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.
Gail Combs said @ur momisugly December 4, 2012 at 11:57 am
Thanks for the kind words Gail. And your often thought-provoking comments. It seems to me that climate in the current debate (the one that’s over & we didn’t need) is a completely different creature than the one I’ve been studying for the last 30-40 years.
Gail Combs says:
December 4, 2012 at 11:10 am
Rare earth metals aren’t that rare; China has just cornered the market by selling them at unrealistically low prices. Some see that loosening, and you can probably expect to see them being mined in places with better environmental and labor practices.
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Going to multilayers could eventually be part of any hypothetical breatkthrough, one supposes.
For the near future, PV will be most attractive in hot places with a lot of sunlight, where people want air conditioning. I recall years ago reading that in the summer, something like 1/3 of the energy used in US cities was for AC. (Perhaps this was at peak AC usage times; I can’t easily find this figure now. It’s still a lot.) Not only would strategically placed solar cut down on fossil fuel use, but it would reduce the amount of generating capacity needed, simply by providing power at the time it’s most needed. At that point, storage isn’t an issue. In the end, you could go well beyond just the AC capacity and relegate power plants to more of standby/night/cloudy day role. For this, nuclear is not so great, because it’s tricky and time-consuming to change power levels. Pumped storage for load leveling not only eases the need for new power plants, it also helps level the load for reactors, making them easier to run.
Meanwhile, besides photovoltaic, there’s also solar-thermal, which seems to be still in a growth phase. It might be challenging to store an underground pool of water, or molten salt, large enough to give back the output of a 1 GW power station for 12 hours, but it’s not impossible.
Footnote about Moore’s Law: it held true for much longer than Gordon Moore’s prediction, bold though that was. But for microchips, the obvious improvement for incresed performnce and speed was increased circuit density. There were no real material limits to making components smaller, though we may be within sight of those now. All it took to predict a doubling of density was a predictable improvement in manufacturing techniques and circuit design. For a lot of other technologies, it’s harder to predict such things when it’s not obvious how the future improvements would work.
vukcevic said @ur momisugly December 4, 2012 at 1:16 pm
I am gobsmacked! That’s numerology at its… er… finest. Thanks Vuk.
rgb says:
“A transient chaotic pattern that has emerged for a few cycles but is likely to disappear without warning just as unpredictably as it emerged.”
Mathamaticians have this concept anathama to me as a rationalist called stochastic resonance. I think it boils down to random harmonics. Bah, at some scale everything is determined and everything is finite.
@gymnosperm:
It isn’t just a math concept. It’s a very real effect. It is used in some kinds of radio detectors. You inject a bit of noise, and it becomes easier to extract the signal…
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=5537075
(The Eye-Tripple-E is a major Electrical Engineer group…)
I first ran into this with old tube radios many decades back (when I was building them as a hobby…) and some had a ‘noise injector’ circuit. Only later did the concept get a name upgrade to ‘stochastic resonance’.
The basic idea is that an oscillator may be just below the point where it will oscillate or a detector may be just below the threshold of detection, and if you introduce just a bit of ‘noise’ you can kick it over the threshold. Thus detecting a signal that otherwise would be missed. The ‘noise’ alone is not enough to set things in motion, nor is the signal, but both, together, do…
Think of it as a little kid trying to turn the handle on the water fountain and can’t quite get it to go, then someone bumps his arm and the water flows… until it doesn’t. During the ‘bumping’ you detect the signal of the kid. Otherwise,not.
TRM
Do those same bacteria live in cold water like NE Russia? Do they take longer to break down the oil in cold water compared to warm?
Methanotrophs infest the planet from pole to pole. They appear to be well adapted to low temperatures. thriving mainly at icy depths, some feasting on methane ice, some lying dormant in Siberian permafrost.
Both of you raise interesting points but I for one would love to see some more serious science on the oil slick on the oceans and how long it lasts…
===========
Hundreds of millions of litres of petroleum enter the environment from both natural and anthropogenic sources every year. The input from natural marine oil seeps alone would be enough to cover all of the world’s oceans in a layer of oil 20 molecules thick. That the globe is not swamped with oil is testament to the efficiency and versatility of the networks of microorganisms that degrade hydrocarbons, some of which have recently begun to reveal the secrets of when and how they exploit hydrocarbons as a source of carbon and energy.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16489346
===========
In other words, I wouldn’t worry too much. Here’s some more science on the subject – from a seriously qualified expert:
http://martinhovland.weebly.com/
John West says: December 4, 2012 at 1:31 pm
quote
Julian Flood says:‘humble pie calculation’.
