What it would take to persuade me that current climate policy makes sense
Guest post by Matt Ridley
I have written about climate change and energy policy for more than 25 years. I have come to the conclusion that current energy and climate policy is probably more dangerous, both economically and ecologically, than climate change itself. This is not the same as arguing that climate has not changed or that mankind is not partly responsible. That the climate has changed because of man-made carbon dioxide I fully accept. What I do not accept is that the change is or will be damaging, or that current policy would prevent it.
For the benefit of supporters of climate change policy who feel frustrated by the reluctance of people like me to accept their assurances, here is what they would need to do to change my mind.
1. I need persuading that the urban heat island effect has been fully purged from the surface temperature record. Satellites are showing less warming than the surface thermometers, and there is evidence that local warming of growing cities, and poor siting of thermometers, is still contaminating the global record. I also need to be convinced that the adjustments made by those who compile the global temperature records are justified. Since 2008 alone, NASA has added about 0.1C of warming to the trend by unexplained “adjustments” to old records. It is not reassuring that one of the main surface temperature records is produced by an extremist prepared to get himself arrested (James Hansen).
2. Despite these two contaminating factors, the temperature trend remains modest: not much more than 0.1 C per decade since 1979. So I would need persuading that water vapour will amplify CO2’s effect threefold in the future but has not done so yet. This is what the models assume despite evidence that clouds formed from water vapour are more likely to moderate than amplify any warming.
3. Nor am I convinced that sulphate aerosols and ocean heat uptake can explain the gap between model predictions and actual observations over the last 34 years. Both are now well understood and provide insufficient excuse for such an underperformance. Negative cloud feedback, leading to total feedbacks being modest, is the more plausible explanation.
4. The one trend that has been worse than expected – Arctic sea ice – is plausibly explained by black carbon (soot), not carbon dioxide. Soot from dirty diesel engines and coal-fired power stations is now reckoned to be a far greater factor in climate change than before; it is a short-lived pollutant, easily dealt with by local rather than global action. So you would need to persuade me that this finding, by explaining some recent climate change, does not further reduce the likely sensitivity of the atmosphere to carbon dioxide. Certainly, it “buys time”.
5. Even the Met Office admits that the failure of the models to predict the temperature standstill of the last 16 years is evidence that natural factors can match man-made ones. We now know there is nothing unprecedented about the level and rate of change of temperature today compared with Medieval, Roman, Holocene Optimum and other post-glacial periods, when carbon dioxide levels did not change significantly, but temperatures did. I would need persuading that natural factors cannot continue to match man-made ones.
6. Given that we know that the warming so far has increased global vegetation cover, increased precipitation, lengthened growing seasons, cause minimal ecological change and had no impact on extreme weather events, I need persuading that future warming will be fast enough and large enough to do net harm rather than net good. Unless water-vapour-supercharged, the models suggest a high probability of temperatures changing less than 2C, which almost everybody agrees will do net good.
7. Nor is it clear that ecosystems and people will fail to adapt, for there is clear evidence that adaptation has already vastly reduced damage from the existing climate – there has been a 98% reduction in the probability of death from drought, flood or storm since the 1920s, for example, and malaria retreated rapidly even as the temperature rose during the twentieth century.
8. So I cannot see why this relatively poor generation should bear the cost of damage that will not become apparent until the time of a far richer future generation, any more than people in 1900 should have borne sacrifices to make people today slightly richer. Or why today’s poor should subsidise, through their electricity bills, today’s rich who receive
subsidies for wind farms, which produce less than 0.5% of the country’s energy.
9. Indeed I will need persuading that dashing to renewables can cut emissions rather than make them worse; this is by no means certain given that the increased use of bioenergy, such as wood or corn ethanol, driven by climate policies, is indeed making them worse.11 Meanwhile shale gas use in the USA has led to a far greater cut in emissions than
any other technology, yet it is opposed every step of the way by climate alarmists.
10. Finally, you might make the argument that even a very small probability of a very large and dangerous change in the climate justifies drastic action. But I would reply that a very small probability of a very large and dangerous effect from the adoption of large-scale
renewable energy, reduced economic growth through carbon taxes or geo-engineering also justifies extreme caution. Pascal’s wager cuts both ways.
