“Apart from all other reasons, the parameters of the geoid depend on the distribution of water over the planetary surface.” — N.S. Sidorenkov

Here comes the backpedaling from the warmists….
Now maybe there is a chance that some coral might survive the “heat”…
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/chance-coral-can-survive-warmer-ocean-20120331-1w518.html
I was so worried about this…NOT !!

Andrew Judd says:
March 31, 2012 at 11:03 am
“It is easier to focus on water and water vapour rather than C02.”
Water just makes the back radiation issue more complicated because of convection and phase changes etc. (I know water is much more important than CO2 for earth’s climate.) I just want to really understand the postulated greenhouse effect due to CO2.
I can not find a simple comprehensive scientifically sound demonstration of the CO2 effect on the internet. The warming people always come up with cars parked in the sun (which has very little to do with radiation) and the skeptics come up with complicated thought experiments (that I’m not sure that they are right).
My questions are:
1. Is it really true that stratospheric CO2 gets more energy from the surface of the earth than from the sun and the rest of the atmosphere combined? What are the percentages?
2. What about the “horizon effect”: almost all CO2 molecules see more sky than earth. Thus more than 50% of their back radiation goes to space.
3. If 1. and 2. are true, what is the effect? Shouldn’t CO2 be considered cooling the earth when it gets most of its energy from earth? Most of the CO2 is close to the warm surface thus helping the earth to radiate energy to space.
4. What about the “umbrella effect”: As CO2 emits and absorbs energy at the same wavelengths it should to a certain degree shield the earth from the suns heat. Whatever energy the CO2 gets directly from the sun, more than 50% go to space and thus can not reach the earth.

@bair polaire
“4. Is there a good everyday life example of reduced heat loss through back radiation?”
An old style thermos bottle with a double-walled glass insert has a mirrored surface on the outer glass. This reflects IR from the hot contents coming off the inner wall back to the inner surface. This is also a good example of the insulating power of a vacuum (the glass container has a double wall with a vacuum). The silvery coating on the outer surface ‘back-radiates’ the IR coming off the hotter inner surface. There is no doubt that the outer wall is colder than the inner wall, but the reflector is still effective at keeping the high energy IR photons in for a while longer then they otherwise would have.
Part of the misunderstanding is that the because the temperature of the ‘colder’ object is colder, people say it can’t ‘heat something that is already warmer’. It is not simply a matter of ‘transferring heat’ it is a matter of the energy of the photons in the IR frequency range. If a high energy photon comes off a surface and is refracted or reflected instead of being absorbed by the colder surface (as a portion are) the same photon can go back to the source and be absorbed. A low energy photon can be absorbed by a hot surface, no problem. Happens all the time between equally hot surfaces, literally.
The over-simplification of the transfer of heat from one surface to another is misleading. There is a seething mass of photons going back and forth between surfaces at all sorts of different energies all the time. Net, the colder one loses less energy that the hotter one and the two average out after a while. If the cold one has an even colder surface behind it, there is a net heat loss to the third even colder surface.
It is not like a flow of money from one pocket to another. There is a continuous interchange with a net loss in one direction (hot to cold). ‘Back radiation’ is going on all the time. The insulating effect of placing more ‘mirrors’ if you will, between the surface and the dead cold of space means a slowed heat loss as the photons take slightly longer to work their way out of the atmosphere.
This effect has been well characterised and is real. The effect from CO2 is no very great. The IPCC reports claim the effect is amplified by water vapour but there is no proof that this amplification is real. The back radiation is real.
If you see that thin aluminized plastic film (partially mirrored) stuck on office building windows that keeps heat in the building in winter by reflection, that is back radiation by reflection. If it were made of an IR absorbing material, it would have a similar though less effective effect, reradiating in all directions, some of in back into the office. Because it is less effective, they use mirrors.

tallbloke says:
March 31, 2012 at 2:31 pm
bair polaire says:
I can not find a simple comprehensive scientifically sound demonstration of the CO2 effect on the internet.
I can assure you there is a co2 effect on the internet. Just look at the number of bytes expended on the subject of this trace gas daily…
You read my mind! This is exactly my suspicion about the CO2 effct…
By the way: JRA-25 is fantastic. Here is the net surface heat flux. Any CO2 effect?
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/gmd/jra/atlas/eng/indexe_surface12.htm
To bad they don’t have CO2 data. Or have they?

I stopped over to RealClimate to see how the IPCC report is sitting with Gavin.
It’s pretty quiet there. The bloggers are worried about Pielke’s button getting too much exposure. And one fellow expresses worry: “I am concerned about the blog whats up with that, why is this issue (climate change) such a controversy to them and others?”

DirkH says:
March 31, 2012 at 3:41 am
Roy Spencer, The Box, measuring back radiation
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/08/help-back-radiation-has-invaded-my-backyard/
==========================================================
The guy is seriously talking about “sky temperature”, very funny.

Link for Planet Under Pressure, State of the Planet Declaration:
http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net/pdf/state_of_planet_declaration.pdf

On its Web site, NSIDC on March 18 observed that the annual maximum had probably been reached and it was the ninth lowest in the satellite era. It went on to say that taken together, the last nine years have been the nine lowest.
So a little logic says that 2012, being better than the previous eight, is the highest maximum in almost a decade. That would have been considered newsworthy except that the purpose was to emphasize the decline, even in a year when it’s up.

