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People send me stuff. This makes Bill Nye’s recent CNN fail look almost forgivable.
My friend Lars Larson, who runs a nationally syndicated radio show out of Portland, OR sent me this audio clip today. I had to listen to it to believe his claim, because who would guess that a credentialed scientist who is lecturing a national audience on climate change issues could misunderstand the greenhouse effect so badly. Here is the audio clip, with Dr. Laurie Johnson of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Have a listen:
The relevant passage starts at about 8:20 into the interview.
She says:
When you get in your car in summer, your car is hot because it has greenhouse gases in it. That’s why its hot.
I’ll have to hand it to Lars Larson, because after the obligatory “hold on a second….” he proceeded to explain how the greenhouse effect works in an automobile, though he mispoke and said “shortwave” instead of “longwave”, but he had the physical premise right.
After explaining that, he asks:
Are you telling me my car heats up because there is more CO2 in the atmosphere?
Unfazed, she insists:
I’m telling you your car heats up because there are greenhouse gases in your car.
And, she goes on to say, after Lars uses the example of sunlight streaming through the open windows of his home, making it hotter, and asks:
Is my house filled with greenhouse gas as well?
She says:
Yes! It has carbon dioxide in it!
Lars retorts:
Are you telling me my house now gets hotter than it it would 20 years ago because there’s now more carbon dioxide in it?
Dr. Johnson responds with:
I don’t know the exact temperature of your house, what I’m going to say is that the scientists…
And then goes on to talk about how “the military is concerned about it”, “scientists everywhere are concerned about it”, “12,000 peer reviewed papers” (channeling Cook et al) and other consensus building statements.
She seemed totally oblivious to the fact that she had just been pwned.
What does real empirical science say about why your car is hot when exposed to sunlight? It says nothing about the role of CO2 (or other greenhouse gases) of course which have a negligible effect at this scale.
From the Georgia State University physics department:
==============================================================
Greenhouse Effect Example
Bright sunlight will effectively warm your car on a cold, clear day by the greenhouse effect. The longer infrared wavelengths radiated by sun-warmed objects do not pass readily through the glass. The entrapment of this energy warms the interior of the vehicle. The trapping of the hot air so that it cannot rise and lose the energy by convection also plays a major role.
 |
Short wavelengths of visible light are readily transmitted through the transparent windshield. (Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see through it!) |
Shorter wavelengths of ultraviolet light are largely blocked by glass since they have greater quantum energies which have absorption mechanisms in the glass. Even though you may be uncomfortably warm with bright sunlight streaming through, you will not be sunburned.
===============================================================
Source: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/grnhse.html
Of course, the role of convection gets immediately stunted when you roll all the windows down.
It is mind blowing that this PhD, doesn’t understand the basic elements of the greenhouse effect (as it applies to actual physical greenhouses, of which your automobile is a small working model) enough to realize when she’s made a major embarrassing blunder, yet persists to lecture the radio audience about the certainty of her position.
Maybe she should have taken some science to go along with that economics training. You’d think a learned individual would train themselves on the basics, apparently not.
For more on how automobiles heat up dangerously, please see the study by my friend Jan Null, who has quantified the effect and danger to children and pets. And remember, don’t leave kids and pets in the car, not even for a minute.
Hint: the hyperthermia danger isn’t from CO2.
Study of Excessive Temperatures in Enclosed Vehicles
Jan Null, CCM 1,2
June 2003
BACKGROUND
Every year dozens of children tragically die due to hyperthermia (heat stroke) after being left unattended in cars, trucks and vans. Over the past five years in the United States 160 deaths of this type have been documented (Kids and Cars and 4 R Kids SakeTM, 2003). [For the current year see 2003 Hyperthermia Fatalities (Children in Vehicles)]. Hundreds of other children left in similar situations suffer great bodily harm and these numbers do not include similar consequences to infirm adults or animals.
More here: http://www.4rkidssake.org/Vehicleheatstudy.htm
UPDATE: Dr. Johnson responds with an admission of error.
The approach of hurricane season has raised public interest in a recent NRDC analysis showing that the U.S. government spent nearly $100 billion in 2012 responding to damage related to climate change. As an NRDC economist, I helped make sure the analysis was sound.
In discussing th
is recently with Lars Larson, I got outside of my area of expertise and made a mistake. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are accelerating climate change, but cars get hot in summer when the sun warms the interior and closed windows trap the heat.
I regret that I misspoke. I apologize for any confusion I might have created. And I hope we can move forward, as a nation, with the action we need to reduce the industrial carbon pollution that is driving climate change and threatening our future.
Laurie T. Johnson, Ph.D.
