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.
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…
Leif you either negate the global temperature average, and thus all the temperature calculation of the modern climatology in one sentence (wow cool!) or you have looked too much at anomalies and not to real temperature graph?
Irrelevant to the fact that the Earth is closer to the Sun and receives more energy in January, the Earth radiates energy in line with the absolute temperature it has, not in line with the anomaly or with the energy received.
The years to year variation of “global temperature” is of about 3.5°C – look at the absolute temperature global:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/clip_image0041.jpg
The absolute minimum is exactly January when the Earth is closest to the sun, which means that at that time the Earth is radiating the less.
Now there might be different explanations for this, but these should come from those who calculate the global average temperature and support this concept.
The anomalies are only yearly deviations from this average line.
Guest post by John Kehr
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.
Thank you John for the post!
Very good points in it. Of course there are people who try to distract from analysing the message, as this is another nail in the CAGW coffin.
The models with positive feedback assume greater increase of the temperatures in the lower atmosphere to allow for the radiation of the energy, and in contrary the Earth is losing fast more energy for any temperature increase without fulfilling the prophecy of the Thermaggedon in the lower atmosphere.
The discrepancy between real data and incremental model prophecy widens as the years pass by.
Steven Mosher says:
March 6, 2013 at 10:05 pm
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.
Models are only tools. Improper use of tools does not disable the tool itself, but shows the incapacity of the tool user to use the tool.
A tool may be biased in a direction or another but still give good approximation from one step to the next.
Using that tool in incremental analysis over longer steps (periods or time frame) shows the incapacity of the user to understand that small systematic errors, can cause big differences over longer periods.
Mario Lento says:
March 8, 2013 at 11:39 pm
Hi Mario. I appreciate the polite response.
It is useful for predicting CO2 given the temperature record. If you give me the temperature record, and don’t tell me the CO2, then ask me what CO2 will be at the end of the record, I can give you a very good estimate of it. And, I do not need to know human inputs over that time interval to get that very good estimate.
Yes, you can argue that, that is not a useful prediction, since you had to tell me the temperatures. I would respond that the prediction of CO2 is fine, you just first have to formulate a useful predictor of temperatures. That predictor of temperatures can be formulated essentially uncoupled from CO2, so you can neglect that in coming up with it. How do I know this? Because this regression shows that the temperature series for the past century+ has been essentially a constant rate trend plus an approximately 60 year cyclic phenomenon, and it has not deviated from that pattern even as CO2 levels have increased markedly. In fact, you can use that trend + ~60 year cycle as a simple model to predict temperatures in the years ahead. I am willing to wager big bucks (to someone I know well and trust, so please do not apply, any strangers reading this) that it will do a fairly good job of doing so.
The k parameter can vary, but the data show it has been fairly stable, fairly constant, for the last 55 years. Yes, it could suddenly shift. So can the Earth’s magnetic field, yet we still use it to navigate, knowing that it is unlikely to shift significantly enough to throw the indicated direction off too far for it to be of use in the near term. Independently of temperature (i.e., not considering large changes in temperature), variation in the k and To parameters depend most obviously on the CO2 concentration in ocean waters currently upwelling, and the state of the biosphere. So, the rate at which they can change is tied to the rate at which those variables change. However, k is constrained to be positive, and significantly greater than zero, because CO2 generating processes are very sensitive to temperature.
“If k varies for different time series, then we can presume that CO2 cools temperatures… right?”
The relationship indicates the direction of causality, as it would be absurd to argue that temperatures depend on the rate of change of CO2, and not its absolute level. Thus, the relationship indicates that temperature drives CO2, and not the other way around.
On 7th March Joe Postma said that ” .. temperature is a function of the frequency distribution of the radiation .. “.
I was led to believe that it was the other way around, i.e. the frequency distribution of e/m radiation from a body is a function of the body’s temperature but i must be wrong. How can a “Slayer” and “Senior Fellow” of blogging group Principia Scientific International possibluy be mistaken? (see Section 3.12 of “Spotlight On Principia Scientific International” http://globalpoliticalshenanigans.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/spotlighton-principia-scientific.html).
Best regards, Pete Ridley
Pete Ridley has apparently never heard of a blackbody spectrum. Or algebra. How can an old man not know algebra? Because he spends his time following people he’s obsessed with.