LOL
unquote
In my own defence I’d like to claim that it was more a lapse of memory than real stupidity — I’ve been looking at various parts of the world which are warming above the predicted rate and had done some dubious (using population of various towns as a proxy for oil run-off but that’s all the info I could get) calculations about Lake Tanganyika. To do the whole ocean calculation was comparatively easy and it was some time ago and.. the two got conflated. Waffle, excuse, etc…
The whole process that got me interested was this: Tom Wigley’s ‘why the blip’ which is about an SST blip during WWII; then the strange changes to the SST graphs and the obvious graphmanship going on with the published versions — you know what I mean, the red and blue bars with the zero line chosen to emphasise the modern warming; after that the Climate Audit posts on the bucket correction were a revelation. For all the juggling, the abrupt blip during WWII showed like a canine’s gonads. Climate science was obviously worried about the blip and was trying to explain it way rather than explain it, a reprehensible habit.
An possible cause of strange weather (apart from natural variation, but it looks a bit abrupt for that) during that time was the war at sea with its concomitant oil spill. Primary cause oil spill, which leads to reduction in aerosol production, lower turbulence, less evaporation. I still think that an oiled surface has lower albedo and lower emissivity, but people have argued about that; maybe I’m wrong with these, but I did poke around to look at various papers and I suspect people are forgetting that the big result of oil pollution is a reduction in roughness. Anyway the main effect is aerosol reduction.
Observation trumps theory of course, and I’ve seen these smooths, seen one which was over twenty thousand square miles and which because of its location must have been at the very least several weeks old. Unless it had been generated by biology, in which case all climate calculations are off and a new game is afoot, it says that something odd is going on with the ocean’s surface. The smooth I saw was resisting about 7m/s wind which agrees nicely with the experience of using radar for slick detection which are also overwhelmed by wind speeds only just above that. No breaking waves, no aerosols. I hope Salter’s cloud ship will give us a handle on the numbers here, but we already know that stratocumulus clouds, which would be modulated by the effect, are a large cooling influence.
I have been known to suggest that the only way to say for sure is to experiment, a procedure sadly lacking in climate science. It would be nice to think of Dr Brown, his youthful enthusiasm for experimental science rekindled by the conversation here*, sneaking out of harbour with a bottle of synthetic detergent and a bottle of olive oil, dribbling them onto the surface and watching in awe as Franklin’s experiment unfolds. If it works as advertised, and he manages to blag the experiment up to a huge oil tanker full of both off the coast of Fiji, I volunteer to carry the bags.
My involvement in this thread started with the idea that we couldn’t do anything about cooling. Well, not by any brute force technique, but I bet we could, if we had to, by manipulating the ocean surface to alter the stratocumulus coverage. The piece of pie, you will observe , was not all that large….
JF
*I hope he looked at the images of North Carolina harbours and saw the same things that I see. Smooths are a real phenomenon but people don’t watch the water surface, they accept its behaviour as normal without looking closely.
If we double the CO2 bumpers across both layers at this point, the lower layer, rounded to three significant digits, is now 40,100, an increase of .25%. The upper layer though is now 800 bumpers, an increase of 100%.
Ah, I see your point. And it is rather a good one. Once again, I’ll have to fall back on the time-honored “dunno”, but damn, that is one hell of an interesting observation/argument.
A big question is to what extent the bands overlap. If they were sharp and mutually exclusive, your argument would be false, because the phenomena would be orthogonal/independent. OTOH, to the extent that the CO_2 emission band(s) signficantly overlaps with the H_2O absorption band(s), then increasing CO_2 concentration by any factor you like negligibly perturbs the total down low, and even if it affects things up high the very water that provides the bulk of the GHE anyway effectively buffers the effect to neutralize it precisely at the TOA where it has no real effect down low. The distribution of heat that is absorbed in atoms that can radiate all the way to space across the thermocline (in depth) changes a bit, but the lower boundary of the thermocline does not.
