Heh. In response to a ridiculous claim making the rounds (I get comment bombed at WUWT daily with that nonsense) which I debunked here: A misinterpreted claim about a NASA press release, CO2, solar flares, and the thermosphere is making the rounds
Dr. Roy Spencer employs some power visual satire, that has truth in it. He writes:
How Can Home Insulation Keep Your House Warmer, When It Cools Your House?!
<sarc> There is an obvious conspiracy from the HVAC and home repair industry, who for years have been telling us to add more insulation to our homes to keep them warmer in winter.
But we all know, from basic thermodynamics, that since insulation conducts heat from the warm interior to the cold outside, it actually COOLS the house.
Go read his entire essay here. <Sarc> on, Roy!
UPDATE: Even Monckton thinks these ideas promoted by slayers/principia/O’Sullivan are ridiculous:
Reply to John O’Sullivan:
One John O’Sullivan has written me a confused and scientifically illiterate “open letter” in which he describes me as a “greenhouse gas promoter”. I do not promote greenhouse gases.
He says I have “carefully styled [my]self ‘science adviser’ to Margaret Thatcher. Others, not I, have used that term. For four years I advised the Prime Minister on various policy matters, including science.
He says I was wrong to say in 1986 that added CO2 in the air would cause some warming. Since 1986 there has been some warming. Some of it may have been caused by CO2.
He says a paper by me admits the “tell-tale greenhouse-effect ‘hot spot’ in the atmosphere isn’t there”. The “hot spot”, which I named, ought to be there whatever the cause of the warming. The IPCC was wrong to assert that it would only arise from greenhouse warming. Its absence indicates either that there has been no warming (confirming the past two decades’ temperature records) or that tropical surface temperatures are inadequately measured.
He misrepresents Professor Richard Lindzen and Dr. Roy Spencer by a series of crude over-simplifications. If he has concerns about their results, he should address his concerns to them, not to me.
He invites me to “throw out” my “shredded blanket effect” of greenhouse gases that “traps” heat. It is Al Gore, not I, who talks of a “blanket” that “traps” heat. Interaction of greenhouse gases with photons at certain absorption wavelengths induces a quantum resonance in the gas molecules, emitting heat directly. It is more like turning on a tiny radiator than trapping heat with a blanket. Therefore, he is wrong to describe CO2 as a “coolant” with respect to global temperature.
He invites me to explain why Al Gore faked a televised experiment. That is a question for Mr. Gore.
He says I am wrong to assert that blackbodies have albedo. Here, he confuses two distinct methods of radiative transfer at a surface: absorption/emission (in which the Earth is a near-blackbody, displacing incoming radiance to the near-infrared in accordance with Wien’s law), and reflection (by which clouds and ice reflect the Sun’s radiance without displacing its incoming wavelengths).
He implicitly attributes Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 speech to the Royal Society about global warming to me. I had ceased to work with her in 1986.
He says that if I checked my history I should discover that it was not until 1981 that scientists were seriously considering CO2’s impact on climate. However, Joseph Fourier had posited the greenhouse effect some 200 years previously; Tyndale had measured the greenhouse effect of various gases at the Royal Institution in London in 1859; Arrhenius had predicted in 1896 that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause 4-8 K warming, and had revised this estimate to 1.6 K in 1906; Callender had sounded a strong note of alarm in 1938; and numerous scientists, including Manabe&Wetherald (1976) had attempted to determine climate sensitivity before Hansen’s 1981 paper.
He says, with characteristic snide offensiveness, that I “crassly” attribute the “heat-trapping properties of latent heat to a trace gas that is a perfect energy emitter”. On the contrary: in its absorption bands, CO2 absorbs the energy of a photon and emits heat by quantum resonance.
He says the American Meteorological Society found in 1951 that all the long-wave radiation that might otherwise have been absorbed by CO2 was “already absorbed by water vapor”. It is now known that, though that is largely true for the lower troposphere, it is often false for the upper.
The series of elementary errors he here perpetrates, delivered with an unbecoming, cranky arrogance, indicates the need for considerable elementary education on his part. I refer him to Dr. Spencer’s excellent plain-English account of how we know there is a greenhouse effect.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (April 18, 2013)
joeldshore says:
April 25, 2013 at 12:29 pm
“The reason that we are not so calm and kind is we have been round and round on this beforeave been round and round on this before
(e.g., a couple years ago on Judith Curry’s blog) and I
really think at this point, you should know better.
You either have one heck of a monstrous mental block or you really do understand but have,
for some bizarre reason, decided that you would rather engage in sophistry.
