Guest post by John Kehr
With two completed months of the year there is starting to be discussion of how 2013 is shaping up for the annual anomaly. Several comments around the web have caught my attention as they demonstrate a basic misunderstanding of how the Earth’s climate is behaving. This is one of those articles that may seem OCD, but this one misunderstanding is what allows warmists to get away with as much as they do when it comes to climate.
I am going to pick on Anthony Watts and Roy Spencer for this one. The article in question was the one where Roy Spencer provided an update of the UAH anomaly. Here is a screen shot of the article.
From March 4th, 2013
The title states that there was a big drop in surface temperature in the month of February from ~ 0.5 to 0.2 °C. This is correct for the anomaly, but it has nothing to do with the Earth’s temperature. The reality is the Earth warmed up, but the anomaly dropped.
Let me explain. January is the coldest month of the year for the planet as a whole. Depending on the source, the average temperature is between 12.0 and 12.5 °C for the month. February is on average 0.18 °C warmer than January, also source dependent. Here is what the basic generic behavior of the Earth is on an annual basis.
Illustration 1: Annual Temperature of the Earth and the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The average temperature of the Earth is different for each month of the year.
This is based on the average from the 1900-1990 data and I have used this extensively as the baseline behavior for the Earth today. Anomaly has no place on this chart because this shows the actual temperature of the Earth and each hemisphere. How the seasons affect the global average is readily apparent. To me it also shows how many factors can influence the global anomaly. January and February are perfect examples of this.
If I switch to Weatherbell I can show some cool graphics that they produce.
Here is January and February of 2013 from their site.
Notice that the Earth is about 0.25 °C warmer in February, but since it was closer to average the anomaly was much less. Climate scientists hate it when people show real temperature because it is impossible to see much warming when you look at the seasonal changes in the actual temperature.
Now for something interesting. In January the anomaly in the Arctic was well above average. By simple physics that meant the Arctic was losing energy to space at a much higher rate than average. Normally the Arctic is losing energy at a rate of 163 W/m^2. In January of 2013 it was losing energy at a rate of 173 W/m^2. That 6% increase in rate of energy loss meant that the Arctic ended up with a negative anomaly in February. The dramatic change in Arctic anomaly played a big role in the drop of the global anomaly in February.
The rate of energy loss is a self-correcting mechanism. Physics don’t allow it to operate in any other way. As a whole the Earth lost ~ 4 W/m^2 more than average over the entire surface in the month of January. Data for February is not yet available, but it will be close to average because the anomaly was closer to average. The higher rate of energy loss in January resulted in a more average February. That is how the climate operates.
Finally I have to get a dig in at CO2. In January of 2013 it was 395 ppm and in 1985 it was 50 points lower at 345 ppm. So despite the fact that CO2 was higher, the Earth was losing energy at a higher rate to space. CO2 was not blocking the energy from escaping despite all the claims that increased CO2 prevents heat from escaping the Earth. The Earth 30 years later was losing a significantly larger amount of energy to space than it was in the past.
The month to month change in the temperature anomally is nearly a random variate.
For a random variate higher anomalies tend to be followed by lower anomalies, and vice versa. This is called “Reversion to the mean.” See…
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ReversiontotheMean.html
In the case of global temperature anomalies this *nearly* applies to month to month variations because month to month variations tend to be much greater than long term trends expressed over the same short term. By long term trends I mean El Nino/ La Nina cycles etc.
Gareth Phillips says:
March 7, 2013 at 12:04 am
Stephen Mosher, thank you for the useful explanation on how CO2 influences heat loss in the atmosphere, it was, clear straightforward and easily understood. And thanks for posting on WUWT.
________________
Mr. Phillips,
Fairy tales are also easy to understand.
Wayne Delbeke says:
March 6, 2013 at 8:08 pm
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2011/12/15/measuring-the-wrong-things-has-the-scientific-method-been-compromised-by-careerism/
===============
so, it is worse than we thought:
In September, Bayer published a study describing how it had halted nearly two-thirds of its early drug target projects because in-house experiments failed to match claims made in the literature. The German pharmaceutical company says that none of the claims it attempted to validate were in papers that had been retracted or were suspected of being flawed. Yet, even the data in the most prestigious journals couldn’t be confirmed.
