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.
You are forgetting Kirchhoff’s Law that says that an object that emits more also absorbs more. The correct physics is this: The Earth’s surface emits radiation almost as a perfect blackbody. At wavelengths where there are significant absorptions by the atmosphere, the radiation is absorbed and re-emitted (and this can occur multiple times) but because temperature falls with height in the troposphere, and because the intensity of emission is an increasing function of temperature, less radiation is emitted to space than is absorbed (and, hence, than was originally emitted by the Earth’s surface).
This is the physics that is confirmed by empirical data http://scienceofdoom.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/radiation-earth-from-space-taylor-499px.png and the correctness of the radiative transfer theory that leads to this is proven everyday by the technology in the field of remote sensing. In fact, it is inconsistent to deny basic radiative transfer theory in the atmosphere and yet believe in any of the work of Spencer and Christy regarding the temperature in the troposphere as measured by satellites (which is perhaps part of the reason why Spencer has taken on the people who deny basic physics, like yourself).
Well, just to repeat, mass is equivalent to resistance and thermal capacity (Cp) is equivalent to capacitance. Increasing either mass or Cp doesn’t change the final temperature, it just changes the time lag. Your circuit probably needs to be in series to make sense and to apply to physical thermodynamic quantities. Mass and thermal capacity etc. don’t add in parallel, but in series. Illustration is good and etc., but I think sometimes (often-times) the analogies get too out of context. Thanks for the polite discussion. But I will remain with the position over the flash-light and mirror (not getting brighter) and the real farmers greenhouse (doesn’t get hotter than the solar forcing).
, so that if you (say) double the input, you change 
(where 
is the cross-sectional area of the output spigot) to 
so 
— the growth in water depth is quadratic, not linear, in the input flow. But it certainly does not increase without bound just because one increases the input rate.
(the albedo) by a small amount in almost any climate model, the system does not run away with warming, it warms a bit to a new steady state temperature — if one uses the barrel example as an analogy (since obviously the equations underlying things are almost completely dissimilar except for the fact that they both describe a dynamic equilibrium, a steady state) one increases the rate of insolation a bit (in the inflow) and the temperature of the system goes up a bit (like the height of water in the barrel) until outgoing radiation (the outflow) once again matches the net insolation. So let’s take it for granted that there is absolutely nothing unusual about either static or dynamic equilibria — they occur all of the time in physical systems both in nature itself and in the laboratory, and that in most stable> systems that exhibit such equilibria, shifting parameters or forcings will shift the equilibrium point or steady state flow around.
I’ve following this discussion, and getting more and more confused, and this last analogy simply leaves me puzzled. Let’s try to be careful. One comment that is worth making early on is that there are (as Bart pointed out) many, many physical systems where increasing a rate or variable (say, an input current or input power or input force) simply pushes the system to a new equilibrium. In very generic terms, the set of all such systems is usually described as the set of all systems with stable equilibria in the first place. If you take a mass on a spring (with a stable equilibrium) and hang the mass in a gravitational field, the string stretches until it cancels gravity and the mass will now perfectly happily oscillate around the new equilibrium. This also happens in cases of dynamic equilibrium, e.g. diffusion or other problems.
Bart already gave the example of a barrel with a small hole at the bottom and an input rate of flow in equilibrium with the rate at which it drains, where if one increases the input rate, all that happens is that the depth of water in the barrel increases a bit until the output rate matches the new input rate. Bart didn’t get the scaling of this right (you have to use Bernoulli’s formula, Bart, or Torricelli’s rule:
The climate itself is precisely such a system. If one increases some forcing — say decreases
We can then leave aside for the moment the enormous complexity of large scale nonlinear systems such as the climate, where the system self-organizes into flow patterns in multiple dimensions, where things like Poincare attractors emerge and one’s conception of a “steady state” devolves to orbits around the attractors on a complex and constantly shifting “energy” surface (energy being a metaphor, since it isn’t really the energy in the sense of physical orbits in a conservative force field) where attractors appear and disappear and the marble rolls first around in one valley, then shifts to another when its trajectory takes it over an edge or the valley it is in rises up to become a hill, where simple, linearized conclusions are often going to be wrong, and return to the carbon cycle per se.
The issue comes right down to this. If humans stopped producing fossil-fuel-derived CO_2 entirely tomorrow, would atmospheric CO_2:
a) Remain constant at a new equilibrium (after a comparatively short relaxation time, say a few decades)?
b) Continue to increase?
c) Decrease, moving back to some previous equilibrium?