At the moment, it seems highly likely that the cure is worse than disease.
We are taking chemotherapy for a cold.
Full paper with graphs and references here
Related articles
- A climate of scepticism (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Matt Ridley responds with a “sleight of hand” (scienceblogs.com)
- Matt Ridley’s actual response (wattsupwiththat.com)
- The Lukewarmer’s Way
Greg House says (January 29, 2013 at 8:41 pm): ‘The whole old thing about “greenhouse effect” was a fiction, a mistake, a wrong guess.’
Again, you go much farther than Wood himself did. He speculated that so-called “back radiation” was of negligible importance in the earth’s energy budget, but
1) did not claim his experiment was conclusive in that regard, and
2) AFAIK did not go beyond one poorly documented experiment to settle the matter.
As I investigate the subject further, I find more “Wood-y” experiments. Here’s one comparing IR-opaque with IR-transparent polyethylene covers for the “high tunnel” variety of greenhouse:
http://www.hort.cornell.edu/hightunnel/about/research/general/plastic_comparisons_reid.pdf
The result: “Infrared wavelength blocking covering offered a benefit of 1-3 degrees F in minimum temperature [at night] in our research, without consistently increasing maximum temperature during the day.”
Were I the excitable type, I’d proclaim that this proves the reality of the so-called “greenhouse” effect, but of course it just demonstrates a non-zero non-negligible role of IR so-called “back radiation” in a type of greenhouse. No Nobel Prizes here. 🙂
(Hat tip to Nick Stokes commenting on Eli Rabett’s blog.)
DZ Berry says:
January 29, 2013 at 8:13 pm
=============================
re: “completely irrelevant”
Funny thing, DZ, your comment is devoid of substance so one cannot tell if you know anything or have any useful thoughts at all. Comments like that are “completely irrelevant”….
Greg House;
Yeah, that is why until a couple of years ago internet was full of explanations referring exactly to that “trapped radiation” in greenhouses and not to suppressed convection. Such explanations still can be found. This is one from 2001 (Wikipedia, “Greenhouse effect”):
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
To demonstrate something you said didn’t happen until a couple of years ago, you provide a link to an article that was written 12 years ago, ten years prior to when you claim it started happening. I note that the article was corrected to say that the use of the word greenhouse was actually a misnomer because actual greenhouses warm by suppressing convection, and that correction was inserted in 2002, 12 years ago.
In addition to making up your own facts you appear to also invent your own timelines and then falsify them with your own evidence.
D.M.H – “Increase of temperatures due to suppression of convection has been known to engineers and scientists as far back as ancient Rome.”
K- “Ever wondered what would happen to convective circulation below the tropopause if the atmosphere could not radiate IR to space? ;)”
——————————————————————————————————————
In the vacuum of space, no one can hear your spherical chicken squawk.*
* Chickens may rapidly become spherical when introduced to the hard vacuum of space. They just don’t stay that way for long…
davidmhoffer says:
January 29, 2013 at 8:22 pm
KevinK;
I suggest what you are seeing is simply that fact that heat travels more slowly through some materials (water vapor) than through others (dry gases like O2, N, Co2, etc.). This causes things to cool off more slowly when it is cloudy at night.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The surface cools due to multiple processes including convection and radiance, with the radiance part being according to SB Law. Radiance is in fact the release of energy from a surface in the form of photons which travel at the speed of light. They do not change speed due to the presence of clouds or no clouds. In fact the SB Law formula is:
P=5.67*10^-8*T^4
where P is in w/m2 and T is in degrees Kelvin. I draw your attention to the fact that there is no term in the equation for the presence of, at any temperature, another body. In other words, a body at 300 degrees K radiates at 459.3 w/m2 if it is next to dry ice and if it is next to the sun itself the exact same number. If the temperature of the body is going up or down is entirely dependent upon the body receiving more energy than it radiates (temp goes up) or less (temp goes down) but at an instant in time when it is at THAT temperature, it radiates at 459.3 w/m2. In the case of a cloudy night, the surface of the earth at, for sake of argument, 300 K (23 C) will cool at a rate of 459.3 w/m2. On a very clear night with low humidity (such as a desert) the temperature will drop rapidly. The exact same earth surface though in a high humidity or cloudy night sky or both will cool more slowly. Not however because the surface is cooling more slowly, it is still cooling at 459.3 w/m2. Nor because the “heat” travels more slowly.
