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:
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)
@ 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 !!.
Here’s a bit of High School Physics using radiation estimates from the equilibrium diagram.
1) The earth’s surface at present radiates 390 W/M^2 and global average temperature is about 288K
2) The Insolation at top of atmosphere is 342 W/M^2
If the atmosphere was suddenly removed 342 W/M^2 would hit the surface and the temperature would be e*A*T^4=342 according to Boltzmann where T is avg temp at equilbbrium
With current atmosphere e*A*t^4=390 where t= 288K
A bit of High school maths means that t/T=(390/342)^(1/4)=1.033
ie T=288/1.033 = 278.6K ie 9.4 deg C cooler than current
ie all the atmosphere, CO2, water vapour, clouds, aerosols etc have warmed the earth by a mere 9.4 deg C.
I notice that Callendar’s model shows CO2 causing about 8 deg C warming at 400ppm. I assume the other 1.4 deg C is caused by everything else.
Why should I believe that adding another 200ppm of CO2 will cause a dangerous climate change?
OK, so where is my comment, Anthony? Is it held back because it contained the ‘S****r’ word? Or the ‘P*******a’ word? From quoting you …?
REPLY: it is right there above. Sometimes combination of links and words trigger the wordpress spam filter, you have to give people a chance to find and correct issues – Anthony
Its a great shame that time travel is not a realty because if it were we could return to a time when this frenetic idiocy about who what when or why one day we get rain and another sun or whether its warmer or cooler did not exist and folk could return to human sacrifices to whichever God seemed to offer the best odds of a good crop. Instead we are mithered at morning noon and night with obsessive halfwits on both sides of the debate those who little better to do with their lives than dance on the head of a pin and those smart enough like Al Gore who completely imune to criticism and contradiction and just happy to fill his bank account with cash. Lets face it the real attraction of climate is the fact that no side can land a killer blow which means ordinary folk will have continue funding this inate stupidity and living in an environment inundated with professional activists and the imposition of useless wind and solar farms that destroy the environment supposedly one side or the other or both were sworn to protect. Even worse is the mealy mouthed appeasment by sceptics agreeing with what remains an hypothesis at best just to avoid being seen as a real sceptic feeble minded. People live and people die why dont you all go away and get a life and stop bitching about something over which we can never exert any control push wwf to really focus on saving Tigers and stop ripping out rainforest for sugar based biofuel instead of wasting time writing reports that most people cant even understand in simple times go and get a life.
The rather close correlation is interesting, and one that Alarmists in particular should make note of. However, with cooling likely in coming decades, I would expect to see the correlation break down, with C02 continuing up.
“a first for QOTW”
I wondered what that was, then looked at the keyboard and realized it’s probably a typo.
Can’t believe I’m the first pedant to mention it. ;-p
REPLY: ??? QOTW= “Quote of the Week” – Anthony
I first saw a similar graph in Matt Ridley’s Angus Miller lecture. It made quite an impression.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/01/thank-you-matt-ridley/
Howard Hayden uses that graph in one of his books, I think. He personally drew it for me in a spreadsheet and explained it to me years ago.
“They use outstanding methods to achieve mediocre results?” This phrase was hijacked and paraphrased from an Air Force officer effectiveness report.
“REPLY: it is right there above. Sometimes combination of links and words trigger the wordpress spam filter, you have to give people a chance to find and correct issues – Anthony”
Totally fine. Thanks!
David Wells says:
August 4, 2013 at 10:55 am
Nature herself has repeatedly landed killer blows on CACCA, but the ideologically-motivated & ill-educated media refuse to report the events & corrupted “scientists” refuse to acknowledge them. Eventually, when the world returns to the temperature regime of the 1960s & early ’70s, it will become increasingly difficult to ignore reality.
[yeah, not getting into this, sorry these turn into food fights- Anthony]
Everyone should read McIntyre’s essay. He is offering one basis for criticizing the performance of climate models.
“A better perspective is the complete mediocrity of the Team makes their work vulnerable to examination by the merely competent.”
Wow! Not only was the knife serrated but it was twisted with a vicious upward thrust. Well done.