To put it another way, the process may not be decomposable at all into the separate sum of “the water GHE” and “the CO_2 GHE” and “the Ozone GHE” and “the Methane GHE” all the way down at the quantum level, so that instead of computing a CO_2 (independent) warming and using it to argue that warming feedback itself affects/increases H2O warming, it could be that tweaking CO_2 simply causes a nonlinear rearrangement in the distribution of the process with almost no effect.
This is not to argue that this does or does not happen, but it does sound like a possibility and I do not know enough about the details of the overall process to know whether or not that has been taken into account. Grant Perry probably does. You might ask him.
rgb
Smooths are a real phenomenon but people don’t watch the water surface, they accept its behaviour as normal without looking closely.
Smooths, as you put it, may have more than one cause, too.
As for albedo variation, see previous post and thin film constructive interference. You can see that at any time by putting a drop of gasoline or oil into a puddle on the pavement. It doesn’t darken the water; it brightens it. A lot. As in you can see the pavement beneath before, but often you cannot afterwards because the water surface becomes mirror-like at all angles.
I also have to say that this same drop of gasoline doesn’t seem to cover a hectare of rain-slick pavement, nor does the occasional drop of oil or gasoline that drips from my boat’s motor into the ocean seem to cover, or smooth, anything like a hectare of ocean. If it did, the entire Beaufort inlet (or any inlet to a harbor) would be one big slick, and they’re not. Even a clean and well maintained motor blows some unburned gasoline out in its exhaust, and in any given harbor with thousands of boats, there are at least tens of boats with egregious leaks of gasoline and/or oil.
rgb
Mathamaticians have this concept anathama to me as a rationalist called stochastic resonance. I think it boils down to random harmonics. Bah, at some scale everything is determined and everything is finite.
There is, quite literally, nothing more rational than a mathematician. Formally rational at that. It is never too late to learn some utterly rational, practical mathematics associated with dynamical systems of multiple, nonlinear, coupled, differential equations (which are, in general, what describe the time evolution of nearly anything, so that most of these ideas are relevant and realized in actual physical phenomena.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_cycle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_bifurcation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period-doubling_bifurcation
Most of these links describe the simplest, almost trivial examples where the Poincare cycles are essentially two dimensional, so that the attractors are points in a plane, but of course they also exist in N dimensional systems with far more complex structure — where “the climate” is certain to be such a system. The really interesting thing about this isn’t its rarity — it is how easy it is for a simple linear system to become just a bit nonlinear, or nonlinear in just the right way, and for chaos to emerge from it.
The math here is difficult, no doubt, and of course linearizing and separating a nonlinear coupled problem will sometimes make chaos disappear from the solution, but all that means is that your simple linearized solution, however intuitive and attractive it is, is just wrong, and will only work for an undetermined period of time and then fail without warning when a Hopf bifurcation occurs and your trajectory kicks you out of your local attractor and into orbit around a new attractor. Or worse.
rgb
To reply to all at once on the solar power issue — again, I’m being a pundit and using the pundit’s privilege to pull a future prediction out of my ass and throw it out there. If it fails, downgrade me as a pundit by all means. The basis for my punditry — not that I have to or should explain, because doing so reduces the “magic” when it all comes true and people go “how did he know, he must be a pundit” — is that following numerous threads on slashdot and gizmag and sometimes attending the odd seminar (I do work in a physics department, remember:-) I think that there are at least three, maybe as many as five or six, significantly different general approaches to solar power any one of which is capable of “breakthrough” at a level that might knock a chunk off of the overall price/performance ratio. People are working with completely different kinds of materials, with crystalline versus amorphous designs, with different dopings, with nanoscale structures in carbon and other materials (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotubes_in_photovoltaics). Then there are non-PV approaches including old fashioned focused light used to heat a boiler and variants thereof, and exotica like solar updraft towers that can generate substantial power and at the same time mobilize a lot of surface heat upwards, essentially facilitating a teensy bit of “global cooling” by warming the upper atmosphere. Any and all of these have some issues, sure, but they are different issues, and some of them represent whole spectra of testable possibilities any one of which could turn out to be “it”.
