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.
I don’t have a problem with radiative physics and the GH effect – I can see it happening from simple observations,
and I have given Greg House at least 4 examples;
and, no, Greg, I donot thinking the earth is flat.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-Aug-2011
And Myrrh, you should also be able to understand the above linked “lecture” by now.
However, I do think the carbon dioxide hysteria has mostly been built on what simple minds can easily understand: let us have a planet, let us add some CO2, let us see if the temperature went up, it did, so that must be it!!!!
According to my own evaluations of all the spectra, taking into account the (very) large absorptions of CO2 at 2 and 4 um – even establishing some recently found UV absorptions-, means that the cooling effect of more CO2 , IMHO, would largely cancel the warming effect from the 14-15um .Then we are not even talking about the cooling effect caused by the CO2 that is taking place because of the increasing greenery on earth. Dr. Brown’s lack of answering that question of mine shows that perhaps he does not know or understand that CO2 takes warmth from its surroundings to built the ever increasing amount of crops and trees that we want.
I forgive him, for that, as biology is not on his credential list.
But I do have another few (trick?) questions for Dr. Brown and others.
So, we are back at school, but now I am the teacher.
My questions for today are:
1) do you think ozone is a GHG? Why?
2) did you know that there are quite a number of human activities that produce ozone?
3) do you think the net effect of more ozone due to human activities is that of warming or cooling?
4) do you think that we should do something to limit the amount of ozone emissions?
25% for the correct answer to each question. I will do the marking.
Your apparent contention that TECS has a constant numerical value (e.g. 3 C per CO2 doubling) has the logical shortcoming that the equilibrium temperature is not observable. In view of the non-observability, this contention is not falsifiable thus lying outside science. Please respond.
Sure. Stop right after “Your apparent contention”. No, that’s not my contention. That is a logical fallacy, called “a straw man”. I said no such thing. I said that the Greenhouse effect is net warming, which means (if you examine the actual context of my statement) on average, all things being equal, the presence of greenhouse gases in an atmosphere make the underlying planet warmer than it would be if there were none. I said nothing whatsoever about logarithmic increases, climate sensitivity, constant numerical values, and made no non-falsifiable contentions. Note well that “warming” can be ordinally quantified without recourse to temperature and statistically sampled on a suitable course-rained basis as temperature as a meaningful function of time (with perfectly reasonable error bars, things that should be present in any experimental measurement I hope you agree), so the tired saw that the Earth’s equilibrium temperature is somehow not “observable” can be put quietly to rest, especially for purposes of showing relative (ordinal) relations, the mere sign of the slope.
This is especially tedious when I just described, in great detail, how one could experimentally falsify the specific assertions “there is no GHE” and “the GHE does not play any role in raising the temperature of the Earth relative to exactly the same atmosphere without CO_2”. The experiment (as I pointed out) has long since been done. The evidence is available to be examined by anyone, including you. The analysis of that evidence gives you, as I just pointed out (again!) a very simple choice — either the laws of nature, as we understand them, are horribly wrong (and I’m not talking about subtle laws, I’m talking Maxwell’s Equations, energy conservation, the Laws of Thermodynamics — stuff like that) or the surface of the Earth must warm to maintain average energy balance, all things being equal, given the TOA spectra with clearly evident reductions in radiation in the CO_2 hole! Reductions that equally clearly correspond to emission from the top of the troposphere, where the GHG concentration finally thins out enough to permit IR radiation to escape from gas molecules that are at a cooler temperature than the surface of the Earth.
Not a word about logarithms. The reasoning process is identical to the reasoning process used to analyze (for example) the flow of fluid in a blood vessel or garden hose. Put your thumb over the end when there is water flowing and the pressure in the hose must increase to maintain the same flow. Or the one used when you tell your teen aged son: “I put ten dollars in my wallet this morning. Mass energy is conserved, and I failed to remove it. It is gone. It is therefore a fair assertion that somebody else removed it, and you are the only person that has been home all day with my wallet. Cough up the cash.”
You don’t look around to rule out invisible fairies or postulate interdimensional space warps. You might be wrong, of course — maybe a small black hole did sweep through the room and suck up your money. But probably not, ya think?
rgb
Robert Brown (June 26, 2012 at 11:50 pm):
If your “net warming” is an increase in an equilibrium temperature then the numerical value of it is not observable. On the other hand, if it is an increase in a temperature then it is observable but the “net warming” may decline in the face of a CO2 concentration increase. Both situations present insurmountable barriers to the existence of the RGB GHE.
rgb,
Loved your “once over lightly” of energy technogies. Here is my take with a little help from Ed Bilpuch:
* Solar energy research and development.