David, you miss the emissivity in the formula which makes a great deal of difference.
The Earth as a whole loses energy to space as a grey body, the radiation coming from various levels, some directly from the surface, some from the atmosphere at different levels.
CO2 radiation in discussion covers narrow bands of the outgoing radiation leaving the Earth.
Changes in CO2 concentration affect primordially those narrow bands emissions. The net heat changes in this area is the CO2 effect – as through enrichment of the CO2 in the atmosphere, these radiation to space are said to come from higher & cooler atmospheric levels.
Inside the atmosphere there are other heat transfer to bring heat at the radiation points from where it leaves the Earth. This heat transfer is described by Kevin.
What you describe are changes in the level from where the heat is radiated to space through clouds, which I do not find relevant to the CO2 discussion directly.
Matt Ridley: A Lukewarmer’s Ten Tests
Posted on January 28, 2013 by Guest Blogger
What it would take to persuade me that current climate policy makes sense
……………………….
Full paper with graphs and references here
Anthony the link leads to “404 not found” error. Here is the functioning link:
http://www.thegwpf.org/mett-ridley-lukewarmers-ten-tests/
or here:
http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2013/01/Ridley-Lukewarmer-Ten-Tests.pdf
to replace the above:
http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2013/01/Ridley-Ten-Tests.pdf
Thank you Matt for putting this list up. It helps a lot to have the points clarified.
One point not discussed above is the very sad situation to see how science is being misused to support certain ideology. The environmentalist movement has very much positioned itself against hard science, pretending to do the “real science” and trying to relativise science as such, becoming the 20th century new religion.
The longer the relativisation of hard science takes, the longer activism is replacing rational discussions and arguments based on proof, the longer the fabrication of data is accepted the bigger the damage done.
Clarifying the skeptics position is very important for the discussion, thank you again Matt for the hard work you do to try to bring rational conversation in front.
Konrad says: January 29, 2013 at 3:25 pm
…
Experiment 1. (low cost)
…
Experiment 2. (high cost)
Attach two gas cylinders with regulators one CO2, one N2, to two 10m long lengths of 5mm PVC tubing. Coil most of the tubing through an insulated container full of hot water. Attach the two open ends of the PVC tubes to two retort stands in front of a cool wall. Set gas flow from both tubes to 1 L/s. Observe the gas flowing out of both tubes with a high quality IR camera capable of seeing beyond 15um. Are the results –
A. Both tubes are visible as warm, but both gas plumes are undetectable.
B. Both tubes are visible as warm and the CO2 gas plume is also visible.
I have done some simple thermography of sky/boiling water/emissivity-reflectance
see
http://climateandstuff.blogspot.ca/search/label/thermal%20imaging?m=0
water vapour at 100C is invisible to a camera with a 2 to 13um response
clear sky appears <-40C camera limit.
high cloud -16C +- a lot!
Low cloud -9 +- a lot!
But what is sky emissivity!
There are a few videos showing that paper placed in the invisible 100C vapour is "instantly" heated. (if the embedded ones don't work try the youtube)
If you wish to ask question please use the linked page – comments here keep disappearing!
When I come to WUWT I feel privileged. I learn so much although so much of it is so beyond my ability to comprehend now and then I see an especially well written piece that even a layman like myself can understand. I urge everyone on this thread to go back to Arno Arrak`s entry of Jan 28th at 4:39pm where he presents a nice concise, factual history of recent climate trends.
Lars P;
David, you miss the emissivity in the formula which makes a great deal of difference.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I didn’t miss it, I left it out because it was not germaine to the question being discussed. The commenter was of the impression that clouds and humidity slow the movement of heat via radiance and what I provided was sufficient to show that this is not the case,
Gary Hladik says, January 29, 2013 at 9:35 pm: “As I investigate the subject further, I find more “Wood-y” experiments. Here’s one comparing IR-opaque with IR-transparent polyethylene covers for the “high tunnel” variety of greenhouse:
http://www.hort.cornell.edu/hightunnel/about/research/general/plastic_comparisons_reid.pdf
The result: “Infrared wavelength blocking covering offered a benefit of 1-3 degrees F in minimum temperature [at night] in our research, without consistently increasing maximum temperature during the day.”