So my bet isn’t on silicon-based solar PV as a single horse in the race — I’m betting that one one of an entire field of horses being cared for and fed by highly motivated trainers who will make a ton of money if their horse wins will turn out to be a winner (indeed, that many of them will, gradually but incrementally improving, hence the prediction of gradual continued reductions in price). And to be honest, I think that plain old boring solar silicon PV has a factor of two to four of pure fat in its price as well and that it will continue to get cheaper per watt for the next decade or two regardless of what happens in the more interesting science, largely due to improvements in manufacturing process, economy of scale (a big one!), scale of demand, and so on.
Could I be wrong, Gail? Sure. Pundits are often wrong. It’s a horse-race, and all of the horses could turn out to be nags, fit for nothing but the glue factory. But I don’t think they will — too much money in it, and the theoretical bases for the various designs are all plausible or you wouldn’t have anybody even trying. But in many locations, for many purposes, solar PV is already break even to win a bit unsubsidized, even using stone age storage technology (or better yet, dumping surplus back into the grid to avoid having to store it at all). So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to predict that solar will advance to where it is a net win over a substantially larger space than it is now. Personally, I could amortize the cost of a 5 kW system for my house today over thirteen to fifteen years. That’s too long, but by 2020 I rather expect that the amortization will be down to 8 to 10 years and literally all new construction will have built in solar rooftops with the cost rolled into the house and mortgage.
Storage advances are a bigger risk, but the stakes are huge. Two technologies that might break out (or might not, see “bigger risk” include Zinc Oxide batteries, that have a lot of the right stuff, and some very wrong stuff indeed. But the wrong stuff seems (to me) to be vulnerable to some really clever engineering, perhaps driven by advances again in nanoscale technology. Also, again there are interesting possibilities associated with carbon nanotubes quite independent of any particular battery design — it seems likely that they can take any existing design and make it more efficient and robust. Billions of dollars in payoff to the first to a really killer patent.
So here’s the secret of my punditry. Sometimes a problem is physically intractable — blocked by inadequate understanding of some very difficult physics. Controlled thermonuclear fusion is a great example. Sometimes a problem is blocked less by physics, more by politics or a lack of will. Liquid Salt Thorium reactors are a case in point. Sometimes a problem is entirely tractable as far as the physics or basic chemistry is concerned, but there are substantial problems with details of the engineering that keep them from working — yet.
The first sort of problem is very difficult to predict. We could break through to a feasible fusion technology tomorrow (or rather, somebody could announce it tomorrow). Or next week. Or ten years from now. Or never. The latter two — my advice is trust the free market system, especially when it is partnered with substantial public investment in the underlying science and engineering.
It works.
rgb
rgbatduke;
Ah, I see your point. And it is rather a good one. Once again, I’ll have to fall back on the time-honored “dunno”, but damn, that is one hell of an interesting observation/argument.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well thanks! I figured it was either an issue worth considering, or that I was so far out to lunch that was in the “not even wrong” category.
Bottom line, I am increasingly questioning the accuracy of the CO2 doubling = 3.7 w/m2 = 1.2 degrees estimate, Not from the perspective that the back radiation exists, but that the calculated magnitude may not translate into surface temperatures in anything resembling a straight forward manner.
Just calculating an “average” temperature for the earth surface is a monstrous chunk of math. The darn thing is round (ish), the idiotic power source doesn’t have the decency to be either “on” or “off”, no, it has to oscillate during the on phase just to make the math more fun. Plus the on phase has two oscillations, one daily and one annual. So how the heck do we calculate the effects of CO2 doubling based on LW that varies with the 4th power of T that we can barely compute in the first place? ‘Cuz in my opinion, the math just gets worser and worser….
Whatever CO2 does, it has 400 to 500 w/m2 to work with in the tropics. In the arctic zones and winter in the temperate zones, it has more like 200 to 300 w/m2 to work with. How do we average that? Should we take say 1% of each? I don’t think we can. The atmospheric column in the tropics is (iirc) twice the depth that it is at the arctic zones, so I would expect a higher proportion of the upward LW in the tropics to be returned back downward than in the arctic zones and temperate zones in the winter. 2% in the tropics and 1% in the arctic? What?
