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Skeptics Are Not Deniers: A Conversation (part 6)
This is Part 6 of my six-part discussion with Robert G. Brown on paleoclimate, climate dynamics, and global warming. Start with Part 1. *********** RB: I’m not sure how much this makes us disagree in the end. We both agree that CO_2 increases are very likely responsible for some fraction of the observed temperature increase […]
Skeptics Are Not Deniers: A Conversation (part 5)
This is Part 5 of my six-part discussion with Robert G. Brown on paleoclimate, climate dynamics, and global warming. Start with Part 1. Wait until next week for my response to the NOAA “greenhouse gases increased the chances of the Texas heat wave by a factor of 20″ study. *************** 5. To analyze the modern […]
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In Part 5, we learn that we don’t understand how the climate works, but we can still model it!
In Part 6, we learn that we don’t know all the factors that influence climate and how they interact, but we should remove those factors from the actual data and viola — the models show CO2 is actually causing warming. The data doesn’t show warming, we have to adjust it first, then run a model to find the world is actually warming.
Dr. Brown,
Thank you! You are just what we (those in opposition of mitigation) need in order for the great silent majority (which I believe exists, but I could be wrong) of scientists, engineers, and scientifically literate people who have drawn the same conclusions to start speaking out against CAGW and its mitigation being the only solution mantra in numbers sufficient to seriously effect policy.
If you are a member of APS, have you expressed your position openly within that organization or any other you may be a member of? Have you requested a survey for wording of “official” statements concerning GW? IMO, these institutions and organizations are the high ground we must take in order to win the war against alarmism. We have to educate the average member and then push from within for changes in “official” statements that reflect the doubts of the majority of scientists. As long as those who advocate for mitigation action like carbon trading and carbon taxes can point to these “objective” institutions’ support for their position, we’ll continue to have difficult times (especially in summer) preventing massive legislative actions until the next real cooling off period, IMO, but I could be wrong.
APS climate change statements:
http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/07_1.cfm
The 2007 statement is absolutely dreadful. The 2010 statement is better but still IMO lacks true objectivity.
I’d also like to thank you for representing NC well, not only in intellect but also in civility. Please, keep it up.
In Part 6, RB wrote:
This is a fallacy a lot of solar enthusiast fall for. The only thing solar cells have in common with computer chips is that both use semiconductor materials. Moore’s Law ONLY states that we can cram progressively more transistors per semiconductor area, which means we can process more and more INFORMATION per area. More’s Law DOESN’T say that semiconductor material becomes cheaper and cheaper.
Solar cells on the other hand just convert incoming light energy per area unit into electricity. Progress there just means an increase in efficiency, which is achieved by using more and more complicated junction structures. This causes an increase in cost per area unit, and could or could not cause an increase or decrease in cost per peak W. The limit is of course the second law of thermodynamics, as the best cells are already in the 40% efficiency range.
There’s nothing possible in the magnitude of progress like Moore’s Law. For something like Moore’s Law to be in effect, we would need to be able to increase the amoung of energy per area unit, which is clearly not possible. And no, concentrating optics does not count, because the optics is already more expensive than the cells per area unit.
And in addition, more than 50% of the cost of installed solar is already in the frame, inverters and so on, a cost that will only go up.
As you may know in Britain we had an exceptionally hot March this year and the conclusion by the BBC and other warmists was that this demonstrated climate change at work. From My till the present day Britain has been submerged in rain, sometimes torrential and other times just heavy. This is cited as the predicted result of global weather perturbation. Over the past couple of weeks we have been treated to a series of insights into the current behaviour of the Jet Stream. The Met Office stated that the behaviour of these high atmosphere winds was not as yet understood. This is an organisation which possesses a huge computer system in which it ‘models’ weather the outcome of which informs Governmental and strategic policy. How in Wonderland can this ‘model’ be so trusted if perhaps the greatest component if its formation is not understood? If only the Met Office was half as diligent never mind sceptic as WUWT.
What I found most frustrating about N-G’s side of the argument was the blinders he donned in regard to economics and policy.
While there is merit is some focus on science and what is known and unknown, the science is literally academic without some affect on decisions and action. Yet even here N-G turns a blind eye to how politics is trumping science.
Skepticism must yield no bounds. A magician is an illusionist who uses misdirection as an essential tool. A skeptic needs to be aware of that misdirection; to look for the questions that are not asked, to challenge the assumptions taken for granted. In a chain of reasoning, it doesn’t matter whether the science is sound when the politics and policy is fraudulent.
“We both agree that CO_2 increases are very likely responsible for some fraction of the observed temperature increase from the LIA on.”
gain. But flat out CO_2 only no feedback gain is IIRC between 0.3 and 0.5 C.
What a ridiculous statement ! Some fraction = 1/1,000,000
I think you would find it very difficult to justify that statement believably. More realistically somewhere between 0.3C and 1.0C out of about 1.5C, depending, although yes, there is at least one model wherein feedbacks are so strong as to result in essentially zero gain. I doubt zero gain or negative gain. I doubt
But regardless, the term “ridiculous” is clearly exaggeration. It is precisely this sort of thing that one should examine very critically, when different people have different quantitative arguments that can describe the past adequately but project very different futures. There’s nothing one can or should “ridicule” in any of these arguments — one should simply look to see how they pan out over a long time because one problem that actually (IMO) plagues climate science is that people on both sides of the issue seem to think that 30 years is “long enough” to make conclusions when in fact it isn’t even a full half-cycle of many of the global decadal oscillations and is a tiny interval compared to characteristic times of e.g. oceanic equilibration.
I’m liking 50 to 100 years as being a minimum baseline of modern era, well-instrumented observations to begin to nail down which models do or don’t really extrapolate. In the meantime, one can argue for one part in a million but one cannot prove that the argument has any realistic predictive power for the future, in part because we (again IMO) don’t have all of the baseline functional drivers nailed down to where we might not be neglecting pieces that have much larger effects than the pieces we are including.
