CO2 and CERES

Alex says:
January 14, 2014 at 11:47 pm
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“The total amount of energy received at ground level from the sun at the zenith is 1004 watts per square meter, which is composed of 527 watts of infrared radiation, 445 watts of visible light, and 32 watts of ultraviolet radiation.”
That’s SWIR the sun is emitting, very close to the visible spectrum. We are interested in reducing incident LWIR on the experiment. This is being emitted around the 10 micron band from the atmosphere. The use of a balloon will get above 90% of the atmospheric LWIR.
“At the top of the atmosphere sunlight is about 30% more intense, with more than three times the fraction of ultraviolet (UV), with most of the extra UV consisting of biologically-damaging shortwave ultraviolet.”
The increase in shorter wavelength radiation at altitude was considered. A 30% increase compared to the unbelievably awesome power of LWIR?! However this minor detail can be easily coped with by attaching a slightly conical tube above the transparent window on the experiment reducing the the area of incoming SW by 30%. By vacuum metallising the interior of the conical tube outgoing LWIR will not change. The outer surface of the tube will need to be sun shielded and air cooled to -50C.
“Telescopes are on mountains to reduce ‘light pollution’ from urban areas and because the air is thinner and ‘cleaner’, therefore better resolution of optics.”
As I said “one of the reasons”. IR astronomy is undertaken from high altitude balloons and aircraft, however space telescopes are far preferred.
Alex, the experiment is not perfect but it is far cheaper than this –
http://i42.tinypic.com/315nbdl.jpg
Empirical experiment can show that the oceans will not freeze in the absence of down welling LWIR. There is nothing radiative GHE believers can do to stop it happening.

Willis Eschenbach says:
January 14, 2014 at 9:56 am
richard verney says:
January 14, 2014 at 3:52 am
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Willis
I do not intend to revert in detail since the discussions with the oceans is side tracking your latest article (which is very interesting), and we have been there, done that before.
Your position (and arguments) in your article in radiating the oceans was circuitous, and therefore proved nothing. But if you wish to argue that the oceans receive substantial DWLWIR and this keeps them from freezing, then you need to explain how DWLWIR effectively gets into the oceans and the problem presented by the optical absorption characteristics of LWIR in water.
LWIR is almost fully absorbed within 10 microns, with about 50% of all LWIR within just 3 microns. The problem is that in the first/top 20 micron layer of the ocean, the energy flux is upwards, and LWIR cannot be conducted or swim against that flow. It is the first few microns that are the power source for the surface evaporation and thus, it appears that, any DWLWIR absorbed in that very narrow layer is being carried upwards, and not down to a depth where the ocean can heat.
Then there is a question mark as to how much DWLWIR actually reaches the oceans in the first place. The oceans are often viewed as calm as a mill pond, however, that is not reality. I hate averages, but conditions over the oceans average BF4+. At this wind force, there is already a divorced layer of windswept spray and spume. Of course, frequently, there are very strong hurricanes and cyclones etc. such that conditions of BF7 to 9 are not at all unusual, and conditions of BF11 & 12 are seen regularly somewhere over the great ocean expanses. Some of these can be the size of a continent. In these conditions, how much DWLWIR actually gets to the surface of the oceans? Given the absorption characteristics of water where LWIR is nearly fully absorbed within just 10 microns, very little if any DWLWIR in these stormy conditions could penetrate the divorced water droplet atmosphere raging above the ocean below. In these stormy conditions, DWLWIR would stay in the atmosphere and not even get to the ocean surface below. In the real world conditions of the oceans and the stormy atmosphere that prevails above the oceans for much of the time, I would suggest that less than the average DWLWIR figures that you claim to be relevant actually reaches the surface of the oceans.
As such your balanced equation (which uses gross figures), is not in balance since less DWLWIR actually reaches the ocean surface (and that LWIR that does can’t easily make its way downwards because the net energy flux is upwards in the first 20 microns).
These are real problems that (in my opinion) your article on radiating the ocean needs to address, should you wish to argue that DWLWIR plays a role in preventing the oceans from freezing.