Were I the excitable type, I’d proclaim that this proves the reality of the so-called “greenhouse” effect,
========================================================
Gary, this “result” is not supported by their own data. Here they go into details: http://www.hort.cornell.edu/hightunnel/about/research/general/penn_state_plastic_study.pdf . You can find this there: “On some, but not all nights, the IR blocking materials provided extra protection by way of retaining heat inside the high tunnel at night.”.
So, exactly like on cloudy nights (see above) we have a lazy “greenhouse effect” again, working part-time.
Another peace of junk science.
Pat Frank says:
January 29, 2013 at 4:30 pm
Konrad, not a problem. 🙂 Atm CO2 will absorb 15 micron radiation. It just will not release that energy as re-radiation, below the tropopause. Instead, it preferentially converts the absorbed energy into kinetic energy by collision with N2 and O2. So, there will always be a 15 micron absorption band. But there won’t be a fluorescence emission band, because the energy has been released by a different mechanism (collision).
Pat, I have no idea where you got the idea that GHGs like CO2 give up most of their energy to kinetic collisions. I personally took an interest in this topic and did a little reading myself. What I found is the likelihood of re-radiation was significantly higher and typically occurs in less than 25 nanoseconds.
I don’t have the reference at hand but I’d suggest you need to recheck this. Think about it. If all the heat radiated from the surface got stuck in the atmosphere how would it cool? The atmosphere would keep right on heating until it boiled off.
I have been mentioning the “cooling effect” of GHGs for a few years now and my logic is exactly the same as Konrad’s. GHGs have 2 effects. The well known GHE does lead to warming but it is only part of the physics. The ignored part of the physics is the cooling effect described by Konrad. In fact, if you take the KT energy cartoons you see a significant amount of energy enters the atmosphere from non-LWIR sources. That energy also has to go away to avoid the over heating problem. CO2 is one of the gases that accomplishes that feat. More CO2, more atmospheric energy radiated to space.
Hi climatebeagle:
You wrote: “So warmer air has the ability to hold more water, but doesn’t mean it will hold more water.”
That’s right. The Clausius-Clapeyron equation shows that a warmer atmosphere can
have more water vapor present, for the same relative humidity. The key is that many
of the climate models originally simply assumed that relative humidity would stay constant.
Radiosonde data seem to show, though, that at the higher levels of the the atmosphere,
relative humidity has been falling, not remaining constant. This means that the water
vapor feedback effect is less than what’s been modeled.
@dbstealey – Yes, that is the first part of the puzzle. RH is falling. Now, is it falling fast enough to offset the effect of water amplification? I don’t know. More deeply, what is the cause of the observed fall in RH? Can we rely on it continuing while CO2 steadily rises? If it is cyclical and due to natural variation, it is going to come back and bite us, big time. If it is not cyclical then global desertification ranks right up there on the list of things we need to understand, pronto. Lower RH means fewer clouds, which is itself a key climate forcing.
For those that think RH is constant and hard coded in climate models (looks at Pat Frank)
http://web.science.unsw.edu.au/~stevensherwood/2009JD012585.pdf
is a good examination of how models predict change in RH. Clue – they couldn’t do that if RH was a constant and hard coded into the system. Now a quick read of this paper shows that the models are not predicting changes in RH anywhere near the size of the changes shown on the chart linked to by DBS, so there is certainly work to be done understanding all the feebacks.
@climatebeagle –
Individual circumstances. Over what time period are you bringing data? A day? A year? I think you are confusing weather for climate, but it is hard to say.
So, exactly like on cloudy nights (see above) we have a lazy “greenhouse effect” again, working part-time.
Another peace of junk science
>>>>>>>>
As has been explained to you on any number of occasions the temperature at any given point in time and space is governed by a combination of factors including conduction, convection, radiance, wind direction and intensity, humidity, barometric pressure, sensible and latent heat amongst others. Demonstrating that the total of all effects is sometimes in opposition to that of the ghe presents precisely zero evidence that the ghe doesn’t exist.
