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 planet Earth loses energy at just the same rate as it receives – there’s no blockage occurring anywhere. The idea that a cold layer beside a warm layer causes the warm layer to heat up some more has always been and will always be a gross violation of basic thermodynamics. This is also specifically the pseudoscience that has been invented to explain the arbitrary difference between the kinetic temperature of the air near the surface and the equivalent blackbody temperature of the outgoing averaged radiation – an invention based on an arbitrary and physically meaningless comparison, which isn’t necessary, because the bottom of the atmospheric layer is naturally the warmest part of the total average, and because sunlight heating in day time at the ground surface actually has an average value of +49C, and this heat distributes up into the atmosphere cooling as it goes; It is this latter that the invention of a cold layer heating a hotter layer has been meant to replace, in order to create CO2 alarm. A cavity which traps radiation does not increase the frequency of the radiation. It is only with an increase of the frequency spectrum of the radiation by which a radiation spectrum can induce higher temperature, and radiation can not and does not change its own frequency spectrum when trapped in a cavity. The idea that it does is a plain violation of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, Planck’s Law, and Wien’s Law. Radiation trapped in a cavity, such as between the atmosphere and surface, does not increase the frequency of the radiation spectrum, and hence does not cause a change in temperature – particularly when the actual source of radiation and input heating is a ~6500K spectrum, and the cavity radiation is only a 255K spectrum. The cavity radiation of -18C is a *result* of the heating which initially occurred from the 6500K spectrum input, and this cavity radiation can not increase its own temperature or its own frequency spectrum past what the 6500K spectrum already did. As we’ve seen, the idea that cavity radiation causes an increase in temperature requires that a hotter object emits less radiation and that a colder object emits more, violating Wien’s Law, Plank’s Law and the Stefan-Boltzmann Law (which are all just Planck’s Law). The mathematics of this invented physics also shows that at zero emission, i.e. perfect internal radiation trapping within the cavity, that at zero emission an object would have infinite temperature. So, both an object of zero Kelvin and infinite kelvin emit zero energy. What actually happens inside a perfect cavity trapping radiation is simply the creation of a blackbody spectrum and standing wave-pattern field of the associated radiation spectrum. It is these consideration which led to Planck’s creation of his law, and the problem with the ultra-violet catastrophe and in figuring out how radiation energy would become distributed in frequency inside a cavity – a solution which required quantization of the spectrum and hence the creation quantum mechanics. Radiation trapped inside a cavity with a source of a known temperature does not cause run-away self-heating to infinity – it creates a blackbody spectrum with a wavefield in all manner of superposition and constructive and destructive interference with itself – it does *not* cause the radiation to spontaneously increase its own temperature spectrum or the kinetic temperature of its own source. Radiation is an electromagnetic vibration – this vibration interacts with matter due to electrodynamics and induces vibration of corresponding power in the matter, in the molecules and atoms etc. The only power that radiation has to induce vibration in matter, and hence induce a temperature, is the power associated with its spectrum. When the matter comes fully to “vibratory equilibrium” with the incident radiation, the radiation and the matter then simply oscillate with corresponding power – the matter emits exactly the power of vibratory energy that comes in. That emitted radiation is of the same power as that coming in, and nowhere in this process will the radiation do more work (i.e. induce a temperature) than it can given its spectrum, and nowhere in this process will the matter vibrate at a higher “temperature rate” than the incident radiation, because the frequency components required to do so don’t exist and are never created. Temperature is a measure of vibration frequency and the frequencies required for a higher temperature induction are simply not there, and they’re not spontaneously created, because there’s no reason for them to be. Trapped radiation inside a cavity simply resonates – it doesn’t change its own spectrum and it doesn’t change its own temperature and it doesn’t change the frequency components of its material source. All of this is what lead to Planck, blackbodies, and quantum mechanics. The entire premise of climate alarm is a scientific travesty, and its basis is the source of the fraud.
REPLY: Hey Joe, there’s this newfangled invention, called PARAGRAPHS. You might want to try them out sometime, I hear they make unreadable compressed prose like yours much more readable. It doesn’t help with your flawed premise though. – Anthony
Bart says:
March 7, 2013 at 1:21 pm
John Finn says:
March 7, 2013 at 12:23 pm
Bart
We’ve been over this before – give it a rest.
