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.
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.
Ah, yet another person who has had a brilliant insight that “climate alarmists” have not, one that proves that the GHE is bogus. It’s “kind of amusing” that you could make this statement when (I would bet a substantial amount of money) you are completely clueless about the actual mathematics of convective heat transfer and whether or not it is incorporated in current climate models and theories. Of course it is — climate scientists are actually not idiots and are not ignorant and didn’t leave out one of the three primary mechanisms of heat transfer (conduction, convection, radiation).
Or perhaps you think that they include it, they just do so incorrectly. It may well be so. In that case, you should very definitely work through the math in the models and demonstrate where and how. I’ll help you get started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_fluid_dynamics
You can (IIRC) get the GISS climate model code on the web. It’s open source. Note well, their code may be wrong — it’s complicated enough it would be surprising if it were not — but I’ll bet you one whole dollar that it doesn’t leave out convection.
rgb
richardscourtney said @ur momisugly December 5, 2012 at 1:29 pm
IIRC from several decades ago the proposal was that the bearings would be magnetic and the whole enclosed in a vacuum, so no friction. You are correct of course that more conventional bearings would be problematic.
rgbatduke said @ur momisugly December 5, 2012 at 10:20 pm
As EM Smith wrote:
So we don’t really know what the code is that they actually run. But I too would be surprised if they failed to include convection.
The Pompous Git:
Thankyou for your comment addressed to me at December 6, 2012 at 1:08 am. It says
Yes, you are right, and there are several other details which could be questioned in my brief explanation of the problems of large power storage.
With respect to your specific point, failure of the electricity supply to the electromagnets would also provide the catastrophic release of the flywheel’s kinetic energy. Whatever the true risk of this, the insurance cost of such a system would make it uneconomic.
For amusement and – hopefully – to aid understanding, I mention a historical example of damage from kinetic energy. The V2 rocket was intended to not carry a warhead because its impact energy would be equivalent to two express trains colliding head-on. The German politicians and military could not understand this and they insisted that one kilo of HE be carried as a warhead in each V2. The effect of this warhead would not have made a discernible difference to the destruction caused by the missile.
Richard
richardscourtney;
For amusement and – hopefully – to aid understanding, I mention a historical example
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Many years ago I was involved in a large IT project. The CFO blew a gasket when he found out that one piece of the infrastructure was not from…. well let’s call the company HAL. He refused to trust any other vendor. The problem was that the product from HAL in that space was so bad that the project would be doomed if we used it. The grizzled old technical architect told me not to worry about it, he’d “design around it”. Sure enough, he did. Every drawing, every piece of documentation showed that product from HAL. The project was a success, the CFO wrote glowing endorsements which went on HAL’s web site, and nobody noticed until three years later that it wasn’t powered on….
rgbatduke says:
December 5, 2012 at 10:20 pm
“Ah, yet another person who has had a brilliant insight that “climate alarmists” have not, one that proves that the GHE is bogus. It’s “kind of amusing” that you could make this statement when (I would bet a substantial amount of money) you are completely clueless about the actual mathematics of convective heat transfer and whether or not it is incorporated in current climate models and theories”
At last I have found someone who is familiar with these equations and how they are applied by GISS. Could you help me out by giving me some idea whether the feedback from convection is positive or negative in these models, and if possible some numbers? If these numbers are available, then I must apologize for saying above, essentially, “They don’t know.”
“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”
==========================
Please don’t accuse me of being linear. It’s almost like “totally tubular” which is a propos here because nature loves tortured tubular helices. As you have pointed out, math founders on data. What we have is too short, and for the oceans, mostly contrived. So either you fold up your tent or continue to use pure reason and well…intuition.
richardscourtney says:
December 6, 2012 at 4:07 am
“The V2 rocket was intended to not carry a warhead because its impact energy would be equivalent to two express trains colliding head-on.”
Some friends and I wondered about the energy release from LCROSS impacting on the Moon and worked it out. I do not recall the figure, but it was quite staggering. When energy increases with the square of velocity (linear or angular), it goes up pretty fast.
I have an hypothesis that this is why there is such a huge perceptual difference between driving 60 mph and 70 mph, even though you are only going 17% faster – I think our brains innately sense the energy of motion. Unfortunately, this causes us to believe we are really getting somewhere much faster when we stomp on the gas, when we may really only be making meager gains.
Richard M says:
December 5, 2012 at 4:43 pm
My thoughts run along similar lines, but I tend to think of it as floodgates in a dam. When you reach the level at which a GHG is substantially radiating, the GHG arrests the rise which would otherwise continue until the column of air was isothermal, just as floodgates maintain the level of water behind the dam and keep it from rising to the top. Add more floodgates, and the water is even more strongly pinned to their level.
