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.
Greg House;
Since until now no warmist has come up with a link to a real genuine experiment proving that 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, this claim looks very much like unsupported scientifically and should be actually considered a sort of science fiction.>>>>
I’ve given you several examples and links!
Oh wait, I’m not a warmist, so mine don’t count.
Run along to RealClimate my friend, challenge the actual warmists if you want, but please, you’ve wasted a considerable amount of everyone’s time, and you have begun to look rather foolish doing it. I gave you a link that demonstrates exactly what you asked for, and does so specificaly with CO2. So there you have an experiment that shows EXACTLY what CO2 does to warm the atmosphere it is in when exposed to IR at the EXACT same frequency as is emitted from earth surface which (if you would get off your lazy @ss and actually READ what SB Law is and what Planck’s constant is you could work backwards to discover the temperatures involved and VOILA! have the proof you asked for)
But you won’t. Your ignorance and foolishness is self imposed. Go fight with the actual warmists over at RC or SkS. They deserve a chance to LOL@U too.
Please consider yourself now on my IGNORE list. You should be proud. It is very hard to get on my IGNORE list. Say hello to Myrrh, he is there right next to you.
So… have a I convinced this one person this time? I doubt it. If he heeds my advice and goes and actually learns the calculus and physics and then comes back to the discussion… but he won’t, because he fears changing is world view more than he desires to know the facts for himself. With any luck though, for every one person that debates the matter, there are dozens more who merely lurk and read an learn and hopefully get set on the right track as a consequence.
If you like to read cool books, I recommend reading:
Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of a Classic Theory
by Joel Cooper. It won’t exactly explain why it happens, but it will give you some insight into how common it is and what its symptoms are. And how universal — we all use the sour grapes technique or “devalue and substitute” to deal with various frustrations. The really interesting thing is that someone in the throes of classic CD can actually have their beliefs directly and totally contradicted — I mean evidence that those beliefs are absolutely false, embarrassing and public contradiction by actual events to powerful to possibly ignore and can still come out of the situation with their belief set stronger.
A bit scary, actually. There’s a lot of CD on both sides of the climate debate, and all of us who hope that we are actually rational need to be aware of CD and its symptoms to be on the lookout for its insidious effects in our own thinking.
CD pervades most religious thinking — it is almost a definition of religious thinking. The one exception is Buddhism, that might be described as the philosophy (not religion) devoted to clearing your mind completely of illusion, giving up all CD and facing the world exactly as it is, with compassion but without a network of attachments and illusions that blur it from what it is into a demented and distorted version of what we wish it to be.
Not a bad prescription for scientists, actually, as well.
rgb
Greg House says (June 25, 2012 at 5:34 pm): “Normally in the science people who make claims should prove scientifically that these claims are scientifically correct. And, of course, normally nobody simply considers a scientifically unsupported claim to be true until it is proven otherwise.”
HOORAY!!!! Now you get it, Greg! Take THAT, davidmhoffer! He gave up on you completely, Greg, and while I admit I had my doubts, I never lost faith, not really. Dare I say it…yes, I shall: Greg, I’m PROUD of you!
OK, off to the lab with you now. We’re all impatient to see the outcome of your experiment. I warn you, the results won’t be what you expect, but that’s a small price to pay for discovering the truth yourself. Good luck!
A good true scientist can separate science and politics and know the difference between them. You seem to have acheived that status. Thank you.
Robert Brown says:
June 25, 2012 at 5:35 pm
After I described the experiment(s),
====================================================
I just hope, Robert, that you do not realise, what you have been doing. I’ll give you a very simple example of an “experiment” of the same quality as yours. I am going to prove, that my finger cools my room. So, I stretch my finger and touch a very small thing. The air in my room starts getting cooler. Conclusion: my finger cools the air.
Any problem? Yes? What do you mean by “you turned the air condition on”? OK, you are very clever. But imagine we had a normally intelligent person teleported, let’s say, from the 10th century into my room. He would certainly consider my conclusion correct, because it is so obvious and he has no idea about air conditioning.
