Note: This will be the top post for a day or two, new posts will appear below this one.
Readers may recall my original post, Nature’s ugly decision: ‘Deniers’ enters the scientific literature. followed by Dr. Paul Bain Responds to Critics of Use of “Denier” Term (with thanks to Jo Nova, be sure to bookmark and visit her site) Dr. Robert G. Brown of Duke University, commenting as rgbatduke, made a response that was commented on by several here in that thread. As commenter REP put it in the update: It is eloquent, insightful and worthy of consideration. I would say, it is likely the best response I’ve ever seen on the use of the “denier” term, not to mention the CAGW issue in general. Thus, I’ve elevated it a full post. Please share the link to this post widely. – Anthony
Dr. Robert G. Brown writes:
The tragic thing about the thoughtless use of a stereotype (denier) is that it reveals that you really think of people in terms of its projected meaning. In particular, even in your response you seem to equate the term “skeptic” with “denier of AGW”.
This is silly. On WUWT most of the skeptics do not “deny” AGW, certainly not the scientists or professional weather people (I myself am a physicist) and honestly, most of the non-scientist skeptics have learned better than that. What they challenge is the catastrophic label and the alleged magnitude of the projected warming on a doubling of CO_2. They challenge this on rather solid empirical grounds and with physical arguments and data analysis that is every bit as scientifically valid as that used to support larger estimates, often obtaining numbers that are in better agreement with observation. For this honest doubt and skepticism that the highly complex global climate models are correct you have the temerity to socially stigmatize them in a scientific journal with a catch-all term that implies that they are as morally reprehensible as those that “deny” that the Nazi Holocaust of genocide against the Jews?
For shame.
Seriously, for shame. You should openly apologize for the use of the term, in Nature, and explain why it was wrong. But you won’t, will you… although I will try to explain why you should.
By your use of this term, you directly imply that I am a “denier”, as I am highly skeptical of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (not just “anthropogenic global warming”, which is plausible if not measurable, although there are honest grounds to doubt even this associated with the details of the Carbon Cycle that remain unresolved by model or experiment). Since I am a theoretical physicist, I find this enormously offensive. I might as well label you an idiot for using it, when you’ve never met me, have no idea of my competence or the strength of my arguments for or against any aspect of climate dynamics (because on this list I argue both points of view as the science demands and am just as vigorous in smacking down bullshit physics used to challenge some aspect of CAGW as I am to question the physics or statistical analysis or modelling used to “prove” it). But honestly, you probably aren’t an idiot (are you?) and no useful purpose is served by ad hominem or emotionally loaded human descriptors in a rational discussion of an objective scientific question, is there.
Please understand that by creating a catch-all label like this, you quite literally are moving the entire discussion outside of the realm of science, where evidence and arguments are considered and weighed independent of the humans that advance them, where our desire to see one or another result proven are (or should be) irrelevant, where people weigh the difficulty of the problem being addressed as an important contributor (in a Bayesian sense) to how much we should believe any answer proposed — so far, into the realm where people do not think at all! They simply use a dismissive label such as “denier” and hence avoid any direct confrontation with the issues being challenged.
The issue of difficulty is key. Let me tell you in a few short words why I am a skeptic. First of all, if one examines the complete geological record of global temperature variation on planet Earth (as best as we can reconstruct it) not just over the last 200 years but over the last 25 million years, over the last billion years — one learns that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about today’s temperatures! Seriously. Not one human being on the planet would look at that complete record — or even the complete record of temperatures during the Holocene, or the Pliestocene — and stab down their finger at the present and go “Oh no!”. Quite the contrary. It isn’t the warmest. It isn’t close to the warmest. It isn’t the warmest in the last 2 or 3 thousand years. It isn’t warming the fastest. It isn’t doing anything that can be resolved from the natural statistical variation of the data. Indeed, now that Mann’s utterly fallacious hockey stick reconstruction has been re-reconstructed with the LIA and MWP restored, it isn’t even remarkable in the last thousand years!