On 7th March Joe Postma said that ” .. temperature is a function of the frequency distribution of the radiation .. “.
I was led to believe that it was the other way around, i.e. the frequency distribution of e/m radiation from a body is a function of the body’s temperature…
Versus:
On 11 March Joe Postma said that “Pete Ridley has apparently never heard of a blackbody spectrum. Or algebra. How can an old man not know algebra? Because he spends his time following people he’s obsessed with.”
Now, let’s see — sarcasm aside — who is right, Pete Ridley or Joe Postma.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law
To quote from the article:
“Planck’s Law can be written:
Now it is a simple matter of fact that this is the equation that describes blackbody radiation. It is also a simple matter of fact that this relation is indeed the frequency distribution of electromagnetic radiation as a function of temperature.
It would appear that Pete Ridley is not only precisely correct in his assertion that Joe Postma has the nature of a blackbody spectrum precisely backwards, where the frequency distribution is indeed a function of the temperature and where all we learn from any other observed frequency distribution is that its sources are not strictly thermal blackbody sources, but that there is some justification in his continuing sarcastic commentary on the dragonslayers, an organization whose sole purpose appears to be making honest scientific skeptics look like idiots by association.
If Joe ever actually learns how to read a graph (such as this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EffectiveTemperature_300dpi_e.png
which sadly presents spectral intensity as a function of wavelength, not frequency, for Mr. Sun, Joe will learn that the Earth is an open system poised between a hot, large blackbody object (Mr. Sun) and an even larger near-perfect blackbody absorber (outer space at 3K). Joe might then consider not using stupid thermodynamic arguments based on unheated thermal reservoirs to make egregious conclusions about the behavior of a heated, open reservoir like the Earth when its radiative behavior is modulated away from that of a black body by the presence of an interpolant layer of gas that absorbs and re-emits radiation in certain broad bands that lie more or less in the middle of the Earth’s thermal spectrum.
He might then take a glance at Petty’s A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation, look at the measurements top of atmosphere and bottom of atmosphere spectra, and then go away and never, ever make any of the absurd and incorrect assertions about CO_2, water vapor, and other greenhouse gases being incapable of modulating the surface temperature of the heated Earth.
But he won’t do any of these things. He won’t even acknowledge that he was wrong in the conflict up above, in spite of my taking the time to actually laboriously type in the actual equation Planck derived (and yes, that I derived myself when I first took Modern Physics some 40 years ago) that proves him categorically incorrect and guilty himself of all of the ignorance that he ascribes to anyone who disagrees with his absurd contention that “cold gas can never cause a warmed surface, cooled only by radiation, to become warmer”.
rgb
Damn, my previous reply was just scroogled by a dropped wireless connection. I will summarize with a single equation:
is Planck’s Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law
Hence Pete Ridley is correct in all respects, including his generally disrespectful dismissal of the crackpots of “Principia Scientifica”, and Joe Postma does indeed have the relationship between spectrum and temperature precisely backwards in his post of March 7.
We are tempted to wonder: Has Joe ever heard of a blackbody spectrum? Or algebra? Or Planck’s Law? If so, it is difficult to see how he could have conflated the causal relationship that temperature determines the spectrum, not the spectrum the temperature in the case of blackbody radiation. We are surrounded by cases of non-thermal spectra — lasers, fluorescent lights — and it is only when we see a spectrum like this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EffectiveTemperature_300dpi_e.png
(for Mr. Sun) that we can reasonably believe that the radiating object is at a nearly uniform radiative temperature and is behaving approximately like a blackbody.
However, in spite of being just about as wrong as it is possible to be, I very much doubt that Joe will admit any such thing. If Joe ever took the trouble to understand this stuff, perhaps by investing a small sum in Grant Petty’s A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation and working through it, in particular looking at and trying to understand the TOA and BOA spectrographs and their relation to blackbody curves at different temperatures in different parts of the spectrum, Joe would be forced to acknowledge that he has been quite wrong to assert that there is no such thing as the GHE, and then Principia Scientifica would take away his “fellowship” and then where would he be?
No longer a crank, I suppose.
rgb
You guys have no clue what you’re talking about.