This isn’t QUITE like the climate/GAST, as the climate is an open system with the source (Sun) and sink (Universe excluding the Sun) outside of the Earth itself. The Earth is basically a closed system as far as carbon is concerned except for a trivial flux of TOA outgassing and influx of carbon in meteors. On the other hand, fossil fuels behave like a “source” because they convert carbon that has been stable for a few hundred million years into carbon dioxide, and given that kind of timescale we can pretend that this is an external source. Also, as far as the atmosphere is concerned there are at least two reservoirs that can constitute “sinks” on similarly very long (compared to human endeavor) timescales — both of them the ocean. In the ocean there is a constant rain of carbon from surface lifeforms down to the sea bottom where it is sequestered in clathrates and oils and eventually subducted to become future fossil fuels. The ocean itself is also a huge CO_2 “capacitor” — it can take up a substantial amount of CO_2 simply because CO_2 is highly soluble in water (fortunately! otherwise how could we make beer!).
The issue of direct solubility as a source/sink is very complex. As has been pointed out several times, a warming sea surface releases substantial amounts of previously sequestered CO_2 into the atmosphere simply by shifting the equilibrium partial pressure at the surface. It doesn’t stop the ocean from absorbing and re-emitting lots of CO_2, of course — there is active transport both ways — it just shifts the amount of CO_2 in the water itself in steady state. MOST of the ocean, however, is at 4K and rock solid steady in temperature. The ocean itself holds some 60 or 70 times as much CO_2 as the atmosphere at any given time. One could increase that number from (say) 65 to (say) 66 and very likely change very little, given that e.g. pH is a log quantity. I would have to also say that there is a lot we still probably don’t know about oceanic chemistry, especially in the deeper ocean. The ocean is also a truly enormous heat sink in exactly the same way — one can dump energy in on the scale of watts/m^2 for a very, very long time without changing its average temperature by much, given a water column kilometers long, several active cooling mechanisms at the top surface, and a range of time scales from comparatively short to very long indeed for transport of heat energy down into the vast ocean below the thermocline a few hundred meters down. CO_2 is no doubt transported down from the surface into the deeper ocean (by diffusion, if by no other means) but the ocean may not be a “well mixed” fluid in the same way that the atmosphere is.
This sort of thing is at the heart of the discussion about ocean acidification, which is an interesting counterpoint to the CAGW issue. If CO_2 is the devil, we would love it if the ocean is indeed a highly active sink, because that favors scenario c) above. However, we would also like it if the CO_2 the ocean absorbs comparatively quickly equilibrates into the deep, cold, ocean waters where it is essentially removed from our consideration — there isn’t a lot of biological impact there (all of the biologically worrisome things involve changes in pH in the warmer surface waters where things grow calcium carbonate shells). Indeed, one comparatively simple way to sequester CO_2 would be to pump it down to (say) 2 km deep into the ocean and release it through a large micropore surface in the form of lots of tiny bubbles at 3 C — huge surface to volume ratio. It dissolves, stabilizes at 4 C, and floats away, sequestered for centuries as it gradually equilibrates below the thermocline where it won’t bother shellfish.
However, this may not be necessary. Nature may do this for us by simply mixing from the surface waters. This is not all “known science” — that’s why people have turned to the ocean looking for their “missing heat” — it is a huge, largely unknown, buffer that is obviously critical in multiple ways to understanding the climate. If one asserts that surface warming is making its way into the ocean depths because there is more mixing than was previously expected, one at the same time is asserting that the rate of transport of surface absorbed CO_2 is similarly much higher than was previously assumed, which both limits the likely limits of surface water acidification and turns the ocean into a much larger, much faster acting buffer for atmospheric CO_2 than the Bern model allows for. Scenario c) is once again made more likely.
I’m moderately skeptical that we understand the full carbon cycle and all of its time constants at this point in time. Sure, we can identify most of the important reservoirs, but the time frame of our modern-era observations with decent instrumentation is pitifully short, and (sadly) the science that is being done is being funded with a built in bias, looking for trouble as it were. Without impugning the motives or ethics of the researchers in any way, there is ample sociological and statistical evidence that funding work in this way leads to substantial, sometimes even overwhelming, bias in the outcomes of the work. It is simply too easy to data dredge or report an anecdotal result that happens to make it to some level of significance while either not looking broadly enough or simply not reporting the fact that the same result doesn’t hold everywhere, it only holds in one particular location or circumstance (where the actual cause for the anomaly could be anything from some confounding cause one did not look at or for, or pure random variation because “p happens” if one does many parallel experiments or makes many parallel observations.
