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.
Vince Causey says:
June 25, 2012 at 8:45 am
George E Smith (and others) who keep trying to show certain individuals why the principle of GHG’s is not in violation of thermodynamic laws, please save your energy.
=========================================================
No, Vince, I am not saying that the principle of GHG’s is in violation of thermodynamic laws, you have missed the point.
I even do not share the opinion, that the principle of GHG’s violates the 2nd law, because the 2nd law is not about radiation. The 2nd law was formulated on the basis of experiments in the early 19th century and as far as I know they did not experiment with radiation. To me the question about radiation is open.
Another open question is the one about slowing down cooling via back radiation. And there are a lot more basic questions.
The warmists need to scientifically prove their key assertions by real genuine experiments. As I can see at the moment, they did not bother to do that and keep feeding people with “thought” experiments. This is not science.
Garcad,
I believe the space blanket analogy was intended to address the idea that the GHE violated the second law of thermodynamics, not the precise mechanism in which the GHE warms the atmosphere. The point is that neither the space blanket or CO_2 are causing heat to flow from a colder object to a warmer one. They are simply slowing down the heat loss of the warmer object. They both prevent radiation from escaping as fast as it would otherwise. The space blanket radiates the energy back to the source and the CO_2 does it mostly kinetically. There is some re-radiation, but not at the same frequency of the absorption band. The analogy works well for the purpose intended.
I am not sure I understand your second point. First of all, Water vapor does have absorption bands that are much broader and, in some cases, overlap the more narrow absorption bands of CO_2. Secondly, everything on Earth is a radiator. Take any part of this planet or its atmosphere into deep space and it will quickly radiate all of its energy into the void (with the possible exception of radioactive material that will take a bit longer.) Everything on Earth and in the air is a ‘net radiator’ and is cooling the planet. And the sun is warming the planet. Absorption bands in atmospheric gases only change how some of the suns energy is re-radiated into space and that has an impact of the temperature of atmospheric gases.
HenryP says:
June 25, 2012 at 9:23 am
but I did give you a clear example that proves the GH effect,
======================================================
I see. All I need is to just go out and I will see it.
Your scientific method is not much different from proving that the earth is flat by advising people to just go out and see the obvious. Obviously the Earth is flat, everyone can see it. A “thought” experiment can also help the unconvinced. Great.
It seems as if Dr. Brown and Roger Sowell have great admiration for each others well earned reputations in their respective fields of expertise and yet they seem to be at odds when it comes to the AGW issue. Would it be possible to kindly ask Roger Sowell to do a guest blog on why we should be more concerned with the global cooling threat? This was a major concern of the world climatologists in the 70`s until Lovelock and Hansen began their dire warnings about CAGW.
@ur momisugly John West
How about: AGWTSFTLOP (Anthropogenic Global Warming That Simply Follows The Laws Of Physics)?
“””””…..Bryan says:
June 25, 2012 at 1:26 am
George E. Smith you make a number of interesting points in your post.
Would you mind answering this question.
The KT97 diagram
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/TFK_bams09.pdf
relies on the following assumption
That the 1364W/m2 solar radiation reaching Earth is thermodynamically equivalent to four times a value of 341W/2 (as shown in their diagram).
It seems to me that this may be true for the first LoT but most unlikely to be true for the second LoT……”””””
Well Bryan, I have to say that Trenberth causes me a heck of a lot of embarrassment, both as a Kiwi, and as a Physicist. I know our schools were better than that when I was educated by them.
So I looked at your Trenberth paper, and damned if it doesn’t have a heading about Earth’s ENERGY budget.
Well any physicist trained when I went to Uof New Zealand, would know that the units of energy are Joules, and that Watts is the SI unit of POWER, and Watts/m^2 is a unit of areal power density.
So NO, hell NO! 1364 W/m^2 is not thermodynamically equivalent to a time averaged 341 W/m^2, and it is not an energy budget.
341 W/m^2 cannot by any stretch of the imagination cause the desert surface Temperatures to reach as high as +60 deg C. (333 K), no matter if that 341 W/m^2 power density is applied for 36 hours per day.