So suppose we figure out a way to solve that problem, we STILL can’t average it in any meaningful way. Suppose for example we concluded the tropics get an extra 6.3 w/m2 at an average temperature of +30 and the arctic zones got 2.9 w/m2 at an average temperature of -40. They’d both go up by the same amount, one degree, based on SB Law. Even if those numbers were right, averaging them would be useless because the number wouldn’t be applicable to an average temperature and would result in a temperature change calculation other than one degree and it would be WRONG! Did I say the math was getting worser and worser? Now it gets ugly ignorant.
In the arctic and winter/temperate zones, there’s not much in the way of water vapour, too cold. So I’d expect any extra downward LW to arrive for the most part at surface, and have some affect on temperature that at least tracks SB Law in some way. But I cannot see where that same relationship could possibly hold at the same order of magnitude in the tropics when 98% of the air column is a few hundred ppm of CO2 and water vapour each, and the bottom 2% is 40,000 ppm water vapour.
So while I have accepted the CO2 doubling = 3.7 w/m2 = +1.2 degrees for a very long time, I am increasingly beginning to question it. It isn’t that we don’t have the compute resources to do the calculations, itz that we don’t have the math equations to put into the computer in the first place. Unless someone can show me a way to resolve all this issues with any degree of accuracy, I submit that the estimate of CO2 doubling = +1.2 degrees is a WAG on a good day, and probably a DAG at best (D=dumb). I’m not sure who originally came up with this value, or how, but I am increasingly suspicious that they can justify it in light of the issues above.
ps ~ no idea who Grant Perry is.
pps
richardscourtney has several times in this forum posted links to studies that attempt to arrive at a sensitivity to CO2 increases via data analysis rather than calculation. (What a novel approach, take measurements and calculate from them! Duh!)
In any event, iirc they come up with sensitivity estimates in the range of under 1/2 degree. In the past, I always assumed that the difference from 1.2 degrees was from feedbacks. Now I’m starting to wonder…. maybe the 1.2 degrees itself is bogus.
no idea who Grant Perry is.
A double typo — damn ‘t’ key next to ‘r’ key. Try Grant Petty.
http://www.amazon.com/First-Course-Atmospheric-Radiation-2nd/dp/0972903313
God, I hope I haven’t been mistyping that for the last day or so. In any event, I’ve communicated a teeny bit with him, and I think he is viewed as being both knowledgeable and objective in this. Most of the graphs you see posted e.g. here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/10/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-emission-spectra
or on wikipedia seem to come out of his book (well, out of NASA by way of his book). I don’t own it, but it isn’t too expensive and I’m seriously thinking of getting a copy. But he’d almost certainly be the man to ask — after you read his book and see whether or not or how this is all taken into account already. Otherwise it is certainly not safe to assume that it is not. People are usually pretty careful.
rgb
rgb
rgbatduke:
Your post at December 5, 2012 at 12:22 pm concerns the need for a method to store large amounts of generated power to facilitate intermittent energy supplies (e.g. wind and solar).
Actually, the benefit of such a storage method is much greater than merely enabling adoption of wind and solar. It could be used to assist the matching of electricity supply to a grid with the varying demand from the grid. This would reduce the need for power stations by about a third.
In your post you say
True, but there is also another limitation and that is materials science.
In general, technology is enabled by knowledge and limited by available materials.
So, for example, the physics and engineering ‘know how’ to construct a Space Elevator exist, but there is no available material with sufficient tensile strength to construct it.
Also, the known risks of a technology may make it non-viable (please note that this is NOT an application of the ludicrous Precautionary Principle). This limitation is demonstrated by the problem of large-scale energy storage which is the subject of your post.
Fuels are stores of energy. For example, fossil fuels are stores of solar energy collected by photosynthesis. And, importantly, they are very stable stores. Burning a kilo of coal releases more energy than burning a kilo of TNT. Ignited TNT releases the energy too fast for it to be adopted as a ‘safe’ fuel although it could be used for that purpose. Very importantly, TNT degrades if not adequately protected from warm temperatures, and the degraded TNT may self-ignite if exposed to vibration or shock.
