There are so many updates and fixes needed to the climate models these days its almost like watching a car undergoing a perpetual repair process. When does the time come when the owners realize that maybe they should take advantage of the “lemon laws” and get a new model? From Johannes Gutenberg University:
International research group shows that the aging of organic aerosols is caused by OH radicals
Climate models need to be updated
Atmospheric aerosol particles have a significant effect on climate. An international team of researchers has now discovered that a chemical process in the atmosphere called aging determines to a major extent the concentration and the characteristics of aerosol particles. To date, this aspect has not been accounted for in regional and global climate models. In the Muchachas [Multiple Chamber Aerosol Chemical Aging Experiments] project, the team has not only managed to demonstrate the effects of aging but has also been able to measure these. Their findings have been published in the specialist journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS).
The quality of air is determined to a considerable extent by aerosol particles. In the form of a fine dust, they are believed to be responsible for a series of respiratory diseases and cardiovascular disorders. In addition, aerosol particles also have various effects on atmospheric radiation balance. Aerosols make a direct contribution to radiation levels in the cloud-free atmosphere by dispersing, reflecting, and absorbing sunlight. Aerosols are also essential for cloud formation in the troposphere: They act as condensation nuclei which even in the presence of low levels of water vapor do enable droplets to form.
The size and concentration of aerosol particles is also of great importance for the number of cloud drops, which in turn influences the reflection characteristics of clouds. Hence, aerosol particles tend to have a cooling influence on the atmosphere. However, the precise processes and feedback mechanisms have not yet been fully understood, so that the interaction between aerosol particles, their suitability as cloud condensation nuclei, and the sunlight reflected off the earth’s surface represented one of the greatest uncertainties in the calculation of climatic activity.
The Muchachas project looked at organic aerosols, which constitute the largest proportion of chemical airborne particles. Organic aerosols are generated above forests, for example, and they are visible in the form of a blue mist in certain places such as the Great Smoky Mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the Blue Mountains. In densely populated areas however, anthropogenically generated and released hydrocarbons play an important role as precursor of the development of secondary organic aerosols.
The experiments showed that the mass and composition of organic aerosols are significantly influenced by OH radicals. OH radicals are the most important oxidants in the atmosphere and make an important contribution to keeping air clean. Researchers from Pittsburgh (USA), Juelich, Karlsruhe, and Mainz (Germany), Gothenburg (Sweden), Copenhagen (Denkmark), and Villigen (Switzerland) analyzed results in four different, large-volume atmospheric simulation chambers and found that the oxidation process called chemical aging has a significant impact and influence on the characteristics and concentration of organic aerosols over their entire life cycle.
“New climate models will have to take these findings into account,” says Professor Dr. Thorsten Hoffmann of the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany. The Mainz researchers contributed primarily to the development of analytical techniques for studying the chemical composition of the aerosol particles in the Muchachas project. Thanks to their development of so-called ‘soft ionization’ techniques and the corresponding mass spectrometers, Hoffmann’s work group was able to track the concentration of individual molecule species in the atmospheric simulation chamber and thus observe the chemical aging of the atmospheric aerosols at the molecular level. It was clearly demonstrated that oxidation occurred in the gaseous phase and not in the particle phase. “Now the goal is to integrate these underlying reactions in models of regional and global atmospheric chemistry and so reduce the discrepancy between the expected and the actually observed concentrations of organic aerosol particles,” explains Hoffmann.
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@Rosco
The debate was and is held behind closed doors.
@All
“Organic aerosols are generated above forests, for example, and they are visible in the form of a blue mist in certain places such as the Great Smoky Mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the Blue Mountains.”
This overlooks the role played by non-visible smaller particles (<0.1 microns) and their interaction with UV and EUV when available. It does not have to be low in the troposphere.
Two institutions historically active in particle ageing are the Univ of Stuttgart and the Univ of Johannesburg. An impressive project to light large grass fires in South Africa was led by Prof Annegarn (UJ) in about 2001 which involved simultaneous observation with various instruments by satellite, U2 and low altitude airfraft. Grass fires are a significant source of aerosols and BC/OC. Recall the Brown Cloud of India etc.
EnerKey http://www.enerkey.info has nods as well. It is the same two universities, well…. megacities project.
So aerosols cool the air, and in the ’70s we started a massive reduction in smog and aerosols… maybe it isn’t CO2 warming, but removing the smog in all the cities where they put the thermometers…
There are so many updates and fixes needed to the climate models these days its almost like watching a car undergoing a perpetual repair process.
————
Yep! this is how all models are developed from day 1 of their existence.
By day 2 the model has captured 80% of the behavior of the physical system they represent. By day 3 they capture 90%, by day 4 they capture 95%, by day 5 they capture 97.5%, on day 6 they replace the core code to improve its computational efficiency and get another small increase in accuracy by tweaking the quality control knobs, etc. etc..
So the whole process resembles modding a car; adding a better carby, replacing the exhaust system with something more efficient, lowering the ride height, installing better shocks, putting nitro in the fuel.
The fact that the scientists go to all this fuss and bother tells you scientist’s care very much about the accuracy of their models. This also tells you scientists are not faking the results, a claim made by many liars who have never even seen the source code for these models.
LazyTeenager says:
October 5, 2012 at 6:32 pm
“a claim made by many liars who have never even seen the source code for these models.”
============
You know better, can’t believe you said that.
Anthony,
I like the car analogy, I built a kit car many years ago and quickly discovered that you never actually finish building one, there are always repairs tweaks and modifications to carry out. I think I spent as much time doing this work as I did driving it. Also spent lots of time at car shows and club meetings discussing how to do these modifications and repairs.
