Towards a theory of climate

Nick Stokes says:
November 14, 2013 at 2:55 am
….Well, the plot shows four different cores, from four different groups, each with the same flatness and rise….
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The paper I linked to says:

“… The ice core data from various polar sites are not consistent with each other, and there is a discrepancy between data and geological climatic evidence(12) One such example is the discrepancy between the classic Antarctic Byrd and Vostok ice cores, where an important decrease in the CO2 content in the air bubbles occurred at the same depth of about 500 meters, but at which the ice age differed by about 16,000 years. In an approximately 14,000-year-old part of the Byrd core, a drop in the CO2 concentration of 50ppmv was observed, but in similarly old ice from the Vostok core, an increase of 60ppmv was found. In about ~6,000-year-old ice from Camp Century, Greenland, the CO2 concentration in air bubbles was 420ppmv, but it was 270 ppmv in similar old ice from Byrd, Antarctica.
H. Oeschger, et al. made an ad hoc attempt to explain some of these discrepancies as (1)”a process which has not yet been identified,” (2) wrong modeling, and (3) “not overlapping time intervals” but these explained nothing. (13)==> H.Oeschger, et al, 1988. Ann. Glaciol., Vol 10, p. 215.

So at that time discrepancies were noted including values as high as 420ppmv AND a paper was written in 1988 to try and sweep the problem under the rug.
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Nick Stokes says: @ur momisugly November 14, 2013 at 2:55 am
If you’re going to insist that scientists just lie to suit their “agenda”, then there’s not much point in discussing science, is there?
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There a very good reasons to discuss this.
The first is to try and determine the truth as best we can.
The second is to expose the lies to sunlight.
Last is to expose and stop the agenda that is propagating the lies.
The last is the most important because the lies and the agenda are killing people. In the UK it is about ~65 people a day in the winter. The agenda is also resulting in a massive wealth transfer. According to the IMF ” In the United States the share of the top 1 percent has close to tripled…”
The ultimate goal of course is power aka (Global Governance)

Nick Stokes says: @ur momisugly November 14, 2013 at 3:46 am
OK, so now it’s volcanoes. USGS gives output of land volcanoes at 0.13 Gton CO2/year. We emit about 40 Gton/yr. 300x! You’ve cited a site which merely says some submarine volcanoes have been discovered. They would need to be about 100 times as productive as land volcanoes to make a difference, and no evidence of that is offered.
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You are missing the entire point, which is that if you claim “Mass Balance” then you’d better consider the entire enchilada and not pick only part of the cycle, the CO2 subcycle. In your last post you seem to say that because you claim CO2 is flat for a millennium, you can ignore geologic and chemical processes.
It appears that you are conflating the conservation of the earth’s total mass of carbon atoms (ignoring meteorites and nuclear decay) with a constant amount of CO2. CO2 is only one of the molecules in the carbon cycle. When the number of CO2 molecules decreases as its carbon becomes coal, limestone or calcite, you no longer have “Mass Balance” When the number of molecules of CO2 increases because a volcano belched, you no longer have “Mass Balance.”
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“…says some submarine volcanoes have been discovered.”
Good grief, Nick it is not ‘Some”
First, remember the oceans cover 70% of the earth’s surface and we really know nothing much about the oceans especially at depth.

…The true extent to which the ocean bed is dotted with volcanoes has been revealed by researchers who have counted 201,055 underwater cones. This is over 10 times more than have been found before.
The team estimates that in total there could be about 3 million submarine volcanoes, 39,000 of which rise more than 1000 metres over the sea bed.
“The distribution of underwater volcanoes tells us something about what is happening in the centre of the Earth,” says John Hillier of the University of Cambridge in the UK. That is because they give information about the flows of hot rock in the mantle beneath. “But the problem is that we cannot see through the water to count them,” he says.
Satellites can detect volcanoes that are more than 1500 m high because the mass of the submerged mountains causes gravity to pull the water in around them. This creates domes on the ocean’s surface that can be several metres high and can be detected from space.
Data overload
But there is a multitude of small volcanoes that have gone undetected. The only way of identifying them is to manually find their outline on sonar measurements taken from ships….
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12218-thousand-of-new-volcanoes-revealed-beneath-the-waves.html#.UoS_QLA1iUY