It takes a power density input rate of 1362 or whatever W/m^2 to get the surface that hot.
On average (Temperature wise) NOTHING happens. It takes TEMPERATURE DIFFERENCES to cause energy in the form of “heat” to flow around anywhere.
The average areal power density is as useful as the average of the phone numbers in the Manhattan Telephone directory. Unfortunately, if you dial that number, and it turns out to be a real phone number, it will only get one specific telephone to ring, and if anybody answers it, they won’t have any idea what the hell you are calling for. Same thing with the earth’s average Temperature; nothing of any interest is happening at that place.
Greg House says:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/22/a-response-to-dr-paul-bains-use-of-denier-in-scientific-literature/#comment-1017852
Henry says:
LOL.
You are funny.
Either way, I can give you 3 other more logical examples of how re-radiation works,
involving water vapor,
here,
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
let me know if you did not catch all three of them, or if you disagree with any of them,
and let me know if you still think I believe the earth is flat.
Reed Coray says:
“John, if someone argued that 2 + 2 = 5,”
Well, if you had 2.4 + 2.4 = 4.8 and rounded each term to only one digit that’d be 2 + 2 = 5.
Just kidding around, it’s a good point that you’re making.
Dr. Brown:
As confirming something is beyond what anyone knows exactly amounts to a form of knowledge in itself, that is still helpful info, and the LIA onset rate analogy does seem fitting. Thank you.
Like you imply, indeed sometimes one has to wait for more data.
Awesome thread!
Thanks, Dr. Brown.
Greg House says (June 25, 2012 at 9:11 am): ‘No. Gary, it is obvious, that 99.99% of the readers can not perform his “thought” experiment, because they do not access to appropriate facilities and equipment.’
99.99% of Dr. Spencer’s readers don’t have to perform the experiment. All it takes is one voodoo physicist (or a team of voodoo physicists) who can, you know, publish their results. Strangely, though, the voodoo physicists would rather snipe on blogs than win a Nobel Prize. WUWT?
‘So I am asking you and other warmists for the 5th time to present a link to a real genuine experiment that proves that cooling of a warmer body can be slowed down by transferring energy (in our case it is infrared radiation) to this warmer body from a colder body without external work.’
And I’m repeating for the (haven’t counted) time that I submitted Dr. Spencer’s article in response to Roger Sowell’s request for experiments to disprove it. Dang, I hand people a Nobel Prize on a silver plate, and this is the thanks I get? 🙂
George E. Smith; says (June 25, 2012 at 9:31 am): [snip]
Wow! Thanks, George, for both responses to my question. While it’s more than I wanted to know about the optics of solar furnaces, it’s fascinating stuff. Looks like I have some reading ahead of me. 🙂
After looking a Al Gore’s famous plot of CO2, notice the annual fluctuation, while the projected effect of reducing fossil fuels is less than 2% here is an obvious effect by man, already over the 2% point. If the effect was equal in north and south, latitudes there would be no fluctuation. So now look at Google Earth and notice how much of the surface carbon sink is compromised, next add up the recently stripped grounds and desertification. While most people tend to accept the multi-tiered model of carbon sinks, each with built in delays and hidden capacities(i.e. “We don’t need to worry about that stuff!”.), what if the truth is a lot simpler and a lot more significant, The carbon sinks you no longer see are the carbon sinks you no longer get! In short, if there is a problem, there is a very good chance the problem isn’t mythical evil capitalists spewing vile gases but overpopulation, stripping of land, denuding of highways, deforestation, removal of riparian lands, and simple grazing and farming, maybe coupled with billions of people burning it all to stay warm in winter. I don’t see how you fix that with a Rio-20 conference full of angry harpies (We love you Hillary).
Vince Causey says (June 25, 2012 at 8:45 am): “Take a pause and ask yourselves, do you honestly and truthfully expect these individuals to be persuaded by any amount of logical argument, no matter how carefully constructed? Honestly?”
