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.
Dr. Brown, I enjoyed your illustration of one powerful way to present part of the big picture.
In passing, you happened to get into a topic which I’ve been interested in recently.
Dr. Robert Brown said:
“There isn’t a shred of evidence for a significantly warmer third stable phase for the Earth — not in the geological record — to which the climate can devolve through a “tipping point”. There is ample evidence of a much colder second phase that is in fact the dominant phase, much more likely and stable than the current interglacial.”
“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 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.”
Indeed, the Maunder Minimum ended 3 centuries ago, after starting 367 or so years ago.
Dr. Abdussamatov has remarked on there being 18 events like the Maunder Minimum in the past 7500 years and them seeming to occur 4 centuries apart. Four centuries after the last such event started in 1645, the namesake Maunder Minimum, would be this century.
That would fit if the unusual changes in solar activity we are starting to see recently are because we are for the first time observing the precursors to a Maunder Minimum type event with modern instruments. Dr. Abdussamatov makes predictions in his paper at
http://http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/view/14754
Aside from debatable details, I wonder if he may have figured out a valid basic pattern. In his scenario, there could be cooling after the current solar cycle peaks, from 2014 onwards (although personally I figure climate is extra hard to predict at time resolution detail comparable to the ENSO ocean oscillation period and thus would be hesitant to be that specific), culminating over decades in a transition into a full Maunder Minimum type event and into the next Little Ice Age starting around the middle of this century.
So, in that context, possibly combine with the overall trend since the Holocene Climate Optimum of LIA-like events tending to be increasingly colder each time they occur. Others have noted the same trend, down to the increasingly greater cold dips in one estimate of historical temperatures over the past few thousand years here:
http://www.timingsolution.com/TS/Links/global_temerature.jpg
That raises a hypothetical of if (1) we could enter another Little Ice Age by the middle of this century, and (2) if so, if such might perhaps even be colder than the last LIA and the last Bond Event.
Of course, the prior extrapolation from history is not an outright proof of even (1) happening as predicted, even under judgment of limited forcing from GHG emissions as in
http://www.sciencebits.com/OnClimateSensitivity
However, I’m speaking of hypotheticals, of possibilities.
Personally I’m getting increasingly interested in the uncertain possibility of a scenario even beyond that: (3) such a LIA transforming into the end of this interglacial, as in enough growth of reflective snowcover to trigger the big transition (if that is how a cold phase transition tends to be triggered — another complex question), although not coming to any conclusion or any exact judgment of odds, since (1)->(2)->(3) would depend on a lot more than (1)->(2) alone.
Some think this interglacial, already 11700 years old, is due to end soon. I am guessing that, if this interglacial does end within, say, the next one or two thousand years, the big transition would start during one of the Maunder Minimum-like cold dips. Under that assumption (guess), with Maunder Minimum events 4 centuries apart, if a cold phase transition doesn’t start later in this 21st century, it wouldn’t before the next chance in the 25th century or later. Conversely, though, under that logic, this century may be a time of particular chance for entering a cold phase transition. Of course, reading so far highlights complexities, as in the length of past interglacials not being constant, what level of solar isolation they end at also not being constant, different authors reaching contradictory conclusions, and so on.
I know the following is something you just said in passing as part of a broader comment on a hypothetical, but it does raise a question:
[a] “cold phase transition would kill billions of people, quite rapidly, as crops failed throughout the temperate breadbasket of the world”
I would be curious what temperature drop rate per unit time you are implicitly thinking of as a hypothetical possibility. I don’t mean a still more multi-disciplinary matter of any attempt to try to estimate human food production exactly (with all sorts of extra complications there for nature versus human efforts at countermeasures) but just the climatogical matter itself, as in approximate degrees Celsius change over roughly around so-and-so decades. I’ve heard figures for the Younger Dryas onset, but some think that could have been due to an unusual event, maybe even a comet impact. A question would be what is the typical speed of an end to an interglacial period, a cold phase transition, if one occurs. Common graphs tend to be too zoomed out on that scale.
Of course, I have no right to presume on your time but was curious, and it might be interest to other readers too.