PV solar makes perfect sense at the roof top level. The only thing stopping me from installing a 5 kVA system on my house in Florida is my spouse who has placed a higher priority on granite counter tops. However at the industrial level PV and CSV make no sense at all owing to problems with storage, distribution and scalability:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/05/15/solar-power-in-florida/
* Thorium fission.
Ed Bilpuch sold me on the Thorium cycle. One tonne of Thorium per year per 1 GWe, 900 kg of “waste”, some of it very valuable such as Palladium and 1.5 kg of Pu238. Contrast that with BWRs with 200 tonnes of Uranium/GWe per year and >199 tonnes of “waste” per year. Alternatively one can burn 3,000,000 tonnes of coal for 1GWe each year.
While golfing, Ed told me about Charlie Bowman’s ADR (Accelerator Driven Reactor). As he was not above “pulling the legs” of simpletons like this camel I challenged him to “show me”. He blew my mind by showing me the 3 meter diameter ADR that TUNL (Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory) was testing in 2002 while Rubbia (CERN) was just talking about it!
* General work on alternative fuels.
You missed some of the ones that are most likely to succeed. Remember how the Germans were able to prolong WW2 by turning coal into gasoline using the Fischer-Tropf process? With gas prices where they are today the conversion of cheap natural gas and coal into gasoline is commercially competitive, The USA has many kinds of natural gas and coal reserves in such huge quantities that we could be independent of imports within 20 years. Taking this to the next level, popular television (“Dallas”) gives just an inkling of the even greater potential of methane hydrates.
* Fusion.
I spent five years (starting in 1970) working on inertial confinement fusion. Back then we thought that commercial generation of electricity using fusion power was only 40 years away. Forty years later I am reasonably confident that this milestone will be achieved within 100 years. Will human civilization last that long? As an optimist I say yes!
Robert Brown says:
June 26, 2012 at 11:24 pm
…rudiments of physics…reasoning…Law of Conservation of Energy, Poynting’s Theorem, Maxwell’s Equations, …spectra… energy conservation… computer… Tyndall… Maxwell… spectroscopy…
=======================================================
Yeah… and after all that Al Gore with all his money and warmists to his disposal comes up with just a fake “proving” “greenhouse effect” (see above)… Come on…
Greg House
The Greenhouse Effect means different things to different people.
So when someone says I believe/don’t believe in the GHE its not possible to know just exactly what they mean.
So I’m going to break it down into more basic elements to find your place in this spectrum.
1. Do you think the atmosphere insulates the Earth Surface?
2. As HenryP says above an insulator retards heat flow.
This means in the case of the atmosphere, among other things;
a/ Daytime, it will absorb some solar radiation making the Earth surface cooler
b/Nighttime, it will absorb some upwelling Infra Red making the surface warmer
3. Do you accept that CO2 and H2O vapour are particularly Infra Red Active?.
Nighttime is best to examine the GHE so next points relate to that.
4. Do you think that the satellite obtained spectrograph showing a bite or notch around 15um is a valid proof of IR absorption in the troposphere?
5. Which gas do you think was responsible for producing the ‘bite’?
6. What happened to the energy represented by the ‘bite’
7. If this energy caused local heating up the atmospheres air would this increase or decrease surface Heat loss?
8. Do you accept that all gases radiate to some extent?
9. Are you comfortable about the existence of photons?
10 When emitted the photons will the photons move in any direction?
11 Will some of these photons will be absorbed by the Earth Surface?
Chris Colose is a brash young academic who rushes in where angels fear to tread. He would benefit from some of the courses that “rgb” runs
Dr. Brown’s lack of answering that question of mine shows that perhaps he does not know or understand that CO2 takes warmth from its surroundings to built the ever increasing amount of crops and trees that we want.
Again, are you daft? Do you seriously think I’ve never heard of photosynthesis? Or that I am unaware that green plants tend to cool the surface in a variety of ways, where respiration and evaporative cooling is, IIRC, many orders of magnitude larger than the “cooling” resulting from the use of photons (not really “heat”, although some fraction of the energy is reversibly stored and hence does not become heat) to build sugars, starches, proteins, cellulose.
None of which has the slightest bit to do with whether or not the GHE exists and warms the earth relative to the greybody average temperature it would have with no atmosphere or a GHG-free atmosphere, and hence it is another straw man. Why put words in my mouth? Why come up with non-sequitors? Who said one single thing about crops and trees?
Now that you have, offhand I think you are orders of magnitude shy (and with a widening gap!) of balancing the gain from higher CO_2 concentrations with increased photosynthesis, but I’m tired and really don’t care enough to work it out or look it up.
1) do you think ozone is a GHG? Why?
2) did you know that there are quite a number of human activities that produce ozone?
3) do you think the net effect of more ozone due to human activities is that of warming or cooling?
4) do you think that we should do something to limit the amount of ozone emissions?
Sigh. Fine. Here, I’ll get them all wrong so you can feel maximally good.
