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.
It seems some one finally pissed off the wrong person. WOW I wish I could write this well. Very nicely said Dr. Brown.
Greg House says:
June 24, 2012 at 5:56 pm
The interesting question is, whether a colder stone can warm or slow down the cooling of a warmer stone by means of its own radiation without external work.
Any real experiments on this issue?
Joe Shaw says:
June 24, 2012 at 8:13 pm
As for an experiment, since we have been talking about lasers and stones, consider two stones in a vacuum chamber with cold walls that are initially in thermal equilibrium with the chamber. We now illuminate the stones with identical lasers… I confess that I have not actually run this experiment.
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So, no real genuine experiment on the issue? I thought so. Also nothing on other basic AGW issues. But let us not jump to conclusions yet. Maybe other warmists will present something.
davidmhoffer says:
June 24, 2012 at 7:58 pm
Greg House;
If you don’t understand how that experiment applies to the issue at hand,
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Consider my question “What do you think this experiment proves and how is it related to what I asked for?” I asked you earlier rhetorical.
I know that you brought unrelated stuff and you know that, too.
Greg House;
I know that you brought unrelated stuff and you know that, too.>>>>
Back your assertion up with a logical refutation.
You can’t. And you know that too.
Terry Oldberg says:
“Among the latter are those who suggest that we have nothing to fear from our CO2 emissions.”
We have nothing to fear from human CO2 emissions, which comprise only about 3% of global CO2 emisssions. The rest are natural. Please sit up straight and pay attention: CO2 has been much higher in the past, when the biosphere teemed with life.
For a little perspective, look at this chart. I know you mean well, but the fact is that a little more of that beneficial trace gas is not a problem. More, in fact, is better.
How hard is it to get your mind around the fact that the “carbon” scare is a money making scam? Your comments are always otherwise very reasonable. Please try to accept the fact that the increase in CO2 from 0.000285 to 0.000392 of the atmosphere is nothing but a normal blip in atmospheric variability, nothing more.
Otherwise, your posts are well worth reading, and make sense to me.
Smokey:
Thank you for taking the time to respond and for the kind words. While agreeing with you in certain respects, I must point out that identification of the associated statistical population is a must for you to be able to support your claim that we have nothing to fear from CO2 emissions. People on both sides of the issue have to get together in identifying this population.
Greg House says (June 24, 2012 at 6:18 pm): “So, no real genuine experiment is available, no link? Anyway, there was none in the Spencer’s article.
I guess, if there was one, he would simply include it in the article, right?
OK, let us not speculate, let us ask the warmists community: dear warmists, please, provide a link to a real genuine experiment on the issue.”
If you check upthread, you’ll note that my first comment was in reply to Roger Sowell’s request for experiments to disprove that a cooler object will slow the cooling of a warmer object. My object in suggesting Dr. Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” experiment was not to prove you wrong (others have done that with everyday examples), but to show how you and your fellow voodoo physicists can prove yourselves right (though, curiously, so far nobody has).
So you can continue to snipe on blogs, or you can reap fame, fortune, and adulation by performing a simple experiment. Which will it be?
Ed_B :
Actually what I said is actually consistent with what you’ve said. The 1°C warming is derived assuming holding all other factors constant. The water vapor feedback, similar idea. It “may be” that other feedbacks negate 95% of this, or it “may be” they add an addition 0.95°C (or more) to it. That’s why there is a range shown for temperature sensitivity.
I personally find this estimate to be the most credible. 2°C/doubling is probably consistent with the amount of warming we’ve seen since 1970 (the period where anthropogenic forcings became significant enough, it is claimed, for their effect on climate to be distinguished from natural forcings).
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.
level in the 1980s and the 
level in the 1990s. This is independent of the climate model’s equilibrium sensitivity for the range of likely values, 1.4 to 5.6 C … We conclude that CO_2 warming should rise above the noise level of natural climate variability in this century.
point? Was Hansen correct? Also, what is the best guess today for the climate sensitivity and role of the sun, given the UAH data?
is around a factor of 2 too small.
level in the 1980s and the 
level in the 1990s — it fell out beneath its starting point in 1980 across the 1980s (at more than the 
level, using their 
), and then slowly rose back to exhibit some gain by 2010, largely gain produced by the 1998 El Nino!
level, not even using their absurdly small 
. Over 30 years, being generous, we might guess the correct climate sensitivity — which recall, by their own assertion and arguments is determinable from this analysis independent of the details — is anywhere from 0.8 to 1.2 C of total warming upon a doubling of CO_2 to 600 ppm. This makes the overall feedbacks neutral to negative compared to the dry air result that was their base estimate.
