By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
I have just had the honor of listening to Professor Murry Salby giving a lecture on climate. He had addressed the Numptorium in Holyrood earlier in the day, to the bafflement of the fourteenth-raters who populate Edinburgh’s daft wee parliament. In the evening, among friends, he gave one of the most outstanding talks I have heard.
Professor Salby has also addressed the Parliament of Eunuchs in Westminster. Unfortunately he did not get the opportunity to talk to our real masters, the unelected Kommissars of the European tyranny-by-clerk.
The Faceless Ones whose trembling, liver-spotted hands guide the European hulk of state unerringly towards the bottom were among the first and most naively enthusiastic true-believers in the New Superstition that is global warming. They could have benefited from a scientific education from the Professor.
His lecture, a simplified version of his earlier talk in Hamburg that was the real reason why spiteful profiteers of doom at Macquarie “University” maliciously canceled his non-refundable ticket home so that he could not attend the kangaroo court that dismissed him, was a first-class exercise in logical deduction.
He had written every word of it, elegantly. He delivered it at a measured pace so that everyone could follow. He unfolded his central case step by step, verifying each step by showing how his theoretical conclusions matched the real-world evidence.
In a normal world with mainstream news media devoted to looking at all subjects from every direction (as Confucius used to put it), Murry Salby’s explosive conclusion that temperature change drives CO2 concentration change and not the other way about would have made headlines. As it is, scarce a word has been published anywhere.
You may well ask what I might have asked: given that the RSS satellite data now show a zero global warming trend for 17 full years, and yet CO2 concentration has been rising almost in a straight line throughout, is it any more justifiable to say that temperature change causes CO2 change than it is to say that CO2 change causes temperature change?
The Professor headed that one off at the pass. During his talk he said it was not global temperature simpliciter but the time-integral of global temperature that determined CO2 concentration change, and did so to a correlation coefficient of around 0.9.
I had first heard of Murry Salby’s work from Dick Lindzen over a drink at a regional government conference we were addressing in Colombia three years ago. I readily agreed with Dick’s conclusion that if we were causing neither temperature change nor even CO2 concentration change the global warming scare was finished.
I began then to wonder whether the world could now throw off the absurdities of climate extremism and develop a sensible theory of climate.
In pursuit of this possibility, I told Professor Salby I was going to ask two questions. He said I could ask just one. So I asked one question in two parts.
First, I asked whether the rapid, exponential decay in carbon-14 over the six decades following the atmospheric nuclear bomb tests had any bearing on his research. He said that the decay curve for carbon-14 indicated a mean CO2 atmospheric residence time far below the several hundred years assumed in certain quarters. It supports Dick Lindzen’s estimate of a 40-year residence time, not the IPCC’s imagined 50-200 years.
Secondly, I asked whether Professor Salby had studied what drove global temperature change. He said he had not gotten to that part of the story yet.
In the past year, I said, four separate groups haf contacted me to say they were able to reproduce global temperature change to a high correlation coefficient by considering it as a function of – and, accordingly, dependent upon – the time-integral of total solar irradiance.
If these four groups are correct, and if Professor Salby is also correct, one can begin to sketch out a respectable theory of climate.
The time-integral of total solar irradiance determines changes in global mean surface temperature. Henrik Svensmark’s cosmic-ray amplification, which now has considerable support in the literature, may help to explain the mechanism.
In turn, the time integral of absolute global mean temperature determines the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Here, the mechanism will owe much to Henry’s Law, which mandates that a warmer ocean can carry less CO2 than a colder ocean. I have never seen an attempt at a quantitative analysis of that relationship in this debate, and should be grateful if any of Anthony’s readers can point me to one.
The increased CO2 concentration as the world warms may well act as a feedback amplifying the warming, and perhaps our own CO2 emissions make a small contribution. But we are not the main cause of warmer weather, and certainly not the sole cause.
For the climate, all the world’s a stage. But, if the theory of climate that is emerging in samizdat lectures such as that of Professor Salby is correct, we are mere bit-part players, who strut and fret our hour upon the stage and then are heard no more.
