Putting Sir Isaac Newton on the right path
Short story by Christopher Bowring
When lay global warming skeptics point out to alarmists that the recent seventeen year period of steady global temperatures invalidates their climate models which predicted runaway global warming, there is often a standard response.
‘How can you, global warming (or climate change) denier, who have no experience of climatology, dare to argue with me, a renowned expert in my field of science?’ Let us return to the England of the seventeenth century to see what is wrong with this rebuttal.
I am in Grantham in Lincolnshire. It is a sunny day. A respectable looking man in a wig is sitting under an apple tree. It is Sir Isaac Newton. I greet him. He smiles back, but looks agitated. ‘What is wrong?’ I ask. ‘I have made a wonderful discovery,’ he replies. ‘I call is my Law of Gravitation’. ‘What does it say?’ I enquire.
‘It says that any two bodies in the universe repel each other with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance apart’. ‘Really?’ I respond. ‘But that is nonsense!’ ‘Nonsense?’ explodes the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. ‘Nonsense? How can you, a nobody, a nonentity, dare to question the mind of the greatest living scientist in the world?’
‘Sir, I refute your law quite simply’. And with that I take an apple from the tree and drop it on Sir Isaac’s head.
Argument from authority is the first line of defence for these people.
We need to draw more attention to the asymmetry between Proposing a theory and Refuting one.
To propose a theory about climate you need to cobble together a vast number of different disciplines and produce a consistent result.
To destroy such a theory you can be as ignorant as you like about most of the theory but simple be able to produce a single flaw.
This is something that does not get emphasised enough.
The climate scientists are a particularly smug and narcissistic lot….characteristics seemingly confined to that ‘discipline’. Characteristics strange as they are distasteful, give the GIGO that they espouse.
refute ?? how does dropping an apple on his head do it ?
That phrase really irks me. There is no “global temperature”, and there certainly aren’t multiple “global temperatures”. Yet we’re always presented with a single, meaningless metric. Why can’t we get away from this??
Precisely. A swift unscientific common-sense solution is often the best way.
“This sir, is how much CO2 we make, which isn’t a lot.”
“What only that much in all that sky up there, blimey”.
At the point where the models are all with 95% confidence wrong, it is not clear at all that it should be called a science.
It is a failed attempt to figure out climate behavior.
I have an acquaintance that beliefs that planet is warming at the rate preached by the most extreme of green dogmas. Every summer he drags himself around, convinced in his heart that it is hotter than ever before. Years back, I tried to tell him that it doesn’t work that way and he barked back his learned nonsense. Since then, I just let him suffer in peace. And suffer he does.
So why did Newton look agitated? Perhaps deep down he knew he had got a sign wrong?
So why are not global warmists agitated instead of agitators? They can see they have got a sign wrong surely? It is cooling.
I suppose there is some data they can’t change and so they must try to change peoples perceptions of that data to maintain their belief system and thereby income streams.
Otherwise I am struggling to see how the circus is still on the road divorced from reality and now divorcing from political “reality”. The whole business is very sad.
@gopal panicker November 29, 2013 at 10:45 pm: “refute ?? how does dropping an apple on his head do it ?”
Re-read that part about “repel”. As eco-geek noted, there was a little sign problem.
Peer review would be a lot more interesting if it generally involved projectiles.
The words “straw man” come to mind as Newton never held such a supposition.
Forget imagining catching him making a completely ridiculous mistake. Instead imagine trying to persuade him that his real theories were incomplete; that the speed of light is constant in every inertial frame or that clocks run slower in a gravitational field.
The reason the AGW people are so hard to argue with is that what they believe ISN’T a mistake. It is indeed quite plausible that changing the composition of the atmosphere might change its radiative properties and lead to warming. There is an aspect of truth to this, just as there is truth in Newtonian mechanics. It is not an error. It is a plausible initial conclusion.
One then needs to go beyond this initial conclusion and look at questions of magnitide and other factors. It is no use getting your knickers in a knot over an effect which is insignificantly small or which is obliviated by other much larger influences and controlling factors on the state of the climate. And if you are willing to take that deeper look you will find (with a sigh of relief) that this is indeed the case.
The problem with the alarmists is that they are unwilling to take that next step. They are so mesmerised by the frightening (wonderful?) possibilities of their initial conclusion that they are are unable to move beyond it. What they believe is actually a piece of the truth. But it is only a piece. Unfortunately they are completely fixated on this piece. They are unable or unwilling to go beyond it and look at the larger picture. Persuading them of their mistake is not a simple matter of demonstrating some gross error.
I propose a theory that says we don’t control the climate; IT controls US…;)
@Jeff Alberts “That phrase really irks me. There is no “global temperature”, and there certainly aren’t multiple “global temperatures”. Yet we’re always presented with a single, meaningless metric. Why can’t we get away from this??”
Precisely – !!! And it doesn’t take a scientist to figure that out – just good old common sense.
The science is settled. It’s wrong, but that is not the point. It is settled and now we are only allowed to dispute the politics. The solution to the settled science is communism. That is wrong, but that is not the point either. The solution is to take any one who disagrees and put them to work in the fields, (Pol Pot and Mao) or to kill them off in a frozen wasteland somewhere (Stalin) . The tools to put in place are a compliant Press and media, (Kim Jong Il, Obama, Hedegaard, Camerloon) and an army of indoctrinated sheep to break windows and daub slogans and terrorize the non-compliant ( Agenda 21 via Greenpeace, FOe, WWF)
Watch your backs. We may think history cannot repeat itself again, but show me an era where it did not…..
Ivor Ward
Jeff Alberts says: “…There is no “global temperature”, and there certainly aren’t multiple “global temperatures”. Yet we’re always presented with a single, meaningless metric. Why can’t we get away from this??”
Because AGW zealots like to pretend there is such a thing. If there were, we’d have no means of measuring it, lacking a place to put a global-scale thermometer. I’ve thought of such a place, but Al Gore doesn’t return my Tweets.
@Jeff Alberts & 4TimesAYear
I agree there are no “global temperatures”. There at least difficulties in measuring a global temperature and I don’t know whether a global temperatur makes sense, but in my opinion there IS a global temperature. What is Your argument?
Another classic example posits a post-1905 visitor to the famed Max Planck in December 1900. “Give me a sphere of gray metal the size of a tennis ball,” says the visitor. “When I cut the sphere into two halves and slam them forcefully together, the result will be a crater two miles wide and one thousand feet deep, that will smoke-and-steam for years.”
“Impossible!” replies der grosse Herr Professor Planck. “We may not know much, but settled thermodynamic principles do specify that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Your tennis-ball cannot possibly liberate sufficient energy for this effect.”
The problem here is that Prof. Planck’s 19th Century view assumes that “energy” is chemical: Even granted his discovery of quantized photoelectric processes that very month, no classical (Newtonian) effect could generate a “tennis-ball” outcome. But prior to Special Relativity, neither Planck nor anyone else can know that “energy” is in fact not chemical but nuclear, proportional to mass times a gigantic conversion factor = 186,282^2, the universally constant rate-of-propagation of electromagnetic radiation (“light”) in vacuo.
“Science” is a Philosophy of the natural world; an empirical, objective, above all rational Method; and in Practice a “social enterprise” subjecting all positive, null, and negative experimental outcomes to strict replication of results. “Nullius in verba” as Galileo put it, or as Feynman admonished: Nature cares nothing for what you may believe, nor for any “mere opinion” you may hold.
Conjecture a contingent, material, rational projection (no inverse causation, miracles, perpetual motion, need apply); formulate a testable hypothesis; conduct rigorous experiments designed specifically not to prove but to invalidate your premises; finally, submit detailed, explicit results for replication by knowledgeable experts (“peers”). Only so is any Theory provisionally verified, ever pending one single contrary result.
Granted classical assumptions, Max Planck in 1900 would not be so much wrong as necessarily mistaken. Meantime, as geodesics in 4-D Riemannian hyperspace, gravitation’s probabilistic trajectories become factorial: Converting not mass-to-energy but space/time to energy would explode the solar system “like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple.”
@cynical_scientist
I couldn’t agree more, they have become fixated on the tail of the dog rather than the body.
It all depends on your mindset.
Some, Newton was one, always question and want to know more – he would say, “we have not pushed the boundaries far enough and man must strive to learn more about the Universe” – he would have marvelled at and with Quantum theory.
Then, there is the ‘other lot’, they are one’s who would have us back in the dark ages before the great enlightenment because that suits their purpose.
Only good men reach out to the firmament, the only thing holding us [the human race] back are the naysayers and deniers of: pure science and the glory of mathematics.
We’ve only dipped our toes and the ‘ocean of space’ is vast.
cynical_scientist says:
November 29, 2013 at 11:16 pm
Nice.
Of course there is no “global temperature”. That’s the reason why we consider, instead, the temperature “anomaly”. For example, we can compare the mean temperature of November 2013 AT A GIVEN PLACE to the mean temperature of December of the years 1980-2010 at the same place. And do the same for other places.
@ Lew Skannen : correctumundo.
The word that really gets me is ‘pause’. It IS NOT a pause – and even sceptics sometimes use the word! A ‘pause’ is a temporary cessation. It implies that you know the future state of events. If you are banging a hammer on a piece of wood, then you pause, it means you KNOW that you are going to carry on hitting the wood with the hammer. If you have finished hitting the wood then it isn’t a pause – it is stopped. Knowing the future state is clear here. If you cannot know the future state (as is the case with climate science) then it is not a ‘pause’. A ‘pause’ implies that the state that existed before will continue – and that simply isn’t knowable!
It’s possible that I’m wrong here, but I’m worried about people who write that Arrhenius measured heat when light was passed through CO2 gas or air with CO2 in it.
The early experiments by Arrhenius, Tyndall et al used a rock salt crystal to refract the visible and particularly the invisible Infra Red part of the spectrum. They did not rely on heat measurements for their theories. They detected wavelength and hence energy, as at absorption bands, using a bolometer. This could have been a thin walled glass sphere filled with a gas, the sphere expanding when heated and the approximate wavelength of the emission measured from its position relative to the crystal. Think Pink Floyd CD covers.
If you go to Web sites and search derivation of Stefan Boltzmann or derivation of Planck equation, you will find that the much publicised energy dependence on the 4th power of temperature arises from mathematical integration of geometric terms such as those taking you from a plane to a sphere.
There might be later papers in which the actual heat production is measured, but I am not aware of any from my fairly broad reading. So you have to place your trust in a theory of quantum electrodynamics.
That said, I do not argue that passage of IR light though a gas mixture containing CO2 will produce heat. It will. I have melted & cut 1 inch steel plate with IR light from a CO2 laser that has been focussed to a very small diameter. In the atmospheric context, while I agree that heat will be produced, I am uncertain about how long the heat will remain in the natural system. Heat that is fleeting, or heat that induces a cooling feedback will not do the job so often claimed by GHG enthusiasts.
There is still no single, quantitative, replicated paper that links GHG concentration with a temperature change in the atmosphere.
Lloyd Martin Hendaye says:
November 29, 2013 at 11:44 pm
“like a stick of dynamite in a rotten apple.”
Hee hee. Reminds me of the story of the Hollywood director who, on hearing of the first atomic bomb attack on Japan, rushed up to his leading actor and breathlessly blurted “This atomic bomb, man, it’s… it’s.. DYNAMITE!!”
(OK, it’s Saturday night here and by now I’m frivolously amused…)
Jean Meeus, I take your point, but there actually is a ‘global temperature’. It’s an average of all locations, all times of day, and all days of the year. I think it’s 14.5-15 C. The anomaly is a reading above or below a set period of time of temps taken from the 1961-1990 average.
The point is not about being a lay climatologist or not it is about dealing with the results of computer simulations.
It is very paradoxical on one hand , some say simulations can be trusted, on the other hand it is said that discrepancy between models and data are irrelevant …
so it is said one must trust simulation because they can hindcast some patterns of the past climate….
I used to believe the opposite, hindcast ability is a weak evidence compare to prediction skills to test a model…especially when some unknown parameters of models have been adjusted first to fit the data!
How can McIntyre a mere statistician refute Michael Mann’s hokey stick? I don’t know but he did.
Does it take a child to point out that the Emperor has now clothes?
If it’s your money (taxes) they want to defraud then you MUST look at what they are saying and dissent if you want. If they leave your pockets and energy infrastructure alone then they can say that pink elephants can fly and I wouldn’t give a crap.
They often refute themselves by claiming many silly things. 🙂
Fight these con artists with every last breath, they are attempting the biggest defraud ever perpetrated on the planet. How do we know the ozone hole hasn’t always been there?
Correction:
Does it take a child to point out that the Emperor has NO clothes?