If humans are paid or otherwise motivated to go on a witch hunt, they will somehow almost always find witches even though witches do not really exist! It’s simple human nature. Even in science, the hardest single thing to ever manage is to maintain one’s own objectivity, to honestly account for doubt even when studying or trying to prove a ‘favorite’ theory. The best way to prove a favorite theory is in some sense to do your best to disprove it — and fail — while finding some positive evidence to support it as well. The failing to disprove it (trying very hard) is a key, often omitted, step, however.
Both Richard Courtney and Bart have done numerical work that indicates that one can fairly easily construct carbon cycle models that are at least reasonably plausible and that can reproduce the pitifully short segment of monotonic Mauna Loa data as well as the Bern model does. I’ve played a bit with it myself, and do not think that the Bern model is “proven”, although I don’t think any of the alternative models are particularly proven either. There is too much we don’t know, and our observational data is a bit too boring, too easy to fit with multiple models. What is needed are decades more of observation, ideally observations that span some sort of departure from monotonic behavior for decades. If the climate remains more or less neutral or even cools a bit for another 15 to 20 years (as seems not entirely implausible at this point based on the last 15 years) perhaps we’ll see the Mauna Loa data alter its monotonic behavior, and in the process learn something important about the underlying time constants. We also might eventually learn enough about the ocean to make some progress there, discover that just as the ocean may well buffer heat much faster than was anticipated, it may well buffer CO_2 much faster than the Bern model admits. The real final scenario might well be:
d) The system quickly relaxes to a new dynamic equilibrium somewhat lower than the original concentration (on the day ACO_2 is “turned off”), then that dynamic equilibrium itself more slowly relaxes with several time constants back to ever-lower levels, eventually once again tracking the climate (e.g. GAST) with a lag and with very slightly higher equilibrium atmospheric CO_2 than might have been there without ACO_2 in the first place.
Note well that I’m not addressing at all whether increased CO_2 is “good” or “bad”. I don’t buy the glib assertion on of many on WUWT that more CO_2 is just “plant food” and a great thing, we should be trying to increase it even if we had Doc Brown’s handy dandy home fusion generators that run on garbage. Nor do I buy the glib assertion that it is the devil, that sea levels will rise by five meters by 2100 and all of that all because of CO_2. If I had an opinion, it is that the truth is somewhere in between — that some aspects of increased CO_2 are likely to be beneficial, some harmful, and that either or both ways we’d be better off figuring out how to minimize the harm and maximize the benefit because there is no question about the enormous harm we do trying to combat a perceived catastrophic threat with inadequate evidence using immature technologies at great expense and to the great benefit of the sharks that always emerge in a feeding frenzy anytime somebody offers up unlimited free money to find the latest sort of “witch” and burn her at the stake (not worrying quite as much as they should about whether or not witches really exist).
rgb
” There is too much we don’t know, and our observational data is a bit too boring, too easy to fit with multiple models.”
which is why I’m looking at d/dt(CO2) , it’s less boring.
rgb says
If I had an opinion, it is that the truth is somewhere in between — that some aspects of increased CO_2 are likely to be beneficial, some harmful, and that either or both ways…blah, blah,
henry says
you are what we call in dutch, a “draad zitter”, not being able to make up his mind about what the graph (that started this post) is showing/
you are the one who is neither hot nor cold
and you are the one that stands in the way of progress
I was like you, during my own investigations, until I decided to do my own investigations, instead of relying on others. The truth is that earth has passed its warmest years 1997-1999 and we are now heading down. Global cooling is here.
I want to warn you about the coming cold: the Dust Bowl drought 1932-1939 was one of the worst environmental disasters of the Twentieth Century anywhere in the world. Three million people left their farms on the Great Plains during the drought and half a million migrated to other states, almost all to the West. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/drought/dust_storms.shtml
I find that as we are moving back, up, from the deep end of the 88 year sine wave, there will be standstill in the change of the speed of cooling, neither accelerating nor decelerating, on the bottom of the wave; therefore naturally, there will also be a lull in pressure difference at that > [40 latitude], where the Dust Bowl drought took place, meaning: no wind and no weather (read: rain). According to my calculations, this will start around 2020 or 2021…..i.e. 1927=2016 (projected, by myself and the planets…)> add 5 years and we are in 2021.