The shrieking hype with which the mainstream news media bigged up Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, ruthlessly exploiting lost lives in their increasingly desperate search for evidence – any evidence – as ex-post-facto justification for their decades of fawning, head-banging acquiescence in the greatest fraud in history shows that they have begun to realize that their attempt at politicizing science itself is failing.
Whether they like it or not, typhoons are acts of God, not of Man.
I asked Professor Salby whether there was enough information in the temperature record to allow him to predict the future evolution of atmospheric CO2 concentration. He said he could not do that.
However, one of the groups working on the dependence of global temperature change on the time-integral of total solar irradiance makes a startling prediction: that we are in for a drop of half a Celsius degree in the next five years.
When I made a glancing reference to that research in an earlier posting, the propagandist John Abraham sneeringly offered me a $1000 bet that the fall in global temperature would not happen.
I did not respond to this characteristically jejune offer. A theory of climate is a hypothesis yet to be verified by observation, experiment and measurement. It is not yet a theorem definitively demonstrated. Explaining the difference to climate communists is likely to prove impossible. To them the Party Line, whatever it is, must be right even if it be wrong.
The group that dares to say it expects an imminent fall in global mean surface temperature does so with great courage, and in the Einsteinian spirit of describing at the outset a test by which its hypothesis may be verified.
Whether that group proves right or wrong, its approach is as consistent with the scientific method as the offering of childish bets is inconsistent with it. In science, all bets are off. As al-Haytham used to say, check and check and check again. He was not talking about checks in settlement of silly wagers.
In due course Professor Salby will publish in the reviewed literature his research on the time-integral of temperature as the driver of CO2 concentration change. So, too, I hope, will the groups working on the time-integral of total solar irradiance as the driver of temperature change.
In the meantime, I hope that those who predict a sharp, near-term fall in global temperature are wrong. Cold is a far bigger killer than warmth. Not that the climate communists of the mainstream media will ever tell you that.
Ulric Lyons says:
November 12, 2013 at 12:49 pm
My beer should stay fizzy when it warms up then as long as I keep it out of the wind eh?
It takes less time to release most of the 3 bar CO2 from 20 cm of beer than 0.0008 bar CO2 in 200 meter ocean into the 0.0004 bar CO2 of the atmosphere…
The prime point I am making is that CO2 uptake by the oceans will be lower with slower surface winds globally.
The largest long term uptake is in polar waters, one need the wind speed there, global is too coarse…
The main upwelling at the equator is cold, it’s called a La Nina.
pCO2 at the upwelling places indeed is rather low, but increases when the waters warm up when drifting off the South American coast and give most release around the Galapagos islands…
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 12, 2013 at 12:42 pm
A change as seen in the past 50/160 years would be seen in all ice cores of all resolution, covering 800 kyears. But it is not.
Thus in my opinion, any theory that says that human are not responsible for the current increase need a lot of proof…
—————————
I don’t know what constitutes “proof” in your book, but there is abundant, if not overwhelming evidence from all around the world that the speed & magnitude of 20th century warming is nothing at all out of the Holocene norm, & even less impressive by the standards of prior interglacials. You don’t need to rely on ice cores.
Here’s such evidence just from the Sui-Tang (a warmer interval in the longer Dark Ages Cold Period) & Medieval Warm Periods in China & Tibet:
http://www.co2science.org/subject/m/summaries/mwpchina.php
“Since one of the purposes of their study was “to test whether the warming in the 20th century has exceeded the maximum magnitude in the past 2000 years,” Ge et al. considered this question in some detail. At the centennial scale, they report that “the temperature anomaly of the 20th century is not only lower than that of the later warm stage of the Medieval Warm Period (the 1200s~1310s), but also slightly lower than that of the warm period in the Sui and Tang dynasties (the 570s~770s) and the early warm stage of the Medieval Warm Period (the 930s~1100s).”