2nd Law: a colder body cannot transfer heat energy to a warmer body without the expenditure of external energy. Thus a refrigerator has to be powered by an electric motor/compressor or a gas flame warming a reservoir externally to pressurise the working fluid .
So, there can be no ‘back radiation’ as claimed by the climate science ‘consensus’. That claim is behind the IPCC ‘Energy Budget’. The ‘back radiation’ assumed to be from the lower atmosphere at 3.7 °C with an emissivity of unity is supposed to add to the small IR from the Earth’s surface to make up black body radiation of 396 W/m^2, S-B for 16 °C [2009 version].
This is a ‘Perpetual Motion Machine of the 2nd Kind’, defined as spontaneously converting thermal energy into mechanical work, the expansion of the lower atmosphere..It does not and cannot exist.
Take away the ‘back radiation’ and all the inputs and outputs add up correctly. The DOWN 333 W/m^2 is apparently made up of an imaginary 238.5 W/,^ DOWN at TOA from assuming incorrectly that Kirchhoff’s Law of Radiation applies at TOA. Where does the missing 94.5 W/m^2 come from? Is it the same place as the 0/9 W/m^2 supposed to be retained in the oceans – so-called abyssal warming for which there is only one possible cause, the melting of the ice caps at the end of ice ages!
These are the same people who imagine the high surface temperature of Venus is from the mainly CO2 atmosphere when that exactly corresponds to lapse rate warming and a hot planet surface on day and night parts! I could be wrong and the IPCC could be right, in a parallel universe, just not ours……
Dr. Brown, to go along with my last comment, you talk of “…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.”
Wouldn’t these “huge (by comparison with the present) secular variations in temperature” hint that unknown effects are more likely to increase temperature changes instead of negate?
oldfossil says:
June 23, 2012 at 2:04 pm
“I ask the following question not in order to debunk the previous comments, but in all sincerity. How does the extreme weather of the past decade fit into this? Floods, hurricanes, melting of polar ice sheets? This needs a good answer because it’s the first challenge that a CAGW supporter is going to throw at you.”
For some brief illustrations:
The following, actually NASA as you can see, shows the arctic beyond more common portrayals of only the past 30-40 years:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif
Look very closely at it, especially how the late 1930s compared to the end of the 20th century. I love that graph because (1) it disarms how CAGW supporters like to dismiss anything not of relative appeal to authority, as it is NASA, turning their own tactics back on them (2) it speaks volumes. Keep in mind CO2 went up continuously over the whole period. Also keep in mind the Arctic is where there has been the most warming, the relative linchpin.
Recent “global warming” has been rather small outside of the upper northern hemisphere, outside of the Arctic. For instance, in the following for satellite data by zone for 1979-2012, there is roughly on the order of maybe 0.1 degrees Celsius meaningful temperature rise over that period beyond the oscillations in the tropics, as can be seen looking at the graph:
http://climate4you.com/images/MSU%20UAH%20TropicsAndExtratropicsMonthlyTempSince1979%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
That contrasts to how the 5-year average of arctic temperature went up by 0.7 degrees 1979-2000 in http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/NASAarctic_temp_trends_rt.jpg
… which is a better-labeled version of the prior NASA graph.
Again compare to the 1930s.
For more on arctic ice:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/02/cache-of-historical-arctic-sea-ice-maps-discovered/
As for hurricanes, see this from Dr. Maue of Florida State University for historical global hurricane frequency:
http://policlimate.com/tropical/global_major_freq.png
For the U.S. in particular, also see:
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/hurricanes_making_landfall_in_the_us_vs_decade1.png
which is a graphical plot of NOAA government data at
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml
Regarding floods and beyond:
CAGW supporters sometimes claim global warming causes increased precipitation (floods) and sometimes claim that it causes decreased precipitation (expansion of deserts). Notice how the effects claimed are supposedly negative either way. But a bit of average temperature rise is somewhat like one moving closer to the equator, something that one can rather readily see has a mixture of positive effects as well as negative effects. In fact, a litmus test for honesty of media presentations of hypothetical global warming effects is whether they imply such would be only negative.