One simply lovely question that emerged on the John NG thread is this. One reasonable criterion for somebody who is a “denier” versus somebody who is a skeptic is that a skeptic can usually tell you at least something — whether or not it is easy or difficult to achieve — that might be evidence that would change their mind. Whether it is a resumption of monotone increases in global temperature at a rate equal to or exceeding 0.1 C/decade even in the teeth of two or three cycles of seriously diminishing solar activity, a sudden, rapid and real, easily observable increase in sea level that exceeds levels that can plausibly be explained by mere thermal expansion or continental motion and so on, combinations of the above, or whatever, there is something that might make them (possibly reluctantly) conclude that even CAGW is more plausible than not for some meaning of the C.
Ideally, the same would be true for individuals on the other side of the issue — if global temperatures actually dropped 0.1 to 0.3 over the next decade or three as solar cycle 24 plays out and solar cycle 25 and 26 came in weaker still, and CO_2 levels and oceanic levels dropped with it, a lot of people would go back to the drawing board, not because their arguments were ridiculous but because they were wrong, because they failed to be borne out by observation.
What is wrong with moderating the tone of the rhetoric so it is less polarizing and more open minded? What is wrong with laying out some sort of reasonable criterion for being convinced of C/c/B/b/N/n/A/GW/GC (Catastrophic or less catastrophic, Beneficial or less beneficial, Neutral (both at the same time in large measure) or neutral (little benefit or damage either way), Anthropogenic (or not) Global warming or, for that matter, Global Cooling anthropogenic or not? Even if it is something as simple as “twenty to thirty years of observations that are predicted accurately by current CAGW models and less accurately by anything else”…
It will probably take even longer to be certain — the climate is pretty complex and there are long time scale drivers (and we need reliable apples to apples data for a lot of it over long time scales to be sure that confirmation bias or sampling bias aren’t corrupting the empirical side one is attempting to fit). But hey, if I see the ocean routinely lapping at my back door at high spring tide in the house I’m living in inside a decade or two, I’m going to be a lot more convinced than I am now — that would take a roughly 20 cm rise, and if one wishes to convince me that sea levels are going to rise by 1 meter in 80 or so years, 11-12 cm per decade, it is hardly crazy to insist that they rise enough for me to see the process unambiguously at work in my own back yard. Not borderline results that depend on marginal statistical analysis or cherrypicking locations; clear, unmistakable signal that anyone can see.
This is the largest problem with the entire issue, and one I have the greatest difficulty communicating even to John NG. Before I am convinced that CO_2 is causing egregious increases compared to natural variability, the signal has to emerge clearly from the noise, not because of clever subtractions of presumed noise, but because the signal clearly emerges from the noise. It may have happened — certainly there are those that think that it has — but IMO it is far from clear and many of the assertions that it has are rather absurd, e.g. Katrina proves CAGW, SLR at selected locations on the eastern seaboard is rising due to CAGW, Antarctica is melting due to CAGW, animal species are disappearing or altering their habitat due to CAGW, etc. Real SLR is perhaps 1 centimeter or even two per decade (if that, the data is still pretty uncertain), real statistical analysis of storm energy, violence, frequency shows no resolvable CAGW signal, and so on.
In the meantime, CAGW itself is not “ridiculous”, it is a hypothesis with some theoretical and some experimental support. It is not a proven hypothesis, not even among climate scientists. Most scientists climate or otherwise consider GW to be proven (the thermometric record speaks for itself). I’d say most scientists consider GW to have some anthropogenic component due to CO_2.
Most scientists may be wrong, but the hypothesis is far from ridiculous.
rgb
rgbatduke (July 16 at 12:58 pm):
If I’m not mistaken, the quantity whose “actual mean being proposed in AR5 is 2.8 C” is the equilibrium climate sensitivity (TECS). TECS is the increase in the increase in the global average equilibrium surface air temperature from a doubling of the CO2 concentration. As the equilibrium temperature is not an observable, speculations regarding the numerical value of TECS are not falsifiable, thus lying outside science.
If climatology is to join the sciences, something other than the magnitude of TECS must be the subject of its speculations. One possibility is to replace speculations about the magnitude of TECS with (falsifiable) predictions of the global average surface air temperature. Does this topic interest you?
Thanks to both parties for sharing their thoughts. The comments triggered and old bug bear.
I have read AR3 and AR4 cover to cover. I commented on this years ago: – I am completely dumbfounded as to how the Summary for Policy Makers could be derived from the Working Group Papers. It is like the Summary for Policy Makers was written independently of the Working Group Papers and it didn’t matter what is in the science section as the political section trumped it in all cases. I read AR4 several times trying to connect the dots. I couldn’t but perhaps others can. As an engineer who has written many reports based on good data and being required to be responsible for the technical and FINANCIAL recommendations I am surprised more scientists haven’t refused to participate in the writing of the Working Group papers. But then that would only leave the politically driven scientists, WWF and Greenpeace to author the WG papers so I guess they are firmly between a rock and a hard place.
There’s nothing possible in the magnitude of progress like Moore’s Law. For something like Moore’s Law to be in effect, we would need to be able to increase the amoung of energy per area unit, which is clearly not possible. And no, concentrating optics does not count, because the optics is already more expensive than the cells per area unit.
I completely understand what you are saying, but what you are saying is clearly completely wrong. Empirically wrong, in some detail. A variation of Moore’s Law has held for hard drives, for example, even though they aren’t semiconductor devices — all that is required is for there to be some arena where there is a power law scaling in what is achieved in time, and sometimes that scaling, even in the case of chips, doesn’t even come from “just” VLSI scaling but from other nonlinear stuff, pipelining and parallelism, new technologies, etc.
Whether or not one counts or discounts concentrating optics, where one should really say that they are more expensive so far than the cells area unit (a far cry from proving that they will always be so), it is a matter of fact that if you plot the cost per watt over time, it seems to be following a power law with a halving time of roughly 10 years. You can argue that this cannot or will not continue — as it has been argued many times in the past with Moore’s Law itself, for that matter. Somehow, the prospect of lots of money and concentrated science always found a way to give it more legs, legs that were always obvious after the fact.