“On a 30-year scale, they likewise report that “the warmest 30-year temperature anomaly in the 20th century is roughly equal to the warmest 30-year one in the Sui and Tang dynasties warm period, but a little lower than that of the Medieval Warm Period.” And on the decadal scale, they say that “the warmest decadal temperature anomaly in the 20th century is approximately at the same level of the warmest decade of the early stage of the Medieval Warm Period.”
“Last of all, Ge et al. additionally note that “although the warming rate in the early 20th century has reached 1.1°C per century, such a rapid change is not unique during the alternation from the cold period[s] to the warm period[s]” of the prior 2000 years. For example, they report that the per-century warming rate from the 480s~500s to the 570s~590s was 1.3°C, while that from the 1140s~1160s to the 1230s~1250s was 1.4°C, and that from the 1650s~1670s to the 1740s~1760s was 1.2°C.
“In discussing the implications of these several observations of pre-20th-century faster-than-recent warmings and higher-than-recent temperatures, Ge et al. say that their analysis “gives a different viewpoint from that ‘the 20th century is the warmest century in the past 1000 years’, presented by IPCC, and is of great significance for better understanding the phenomena of the greenhouse effect and global warming etc. induced by human activities.” And what would that “different viewpoint” be? In the words of Ge et al., “the temperature of the 20th century in eastern China is still within the threshold of the variability of the last 2000 years,” which observation clearly indicates that the Chinese data provide no evidence for the hypothesis that the eastern part of the country’s 20th-century warming – or even a small part of it – was human-induced.”
Proxy data show that Earth has been in a longer-term cooling trend for over 3000 years, with each warm fluctuation reaching a lower peak & cold phases generally cooler since at least the Minoan Warm Period, if not indeed the Holocene Optimum. IMO the evidence is overwhelming that contemporary humans, despite altering environments & excavating hydrocarbons, have had very little effect on natural climatic fluctuations, outside of urban heat islands.
milodonharlani says:
November 12, 2013 at 1:48 pm
Sorry, I was talking about the cause of current increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, not about the cause of the increase in temperature. The ice cores show a modest increase in CO2 of 8 ppmv/K over 800 kyrs, while te current increase is over 100 ppmv/K, which isn’t seen over pre-industrial times in ice cores of any resolution.
The influence of the extra CO2 on temperature is an entirely separate debate, of which I have the opinion that it is at the low side, hardly measurable in the real world…
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 12, 2013 at 2:03 pm
Apologies. Skimming instead of reading.
I don’t know if you’re right that ~100 ppm of current Mauna Loa reading nearing 400 ppm is man-made or not, but you make a good case, IMO. I agree that the fourth molecule we might have added to 10,000 molecules of dry air has a negligible effect on global average temperature, if such can be measured.
For the benefit of those of us unfamiliar with the general circulation models that the climate-science establishment runs on its supercomputers: Are you saying that those models really attempt numerical solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations for the atmosphere as a whole? At what time and spatial resolutions? (I’m speaking from total ignorance of fluid mechanics–which I’ve resigned myself to having become too old to learn–so I would not at all be surprised that my gut reaction is totally wrong. But it sounds preposterous that resolutions fine enough to yield creditable results for the atmosphere as a whole over any appreciably long time scales are seriously being attempted, even with supercomputers.)
In a crude sense, yes. The granularity is order of 1 degree (which is absurd, yes, on a spherical surface but it’s the easy solution to program where the right solution — a scalable icosahedral tiling — is much more difficult) times some number of layers/slabs spatially, and IIRC CAM 3 did five minute time resolution. I think that they use differences for e.g. mass transport and density changes. But as long as they include vertical and horizontal convection (mass transport) and explicitly integrate over time, anything they do (no matter how they approximate the physics of each timestep) is basically a NS solution attempt because that’s the fundamental description of the fluid system. With lots of coupling, of course.
That’s why they’re called “General CIRCULATION Models” — they account for mass transport as well as energy transport.