Furthermore, examination of this record over the last 5 million years reveals a sobering fact. We are in an ice age, where the Earth spends 80 to 90% of its geological time in the grip of vast ice sheets that cover the polar latitudes well down into what is currently the temperate zone. We are at the (probable) end of the Holocene, the interglacial in which humans emerged all the way from tribal hunter-gatherers to modern civilization. The Earth’s climate is manifestly, empirically bistable, with a warm phase and cold phase, and the cold phase is both more likely and more stable. As a physicist who has extensively studied bistable open systems, this empirical result clearly visible in the data has profound implications. The fact that the LIA was the coldest point in the entire Holocene (which has been systematically cooling from the Holocene Optimum on) is also worrisome. Decades are irrelevant on the scale of these changes. Centuries are barely relevant. We are nowhere near the warmest, but the coldest century in the last 10,000 years ended a mere 300 years ago, and corresponded almost perfectly with the Maunder minimum in solar activity.
There is absolutely no evidence in this historical record of a third stable warm phase that might be associated with a “tipping point” and hence “catastrophe” (in the specific mathematical sense of catastrophe, a first order phase transition to a new stable phase). It has been far warmer in the past without tipping into this phase. If anything, we are geologically approaching the point where the Earth is likely to tip the other way, into the phase that we know is there — the cold phase. A cold phase transition, which the historical record indicates can occur quite rapidly with large secular temperature changes on a decadal time scale, would truly be a catastrophe. Even if “catastrophic” AGW is correct and we do warm another 3 C over the next century, if it stabilized the Earth in warm phase and prevented or delayed the Earth’s transition into cold phase it would be worth it because the cold phase transition would kill billions of people, quite rapidly, as crops failed throughout the temperate breadbasket of the world.
Now let us try to analyze the modern era bearing in mind the evidence of an utterly unremarkable present. To begin with, we need a model that predicts the swings of glaciation and interglacials. Lacking this, we cannot predict the temperature that we should have outside for any given baseline concentration of CO_2, nor can we resolve variations in this baseline due to things other than CO_2 from that due to CO_2. We don’t have any such thing. We don’t have anything close to this. We cannot predict, or explain after the fact, the huge (by comparison with the present) secular variations in temperature observed over the last 20,000 years, let alone the last 5 million or 25 million or billion. We do not understand the forces that set the baseline “thermostat” for the Earth before any modulation due to anthropogenic CO_2, and hence we have no idea if those forces are naturally warming or cooling the Earth as a trend that has to be accounted for before assigning the “anthropogenic” component of any warming.
This is a hard problem. Not settled science, not well understood, not understood. There are theories and models (and as a theorist, I just love to tell stories) but there aren’t any particularly successful theories or models and there is a lot of competition between the stories (none of which agree with or predict the empirical data particularly well, at best agreeing with some gross features but not others). One part of the difficulty is that the Earth is a highly multivariate and chaotic driven/open system with complex nonlinear coupling between all of its many drivers, and with anything but a regular surface. If one tried to actually write “the” partial differential equation for the global climate system, it would be a set of coupled Navier-Stokes equations with unbelievably nasty nonlinear coupling terms — if one can actually include the physics of the water and carbon cycles in the N-S equations at all. It is, quite literally, the most difficult problem in mathematical physics we have ever attempted to solve or understand! Global Climate Models are children’s toys in comparison to the actual underlying complexity, especially when (as noted) the major drivers setting the baseline behavior are not well understood or quantitatively available.
The truth of this is revealed in the lack of skill in the GCMs. They utterly failed to predict the last 13 or 14 years of flat to descending global temperatures, for example, although naturally one can go back and tweak parameters and make them fit it now, after the fact. And every year that passes without significant warming should be rigorously lowering the climate sensitivity and projected AGW, making the probability of the “C” increasinginly remote.
These are all (in my opinion) good reasons to be skeptical of the often egregious claims of CAGW. Another reason is the exact opposite of the reason you used “denier” in your article. The actual scientific question has long since been co-opted by the social and political one. The real reason you used the term is revealed even in your response — we all “should” be doing this and that whether or not there is a real risk of “catastrophe”. In particular, we “should” be using less fossil fuel, working to preserve the environment, and so on.
The problem with this “end justifies the means” argument — where the means involved is the abhorrent use of a pejorative descriptor to devalue the arguers of alternative points of view rather than their arguments at the political and social level — is that it is as close to absolute evil in social and public discourse as it is possible to get. I strongly suggest that you read Feynman’s rather famous “Cargo Cult” talk:
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
In particular, I quote:
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a
friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. “Well,” I said, “there aren’t any.” He said, “Yes, but then we won’t get support for more research of this kind.” I think that’s kind of dishonest. If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing–and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.