Wonder if Sir Isaac Newton ever observed hail stones as big as apples?
Heard on the radio driving home to-day (not word for word):
BBC LONDON – We love to talk about the weather but over in South Africa they have just experienced a massive hailstorm that has hit Johannesburg and created all sorts of chaos on the roads and damage. Tell us all about it Joe Bloggs in Joburg.
JOE BLOGGS IN JOBURG – Yes it was terrible, it was awful, it was chaotic, etc etc, we have had heavy storms before but never seen anything like this etc etc:
http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/c4fd220041fe7af9b5e5bd1c2eddf908/Massive-hailstorm-showers-Joburg
BBC LONDON – And tell me Joe Bloggs in Joburg do you think that global warming is to blame?
JOE BLOGGS IN JOBURG – Well it must have something to do with it because we have NEVER EVER seen anything like it etc etc.
What a shame the BBC does not bother to check history:
Although 26 natives are known to have been killed in Sunday’s [Feb. 2 1936] terrific hailstorm near Settlers, Transvaal, the full death-toll, it is believed, will be greater. The storm was one of the worst and most remarkable within living memory. It approached as a black cloud. Then, with a roar like gun-fire, it seemed that a gigantic iceberg in the sky had shattered. Fragments of ice, as big as coconuts, rained down for half an hour, piling to a height of three feet. Natives endeavored to rescue stricken neighbors, relatives and womenfolk, but all who were unable to gain shelter were killed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/opinion/04iht-oldfeb04.html?_r=1&
Check also Pretoria 17 Nov 1949 and 1 November 1985.
I am sure that Sir Isaac Newton would have been suitably repelled by the BBC report.
Aristotle claimed objects fall with a speed proportional to their weight. This was accepted for a thousand years until Galeileo disproved it with a simple experiment. Anyone could do the experiment, so why did the world believe Aristotle for do long? I assume it’s the “taboo” of arguing with the authority. Even Galileo got himself into trouble with the authority of the Catholic Church, and it took them 500 years to admit Galileo was right.
As a layperson what am I to make of this? Should I listen to what climate scientists tell me? OK I will. If I were a politician I will start formulating policy based on the following piece of horseshit.
If I were a politician formulating policy how much confidence should I place on the models?
Should I be concerned? You betcha.
I am just a layperson so I will avert my eyes from the literature and listen to what the Calamastrologists are telling me. I will believe and act now, like a lamb to the slaughter.
Here is a timely lesson about experts and those who are not.
@strike
Your “opinion” needs to be defined before any rebuttal.
What, in your “opinion”(snicker) is the “global temperature” exactly?
Snicker=laughing at you
[Snip. persona non grata. ~mod
[Snip. PNG. — mod.]
Jean Meeus says: “That’s the reason why we consider, instead, the temperature “anomaly”. For example, we can compare the mean temperature of November 2013 AT A GIVEN PLACE to the mean temperature of December of the years 1980-2010 at the same place.”
No! Climate scietivists like the ‘anomaly’ because it masks the real temperature changes which don’t sound very scary. Also if you compare November 2013 to December of earlier years you will certainly see warming – is that how it’s done?
@Jeff Alberts says:
“That phrase really irks me. There is no “global temperature” ”
I always ask ‘what is the average temperature of your house, including oven, hot plates, refrigerator, heater ?’ I agree that such averages are meaningless, however the current climate does not seem warmer than that which was described as the Little Ice Age.
Sorry, I made a mistake.
“For example, we can compare the mean temperature of November 2013 AT A GIVEN PLACE to the mean temperature of December of the years 1980-2010 at the same place.”
Of course, it should be “to the mean temperature of NOVEMBER of the years…”.
” but there actually is a ‘global temperature’. It’s an average of all locations, all times of day, and all days of the year.” How can you calculate the average of the temperature at London and that on the Mount Everest? Makes not much sense, IMO.
95% certainty, means nothing at all. A Bonobo ape is 99% human in his DNA, I would not like him to be my lawyer, doctor, teacher… he can of course graduate with honors as climatologist and work for the IPCC. From Belgium with love.
Jean Meeus says: “That’s the reason why we consider, instead, the temperature “anomaly”. For example, we can compare the mean temperature of November 2013 AT A GIVEN PLACE to the mean temperature of December of the years 1980-2010 at the same place.”
And if you fail to publish the average of the years 1980-2010 (something that is almost always omitted) as well as the anomaly from that average then you make it impossible to reconstruct the actual temperatures you are dealing with.
Like showing all of your working out, not just part of it.
I always liked Tim Allen’s line in “Galaxy Quest”: “You don’t have to be a great actor to spot a bad one.”
Same with science and scientists.
Lumping climate scientists in a single class of political climate scientists is a bit of a glittering generalization. We need to separate the real climate scientists from the political types. The trouble is the latter seem to be making the most noise and serving totally political ends. If it weren’t for the lofty goal of saving the planet, the left would have to find some other reason to try to control all.
I hate to argue with one of the better responders here.
Geoff Sherrington says
“That said, I do not argue that passage of IR light though a gas mixture containing CO2 will produce heat. It will.”
That statement is a given. The argument is that a minor change in the atmosphere composition of gases will result in a measurable change in the heat production,
Maybe if the scientific climate scientists pushed back against the political ones once in a while we’d be able to differentiate. At present it seems that 97% of climate scientists are corrupt, self-serving liars.
Jean Meeus, you CAN average out global temperature. Sorry to labour the point, but you can do it in much the same way as an average wealth is arrived at for a nation. You would have extremely rich people who are worth billions, and others worth virtually nothing. It’s still possible to say that the ‘average person has a wealth of…’. The fact is that you could travel much of the world in just a pair of trousers (pants in the US!), a shirt, and a jacket. You could be very comfortable throughout much of the world, withstand the heat in the tropics, and the cold in Scandanavia. Of course, there a few places where you would fry or freeze, but these locations don’t take up an enormous part of the globe. Despite very cold temps in Antarctica, you could walk around in your jacket as far south as the Falkland Islands and as far north as Sweden. So it follows that much of the world (by latitude) has a temperature that varies only a few degrees either way.
I should point out (and I’m sure most here know already) I am very much a climate sceptic, but the FACT is that there CAN be a globally averaged temperature – which I believe is 14.5 to 15 C. I really don’t think that we should start denying that there isn’t an averaged temperature. Let’s stick to what is true – it’s the other side, the warmists, that lie and deny.
How many scientists were amateurs? If we consider Alfred Wegener, he was an “untrained” geologist. Who were scientific peers to Newton and Faraday?
We all know the issue with “climate science” is computer models, oh and funding. It is far too easy creating a “scary” model of “climate” in a computer program designed to do just that.
“The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
November 30, 2013 at 5:01 am
Jean Meeus, you CAN average out global temperature.”
Yes, we know we CAN do that. But doing that is completely meaningless because it is made up.
I have been interested in the Polar Bear pop. around Churchill Manitoba, so yesterday I down loaded all the daily temperatures for the month of November from 1943 to 2013 using weather underground as a source. I then averaged the daily November temps for each year, thinking it would probably correlate well with early ice formation. Below is the data. Linear trend line is Zero.Some of the years data was Missing.
Hi Mean Lo
2013 12.5 5.2 -2.2
2012 12.1 5.8 -0.6
2011 20.3 15.5 10.6
2010 22.6 17.7 12.9
2009 24.5 19.1 13.4
2008 20.5 15.2 9.7
2007 13.2 6.3 -0.4
2006 16.7 9.6 2.1
2005 20.1 14.7 9.3
2004 17.6 10.2 3.0
2003 16.6 9.8 3.2
2002 14.2 6.6 -1.3
2001 19.3 12.5 5.6
2000 17.3 12.2 6.8
1999 21.7 15.1 8.2
1998 24.4 18.6 14.1
1997 14.9 8.9 2.9
1996 14.6 8.2 2.0
1995 7.4 2.2 -2.9
1994 20.2 14.3 8.4
1993 12.3 4.7 -3.2
1992 19.4 13.2 6.8
1991 9.2 2.2 -5.0
1990 15.9 9.5 2.9
1989 5.9 0.7 -4.7
1988 16.5 9.5 2.1
1987 18.0 11.6 4.8
1986 3.0 -2.1 -6.8
1985 7.9 1.9 -4.3
1984 15.4 9.1 2.8
1983 24.6 20.2 16.1
1982 6.5 0.5 -5.4
1981 23.6 18.6 13.4
1980 15.1 8.0 0.3
1979 15.6 11.2 6.7
1978 10.0 3.8 -2.4
1977 16.0 11.4 6.3
1976 16.5 10.7 4.4
1975 17.5 12.1 6.6
1974 22.7 17.1 11.4
1973 19.5 13.6 7.7
1972
1971
1970
1969
1968
1967
1966 4.3 -2.5 -9.5
1965 13.8 6.6 -0.6
1964 15.6 10.6 5.6
1963 18.3 13.9 9.5
1962 15.2 8.2 0.9
1961 19.4 11.9 3.9
1960 13.7 7.2 0.2
1959 10.5 4.5 -1.6
1958 18.4 12.9 7.2
1957 13.7 6.9 0.1
1956 15.1 8.3 1.3
1955 20.0 14.1 8.2
1954 20.5 14.2 7.8
1953 27.7 22.7 17.6
1952 15.5 9.6 3.7
1951 13.1 7.4 1.4
1950 14.2 8.1 2.0
1949
1948
1947
1946
1945
1944 19.6 13.8 7.7
1943 20.7 14.7 9.0
Geoff Sherrington November 30 1.05am
There is still no single, quantitative, replicated paper that links GHG concentration with a temperature change in the atmosphere.
That’s the crunch, Geoff, isn’t it?
We all know (or think we know) what CO2 is capable of in theory and in the laboratory. And even some sceptics get a bit short with you if you try to suggest that extrapolating that into the real world doesn’t work.
But it doesn’t work. Nobody has yet produced any empirical evidence that CO2 does what they claim for it and when you hear the likes of Lord May talking about the “greenhouse gas blanket” being made thicker by increased CO2 you wonder just what sort of science these guys have been studying (or possibly what they’ve been smoking!).
I failed to point out the temps are Hi, Mean, and Lo
as a lay sceptic, in chilly Queensland, wearing a sweater, i’ve learned to take into account the ifs, buts & maybes:
30 Nov: Sydney Morning Herald: Peter Hannam: Summer warmth ahead to cap Sydney’s hottest year
Sydney can expect a warmer than average summer, making it likely the city will also record its hottest ever year, the Bureau of Meteorology predicts. With a top of 30 degrees forecast for Thursday, the harbour city will be certain to notch up another month of above-average maximums, even though November has had closer to normal temperatures than the July-October stretch of warmth.
Barring a cool end to the year, 2013 is likely to be Sydney’s warmest in 154 years of record, said Aaron Coutts-Smith, head of the bureau’s climate monitoring for NSW. ”We’re miles ahead of the previous [record],” said Dr Coutts-Smith, with the 2004 and 2005 years at present tied for the record with a daily average maximum of about 23.4 degrees…
Current models show the odds are in favour of a warmer and drier summer than average for most of NSW, including the Sydney area…
The city is expecting showers on Friday and possibly Saturday, topping up the 190 millimetres already recorded for the month – the wettest November since 1984…
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/summer-warmth-ahead-to-cap-sydneys-hottest-year-20131127-2y9kh.html
“pat says:
November 30, 2013 at 5:29 am”
Cold here in Sydney, too. And forecasts are generated by? Computer models! HA!
cynical_scientist says:
November 29, 2013 at 11:16 pm
The words “straw man” come to mind as Newton never held such a supposition.
“The reason the AGW people are so hard to argue with is that what they believe ISN’T a mistake. It is indeed quite plausible that changing the composition of the atmosphere might change its radiative properties and lead to warming. There is an aspect of truth to this, just as there is truth in Newtonian mechanics. It is not an error. It is a plausible initial conclusion.”
Might Cause? Really?
No it has to be be shown conclusively the changes in the composition earth atmosphere leads to warming.
And then you have to beat thermodynamics….
Might cause leads to failure in the engineering world
lemiere jacques says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:16 am
so it is said one must trust simulation because they can hindcast some patterns of the past climate….
=================
A parrot can hindcast – repeat what it has learned. this doesn’t mean it has any skill predicting the future. the problem is that modellers use the same data to train the models that they use to validate the models. this tells us nothing about the skill of the models.
if you want to actually validate a climate model, train it using the temperature data from 1850-1950, then ask it to predict temperatures from 1950-2013 and see how well it does. what you will find is what we are seeing now.