Danger from global cooling is documented and provable. It looks we have only ca. 7 “fat” years left……
WHAT MUST WE DO?
We urgently need to develop and encourage more agriculture at lower latitudes, like in Africa and/or South America. This is where we can expect to find warmth and more rain during a global cooling period.
We need to warn the farmers living at the higher latitudes (>40) who already suffered poor crops due to the cold and/ or due to the droughts that things are not going to get better there for the next few decades. It will only get worse as time goes by.
We also have to provide more protection against more precipitation at certain places of lower latitudes (FLOODS!), <[30] latitude, especially around the equator.
Henry
Stephen Wilde 4:34am: “Objections based on aspects of physics that are ancillary to the main point….Introduction of unnecessary complexity which has no effect on the net out turn in the real world.”
Stephen – This is spin doctor stuff not science. Your missing the p*V term for gas enthalpy is not ancillary (it is basic science – well known) nor does it have no effect on your conclusions which become wrong considering the text book physics you refuse to access and therefore mislead readers.
“I’ll just wait and see how future data turns out.”
You don’t have to wait. Look at the modern near surface thermometer record or lower troposphere satellite Tmean record (and even the paleo. Tmean stuff) – the existing record and modern science already show your conclusions about Tmean and atm. height are wrong in part because you don’t correctly apply physics of gas enthalpy.
4:54pm: “The problem lies in explaining that to anyone fixated on the radiative theory of gases.”
I didn’t even have to mention in this post Stephen’s extremely limited application of radiative energy transfer in an atm. in demonstrating his narrative conclusions can be shown wrong when anyone accesses the video replay available in a modern atm. physics text book.
Ferdi, thanks for that link. It opened half way through so I must have read it before , though I don’t recall. The ‘response function’ bit at the end looks interesting , though this looks like a slide show to accompany a presentation and does not really explain itself.
Conclusion:
The observed increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide
since pre-industrial times is entirely due to human
activities.
Conclusion:
2/3 of the interannual variance of the CO2 growth
rate is explained by the delayed response of the
terrestrial biosphere to interannual variations of
temperature and precipitation.
I don’t see any mention of SST and he seems to be using GISS global temp (ie land and sea) so no explicit reckoning with out gassing question.
Shame it’s not more explicit , but interesting, thanks.
richardscourtney says:
November 14, 2013 at 6:11 pm
Richard,
I never met Jaworowski in person. Only had some correspondence with him. It seems that he was a very admirable person.
I have not the slightest reason to doubt his integrity in what he has done before 1992. But I have compelling reasons to doubt his knowledge of ice cores in the period after 1992.
All his citations are from works before 1992. In 1996 the Etheridge e.a. work on three Law Dome ice cores was published, which (without naming him) point by point refuted all his previous claims.
He never reacted on Etheridge’s work, neither cites it in later publications.
The investigation of the Law Dome ice cores e.g. shows the lag between gas age and ice age, measured top down in firn until closing depth. If he in 2004 in his letter to the Congressional Committee still writes about an “arbitrary” lag (to hide the “truth”?), then I have serious doubts about his knowledge. Either he hasn’t read Etheridge’s work or he forgot its conclusions, to bring it mildly.
And if he then declares that CO2 may migrate from lower concentrations to higher concentrations (to explain the lower values in ice cores), sorry but that is far beyond a lack of knowledge…
Greg Goodman says:
November 15, 2013 at 8:14 am
Indeed it is from a slide show at the festivities for 50 years of Mauna Loa data…
But you can contact him as
Pieter.Tans as usual
at
the NOAA webmail:
noaa.gov
He was very helpful in the past, received a few days of raw voltage data (10-sec snapshots) of the instrument at Mauna Loa from him to check their calculations…
Stephen Wilde says:
The fact that you think this speaks volumes about your own inability to distinguish between physics and nonsense.