Richard111,
No, no, we do not refer to the “temperature” of an individual molecule. Temperature refers to the average kinetic energy of the molecules in a quantity of matter. No, no, CO2 absorbs 15-micron radiation due to induced dipole moment, which is the same way a microwave oven heats food. Yes CO2 can emit 15-micron photons too, but in the lower atmosphere this is unlikely as before a photon could be re-emitted the molecule has slammed into thousands of its neighboring molecules, thus ‘thermalizing” the absorbed energy. This is the actual greenhouse effect, which has nothing whatsoever to do with “back radiation.”
FrankK says:
August 4, 2013 at 10:28 am
IMO the graph doesn’t assume that CO2 is the primary driver of climate. It merely shows what might be expected from increasing the concentration of the trace gas in the atmosphere. Other factors are far more important in forcing climate.
If you accept the IPCC assumption that CO2 levels were fairly constant in the Holocene before c. 1850 (which is by no means incontrovertibly in evidence), then the graph indicates what the effect on temperature might be from higher concentrations. I don’t know if Callendar possible considered feedback effects, but so far going from three to four molecules of CO2 per 10,000 air molecules has indeed raised global temperature by about the 0.7 degrees C shown in the graph (if you believe the global temperature compilations, which I don’t, but will accept them for the sake of argument).
The take away is that the additional ~0.8 degrees rise forecast for continuing on to six molecules per 10,000 from the current four would not result in climatic catastrophe. The Team has to make unsupported assumptions about positive feedback effects to get anywhere near the Venusian calamity forecast by prophets of doom like Hansen.
Whether equilibrium has been attained or not is debatable. Nature is busily drawing the extra carbon dioxide out of the air & depositing it in various sinks, about which science knows little.
[yeah, not getting into this, sorry these turn into food fights- Anthony]
While the presumed net temperature effect of CO2 is a bit too high, the article linked ( http://climateaudit.org/2013/07/26/guy-callendar-vs-the-gcms/ ) illustrates how that 1938 publication had:
* Frankness on major carbon fertilization benefit without any attempt to treat it as info nobody is supposed to mention or ever know about
* Discussion of benefits to mankind and a pro-human rather than anti-human mindset (with the former about universal until an escalating combination of cultural factors reached a turning point by 3 decades after WWII)
* Comprehension of how the average net effect of increased cloudiness is “increasing the reflection loss and thus reducing the effective sun heat” (net cooling with days under white reflective clouds less hot on average), in contrast to how even that basic level of honesty is so rare today.
The last point comes close to the grand truth of climate:
Albedo change is what has dominated climate change now and over thousands of years past. On lengthy timescales of interglacials versus glacials, it does so through the feedback effect of ice sheets (a much whiter planet when continents are largely covered by glaciers) being what amplifies initial temperature change far more so than CO2. Short timescales are dominated by another kind of albedo change, up to multiple percent change in average cloud cover (having a relatively huge W/m^2 effect in climate terms) as influenced by cosmic ray variation (mostly solar modulated) as illustrated in http://s23.postimg.org/qldgno07f/edited4.gif (enlarging on further click).
Henry Clark says:
August 4, 2013 at 12:44 pm
Yeah, the graph comes in a little high at ~1.5 degrees C for doubling from three to six CO2 molecules per 10,000 instead of 1.2 degrees, but close enough for government work, IMO. Important point is that the climate sensitivity isn’t the 4.5 to 7.0 degrees wildly assumed by IPCC in its woollier, less restrained ARs.
Steve M’s observation way explain why it’s so hard to get members of the team to debate.
OldWeirdHarold says:
“…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.”
+++++++++
Well, the feedback (often ignored when discussing forcing as if forcing = temperature change) also divides easily into two: the increase in absolute humidity with an increase in temperature giving an increased forcing, and the other feedbacks that cause quite the opposite: thermals, thunderstorms, increased cloudiness and earlier-in-the-day onset of cloudiness in the tropical zones.
The oversimplification I see most often is the calculation of forcing as if it means a temperature rise. The purpose of the misdirection is to pretend that a doubling of forcing equals a particular temperature rise, completely ignoring the multiple responses that kick in to prevent that from happening. CO2 forcing is straightforward. Methane forcing is straightforward. The reactions to that forcing are very complex and from what we can tell so far, very effective at stabilizing the global average temperature with an 8 month delay.
I’m surprised at the low % of people who have seen this graph before, or one’s like it. The fact that CO2’s effects are logarithmic is well known and constitute what should have been the beginning and the end of the debate.