Chief Economist, Climate and Clean Air Program
Natural Resources Defense Council
1152 15th St NW Ste 300
Washington D.C., 20009
Oooh, the ignorance… it burrrrrnnnnnnnsssssss!!!!!!!
NRDC have been very prominent in pushing the “Acid Oceans” idea. They have had a revolving door with EPA for many years and have received milions of dollars in grants from the EPA.
Frances Beinecke, President of NRDC, is on the board of the World Resources Institute, with Al Gore: http://www.wri.org/about/board/frances-beineke. Currently on the Board of Trustees are Van Jones, Laurie David, Leonardo di Caprio, Robert Redford and long time activist George Woodwell of Woods Hole, where John Holdren worked for many years.
David Doniger, NRDC Policy Director and Senior Attorney, served as director of climate change policy in the EPA air office, under Carol Browner. He was prominent in Massachussetts vs EPA.
Nancy Stoner, EPA Acting Assistant Administrator for Water was previously the Co-Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Water Program.
Associate Administrator for the Office of Policy, Michael Goo was the Climate Legislative Director for the Natural Resources Defense Council and spent time at the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Money from the EPA, one amongst many:
Award Date: 10/11/2010 Cum Award: £1,150,123, Recipient Name: NRDC NY – Natural Resources Defense Council, Grant ID Number: XA – 83379901-2
“This project facilitates coordination among current and emerging state greenhouse gas registries in order to ensure consistency and credibility. Companies are encouraged to participate and invest in these efforts in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
David Hawkins, Natural Resources Defence Council, was a Review Editor for the AR4 Synthesis Report.
She is one of the many bureaucrats who are making a career managing ad hoc institutes dedicated to foster sustainability (mostly of the global warming agitprop). Another one like this is Laurence Tubiana is the director of the Institute of Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), professor at Sciences Po Paris, political science…
At the very start of the Audio clip Lars Lawson says:-
“And a warm welcome to Dr. Laurie Johnson from the National Resources Defense Council”
There is nothing more pitiful than an “expert” pontificating in an area they are totally ignorant of. In her case, her PhD actually does stand for Piled Higher and Deeper.
================================================================
Sooo …. I should plant my tomatoes in my back seat?
Or maybe this bit of knowledge is unknown to the rest of the world because “Big Ice-scraper” companies are pouring money into the effort to suppress this knowledge to protect their profits? I mean, if people knew this all they’d need to do next winter is swing by Taco Bell for a couple of bean burritos before they park their cars. Who’d ever need to scrape their windshield?
Only 8% of CO2 spectrum is involved so whatever the concentration of CO2 is, multiply that by 0.8 then only take into account that portion that is in the troposphere…..how can such a small amount of CO2 have any effect at all?
around 4min20 into the audio: “In our time , about 8.000 years on Earth….”
Seems she’s a creationist as well !
She plays the Games Of Thrones well. She taken a position which is supported by the power crazed lunatics in control of our society and has stuck to her stupid claims even in the face evidence to the contrary. She makes the right noises and the right times. She is a scumbag politician. They are all the same, these political types. Whether they work in your company or in your parliament, the political type is the most destructive and evil of all the beasts.
Relative to Dennis A’s reference to the acid ocean idea, I was unaware of it until I read an article about it in the March 25, 2013 issue of Chemistry and Engineering News (C&EN). You might be interested in my letter to the editor which was published in the May 13, 2013 issue. JLK
Did she do an actual scientific test? It would be rather easy.Identical cars fitted with thermometers under identical conditions with differing levels of CO2 in them, left out on the same hot day.
An assertion without even so much as an attempt to prove the point suggests it is either propaganda or part of a belief system, an integral part of RELIGION( the climate cult), not science.
If you could borrow the new cars from a car dealer and borrow the thermocouples and data loggers, this would be an easy and inexpensive study to perform that would prove almost instantly that the hypothesis was null and void.
Putting an unfounded and untested assertion out to the public under the guise of science to try to prove a (scientific) point is(scientific) fraud. Come to think of it, how many of the increasing number of “out there” studies we see to convince us that climate change/global warming/extreme weather/ BS of the day is real are based on solid, statistically significant controlled studies?
Ah, but isn’t the main greenhouse gas in your car methane?
The car heating situation would make for a good experiment.
Have one car with ordinary air in it and another with greenhouse-gas-free air in it. Leave both in the sunshine and compare the temperatures. Will the car without the greenhouse gasses remain cool?
(An easier option might be one car filled with CO2 and the other filled with N2.)
I have recently been trying to catch up with the greenhouse gas heating theory and have not found much useful via Google. Can anyone recommend some links?