Heck, I don’t even expect the true believers to be swayed by actual evidence, let alone “logical argument” (see preceding comments for illustration). 🙂 Remember, though, that new people come to this blog all the time, so I think it’s a good idea to engage the voodoo physicists from time to time and point out their fallacies for the benefit of newbies. It’s also a good way to test one’s own understanding of the science, plus I learn from others’ responses to the voodoo comments (e.g. RGB’s comments above). Besides, I find their ideas fascinating–in the sense that a train wreck is fascinating–so I don’t consider the time wasted. 🙂
There’s always felt like there’s a degree of Godwin’s Law-ness that’s been run afoul in this whole issue to me. If I call them Holocaust Skeptics, does it become less offensive? I rather think not. Denier is a perfectly good word, if applied correctly, and without dragging Hitler and his minions into the conversation. Tho I will cheerfully admit “denier” usually isn’t applied correctly in this case, as the essay points out. It is too often used in bait-and-switch mode, much as the entire “consensus” argument is used in bait-and-switch mode, ignoring such consensus that exists is on very narrow grounds that most skeptics would be happy to agree to as well.
logicophilosophicus says:
June 25, 2012 at 8:35 am
Or try this experiment yourself. Fill a vacuum flask with freshly percolated coffee. Cap it. After a couple of hours measure the temp of the water. Read the ambient temp off your thermostat. Drink the coffee. Refill with freshly perked coffee, recap and stick it in the fridge for the same couple of hours. Read the temperature from your fridge’s thermostat (or its spec – probably c 5 degrees). Remove, measure temp, drink coffee. According to Newton’s Law of Cooling you won’t enjoy the second batch as much as the first, which contains extra heat from its environment.>>>>
That’s a great experiment. Now let’s run through it a slightly different way. Let’s make it three iterations. We’ll store the flask of coffee at room temperature (20 C) and in the fridge (5 C) and once more in the FREEZER (-10C). Each for two hours, and we’ll then take the tempertature of each.
The flask stored in the fridge will be cooler than the flask stored at room temperature, but it will be warmer than the flask stored in the freezer. The obvious conclusion being that despite being cooler than the flask stored at room temperature, the fridge kept the flask warmer than it would have been had it instead been in the freezer.
All you need do now is extend this simple experiment to earth. Earth surface is at an “average” of +15C, the atmosphere is at -20C and outer space is at -270C. Take out the atmosphere, and the only possible result is that earth surface would be MUCH colder than it is now due to the presence of an atmosphere colder than it is.
We can prove this is the case by looking at the temperatures of planets that have no atmosphere at all. We’ve measured the surface temps of the moon for example. It has an “average” temperature far lower than earth’s, despite being exposed to almost the exact same insolation. It has an average temperature almost exactly that predicted by Stefan-Boltzmann equations.
So…. your flask in the fridge experiment extended out to three data points instead of just two, shows precisely the effect we’ve been trying to explain. A colder body does slow down the cooling of a warmer body IN COMPARISON TO THE ABSENCE OF ANY BODY AT ALL. A case in point being the earth itself, surrounded by an atmosphere colder than itself, it is nonetheless WARMER than the moon with no atmosphere at all, but the exact same insolation.
Keep demanding experiments all you want, but the experiment you proposed, the “experiment” of comparing the earth to the moon using ACTUAL MEASURED VALUES and the match to SB Law are exact.
To which I expect someone to scream “that’s not proof, I demanded proof” or “that’s not relevant to the question I asked, prove how that’s relevant to my question” or “well you’r experiment is invalid because because of x, y or z” or some other version of “lalalalalalalal…..”
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.
And when has that ever worked? Not when the Aztecs cut your heart out to offer up to the sun. Not when the Christians burned the witches. Not when the Muslims execute the apostates. As you say, such moral authority is unshakable to the believer, and history shows us that the only effective limitation is a universal bill of rights that makes it even more immoral to foist your beliefs on others against their will (and that still doesn’t work very well, just better than the alternatives).