Either way, it is not a pretty sight.”
Sir, it´s your comment that is not a pretty sight.
The fact that you “have been round and round on this before” does not give you the right to answer with denigrating comments.
Besides, instead of putting up strawmen and attacking them, why don´t you go to his site and read the post
“The Fraud of the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect Part 2: Moving to Reality”.
Anthony: Do you employ different mod standards depending upon whom is being denigrated?
Period.
HIGH FIVE to Joel! 🙂
We each independently came up with the same results for the heat flow for multilayer shells with adjustable emissivity (although I admit I simply went to Wikipedia and used their result for emissivities other than 1, rather than re-deriving it myself).
dbstealey says:
That was good for a laugh! Do you really have that little self-awareness as to be deluded into thinking that your conclusions are based on empirical measurements? No they are not…They are dictated by your ideology, which is why they are in such stark contrast to the conclusions of respected scientific authorities like the National Academy of Sciences, which are able to more objectively look at the empirical evidence.
CEH says:
What strawman have I put up? Postma clearly says that the correct temperature no-greenhouse temperature to compare to is +49degC. Where is the strawman? I use that temperature and show that assuming an average temperature of that on the Earth does not even come close to giving radiative balance. If you use the accepted no-greenhouse temperature of -15degC, you do get radiative balance.
All his day-side, night-side stuff is just a distraction. Radiative balance only constrains the average surface temperature…It does not have much to say about diurnal or spatial temperature distributions, which are determined by other issues (thermal inertia, length of the day, …)
CEH says: “why don´t you go to his site and read the post
“The Fraud of the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect Part 2: Moving to Reality”.
Joe Postma makes numerous basic physics and mathematics errors on his blog. In that particular post, there are two primary errors — one rather obvious and one rather subtle.
OBVIOUS: He correctly deduces that sunlight spread out over the entire sphere would be 240 W/m^2, or an effective blackbody temperature of 255 K = -18 C. This result is widely quoted and widely known. He then tries to spread out the sunlight over only 1/2 of the sphere. But instead of simply doubling the intensity of the sunlight to 480 W/m^2 (30 C), he increases in by a factor of 4/pi to 611 W/m^2 (49 C). Basically, he is calculating the results only for the warmest location — the equator — rather than the whole sphere.
SUBTLE: His results require that the sunny side of the sphere has a low heat capacity so that the planet will warm up quickly toward the daytime equilibrium temperatures he calculates. But then he requires that the night side has a large heat capacity so that the planet cools slowly. This is not easy to show without much more detailed calculations, so it is easy to gloss over. Unless you are willing to do a detailed calculation (ie either an actual integration or a numerical integration using some reasonable estimates for heat capacity), this error will not be easy to spot.
(It is interesting to note that this error is even hinted at in his drawing. The night side gets cooler from dusk to dawn, but the day side does not get warmer from dawn to dusk. Right at “dawn” the temperature is implied to jump up to a warm value immediately — the same temperature it is at dusk.)
Joel Shore says
“You have the perfect unfalsifiable religion:”
Which is a strange claim for an advocate of the theory of catastrophic consequences for mankind if more CO2 enters the atmosphere.
Indeed the ‘science’ behind AGW theory is quite happy to accept the theory predicts colder weather,warmer weather,wetter weather,dryer weather and so on .
Nothing can contradict the IPCC religion.
This was the very reason that Ivar Giaever ( Nobel Prize in Physics) cited when he resigned from the APS.
He said that the IPCC promoted pseudoscience because it could not be tested within the framework of science.
Perhaps Archbishop Joel could provide us with a test that would falsify the theory of the CO2 driven Greenhouse Effect.
I bet he cant!
Bryan:
re your post at April 28, 2013 at 3:04 pm .
I make this suggestion as a sincere kindness.
Please, for your own benefit, apply some introspection.
Yes, Joel Shore is a deluded fanatical AGW proponent.
But that does not justify you being a deluded AGW opponent.
The radiative physics is clear, and Shore is right about that while you are wrong.
The empirical data is also clear and Shore is wrong about that while you are right.
The empirical data shows the feedbacks in the climate system are negative so AGW cannot be a sufficiently large effect for it to be discernible from natural climate variability. Simply, AGW is not a problem and it cannot be a problem, but that is because the climate system is as it is. It is not because radiative physics is fundamentally wrong.
I commend you to read my above post which you can jump to by use of this link
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/24/spencer-slays-with-sarcasm/#comment-1286437
Richard
joelshore says:
“…They are dictated by your ideology, which is why they are in such stark contrast to the conclusions of respected scientific authorities like the National Academy of Sciences…”
Ah. Yet another example of psychological projection by Joel Shore, with a dollop of Appeal to Authority.