In the present case, a lot of the obstacles aren’t even physics — they are manufacturing or engineering obstacles — how to build efficient foundries, how to accomplish economies of scale. And then there is a lot of research being done into the actual semiconductor physics, work with a huge potential payoff given success.
Could all this work fail? Absolutely! We may have hit the wall, and PV cells may never get cheaper in real dollars than they are today. Do I think that likely? Are you kidding? Of course not. I think that they’ll continue to come down in price rather aggressively for at least two more decades, quite possibly with some discrete doublings in cost efficiency (just as was seen in CPUs).
As for cost-benefit — at today’s prices, a rooftop collector plus inverter with guaranteed sellback into the electrical net is barely a net loss for me, living in the south, amortized over 20 years. I’m talking over the counter retail. With the government subsidy, it might be a small win (but high risk and a fair bit of cash out of pocket to buy in). A halving of the price of the actual cells (which are still a substantial part of the total cost of the installation) would almost certainly permit the installation to be scaled to where it was easily a decent ROI on a less than 20 year amortization plus years of profit. Halving twice would make it a no-brainer — it would be a standard feature of almost all new construction housing in the South.
But I honestly don’t care if you agree with this projection. If prices drop I’ll “vote” with my pocketbook, acting in my own best self-interest, as will you. If they don’t, well, then I guess I was wrong. I’m just explaining why in my, fairly well informed opinion doing nothing about carbon (which is probably what is going to be done anyway, at least for a decade or two yet) isn’t a crazy choice. It lets one accumulate a 50 year baseline of reliable satellite data extended modestly by sounding data from a decade or two more. It might suffice to convince even most skeptics that C/c/A/GW is a real problem — or not. In the meantime, solar PV technology may — or may not, sure — become first economically feasible, then economically advantageous, so that in 20 years rooftop PV systems on houses are as common as houses with double insulated low-E glass windows or houses with high efficiency air conditioning and furnaces, just features worth paying for.
I’ve spent a bunch of money on high efficiency H/AC in my house as the original equipment wore out and it has dropped my utility bill tremendously. Why wouldn’t one want to do this when you’ve got to install a new AC anyway, if one can afford it? Does it reduce my “carbon footprint”? Probably. Do I care? A bit — I’m not worried about carbon yet, but all things being equal reducing the risk that I’m wrong seems sensible, especially if I can do so at a positive ROI. Why would rooftop solar be any different? If it never makes sense, I’ll never buy it, but I’m certainly not going to pay more for carbon based electrical energy if I can get it more cheaply at home and realize a positive ROI in the process. I even view “energy independence” as being worth something, by which I mean having some electrical capacity that does NOT depend on the power grid would have saved me around $2000 and a whole lot of discomfort over the last 20 years as weather events like hurricanes have knocked out my power for week long intervals, and utility costs have only gone up in the meantime as well.
Do I support grant funded research to improve PV electrical generation? Damn skippy I do! If it “hits” I and every other taxpayer make out like bandits. In the meantime that work costs pennies per taxpayer, if that much. If it never hits, it keeps some smart people off of the streets and supports the entire research infrastructure that has proven to be a source of enormous wealth to us over decades.
Do I support carbon trading, widespread government subsidy of immature technologies? No and no. Do you have to agree with me? No. Use your own judgment.
I do.
rgb
The same is true of many other things.
There is a glaring lack of evidence for changes in solar activity of sufficient magnitude to be a ‘powerful driver’ in the climate. The carbon dating calibration/correction curve would be much further from the constant decay trend if that were the case.
As you mention at the end of the paragraph, the climate is a chaotic {but thermodynamically constrained} system. A powerful driver is not required for large changes in state. Very small inputs can have very large effects, climate sensitivity is not likely to be linear function in a non-linear system.
Well, glaring lack of evidence unless you count things like ice ages and 6-10C variability on geological timescales, or the imperfect correspondences between solar variability and e.g. the LIA, the Dalton minimum, and other sort-of-periodic climate fluctuations.
The problem isn’t that there isn’t any evidence, it is that the evidence isn’t consistent with it being (as you observe) a simple logistic driver (although even this isn’t certain as we don’t have really good, non-confounded proxies for solar state into the remote past). But as you note, the climate is a chaotic, thermodynamically constrained and highly nonlinear system, and it is not only the case that small changes can have large effects, it is the case that small changes in one variable can have large effects when some other variable is in one certain range and small effects otherwise. Furthermore, the interacting variables themselves may not be periodic or linear or predictable.
Solar maxima might (for example) have a greatly amplified effect if they occur during the positive (warming) phase of the NAO, a doubly amplified effect if this occurs when there is surplus CO_2 above some threshold, and ENSO is always in positive phase. But if any one of these is not satisfied, the climate might be nearly neutral, and if two or more are the opposite, it might cool. Volcanic aerosols might trump all of them, or might nonlinearly feed back on cooling but be nearly balanced on warming.
As it is, the occurrence of sort-of-resonances with periodicities in the Earth’s orbital parameters — tilt, precession, orbital resonance — in the glacial cycle is one sort of evidence that solar variability is important in subtle and not terribly consistent or constant ways. The occurrence of geological era variability between (very) warm phases and (very cold) ice ages where details on less than tens of millennia are erased in the fossil record and proxies adds still more uncertainty to the puzzle. And crazy or not, there are at least some not completely implausible arguments for ways the sun itself might directly affect global climate, in fairly powerful ways, other than “just” by variation of TOA insolation. Our lack of certain knowledge about the sun — again in part due to a remarkably short baseline of observations, plus the fact that the sun has many, many unsolved puzzles left even given e.g. SOHO and modern observations with modern instrumentations simply adds to our uncertainty in the correctness of climate models that make assumptions about how solar state works in the climate.