1) Absolutely not! Ozone is perfectly optically transparent and has absolutely no energy levels that couple to electromagnetic radiation. I think so because I think Ozone is made out of neutrinos and Dark Energy, neither of which couple much to electromagnetic radiation. It just looks like three Oxygens made out of ordinary charge stuck together when, erm, well, damn, how DO we see it…
2) No, I did not know that! I thought it was only produce in elf-farts and by the sparks given off from the horns of pink unicorns.
3) Aha! You’re trying to trick me! Not so fast! If Ozone is made of neutrinos and dark matter and produced only by elves and unicorns, human produced ozone has no effect because there isn’t any. That smell you sometimes smell around sparky electrical equipment is the elves. Really, they should just not eat cabbage, but (sigh) they can’t get enough of the stuff. Shocking, really.
4) Absolutely! It’s near the top of my list. Why, just yesterday I shot a pink unicorn and ground its sparky horn into powder for causing global, er, warming, or cooling, or cancer, or whatever an oxidative free radical does to human tissue when you inhale it. Besides, the street price these days for ground pink unicorn horn, well, let’s just say it gives a whole new meaning to the term “drive by shooting” when I see a whole herd of those pink suckers out on the islands around here, producing their stinkin’ ozone.
I’m also working with the elves (in between bong hits) to limit their intake of cabbage, but it isn’t easy. I just caught one yesterday, sneaking a spring roll, loaded with garlic and even some cauliflower. Eeeew. And when I sat him down to try to talk some sense into him, all he could do was mumble something about “the best cabbage rolls ever produced by humans”, “mosquitos”, and “damn right, no such thing as a moon mission”, while simply constantly emitting — well, “ozone”.
Maybe I should shoot the elves and try talking to the pink unicorns?
See, now I’ve given you all the room in the world to expound on yet another non-sequitor in a list of non-sequitors. But hey, at least you don’t argue that there is no such thing as a GHE and that increasing CO_2 concentration and ignoring feedback or contributions from other things will, in general, lead to more, not less, warming, so (seriously) kudos for you. I qualify it because (as several perfectly reasonable people have already pointed out) we may not know the magnitude or even the sign of e.g. net feedback from the entire water cycle. Or we may, and those reasonable people could be wrong. Somebody reasonable is going to be wrong somewhere, because reasonable people are disagreeing.
rgb
KenCoffman says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/22/a-response-to-dr-paul-bains-use-of-denier-in-scientific-literature/#comment-1019035
Henry says: Thanks so much!! I really appreciate you letting me know.
By the way, in case it wasn’t sufficiently clear, we are now equipped for the following sorites:
1) Elves eat cabbage rolls
2) Cabbage rolls make you fart
3) Elves that never fart, produce no ozone
4) David M. Hoffer is known to produce a lot of ozone
5) David M. Hoffer is an Elf.
I have no idea if 5) is valid, or true, given the other four propositions, but his grandmother made him a lot of cabbage rolls when he was young which both kept him from pursuing a career as a lunar astronaut and just might have been the highly occult cause of all of the warming observed in the 80s and 90s.
Besides, the onus of proof is now on him to prove that it is not true, because we have just learned that anything that might be true is sufficient to disprove all propositions it contradicts until it is explicitly disproven, completely independent of how much or little evidence supports those other propositions. And besides, he’s admitted that he eats cabbage rolls, so do elves, and the rest is pure logic…
rgb
TimC says:
June 26, 2012 at 9:57 pm
For once, the scientists are encountering some of the mockery and heat (no pin intended!) that some of us endure daily…
When an ego is seriously in need of some deflation, a pin works well…
davidmhoffer said: “handing the enemy a victory …”.
Who is “the enemy”, exactly? We are not at war: we are seeking true explanations and solutions (to hugely complex issues) each in our own ways, and to reconcile others to our point of view.
I suggest that describing or even thinking of them in stereotype as “enemies” really is the wrong way to go – we are all humans, on this lovely (but quite small) planet together!
However at the industrial level PV and CSV make no sense at all…
Agreed (about the rooftop level, where I too have hungrily priced it as break even to lose a bit with the subsidy) but wait ten years. $1/watt is pretty much break even, and we’re JUST over that, but Moore’s law suggests that by 2020 they’ll cost $0.50/watt or less and at that point they will be no-brainers on rooftops, and there are a lot of rooftops. As for industrial and large scale installations, no arguments except to note that technology is not static. Zinc-Oxygen or some other new technology in storage batteries, discovery of a room temperature superconductor capable of carrying high currents, and who knows?
* Thorium fission.