The central fact remains: Planet Earth is mocking Joel Shore’s religious belief system: global temperatures continue to decline, even while CO2 continues to rise. Shore’s belief system is being falsified every day, and his response is to accuse truth-tellers of being ‘ideological’. As if.
The fact is that Lefitst ideology totally rules Joel Shore. Everything is political to him, so when the science proves he is wrong, his response is to turn the debate political. Sadly, he has a lot of company in his asinine beliefs. But the truth is coming out, proclaimed by the ultimate Authority — Planet Earth.
Who ya gonna believe? Planet Earth? Or Joel Shore?
I have actually had the pleasure of following the debate about the cooling effects of CO2 on the climate sceptics mailing list for many years, long before it ever became an issue in the popular press. Due to the long arguments pro and con there (including my own contributions) I can perhaps add a useful perspective to the debate.
It all started by someone asking the question: “how warm would a planet be WITH an atmosphere, but WITHOUT greenhouse gases?” (I think even Spencer has touched upon this question). I found a very surprising result. Radiative physics teaches us that without greenhouse gases the *surface* temperature of the earth would approach something close to a black body. However, the *atmosphere* would be much much warmer than today! Here is how the mechanism works:
1. During the day the hot solar heated surface would heat the air above through conduction. This would cause convection, transporting massive amounts of heat up into the atmosphere. In a greenhouse world this would have been radiated away into space, but without greenhouse gases there is very little radiation, and so the heat becomes trapped in the atmosphere.
2. During the night the radiating surface would cool the air above through conduction. This would NOT cause conduction because cool air does not rise. Therefore the cooling at night can only be transported upwards into the atmosphere through layer to layer conduction, which obviously is muc slower than convective heating.
3. The asymmetry between night time cooling and daytime heating would cause the atmosphere to heat dramatically, even though the average temperature on the surface would be that of a black body.
CONCLUSION: greenhouse gases warm the earth by cooling the atmosphere. The greenhouse gases cause the total amount of heat energy stored in the atmosphere to FALL, and radically changes the temperature profile of the atmosphere. Thus, we can think of greenhouse gases acting like a kind of heat engine, transporting heat from the top of atmosphere down to the surface. In this process of heating the surface, there is net energy loss to space (through radiation).
Onar Åm, I question your conclusions about an atmosphere without any GHGs (although at some lever this is a moot point since ALL known atmospheres in the solar system do indeed have radiative gases. There would also have to be no aerosols and no clouds)
1) Convection must be symmetric in the sense that rising gas in one place must be offset by falling gas in another. So for every place that warm ground is warming the cool atmosphere and causing it to rise, there is another place where the cool ground is cooling the warm descending air.
2) Convection tends to stop when the actual lapse rate gets smaller than the adiabatic lapse rate. If the atmosphere was “warm all the way up”, then convection would stop near the surface. This suggests that convection will not warm the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Only the very inefficient conductive warming could do this.
Throw in rotation and we have a very messy fluid dynamics problem. I don’t know the answer, but I suspect it is not as simple as the whole atmosphere being as warm as the warmest place on the surface (as I have heard people conclude). It is fun to think about though.
*************************************
I do agree with your main conclusion though …
“greenhouse gases warm the earth by cooling the atmosphere [in the upper troposphere in particular]. ” 🙂
Onar Åm: I agree that there are lots of strange things about the situation of absolutely no greenhouse gases that make it a sort of strange and singular limit, in many ways more complicated to think about than when you do have them! (There are also practical questions of how you remove all greenhouse gases since this removes clouds and that, plus the temperature changes, causes changes in albedo…and so on and so forth.)
However, these complications have no real bearing on the question of what the effect is of increases in greenhouse gases from our current state (despite the views of people like Konrad to the contrary).
Well, Richard S Courtney and I may disagree about just about everything (including what the empirical data show), but I agree with him that the question of what the feedbacks are and what the climate sensitivity is are at least the questions where there is still some room for legitimate scientific disagreements.
The arguments about the basic radiative physics (or…and here I know that he will disagree…the clear fact that the rise in CO2 is anthropogenic) just serve to make AGW skeptics look even worse to the scientific community as a whole than they already do, which is why some like Spencer try to hard to combat this blatant incorrect physics, to little avail with those committed to believing nonsense.
Onar Åm,
It’s an interesting thought experiment, that I’ve given some thought to myself.