U know what i like the most about WUWT and mostly this open thread?
People speak out.. As the wish for and for what they believe in..
Thanks everyone.. keep looking up!

bair polaire says:
March 31, 2012 at 1:51 am
Why then is CO2 not considered to shield the earth more from the suns heat than warming the earth (actually just slowing heat loss) through a little back radiation from a dim source?
=======================================
There are a few things the climate “scientists” have made disappear:
1.The Sun sends a significant portion of IR radiation to the surface.
2. The air get warm via contact with the surface and convection.
3. The IR radiation the surface emits is because of (2) very weak and can not produce a significant amount of back radiation.
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/wood_rw.1909.html

@Greg House
Your sure are setting them straight. Good for you! Gee, Greg House, I also saw a Ron, brings back very old memories of hand pumped scoters and pulling taffy on 44. Probably just a coincidence… surely… -wayne

You know the debate over ‘cold’ down welling radiation, reducing the rate of cooling, or not, comes up over and over again and it seems there should have been some serious experimentation on this before now because it is so fundamental. I’ve not been able to find any documentation of such.
What would comprise a good experimental set up to put this issue to bed?
I would think you could pretty easily measure the energy flux in a solid target with a known conductivity and a constant energy source buried below the surface. Varying the incident ‘cold’ radiation should produce a measurable flux change in the target.
Has it been done? If not, why not?

I have a really important question regarding Sea Ice Volume anomaly, I wasreading the Luke Warm blog on Accuweather about how its a better indicator of arctic ice than Extent. He shows that The sea ice volume, which takes into account the area and thickness of the ice is still running well below normal across the Arctic as we continue to lose older, thicker ice and replace it with younger, thinner ice that is much more prone to completely melting away during the summer months. How much of this is important, and which is more important, extent or volume?
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-blogs/climatechange/update-on-sae-ice-volume/63069

Ric Werme says: March 31, 2012 at 10:40 am
Trofim Lysenko Award
Science in Service to the Party
http://therealrevo.com/blog/?p=70900

Mike Jonas says
In particular, there cannot have been any net gain in energy and the exact same amount of CO2 still goes into the atmosphere.
———–
Mike it looks like you learnt chemical equations ok but got confused about the conservation of energy thing.
There is a net gain of energy because the process has as an input solar energy. You do explain that later on, so it looks like the need to ridicule led to some pretty twisted wording.
This is a costly scheme, but any energy infrastructure is costly. So it would have been more informative to have said how costly in relation to other energy sources.
This scheme does solve the “solar and wind” are intermittent” problem so it’s not completely wacky as you are trying so, so hard to portray.

Mike Jonas says
At least they admit that the investment required would be “huge”.
———
They reckon around 180 billion dollars.
A replacement set coal power Stations would cost?

And a new power station is around 2B.
http://144.122.162.144/~itosun/data/energy/Coal-cost.pdf

“My questions are:
1. Is it really true that stratospheric CO2 gets more energy from the surface of the earth than from the sun and the rest of the atmosphere combined? What are the percentages?”
Energy of gases is mostly the velocity of molecules of the gases. But the velocity of gas molecules is not the aspect one is referring to in regard to “greenhouse gases”, instead referring to vibrations of atom and of atoms in a molecule.
Sunlight is not going add much velocity to gas. If want warm or heat gas with sunlight, the sunlight heating a solid or liquid and these warming gas molecules via conduction and convection would be a more dominate factor.
An example would be to put hollow glass sphere in space and have a thin atmosphere of gas inside the sphere. The heating of the gas would seem to me to be to mostly caused by the temperature that sunlight warmed the glass of the sphere. Since volume increase more than surface area, the larger the sphere would have cooler air. If sunlight were to significantly warm gas molecules, than larger sphere would get warmer.
Though sunlight does increase the velocity of gas [the point is how much], one see sunlight accelerating gas molecules by looking at a comet- that is what makes a comet tail.
But back your point you seem to asking what causes CO2 molecule to vibrate the most- it seems to me the energy of Sun would do this more than energy of radiant nature of earth.
“2. What about the “horizon effect”: almost all CO2 molecules see more sky than earth. Thus more than 50% of their back radiation goes to space.”
Especially true at higher elevation. Therefore it seems if CO2 is important in terms it’s “greenhouse effect” it would tend to cool earth.
“3. If 1. and 2. are true, what is the effect? Shouldn’t CO2 be considered cooling the earth when it gets most of its energy from earth? Most of the CO2 is close to the warm surface thus helping the earth to radiate energy to space.”
The important factor is the term greenhouse affect- which defined poorly. But it includes water vapor. And water vapor is the more significant factor in causing “the greenhouse affect”.
And I would say that water vapor causing a greenhouse affect has to do more than it’s radiate properties. There a tremendous amount heat energy stored in the latent heat of water vapor.
There also clouds- the reason you see clouds isn’t because you are seeing water vapor, you seeing water droplets. So clouds in terms of greenhouse affect are billions of tonnes of liquid water suspended in the form droplets- it’s liquid, not gas. Or look at clouds as machines in which droplets and water vapor are being “processed”.
“4. What about the “umbrella effect”: As CO2 emits and absorbs energy at the same wavelengths it should to a certain degree shield the earth from the suns heat. Whatever energy the CO2 gets directly from the sun, more than 50% go to space and thus can not reach the earth.”
Shield is interesting term. Matter is either transparent, absorbs, or reflects. And does all them depending type of radiation and density and shape of the matter. CO2 is a trace gas. But even our atmosphere was mostly or pure CO2, it would not block much of the sun’s radiation. CO2 is a transparent gas. And it’s transparent to most the energy of sunlight.
It seems to me fairly obvious that somewhere around 90% or more of all sunlight intersecting earth, isn’t “absorbed” by earth. And in terms something like a shield, clouds or other particles of matter are mostly responsible for “shielding” the earth. Clouds are made of transparent water, but because of their size they scatter [bends] light.
Not including clouds, a clear atmosphere stops [shields, scatters, reflects, adsorbs] about 30% of sunlight from reaching the surface. At Noon in clear day of the 1300 watts per square of solar flux at the top of the atmosphere, only about 1000 watts per square meter reaches the surface. [I would guess if our atmosphere was pure CO2, more energy on a clear day would reach the surface]. Instead at noon, you measure sunlight at the surface at 9 am, one gets about 250 watts per square meter. If looking whole day-lit globe less than 1/2 of it reaches the surface. And because the surface a hemisphere, more half sunlight is hitting the surface of earth at angle greater than 45 degree [spread the sq meter at top of atmosphere area over large surface of a horizontal surface.
But returning to noon clear day and 1000 watts per square at surface a large percentage of that energy is not absorbed- humans can design systems that capture about 60% of the energy- the natural environment does absorb this much. The earth’s ocean which cover most of surface does do good job of capturing the sun’s energy, perhaps 50% whereas land areas absorb far less.