In the summer, my swimming pool in Southern Spain reaches about 37degC, in the Middle East the pool was over 40deg. If one looks at salt lakes in tropical/equatorial areas these can be more in the region of 50degC. As your article on ARGO shows, the main oceans rarely exceed much over 30 degC. This is not because of lack of solar energy, there is enough to heat the equatorial/tropical oceans to about 50degC (Konrad suggests 80degC, I haven’t seen his figures), but is does not achieve these temperatures because the heat is carried away (some downwards to depth, some polewards by ocean currents) before it gets to these high temperatures. Quite simply, there is so much excess solar energy in the equatorial and tropical oceans that they would not freeze. Think about it.
There appears to be a problem with the GHE theory since all but none of the data supports it. Usually, there are issues with the data, and this prevents the claim of a killer blow. But the other side of ever reducing figures for climate sensitivity, is that it is possible that the entire theory on which climate sensitivity is based is fundamentally flawed.
Willis, as you pick more and more holes in the data and/or conclusions drawn therefrom, there may come a time when you conclude that there are fundamental flaws in the application of principles upon which the theory is based. We will see how the years develop.

Thanks for the S-B details, Willis
The point I want to make is that temperatures everywhere are continuously changing. In my grid square the difference between daily minimum and daily maximum is now 5 to 10 C, and over the year the difference between the lowest low and the highest high is about 40 C. Since S-B involves the fourth power of temperature, using the average gives incorrect results (the fourth power of the average is not the average of the fourth powers). Calculating radiative output from an average temperature will understate the radiation. Calculating the average temperature from the average radiation will overstate the temperature. My estimate of the effect in my grid square is c 3% Of course this effect diminishes as you get nearer the tropics, and of course the temperature data sets are neither precise nor based on arithmetic means, but I still think it should be taken into account.

imarilyAs many other readers will be aware I am not a “single issue fanatic”. My empirical experiments clearly cover a range of issues –
– Does LWIR slow the cooling rate of water that is free to evaporatively cool?
– Does the relative height of energy entry and exit in a fluid column effect the average temperature?
– Does gravity create a bias in conductive flux between surface and atmosphere?
– How hot would our oceans get without atmospheric cooling?

I can help you with some of this.
– Does your steel greenhouse work?
The “steel greenhouse” is also known as the “simplest single layer climate model” and is described in (even more) detail in Petty’s book on atmospheric radiation. In his book it has multiple parameters for e.g. the absorptivity of the atmosphere in (only) two generic decompositions of the spectrum — “SW” (UV through short wavelength IR, but mostly visible) and “LW” (IR in the BB band roughly centered on the Earth’s average blackbody emission peak). In the limit that the system has zero albedo, unit emissivity, zero SW absorptivity and unit LW absorptivity, you get the steel greenhouse, with its well-known solution — a greenhouse amplification of the greybody temperature of roughly 1.19. Give a greybody temperature of (IIRC, I’m not recomputing it or looking it up) of 255K if the Earth were a steel greenhouse — perfect SW absorber with 100% of the LWIR from the surface blocked and symmetrically re-emitted — the mean temperature would be around 303K. This also gives us the opportunity to compute the “efficiency” of the total atmospheric effect relative to the steel greenhouse — the Earth’s atmosphere has a net heat trapping effect of 68% of the theoretical limit (using 288 K as its mean temperature, although this number like so many is highly uncertain).
However, this toy model is just that — a TOY model. It treats a single slab atmosphere, where I suspect that the atmosphere needs at least five layers to get APPROXIMATELY, CRUDELY correct — a surface layer, a layer corresponding to “low” tropospheric clouds (low enough that the atmosphere above them is essentially opaque in H_2O and CO_2 absorption), another for “high” tropospheric clouds where the layer ABOVE them is diffusively transparent, the diffusively transparent layer (in depth) at the top of the troposphere where the atmosphere primarily radiatively cools, and the stratosphere. It might even need a sixth layer outside of the stratosphere as a lot of complex stuff happens there that has the potential to affect the jet stream.