It’s essentially the situation in the oceans, only inverted. Water near the poles cools, and sinks, which drives the convection cycle. Because there’s no way for the deep water to radiate to space, and it’s convectively stable with warm on top of cold, the deep water remains uniformly at the coldest surface temperature, until it rises to the surface where contact with the surface warms it. (It’s a bit more efficient because water is transparent,) The warm water then rises and flows across the surface back to the poles.
Likewise in a GHG-free atmosphere, the air would rise at the equator into a relatively warm atmosphere of nearly constant potential temperature, driving the convection cycle. It remains warm until it descends to the polar surface, where contact cools it, and it flows across the surface back to the equator.
The difference is that air is far more compressible. The adiabatic lapse rate in the oceans is about 0.1 C/km, and indeed the oceans warm about 0.4 C as you descend 4 km. (You could call it a sort of deep-ocean greenhouse effect. After all, liquid water is a ‘greenhouse’ material!) The adiabatic lapse rate in dry air would be around 10 C/km, and so the air would cool with altitude much as it does now. And warm as it descends, but only by as much as it cooled. The surface would be much colder on average, and less uniform equator-to-pole, and the atmosphere would be cold at altitude, more uniform equator-to-pole, but a lot warmer than you would expect given the coldness of the surface below it.
It’s an interesting thought experiment.
Kristian says (April 28, 2013 at 6:15 am): “Can anyone here provide me with a single physics textbook example (or better yet, an actual account of a controlled experiment conducted in a vacuum chamber) where it is shown, or even remotely discussed, that supplied with a constant energy input, the central sphere will heat up beyond the original input energy temperature with the shell in place around it?”
Such examples seem to be few and far between, but after a short search I found one that seems to come close (problem 7.12 on page 245):
http://books.google.com/books?id=J2KZq0e4lCIC&q=sphere+shield#v=snippet&q=sphere%20shield&f=false
The low emissivity of the shield would seem to make this more of a reflection than an emission problem, and I’m not clear how Kristian views the ability of a reflection to heat its source.
Unfortunately the problem analysis is not part of the preview and I don’t have the book (it’s a bit pricey). So if anyone still reading this thread (yes, both of you) has the book–or an earlier edition?–perhaps you can tell us how it all comes out. 🙂
richardscourtney says at April 28, 2013 at 3:18 pm
Bryan re your post at April 28, 2013 at 3:04 pm .
“Yes, Joel Shore is a deluded fanatical AGW proponent.”
…………I agree
“But that does not justify you being a deluded AGW opponent”.
“The empirical data is also clear and Shore is wrong about that while you are right.”
Richard my post that you refer to was largely about the views of Ivar Giaever ( Nobel Prize in Physics).
He said that Climate ‘Science’ as accepted by the IPCC was pseudoscience because it could not be falsified.
Do you disagree with him and if so why?
I also challenged Joel Shore to give some test that could falsify the theory he advocates.
It come as no surprise to me that he cannot.
I did not give any opinion about radiative physics in this thread so its a puzzle to me as to where you find some disagreement.
My own opinion is that the radiative properties of CO2 while important at furnace temperatures are negligible at atmospheric temperatures.
This is in line with the findings of R.W. Wood and are not very different from your own views.
If the air consisted solely of non- GHG and couldn’t radiate heat, the surface would get to the average blackbody temperature of an airless planet and at the boundary of outer space would at the average BB temperature of space.
If however non-GHG could radiate heat, then the downwelling IR from the air would add to the downwelling IR from the star and raise the surface temperature until such time that the outgoing radiation balances the incoming radiation, the temperature being determined by the stephan-boltzman equation.
Can someone contact the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and tell them where they’ve gone wrong. They do actually measure real things out there in the universe.
From
http://www.nrao.edu/index.php/learn/radioastronomy/radiowaves#blackbody
“Thermal Emission
Blackbody Radiation
Thermal emission is perhaps the most basic form of emission for EM radiation. Any object or particle that has a temperature above absolute zero emits thermal radiation. The temperature of the object causes the atoms and molecules within the object to move around. For example, the molecules of a gas, as in a planet’s atmosphere, spin around and bump into one another. When the molecules bump into each other, they change direction. A change in direction is equivalent to acceleration. As stated above, when charged particles accelerate, they emit electromagnetic radiation. So each time a molecule changes direction, it emits radiation across the spectrum, just not equally. As a result, the amount of motion within an object is directly related to its temperature.”
Bryan:
At April 29, 2013 at 12:50 am you say to and ask me.
Hmmm. “Largely about”? I answered its part which I understood concerned the discussion in this thread.