As I said, the amazing thing about this dancing bear is that it can dance at all. The errors in GCMs would be nothing to be ashamed of if it weren’t for the fact that they are being used to push hundred-billion dollar, million death solutions on the world at the same time that they are systematically diverging from the actual observational data and fail to explain all sorts of things correctly. Yes, they can dance — sometimes, badly — but not nearly well enough to go on the stage in Moscow in a production of Swan Lake.
rgb
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
“The largest long term uptake is in polar waters, one need the wind speed there, global is too coarse…”
The quickest rates as it is colder but not the largest uptake as the area is relatively small. It’s not as if this is the only area of uptake, and I disagree that global is too coarse, Slower surface winds will reduce uptake in any given area.
thThe rest of your response doesn’t seem to contradict my view that radiative gases will simply rise higher than non radiative gases of the same weight and will stop rising when the energy they radiate directly out to space equalises with the radiation they send directly back to the surface and at that height they no longer warm the surface because that which they send down is offset by that which is sent out of the atmosphere to space.
This means precisely nothing to me. Why would radiative gases rise higher than non-radiative gases of the same weight? Indeed, direct observational evidence demonstrates that the atmosphere is well mixed (and uniformly mixed) at all heights once you are away from the immediate vicinity of a source. Clearly you do not understand the second law of thermodynamics. Why would they stop rising (not that they should ever have started) when they radiate equal amounts of energy up and down? They should always radiate equal amounts of energy up and down. A gas molecule retains no memory of the direction the photon that excited it came from and re-emits uniformly in all directions, on average. Nor do molecules have any idea of what is “up” or what is “down” while they are in free motion. Finally, what possible basis could you have for asserting that the radiation they send back down won’t “warm the surface”? Radiation carries energy, period. Energy input to the surface is a part of the energy flow budget that determines its temperature, and comes in on the positive side of the ledger just as energy emitted from the surface goes on the negative side of the ledger. “Warming” vs “Cooling” depends on the totals of both sides, but the downwelling radiation, carrying energy, is without any question a warming/forcing transaction.
I have officially changed my mind. Based on your responses I can only conclude that you don’t understand physics well enough to usefully participate in model building. Your assertions are often plain old wrong, in direct contradiction to known experimental results, and when you explain the ones that aren’t in more detail, I can only conclude that you don’t understand what you are talking about.
I don’t mean that as any sort of insult, by the way. It’s just that assertions that two molecular species at the same temperature and with the same mass will sort themselves out by height violates so many principles of thermodynamics that it is immediately clear that you’ve never taken a good course in the subject. And if you haven’t taken a good course in the subject, how in the world are you going to build a credible model for a system that climate physics Ph.D.s, trying pretty hard, have a difficult time capturing.
I’d address the vertical vs horizontal advection problem in further detail as well, but there isn’t any point. I wasn’t asserting an isothermal atmosphere, I was asserting a profound lowering of the troposphere as most of the atmosphere inverts. With or without lateral heat transport, the only place the atmosphere can lose heat is at the surface. Tropical surfaces can lose heat at the poles, sure, but the ATMOSPHERE doesn’t lose heat ANYWHERE BUT AT THE BOTTOM. Hence outside of a thin mixed region at the bottom, it will form a nearly stable vertically stratified inverted atmosphere with warmer air strictly on top. The stratosphere will come way on down towards the surface, along with the tropopause.
Sorry,
rgb
Bart says:
November 12, 2013 at 1:00 pm
Gibberish. It’s physical meaning is that there is an integration of T into CO2. There is no avoiding it using rigorous mathematics. Look up the Bode Phase-Gain relationship – phase and gain are inextricably related in minimum phase systems. 90 deg phase lag means integration.
That is a mathematical solution, but doesn’t explain the physical meaning. And it doesn’t hold for a combination of a sinusoid and a slope in temperature:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/sim_co2_temp_00.jpg
where CO2 linearly follows T with a 90 deg lag for the sinusoid.
with its derivative:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/sim_dco2_dT_Tanom_00.jpg
As the increase of CO2 is a linear function of T, the slope of CO2 in the derivative is zero and the amplitude of the sinusoid in the derivative remains zero, thus integrating T with a factor zero and an offset will restore the slope of the CO2 increase but can’t restore its variability.