Alone, CO2’s effects beyond 400 ppm are so small as to make debating them laughable. The only way to accept CO2 being logarithmic and still raise the alarm is to claim that feedback effects are very large (which is what the IPCC and the alarmists in general do). The problem with that argument is that it is self defeating.
1. If feedbacks were very large, then the effect would be readily apparent in the temperature record. It is not.
2. If feedbacks are low (as evidence suggests) then there’s nothing to worry about in the first place.
My opinion is that this aspect of the physics needs to get more exposure. Understanding the logarithmic nature of CO2 is all one needs to end the debate. It is why the warmists want to scream about tree rings, and hottest decades on record, and ice decline, and heat hiding in the ocean…. anything but this one simple fact that CO2’s effects are logarithmic.
The log relationship between CO2 and “forcing” is standard and everyone ought to be familiar with it. Howver, the log relationship between CO2 and temperature anomaly is not something that one commonly sees, or at all, presumably because of positive feedbacks. So you have to watch the distinction- Anthony, better it you pointed this out.
The direct effects of CO2 in the graph are a good starting point.
It is important to emphasize the climate feedback as well.
The last 11000 years showed a remarkable stability of the climate.
If the climate was less stable, it would have been pushed into an extreme, up or down, many times over.
We do not have the data and modeling ability to find that feedback now, except by looking at its results on the measured temperatures. As the recent record goes more toward a light cooling 1997-present, similar to the trend 1940-1970
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/trend:12/plot/rss/from:1997
the case for a CO2 sensitivity (feedback included) of 0 -1C becomes stronger.
PS The putdown of McIntyre is spot on. As a mathematical physicist I always said that an 8th grade kid, who is required to be able to read and understand data, can take down most of the conclusions of climate science.
davidmhoffer says:
August 4, 2013 at 1:21 pm
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
If you study maths and sciences you might understand logarithmic effects.
Trouble is most kids today don’t get to use logarithmic paper or do science experiments that require one or both axes on a log scale, or to learn that you can turn an exponential curve into a straight line with a log. You can do everything with a calculator so that you don’t have any understanding of what you are doing. You just put the numbers in the way the teacher tells you and the “graphing” calculator does it all for you. I can recall 30 years ago, having to buy my kids special calculators for school. I still have trouble getting my offspring to understand logarithmic effects and they are both well educated but not in sciences. They get as sucked in by the media hype as any other member of the public. The school system didn’t require them to take a lot of chemistry, physics and calculus. Just enough to get by and use a calculator with appropriate programs. Thing is, how do they (or anyone) know that the programs they are using are correct?? They will use nomographs, but they don’t understand that there is complex math behind them. They don’t trust the system – but they will use products provided by the system without questioning what the little black box or nomograph is doing. Remember those old calculators that just wouldn’t give you a whole number for an answer? Remember writing Fortran programs to force a computer to give you the correct answer? Or at least what we assumed was the correct answer. Course that was about 40 years ago so maybe I don’t remember it quite right. My motto for my kids is “THINK”. One thing I knew and have confirmed from reading this blog is no one can be certain about science.
Can anyone think of an experiment that demonstrates that, in principle, non-condensing greenhouse gases are not essential to maintaining a model greenhouse with water vapor feedback.
It maybe appropriate to start with a frozen world as a potential source of water vapor, since that is the claimed outcome if long lived greenhouse gases are completely removed. I think the challenge would be to counteract in some way the effect of container if it was included in the design. Most of these experiments need a container to hold the gas in, and I feel a container would negate the purpose of the demonstration.
Here’s my idea of an experiment that demonstrates that, in principle, non-condensing greenhouse gases may not be essential to maintaining a model greenhouse with water vapor feedback:
You start out with a fridge. Inside at the top, you have a decent 100W light bulb(s) that kicks out a fair bit of heat (incandescent). And there is a temperature probe in about the middle of the fridge. Inside the bottom of the fridge is a bath with a 10 Lt block of ice wrapped in air tight plastic. The fridge and light are both turned on and adjustments are made to the light bulb, or number of light bulbs, and the thermostat in the fridge so that temperature is maintained at just below freezing (say -0.03 deg C). That’s the control.
Remove the plastic so that the ice is in contact with the fridges atmosphere, and see what happens!
What is of concern to me is that people actually believe him. Secondly, for the most part he gets away with it!! And fills up his coffers with huge amounts of $$s for the same.
