Notes on the February Global Temperature Anomaly

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.
Obviously I needed to put a tag in front of my comment. Let me remind you that I’m a skeptic. This was a sarcastic joke.
But by all means, take it seriously.
Sheesh.
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“Remove the hole, and the temperature in the cavity will diverge as its enthalpy content increases without bound”
If this occurred, we could smelt steel with a 100W light bulb. It doesn’t occur.

Joseph E Postma says:
March 12, 2013 at 10:47 am
“The shell just comes to the same temperature as the source, and then the shell emits the energy of the source. It doesn’t require the source getting hotter.”
I think that would not be an equilibrium condition, because the shell has greater than twice the surface area of the planet, as it has an inside, and an outside. If we assume the shell is transparent to incoming radiation, and opaque to outgoing radiation, then we can effectively move the energy source inside the planet without changing the result, and the problem becomes analogous to Willis’ “Steel Greenhouse”. I wrote up the math for equilibrium conditions here.
The final formula I came up with was this:

T_planet_with_shell = T_planet_without_shell * ( 1 + (R_inner/R_outer)^2)^0.25

where the “T” variables are surface temperatures and R_inner and R_outer are the inner and outer radius of the shell. In equilibrium, the temperature of the shell is less than the temperature of the planet, and net energy is flowing outward, so there is no contradiction of the laws of thermodynamics. But, there was a very interesting thing about this formula…
Let

R0 = f*R_inner + (1-f)*R_outer

where f is a number between 0 and 1. Then, if the depth “d” is d = R_outer – R_inner,

T_planet_with_shell = T_planet_without_shell * ( 1 + ((R0-(1-f)*d)/(R0+f*d))^2)^0.25

The partial derivative of this with respect to d is negative, i.e., locally, the surface temperature decreases as the thickness of the shell increases, and this holds for any R0 defined by the relationship above, i.e., for any situation in which there is a constant radius which remains inside the shell as it expands.
This is very simplistic, of course, but it illustrates one of the ways in which a counter-intuitive result, local surface cooling the in face of increasing GHG, can come about. It does not contradict the GHE – the surface temperature is always greater than it would be without the GHG – but, there can be conditions in which incremental increase in concentration can produce cooling.
My advice is: assault the weak points in the fortification. If you mass your forces where the walls are thickest, you are going to suffer heavy losses, and probably fail to take the castle. Assaulting the basic so-called “greenhouse” effect is sort of like carrying pictures of Chairman Mao – you ain’t gonna’ make it with anyone anyhow. At least until you have solid evidence to back up the claim that it does not exist at all.

Joseph E Postma says:
March 12, 2013 at 12:40 pm
My comments are disappearing, too. Must be something with the site. I just wait, though, and they eventually appear.
I think Dr. Brown’s earlier analogy was very effective. When you put on a coat in cold weather, the coat doesn’t heat you up, your internal heat mechanisms do. All the coat does is inhibit the convective loss of that heat. Similarly, here, the shell does not warm the planet, it just inhibits the radiative loss of heat.
I don’t know if it can be made any simpler than that. If you still disagree, we will just have to agree to disagree.