When the models were trained using data from 1850-2000, they were unable to predict temperatures from 2000-2013. yes, they could predict temperatures from 1850-2000, because these were the training set, the models memorized these and parroted them back. But just like a parrot the models were unable to predict the future for 2000 onwards.
What the models were able to predict from 2000 onwards was what the climate modellers believed. the modellers believed that temps would continue to rise as CO2 was continuing to rise, and this is what the models delivered; what the modellers believed the future would look like.
Can someone please explain to this Box of Rocks how a CO2 molecule can generate heat?
I know that CO2 can release energy when it cools or absorb energy as it warms.
There is also this idea that it can emit photons under certain circumstances…
But hey does it have a secret stash or is there a Keynesian multiplier for CO2 to generate or convert matter and energy????
Jan Jacobs says:
November 30, 2013 at 2:46 am
95% certainty, means nothing at all.
================
it means that if you repeat the identical experiment 20 times, 19 times the result will be negative and 1 time it will be positive, on average. If you then publish the 1 in 20 and fail to publish the 19 in 20, you have on your hands an exciting new discovery in science. that no one will be able to replicate. but since peer reviews does not involve replication, this will not prove a barrier to publication of utter nonsense as scientific fact.
the problem is that “modern” science ignores the scientific principle. the method that allowed us to separate superstition from reality is being largely ignored by scientists. instead they are selectively publishing positive results because this attracts grant money. Imagine you get $5 million in grant money to study XYZ. You then report back that yes, we spend $5 million and found that XYZ doesn’t happen. Can we now have another $5 million?
Now imagine instead that you report back that XYZ does happen (as we have seen, 1 in 20 times) and you want $5 million more for continued studies of this very promising and unexpected result. Which report will get you the money and which will report will get your the boot?
So, with car payment and mortgage payments and bills mounting up, a wife to keep and children to feed, which report are you going to deliver?
Patrick, it isn’t meaningless – although I’ll agree that some of it is fabricated (extrapolated). It is still meaningful. Without it we wouldn’t know whether, over time, the global temperature is rising or falling. Other metrics are not useful. When it starts falling (when we are about to plunge into the next Ice Age) then we had better know about it so that we can prepare. Sorry, but I think it’s frankly ridiculous to say it’s meaningless. All we can do is prepare for whatever the Earth throws at us based on what we record and see. Gathering global temperatures and collating them into an average serves a purpose. The alternative is watching glaciers melt and/or noticing increased forest fires – all to try and inform you about what the Earth is doing – temperature wise. Frankly, I’d rather collect temps and average them out, wouldn’t you? The alternative is a caveman approach. We’re all well aware that some of the records are fabricated and adjusted, but it’s still better than watching to see if a Pyracantha berries early, or if a Fuschia flowers late.
Box of Rocks — For a question like that you should really let your fingers do the walking on the web. There are scores of articles to explain it, like this one. The “heat” from CO2 is (ultimately) from the sun, not from the CO2 itself.
Short answer – The sun heats things up. These things emit infrared radiation. Greenhouse gases (including CO2) absorb infrared radiation. Absorbing this radiation heats them up; they then heat up the atmosphere. (Oxygen and nitrogen don’t absorb infrared radiation, so if there were no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this infrared radiation would make it into space without heating up anything.)
David L. says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:58 am
so why did the world believe Aristotle for do long?
=============
because sometimes lighter objects do fall slower than heavier objects, but heavier objects almost never fall slower than lighter objects. this was taken as proof that Aristotle was right.
This is how superstition and false beliefs comes into existence, when we accept positive examples as proof that something is true. This is largely the driving force behind AGW. Positive examples are taken as proof of AGW, while negative examples are ignored.
However, as with Aristotle, it is the negative results that are important. The small, light objects that on occasion do fall faster than large heavy objects are what proves Aristotle wrong. It is these negative results that do not get published that prevent us from discovering the truth.
for example, a lead pellet weighs less than a large block of Styrofoam. Yet the lead pellet falls faster than the block of foam. By the scientific method, this single example proves Aristotle wrong. However, by “modern” science, the hundreds of examples of heavier objects falling faster than lighter object “outweighs” the evidence of this single exception, making Aristotle correct.
cynical_scientist says:
November 29, 2013 at 11:16 pm
An old saying about a nail and the head of a hammer comes to mind. Nicely done.
Yup. Nice and easy does it. Why is it that so many people in the MSM are frightened to even ask simple questions? Perhaps a lack of confidence that comes from not having a basic science education.
Rather than arguing AGW with your neighbor that believes in warming, argue Aristotle first. Establish in their mind why positive examples are not proof, but negative examples are. Do this for something simple and non controversial, like falling objects.
Only after they agree on the principle of scientific discovery, then apply this to their argument that such and such storm proves AGW is real. Explain that a storm does not prove AGW any more than a heavy object falling faster than a light object proves Aristotle.
Then apply the flat-line in temperatures to rising CO2 levels, to demonstrate to them that just like Aristotle, the lack of warming is proof that AGW is wrong. That in the case of falling objects, as single example that does not fit is all it took to prove Aristotle wrong. In the case of AGW, no matter how many positive examples are found, it only takes one negative example to prove AGW wrong.
This is what separates superstition from science. Superstition relies of positive examples to establish belief. Science relies on negative examples to establish truth. No matter how many positive results are published in leaned journals it doesn’t prove anything. However, a single negative result can prove a whole body of scientific theory and teaching, going back almost 2000 years to be wrong.
Poppycock. Newton was 100 percent correct, and dropping the apple on his head actually proves it.
The only time relativistic effects take hold is at massive planetary scales and where gravity difference is relatively significant, for instance the difference between Earth orbit and surface level.
There is also speeds approaching the speed of light where time dilation takes hold.
For all Earthly interactions of matter (hadron configurations perceivable by the human eye) Newton’s laws are correct, which is why when someone makes the correct claim that the top 15 floors of the north tower on 911 cannot ACCELERATE at 64% freefall through resistance greater than it’s static weight without extra energy in the form of explosives removing the resistance, the anti-conspiracy morons cannot counter with “Well Newton’s laws are wrong according to relativity”
Newton’s third law also states that 2 colliding objects exert equal force against each other which means that for every floor destroyed in the resisting section a floor must be destroyed in the falling section, meaning that after 15 floors there cannot be any piledriver destroying the building.
I’m surprised you would post Mr Bowring’s erroneous example.
Whatever happened to the boy who told the Emperor he had no clothes? Did his mom take him home and beat him to within inches of his life or did they make him the new Emperor? Not that we’re hedging our bets or anything.
@Jeff Alberts
>>……There is no “global temperature”, and there certainly aren’t multiple “global temperatures”. Yet we’re always presented with a single, meaningless metric.<>That’s the reason why we consider, instead, the temperature “anomaly.”<>Jean Meeus, you CAN average out global temperature.<<
Yes, indeed. You can average anything, but does that statistic actually have any meaning? Once again, it goes back to sampling. I can argue with how you sampled data for any kind of average you want to take. This is part of the reason why the AGW proponents have been reduced to absurdly proposing that the excess heat they expect is "hiding" somewhere in the ocean, i.e. the heat is still there; they just can't sample it.
The above did not format properly when posted, so I’m going to do these one at a time.
@Jeff Alberts
>>……There is no “global temperature”, and there certainly aren’t multiple “global temperatures”. Yet we’re always presented with a single, meaningless metric.<<
Amen, brother. This is a theoretical construct upon which additional theoretical constructs (models) have been built at considerable cost, and all of it has been much ado about nothing.
@Jean Meeus
>>That’s the reason why we consider, instead, the temperature “anomaly.”<<
Using temperature "anomalies" does not solve the problem, as you must always posit some sort of global temperature to which you can compare these variations and then say, "See. It's getting hotter." All problems with the attempt to prove that it is getting hotter (or colder) derive from sampling errors, as shown by Alan Watts among others. These sampling errors in turn derive from the fact that "global temperature" is a meaningless theoretical construct that leads you into additional logical errors.
@Big Jim Cooley
>>Jean Meeus, you CAN average out global temperature.<<
Yes, indeed. You can average anything, but does that statistic actually have any meaning? Once again, it goes back to sampling. I can argue with how you sampled data for any kind of average you want to take. This is part of the reason why the AGW proponents have been reduced to absurdly proposing that the excess heat they expect is "hiding" somewhere in the ocean, i.e. the heat is still there; they just can't sample it.
ferdberple on November 30, 2013 at 6:05 am
David L. says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:58 am
so why did the world believe Aristotle for do long?
=============
because sometimes lighter objects do fall slower than heavier objects, but heavier objects almost never fall slower than lighter objects. this was taken as proof that Aristotle was right.
–///////////——-
Good point! And it took man going to the moon to finally show even a feather will fall as fast as a hammer in a vacuum; but you have to believe man went to the moon and it wasn’t staged in Hollywood! 🙂 /sarc
cynical_scientist says:
November 29, 2013 at 11:16 pm
The problem with the alarmists is that they are unwilling to take that next step. They are so mesmerised by the frightening (wonderful?) possibilities of their initial conclusion that they are are unable to move beyond it. … They are unable or unwilling (emphasis added) to go beyond it and look at the larger picture.
They are more than capable of looking at the larger picture. Their problem is that they are, as you also suggest, unwilling to move beyond their initial view. And that is because their true goal is politically driven, the accumulation of the vast powers and monies that they and their allies envision will be theirs if they can convince the general populace that the world will be doomed if we don’t take the actions they suggest.
Remove all possibility of accumulating those powers and monies and the alarmists would move on to other pursuits. Most of them, by now, have absolutely no interest in the truth, for the truth will ruin their prospects for advancement.
Fortunately, the populace is starting to smell a rat.
Everyone! Averaging is very important and informative. Let me give you a few examples. The average surface temperature of the oceans is 22˚C, the average temperature 2 meters above the surface is 15˚C and the average temperature of the deep ocean depths is 4˚C. Most importantly the average temperature of the entire ocean is 6˚C exactly equal to what the S-B equation says it should be, proving the AGW theory is a hoax.
The lay skeptic can also point out that the money spent by the evil oil companies is far smaller than the money spent by the governments propping up the theory. There are far more paychecks cut by governments/university’s/ngo’s than by carbon-based energy companies.
@Genghis
>>Everyone! Averaging is very important and informative.<<
Yes, indeed. Averages (simple means) can be very important and informative when they are used appropriately. An average temperature of the Earth, however, is a meaningless use of a statistical mean.
How could we disprove that … the gravity ‘constant’ is not constant over distance and instead gradually decreases to zero at some enormous distance, (eg 5000 LY ?), then reverses into growing repulsive force beyond that distance …?
And then, if such could somehow be proven, then what would that do to “dark matter” theory?
The average global temperature, as a concept, is as useful as the average city telephone number.
It can be calculated and the result can be compared with previous calculations. But it doesn’t tell us anything.
And when anomalies are calculated without regard to mass closures of cooler rural stations they merely mislead.
On a global temperature…I think you are all correct. There is no such thing as a global temperature, but we can come up with a measurement that is significant and meaningful. The ‘ghost’ made the analogy of average wealth in a given population. The problem with that analogy is that ‘wealth’ and ‘population’ are both easily quantifiable. There will always be places on the Earth and in the atmosphere whose temperature we can not measure probably. So we can never
be sure if we have the true average temperature. As jbird points out, this is the excuse the warmests use when they say the heat is hiding in the oceans.
We can, however, measure the temperature of the same places consistently and over a period of time. If these places are significantly global, we can than draw some legitimate conclusions about whether the atmosphere is warming, cooling are just about the same. The specific number is indeed meaningless, but how the number changes over time does give us real knowledge about what is happening with the atmosphere of the Earth.
When the warmists say: “The heat is hiding in the deep oceans…” they are removing all meaning from the ‘global temperature’ metric, and all science from the AGW theory. If the ‘global temperatures’ start to rise, skeptics can now claim that the ‘cool’ is hiding in the deep oceans and that there is no global warming. Neither argument is legitimate, because the premise of the AGW theory is that the ATMOSPHERE will warm with increasing CO2. It is in the atmosphere that this additional energy first appears as heat, and it is in the atmosphere that we must quantify this ‘change in heat’ to determine the validity of the theory. The only way to do that is to average out the changes in a global network of temperature measuring devices over a long period of time.
When the average atmospheric temperature was rising, some skeptics tried argue that the number was meaningless. And they were/are right, but the change in the number is not meaningless. Now the warmists are trying to argue that the lack of change in the number is meaningless. They are wrong. The lack of change in that number is very significant. The AGW Theory, as proposed by the IPCC, is falsified.
(I am ignoring the question of the manipulation of the data in this post. That is another question all together.)