One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.
I say that’s also important in giving certain types of government
advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether
drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it
would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a
result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re
being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish it at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.
Time for a bit of soul-searching, Dr. Bain. Have you come even close to living up to the standards laid out by Richard Feynman? Is this sort of honesty apparent anywhere in the global climate debate? Did the “Hockey Team” embrace this sort of honesty in the infamous Climategate emails? Do the IPCC reports ever seem to present the counter arguments, or do they carefully avoid showing pictures of the 20,000 year thermal record, preferring instead Mann’s hockey stick because it increases the alarmism (and hence political impact of the report)? Does the term “denier” have any place in any scientific paper ever published given Feynman’s rather simple criterion for scientific honesty?
And finally, how dare you presume to make choices for me, for my relatives, for my friends, for all of the people of the world, but concealing information from them so that they make a choice to allocate resources the way you think they should be allocated, just like the dishonest astronomer of his example. Yes, the price of honesty might be that people don’t choose to support your work. Tough. It is their money, and their choice!
Sadly, it is all too likely that this is precisely what is at stake in climate research. If there is no threat of catastrophe — and as I said, prior to the hockey stick nobody had the slightest bit of luck convincing anyone that the sky was falling because global climate today is geologically unremarkable in every single way except that we happen to be living in it instead of analyzing it in a geological record — then there is little incentive to fund the enormous amount of work being done on climate science. There is even less incentive to spend trillions of dollars of other people’s money (and some of our own) to ameliorate a “threat” that might well be pure moonshine, quite possibly ignoring an even greater threat of movement in the exact opposite direction to the one the IPCC anticipates.
Why am I a skeptic? Because I recognize the true degree of our ignorance in addressing this supremely difficult problem, while at the same time as a mere citizen I weigh civilization and its benefits against draconian energy austerity on the basis of no actual evidence that global climate is in any way behaving unusually on a geological time scale.
For shame.
Sorry, time to return to Beaufort, so I will regretfully not be participating further in this thread for at least 8 or 9 hours. I will try to check in again and clear any further comments, objections, accusations of my being an immoral warmist or an equally immoral denierist, proofs that there is no GHE or that the GHE is now destined to run away and melt Antarctica and boil the oceans, or other manifestations of my being an arrogant physicist for daring to speak up — either way — on issues of climate when I lack credentialing, primary training, some of the data, proper respect for peer-reviewed literature, proper reverence for scientists that work in the field, belief in models, disbelief in models, understanding of the laws of thermodynamics, or etc.
None of which really pertain to whether or not it is appropriate to use derogatory terms or terms intended to short-circuit the objective treatment of issues in a scientific journal article, but hey, they are fun, sometimes educational, and I’m happy to play, learn, or teach, so bring it.
rgb
mydogsgotnonose;
I do not claim that radiative equilibrium does not involve energy flow in both ways>>>
This is in opposition to your original statement. The balance of your answer is predicated on specifics not included in your original assertion. If you want to argue about how the Trenberth diagram differs from reality, or the problems associated with modeling forcing as if it originated at TOA or any of the other caveats you through into the argument after the fact, then state them up front. Your original statement as worded is false, and I see Dr Brown has weighed in on the issue as well.
Be specific and you might find that I agree with some (not all) of your assertions.
Rosco says:
June 22, 2012 at 6:52 pm
“Seems to me that to denigrate and vilify any portion of the population for a belief or way of life is to mimic Adolf Hitler – or any other evil monster that employed the politics of hate, envy and vilification to achieve their own ends.”
…..
“History is littered with horror because a certain percentage of a population slavishly followed some eloquent leader who spruiked (?) hatred of a certain class during tough times.”
Read all the comments. Rosco nailed the underlying issue at hand that Dr. Robert G. Brown
writes in defending his personal thoughts and belief around the demonizing of those who do not fall inline to the greed driven CAGW consensus.
Please do not respond to lazy teenager…it just empowers his tiny parts.
OK
Robert Brown says:
June 24, 2012 at 8:07 am
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Tyndall suggested water vapour was the major GHE but that was 150 years ago without satellites and he didn’t go further so far as I can tell.
You explained the CO2 “hole” very well. Can we also see the H2O hole, the CH4 hole, etc and thus quantify what is going on? As an engineer I have read many theories on the strength of materials. but I only trusted the test results of broken concrete cylinders and failed beams since they didn’t always follow theory without application of empirical factors.