Wayne Delbeke;
Course that was about 40 years ago so maybe I don’t remember it quite right.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Your recollection and mine pretty much match. I agree with your entire comment.
Anyone who complains about amateurs in science, and denigrates them, has no idea of the history of science. I suggest they start with Bill Bryson’s excellent summary, A Short History of Nearly Everything. From there a fascinating world opens up of the development of science primarily through amateurs. Without Church of England vicars we would never have come as far in our knowledge.
Steve McIntyre says:
August 4, 2013 at 1:51 pm
The log relationship between CO2 and “forcing” is standard and everyone ought to be familiar with it. Howver, the log relationship between CO2 and temperature anomaly is not something that one commonly sees, or at all, presumably because of positive feedbacks.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
IPCC AR4 WG1 2.2 is quite clear that RF (Radiative Forcing) and SF (Surface Forcing) are not the same thing:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-2.html
That said, they are related (precisely how depends on many factors and the IPCC admits in the link above that they don’t know for certain) but at days end, as the effects of RF diminish toward zero, then so must the SF effects.
If I could ask Al Gore two questions they would be:
1) Who said it was a hoax? (I doubt any on the WUWT blogroll would appear)
2) Would Al have experienced warmer global mean temperature than today at the start of the Late Ordovician? “…it’s high school physics.”
The other deadly gas we hear about is methane. Here is a post out today at JoNova from a guest blogger: Tom Quirk.
Just to add something on methane. I think scientists were puzzled a while back why the rise in methane rise had slowed down.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/11/us-climate-methane-idUSTRE77A1LN20110811
That chart showed up on this website 5 years ago and several dozen times since in various different versions.
Somewhat oddly, Gordon Manley’s Climate and the British Scene (1952) and WG Kendrew’s Climatology (1949) make only passing reference to CO2 as, in Manley’s words, “a minor variable constituent of potential importance”. From this I think we can take it that Callendar’s work wasn’t considered important by the climatologists of his day.
Devaluation of academic achievement seems to be an all to common occurrence these days.
When I received my degree, back in the stone age, the classification system worked out something like this: First class honors degree was awarded to the top two or maybe three percent. An upper second class honors degree was awarded to roughly the next ten percent. A lower second class degree to something like the next 60 percent, maybe 20 percent got a third class degree, five percent a pass, and the rest failed.
I was always quite proud of my 2:1 (upper second), knowing that I really wasn’t in the same class as those that I knew that received a first.
Browsing the website of my old university, I was astonished to see that a first was now awarded to roughly ten percent, an upper second town astonishing 55 percent etc.etc.
It seems that employers wanted upper second degree students … so the university system in the UK gave them what they wanted.
The degredation of academic qualification has been significant in my lifetime. Looking at the quality of these “professors” I can only agree that even 40 years ago, they would have been sweeping floors.
“A better perspective is the complete mediocrity of the Team makes their work vulnerable to examination by the merely competent.”
Wait. Did Steve just claim that a caveman could debunk the Team? 🙂
I went over and read the article on it by Steve …. pretty impressive. The fellow also notes that there are two driving forces, … the input side and the output side. Unlike todays Climate Charletans, he gives recognistion that the Earth seeks to stabilize and that an increase in warming will lead to compensatory mechanisms .. ie., clouds .. that will decrease the amount of the solar constant that is allowed to reach the surface.
Funny … the poll seems to have a lot of respondents that haven’t seen the temp/CO2 logarithmic relationship expressed in a graph like that above … where have they been all of their lives, on alarmist blogs ?
Streetcred said @ August 4, 2013 at 6:25 pm
Callendar’s graph isn’t widely reproduced. As I pointed out above, his contemporaries didn’t believe that CO2 had very much influence on climate. Hansen and his missionaries don’t want us to know that any such influence is logarithmic.
“A better perspective is the complete mediocrity of the Team makes their work vulnerable to examination by the merely competent. – Steve McIntyre,”
Mr McIntyre, your humility is only outdone by the effect you have had on the so called “science” of climate over the last decade+. You sir, are anything but “merely competent”. Where many a man would have given up you carried on in the face of rude, ignorant abuse and triumphed.
Cheers
I think that Steve’s high school comparison is spot-on. Like Climate Alarmists, most high school teachers are not particularly bright and/or intellectually honest.