For floods and in fact many other potential topics, one reference list is here:
http://co2science.org/subject/subject.php
From there, for example, one finds:
http://co2science.org/articles/V9/N17/C2.php
Also, aside from those topics, see this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/11/does-co2-correlate-with-temperature-history-a-look-at-multiple-timescales-in-the-context-of-the-shakun-et-al-paper/
@ur momisugly Gary Pearse on June 24, 2012 at 10:25 am,
“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.”
Gary, the topic of atmospheric cooling/warming and surface of the Earth cooling/warming is not analogous to a heat pump. There is no external mechanical work being input into the system, such as is required for a heat pump. (for a primer on heat pumps, the wikipedia is not bad…. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump )
In fact, on the night-side of the planet, there is no heat input from the Sun. The Laws of Thermodynamics apply there, too. The cooler body will impede the rate of cooling of the warmer body.
A better challenge, and this is to you, is to construct an experiment to disprove that assertion.
I should warn you, though, that an annealing oven in cooling mode is proof positive that cooler bodies DO impede (slow down) the rate of cooling of a warmer body. Every time. No magic, no violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics. Energy is conserved. Heat flows from hot to cold.
Standing ovation Dr. Brown; I don’t think it’s possible to make the case any plainer than that.
Thank you.
[SNIP: Your first time commenting and you are ignorant and rude. Good start. Check out site policy here, then if you have anything substantive to contribute you can get your comment approved. -REP]
hightflight – some dumb number says
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.
Henry says
Interesting comment. But I guess there is one too many may-be’s in that sentence? You seem to be sure. Do you have more proof? I know earth has currently entered a cooling phase.
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
But I am not too worried about us falling into an ice age. Remember the ice age trap is caused by more snow and ice deflecting light (energy) away from earth. Current technology can help us overcome such problems –
one of the solutions proposed would be to cover the snow and ice sheets with – would you believe it – CARBON dust, to stop the deflection of light and energy.
Many thanks to Dr. Brown for an excellent post and subsequent comments… and thanks to Anthony, as always, for bringing it to us!
However, I fear the the “d-word” has distracted us from the “meat” of Dr. Bain’s paper. He seems to want to “frame” a proposed action as something other than the “real” intent and effect. He seems to want to “frame” an action as favoring “warmth” (he doesn’t mean temperature, but “friendliness”) or as favoring “development”. Unless I misunderstand his use of the word “frame”… he advocates lying to us!
Sorry to have left this comment for so late in the discussion.
@ur momisugly Gary Pearse on June 24, 2012 at 10:25 am,
“The refrigeration cycle does just that, it takes even more heat out of the cold cabinet an vents it to the warm surroundings.”
And if you leave your fridge door open, your kitchen warms, not cools.
Greg House;
You need to prove first, that this is “radiated” heat and “conducted” heat. Because your body warms the air around it by contact.>>>>>>>>>>>>>
If that were the case, then ANY material that prevented air flow would have the exact same effect, but it doesn’t. Further, the materials that are used for “space blankets” have proven very effective as insulation in satellite and other equipment that operates in a vacuum where the possibility that conduction is the dominant factor is pretty much zero.
Need further proof that a hotter object can absorb energy from a colder one?
Take 3 objects in local thermodynamic equilibrium with a vacuum separating them;
So the only method of heat transfer is by radiation
(Remember absorption of a photon by a particular molecule is a Micro event)
A one at 270K
B one at 300K
C one at 330K
All three will include 10um radiation within their Planck spectrum
All agree that B can accept a 10um photon from C.
Some however think that B will reject an identical 10um photon from A
This makes no logical sense.
B cannot distinguish between the 10um photons from A and C.
Photons are also Bosons that is particles which are indistinguishable.
There are many more photons from C being absorbed by A and B
However remember radiation is not heat.
The excess flux of photons will constitute a Heat transfer and is a Macro event.
Heat transfer is from C to both B and A as you would expect from the Second LoT.
The Cargo Cult Science link was interesting.
I would sugest as similar
Hayek’s Nobel Prize Lecture “The Pretence of Knowledge”
Which in addition adresses something that Feynman missed
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html
Some areas of valuable inquiry are not and can not ever be science.