The single layer toy model has no lateral transport, no vertical transport, no latent heat transport, no surface inhomogeneity, no ocean, no variation of insolation, and if it has an albedo it has a single one for the whole uniform sphere. Petty’s single layer model isn’t a heat engine at all — it is a passive differential system that approaches an analytically determinable equilibrium. The best that can be said of it is that one can crudely match the parameters to approximately measured or estimated numbers to see what non-unique span of values of AVERAGE LW/SW absorption, albedo etc correspond to the observed 68% and then to further muse on how this might change if one e.g. changes . That’s not a criticism of Willis’s model or anyone else who has “invented” it and used it in an argument with crazies who wish to “deny” that the GHE exists at all (PSI, anyone?) — including me and Dick Lindzen. It’s just that come on, guys, do you really think that climate scientists don’t understand this? What exactly do you think General Circulation Models are?
– Does CO2 both absorb and radiate LWIR?
Are you being serious? The answer is a laughable, obvious, yes. Which you would know if you ever took anything vaguely resembling a physics course. Not only does it absorb and emit LWIR, but the absorption and emission cross-sections are pretty much the same. This is known as Kirchoff’s Law. That’s why we don’t have two different numbers, one for the absorptivity of CO_2 and a second one for the emissivity. However, the reason for it really is that molecules absorb and emit radiation via transitions between (primarily) dipole-coupled quantum levels and the same interaction term governs absorption and emission, per level. CO_2 is complex enough that it doesn’t just radiate from disparate sharp levels — there are so many that given various forms of line broadening at work they form bands. The bands are clearly visible in absorption/emission spectra. By all means, learn to do spectroscopy — it’s a better hobby than many — but don’t expect to “discover” that physicists are idiots and CO_2 doesn’t absorb and emit LWIR.
– Does LWIR slow the cooling rate of water that is free to evaporatively cool?
Again, are you serious? Sigh, I suppose you are. Look, most of us believe in this Law of Nature known variously as The Law of Conservation of Energy or The First Law of Thermodynamics. You are welcome, of course, to empirically test it — undergrads test it all the time in intro physics labs as that is one way to learn — but try not to hold your breath until you “discover” a violation that isn’t just you doing a sloppy experiment. With that in mind, let’s see what the first law tells us, if you arrange two identical containers of water that are adiabatic on the container sides (basically a thermos, no or limited cooling through the container sides) and place an infrared heat lamp over one of the two open water surfaces, directed down. You have to decide what temperature you are going to maintain the air above the water at, and whether or not you are going to regulate its humidity as well, because the water in both containers will approach a temperature that is in quasi-equilibrium with the air — quasi because it will be cooler than the air because the air will generally speaking be slowly evaporating the water, using energy absorbed from the air primarily from conduction but also via radiation.
Now imagine that you turn the heat lamp over one container on. Ooo, now there is another source of energy entering the surface! True, most of the energy will be absorbed in a very thin layer AT the surface, but this surface layer will become hotter! Some of the heat will be transformed into latent heat, increasing the evaporation rate, but since that rate depends on the temperature, an increased rate that balances the new rate of energy flux into the water will only be sustained with a higher surface temperature. Since the upper surface of the water is in thermal contact with the water below, its temperature will (slowly) rise to be in quasi-equilibrium.
Remember, you have a knob on your thermal lamp. You can turn up the intensity of LWIR to where it boils the container of water away in a matter of minutes. If LWIR can actively heat the water, do you seriously think that it won’t “slow the cooling” of water in the even that the water is disequilibrated at the start on the warm side? For some specific intensity, the warmer water won’t BE disequilibrated, and the “cooling time” will be “infinity” (as long as it takes to evaporate all of the water).
This is the basic physics that answers your question. What actually happens in the ocean is of course vastly more complex, but not because “LWIR doesn’t slow the rate of cooling” or whatever you want to postulate. The water has to obey the law of conservation of energy. LWIR is a source of strongly coupled energy. Of course it will.