(or figure 7 itself) was never actually computed or meant to be taken seriously as a prediction that might actually be checked one day. Perhaps I made horrible errors in scaling it by hand and aligning it with 1980 as a common starting date (clearly labelled on both figures) — although I did exercise reasonable care. But one thing the uah-and-hansen81.jpg does not do, and that is provide a convincing demonstration that we are in the grip of runaway catastrophic anthropogenic global warming of the sort that we might expect if the climate sensitivity was really large enough to produce a 3+ C warming by 2100.
It isn’t more powerful — quite the contrary. But there is a bit of a catch 22. It has to be warm to get a lot of water vapor into the air. Also, the amount of water vapor in the air is highly variable, from “nearly none” in very, very cold air to quite a bit right over the warm tropical ocean. This means that water vapor, as a greenhouse gas on its own, is almost certainly unstable against the cold. If it gets cold enough to dry the air, the clear cold dry air provides very little GHE. It then gets colder, and hence drier. CO_2 provides a steady, global GHE that is there independent of the water vapor content. In dry air, it is a major player if not dominant. In wet air, it is less important. Without any CO_2, the planet would probably be a ball of ice save for a band around the tropics.
The other thing to remember is that even to those that agree with the CAGW hypothesis CO_2 in the atmosphere is saturated, even at its very low concentration. The atmosphere is optically thick to the IR radiation that CO_2 strongly absorbs and scatters. There is a fairly complicated relationship between the optical depth of the CO_2 and the adiabatic lapse rate (which varies substantially for wet and dry air). Basically, CO_2 doesn’t actually give up (much) the radiation it scatters at the surface until it reaches a height of between 5 and 6 km, basically the top of the troposphere (which is why that’s the top of the troposphere). Doubling the CO_2 content of the atmosphere doesn’t double the height at which this occurs, nor does it double the lapse rate, and it certainly doesn’t double the warming, but it does seem reasonable that it will warm it a bit.
The argument is about how much. There is a 32 year old paper by Hansen, Johnson, Lacis, Lebedeff, Lee, Rind, and Russell (Science 213, p 957, 1981) that directly estimated climate sensitivity under a number of different scenarios. They thought about (and computed estimates of) the warming we’d get if we doubled CO_2 to 600 ppm when dry air dominated, when humidity was fixed, when moist air dominated the lapse rate, and found that one got modest warming for dry (1.2 C) or moist air (1.4 C), and the most warming for fixed humidity (1.9 C). The reason was that moist air alters the lapse rate and transports more heat up to where it can radiate, where humid but static air gets additional greenhouse warming from the humidity. They then tried — note well, tried — to guestimate the effects of clouds, changes in the albedo of the land and icepack. Their assignment of the feedbacks from these things was uniformly positive, and indeed roughly doubled the moist air sensitivity in their best (at that time) guess. Their most aggressive guess, again at that time, was a 3.5 C increase in temperature for a doubling of CO_2, with net warming feedbacks from clouds, the ocean, the soil, the melting of ice, and they strictly limited the possible effects of e.g. solar variability (if I understand their paper correctly) to roughly 10% of the CO_2 initiated warming — openly ignoring it in their estimate of the total temperature increase but noting that including it along with aerosols (that can cause cooling to compensate for the warming) improved the quality of their models.
The most interesting thing about this paper was their figure 7, based on 2.8 C. To quote them:
The predicted CO_2 warming rises out of the
A bold prediction by the man who almost singlehandedly created the CAGW scenario, in no small part by means of this paper.
However, it is sometimes worthwhile to take a bold prediction and compare it to the data. We are well out of the 20th century at this point, and have over 30 years of very accurate and consistent global data in the form of the UAH lower troposphere temperature anomaly. I was curious — did we pass the
This wasn’t easy to produce. All I had is a copy of the paper (and a copy of the UAH graph) and had to snip out the figures, put them into xfig, draw a scale under the (WUWT) UAH lower troposphere temperatures and trace them, literally, from 1980 to 2010 (where I have to stop because of the 13 month smoothing, but they are on the way down at the end, at least so far, and have dipped below the 30 year baseline several months of this year). I then had to do the same thing with Hansen et. al.’s figure 7, after stretching the imported clipped figure to make the scales match up.