God help us all if this is the level of physics that’s in climate science.
The silver lining prevents heat loss by radiation. This is basic engineering. The difference between engineering and science is that engineering is not at all speculative. When you run the equations for a system’s energy balance, they work and you can confirm that they work. Generally, arguing with basic engineering principles is a losing proposition.
Well said, Commie Bob! And the GHE is similarly basic engineering. Trying to claim that it does not exist is just plain silly and ignorant, especially when anyone who wishes can invest in e.g. Grant Petty’s A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation and learn both the physics itself and look at a variety of spectrographs that are for all practical purposes direct experimental evidence of the GHE in action. Or one can do enormously simple thermodynamic computations that show precisely how interposing an intermediary blackbody radiator between a heated body and a cold reservoir raises the temperature of the heated reservoir, how placing such an intermediary between a warm reservoir and a cold reservoir slows the rate of heat transfer between the two completely independent of the heat capacity of the intermediary layer, effectively making it a non-conductor non-convector and restricting the effects to radiation only.
All people do when they claim “there is no GHE” or “the GHE violates the second law of thermodynamics” or “there is no experimental evidence for the GHE” is expose their own near-complete ignorance of radiation physics, the laws of thermodynamics, and how to read a spectrograph. This, in turn, makes it too easy for climate alarmists to point the finger at skeptics and indulge in a few — sadly highly effective — logical fallacies by noting that because some skeptics are this ignorant, everybody who is skeptical must be wrong. No wonder that Steve McIntyre cuts off such discussions rather instantly when they occur out of context on his blog (and thereby increases its overall credibility). Anthony is (probably correctly) more tolerant because the cost of even this much censorship is quite high (ask people who try to post skeptical arguments on RealClimate) but that doesn’t mean that asserting that there is no GHE because the sun is made of iron, because the Earth is heated by thermonuclear fusion occurring in the Earth’s core, because it is “impossible for a colder gas to heat a warmer gas” is anything but junk science.
rgb
Amen rgb. But with that said, why did Watts post this article which is obviously going to feed that ignorance?
John Kehr writes:
“Normally the Arctic is losing energy at a rate of 163 W/m^2. In January of 2013 it was losing energy at a rate of 173 W/m^2.”
Dr. Svalgarrd writes in reply to the above:
“Because the Earth is closest to the Sun in January it receives more energy from the Sun, so it is understandable that it must also lose more…”
The Arctic is in darkness in January thus it is getting little to zero energy from the sun.
Here is an interesting quote from the same article:
Modern management science tells us that if you want more of something, all you have to do is measure it. . . . The measurement alone – even if you do nothing else such as attach consequences to the values produced by the measurement – helps to massively improve the value of the output. . . . We aren’t measuring is the REPLICATION rate of scientific work by scientists. We aren’t measuring it, nor are we publishing it widely. In other words, we tell the scientific community that we ignore their poor efforts and wasted research dollars. . . . This is because we are not measuring it. And management science tells us that if you don’t measure, you are going to waste a whole lot of money.
The “silver lining” in the thermos is thousands of molecules thick and the mass of that layer inhibits IR penetration or transfer. A free roaming three atom gas molecule has no such support network. The OLR absorption lasts for a vibrational billionth of a second per CO2 molecule….is transfered to the adjoining N2O2 gas molecules, which each vibrate for 4 billionths of a second. This converted IR is then KE and travels vertically away from the planet as convective waves. The absorbed OLR photon is emitted as a longer wave length, lower energy IR photon that is incapable of “warming” the still warmer Earth surface, as this energy flow obeys the Laws of Thermodynamics. The “silver lining” to science on this planet is that Truth is self evident….and ignorance is self destructive. Carbon Dioxide molecules merely vibrate as the OLR passes at 186,000 mps. A tuning fork in a concert hall will vibrate to the music….but it does not AMPLIFY the music.
