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.
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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.