The dialogue is and has been open for a long time. It isn’t all one sided, either. I’d be perfectly content if the IPCC and climate scientists in general spoke up publicly about the doubts, reservations, and limits they speak of privately and make it clear to the voting public that has to pay the tab that amongst themselves, the science is not so settled — at best, CAGW is a moderately successful fit to recent data, subject to a small pile of assumptions that are open to question, using models that cannot be extended indefinitely into the past to hindcast prior temperatures without enormous errors and a failure to replicate things like the MWP and LIA (not to mention everything else in the Holocene and beyond).
This is the really puzzling thing. I have apparently rational conversations with climate scientists and they don’t see this as a problem. For them, all that matters is fitting the local behavior (which they use to justify the parameterization of the climate sensitivity and the overall model on a Bayesian basis). Basically, parameters that produce the best fit on a limited interval win, independent of how well they extrapolate.
I’ve just had a rather long argument with Henry P. on another thread over this very point, and it is (to me) extremely worrisome. Any model capable of producing smooth curves with a nearly monotonic behavior will fit the CO_2 — temperature data. In fact, models with no physical meaning whatsoever can manage it. We’re back to the “fitting an elephant and making it wiggle its trunk” quote from Fermi.
I admit that I’m bemused. I routinely build e.g. neural network based predictive models and other predictive models. It is very easy to engineer a NN (or other model) that is basically overcomplete and very happy fitting the training data as closely as its actual scatter permits. However, one learns the hard way when one has to sell the models for money and they need to actually work that after a certain point — a point that depends in a highly nontrivial, nonlinear, unpredictable way on the actual structure of the underlying joint probability distribution you are approximating and the amount of data you have — those supersmart models do a superstupid bad job — a job that gets worse with overtraining and overcompleteness — of actually predicting trial data. I’d wax poetic about degrees of freedom, projective envelopes on the multivariate parameter space, population of data cells, and more, but the bottom line is that it is easy as hell to make horrendous errors with complex models and the only way to avoid it is a validation process that takes you outside of the data used to build it. Otherwise you can fit the data as tightly as you like and gain an enormous amount of confidence in the result and be slapped in the face when the actual PDF has a completely different behavior than your fit once you get outside of the range of the fit parameters.
It’s not that I think that all of the models are worthless, only that I mistrust their validation unless it is global. Bayes cannot help you here — mere statistics cannot help you with the problem Koutoyiannis illustrates so eloquently in his 2005 Hydrology paper, figure 1. That’s a problem more fundamental — the fitting of an actual curve to a (presumed) underlying PDF on the basis of data and hoping it will extrapolate, in a system known to be chaotic and to have drivers of long period significant variability that no model can quantitatively account for. But I have the devil of a time convincing anybody that they should be, say, four or five times more cautious about giving models substantial weight simply on the basis of a validation process that cannot extrapolate a mere 1000 years into the past (which is the shortest time that might conceivably capture the full range of relaxation times likely to be important in any global global model, IMO).
Oh, well. Back to building real models on real data (my current work chore when I’m not taking a beer and WUWT break…). There I have to be quite rigorous about this sort of thing or I won’t make any money.
rgb
Outstanding! Thank you for making my Monday.
What does that make Dr. Paul Bain to be? A Fanatic? A Bigot? A Dogmatist? One who tolerates or accepts or considers no other opinion?
If I understand that you mean, by CO2 hole, a notch in the spectrum indicating rather complete absorption of the IR radiation in a narrow range of frequencies attributable to CO2, and that you consider this to be proof that CO2 must be absorbing energy and dissipating heat, then why is there no such notch of absorption in the range of frequencies attributable to IR absorption by H2O vapor and liquid.
Is there such a notch that is occulted by some means?
The reason I sent you to a book on Climate Physics is because you have (I suspect) a fundamentally incorrect way of viewing the process, also suggested by your more detailed description here. CO_2 indeed “absorbs” the IR radiation, but for the most part only transiently. It the reradiates it in a more or less random direction, not unlike the way visible light is scattered off of a water droplet (well, quite unlike but it makes a simple and not particularly misleading picture). The energy then diffuses as photons from the ground on average upwards — upward only because there is a diffusive gradient given a source of energy e.g. IR photons below (the ground) and not so much of a source above (2 K temperature of radiative space, for example). The CO_2 that is doing the scattering cools with height due to the adiabatic lapse rate (described in some detail in the book) and the photons in the relevant IR bands remain more or less equilibrated with the CO_2, with some losses to the surrounding air molecules. The latter can be thought of as “absorption” of the IR not by the CO_2 (which really just scatters it) but by the air in a secondary transfer process that removes the energy from the CO_2 but IIRC it is less important than the scattering.