Mr. Bowring errs when he states that “…the recent seventeen year period of steady global temperatures invalidates their climate models which predicted runaway global warming…” Today’s climate models do not make predictions and are insusceptible to being invalidated. They make “projections” and are susceptible to being “evaluated.”
The word ‘probably’ in the first paragraph of my previous post should be ‘properly’.
O/T, but Real Clear Politics is carrying this Richard Tol article this morning.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100248380/extreme-weather-events-are-increasing-yet-another-green-propaganda-myth/
…. Make that Dellingpole. (too much stuff on the clipboard)
I think this is the dumbest thing you have posted since I have been reading WUWT.
Like box-of-rocks, the bag of hammers has a problem with the generates heat idea, and also with the idea that nitrogen and oxygen don’t absorb heat.
So the contention is that without CO2 (and other GHGs) the atmosphere would have no temperature? It would be at 0K? Would instantly freeze and fall to the ground, where it would remain, because even if the ground is warm, these gasses can’t absorb/hold heat?
When I go outside on a hot day, and feel the warm air on my skin, its just the trace CO2 carrying all that warmth?
“Don’t absorb heat” “don’t absorb infrared radiation.” Try this short and elementary introduction.
(whoops, should be…”don’t absorb heat” is not the same as “don’t absorb infrared radiation”)
The joke is on all of us because science NEVER agreed a crisis WILL happen and agreed on nothing beyond “could be” a catastrophic crisis. It’s not a crime to say “could be” but it is a crime when to say it WILL when science has not
sabretruthtiger says:
I think someone must have dropped a box of apples on your head.
The scientific method requires any hypothetical speculation to be supported by empirical evidence if it is to become worthy of consideration. There is no such evidence supporting the AGW guess; zip, zilch, zero, nada, none, in spite of 25 years and $billions spent in the fruitless search. If it existed, we would all know about it. Can’t we move on?
It’s been a clever ruse from day one. In order to change, politically and financially, the vast majority of the world and it’s populations’ way of life, what other subject could possibly be better than AGW? A subject that is and continues to be argued ad infinitum with the only recourse to a ‘solution’ that being the financial ruination of states whereupon they ‘must’ discard the theory in order to survive.
Philip Peake;
So the contention is that without CO2 (and other GHGs) the atmosphere would have no temperature? It would be at 0K?
>>>>>>>>
The sloppy use of terminology leads to confusion. There are multiple means by which energy moves through the system. One of these is radiated energy. Another is conduction. With or without ghg’s, the atmosphere would still be heated by conduction.
I am constantly disappointed in well educated people at or near the end of very successful careers in science fields, who assume the ‘expert climatologists’ with their peer-reviewed papers must be right, and won’t even look at the alleged data that props up unsubstantiated claims. Anything presented to the contrary of their view must be ‘cherry-picked’.
Apologies to Anthony (typed “Alan” instead above). Sometimes my fingers don’t always do what they are supposed to, especially when I get in a hurry.
Bob (Lord) May was my 4th yr Physics lecturer some 48 yrs ago at School of Physics Sydney Uni and he was a nauseating, arrogant s.o.b full of himself then with comments like “half of you shouldn’t be in this class”.
On the issue of constant temperature for 17yrs. We know a single temperature for the earth is a meaningless artefact, see paper by Essex et al J of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics, so enjoy the beautiful and delicious irony of alarmists being hung on their on petard.
Re “meaningless average global temperature”
I agree, in many contexts this is a meaningless number. HOWEVER, if you had a theory that the globe was heating up, wouldn’t this metric be useful? The delta may not constitute proof nor failure of the theory but to suggest it is meaningless is to throw out one of many valuable tools.
Averaging a group of people’s heights could be said to be meaningless since perhaps no single person is that height, but if you were attempting to see if over time, the average height of people was increasing, this indeed would be a valuable tool.
Of course ascribing causal processes to said average is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. In questioning this causality, the layman is prooving himself more than capable.
In reponse to Jeff Alberts November 29, 2013 at 10:48 pm:
There is a place to measure global temperature, but one needs a huge rectal thermometer to take to Norfolk, Virginia where, as the salors say, is the site to set up the equipment to give the world an enema.
My argument is here: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/globaltemp/GlobTemp.JNET.pdf
To Jean Meeus: I didn’t say you couldn’t average temperatures, I said it’s meaningless. Big difference. The average human has approximately one breast and one testicle. Is that meaningful?
Gravity? Hmm?
Just the other day I was lampooning AGW with my friend Chuck. I suggested that if I were a Gravitologist pitching a theory that human induced gravity change will lead to a catastrophic world wide death and destruction I would use the same kind of model based evidence and attribution of observations as the AGW cult does.
My PhD in Gravity, my expertise, models and peer consensus would surely be sufficient for all the world government to take action.
My theory goes like this. Because of mankind’s over population and altering of earth’s natural existence we are causing a reduced speed of rotation. That with this reduction of speed comes greater weight of all things due to the loss of centrifugal force. I am certain this will continue and lead to humans reaching unbearable weights of 2 tons by the year 2100 if this is not stopped.
My modeling shows the trend of increased gravity is increasing. While recent observations show a 17 year hiatus the increase will reappear stronger than ever in coming years.
Mankind, the animal kingdom, marine life and much of our plant life will not survive the multiplying of gravity.
The UN IPGC, Intergovernmental Panel on Gravity Change, has collected the data from all of the world’s scientific institutions and a consensus has been reached.
Gravity is increasing and humans are causing it.
We are already witnessing the effects throughout the world. Rain is falling harder, rivers run faster, birds fly lower, tree branches droop lower and many people feel heavier.
Every one of the observations needs increased research and monitoring to learn the effects and determine how to reverse the trend and/or adapt to a heavier world. It will take a much longer time scale than the current hiatus to know for certain if we are doomed or not.
So doing nothing is not an option. Even if we are wrong these recommended steps to preserve the planet are still worthy of taking.
Collecting more data is always good.
😉
No, I’m pretty sure the #&%-hole of the planet is somewhere in New Jersey. Snookie is proof.
Joseph W. says:
November 30, 2013 at 6:01 am
“Short answer – The sun heats things up. These things emit infrared radiation. Greenhouse gases (including CO2) absorb infrared radiation. Absorbing this radiation heats them up; they then heat up the atmosphere. (Oxygen and nitrogen don’t absorb infrared radiation, so if there were no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this infrared radiation would make it into space without heating up anything.)”
————–
IMHO, …. that t’was a wee bit too short of an answer.
Yup, the sun heats things up (rocks, sand, soil, etc.) and they get hot. And the rising air currents caused by those hot thingys when the Nitrogen and Oxygen molecules get hot when they make contact with those hot thingys. And as those hot Nitrogen and Oxygen molecules rise above the surface they make contact with more of the Nitrogen and Oxygen molecules and part of their hotness is transferred to them. And when they rise above the hot surface more Nitrogen and Oxygen molecules flow in to take their place and they absorb heat. Thus the near surface atmosphere starts heating up. The process is called “conduction of thermal energy”.
The Sun keeps heating the surface thingys up ….. and all air molecules that make contact with said surface will absorb thermal energy via said conduction.
The near surface air in desert locales such as southwest US, northern Mexico, Sahara Desert, etc., gets extremely hot during the daytime due to the above process of thermal conduction.
And there is CO2 in that desert air, at approximately the same ppm as everywhere else. But at 398+- ppm there is not sufficient quantity to make one iota of measurable difference in the air temperature. Even if you eliminated all the CO2 ……. or doubled the amount of CO2, …. you could not detect any measurable difference in the air temperature.
The desert air temperature will start to decrease just as soon as the temperature of those hot thingys on the surface start to decrease. Only if air currents containing H2O vapor (humidity) at say 12,000 to 30,000+ ppm flow into said desert areas will the air temperatures remain warmer longer into the night time.
And ps: anything that one can derive or obtain a number set from ……. then an average number can be calculated for said set.
An average number is a “one time” thingy of a past event and is only useful as a “reference” of said past event …… and has no actual quantative value other than to said number set via which it was calculated.
Measuring the temperature of small volumes (1 to 5 gallons) of water (or anti-freeze) is far, far more sensible than the silliness of measuring air temperatures.
Back to the future…..oh, i mean Reality.
If it keeps getting warmer on average than it might freeze more on average.
Watch out for the ‘Mpemba Effect’!
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/d8a2f611e853
Thanks for the interesting articles and comments.
dang sin-tax errors…than-then
[Is a sin-tax error corrected when you get a cosine-tax rebate in the mail? Mod]
[Or does a cosine-tax rebate merely charge you again for the sin-tax? Mod]
strike says:
November 29, 2013 at 11:42 pm
Jean Meeus says:
November 30, 2013 at 12:00 am
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:08 am
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
November 30, 2013 at 5:01 am
etc.
I try this every couple years, to no avail, so I suppose this is just beating a dead horse, but:
The High School and Engineering School physics I was taught (in the 60s & 70s) stressed the distinction between extensive properties and intensive properties of matter. Perhaps it is now considered “forbidden knowledge” in the post-normal science age.
Whether we were dealing with gases, solids, or radiant spectra, it was NEVER correct to simply compute an arithmetic average of Temperatures. Which is to say – it gives the WRONG (physically unreal) answer.
Now, in the case of the earths atmosphere (a gas),
a.) please specify the exact conditions under which the ideal gas law may be ignored (i.e. disregarding volume and pressure and latent heat of evaporation) and a simple arithmetic average of random temperatures will produce a correct result.
b.) do these conditions actually obtain on our planet?
wrt “average wealth/income”: when adequately defined, wealth or income are extensive properties of individuals and groups; the analogy with temperatures (an intensive property) therefore fails. So yes we “can” average temperatures or telephone numbers for that matter, but in either case the result has no physical reality or meaning.
You should continue your dialogue with the warmists by asking questions. For example ask how their experts explain the hiatus. And if they answer ask how their experts explain the mechanism used when the missing heat goes to the deep waters? Some numbers, maybe?
Easy questions are also revealing. What is the global average temperature? What happens if it rises to super hot 17 C. Are we toasted? What will be different? OK. Every Canadian knows the there is too hot in the USA. But what about Siberia, Greenland, Alaska and so on. What is the optimum temperature for mankind?
Most of the modelled warming is not coming from CO2 but from the chain-reaction of warmings created by CO2 at first and after that by consequences of that warming. If there is no measurable warming, does the heat created by the secondary effects exist or not?
Reliably & precisely taking earth’s average surface temperature to tenths or hundredths of a degree is theoretically possible but practically impossible. Adequate coverage with the same instruments all properly sited (in cities or out?), placed & maintained at the same distance above ground level, recording highs & lows each day & retrieving these readings may never be practical. What degree of coverage would be adequate? One station per 10,000 square kilometers? That would require 51,000 such stations, including in the Himalayas & somehow stationary at the North Pole. But my county covers just 8368 km², yet includes snowy mountains, river valleys, semi-arid plateau & sandy sage desert.
CRUTEM4 relies upon 5583 stations, with the US hugely overrepresented (1064 v. 213 in Russia).
Satellites & balloons too have limitations, but fewer than surface stations.
“The fact is that you could travel much of the world in just a pair of trousers (pants in the US!), a shirt, and a jacket.”
But isn’t that just the point how useless an average temperature is? A value does exists but it is of little practical use. No traveler to the US in their right mind would pack for the “average US temperature” (let alone a world average) and there is not one, national average weather report that we consult each day. The range of temperatures is just too great for the average to have any meaning. Looking at other metrics, such as an upward trend in areas that have little natural variation in temperature, would seem to have much more value to me, a layman.
I suspect the initial parable where “… any two bodies in the universe REPEL each other …” has been confused with another law and entity. The force described is not of the “Law of Gravitation ” but the “Law of Levitation” and this was not Sir Newton but an earlier incarnation of Captain Hubbard. In this modern time the science of Levitation Theory studies continues by those scientists who study science and the technologists implement the science in Clearwater Florida. Recently the great quantities of man made CO2 levitating into the greenhouse repel the efforts of scientists to levitate and only through the efforts of the technologists to remove the weighty physical monies from those seeking levitation are they able to ascend to the heavens similar to the balloonists tossing ballast overboard and relying upon the less dense hot air to propel their upward journey. All hail bop.
Global average temperature is useful when comparing planets!
But, on earth regional averages are much more useful.
Does it matter it global average temperatures rise, *IF* that rise occurred due to a rise in the regional temp in, say, Australia and Japan?
Would the change in global average temperature have any influence to me located on the south coast of the UK, or you where you are?
Average regional temperatures could indicate how a region may respond to any change.