Even applying scientific methods to problems that are not rooted in physics and mathematics will not produce meaningful results.
davidmhoffer says:
June 24, 2012 at 12:54 pm
If that were the case, then ANY material that prevented air flow would have the exact same effect, but it doesn’t. Further, the materials that are used for “space blankets” have proven very effective as insulation in satellite and other equipment that operates in a vacuum where the possibility that conduction is the dominant factor is pretty much zero.
===================================================
The problem with the moderate warmists is, that they confuse providing an (wrong) analogy or an illustration of their ideas with providing the proof, that their ideas are scientifically correct. Sad. You guys really need to understand the existence of this problem and start question things, seriously question. Radical (political) warmists do not need to do that, I am sure they know that the whole AGW thing is a complete bull***t.
Of course, if there is is no gas, then there is neither conduction nor convection, only radiation. If there is gas, then there are conduction and convection and radiation. These are 2 different cases.
Besides, there is a question, whether the “back radiation” can warm at all and the next question is, if it can, whether it is significant or insignificant.
Many different issues, but a warmist is satisfied with the blanket example. Sad.
Bryan says:
June 24, 2012 at 1:20 pm
Need further proof that a hotter object can absorb energy from a colder one?…
This makes no logical sense.
================================================
The 2nd law did not make logical sense either, until people made experiments.
Can you present a real genuine experiment?
Greg House;
Many different issues, but a warmist is satisfied with the blanket example. Sad.>>>>
1. I am not a warmist.
2. I was pretty certain that my example would fall on deaf ears (or blind eyes as the case may be) but I did consider briefly that the problem with the ears had to do with a local vacuum.
3. Consider Bryan’s ABC example above. That’s pretty hard to argue with. But I’m sure you will.
4. What is truly sad is that there is SO much wrong with the CAGW meme that is easily debunked, yet we spend an inordinate amount of time on this issue instead.
CRISP says:
June 23, 2012 at 9:52 pm
“Those on this site (including Anthony who I otherwise admire for his sterling fortitude and courage) should provide some hard evidence and sound physical theory to show there even is a Greenhouse Effect.”
If I interpret you correctly, you are suggesting skeptics could or should argue there is outright zero warming effect from greenhouse gases. But that isn’t the right strategy, not being so.
We are probably in agreement on the big picture of opposing the CAGW movement. Let me just try to help you and any readers see what is not bulletproof and what you want to avoid in favor of more battlehardened arguments.
Consider Venus. Really part of the reason that Venus is quite so hot is because its orbit closer to the sun results in double the watts of solar radiation coming in per unit area, compared to Earth. But both the mass and the composition of its atmosphere also matter. Its atmosphere masses around 90 times the mass of Earth’s atmosphere. Pretend we magically removed almost all of the Venus atmosphere, so only 0.00000-something atm was left as a minuscule trace instead of around 90 atm. Would that reduce the average equilibrium temperature of the Venus surface? Yes. After all, we can tell that even by just comparison with Mercury, closer to the sun but lacking an atmosphere.
(Mercury has less average temperature than Venus, e.g. http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Mercury&Display=Facts versus http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Venus&Display=Facts&System=Metric ).
Now we magically add back the Venus atmosphere. We are taking it from a Mercury-like trace-insignificant atmosphere back to a thick atmosphere again. Are we causing the average equilibrium temperature of the surface to increase compared to how it was when airless? Yes. We are not warming it necessarily directly. However, heat transfer fundamentally from the super-hot sun, via sunlight, is doing so in the end.
Now suppose Venus had a 1 atm atmosphere. We increase its atmosphere by 0.0001%. Do we cause the equilibrium temperature of the surface to increase by a non-zero amount, however small? Yes.
Would that, fundamentally fueled by the heat transfer from the hot sun to the less-hot planet, violate the second law of thermodynamics? No.
CRISP says:
June 23, 2012 at 9:52 pm
“Either the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is right or Greenhouse Theory is right. Not both, It is impossible. You CANNOT transfer heat from a cold body to a warmer body without doing work. No amount of so-called ‘back-radiation’ from a cold upper atmosphere to a warmer earth and ocean surface will do anything to the temperatures of the latter. “
Net heat transfer is always from a really hot object, the Sun, to a less-hot planet. A colder substance surrounding an object (such as the atmosphere surrounding a planet) can influence equilibrium temperature, though.