In case you do not understand, I mean, to a scientific method belongs also proving, that the effect was not produced by other factors.
Anyway, you are welcome to present a link I asked for in my previous comment.
Gary Hladik says:
June 25, 2012 at 6:28 pm
Greg House says (June 25, 2012 at 5:34 pm): “Normally in the science people who make claims should prove scientifically that these claims are scientifically correct. And, of course, normally nobody simply considers a scientifically unsupported claim to be true until it is proven otherwise.”
OK, off to the lab with you now. We’re all impatient to see the outcome of your experiment. I warn you, the results won’t be what you expect, but that’s a small price to pay for discovering the truth yourself. Good luck!
==========================================================
Gary, is it possible, that you omitted this by reading my comment?:
Since until now no warmist has come up with a link to a real genuine experiment proving that 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, this claim looks very much like unsupported scientifically and should be actually considered a sort of science fiction.
I have been doing my experiment on this thread. My claim is, as you can see in my comments, that the warmists’ claim about “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” looks very much like unsupported scientifically. And this thread exactly proves this claim being correct beyond a reasonable doubt. Still, it is possible that a warmist comes up with something real, why not, let us wait a little bit longer.
Robert Brown;
I haven’t read the exact book you recommended, but I have done some reading on CD and also on Neuro Linguistic Programming which covers a lot of the same territory (and has a lot of branches, not all of them credible imho).
But my favourite story comes from a family reunion some years ago where I was bested, and I mean demolished, by a little old lady who claimed that man had never set foot on the moon. I had volunteered to take her to the local observsatory where there was a telescope powerful enough to actually see some of the equipment the Apollo missions had left behind. No need she said, she could prove it with a though experiment. Fine I said, go ahead.
Mosquitos! she shouted triumphantly.
Huh? says I.
She waggled her finger at me, and put me in my place. “If they cannot get rid of mosquitos, tiny little mosquitos, how could they possibly go to the moon?”
It has been 20 years, and to this day, I have no response that would have seemed adequate.
Current temperatures are within past bounds so this shows the current warming is mostly caused by natural forcings which we don’t know about because what we do know about doesn’t explain a natural cause. Past temperatures have fluctuated much more than is currently happening but has stayed within bounds which means there is an unknown negative feedback which stabilizes temperatures so there is nothing to worry about. Am I close?
Very close. I would replace “current warming is mostly caused by…” with “current warming may be caused by natural forcings that were responsible for similar fluctuations in global temperature in the past”
The last sentence I agree with, although again it isn’t nothing to worry about, it is that it is highly premature to start worrying to the exclusion of all else and totally incorrect to start spending public money like water to deal with catastrophe that is by no means a sure thing.
The funny thing is that when I communicate offline with real climate scientists (where I am, I freely admit, at best a Sears climate scientist if there are any Zappa fans listening:-) they tell me that “mainstream” climate scientists no longer believe in the high end forcings, most climate scientists no longer think that end of century warming will be catastrophic, and all of them — while rightly concerned, because there is a correlation between CO_2 and temperature that is not yet refuted and because there are models, perfect or not, that can physically connect the two to predict that warming will continue, driven in large part by the CO_2 increase that humans may well be adding to the atmosphere — also admit a lot more uncertainty about the model predictions and so on than makes it into the public debate.
There is an odd cognitive dissonance in the entire debate. The science is (and scientists usually are) mostly honest, a lot more honest than many of the critics on WUWT will admit. GallopingCamel said as much up above, and I believe him, as that agrees with my experience as well. Good scientists know the limits of their own knowledge and respect their own ignorance even in their own areas of expertise, especially when confronting other experts (who can, as I know from experience, often see right through you if you are bullshitting and who know JUST how to call you on it).
Yet those same scientists are in a very creepy way somewhat dishonest at the same time, in exactly the sense Feynman warned about. They stand by silent while parts of their science are taken up, transmuted from a plausible theory with some support into “settled science” to be considered as fact just as reliable as the theory of gravitation, and are presented to an unwary public as an excuse for picking their pocket and giving up their political franchise to people who promise to act on their behalf to “save” them from this catastrophe by implementing measures that the experts themselves, if confronted, will openly admit are nearly pointless while avoiding measures that might actually work (but that don’t permit nearly the pickpocketing).
