This comment from Dr. Robert Brown at Duke University is elevated from a comment to a full post for further discussion. Since we have a new paper (Shepherd et al) that is being touted in the media as “certain” using noisy data with no stable baseline, this discussion seems relevant.
So wait, you are saying that fossil fuels do not cause warming, but that if we shift away from them to clean energies, there is a risk of the earth cooling? Uh, could you just think that through and try agan?
No, that’s just some people on the list who are “certain” — with no more grounds than those of the warmists — that the Earth is about to cool. In the long run, of course, they are correct — the current interglacial (the Holocene) is bound to end at some point soon in geological time, but that could be anytime from “starting right now” to “in a thousand years” or even longer. Some are silly enough to fit a sine function to some fragment of data and believe that that has predictive value.
The problem is that nobody knows why the Eocene ended and the Pleistocene (the current ice age) started, and nobody knows exactly where and why the Pliestocene is a modulated series of glaciations followed by brief stretches of interglacial.
There are theories — see e.g. the Milankovitch cycle — but they have no quantitative predictive value and the actual causal mechanism is far from clear. So we do not know what the temperature outside “should” be, with and/or without CO_2. We do know historically that the Little Ice Age that ended around 200 years ago was tied for the coldest century long stretch of the entire Holocene — that is, the coldest for the last 11,000 or so years (where it might surprise you to learn that the Holocene Optimum was between 1.5 and 2 C warmer than it is today, without CO_2).
So the fact of the matter is that there is a risk of the Earth cooling — in fact, there is a risk of a return to open glaciation, the start of the next 90,000 year glacial era — but it is not a particularly high risk and we have no way to meaningfully do much better than to say “sometime in the next few centuries”. CO_2 might, actually, help prevent the next glacial era (or at least, might delay it) but even that is not clear — the Ordovician-Silurian ice age began with CO_2 levels of 7000 ppm. That is around 17 times the current level, almost 1% of the atmosphere CO_2 — and persisted for millions of years with CO_2 levels consistently in the ballpark of 4000 ppm. If the Earth’s climate system (which we do not understand, in my opinion, well enough to predict even a single decade out let alone a century) decides it is time for glaciation, I suspect that nothing we can do will have any meaningful effect on the process, just as I don’t think that we have had any profound warming influence on the Earth so far.
The fundamental issue is this. We have some thirty three years of halfway decent climate data — perhaps twice that if you are very generous — which is the blink of an eye in the chaotic climate system that is the Earth. There has been roughly 0.3 C warming over that thirty-three year stretch, or roughly 0.1 C/decade. It is almost certain that some fraction of that warming was completely natural, not due to human causes and we do not know that fraction — a reasonable guess would be to extrapolate the warming rate from the entire post LIA era, which is already close to 0.1 C/decade. It is probably reasonable to assign roughly 0.3 C total warming to Anthropogenic CO_2 — that is everything, not just the last thirty years but from the beginning of time. It might be as much as 0.5C, it might be as little as 0.1C (or even be negative), but the physics suggests a warming on the order of 1.2 C upon a complete doubling of CO_2 if we don’t pretend to more knowledge than we have concerning the nature and signs of the feedbacks.
At the moment there is little reason to think that we are headed towards catastrophe. When the combined membership of the AMA and AGU were surveyed — this is surveying climate scientists in general, not the public or the particular climate scientists that are most vocal on the issue — 15% were not convinced of anthropogenic global warming at all, and over half of them doubted that the warming anthropogenic or not would be catastrophic. It’s the George Mason survey — feel free to look it up. The general consensus was, and remains, that there has definitely and unsurprisingly been warming post LIA, that humans have caused some part of this (how much open to considerable debate as the science is not settled or particularly clear), that there is some chance of it being “catastrophic” warming in the future, a much larger chance that it will not be, and some chance that it will not warm further at all or even cool.
The rational thing to do is to continue to pursue the science, especially the accumulation of a few more decades of halfway decent data, until that science becomes a bit clearer, without betting our prosperity and the prosperity of our children and the calamitous and catastrophic perpetuation of global poverty and untold misery in the present on the relatively small chance of the warming being catastrophic and there being something we can do about it to prevent it from becoming so.
So far, if catastrophe is in the cards, the measures proposed won’t prevent it even according to those that predict it! In fact, it won’t have any effect on the catastrophe at all according to the worst case doom and gloomers. We could stop burning carbon worldwide tomorrow and if the carbon cycle model currently in favor with the CAGW crowd is correct (which I doubt) it would take centuries for the Earth’s CO_2 level to go back to “normal” — whatever that means, given that it varies by almost a factor of 2 completely naturally from glacial era to interglacial. In fact, according to that model the CO_2 levels will continue to go up as long as we contribute any CO_2 at all, because they’ve stuck an absurdly long relaxation time into their basic system of equations (one with very little empirical foundation, again IMO).
Again, I suggest that you reread the top article carefully. I actually do not think it is the best example of Monckton’s writing — a few people have noted that its tone is not terribly elevating, and I have to agree — but I sense and sympathize with his frustration, given the content of the article. There is a stench of hypocrisy that stretches from Al Gore’s globe-hopping by jet and his huge house and large car all the way to a collection of people with nothing better to do who have jetted to Doha to have a big party and figure out how to continue their quest for World Domination, hypocrisy with king-sized blinders that seem quite incapable of permitting the slightest bit of doubt to enter, even when bold predictions like those openly made in the 2008 report come back to bite them in the ass.