I do not think so, and yes, I agree that would be a monumental task. As Willis Eisenbach has shown numerous times, the models all behave like a simple one-box model with CO2 as driving input. I think they are really rudimentary.
Sorry, Bart, but this is just not true:
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/atm-cam/docs/description/
It’s open source, so you can grab it and look at the source. The atmosphere and ocean are partitioned into volumes, and coupled differential equations are solved in time. This IS a monumental problem, but they are indeed getting what amounts to a crude solution to the NS equation (or two coupled NS equations, depending on how they treat the ocean, but usually it’s treated as a “single slab”, effectively a couple boundary layer without much internal structure).
Ulric Lyons says:
November 12, 2013 at 2:37 pm
The quickest rates as it is colder but not the largest uptake as the area is relatively small. It’s not as if this is the only area of uptake, and I disagree that global is too coarse, Slower surface winds will reduce uptake in any given area.
Slower surface winds will reduce the release in warm areas and the uptake in cold areas. A lot of uptake and release is seasonal in the mid-latitudes surface waters (the mixed layer), thus absorbing in winter and releasing in summer. Over a year that gives a net uptake, reaching a maximum of 10% of the change in the atmosphere in 2-3 years. The only semi-permanent uptake is via the sink places near the poles, mainly the NE Atlantic where the THC deep waters are formed, coming back to the surface many centuries later.
The surface waters play a role on short term, the deep oceans is where the main sinks are…
Stephen Wilde: which omits the inevitable circulation caused by uneven surface heating creating density differentials and doesn’t realise that simple uplift has a cooling effect because kinetic energy gets converted to potential energy with height.
And here is where we have to part ways. Simple uplift is caused by buoyancy. A parcel of air warms, its density decreases as it expands, and cooler air around it displaces it. You can watch this happen in any fluid heated at the bottom and cooled at the top. It creates convective rolls that carry heat from the bottom to the top, where the heat is lost to something else. Indeed, convective rolls in a fluid are a self-organizing heat engine.
As the gas parcel rises, it is surrounded by air (which is a poor conductor) and it approximately adiabatically expands. The does indeed “cool” the gas in the specific sense of lowering its temperature, but not in the sense of losing its heat content. Indeed, the word “adiabatic” means “without gaining or losing heat” in thermodynamic contexts. So it does not actually cool in the sense that it loses any of the heat it picked up at the surface. The dry adiabatic lapse rate is the rate of temperature drop with height produced by the approximately adiabatic expansion of uplifted air and downfalling air in convective rolls.
And there’s the rub. There are no convective rolls For there to be convective rolls, the air at the top has to cool and become more dense to sink, displaced by upwelling warmer air. Adiabatic expansion is expansion — it never recompresses the air. One has to lose the heat to a cold reservoir, somewhere, for the air density to increase so it can fall. But without radiative coupling, it cannot lose heat! Air is an excellent insulator, and the only two places it can lose heat TO are the surface or (via radiation) outer space. But you’ve turned off outer space along with radiation, and air high aloft cannot possibly lose heat to the surface via conduction.
You end up with the air stratified pretty much the same way that water is stratified — warmest, air on top, without any density variation that can create large scale convective rolls and hence a DALR between a warm surface and a cold interface where the heat is finally lost. That’s what defines our troposphere — it is the height range where the atmosphere starts to aggressively lose heat to outer space via radiation. This cools it and increases its density, so that it has net NEGATIVE buoyancy compared to air at the surface, so it falls to displace it.
As I said, you don’t seem to have studied thermodynamics or statistical mechanics. The thing that cools air parcels as they rise is adiabatic expansion, not some sort of tradeoff between temperature and gravity. There are numerous proofs out there that an air column in thermodynamic equilibrium is isothermal, whether or not it is a gravitational field. If it weren’t, one could build a second-law violating heat engine that used gravity as a Maxwell Demon to sort out warm air at the bottom even with no external energy input. Not happening.
