A poll follows, a first for QOTW.
Sometimes in the climate wars when things get ridiculous and emotional we often ask or see asked “what is this, high school”? A classic example is Al Gore’s “high school physics” when it comes to the CO2 effect:
“The deniers claim that it’s some kind of hoax and that the global scientific community is lying to people,” he said. “It’s not a hoax, it’s high school physics.” – Al Gore in an interview with MNN 9/14/2011
Unless you are a fringe skeptic (for example a “Slayer” at Principia Scientific) you wouldn’t call the greenhouse effect a hoax, I surely don’t. But as my replication of Al Gore’s “high school physics” experiment proved, Gore even got the “high school physics” wrong. Then, he faked the results in post production.
Steve McIntyre has some perspective on the “high school” nature of climate science that is worth repeating:
It seems to me that most famous “amateurs” from the past were highly professional in their field. Nor do I find invocation of their stories very relevant since the sociology of the science enterprise has changed so much.
In my opinion, most climate scientists on the Team would have been high school teachers in an earlier generation – if they were lucky. Many/most of them have degrees from minor universities. It’s much easier to picture people like Briffa or Jones as high school teachers than as Oxford dons of a generation ago. Or as minor officials in a municipal government.
Allusions to famous past amateurs over-inflates the rather small accomplishments of present critics, including myself. A better perspective is the complete mediocrity of the Team makes their work vulnerable to examination by the merely competent.
– Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit Aug 1, 2013 at 2:44 PM
h/t to Charles the Moderator
Please take a look at this graph from the essay Steve left a comment in:
The poll is about the graph:
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Steve is too charitable; “mediocrity” is giving them a lot.
Steve McIntyre made what appears to be a simple statement of the obvious, but is really a stinging indictment of the nature of political power in the free world.
How about, “Outstandingly mediocre”? Give them their due, they do stand out.
I’ve seen that graph in many places, including WUWT and in journal articles printed prior to the late 80’s.
I don’t think they’re mediocre at all. I think they’re hugely successful at recognizing the political trend and using it to make a bunch of money. They’re extremely talented charlatans.
There are countless discussions of the logarithmic relation of CO2 to temperature. This is reflected by indexing climate sensitivity to a “doubling” of CO2. But once the logarithmic relation is accepted, it becomes unnecessary to graph it. All you need is a single number (e.g., 2). This could be graphed, with the x-axis running from the pre-industrial value of, say, 280 ppm up to 560, and the y-axis running from some temperature T up to T+2. But why bother? So if there is a relative lack of such graphs in the literature, it is due to their inconsequentiality, if there is such a word. Of course, when the relation of the two quantities was first being considered, there would have graphs of one vs. the other, as in the Callendar graph. But once the logarithmic relation was accepted, there would have been no reason to continue showing the graph. So if the poll had asked if people had heard of or accepted the logarithmic relationship, I imagine most people would answer “Yes.” But I think a smaller number would have actually seen or remembered seeing such a graph. In my case, I don’t recall seeing a specific graph, so can’t answer either “Yes” or “No,” the only options in the poll.
“Thus a change of water vapour, sky radiation and temperature is corrected by a change of cloudiness and atmospheric circulation, the former increasing the reflection loss and thus reducing the effective sun heat.”
Exactly as per my blog contributions for the past 6 years and as per my New Climate Model (new website imminent).
Most do not understand the majority of the warming has already happened with regard to CO2. Above about 800ppm the effect is severely diminished and is the reason the earth survived bouts of 4,000 ppm while having both heat and glaciation at that level. This simple observation takes CO2 out of the running as the major driver of climate. And any Jr High School kid with basic science can figure this one out..
I’ll bet Obama never saw this graph in school, either.
I wonder, could John Holdren have shown this to the prez?
Nice picture but, I lost all fear and concern of CAGW when I read the harry read me file.
They still haven’t shown me anything to fear.
cn
I saw it here at WUWT and other places.
I think the graph is important because it drives home the point CO2 vs temp is NOT a linear relationship heading off into the Chicken Little Sky.
Of course you have to be able to read and to understand a graph. (Yes that is snark)
@ur momisugly Lance Wallace …. Yes, an understanding of the math should make the graph unnecessary. But remember that most people DO NOT have an intuitive understanding of the math. For those people a picture may be the only way the idea sinks in.
Go back in history far enough and all great scientists/engineers//inventors were amateurs, e.g. Archimedes, Galileo Galilei, Newton, Voltaire, Gauss, Watt (a much earlier namesake), Brunel, Westinghouse……
My qualifications are in biomedical science and I invite any reader to grab hold of a copy of the history of the illegal grave-robbing Hunter brothers. You do not get more amateur than them, yet they are revered by the Royal College of Surgeons. http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums
The book about them is fascinating (sorry – no link).