I would need to know what Ivar Giaever specifically said before I would be willing to agree or dispute any individual statement in it.
Much IPCC so-called science is falsifiable; e.g. total loss of Himalayan glaciers within 35 years. But the reliance of much IPCC so-called science on not-validated computer models is pure pseudoscience. None of the computer models has any demonstrated forecasting skill but they are being used to predict and project the future: this is so wrong that it makes astrology look good.
However, this modelling activity is falsifiable and it has been falsified in several ways because its predictions have been observed to NOT emulate reality; e.g. the tropospheric ‘hot spot’ is missing, and the “committed warming” has vanished, and etc..
The problem is that each time the models are falsified the AGW-advocates ‘move the goal posts’, the problem is not that the models are inherently not falsifiable. In other words, we are confronted with pseudoscientists conducting pseudoscience.
Dealing with the pseudoscientists can only be accomplished by defeating them with science. It cannot be accomplished by combating them with alternative pseudoscience.
AGW-is bunkum. It takes a small and trivial piece of scientific information (i.e. the existence of the radiative GHE) and exaggerates it into a problem which does not – and cannot – exist in reality then uses politics to impose harmful policies in response to the non-problem.
Simply, the AGW-hypothesis is pure Lysenkoism. Like the original activities of Trofim Lysenko, AGW can only be overcome by championing adherence to the realities of true science and the scientific method.
Richard
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
April 27, 2013 at 4:42 pm
Myrrh says:
April 27, 2013 at 3:57 pm
“Since Carbon Dioxide is heavier than air it will be found mainly in the first few hundred metres..”
In the first few hundred meters over land, you can find much higher and much lower levels, depending of nearby sources and sinks. In a forest: high levels at night (up to 600 ppmv), low levels during the day (down to 250 ppmv, a lot below the 400 ppmv in the bulk of the atmosphere). Simply because the mixing time is longer than the source or sink speed. The same for volcanic vents.
That is for 5% of all air mass where CO2 is not well mixed.
Ferdinand – that’s the whole point about carbon dioxide, it’s heavier than air because it has mass and therefore subject to gravity and therefore has weight because gravity gives weight, because it is a real gas and not the pretend ideal gas of AGW, it will be predominantly near the surface in higher concentrations – where it is being produced, and, recycled by flora, on land and in the ocean. Differing figures, but around 70% of all the oxygen produced is said to be by photosynthesis in the ocean. Plants when they are not involving themselves in photosynthesis breathe in oxygen and breathe carbon dioxide, just like us..
It remains a trace gas. Double it, it is still a trace gas.
What world do they live in who think a trace gas can act like a thermal blanket?
If you measure in Hawaii at sealevel or at 3,400 m height at Mauna Loa, you will find the same levels of CO2 within 1 ppmv.
Sorry, I just don’t believe those figures.
Hawaii is one of the world’s greatest producers of carbon dioxide! A major hot spot in a warm ocean actively creating volcanic islands. Active volcanos constantly venting, thousands of earthquakes a year, and, Mauna Loa is the world’s biggest active volcano, and, that’s besides the lush vegetation in and out the ocean breathing out the stuff. The station of Mauna Loa is slap bang in the middle this great carbon dioxide production.
Do you know how they measure there? Completely arbitrarily! They decide what is and is not from the great volcanic production – it’s not possible to tell that. It’s ludicrous, it is completely unscientific.* And Hawaii has had a huge increase in air traffic over the last decades, day and night.
If anyone really thinks Keeling went to Hawaii from Antarctica because he thought “background carbon dioxide levels could be measured anywhere in the world and they would be the same”..
“Rain is carbon dioxide”
“Rain is water, with very little CO2 in it, even less if SO2 and NOx are present as stronger acids. Further, CO2 in rain comes from where the clouds were formed, not from near ground. Thus that CO2 needs to go up first… And where most water evaporates (equatorial oceans), CO2 goes in the atmosphere too from the deep ocean water upwelling.”
What? All rain is carbonic acid. Of course it comes from where the clouds are formed, that’s why it takes out all and any of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with it…
..the residence time of water in the atmosphere is 8-10 days, carbon dioxide is fully part of that Water Cycle.
Globally, every time it rains it rains carbonic acid, that is carbon dioxide being recycled every 8-10 days in the Water Cycle.
AGWSF’s Greenhouse Effect doesn’t have the Water Cycle. They have excised it from their models.
Well, actually, with their ideal gases they can’t have it anyway.
Real gases have attraction, water and carbon dioxide are irresistably attracted to each other.