Let’s do a thought experiment to illustrate something about the 2nd law. Pretend you have a super, super intense spotlight or laser, so intense that the warmth of the beam if you wave a hand in front is quite noticeable. You have a beachball also in the room. You are continuously pumping water nearly ice cold through a thin transparent water tank. You put a sheet of aluminum foil in the tank, so it stops the beam from the spotlight which would otherwise pass through the water tank to hit the beachball.
Now you remove the sheet of opaque aluminum foil. Does the surface temperature of the beachball increase by a non-zero amount? Yes.
We just changed the composition of a cold object (the interior of the water tank), and, by doing so, increased the equilibrium temperature of a warmer object (the beachball which is more like room temperature or above). We didn’t violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics in the process. What is really warming the beachball, where the net heat transfer is coming from, is the spotlight (the analogy of the sun).
But see my comment to Myrrh below, on other, better ways to argue against CAGW.
Myrrh says:
June 23, 2012 at 5:09 pm
“By all means tell the CAGW crowd that you’re of the same AGW belief system, but have a difference of doctrine about how much warming from CO2, just quit pretending you’re skeptics.”
I know, like the past quote, you were talking to someone else. However, there’s a different perspective from which this matter can be approached and how to argue these topics.
Before talking directly about temperature effect from CO2, let’s do an example with hurricanes.
If asked about the CAGW movement implying a terrible trend there, someone could try to argue that there has been absolutely zero effect from human emissions on hurricane rates, but that would be a foolish argument. Even worse than taking forever to prove, it’d be impossible. However, I just show such as this graph:
http://policlimate.com/tropical/global_major_freq.png
Its implicit upper limit on effects blows hurricane claims out of the water, as seeing a slight decline (not skyrocketing increase) in hurricane frequency over the past couple decades does not generate the fear of catastrophic global warming that the agenda of the CAGW movement depends upon. You don’t need to prove a technicality, a zero. You just need to show an upper limit.
You can do similar on CAGW-movement claims about tornadoes, droughts, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, hypercanes, mosquitoes, sea level rise, etc. showing the pattern of BS.
For instance, I wrote a mini-essay in my May 1, 2012 7:22pm comment and later at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/30/why-climate-science-is-a-textbook-example-of-groupthink/
I won’t reproduce its length here, but, actually, as an example of one point:
Average sea level rise rates in the second half 20th century were no more than about those in the first half of the 20th century or even in the late 19th century, since the end of the Little Ice Age, despite how human emissions rose more than a factor of 10 over that period:
http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Holgate/sealevel_change_poster_holgate.pdf
Even the IPCC’s sea level rise rate graph (in the 2007 report IIRC) is rather similar to that in the above link if one looks closely, although they try hard to keep you from noticing; in fact, the low end of their estimate range for predictions of sea level rise over the 21st century by the year 2100 A.D. is merely comparable to the few inches in the 20th century, despite vast differences in human emissions.
For temperature itself, you can show the upper limit on manmade temperature effect is small.
Do I believe in AGW? Technically yes. In fact, I believe if I throw a black garbage bag on my lawn, it slightly warms my backyard (albedo change), and, although obviously not much compared to the Earth’s 500 trillion square meter area, it *technically* warms the planet. I could not say otherwise with complete truth. Nobody will ever show mankind has zero effect.
The few terawatts of waste heat from our power usage, such as 2 TW average electrical usage of global human civilization, are not much compared to the 170000 terawatts of solar energy intersecting Earth, but they are technically non-zero AGW. There is the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI), some temperature effects of agricultural land use change including irrigation, a little blackening of some surfaces (albedo change) from carbon soot, some cooling effect from human aerosol emissions, and some warming effect from GHG emissions, with a non-zero effect from such no more thermodynamically or physically impossible than the principle of http://www.google.com/search?q=radiant+foil+insulation even if a gas rather than a solid film.