A ‘safe’ energy store for large energy storage needs the attributes of a fuel; i.e. it needs to store much energy in small volume, and to only release the stored energy at a controllable rate when required. This is a difficult requirement.
Electrolysis of water to obtain hydrogen has been suggested but hydrogen storage would be problematic.
Large flywheels have been investigated but bearing wear would pose a severe threat of unintended release of the energy (with similar effect to unintended ignition of TNT).
Pumped storage is used but its expansion to provide additional benefit is limited.
Some battery developments are suggested but there are no foreseeable solutions to existing materials constraints. However, breakthroughs are not foreseeable so continuing research is much warranted.
Similarly, large electrical capacitor banks are also being studied but they also need a materials breakthrough.
The ‘best’ option at present is to ‘store’ energy by using it to construct synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. However, like everything else, its adoption needs to be economic. Synthesis of hydrocarbons as an electricity store is more costly than coping with the lack of such an energy store.
Hence, I see no solution to the problem but a ‘breakthrough’ may be ‘over the horizon’. If it occurs then it will change the world as we know it.
Richard
“In the past, I always assumed that the difference from 1.2 degrees was from feedbacks. Now I’m starting to wonder…. maybe the 1.2 degrees itself is bogus.”
David, I don’t think I would jump to bogus but your thought to question it is a big step forward. Read again Robert’s description of co2 radiation being better thought of as more a diffusion process due to the relative short path length compared to the vastness of our atmosphere and due to the a relative high pressure and density. He and I are parallel in that respect and I greatly appreciate him speaking of just the physics and nothing but the physics. The question is; is it accurate to assume that a measurement of the radiative properties of co2 in a small lab test are exactly the same as if that test had been on one cubic kilometer of a mixture of N2 and O2 with the proper concentration of co2? The larger test then includes the fact that at short path lengths radiation in all respects is operating more like diffusion of energy, not a one-time energy transfer.
I am starting to realize that, like Dr. Brown stated above, changes in carbon dioxide’s concentrations may have a markedly different answer in an actual atmosphere with huge distances involved and pressure, density and temperature gradients present. Possibly thoughts and assumptions started way back with Arrhenius and Plass may be flawed. Just look to the path length of individual spectrum lines to help visualize what is happening at the grand scale. Stop thinking that radiation in co2 or h2o lines can beam down directly to the surface from altitudes greater that about a tree’s height, that simply does not occur. Diffusion is a correct view.
davidmhoffer, maybe I should have said “Diffusion is a more correct view.”
JazzyT says:
December 4, 2012 at 3:06 pm
Gail Combs says:
December 4, 2012 at 11:10 am
People point out “Moore’s law” but the export of the solar industry to the sweat shops in China plus the horrible pollution caused by China’s rare earth mining is not represented in the curves I have seen..
Rare earth metals aren’t that rare; China has just cornered the market by selling them at unrealistically low prices. Some see that loosening, and you can probably expect to see them being mined in places with better environmental and labor practices.
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And that was just my point. You have to look not only at the innovation process but also the cost of manufacturing;
Operating Overhead
Buildings
Manufacturing Equipment
Electricity
Permits
Lawyers
Accountants
Safety/OSHA compliance officers
QC
Maintainence
Water
Sewer
Labor
Raw Materials
However the era of Cheap Chinese goods is almost over. American and EU manufacturing has been wiped of the board.
Manufacturers scrambling as raw material prices surge… Demand from emerging economies outside the United States also continues to push up prices. China now accounts for 45 percent of the world’s steel consumption and 10 percent of crude oil consumption
The end of cheap China: What do soaring Chinese wages mean for global manufacturing?
In 2000, Mexican manufacturing labor was more than three times as expensive as Chinese. But after of decade of stagnant wages in Mexico and a sustained rise in China, Chinese labor is no longer cheap. In fact, it costs almost the same amount to hire Mexican workers…
China is taking steps to mitigate air pollution… Its hefty subsidies to its solar industry have prompted some U.S. manufacturers to file a complaint with the International Trade Commission.