I just can’t conceive of how someone can write nonsense like this and actually believe it has any meaning. It is just a bunch of random sciencey-sounding words strung together. You are pretty much the ultimate example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, talking as if you are an expert about things you don’t have the slightest understanding of. You wrote an entire post over at Tallbloke’s about the ideal gas laws and then it came out in the comments section that you didn’t even know what the symbol “n” in the equation stood for. (Of course, once you learned that it stood for something different than what you thought it did, it miraculously did not change your conclusions…because of course, your conclusions are not based on an understanding of equations, they are based on creating random jargon-filled sentences that cannot be reduced to a mathematical formulation of any kind.) And, then later on, you embarked on some nonsense about how the Ideal Gas Constant is not a constant.
If you can’t understand this basic stuff, how do you possibly labor under the illusion that you somehow understand atmospheric physics far better than people who actually understand the Ideal Gas Law and things far more complicated than the Ideal Gas Law?
Anomalatys says:
November 15, 2013 at 9:02 am
“Of course it has, if what you say were true then the outgoing flux at the top of the atmosphere would be equal to the flux leaving the surface.”
That is *not an observation that the surface is driven to higher temperature than the insolation.
Actually it necessarily follows from it, since the outgoing flux at the top of the atmosphere is in close balance with the insolation, the surface must have been driven to a higher temperature than would balance the insolation.
That postulate has never been observed in an experiment to test for it, not does it occur at the surface of the Earth,
Clearly you are wrong about this.
Greg Goodman says:
November 15, 2013 at 3:13 am
An interesting exercise, but there are several caveats such as you mention.
Moreover, the data themselves have been pre-processed in ways which could affect the conclusions. The temperature measurements are subjected to unknown processing, corrections, and so forth. If you are using the numerical derivative of the CO2 measurements, then the numerical differentiation has a frequency response which is reduced from that of an actual derivative at higher frequency. Averaging to remove the annual CO2 cycling also attenuates higher frequencies – you might try a different filter with a flatter response and a band-stop at 1 years^-1.
In addition, the actual dependence may only be partially captured by the global averages. As a reductio, suppose that all the CO2 rich upwelling came in a specific region off the coast of Borneo, to pick a spot at random. Then, the temperature anomalies in and around Borneo would be the proper variable to use, not the global temperature anomaly, which would only pick it up partially.
In general, you would need a proper density weighting function or table, one each for both the CO2 and the temperatures across the globe, to produce weighted averages which more closely represented the input/output variables. And, of course, these measurements could still get corrupted by external forcings.
We have to make the best of what we can with the data we have. But, it is not a good idea to invest too much confidence in the data, and insist on precisely matching them to draw conclusions. There is a generally a point of diminishing returns in doing so with uncertain data.
rgbatduke says:
November 15, 2013 at 7:28 am
“Bart didn’t get the scaling of this right (you have to use Bernoulli’s formula, Bart, or Torricelli’s rule… the growth in water depth is quadratic, not linear, in the input flow.”
Thanks for pointing this out. A quibble – the growth is still approximately linear with respect to a small change in input flow:
delta-height/nominal-height = 2*delta-input/nominal-input
So, the percentage change in height is twice the percentage change in input, and a 3% increase in rate of input results in a 6% change in height.
“Also, as far as the atmosphere is concerned there are at least two reservoirs that can constitute “sinks” on similarly very long (compared to human endeavor) timescales — both of them the ocean.”
There are more. On land, there is mineral weathering, and biota. It is not true, for example, that forests provide no net sink because of constant living and dying, rotting and outgassing. For one thing, not all living matter outgasses back all its stored CO2 when it dies. We wouldn’t have “fossil fuels” if it did. For another, a forest increasing in area constitutes a dynamic sink. If the forest is larger than before, then it has more carbon stored in it at the present moment than before.
But, an excellent summation otherwise.
joeldshore says:
November 15, 2013 at 8:42 am
I do not think Stephen is saying he agrees with everything Anomalatys said, just this specific item: that maintaining atmosphere at altitude requires a constant energy input, as the potential energy which keeps it up there is constantly radiating away.
The Ideal Gas Constant is only constant for an ideal gas, hence the name.
joeldshore says: November 15, 2013 at 4:09 am
“So, in other words, you are unwilling to provide evidence to back up your completely unsubstantitated claims.”
Indeed, the claims are a fantasy. Here is Dr J’s own CV. He claims many achievements, including his criticism of ice-core methods. But he makes no claim to discovering ice core analysis methods.
Bart says:
An interesting exercise, but there are several caveats such as you mention.