I won’t be entirely comfortable with those models until they can explain the geological timescale global climate without much by way of heuristics. This may never happen — you can’t squeeze data out of a turnip, so to speak, and we may never know what caused an ice age like the one at the Ordovician-Silurian boundary, that happened in spite of atmospheric CO_2 levels estimated to be in the range of 4000 to 7000 ppm! Yes, that would be almost exactly an order of magnitude greater than we have today during the ice age, which lasted for over a million years with no particular reason to think that it was continental drift of orbital variation that was the cause.
There are some lovely stories about the cause of this event, but they are just glorified science fiction, like the stories that it is CO_2 variation that has caused all of the ice ages on geological time scales. Gamma ray burst wiping out the ozone layer? Sure, why not. Chaotic fluctuation in solar output lasting a million years? Possible. Passage of the sun through a dense cloud of interstellar dust as the cause of same? Difficult to rule out. Simultaneous eruption of a hundred Tambora sized volcanos, collision with a 10 km asteroid, work down the science fiction list, look for evidence to the extent that one can in a fossil record with huge amounts of noise, and pray.
In the meantime, please do not insist that there is no evidence that solar state cannot be a major driver of global climate. We don’t know that. There is evidence that suggest that it might be, but the total evidence available to us is probably horribly inadequate to resolve the question even in principle, and our knowledge of and certainty in the physics of a lot of the complex system is still very much up on the air. Personally, I rather think the sun is more variable and chaotic than we have observed in the scant century or two we’ve been watching it with enlightened eyes and even telescopes as “modern” instrumentation. It wouldn’t surprise me to be surprised by future discoveries in solar physics, which I think is actually rather exciting.
rgb
Radiative cooling sucks heat from the ground up to the higher troposphere and sends it packing. We experience it here in NE Oregon and can be strong enough to kill garden plants during Summer months. Where it goes from there I am not sure but my hunch is that some heat dissipates in the stratosphere and some even manages to escape into space. Because it comes and goes, you need constant satellite surveilance to catch it and quantify it. I think that is where the missing heat is. Back into space and is the reason why Trenbreth cannot find it. It chaotically occurs in time and location along with thunder storms and thermals, and is hard to “capture” with our current satellite set-up. The CO2 hypothesis has yet to be proven. The null hypothesis still stands.
Dearest Pamela,
I regretfully must categorically disagree with your description. Radiation is the only way the Earth itself cools. The greenhouse effect slows this cooling, but as you observe, on a very dry day at high altitude it may not slow it a lot. I’m unaware of any “missing heat” in this process.
I’ve already posted a number of moderately clear descriptions of the greenhouse effect and the direct, photographic evidence of the GHE in action. Satellites can and do observe it in action; sadly they cannot AFAIK watch it for the whole globe all of the time closely enough to be able to quantitatively evaluate our outgoing radiation and its modulation in real time, but there is really no doubt that it exists and is responsible for the Earth not being a snowball. There is also in my mind little doubt that there is any sort of runaway pathway to “Venus” like conditions on Earth as Hansen has sometimes utterly irresponsibly proposed. The aforementioned Ordovician-ending ice age — occurring in the teeth of 7 parts per thousand of CO_2, almost a 1% CO_2 atmosphere — is pretty strong evidence that runaway CO_2 mediated global warming not only is impossible, but that even atmospheric CO_2 concentrations around 20 times what they are today aren’t enough to prevent an ice age if some unknown conditions are met.
Why this doesn’t influence the doubt levels of modern climatologists I have no idea, but that doesn’t mean that CO_2 isn’t a greenhouse gas and that the GHE isn’t real. Heat doesn’t “dissipate” in the stratosphere — where could it go? The only place it can go is out to space, radiated away, and it has to do this all of the time in order to remain in balance with incoming energy from the sun.
rgb
You very nearly came to the same conclusions as I have concerning CO2 but then spoiled it. I pointed out some time ago that Jupiter, with its atmosphere of non GHG gasses hydrogen and helium , radiates more heat than it receives from the sun. It is accepted that this heat comes from adiabatic compression, as per the gas laws, but when questioned about this you claimed that what happens on Jupiter has nothing to do with earth. Sorry but both planets operate under the same physical laws. You accept compressive heating on Jupiter but not on Earth and instead return to CO2 because it is a GHG. (GHG is a stupid non scientific label since the atmosphere acts in no way like a greenhouse and scientific labels are supposed to be accurate which the GHG one is not and the reason why Continental Drift was changed to Plate Tectonics, because it most accurately described what was happening to both Continental plates as well as Oceanic ones)
That puts you well above many climate scientists. You probably have a better overall knowledge of the many, many fields that have impacts on our climate than those who actually believe they are climate scientists. To be a true climate scientist would likely take degrees in a dozen or more fields.
You’re very kind (and I don’t disagree that it is a very difficult multidisciplinary subject) but still, a person who is “doing” it is likely to have learned some things that I simply haven’t and have to look up and remind myself every time I try to think about them. It’s difficult to master even all of the physics only needed in climate science, let alone the knowledge of geology, statistics, ODEs and PDEs, and so on that is required. To be a true climate scientist one is probably best off being a scientist in a multidisciplinary team, employing statisticians, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, chemists, geologists, and more, all working together, tied together by a few polymaths who are good in multiple disciplines (although probably not good enough to stand alone in them) to provide direction and glue.
Or, perhaps, to work in blogspace. I’m still meditating upon how bloggery facilitates true collaborative brainstorming that can lead to more than just bullshit heuristic arguments. I’m not sure that we’ve managed to capture the next generation paradigm for serious research yet, the one in which the internet itself is the primary facilitating tool. It has worked absolute magic in the open source world, but so far I’m not certain it has worked magic in science.
A shame, really. It should.
rgb
Understanding the logarithmic nature of CO2 also speaks in my mind to the issue of sensitivity. If sensitivity is low, then really, what are we so concerned about? The CAGW meme relies on sensitivity being high, very high. Some of the initial alarmist estimates were 6 degrees C or more for CO2 doubling. They’ve been revised downward steadily since then, now ranging from +3 to +4.5.
