Readers may recall this story: Nobel laureate resigns from American Physical Society to protest the organization’s stance on global warming.
He’s back.
From the Observations, Scientific American Blog Network
Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting: From the Big Bang to the Big Controversy (aka Climate Change)
Ivar Giaever, who shared the 1973 prize for work on tunneling in superconductors but was to offer a skeptical take on climate change, Molina said that critics aren’t usually the experts. Listening to them, he added, is like going to your dentist when you have a heart problem.
As he took the stage for his turn, Giaever’s immediate remark was, “I am happy I’m allowed to speak for myself.” He derided the Nobel committees for awarding Al Gore and R.K. Pachauri a peace prize, and called agreement with the evidence of climate change a “religion.”
In contrast to Crutzen and Molina, Giaever found the measurement of the global average temperature rise of 0.8 degrees over 150 years remarkably unlikely to be accurate, because of the difficulties with precision for such measurements—and small enough not to matter in any case:
“What does it mean that the temperature has gone up 0.8 degrees? Probably nothing.”
He disagreed that carbon dioxide was involved and showed several charts that asserted, among other things, that climate had even cooled. “I pick and choose when I give this talk just the way the previous speaker picked and chose when he gave his talk,” he added. He finished with a pronouncement:
“Is climate change pseudoscience? If I’m going to answer the question, the answer is: absolutely.”
h/t to Marc Morano of Climate Depot
Do you really think so? I would suggest that a useful average for surface temperatures would have to be a weighted one based on the local heat capacities. This, then, would at least be a proxy for global heat energy. Without that kind of weighting, what does the average of an intensive variable like temperature really mean?
Even if not weighted based on the local heat capacities, it still averages over them. As long as the heat capacities themselves don’t, on average, change significantly over time in ways that a time average cannot capture the average temperature would be expected, I think, to vary monotonically with the global enthalpy. Probably not linearly, but monotonically is enough for an apples to apples comparison of the result over time.
In other words, if the average temperature, reasonably consistently computed, increases over time it is very likely that global enthalpy has increased over that time as well. Which, given more or less constant heat input, implies an increase in the resistance associated with heat loss.
The point isn’t that this average is the best quantitative measure of global temperature — it probably is not. But it can still be a consistent and fairly reliable measure of global warming or cooling in the enthalpic sense. A far better measure is to not bother with the full spatiotemporal averaging and to construct a four dimensional graph of coarse grained average temperatures in space and time over the sphere and year. Which is of course what real climate scientists do, at least I profoundly hope and expect that they do. Given that one can do anything one likes with the result — weight it as you suggest (if you can figure out how) and compute an estimate of enthalpy for at least some part/depth of the surface, average the fourth power, compute the distribution of the fourth power and convert it into a radiation rate (and then time average that) and so on.
rgb
rgbatduke says:
July 6, 2012 at 5:29 pm
“…and convert it into a radiation rate …”
There again, the radiation rate depends on local emissivity. Obviously, the globally averaged temperature means something, but what exactly, I do not think anyone really knows. The only thing I can say for sure is that the time rate of change of atmospheric CO2 concentration is essentially proportional to it. But, that probably has a lot to do with the fact that the Earth’s surface is mostly water, which has roughly uniform thermal characteristics (at least, a lot more uniform than land).