Ed Bilpuch sold me on the Thorium cycle. One tonne of Thorium per year per 1 GWe, 900 kg of “waste”, some of it very valuable such as Palladium and 1.5 kg of Pu238. Contrast that with BWRs with 200 tonnes of Uranium/GWe per year and >199 tonnes of “waste” per year. Alternatively one can burn 3,000,000 tonnes of coal for 1GWe each year.
How do you get Pu238? I thought one of the advantages of Thorium is that it is virtually nuclear proliferation proof — indeed, the story I heard is that the AEC back in the old days was (for that very reason and for the reasons you mention) heavily into thorium commercial reactors. Oh, and they can be designed to have very nearly zero chance of melting down, did I mention that? However, the cold war had started, and the US military needed cone head quantities of Pu to build nukes, and they wanted commercial companies to do the work of cooking it for them. So they basically shut down Thorium research cold and forced all development and commercial plants to be fission, retaining the sole role of reprocessing the spent waste to recover the plutonium.
I’m amazed that India hasn’t gone into it heavily; IIRC they have (literally) mountains of Thorium in the himalayas.
While golfing, Ed told me about Charlie Bowman’s ADR (Accelerator Driven Reactor). As he was not above “pulling the legs” of simpletons like this camel I challenged him to “show me”. He blew my mind by showing me the 3 meter diameter ADR that TUNL (Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory) was testing in 2002 while Rubbia (CERN) was just talking about it!
Larry Biedenharn, back when he was working on muon catalyzed fusion, proposed a fission-fusion breeder reactor — use the muons given off by a fission reactor to catalyze D_2 or DT or T2 fusions in a suitable stoichiometry of surrounding medium, to get a second stage energy boost that might have ended up larger than the original, depending on how many fusions you could get per muon (the “sticking problem”). I’ve never heard of anyone ever actually trying it, but if it worked it could conceivably multiply the fuel efficiency of a fission reactor by anywhere from 3 to 20 (I don’t remember the branching ratios and so on that limit it on the input side, the output side is experimentally unknown, but Larry was pretty smart and his back of the envelope calculations suggested that it would be break even right away. Probably still true today.
* General work on alternative fuels.
You missed some of the ones that are most likely to succeed. Remember how the Germans were able to prolong WW2 by turning coal into gasoline using the Fischer-Tropf process? With gas prices where they are today the conversion of cheap natural gas and coal into gasoline is commercially competitive, The USA has many kinds of natural gas and coal reserves in such huge quantities that we could be independent of imports within 20 years. Taking this to the next level, popular television (“Dallas”) gives just an inkling of the even greater potential of methane hydrates.
I actually didn’t try to list them all because there are too many, but I’m aware of (some) of them. FT in particular I fantasize as being run off of solar cells. The problem is that gasoline in particular is too damn valuable to give up. It’s basically impossible to get order of 10 kW-hours into a liter-sized volume otherwise — batteries just can’t do it, and will probably never be able to do so. That might get over the objection of using coal to turn the coal into gasoline (and would give one more gasoline) while also finding a useful industrial scale use for solar cells, since it neatly trumps the storage and commercialization problem. 10 kWh in a liter of gasoline will one day be worth more than 10 kWh of electricity (it is almost break even right now). Hydrates I keep hearing about, but that’s all. I’ll wait and see.
* Fusion.
I spent five years (starting in 1970) working on inertial confinement fusion. Back then we thought that commercial generation of electricity using fusion power was only 40 years away. Forty years later I am reasonably confident that this milestone will be achieved within 100 years. Will human civilization last that long? As an optimist I say yes!
I think we’ll do it in 10, at most 20. I think I even know how to do it, but if I told you then I’d have to kill you. I’m hoping to make a few million bucks shortly — if I do, perhaps I’ll invest some in finding out if I’m right. Then look out Bill Gates! Fusion, in addition to being worth trillions and saving civilization from CAGW (if any), would finally make us a type II civilization, one that has earned the right to evolve into the future and spread out in the solar system — if we can deal with our own monkey-brained tribal human mythological irrationality and inclination to fight for status and power and breeding rights.
But fusion would give us the time to evolve out of them. There is almost no ecological problem that humans face that cannot be solved with enough, cheap enough clean energy, and humans can’t use up all of the deuterium even on Earth (assuming one can get DD fusion to work). And then there is Jupiter…
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Henry asks
0) how much is the cooling caused by CO2 by increasing vegetation?
1) do you think ozone is a GHG? Why?
2) did you know that there are quite a number of human activities that produce ozone?
3) do you think the net effect of more ozone due to human activities is that of warming or cooling?
4) do you think that we should do something to limit the amount of ozone emissions?
Answers by R. Brown
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/22/a-response-to-dr-paul-bains-use-of-denier-in-scientific-literature/#comment-1019299
Henry says
Sorry, Dr Brown, I have to flunk you. Ozone has strong absorption at 10-11 um.
You did not answer one of questions correctly.
