Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I was thinking about “dust devils”, the little whirlwinds of dust that you see on a hot day, and they reminded me that we get dulled by familiarity with the wonders of our planet. Suppose, for example, that “back in the olden days” your family lived for generations in a village on a tiny island where there were no clouds. None at all. Ever.
Now, imagine the consternation that would occur if one day, after centuries without a single cloud, a big fluffy white cumulus cloud suddenly popped into existence one afternoon right over the village, hung around for six hours, and then disappeared in the evening. If it happened once, it would pass into legend as the giant white boulder in the sky that threatened to crush the village, and only disappeared after the priests did their most powerful chants …
Next, imagine that over time the appearance of the clouds became more common, but the priests always successfully chased them off … until one day, a plain old white fluffy cloud suddenly started growing straight towards the sky, and it turned black, and miracle of miracles, pure water started pouring out of the cloud! The cloud turned into a fountain! Who knew? If it happened once, it would be spoken of for years.
Next, imagine that over time, the appearance of rain clouds became more common, and the priests tried to make them stick around … until one day the priests were out doing their rain dance in the pouring rain, when without warning, there was a blinding flash of light and a tremendous sound, and all of the priests were knocked dead by some strange, unknown power … imagine the consternation and wonder that would cause, and what kind of legends that would engender …
I bring all this up to highlight the nature of something called an “emergent phenomenon”. The cumulus cloud is an example of an emergent phenomenon. The rainstorms are a second, different emergent phenomenon. Finally, the lightning is a third example of an emergent phenomenon.
So … what are the characteristics of such a creature? How can we tell an emergent phenomenon from all the other inhabitants of the zoo? The following is not an exhaustive list, and some don’t have every characteristic, but here are the things that set an emergent phenomenon apart from its cousins.
• It has a “lifespan”—it is called “emergent” because it emerges from the background conditions at a certain time, lasts for a certain span of time, and then dies out.
• It emerges spontaneously whenever conditions are favorable, and never emerges otherwise. Often this is associated with the passing of some threshold, with emergence not happening at all below the threshold, and increasing quickly once the threshold is passed.
• It has “edges” that make it clearly distiguishable from its surrounding background.
• It must constantly change and adapt to current conditions in order to persist in time.
• It may split into two or more independent copies of itself.
• It can move independently through its surroundings.
• It can do work on its surroundings.
• Once it emerges, it can persist through conditions below the threshold for emergence.
• It is unexpected in the sense that it is not intuitively predictable from the previous conditions. For example, there is nothing about a clear blue sky that says “here come fluffy white clouds”. There is nothing about white fluffy clouds that screams “Close your car windows.” And there is certainly nothing about a warm summer rain that warns “Don’t stand out in a field or a million volts of electricity might pass directly through your corpus delecti …”.
What does this have to do with climate? Well, emergent phenomena are the missing link in the climate models. They are what keep the planet from overheating.
See, the planet is in a funny position. We’re only running at about 70% throttle. About 30% of the sunlight hitting the planet never makes it into the climate system. So never mind CO2, there’s enough energy from the sun to fry us all to a crisp … but that’s never happened.
The reason it hasn’t happened is that there are a host of emergent phenomena that stand in the way of overheating … which brings me back to the dust devils. Here’s a photo I took of some dust devils at night, cooling the surface of the desert from the effects of the huge fire at the left of the picture … dust devils don’t care about the source of the heat.
Now, dust devils have all the characteristics of typical emergent phenomena—they have a lifespan, the do work on their surroundings, they move independently, they change and adapt, they are not intuitively predictable from calm air. In this photo they were emerging next to the fire, then spinning off to the right into conditions where the surface is too cool for them to emerge. So they fulfill all the requirements, they are emergent phenomena … and given that the dust devils do work, then what is the dust devil’s day job? That is to say, what work is a dust devil doing on the surroundings?