IIRC, the actual mean being proposed in AR5 is 2.8C, and John NG indicated to me offline that his personal bet is 2.5C. And yes, I appreciate your argument for even less.
John Marshall — sorry, I was reading the messages in the wrong order or I would have realized that you already indicated the Ordovician Ice Age (and sorry about misnaming plate tectonics — I’m an old guy and it was continental drift when I grew up, and I haven’t taken “geology” since a single course in high school and learned most of it on my own, especially when dinosaurs fascinated me pre-age 13 and sympathetically when my kids reached the age where they liked them too.
But I completely agree. The Ordovician is a — at least a Apatosaurus in the room (bigger than an elephant, for sure) — being ignored by climate scientists. If an ice age that lasts a million years or more can occur where during the ice age the CO_2 drops only to 4000 ppm, and where the ice age itself is initiated at close to 1% CO_2 in the atmosphere, it is difficult for me to give as much credence as perhaps I should to those who have warned me in a voice most dire that our current CO_2 levels have made a return to glaciation inconceivable. To quote from The Princess Bride — “You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think that it means…”
It is difficult to consider something inconceivable when it has already happened. And we do not know why. Which makes it difficult to answer the question, Why Not? And this is far from the only ice age, and no, we don’t really have a good theory for why any of them happened, unless you are a “CO_2 is everything” enthusiast who wants to blame them all on overturning and sequestering carbon stores. Which I personally think is a bit silly, but we’ll see — I could be wrong!
OK, just about time to quit blogging and go fishing on the high (but not too high!) tide out back. Having added 10,000 or so words to its content, I may just retire from the thread on BOTH websites at this point. Hopefully it did some good, more good than harm, on both sides of the issue. Should have made the Ordovician point with John NG, though — I just never remember the particular name unless I look it up (curse you 10th grade geology back there in 1971, curse you all of the beer and dead brain cells in between:-)!
rgb
To claim that you are an old guy perhaps ignores your capabilities and work. By the way my age is greater than yours, I bet, at 71. New concepts are not that hard to grasp with an open mind. I will continue to fight the 2nd law corner when confronted with the GHG theory since I still consider it to be false, despite your recent emails to me. Observation shows that CO2 has little to do with climate drivers but a lot to do with politics and money. The label ‘catastrophic’ also shows that those using it have little knowledge of recent and past climate/weather or choose not to use that knowledge if politics/money get in the way.
rgbatduke;
IIRC, the actual mean being proposed in AR5 is 2.8C, and John NG indicated to me offline that his personal bet is 2.5C. And yes, I appreciate your argument for even less.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Ah, so they are reducing the mean estimate… AGAIN! Still high in my opinion, but at least they’re moving the numbers into a range that is more supportable by both the data and the physics. Please note that I said “more supportable” not that I agree with it.
Even that is misleading in my view however because I’m betting that they are leaving out a crucial part of the physics in their explanation of that number. When I first read AR4, I couldn’t resolve CO2 doubling = 3.7 w/m2 = +1 degree + feedbacks with SB Law. Using the average temperature of earth at +15C (a number which I now doubt to be accurate but for the purposes of this discussion let’s run with it) I calculated that it would take 5.4 w/m2 to raise average earth temps by 1 degree. The 3.7 w/m2 looked doubtful, but with all the scrutiny AR4 was getting, it didn’t seem that anyone was challenging it. So I started asking questions.
It turns out that the calculation is not done against temperature at earth surface. It is done at the “effective black body” temperature of earth as seen from space, which is about -20 C. But to find the words that explained that, I had to go back to AR3 where the definition exists. AR4 simply refers to that value from AR3, but WITHOUT the additional explanation that it is in reference to an average temp of -20C rather than an average surface temp of +15C. Sort of like they calculate the effects of X amount of CO2 over 280 ppm without acknowledging that thos effects are already in place and any adidtional CO2 must be calculated against current CO2 concentrations which are closer to 400 and result in far lower effects than those referenced in AR4.
So….how does +1 degree at -20C, which occurrs on the mythical “average” at about 14,000 feet in altitude, translate into surface temperatures? Even if we were to assume that the 3.7 w/m2 went straight through the atmosphere unimpeded, we would still get a change in surface temps based on the IPCC’s “average” of 15C of only 0.7 degrees per doubling of CO2, not 1 degree. Scaling that to include feedbacks, provided that the AR5 definition is the same as AR4 and AR3, that putated 2.5 degrees is actually, at surface, only 1.75 degrees. Misleading upon misleading upon misleading.
Now let us factor in that if one were to model 3.7 w/m2 at TOA (which is my understanding of the IPCC methodology but its been quite a while since I actually read it) one would have a tough time arguing that all 3.7 w/m2 would even get through the atmosphere to surface in the first place. Water vapour absorption spectra overlaps CO2. Yes, it isn’t as strong an absorber as CO2 at the relevant wavelengths, but we measure water vapour at earth surface as high as 40,000 ppm versus CO2 at just 400 ppm. Even though a weaker absorber, water vapour overwhelms CO2 at low altitudes and low latitudes. CO2’s effects are therefor to be expected to be more pronounced at high altitudes and high latitudes where lower temps force water vapour out of the air.
So if water vapour is a GHG, resisting the radiation of energy from earth to space, it must also be a resistor of energy re-radiated at high altitude from CO2 toward earth. I’ve not seen a paper anywhere trying to quantify this, but it seems improbably to me that the all, or even most, of the 3.7 w/m2 modeled at TOA is going to make it to earth surface.
So what would be a realistice value? 50%? 25%? I really don’t have a clue on that one, but what I can suggest is that if AR5 is quoting a mean range of 2.5 degrees at earth’s effective black body temperature for a doubling of CO2, I cannot see how that would translate to more than a degree or so at surface, if that. Water vapour absorbs and re-radiates in both directions, and it just seems to me that CO2 at altitude producing 3.7 w/m2 is just not going to be able to punch very much of it through the water vapour below.