You take an off-hand remark that has clear meaning in the context of the paragraph, and then single it out to reinterpret it in under another context.
This is what you’re reduced to. It’s called sophistry.
Radiation trapped inside a cavity does not heat up its own source or increase is frequency spectrum and hence its temperature. To deny this is to deny the derivation of quantum mechanics, let alone thermodynamics. Read up on the development of Planck’s Law. Copying it from Wikipedia and writing it here counts for squat.
Or, maybe it didn’t get scroogled. Sigh.
Either way, the conclusion is the same. Before asserting that others don’t understand the blackbody curve, Joe should invest some time learning to understand it himself.
rgb
Planck’s Law is not the GHE. If you have the frequency spectrum you can get the temperature; if you have the temperature you can get the frequency spectrum. No need to deny algebra.
Radiation trapped inside a cavity does not heat up its own source or increase is frequency spectrum and hence its temperature. To deny this is to deny the derivation of quantum mechanics, let alone thermodynamics. Read up on the development of Planck’s Law. Copying it from Wikipedia and writing it here counts for squat.
Why do you keep repeating this? What is the relevance of this statement to the consideration of the Earth, poised between the hot Sun and the 3 K perfect absorber sky? Can you say “straw man”?
Instead of yammering (incorrectly) about blackbody radiation from a cavity, how about considering the radiative cooling of a heated body suspended INSIDE an effectively infinite, near-zero-temperature cavity that absorbs for all practical purposes 100% of the radiation emitted into it? How about considering the Stefan-Boltzmann law and pyrometry as an empirical practice based quite accurately on Stefan-Boltzmann and Planck’s Law? Then how about thinking about interpreting actual spectrographs?
But no, straw men are so much easier to win an argument with. For one thing, you don’t actually have to work through the non-equilibrium dynamics of an open system, you can just spout irrelevancies from equilibrium thermodynamics.
rgb
RGB you’re not even talking about anything relevant now. Changing goal posts? A spectrum is not evidence of the GHE. Partial return of radiation would be an approximation to 100% return, the best case scenario, which just creates a blackbody spectrum, and doesn’t heat itself up. Planck’s Law and the Stefan-Boltzmann Law which results from it aren’t the GHE. No need to get upset.
Which is warmer, a heated body in a cavity with perfectly absorptive walls at 3 K (no return) or a heated body in a cavity with walls maintained at any intermediary temperatures? No need to get upset, but there is a wee bit of a need to not propose irrelevant models. The Earth’s surface isn’t in a 100% return cavity, in the absence of an atmosphere it would be in a (nearly) 0% return cavity. The atmosphere acts like a partial return cavity at a finite, much warmer temperature, in certain bands of frequencies. This raises the temperature compared to what it would be in the 3K cavity of outer space alone.
This is, once again, so bone simple I am truly amazed that anybody could actually argue about it. Putting any matter whatsoever in between the sun-warmed Earth’s surface and outer space would raise the surface’s mean temperature compared to exposure directly to the 3 K outer space. Putting an opaque absorber gas that returns a fair bit of the outgoing radiation in at least certain bands that are right in the middle of the blackbody curve associated with the radiating surface temperature raises it a nontrivial amount.
But then, you don’t appreciate the tuning fork argument you yourself raised, even though you can hear the difference in sound intensity at the source when a fraction of the outgoing radiation is returned. You don’t seem to be able to comprehend simple energy conservation.
rgb
Joe, rgb
Maybe this will help the discussion (or maybe not, we’ll see).
I’ve been studying nightly cooling (you can follow the link in my name, or the links I’ve posted in a number of my replies). The temperature record shows that it cools with a close approximation the same amount temperatures go up the preceding day.
This led me to getting an IR thermometer and measuring the temp of the zenith in IR. I believe the physics of Co2 GHG’s, but I also know that it doesn’t show up in the nightly cooling record.
What I found is that on a clear sky 35F day, the zenith measured ~-41F. At 35F, there is minimal water vapor, and from searching the web many such ir zenith measurements are within 10-20 degrees of air temp. I suspect that water vapor is the reason it’s so much warmer. Based on the nightly cooling records, this makes me think temperatures are self regulated by water vapor, and while a doubling of Co2 might raise temps by ~1.1C, it would be the zenith temp changing, not air temps.