Again, you can fantasize that climate scientists are ignorant of all of this, or you could be more concrete, look at the source and parameterization of GCMs that include an ocean slab, and see how they handle it. They might handle it incorrectly, to be sure. But desktop experiments are not going to correct it — the ocean surface is complex with constantly varying wind, sunlight, humidity, cloud cover, rainfall, with surface waves, varying salinity and temperature, upwelling and downwelling and sidewelling water currents carrying water with different salinity/temperature/density, mixing, silt content, surface ice or a lack thereof, and even varying surface pressure. Still, shallow water responds to “forcing” completely differently from deep water driven to whitecaps by a 30 knot wind.
If you want to try to measure some span of this, play through. You’ll need a fleet of ocean vessels (to make measurements all over the world), and some SERIOUS measurement apparatus. Or you’ll need a very expensive and well-equipped laboratory, e.g. one that contains a pool hundreds of meters across and at least 100s of meters deep, with wind machines, machines that can create and regulate “currents”, and ever so much more. I think the boats would be cheaper, and they’re still too expensive and their measurements still probably too inexact to be of much use. Hence the tendency to simplify, to parameterize, to approximate even if they do get it somewhat wrong.
– Does the relative height of energy entry and exit in a fluid column effect the average temperature?
Goodness, any cook knows the answer to that one. We heat pans at the bottom, not the top. We do this because if we do, convective instability distributes the heat, causing substantially improved mixing. If you heat at the top, the fluid stratifies, and since fluids are usually indifferent conductors of heat, it takes a long time to heat the fluid at the bottom by conduction.
One can heat a fluid at the top and stir it, of course, and end up heating it just as fast as you would heating it at the bottom and stirring it.
Does this affect the “average temperature”? Again, dumb question. The answer is obviously yes. But not because of “gravity” per se; because anything that alters the thermal boundary conditions of a material system is going to (in general) alter the average temperature. The only question is, how much, and what are the important mechanisms for heat transport inside the boundary and how do they change as you do. As I said, any decent cook knows about the top to bottom turbulent instability, and sure, that is going to dramatically alter the average temperature within a wide range of reasonable conditions.
– Does gravity create a bias in conductive flux between surface and atmosphere?
If you mean is heat more easily conducted vertically downward across a boundary than upward, the answer is no. I realize that you will not understand this answer and will want to doubt it, but bear in mind that any other answer constitutes a “Maxwell Demon” at the surface — the little invisible dude that lets faster molecules through going one way and slower molecules through the other way — and will lead to a direct violation of the second law of thermodynamics and the ability to create perpetual motion machines of the second kind. It violates detailed balance at the surface.
You can, I’m sure, come up with lots of arguments to try to convince yourself otherwise — the downward directed molecules should be “speeding up” etc — but trust me — they are false arguments when you consider detailed balance at the surface. They only hold when the density of the fluid in the parcels above and below the surface is varying (e.g. the fluid is compressing), not in equilibrium.
– How hot would our oceans get without atmospheric cooling?
That one I won’t answer, as the answer is too complex. Do you mean without an atmosphere at all? They’d boil away until they froze, then sublimate away until they were gone. Do you mean with an atmosphere but no GHGs? They’d freeze all the way to the bottom and never thaw anywhere but in small surface layers (perhaps) in tropical summer or around geothermal heat sources at the bottom of the ice. In between those limits, there aren’t any sane answers because there is no such thing as “atmospheric cooling” as a single channel you can turn on and off. Thermoregulation of the oceans involves radiation, conduction, convection, and latent heat in an actively driven constantly varying environment. Show me a “single switch”…
Hope that helps. Basically, I have to agree with Willis. It’s nice to have a hobby, but you are really wasting your own and everybody else’s time if you think that you are going to discover some answer to these questions that reveals that there is no GHE, or that gravity is important in some way OTHER than its already enormous importance as the co-driver of nearly all transport processes in the ocean and air. Which is really quite enough, and more than complex enough that desktop experiments are going to reveal nothing either unknown or likely to come as a revelation that changes everything in climate science.