Now, consider the action of a dam with two levels of floodgates. There is too much flow for the lower level to arrest the rise, so the water continues rising until it reaches the second level, at which it stops. Now, you add more floodgates at the lower level, and the water recedes from the upper floodgates. We have such a situation in the atmosphere: H2O and CO2 form a lower level of floodgates, and CH4 the upper level. Radiation is flowing out of the higher level CH4 gates. You add more lower level gates in the form of CO2 and what happens? Cooling.
I have some maths which suggest this may very well be what happens, but the model needs work.
I keep getting different answers to these calculations, not least because it’s a long time since I’ve tried cubing negative exponents. Could someone help? My first calculation was:
quote
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 ) = approx 3.5*10^10 ha.
number of 5 ml doses per year per ha = (20*2*10^9)/(3.5*10^10) = 1
unquote
It ought to be quite simple but I keep getting lost in the zeros and, my initial result being the same as Dr Brown’s calculation, I didn’t check any further. /Nullius in verba/ and all that.
First, how big is an oil molecule? 2*10^-10 metres across is one answer I’ve found. How thick would a 5 ml dose be when spread over one hectare, in molecule diameters? Franklin’s experiment found that 5ml smoothed one hectare. Is this realistic? If not, of course, all bets are off. I’ve got a tentative answer of 3, which is OK, but I don’t trust it. If the coverage is greater than one layer then it’s worth continuing with the next bit.
The primary oil spill is 2*10^9 litres down the drain: — this number is from NASA’s down the drain portion of its seawifs calculation 1994 (363 million gallons US) and assumed to have increased to about 500 million gallons US. Approx 4 litres per gallon.
Here’s the area of the ocean:
3.5*10^10 hectares (335,258,000 km^2 * 100 (hectares per km^2) )
One ‘dose’ of oil is 5 ml. I don’t know what the ‘dose’ of surfactant is which would result in the same effect, but I make the arbitrary assumption that the surfactant load is the equivalent of the oil load.
Total number of down the drain oil doses overall is 2* 10^9* 200 (n.b. 200 doses of 5 ml makes one litre)
Question : how many ‘doses’ of ‘down the drain’ oil does each hectare of ocean receive, on average, each year? (From this we can estimate the number of doses when we add in the extra oil and surfactant.)
Could someone go through it again? I see that I’ve divided 1000 by 5 and come to 20 in the original which is possibly in error*. Also, the number of hectares for the ocean surface keeps coming out differently and I’m running out of fingers**.
I suspect there are two errors, or more, which cancel out, but, as I say, it would be a mercy if someone else would check the whole thing, including the simplest of facts. Help!
JF
*this is a joke.
** so is this.
TomB says: December 4, 2012 at 11:32 am
quote
Wow, those are some pretty extreme claims you’re making. Being ex-Navy and having circumnavigated the globe, I’ve never seen what you describe. Cover the entire world’s oceans every fortnight? Oil slicks to the horizon? Tens of thousands of square miles? The entire Mediterranean from end to end? Seriously?
unquote
Well, I don’t know what ships you sailed, but my experience over the sea was almost exclusively from the air. I have seen these smooths — not slicks, these are smoothed areas of surface which react anomalously to wave and wind action — and I’ve seen them from the Arctic to the Falklands. If you read above you will see some North Carolina smooths which I pointed out for Dr Brown. If you’d like rather more topical and fun examples then Google ‘Doha’ and click on images. Look at
http://www.texasgopvote.com/issues/stop-big-government/doha-qatar-perfect-laboratory-study-climate-change-004865
(and lots of others) and you will see what I’m talking about, texture changes across the surface, smooths. They’re not difficult to see but they take some mental effort to even notice. The one from Tenerife was the run-off from Puerto de Santiago and did indeed reach the horizon. You are free not to believe me, but that’s your loss. You could always go and look for yourself and I’ll have the courtesy to take your observations at face value.
quote
The north Siberian coast has enough light oil coming down its rivers to equal an Exxon Valdez every five weeks….
unquote
SIBERIAN ARCTIC OIL SPILL 2012
Source : UN via da-voda.com
Lena 25,000 tons
Ob 125,000 tons
Yenisei 225,000 tons
(total spill is 500,000 tons, 150 million US gallons, A m^3 weighs .9 tonne so total spill from Siberian rivers is 500,000/.9. Call it 600,000 m^3 in round figures.) I can’t find the figures for the North Slope Alaska.
Exxon Valdez spill: approx 40,000 — to 120,000 m^3. Ish. Wikipedia. Let’s call it 80,000. Not far off.