Or, you could actually do the arithmetic based on the actual physics. Well, you could if you knew how. Neither the reflective silver lining nor the GHE have anything to do with the mass of the layer — they have everything to do with the optical cross-section of the layer and its optical thickness.
Your analogy concerning tuning forks is especially illuminating. A tuning fork in a concert hall will indeed absorb energy from outgoing sound and re-radiate it. And in fact it re-radiates it more or less isotropically. Which means that some fraction of the energy is de facto reflected back towards the source. Which means that a microphone near the source will register a slightly higher sound intensity than it would if there were no tuning forks, no sources of reflection.
Sometime you might go to your favorite neighborhood music store, as many of them have a special “sound room” for people to use to test instruments. Those rooms often have walls that are lined with soft carpet or special sound-absorbing panels, the moral equivalent of a 3 K blackbody sky. Sounds are all hushed in such a room because sound energy is given off by a source, goes to the wall, and disappears. Contrast this with the same instrument played in the same room but with normal walls, or even with less absorptive walls. A simple microphone will register a higher sound level in a room with non-absorptive boundary conditions than in a room with a partially reflective environment.
CO_2 molecules are no different than those tuning forks. They absorb IR photons incident on them in a highly directional manner and re-radiate the energy in all directions. Some of the energy they absorb is thus directed back towards the source. This increases the energy density of the source volume. One can measure this for light just as one can for sound. But you don’t really care if your own arguments actually make sense, I suspect, and I know from past experience that you are beyond any sort of correction.
In the meantime, though, meditate upon the fact that your own ears — not just a microphone, ears are more than sensitive enough — can detect the difference in local sound intensity when one creates resonance between a pair of tuning forks compared to the intensity observed with just one. And thus I don’t even have to refute you, you refute yourself.
rgb
jeez says:
March 7, 2013 at 2:26 am
“The use of anomalies is not hidden or a trick, but a useful means of identifying trends.”
Use of anomalies encourages those who have no interest in the facts and who care about the trends only. A trend is a human construct that should be judged on how well it represents the facts. With the use of anomalies, you have already said bye-bye to the facts and cannot use them to criticize the misuse of trends.
Could we all please stop confusing the world and our descriptions of the world? A temperature measurement is a fact in the world. A trend exists in our minds and not in the world. Or maybe we just all want to be modelers who make careers of confusing the world with their models.
Mosher says:
“1. C02 does not prevent heat from escape the earth.
2. C02 along with other gases ( including water vapor) SLOW the rate at which the earth loses
energy to space.
How does that work?
1. C02 and other gases are relatively, not completely, opaque to LW radiation. We know this from measurements.
2. Because of this earth radiates energy to space from a point in the atmosphere known as the ERL.
3. Add more GHGs to the atmosphere and you raise the ERL
4. When the ERL is raised, earth radiates from a higher colder place.
5. Radiating from a colder height means the loss rate is lower.
heat is not blocked from escaping. It escapes. But with more GHGs this escape happens from a higher colder location, and consequently it happens less rapidliy than it would otherwise.
Slowing the cooling, is referred to as warming.
The silver lining of a thermos does not warm the coffee. By reflecting radiation it slows the rate of cooling and keeps your coffe warmer than it would have been otherwise.
Think of C02 and other greenhouse gases as a leaky radiation screen. eventually the radiation escapes, but at a slower rate than it would otherwise.
Finally, the temperature data you are showing is the pretty color maps….. That’s a model output.
Just for your information. And Oh, the model used to create those temperatures?
That model agrees with me. It’s physics says c02 causes warming. So, rather funnily you used model temperature data ( NCEP) and the models used to create that data, agree that c02 causes warming.”
1 & 2 seem to be nothing more than semantics in my book. If you are slowing the heat loss, that means you are preventing SOME of the heat loss, so what’s your point? Slowing is somehow different than preventing? Ok…who cares? Would the statement “Stopped 10% of heat from escaping” be inaccurate?
Your description of how the thermos keeps hot things hot is entertaining.
Could you please explain how it keeps cold things cold? I’m still confused on how it knows which is which.