I myself am not a believer in CAGW. Nor am I a disbeliever. The only thing that I “believe” in regarding the subject is our own ignorance, combined with a fairly firm belief that there is little reason to panic visible in the climate record, and that is before various thumbs were laid firmly on the scales. Remove those thumbs and there is even less reason to panic.
My own prediction for the climate is this. We will probably continue to experience mild warming for another ten to twenty years — warming on the order of 0.1C per decade. It will probably occur in bursts — the climate record shows clear signs of punctuated equilibrium, a Hurst-Kolmogorov process — most likely associated with strong El Ninos (if we get back to where strong El Ninos occur — the last couple have fizzled out altogether, hence the lack of warming). In the meantime, we will without much additional effort beyond existing research and the obvious profit incentives drop the cost of solar power by a factor of four, and it will become at least competitive with the cheapest ways of generating electrical power. We will also have at least one major breakthrough in energy storage technology. The two together will cause solar to become more profitable than coal independent of subsidy, for much but not all of the world. Without anybody being inconvenienced or “doing” anything beyond pursuing the most profitable course, global consumption of carbon will then drop like a rock no matter what we do in the meantime.
Beyond twenty years I don’t think anybody has a clue as to what the temperature will do. I don’t even have a lot of confidence in my own prediction. It wouldn’t surprise me if it got cooler, especially if the Sun enters a true Maunder-style minimum. Nor would it surprise me if it got warmer than my modest prediction. But either way, I think roughly 500 ppm is likely to be the peak level of CO_2 before it comes down, and it may well fail to make it to 500 ppm, and even the catastrophists would have a hard time making a catastrophe out of that given 0.3 C of warming in association with the bump from 300 to 400.
We could make it more likely to cut off before 500 ppm — invest massively in nuclear power. Nuclear power is actually relatively cheap, so this is a cost-benefit win, if we regulate them carefully for safety and avoid nuclear proliferation (both risks, but less catastrophic than the inflated predictions of the catastrophists). But I don’t think we will, and in the end I don’t think it will matter.
Walt The Physicist says:
December 3, 2012 at 1:08 pm
quote
And thus, the “tabloid scientists” entertain/scary public and overwhelm funding sources by showing that their peer-reviewed “science” publications undoubtedly show that “oil smooths warm the sea surface by reducing albedo, lowering emissivity, reducing mechanical mixing… lower turbulence and thereby reduce stratocumulus formation and reduce evaporation.” In the midst of all this confusion neither public nor program managers notice that “reducing albedo” is opposite to “lowering emissivity”… In midst of this confusion examining and questioning the accuracy of these research becomes next to impossible, especially after energized and vocal consumers of “tabloid science” weigh in. Please stop drinking kool-aid, go start business, do something useful.
unquote
Please look at PJ Minnett’s pdf modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/sci_team/meetings/200503/…/minnett1.pdf
and explain the emisssivity wind speed graphs. They’re not the ones I initially used to check the idea — those were much simpler — and it would be nice if an expert like yourself would interpret them. My naive view is that they show emissivity falling as wind speed decreases, even though Masuda’s theoretical study (also shown on the graph) assumed the opposite.
I do not understand why reducing albedo and lowering emissivity are contradictory but that may well be a failing of my education. Lower wind speed will allow a smoother surface. Smooth ocean albedo is lower than ruffled. Minnett’s graphs show lower emissivity as wind drops. I must be making an obvious error here and I’d be grateful if you could explain it.
I did start a business: it paid the mortgage, paid the school fees and financed the children through university, though what that has to do with a discussion on ocean warming is puzzling me.
rgbatduke says, December 3, 2012 at 9:06 pm: “What the CO_2 (or other GHGs) does is act almost exactly like a space blanket and reflect part of the outgoing radiant blackbody energy back, slowing the cooling.
=========================================================
This is a well known warmists’ key narrative. This is not a scientific fact, because there is apparently not a single experiment confirming that.
The outgoing radiation can be reflected back to the source, of course, but there is apparently no experimental proof this back radiation has any effect on the temperature of the source. Given the fact, that warmists do not present any experiment, it is reasonable to assume, that the effect is either zero or negligible.
On this occasion I think it would be appropriate, if I shared some thoughts about good/effective propaganda. Of course, just telling people they should believe certain bull***t does not work well with many people. There is a better procedure:
1. Tell people a lot of right things repeatedly in extensive postings for a long time, thus establishing trust.
2. Without overloading it, insert your bull***t between those right things.
That’s it, so simple. Once the trust has been established, much more people will swallow the bull***t without even noticing it.
Now, dear sceptics, please, critically re-read this thread and the parallel one: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/01/18-annual-climate-gabfests-16-years-without-warming/.