Most explanations resort to claiming things like: CO2 “traps heat”. To me that sounds like a cop out because the claimed heating seems to be due to the re-radiation from greenhouse gasses and this ignores the fact that all the other gasses are warmed by the earth by conduction and they also emit infra red radiation in all directions. Which is the bigger effect?
Methane can be a major greenhouse gas in your car if you eat burritos before driving. Perhaps just hold it in and feel very uncomfortable while driving. Hopefully(according to the UN via “sustainable development”) you kill yourself whilst driving in this uncomfortable state to reduce the human carbon footprint from the evil humans. How dare we recycle the carbon buried beneath the ground to feed the plants.
I suppose we can get two cars of the same make and model, well sealed and equally exposed to the sun. Fill one with a non greenhouse gas,say N2, and the other with that dreaded CO2, to equal pressures, and monitor the temperature increase over time. But this seems highly reminiscent of one of Anthony’s previous endeavors, done more on a lab scale.
Twenty years ago, scientists debated the cause of real greenhouse warming. Half thought the glass prevented infrared from escaping, half thought the glass prevented convection. The consensus is now convection. Rolling down the windows allows convection to proceed.
I don’t know how much a PhD in Economics from the University of Washington, Seattle costs, but I know how much it’s worth.
It is becoming patently obvious, if you want to be noticed and have a hint of fame, just lie!
“Kaboom says:
May 23, 2013 at 11:41 am
Now the interesting part .. since the levels of “greenhouse gases” are roughly the same in summer and winter, why doesn’t get the inside of the car as hot in winter when the sun shined on it as in the summer? ;)”
Probably drives around with a car painted black and with a black interior. So cooks in summer and feels a bit warmer during Winter. It must be CO2. 🙂
Great. Another gooberment “expert” that isn’t. In fact, no better than a 5th-grader.
This cretin is not the first global warming activist to have a weird theory about why cars are warm on sunny days: David Suzuki beat her to it by a quarter century. http://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/pastedgraphic-1.pdf
As a sometime refugee from academia myself (Ph.D., History, taught at two major state universities before being driven around the bend by my colleagues and getting some sense and going back to school to get an M.B.A. and embarking on a new career in business) I can testify to how these people’s education makes them less able. not more able, to deal in realities, and often less able to do so than people of average or even below-average intelligence: there was the one colleague – a history prof himself! – who said that the Soviet system was so much more efficient and humane than ours in the US (and when I confronted him with the millions murdered by Lenin and Stalin, and the horrors of daily life in a totalitarian state, said that it was “a necessary step in reforming society”); and another who claimed that the only way big retailers made money was to sell at a loss and make it up on interest.
No one should be surprised at this mollusk’s self-deceit.
Jim Steele wrote;
“Twenty years ago, scientists debated the cause of real greenhouse warming. Half thought the glass prevented infrared from escaping, half thought the glass prevented convection. The consensus is now convection. Rolling down the windows allows convection to proceed.”
Quite correct, it is now clear that the ”GHE” merely acts as a hybrid optical/thermal delay line. Once a packet of IR energy is emitted by the heated surfaces inside the car it is absorbed by the windshield, remember it’s opaque, opaque things absorb EM energy in those wavelengths where they are opaque. The windshield warms and then emits (after a delay) half of the energy back into the car, and half from the exterior surface. The absorption/remission delay and the travel times (about 1 nanosecond per foot) simply delay the energy flow by causing multiple trips through the system, alternating between thermal and EM energy.
This is why farmers sometimes make real greenhouses out of plastics that are transparent to IR radiation. The plastic is inexpensive and tougher than glass.
A thermal insulator on the other hand slows the velocity of thermal energy, which can cause something to cool more slowly.
The funny thing about a delay line like this is that you can only observe the delay when a pulse of energy flows through the system. When a steady state input is present the delay is still there but it cannot be observed. Until we have tools that can track individual photons at the speed of light we will not be able to observe it.
The ”GHE” in the atmosphere also only delays the flow of energy through the system. The missing heat is long gone. By delaying the flow of energy through the system the “GHE” only causes the gases in the atmosphere to warm up slightly faster when a change in the input occurs (sunrise, or clouds dissipating).
To learn more just look up the “temporal response of an integrating sphere”, a similar situation occurs there.
Cheers, Kevin.
Where is the science behind “…And remember, don’t leave kids and pets in the car, not even for a minute…”? For a site that argues against alarmist positions this is an incredible disappointment.
The families that have their children die in vehicles due to hyperthermia are do so inadvertently, not through conscious choice.
This has to be an even clearer case of the cost of government intervention (http://www.freerangekids.com/on-trial-for-letting-kids-wait-in-the-car-its-child-endangerment-2/)
far outweighs the benefits.