The behavior of radiation trapped inside a cavity is not MY premise – it is the foundation of quantum mechanics. Radiation trapped inside a cavity does not increase its own temperature spectrum and nor, commensurately, can it increase the vibration spectrum and hence temperature of the material source. Trapped radiation combines in superposition in constructive and destructive interference and it was in solving this problem that led to the blackbody spectrum and quantum mechanics via Planck. Radiation trapped inside a cavity simply doesn’t change its own temperature/radiation spectrum nor does it induce higher temperature than the temperature spectrum that it is, and that is a premise which underlies quantum mechanics.
Latitude says:
March 7, 2013 at 3:29 pm
John Finn says:
March 7, 2013 at 12:23 pm
The fact remains that adding ~7 Gt of carbon to the atmosphere each year by fossil fuel burning is resulting in a net increase of atmospheric CO2
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When you look at all the reservoirs for carbon, I seriously doubt it…
…just plants (land and aquatic) would swamp that in a heart beat
bacteria would make it all look silly
Then why are CO2 concentrations increasing in the atmosphere? And why is the overall increase roughly proportional to human emissions for every year since 1958 at least.
Phil. says:
March 7, 2013 at 2:53 pm
“Actually it hasn’t, you keep putting up a bogus model which has no resemblance to reality, that is not debunking.”
Actually, it has, and an empty assertion that the model is bogus carries no weight.
Are you denying that the data show a relationship of the form given?
dCO2/dt = k*(T – To)
Because I do not think any sentient person could deny it. Here is an even better correlation with satellite data, though it is less long-term.
If you accept the equation, then the rest necessarily follows. So, please explain where you think the argument turns “bogus”.
John Finn says:
March 7, 2013 at 4:00 pm
Then why are CO2 concentrations increasing in the atmosphere?”
This is post hoc ergo propter hoc, a classic logical fallacy. There is no reason to assume they would not have increased absent human inputs.
“And why is the overall increase roughly proportional to human emissions for every year since 1958 at least.”
“Roughly” is the key word here. Some years ago, a lady in Tennesee found a spot of mold in her kitchen which “roughly” looked like Euro-centric depictions of Jesus, and pilgrims came from all around to view it. Was it truly formed by divine intervention?
The happenstance of two slightly quadratic time series being scale similar is not at all an unusual or unlikely occurrence. In fact, it’s just about guaranteed.
But, the two series look nothing like one another on the fine scale of differentials. They do not share anything close to this level of correlation.
John Finn says:
March 7, 2013 at 4:00 pm
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The atmosphere holds a little more than 800 Gt…….supposedly we add 7-8 Gt
I seriously doubt if plants, bacteria, etc would not use a 1% increase in fertilizer…
..and I seriously doubt that our planet is so sensitive, or that CO2 is that powerful
Why CO2 levels are increasing is a bigger question
Bart says:
March 7, 2013 at 2:54 pm
philincalifornia says:
March 7, 2013 at 2:29 pm
Are you referring to this?
———————————————
Thanks Bart. I somehow missed that, which is strange as I read WUWT daily. Must’ve been on a long plane ride and then some.
It was an independent thought. Realists do have those, as opposed to the “scientists” who can only go “baah baah baah”.
Steven Mosher March 6, 2013 at 10:05 pm says:
“…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.”
