Warwick Hughes writes:
Thanks to The National Business Review in New Zealand we have this rare article on Steve McIntyre while he was visiting downunder.
Full article here, but the web version doesn’t have the same headline: http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/too-much-hot-air-about-global-warming-says-researcher-rv-1
h/t to reader Bob Koss
Radical Rodent writes “Is it a fact that the energy is transferred to the lower atmosphere?”
The physics predicts so, yes. The atmosphere is cooler than the surface on average (of the ocean mostly) and the GHGs absorb radiation emitted from the surface and transfer it to the atmosphere through collision. Standard stuff.
Radical Rodent writes “Why is the so-far-failed prediction suddenly expected to be correct, “all else being equal,””
Firstly lets make sure we’re on the same page here. The temperature gradient in the atmosphere isn’t the atmosphere as we measure it, warming over time as such. The temperature gradient is more warming at the bottom of the atmosphere and less at the top. Cooling at the top in fact. Thats what the physics predicts with all things being equal.
The reason we’ve not warmed over the last 10-15 years is not understood by the scientists. IMO its because the atmosphere (weather) is responding to the forcing by sending more energy up into the upper atmosphere where it is radiated away. However it could simply be a cycle of the oceans or any number of things that cause that energy loss. Nobody knows.
TimTheToolMan (February 10, 2013 at 12:15 am):
Aha, with you, now… well, sort of. You seem to be talking about the lapse rate, be it environmental or adiabatic. There are all sorts of reasons for its existence, not least the various gas laws (temperature increasing with pressure, and so on). That, coupled with convection and advection stirring up the atmosphere, water vapour saturation, and, perhaps, a few other things I haven’t thought of to mention, but you may know about, all manage to make the observation, analysis and subsequent extrapolation of data very difficult. Of course, that hasn’t stopped people making simple models that almost give the same results as observed, then taking them further than the few days of forecasting, and stating that a disaster is looming. When it doesn’t arrive, predictions and models can then be tweaked so that observations can fit the “predictions”, even if they didn’t. (I’m thinking of the floods that “fitted the models”, when the predictions were for drought, and vice versa, ad infinitum.)
There is, of course, a lot more involved in the Earth’s climates than the simple stirring of the gasses of atmosphere, as Willis Eschenbach explores in “Slow Drift in Thermoregulated Emergent Systems”, a more recent post on this site.
TimTheToolMan says:
February 9, 2013 at 2:22 pm
Gail writes “You are missing the fact that there is a day and a night and incoming solar energy as well as outgoing long wave very WEAK IR.”
I’m not missing anything Gail. You’re adding more and then knocking it down. That is a classic strawman argument.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No I am adding the rest of the picture, the other side of the equation.
I see this type of deception that the Warmists are practicing often.
Here is another example of lying by omission:
A farmer ‘makes’ $500,000 a year so he is wealthy and crucified in the media for receiving subsidies. However no one in the media mentions he has $475,000 in expenses in running his farm or that the USDA considers the rental value of his home as part of that “income” they report on their forms or that the guy and his wife are both working full time jobs in addition to farming.
Nothing I have read from McIntyre indicates that he is an agenda-driven activist – or, perhaps more exactly, an anti-activist. He is a fellow who saw problems with inherent, unproven assumptions in models and flawed analytical techniques in data analysis and had the effrontery to say so publicly and repeatedly.
His position is consistent with that faced by Copernicus. Copernicus knew that challenging Man’s centrality in the universe challenged the legitimacy not just of the current, literal interpretation of the Bible, but of the position of kings and popes to rule by divine right. If Earth were just one of many in God’s universe, then were these men in power above all just some of many men in God’s universe also? But Copernicus, unlike McIntryre, would not just be vilified for his views, but probably ruined and exiled, if not executed. So Copernicus did not release his game-changing work until after his death.
McIntyre has challenged at an almost religious level. The popes and prophets are Gore, Suzuki, the WWF and Greenpeace; the kings are all the government and business leaders who have tied their influence and future wealth to the CAGW bandwagon. And, as for Copernicus, the dispute is not about the facts of the matter. It matters little that the issue might be reinterpreted and cause our views to change about how much role CO2 plays in the temperature of the livable part of the planet, just as it mattered little to the pre-Rennaissance ruler if the Sun revolved around the Earth. What matters now as it did then is how this fundamental perception plays into the legitimacy of the powerholders to act as they wish. If CO2 is not a cosmic-scale villain, there is no need for wide-sweeping, draconian authority fitting an apocalyptic emergency.
We elect or otherwise designate others to act for us on the premise that they will do so in our best, long-term interests. We pay taxes and enter into war on that basis. Should we come to see that those with our reins in their hands are acting, instead, against what would be our wishes should be we better informed, we would withdraw their power – or at least oppose it. That is why they are angered.
Anger is the response to a loss or perceived loss of control; derision or confusion to a presentation of foolishness. When someone is demonized, when someone spits venom, we can justly suspect power, not truth is under attack.
McIntyre as demon? There are far worse things to be.
Mosher, the difference between the sceptics and the alarmists is that when sea ice in the Arctic (let’s all ignore the Antarctic as the ice there isn’t behaving as the alarmists wish, so it doesn’t really exist) fell to a record low the sceptics went looking for the reason/mechanism behind it while the alarmists stood there waving their arms and screaming that the sky was falling.
You are firmly in that latter camp. There is nothing scientific about it, no matter how many times you appeal to Feynman to try and legitimise your cryptic ranting. How you can behave in this most unscientific way despite being so well exposed to Steve M’s methodical methods is beyond me. My guess is that being a supposed ‘lukewarmist’ pays better.
Gail writes “No I am adding the rest of the picture, the other side of the equation.”
So do you agree that the underlying assumption of increased temperature gradient from the physics is sound? I’m not talking about the feedbacks and other processes that go on in addition, purely the fundamental theory of AGW. So in your answer of yes or no dont add ANY other assumptions. This question is about the physics ONLY.
Aww, c’mon, Anthony – LT was the best clueless comic relief at WUWT, and this latest was an absolute classic; nobody but LT would take that bilge seriously.
While I agree w/ other commenters here that Mosher’s comment was way too broad brush and somewhat diversionary (there are degrees of certainty, and good policy must weigh both costs and potential risks/benefits of various strategies – in the face of uncertainty), not in a million years would it have occurred to me to impute an ulterior motive. This kind of thing is just a distraction – it contributes nothing to the discussion.
More generally, and speaking of Steve Mac, he has always had a policy of zero-tolerance for speculation about motive, and I think it’s a good one.
Tim the Tool man, how much of the out going energy in the atmosphere is from conducted and convected process, verses a radiative process? And a follow up; does CO2 in the atmosphere accelerate the loss to space of recieved conducted energy from the surface?
David asks “how much of the out going energy in the atmosphere is from conducted and convected process, verses a radiative process?”
General scientific consensus fwiw describes the components thus
http://scienceofdoom.com/2013/02/02/kiehl-trenberth-and-the-atmospheric-window/
With a followup “does CO2 in the atmosphere accelerate the loss to space of recieved conducted energy from the surface?”
Accelerate? I’m not sure what you mean exactly. Much of the energy radiated from earth is radiated away by the CO2 in the upper atmosphere. In a general sense, CO2 transfers the energy towards the atmosphere low down in the atmosphere and radiates it away from further up. CO2 both warms and cools the atmosphere at different altitudes.