Dr Brown wrote
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I enjoyed your calculation of the oil required to coat the oceans — it reminded me of Willis’s calculation re Salter’s cloud ships where he proved that they would have to shoot water into the air so fast they would drive themselves underwater. I doubt anyone now sees Miss Pockel’s experiment where one gets an estimate of a molecule’s dimensions. Look it up, it’s fun physics. It also shows that oil does spread out into layers a few molecules thick. Anyway, be that as it may, perhaps you could check your — and my — numbers with the NASA Wifis numbers for light oil spill. Benjamin Franklin’s experiment shows that a teaspoon of oil smooths a hectare. Ish, ballpark handwaving figures, but it gives us somewhere to start. Like you I’m always dubious of my calculations, especially with the varying measurement systems — at one stage I was working in gallons US per fortnight per hectare.
quote
This still doesn’t do your assertion full justice. “Oil” is a heterogeneous mixture of hydrocarbons. Some of them are volatile and almost immediately evaporate. Others are dense and sink. All of them are quite tasty to a number of things that live in the ocean. While I am quite certain that there are places where oil slicks both natural and manmade can be seen on the ocean, there is no possible way that those slicks would ever actually cover the ocean because they would be eaten, oxidized, evaporated, and sink faster than they could ever spread. At no time could they cover even a significant fraction of the ocean’s surface area. That, as noted above, is enormous.
unquote
Yes, I’ve seen the sea. You seem to be thinking in spill and slick terms which is why you are going off at half cock. Think of the oil coming down a river, it has little or no volatile fractions, no thick lumps, it has already been sorted to be the right consistency to spread on water — that’s how it gets to the sea. In 1994 that was 363 million gallons per year and now it will be much more. Don’t think slick, think smooth, a layer a few molecules thick that alters the properties of the oceanic boundary layer. Follow the example of your illustrious compatriot and trickle a few mls of olive oil onto a lake and watch the result. I haven’t done that actual experiment, but I’ve seen the oil from sun tan lotion smooth a bay in Ibiza. The Med is really filthy and I find myself reluctant to swim in it: if oil spill really does warm then enclosed areas like the Med should show it.
Now, science, numbers, measurements etc; can you tell me how fast an oil spill oxidises in the open ocean? In the Arctic seas? How much oil is in the oceanic boundary layer in an area like the Gulf? The sea of Okhotsk? Where are the measurements? Remember I have seen a smooth covering tens of thousands of square miles in an area that is far from land. The Azores high had been parked there for weeks so the stuff was at least several weeks old and, checking the way the wind and currents flow in the North Atlantic, I can’t see an easy way for it to come from the nearest coasts. The only oxidation experiment I’ve managed to track was with droplets, not the same thing of course, but maybe someone has done the work. Yes, bacteria will eat oil, but how fast?
You’re a scientist, I assume. Have a look at the references I suggested, Wigley and Franklin.
quote
So I must regretfully state that unless I have made an egregious error in my arithmetic above [][] I spend my summers in boats, fishing off of the North Carolina coast outside of its busiest harbor. I have yet to see one oil slick, or even a single extended patch of oil on the surface, even in the harbors.
unquote
One quiet evening next summer when the sun is going down and there’s a nice breeze ruffling the surface, cruise off the harbour and look up sun. You will see areas ruffled by the wind and large smooth areas — no, they are not all caused by variations in the wind because you will see a cat’s paw tickle the ruffled areas while leaving the smooth areas untouched. Something is altering the surface properties. That’s the effect I’m talking about. If you want some idea about what to look for then just Google a few pictures of boats — many of them show a smooth. The best are the ones with a polar bear, I find it amusing to see the threatened and a possible cause of the threat in one image. But I digress.
quote
I suggest that you change your primary sources away from ones that not only lie to you, but lie to you in a way that insults your intelligence and ability to do arithmetic. I also humbly suggest that if you have posted this misinformation elsewhere, you consider the damage this sort of nonsense does to everybody’s ability to hold a rational conversation on the subject. I would expect the “coverage of the ocean with oil” to be an utterly negligible effect compared to the direct greenhouse effect of the volatiles and natural gas released when oil is pumped plus the greenhouse effect of the burned oil in the form of CO_2. Those positive warming effects might well be partially balanced by particulates that could have either warming or cooling effects and aerosols that are mostly cooling. In other words, there is literally no point even mentioning it, which is why nobody ever does and they are completely ignored in all global climate models.
unquote
An oil smoothed surface will produce many fewer aerosols: one aerosol scientist tried to get them sampled over the Gulf spill to see if that actually happened there, so the idea is not too far from feasibility. Fewer aerosols means lower albedo of the 30% of the ocean which is covered with stratocumulus cloud and I expect this to be the greatest effect. Israeli scientists have tried reducing reservoir evaporation by doping the surface with oil. I have heard that rice paddies are warmed by the same process but I’ve not been able to find any references on-line.
Perhaps I may be permitted to follow your example and give some advice: the CO2 based models are failing, but the world has warmed a bit, the Arctic has warmed enormously, the blip in SSTs from 1939 – 45 was so pronounced that the proponents of CO2-only warming were forced to make an ad hoc ‘correction’ to reality (see ‘why the blip’ in the Climategate emails). My advice to you is to be more open to new ideas which suggest an explanation (any explanation, all explanations, that’s how you get new ideas; I exclude the dragons) for those facts, because it’s the anomalies which will show what is actually happening. More particularly, don’t blunder off doing calculations that spring from ludicrous preconceptions. Millimetres of oil spill over the entire ocean? Man, you’re out to lunch! I want you to have an open mind, but not that open.
quote
Try again.
unquote
Open your eyes and look around. Happy sailing.