The result is available at:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/uah-and-hansen81.jpg
(MODERATORS, ANTHONY — please insert the figure here in the text if you can, it is better than a link.)
There are two things that are immediately apparent from this figure. First is that Hansen, et. al. woefully underestimated the natural variability of the global temperature. This isn’t really their fault — there weren’t any particularly good ways to estimate global temperature then. However, it is apparent that their estimate of
Second, as far as CO_2-induced warming “rising out” at the
Of the entire 30 year period of accurate global temperature measurements, six of them — at most — exceeded the line that Hansen, et. al. identified as 1.4 C total warming (under a doubling of CO_2, by the end of the century). It is 2010 and CO_2-induced warming (if any) has still not risen out at the
A final point to consider is whether or not the assumption that solar variability is irrelevant is a good one. I have no dog in the race, but it is worth pointing out that from the 1970s through the 1990s, we were having the two most intense solar cycles of the twentieth century, arguably two of the most intense solar cycles on a far longer timescale. Hansen also seems to have completely ignored the substantial climate variability from the LIA to the present era, which cannot possibly be attributed to CO_2 (and which substantially increases the estimate of natural variability still further, if honestly included in any estimate of “resolvable” CO_2-induced warming).
The inclusion of solar variability, paradoxically, both helps and hurts the argument of higher CO_2 sensitivity. It helps it by providing a confounding factor for the relative lack of temperature increase given continuously increasing CO_2 concentration. Solar cycle 24 is the lowest in a century — perhaps if it were as large as 21 or 22 we would still be strongly warming. It hurts because in that case, one has to attribute a much larger fraction of the warming in the latter third of the 20th century to a hyperactive sun, leaving a lot less to explain with CO_2.
I am not alone in noting that the fact that global temperatures have been in the doldrums, rising only modestly over the only 30 year stretch in human history where we can honestly say that we have a global measure of temperatures (as opposed to a sampled collection of local measures that omit 70 or 80% of the planet from the beginning) is a serious problem for the higher, more egregious claims of climate sensitivity — the part that leads one to the “C”atastrophic part of CAGW. At the moment, I think even a 2 C total warming by the end of the century is somewhat unlikely, and the higher estimates of 2.8 C and up are simply absurd.
And even a 1 C estimate of total warming may be excessive if solar variability is indeed a major player through any of the nonlinear mechanisms that have been proposed (or mechanisms we may not have even thought of, yet, as I doubt that the coupling between the sun and planetary climate is as simple as mere TOA insolation). Or if decadal oscillations play a much larger role. Or if the Earth is steadily precessing to where a critical tipping point towards ice age conditions is likely to occur (most of the Holocene has been spent cooling gradually from the Holocene Optimum).
Note well that if we merely linearly extrapolate the 30 year trend visible in the UAH data, we get a temperature in 2100 that agrees pretty well with a 0.8 to 1.2 C rise. This is warming, to be sure, and it may even be anthropogenic warming, although this is still a somewhat open question that will probably not be resolved unless and until we see a decade-long reduction in global temperatures (to get the data needed to resolve the role of the ocean and soil — deliberately omitted in the Hansen, et. al. paper who attributed all of the CO_2 increase to humans and none to the shifting of an ocean-atmosphere-soil equilibrium with temperature in a complex carbon cycle, if I understand their paper correctly).
To conclude, take my screen-scraped figure with a grain of salt. I think the conclusions I draw from it are pretty sound, but for all I know Hansen, et. al. simply handed a figure to some illustrators who drew a crude picture and their
rgb
Gary Hladik says:
June 24, 2012 at 10:12 pm
My object in suggesting Dr. Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” experiment …
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Come on, Gary, let us stick to the truth: there is no experiment or any link to an experiment in Dr. Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” article. What he called a “thought experiment” is just what he wanted the readers to believe, highly probable unsupported by any real scientific experiment, otherwise he would have referred to it.