Moreover, the data themselves have been pre-processed in ways which could affect the conclusions. The temperature measurements are subjected to unknown processing, corrections, and so forth. If you are using the numerical derivative of the CO2 measurements, then the numerical differentiation has a frequency response which is reduced from that of an actual derivative at higher frequency. Averaging to remove the annual CO2 cycling also attenuates higher frequencies – you might try a different filter with a flatter response and a band-stop at 1 years^-1.
=====
I used ICOADS since I have shown that Hadley’s processing does mess with the frequency characteristics. There may be other issues with ICOADS of course. I’m not ‘averaging’ , I use a triple running mean filter (12,9,7) with a zero at precisely 12mo to remove the annual cycle. what would you suggest as being “flatter”?
The filtering effect of numerical diff seems a bit irrelevant when running everything through a 12mo filter anyway. I could try a gaussian diff that reproduces the true differential but that would leak a bit of the 12mo cycle.
One defect I do notice is that the CO2 data is already smoother (lower Q) than the SST data, suggesting some physical low pass filtering is taking place. It may be possible to reduce the residual signal somewhat by using a slightly longer filter on SST
Clearly we are hampered by quality of the data and the continual manipulation that every climate related dataset now seems to now go through to make it fit the ever less likely AGW theme.
That is one of the reasons I favour looking derivatives and various other methods, since it is easy enough to ease a few tenths of a degree onto the end of the data but rigging the derivatives is a lot harder.
Also comparing various data can sometimes point out a sampling issue or point out a blatant “bias correction” bias.
I did have a quick run around major basins individually (eg ex-tropical S Pacific, etc.) but none seemed to fit better than global. Nino1.2 was most similar.but did not correlate as well.
Thanks for your comments.
Bart says:
November 15, 2013 at 11:05 am
joeldshore says:
November 15, 2013 at 8:42 am
I do not think Stephen is saying he agrees with everything Anomalatys said, just this specific item: that maintaining atmosphere at altitude requires a constant energy input, as the potential energy which keeps it up there is constantly radiating away.
The energy that radiates away is the rotational and vibrational energy, not potential energy.
The Ideal Gas Constant is only constant for an ideal gas, hence the name.
The name is the Universal Gas Constant and is constant for all gases whether ideal or not. It’s equal to the Boltzmann constant times Avagadro’s number, even the various forms of the equation of state for non-ideal gases e.g. van der Waals, Redlich-Kwong etc., use the same constant.
Bart says:
This is the quote that Stephen from presented from Anomalatys that he described as showing that “he seems to get the basic idea”:
There is nothing in these three sentences that has correct physics ideas whatsoever. And, of course, it was all in support of Stephen’s non-sensical claim that the Earth’s average surface temperature can exceed the 255 K limit even in the absence of a radiatively-absorbing atmosphere because of some magical effect whereby the surface does not radiantly emit the energy we know it does emit by virtue of its temperature because part of the energy goes into doing something else, like holding up the atmosphere or driving convection or what-not. And, that idea is nonsense.
Yeah…Well, at first I thought what he might be saying is that real gases can deviate from the ideal gas law, but if you look at the discussion there (http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/01/13/stephen-wilde-greenhouse-gases-and-the-ideal-gas-law/), it doesn’t seem to be what he is talking about. Furthermore, such deviations are pretty small at the densities of our atmosphere and hence are not much to base some dramatic theory on. The fact is that, for most purposes, it is perfectly fine to consider the atmosphere as obeying the ideal gas law.
The gas constant varies depending in the molecular weight of the constituent gases and not radiative characteristics. Rspecific for non ideal gases is a different number to R for ideal gases.
Phil confirmed that when I was trying to ascertain whether the gas constant could deal with radiative capability as well as mass.
There is a lot of confusion in the posts in this thread that I do not have the will to unravel.
rgb as an esteemed professor said that rising air cooled but the heat content stayed the same.
In light of that I have doubts about the sincerity and expertise of him and many others who contribute here.
…what would you suggest as being “flatter”?
Do you have access to any filter design software? I think you can find free software for the Parks-McClellan algorithm on the web, though it may be in FORTRAN and, unless you have a FORTRAN compiler, you might need to translate it to C or whatever you do have access to. I’m in that situation, myself. All my old filter design routines are in FORTRAN, and I no longer have a functioning FORTRAN compiler. A better bet may be to find a friend who has filter design software, or a license for it from one of the outfits which provide that sort of thing, and get him/her to design you one. That’s what I do these days on the rare occasions when I have a need.