I now have a mental picture of these guys spending hours doing lots of modifications and repairs to the code and data and every couple, up to their elbows in bits of paper, on the internet forums and blogs, then changing the changes and finally every couple of months running the model and being shocked by the results. Then panicing the MSM with the horor of what they’ve found.
The difference between someone maintaining an old/kit car and a climate modeller is that the CAGW climate modeller thinks that after each iteration he’s got it right whereas the car mechanic knows that something else will go wrong with the car sooner or later.
LT
This also tells you scientists are not faking the results, a claim made by many liars who have never even seen the source code for these models.
——–
They like teenagers have yet to learn that they don’t know everything and that they get things wrong more often than right (or never right so far). What they seem to care about is fame and money they are part of the teenage “I’m worth it” generation
http://magazine.loreal-finance.com/l-oreal-because-im-worth-it-40-years-late/id/318
@SandyInLimousin
Your comment about teenagers is right on the mark – a recent read suggested it was down to the promotion of self-esteem to boost academic achievement, and it applies to a whole generation of scientists IMHO, although thankfully not all suffer from inflated egos. http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2012/09/30/self-esteem-and-the-misplaced-fervour-of-climate-scientists/
“New climate models will have to take this into account” Indeed yet they are the models that prove global warming. Billions wasted and ecomony’s ruined because of models that are a total crock. How can the money grubbing useful idiots keep up the pretense and still lie straight in bed.
I have no problem with scientists attempting to understand how the Creator put this Creation together. The problems seem to occur when men seek to control Creation.
I recently was taken to task on a different thread for speaking with wonder of the sheer magnitude of creation. My awe was seen as a sort of defeatism. The scolding made me think.
I suppose it is human nature to try to control Creation. The simple fact I weed my garden and squash bugs and worms alters the ecosystem, and the fact I add manure makes me a chemist, altering soil chemistry. The more I learn, the better the gardener I may be, but this doesn’t put me in control. Instead I am responding. I am not a dictator, ordering the clouds about. Rather I am a dancer, listening to a music I myself don’t play.
There was one WUWT thread which discussed the organic molecules plankton puts into the air, and how they can reach the upper atmosphere, and, (because they included elements ending in “ine,” such as Bromine, Fluorine, Chlorine, and Iodine,) alter the amount of Ozone, which in turn effected the types and powers of sunlight.
You can try to include such factors in a model, along with many other factors. Who knows, if you told bleeping politicians to buzz off, and worked with thousands of other dedicated scientists, you might even create a decent model. Then, once you had a sort of understanding of how things work, you could even attempt to improve the weather by fertilizing or weeding out the sea’s plankton. However you are still involved in actions and reactions, and still are responding to constant changes, (and the Laws of Unintended Consequences,) and are still basically a dancer.
Even among environmentalists there is a sort of split-personality: On one hand they are horrified by any meddling with how nature does things, and on the other hand they want to control and engineer the weather of the entire planet.
The truth is that we are in essence dancing to the Creator’s tune. At times it is a lovely waltz, and at other times it is bullets about our feet.
“There are so many updates and fixes needed to the climate models these days its almost like watching a car undergoing a perpetual repair process”
I think this is what you mean.
If we learned something new, and scientists _didn’t_ update their models you would have a much stronger criticism.
With regard to the actual content of the press release quoted, it isn’t clear if the process they report on (aerosol particles, particularly organic chemicals, getting smaller over time) makes them better or worse at forming clouds and their other atmosphere cooling functions.
In the real world, living things perpetuate themselves by ‘survival of the fit enough at the time’ and all living things alter their local environment to enhance their own survival. That’s right. Every living thing alters its local environment to enhance its own survival. The biosphere ‘terraforms’ planet Earth every hour of every day. The biggest impacts are made by single celled organisms: plant, fungal, and bacterial. Man is way down on the list; but we can see and think about what we do. We often do not see or think about what the rest of nature is doing. Plus, things done by the arts of Man are no less natural than things done by any other life form on this rock.
Atmospheric aerosol particles have a significant effect on climate. An international team of researchers has now discovered that a chemical process in the atmosphere called aging determines to a major extent the concentration and the characteristics of aerosol particles.
This is no where near new. I can remember the group of acid rain activists I fixed equipment for talking about this effect in the late fifties and early sixties with pretty well exactly the same conclusions. They did it with crude boxes costing a few pounds UK not supercomputers but the answers are so near identical as to be just copies of the original work.
The climate models ignore far too much to be taken as anything more that rough guide and in no way are good enough to justify any action based on them. For a start there should never be any significant natural source of CO2 gas discovered that has not been included in the models or the claims for it have to be considered false. Where also is the proof that CO2 does not stabilise at precisely the same level regardless of man’s activities as it is a production and use system which is and always has been self balancing in the longer term? Until there is absolute proof that this is not the case then CO2 science should be considered merely a guess.
This will fix all climate models, just microwave everyone, and the world can go back to the way it was, of course, as we know, none of this is required, yet it is happening all day long
http://bcfreedom.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/death-lies-and-mutations-what-the-military-kept-from-the-public-on-microwave-radiation/
LazyTeenager says:
Yep! this is how all models are developed from day 1 of their existence.
By day 2 the model has captured 80% of the behavior of the physical system they represent. By day 3 they capture 90%, by day 4 they capture 95%, by day 5 they capture 97.5%, on day 6 they replace the core code to improve its computational efficiency and get another small increase in accuracy by tweaking the quality control knobs, etc. etc..
The problem with this process is that we are currently sitting at about 8:15 AM on Day 1, and these jokers are pretending that they have Day 7 quality models. These models cannot make useful predictions over useful time periods at useful resolutions, let alone explain anything. And they won’t be able to, until long after we are all dead. And there is nothing wrong with that. The only problem is when people pretend otherwise, for political purposes.