But does that mean I believe in CAGW, as opposed to AGW in the “not catastrophic, small, and beneficial” sense? No. I don’t have binary thought.
The CAGW movement overall absolutely loves binary thought — black and white thinking — as in simply either CO2 has an effect or it doesn’t for the end of someone’s thought process in deciding which side is valid. That allows them to practically reduce the debate to “CO2 has a non-zero effect” *therefore you must believe* “.” They want you flailing against the first part rather than the effective *therefore* leap of logic which is their weakness.
That is the cardinal basis of their widely-reported 97% consensus figure from Doran & Zimmerman 2009, which asked two questions: (1) if global temperatures rose since the pre-1800s (2) if human activity has a significant effect.
The first question is a trick where the survey and every pro-CAGW site I’ve seen reporting it naturally or carefully maintains their standard level of (dis)honesty to the public by not mentioning that the pre-1800s were the latter part of the Little Ice Age, so of course even a skeptic scientist technically has to answer yes. For the second question, like skeptic Dr. Spencer noted in his response, he’d be forced to answer yes to both questions, because significant in a scientific sense means technically non-zero, and even species like trees have a non-zero effect on climate.
In the paper, passing peer review, the authors conclude the distribution of answers to those survey questions implies that debate on the “role played by human activity is largely nonexistent” amongst climate experts. *That* is their level of brilliance and intellect, their level of honesty, or a mixture of both.
Anyway, this is a bit like nuclear power topics. A majority of the groups which are the most hardcore foundation of the CAGW movement (like Greenpeace, the German Green Party, and so on) are also against nuclear power. Again, if someone has binary thought, they love it. They can easily point out that some manmade radioisotopes in nuclear waste have half-lives of millions of years and have technically non-zero radiation emissions even after that time. However, their intellectual nemesis is if people rise to informed quantitative thought, like this:
Since the fraction of a radioisotope’s atoms decaying per unit of time is inversely proportional to its half-life, the relative radioactivity of a quantity of buried human radioactive waste would diminish over time compared to natural radioisotopes (such as the decay chains of 120 trillion tons of thorium and 40 trillion tons of uranium which are at relatively trace concentrations of parts per million each over the crust’s 3 * 10^19 ton mass).[85][86][87] For instance, over a timeframe of thousands of years, after the most active short half-life radioisotopes decayed, burying U.S. nuclear waste would increase the radioactivity in the top 2000 feet of rock and soil in the United States (10 million km^2) by ≈ 1 part in 10 million over the cumulative amount of natural radioisotopes in such a volume, although the vicinity of the site would have a far higher concentration of artificial radioisotopes underground than such an average.[88]
We’re probably on the same overall side here, but I’m saying you make a mistake if you try to argue that CO2 has zero effect or that humans have zero effect, much like if someone tried to argue that human nuclear waste had zero radioactivity. Providing quantitative numbers, arguments, and context is what destroys the claims of these guys on CAGW, on nuclear power, on peak phosphorus, and within the rest of an ideological movement which for its hardcore leadership is often as fundamentally about aiming to enforce reduced energy consumption and reduced material consumption (a.k.a. deindustrialization) as in the specifics of each claim. The last phrases are a generalization, not applicable to every individual, but there is a lot of common thread.
Roger Sowell says (June 24, 2012 at 11:39 am): “A better challenge, and this is to you, is to construct an experiment to disprove that assertion.”
Dr. Roy Spencer described a suitable thought experiment here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
The “sky dragon slayers” replied here:
http://slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still
but didn’t actually perform the experiment. This is strange, because as I’ve written in WUWT comments before, the result they expect would overturn conventional physics, snare a Nobel Prize at minimum, and get them invited to all the best parties. 🙂 So again, I propose that the “No Virginia” people actually perform Dr. Spencer’s thought experiment and slay the threat of thermageddon forever.
Terry Oldberg says:
June 24, 2012 at 7:27 am
Technically, the IPCC climate models do not” predict.” They “project.” The two words reference different concepts.
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“Predict”. “Project”. The IPeCaC may have used “project” but they were actually predicting. Their predictions have been wrong. Call them “projections” if you want, but they’ve been wrong. Should the term “denier” be used in a scientific journal of someone who points that out?