Even ‘out of region’ temperatures are of interest but surely global average temperatures, due to sparse sampling and the wide area, are, for what they are currently used for, useless.
Ferdperple says:
“This is what separates superstition from science. Superstition relies of positive examples to establish belief. Science relies on negative examples to establish truth. No matter how many positive results are published in leaned journals it doesn’t prove anything. However, a single negative result can prove a whole body of scientific theory and teaching, going back almost 2000 years to be wrong.”
Amen Ferd. In my mind, this is one of the keys to help the CAGW believers understand what is wrong with their thinking. They need to be able to differentiate between superstition and science, the difference between superstitious thinking and scientific thinking. Unfortunately, when one is driven by hatred and mistrust of Big Oil the fossil fuel companies as many AGW believers probably are, this can be a difficult if not impossible thing to do. The superstitious CAGW belief can be very hard to let go of when your emotions are a big driver of your thinking and your acceptance of superstition more than any healthy respect for science can cause you to abandon it.
I have an older brother who is a firm diehard believer in CAGW, and I have had several rounds of argument with him on the subject. I might try to get him to understand the difference between superstition and science, but all he would probably do is discount the contrary CAGW evidence as contrived and paid for by Big Oil. I have decided that it is a waste of time trying to get him to understand why he is wrong. It would only damage our sibling relationship, and I don’t want to do that.
Badly worded sentence in previous post:
When your emotions are a big driver of your thinking and play a large role in your acceptance of CAGW, letting go of it can be a very hard thing to do. Those emotions make it much easier for you to embrace CAGW than any healthy respect for science would cause you to abandon it.
You can’t fool a climate scientist who would explain that the mass of the particulate matter in the column of air above the apple is greater then the mass of the particulate matter in the column of air beneath the apple thereby driving the apple towards Sir Isaac Newton’s head and in so explaining save Sir Isaac’s original hypothesis.
My sin-tax (syntax) may be different than yours.Enough so that i question (skeptical) of a lot of things.
Like what i refered to above”Why Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold—Physicists Solve the Mpemba Effect”
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/d8a2f611e853
Some ‘established science’ is always up for grabs and reality can be strange.
My take on the ‘mpemba effect’ may be that warmer water is less dense than cold, so,more space between molecules ,so less molecules more volume ,expanding ‘gas’ ,faster phase change.
How’s that for ‘comment science’.
PS-I also think the cold atmosphere probably dominates the system.Where does all that ice at the poles come from any way?
PSS-14°C or 57.2°F(average temp of planet according to some) is fairly cold like my basement walls (54°F) when it’s 38°F outside. With those temps. i want to turn the heat up but i have to think of the ‘skyrocketing costs’.
(inside 68°F with heat on,maybe i should lower that ?)
Does it take a child to point out that the Emperor has now clothes?
Correction:
Does it take a child to point out that the Emperor has NO clothes?
Lol, Jimbo I preferred the first one, as the Emperor has “Now clothes” as in trendy and fashionable, but he is wearing none. Or how about “No Now clothes” or even “ Now No clothes or even Know No Now clothes. Silly? Yes very.
Sorry I could not sleep and I have been having a chuckle over some of the posts. I even visited the “The Four Fundamental Forces” to brush up.
Hmm back to the sack for me.
Well, I’m no climatologist but … (Sounds like a good entrée to a joke)
When this nonsense first was propagated, back in the early ’80s, I was curious. It could be possible. But, being a history buff, I realized that “climate” has many moods and specifically it had been warmer in the past, before it became colder and warmer, etc.
Being an engineer, I could not buy into the “positive feedback” so essential to the scare, as the direct CO2 warming is, even to the warmistas, inadequate to create panic. As an engineer, I understand feedback, and clearly there are no positive feedback mechanisms operating on the Earth, otherwise we would have all fried or frozen billions of years ago.
BTW It’s cold here in Ottawa!
Samuel C Cogar November 30, 2013 at 9:50 am
The greatest transfer of energy from Sun to Earth is via the oceans, which absorb the entire visual spectrum, and reflects the IR, as I understand. Any SCUBA diver will explain the relationship between light and heat in the oceans.
I rebut arguments from authority this way:
Me: “Do you consider yourself a scientist?”
If the layperson says “yes”, my response is “Then you of all people should know how science is done.”
If the layperson says “no”, my response is “Well I am one. And as a scientist I will tell you how science is done.”
And then I go on to explain how science works and why the seventeen-year trend kills the global warming hypothesis.
Yet superstition is still going strong, often promoted by many on this blog, and by billions of people around the world. No amount of reason and countless negative results seem able to quell it.
I ♥ all here, well, maybe some less. I got my GED when I was 16. (better than George Clooney) Scored 60 in science in ’79’. Spent 12 years cooking, thermodynamics 501. Spent 7 years as a salesman. Worked with pressures over 70,000 PSI. water pressure. As an observant ‘layperson’, political science sucks. Please, allow me to try to learn here. I know, I’m a rude, crude, socially un-acceptable, freak who got off his leash, but,
BS is BS.
Prove your wrong or, prove your right and I might listen to you. Otherwise, STFU!
♣
People individually are getting smarter and BS will no longer be held high in transit. (unless it’s dangerous.)
Store
High
In
Transit.
😉
You missed Bowring’s use of “repel” in his example.
You need to give your GED back.
@The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley, November 30, 2013 at 5:01 am
Yes, Big Jim, of course there is a mean global temperature. And you can calculate it by any one of half a hundred different statistical methods and get fifty different answers.
And every single one of them will be useless as an indicator of anything important.
Computer climate models don’t input global temperature as a variable. Nor do they derive it as a first-level output. Researchers just look at the scenario they have just generated, say “Wow, that looks scary! What’s the global temp?” and then take a mean of the local temperatures. So they have a single figure they can present to the IPCC and say “We mustn’t go above 2 degrees.” Or three. Or five. Or whatever.
It’s advertising, not science.
I’m sorry, You’re. My English is worthless.
I do not understand all the physics and if c02 can cause significant warming.
But I do know if models fail to predict what they are suppose to then there is a big problem with the science. The sooner we face up to it the better.
@RogerKnights
“You missed Bowring’s use of “repel” in his example.”
No I didn’t, please elaborate.
@Bruce Cobb
“I think someone must have dropped a box of apples on your head.”
You’ve probably experienced this yourself, as the intellect required to come up with the above statement indicates you work as a fruit picker.
Of course, a global temperature does not make sense conceptually. However, it does make sense to have markers or proxies as measures of our environment, as long as the metric is acquired consistently and reliably over time.
My field of research is Multiple Sclerosis. So how does one measure a disease – such as MS – to determine if treatment is effective or whether the disease is progressing ? How does one measure mobility, sensory disturbances, depression, sexual dysfunction, vision loss, cognitive dysfunction, urinary troubles ? What about sub clinical disease activity ? MRI only detects part of the problem. Biological markers anyone ? The answer is that we have come up with scales and numbers and Z scores that tally up to a number which is meaningless in itself but which is a decent indicator of disease activity as long as the underlying metrics are obtained in a consistent and standard manner.
So, is gravity a repulsive or attractive force? Us un-educated would really like to know.
François GM says:
November 30, 2013 at 7:06 pm
Of course, a global temperature does not make sense conceptually. However, it does make sense to have markers or proxies as measures of our environment, as long as the metric is acquired consistently and reliably over time.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well there’s the problem right there. I’m surprised it hasn’t come up in this thread, but the fact of the matter is that temperature is not, and cannot, be a consistent and reliable proxy for energy balance, That would defy the laws of physics. Energy flux measured in w/m2 varies with temperature in degrees K raised to the power of 4. With no linear relationship between the two, no matter how you average temperature, or calculate anomalies, you do not have a useful metric.
A temperature change of 1 degree at -40C is indicative of a change in energy balance of 2.89 w/m2
A temperature change of 1 degree at +40C is indicative of a change in energy balance of 6.99 w/m2
Averaging temperature, even if there was a way to do it, still delivers a result that is NOT directly related to energy balance. In fact, one could be negative and the other positive under the right circumstances.
François GM:
In medical research, the norm is for a statistical population to underlie the model that emerges from a study. Please note that for the IPCC climate models the underlying population does not exist.
A few years ago at work, I was waiting for the microwave oven to finish heating my lunch. During that time I happened to observe a mug that a co-worker had left on top of the microwave oven. It was one of those tourist mugs. This one had the outline of New Mexico on one side, and some statistics about New Mexico on the other side. I saw, with some amusement, that the average yearly temperature in New Mexico was 50 degrees F.
I have very seldom experienced 50 degrees F in New Mexico, except for perhaps two or three days in the Spring, and two or three days in the Fall. I got to thinking about averages, and I realized that an average is really quite meaningless unless you know the actual range that has been averaged. Here in New Mexico a generally-accepted low temperature of negative 10 degrees F, usually in the northern part of the state, could be observed for a few days or weeks in winter. And a general-accepted high temperature of positive 110 degrees F is often observed in the southern part of the state for a few days or weeks in summer. In addition, even during winter the temperature might go up 60 degrees from nighttime lows to daytime highs, and during summer the temperature might go down 60 degrees from daytime highs to nighttime lows.
Climate is not an average temperature. Climate is the variable range of temperatures that is experienced in certain regions, taking into account the differences between day and night, altitude, prevailing winds, and humidity shifts, along with several dozen other parameters.
In reference to Newton, his observations on gravity had nothing to do with apples. He observed that two large lead balls that he had hung inside of a tall tower, had slightly deflected towards each other. The reason he was measuring deflection was because he was trying to transmute one of the lead balls, because he was making a living as an alchemist. Luckily, his observation of the deflection sidetracked him from his efforts to turn lead to gold, and he is now remembered more for his practice of scientific methodology, than for his forays into producing precious metals.
I suppose that some disillusioned soul may want to compare Newton’s wages as an alchemist to the grant money given for climate studies, but I’m sure there is no correlation there.
Mommy/Daddy, why is the Emporer naked?
The story illustrates the point that Christopher Bowring makes that a lay person can point out a problem with a “hypothesis” proposed by a respected scientist.The story also illustrates the fact that the lay person does not listen to anything that anyone else has to say because their ego won’t let them .The lay person does not achieve the same respect unless he shows that he has also read what others have to say.
But it is even worse than you think!
NASA-GISS/Hansen-HADCRU (and others) are desperate to “spread” their thermometer records as wide as possible over as much area as possible, regardless of the logic involved or the physics, geology, and all of those “seven-league steps” needed to cross the geography between each thermometer.
Thus, we are told the Arctic (all ice and salt water and ice-covered salt water between 70 north and 90 north) is warming dangerously when the Canadian and Siberian tundra and forest (all growing at different rates under different conditions between 60 north and 72 north) is reported as one overall “average” record: “Arctic temperatures – averaged for 60 – 80 north”. 20 degrees latitude is the distance between Key West (just at lat 23.5 under the Tropic of Cancer) and .. well … Mongolia, North Korea ..
Oregon
Idaho
Wyoming
South Dakota / Nebraska border
South Dakota
Iowa
Wisconsin, and more specifically, down at lat 43 itself ….
43°0′N 87°53′W Lake Michigan
43°0′N 86°13′W Upper Peninsula, Michigan. Sure – Let’s use this 60-80 “arctic average” to discuss water temperatures out on the ice pack by averaging Miami’s temperature readings with Michigan and Idaho.
But it is even worse than you thought!
At minimum ice conditions, we see now 3 – 4 million square kilometers of ice in the Arctic in September. 3 million square km’s is a “beanie cap” roughly centered on the pole, extending down to latitude 81.2 At mid-September, day-of-year = 264 at the solstice, the DMI daily average temperature (unchanged since records started in 1959) is right at 265 deg K for 80 north latitude.
So, 3 million sq km’s are emitting into space from ice (or water) at a average temperature of 265 ^4th power. Seems like a lot.
Maybe we should average that 265 deg K with the temperature of the earth at three other spots: 23.5 north (Key West, FL), near 0 latitude (Madang, New Guinea), and near 23.5 south latitude (Tahiti) – all also near the water level, and all in September. Just to be fair.
Key West, FL. air temp (T ave, Sept) = 302 K. Water temp = 301 K.
Madang, NG air temp (T ave, Sept) = 300.5 K. Water temp = 301 K
Tahiti. air temp (T ave, Sept) = 298 K. Water temp = 299 K.
A small question for the class: How many million sq kilometers of water (and land) are emitting into space between 23.5 north latitude and 23.5 south latitude at 300^4 power in September each year?
Do we really want to destroy our world’s economy based on a flat-plate “average” temperature approximation of radiation into space?