But, I could be wrong…. 😉
Again, you are comparing apples to oranges. Moore’s law applies so far to INFORMATION processing, of which information storage is a part. I did NOT say it applies only to semiconductors. Hard drives store INFORMATION, solar cells convert energy. With information storage or processing there is no forseeable physical limit. It’s even conceivable to store or process multiple bits per atom.
With energy conversion the hard physical limit is the second law. You can’t convert more energy than what’s input. It does not matter how cheap or efficient solar cells get. You can’t get more out of them than the sun produces. Any technology cost follows initially a power law. Compare the cost per horsepower of todays cars to a car say from 1910. It also followed a power law. But the floor was reached a while ago. Solar cells are very fast approaching that floor, and have arguably reached it already. See all the cell manufacturers that are going bankrupt because their product sales at current prices does not support them. Have you heard of a meltdown in information processing equipment manufacturers? There neither chip nor end-user equipment manufacturers are doing badly. Simply because there Moore’s law is in effect instead of the second law.
And for solar the enery area density is just very low, Meaning a large area needs to be used to collect the diffuse energy. No way around that.
Dr. Brown, thank you for your comments. Very well presented. I’m sure they will be read and studied by many.
As I said, if you’re right, then I just won’t invest. But as I also said, it wouldn’t take much of a drop in real cost to make them a break even to win a bit proposition at over the counter prices. As for the rest of your remarks, there are a number of scaling laws at play, such as the one that generally predicts a rise in the real price of mining scarce resources as the initial easily accessible sources are exploited and played out. A second way solar technology could become a wise investment with a solid ROI is simple rate increases in electrical power due to all causes.
In reply to your question about meltdowns in microelectronics, of course there have been some. It’s a market. Somebody overproduces, suddenly people can’t make margin, there’s a shakeout. There have been several that I recall from my beowulf years, and even more in the PC industry in general, where margins are always on the edge of bankrupting the low-rent manufacturers if they are to remain competitive. There is also the foundry problem — new foundries for next-gen VLSI are horrendously expensive — so expensive that only a few companies can afford them, and those companies often pick up a serious technological edge (something that is happening now with Intel, as usual, being the one company that can afford to make a move that its competitors cannot then afford not to make, even though it may nearly bankrupt them in the process.
I actually suspect that the issue with PV cells has more to do with foundries and politics than with real costs of the technology (once the foundries are amortized). the PV market got nailed by an oversupply from China, brought about by the fact that China subsidized the hell out of its foundries (giving them an unfair advantage over even our subsidized, but less extravagantly so foundries). The supply got ahead of the demand curve before amortization had a chance to occur. There are also quite a few places where cost breakthroughs can occur in semiconductor PVs — I think you overestimate the extent to which the physics and engineering are already cut and dried. It isn’t a matter of just increasing thermodynamic cell efficiency, quite the contrary. It is a matter of increasing economic efficiency for any given thermodynamic efficiency. Given (say) an 8% conversion rate at retail cost $X in 2012, it is entirely plausible that improvements in economy of scale, use of amorphous vs crystalline semiconductors, variations in doping, improvements in nanoscale VLSI, all could combine to make the retail cost at 8% conversion $X/2 in 2020. Where is the second law violated in that? Indeed, a lot of the price drops we’ve seen have been at more or less constant efficiency, simply from improved foundries and economies of scale.
But I also have a lot of confidence in the probable discovery of hard improvements in the physics, either achieving any given percentage conversion with much cheaper materials or developing a much more efficient conversion with more expensive materials, but not scalably more expensive. Or products of sheer human ingenuity. But then, I’m an optimist.
Yet another place that could make a serious difference in solar and alternative energy, PV or not is storage or energy transport technology. As has been pointed out repeatedly, one serious barrier to commercial exploitation of solar where purchases in bulk can already provide — in principle — economy of scale sufficient to make it a decent ROI is the fact that you still have to buy power when the sun goes down, or behind clouds, etc. In addition, people who live in Maine aren’t going to get the ROI of somebody that lives in Arizona. A breakthrough in battery technology, for example really perfecting a cheap zinc-air storage battery or some other high density, inexpensive, low memory storage battery, could change everything almost overnight. Individually all of these chances might be small, but there is a huge payoff and a lot of people are working very hard to win this particular lottery. I don’t think my optimism is baseless — solar cells are vastly less expensive than they were one or two decades ago. Rechargable battery technology has improved radically twice or more in the last few decades.
IMO, we could make solar happen radically fast, if we needed to, with Manhattan-project style R&D and investment. We could also make nuclear replace coal radically fast if we needed to, without really requiring any new technology at all, or implementing “old” new technology in the form of Thorium Salt reactors. I’m not alone in my optimism in these technologies — a lot of my nuclear physicist friends think this is quite doable as well.
So while we might well disagree about whether or not solar, or batteries, or nuclear fission (any flavor), or wind, or fusion will pan out in any particular time frame, we might agree that the vast range of these alternatives, many of which are already borderline profitable in terms of ROI, will almost certainly produce several alternatives that might yet replace constantly more costly carbon based fuels (with the possible exception of gasoline, which is nearly unique in terms of portable energy density), and that if CO_2 ever truly did emerge as a problem at a level that didn’t require careful extraction of a “warming signal” from a dubious treatment of “climate noise” we could, as a society, implement one or more of these technologies quite rapidly and probably even experience a gold rush of sorts in the process from the large amounts of money in motion and jobs created. There is, therefore, no reason to panic and spend vast sums implementing immature technologies now, even as there is some reason to continue investing to make the immature technologies mature, and even investing in long shot stuff along the way.
Do you disagree? Would you pull a Ron Paul if you could and pull the plug on the DOE altogether, on energy technology research altogether?