But let us wait a little bit longer, maybe other warmists will present something.
Robert G. Brown said:
“No, the place I have trouble with isn’t (most of) the actual scientists or their publications, it is the IPCC. The scientists in private and in print are a lot more cautious about their conclusions than the AR reports have ever been.”
This is the real problem with the IPCC. Their science working goups (WG1) mostly produce excellent work if you ignore the crazy ones like WG1 chapter 5 (Paleo) where Michael Mann, Ben Santer, Kevin Trenberth, Caspar Ammann, Phil Jones, Kieth Briffa et al. rule.
Working Group II takes things to the next level. Their task is to make assessments based on the science by identifying “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”.
The WG1 & WG2 reports are used as a basis for the final reports which include a “Summary for Policy Makers” which is probably the only thing our rulers bother to read.
The problem with this process is that the message is transformed as it works its way through the IPCC. Most of the WG1 science says that nothing unusual is happening and we are not sure what caused the observed warming since 1850. If you don’t believe me please take the trouble to look at some of the non-controversial AR5 WG1 drafts such as those covering the atmosphere, sea level and ice:
http://www.gallopingcamel.info/Docs/WG1-Ch2.doc………………….Atmosphere
http://www.gallopingcamel.info/Docs/WG1-Ch3.doc………………….Oceans
http://www.gallopingcamel.info/Docs/WG1-Ch4.doc………………….Cryosphere
Please note the admirable caution expressed by the scientists who prepared these drafts but if the Assessment Report #5 (AR5) follows the pattern of AR4 it does not matter what the science says.
The AR5 “Summary for Policy Makers” will be published in September 2013. It will be astounding if it truly conforms to the WG1 findings other than the controversial chapters (chapter 5 = Paleo, chapter 9 = Models and chapter 10 = Attributions).
“That’s why it is really amazingly silly to assert that the GHE doesn’t exist and isn’t an important factor in warming the Earth. One can directly observe TOA radiation in the entire spectrum and see the CO_2 hole.”
As I look at the TOA IR spectrographs, I see the CO2 hole. What I do not see is an H2O hole.
Will Dr. Brown please trouble himself to reconcile this or correct my misapprehension?
It is. However, it is important to note, that it is patiently not true, that the more water vapor you put into the atmosphere the more GHE you get.
Agreed. Although if you read through Hansen’s paper in the mini-article in-thread just above (you’ll have to google up a copy — it is online as a scanned PDF) you’ll see that in the climate models it most often is anything from a positive to a strongly positive feedback. Moist air (as in evaporation from warm oceans) alters the adiabatic lapse rate and transports heat high into the sky where it can radiate at a higher temperature, increasing cooling efficiency. Clouds also directly modulate the albedo. In the tropics through the lower temperate zone, where most of the heating of the planet occurs, this is all net cooling and should be negative feedback. Overall, I suspect, it should be negative feedback, but it is most often included (one way or another) as a net positive feedback, I believe, in the climate models starting with Hansen. Roy Spencer and a number of others have pointed this out — it isn’t my idea.
Water is complicated. Willis’s recent analysis of brand-new satellite data strongly suggests that the feedback is not only negative, it is strongly negative, that as CO_2 heats the tropics, more ocean water evaporates, which creates more clouds, which increases the albedo and permits more heat to be radiated from higher up, which cancels most of the expected warming. At the poles it is weakly warming, but the poles don’t have anywhere near the surface area (Jacobean, please) and only receive oblique solar radiation even in the middle of summer, so heating or cooling effects are much less extreme.
Note that this is strongly negative feedback even before considering exotica like possible Solar magnetic GCR modulation of aerosols and hence cloud formation probabilities.
rgb
As I look at the TOA IR spectrographs, I see the CO2 hole. What I do not see is an H2O hole.
-meters (micrometers), in the infrared. CO_2 absorbs all the radiation from roughly 14 to 16 
-meters (trumping the water window in the bottom aggregate curve).
Will Dr. Brown please trouble himself to reconcile this or correct my misapprehension?
I’m not sure what you mean by an “H2O hole”, but if you google up:
PhysMetLectNotes.pdf
which is really a book, not notes at all, on the physics of meteorology by Caballero and download it, you (and everybody else still listening in on this thread) can actually learn some serious physics and how it pertains to climate. It’s a great book.