I think this provides a reasonable explanation of measurements with the physics of GHG. And proves there is no dangerous AGW.
RGB you’re still getting upset. Radiation trapped inside a cavity doesn’t increase its own frequency spectrum or increase the temperature of its source. It creates a blackbody spectrum. Read up on Planck and the origin of quantum mechanics. No one ever got warm by standing in front of a mirror.
Joseph,
When reflective materials are used for insulation, it surely helps keep them warm.
RGB you’re still getting upset. Radiation trapped inside a cavity doesn’t increase its own frequency spectrum or increase the temperature of its source. It creates a blackbody spectrum. Read up on Planck and the origin of quantum mechanics. No one ever got warm by standing in front of a mirror.
with a steady input of power 
.
. We can compute this from the Stefan-Boltzmann equation:
is the surface area of the spherical object 
.
and the perfect absorber cavity will cause its temperature to rise relative to the thermal equilibrium 
established in c). Putting a perfect optical reflector in between it would reflect 100% of the energy being radiated by 
and would cause its temperature to increase without bound as this effectively puts it into an adiabatic state with a finite power input.
and emissivity 
, finding 
is a one line exercise in algebra. Obstructing/reflecting any of the radiation outflow from 
relative to a surrounding 3 K blackbody cavity, which is where true equilibrium lies will cause the temperature of 
to rise. This includes the case where the interpolated material heats up BECAUSE of the radiation it absorbs en route to the surrounding perfect radiative absorber — the specific case of the GHE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_blanket
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiant_barrier
Or, perhaps they did, and do all the time. In fact, if you hold a sheet of aluminum foil up in front of your face, you can feel the reflected radiation as it causes your skin temperature to slightly increase.
You might want to think about the Poynting vector and conservation of energy and power flow and all that before making silly statements.
But let me be precise and clear.
a) Given a spherical object
b) Inside a perfect absorber cavity (one that does not return any radiation at all, where outer space is a damn good approximation at black sky with a 3K blackbody temperature).
c) It will achieve thermal equilibrium when the total power flux of thermal/blackbody radiation balances
where
d) Putting any matter whatsoever at any higher temperature between the object
Again, simple energy conservation. Given
The problem with your harping on blackbody cavities is that they are adiabatically isolated systems in thermal equilibrium. They have no power source. The Earth is not a blackbody cavity — it has multiple power sources (the sun, tides, internal nuclear heating). Nor is it in thermal equilibrium — it is inside a Universe-sized “blackbody cavity” with equilibrium radiation at three degrees Kelvin, the temperature the Earth would eventually have without heating.
rgb
Hi Bart: You wrote:
“That predictor of temperatures can be formulated essentially uncoupled from CO2, so you can neglect that in coming up with it. How do I know this? Because this regression shows that the temperature series for the past century+ has been essentially a constant rate trend plus an approximately 60 year cyclic phenomenon, and it has not deviated from that pattern even as CO2 levels have increased markedly. In fact, you can use that trend + ~60 year cycle as a simple model to predict temperatures in the years ahead. I am willing to wager big bucks (to someone I know well and trust, so please do not apply, any strangers reading this) that it will do a fairly good job of doing so.”
So you are saying that the equation predicted flat temperatures for the past 15 years? In other words, CO2 drove the temperatures flat from 1998, but upwards before that period?
Hi Robert (rgb),
I realised many months ago that trying to reason with Joe Postma is as fruitful as trying to reason with a drunk. His superiority complex prohibits acceptance that he is wrong.
Dr. David Weston Allen and you too have had similar experiences trying to debate with Joe and his fellow “Slayers” at PSI. It’s like talking to a wall.
Keep up the good work.
Best regards, Pete Ridley
So you are saying that the equation predicted flat temperatures for the past 15 years? In other words, CO2 drove the temperatures flat from 1998, but upwards before that period?
And downward before that. And upward before that. Hell, you can go back over the last million years and CO_2 is solely responsible for all of the ups and downs.
Isn’t it?
rgb
Micro: “When reflective materials are used for insulation, it surely helps keep them warm.”
Keeping them warm is not the GHE. A space blanket doesn’t heat you when you stand beside it, only when you’re wrapped in it. It does the same thing as a blanket but even better because it is impermeable.