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Terry Oldberg;
If I’m not mistaken, the quantity whose “actual mean being proposed in AR5 is 2.8 C” is the equilibrium climate sensitivity (TECS). TECS is the increase in the increase in the global average equilibrium surface air temperature from a doubling of the CO2 concentration.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Have they changed the definition? In AR3 and AR4 they were talking about the “effective black body” temperature of earth, which is NOT the surface temperature.
davidmhoffer:
According to Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity ) TECS “…refers to the equilibrium change in global mean near-surface air temperature that would result from a sustained doubling of the atmospheric (equivalent) carbon dioxide concentration (ΔTx2).” The pertinent feature of the referenced temperature is that it is an equilibrium temperature, consequently is unobservable.
izen says: July 16, 2012 at 5:58 am
Izen, watch Murry Salby’s video regarding your carbon isotopes argument.
Your other question is far too silly for a response – unless you are nine years old or younger, in which case I apologize.
How old are you?
This question goes back way to the first post, but is still valid and remains unanswered :
Dr. Brown said :
Dr. Brown, as a scientist, can you please clarify where I can find where climate scientists added the “catastrophic label” as you call it. I can’t seem to find it anywhere in scientific literature. Is it possible that self-proclaimed ‘skeptics’ (of the various varieties) have invented this label themselves ? Could it be that the term CAGW has been invented by ‘skeptics’, for political reasons, and has no place in science at all ? And could it possibly be that therefor you are challenging a label created by opinion, to counteract and opposing ‘opinion’, and that thus the label ‘catastrophic’ is not at all scientific ?
Second, ‘the alleged magnitude of the projected warming on a doubling of CO_2′ is 1.5-4.5 C (best estimate of 3 C) per doubling of CO2. Is this range really scientifically challenged, as you allege ? Or is this simply another derivative of the “catastrophic” label that seems to be invented by self-proclaimed ‘skeptics’ that prefer political skapegoating and labeling over scientific findings and reason ?
Sorry Dr. Brown, if I rubbed your lamp in the previous post.
Your statement :
is very well put, and, getting used to your blunt, but fair and scientifically accurate style, I would hope to see some more of your responses to obvious ‘confusionist’ pseudo-science postings that are so rampant on this fine blog.
Terry Oldberg says:
July 16, 2012 at 10:48 pm
davidmhoffer:
According to Wikipedia
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You want to prove a definition then quote the source which is AR3 and AR4. You want me to take Wikipedia’s definition of what AR3/4 says over what AR3/4?
davidmhoffer:
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify. Regarding the question of the definition of terms, my desire is to provide an accurate account of the definition of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (TECS) for IPCC Working Group 1 in AR4. Please note that Working Group I references TECS by the more ambiguous term “Climate Sensitivity.”
According to “Climate Change 2007: Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis, Section 8.6 Climate Sensitivity and Feedbacks, 8.6.1 Introduction, first paragraph”: “Climate Sensitivity is a metric used to characterise the response of the global climate system to a given forcing.” Paragraph 1 goes on to state that “It is broadly defined as the equilibrium global mean surface temperature following a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration (see Box 10.2).”
According to the authors of the description at http://math.about.com/od/statistics/a/meanmedian.htm, “Before you can begin to understand statistics, there are four terms you will need to fully understand. The first term ‘average’ is something we have been familiar with from a very early age when we start analyzing our marks on report cards. We add together all of our test results and then divide it by the sum of the total number of marks there are. We often call it the average. However, statistically it’s the Mean!”
By combining the descriptions from these two sources, I arrive at the conclusion that for IPCC Working Group I in AR4, TECS is the result from summing the equilibrium surface temperatures at a number of different points in Earth’s surface and dividing by the count of these points. Wikipedia’s definition differs from this one in reducing the range of ambiguity of the radial position near the surface of the Earth at which the various equilibrium temperatures are defined.
A conclusion that can, I think, be drawn from the above evidence is that the numerical value which is calculated by summing the various equilibrium temperatures and dividing by the count of them is not an observable feature of the real world. It is not an observable because none of the equilibrium temperatures from which this value is computed are observables.
Terry Oldberg;
By combining the descriptions from these two sources, I arrive at the conclusion that for IPCC Working Group I in AR4, TECS is the result from summing the equilibrium surface temperatures >>>>>
This connot be reconciled with the IPCC AR4 meme that CO2 doubling = 3.7 w/m2 = +1 degree and that the mean temperature that they use is 15C. To raise the temperature 15C by one degree requires additional forcing of 5.5 w/m2 (Stefan-Boltzmann Law). This leads to one of several possible conclusions:
1. Stefan-Boltzmann Law has been superseded by the IPCC
2. The IPCC did the math wrong
3. The IPCC is using -20C at the mean earth surface temperature, not +15C
In order to clarify this matter, refer to AR3 where it is clear that they are speaking of the “effective black body” temperature of earth which is -20C and which is the ONLY logical explanation for the meme of CO2 doubling = 3.7 w/m2 = +1 degree. Either we conclude that the definition in AR3 was poorly worded in carrying the discussion over to AR4, or that AR4 is simply built on a total and complete violation of SB Law.
In 3) above I did not mean to include the word “surface” Sentence should have read
3. The IPCC is using -20C as the mean temperature of earth which is derived from the “effective black body temperature” of earth.
Look, I am an electronics engineer with over 35 years of experience. I know the physics and engineering of solar cells very well and know in detail what can and cannot be achieved with the limits of their physics. And there I don’t share your optimism. Basically solar and wind are collectors of low density energy of uncontrolled variable supply. Meaning both are usable only either in conjunction with vast amound of energy storage (not available for the near future), or in conjunction with conventional energy sources. And they require large support structures to collect the low density energy of a large area.
This means you have to add the cost of storage or the building, maintenance and fuel cost of conventional sources. And because the conventional sources have to be available at full max load capacity, you double the total energy supply cost, as the “alternate” sources like solar and wind can potentially only reduce the fuel cost, which in case of nuclear is a very small part of the cost per enery unit.