JF
In the meantime, we will without much additional effort beyond existing research and the obvious profit incentives drop the cost of solar power by a factor of four, and it will become at least competitive with the cheapest ways of generating electrical power. We will also have at least one major breakthrough in energy storage technology. The two together will cause solar to become more profitable than coal independent of subsidy, for much but not all of the world.
That’s an article of pure faith. We’ve seen batteries improve at a glacial pace for a century and there isn’t enough pumped storage available to handle green energy at scale. I remain highly skeptical of the efficiency claims for compressed air. Flow batteries? Meh. Hydrogen? Blech. Ammonia? Meh. That means that any green energy is going to have to be backed up with a significant amount of gas turbines which are the cheapest option and the most responsive but still add to the cost of the system.
Solar still requires massive subsidies today even after the low-hanging fruit has been harvested and China continues to massively subsidize domestic production leading to artificially low panel prices.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/a-skeptic-looks-at-alternative-energy/1
….impossible that the earth’s temperature can exhibit a standstill of five years, much less 15, given the nearly exponential increase in CO2 we have experienced over the last 15 years.
Not quite. Suppose that the temperature over the last fifteen years would have gone down, all things being equal, if it were not for the addition of the CO_2. The point is that the range of natural variation is large enough to explain the recent rise without CO_2, or to explain the recent flat spot with it. However, the probability of such a sustained (canceled) downturn is not so great, hence the addition of p-values indicating that improbability. The longer without an actual rise, the less probable, perhaps, that the upper bounds of CO_2 forced high feedback climate sensitivity are correct.
So it certainly isn’t impossible. It is just increasingly improbable. Eventually it will become too improbable to believe — or the temperature will start going up again. Some would say that we’ve already reached the former state; I disagree. The IPCC 2008 report assigns the probability at 5%, which is not all that close to zero. This is, I suspect, a bullshit statistics number pulled out of somebody’s ass, not a real computed probability estimate with some grounding, but it still it indicates correctly that the over the last hundred and fifty plus years of thermometric records, downturns or flattenings of 15 years or so are not unknown. I’d actually say the empirical odds WITHOUT CO_2 of such an downturn episode are no worse than 1 in 10 across the post-LIA warming (one is clearly visible in the climate record) but with presumed AGW it should be smaller so 5% is probably not crazy, bullshit or not.
Of course, speaking of probability at all is de facto evidence that climate science is far from certain, as we use probability in this context to describe our essential uncertainty in the actual climate dynamics. This is the more interesting consequence of the flat stretch — no matter what, it increases that uncertainty (out to where the probability of the observed event is not too small) OR we’re awesomely (un)lucky to see a very unlikely extreme in the first 33 years of accurate records when only one such episode has occurred in the previous stretch from the Dalton minimum to the present.
As I said, at the moment this hardly strengthens the CAGW argument, without disproving it. In four or five years, it will weaken that argument to the point where the “C” part is pretty unbelievable even to people that formerly believed it quite firmly. But to actually disprove the argument we have to have a better understanding than we have now of the climate, not just a moderate stretch of apparently contradictory data.
rgb
That’s an article of pure faith.
Well, not really. Solar PV has been following a Moore’s Law-like curve, and if you follow the literature, they really do continue to make discoveries and improvements that affect cost per watt downstream. Batteries are indeed a longer shot, I agree, but I think we’re due for a breakthrough, perhaps in zinc-oxide, perhaps in nanoscale-driven stuff.
In any event, I freely admit that my claims here are pure punditry. You pays your money, you takes your choice. I’m just telling you what my best-guess crystal ball gazing reveals, you are entirely welcome to think differently and we’ll let the future decide.
rgb
Given that AFAIK, it is not possible to predict either the timing or the strength of the ENSO a decade out, given that weather/climate appears to depend on the particular present and recent past state of the oscillation over much of the globe, how accurate do you think the predictions of “climate change” could be? To make the question concrete, given your choice of the various temperature estimates for the period from 1979 to 2012 — RSS, GISS, HADCRUT, whatever — how would any simple “almanac” level model have predicted either the volcanic eruptions or the superstrong ENSO that is almost certainly responsible for the sharp bump in SSTs and global temperatures that occurred in the general vicinity of 1997-1998? Without this bump, the decadal predictions are horribly wrong, but I see no possible way that anyone could have predicted Mount Pinatubo or the 1998 ENSO effect in 1988, let alone 1978. Do you?
Generally, my point was that the GCM’s have never produced any predictions that have utility (economic value). And there are large economic costs to not correctly predicting the weather, a few weeks to a few decades in advance. Consequently, those who need to know what the future weather will be, are investing in models that predict based on measurable indicators and on a regional basis. We already know some indicators that are useful for predicting months in advance, notably ENSO. I expect more to be found and our ability to predict over these timescales to improve.
Once we can predict, we then in a position to theorize/investigate why we can predict.
As to whether there is ‘climate’ and variability around ‘climate’ that produces weather. I’m not sure this is even an important question. I see climate as no more or less than average weather. Therefore the only difference between predicting weather and predicting climate is timescale.
Of course, these indicators won’t predict volcanic eruptions. I don’t know whether they could have predicted the super El Nino, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility.
I don’t see the GCM climate modellers getting out of their mire of GHGs drive the ‘global climate’ any time soon, so significant advances will come from elsewhere. Science has many examples of a seeming complex phenomena being controlled by simple principles, Gregor Mendel comes to mind. Science also has many examples of economic need driving science forward in particular areas.