Several years ago, my neighbor’s daughter asked me if I thought that Global Warming was going to kill us all. She was propagandized with that meme in high school. She and her classmates were also advised not to have children, for that very reason.
Welcome to the People’s Republic of California.
The Earth radiates according to a quantum mechanical model developed by Plank. Some of the radiation is absorbed by the bonds in carbon dioxide molecules and gets re-radiated at a different frequency. The greenhouse theory then states that this re-radiated radiation from CO2 will be absorbed and converted to heat even though the planet earth is already radiating at the same frequency in a desparate attempt to lose exactly that heat. The net effect is that the Earth stops radiating like a black body as it radiates more at those frequencies where CO2 and other greenhouse gases are not absorbing radiationso the Plank black body quantum mechanical probability density function no longer applies.
This can only be described as “high school physcis” if you simplify it down to the level at which someone like Gore might understand it, by which time some rather important details would have been lightly skipped over.
Richard111 August 4, 2013 at 9:51 am
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.
For the horizon to be at least 10 degrees below the molecule’s “horizontal plane,” the molecule must be at least 100 km above the earth’s surface, approximately. The tropopause is 9-17 km above the earth’s surface, depending on latitude. So your up vs. down argument would seem to be worthless. Please do the math yourself in case I made a mistake.
The formula is quite simple.
Y temp anomaly = [doubling value] / ln(2) * ln (CO2 ppm) – [doubling value] / ln(2) * ln (280) – [temp anomaly 1765]
Or,
Y anom = 3/ln(2)*ln(CO2) – 26.4 – 0.5 = 4.33 * ln (CO2ppm) – 26.9
You can plug any CO2 number into that formula and reproduce the chart and whatever global warming theory predicts temps will get to at equilibrium for a given CO2. Make a chart.
Richard111 August 4, 2013 at 9:51 am
Something else – I just can’t restrain this: Doesn’t it occur to people like you that climate scientists can’t be THAT freaking stupid?
[yeah, not getting into this, sorry these turn into food fights- Anthony]
It shouldn’t do, Anthony, this is what used to be what NASA taught, primary and high school physics, versus what they teach now.
Either what NASA taught traditionally as I quote is correct and the KT97 and ilk have changed that, or it isn’t.
This is a straight elementary science question.
Streetcred says:
August 4, 2013 at 6:25 pm
Funny … the poll seems to have a lot of respondents that haven’t seen the temp/CO2 logarithmic relationship expressed in a graph like that above … where have they been all of their lives, on alarmist blogs ?
——————————————–
That’s it?
Either you remember seeing the graph or you’ve spent your life viewing alarmist’s blogs?
Streetcred, believe it or not most people are rationally ignorant.
Not only do most people not understand the graph, they don’t care to.
Most people do something else for a living besides climate science or weather watching.
Most people do not understand nor care about climate science.
(Yes that’s correct, they’re like most alarmists in that respect.)
cn
. . “To these men, the truth is but a lie undiscovered.”
Said by Mary (played by Jessica Lange) in the Move “Rob Roy”.
.
I got the giggles from Mr. McIntyre’s bit of snobbishness about minor universities: “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.”
The fact that these folks are being hired by MAJOR universities and I keep seeing the climate drivel from MAJOR universities says quite a bit about the MAJOR universities.
Being a multi-degree graduate of a state university, cow college at that, I wasn’t aware that there was secret math and science not allowed to be taught at MINOR universities. My experience has taught me that the source of the degree isn’t always the best indicator of the quality of the science.
Note to Steve McIntyre: Sir John Houghton was an Oxford don a generation ago….
Steve McIntyre says:
August 4, 2013 at 1:51 pm
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In 1937, the “feedback” concept hadn’t been invented, AFAIK. In fact, this is only about 30 years after Arrhenius and Angstrom were arguing about the value of the no-feedback climate sensitivity based on physical chemical estimates (they had no accurate spectra and no computer IR absorption models then, and had to make statistical mechanical guesstimates).
If I understand correctly, the reason for the logarithmic curve is pretty straightforward. As CO2 increases, the early CO2 absorbs most of the infrared at the specific wavelengths that CO2 absorbs it, leaving less infrared at these wavelengths for later CO2.