In this great book, Chapter 5 is devoted to radiation. The whole thing. Stefan-Boltzmann, Wien’s Law, absorption lines, broadening — it won’t be easy reading if you’ve never taken even intro/kiddy quantum before, but it is, actually, reasonably self-contained and you can puzzle it out if you try.
In this great chapter of this great book, look at the following figures:
Figure 5.14, which shows the (rescaled) Planck functions that describe the spectrum of incoming sunlight — almost square on the most transparent part of the atmosphere — and the spectrum of outgoing ground radiation at 288 K — shift it a hair left for the tropics.
Next, contemplate 5.15, which shows the absorptance/transmittance of the atmosphere, by component, unweighted and weighted and summed at the bottom. Note well that water absorbs lots of stuff but there is a water window from 8 to 17
Finally 5.16 is one part of what you are looking for — it directly presents TOA incoming solar radiation and compares it with what reaches the ground. You can see that water actually blocks (absorps) a fair bit of incoming radiation before it reaches the ground, warming the air it’s in.
But I think what you really want to look at is figures 5.17 — TOA spectra from above the Sahara (hot, dry air) and above the Antarctic ice sheet (gold, not so dry air). These figures clearly show how, and where, water and CO_2 both act as GHGs but in very different ways, in particular often radiating from different heights at different temperatures, with the water not well mixed.
These two figures all by themselves are rather conclusive proof of the GHE to anyone who takes the time to understand them. And they are only two in a vast array of satellite data that is now routinely obtained. That’s why climatologists (and most meteorologists) are at best tolerantly amused when people propose that “there is no GHE”. Of course there is. We’ve taken its picture.
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This is the real problem with the IPCC. Their science working goups (WG1) mostly produce excellent work if you ignore the crazy ones like WG1 chapter 5 (Paleo) where Michael Mann, Ben Santer, Kevin Trenberth, Caspar Ammann, Phil Jones, Kieth Briffa et al. rule.
Hi “Camel”;-)
That’s what I’ve heard, both from you directly and from a number of other folks as well. And it’s not just in the IPCC. Most climate scientists are very respectful of their own and everybody else’s ignorance, because science has a way of crushing anyone who lacks that respect and takes themselves and their ideas too seriously. Unless their name is Feynman, or Dirac, or Einstein, but then, even those guys didn’t take themselves that seriously. Pompous a**holes often lose in a smackdown fight with mother nature, and it is mere wisdom not to overstate your case when you could lose, irrevocably, in her court. Witness the fallout to the poor souls who prematurely announced transluminal neutrinos.
Even the souls of some of the Paleo people might be salvageable. I still think of Briffa, and to some extent Jones, as ordinary scientists who somehow got swept off of their feet and forced to Mann up when his hockey stick was made into the poster child of the entire IPCC and “movement” to end CAGW — if you look at their reconstructions pre-Mann, they were almost exactly in agreement with what the re-reconstructed reconstructions are starting to show now that the MWP and LIA are once again being acknowledged. Also, they seem a bit bitter about this from time to time in the climategate emails.
But overall, I think that most real climate scientists are a lot more conservative than the IPCC suggests. Sure, they worry about AGW — I worry about AGW — but they don’t pretend that there aren’t some fairly serious problems with the hypothesis itself and that the theories that have predicted it (e.g. the Hansen paper above) have failed pretty miserably. Sadly, over a decade of abuse has left the literature badly distorted, and letting phrases like “denier” into Nature won’t improve matters.
Or maybe it will. It could be a bit over the top, and might inspire some changes…
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Henry@Robert
Just to refresh you, my comment was::
Robert Brown says
if you actually give up your religion and study the experimental evidence that conclusively proves
….experimental evidence that conclusively proves …..
Henry says
the reference to religion was uncalled for.
I have to challenge you
CO2 also causes cooling by taking part in the life cycle. Plants and trees need warmth and CO2 to grow – which is why you don’t see trees at high latitudes and high altitudes. There is clear evidence that there has been a big increase in greenery on earth in the past 4 decades.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/24/the-earths-biosphere-is-booming-data-suggests-that-co2-is-the-cause-part-2/
As far as I know, there are no measurements showing us 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?