The answer is, it is cooling the surface in a several ways. First, it is taking warm surface air and spiraling it up rapidly to altitude, physically removing the heated air from the surface. Next, the increased speed of the wind increases evaporation, further cooling the surface. Next, wind on the earth’s surface increases the “wind chill factor”, which is the increased conduction of heat from surface to atmosphere via surface turbulence.
So a dust devil is a natural cooling machine, a fantastic piece of hardware that is very effective at reducing the surface temperature. And while that is amazing in itself, that’s not the beauty part …
The beauty part is that dust devils only emerge where and when they are needed, at the hot spots. If you’re looking a chunk of real estate, the spot where the dust devil emerges is where the heat is located. This makes it incredibly efficient. Consider how much energy it would take to cool the whole chunk of real estate, and how much less energy it takes to focus the cooling energy exactly where it is needed.
The same is true of the tropical clouds. You don’t want clouds in the tropics all the time, they would reflect all the sunshine, and the planet would cool way down. You only want clouds when it gets hot … which of course is exactly what happens on your average tropical day. In the cool of the tropical morning, it is clear. But when the surface warms, the clouds emerge, and if the warming continues, then the thunderstorms emerge as well.
So to complete the thought, the beauty part of emergent phenomena is that their thresholds are temperature-dependent. As a result, they are independent of both total forcing and total losses. This is a critical point. They are temperature-dependent, not forcing-dependent.
For example, clouds don’t emerge in the tropics when the sun is hot (forcing-dependent). Instead, they only emerge when the surface is hot (temperature-dependent).
And this is why changes in the forcings don’t have much effect on temperatures, particularly on the hot side of the range where the various phenomena emerge in untold numbers. Increases in forcing, whether from CO2, from volcanoes, or from the 5% increase in solar strength over the last half-billion years, don’t affect the temperature much because they don’t affect the emergence thresholds of clouds and dust-devils and thunderstorms. Instead, the emergence of these and other temperature-regulating phenomena is controlled by thresholds related to surface temperature and insensitive to forcing. As a result, the cooling phenomena emerge exactly as, when, and where they are needed, and their emergence is not a function of the forcing in any but the most indirect manner.
Finally, as I mentioned, we’re dulled by exposure to the radical, unusual nature of the emergent phenomena. As a result, for example, the numbers of dust devils could double, and nobody would be the wiser. We hardly notice them, yet they remove huge amounts of energy from the surface in the worlds’ hottest areas. Or, clouds could emerge fifteen minutes earlier in the tropics. Nobody would even remark on it. But either of those shifts would have a profound and lasting effect on the surface temperature …
And that’s why the climate models don’t explain much. They don’t have any of the many emergent mechanisms that preferentially cool the hot spots. No thunderstorms. No dust devils. No waterspouts. No cyclones … and without those temperature-sensitive heat-seeking surface-cooling mechanisms, the models don’t have a chance of reflecting reality.
Regards to all,
w.
NB: Please quote what you disagree with. I can defend my own words, and I am happy to do so. I can’t defend your interpretation of my words. Quote what you disagree with.
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Before I play “catch up” I would like to say …. “Thank you, Willis, for such a great commentary”. I really enjoyed it, learned a few new thing and plan on reading it again.
Now to do my catching up ….
—————
dp says:
February 13, 2014 at 4:22 pm
“and I don’t think we’ll ever solve the modeling problem if the objective is to compare temperatures over time.”
——————
I am absolutely sure they will never solve the modeling problem if the objective is to compare temperatures over time …… because their “hindsight” modeling results will serve no practical purpose for determining future climatic conditions.
I really don’t think anyone is silly enough to compare “team-sport’s scores” over time to determine how each of the sport teams is going to perform in future years. The performance of a sports team is also subject to multiple “emergent phenomenon”, ….. are they not?
Computer modeling only works for “closed” systems, They don’t work for “open” systems, …… especially “open” systems with multiple “emergent phenomenon”.
Michael D says:
February 13, 2014 at 4:44 pm
“Do you think there is a night-time reverse thermostatic effect as well? I.e. do clouds tend to come on cold nights to insulate the Earth and prevent global cooling?”