These from a wiki page – http://creationwiki.org/Carbonic_acid
“Carbonic acid’s ancient names were ‘acid of the air’ and ‘aerial acid'”
“Acid rain or normal rain has dissolved carbonic acid in it has a pH of 4.5 to 5.6.”
Note, normal natural clean rain which is carbonic acid is never called acid rain in science.
That small piece goes on to say that: “The carbonic acid in the ocean is increasing, causing many animals, like plankton, to die and is corroding to shells and coral. The acid rain falls and drains into the ocean making it have more acid than it has had previously. The ocean is at a pH of 8.1, which is about 0.1 lower than at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.”
This is typical AGWSF meme scaremongering by twisting science.
A pH of 8.1 would not be made more acidic but less alkaline. That’s besides the blatant lies about causing plankton to die and corroding shells and corals. Plankton is also plant life, algae, which feed on carbon dioxide, and the animal life which feed on plankton would also benefit.
A pH of 8.1 would not be made more acidic but less alkaline – it would have to go through neutral first, which is pH 7, before it became acidic. And, each whole number up and down the scale is logarithmic, a pH of 9 is ten times more alkaline than a pH of 8, so their “0.1 lower than at the beginning of Industrial Revolution” is brainwashing scary for the unwary.
So much misinformation in such a small piece, composed of AGWSF fake fisics memes.
“AIRS concluded that “Carbon Dioxide was not at all well-mixed, but lumpy”
Have a look at their scale of CO2: +/- 8 ppmv worst case, +/- 2% of full scale, I call that well mixed, taken into account that 20% of all CO2 in the atmosphere moves in and out within a year. They may call that “lumpy”, just to show how good that their satellites are…
Nope, what you are looking at is a cherry picked bite from mid troposphere, they haven’t released any of the upper and lower troposphere data, not any of it.
Their conclusion is based on all their data, the complete picture from top to bottom of troposphere.
Of course carbon dioxide will be shown to be lumpy and particularly at the bottom of the troposphere because that is where it is produced, and where it sinks down because it is a real gas and heavier than air.
This is just the same ol’ same ol’ manipulation of real data, our temperature records have been totally screwed by them – even claimed to be “lost”. You take these on trust mistakenly, is my opinion.
*Well worth reading from Timothy Casey re volcanic production: http://carbon-budget.geologist-1011.net/
“1.2 The Location of CO2 Monitoring Station in regions enriched by volcanic CO2”
One of the conclusions from the AIRS team was that they would have to go away and look at wind systems..
Which reminds me too, that when I checked out the Mauna Loa claim that it is a “pristine measuring site uncontaminated by local production”, supposedly capturing clean unpolluted “background” from trade winds, I think I found one of the winds coming in their direction which made for great wind surfing was coming from China and not from the opposite direction, I can’t be sure because I didn’t have the time then to really check if I got it right, and then time passed..
Anyway, the AIRS team were truly shocked to find carbon dioxide was not well mixed, because they had been educated in the AGW memes. They were astonished to find it was lumpy and not well mixed at all.
kencoffman (@kencoffman) says:
April 28, 2013 at 4:23 am
Myrrh, I’m often mystified by your thoughts. Can I ask a simple, direct question?
If you created a huge, hundred meter diameter focusing lens with a topside coating that reflected all light bandwidths except green (say 500-550nm which pass through unimpeded) and focused all the green light of direct sunlight onto a spot 1-foot-wide and put your hand at that focus, what would happen to your hand? This would be an interesting experiment–I’d be very happy to let you go first.
Well, I’m not mystified by your response..
Visible light from the Sun is not a thermal energy, it cannot heat matter. It works on the tiny electronic transition level not on the big molecular vibrational level which is what it takes to move matter into heat.
We cannot feel visible light from the Sun, it is not hot. What we feel as heat from the Sun is longwave infrared which is thermal infrared; of heat infrared and not of reflective light infrared, which is the not hot shortwaves of infrared.
See the NASA quote I posted from traditional physics.
The AGWScienceFiction’s GreenhouseEffect Illusion’s Energy Budget has taken out the direct real heat from the Sun, which is the Sun’s thermal energy in transfer by radiation, and claims that non-thermal shortwaves do the heating.
Idiocy by the standard of traditional physics.
Myrrh says:
April 29, 2013 at 2:26 am
Myrrh, it is hard to discuss with somebody who reject real world facts.