More particularly, don’t blunder off doing calculations that spring from ludicrous preconceptions. Millimetres of oil spill over the entire ocean? Man, you’re out to lunch! I want you to have an open mind, but not that open.
What part of the arithmetic did you not like? I thought it was very clear. Basically, it proved that your assertion that the Earth’s oceans are covered by the equivalent of a layer of oil a fortnight — even one a single molecule thick — are false. A better estimate might be a single such layer in a year, at least from human sources, but even this is probably an overestimate (possibly an egregious one). As many others have pointed out, natural sources of oil probably exceed human ones, and direct empirical studies of the Gulf oil spill revealed that bacteria eat (and hence clean up) both methane and oil far, far faster than people had previously thought, see e.g. http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112692737/oil-eating-bacteria-clean-up-oil-spill-091212/. The thin surface layers you describe would have a half life of next to nothing — hours, days at most, between volatiles and bacteria.
Don’t get me wrong — I think oil pollution of the ocean is a bad thing. But attributing global warming to it is a far, far reach, one not well served by alleging a coverage that is a signficant fraction of all of the oil pumped in a year (recall that ALL the oil makes a layer only ten MICRONS — a few hundred molecules — thick). It would take all of the oil ever pumped out of the ground, times a factor of four or five, to cover the ocean to the depth of a millimeter.
rgb
Julian Flood,
please note:
1) “Twice an Exxon Valdez spill worth of oil seeps into the Gulf of Mexico every year, according to a new study that will be presented January 27 at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Antonio, Texas. ”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=20863
2) Satellite images of the phenomena:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36873
3) Petroleum is a source of both carbon and energy for primary producers at the base of marine ecosystems. Petroleum is a life-enriching food: not something to hate, but to celebrate:
http://living-petrol.blogspot.com/ncr
rgbatduke said @ur momisugly December 3, 2012 at 7:51 pm
Climate is defined by the statistics of temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, precipitation, atmospheric particle count and other meteorological elemental measurements in a particular locality over long periods. Arbitrarily, the minimum period of time to consider these statistics to encompass the term climate is thirty years. Climate is contrasted with weather defined as the current state of these elements.
The most obvious characteristic of climate is that it determines the vegetation type growing at a locality. The Köppen system is the most widely used climate classification system. It was introduced by Russian/German climatologist Wladimir Köppen in 1884. Köppen modified his system several times and the German climatologist Rudolf Geiger collaborated with Köppen on later changes to the system so it is often referred to as Köppen–Geiger.
The system is based on the concept that native vegetation is the best expression of climate. Thus, Köppen climate zone boundaries have been determined by vegetation distribution. The Köppen system combines average annual and monthly temperatures and precipitation, and the seasonality of precipitation.
There’s a map of the current Köppen climate zones here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Koppen_World_Map.png
The boundaries between zones are determined by isotherms and they vary considerably from year to year (weather noise). There’s a map showing the movements of the Köppen climate boundary in the eastern US during the 20thC here:
http://www.sturmsoft.com/climate/suckling_mitchell_2000_fig2_3.gif
Hope that helps. Essentially, the term “global climate” is incoherent in climatology since something cannot be simultaneously local and global. I also note the almost complete lack of knowledge of climatological terminology among the warmists. So it goes…
The outgoing radiation can be reflected back to the source, of course, but there is apparently no experimental proof this back radiation has any effect on the temperature of the source. Given the fact, that warmists do not present any experiment, it is reasonable to assume, that the effect is either zero or negligible.
Point a) I’m not a “warmist”. Neither am I a “denier”. I’m a physicist.
Point b) I offered a very, very simple physical argument. The only ways it can be wrong are if the Stefan-Boltzmann equation itself is egregiously wrong (it is not) or the laws of thermodynamics are wrong (they’re not wrong either). Or, of course, if I made an actual mistake in my reasoning. If you find an actual mistake, let me know.
Point c) Get a large piece of aluminum foil. Place it in front of your face a few centimeters away. You can feel the reflected heat radiated from your face, warming your face. Experimental proof that reflected “back radiation” can have a clearly perceptible effect on the temperature of the source, right there in your own kitchen!
Point d) hazy nights do not cool as rapidly as clear nights. The diurnal temperature variation of the dry desert is much greater than that of a humid coastal area at the same latitude. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas too — direct evidence that back radiation has an effect on the temperature of the source in the context of climate. CO_2 is a much weaker greenhouse gas, but the principle is the same.
Use your reason, my friend. Ignoring the empirically founded laws of physics because you find them inconveniently opposed to a favored belief serves no one, and it certainly doesn’t make it “reasonable” to reject the correctly derived conclusions that follow from those laws. If you wish to discuss that derivation, I would be happy to accommodate you and explain further until you understand it. If all you want to do is sound clever while salting your dialogue with enough stuff to give somebody a winning sheet if they are playing logical fallacy bingo, then no one can prevent you from doing so, but there is little point to it.
rgb
NASA’s figures: Big spills, 37, routine maintenance 137, down the drain 363, up in smoke 92, offshore drilling 15, natural seeps 62. That’s millions of gallons (US) and was the state of things in 1994.