@David vun Kannon
You said:
“Any rise in temperature will raise the amount of water held in the atmosphere. That is basic physics.”
I showed a case where your claim was not true, so you claim cannot be basic physics.
Now you say I’m confusing weather with climate, but it’s your statement I’m responding to, which has no mention of timeframe.
Not sure anything at climate timescales can be described as basic physics when the “climate system is […] inherently chaotic” (IPCC).
Greg House says (January 30, 2013 at 7:16 am): “‘On some, but not all nights, the IR blocking materials provided extra protection by way of retaining heat inside the high tunnel at night.’
So, exactly like on cloudy nights (see above) we have a lazy “greenhouse effect” again, working part-time.”
Yet according to you, Greg, there should have been NO so-called “greenhouse” effect (SCGE), “lazy” or not, in this 2006 study, or the 2007 experiment which found a consistent SCGE. WUWT?
So let’s sum up. We have three daylight “box” experiments (Wood, Pratt, Nahle) with two failures to detect a SCGE and one success. We have a 2006 day/night high tunnel experiment that found an inconsistent SCGE, and one in 2007 that found a consistent SCGE. Given these mixed results, do you still think the science is “settled”?
thefordprefect says:
January 30, 2013 at 4:41 am
—————————————————————————————-
thefordprefect,
I note in your IR imaging that while water vapour does not read at 100C is is still slightly visible, reading 28C.
In the absence of answers from Pat Frank, wonder if you would be prepared to offer an answer to these two experiments –
Experiment 1. (low cost)
Build two insulated containers with potassium chloride salt lenses for lids. Under a clear dry night sky (desert conditions would be best) fill both containers with dry 30C gas. CO2 in one container 1, N2 in container 2. Which container cools Faster? Is the answer –
A. Both containers cool at the same rate.
B. Container 1 cools faster because of the greater IR emission from CO2.
C. Container 2 cools faster because of the greater thermal conductivity of N2.
Experiment 2. (high cost)
Attach two gas cylinders with regulators one CO2, one N2, to two 10m long lengths of 5mm PVC tubing. Coil most of the tubing through an insulated container full of hot water. Attach the two open ends of the PVC tubes to two retort stands in front of a cool wall. Set gas flow from both tubes to 1 L/s. Observe the gas flowing out of both tubes with a high quality IR camera capable of seeing beyond 15um. Are the results –
A. Both tubes are visible as warm, but both gas plumes are undetectable.
B. Both tubes are visible as warm and the CO2 gas plume is also visible.
Or perhaps this –
“What would happen to convective circulation in the lower atmosphere if the atmosphere contained no radiative gases?”
@climatebeagle – Sorry your definition of basic physics is so, um, basic. If you restrict yourself to claims that are always true, you’re left with e=mc^2 and c is constant in a vacuum. I’d say basic physics is what you can demonstrate repeatedly in a lab, where confounding individual circumstances can be removed. What happened at one station on one day is irrelevant. If I poked through the data and found one station and one day when the temperature went up and RH also went up, would I have accomplished anything? Would you be ‘disproven’? No, because you hadn’t ‘proven’ anything in the first place.
Richard M says:
January 30, 2013 at 7:40 am
—————————————————————————–
Richard,
Evidence would indicate that some of the most fervent defenders of the cause have known for years that modelling an atmosphere without depth, gravity and moving gases was wrong.
The castle of AGW may look impressive, but the walls are cardboard and the 2500 knights on the ramparts are scarecrows sewn from whole cloth and stuffed with grey literature.
Look what happens when a Russian meteorologist accidentally gets too close to the walls. In 2010 a discussion paper on a possible driver of horizontal winds due to rising moist air masses was discussed at the Air Vent –
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/weight-of-water-and-wind-hurricane-pros-weigh-in/
All that it would take for the Makarieva Effect to work is for rising moist air masses to be slightly diabatic. The Knights of Consensus all rode out to defend the “Cause” and trash the paper. Nick Stokes, Joel Shore, Eli Rabett and other old favourites can be seen in the fray. At the time many thought they were just trying to prevent re-examination of GCMs. But in hindsight they had to trash the paper because it was getting too close to the real role of radiative gases in the atmosphere. The question of whether the radiative properties of H2O could be the factor making rising moist air masses non-adiabatic gets stamped on hard.