– The CO2 levels and trends at Cape Kumukahi near sealevel and at Mauna Loa at 3,400 m height are near the same. See:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/iadv/graph.php?code=KUM&program=ccgg&type=ts
and
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/iadv/graph.php?code=MLO&program=ccgg&type=ts
Indeed the Mauna Loa data are “cleaned” from outliers with a simple algorithm: when there is downwind air from the volcanic vents, the variability within an hour is larger than 0.25 ppmv. These data are marked and not used for averaging. But that doesn’t influence the yearly averages and trends with more than 0.1 ppmv. The unadjusted raw data still are available. Raw and cleaned data plotted together for MLO and SPO:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_mlo_spo_raw_select_2008.jpg
The measurements at the South Pole started before Mauna Loa but couldn’t go on as the base was about closed. Only flask samples were taken during a few years. Later on, the South Pole base started again with continuous measurements. These show similar levels as Mauna Loa and many other places.
As far as I know, all emissions of China are at ground level. According to you, these can’t reach Mauna Loa at all.
CO2 measurements are made in lots of places, by different organisations from different countries. Hundreds of people are involved. If you think that the data are manipulated, why is nobody of these people complaining about that, even not after retirement?
Rain is 99.65% water. The maximum solubility of CO2 in water is 3.5 g/l or 0.35%. That is CO2 + carbonic acid + bicarbonate + carbonate, where CO2 + carbonic acid is less than 1% of the carbon mixture. See:
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gases-solubility-water-d_1148.html
The creation website you refer to has many errors, including that carbonic acid is insoluble in water???
Together with vaporizing water, CO2 is released from the oceans and follows the same path from equator to poles and from near surface to the stratosphere. Simply think about wind speed and convection, which are much faster than the settlement of CO2 in stagnant air: 1% increase at the bottom of a 70 m column in 40 years…
Timothy Casey is completely wrong about the influence of volcanoes. Especially about the 13C/12C ratio: magmatic CO2 has a lower 13C/12C ratio than subduction CO2, but still is higher than the ratio in the atmosphere. The drop in ratio as seen in the atmosphere can only be from fossil fuel burning or from vegetation decay. But vegetation is growing, as the oxygen balance proves.
Further, you have no idea what the AIRS people know or don’t know about CO2 levels in the lower troposhere and in the stratosphere. They call the mid-stratosphere CO2 levels “lumpy” because they can see a variability of +/- 2% of full scale. That is fine for their instrumentation but of no interest for the effect of CO2 on temperature or for not calling CO2 “well mixed” over the world.
Further, over 70% of the near surface, that is over the oceans, similar levels as at 3400 meter height are found, as good as at 12,000 meters. Regular commercial flights sampled CO2 already over 50 years ago between Scandinavia and the VS. That shows the following seasonal curves:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/seasonal_height.jpg
The maximum difference of CO2 between sealevel and 12 km height was 6 ppmv…
Only in the first few hundred meters over land, CO2 is not well mixed, but very variable with lower values when photosynthesis is at work and higher values when there is inversion at night.
Myrrh says:
April 29, 2013 at 3:46 am
I still am awaiting your response to what happens with the visible light that enters the oceans and is absorbed in the first few hundred meters. Something says me that there must be conservation of energy?
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
April 28, 2013 at 11:40 am
Myrrh says:
April 28, 2013 at 3:15 am
Myrrh,
Only one question: as no visible light reaches the ocean depths below a few hundred meters, what happens with the energy contained in that light between zero and 200 meter depth were it all is absorbed by water and/or suspended matter?
“Absorbed” does not necessarily mean the energy is turned to heat. Unless you think an ice cube is hot..
Lot’s of things. Attenuation, dissipation; scattering, absorption by photosynthesis and pigments along the way, used up in all the eyes in the ocean for seeing by conversion to nerve impulses.., and simply, just stops. Oh and I’ve mentioned in my last post to you, some 70% of our oxygen is produced by photosynthesis in the oceans, which is conversion to chemical energy, sugars..
Visible light is created, what is created is not eternal, some things just stop because they run out of energy like the petrol in your car runs out, the energy of visible light is also using up its own energy in motion, it’s its own petrol. The atmosphere slows down visible light, blue being more energetic gets absorbed by the electrons and scattered more, hence our blue sky, the ocean slows down visible light from the Sun around 14 times more than air, visible light uses up its energy by this.
Visible light is slowed down in the atmosphere from all its encounters with the electrons, of course, still at huge speeds, but each absorption by an electron which is energised and then returns to its ground state, takes time. Visible light separates out into the colours in the first place because they are each affected differently by the same medium, as in prisms and in rainbows. In transparent mediums such as glass prisms and water droplets, and so in the ocean, visible light is not absorbed at all but transmitted through unchanged, but, each encounter it has trying to get into to play with the electrons delays it more than simple absorption by the electrons in the fluid gas air, it tries ‘several’ times to get in to reach the electron in the volume which is a molecule of water, in which the electrons dance, as it can’t it then gets ‘passed along’, transmitted, this delays visible considerably more.