Let’s take it from the beginning. It is infrared radiation or so-called long-wave radiation that escapes into space. It is carbon dioxide, water vapor, and other GH gases that slow down the escape by absorbing some of it on the way out. This absorbed radiation supplies the energy they use to warm the atmosphere. Now your greenhouse theory stipulates that adding more of a greenhouse gas, say carbon dioxide, to the atmosphere, will cause more absorption which will supply more energy to warm the atmosphere some more. That is known as the enhanced greenhouse effect but IPCC has decided to drop the word “enhanced” from their documents. Suppose you are a scientist and want to find out if that is true. You decide that you are going to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and monitor air temperature continuously as you do it. You keep doing this for 17 years straight but nothing happens. If I were that scientist I would decide that my experiment is a failure – adding carbon dioxide to air simply does not warm it. And that is where we stand today as even Pachauri of IPCC has admitted that there has been no warming for 17 years. So what is going on? Your laboratory tells you that carbon dioxide absorbs in the infrared but nothing happens when you mix it with air. Ferenc Miskolczi has the answer. He used NOAA weather balloon database to measure infrared absorption by the atmosphere over time. He did a meticulous layer by layer analysis of these data. And determined that infrared absorption by the atmosphere had been constant for 61 years while carbon dioxide went up by 21.6 percent. The addition of this amount of carbon dioxide had no influence on the absorption of IR by the atmosphere. This is an extremely important observation because no absorption means no enhanced greenhouse effect. It is diametrically opposite to the predictions of the greenhouse warming theory. In science, a theory whose predictions are wrong is cast into the wastebasket of history and that is where the greenhouse theory belongs. Miskolczi theory, on the other hand, explains everything. According to him, in an atmosphere where several greenhouse gases are present they cooperate by establishing an optimum transmittance value in the IR. When the amount of one gas, say carbon dioxide, is changed that also changes the amount of IR it absorbs. This causes the other gases to shift their concentrations until the optimum transmittance in the IR is restored. In the case of the earth atmosphere the only gas whose concentration can do this is water vapor. When carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere it starts to absorb immediately. Water vapor concentration diminishes in response to it, its share of absorption is reduced, and the optimum transmittance is restored. This amounts to negative water vapor feedback, the exact opposite of what the IPCC uses. In the long run, it demands that atmospheric carbon dioxide should decrease when carbon dioxide increases, the opposite of what the IPCC greenhouse theory stipulates. Miskolczi explains, and the greenhouse theory fails to explain, why the addition of carbon dioxide to air does not increase IR absorption by the atmosphere. And why there has been no warming for 17 years while carbon dioxide relentlessly increased. Since the optimum window for IR absorption is constant the rate of radiation escape is also constant and addition of GH gases to the atmosphere has no influence on the cooling rate. And finally, the demise of the greenhouse theory also means that anthropogenic global warming is nothing but a pseudoscientific myth.
Oh, I forgot those pretty pictures. I have never understood why people make them. The fact that your computer can produce them is not enough to justify their existence. Two of them is not too bad but when people throw pages of them at you like Hansen does I really get annoyed.
…atmospheric water vapor [not carbon dioxide!] should decrease…
Arno Arrak commented on Notes on the February Global Temperature Anomaly.
in response to Anthony Watts:
Arno,
The data I’ve extracted from NCDC station measurements show exactly this, from 1950 to 2010, the amount temps go up during the day are almost exactly matched by the amount they will drop that night. Some years there’s slightly more cooling, others slightly more warming when averaged for the whole year.
I start with 1950, because the coverage by stations gets pretty poor prior to then, and I stopped working on the data after I finished downloading the compete 2010 data set.
So let’s get this straight:
If July (average 15.9) has an anomaly of -3.5, that doesn’t matter because that 12.4 is still warmer than January’s average of 12.0?
Where does this guy learn his science? From the back of corn flake boxes?
And let us see what he says next year when January is a +3.5. Will he argue that THAT doesn’t matter because it is still less than July’s 15.9?
“Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”. . . . . Clunk!
If you think k is really constant in this equation as it pertains to real life (other than a cherry picked curve fit) , you don’t understand real life.
It should be obvious from the data just because the Earth is receiving significantly more solar radiation in January than July and yet the overall T is cooler in January that things are indeed a bit more complex than simple radiative examples. The reason has been covered above is due to the unequal distribution of land mass and ocean. And, again one has the problem that oceans have substantially lower albedo than land so simplistically, Earth should be absorbing more of the incoming solar which is more abundant in January, yet the mean temperature is lower than July. Of course it does make sense when considering evaporative cooling and cloud formation but not before.
Mosh’s malarky about Effective Radiating Level is pure BS, hansen style. First off, they treat the lapse rate as some sort of magical absolute (depending upon h2o vapor content). It is nothing more than conservation of energy in operation, very importantly including convection as well as radiation. What’s more, no level is where all radiation comes from. Much of it leaves the surface and escapes to space. Whereever there is spectral absorption, there is mostly very short path lengths. As one goes up in altitude, the dropping pressure sharpens the peaks – a be assured that there is perfect correlation between the spectral absorption and emissions (as the temperature of the gas approaches that of the original blackbody source- but it cannot due to the fact it is radiating both outward and inward). (note that the spectral emission amount when the level is colder has a net absorption and when warmer, it would have a net emission).