Mike Bromley the Kurd says:
November 29, 2013 at 10:45 pm
“The climate scientists are a particularly smug and narcissistic lot….characteristics seemingly confined to that ‘discipline’. Characteristics strange as they are distasteful, give the GIGO that they espouse”.
Right.
And we have been here before when a similar pact of “particularly smug and narcissistic lot” started to measure the size and shape of the human nose to determine which people they were going to send into the gas chambers.
The current lot has a similar objective but now target all of humanity.
We’re all Jews now.
http://green-agenda.com and UN Agenda 21
A layperson’s view….m mann’s hockey stick…climategate e-mails
17years of no warming while co2 rises. Nuv said. I rest my case
“Aristotle claimed objects fall with a speed proportional to their weight. This was accepted for a thousand years until Galeileo disproved it with a simple experiment. Anyone could do the experiment, so why did the world believe Aristotle for do long?”
It made sense within the schema of Aristotelian physics, which was based on everyday observation and so seemed a reasonable way of thinking about the world. No-one did the experiment because they had insufficient reason to doubt Aristotelian physics until Galileo’s time. He worked out, via a thought experiment, that Aristotle was wrong about that, and then devised his rolling balls experiment to prove it.
sabretruthtiger says:
November 30, 2013 at 6:23 am
“Newton’s third law also states that 2 colliding objects exert equal force against each other which means that for every floor destroyed in the resisting section a floor must be destroyed in the falling section, meaning that after 15 floors there cannot be any piledriver destroying the building.”
Are you thinking that when the top 15 floors dropped, the floors at the plane’s impact point were being removed from existence 2 by 2, one from above and one from below that point? Actually, floors were being collapsed. A collapsed floor has essentially the same weight after collapsing as before collapsing. I say essentially the same because some debris would spill out to the sides. Even with some loss of material, after collapsing each floor would actually have even greater pile driving capability. Collapsing absorbs energy. That’s why we don’t have much use for rubber hammers.
SR
Janice says:
November 30, 2013 at 8:42 pm
“Climate is not an average temperature. Climate is the variable range of temperatures that is experienced in certain regions,…”
Yes, indeed! For years I have head TV weather people make statements like “Today will be 10 degrees above normal” when they actually meant today will be 10 degrees above average.
SR
Joseph W. says:
November 30, 2013 at 6:01 am
Box of Rocks — For a question like that you should really let your fingers do the walking on the web. There are scores of articles to explain it, like this one. The “heat” from CO2 is (ultimately) from the sun, not from the CO2 itself.
Short answer – The sun heats things up. These things emit infrared radiation. Greenhouse gases (including CO2) absorb infrared radiation. Absorbing this radiation heats them up; they then heat up the atmosphere. (Oxygen and nitrogen don’t absorb infrared radiation, so if there were no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this infrared radiation would make it into space without heating up anything.)
But how is that generating energy??
The CO2 molecule is merely absorbing then re-emitting energy, or recycled….
No new energy is produced or generated.
Right?
Really is what happens whether you believe in it or not.
Years ago I was designing an FM radio,. At one pint I had to redo it because the (German) sponsors wanted a (German) front-end in it. They believed that German engineering was always perfect.
At some point about then it became noisy. I was busy working on other parts of the set to s a consultant was brought in who diligently went through my own design bits (the front end was bought in) and after two weeks pronounced that ‘it was unlikely it was my stages that were introducing the noise’ . My response was ‘I could have told you that in 5 minutes’
‘Oh? How?’
‘Simple;” I unsoldered the front end and replaced it with a dummy load, and injected a signal at the IF frequency instead of FM. ‘Look, no noise with it not there’ I said. ‘Oh’, he said….
My brother in law is a palaeogeologist, his study is techniques for dating old rocks. A lot of this involves proxies from almost everything to cross measure age effects of which temperature and carbon dioxide are bit tow ‘signatures’ . Being a sort of average to cooking PhD I had expected him to fully go along with AGW, as most scientists not in the field used to. Not a bit of it . ‘Total bunk;’ He declared. ‘Oh? why?’ ‘Because if CO2 had done then what they claim it is doing now, life would never have evolved on Earth at all’…..
Er that should have been REALITY is what happens etc..
Robert of Ottawa says:
November 30, 2013 at 2:43 pm
@ Samuel C Cogar November 30, 2013 at 9:50 am
“The greatest transfer of energy from Sun to Earth is via the oceans, which absorb the entire visual spectrum, and reflects the IR, as I understand. Any SCUBA diver will explain the relationship between light and heat in the oceans.”
——————–
Right you are Robert, the greatest transfer of energy from Sun to Earth is via the oceans simply because the oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface.
And keep in mind the fact that even though the water is capable of absorbing the entire visual spectrum ….. the actual amount that it absorbs is highly dependent upon the “angle of incidence” that the Sunlight strikes the surface of the water. Maximum absorption will only occur at 90 degrees to perpendicular ….. and as that angle decreases toward 0 degrees ….. the amount of reflected Sunlight off the surface of the water increases. And water also absorbs and emits IR, as well as reflects it.
See absorption spectrum @ http://atoc.colorado.edu/wxlab/radiation/background.html
The root cause of The Great CAGW Scare and the reasons that intelligent people refuse to acknowledge the factual science that negates and/or disproves such junk science.
Me thinks one will get a more sound and realistic perspective if they honestly look at the “roots” of human caused CO2 causing Anthropogenic Global Warming.
And to do that they have to look at the three (3) distinctly different groups of people who “have a BIG dog in the CO2 fight”, and it is of my opinion …… that all of them, ….. for their own personal reasons, …… have been desperately trying to convince the public that, to wit:
1. Increasing Global Warming is “right as rain” and will destroy life on earth if not kept in check;
2. The cause of AGW is the “greenhouse” gas CO2 that is increasing in the atmosphere;
3. Human activities are the cause of CO2 increasing in the atmosphere;
And the three (3) groups are, to wit:
Group #1: Government funded Climate Scientists – This group has expended years n’ years and hundreds of millions of government funds researching the effects of Greenhouse Gases and to justify past expenditures and their future existence they were forced to provide a PJE (Proof of Job Existence) for public approval …. and thus their “proof(s)” are their claimed “increasing average temperatures”.
Group #2: Opportunists wanting “part of the action” – with so much “free” taxpayer money being distributed indiscriminately they seized upon the opportunity to “jump on the Global Warming bandwagon” anywhere they could get “hold” so as to get their share of said tax dollars and used the “claimed proofs” attested to by the aforementioned Climate Scientists to justify their actions.
Group #3: Environmentalists and liberal socialists – when Group #1 and Group #2 got CO2 declared an “air contaminent” and the primary cause of AGW ……. it was a Godsend for Group #3 and they also “jumped on the Global Warming bandwagon” and cited the “claims” of Group #1 and Group #2 for the explicit purpose of furthering their agenda of “shutting down” all Capitalism and Capitalists ventures they could by claiming they contribute to the increase in atmospheric CO2 quantities.
Given the above, is there any question as to why there is a “concensus of opinion” among the three (3) above Groups that ….. CO2 causes AGW?
And how do you put a “stop” to it?
You cut off their money supply.
But cutting off their money supply is nigh onto an impossibility simply because …. many of those who have the authority to supply said money are also actually or politically connected to the above noted Group #2 ….. and/or are dependent upon political support from above noted Group #3.
Adelard of Bath (12th century)
(a call on) “authority does not even necessarily add probability to a given argument”
Personally I think AGW is the emperors new clothes.
Steve Reddish says:
“Are you thinking that when the top 15 floors dropped, the floors at the plane’s impact point were being removed from existence 2 by 2, one from above and one from below that point? Actually, floors were being collapsed. A collapsed floor has essentially the same weight after collapsing as before collapsing. I say essentially the same because some debris would spill out to the sides. Even with some loss of material, after collapsing each floor would actually have even greater pile driving capability. Collapsing absorbs energy. That’s why we don’t have much use for rubber hammers.”
The debris has no cohesive structure and is virtually all expelled from the sides. In fact in the video you see it all expelled explosively up and out. 90 percent of the concrete was pulverised over several city blocks, there were no stacked floors or mountain of rubble and floors at the bottom to suggest the accreted mass was heavily utilised in the collapse. Collapsing does absorb energy which absorbs the momentum from the initial motion, so yes you’re saying that momentum is absorbed by the disintegration, but it is also absorbed by the superior upward resistance, either way momentum is absorbed and the superior upward resistance slows it to a stop. The 64% freefall acceleration of the roofline shows there was no accreted mass involved as there would be a distributed absorbtion of energy down the building as floors were destroyed and rubble particles involved in the collapse released energy in multi-directional interactions along with the retaining of most of the building’s mass. The massive roofline acceleration shows the mass was being expelled.
A good link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjSd9wB55zk
@Steve Reddish
>>weather people make statements like “Today will be 10 degrees above normal” when they actually meant today will be 10 degrees above average.<<
Even better would be: Today's high temperature will be 10 degrees above average, while today's low temperature will be 10 degrees below average, and today's average temperature will be… average… when compared to the official, historical range of temperatures measured here since 1890. Then they should throw in the disclaimer: "Beyond that, we have no idea."
@Sabre”truth”,
Truthers such as yourself generally have the cranial capacity of a fruit fly, and even that may be being generous. Your belief in a huge government conspiracy behind the 9/11 tragedy is laughably absurd.
In my humble opinion, 9/11 Truthers with their whacko conspiracy theories have no place on this website. “Sabretruth” is simply talking out of his arse.
Bruce Cobb says:
December 1, 2013 at 8:59 am
In my humble opinion, 9/11 Truthers with their whacko conspiracy theories have no place on this website. “Sabretruth” is simply talking out of his arse.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Seconded. Well, other than the arse comment as I’m certain his arse is upset about having that drivel attributed to it.
Steve Oregon says:
November 30, 2013 at 9:29 am
“Gravity? Hmm?
Just the other day I was lampooning AGW with my friend Chuck…..”
I really like your UN IPGC example.
If only the Church of AGW people would read it.
BUT… they probably wouldn’t get it anyway.
Here:
Robert of Ottawa says:
You understand incorrectly. In fact, water is an extremely strong absorber of IR radiation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_absorption_by_water ); very little of it gets reflected. In fact, it is such a good absorber that most of it gets absorbed within a very short distance of the surface, a fact that some have used to try to claim that by some magical processes, IR can’t heat the ocean. However, such errant nonsense has been trounced by many, including Willis Eschenbach.
Jeff Alberts says:
Well, that looks like someone else’s argument…and I wouldn’t be so quick to claim it if I were you since it is mainly a bunch of nonsense. That paper mainly just creates a strawman, arguing that a global average temperature can’t be defined in a strict thermodynamic sense. Big whoop!!! Heck, temperature can’t be defined in a strict thermodynamic sense for any system out of equilibrium, which in practice means essentially every system we deal with…and yet it is a perfectly useful concept. Global temperature, or more precisely, global temperature anomaly is a also useful concept and figure-of-merit.
The only attempt that the paper you cited makes to be at all relevant to the real world is in a little exercise they do to try different sorts of averages and see the effect on the temperature trends. However, to do this, they average temperatures, not anomalies. And, worse yet, they choose ridiculous averaging methods that basically just put all the weight on one data point for each month in their small data set.
So, the moral of their paper is if you do really stupid things, you can get weird results. The solution to that, of course, is not to do really stupid things.
A Hundred Authors Against Einstein
A collection of various criticisms can be found in the book Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein (A Hundred Authors Against Einstein), published in 1931. It contains very short texts from 28 authors, and excerpts from the publications of another 19 authors. The rest consists of a list that also includes people who only for some time were opposed to relativity. Besides philosophic objections (mostly based on Kantianism), also some alleged elementary failures of the theory were included, however, as some commented, those failures were due to the authors’ misunderstanding of relativity. For example, Hans Reichenbach described the book as an “accumulation of naive errors”, and as “unintentionally funny”. Albert von Brunn interpreted the book as a backward step to the 16th and 17th century, and Einstein is reported to have said, in response to the book, that, if he were wrong, one author alone would have been sufficient to refute him:
If I were wrong, then one would have been enough !
Jeff Alberts says: That phrase really irks me. There is no “global temperature”… Yet we’re always presented with a single, meaningless metric.”
Do you regard global temperature measured by satellite (by microwave thermal emission) to be a meaningless metric – by Roy Spencer at http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ for example? Surely planetary albedo is well-defined (at an astronomical level, although I accept it does not measure regional variations at the surface)?
One of my favorites is that the Earth is finite so we are running out of resources.
The Earth has a mass of 6E24 Kg. Divide that among 10 billion people and you get 6E14Kg per person. Or 6E11 metric tons per person. Which is quite a lot. Throw in asteroid mining and you have even more. We are not running out of matter. The problem is that some people have run out of ideas.