Jim
NK says: “Stop picking on warmists for failing to provide empirical data to prove the ‘physics’ of CO2 causing catastrophic AGW and ‘climate change’.”
Here is some of the evidence:
“Increases in greenhouse forcing inferred from the outgoing longwave radiation spectra of the Earth in 1970 and 1997,” J.E. Harries et al, Nature 410, 355-357 (15 March 2001).
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
“Comparison of spectrally resolved outgoing longwave data between 1970 and present,” J.A. Griggs et al, Proc SPIE 164, 5543 (2004). http://spiedigitallibrary.org/proceedings/resource/2/psisdg/5543/1/164_1
“Spectral signatures of climate change in the Earth’s infrared spectrum between 1970 and 2006,” Chen et al, (2007) http://www.eumetsat.int/Home/Main/Publications/Conference_and_Workshop_Proceedings/groups/cps/documents/document/pdf_conf_p50_s9_01_harries_v.pdf
“Radiative forcing – measured at Earth’s surface – corroborate the increasing greenhouse effect,” R. Phillipona et al, Geo Res Letters, v31 L03202 (2004)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2003GL018765/abstract
“Measurements of the Radiative Surface Forcing of Climate,” W.F.J. Evans, Jan 2006
https://ams.confex.com/ams/Annual2006/techprogram/paper_100737.htm
More papers on this subject are listed here:
http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/papers-on-changes-in-olr-due-to-ghgs/
John Manville says:
March 6, 2013 at 8:22 pm
CO2 is not a “green house” gas. No gas is a green house gas. Its time to stop the charade. Stop using the term Green House in place of a more correct term Glass House.
=============
Agreed. Greenhouses warm by limiting convection. They do not warm by blocking outgoing IR.
Adding GHG to the atmosphere increases the radiation of energy from the atmosphere to space, reducing the temperature of the atmosphere, increasing convection. Without GHG the atmosphere would be warmer than it is, because it would have no way to radiate energy to space. Instead, all energy loss from the atmosphere could only occur via convection with the surface.
Without GHG only the surface could radiate energy to space and the atmosphere would be isothermal with minimal convection. There would be no lapse rate as can be readily demonstrated by the kinetic theory of gas. Instead, the hotter air molecules would rise higher in the atmosphere because the less dense molecules above favor energetic molecules “re-bounding” upwards slightly more than downwards. The less energetic molecule sink with gravity, as does the entire air mass except for the collisions with other molecules.
This statistical advantage balances the conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy as the molecules fall under the influence of gravity. It is only after you add GHG that a lapse rate is seen, which is limited by the force of gravity. No matter how much GHG you add, air cannot fall faster than the rate established by gravity. Energy carried upwards by convection reduces the lapse rate. Adding GHG allows more of this energy to radiated to space without a reduction in the lapse rate, proving increased convection and increased cooling of the surface.
Michel,
“Temperature is an intensive property. It is therefore meaningless to average absolute temperatures among various locations.
Take a bucket of ice cold water and one at boiling: is the average temperature of the system 50 °C?”
It is not necessarily meaningless. It depends what you are trying to determine. If heat content is your thing, then taking an average temperature of 50c will give the correct heat content, the same as taking each bucket separately.
I do take your point about equal quantities though. Quantities and specific heat capacities must be the same for the mean temperature to have any real meaning.
Rgb,
Your rhino analysis is very perceptive and puts climate science into perspective. We can’t change the rhino, but we would like to know what makes him tick.
lsvalgaard says:
March 6, 2013 at 7:49 pm
Normally the Arctic is losing energy at a rate of 163 W/m^2. In January of 2013 it was losing energy at a rate of 173 W/m^2.
Because the Earth is closest to the Sun in January it receives more energy from the Sun, so it is understandable that it must also lose more…
Oh, are you sure?
What does the distance matter if the arctic is getting no sunlight?
Amen rgb. But with that said, why did Watts post this article which is obviously going to feed that ignorance?