RBG, The radiation from an ice cube does not warm you up or make you hotter. Please stop denying the origin of quantum theory, and thinking that just because something has a spectrum, it must be heating you up. Stand in front of a mirror and watch nothing happen to your skin temperature. Radiation trapped inside a cavity or returned from the source does not heat the source up some more. Stating the S-B Equation doesn’t change that – Planck’s Law and the S-B Law which comes from it do not say that trapped radiation causes an increase in its own frequency distribution and temperature.
RBG: “you can go back over the last million years and CO_2 is solely responsible for all of the ups and downs”
Complete fraud. The up and down of CO2 was caused BY the up and down of temperature. Everyone knows that CO2 lags temperature and therefore isn’t a cause to temperature. Read Bart’s recent posts. There are still people who believe Al Gore? Amazing.
RGB: “you can go back over the last million years and CO_2 is solely responsible for all of the ups and downs.”
There are still people who believe Al Gore? It was *temperature* that was responsible for the ups and downs of CO2. Read Bart’s recent posts up the line. Everyone knows that CO2 lagged temperature for those last million years and therefore CO2 wasn’t cause of anything.
@Joseph E Postma says:
March 11, 2013 at 5:46 pm
“RBG, The radiation from an ice cube does not warm you up or make you hotter. ”
I would have to agree… otherwise, one could trap a photon of light in a mirrored room and the room would heat up with all that reflected energy… then we could harness all that free energy from time to time.
I think what entices the mindset is that a relatively warm object next to a mass warmer than absolute zero but cooler than the relatively warm object would cool less than if the relatively warm object were near a mass at absolute zero. This is true if all else were equal. Some people see that cooler object as an energy source, when in fact it is not.
@Mario
“I think what entices the mindset is that a relatively warm object next to a mass warmer than absolute zero but cooler than the relatively warm object would cool less than if the relatively warm object were near a mass at absolute zero.”
This is fact.
“Some people see that cooler object as an energy source, when in fact it is not.”
This is wrong. SB is calculated based on degrees K, because everything above 0K gives off energy.
Dr. David Weston Allen and you too have had similar experiences trying to debate with Joe and his fellow “Slayers” at PSI. It’s like talking to a wall.
Ahhh, Joe is relatively benign. He actually knows some physics, he just doesn’t know it very well and isn’t thinking things like detailed balance in energy flow through, and he sadly accepts the word of some other slayers that the asserted GHE is somehow heat flowing from a cold equilibrium reservoir to warm a hot equilibrium reservoir (not true — the “hot reservoir” is being actively heated, and cold materials are perfectly capable of impeding the flow of heat in any version of the heat equation or analysis of energy flow).
No, if you want the true Horror, the Horror, have a conversation with or visit the website of FauxScienceSlayer above. A.K.A. Joseph A. Olson. There you will learn, oh, so many things. He seems to have laid off his assertion that thermonuclear fusion in the Earth’s crust is powering AGW, and is instead back onto fission. Oh, wait, no he hasn’t:
“What force causes these huge climate change cycles ? There is an apparent correlation with alignments of Jupiter and Neptune. At certain points in their orbits, these planets are closest to Earth when the gravity is attractive and then suddenly at passing, the gravity pulls the crust in the opposite direction. This additional shock wave tumbles the Uranium nodules setting off spontaneous natural nuclear explosions (see Oklo). Occasionally there is also a large deposit of Lithium to create a fission-fusion explosion like our 1952 Hydrogen bomb (see Teller-Ulam).”
Someday Olson should actually amuse himself by computing just how much the awesome gravitation of Jupiter and Neptune “suddenly, at passing” pulls the crust in the opposite direction. For a value of suddenly that, well, isn’t. But how can one even begin to educate such a complete ass? Point out that the Earth is in free fall with respect to all of the gravitational influences at its location in space, and that they act more or less identically on the whole object? Point out that the direct gravitational force of attraction of Jupiter alone is tiny indeed, and that the only thing that exerts a differential force is Jupiter’s tide, which is tiny over another power of the distance in between? Point out that Neptune is really, really far away in addition to not being all that big, so that its direct gravitational force is really, really tiny, and its tidal differential so tiny that I doubt we could measure it (or, frankly, Jupiter’s tidal differential) with our most sensitive instrumentation?