In particular, they have almost nothing to do with Willis’s work above. You’re basically saying “Look guys, you might have all of the physics wrong and I’m doing experiments that will prove it to the world”. Except that no, the general physics you are looking at is well known and has been for decades to over a century in many cases, and it is doubtful that you understand physics itself well enough to understand why you are looking for things as elusive as perpetual motion machines.
rgb

“Do you mean with an atmosphere but no GHGs? They’d freeze all the way to the bottom and never thaw anywhere but in small surface layers (perhaps) in tropical summer or around geothermal heat sources at the bottom of the ice. ”
Dr. Brown, very nice summary of the physics involved in these various areas and I only end up with one question where your view and my view seem to diverge so greatly. On your other points I agree point for point, even adding further factors like the ellipsoiod flattening of our planet, the graviational acceleration constant varying from the equator to the poles, the axial tilt, and many more factors that are real and in a perfect analysis you can never ignore and besides there are many more.
You say with no GHGs in our atmosphere the oceans would all freeze over even after assuming that with no GHGs there are also no clouds either, so the albedo is hugely also reduces leaving the tropics (here assiming 30N to 30S being one half of the area and more than half of the radiation absorbed daily) receiving some ≈500 W/m2 which is more than is now received. With albedo assumed about 0.10 the noon zenith under the sun would receive about 1200 W/m2 at that instance.
How do you then evision all of the oceans freezing in this zone for that I don’t understand how you see this occurring even if all land is under snow and ice with high albedo. You must see some other physical factors that I am leaving out. Or, I do realize my view is trying to take a more realistic and not of an radiation averaged, evenly illuminated and flat disk Earth with no diuranal cycle from the rotation and maybe you were taking more this general climate science viewpoint, for that seems to answer the differences between our views but maybe I am mistaken here.

Roger Brown,
According to your logic, it’s OK for one and the same batch of energy to be shed from the surface as energy loss based on a certain temperature, to then go into warming the cooler atmosphere upon absorption to a slightly lower temperature and then next being sent back down again from this temperature to do some more warming of the already warmer surface, the very source that ejected it as thermal loss in the first place.
I would call that ‘super-conservation of energy’ …
It’s the second round of heating for one packet of energy that violates the laws of thermodynamics.

Willis Eschenbach says, January 15, 2014 at 12:09 pm:
“Kristian, your lack of knowledge is large … but your arrogance in the face of that impressive lacuna is stunning.”
Oh my,
Here’s someone calling other people arrogant ignorants …
Your utter lack of understanding on this subject shines through in your last posting, Willis.
“Dr. Brown is right, and this is not “climate physics”—it’s called “physics”. There are sections on this very subject (warming by radiation) in any detailed college physics textbooks. All of them use the same procedure. You SUM THE INCOMING FLUXES to get the total incoming flux.”
Dear me.
Willis, a larger incoming total flux from added, separate objects HOTTER than the originally receiving object (like from the Sun to the surface of the Earth, not from the atmosphere to the surface, meaning positive ‘heat transfer’), but no hotter than the original source, will heat the receiving object FASTER, but could never create a higher end temperature. You really think that if you put one 100 C heater in front of a brick wall, the highest temp the brick wall could potentially reach is 100 C, while if you put two 100 C heaters in front of it, its final high temp could reach 170 C, warmer than each of the heaters, its energy sources, based purely on the doubled radiative flux it gets in?
You clearly don’t have the slightest clue about the difference between instantaneous flux and build-up of internal energy towards an equilibrium (steady-state) temperature.
Real objects with a thermal mass heat up through storing incoming heat (or work) from its surroundings. That’s what physics is telling us and always has been. You cannot determine the final temperature of real objects by using instantaneous fluxes, Willis. That only works with black bodies without thermal mass, where all energy exchange IN/OUT occurs instantly.
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And, Willis, you conveniently ignored the rest of my last reply to you except the part where you bizarrely imply me being a servant of Konrad when simply pointing out that you used the exact same tactic on him as you accuse other people of doing to you, making claims about his words. My comment contained a lot more than that, Willis, pointed directly to your claims and assertions. I quoted you. Please read it again in full and consider what I’m saying. One gets the distinct sense that you’re evading, playing the la-la-la game like that.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/13/co2-and-ceres/#comment-1535984