I do not agree that in the case of the PSI founding members “ .. It has become the primary battlefield of a modern religious war .. ”.
Even in the case of founding members, I’d probably exclude Tim Ball from this list. I actually find a lot of his writing on this issue to be well informed and quite compelling, in general agreement with my own opinions. But Dr. Ball doesn’t deny the existence of the GHE at all, he merely argues — correctly IMO — that we cannot naively claim that we understand all of the nonlinear and nontrivial feedbacks associated with the climate system well enough to assert that a change in CO_2 concentration will lead to any particular change in global average temperature or heat distribution. In my own opinion the null hypothesis here is the roughly 1-1.5 C expected from e.g. doubling CO_2 alone without any feedback at all, and the honest truth is that we have no real idea (yet) of the feedbacks sufficient to even give us a certain prediction of their sign. The last fifteen years of increasing divergence between UAH or even GISS from the rising CO_2 levels is not strong evidence for large positive feedback, to say the least.
BTW, I hope that you are prepared to contribute to the exchanges that I copied you on today about the extent of that “greenhouse effect” which Joe Postma and associates at PSI deny the existence of. Contrary to what the power-hungry, the UN, the politicnas, the environmental activists and th erenewable energy industry would have us believe, the science is far from settled and the debate is far from over.
To a limited extent, sure. As I commented in reply to the email, I’m already “on” the list of exchanges within this group, although I’m still not convinced that there is any real point to it all. IIRC Grant Petty tried to push the boulder over that hill for quite some time and finally gave up. Where the guru cannot succeed, how can then the chela? I can’t even get Joe Postma — who as I said is I think both honest and moderately educated — to understand the difference between a classical passive black body cavity at a fixed, fully equilibrated temperature with a tiny hole and an isolated actively heated spherical body in dynamical equilibrium with a “black body” perfect absorber Universe. Nor can I get him to buy or work through Petty’s book on his own, although the physics in it is pretty straightforward.
The problem is that I’m not a believer in grand conspiracies. Never explain by a grand conspiracy what is adequately explained by sheer human greed and incompetence — a contemporary version of Ockham’s razor. In the end, though, science does not care about belief, greed, or even incompetence. If Hansen himself is right, and we’re going to experience 5 meter SLR over the next 80 years and 3-5 C of temperature increase, my beliefs about this will not change the facts. If Hansen is wrong and temperatures go up only 1 C, or remain about the same, or go down some, well, neither his beliefs nor mine will change that.
In the meantime, it seems pretty harmless to let the null hypothesis stand, at least compared to the enormous cost of taking the wrong action at this time. SLR is an order of magnitude shy of the rate needed for Hansen’s publicly stated belief to be correct. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, only that there isn’t any believable evidence that he’s right, yet. The pattern of global temperature change — even allowing for what a cynic might call deliberate thumbs on the scales — is not one that can easily be explained by the anthropogenic CO_2 hypothesis, where paradoxically there has been no warming at all since slightly before the 2001 events that led to Mann’s elevation from unheard of nobody to the prophet of the age, because he finally gave them the desired MWP-free prophecy where perhaps more honest scientists could not or would not or at the very least did not. The last 15 or 16 years are not disproof of the CAGW hypothesis, but they are not strong evidence in favor of it, either. The good news, then, is that there is no reason to panic, no reason to spend order of a trillion dollars on measures that even the proponents of those measures agree will not make a whit of difference in the outcome as things stand. We can afford to wait and see, and in the meantime think up some sort of measures that might actually work — such as building nuclear power plants wholesale, developing LFTR, and so on — in the event that SLR suddenly does jump up to the inch plus per year necessary to fuel Hansen’s “overheated” doomsday scenario.
And if this never happens? Perhaps we can use some of the trillions of dollars saved to fix the economic, social and education problems of the poorest people in the world and usher in a era of peace and globe-spanning civilization. Right now, we don’t have to wait for 2100 for a catastrophe. By diverting hundreds of billions of elective dollars towards measures that even on paper are totally inadequate to prevent a highly uncertain disaster, we are guaranteeing a catastrophe right now whose price will be paid, as usual, by the poorest people in the world.
Energy is civilization. By energy standards, well over half the people of the world are essentially uncivilized, still living in 18th or 19th century levels of poverty and misery. This is the missing half of the political dialogue. The countries that are being played for suckers are the countries that can least afford it, countries where people already go to be every night with the sun because they have no electrical lights, where they wash clothes by hand as they lack washing machines, where they cook on animal dung as they lack the energy resources and economy that might enable them to cook on an electrical or natural gas stove instead. People are starving and dying every day because there is no medicine, no refrigeration for medicine or food, no electricity, no energy-based transportation that can carry the simplest necessities of civilization from the industrial nations where these things are all abundant and cheap (because energy is abundant and cheap) to where they are infinitely expensive by the only standard that matters — a complete dearth, at any price anyone can afford.
In the meantime, nobody alive seems to have learned anything from the story of Chicken Little, or any of the other cautionary folk tales that once constituted a fund of simple wisdom for our species. The flames of religious passion that once might have been devoted to Jesus, or Allah, or Krishna, are now diverted towards Saving the Environment, always in capital letters, where the unwritten extreme of saving the environment is nothing less than the extinction of (most of) humanity, because otherwise we live in it and leave our mark. In defense of the Gods, no lie, no misstatement, no overstatement of the certainty of our knowledge is too much because the cause itself is pure, because the ends justify any means, especially if we can arrange for the 3/4 of humanity we wish to slate for extinction to be the other 3/4, the one that doesn’t include ourselves, our friends, our children, our loved ones. O Lord, inflict on the world a universal plague to save the world from us only — Lord, would you really mind inflicting the plague on everybody else?
In the teeth of this sort of passion — or the equally religious passion of the Other Side, the side that is certain that it is impossible for catastrophic warming to occur no matter what we do, that the environment can recover from any shock humans inflict on it and if it doesn’t, screw it, it is our environment to screw up as we like — where can mere common sense reside? The “Show Me” sort of mind that doesn’t listen to one-sided presentations of the evidence, that remains dubious that asserting that a “super storm” is caused by climate change means that that storm was in any way whatsoever connected to climate change, or that climate change (to the extent that the climate is always changing!) is necessarily connected to human activity — this sort of mind is somewhat rare today. There is too much to know, it is too difficult to form a considered, well-informed judgment about things like the climate, so if Hansen speaketh, who will gainsay him? Especially if he partners with many who would profit from he prophecy… because there is, indeed, a sucker born every minute, and two to take him.
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The shell and planet would just come to the same temperature.
Now we are getting somewhere, as this is simply incorrect. The shell is just a shell. It radiates blackbody radiation both inside and outside, as it has no idea what is the inside and what is the outside — those are human assignments. Its radiation can be measured. In dynamic equilibrium, it has a larger surface area than the planet. It must lose the power P in the outward direction only. The expression for dynamical thermal equilibrium for a closed spherical surface is:

(or do you disagree with the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, in which case you have rejected basic physics and you are right, we’ll have to agree to disagree). A blackbody shell with unit emissivity being uniformly heated at a rate placed in empty space so that energy radiated outwards is lost at integrated rate when the shell is in equilibrium well be at temperature:

Period. Otherwise it won’t be in detailed balance. Surely you agree?
But the planet inside the shell will not be at this temperature. First of all, its equilibrium temperature in the absence of the shell would be higher than the temperature of the shell, as it has to lose the same power but through a smaller surface. Before, it was surrounded by a perfect absorber at 3 K, so basically every outgoing photon was lost to infinity. Now, however, it is surrounded by a shell of matter only a bit cooler than it would have been without it. This shell radiates just as much power back into the cavity containing the central sphere as it radiates outward, in the limit of a very thin shell. After all, its temperature is the same (it is thin) and the inner and outer surface areas are the same.
The inner sphere is now a complete distinct problem in heat flow. Now you have a sphere of radius (say) being heated at a constant rate surrounded by a perfect blackbody shell at radius (say) which is in turn surrounded by outer space, effectively a 3 K perfect absorber, a photonic roach motel where photons check in but don’t check out, one way ticket.
Photons on the inside do not have a one way ticket. They are emitted by the central sphere, absorbed by the shell, and have roughly an even chance of being reradiated back inside the cavity as outside (and lost). Of the photons that are reradiated back into the cavity, some of them miss the central sphere and are absorbed again by some other part of the shell, others hit the central sphere and constitute an additional source of backradiated power that has to be lost by that sphere in equilibrium.
The rate at which the inner sphere loses energy is completely independent of whether or not it is in a cavity. It depends only on Stefan-Boltzman and hence , , its area and its temperature. With unit emissivity it absorbs all photons incident on it, and they add to the net power it must reject to remain in dynamical equilibrium. Its temperature therefore rises, because has gone up, but everything else is unchanged.
You actually understand this perfectly well now. If you beamed a laser at the central sphere to deliver the power to it in the first place (and the sphere were a good conductor so it remained at a reasonably uniform surface temperature) it wouldn’t change from S-B above. If you increased the laser power to , all that would do is increases — the sphere doesn’t know anything about the spectrum or origin of photons incident on its surface, it just absorbs 100% of them because its emissivity is one (it is dead, flat black). Similarly it doesn’t know or care if some of the photons delivering power to it are energy it gave off before that was absorbed by the shell and partially reradiated back to fall on the sphere once again. All it knows is that the total power it has to reject in equilibrium is now larger.
There are a number of other ways of working through the logic and the heat flow, and absolutely all of them will yield the same result — the inner, uniformly heated sphere will get warmer when it is surrounded by ANY sphere at ANY radius that is warmer than 3 K, compared to its temperature when surrounded by a 3 K perfect absorber at “infinity”.
This must be so — if you think about it — so that the second law of thermodynamics can be satisfied. The net rate of radiative heat flow between two reservoirs has to be a function of the temperature difference, all other things being equal. In particular, it has to vanish when the two reservoirs are at the same temperature, and go from hotter to cooler where either reservoir could be the hotter or cooler one. Clearly to at least a first approximation, the rate of heat flow has to be proportional to the temperature difference between the two reservoirs and has to be directed from hotter to colder.
However, both reservoirs radiate like blackbodies. There is always radiation going in both directions. The net transfer above is a question of detailed balance between the two. Neither reservoir knows what the other one is doing, it just receives the radiation it gives off and uses it as part of its dynamical heat budget, warming and cooling until the net radiation rate matches the input power and detailed balance is achieved.
Hence we can conclude that — just as is the case for the basic heat equation and heat conductivity — interpolating matter of any sort at (necessarily) intermediate temperatures between two reservoirs alters the relative rates of heat flow. You acknowledge that wrapping a coat around a heat source interpolated between that heat source and a surrounding cold reservoir warms the inside of the coat and causes the dynamic equilibrium temperature of the heat source to go up (which is why we insulate our houses and our bodies). Wrapping any sort of barrier around a heat source being cooled only via radiation to a colder reservoir causes that barrier to attain an intermediate temperature and causes the heat source’s temperature to go up to maintain the requisite level of net heat transfer.
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