Nick Stokes tried to deflect discussion from possible diabatic processes here –
“But in the atmosphere it’s different. The air is cooled adiabatically, by expansion on rising. Any latent heat released is not removed; it stays in the air and counters, but does not stop, the adiabatic cooling that is causing condensation.”
and here –
“The notion of adiabatic cooling is fundamental here. It means that the air cools with no (significant) heat moving anywhere (over the timescale). That means that LH, when released, is not removed.”
Jim_D tried to dismiss radiative cooling after I offered it as a possible mechanism here –
“The next question is why the energy can’t go anywhere, e.g. by radiation. Yes, radiation may influence cloud edges a little, but in the updraft cores, it is completely saturated and radiation does not get very far in those circumstances, besides which we are talking about small temperature differences locally, so the net radiation effect is close to zero.”
and here –
“While clear air is quite transparent to IR, cloudy air is almost completely opaque to it. This is why only cloud edges are subject to radiative effects (and mixing). As determined from cloud tops, the core cloudy air makes it up to levels consistent with adiabatic theory.”
They knew there was a serious problem with the modelling of the role of radiative gases in the atmosphere. They knew years ago. I now believe that at least some of the AGW supporters have known for many years that radiative gases cool our atmosphere at all concentrations above 0ppm.
Trashing a Meteorology paper because it might accidentally hurt the “cause”? Simply putrescent.
Radiative gases are critical for continued convective circulation below the tropopause. Without convective circulation our atmosphere will cook. Adding radiative gases to the atmosphere will not reduce its radiative cooling ability.
PS. The good news, the Makarieva paper has finally been accepted for publication.
Konrad,
Thanks for the link and update re the Makarieva paper. I found this editorial statement on what appears to have been an extraordinary review process to be most interesting:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/10/C15277/2013/acpd-10-C15277-2013.pdf
At least they are allowing publication now, but it is curious how strong is the resistance to publishing a scientific paper at the bleeding edge if it goes against the prevailing view or practice. How many important scientific insights could be blocked through the years if the dominant current players can dictate that articles arguing rival hypotheses cannot even be published??
What is amazing is that they let petty forms of pride override their scientific duty to enable genuine discovery, and fail to allow scientific method via experiment and observed data judge an hypothesis, but use close-minded jealously to be the judge instead. And we wonder how Copernicus felt 🙂
Gary Hladik
(and other sensible people)
I just had the dumbest thought. Why are we arguing about the way the physics works and the details of experiments when we really don’t need to. We can measure directly. ARM, CERES, ERBE have been measuring all this stuff for years. Here’s one paper:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20080014265_2008014213.pdf
upward LW, downward LW, cloudy, clear sky, annual, seasonal, diurnal….all there. Diurnal variation is a lot less than I would have guessed. But that’s the data. All the graphs are after the references at the very end. Have a look at, for example, figure 15, downward LW versus precipitable water. Range of 200 to 400 w/m2. Now scroll up to the graph of diurnal variation and see how small it is. Now let’s ask the tough question:
If, at night time, on a moonless night, we can measure 200+ w/m2 downward LW, and we know that background radiance from space is only 2.7 w/m2….
What explanation is there for the downward LW other than ghe?
Who needs boxes with salt windows and lasers and such. LW flux from sun = 0. From moon = 0. From space = 2.7 w/m2. OK, where’s the extra couple hundred watts coming from? Magic?
What about upward LW from the surface? Unless you measure in ALL directions, just quoting downward can be misleading. Are you sure you’re not just measuring the latent heat held by water vapour in the atmosphere, that’s transferred there from the surface by conduction and moved upwards by convection? (You also didn’t say whether it was cloudy or clear.)
You’re quite correct that any heat in the atmosphere doesn’t get there by magic, but it is not and cannot be a heat source. The heat can only get there by incoming radiation (but being predominantly SW, passes straight through) or from the surface by both conduction and radiation. I would suggest that conduction (and convection to distribute it upwards) is the predominant heat transfer, i.e. surface cooling mechanism, with radiation playing a comparatively small role.