I don’t remember precisely where I read it — perhaps in a WUWT or a Climategate email — but I seem to recall a story of a hockey team member who wrote of being blindsided by a radio talk host who smoothly manipulated him into making statements supporting an extreme version of CAGW that he actually didn’t think were true. It wasn’t even about “the cause”, in the end, it was about the ratings because non-catastrophe is boring.
Simply resolving this strange disparity, communicating the actual level of doubt from the mainstream climate scientists to the public and eliminating this absolutism from the political pronouncements would go a long way to making me happy, or a lot happier. The way CAGW is currently presented, it is a sucker bet and clearly is being pursued most vehemently by individuals who are either carried away with a messianic complex and desire to save the world (whether or not it needs it), people who would be disappointed or refuse to accept it if you could prove beyond any doubt that CAGW was not correct and there was nothing at all to worry about (or even worse, that the CO_2 we’ve emitted is precisely what we needed to avoid the next glaciation and in fact saved the world where their advice would have damned it), or by people who plan to make money from it, honestly or dishonestly.
Including, paradoxically, the energy companies. You don’t think they’ll profit enormously from (measures taken to ameliorate) CAGW? That’s a sucker bet too. Of course they will. They are. No matter what it costs them, they’ll pass the costs plus profit on to you, and higher costs simply mean higher profits. You want solar electricity? No problem. Expect proportionally higher rates.
Remember unleaded gasoline? They removed an additive that cost money, and then sold it for more money.
Like that.
rgb
It has been 20 years, and to this day, I have no response that would have seemed adequate.
ROTFL and speechless myself.
rgb
davidmhoffer says:
June 25, 2012 at 6:15 pm
Greg House;
Since until now no warmist has come up with a link to a real genuine experiment proving that 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, this claim looks very much like unsupported scientifically and should be actually considered a sort of science fiction.>>>>
I’ve given you several examples and links!
==========================================================
No. What you gave is not a link to an experiment proving… (see what you have quoted).
I just hope, Robert, that you do not realise, what you have been doing. I’ll give you a very simple example of an “experiment” of the same quality as yours. I am going to prove, that my finger cools my room. So, I stretch my finger and touch a very small thing. The air in my room starts getting cooler. Conclusion: my finger cools the air.
Any problem? Yes? What do you mean by “you turned the air condition on”? OK, you are very clever. But imagine we had a normally intelligent person teleported, let’s say, from the 10th century into my room. He would certainly consider my conclusion correct, because it is so obvious and he has no idea about air conditioning.
In case you do not understand, I mean, to a scientific method belongs also proving, that the effect was not produced by other factors.
Or, I can reply in the best of grace, “Truly, you have a dizzying intellect”, to which you can reply “Wait until I get going! Now, where was I?”…
rgb
Greg House,
Regarding the claim 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”, I recomment a small book [a little over a hundred pages] by Peter Atkins called Four Laws That Drive The Universe.
It explains the Zeroth Law through the Third Law of thermodynamics, and it answers your question about energy transfer between bodies of different temperatures.
Net energy transfer cannot go from a cooler to a warmer body without work.
Robert Brown says:
June 25, 2012 at 6:17 pm
If you like to read cool books, I recommend reading:
Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of a Classic Theory
by Joel Cooper. It won’t exactly explain why it happens, but it will give you some insight into how common it is and what its symptoms are. And how universal — we all use the sour grapes technique or “devalue and substitute” to deal with various frustrations. The really interesting thing is that someone in the throes of classic CD can actually have their beliefs directly and totally contradicted — I mean evidence that those beliefs are absolutely false, embarrassing and public contradiction by actual events to powerful to possibly ignore and can still come out of the situation with their belief set stronger.
A bit scary, actually. There’s a lot of CD on both sides of the climate debate, and all of us who hope that we are actually rational need to be aware of CD and its symptoms to be on the lookout for its insidious effects in our own thinking.