Pressure is being brought to bare on China. Propelled by its rapid industrial expansion and low environmental standards, China also has become one of the world’s biggest polluters. It now produces more sulfur dioxide than any other country, and has taken the lead in generating carbon dioxide as well…. if China doesn’t take steps “to bring pollution levels closer to those in the rest of the world, China’s trading partners can justifiably complain that China’s failure to act confers on its domestic steelmaking industry an unfair competitive advantage.”
rgbatduke;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/10/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-emission-spectra
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If you look at Petty 8.1, the curve for Barrow Alaska shows plenty of downward LW in the 15 micron range, but it falls off the Planck curve by a healthy chunk. But tropical Nauru, it is bang on the Planck curve at that point.
Easy to conclude I think that additional CO2 would drive the Barrow curve closer to Planck. But would additional CO2 drive Nauru curve any higher? If you break GISS down by latitude, the temperature change in the tropics is minimal, most of the rise is in higher latitudes. Yes, it is way more complicated than that, but, hmmmm….
wayne says:
December 5, 2012 at 1:47 pm
davidmhoffer, maybe I should have said “Diffusion is a more correct view.”
I knew what you meant 😉
agreed
davidmhoffer says, December 5, 2012 at 12:36 pm: “Now I’m starting to wonder…. maybe the 1.2 degrees itself is bogus.”
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I am pleasantly surprised, David. I thought the Earth would sooner stop spinning and the sky fall down on the Earth, than… Go ahead, start really questioning things like “blanket warming by back radiation”, “the world is warming” etc. .
I hope to enjoy watching your first steps.
I have often mentioned what I call the cooling effect of GHGs. This seems like a good thread to either squash my thoughts or validate them. When I look at the KT diagrams they show about 160 w/m2 reaching the planet surface. In addition, they show around 78 w/m2 absorbed directly in the atmosphere from the Sun and another 97 w/m2 that enters the atmosphere through evaporation and conduction. That’s a lot of energy (about a third of what gets radiated from the surface) that enters the atmosphere through non-surface radiation. What is the effect of GHGs on this energy?
If I borrow the pinball analogy it’s like lots of those little machine guns are located throughout the atmosphere, are constantly being fueled by these non-radiative processes and are also constantly firing balls (let’s call them NR balls vs. R balls). These NR balls are then also bounced around just like the R balls from the surface.
These NR balls also eventually get radiated to space or back to the surface (although the amount gets quite low as you higher). It turns out that the little machine guns are the same exact guys (molecules) as the ones that are deflecting (absorbing and refiring) the R balls adding to the complexity of the situation.
Now, it seems to me that these little guys are doing double duty. When they are firing NR balls they are moving energy to space (eventually, since if they are reabsorbed they have essentially done nothing), especially when they are at high altitudes. The net effect of adding more of these guys would be to increase the movement of energy from the atmosphere to space, that is … cooling.
Ok, where have I gone wrong and, if I haven’t broken any laws of physics, where is this factored into climate models?
Richard M says:
December 5, 2012 at 4:43 pm
“I have often mentioned what I call the cooling effect of GHGs.”
Here in Michigan you can tell who’s paying the most to Consumers Energy by how fast the snow melts off their roof. The one with the first bare roof has the highest heating bill. The one with the deepest snow has the most insulation, the highest “R” factor in the vernacular, so its warm inside but the roof is colder since there is less heat escaping. Its the same with CO2; it adds to the R value of the atmosphere and the surface gets slightly warmer and the stratosphere cools off. Unless the guy with the snow on his roof leaves all his windows and doors open. Then the extra insulation does him no good at all.
The real purpose of a house is to control convection so the atmosphere can’t take your hard-earned heat away. Which is what it does to the “Greenhouse Effect.” Yes, greenhouse gases have an effect on radiation near the surface, and would warm the surface, except there is nothing to stop convection, which whisks the heat upward until either clouds form or the heat reaches an altitude from which it can be radiated to space. The climate alarmists have yet to realize this (or they really don’t want to know). Its kind of amusing all of the cloud research going on without the climate cabal learning anything for sure (although real progress is being made). Next time you’re sitting by a campfire ponder how much fuel you’re burning, and where the heat is going. Look upward.
Greg House;
I hope to enjoy watching your first steps.
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A clearer demonstration that you understood not a single word of the discussion could not be had.