Always remember to shift the output to the midpoint of the symmetric filter response to get zero-phase.
“The filtering effect of numerical diff seems a bit irrelevant when running everything through a 12mo filter anyway.”
Yes, this is not a big deal, especially as the high frequency stuff is more variable and least likely to match anyway. I just included it for completeness.
Agree and sympathize with all your other comments.
The biggest thing to me, though, is the fact that these are bulk, globally uniformly averaged quantities, and the actual dynamics of interest are probably greater or lesser in different parts of the world, so these variables do not reflect them to high fidelity. I’m amazed, honestly, that the relationship appears as close as it does. That suggests to me that it really is a powerful relationship, to be so prominently visible in amongst all the other stuff going on.
joeldshore said:
“some magical effect whereby the surface does not radiantly emit the energy we know it does emit by virtue of its temperature because part of the energy goes into doing something else, like holding up the atmosphere or driving convection ”
If kinetic energy at the surface is used to drive convection and /or holding up the atmosphere do you contend that it is is still available for radiation to space ?
Note that my sole purpose is to seek the truth so if you can demonstrate that energy at the surface can do both things at once I may reconsider.
In my view the surface can radiate more than does the planet as viewed from space if a portion of its kinetic energy is so diverted.
If part of the energy needed to drive convection and hold up the atmosphere were able to leak out to space would that not result in an excess of radiation out as compared to radiation in with an inevitable net cooling effect until the atmosphere froze to the surface ?
Just asking.
Phil said:
The energy that radiates away is the rotational and vibrational energy, not potential energy.
Well if the rotational and vibrational energy radiates away does that not affect the gravitational potential energy that the molecule can achieve ?
Phil. says:
November 15, 2013 at 12:37 pm
“The energy that radiates away is the rotational and vibrational energy, not potential energy.”
The recoil of the emission provides a delta-V which changes the orbit of the molecule.
“The name is the Universal Gas Constant and is constant for all gases whether ideal or not.”
As far as it is used in the ideal gas law, it is applicable only for ideal gases.
joeldshore says:
November 15, 2013 at 12:43 pm
“The fact is that, for most purposes, it is perfectly fine to consider the atmosphere as obeying the ideal gas law.”
As I cannot think of any reason why not at the present time, I will concede the point.
“As I cannot think of any reason why not at the present time, I will concede the point.”
Except, of course, for the recoil effect on the gravitationally induced orbit I mentioned, and the fact that this is not a closed system…
Clearly, it only holds within small volumes, as the pressure and temperature are continuously changing in the large.
Bart: I’m in that situation, myself. All my old filter design routines are in FORTRAN, and I no longer have a functioning FORTRAN compiler.
gcc (gnu compiler collection) has a good fortran compiler, and it’s free.
Thanks for the suggestion of Parks-McClellan algorithm, I’ll make a note, but I don’t like ripply filters and a I don’t think a sharp cut-off is important in this application.
” I’m amazed, honestly, that the relationship appears as close as it does. That suggests to me that it really is a powerful relationship, to be so prominently visible in amongst all the other stuff going on.”
Yes, even just the dCO2 vs SST is pretty clear, as MacRae and others have noted:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=223
[SNIP – It turns out “Anomalatys” IS Joe Postma. This is confirmed by cross referencing IP addresses. The IP addresses used by “Anomalatys” cross reference and match IP adresses used by Joe Postma previously on WUWT. Joe you’ve been banned here prior for bad behavior and thread bombing with your dreck, and your lie is exposed. Now get the hell off my blog once and for all and take your defective theories with you. – Anthony Watts]
Ha, I was wondering. I remember the good old days where he went by — what was it? — Joules Verne?
“My name is Joules because I know how to find and count them no matter how they try to hide.
Thanks for playing.”
Thanks for playing seems to be his signature line. He was outed on his personal blog over a month ago for posting as this name, BTW.
rgb
Greg Goodman says:
November 15, 2013 at 2:16 pm
“gcc (gnu compiler collection) has a good fortran compiler, and it’s free.”
Thanks. I will make a note of it.
The ripple is something you specify, and it can be arbitrarily small (though, you pay the price in length of the filter). The point is to get a flat passband. Averaging has a magnitude response which looks like a sinc function, and is immediately starting to progressively attenuate input components as their frequency increases.
But, I think it’s probably kind of futile to try to match things too closely, as I have explained in reasoning given previously.