Basic logic from a layman. Every CO2 molecule in the atmosphere is on its own and being battered by some 2,499 plus other molecules. This battering is termed conduction and the CO2 molecule will be at whatever the local air temperature is, somewhere between say +15 to -50C depending on altitude up the air column. This means the CO2 molecule is too warm to readily absorb radiation in the 15 micron band from any source. But in that temperature range the CO2 will happily emit photons in the15 micron band. Just assume the molecule is at an altitude such that the earth horizon is 10 degrees below the molecule’s horizontal plane. Thus if the photon is emitted above the horizon the photon is probably lost to space and if below the horizon it could reach the surface. What are the number of upward directions as opposed to the downward directions? I make it 200 x 360 = 72,000 possible directions up and opposed to 160 x 360 = 57,600 downwards directions. Therefore there is a 25% better chance of the photon escaping to space than reaching the surface and that chance improves with the altitude. Once the molecule has emitted that photon that particular molecule will be at a temperature of -79C, not for long with all the battering but this is a cooling effect in the atmosphere.
All this clearly implies 15 micron radiation from CO2 in the atmosphere is certainly reaching the surface but it is not ‘back radiation’ and certainly less than claimed by CAGW adherents.
Well, tear my logic apart, I need to learn.
The Callendar model is cloudless. I could be used on an oceanless planet.
On Earth, tropical oceans have reached maximum temps due to oceans of water. Water vapor pressure rises exponentially. At 300K, there is so much vapor that it convects upward, condensing to clouds, blocking further solar insolation.
I’m not sure if I get the point. That graph is simply a representation of Arrhenius’ law, which everybody but the Principia bunch agree upon. But this was plotted prior to the assertion of Clausius-Clapeyron feedback. It’s a statement of the obvious in graphical form sans feedback.
Now as for feedback, that’s a whole other can of worms.
I’ve seen the graph, well sort of here:
http://www.junksciencearchive.com/Greenhouse/co2greenhouse-X2.png
and I made my own once:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v249/stacase/SteepOrFlat.gif
Anthony says:
Unless you are a fringe skeptic (for example a “Slayer” at Principia Scientific) you wouldn’t call the greenhouse effect a hoax, I surely don’t.”
Assuming the observed warming effect on the global planetary surface by the presence of our atmosphere to be caused by the restriction of outgoing radiative energy loss from the surface, I would not expect to have originated as a hoax, not by any means, but most likely stems rather from a misguided act of jumping to conclusions, traceable all the way back to Fourier and his misinterpretation of de Saussure’s experiment (at the time when people had just discovered and eagerly sought to invoke the ‘magical’ powers of the infrared (thermal) radiation as the driver behind all kinds of phenomena).
No, the atmospheric warming effect on the surface is clearly caused by the restriction of energy being carried away from the ground/sea by convective/evaporative processes. The weight of the atmosphere upon the surface is a force from above that constantly needs to be overcome by these processes, and it needs to be done fast enough to keep ut with with the absorption of incoming solar energy. In order for this to be accomplished, the kinetic level at the surface needs to be sufficiently high so that the upward acceleration of heated air can balance the accumulation of energy from the Sun. In other words, energy will pile up and the surface temperature will rise until the convectional engine becomes adequately efficient.
You don’t have to be a ‘S****r’ to see this. I’m almost tempted to call it … ‘highschool physics’.
I have no idea why Askimet ate that last comment. Am I not supposed to say “pr******ia”?
McIntyre writes:
“In my opinion, most climate scientists on the Team would have been high school teachers in an earlier generation – if they were lucky. Many/most of them have degrees from minor universities. It’s much easier to picture people like Briffa or Jones as high school teachers than as Oxford dons of a generation ago. Or as minor officials in a municipal government.”
Yep. Some of them could teach “Introduction to Time Series Analysis” or “Introduction to Differential Equations” at most state universities in the US. I do not see any of them as professors of hard sciences. Pardon my harsh judgement, but this is what happens when teaching the “right doctrine” becomes more important than practicing science with a critical eye.
Callendar’s graph shows a climate sensitivity of about 1.5 degree C for the doubling of CO2 concentration from three to six molecules per 10,000 air molecules. Sounds about right for water vapor pressure of 7.5mm of Hg, but I’ve never experimentally measured it myself. His finding is probably close to the actual that would be observed, since IMO positive & negative feedbacks tend to cancel each other out on the homeostatic earth.
I have to admit I’m not that impressed with the Callendar model “fit”. Its still based on dominant CO2 primary cause and is therefore just a “fit”. So how does it perform on the CET temp record from 1659 to 2013 for example ?. or am I missing something . Look at the period (LENGTH for some here!) from 1998 to 2013 – the Callendar model performs poorly. To me its just as bad as all the other “climate models” out there and has no facility to model reality.
[snip – sorry Greg, you’ve hijacked too many threads here at WUWT, and I already know what you have to say. Feel free to be as upset as you wish. – Anthony]
Really, comment deleted? Unbelievable.
REPLY: Like I said above, when snipping your comment, I’m not going to allow you to threadjack. Feel free to be as upset as you wish – Anthony
I have seen other versions of the graph, but I have not seen one dated “1938” and with the constant H2O partial pressure of 7.5 mm Hg.
1938 ?!?!? 30 years of supercomputer GCMs and 1.7 deg C per Doubling is not only still in play, but the range of published sensitivities is being reduced to meet a slide rule estimate 75 years old.
To Lance Wallace,
A picture is worth a thousand words.
If the picture told an alarming tale, it would be used in the “cause”.
This picture is non-alarming and reassuring. Therefore it gets little press.
OK I missed the point being made. No better than !!.