Similarly in 20 years of finance, I learned to write financial models to watch the most important 97% of my business most closely, and the 3% got only regular reviews. A doubling or halving of the 3% would not change my business significantly, but a change in the 97% would. But also we looked ahead to see where the 3% might go in case it might change by an order of magnitude.
And this is the problem I have with climate models. I do not understand the focus on the multiple gases that make up the 3% when we don’t even understand the gas that makes up the 97%
There have been some excellent discussions on this site over the years and Robert Brown has explained some things in plain English that have helped immensely. I understand catalysts and other such things. I understand logs and exponential curves. I have lots of rudimentary math ands physics and chemistry and biology and microbiology. But it is old. I am well past retirement, which gives me time to read.
But in spite of all my education and all my reading, I have not been able to understand how CO2 is so important. I should have thought scientists should have been focusing on water vapour given its dominance.
Can you explain that in simple terms so an old retired engineer can get it through my head. I keep telling my kids that the CO2 issue keeps diverting our attention away from real pollution issues, away from figuring out how not to over fish the oceans, away from working on cures for Cancer ands AIDS and Malaria.
I can’t figure it out, and I have spent the last 25 years trying to understand it. CO2 as the driver of climate just goes against what I learned 40 to 50 years ago and my lifetime of continuing education.
I would accept water vapour and some interaction with in like the sun or cosmic rays in short order. But I really struggle with CO2.
I would love a simple explanation but in years of reading WUWT, I haven’t really seen one that is simple as breaking a concrete cylinder and recording the stress and strain and writing down the answer. Maybe there isn’t one.
But if Robert Brown or anyone else has a simple answer on how CO2 is so much more powerful than water vapour, I would really appreciate it.
Thank you for your patience and my ongoing education.
Wayne Delbeke,
Faraway, Alberta,
Canada
I chime in to agree with what Dr. Robert Brown wrote on June 24, 2012 at 8:07 am regarding radiative heat transfer.
The engineers on this blog should also know this. The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to net heat transferred.
Dr. Brown’s statement is correct, that (paraphrased) the colder body does not warm the warmer body, it merely slows the warmer body’s rate of cooling. Dr. Brown gave several examples. There are many, many more examples in everyday life.
For the car buffs out there, consider that the hot exhaust pipe on a 1969 Chevelle Malibu (big, V8 engine muscle car) is so hot that radiant heat impinges on the adjacent starter motor and causes premature failure. The solution was (and is) to install a heat shield on the starter motor so the radiant heat (IR electromagnetic radiation) cannot impinge on the starter motor. A heat shield in this instance is a flat sheet of steel, the one we installed was approximately 4 inches wide and 12 inches long, and 1/16 inch thickness. Does this cause the exhaust pipe to get hotter? Actually, it does. But, the exhaust pipe will never get hotter than the exhaust coming out of the engine’s cylinders. What happens is that the exhaust pipe does not cool quite as rapidly as it does without the radiant heat shield. The heat shield is far cooler than the exhaust pipe. Can one argue that no energy flows from the heat shield to the hot exhaust pipe? No NET energy flows from cooler to hotter, but one can easily see that the cooler shield has a measurable impact on the hotter exhaust pipe.
Next, if there are any chemical engineers on this thread, I refer you to Perry’s Chemical Engineering Handbook (mine is Fifth Edition, 1973) and page 10-56 “Heat Transmission by Radiation”. The thermal absorption and emission by Carbon Dioxide, water vapor, and several other gases is discussed there and through page 10-59. Perry’s pertains to the design of fired furnaces, in which fossil fuels are burned. Therefore the charts and graphs contain information for those conditions, not the relatively cold temperatures and very low (ppm) concentrations of CO2 found in the atmosphere. I would hope that this removes any doubt about CO2 absorbing and emitting radiant energy. Engineers must account for this fact when designing fired heaters. It is also a fact that there are hundreds of millions of fired heaters operating around the world, many operating continuously. This is not new, as fired heaters have been operating for more than a century.
In my current profession (lawyer), it would be negligence at the least, and professional malpractice at the worst, for an engineering design firm to NOT account for the absorptive and radiative properties of CO2 in their furnace design, if that badly-designed furnace caused injury or property damage.