Greg House says:
December 3, 2012 at 9:51 pm
I really do not think there is any question that, all things being equal, a single IR absorber blanket will tend to trap heat. Dr. Brown’s reference to a “space blanket” is a case in point. Satellites are routinely wrapped in IR reflecting MLI blankets for thermal control. Some 50 odd years into the Space Age, the properties and effects of these blankets are very well understood and confirmed many times over.
But, are all things equal? Clearly not. There are many mechanisms, e.g., evaporation of water and photosynthesis, which can oppose the extra heating from any small change in emissivity. And, do the equations hold for complex atmospheres with many absorbers/emitters? I suspect they may not, though thermal dynamics is not my specialty. I believe however, based on some vague scratches I have made on paper, that I could construct an experimental system, at least, with two absorbers/emitters which would be governed approximately by an equation of the form:
dT/dt = k1*(T1 – T) + k2*(T2 – T)
where T is temperature, dT/dt is its derivative with respect to time, and k1, k2, T1 and T2 are constants related to gases #1 and #2 and their heat capacities/concentrations. T1 and T2 would represent a “warming potential”, i.e., the temperatures each gas would drive the system to in the absence of the other. k1 and k2 would be most directly impacted by concentration.
In steady state, T would approach
T = (k1*T1 + k2*T2) / (k1 + k2)
The partial derivative of T with respect to k1 would then be
dT/dk1 = k2*(T1 – T2) / (k1 + k2)^2
If T1 is less than T2, i.e., the warming potential of gas #2 is greater than gas #1, then the effect of increasing the concentration of gas #1 and thus k1 would be to lower the temperature.
I suspect that, with the interaction of water vapor, CO2, and CH4 particularly in our atmosphere, we might as easily decrease equilibrium temperature as increase it by adding more CO2. It is all very complex, and I do not have faith that those concerned with the dynamics have entirely worked it all out. I am quite certain that there is no significant terrestrial warming signal induced by increasing CO2, as the temperature/CO2 relationship is clearly dominated by causal relationship running from temperature to CO2. Whether the lack of a warming signal is due to feedback or oversimplification of the relationship or both, I do not know. But, I do know that things are not working out according to the script.
rgbatduke says:
December 3, 2012 at 10:41 pm
“Solar PV has been following a Moore’s Law-like curve, and if you follow the literature, they really do continue to make discoveries and improvements that affect cost per watt downstream.”
Moore’s Law is, of course, not a law but an empirical observation. And, those costs are entirely based on currently low demand. If truly large scale demand for solar infrastructure significant enough to make a real dent in our energy appetite were to emerge, you would see the costs skyrocket. Some, for example, have computed that we could satisfy our electricity demand by carpeting a 100 X 100 mile swath of Arizona desert with solar panels. Never minding the horrendous environmental impact of such an expanse, try calculating, sometime, how much material it would take to cover a 10,000 square mile area with these things, and current production levels of key elements. You will find that, at current production levels, it would require centuries to complete the project.
Oops, mouse pad misbehaving. Call all of this a billion gallons, or 8 billion pounds, or 4 billion kilograms. Sounds like a lot!
kilograms per square meter. That is one hundredth of a gram, or one hundredth of a milliliter, in a year, take your pick. In a day, call it — generously — one ten thousand of a milliliter, or a tenth of a microgram of oil per square meter, although of course it isn’t anywhere near uniformly applied. Biological sources of oil from living creatures in seawater probably contribute amounts competitive with that.
Now divide it by the roughly 400 trillion square meters of surface area. Now it is down to hmm,
We could now go over the surface chemistry and rate that a microgram of oil spread across a square meter of area — where we are down to less than a billionth of a gram of oil per square centimeter — will oxidize and vaporize in sunlight and be eaten by bacteria to compute its half life — if there were any point. There isn’t. This is many orders of magnitude away from being a plausible cause of global anything, but especially not global warming. Or cooling. It is at most a high local and occasional mess.
That’s assuming NASA’s figures are correct. But with 30 billion barrels of oil per year, and each barrel containing 42 gallons of oil, that’s 1.3 trillion gallons of oil pumped each year. A billion gallons of loss, all into the ocean, is 0.1% of that. To me that seems absurdly high. So as much as a microgram per square meter per day is probably an upper bound estimate, at least IMO.
rgb
Storing a movement (electricity) increases the risk exponentially for catastrophic failure, as exemplified by the many burned down cars/houses caused by shorted batteries.
Any form of electricity storage is by definition always actively safe, you need to 100% exact have monitoring if you want to store gWatts since if such a device blows up it releases all that energy at once.
As such the idea that a ‘major breakthrough’ that could safely store the vast quantities of energy needed to compensate for day/night cycles is absurd.
Already for a tiny amount such as used by a car it will hard to invent something small, light weight and safe enough to fit in a car that can hold the equivalent of a tank of gas, is an undertaking that will stump science for decades to come.
I disagree. GHGs cause cooling of the stratosphere according to the IPCC and common sense. Therefore by the Lapse Rate law they cause cooling of the entire atmosphere. Increasing CO2 levels cause global cooling. I am happy to concede that the cooling may not be much although the record over the past million years shows repeated episodes in which CO2 levels increase following increases in temperature followed by a collapse in temperature associated with a long slow decline in CO2 levels which remain high as the planet cools.