CD pervades most religious thinking — it is almost a definition of religious thinking. The one exception is Buddhism, that might be described as the philosophy (not religion) devoted to clearing your mind completely of illusion, giving up all CD and facing the world exactly as it is, with compassion but without a network of attachments and illusions that blur it from what it is into a demented and distorted version of what we wish it to be.
Not a bad prescription for scientists, actually, as well.
==========================
Intelligent Design. “Science is thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” I’m not sure who said that.
Romans 1 talks about it. (Not each and every man but Mankind in general without God.)
Respects.
Smokey says:
June 25, 2012 at 7:13 pm
Greg House,
Regarding the claim 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”, …
Net energy transfer cannot go from a cooler to a warmer body without work.
===================================================
I am afraid you missed the point. It is about slowing down the cooling, not about net warming. Some guys claim that it is possible, so I keep asking for an experimental proof.
Greg House says:
June 25, 2012 at 7:27 pm
“I am afraid you missed the point. It is about slowing down the cooling, not about net warming. Some guys claim that it is possible, so I keep asking for an experimental proof.”
Simple. Do the experiment yourself and tell us what you find out.
Babsy says:
June 25, 2012 at 7:44 pm
Simple. Do the experiment yourself and tell us what you find out.
==========================================================
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/22/a-response-to-dr-paul-bains-use-of-denier-in-scientific-literature/#comment-1018147
davidmhoffer says (June 25, 2012 at 6:54 pm): ‘She waggled her finger at me, and put me in my place. “If they cannot get rid of mosquitos, tiny little mosquitos, how could they possibly go to the moon?”’
Wow, you’re right! Because getting rid of mosquitos is EXACTLY like going to the moon! [end with an elaborate eye roll, then run] 🙂
Gary Hladik;
Wow, you’re right! Because getting rid of mosquitos is EXACTLY like going to the moon! [end with an elaborate eye roll, then run] 🙂
>>>>>>>>
Are you nuts? That little old lady made the best cabbage rolls I have ever tasted in my life. I looked her in the eye, said I never thought of it like that before, you’re right. May I have some more cabbage rolls? To this day, I maintain that no human being has ever set foot on the moon. She’s right, and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise. There is NOTHING that can convince me.
Net energy transfer cannot go from a cooler to a warmer body without work.
Quite right, but that is not what happens in the GHE, which Greg is steadfastly refusing to even try to understand. The “energy transfer” is first from the very hot sun to the much cooler earth in the visible part of the spectrum through an atmosphere that is conveniently mostly transparent right where the sun has its radiation intensity spectral peak, no second law violation there. The resulting heat warms the Earth, the ocean, the air, totally consistent with everyday experience — we lie out there in the sun like our reptile forebears to warm up.
Then the sun goes down. If it is cloudy, it doesn’t cool much overnight because the clouds reflect part of the heat being given up by the ground back to the ground, in spite of being much cooler. This violates no laws of thermodynamics — you can buy cute little parabolic mirror hot dog cookers that reflect and concentrate sunlight enough to cook hot dogs, even though the mirror itself remains quite cool. Cool clouds and can still reflect heat being given off by the sun warmed ground and hence slow down its cooling.
If it is bone dry, it cools quite a lot more. One doesn’t have to “do an experiment” to prove this; most of us have done the experiment thousands of times in a lifetime already by just observing the environment we live in.
Voila! Modulation of the mean temperature of the ground, which spends a longer time warm with the cloud than without it, in spite of the fact that the cloud is much cooler than the ground, due to the greenhouse effect. We can thus see that any argument that claims that cooler gases or objects are incapable of reflecting heat back at a hotter object and thereby slow its rate of cooling are simply wrong, contradicted not only by “experiment” but by nearly everyday experience if you just open your eyes and look. The extreme examples of this are an ultra-dry desert environment, where the hottest daytime temperatures are often 40 to 50 C warmer than nighttime temperatures, and those dreary, cloudy days where the sun doesn’t warm and the ground doesn’t cool at night and temperatures remain nearly constant (and much warmer than the clouds overhead) or the suffocating trapping of heat on a humid but clear night in the tropical rain forest.