Bair polair, Tall bloke
The surface heats the C02, the C02 returns some energy to the surface.
If you cannot realise this will slow down the heat loss from the surface and cause the surface heated by the sun to get hotter then nobody will ever explain it to you. This effect is overwhelmingly more important for water regardless of how water is transported into the atmosphere. The surface emits radiation no matter what your opinion or political view on climate might be.
I have just spent months of my life attempting to explain simple science ideas to people who show no willingness at all to learn.
And when i tried to get Wiki to have a better explanation of the Greenhouse effect, Wiki banned me. And banned my wife. Wiki want you to believe the moron version that the atmosphere heats the surface or else!
Evidently it seems important for people to be ignorant and there are limits to what anybody can do to change that against such overwhelming forces.

A Fascinating story on the discovery of the causes of Ice Ages
Milutin Milankovitch was born in the politically volatile Balkan nation of Serbia—later incorporated into Yugoslavia—in 1879. Milankovitch came from a relatively privileged background. His family owned extensive farmlands and vineyards, and several of his relatives were university graduates. For a time, he gave in to family pressure and studied agriculture in preparation for taking up the management of the Milankovitch estates. But he was more interested in the sciences and went instead to Vienna, where he earned a doctorate in engineering in 1904. After working for five years as an engineer in Vienna, building such things as dams and bridges of reinforced concrete, he gladly returned to his homeland to accept a post at the University of Belgrade. There he lectured on mechanics, astronomy and theoretical physics, and yearned for a challenge that would permit him to make his mark in the world of science.
In 1911, during an evening of wine tippling with a poet friend, Milankovitch selected his challenge: He would develop a mathematical theory that would enable him to determine not only the temperature of the earth at different latitudes and at different times but also the climates of other planets in the solar system. It was to be an ambitious scientific sojourn in what
Milankovitch called “distant worlds and times,’ and the young professor had picked an ideal stage of his life to begin. “I set Out on this hunt in my best years,” he recalled later. “Had I been somewhat younger I would not have possessed the necessary knowledge and experience. Had I been older I would not have had enough of that self-confidence that only youth can offer
in the form of rashness.”
Milankovitch pursued his goal with single-minded devotion. As he later observed: “When a scholar stands before a scientific problem, he becomes like a hunting dog that has sensed the game.” His first step was to make a thorough survey of work that had already been done in his chosen field. He was fascinated by James Croll’s astronomical theory, but concluded that Croll, for all his considerable accomplishments, had lacked the precise data required to deal adequately with a problem of such magnitude. Luckily, though, Milankovitch came across the more recent studies of the German mathematician Ludwig Pilgrim, who in 1904 had published minutely detailed calculations of the precession of the equinoxes and changes in the earth’s orbital eccentricity and angle of tilt. Indeed, Pilgrim had even gone so far as to chart the relationship between orbital eccentricity and the presumed chronology of past ice ages. Milankovitch judged that Pilgrim’s understanding of climatology left much to be desired, but could find no fault with his mathematics; he used the German’s figures to work out his own calculations of past climates of the earth and other planets.
His progress was interrupted in the fall of 1912 by the outbreak of the First Balkan War, in which Serbia joined its neighboring allies to expel the Turks from southeastern Europe; a reserve Army officer, Milankovitch was called to active duty with his regiment. Hostilities were short-lived, however, and Milankovitch soon returned to his civilian desk. During the next
two years he published several papers outlining the emerging results of his work, which indicated that glacial advances and retreats could indeed be brought about by changes in solar radiation due to the precession of the equinoxes and to variations in the earth’s orbital eccentricity. (His calculations became considerably more accurate after 1913, when American scientists at the Smithsonian Institution were able to establish the solar constant, or the intensity of the sun’s radiation.) He also showed that variations in the planet’s angle of tilt influenced climate to a far greater degree than James Croll had believed.
In the summer of 1914, war intruded once again on Milankovitch’s affairs. He was visiting his home village of Dalj—then a part of Austria Hungary—when World War I began, and was promptly interned as a prisoner of war. But his studies would not be hindered: In his suitcase, he carried the papers on what he called “my great cosmic problem,” and during his first night of confinement, he whipped out his fountain pen and turned to his calculations. “As I looked around my room after midnight,” he recalled later, “I needed some time before I realized where I was. The little room seemed like the nightquarters on my trip through the universe.”
Milankovitch did not stay long in his cell. Learning of his imprisonment, a Hungarian university professor who knew of the Serbian’s accomplishments prevailed upon the authorities to parole Milankovitch to Budapest, where he could have access to the library at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. There he spent the rest of the war years, developing a theory for predicting the earth’s climate and completing a description of the climates of Mars and Venus. In 1920, his results were published in a work titled Mathematical Theory of Heat Phenomena Produced by Solar Radiation, in which the author demonstrated mathematically that widespread glaciation could be induced by astronomical changes that alter the amount and distribution of solar radiation reaching the earth. He also maintained that it was possible to determine the amount of radiation that had reached the earth at any time during the past. In short, Milankovitch was claiming he could prove that astronomical processes caused ice ages.
Among the many scientists who were impressed by Milankovitch’s work was the eminent German climatologist Wladimir Koppen, whose son-in-law, Alfred Wegener, had startled the scientific world in 1912 with his theory of continental drift. Now, Koppen and Wegener were in the process of writing a book about past climates. Invited to contribute to this project,
Milankovitch readily agreed, and set out to plot a curve that would show the variations in radiation that he believed were responsible for the succession of ice ages.
James Croll had believed that variations in solar radiation at very high latitudes during the winter were the dominant factor in the onset of glaciation. But Milankovitch saw the matter otherwise. After lengthy correspondence with Köppen, he had become convinced that the decisive factor in glaciation is the diminution of summer heat in the temperate latitudes, not a reduction of winter radiation at the Poles—where temperatures even today are low enough to preserve a permanent snow cover. Working from morning until night, he drew curves showing how summer radiation in the middle latitudes—between lat. 55° N. and lat. 65° N.—had varied during the past 600,000 years. Finally, after 100 days, he finished his calculations and mailed the results to Koppen.
When the German scientist examined the work of his Serbian colleague, he was immediately struck by the marked similarity between the lines on the Milankovitch chart and the sequence of European glaciations established years before by the geographers Albrecht Penck and Eduard Bruckner. Koppen informed Milankovitch that his astronomical theory had thus been confirmed, and asked him to attend a scientific conference to be held in
Innsbruck, Austria. There, as Milankovitch listened from an inconspicuous last-row seat, Alfred Wegener presented a spirited lecture on continental drift and ancient climates, illustrating the section on the Pleistocene epoch with Milankovitch’s painstakingly computed radiation curves. So well received was this new explanation for ice ages that Milankovitch slept that night “on a bed of laurels and soft pillows.”
Köppen and Wegener included Milankovitch’s work in their 1924 book, Climates of the Geological Past, and many geologists were convinced that the ice ages had at last been explained. Milankovitch, meanwhile, continued to elaborate and refine his theory, computing curves for latitudes both higher and lower than those that he had previously plotted. In 1930, he published his clearest statement yet on the causes of ice ages: Mathematical Climatology and the Astronomical Theory of Climatic Changes. In it, he demonstrated that radiation curves calculated for the higher latitudes are dominated by the 41,000-year tilt cycle, while curves for latitudes closer to the Equator are more heavily influenced by the 22,000-year precession of the equinoxes.
Aside from the fact that they corresponded with the assumed periods of glacial advances and retreats, Milankovitch’s curves did not offer definitive proof that they delineated the causes of ice ages. But this correspondence seemed far too striking for mere coincidence. Scientists the world over came to accept the Milankovitch explanation for climate changes, and Milutin Milankovitch was convinced that his life’s great work was done. For the first time since 1911, when he had set his lofty goal of scientific discovery, he was without a great challenge to face. “I am too old to start a new theory,” he remarked wistfully to his son in 1941, “and theories of the magnitude of the one I have completed do not grow on trees.”
Planet Earth
Ice Ages
By Windsor Chorlton
Time Life Boks
1983
Milankovitch noted that as the earth spins and moves around the sun, both its orbit and its attitude change slightly. The orbit varies from almost circular to strongly elliptical and back again every 93,000 years or so. The earth’s tilt in relation to the plane of its orbit—the cause of earthly seasons—changes from about 22 degrees to more than 24 degrees and back every 41,000 years. The earth also wobbles, rocking in a circular motion around its axis like a slowing top, and this too has a cycle: One full wobble consumes 25,800 years. By altering the distance between the sun and earth or changing the angle at which radiation strikes particular points on the earth, these moves alter the amount of solar energy reaching certain latitudes in certain seasons.
Evidence that supports the critical role Milankovitch attributed to these cycles has accumulated steadily. For instance, scientists from the Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory in New York discovered that variations in the type of oxygen and in the distribution of the remains of minute marine life—found in sedimentary samples taken from the floor of the
Indian Ocean—indicate periodic and severe climate changes. The sea-core record suggests that some of these changes have peaked every 23,000 years, others every 41,000 years and still others about every 100,000 years. It seems highly unlikely that the similarity to the span of orbital variations is mere coincidence.
Planet Earth
Atmosphere
By Oliver E. Allen
Time Life Books
1983