Obviously? It wasn’t and still isn’t obvious to me that it feeds ignorance. It points out, correctly, that the Earth is basically at least locally stable as far as climate is concerned, so an extremely warm month loses more heat than an extremely cool month, tending to cause regression to some sort of mean. The mean itself we do not understand particularly well because it wanders all over the place, often in a highly counterintuitive manner, to the point where our ability to predict that mean with GCMs really sucks, as evidenced by the increasing divergence between observed global temperatures and the predicted mean behavior according to various feedback and forcing scenarios (all of which lead to a lot more warming than has been observed). I agree that making any sort of deep well out of the 0.3C drop in the anomaly is just as silly as making a mountain out of the similar rise in the anomaly the previous month, and that even pretending that trends in the N-month smoothed values in temperature is committing the same error on a different scale when we do not understand the dynamics and feedbacks that set the supposed “equilibrium” to which these extremes are regressing, the supposed “climate signal” buried inside the climate noise.
Discussing this hardly feeds ignorance, quite the opposite.
The fact that it causes dragonslayers to come out of their burrow and spout fire is all by itself a way of combating ignorance, as it permits their arguments to be systematically demolished (again). That may have no effect on the individuals in question, any more than you are going to convince a devout Biblical literalist that there never was a world-spanning flood through which all the world’s species were preserved inside a wooden boat the size of a Wal Mart by mere arithmetic and rational argument, but it does lay out the arguments in stark contrast that may well help individuals listening in to decide for themselves, which is hardly feeding ignorance. It is feeding ignorance only if the dragonslayers spout nonsense and nobody replies.
Personally, I’d rather have a discussion with the ignorant than censorship and the exclusion of the ignorant from all civil discourse. The physics students who have the most to learn are the ones who know the least, whose misconceptions are the greatest. If you can reach them — and often they can, at least when their ignorance is not grounded in one of the many sorts of “religious” faith that infects the human species and compromises our ability to think rationally about our Universe — then they can learn more, faster, than a student who is already acing the material. And sometimes students who are merely listening in are helped much more as you explain things so simply that you have a chance of reaching the most ignorant than they might be by a higher level discussion that largely went over their heads.
So hats off to Anthony for minimally censoring the blog, primarily for the civility of the discourse rather than its content. I have left at least one other climate blog because I got tired of the blog owner from stepping in and censoring or commenting on my contributions. I can be wrong as easily as the next person, and have been corrected on THIS blog by a number of people a number of times, but I’d much rather learn from my own mistakes in a public, civil discussion than have them cut off or corrected by the harsh hand of a censor who (in fact) might not know as much as I know, and who in fact might be perpetuating errors themselves by their actions.
The whole point of science is that sound scientific knowledge is the remnants that can least be doubted when we try very hard to doubt all that we can, the parts that — in open and free discussion and consideration of by data and prior knowledge — we end up agreeing are likely to be true given. Scientific consensus does not equal truth, it equals some sort of “best belief, given what we know and can see, so far”, and is (or should be) highly responsive to new data, new arguments, alternative hypotheses, and is (or should be) highly cynical about claims of unquestionable knowledge on the part of any scientist.
So when Lief corrects me concerning solar dynamics, I listen. I don’t take it for granted that he is always right, but he for damn sure has forgotten over the course of a long career more than I ever learned or am learning about the way the sun works. He’s also (refreshingly) usually fairly candid about the probable limits of his own knowledge, the places where his own beliefs are educated guesses that he has some confidence in but that are hardly vox dei truth. When Steven Mosher makes assertions that I’ve made arithmetic errors, well, I do suck at arithmetic, and my back of the envelope computations aren’t always correct as a consequence. But they are correctable. Hell, yesterday I dropped a factor of r while solving a difficult problem that I wrote! with a student, ending up with the wrong units in my own answer, and had to stare at the page for four or five minutes to find the place where I dropped it. In turn, however, when I point out that there is a pretty serious disparity in the claims for “settled science” certainty in the “projections” (not predictions) in climate science and the actual data, well, that’s something that should be taken just as seriously in debate that is just as uncensored and open.