Where in the atmosphere the longer wavelengths of visible have greater ability to pass through because they are bigger than blue, their size slows them down more in the denser medium of the ocean, so they attentuate more quickly. Blue and violet slip through more easily.
Check out how they deal with attentuation in optic cables.
Hmm, first page I pulled out: http://www.eetimes.com/design/communications-design/4139197/Performing-Fiber-Optic-Cable-Attenuation-Measurements-A-Tutorial
Be careful here, I don’t know what he means by ” OH water molecules called “high water” are another deformity incorporated into the material during the manufacture that results in absorption”. Is this water the same as H20 in transmitting property? If so is he using “absorbed” in the general sense knowing that water is a transparent medium and so attenuation is because not absorbed, but slowing down greater, or is this another example of AGW memes so ingrained that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about..? What motivates me to keep going in these arguments is the deliberate confusion created in basic science, not only in the general population in order to create the AGW scare, but because it is producing people working in, and especially teaching about, such industries who would not be able to design the products from scratch..
Short piece on attenuation:
“Attenuation
“This article is about attenuation in physics. For other uses, see Attenuation (disambiguation).
In physics, attenuation (in some contexts also called extinction) is the gradual loss in intensity of any kind of flux through a medium. For instance, sunlight is attenuated by dark glasses, X-rays are attenuated by lead, and light and sound are attenuated by water.
“In electrical engineering and telecommunications, attenuation affects the propagation of waves and signals in electrical circuits, in optical fibers, as well as in air (radio waves).”
Continued on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuation
Another short piece:
“Attenuation and Dispersion in Fiber-Optic Cable
Correct functioning of an optical data link depends on modulated light reaching the receiver with enough power to be demodulated correctly. Attenuation is the reduction in power of the light signal as it is transmitted. Attenuation is caused by passive media components, such as cables, cable splices, and connectors. While attenuation is significantly lower for optical fiber than for other media, it still occurs in both multimode and single-mode transmission. An efficient optical data link must have enough light available to overcome attenuation.
“Dispersion is the spreading of the signal in time. The following two types of dispersion can affect an optical data link:
“Chromatic dispersion—Spreading of the signal in time resulting from the different speeds of light rays.
Modal dispersion—Spreading of the signal in time resulting from the different propagation modes in the fiber.”
http://www.juniper.net/techpubs/en_US/release-independent/junos/topics/concept/fiber-optic-cable-signal-loss-attenuation-dispersion-understanding.html
Look like I should have used dispersion rather than dissipation..
Lots about the properties of light in Optics, haven’t found anything in Thermodynamics proclaiming the great heating power of visible light..
Myrrh says:
April 29, 2013 at 3:46 am
Visible light from the Sun is not a thermal energy, it cannot heat matter. It works on the tiny electronic transition level not on the big molecular vibrational level which is what it takes to move matter into heat.
More of your unscientific nonsense, the electronic transition is the large one and the vibrational transition which is the small one (although not as small as the rotational transition). See here and learn:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/molecule/molec.html#c2
We cannot feel visible light from the Sun, it is not hot. What we feel as heat from the Sun is longwave infrared which is thermal infrared; of heat infrared and not of reflective light infrared, which is the not hot shortwaves of infrared.
Which has all to do with the properties of our skin, not the properties of the light!
Friends:
I strongly commend that posts from Myrrh be ignored.
It is not possible to address such complete nonsense as this irrational twaddle posted by Myrrh at April 29, 2013 at 4:40 am.
Richard
Be careful here, I don’t know what he means by ” OH water molecules called “high water” are another deformity incorporated into the material during the manufacture that results in absorption”. Is this water the same as H20 in transmitting property? If so is he using “absorbed” in the general sense knowing that water is a transparent medium and so attenuation is because not absorbed, but slowing down greater, or is this another example of AGW memes so ingrained that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about..?
It’s clear that you don’t know what’s being talked about because you have no clue about the interaction of light with matter!
In the case of fiber optics the presence of OH- ions incorporated in the silica matrix leads to absorption, particularly at the 1380 cm-1 transition, thus removing energy from the signal. The presence of such impurities (at the ppb level) defines the performance of the fiber and specifies the useful wavelength windows for it (i.e. not 1380 cm-1).