Another factor missed by the Mosh (hansen) explanation is that with trace ghgs, especially when resorting to Stefan’s law, is that if one adds ghgs to increase absorption, then there is an increase in emissivity that increases the amount of radiation originating from that layer and beyond even at the same T for that layer. The only place one can say has an actual BB emission continuum at a given level in the atmosphere is where opaque clouds are present. Also, in reality, the emissivity would be wavelength dependent and very complex, not merely a single number as used in Stefan’s law – an engineering approximation.
Basically, they are creating a total fiction based upon simplifications which are not even physical and then trying to claim that these accurately describe nature. Anyone can see from the first of my post that such simplifications would lead to drastically wrong conclusions about the Jan/Jul temperature differences.
John,
I think most of us understand temperature anomalies versus actual temps. As a matter of fact, we could play all kinds of games just by changing the baseline interval (1950-1980 versus 1960-1990 versus 1930-1960). I could take a warm period (1975-2005) and plot my anomalies against that period, and bingo! we have Global Cooling! That is why I don’t get too excited with these monthly anomaly reports. Many organizations use diferent yard sticks that in the end just confuse things. Climate Science, as it is done today heavily depends upon statistics. And the art of analytics has become more important than the science.
Mario Lento says:
March 8, 2013 at 2:53 am
“If you think k is really constant…”
I assume that is addressed to me. I never said it was a constant. It almost surely is not. But, over finite timelines, it can be approximated as a constant. It holds up pretty well as a single value in the interval 1958-present.
This is elementary, Taylor series based linearization. High school students learn it in their first course in calculus.
Bart says:
March 8, 2013 at 10:21 am
The funny thing about that comment is that I usually get criticized from the other side. People claim that the relationship does not hold in earlier periods, based on very inferior measurements of CO2 inferred from ice cores. While not conceding the accuracy of those measurements, I point out that the relationship can change over time, and they then accuse me of slight of hand for suggesting a linearized relationship may need updating from time to time.
I can’t win with people who are bound and determined to find an excuse to ignore the obvious. But, it is all rigorous, well-established mathematics, and the linearized relationship with constant affine parameters holds incredibly well in the period 1958-present, the period in which we have the best, most modern, most accurate, and most up-to-date measurements. And, in that interval, we can say unequivocally that temperatures have determined CO2 concentration, and not human inputs.
Bart says:
March 8, 2013 at 10:30 am
“And, in that interval, we can say unequivocally that temperatures have determined CO2 concentration, and not human inputs.”
Furthermore, we can conclude with equal assurance that CO2 concentration has not influenced globally averaged temperature to any significant degree.
The behavior of radiation trapped inside a cavity is not MY premise – it is the foundation of quantum mechanics. Radiation trapped inside a cavity does not increase its own temperature spectrum and nor, commensurately, can it increase the vibration spectrum and hence temperature of the material source. Trapped radiation combines in superposition in constructive and destructive interference and it was in solving this problem that led to the blackbody spectrum and quantum mechanics via Planck. Radiation trapped inside a cavity simply doesn’t change its own temperature/radiation spectrum nor does it induce higher temperature than the temperature spectrum that it is, and that is a premise which underlies quantum mechanics.
Fortunately, since the “cavity” the Earth is trapped in is really large and is almost entirely at 3 K as far as radiation is concerned, we’re sitting right next (in astronomical terms) to this big thing called “the Sun”. And when one takes into account the fact that the Earth’s surface is not a passive blackbody cooling because it is radiating all of its energy into an enormous near-perfect radiation absorber, but is rather an active part of an open system that receives energy from the sun predominantly through one mostly-unblocked frequency band through the atmosphere but radiates it back to space through a significantly blocked frequency band through the atmosphere (where the atmosphere itself radiates energy back to space at temperatures that are much lower than the surface) one can easily show that the dynamic surface of the Earth is warmer in dynamical equilibrium with the greenhouse blocking than it would be without it.