rgb
@rgb
I was speaking of the ignorance that is used by warmists vis-a-vis your prior post. I have no problem with the ignorance of the commenter’s, as you have correctly observed (IMO) that it is an opportunity for teaching, which is usually a good thing. I do not think comments should be censored simply due to difference of opinion or lack of validity. With that said, the article itself is posted with some authority (although he didnt write it, by Watts himself). In that the article is so full of half truths and, in my view, concludes that CO2 is NOT “blocking” energy from leaving the Earth, which is patently false, as you have also pointed out. Take the last paragraph:
“Finally I have to get a dig in at CO2. In January of 2013 it was 395 ppm and in 1985 it was 50 points lower at 345 ppm. So despite the fact that CO2 was higher, the Earth was losing energy at a higher rate to space. CO2 was not blocking the energy from escaping despite all the claims that increased CO2 prevents heat from escaping the Earth. The Earth 30 years later was losing a significantly larger amount of energy to space than it was in the past.”
–“So despite the fact that CO2 was higher, the Earth was losing energy at a higher rate to space.” If that were the case, the Earth would be cooling. Now this may or may not have been happening over the past 20 years but surely not the past 100! The author has completely missed the idea that what I will call the “effective emmisivity” of the Earth has changed over that time period, and is exactly what all the climate scientists are trying to get to the bottom of (with varying success). I completely agree with you ( I think, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth) that our relative understanding of factors influencing this coefficient is in its infancy, and therefore the hype over catastrophic AGW is unwarranted. However, publishing half truths and downright misunderstanding of heat transfer at a highly visible outlet such as WUWT is counter productive.
http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Hot_spot.jpg
This graph, showing that there is no atmospheric hotspot to match climate models is proof that GHG cools the surface rather than warms it, by increasing the radiation of energy from the atmosphere to space, which enhances convection – the exact opposite of how a greenhouse warms.
The atmospheric cold spot show in this graph on the left is the smoking gun that shows the cooling effect of GHG at work in the atmosphere. It is time to re-examine the assumption that GHG warms the surface by limiting outgoing IR. Without GHG in the atmosphere there would be no outgoing IR from the atmosphere and no convection. Without convection the surface would be hotter than it is now, which is how a greenhouse warms.
NZ Willy says:
March 6, 2013 at 9:25 pm
To enhance Leif’s point, since the Earth is closest to the Sun in January and apogee (farthest away) is in July, it can’t be right that the Earth is coolest in January, regardless of the temperature record. This is a model anyone can understand.
Secondly, I quite agree that the Earth is radiating heat away into space as well as it ever did, and all can test this hypothesis using your old automobile. Just leave it parked out on the street on a night when the temperature goes some degrees below zero. In the morning you will find that the windshield has frozen over, but the side windows still have only liquid water. This is because the ground is heating the side windows with infrared (IR) radiation, but the windshield is pointing to the sky and does not receive IR, either from the ground nor from the so-called “forcing” in the sky. It radiates its heat into sky & space and freezes. There is no useful “forcing”. So the Earth is radiating its heat into space just the same as it ever did. After the 200th such lesson, I keep my car under cover overnight now.
Actually the front windshield is pointed to both the ground and the sky….
Side windshields are pointed horizontally thus perpendicular to the ground and sky save the sliver that give the side windshields depth.
I have yet to experience side windows being liquid whilst the front is frozen. On the Great Plains it is all or none and the state is the same.
I apologize for raining on Mosher’s parade once again. Apparently, he has become WUWT’s resident troll. He certainly hijacked this thread. He replaced the important topic of anomalies with his musings on radiation theory.
Since we are not going to engage in a critical discussion of the use of anomalies, permit me to sum my opinion of them with a quotation from the movie “Aladdin.” Explaining the life of genies, the genie says that it is “Cosmic Power in an itty bitty living space (meaning the lamp).” The same can be said for climate theory. It is Cosmic Theory on an itty bitty factual basis. There is no better example of that division between cosmic theory and factual basis than the use of anomalies. In genuine science, the facts are like a tight shoe that requires a shoe horn; that is, theory has to accommodate the facts but the facts do not have to accommodate the theory. Just look at the one reason given for liking anomalies. That reason is that anomalies are “preconfigured” for work with trends. There are some who believe that trends are real and actually constitute the facts of climate science. Until those very influential folks are disabused of that most fundamental error, climate science will remain in the realm of Cosmic Theory.