I prefer to use “skeptics” as a shorthand for “fake skeptics”. Because they aren’t skeptical, they are just against it, and they cheer their own side on, no matter what.
Which happens on both sides of the line. So why not drop all such terminology? Simply either respond to or ignore the irrational religion nuts on both sides. I am stupid and usually will argue with them, but I if I call them names I do so individually and I try not to do even that. For example, one person participating in the thread is clearly just such a person, a bit of a crank or quack, but out of respect I’m not using derogatory language to describe them or explicitly identify them.
Also, bear in mind that just because people don’t agree with you — no matter how vehemently you believe your own arguments — doesn’t make them wrong, or you right. I know it is frustrating at times when you really understand something very clearly and they either don’t or don’t seem to see or agree how it fits into the puzzle. But bear in mind that climate is not simple! It is rather complex. There is a lot of room for people to agree on the basic physics but disagree on how it all works out because some parts of the basic physics are represented by empirically fit parameters in a model built on certain assumptions, and the assumptions might not be true, or the model might leave something out, in such a way that with those parameters it fits the past but still fails to predict the future.
In fact, it’s pretty easy for that to be the case for really complex phenomena. That’s why we consider them to be complex. Understanding planetary orbits — easy. Understanding Poincare cycles in a ten or twenty dimensional dynamical space — not so easy.
rgb
Henry@Robert the duke
Again you go hiding in words, not answering the question that I posed to you. It seems biology is not on your list of credentials?
Just to refresh you, the question was::
As far as I know, there are no measurements showing how much cooling is caused by the CO2 by taking part in the life cycle…. That being the case, please let us know how you can be so sure that the net effect of more CO2 is that of warming rather than cooling?
For the car buffs out there, consider that the hot exhaust pipe on a 1969 Chevelle Malibu (big, V8 engine muscle car) is so hot that radiant heat impinges on the adjacent starter motor and causes premature failure.
Beautiful example, perfectly presented. I would bet you are a hell of a lawyer, sir.
Now I really have to go. See you all — well, not exactly, but you get what I mean — sometime this evening.
rgb
(Grumble, blog might as well be crack cocaine…. grumble)
beng says:
June 24, 2012 at 7:11 am
Well, the hole does prove warming. …I was going to write more, but figured it was a waste of time.
=======================================================
Yes, it was a waste of time.
I specifically asked for “a scientific physical experiment proving CO2 warming, more exactly, proving that 200-300 ppm CO2 in the air (1 molecule from 3300-5000 molecules) cause (according to the AGW concept) 7 degrees rise in temperature“. It is very clear.
What you warmists present is your understanding or your version of how CO2 must cause warming, but no real experiment. The AGW hypothesis is 160 years old and was based on misunderstanding, that is why they use the term “greenhouse effect”, and if you look for experiments supporting it you can find only fakes or unrelated stuff.
Robert Brown; 8.07am: Don’t get me wrong – there is a GHE because higher optical depth in the IR imposes a significant impedance to IR transmission to space. However, climate science’s claim that it’s 33 K is bunkum because ~24 K is from gravitational potential energy – lapse rate.
And as for people like Lindzen claiming it would be ~80 K without convection, there’s a serious problem because the IPCC ‘consensus’ IR physics is wrong. This is proved by Nahle’s Mylar balloon experiment; just because IR is absorbed does not mean it is directly thermalised!
What’s more, I object to the use of the two-stream approximation and the IPCC’s claim that IR UP at the earth’s surface is the black body level in a vacuum. It’s because I spent quite a long time with others doing practical measurements of combined conduction, convection and radiation in metallurgical plants, I know for a fact that with natural convection from horizontal ~0.9 emissivity plates [steel off a rolling mill], you need >~100 °C before radiation dominates. For aluminium it’s >~300 °C. You can check this out in heat transfer handbooks like McAdams.
As we made two colour pyrometers from components, I also object to the subject-wide failure to understand that pyrgeometers cannot measure real radiant energy flux. The problem is Houghton’s claims include black body radiation from the lower atmosphere in LTE and the two-stream model. These have conditioned others into making serious mistakes. This has led to the perpetual motion machine in the climate models and the simply stupid predictions of future warming when for CO2, self-absorption sets in at ~200 ppmV, so no CO2-AGW is apparently possible. Hottell charts have been used for 60 years to design metallurgical processes.