Ric Werme says:
March 31, 2012 at 10:40 am
If you indeed found it at The Register, then I don’t see why you were shocked unless you aren’t familiar with El Reg and their style. I don’t understand why you didn’t include a link to that quote. Well, if you found it on Pravda, I could understand….
@Ric
You’re right, it’s from the Reg and I had meant to include the link below the headline of the piece.. don’t know what happened.
Thanks for posting it.
I’m still looking for the actual paper and any video from the panel..
Cheers!

it seems the drug companies hare having a hard time reproducing the “discoveries” claimed by universities, prior to trying to create new drugs based upon said “research: http://news.yahoo.com/cancer-science-many-discoveries-dont-hold-174216262.html
do you all think there is any chance “climate research” might be similarly plagued? 😉

May I draw everyone’s attention to the fact that there has been a major reversal in climate science reported at Realclimate here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=11329
REPLY: This is a badly executed April Fools Joke, ignore it. Here’s why I didn’t do one this year:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/01/how-peter-gleicks-skullduggery-killed-my-april-fools-posting/
With so much deception going on, you’d think RealClimate would know better. I guess not. – Anthony

@Bobl
bair polaire says: I can not find a simple comprehensive scientifically sound demonstration of the CO2 effect on the internet.
Best explanation is to not think thermal, but to use a more familliar example of the same phenomenon. Consider a fluorescent light bulb. …
PS, its clear here by the way that CO2 should reduce day temps and increase night ones such that the average temp might be higher but the diurnal range should be lower. IE a warming world will be more tropical, less dynamic, and safer for all lifeforms. Global warming must reduce the instance of extreme temperatures, either daily max, or nightly mins, has to.

Thanks a lot for your explanations! This really helps. I think your fluorescent light bulb is so far the best everyday life example of back radiation. Even though the reemission/afterglow does nothing to make the bulb brighter or reduce energy consumption as it is in a different wavelength than the source.
I would like to read more on your notion that the CO2 effect would make the climate milder and life more pleasant. Is this effect visible in the temperature records?