So fixing his knowledge of physics or the ability to do simple arithmetic isn’t going to happen, and pointing out summary articles such as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient
isn’t good enough for him. If you read other items on his website, where he speaks freely about “the Godel metric” and the supposed “shadow government” that really runs things, and keeps the truth about the possibility of time travel (no, I’m not making this up) from the rest of us all to cover up the real reason for the red shift, which (in case you weren’t aware of it) is not the Big Bang — it’s all part of a huge government conspiracy, the same one that backs climate science and pretty much any other commonly accepted scientific knowledge that he doesn’t “like”. So when you read a table of things like the concentration of radioactives inside the Earth and their energy production per kilogram (order of a trillionth of a watt), when you read that 44 TW is being transported from the interior to the surface every day (which is just under 0.1 W/m^2, BTW, a piece of arithmetic JAO seems to get wrong elsewhere in the piece I’m quoting, and as such 0.03% of the roughly 300 watts/m^2 associated with insolation), this is all wildly wrong! What he fails to appreciate is that even if it were low by a factor of 3 (which it’s suspect it is not) it would still be only 0.3 W/m^2 compared to 300, a whole 0.1%, and that this number is not meaningfully variable as the heat equation itself smooths out any variations caused by — ahem — tidal interactions with Jupiter and Neptune that make Uranium nodules tumble together to set off thermonuclear explosions of Lithium inside of the Earth.
No, the sad thing is that Joe is actually too smart to hang out with that crowd — they seem to be rather a bunch of odd bedfellows where it is OK to stand up next to a complete crank as long as it is in a good, religious cause. I expect that one day he will wake up, read through all of Olson’s website, actually get a (dare I say it) book or two on radiative physics, ideally including Petty, remind himself about the Poynting vector and the heat equation, smack himself in the forehead and say “what WAS I THINKING” and move on. Another person I feel sorry for — a bit — is Pierre Latour, who also manages to completely ignore Mr. Sun and Mr. Night Sky when reproducing figures from elementary thermo texts involving passive thermal reservoirs to try to prove the CO_2 cannot cause the surface of the Earth to warm simply by impeding the output flow of heat to 3 K outer space that was originally received from a far, far, hotter source — the Sun. No laws of thermodynamics are harmed by this process, I promise.
But you know all that — I think you’re on that damn list that Roger Taguchi set up (and that I VERY briefly participated in, before realizing that that way lies madness). Judith Curry’s remark seems most apropos:
“If you’ve followed the Skydragon threads, you can imagine the obtuseness, false accusations, deliberate misrepresentations, sophistry etc. that dominated these emails.”
I don’t think Joe is dishonest, merely (badly) mistaken. But I can’t figure out WHAT Olson is (or rather, I can but it’s rude to say it), and I’ve had spectacular offline discussions with other slayers as well. No crank theory is too cranky to be adulated as long as it opposes the GHE, no argument however cogent in support of the GHE is ever listened to and taken seriously.
This is the great tragedy of climate science. It has become the primary battlefield of a modern religious war, one that (like the great religious wars of the past) is being used primarily to extort wealth and power from a populace literally incapable of actually following and working through the many arguments themselves. I’m a mathematician, physicist, statistician and computer modeler and work pretty hard on this stuff as one of my primary hobbies, as it were, and I find it difficult (in part because even the sources of data are now corrupt, where they are openly available at all, and because it seems as though everybody who works in climate science got there somehow without ever taking a course in even elementary statistics and who have never heard of error bars). Pity the poor politician or person in the street whose idea of difficult math was high school algebra and who has, therefore, no idea how difficult the physics problem the GCMs are attempting to solve is. Pity the poor person who has never heard of confirmation bias, data dredging, or all of the myriad other ways to lie with numbers and graphs and statements drawn only from selected parts of the big picture.
Periodically I vow not to get drawn back into a pointless discussion, because it is precisely as fruitless as trying to discuss Noah’s Ark with a Biblically Inerrant Conservative Christian — no little thing like mathematics or common sense is going to get in the way of religious belief. But hell, I’m a wild-eyed optimist, and think that if only I explain things just right…
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