Like all cyclic heat engines, convective atmospheric rolls run between two thermal reservoirs — the heated surface and outer space at 3K. You MUST have a cold reservoir to reject the heat uptake. Turn off radiation, and you don’t.
rgb
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 12, 2013 at 2:55 pm
A deep ocean sink:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130905134100.htm
Bob Weber says:/
“Corbyn’s forecasts are not that expensive and I find it interesting to watch it all play out every month. For instance he forecasted 30 days ahead the highest solar activity level for the last week of October, and we had all those x-flares. His weather forecasts for that period were correct for both sides of the Atlantic.”
He certainly did not forecast for X-flares in late October, his “Trafalgar” storm for the 21-23 Oct didn’t happen, and daily UK temperature deviations through the month were largely the opposite of he forecast, i.e. he forecast a cool start and warming up towards hot on the 9/10th, around normals for 12-19th, cool/cold for 21-26th, and warming towards month end. Here’s what really happened:
http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/cgi-bin/klibild?WMO=u3008&ZEITRAUM=08&ZEIT=12112013&ART=MAX&LANG=en&1384297772&ZUGRIFF=NORMAL&MD5=
“Where did rgb at duke assert an isothermal atmosphere?”
He said:
“If you leave radiative coupling out, the atmospheric gas will only cool at the surface of the Earth, because in that case only the surface of the Earth will be able to radiate energy away to space. Since warm air rises (due to buoyancy forces) and since air, once warmer than the surface, will be unable to lose heat once it has lifted away from the surface and will always be displaced and held aloft by cooler air underneath, the atmosphere would promptly invert — coolest at the bottom, hottest at the top, and a nearly smooth gradient from coolest to warmest.”
Which in no possible interpretation of the meaning of plain English can be interpreted as an “isothermal atmosphere”.
Note well that which omits the inevitable circulation caused by uneven surface heating creating density differentials and doesn’t realise that simple uplift has a cooling effect because kinetic energy gets converted to potential energy with height.
Time to go retake thermodynamics. This is not a “cooling effect”.
I wonder how you explain the stratosphere and thermosphere? Above the tropopause, the atmosphere gets hotter with height.
Nor does he realise that simple adiabatic descent has a warming effect as potential energy is converted back to kinetic energy.
Because it doesn’t. Adiabatic expansion and compression increase the temperature of a gas as it rises and falls, but the energy content of the parcel does not change. That’s what adiabatic means. You might want to get a book on the physics of this stuff and work through it. At no point in the derivation of the DALR does anyone ever assert that the cooling is conversion of potential energy into kinetic energy. In fact, if you understood the equipartition theorem, you’d see why this is not, in fact, relevant. The gas is at all times in a near-thermal equilibrium (“quasi-static”) state. It cools for the same reason that a compressed gas quickly expanding into a vacuum cools, or why the gas in a cylinder in a Carnot cycle cools in the adiabatic leg of the cycle, and gravity has nothing to do with it.
Good at physics but poor on meteorology.
I wouldn’t even claim to be good at physics. Big subject, lots of physicists. But probably better than most humans who aren’t physicists. The “meteorology” bit is irrelevant here. As I hopefully have convincingly demonstrated above, you are misconstruing my words, turning a thermally stratified, inverted atmosphere into something “isothermal”. You are also getting some very simple physics quite wrong, at least according to the climate physics textbooks I’ve looked at and worked through and my not particularly terrible knowledge of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics outside of climate science entirely. Warming and cooling are words you need to use carefully in this discussion, because they can refer to increase or decrease of temperature or absorption and rejection of heat from reservoirs.
When I say that a non-radiative atmosphere, in steady state, only cools at the bottom I mean specifically that they only place it can actually lose internal energy, once it gains it, is via direct contact with a cooler surface. Heat will take a one-way trip upwards, because without losing the heat it picks up at the surface via radiation, it cannot ever increase its density as it cools from adiabatic expansion, and hence it cannot ever fall again. Air will stratify from densest coolest at the bottom to warmest least dense at the top, just as it does everywhere above the tropopause now because radiative cooling becomes irrelevant when the greenhouse gas density drops to where the mean free path of LWIR photons suffices to allow immediate escape.
rgb
Gail Combs:
Thankyou for your additions to information I provided which you provide in your post at November 12, 2013 at 11:14 am.