“Is the Sun’s radiation around 10 micron really lower than the Earth’s outgoing radiation at 10 micron?”
I provide Bair Polair with a calculation that shows it indeed is, by a factor of 4 million. He says he doubts it. Now, if I doubted something as fundamental as that, I would immediately check it. I mean it isn’t hard. Planck’s Law is widely available on the internet. All you have to do is plug in a wavelength of 10 micron for the Sun’s surface temperature (5800K) and the Earth’s 288K and see what values you get. Then you need to remember the inverse square law, since the Sun is 150 million kilometres away. I would check these calculations if I had doubts, but Bair Polaire simply says he doesn’t believe it. What doesn’t he believe? Planck’s Law? the formula for the surface area of a sphere? Mathematics in general? or the accumulated scientific knowledge of the last millennia?
I am willing to help anyone who has a genuine problem understanding but, as Andrew Judd says, Bair Polair like so many others is not interested in finding out. They ask questions rather in the hope that there is no answer and thus they have discovered something that every physicist since Isaac Newton has overlooked. That’s not going to happen.
Arguing against proven science, that which can be measured and verified, simply gives all sceptics a bad name.
So, Bair Polair, this puts you firmly in the Sky Dragon cuckoo club. I suggest you visit Tallbloke’s website where I am sure he will tell you exactly what you want to hear.
Bye.

Mike Jonas ….. Shushhhhhhhh.

tallbloke says:
March 31, 2012 at 6:25 am
I really like the new “Transendental rants and far out theories” section. A couple of good site links there. I’m thinking of adding a “lukewarm junkscience” section on the Talkshop. 😉
——————————————–
LOL! Good move, Tall Bloke! Many will chafe at being categorized into the the margins…the Pale of Hypotheses… but will appreciate the offer of a soapbox. At the same time, science purists may grumble over the perceived legitimising, but will enjoy piling into the claims to debunk. Interesting it will be to see if any make it out of the ghetto into the mainstream, or vice-versa.
Perhaps avoiding the term “junk-science” will calm nerves. A word like “speculative” may be better, I don’t know. I was impressed by the way the late Carl Sagan subtitled one of his books as “speculations.” The one in which he called our brainstem “reptillian” and compared it to Siggy Freud’s Id, the mid-brain to the Ego and what he called the “neo-cortex,” the Super Ego. Plausible and poetic mind-candy and no one got angry or jumped down his throat for that because “speculation” tends to disarm rather than raise hackles, I guess.

@Bomber_the_Cat
Sorry I made you angry. And thanks for giving more detail on your calculations. I do have a genuine problem understanding. I am not a physicist so I am not familiar with making all these calculations myself as you require me to do. (That’s why I keep asking for a simple comprehensive scientifically sound explanation of the greenhouse effect.)
My understanding of blackbody radiation is as follows: the higher the temperature, the shorter the wavelength of the emission peak. But nevertheless: the higher the temperature the more it radiates at all wavelengths.
My understanding of the role of the distance of the radiant source is the following: The further away the radiant source the less radiation is received by a unit area (inverse square law). But: the radiant source does not get dimmer by distance it just gets smaller.
Everyday life example: streetlights at night. Contrary to common believe the more distant streetlights are not dimmer, they are just smaller. (If this were the case we would all walk in our own spotlight and the world around us would be dark.) Thats why I came up with checking your calculation against the space the sun occupies on the sky. And from that calculation I figured that your claim that the earth is 4 million times brighter at its peak emission wavelength than the sun is a little bit too high. (Any sources besides your calculation? I tried to find it, but did not succeed.)
You are not right when you say: “I would check these calculations if I had doubts, but Bair Polaire simply says he doesn’t believe it. What doesn’t he believe?”
I gave my reasons for not believing before and I give them here. I even offered a quick plausibility check. Maybe I am wrong. No problem. I’m here to learn. But please don’t make hurting assumptions about my motives just because I don’t agree with you or don’t understand you. Thank you.

Girma says: March 31, 2012 at 11:54 pm
A Fascinating story on the discovery of the causes of Ice Ages
This is the building where Milankovic was a professor.
http://www.bg.ac.rs/img/etf.jpg
Sculpture to the right is of Nikola Tesla, another great Serbian scientist and innovator.
There are two large theatres where Milankovic gave lectures (capacity about 300 each), btw, where I attended lectures many years later, and laboured through numerous exams as these ‘poor souls’ shown here.