I will give you 10% for the effort of writing all your fairy tales,
but all of it is just that,
BS
dcfl51 said
Dear dcfl51, if “catastrophe” in the context of climate change is not defined in scientific literature, then why is a scientist like OP Dr.Brown bringing this up as one of only two arguments against the assertion that (in Dr.Brown’s words) skeptics do not ‘deny’ AGW ? Could he not have presented a scientifically based argument, sustained by scientific research, that shows that ‘skeptics’ actually challenge a scientific issue instead of an undefined ‘label’ that they created themselves ?
Also, I seem to have a hard time finding these publications that assert that the world is approaching a tipping point and that we have only X years to save the world. could you at least provide a few references ?
Also, you mention a list of 10 “predictions of catastrophe”, but you did not reference a single one of them.
Which of these alleged “predictions” did you find most convincing in context of the argument that Dr,Brown is making about which aspect of AGW it is that ‘skeptics’ are actually challenging ?
Finally, you mention 4 statements which you claim “published papers which contradict the IPCC’s sensitivity predictions of 1.5 – 4.5 degC for a doubling of CO2” :
A) The absence of the troposphere hotspot. Can you please provide the reference to the scientific publication you were thinking of here, and specify where that publication claims that the IPCC sensitivity estimate is contradicted ?
B) The work of Spencer & Braswell. More on this below.
C) Lindzen & Choi compared sea surface temperature changes with changes in outgoing long wave radiation. Yes, they did, and their work was widely presented in public media as “the end of the AGW scam”.
Unfortunately, Trenberth et al 2010 (and two other papers) pointed out the methodological flaws in their work, including fundamental mistakes such as counting the Stephan Bolzmann blackbody radiation as a “negative feedback”. Lindzen himself refers to this work as an “embarrassing mistake”.
D) The work of Miskolczi. Miskolczi ? Are you serious ? Even Anthony Watts does not promote this guy any more. But since you brought it up : Can you explain where Miskolczi obtained his formula 7 from ? If you can’t then don’t be embarrassed. He created it out of thin air, making THREE assumptions about planetary atmospheres, neither of which has any basis in physics. He gives away one. Can you name the other two ?
So in this list, B) seems the only scientific publication with any scientific merit at all to defend Dr.Brown’s second argument on what ‘skeptics’ actually challenge. And this is a publication that suggests that El Nino events are caused by clouds, and was so fundamentally flawed that the editor of the journal that accepted the paper resigned.
Is there possibly a way that you may have overlooked some good scientific publications that show that “skeptics do not ‘deny’ AGW” but instead challenge “the alleged magnitude of the projected warming on a doubling of CO_2”, as Dr.Brown suggests ?
Robert Brown says (June 26, 2012 at 9:33 pm): “Anthony, I’m sorry, I’m tired and my patience is wearing thin.”
For what it’s worth, I (and no doubt others) have both enjoyed your comments and learned from them. If I may suggest two rules before engaging voodoo physicists (VP) in the future:
1) Abandon all hope of convincing or even educating the VPs. Your real target is the lurker who may otherwise be seduced by the dark side of the farce. Again, for what it’s worth, I think you’ve done that quite well in this thread.
2) Have fun. There are few things as humorous as the den–er, willfully ignorant, so enjoy yourself (see davidmhoffer, June 26, 2012 at 10:01 pm). This also applies when engaging zealots on the other side; being a heretic/infidel can be a lot of fun.
BTW, since WUWT doesn’t like the D-word even when it’s accurate, I suggest we refer to den–er, disbelief of the so-called “greenhouse effect” as the “greghouse effect”. 🙂
Greg House, you seem in need of some tools, if I read your stance correct. Here is a spreadsheet that is right down your alley. The greatest point of this spread is that only one physics law (S-B grey-body) is used in the construction, you can add, extend and expand inter-relations in the light blue area at will to get more realisitic or match actual empirical data but here’s the amazing thing…. changing any of the light blue parameters never changes the amount of LW radiation exiting at the TOA. That spreadsheet has caused me to pause for over a week now and I have more that are much more complex now, but this was my starting point. The data in blue is just synthetically spread but you will find it doesn’t really matter.
Try it please. I think you or anyone capable of understanding basic physics is going to find this quite amazing. Let me know later what you think of it.
The spreadsheet:
http://i50.tinypic.com/2nbt27s.png
The equations to build it (majority just pull down):
http://i49.tinypic.com/2chx7kp.png
Maybe that will helps you get a few of your points across.
Greg House, I should have looked more closely before sending those. The covered up emissivity at the bottom is 1.0000, space being about as close to a true blackbody as they come. The top yellow emissivity is from Dr. Miskolczi’s papers and it the long-wave transitivity at the surface from exp(-tau) or e^(-1.87xx). The other yellow controlling data (and there are only eight) are from either the 1976 US Std Atm or a close match to Trenberth’s papers. The 240 wm-2 at toa is pretty accepted and is calculated by the sheet itself. You seem versed enough to see through the rest but ask if you don’t understand any particulars.