The Earth does not change its own temperature — the Sun does that — but the temperature the Earth’s surface oscillates around in dynamical equilibrium absolutely depends on whether or not outgoing radiation from that surface is absorbed and partially reflected back to the surface by colder gases surrounding it.
The day you actually learn some thermodynamics and stop misapplying things that apply to passive thermal reservoirs to even the simplest possible dynamical model for an Earth in thermal balance between a very hot, nearby Sun and a very cold rest of the Universe, you will stop sounding rather silly. And the same is true of Latour. It is so very easy to show that interpolating a cooler blackbody absorber layer between a continuously warmed reservoir and a perfect absorber results in the warmed reservoir getting warmer than it would without the interpolant layer, in dynamical equilibrium. And no laws of thermodynamics are harmed in the least by the result.
rgb
Radiation doesn’t cause itself to heat itself up when it interacts with itself or its own source. QED. Welcome to blackbodies and quantum mechanics. Read up on Planck. Trapping radiation inside a cavity with an active source is *exactly* how blackbodies are created, and it doesn’t heat itself up to infinity, or at all.
Radiation doesn’t cause itself to heat itself up when it interacts with itself or its own source. QED. Welcome to blackbodies and quantum mechanics. Read up on Planck. Trapping radiation inside a cavity with an active source is *exactly* how blackbodies are created, and it doesn’t heat itself up to infinity, or at all.
I teach graduate electrodynamics and quantum mechanics. I have a published paper in QED. I actually understand BB radiation reasonably well, and in my checkered past have derived Stefan-Boltzmann. None of which has the slightest bearing on what I said up above. I repeat: The day you actually learn…” and will add a suggestion to learn some of the rest of physics too, not just thermodynamics, in particular the proper description of open (non-equilibrium) systems.
rgb
JP says:
March 8, 2013 at 6:05 am
John,
I think most of us understand temperature anomalies versus actual temps. As a matter of fact, we could play all kinds of games just by changing the baseline interval (1950-1980 versus 1960-1990 versus 1930-1960). I could take a warm period (1975-2005) and plot my anomalies against that period, and bingo! we have Global Cooling!
Uhh! It doesn’t matter what base period you choose it won’t change the trend. The actual anomalies might be lower in absolute terms but that won’t affect how they relate to previous periods.
Some time ago UAH changed their baseline from 1979-1998 to 1981-2010. While this changed the actual anomaly numbers it had no affect on the warming trend which remained exactly the same at ~0.13 deg per decade.
“I teach graduate electrodynamics and quantum mechanics. I have a published paper in QED.”
Then why are you so confused as to the behavior of radiation trapped inside a cavity? You should brush up on your history of those developments and what they lead to, and then correct your cognitive dissonance. Radiation interacting with itself doesn’t change its temperature spectrum or the temperature it can induce in matter. Thermo 101 and first year quantum. Enjoy.
“Some time ago UAH changed their baseline from 1979-1998 to 1981-2010. While this changed the actual anomaly numbers it had no affect on the warming trend which remained exactly the same at ~0.13 deg per decade.”
True for UAH. But I wonder about HadCrut? ( Don’t get me wrong, I prefer satellite soundings versus thermometers).And while the trend would be positive (warming) the magnitude in the rise would be less. And if we saw global temperatures stay neutral to slight cooling for a short interval (say 7 months), people would thing we are cooling, when in fact we could still be warming if we used the period 1950-1980 as a baseline. I am not saying we haven’t warmed since 1970. But I long tired of this issue. I think it is interesting, but I tend to take a very, very long view of climate (centennial versus decadal). But, I get your perspective; I could have overstated my point.
Hi Bart: I was rude in my comment the way I hastily commented. Noted.
However, you wrote “Actually, it has, and an empty assertion that the model is bogus carries no weight.”
The model is useless for predicting anything as a function of CO2. The only function it serves is that with some “mysterious” k value one can fit a curve of temperature proportion to CO2 for some period of time. At other periods, another different k value will be needed to fit the temperature curve. Thus, CO2 has no bearing. If k varies for different time series, then we can presume that CO2 cools temperatures… right?