The point is that the radiation cannot be lost to space, actually removing the energy permanently from the Earth viewed as a thermal system, until it reaches molecules of whatever sort that are high enough that the CO_2 molecules (and other GHG molecules) have an optical scattering path in the outward direction that is greater than the remaining (optical) thickness of the atmosphere. That height is roughly 5 to 6 km above sea level (variable according to many factors). The temperature there is much lower than the temperature on the ground (from the lapse rate) and radiation from that height in the IR spectrum appears to be more or less “equilibrated” with the radiating gas at that height (which is what the TOA spectrographs in the book show).
Those spectrographs quite clearly show similar radiation from H_2O, but not at the same temperature/height as the CO_2-scattered radiation. So I don’t understand your question. If you look over many such spectrographs taken from TOA, it is pretty easy to differentiate between radiation from the ground in the water “hole” in the IR spectrum, radiation from water absorption bands, and radiation from the CO_2 bands, all three typically from different “temperatures” identifying by the shape and relative intensity of the (approximate) blackbody curve associated with the height and band from which the radiation occurred. I don’t know how to put it more plainly than that, but Caballero is pretty readable (and much more thorough), so please give it a try.
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To which I expect someone to scream “that’s not proof, I demanded proof” or “that’s not relevant to the question I asked, prove how that’s relevant to my question” or “well you’r experiment is invalid because because of x, y or z” or some other version of “lalalalalalalal…..”
You have my sympathy, David. Your arguments are clear and I completely agree, but you’re doing so well trying to teach this that I see no good reason to jump in.
Here, I’ll make the proof/experiment even simpler. Go to your cupboard. Get out a piece of aluminum foil, a nice big one. Use one hand to wrap your off hand loosely in the foil (you may want to fold it to make a “mitt” of the same size and shape as a gallon size plastic ziplock, which you should also have handy). Then slip the other into the ziplock. Try to arrange it so that the circulation of air around both are roughly the same, no need to “seal” them around your wrists.
If your house is cool and the air is still, you should almost instantly notice a difference in temperature. The aluminum (shiny side in, please!) is reflecting the IR from your hand back in, preventing it from cooling as fast as the one wrapped in plastic. Even though the aluminum is a better conductor of heat and actually stays closer to the (cooler) room temperature, it is a gangbusters good reflector of photons and radiation is your primary cooling mechanism and because neither the bag nor the foil has much heat capacity and because both of them roughly equally block convection, the foil easily wins.
Although I personally like the space blanket example, which is the foil experiment on a full-body scale, proven to save lives under far colder conditions than you are likely to want to experiment with (walk-in freezer, anyone?) The foil has almost no conductive resistance. It does block some convective loss, but if you are in still air this isn’t that great anyway. But it sure blocks radiation!
Here’s yet another “experiment”. Last September my Ford Excursion caught fire under the hood, sitting about five feet from the front of my boat trailer. After the fire was put out, the black plastic trim on the trailer and the black plastic wiring harness were bubbled up, but the white boat itself was more or less completely untouched. Black absorbs and turns the energy into heat. White reflects (absorbs for a moment and then reradiates outward without turning it into heat in the material). The energy reflected back at the fire ultimately raised its temperature a smidgeon. The energy absorbed was lost. We know this because energy cannot be created or destroyed, so where else could it go?
There are countless experiments one can devise to prove this, many of them trivially accessible to somebody at home. But you can feel the body heat reflected from foil, especially with temperature sensitive body parts like fingertips or lips. Personally I can feel the slight warming of my lips just holding a sheet of foil in front of my face (double blinded with plastic, eyes closed, somebody else doing the holding).