bair polaire says:
I still don’t understand why CO2 is not heated by the sun directly. Not even a little bit?
What makes you think that? CO2 will absorb inbound Solar radiation within it’s absorption band, and does, over 85% of inbound energy from the sun and outbound energy in the absorption band is already absorbed and indeed this puts a solid cap of the absolute maximum amount of warming that we may experience even if the whole atmosphere was CO2. CO2 will slow the uptake of energy as well as slow the loss, the system will reach equilibrium potentially at a higher temperature but with a reduced temperature range. However CO2 is already doing 85% of the warming it ever possibly can.
If you do the math, it works out to be 5.2 degrees including ALL FEEDBACKS when making the assumption that CO2 is the only driver of the temperature rise (valid in a 100% CO2 atmosphere) for any reasonable concentration of CO2 though it’s not the only driver. For the next doubling I figure this works out to about 0.6 degrees max.
It’s very complicated however, the climate is driven by masses of variables, our atmosphere is a chaotic, open system, with multiple feedbacks working in unpredictable ways. CO2 is only proven to cause warming in experiments in CLOSED, Non-chaotic SYSTEMS. Cooling / Warming of the atmosphere occurs by multiple mechanisms, many more than just radiation. There is in my opinion zero chance of modelling it. CO2 will undoubtably cause some warming but If you want to know what will happen, you should start with observations and work from there.
For example from the little ice age to now there has been about 0.6 degrees of warming. That’s for and increase of about 110 PPM. Now the Australian Government tries to tell me that for the next doubling they think we will get 6 degrees (disregarding that this is above the max that could ever happen even for 100% CO2). So the government reckons then that the next 110PPM rise in CO2 will cause about 2-3 degrees of warming, but if the last 100PPM caused 0.6 (assuming all the rise from the little ice-age to now is CO2 driven which it’s not), and the relationship is logarithmic (each equal rise in CO2 results in less warming) then it follows that the rise for the next 110PPM CO2 rise must be strictly less than the warming due to the last 110 PPM rise, again run the math and you get a max number around 1-1.5 degree for a doubling of CO2. 2-3 degrees is just ridiculous, it is not in any way supported by any observation of how the atmosphere actually behaves. Conclusion : The Australia Government is WRONG by a factor of about 5!
Add this to the fact above that adding thermal resistance to the atmosphere serves to reduce the temperature range (lower highs, and higher lows) and you have the recipe for a pretty productive climate if the earth did warm – but unfortunately it probably wont 🙁
=================================================================
I want you to think about something else, by 2050 the Australian Government at the rate they are spending it will have spent $100 Bn of taxpayer money on this farce. If that money went to feeding the starving millions how many lives would be saved on this earth. If the corn that is turned into ethanol to burn in your car, was sent to africa instead how many deaths would have been prevented.
Finally, at a carbon price of only $40 per tonne, it becomes more cost-effective to burn flour to produce electricity than coal (similar calorific value – look it up, some great videos on you-tube) – flour, a staple of life, is renewable and can be produced from most carbohydrates (potato, wheat, corn, rice) – this will become viable WELL BEFORE TRADITIONAL RENEWABLES BECOME COST EFFECTIVE and coal station boilers could easily be adapted to run on it – Think about the morality of that before you start agreeing to tax carbon dioxide. Burning food for fuel is morally corrupt!
Bob

@Andrew Judd
Do you want to understand??? Or do you want to falsify without learning?????
I don’t want to falsify anything. I just try to ask precise questions. Because after all my googleing and reading blogs and scientific papers I have to admit – ad this was my first sentence – I still don’t really understand the greenhouse effect.
Everything you say about radiation and CO2 I have read before. I don’t doubt it.
It would just help me if you could give me a rough estimate of the percentages involved.
1. What percentage of the total energy the earth is radiating towards the atmosphere is absorbed by CO2? The absorption/emission bandwidths of CO2 are rather small and not at the emission peak of the earth. Plus the CO2 might get input from other sources like the sun and the rest of the atmosphere.
2. What percentage of that energy received from the surface is re-emitted by CO2 molecules towards earth?
3. What is the effect of this back and force radiation exchange regarding the temperature of the surface? Time frames? When is this effect strongest? Day, night etc.? (As Bobl pointed out: most likely it makes the climate a little warmer on average but less extreme. Do you agree?)
4. What about my “bonus question”: The lower and warmer 50% of CO2 in the atmosphere radiate mostly upwards. Why does this not result in cooling?
Don’t get angry. I’m just trying to learn. If you yell at me and ridicule me I might better give up.

bair polaire says:
April 1, 2012 at 12:56 am
“Bonus question: The lower 50% of CO2 in the atmosphere is warmer than the upper 50%. Most of the radiation goes up not down. Why than is a doubling of CO2 not considered to speed up the cooling of the earth? Radiation is faster than conduction.”
Without greenhouse gases, the radiation would make it instantly to space. That’s why adding greenhouse gases slows down the radiative cooling through absorption and re-radiation. This effect is of course nearly saturated after you have achieved an average of ONE absorption and re-emission per photon, after that, adding more greenhouse gases changes the behaviour only very slightly.
It is this very slight change that according to the international AGW reserach funds recipient mafia will trigger a catastrophy.

Bair Polaire
Lets start with the bonus question first. The C02 does result in cooling of the heated atmosphere. If the GHG’s were not cooling the atmosphere it would be impossibly hot at altitude instead of being cold at altitude where it matters for humans.
Think about it please. Just once at least.
1. The surface is continually heating the colder atmosphere.
2. The atmosphere is continually cooling by emitting radiation in all directions.
3. The surface receives some of this radiation from the cold atmosphere. But this means some of the energy from the surface heated by the sun has not passed thru the atmosphere to outerspace. If you are heating something and you reduce the cooling it becomes hotter.
Dont please ask me for minute details about this. What part of the above can you not understand?
If you heat an object and place a cold object next to the heated object then the hot object heats the cold object and *both* objects become warmer between each other. If the cold object was not continually cooling it would just get hotter and hotter and hotter.
The atmosphere does not get hotter and hotter and hotter when it is heated by the surface because the atmosphere is continually cooling because it is emitting radiation to space.
If the atmosphere was not able to emit radiation it would rise in temperature at altitude to tens of thousands of degrees and would still carry on getting hotter until the atmosphere was entirely spread beyond the gravitational pull of the earth.

Interesting to see how the Arctic and Antarctic are refusing to kowtow to the Warmista’s needs, maybe it is the wrong sort of ice, or cold because of course, it can’t be a modelling fault.
It is going to be a fascinating melt season in the Arctic, when it starts!
I used to keep an eye on it over at Neven’s site but he’s gone all politico and seems to be moving away from the ice science, well enough for a worry that observer bias could be creeping in over there.

Can anyone tell me what, exactly, is the deal between Pielke Sr and Jr? I keep getting conflicting ideas about these two. Jr, for example, seems to me to sometimes be on both sides of the fence at once.

Otter says:
April 1, 2012 at 8:31 am
“Can anyone tell me what, exactly, is the deal between Pielke Sr and Jr? I keep getting conflicting ideas about these two. Jr, for example, seems to me to sometimes be on both sides of the fence at once.”
Sr. is more into the hard science questions, Jr. more into the social or science communications aspects so he’s usually making a more political point.