If you don’t have an answer to that question I have to say that I am puzzled that anyone with an enquiring mind would be willing to sign on to say that CO2 causes warming.
Quite apart from that, you (or anyone) still have to prove to me quantitatively that the CO2 traps more LW (earthshine) energy then it re-radiates SW (sunshine) energy,
in the right dimensions, i.e.
W/m3 / [0.03%- 0.06%]CO2/m2/24hours), radiative warming effect
and
W/m3 / [0.03%- 0.06%]CO2/m2/24hours), radiative cooling effect
taken into account all absorptions of CO2, SW and LW and even the latest UV absorptions, by which we are now able to identify CO2 on other planets.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
Henry@those insisting of closed box experiments
That a GH effect exists is very easily proven. Just check the minimum temp. on a cloudless night and compare it with the minimum on a cloudy night, especially in winter. The days must be not too far apart of course. Note that on a cloudy night the minimum can easily be up to 7 or 8 degrees C higher.
However, as I explained many times before, closed box experiments as proposed by Tyndall and others will never work because they do not assess the whole of the problem, especially when dealing with CO2.
I have explained this in detail,
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
Finally, clearly it is getting colder on earth. Since about 1995. If we look at the fall in maxima it follows on a distinct, organised, exponential or binominal curve.
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
from there, we must accept that the whole climate is on a type of sinus curve, such as ,
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/orssengo3.png
Study this curve carefully and you will see that around 1994 temps went down (negative/decline) as correctly predicted by me here whereas the green line from the IPCC still wants us to believe that it goes the other way (positive/incline).
Making wars, burning stuff and atomic explosions seems be cause for extra cooling on that curve. More greenery seems to trap heat.
“””””…..Gary Hladik says:
June 24, 2012 at 6:26 pm
Joe Shaw says (June 24, 2012 at 5:12 pm): “As long as energy is deposited faster than it is removed by conduction, convection, or radiation the temperature of the target will increase – regardless of the temperature of the source.”
That brings up a question I asked some time ago near the end of this comment thread:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/03/monckton-responds-to-skeptical-science/
“Is it possible in principle to use a solar furnace to reach a temperature greater than that of the sun’s “black body” temp, about 5,800 degrees K?”…..”””””
The answer to that question is NO; well more scientifically acurate; hell no.
There’s a fundamental law of Imaging Optics, that says, that no imaging optical system, can form a brighter (higher radiance) image than an APLANATIC SYSTEM; that is a system simultaneously corrected for both spherical aberration, and for coma; no I’m not going to explain what those are; giggle it up for yourself (I don’t need to).
That one’s a bit esoteric, because you have to study the whole theory of optical aberrations to understand why. But a more important theorem of imaging optic sis that no imaging optical system can form an image that is brighter (higher radiance), than the source being imaged. Well you can’t make the image less bright than the source either wthout wasting energy. Brightness (radiance, sterance, luminance, whatever, your choice) is conserved under all geometrical optical transformations. One of the first proofs of the theorem (there are a number of recognized originators) was Rudolph Clausius; a thermo-dynamicist of some repute; who derived the “optical sine theorem” from the second law of thermodynamics.
Basically you take a black body radiator source, at some Temperature T1, and you take your brightness enhancing optical imaging system, and you form an image of the source, that is (you claim) brighter than the source was. This image is formed on the entrance aperture of a second black body absorber, equal in area to that entrance aperture. When the system finally comes to thermal equilibrium, the second black body will be at a Temperature T2 and T2 > T1, and that second black body, will be radiating more energy than the first one was putting out, because of the SB law. Ergo, the premise is false, and you cannot increase the brightness of the image, above that of the source.
A completely different optical discipline is “non-imaging optics”, where there is no intent and no need to form an image of a source. If Imelda Marcos, tosses her shoes into the closet, she only cares that they go into the closet, but she doesn’t care where abouts they are in there.
Non- imaging optics, is central to solar energy collection. You just want to herd those photons into the corral, and where they end up in there is of secondary importance.
I say secondary importance, because you don’t want them all landing in the same spot, and melting whatever is on that spot. Fortunately it is also true with non imaging optics, that you can’t make a brighter “bunch” of photons, than what came from the source. The etendue (French word) is conserved; fancy word for” throughput”.