Yes.
http://www.cipa.org/files/public/GlobalWarmingScience.pdf (page 53)
http://books.google.com/books?id=X3XD9VwhETkC&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq=pat+michaels+co2+%22logarithmic%22&source=bl&ots=PDguFiRtQN&sig=85we669RkeB8Ceteo8vKWD-Km0A&hl=en&sa=X&ei=59z_Uaq7EYetigKutoFA&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=pat%20michaels%20co2%20%22logarithmic%22&f=false
Whenever you get that “heating component” figured out for the refrigerant class of gases in the atmosphere – it’s a frigid nitrogen oxygen bath refrigerated by the phase change refrigerant water – to move an instrument, or when you find the text with the heating component shown for a refrigerant, you let us all know.
The only people on this earth to be laughed at to their face by so many people they’re afraid to go off their own reservation is climatologists who believe in that magic gas story.
Show us some magic gas believers being right about which way an instrument is going to point.
Show us some magic gas believers being right about anything at all.
People laugh at those who believe in the “heating component of refrigerants” with the offhand disdain one reserves for a child who thinks movies are real.
I never read the Dragon Slayer book but I did check the loon-tunes crowd who’s trying to bark magic gas is real.
Magical back and forth-isms un-countable by mathematics of any kind, and undetectable by instruments of any kind swarming between objects two ways, when every instrument and mathematic ever devised shows clearly heat transfer is from more concentrated to less;
the fantasy belief that the lack of any warming for nearly 20 years doesn’t dent their procession of ludicrous and insultingly ill-conceived claims,
the fantasy that lack of a developing tropospheric hotspot isn’t instant death to their bullshoot.
Then there’s the fact that they’re the only bunch of goobers on earth to claim their bullshoot’s “too big to check with an experiment” while “maybe being” in the next hype story, “so small as to be barely measurable” while being “too obvious not to believe in.”
The things you magic gassers say are far and away the most ridiculed statements in modern technological dismissal of luddites who can’t read an instrument or predict which way one’s going to point.
If magic gas has any traction in reality based science there will be found to be a textbook describing how to project the warming done by the refrigerant in a phase-change refrigeration system.
If it has any reality based values, the infrared astronomy field would have no problem revealing and describing in full, the giant infrared light you’re constantly claiming is in the sky, “too big to not believe in, too small for any instrument to actually measure.”
The insanity of people whose theory can’t even predict the direction a thermometer is going to move, and who systematically preach against entropic thermodynamical motion by charge carriers
claiming people in real sciences believe that crap,
is the mark of just how bad it’s gotten in the world of “opinion based” pseudoscience.
You people have actually tried to redefine science so that something that can’t be tested at all goes beyond hypothesis to be ‘theory’
and where you claim you have a “scientific theory”
that’s not falsifiable.
Your peoples’ claims have included everything from hockey stick generators looking into bore holes to turn trees into magical treemomiturs that are 1/10th degree thermometers,
to the lack of a tropospheric hotspot not proving it wrong,
to the fact there’s a giant gas mirror receiving 168 watts from the earth emitting 324 back down to it, and 324 out toward the sky.
That’s your official scientific earth energy budget. 168 watts from earth gets 324 back. And 324 out the top.
To you that’s science.
To the rest of the world that’s a laughingstock.
Richard Vada says:
August 5, 2013 at 12:28 pm
to the fact there’s a giant gas mirror receiving 168 watts from the earth emitting 324 back down to it, and 324 out toward the sky.
That’s your official scientific earth energy budget. 168 watts from earth gets 324 back. And 324 out the top.
To you that’s science.
To the rest of the world that’s a laughingstock.
It is achieved by giving the solar constant figure (which is a measure of how much direct radiant heat from the Sun, longwave infrared, heats the surface), to shortwave at TOA, claiming that no direct radiant longwave infrared from the Sun gets through TOA.
This in order to claim that real world measurements of downwelling longwave infrared from the Sun which does reach the surface and which we feel directly as heat, is attributed instead to “greenhouse gases backradiating longwave infrared from the atmosphere under TOA”.
They then take off from this misattributed solar constant which they have placed at TOA and given to “shortwave in” (mainly visible with some uv and near infrared either side, nir being 1% of this ‘total shortwave in”), reflection and so on, and arrive at their physically impossible shortwave heating the surface figure.
I have asked this before – did Trenberth devise this energy budget himself?
richard vada,very eloquently put.