Wind power folly in Nevada:
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2012/mar/30/nv-energy-windmill-program-generates-rebates-littl/

@Andrew Judd
Thanks for getting back to my questions. I perfectly understand all of what you say. I’ve read this many times before. It’s usually not disputed and I don’t doubt it.
Now you say:
If you heat an object and place a cold object next to the heated object then the hot object heats the cold object and *both* objects become warmer between each other.
And this I don’t believe. “Both objects become warmer between each other?” Most certainly not. The colder object gets warmer, but the warmer objects does not get warmer, it still gets colder. It just cools a little slower than without the colder (and warming) object nearby.
Maybe I am misreading your statement. Maybe you want to say: If you continually heat an object and place a cold object nearby, it warms the cold object and at a certain point, when the colder object is warmer than the background, the warmer – and still continually heated – object can get even a little warmer than before.
With this I agree. (Like the earth being continually heated by the sun and is now getting even a little warmer because the nearby CO2 is already warmer than space and now we get more CO2.)
Then you say: Dont please ask me for minute details about this. Why not? This is exactly what I want to understand. What are the percentages? What do we really know about how big the effect is? Does the heat content of CO2 compared to the rest of the atmosphere play a role? Is CO2 absorbing incoming solar radiation? (You say it is transparent, Bomber says it’s negligible, gbaikie points to a graph that shows its absorbing something and Bobl says yes, a lot – around 85% of all it can take.) There are many more relevant questions. Some of them are not settled.
We are asked to risk the future of our societies to prevent this back radiation effect from CO2 and I shall not ask for details? Not even rough estimates?
I don’t think I can agree to this.

Anyone know of updates on Fakegate and Gleick?

This one is not to be missed…. The beginning of the end for the CAGW scam in Europe??
http://thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/5352-dominic-lawson-britain-has-finally-rejected-the-bogus-economics-of-climate-change.html

@Bobl
Thanks again for the detailed answers to my questions. Very interesting aspects!
Just a little clarification on the “bonus question”: I am pretty sure CO2 radiates isotropically
Me too. Thats why I say more than half of the radiation is to the sky, because most CO2 molecules are (high) above the surface.
I restate:
CO2 is radiating isotropically – in all directions.
Most CO2 molecules are seeing more sky than earth especially at higher elevations.
The lower 50% of CO2 is warmer than the upper 50% thus radiating more energy. (Even when the air moves up and down by convection this is still true.)
Therefore no matter how much downwelling radiation from CO2 we measure, there is always more upwelling radiation from CO2 to offset that.
On top of that, most downwelling radiation from CO2 (80%) is not re-emitted by the surface at wavelengths that CO2 can absorb.
Thus CO2 is cooling the earth more than it is warming it. And even with more CO2 the earth must still be cooling due to CO2.
My reasoning is probably wrong, I just don’t understand why. And if I do, I probably understand the greenhouse effect better.

Bair polair
And remember that at point 4. the absorbed energy from the atmospheric C02 only slows down the rate of cooling of a surface heated by the sun. Energy from C02 has no ability to warm the surface. More surface energy leaves the hot surface to keep heating the colder C02

@Andrew Judd
C02 is cooling the atmosphere
The absorbed energy from the atmospheric C02 only slows down the rate of cooling of a surface heated by the sun. Energy from C02 has no ability to warm the surface.
Now I’m seeing light.
Thank you all!

Latest on Richard Black of the BBC and how he is involved in environmental advocacy:
http://blackswhitewash.com

Bair polaire
Good. If you now go to Wiki and try to edit the greenhouse effect page to describe the greenhouse effect as i just described it to you, then you can get banned from wiki like i did
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=592373
There are some fairly well known climate scientists active on the wiki page, who work very hard to ensure you learn the version of the greenhouse effect that you could not make any sense of, where you are required to believe the backradiation warms the surface.

Andrew Judd
I have read your edit war at wikipedia. It’s unbelievable. Keep up the good work!
Maybe you can write an article on this topic and post it here or somewhere else.

bair polaire says:
April 1, 2012 at 2:18 pm
“Andrew Judd
I have read your edit war at wikipedia. It’s unbelievable. ”
You must be new. Happens all the time.

“If you heat an object and place a cold object next to the heated object then the hot object heats the cold object and *both* objects become warmer between each other. If the cold object was not continually cooling it would just get hotter and hotter and hotter.”
If you put a frying pan on the stove, turn the element at low setting so that frying reaches 100 C. Because of low heating the frying pan does get above 100 C.
Though If you put lid on frying pan the temperature would rise [you are blocking convection] by modest amount- so a few degrees [not doubling it’s temperature 200 C]. If put a cold steak on the frying pan or near the frying it would not increase the frying pan’s temperature. After steak as warmed to same temperature and it’s on the frying pan, it would function like a lid.
If you did this in a vacuum on the Moon- there is no convection, and therefore would warm up as though frying pan had a lid on earth.
At a set distance from the Sun [say earth distance] the sun can only heat an object to a certain temperature. The hottest temperatures at earth distance can found on the Moon, where surface temperatures can reach around 120 C. Because the earth atmosphere prevent at least 30% of the solar energy from reaching the surface, the highest surface temperature can not match the lunar’s surface temperature. As long as earth atmosphere blocks 30% or more of the energy from the sun this will always be the case. Doubling the mass of earth’s atmosphere would reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface therefore lower possible maximum temperature
that surface could warm up to. Doubling the mass of earth atmosphere might increase the average temperature or the “greenhouse effect” but not the the surface temperature.
If instead you reduced Earth atmosphere to the Mars’ thin and mostly CO2 atmosphere, you would cause there to be higher surface temperature, but have less “greenhouse affect”.
On earth the warmest temperatures are the ground- one can almost fry eggs on a sidewalk.
And highest air temperatures never exceed [or get close] to the highest ground temperature.
So frying eggs on the moon would be quite easy. But because of spherical nature of the Moon, when one goes towards the poles, a horizontal [or level] sidewalk would have lower maximum temperature that it could reach. If sidewalk tilted towards the sun, one doesn’t get this reduction.
On earth [being spherical] one gets similar reduction in maximum temperature the surface can
reach. But an additional factor on earth as one goes towards the poles is that a sun at a low angle and has to go thru more atmosphere. And therefore with tilted sidewalk one gets a lower maximum temperature.
Venus temperature exceed it’s maximum temperature at it’s distance from the Sun. It does so because it has a massive atmosphere. If one were to measure Venus maximum surface temperature at an elevation which similar pressure as on earth- had a floating sidewalk- the sidewalk’s temperature would reach around 470 K [470 cubed times .0000000567. which is 2767 watts per square meter in the ballpark of solar flux at Venus distance].
Whereas near Venus surface at 92 atm it’s air temperature being around 737 K [and the sidewalk would same as air temperature- whether it was in sunlight or not].
Btw, the floating sidewalk in sunlight would much hotter than the air temperature at that elevation [somewhere around 360 K- a similar difference [though greater] as one can find on earth]. Or if Earth was at Venus distance, mid day surface temperature- easily fry eggs- one could probably cook a pot roast on sidewalk, air temperatures would similar to a sauna. Though one have significant increase in cloud cover which make much cloudier world and vastly more rain. Earth ocean would not boil but there would certainly be an increase their evaporation rate. Earth would still be habitable, it take centuries to warm the oceans. But one would have world in which CAGW would be a more accurate prediction of the future.