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George E. Smith; says:
June 25, 2012 at 1:28 am
Simple existence proof mydog, If you put one end of the poker into the fire, so it gets hot, the molecules in the poker will bounce all over the place colliding with each other.
Mr. Smith and others please tell us the boundaries of your thought experiments. Heat like work must cross a boundary to be other than internal. The fire raises the internal energy of the poker and to be accurate your experiment should show that the poker can raise the temperature of the fire (the external energy/heat sourse).
Also the lattice structure of steel prevents molecules bouncing all over the place unless you are talking melting.
“Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.”[5] Clausius statement from Wiki.
Where in the Clausicus statement does he require ““heat” going in both directions, just as Clausius required.”
Jim Clarke says:
June 25, 2012 at 9:39 am
Garcad,
“The space blanket radiates the energy back to the source and the CO_2 does it mostly kinetically. There is some re-radiation, but not at the same frequency of the absorption band.”
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For curiosity’s sake, can you inform me better on the proportion of energy transfer via kinetics vs radiation? The reason I’m interested is that the concept of ‘back radiation’ requires radiation while an absorption notch (rather than a peak) in the IR spectrograph demonstrates absorption and not back-radiation or any other radiation. Where do I find the numbers that substantiate the notion of back-radiation?
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Jim Clarke says:
“I am not sure I understand your second point. First of all, Water vapor does have absorption bands that are much broader and, in some cases, overlap the more narrow absorption bands of CO_2. Secondly, everything on Earth is a radiator.”
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Of course water and water vapor have absorption bands, however the TOA IR spectrograph shows no absorption notch such as it does for CO2 – a notch which is very distinct and very deep.
(http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/farir_workshop/2011/pdfs/Mlynczak_2011Nov09_FarIRworkshop.pdf)
I’m sorry that I don’t know how to link directly to the spectrograph within the pdf.
Perhaps I don’t know how to interpret the spectrograph properly, but I see no notch for water. My inference is, therefore, that water is a net radiator as seen from TOA.
Given that transport of heat is powering a cycle using water gas (one of the lightest molecules in the atmosphere which does not even require convection to rise), one considers that water is the main constituent of the working fluid of a refrigeration system. That being the case, how can CO2 properly be characterized as a heat trap in this situation if the significant characteristic is that it is assisting in the conveyance of heat in a more efficient manner than would occur without it? Any improvement in the heat carrying capacity of the working fluid of a refrigeration system does that.
Thank you for discussing this and, as always, please correct any errors in my thinking.
In short, if there is a problem, there is a very good chance the problem isn’t mythical evil capitalists spewing vile gases but overpopulation, stripping of land, denuding of highways, deforestation, removal of riparian lands, and simple grazing and farming, maybe coupled with billions of people burning it all to stay warm in winter.
Agreed. Land use is a major problem in many ways. It has a very large impact on (at least local) water cycles as well. Legend, at least, has it that goats created the sahara desert by eating all of it water-retaining vegetation once they were introduced. The Aswan Dam in Egypt has had a more measurable impact on the local microclimate of the Nile basin. And the UHI effect everywhere is testimony to the local warming concrete and local surplus CO_2 and water vapor create when houses and yards and streets and shopping malls replace forest land.
OTOH, I have no good solutions for this. Killing off the billions of people trying to survive by doing all of this seems extreme. I vote for trying to increase the civilization level of the world, since affluence seems to be the only effective means of population control and energy/economic surplus is the only means we have that enable us to take “elective” measures (so that our mere individual survival is not at stake). Of course that costs a lot of money. Perhaps we could get some of it by raiding the carbon futures funds and redirecting money being wasted on CAGW hysteria and planning for 39″ SLR in NC.
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Robert Smith said:
How about 1981 instead?: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evaluating-a-1981-temperature-projection/#more-11398
Hansen et al. don’t seem that far off, and that was 30 years ago.
[Reply: Mr. Morefield, I object to your using taxpayer-paid time and a computer owned by the EPA to read and comment on blogs during working hours. And please use only one screen name, per site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]