Desert, big daytime warming, fast nighttime cooling. Humid but cloudless summer day in NC — big daytime warming but very slow and limited nighttime cooling. How could one not observe this in 30 or 40 years of life experience? And note well that this does not warm anything — it slows the cooling and results in on-average warmer temperatures because heating and cooling are not symmetric — humid North Carolina in the summertime is maybe 40 C during the day and 25 at night where a desert at the same latitude might get up to 50 C during the day but quickly drop to 0 C at night — cooler on average.
CO_2 warming is simply harder to see, because we cannot see carbon dioxide where we can see clouds or “feel” the oppressive heat trapping of water vapor as probably the strongest greenhouse gas of our everyday experience. We can, however, see it with instruments! I’ve already pointed out — many times, actually — on this very thread places one can go to see actual experimental spectrographs of top of atmosphere radiation. Other people have pointed out many places where people directly measure downwelling radiation, radiation given up by the sun-warmed earth but then partially reflected back to that earth by a cooler greenhouse gas concentration (water vapor, CO_2, whatever) that does not, in the process, necessarily become warmed by it.
Fortunately, I can provide you with a really easy link to see the results of real, live TOA spectrographic experiments that directly detect the GHE, with easy step-by-step explanations of the physics involved. It won’t matter — you (Greg) probably won’t even follow the link or look at them because if you did you’d have to confront the possibility that you’ve been wasting everybody’s time for years on this point. But still, what can one do but try:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/10/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-emission-spectra/
Oh, look at that. It’s even on WUWT. How about that?
The article, incidentally, is IMO somewhat flawed, in particular where it says that the downwelling radiation “further warms the earth”. This is misleading. It isn’t warming the Earth, it is the return of some of the radiation given off by the Earth as it tries to cool, and it slows down the cooling, so it spends more time warmer.
But the figures! They are sublime, and clearly show that one can see (most of) the missing energy looking down in the reflected energy looking up.
Spend some time with them. Get to know and understand them. Then read Cabellero, for a much better explanation of the GHE that doesn’t rely on the misleading description of downwelling radiation as “warming”, when all it really does is slow cooling.
rgb
Robert Brown says:
June 25, 2012 at 8:19 pm
Quite right, but that is not what happens in the GHE…
=====================================================
Yeah, another narrative.
Now, as far as I know, the only experimentally proven (by Tyndall in 1859) thing about “greenhouse gases” is that they have the ability to absorb and re-emit some portion of infrared radiation. That is all.
This alone does not prove their ability to warm or slow down cooling specifically by this process. This is an important point. And no warmist (until now) has been able to present a real genuine experiment proving that. A falsifiable scientific experiment.
What they do is feeding us with narratives about blankets, plates etc. and we should get the impression that things do work this way. This is not science. They also present conflicting versions about how this allegedly work. Normally the whole thing should have been dismissed long ago.
I fully and openly deny that humans can drive such changes in climate on global and regional scales without actively attacking the environment.
The only way we, as a species, could ever stand a chance at adding enough CO2 to the atmosphere to alter the world’s climate on our own is if ever damned one of us gets a box of matches and lights everything we see on fire.
Everything.
If one throws a ball up in the air, itz velocity at the peak of itz trajectory is zero. Since, at the peak of itz trajectory, the velocity is zero, the ball cannot get down.
I demand an experiment that proves otherwise. No, saying you went outside and threw a ball up in the air and it came back down doesn’t count. Thatz not proof. I demanded proof using a REAL experiment. Look, if all you do is throw the ball in the air and it comes back down, how do we know that it isn’t because there are miniature jets in the balls surface that turn on and accelerate it back to earth? For that matter, how do we know that the ball actually fell? Since we know the velocity of the ball at the peak of itz trajectory is zero, we know thatz impossible. Itz more likely (probable in fact) that the earth moved toward the ball and not the other way around.