The hypothesis that back-radiation further heats the surface is a basic maths failure. If a unit of heat has been lost from the surface (assuming for the sake of argument, by radiation), then *if* 0.x of that unit is back-radiated, the net heat at the surface would be -1 + 0.x, i.e. cooler, not 1.x or warmer. The heat cannot be in two places at once, otherwise you create energy.out of nothing, which is impossible.
Skiphil & Simon,
The example I gave is but one of the atrocities against science that the defenders of the “Cause” have committed. There are so many more for preserved forever in the climate shame file that is the Internet.
The video of Svensmark being verbally attacked for presenting a hypothesis on cosmic rays and proposing further empirical study is another shocking example. The speed at which the counter papers were rushed unquestioned through pal review before the results of actual empirical experiments were in was shameful and obvious.
The misuse of Anthony’s data by NOAA and the pre-emptive strike by press release Muller & Best is yet another shameful episode.
These people knew what they were doing was wrong. They didn’t care about science, just politics and money.
davidmhoffer says (January 30, 2013 at 5:37 pm):
“Gary Hladik
(and other sensible people)
I just had the dumbest thought. Why are we arguing about the way the physics works and the details of experiments when we really don’t need to. We can measure directly. ARM, CERES, ERBE have been measuring all this stuff for years.”
Thanks, David. The evidence for the so-called “greenhouse” effect in the earth’s atmosphere is indeed overwhelming. So much so that our “Is so!”/”Is not!” discussions here on WUWT are probably beyond funny to “real” scientists on both sides of the CAGW issue. Please understand, however, that while Greg takes the toy greenhouses of Wood, Pratt, and Nahle as models of the atmosphere, I see them only as models of…
.
.
.
(wait for it)
.
.
..
greenhouses! 🙂
In fact I’ve mentioned this several times. Up to now I’ve thought, like Greg, that a radiation effect on greenhouse temperature was not detectable. The Pratt and high tunnel experiments, however, have me thinking maybe the effect is measurable when extraneous influences are minimized.
davidmhoffer says:
January 30, 2013 at 5:37 pm
“OK, where’s the extra couple hundred watts coming from? Magic?”
—————————————————————————————-
No, not magic. Radiative gases, in particular H2O. And due to the pressure gradient in the atmosphere and its effect on optical opacity to IR, if 200 watts can be detected form ground level, more will be being radiated to space from that same patch of sky.
It is this IR radiation that allows energy loss from the atmosphere at a level higher than energy enters the atmosphere. Without this convective circulation below the tropopause would stall. For a fluid column in a gravity field that is maintaining a constant average temperature over time, yet is exhibiting vertical convective circulation, energy must be exiting the fluid at a higher level than it is entering.
What would happen to temperatures in the lower atmosphere if convective circulation stalls?
“Increase of temperatures due to suppression of convection has been known to engineers and scientists as far back as ancient Rome.” – davidmhoffer
davidmhoffer says, January 30, 2013 at 5:37 pm: “If, at night time, on a moonless night, we can measure 200+ w/m2 downward LW, and we know that background radiance from space is only 2.7 w/m2…. What explanation is there for the downward LW other than ghe?”
===============================================================
This is very simple and I am happy to explain it to you again.
The IPCC maintains that “greenhouse gases” not just absorb and re-emit the IR radiation coming from the Earth surface back to the surface (here is your downward LW), but also that this re-emitted IR radiation affects the temperature of the source (the surface).
So, there are 2 parts in the “greenhouse effect” as presented by the IPCC: (1) absorption/emission and (2) effect on the temperature of the source (the surface).
The first part was proven experimentally 150 years ago, no problem with that, but the second one has apparently never been proven experimentally, by a real scientific physical experiment.
On the other hand, it was experimentally proven long ago (1909) by American professor of physics R.W.Wood that that sort of IR (back/trapped radiation) had zero (or negligible) effect on the temperature of the source: http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/wood_rw.1909.html . Thus the second part was in fact disproved.
So, again, it is not about whether there is back radiation or not, it is about whether this back radiation affects the temperature of the source (surface) or not. I hope this will help.