gbaikie says:
April 1, 2012 at 4:37 pm
“If you put a frying pan on the stove, turn the element at low setting so that frying reaches 100 C. Because of low heating the frying pan does get above 100 C.”
Don’t confuse radiative energy transfer with conduction. The greenhouse effect describes only radiative transfer.

Australians do not trust Climate Change Commissioner:
http://www.news.com.au/national/tim-flannerys-like-the-weather-unreliable/story-e6frfkvr-1226316094295
I don’t know why that is [/sarcasm]

Joe Bastardi said on his show “Wise Guys of Weather”, that he comes to this site nearly every hour now to check on the rising sea ice. I thought, “Wow, that’s ironic because i do the same thing.” I agree with Ric Werme that this is the best climate blog on the planet, hands down. I was at one time a believer in AGW, but when i saw this site a few years ago, I slowly, but surely became skeptical, and I owe it all to this website, keep up the good work guys!

@bair polaire
@ Andrew Judd
Andrew, I think you have had a few too many wars with a few too many people. Understandably you are suspicious of questions like Bair’s, but I think Bair really does want to understand (potentially both sides of the argument). If he can come here for the science, he can get the team view over at Real-Climate and make up his own mind. We can only hope science prevails.
Bair
With the Brick experiment Andrew is trying (in a round about way) to demonstrate that the source must always be hotter than the sink, as the back radiation from the colder brick increases (reducing the nett flow of energy from hot to cold) the transfer of energy from the hot interior of the hot brick to the surface needs to meet the nett radiative loss of the surface and so the brick gets hotter. This will actually tend to an equilibrium, where the surface of the brick relative to the cold brick, would reach a temperature where the loss of energy radiatively exactly balances the nett gain of energy by conduction from the bricks interior. The surface of the brick however can never get hotter than the energy source – in this case the centre of the hot brick.
When you say most CO2 molecules see more sky than earth that is strictly true, but if you look at the depth of the atmosphere relative to the diameter of the earth, you’ll see that the radiation that misses the earth at low angles is not a lot and 50% is probably a pretty good approximation.
Your reasoning is a little off. The CO2 is cooling the earth, but it is not as effecient at doing it as oxygen, when we take oxygen and turn it into CO2 then we reduce the cooling efficiency of the atmosphere (increase the insulating factor) and (Theoretically) the earth warms – the only problem is the the atmosphere is not a closed system it reacts to imbalances like this. You see it every day, given the right weather conditions, the hot air evaporates and stores water, if there is enough water in the air and a low enough air pressure, storms form and sucks massive amounts of heat upward which is mostly radiated to space. (Because the clouds of the storm are below the energy source now, and clouds reflect IR the radiation is pretty much all outward to space now). Rain falls – interestingly the kinetic (motion) energy in the rain comes from absorbed heat (turned into potential energy in the water vapour). To my knowledge the potential energy absorbed by evaporated water in reaching the troposphere and then expended in kinetic energy is NOT accounted for in any models.
Anyway, the CO2 cools the earth less efficiently that it’s precursor (oxygen) but any heating of the surface is still very lossy, the broadband emission of the hot solid (the surface) now slightly warmer than the no CO2 case, escapes through the remaining spectrum, 15% escapes through at CO2 wavelengths, some is absorbed in increased evaporation and precipitation, a whole lot goes into heating the oceans, some goes to heating the bulk of the earth. In the end when you spread that tiny bit of extra warming due to the insulative effect of CO2 at three narrow wavelengths across all of the possible ways it can escape, only a fraction of the extra warmth remains, it has to be warmer, because the extraction of energy is driven by the surface temperature, but the equilibrium temperature is far below what you would expect if there were no losses. This is what we would call Negative feedbacks and there are a lot of them.
There are undoubtably positive feedbacks too, the IPCC contend that the positive feedbacks overwhelm the negative in such a way that the CO2 warming is amplified by three times. Given the scale of the negative feedbacks in the system naturally, the positive feedbacks would need to overwhelm the negative feedbacks by that factor, considering that the negative feedback due to broadband emission BY ITSELF is 5:1 the CAGW proponents are therefore contending that positive feedback is more than a factor of 15!. If this was the case the temperature would be massively unstable and there would be oscillatory behaviour every day at noon, and the temperature will continue to rise for hours after a cloud comes over or the sun goes down. In real life that just doesn’t happen, things are remarkably stable. One can only conclude that the feedback has to be negative.
Personally I don’t see why this isn’t self evident to climate sciences, it stands out like the proverbial dogs balls to me