Bruce Cobb says:
December 1, 2013 at 8:59 am
My favorite 9/11 Truther theory:
http://classicalvalues.com/2012/11/mohamed-atta-and-the-venice-flying-circus/
There are actual data points including Ruddy Dekkers getting busted for drug smuggling. Venice, FLA was where the 9/11 pilots trained. Ruddy Dekkers owned the training company.
Here is where I give the Truthers props – the press was fed a fiction. The question of course is – what is the truth? The Truthers (at least most of them) probably do not have it. But we do know the Press is fond of fictions – “If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance.” “The www site will be working
Oct 1st,Nov 1st,Nov 30th” – lies? Or just a lack of interest in other than being spoon fed. And of course there are more sinister theories about the press.And we know the Press quite well from the Global Warming Swindle.
When the weather man says “10 degrees above (or below) normal” he/she is referring to the National Weather Service (NWS) “normal” average. This is an interesting number, which Anthony can provide more insight than I, but what follows is my basic understanding of the NWS “normal”.
For some reason the NWS uses that last 30 years of data from the turn of the decade to calculate the averages for weather data (precipitation, temperature, etc..). They do NOT use the entire period of record. My meteorologist friends do not know why this method is employed, but suspect it goes back to the days of the NWS having to do all the calculations manually.
This caused problems for the USGS in North Dakota when they were doing hydrological models of the Devils Lake basin flooding (which is when I discovered the NWS methodology). USGS uses the entire period of record for data they collect when calculating mean and median values for hydrological data. They thought the NWS used similar methods. NOT.
Here is my understanding of how it works (correct me if I am wrong Anthony). I will use the last 40 years as an example. During the year of 2001,the average temperature is calculated from 1970 to 2000 for a weather station. This 30 year average is then termed “The Normal” temperature, that all future temperatures are compared to for a particular weather station for the next 10 years (2001 to 2011). Then in 2011 a new “Normal” is established using the data from 1980 to 2010. All future comparisons for the next 10 years use this new “Normal”.
So “Normal” is a moving target. Also, this “Normal” change takes effect immediately. It does not change year by year. It is once every ten years, like a light switch. Additionally, it does not take into consideration the entire period of record.
sabretruthtiger says:
December 1, 2013 at 7:25 am
Watched the video. If the lower section of the building is pre-destroyed why doesn’t the moving section accelerate at near 9.8m/s2 – “g”? The video does not explain the slower than “g” acceleration.
Bruce Cobb says:
December 1, 2013 at 8:59 am
“In my humble opinion, 9/11 Truthers with their whacko conspiracy theories have no place on this website. “Sabretruth” is simply talking out of his arse.”
——————–
HA, …. IMHO, anyone that actually believes that two (2) similarly constructed “tube in tube” buildings of 100+ stories in height and containing completely different internal furnishings, ….. that were struck by two (2) different airplanes, …… that were traveling at two (2) different trajectories, ….. that struck said buildings at two (2) completely different impact points, ….. that caused both buildings to collapse inward upon themselves in an absolutely identical process …….. are the same/similar people that actually believes that all the passengers on the 4th hijacked airplane …. all voted to commit mass suicide by intentionally CRASHING the airplane “nose-first” into the ground in PA ….. after they overpowered the terrorists and took control of said airplane.
And the “proof” is in the RADAR images of them doing said. 🙂
Lots of negative comments on the forum about theScientific community’s consensus on AGW. I wonder how many of these commenters have a) read and tried to understand the science behind the consensus , or b) published an anti-AGW peer reviewed paper, or c) SEEN an anti-AGW paper. I submit that a or b are unlikely, and that c is impossible, since there aren’t any.
Box of Rocks —
But how is that generating energy??
The CO2 molecule is merely absorbing then re-emitting energy, or recycled….
No new energy is produced or generated.
Right?
Right. The energy is coming from fusion in the sun, and is then transferred from place to place. There is no kind of global warming theorist who thinks that CO2 is generating new energy. At least I hope there isn’t.
But energy that hangs around in the earth’s atmosphere (as hotter CO2, water, methane, etc.) heats up the atmosphere and makes the earth warmer. Energy that escapes (as infrared radiation that wasn’t absorbed by anything) does not. That’s why molecules that catch some of this infrared radiation can make the atmosphere warmer than it would otherwise be, even though they are not generating the energy themselves. They’re simply capturing energy from the sun that would otherwise escape.
(Which still leaves the questions of “how much warmer?” “how fast?” and “what happens then?”)
Arguing over the ability to calculate an average temperature for the Earth is a waste of time. Of course you can – but with what error margins? Is it 100%? Or maybe only 50%.
Some folk average a selection of weather stations. Some use ice-core, tree-ring or earth bore proxies. And some just use a Greenhouse Theory from the sun’s strength.
I prefer the finger in the air job.
If history repeat, and it does, the ‘pause’ will be written-away in a few years time.
Measurements will be found lacking and adjustments will be made.
The slope will be positive, and the pause will be a distant memory to some, forgotten by most.
It’s happening already to the high temps in the 1930’s. They are being “adjusted away.”
Joseph W –
You had me till you said -“heats up the atmosphere and makes the earth warmer”.
Heat up the atmosphere? Maybe. Kind of like farting in a very large gym me thinks.
Heat up the earth. Not a snow balls chance. The earth is too big and the amount of GHGs is infinitesimal. The orders of magnitude are just too big.
How can something that is less than 1% of something retain enough energy to warm the remaining 99%?
To me that is the fundamental question.
How can something that is less than 1% of something retain enough energy to warm the remaining 99%?
Do a calculation yourself and see!
Suppose you have 100 cc of water at close to 0 degrees centigrade (i.e., just above freezing).
Suppose you drop in 1 cc of water at close to 100 degrees centigrade (i.e., just below boiling).
Suppose the heat capacity of water is 1 calorie per degree C per cc (i.e., when a cc of water cools by 1 degree, it releases 1 calorie of heat; when a cc of water warms by 1 degree, it absorbs 1 calorie of heat).
What will the temperature of the water be afterwards? Roughly speaking.
joeldshore says:
December 1, 2013 at 6:19 pm
“The absorption of electromagnetic radiation by water in the gas phase occurs in three regions of the spectrum.”
+++++++++
Joel the quote is the first sentence from the link you provided. Please note the words “gas phase”. The oceans are liquid not gas. Get the man a reference for liquid.
@mkelly: If you looked more carefully at the link, you would see that they talk about liquid water too and even show spectra for liquid water. They start off talking about the gas phase because it is much easier to consider, being that you have just an isolated molecule to consider rather than a bunch of strongly-interacting molecules.
Joseph W. says:
December 2, 2013 at 12:56 pm
“Suppose you have 100 cc of water at close to 0 degrees centigrade (i.e., just above freezing).
Suppose you drop in 1 cc of water at close to 100 degrees centigrade (i.e., just below boiling).
What will the temperature of the water be afterwards? Roughly speaking.”
———–
Joseph W., …. “Roughly speaking”, …. the temperature of your 101 cc’s of water, afterwards, will be slightly less than it was before you dropped that 1 cc of hot water into it.
And that is because said 100 cc of water is constantly emitting thermal (heat) energy …… and its temperature will continue to decrease …… unless you are constantly adding sufficient thermal (heat) energy to keep its temperature stable …… or you are constantly adding more thermal (heat) energy than what is being emitted thus causing its temperature to increase.
There is no known entity in the universe that is capable of “trapping” thermal (heat) energy other than the proverbial Black Holes that are situate at the centers of galaxies.
Thermal (heat) energy can be converted to mass (E=MC2) …. but it can not be “trapped”.
Samuel, no, none of this is true. You’re making some false assumptions about time. If you heat the electric coils on your stove to 150 degrees C, they will eventually cool down to room temperature…but for the time being they have, indeed, trapped some heat, and as they emit that heat, they heat up their surroundings. They haven’t trapped the heat forever but they have trapped it for that time. Black holes don’t enter into it, and neither does relativity.
If the surroundings of the water in my little problem were way, way colder than that water is (and remember I set it just above freezing), then it would be emitting heat rapidly and freezing…but that was not part of my problem. Assume the surroundings are close to the same temperature as that water sample and it’s in equilibrium with them. It’s not emitting heat, and even after you drop in the 1 cc of hot water (and heat it up), it won’t be cooling that rapidly. This is a high school chemistry problem, not a senior-level physics problem – relativity doesn’t matter on this scale. Can you solve it?
I wrote the problem for Box of Rocks to show that 1% of something can heat the other 99%. His intuition tells him it can’t, but if he solves the problem with actual numbers, as I hope he will, he’ll see that it can.
I was thinking in terms of Cp…..
Anyway, CO2 in a control volume in the atmosphere has the same temperature as it’s surroundings.
Didn’t the electric coils convert electrical energy into thermal energy?
Isn’ the amount of energy converted way greater than what is being lost to the surrounding environment….
Anyway, CO2 in a control volume in the atmosphere has the same temperature as it’s surroundings.
But if something heats up the CO2 (like infrared radiation that the oxygen and nitrogen don’t absorb), then the CO2 will be warmer until it transmits that heat to its surroundings. Which will then be warmer than they otherwise would have been.
Didn’t the electric coils convert electrical energy into thermal energy?
Yes. Just as greenhouse gases convert one form of energy (infrared radiation) to another (thermal energy); likewise if you heat water in a microwave, the water converts one form of energy (microwaves, which are a kind of infrared) into another (thermal energy).
Isn’t the amount of energy converted way greater than what is being lost to the surrounding environment….
No, because eventually as the coils cool back down to room temperature, all that energy is being lost to the surrounding environment.
If energy is stopped some where in the atmosphere by increasing amounts of CO2 (kinda like clouds ,i guess) then the amount of energy getting to the surface decreases ? or changes? or ?
Just wondering about that
…thanks
Maybe not “stopped” but ,converted ,changed ,emitted ,re-emitted ,absorbed ,delayed,stored ,etc.
Because if it is then those diagrams about how energy like short wave coverted to long wave and reflected(emitted?) from the surface forgot about atmospheric losses of energy that would otherwise be reaching the surface, because of increasing amounts of CO2 and other so called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?
Seems to me somewhere there’s a point of diminishing returns?
Does the Thermosphere heat the lower levels of atmosphere?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermosphere
from reference link:
“The highly diluted gas in this layer can reach 2,500 °C (4,530 °F) during the day. Even though the temperature is so high, one would not feel warm in the thermosphere, because it is so near vacuum that there is not enough contact with the few atoms of gas to transfer much heat. A normal thermometer would read significantly below 0 °C (32 °F), because the energy lost by thermal radiation would exceed the energy acquired from the atmospheric gas by direct contact. “
The greenhouse gases I know absorb infrared radiation, not visible light (that’s why they’re colorless and invisible). So energy can make it to the surface as visible light (which GHG’s will not absorb), heat things up down there, and when those hot things emit energy in the form of infrared radiation, greenhouse gases prevent some of that energy from escaping into space.
That is the point of the diagrams you saw. Look at this diagram, also from Wikipedia, to see which wavelengths are being absorbed the most and which ones get through to the surface. (The colored bars represent visible light, and everything to the right of them is some kind of infrared. The apparent 100% opacity for ultraviolet light is not quite right. Obviously some ultraviolet light gets through – that is what causes sunburn for example – but per that diagram and the article you linked on the thermosphere, most of it does not.)
“The greenhouse gases I know absorb infrared radiation” ….?that would otherwise go to the surface or be absorbed by other matter ,right?
So, if it was not absorbed it would make it through to the surface ?
So, absorbed infrared radiation is absorbed both ways ? and radiated back in ever increasing amounts?
How come this effect isn’t noted in everyday/practical profitable enterprises like home heating (attic filled with radiative otherwise nonreactive gases stuff like that)?
Is it like another layer of the atmosphere highly diluted like the Troposphere?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troposphere
Where it says that Friction is the cause….
“The lowest part of the troposphere, where friction with the Earth’s surface influences air flow, is the planetary boundary layer. This layer is typically a few hundred metres to 2 km (1.2 mi) deep depending on the landform and time of day. ”
Friction causes heat?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friction
“This property can have dramatic consequences, as illustrated by the use of friction created by rubbing pieces of wood together to start a fire.Kinetic energy is converted to heat whenever motion with friction occurs, for example when a viscous fluid is stirred. “
“The greenhouse gases I know absorb infrared radiation” ….?that would otherwise go to the surface or be absorbed by other matter ,right?
Again, the infrared radiation in question is coming from the surface…from things that were heated by visible light or other means. Reread that (which I linked to a couple of times above) – it’s very short and clear.