By the way, I am not trying to champion temperature readings as the factual basis of climate science. Some other characteristic of the real world might be much better. But that is another discussion.
Steve Mosher, rgb, et al:
CO2… this trace gas comprises ~395 ppm or 0.0395% of the atmosphere, and human activity is responsible for an estimated 3% to 4% (IPCC AR4 data I was directed to was 2.9%; don’t have that link, sorry) , or a total of ~12 ppm or 0.00012%. So, 96% to 97% of CO2 entering the atmosphere we have no control over. If CO2 is going to cause cataclysmic changes, we are out of luck, because natural sources (ocean degassing, biosphere, volcanos, etc) will overwhelm our efforts at control.
Water vapor: WUWT has published from time to time a chart showing IR absorption spectra of varioius “green house” gasses. Water vapor was shown to be more efficient at being energized at more LIR wavelengths than CO2. So, if CO2 is a concern, so is water vapor but intrinsically more so. Further, water vapor concentration in the atmosphere has typically varied between 1% and 4% (i.e., 25 to 100 times the concentration of CO2), before being recently shown here at WUWT to be diminishing.
Bottom line: Human activity causes “global warming” and consequences from this result (e.g, “Climate Change”) from OUR contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere? Doen’t make sense.
What non-scientfic nonsense. “Slowing the cooling” and “warming” are two entirely different things. In Science precise language it used, such an inprecise conflation of two different concepts is the hallmark of politics, not science. Right up there with “reducing the projected increase in the budget” being described as a “cut in spending”
The Earth is not a closed system, it is an open system. Energy flows in constantly from Mr. Sun (plus tiny slivers from other sources). It is partially absorbed, hangs out as enthalpy distributed all over the damn place for a while, and eventually makes its way to outer space on a one-way journey to infinity and beyond. On average if the entire Earth has a certain enthalpy content today, and a year from now on a given day it has the same enthalpy content, the net energy in precisely balances the net energy out, but since it is an open system with the equivalent of mad dwarves opening and closing windows and umbrellas regulating the flow both in and out, one any given day the Earth absorbs a bit more than it loses (warming) or loses more than it absorbs (cooling).
Given an actively heated reservoir in purely radiative thermal contact with a 3 K near-perfect absorber cold reservoir, it is absolutely trivial to show that slowing the radiative cooling via the interpolation of an absorptive, reradiative layer leads to warming of the actively heated reservoir by slowing its cooling (that is, inhibiting the outgoing radiative flow). Putting any sort of absorptive, reradiative layer in between will do the trick, working in any frequency.
To get a net gain in temperature, one does need to modulate the rate at which energy is delivered into the system differently (and less) than one modulates the outgoing flow, but because the Earth is heated by a Sun at 6000 K through a relatively transparent window in the atmosphere and cooled at a few hundred K where there happens to be a number of strongly absorptive and reradiative (opaque) bands, this condition is satisfied in the specific case of the Earth’s atmosphere, at least.
To the extent that the term “warming” or “cooling” refers to a measurable increase or decrease in surface temperature, one expects modulation of GHG concentratiosn in the atmosphere to modulate surface temperature, that is, lead to warming or cooling. How much warming or cooling is very much open to discussion, because the Earth is anything but an ideal, approximately linear, system that is empirically perfectly capable of not only behaving in a counterintuitive (linearized) way, it is capable of stable, long term operation in antiintuitive ways, ways that directly contradict any naive linear response hypothesis. More CO_2 in the atmosphere “should” lead to modest warming, but could lead to anything from extreme warming to actual cooling — the system is that complex and nonlinear. Furthermore, what it will actually lead to can itself vary in time because in no sense is the Earth’s climate system stationary, even without modulation of e.g. CO_2 concentrations.