As you say, if much higher atmospheric CO2 concentration had little climate effect in the past then there needs to be a very good explanation for why it is claimed slightly higher atmospheric CO2 concentration would have significant climate effect now.
Richard
milodonharlani says:
November 12, 2013 at 3:17 pm
Thanks for the link! I did know, the ocean surface is a net sink for CO2 beyond the direct solubility thanks to a lot of coccoliths, dropping their shells and organics to the ocean bottom, either directly or after being eaten… But this is an extra…
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
“The surface waters play a role on short term, the deep oceans is where the main sinks are…”
It all takes place at the surface, and as you say, “a lot of uptake and release is seasonal in the mid-latitudes surface waters”. A falling trend in surface wind speed should produce a falling trend in uptake.
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 12, 2013 at 3:35 pm
You’re welcome. It was a sink that hadn’t been obvious to me. I’ve said all along that science doesn’t know all the carbon sinks, so it seems premature to build models on assumptions not in evidence.
Snow is quite rare in Britain. I do not think we could have any material effect on its impacts due to this infrequency.I do Remember putting soot on our path during the 1962/3 winter. In my opinion soot in the arctic is possibly a major factor in its melt.
Curiously, snow is quite rare in North Carolina, too. Snow in mid-November is scarce as hen’s teeth. And dammit, it is snowing outside, right now. I do believe that this is the earliest date with observable snowfall I’ve seen here in 40 years, although I’m not looking up the records that would prove or disprove my memory.
Odd, though, no matter how you slice it. In the 80s and 90s I used to pick tomatoes from unfrosted tomato plants in my garden in December. This year we had our first killing frost weeks ago. But I’m certain that this is still going to be the fourth warmest November on record, or the like, by the time the CAGW climate bloggers get through with it.
Sigh.
rgb
rgbatduke says: November 12, 2013 at 3:07 pm
I’m reluctant to intrude when you’re mostly giving a much-needed correct scientific account. Just a few things, that have cropped up in various places:
“Since warm air rises (due to buoyancy forces) and since air, once warmer than the surface, will be unable to lose heat once it has lifted away from the surface and will always be displaced and held aloft by cooler air underneath, the atmosphere would promptly invert — coolest at the bottom, hottest at the top, and a nearly smooth gradient from coolest to warmest. “
Any dry gas below the DALR (dry lapse rate) is convectively stable. It takes energy to lift an air parcel, because it becomes cool and more dense for its level. So the lapse rate would still be maintained. A clue here is that its value is g/cp. No mention of radiative properties.
“And there’s the rub. There are no convective rolls”
It’s stable, so there are no natural convective rolls. But there is driven circulation. Whenever there is wind, there are eddies, with all orientations. It takes energy to push air up or down (lapse rate below DALR), but as you’ve said, it carries heat (adiabatic). It’s not perfectly adiabatic, so that heat gets transferred to the new level, and the heat pumping is downward, for both rising and falling air. The lapse rate is maintained by a heat pump, driven by the KE of the wind.
And there will be wind, because there is still a heat source (tropic) and sink (polar), so a heat engine.
“A gas molecule retains no memory of the direction the photon that excited it came from and re-emits uniformly in all directions, on average.”
In fact, the gas molecule doesn’t even retain the energy. The time scale for ke exchange with colliding molecules is faster than the average time for re-emission. That’s a consequence of local thermodynamic equilibrium. Emission reflects just the temperature of the mixed gas, not prior absorption events. Of course, absorption helps maintain the temperature.
“(or two coupled NS equations, depending on how they treat the ocean, but usually it’s treated as a “single slab”, effectively a couple boundary layer without much internal structure)”
You’re absolutely right about GCM being a NS solver. And CAM doesn’t do much about the ocean – it’s an Atmosphere Model. But others, like GFDL, do full ocean dynamics.
Ferdinand Engelbeen:
I had written that
Your post at November 12, 2013 at 11:20 am comments on that saying
“Right” but ”one sided”? No, it is right in so far as any such estimate is “right”.