Joseph, the following words in your statement are incorrect: “….that would otherwise go to the surface or be absorbed by other matter”. INSTEAD, A MORE ACCURATE STATEMENT OF THE PHYSICS IS: ” IN THE ABSENCE OF GREENHOUSE GASES, INFRARED (THERMAL) RADIATION FLOWING UPWARDS FROM THE EARTH’S SURFACE WOULD PENETRATE THE ATMOSPHERE AND LEAVE EARTH.” Thus energy flow out of the earth’s system is diminished by GHGs; because energy flow out of the earth’s system is reduced by GHGs, the Earth’s temperature rises, thereby increasing thermal radiation outward until the system stabilizes again. Thus the earth warms when GHGs are added to the atmosphere.
That was mbur’s statement, not mine, which I was quoting in italics so as to answer it; read the rest of the conversation above it and see.
Sorry, Joseph. My note should have been addressed to mbur. We should also tell him that infrared thermal radiation transmission through the walls of his house is small, and the effect of GHGs in his walls will be vanishingly small.
Joseph W. says:
December 3, 2013 at 5:47 am
“Samuel, no, none of this is true. You’re making some false assumptions about time. If you heat the electric coils on your stove to 150 degrees C, they will eventually cool down to room temperature…but for the time being they have, indeed, trapped some heat, and as they emit that heat, they heat up their surroundings. They haven’t trapped the heat forever but they have trapped it for that time.”
———————–
Sorry bout that, Joseph W, but everything I stated was true. If the object in question is emitting thermal energy then said energy is NOT trapped. And my response was based on the parameters you defined in your conversation with Box of Rocks …. who stated, to wit:
——————–
[December 2, 2013 at 12:09 pm] “You had me till you said -”heats up the atmosphere and makes the earth warmer”.
How can something that is less than 1% of something retain enough energy to warm the remaining 99%?”
——————
But, Joseph W., you completely REVERSED those parameters in your cited example for doing said calculations …. apparently for the purpose of getting the results your wanted to get.
You can not associate or correlate 100 cc’s of H2O that is confined within a container who’s surrounding are extremely warmer than the H2O itself …… to CO2 molecules in the atmosphere that are not confined within a container and who’s surrounding are extremely colder than the CO2 molecules themselves.
Technically, Joseph W., your 100 cc of water is getting warmer regardless of whether or not you add that 1 cc of hot H20 to it …. unless the container is in your freezer. Which in that case, the freezer will suck the heat out of that 1 cc of H2O before it can affect the temperature of the total volume of H20.
Joseph W., at 398 ppm the CO2 molecules in the atmosphere are …. FAR & FEW between, … therefore very little of the IR radiation from the surface makes contact with them. But when it does, it is absorbed by the CO2 molecule …… and then almost immediately the CO2 molecule starts emitting that energy in ALL DIRECTIONS, …… just like a light bulb emits light. And if said CO2 molecule makes contact with another gas molecule in the air it will “conduct” some of said energy to the other gas molecule …… unless said contacted molecule contains more thermal energy than it does which will result with the CO2 absorbing more energy.
Given the above said is why it is utterly IMPOSSIBLE for anyone to calculate the “warming effect” of atmospheric CO2. And atmospheric Oxygen and Nitrogen molecules will get “hot-as-blazes” just from making contact with the surface that is radiating all of that IR energy.
When measuring near-surface air temperature …. you are measuring the thermal energy that is being EMITTED by all the different gas molecules, ….. not just specific ones.
That was my question after the quotes.
What i’m thinking,then,after i read that explanation(not referenced) is that, these/those ‘greenhouse gases’ are not reactive with any other radiation from the sun or space,right?(thermosphere and water ignored)
That’s what the physics of it are ,right ?according to general understanding?
Then if my attic and walls were mixed ‘greenhouse gases’ inside with my insulation.Around1% or some thing like that,and wouldn’t need to be sealed right ? (like the atmosphere)and could release the gas in summer time.(don’t want run-away warming)
Then with less or the same energy added(thermal from burning natural gas and electricity)to my sub-system.
It would be like a green house nice and warm. Frosty would have to stay outside,right?
How come i’ve never heard of that practice?Think of the money saved.and those ‘evil’ fuel companys would have to suffer with less fuel being bought and the ‘good’ greenhouse gas companys would be rich,right?
Thanks for the interesting articles and comments.
sorry ,didn’t see that other reply above…..
….thanks for the interesting comments.
I did see your reference Joseph W.
http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/globalwarmA5.html
” Radiation that is 100% transmittance is not blocked but travels straight through the sample”
so the atmosphere is what? % Transmittance?
@warren a very passionate reply . I have a question:
“because energy flow out of the earth’s system is reduced by GHGs, the Earth’s temperature rises, thereby increasing thermal radiation outward until the system stabilizes again.”
If the energy flow is reduced ?then that must be where the ” increasing thermal radiation outward ” energy comes from, right? and good thing to that it “stabilizes ”
Is more energy added?Maybe ,Geothermal? oh ,i get it,energy is stored by more GHG’s?
How come it’s cold?
Really?”that infrared thermal radiation transmission through the walls of his house is small, and the effect of GHGs in his walls will be vanishingly small.”
you’re saying that the GHE is only applicable to global atmospheric systems and not on small scale sub-systems?So, my house isn’t as good as the atmosphere at storing energy?
I am adding a lot of energy from my heater(thermal radiation) .
?small transmission rates ?doesn’t that mean that less is transmitted?So, by your words
“infrared thermal radiation transmission through the walls of his house is small, and the effect of GHGs in his walls will be vanishingly small.” so thermal radiation would not be transmitted(or reduced?) and remain in the system(my house)?
*(or -energy flow- reduced?) ….by having GHG’s in my walls?
mbur – Solar energy gives only about 1000 1000 watts/square meter on a good day (the average, says that article, is more like 250). The fanciest most expensive new solar panels apparently can convert about 44% of that into electricity for heating your house. By checking your electric bill you can figure out how much surface area it would take to power your house on sunlight alone.
The Wiki on Radiative Forcing claims that the difference in energy caused by greenhouse gases is much lower – on the order of 3 watts per square meter…two orders of magnitude smaller. So pumping up the GHG’s even to much higher concentrations would be way too little energy to heat a house by itself. (Of course it would be only the beginnings of your problems – gases diffuse into each other, so you couldn’t keep the GHG concentrations that high anyway; plus you need to breathe the air in your house…) I’m not going to attempt any more detailed calculations but I think you get the general idea.
Samuel – You’re missing the point of a very simple example. He asks, “How can 1% of a sample heat up the rest of the sample?” A simple and honest question deserving a simple and honest answer. I set a problem that shows how it can (1 cc of hot water can indeed heat up 100 cc of cold water; if you can do some basic algebra you can solve the problem of “how much?” – as you haven’t done. Assume the lab is “just over freezing temperature” and don’t worry about the long run when the water adjusts to the temperature of the lab; what would the temperature be right after mixing?).
You started talking about “E=mc^2” and “black holes” — not even close to relevant to the question or its answer. If you want to instruct people on basic physics, first you should learn some basic physics.
@Joseph W.-thanks for yor reply.nice to engage in some’comment science’ with you in this fantastic forum -WUWT
folowing your links led me to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgoing_longwave_radiation
Some of this radiation is directed back towards the Earth, increasing the average temperature of the Earth’s surface. Therefore, an increase in the concentration of a greenhouse gas would contribute to global warming by increasing the amount of radiation that is absorbed and emitted by these atmospheric constituents.
The OLR is dependent on the temperature of the radiating body. It is affected by the Earth’s skin temperature, skin surface emissivity, atmospheric temperature, water vapor profile, and cloud cover.[1]”
and this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AIRS_OLR.png
in that diagram is where OLR is higher is that where GHG’s are?or maybe aren’t? does that change? is there a more current version for comparison? can i look at seperate years or ‘snapshots’ side by side?
Also this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing
“The radiation balance is altered by such factors as the intensity of solar energy, reflectivity of clouds or gases, absorption by various greenhouse gases or surfaces, emission of heat by various materials. Any such alteration is a radiative forcing, and causes a new balance to be reached. This happens continuously as sunlight hits the surface, clouds and aerosols form, the concentrations of atmospheric gases vary, and seasons alter the ground cover”
what i was saying earlier in this thread was that those diagrams showing radiation ? yellow arrows in this diagram(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greenhouse_Effect.svg) show an amount that should be a variable right?
mbur says:
December 4, 2013 at 8:25 am
“How come i’ve never heard of that practice? Think of the money saved.and those ‘evil’ fuel companys would have to suffer with less fuel being bought and the ‘good’ greenhouse gas companys would be rich,right?”
——–
Hey now, you just haven’t been reading my various forum commentary over the past 10+ years because I’ve been telling those avid believing proponents of CAGW that if they actually believe that “junk science” then they should get their homes and houses “insulated” by pumping a 20% mixture of CO2 into the attic and walls of their abode, … which is GUARANTEED by James Hansen et el, hundreds of scientific organizations and the IPCC …. to keep their home warm in winter and cool in summer at only 1/3 their present cost of heating and cooling.
@Samuel C Cogar -Thanks for the reply.
I knew that i was missing something .
…—>
Warren says:
December 4, 2013 at 9:52 am
“We should also tell him that infrared thermal radiation transmission through the walls of his house is small, and the effect of GHGs in his walls will be vanishingly small.”
——–
Warren, take a quicky “looky see” at these 3 images , to wit
#1 – http://aspencore.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/infrared-house.jpg
#2 – http://www.nachi.org/images10-2/infrared_house.jpg
#3 –
Then tell us again about that thar IR radiation transmission thingy.
Joseph W. says:
December 4, 2013 at 12:12 pm
“The Wiki on Radiative Forcing claims that the difference in energy caused by greenhouse gases is much lower – on the order of 3 watts per square meter…two orders of magnitude smaller. So pumping up the GHG’s even to much higher concentrations would be way too little energy to heat a house by itself. (Of course it would be only the beginnings of your problems – gases diffuse into each other, so you couldn’t keep the GHG concentrations that high anyway; plus you need to breathe the air in your house…) I’m not going to attempt any more detailed calculations but I think you get the general idea. ”
——–
Joseph W, just what in the world are obfuscating about now?
What does the energy required for pumping up the CO2 (GHG) have to do with the energy required to heat/cool a house or home? Do you know some more “junk science” that I haven’t read about yet?
HA, and breathing the CO2 insulation that you pumped into the walls, ceilings and attic of your house, …. HUH?
Now that was a cutey.
=================
Joseph W. says:
December 4, 2013 at 12:12 pm
“Samuel – You’re missing the point of a very simple example. He asks, “How can 1% of a sample heat up the rest of the sample?””
——–
Yup, Joseph W, and you are still in obfuscation mode.
He was asking about atmospheric gasses, ….. not about a pot of water fresh out of a freezer.
==============
“if you can do some basic algebra you can solve the problem of “how much?” – as you haven’t done. Assume the lab is “just over freezing temperature” and don’t worry about the long run when the water adjusts to the temperature of the lab; what would the temperature be right after mixing?). ”
——–
You need common sense and logical reasoning to help you employ that basic algebra.
Joseph W, now you changed the parameters to a “closed environment” …. which the atmosphere is not one. Anyway, your example is still FUBAR because your specified quantities are unrealistic relative to the question asked. …. 1% of 20cc is not 1cc, ….. it is 0.2 or 2/10th of a cc.
Joseph, here are some realistic figures, to wit:
average mass of the atmosphere = about 5 quadrillion (5,000,000,000,000,000) metric tons.
CO2 in the atmosphere = at 393 ppm — 0.000393 or 0.0393%
@ 0.0393% there is about 1,965,000,000,000 metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere.
@ 0.0393% there is about 1,965 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Therefore, @ 393 ppm, each ppm of CO2 is equal to about 5 billion tons of CO2.
Therefore, an average 2 ppm yearly increase in CO2 is about 10 billion tons of CO2.
Joseph, if you dumped 10 billion tons of hot water into …. 5 quadrillion (5,000,000,000,000,000) tons of ice cold water it would hardly make a riffle, let alone change its temperature enough for you to measure.
===============
“You started talking about “E=mc^2″ and “black holes” — not even close to relevant to the question or its answer. If you want to instruct people on basic physics, first you should learn some basic physics.”
——–
HA, E=mc2 defines the “trapping” of thermal energy, …. the conversion of energy to mass. Where in hell do you think that fossil fuels got their energy from, the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Joseph W, you should learn the definition of the word “trap” or ”trapped” and quit talking junk science. Your implied definition is equivalent to saying “a female is only ½ pregnant”.