Dr Brown, I enjoyed reading your thoughts on fusion. It made me think of something the late Dr Bussard said during the Google lecture he gave on Inertial Electric Confinement fusion. He was quoting another scientist, who said “we have been working on toroidal fusion for 50 years, and the one thing we’ve learned is that they’re no damn good! Fusion works though – you only have to look up at the sky full of stars – and not a single one is toroidal.”
I believe toroidal fusion to be just another policy failure, like so many other policy failures, though not as bad as the one we are seeing unravel in Europe.
I also see you’ve been feeding the trolls again. I warned against this very thing in my first post – you can explain all you want and they ask for experiments; you describe experiments and they say they’re not relevant. You might as well try arguing with Kenji (he’s Anthony’s dog BTW, a respected member of the onion of concerned scientists.) Do rest assured though, that most of us do get what you’ve said.
Henry says
as being due to O_2 and O_3.
hole and lo, it has exactly the same structure. A bite looking down, the missing radiation backscattered looking up, right down to the little hole within the hole in the middle! It is radiating at a warmer temperature because the optical path is longer and the absorption is weaker in the first place.
Sorry, Dr Brown, I have to flunk you. Ozone has strong absorption at 10-11 um.
You did not answer one of questions correctly.
I will give you 10% for the effort of writing all your fairy tales,
but all of it is just that,
BS
I flunked? Really?
Oh, NO! Noobody expects the HenryP Inquisition…
Look, HenryP, I was just funnin’ with ya, although I shouldn’t do this with a literalist. Did you notice how all of my answers were perfectly wrong? As wrong as they could possibly be? Don’t you think that takes skill?
Besides, I really can read a spectrograph and make sense of it, especially if some other kind person more skilled and patient than I has taken the trouble to go through it and mark it up with absorption lines. I therefore commend you (and Greg, and Myrrh), once again, to visit:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/10/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-emission-spectra/
and look at his Perry Fig 6.6, 8.1, and 8.2, especially 8.2, where he labels the bite between 9.5 and 10
8.2 is as close as anybody could ever want to a direct photograph of the GHE. TOA looking down, BOA, looking up, both in the Arctic, at night, superimposed on the S-B curves clearly labelled with their temperature. Surface temperature just under 270. Looking down, a very clear CO_2 hole, where it is absolutely clear that the temperature of the CO_2 that finally radiates in the hole is just under 230K. 270 – 230 = 40 K. The DALR is maybe 6K/km. We divide and estimate that the CO_2 is probably radiating from the vicinity of the tropopause. What a surprise. Looking up we equally clearly see the missing surface radiation being reflected down. In fact, you can see this happening at damn near the granularity of individual lines — where TOA dips, BOA rises, sharp little line by sharp little line. You can see the GHE happening at the quantum level, in other words, per species in regions where single lines dominate as opposed to bands.
We look at the 9.5
Note well that there is a lot more energy missing from the CO_2 hole than there is from the O3 hole, HP. The former is wider, closer to (almost at!) the peak in the ground emission spectrum. The total outgoing power per unit area (really, steradian) that is being blocked is roughly the area under these curves, and whether you are BOA looking up or TOA looking down CO_2 clearly wins. So while you are quite right that O3 is a player, it isn’t really a neglected player or an unknown player. Is it being treated adequately or reasonably in GCMs? Don’t ask me, I’m not a “player” — ask somebody like John NG (his blog is linked above) who is. Since he is very definitely not an idiot, not a knee-jerk CAGW proponent, and almost certainly can read TOA spectroscopy even better than I can, I would personally bet that the answer is yes, but that’s exactly the kind of place that you could look if you wanted to check the science in the GCMs — how do they set parameters like this, how do they adjust it for location (latitude and longitude, both matter on the inhomogeneous dynamical surface), time of year, variation in the height of the tropopause with fluctuations in the jet stream driven by ENSO/decadal oscillation type dynamics, and any possible modulation by e.g. GCRs and/or geosolar magnetism.
We know that the so-called “ozone hole” (and upper atmospheric ozone content in general) is dynamic, and modulated by more than just CFCs or other anthropogenic aerosols. Does this modulation produces macroscopic secular changes in the total greenhouse forcing, and is it correctly accounted for? I have no idea — I’m not sure anyone does. But I’m fairly sure that people who do climate modelling at least think about it and try to include it in a reasonable way, even if “reasonable” ends up being “treated like a constant forcing, uninteresting” simply because of any good reason (so far) to do otherwise.