I do however share your optimism in regards to nuclear. Gen IV uranium or thorium based. With that we won’t need any other energy sources ever as they can supply ALL our energy needs for the lifetime of humanity.
Especially with Thorium. For example, just the average Th content of the soil excavated for the foundation of a house could supply enough energy for the lifetime of the occupants. That’s where we should invest as that would produce the largest ROI.
The usual argument I hear against nuclear is of course the waste, which in reality is not a problem for these new reactors.
As Alvin Weinberg, the inventor of the pressurized water reactor, once said:
“Nuclear waste is not a substance. Wasting valuable nuclear materials is what stupid governments do.”
The other argument is that nuclear cannot load follow. Which is only true because todays reactors are build as base-load suppliers. They are build that way because the fuel cost is such a small part of the operating cost (the others are more or less fixed) that they become cheapest to operate as base load devices, running at 100% load all the time. However, there’s no reason reactors can’t be build to load follow. The reactors in nuclear submarines for example can ramp from idle to full power and back within 2 minutes. Well into the reaction realm of gas turbine load followers.
Dr. Brown, as a scientist, can you please clarify where I can find where climate scientists added the “catastrophic label” as you call it. I can’t seem to find it anywhere in scientific literature. Is it possible that self-proclaimed ‘skeptics’ (of the various varieties) have invented this label themselves ? Could it be that the term CAGW has been invented by ‘skeptics’, for political reasons, and has no place in science at all ? And could it possibly be that therefor you are challenging a label created by opinion, to counteract and opposing ‘opinion’, and that thus the label ‘catastrophic’ is not at all scientific ?
I dunno. Did you actually visit and read through TFS on John NG’s blog that are the subject of this thread? John Nielsen-Gammon, the host, is a climate scientist. He seems completely aware of the “catastrophic” aspect of AGW as a nearly universal adjunct to the science, to the extent that many papers address nothing but how “catastrophic” (politically and economically) things like an AGW-predicated SLR will be, whether or not the ice caps will be melted in ten years, 100 years, 1000 years, how big the droughts are we’re bound to have when the temperature has increased, and so on. He also is well aware of the inexcusable bias of a famous survey that asked “scientists” of many disciplines whether or not they thought warming had occurred and whether or not any of that warming was anthropogenic, which was then used — and continues to be used — to justify taking any measures to combat an alleged catastrophe, as in “90% plus of all scientists believe in anthropogenic warming, so we need to prepare for a SLR that will flood all of Florida in 100 years and take enormously expensive measures in the meantime to control CO_2”. If you actually participate in any debates at all on this subject, you cannot possibly not have heard this. Indeed, it is difficult to hear anything else in many public forums. It is also absolutely the tone of the “Summary for Policy Makers” produced by the IPCC.
JNG pointed out to me that in a survey that asked climate scientists — members of the AMS and AGU — about the specific issue of catastrophic AGW, 16% of those surveyed said that they thought that AGW would be modest and its effects non-catastrophic/negligible, 31% thought that it would have moderate negative effects but that they wouldn’t be massively negative or truly “catastrophic”, and only 43% thought they would be catastrophic. Not even all of the members surveyed agreed that significant/detectable anthropogenic global warming has occurred. I do, so I suppose I’m a warmist compare to at least “climate scientists”.
John’s response — as a climate scientist — is to break personal conclusions about AGW into three categories. One he labels CAGW — Catastrophic with a capital C, corresponding to the 43% that believe that a doubling of CO_2 will be enormously, catastrophically expensive, disasterous whatever that means to the individual involved. Another he labels cAGW — corresponding to the 31% or so of climate scientists (including himself) who think that AGW is happening and will have moderately negative consequences (not ruling out the possibility that some of its consequences could be positive as well). The remaining 16% — roughly 1/7th of the surveyed members of the two scientific bodies where one would expect to reach the “95% of all scientists believe in AGW so let us pick your pocket” level — are not yet convinced that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is occurring at all, either they aren’t even certain that global warming is (significantly) anthropogenic (5%) or they think that AGW is happening but will have negligible impact (11%).
So is CAGW a “scientific term”? Of course not. Nothing in the policy level political and economic discussion involves scientific terms or assess scientific doubt! It is a political term, however, in nearly universal usage, and often used with either the active compliance of the 43% or the passive acquiescence of the remaining 57%.
Now, we could get rid of that kind of term by (for example) getting rid of the Summary for Policy Makers produced by the IPCC completely. Force policy makers to read the actual scientific working group reports. There they would see real boundaries placed on this, real limits on certainty, the real doubts of even the working climate scientists who do the science being reported. That still wouldn’t completely fix either the process or the bias that is apparent in some of even the working groups (paleoclimatology being a great example, post-Mann) but it would be a huge step forward.
Does that help? As a physicist, my name is regularly taken in vain when professional societies in physics, claiming to speak for me, assert that they accept that AGW has occurred and will have catastrophic consequences upon a doubling of CO_2, as if all physicists agree. Not even all climate scientists agree, and surveys that “prove” that scientists this or that are often horribly biased simply by the stupid, un-nuanced questions being asked. Has the Earth warmed in the last 100 years? Are you stupid or something? Of course it has. Is any of that warming likely due to any sort of human activity? Why sure, probably. Why not?
Does this in any way imply that I agree that human caused activity will lead to a 5 to 10 C rise in global temperatures upon a doubling of atmospheric CO_2 — and yes, these are numbers pulled out of one of Hansen’s many enormously alarmist papers — with catastrophic effects including the melting of the Greenland ice cap and most other glaciers and ocean ice, massive droughts, violent storms, sea levels that flood whole countries, human displacement in the billions, famine, plague and war (so please, let us have your money and political support)?
Let me help you. No, it does not.
It isn’t even the case that most climate scientists that that is likely to be true, in part because there are damn good observational reasons to think that it is not. So sure, your comment above is a bit of a straw man, in context, but hopefully this has beaten the stuffing out of it.
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