This is bog standard physics. Look it up in ANY physics text on statics and dynamics. They all say the same thing. The velocity of the ball at the peak of itz trajectory is zero. What has happened is that there is this huge number of scientists that want to convince us that at the peak of the trajectory, the ball is both moving and not moving. This defies logic! Standard physics has been corrupted to support this total fiction. But no, they all say the ball can get back to earth just by falling. Can you believe that they actually teach this drivel in school?
An entire generation has been completely corrupted by a complete fiction. They’ve been taught something that CLEARLY isn’t possible, and all you have to do is pick up ANY physics text book and you will see that what I am telling you is true. Once that ball hits the peak of itz trajectory, IT CAN NO LONGER MOVE.
No, don’t send me your videos showing that it does fall back to earth, I know they are all doctored, or that it was the earth that moved instead, or that a mosquito was sitting on the ball and used itz wings to alter the trajectory. And don’t tell me to go outside and throw a ball in the air myself, there’s no point because I understand physics, and I already know that at the peak of the trajectory the velocity is zero. I know that because I read it in a physics book, so I already know the answer. I demand an expeirment that proves otherwise, and any experiment that you show me is obviously wrong because I already know that it is impossible for the ball to move once it gets to peak trajectory. Thats why I demand an experiment to prove otherwise. To expose all you charlatans for what you are.
Please pass the mosquito repellant. And yes thank you, I will have another helping of cabbage rolls.
I as well, fully and openly deny that trees
can be magical treemomiturs: Liebig’s law forbids it so swiftly it’s shocking.
I fully and openly deny that Magical Mannian Hockey Stick Scrawls,
can cyfer doomsday or in any other way predict A.N.Y. real-world situation
I fully and openly deny there is any reason Al Gore got hung up on selling ALTERNATE ENERGY and DRIVING UP worry about PEAK OIL except to make his money back after he lost the election,
using his OCCIDENTAL OIL (2nd largest deliverer of oil to california, 3rd largest oil company in the world, HUGE ALTERNATE ENERGY component) FORTUNE
he
INHERITED.
I fully and openly deny A.N.Y. relationship to rising CO2 and rising temperatures, and indeed, it is PROVEN by not only Anthony Watt’s redo of Al’s fake ‘more gas in the jar’ experiment,
AND the fact that temperatures today compared with ACTUAL, PAPER RECORDS are QUITE COOL, relatively, with many, many gases rising in quantity in the atmosphere as we speak;
and, I deny there is ANY truth WHATEVER that temperatures have E.V.E.R. left the 100 year norm..
GO CHECK.
Greg House says (June 25, 2012 at 6:51 pm): “Gary, is it possible, that you omitted this by reading my comment?: [snip]”
Heh. Of course not. I just ignored it for comedic effect. 🙂
I really wish you hadn’t written it, though, because it totally contradicts the first (entirely accurate) part. Various commenters (not I) have already pointed out numerous examples of exactly what you’ve repeatedly requested, but apparently (check all that apply):
__ There are none so blind…
__ You can lead a horse to water…
__ You can’t handle… (hint: Jack Nicholson said it)
__ All of the above
I guess I’ve been a bit hard on you, Greg, urging you to do an experiment which is apparently beyond your capabilities, but you’ll notice that nobody else has done it either, including the “scientists” in the “No Virginia” thread I referenced in my first comment; yet these guys are positive Dr. Spencer’s thought experiment is nonsense. Given that so-called “back radiation” is such a fundamental part of climate science, and given that both sides of the CAGW controversy accept it, then disproving the “Yes, Virginia” thought experiment really would revolutionize physics. So why hasn’t anybody done so?
davidmhoffer says:
June 25, 2012 at 9:25 pm
If one throws a ball up in the air, itz velocity at the peak of itz trajectory is zero. Since, at the peak of itz trajectory, the velocity is zero, the ball cannot get down.
I demand an experiment that proves otherwise. No, saying you went outside and threw a ball up in the air and it came back down doesn’t count. Thatz not proof. I demanded proof using a REAL experiment. Look, if all you do is throw the ball in the air and it comes back down, how do we know that it isn’t because…
==========================================================
I understand your confusion. If the ball comes down, very nice. If you said “the ball comes down because of “greenhouse effect””, you would need to prove it.