But I digress. I actually suspect that you know all of this, HenryP — and you really do try to look at, and understand, things quantitatively, I’ll grant you that. If only G and M were so inclined. But will they even look at figure 8.2 in the article linked a few measly lines above, exerting (as Greg would put it) a tiny pressure with a single finger that would have the profound effect of cooling their anti-GHE jets if they didn’t simultaneously close his eyes and recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards so they couldn’t see or think about the graph(s) at the other end?
Absolutely not. When space aliens fail to arrive at the time and place confidently predicted by the cult leaders, it does not prove that they weren’t right after all. Quite the opposite! It shows that the aliens heard their prayers, and decided to spare the Earth for a few more decades! To quote yet another movie (wasted on the audience, apparently), the end result is always “We must redouble our efforts!” Followed by “See that you do. The Emperor is not so — forgiving — as I am…” and the passing of the collection plate.
This is so sad. In the real world, the child who pointed out that the Emperor had no clothes would be grabbed by its own parents, gutted like a trout and cast into the fire lest its heretical observation bring down the wrath of heaven on the entire tribe. Does not the Old Testament advise us to stone our children to death if they talk back to us?
Note to self: Add a few good sized bricks to my iocaine stash and use them when my kids get up. No point in getting their sheets all bloody. It does explain why my luck fishing has been lousy almost as well as the #!*% north wind, though, doesn’t it?
rgb
The spreadsheet:
http://i50.tinypic.com/2nbt27s.png
The equations to build it (majority just pull down):
http://i49.tinypic.com/2chx7kp.png
Maybe that will helps you get a few of your points across.
Dearest Wayne,
You, OTOH, get an A+. Sadly, though, you did not post the actual spreadsheet, and screen-scraping a png is going to be too large a barrier for those who are absolutely convinced that all of this is the work of the devil (Al Gore) who is manipulating hidden puppet strings behind the scenes to convince the entire world that (gasp) this failed idea of Arrhenius is actually true. See description of classical Cognitive Dissonance above.
I would make only two or three suggestions for further improving your “Greenhouse model in a box”. One is replace the column that contains temperatures as a function of heights with a linear formula with a single entered parameter: the Adiabatic Lapse Rate. That way people can try dry, humid, and wet air lapse rates by simply changing a number instead of recomputing a column by hand. Yes, it is approximate and probably not exactly linear but it is monotonic and that’s nearly all that counts. Second, do the same with the column next to it that describes (if I understand it) the exponential attenuation with height, presumably obtained from the mean free optical path of IR photons as a function of e.g. CO_2 density or the like — if I don’t understand this, don’t worry about it but replace the column either way with a formula, that way there is “nothing up your sleeve”. It is pretty easy to compute the expected pressure gradient with height to at least first order from buoyancy and atmospheric compressibility, and to transform this into the mean distance between CO2 molecules and thence (with cross-sections and the mean free path MFP) into exponential attenuation formulae.
Well, OK, so it’s not so easy to do all of that but you still should at least put in the formula itself and maybe crossreference it to a book or article somewhere. Again leave the formula parametric — if somebody wants to increase or decrease the MFP or assert that all of the CO_2 (being “heavier” than O2 and N2) settles to the bottom, they can play right through — nothing they do that doesn’t destroy a monotonic increase in MFP that must occur with height is going to affect the qualitative conclusion, after all, only the actual magnitude of the final result.
Then submit it to Anthony as a top-level article so you can get the actual spreadsheet linked into the article, and can explain what you’ve done (and maybe present some nifty graphs to make it easier to understand). Until you do that, I can’t be certain that everything you’ve done is correct, but it certainly looks reasonable, and — simple as it is — it is precisely what all climate scientists should be doing on a microscopic scale — presenting not just the result of a complex calculation but the actual code (and data, if any) used to arrive at that result, with annotation and explanation.
That still won’t help those trapped in the throes of terminal CD, but it will certainly help everybody else, and even if you have made a horrible mistake in your spreadsheet, by putting it out there and getting it vetted and critiqued by knowledgable people you can fix the errors, end up with something that everybody (reasonable) agrees is a decent and accurate implementation of the physics with simple parameters to allow people to play with the result within the assumptions of the model and that will produce a reasonable estimate of the GHE, one that might not work for an inverted atmosphere (relatively rare) but that should work quite well otherwise.
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I also see you’ve been feeding the trolls again. I warned against this very thing in my first post – you can explain all you want and they ask for experiments; you describe experiments and they say they’re not relevant.
I’m a compulsive teacher, what can I say. Or perhaps I view it as practice. I keep thinking that if I explain it just so, lay it out so very clearly in only a few steps, minimize the requirements for special knowledge, keep it stuff they can add up on fingers and toes by looking at actual data…
But Dave’s Heinlein quote is probably the best description of the probable result. In the end, I’m just annoying mules.