The main GHG is water vapour. The near instantaneous emission of the same quantum from a thermally-excited GHG molecule, about 5% of CO2 at RT means. LTE is restored. So the GHE is probably GHGs transferring energy by pseudo-scattering to heterogeneities, clouds, and space!
[This is a different mindset to expose poor physics in the climate models, chosen to maximise the political effect of the ‘projections’, nothing to do with objective science which accepts a small, constant GHE and moves on to real problems.]
By the way – thank you Dr Brown and all the other physicists, engineers, and all the other people contributing to my education here … and thank you Anthony Watts. I find I turn the television off and check your blog to see what I might learn each day. Good to see all ideas being brought forward and discussed. It makes sure you turn your brain on while you read. Thanks to all.
I think we’re seeing now how capital goes on strike. The true believers, having capture a political party via alliance, are coercing as much investment as they can into “renewables” and “sustainables” (ie payoffs to the complicit on the way to bankruptcy court).
Real investment in energy, which, as you have outlined (see Chiefio’s blog if you’ve a mind to, but set aside some time for serious reading ) is clearly profitable and problem solving, has slowed except in a few pockets temporarily remote from federal control.
Investors are now punishing the worst of the European offenders.
Having used up the surplus of the magnificent post WWII expansion of capitalism in an orgy of progressive conspicuous compassion, we have now have a system that is brittle again. Can we bend or must we break.
That a liberal jurisdiction in Ca. would vote for modest pension reform is a hopeful sign, as was Wisconsin. Note that fiscal sanity does not require a libertarian revolution — a wide range of governments is possible inside an economy allocating20-25% to a public sector.
But the energy sector is most worrisome … its hard to imagine a quicker way to cause chaos in a modern society than to eliminate the reliability of the grid and the wide availability of fuels at plausable prices.
And even health care does not posses the potential for social control that control of energy does.
The opposite of “Climate Deniers” May be Energy Holocost Enablers”,
and that is worrisome indeed.
You explained the CO2 “hole” very well. Can we also see the H2O hole, the CH4 hole, etc and thus quantify what is going on?
To some extent. CH4 is pretty much ignorable at this point IIRC — a stronger GHG but only there in trace amounts, quickly broken down into CO_2 and H2O. Water is the big problem, because its effect is enormously variable. As vapor it is (mostly, usually) net warming. As tropical or temperate clouds it is strongly net cooling (albedo increase trumps GHE). As polar clouds it is usually net warming. But wet air has a different ALR than dry air, wet air contains a lot of enthalpy that dry air does not, wet and dry air self-organize into precipitation structures, those structures have a significant effect on cooling or warming efficiency, and then there are the decadal oscillations changing everything around every decade or three or four (while the Sun is tap-tap-tapping on the system with solar cycle variations and the ocean warms or cools and participates in delayed differential heat transfer). So it isn’t very easy to predict or measure what water vapor does or will do, even on average.
A single example — NASA has measured a 10% drop in water vapor in the stratosphere over the last five or six years. Why did this happen? Back of the envelope estimates suggest that this might be responsible for as much as 0.5C net cooling, if it persists — it thins the optical barrier to outgoing radiation, dropping the “greenhouse ceiling” as it were. But since we don’t know why it happened, we can’t predict when or if it might go away or start again.
This is the sort of thing that is at the heart of my skepticism. One single neglected effect like this could completely negate the warming from CO_2 doubling alone, and we have nothing but empirical observation to tell us when a neglected effect becomes important.
This is what the the CAGW enthusiasts fail to accommodate, at least in “public” (I think they do it pretty well in private) — acknowledge how much one can doubt the completeness and correctness of their premises before publishing phony numbers like “90% likely” to see 3 C warming. That’s “90% likely if the following propositions are all true” in a proper Bayesian exposition. But what are the probabilities that those propositions are themselves complete and true? I’m betting that it is a lot less than 100%, or that this is quantitatively taken into account in the 90%.