There’s a “gotcha” in there. The “brightness” of a source/image also involves the refractive index of the medium, in which the source or image lies (or non-image) and the brightness in the medium goes as n^2. So if you take a source in air/vacuo, and you form an image of it in a medium of index 1.414, the image inside the medium can be twice as bright as the source was (without violating the second law.); but ONLY inside the medium so you have to be inside the material with it to see the brighter image.
Roland Winston (UC Merced) is the world champion of non-imaging optics, which he basically invented, along with the late W.T. Welford, a British chap. And they made a solid gizmo called a CPC; Compound Parabolic Concentrator, ground out of a YAG crystal (Yttrium Aluminium Garnet), with which they formed an image of the sun inside the crystal, that was brighter than the sun is in vaccuum. The point is you can’t ever get that brighter image outside the crystal, to feed back to the sun, and burn the whole thing to the ground ! And no, they did not get a Temperature higher than the sun; I aleady told you you can’t do that.
So the short answer is NO, can’t be done. Prof Winston did tell me once how he prevented the YAG from vaporizing; but damned if I can remember how. He invented this stuff eons ago when he was at Argonne Labs, part of the U of Chicago.
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.
Your guess is as good as mine — I’m sure we’ve seen the same graphs (because I linked some of the above, if for no other reason:-). It appears that it can be quite rapid, though. Multiple degrees C per century, or even faster. As you note, the proxies get smeared out so resolving it more accurately is difficult, but it appears to be a very systematic and inexorable process once it starts, as does the warming process that ends the glacial periods, although the latter seems more susceptible to bobbles up that don’t make it to “warm phase” — cold phase is more stable. I’m guessing that the constraint is how long it takes to squeeze moderating heat out of the ocean. But the LIA suggests that it needn’t be a long time. The LIA itself was fairly sudden and cold enough to systematically freeze the Thames river hard enough for winter festivals to be held on it. The whole event was on the order of (less than) a century. So clearly one can lose between 1 and 2 C in a century, and that would be enough to have devastating economic effects on some of the world’s temperate breadbaskets, as would a “year without a summer” from e.g. a major (Gt+) volcanic explosion or small asteroid.
And yes, the cold phase lurks beneath us, and we don’t know what might trigger a rapid cooling. The LIA cooling was fast enough, and deep enough, to overwhelm even the projected warming, since it would also cancel the positive feedback needed to get a catastrophe. If a similar event ever got out ahead, temperatures could still plunge, increasing oceanic uptake of CO_2, and perhaps even reverse things.
But all of that is pretty speculative. We do love stories, as a species. Better to be conservative, and wait on data and theories that actually work to predict it.
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Joe Shaw: I am not arguing there is no GHE just that the way it is portrayed in the Trenberth cartoon is wrong and gives a perpetual motion machine. Throwing in laser illumination is an attempt to divert attention from false physics.
First check out the cartoon and you will see that with no ‘back radiation’, inputs and outputs balance, except for 0.9 W/m^2 [‘net absorbed’] which seems to be the start of a new scam for AR5: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/TFK_bams09.pdf
239 W/m^2 comes into the lower atmosphere, 239 W/m^2 leaves at TOA. 333 W/m^2, the S-B black body radiation for 3.7 °C, is supposed to add to the net 63 W/m^2 net IR UP from the earth’s surface to make 396 W/m^2, the S-B black body radiation for 16 °C, the correct average temperature of the Earth’s surface.
But this is phoney physics. A century of experiment has shown that for a flat surface, radiative flux cannot exceed [conduction + natural convection] until temperature rises to ~100 °C for 0.9 emissivity. For lower emissivity Aluminium plates, you have to exceed 300 °C, and yes, I have measured it.
So, the real IR heating of the first ~30 m of lower atmosphere is the 23 W/m^2 [63 W/m^2 net IR – 40 W/m^2 through the ‘Atmospheric Window’]. If the 333 W/m^2 recycled ‘back radiation’ was real, the same proportion would go through the ‘Atmospheric Window’ as for the real net IR so TOA IR would increase by 333*[40/63] = 211 W/m^2 making a total of 450 W/m^2!
The bottom line is that the assumption that the IR from the earth’s surface has to be that from a black body at 16 °C in a vacuum can never be proved experimentally and is wrong. It’s an assumption based on a failure to understand that conduction, convection and radiation at boundaries with gases are coupled. You can prove this to yourself by putting up a windbreak on a beach.