Further there is a huge amount of evidence linking solar cycles to global temperatures with very high correlation coefficients. Solar cycles are increasingly falling to predictability and the underpinning physics is becoming clearer. Serious scientists rather than the IPCC data fiddlers have been saying for years (decades in some instances) that we are moving into a colder world and elevated CO2 levels may make that world just a little cooler.
The price we will have to pay will be much amplified via the positive feedbacks of the warmist scam.
Stay cool!
The CO2 back radiation heats the oceans ?
Non climatic geological records say NO!
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NoRoomForCO2.htm
There is no room for any CO2 input in the N. Atlantic SST rise.
Dr Brown says he has seen no slicks or spills in North Carolina. I thought I’d look at some images. If you Google ‘north carolina harbour’ and click on images, in the first hit you’ll see the near surface smoothed with a clean area further out. That’s
http://www.oyster-harbour-holden-beach.com/holden-beach-aerial-photos.html
There’s a click on link that says ‘Also view the Holden Beach Proximity Aerial Photos’ Look above the labels and out to sea: see the smoothness of parts of the surface with darker ruffled areas? That’s a typical result of sewage oil and surfactant coating the surface.
Silver Lake Harbour Ocracok, same thing (it’s the fifth image).
WYNDHAM FAIRFIELD HARBOUR GOLF LAKE NORTH CAROLINA TIMESHARE VACATION RENTAL shows the effect very neatly.
Cypress in harbour, Edenton, North Carolina
http://www.vacationhomes.net/blog/2012/05/11/top-10-places-to-visit-in-north-carolina,-usa/ 3.wilmington….
Hilton Head island…
Lake Hickory…
etc. Just browse through the series, then try looking at images of e.g. the Barents and Kara seas, Okhotsk.
You get the idea. These are not slicks, they are smooths, molecule-thick layers of oil and surfactant that alter the physics of the surface. Yes, I know, you’ll claim that it’s just a trick of the light, or variation in wind speeds etc. No, it isn’t. Watch the behaviour of these anomalous areas in real time and study their behaviour. You will find that they react differently to the same stimulus that is affecting the ruffled areas.
It would make a nice little science project to sample smooths and adjacent unsmoothed areas to see what’s going on. How you could do the experiment is another matter — the amounts of pollution will be tiny.
Khwarizmi, yes, slicks have been known in the area for as long as humans have been there. As I remarked above, it’s typical of modern journalism that the press has mentioned it hardly at all. The shrimp picture is interesting; my brother, a long-time sea drill oil man (surveys, not the actual process) tells me there is a superstition that lots of shrimp on the sea bed is a good indicator of oil below.
JF
And this is the point. Yet realistically we won’t stop our co2 levels going up no matter how hard we try. India and China will continue their upward spurt which will easily cancel out any Western reductions.
And right on cue we now have this:
Yet they avert their eyes at the IPCC temperature / co2 scenarios graph which also shows an expanding gap between this high end co2 output and flat global mean temperature. What part of ooops! don’t they understand? Sometimes I feel like calling them the ‘deniers’ but I will hold off.
Actually, it’s not about reducing future ‘global warming’, it’s about the green agenda, money and power. See Gore, Greenpeace, IPCC and other opportunists.
Dr. Brown
Nice to see you use some of the information I e-mailed to you some months ago.
Please see:- http://www.climateofsophistry.com written by Canadian astrophysicist Joseph E Postma.
Thanks for your time posting.
If (as I suspect) renewable energy is a pipe dream, at least for many decades, someone on our side needs to take on, in detail, Amory Lovins’ book, published a year ago, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era, on Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Fire-Business-Solutions-Energy/dp/1603583718/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354623155&sr=1-1&keywords=amory+lovins
It has only two negative reviews (out of 21)–and they were only directed at the poor formatting of the Kindle editions. It has lots of testimonial quotes from bigshots. It received a starry-eyed review here: http://seekingalpha.com/article/293982-book-review-reinventing-fire
But, according to Hansen, it’s totally crazy–only nuclear will do the job. WUWT should start a thread on the book and author, perhaps after soliciting for an initial comment, or perhaps just crowdsourcing feedback. Some food for thought can be found in the comment below:
MangoChutney says:
December 3, 2012 at 4:58 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/tips-and-notes/#comment-1162944
“A new report suggests that small-scale renewable technologies on commercial developments might cost more than they’re worth.”
But, are all things equal? Clearly not. There are many mechanisms, e.g., evaporation of water and photosynthesis, which can oppose the extra heating from any small change in emissivity.
Actually (and rather interestingly) there are not as many as you might think. Most of those models involve taking the aforementioned shell and adding additional channels to help transport the heat from the inner absorptive surface to the outer emissive surface. But in my model, I already made the entire shell a thermal superconductor — adding a finite conductivity merely maintains the inner surface of a (now thick) shell at a warmer temperature than the outer one and is net warming, not cooling.
Of course if you placed the inner shell of a high-conductivity shell in physical contact with the outer surface that would indeed do it — that would reduce the temperature difference between the surface of the sphere and the surface of the shell directly. Direct contact and convection would accomplish the same sort of thing by providing a parallel channel that forces the temperature of the inner sphere and outer shell closer together. However, again, the effect is not as profound as you might expect, especially when the conductivity and/or thermal transport is poor and slow, respectively. Given outward directed heat flow that is rate-limited at the top by the S-B equation only, it is really difficult to avoid differential warming inside a differential shell, which is why the Earth, Sun, etc get hotter as you descend into them. The outer surface is SB limited in temperature, and all heat transport mechanisms combined have to move heat at that rate from the inner source to the outer radiative surface. All heat transport mechanisms require a thermal gradient to function. Q.E.D — all that is left is determining the magnitude of that gradient given multiple channels of indifferent conductivity.
