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:
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
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 @ur momisugly 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.