That’s why CAGW fails so many common sense checks from non-experts. Non-experts routinely rely on their own admission of ignorance, where experts equally routinely overestimate the reliability of their own knowledge. This is a measurable phenomenon, and is addressed in some detail in Taleb’s book The Black Swan. But it is ultimately just Bayes theorem.
rgb
Wayne Delbeke;
But if Robert Brown or anyone else has a simple answer on how CO2 is so much more powerful than water vapour, I would really appreciate it.>>>
The position of the climate modeling community runs something like this:
Water vapour is the dominant GHG. Doubling of CO2 would increase temps by only a single degree (while water vapour is many times that). The logic from there is that the rise of a single degree would raise the maximum amount of water vapour that the atmosphere could hold. (Given that you are an engineer, I’m sure you are familiar with the Engineer’s Toolbox which is online and has a nice graph depicting max water vapour content in air versus temperature). The models then go on to assume that the rise in temperature results in a rise in water vapour which Inresults in a rise of another 2 to 4 degrees over and above the original 1 degree from CO2.
That’s the basics of their theory, I have any number of objections to it:
1. Just because the air CAN hold more water vapour doesn’t mean that it WILL hold more water vapour. The atmospheric water vapour content is not maxed out at the current temperature, there is no reason to believe that it would at a higher temperature.
2. The conditions for such a positive feedback cycle appear to have been present in the past according to the geological record, and no such positive feedback loop appeared.
3. They presume that this amount of warming would be catastrophic. While I seriously doubt that CO2 doubling would cause that much warming, I also seriously doubt that is that amount of warming occurred that it would be catastrophic. The warming would be most pronounced at the coldest temperatures and least pronounced at the warmist temperatures (SB Law being that P varies with T^4) and the geological record clearly shows that the earth’s biosphere was most vigorous at higher temps than we have today. In fact, greenhouse operators pump massive amounts of CO2 into their greenhouses because of the huge positive impact it has on production, suggesting that plants evolved in much higher CO2 concentrations and the levels we have today are abnormally low from an evolutionary timeline perspective.
4. The presentation of the model results are frequently predicated upon CO2 doubling = +3.7 w/m2 which I actually believe to be reasonably fair. Then the predictions start, and they play the game of beginning with pre-industrial CO2 levels at 278 ppm while at the same time glossing over the meaning of “CO2 doubling” which is their admission that the effects of CO2 doubling are logarithmic. This is a double case of misdirection. For starters, we aren’t at 278 ppm and haven’t been for about a century. We’re very close to 400 ppm today, so if we’re going to talk about the effects of CO2 doubling, let’s start with today. To double from TODAY to get another 3.7 w/m2 from CO2 we’d need (at present rates of increase) around another 200 years to get that additional one degree.
Hope that helps… and keep in mind that I’ve simplified their argument as well as my criticisms of it for the sake of brevity (or in my case, what passes for brevity)
“As far as I know, there are no measurements showing how much cooling is caused by the CO2 by taking part in the life cycle…. That being the case, please let us know how you can be so sure that the net effect of more CO2 is that of warming rather than cooling?”
Maybe there is: Looking at the glacial periods and the interglacial periods where CO_2 rose following the glacial period, it may be that the increase in CO_2 in promoting vegetation was responsible for the interglacial to end by accelerating a cooler surface with ever increasing vegetation. Why the glacial period ended is a separate mechanism.
Thank you, Dr. Brown! And you, sir, are one hell of a physicist with a rare ability to clearly explain complex issues.
Robert Sowell: 9.39 am. You refer to Perry. Mine is a bit later but what you MUST realise is that the Hottell Diagrams used to predict emissivity and absorptivity of GHGs in furnace gases are based on the partial pressure.physical optical path length. He used Bar.cm.
The absolutely key deduction to this is that for an infinite physical optical path length, the partial pressure at which the emissivity/absorptivity levels off is ~200 ppmV.. This is the guy who worked it out; tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/agw-an-alternate-look-part-1-details-c.pdf
Assuming he is correct, self absorption for the two narrow IR bands of CO2 means it cannot produce significant CO2-AGW. This claim is based on phoney, phake, phallacious, phantasy physics in the IPCC climate models from physicists and others who should have known better!
Robert Brown says:
June 24, 2012 at 8:07 am
mydogsgotnonose says:
June 24, 2012 at 1:45 am
“Sorry George E Smith, there are engineers like me who can easily show why electromagnetic radiation cannot transfer energy to a warmer body contrary to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
There is a glaring hole in the understanding of most physicists.”
Robert Brown says:
June 24, 2012 at 8:07 am
“Look, don’t think of it as transferring energy to a warmer body. That’s where everybody gets mentally screwed up. Think of it as slowing down the cooling of a warmer body.”
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Yeah, just rename it and everything will be just fine.