You say you use a lower NASA estimate of 23:1 and not our estimate of 34:1. This again demonstrates the lack of adequate quantification of all parts of the carbon cycle. However, assuming the NASA estimate is “right” then that does not alter my point that the anthropogenic emission is a small part of the total emission.
You say
True, I did not “tell” anybody that.
I also did not mention the height of the Eiffel Tower because that is also not relevant to my point that the anthropogenic emission is a small part of the total emission.
And you also say
No, I did not “tell” anybody that because it is irrelevant nonsense.
A CO2 molecule does not know from whence it was emitted. Any molecule in the air has an equal chance of being sequestered by the sinks (ignoring the trivial isotope separation). At issue is whether the small anthropogenic CO2 emission is sufficient addition to the natural CO2 emission to cause the resulting total CO2 emission to overwhelm the available sinks. The fact that humans don’t provide additional sinks is irrelevant to this issue.
Importantly, it is the nonsensical assertion that there is importance to the statement that “humans sink near zero carbon” which has induced the insane pressures to enforce adoption of CCS so humans do “sink carbon”.
Of importance is whether the small anthropogenic CO2 emission is sufficient to overwhelm the ability of the existing sinks to sequester all the total CO2 emission. And – as I have repeatedly explained above – the dynamics of the seasonal variation demonstrates they can, so the year-on-year rise in atmospheric CO2 is probably an effect of changed equilibrium of the carbon cycle. Perhaps the anthropogenic emission is the cause of that altered equilibrium, but other causes are more likely.
Richard
Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 12, 2013 at 2:43 pm
“And it doesn’t hold for a combination of a sinusoid and a slope in temperature:”
It always holds, Ferdinand. It’s a mathematical law, not open to negotiation. If you think it doesn’t hold, you do not understand it.
rgbatduke says:
November 12, 2013 at 2:48 pm
I stand corrected. Monumental tasks, though, tend to be vulnerable to monumental errors, mistakes, or omissions.
rgbatduke says:
November 12, 2013 at 4:02 pm
I’ve had the same experience with tomatoes in Oregon. My crop this year was pitiful, as were those of my kith & kin. May have to start them in a real greenhouse next year.
Well do I remember the year the PDO so dramatically flipped to its warm phase, 1977, although of course I didn’t know what was happening at the time, except a lot of strange things all at once, including to wheat prices. I also recall the remarkably cold winters of the ’60s, especially Dec ’68. But maybe that was just weather.
richardscourtney says:
November 12, 2013 at 4:07 pm
“No, I did not “tell” anybody that because it is irrelevant nonsense.”
Indeed, it is. It is the “mass balance” argument, soft peddled into the conversation. Half of this thread has been devoted to debunking it.
The expansion of a sink which expanded due to human inputs is an artificial sink. It does not matter if it was constructed in passive opposition to our forcing. It is still increased capacity which would not be there if we were not inducing it.
richardscourtney says:November 12, 2013 at 4:07 pm
“True, I did not “tell” anybody that.
I also did not mention the height of the Eiffel Tower because that is also not relevant to my point that the anthropogenic emission is a small part of the total emission.”
It is entirely relevant. The “natural” emissions and absorptions are coupled. They have been proceeding for millenia in balance, and there are strong reasons for that.
One main component is photosynthesis. About 100 Gt/year C is reduced by this process. The reduced C is subsequently oxidised, either by combustion or respiration. That is “natural” emission, and it cannot in the long term proceed faster than the reduction. Nor can it proceed slower, because there is no long term repository for reduced C. Wood (the most stable) lasts for decades, maybe even centuries, but eventually it all oxidises.
The other main coupled precess is seasonal ocean exchange. Much of the ocean cools by several degrees toward winter, and warms by the same amount toward summer. CO2 is more soluble in cold water, so is absorbed as it cools and emitted as it warms. It warms and cools by the same amount.
When we dig up and burn carbon, that is not part of a coupled process. It does not return to the coal seams. Unlike the natural cycling, it is new carbon added to the system.