Gunga Din:
In statistically testing a predictive model one compares the predicted to the observed relative frequencies of the outcomes of statistical events. If there is not a match, the model is falsified by the evidence. Otherwise, it is said to be “validated.” None of the IPCC climate models are susceptible to being falsified or validated in this way. As their claims are not falsifiable, none of these models merit the descriptor “scientific.”
While making no predictions, the IPCC models do make projections. The existence of projections supports the type of comparison that the IPCC calls an “evaluation.” In an IPCC-style “evaluation,” projected global surface temperatures are compared to a selected global surface temperature time series. This comparison does not, however, result in either the falsification of or validation of the associated model or models. Because we can neither falsifify nor validate them, these models are scientifically worthless. Confusion of “prediction” with “projection” and “validation” with “evaluation” serves to cover up this state of affairs.
John Brookes says: June 24, 2012 at 2:25 am
Yeah, they ain’t deniers. Its just that they don’t want to believe certain things, and no matter what you do or say, they insist on staying unconvinced. Is that a denier? Or is there another good word to describe this particular take on reality?
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.
John, if someone argued that 2 + 2 = 5, I would deny it no matter what you said or did. You can claim the reason I don’t believe 2 + 2= 5 is because I don’t want to believe that 2 + 2 = 5. However, my wanting to believe or not wanting to believe has nothing to do with reality. 2 + 2 isn’t 5 no matter what you or anyone else says or does. So your implication that someone is wrong because he/she doesn’t want to believe a claim is an extremely weak argument for the truth of what is being claimed.
@mydogsgotnonose
“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.”
Does not the existence of military and industrial lasers, in which a relatively low temperature lasing medium is used to generate electromagnetic energy, deposit it into targets, an heat them to the point that they melt, explode, or undergo nuclear fusion falsify this hypothesis? What have I missed here?
Joe
davidmhoffer says:
June 24, 2012 at 1:57 pm
What is truly sad is that there is SO much wrong with the CAGW meme that is easily debunked, yet we spend an inordinate amount of time on this issue instead.
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No, sad is both buying the scientifically unsupported AGW basics and not understanding, that those who did that have a very weak position and will lose any debate against an intelligent warmist. I am not going into details now, but I can give you a few conspicuous examples: many warmists think, that they have a valid argument with “the warming has stopped 12 years ago” or “there is no/weak correlation between warming and CO2”. These are not really valid arguments, although they can impress some people, you’d better forget it and focus on the basics.
Gary Hladik says:
June 24, 2012 at 2:24 pm
Roger Sowell says (June 24, 2012 at 11:39 am): “A better challenge, and this is to you, is to construct an experiment to disprove that assertion.”
Dr. Roy Spencer described a suitable thought experiment here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
The “sky dragon slayers” replied here:
http://slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still
but didn’t actually perform the experiment. This is strange,
=====================================================
I see. Roger Sowell asked for an experiment and you give him a “thought” experiment? (shock)
Why didn’t Roy Spencer made a real experiment, by the way?
****
Pamela Gray says:
June 24, 2012 at 8:26 am
beng, the physics in your closed experiment are not debated. But in nature, we have no such closed experiment. If what you say held sway in nature, we would be able to detect the resultant warming, but it appears we are unable to do that in its entirety and are wringing our hands in search of the missing heat. Have you found it?
****
Pamela, I’m just trying to establish the basics. One has to get these down first.
Now, certainly, others things come into play. Negative feedback is one. If higher temps from GHGs cause more clouds & raise albedo, that can cancel out some or even most of the effect. Also, higher temps could cause increased energy going into convection, which can bypass the GHG effect. As Willis has pointed out, the convection/Tstorm cycle can actually reduce temps from added thermal input. Natural variations/attractors may be powerful enough to dwarf effects of the current CO2 rise. In fact, from numerous previous simple and lately Willis E’s studies, the climate sensitivity is much lower than the standard IPCC positive-feedback-driven drivel. These lower sensitivities seem logical to me for plenty of reasons.
But I still think one has to get the basic foundations correct to build on. Not doing so leads to wrong conclusions & makes skeptics targets.