Robert, just prove that the cooling of a warmer body can be slowed down by transferring energy to this warmer body from a colder body without external work. In our case it would be transferring energy by radiation.
Is there any genuine experiment proving that?
Roger Sowell says:
June 24, 2012 at 9:39 am
The engineers on this blog should also know this. The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to net heat transferred. …….the colder body does not warm the warmer body…,.
Thermodynamics is a bit more dynamic than that, and yet invariably, even among the scientifically literate it gets invoked in these discussions to support this simplistic statement. The refrigeration cyle does just that, it takes even more heat out of the cold cabinet an vents it to the warm surroundings. A “heat pump” can pull heat out of the arctic ocean to warm your tent and warmer body. One has to be precise concerning the conditions of the system in bandying about the laws of thermodynamics.
Robert Brown says:
June 24, 2012 at 8:07 am
If you wrapped your hand in a space blanket, it immediately got warm. A lot warm. You could feel your own radiated heat being trapped, unable to escape to “infinity”
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No Robert, it is just your imagination telling you that. You need to prove first, that this is “radiated” heat and “conducted” heat. Because your body warms the air around it by contact. You guys have managed to make heat transfer by contact somehow disappear.
Sorry, I meant “You need to prove first, that this is “radiated” heat and NOT “conducted” heat”.
copy of letter sent to the editor last week (no reponse so far)
“Dear Sirs,
I have recently read your article :- [ title of work with link ] As far as I can understand from the content, the writers have explicitly used terminology that I would have expected of the tabloid press but not of such an article in such a journal as yours, I look to your Journal and others as a source of highly critiqued and informed comment to allow myself to form an opinion based on fact.
I do not accept that the authors use of the word `denier` is correct or informative, in fact it appears to be the opposite. By way of an example , although I read on the subject extensively I can not yet accept a premise that humankind is responsible for global warming due to the many and varied scientific reports that do not support this theory.
I do understand and support the premise that the earth does undergo continual climate change and that the global climate may be warming and that sea level may also be rising.
As you may appreciate, based on my understanding immediately above I very strongly disagree with being called a “denier” the word is wrong and inaccurate and has too many unacceptable connotations to be used in your journal, it should not be used to label myself nor any other groups or peoples who have an interest in the facts of science. as it is only through facts that we may come to some agreed acceptable understanding regarding a science still in its infancy.
The Solvay conference can be taken as an example of how to conduct and discuss matters of great importance.
I hope you may be able in some way to repair to, and maintain the high standards you are capable of.
Yours Faithfully”
I guess I`m not going to receive a reply
Robert Brown says:
June 24, 2012 at 8:07 am
Furthermore, many of the “random walk” pathways of radiative diffusion through a dense collection of scatterers lead back to “the ground” — this is why a fog or the inside of a cloud “glows” somewhat in all directions. You cannot even see a source like the sun through a cloud — you just see the whole cloud, lit up diffusively.
Same applies to dust storms — I have some great shots of orange air from Iraq.
However, the diffused light effect depends on how much of the cloud (or fog, or dust) is between you and the sun. I’ve been in noontime clouds so dark I’ve had to turn the instrument lights on and in a shamal (while on the ground) so thick I couldn’t see a halogen security light fifteen feet away.
Greg House says:
June 24, 2012 at 10:27 am
No Robert, it is just your imagination telling you that. You need to prove first, that this is “radiated” heat and “conducted” heat. Because your body warms the air around it by contact. You guys have managed to make heat transfer by contact somehow disappear.
Department of anecdotal evidence: I’ve used space blankets a lot (they’re standard military survival gear) and you can feel the warmth from a blanket held a few inches away just as fast as you feel the warmth from one almost touching your skin. I’m not a physicist (nor have I ever been to a Holiday Inn Express), but logic would dictate that I couldn’t have warmed several cubic feet of air by convection fast enough for me to have noticed how rapidly I *did* get warm with the blanket offset from my bod.
And, as I said, anecdotal — your mileage may vary.
Dr. Brown, “This is the sort of thing that is at the heart of my skepticism. One single neglected effect like this could completely negate the warming from CO_2 doubling alone, and we have nothing but empirical observation to tell us when a neglected effect becomes important.”
Wouldn’t it also be true that one single neglected effect could double or triple the warming from CO_2 doubling alone? It seems apparent you give more weight to the possibility of a negating effect. Why?