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***
Vince Causey says:
June 27, 2012 at 4:22 am
I also see you’ve been feeding the trolls again. I warned against this very thing in my first post
****
C’mon, Vince. Every bit that Robert writes is worth reading — the trolls aren’t here for learning, but many others are.
(although I haven’t written a quantum textbook, sadly)
I tried, the paper kept moving around.
This is true because: a) the “7 degrees” is the numerical value of an equilibrium tempeature and b) an equilibrium temperature is not an observable feature of the real world.
…or, the “7 degrees” refers to a perfectly well defined, measurable, and indeed measured (well or badly) average temperature for the real world. Any of several such well-defined average temperatures — total surface, land surface, SST, lower troposphere, etc.
The science of climate makes claims about the numerical values of these measured and computed averages derived in well-defined ways from actual measurement data obtained using thermometers, which can easily be shown to produce reasonable, reproducible, physically meaningful measurements that can be connected on a coarse grained, quasi-static basis that is perfectly well understood to the average local enthalpy of the coarse-grained volume they are in thermal contact with.
You don’t want to go to this place, seriously. It is complete and utter bullshit. You can argue all you want about the accuracy of the results, whether or not the statistical averages are being well or poorly computed from the samplings, whether or not the keepers of the GISS or Hadley data sets have their thumbs on the scales, but do not make assertions that any physicist who has actually taken thermodynamics and statistical mechanics knows are completely irrelevant to the discussion.
The point of temperature is that it is related to enthalpy by the equipartition theorem. This in turn can be formally derived in stat mech subject to conditions that can easily be shown to be satisfied in the vicinity of a thermometer that isn’t sitting somewhere so dynamic that the thermometer itself can’t equilibrate with its surroundings in a reasonable way. Therefore, a variable density array of thermometers in a room provides a systematically improvable direct measure of the enthalpy of the air in the room, and temperature changes are at least to first order directly proportional</I to the enthalpy changes (on average) completely independent of the density!
And even a single thermometer in a room provides a decent estimate of the room’s limiting temperature unless the room is large and filled with people using blowtorches on blocks of ice.
Now make the room larger and larger until it contains the surface of the Earth and as much of the crust and overhead volume as you care to. As you make it larger, the statistical precision of the result of your measurement decreases, but the measurement itself is still an observable. Increase the density in this larger volume and the precision improves. Use the measurements you obtain to learn more about how the result varies spatiotemporally and you can actually improve the grid and sampling mechanism to increase your precision more than you would with a simple array (adaptive sampling so you put more thermometers places where the temperature varies more strongly). Integrate this over suitably coarse grained time and your time-average temperature becomes an directly justified proxy for time averaged enthalpy. Compare the variation of the enthalpy to observable energy flow through the open system by computing estimates — from measurements at the TOA — of total energy in minus total energy out, use a bit of very simple physics associated with radiative processes that has been known for well over a century and validated in countless experiments (and in any event, you’re measuring the goddamn spectrum, not just relying on an idealized blackbody spectrum in your computations, so in the end you’re just integrating the Poynting vector through a closed surface that contains the Earth, something that is physics that is just as challengable as Newton’s Law of Gravitation (in other words, don’t try it in context, you’ll only make an ass of yourself).
Average surface temperature may have large error bars, may or may not be computed correctly, but there is nothing non-observable about it and it is a direct, completely justified measure of the relevant enthalpy that the integral of the Poynting vector at, say, one Earth radius above the surface must be modulating in a continuity equation for energy — that is, raw, naked energy conservation used as a first principle. I can write this partial differential equation down for you if you like — basically it is the first law of thermodynamics but one has to use Maxwell’s equations at the boundary to compute the energy flux in or out of the volume.
So, am I just annoying the ass, or would you care to retract your utterly indefensible and absurd statement? (And don’t get started with latent heats and so on — again, they only modify details that are irrelevant on an annualized basis or that can be handled as perturbations or with bookkeeping on the side. They don’t make “average temperature” any less valid as an observable, invalidate our use of the Poynting vector or energy conservation/the first law, only correct our estimates of the enthalpy and its volume integral.)
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Robert Brown (June 27, 2012 at 8:03 am):
To state that a science of climate “makes claims about the numerical values of these measured an computed averages…” is a half truth that conceals a fatal structural error of climatology. If there were a science of climate it would make claims about the outcomes of statistical events. Like yourself, IPCC working group 1 references measurements but fails to reference events.
beng,
“C’mon, Vince. Every bit that Robert writes is worth reading — the trolls aren’t here for learning, but many others are.”
Can’t argue with that – it’s certainly been educational. I was just getting a bit worried for Dr Brown’s blood pressure – but from his response, he seems to be doing just fine 🙂
(although I haven’t written a quantum textbook, sadly)
I tried, the paper kept moving around.
Are you certain of that?
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