In the case of fluids, they tend to self-organize into convective rolls or (for fluids on rotating differentially heated height varying surfaces including one over a mostly liquid surfaced ocean) more complex structures like Hadley cells and decadal oscillations and the like, and some of this modulates the heat gain by affecting albedo, other parts modulate heat transport (a big storm can often uplift a lot of heat into the stratosphere where it is relatively easily lost). And finally, the “shell” in the toy model isn’t opaque — it for all practical purposes is “full of holes” through which direct radiative cooling occurs and this is a perfect short circuit, but one of a diffusive nature because only a fairly moderate fraction of emitted BB photons are in the holes so that the shell still slows down radiative loss.
Radiation is actually a rather important cooling channel. It is the most important channel through which the human body thermoregulates — we lose more heat through radiation than through convection, conduction and evaporation, although we supplement and fine tune our cooling using mixes of the other three (or make one dominant by e.g. jumping in a lake). Air is too damn good an insulator otherwise. It is the only net loss channel for the planetary system itself — evaporative outgassing of the atmosphere exists but is absolutely negligible in comparison and partially confounded by infalling matter.
So don’t be too sure that you can come close to eliminating the GHE with a parallel transport model constrained to lose all of the heat to the cold reservoir through radiation, however it moves around in between, not with physically plausible parameters.
Good reply, BTW. If only Greg would take notice and reply in this way, the quality of the discussion would be much improved.
rgb
I disagree. GHGs cause cooling of the stratosphere according to the IPCC and common sense.
Look, I provided a very, very simple physical model of the GHE. Instead of just asserting that you disagree — very useful information that this might be — and adding nonsense like “according to the IPCC” that is obviously false — why not either address the model or explain in some detail how and why, ideally with equations or with some sort of complete discussion?
Otherwise what can I say? You’re wrong, categorically. Now you can say you’re right, I can say you’re wrong, and we can have a kindergarten level discussion instead.
rgb
Dr. Brown,
Thank you for the contributions you have made here. They make the visits worth while.
Personally, I believe you have gone way out on a limb forecasting gentle warming for the next twenty years. I would like to agree with you because the alternative would be terrible.
I believe that the global climate for the next twenty years will be exactly the same as it has been for the last 5k years.
Jeff
Dr Brown,
Inspired by your calculations I’ve had another shot at working out oil smooth coverage: you will be pleased with the result. I’ve saved it as ‘humble pie calculation’.
All figures are rounded. We make the assumption that the numbers at the NASA seawifs site are outdated and the real numbers have increased since 1994, which seems reasonable. Call the ‘down the drain’ figure 500 *10^6 gallons US.
That’s 500 *10^6 * 4 = 2000 *10^6 litres ‘down the drain’ = 2*10^9 litres per year
Area of world ocean = 3.5*10^8 sq km (70% of 500*10^6 ) = 3.5*10^10 ha.
5ml of oil will smooth on e hectare (Franklin).
number of 5 ml doses per year per ha = (20*2*10^9)/(3.5*10^10) = 1
Allowing for all the other oil spills/seeps/up in smoke etc we can just about stretch that to 2. So my statement was out by a factor of at least twenty and the egregious calculation error is mine, not yours. Even if I bring surfactant pollution into play that will only bring it up to about 4, and that really is handwaving as I’ve seen no research on surfactant smoothing at all. I think I may have been confusing the number of smoothing doses over the entire ocean for those I calculated for Lake Tanganyika. Sorry about that, I had no intention to mislead.
It now becomes a matter of how quickly a smooth will degrade: at one ‘event’ per year there is only a slim chance that the effect will be widespread. Four doses a year will be significant if the lifetime of a smooth is more than a few weeks. You will have noticed that the Gulf spill biological degradation figures are for deep layer, treated spill with a lot of heavy stuff. I’ve not seen figures for oxidation and degradation in thin films, but it should be fairly rapid where the temperature is at a reasonable level, and very much slower in the Arctic.
The smooth of 20 thousand + square miles which I saw on the way to Madeira was on a line from Santiago de Compostela to Funchal, from approximately abeam Lisbon for forty minutes, G/S about 500kts, height 40k ft. The pollutant cannot have come from the Med as the surface current runs in, not out — unless it gets entrained in the deep water and gets out that way, but I can’t see a mechanism for that. The high had been in place for some weeks, so the pollutant had been exposed for that time and was still suppressing the effects of a breeze of around Force 4, with the smoothed area like glass and whitecaps showing in the area outside. Presumably the pollutant was generated elsewhere — if not, buy shares in anyone who wants to drill off Madeira — and would have taken a while to move into place, so a lifetime of several weeks does not seem too unlikely.
You will have seen the recent paper about uncertainties in aerosols and clouds. If, as I contend, smooths alter low level cloud albedo by reducing aerosol production from e.g breaking waves, then they introduce another uncertainty into the mix.
Thank you for the lesson. It was fun.
JF