The modellers argue the textbooks assume Kirchhoff’s Law of Radiation applies at TOA giving an extra 239 W/m^2 DOWN. However, look at the fine print and Kirchhoff’s Law only applies at thermal equilibrium; the transition from mostly convection to all radiation at TOA is as far from thermal equilibrium you can get. There are arguments about the mechanism. I deduce that because thermalisation is at aerosols and there aren’t any that high up, all IR is pseudo-scattered to space meaning DOWN emissivity = ZERO.
So, the models need to be recast using net radiative heat transport: it’s a minor part of the problem in the lower atmosphere so the GHE is also very minor, ~9 K on average and mostly by clouds absorbing pseudo-scattered IR, cue Miskolczi!
Greg House says (June 24, 2012 at 10:37 pm): “Come on, Gary, let us stick to the truth: there is no experiment or any link to an experiment in Dr. Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” article.”
As I have pointed out repeatedly, Dr. Spencer describes a thought experiment that voodoo physicists could perform in real life to prove their claims and revolutionize physics. That no one has done so pretty much settles the question of voodoo physics, doesn’t it?
“””””…..Joe Shaw says:
June 24, 2012 at 2:55 pm
@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.”…..”””””
Go for it Joe; I’m all ears, the floor is yours. So you can explain why EM radiation from the earth, can fall onto the backside of the colder moon, as earthshine, yet the same solid angle of EM energy, heading in the direction of the sun, from the earth; the sun having about the same apparent angle as the moon, is refused landing privileges when it gets there, because Engineer Joe Shaw says that’s not allowed. So just what is your egineering discipline Joe; saying engineer, is rather general ?
So come on Joe, show us your engineering proof.
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?
Two reasons. One is (as I’ve posted an actual graph to support, up above) the data does not support — so far — higher climate sensitivities of the sort leading to CAGW, it supports lower to negative climate sensitivities leading to a much more moderate increase. That may change. That may not. But one has to go with the evidence, and I use all five million years worth of evidence to assess what is a “reasonable” natural variation, not the absurdly small estimates used by Hansen or the utter lack of variation in Mann’s completely artificial and spurious hockey stick. If it weren’t for the hockey stick, most Americans would never have heard of the IPCC or global warming. They wouldn’t have had any reason to because the warming we’ve experienced is completely within the bounds of natural variation. It is reasonable to think that some fraction of it is due to increased CO_2. It is not reasonable to attribute all, or even most of the warming to that alone — not after you note that the MWP 1000 years ago was almost as warm as it is today without additional anthropogenic CO_2. Who can say how much of today’s warming is from exactly the same (unknown, poorly understood) cause? But the data does not support the idea that the Earth easily fluctuates to much warmer temperatures.
The second is Bayes theorem. To produce a lot more warming requires still more special circumstances to align with warming. Even if you merely weight the unknown at 50-50, the net effect of unknown causes is to probably cause regression of any warming to the mean, not to the still more extreme. This is in addition to the fact that consistency requires one to decrease degree of belief in a hypothesis if there are unknown confounding factors — it simply increases the size of the space of possibilities so the specific possibility you are considering becomes less likely.
I could make up a few simple metaphors from gambling to illustrate the point further, but I’m tired (drove a few hundred miles, set up house, and posted maybe 20,000 words today on this thread) so you’ll have to see if you can understand what I said from words alone.
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What Dr Robert Brown’s failed to appreciate in his eloquent response is the moral dimension, when he says:
“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,..”
Well, Dr. Paul Bain dares to presume because of noble cause corruption. He reshapes the world to save us from climate disaster, for our own good and has moral authority to exaggerate, cajole, insult and if necessary lie, all to ‘save the children’.
Dr Brown needs to consider that such moral authority is often unshakeable. Just as Dr Bain needs to not label you ‘denier’, we need to acknowledge their moral belief, but then open a dialogue on how they might be wrong.
Every now and again I read or hear something and say to myself ‘I wish I had thought of or said that!‘ Dr Brown’s response to Bain is one of those moments. Well written well argued and well said !! Dammit I wish I had written that 🙂
I didn’t know Physicists could write so eloquently … BRAVO !