So it is not, actually, “political” to argue that slowing cooling leads to warming, any more than putting on a jacket, which slows the cooling of your body, also warms your body (literally raises its surface temperature) because your body constantly generates heat and you are interfering with the rate at which it loses heat. Like the Earth, your body will react in various ways to try to avoid overheating, and may entirely change its mode of cooling from radiation to evaporation in response to the additional jacket to attempt to maintain homeostasis, and once the jacket is soaked with sweat it may well be that you get damn cold as its ability to function as a slower of cooling is compromised. It’s just an attempt to explain the physics to numb-nuts who try to argue that modulating an interpolant absorptive layer cannot cause the co-modulation of the temperature of an actively heated body radiating to a perfect absorber.
rgb
– – – – – – – –
rgbatduke,
I am calling your wonderful post ‘Ode to Rhino Earth’ with a subtitle ‘Tickling the Rhino with a CO2 Feather Just Makes it Giggle’.
Thanks for the post. I vote for making it a main article.
It has become my view that it is reasonable, from a physics of the atmosphere perspective, that the behavior of the Total Earth-Atmospheric System (TEAS) has either relatively minor or no discernible reaction to CO2.
NOTE: Shouldn’t we be giving the effect of our atmosphere on surface temps the name Planetary Atmosphere Effect (PAE) and not the misleading GHE? The CO2 is just one of numerous components of the PAE and CO2 reasonably appears to be a lower order of magnitude component.
John
I do take your point about equal quantities though. Quantities and specific heat capacities must be the same for the mean temperature to have any real meaning.
Or, to put it differently, at the end of the day “heat” is a meaningless term that refers to energy that is no longer available for doing work in the specific context of the first law of thermodynamics that balances enthalpy, work, and heat or the second law that describes “becomes unavailable” in more precise statistical mechanical terms. Enthalpy, OTOH, is a valid concept, an actual measurable property of any collection of matter. Temperature is microscopically defined — note well, defined — as an average quantity in terms of enthalpy, at least local thermal equilibrium, and the equipartition theorem.
So even just water is complex, because it isn’t just liquid water in a linearized regime that participates in global enthalpy/temperature estimation. Water vapor has latent heat of vaporization in addition to a heat capacity. Solid water has latent heat of fusion. Water as a gas may have different degrees of freedom that contribute to equipartition based temperatures at any given temperature compared to water as a solid. Nonlinearities abound, and indeed enthalpy is only locally linear in temperature or vice versa.
Now compound this problem in an atmosphere with rapidly and widely varying enthalphy associated with just its water content. Throw in the fact that water in different states has a wildly varying albedo and transparency all across a relevant part of the spectrum, and that 2/3 of the Earth’s surface is covered with the damn stuff in all sorts of different forms, with different admixtures of things like salt and particulate matter, moving at different rates, mixing or not mixing with deeper colder water underneath, being transported up into the stratosphere (or not) to modulate a whole bunch of stuff up there.
Is it any real wonder that we (as far as – I know, from having read a number of recent papers) have no idea why the stratosphere has dried out by some 10% over the last decade? Or why it was comparatively wet before that? Or what its water content might have been over the last several hundred years? Or how, specifically, that might effect climate?
Our ignorance vastly outweight our knowledge in climate science, however much we might claim to know the local physics that supposedly — eventually — nonlinearly — drives the climate.
I don’t find this result surprising, given that there’s essentially none of the major GHG – H2O – at the poles.
rgbatduke…….exactly. I might disagree with Stephen Mosher on attribution and feedback but his description of the GHE is spot on. Arguing about the science at this level is counter-productive and plays into the hands of those who abuse the science for their own ends.
Steven Mosher says:
“…Slowing the cooling, is referred to as warming.”
I disagree. reversing the cooling is warming. Slowing the cooling merely causes the cooling to keep happening at a slower rate.
If you take a warm object into your air-conditioned home from outside, the object will cool until its temperature matches the environment of your house. The rate of cooling is constantly slowing as delta T trends to zero. But it will never warm as long as the environmental temperature remains constant.