Remember the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that runs through the seismically active Iceland? Map
Remember the Pacific Trench? link
Those are just a couple of areas that could are leaking CO2 and scientists don’t have an inkling of how much. You, yourself have indicated that the figures for volcanic outgassing is based only on land-based volcanoes.
They are even now finding active volcanoes under the Arctic and Antarctic seas.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/06/080626-arctic-volcano.html
http://www.livescience.com/15006-underwater-volcanoes-discovered-antarctica.html
Also just because a volcano is not actively producing lava does not mean it is not leaking CO2: LAKE NYOS (1986)
In other words the ‘Official’ amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes is just another wild-ass guess made without sufficient evidence.
NOTE: 195 governments including the USA committed by treaty to produce this anti-CO2 science when they signed The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

..The ultimate objective of the Convention is to stabilize greenhouse gas …
Industrialized nations agree under the Convention to support climate change …

I’m particularly interested to hear more from rgb as to how he managed to think that a rising molecule can retain its heat whist cooling during the course of rising against gravity. It retains its energy but not its heat.
Wow, a really simple one. Get on an airplane. Carry with you a thermos flask containing one of those little button USB recording thermometers — they aren’t too expensive — and some air from your house. Take off and fly anywhere you like. When you land, plot the temperature of the gas in the thermos.
As you flew, the plane rose some 10 km. In fact, it rose to the height of the stratosphere, as that’s where jets generally fly. The potential energy (per molecule) of all the molecules of gas in your (adiabatic) flask have all increased by mgH. Yet strangely, the temperature in your flask reads dead constant for the entire flight! How in in the world does that work?
Because if you write out the first law of thermodynamics, the energy in the flask changed according to:

where is the total internal energy (kinetic plus potential) of the molecules in the flask, is the heat exchanged between the molecules and the surrounding environment (which is zero because the gas is in an adiabatic insulated thermos flask) and W is the work done on the system by external forces. Since the flask is adiabatic, if we assume a monoatomic gas:

or

The next mental example (or go ahead, by all means do the experiments) is a bit more challenging. Suppose you have the gas, but now it is in an insulated cylinder with an insulated piston. You fill your flask with air down on the ground as before (still containing your well-equilibrated recording thermometer) so that the pressure inside and outside are equal and the piston does not move. You place the entire cylinder in a large vacuum chamber and slowly lower the pressure. The gas inside the piston expands (doing positive work on its environment, which is negative work on the flask) but it still is adiabatic. The first law now reads:

is clearly negative — it did work, its potential energy did not change, the work energy had to come from somewhere, it couldn’t come from infiltrating heat, so the average internal kinetic energy of the gas molecules has to decrease, cooling the gas by removing some of its energy to the environment by means other than heat transfer. Precisely the same process works in reverse — it is why air in the bicycle pump cylinder heats up as you compress it. It is ancient technology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_piston
(the adiabatic fire starter).
As Joel pointed out, buoyant forces do work on a parcel of rising gas. The work they do is fundamentally no different from the work the flask does lifting the gas inside to the stratosphere, and globally is precisely balanced by some denser gas falling to replace it, so no net energy leaves the system as all of this goes on (which is the problem I’m discussing with Nick Stokes). In other words, if there is no radiation at all from the atmosphere is always zero for the atmosphere as a whole everywhere but at the surface, which means that you can move energy around internally, sure, but once the gas gains it, it is going to retain it for a very long time because it can only lose it at the surface.
Rising gas heated by the surface will still cool as it rises, but not because it gains gravitational PE — that gain is brought about by the work done by the buoyant force — but because the pressure decreases as it rises so it cools (approximately adiabatically) as the gas parcel expands into its lower pressure surroundings. This article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_process#Adiabatic_heating_and_cooling
will, if you take the time to work through it with any intro physics book in the known universe that contains a thermo section (my own doesn’t, yet, as I haven’t had time to finish writing it) walk you through how this works. Finally, you absolutely need to retrieve this:
http://people.su.se/~rcaba/teaching/PhysMetLectNotes.pdf
Rodrigo Caballero’s Meteorlogical Physics lecture notes. Indeed, this book will walk you through the needed thermo too. Chapter 2 is what you need to learn.
Note well that I’ve answered your question, precisely and with empirical tests you can easily perform, in the very best of faith. You could also note that inside your well-insulated house, heat rises and accumulates at the ceiling, the air getting cooler as you descend to the floor UNTIL the whole system equilibrates via conduction (again, my issue with Nick — if you have a heat source on one patch of the floor and a cold sink on another patch on the floor across the house, you’re still going to end up with mostly stratified air with a negative lapse rate because the air cannot lose heat at the ceiling and the hottest, least dense air is quite stable there).
I’m just tell you what lots of others here have told you. I teach physics every day. In ten minutes I’m going to get up and go teach a class of 220 very bright students for three hours straight. I’ve written (and am still writing) physics textbooks at the introductory level and the graduate level. I’ve studied physics for 40 years. I’m a theoretical physicist and am roughly masters-to-Ph.D. competent in mathematics, statistics, and computer science as well. I am not stupid, in other words, nor am I ignorant. Finally, I have absolutely no dog in this race outside of genuine interest in figuring out how it all works. You have no doubt seen me arguing with Nick Stokes and Joel Shore as often as not — I respect both of them but they have to convince me the hard way when they make an assertion the same as anybody else. Sometimes they succeed. I cannot possibly be called a “warmist” (well, I can, on PSI:-).
Bear that in mind before you respond. Either you address the equations themselves, and point out someplace that I make an actual error in the use of the accepted, proven equations of physics, or you acknowledge that you are probably wrong. You might consider doing the latter simply because you have pretty obviously never taken any course in physics beyond something very, very elementary. You can ask yourself, “Is physics so easy that a completely ignorant person can just pick two or three equations they don’t understand out of it all and manipulate them to get right answers, or does it require a deep conceptual understanding of things like statistical mechanics, equilibrium, and thermodynamics that I’ve never had the opportunity to acquire?”
Your response will, in other words, determine your level of honesty. If you are suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder tinged with grandiosity, you will puff up and assert that you’re right, I’m wrong, and not actually address the first law of thermodynamics or the actual derivation of the observed DALR, and you’ll continue to make absurd assertions such as the one that molecules sort themselves out by weight and temperature in a well-mixed atmosphere. That is simply empirically untrue, as you’d learn if you looked. If you too are a fellow pilgrim, less interested in self-aggrandizement as the discoverer of the REAL climate theory of your own invention than you are in learning how the climate system really works and what can and can’t be believed about it, you will retire to learn some physics before trying to reinvent it wrong.
rgb

Anomalatys says:

Maybe a paper should be published on this since it seems so controversial.

As I noted, the papers have been published, and they show that you are wrong…and that the laws of thermodynamics are correct.
There is no ambiguity about whether or not there is a lapse rate in equilibrium in a gravitational field: there is not.
I personally am more agnostic in regards to the arguments between people like rgb and Roy Spencer on one side and Nick Stokes on the other in regards to what the temperature distribution would be in the absence of any radiatively-active elements in the atmosphere (but not in equilibrium because the Earth is still receiving energy from the sun).
Finally, this whole discussion makes little difference to the ultimate question of whether one can somehow have the surface temperature on Earth in the absence of a radiative-active atmosphere. The answer is that it is not possible without either violating the First Law of Thermodynamics (i.e., conservation of energy) or making up new laws of physics (such as Stephen Wilde does by positing that the Earth’s surface doesn’t emit as much radiation as the laws of physics [and empirical measurements, by the way] say it actually emits).