Now, ‘the blip Zeitgeist thingy’. As you are interested in climate change I’ll assume you’re familiar with Climate Audit. Go and search for the bucket correction and look at the Climategate emails relating to sea temperatures, Tom Wigley and ‘why the blip?’ You will find that those who want the world to be warming are very anxious to hide the fact that during WWII there was a huge blip in temperatures which the CO2 theory of global warming could not explain. Instead of rejoicing at something new in the data, these ‘scientists’ tried to explain, obfuscate and massage it away to preserve the primacy of CO2. That’s not zeitgeist, that’s sharp practice. Perhaps you are not concerned that new and important data is not just ignored but hidden. I do not share your insouciance.
JF
Dr. Brown,
This statement that you repeat “… 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.” is not only without proof, it doesn’t ring true. It has no connection to measurable physical properties, and doesn’t even consider the primary modes of atmospheric heat transfer within the atmosphere, that cool Earth’s surface. This, from someone with a PhD in Physics, baffles me. What “physics” suggest 1.2 C warming?
rgb wrote:
quote
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.
unquote
If you blow a soap bubble you can see the interference colours. If the bubble lasts long enough then you’ll observe that tiny black areas form in the film which multiply. In an extremely long lived bubble the whole thing becomes almost invisible, not raindow coloured at all, a bubble ghost. Why is this? What depth of film is required for interference colours to form? How thick is a smooth?
I look forward to hearing the results of your experiments in Beaufort harbour. I would suggest using light oil (olive oil will probably keep any ecowarriors off your back) at first. For the surfactant trial, use a modern synthetic detergent. I have no idea what will happen in the latter case but I’d like to know. Perhaps you won’t need to actually do the oil trial: it sounds as if the harbour is like every other harbour in the world, well smoothed. Look carefully.
Another way of looking at the albedo problem is to use the graphs for albedo vs windspeed. I will be interested on which way you think that goes. It’s a large scale effect, not a surface film effect, but small in its overall contribution. My bet is the big albedo change is aerosol mediated.
JF
Any chance of a check over my calculations in my earlier post at 10.49 7 Dec.? I keep getting different answers.
TomB,
Re the Exxon Valdez spill:
I’ve found a new figure for the spill.
http://www.evostc.state.ak.us/facts/qanda.cfm seems to be a reputable site. It gives the following spill details:
quote
How much oil was spilled?
Approximately 11 million gallons or 257,000 barrels or 38,800 metric tonnes. Picture the swimming pool at your school or in your community. The amount of spilled oil is roughly equivalent to 17 olympic-sized swimming pools.
unquote
Siberian river oil spill: 500,000 tons. So the number of EV size spills is 500,000/38,800 =12.8866.
52 weeks per year divided by 12.8866 = 4.0352.
Enough spilled oil comes down the rivers into the Siberian seas to equal the Exxon Valdez spill amount every four weeks, five hours and 58 minutes, so I seem to have understated the case. Sorry about that and thanks for letting me set the record straight.
JF
Dr Brown,
I’ve just re-read your statement above where you mention Beaufort harbour. It certainly looks a delightful place in the pictures at
http://marinas.com/view/inlet/1668_Beaufort_Harbor_Inlet_NC_United_States
There’s an option to put the images up as backdrops. I’d say the best is the second, the one looking out to sea from above the river. I particularly enjoy the exquisite play of light and shade across the water, the ruffling of the clean water next to the mirror surfaces which reveal the currents sweeping across the inlet, the whole bay a demonstration of the power of the oceanic boundary layer to alter the physics of the surface. Could I ask you to indulge me and put that one up on your screen. Then each time you switch on your computer you can think about this statement of yours:
” 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. ”
Not gasoline, oil. Not ‘slick’, Dr Brown, ‘smooth’. Can you see them yet?
JF
RGB said;
“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.”
I have a good handle on what was causing the coldest seasons through the LIA, and I am looking at 2015-2025 being the coldest period this century, with severe cold episodes occurring rather soon.
Such as Spring-early Summer 2016. The analogue I am using is astronomically derived and is 1837. March to May in England that year was colder than any such same period through late Maunder and Dalton: http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/tcet.dat
It led to crop failures and famines in several regions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agra_famine_of_1837%E2%80%931838
http://www.histori.ca/peace/page.do?pageID=341
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oshio_Heihachiro
http://www.landandfreedom.org/ushistory/us8.htm
http://www.swedesintexas.com/readingroom/rr0002.htm
http://mikecochran.net/sheriffs.html
There are times when the 179yr analogue will fail, but I am confident it will follow through in this particular instance.