———————
If the humidity is high enough …. then fogs and mists come on cold nights to insulate the Earth and prevent global cooling
Konrad says:
February 13, 2014 at 9:34 pm
[quoting: Samuel C Cogar] “Now why didn’t I think of that, …… it’s so obvious its embarrassing”
……….
“I suspect you are being facetious. This is ill advised. You would need to be better at empirical experiment than me to challenge. And I am better than Dr. Spencer at this.”
———————
Absolutely NOT. I was as serious as a heart attack.
One very important thing I learned many years ago in my career as a Logical Designer (Design Engineer) was that one had to ask them self just as many “No” questions as they did ”Yes” questions if they had any hope at all of creating a great design that actually worked without having to re-design part of it during “testing”. ……. But me forgettum dat. CRS
I have asked myself the “Yes” (positive) question of: “Will greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere” ….. but I forgot to ask myself the “No” (negative) question of: “Will greenhouse gases cool the atmosphere”.
TA DAH, …. the “No” question, …….. absolutely, that is the primary function they provide.
Even the non-GHG gases do likewise via their contact (conduction) with the earth’s surface. Cause, …. being the primary “players”, ……. they also “heat up” and quickly rise into the atmosphere resulting in thermals and “dust devils”.
Cheers
Mr. Eschenbach,
While you are entirely correct, I think the focus should be on the actual surface, where the emergent events are triggered.
My understanding is that the models estimate evaporation, convection and sensible energy flux effects smoothly by averaging them together. While in reality as you have demonstrated they are step functions with a hard upper limit, where net cooling reverses and negates any temperature or energy increase. I believe the upper limit (over the ocean) is somewhere in the 22˚ to 30˚C temperature range, much like the boiling point of water is 100˚C.
The direct cooling effect is evaporation which accounts for at least 51% of the cooling and it rapidly increases as the temperature increases (the upper limit).
Just wanted to say that I loved this essay, the writing was beautiful and the content excellent. Hope to read more of your writing.
rwnj says: @ur momisugly February 13, 2014 at 3:41 pm
…. That is, does global warming cause more storms?
stevek says: @ur momisugly February 13, 2014 at 4:03 pm
If ocean warms the monsoons off ocean carry more water. With warming some say the monsoon winds are stronger….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
There are papers answering those questions (see below) and it would seem that the answer is, it depends on what location you are talking about. As some have mentioned less of a temperature differential between the equator and poles means less storminess. A shifting of the rain bands can mean drought or flooding depending on the location.
I think what Willis is discussing is the thermostat that acts to limit the upper temperature range especially where there is abundant moisture (thunderstorms) in the tropics and subtropics. Without water the ‘Thermotat’ is not as efficient at dumping heat.
Decreasing Asian summer monsoon intensity after 1860 AD in the global warming epoch
(DOT)springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-012-1378-0
The impact of North Atlantic storminess on western European coasts: A review
The impact of North Atlantic storminess on western European coasts: A review
CO2Science: (wwwDOT)co2science.org/articles/V15/N36/C3.php
This discussion is very much worth the read because it uses several different methods to shows storminess ” is high during the LIA with a marked transition from reduced levels during the MCA [hereafter MWP]
New Insights into North European and North Atlantic Surface Pressure Variability, Storminess, and Related Climatic Change since 1830
connection(DOT)ebscohost.com/c/articles/36003438/new-insights-north-european-north-atlantic-surface-pressure-variability-storminess-related-climatic-change-since-1830
Aeolian sand movement and relative sea-level rise in Ho Bugt, western Denmark, during the `Little Ice Age’
hol(DOT)sagepub.com/content/18/6/951.abstract
MONSOONS
The Holocene Asian Monsoon: Links to Solar Changes and North Atlantic Climate (Links to more articles)
Paleotemperature variability in central China during the last 13 ka recorded by a novel microbial lipid proxy in the Dajiuhu peat deposit
hol(DOT)sagepub.com/content/23/8/1123.abstract
Atlantic Forcing of Persistent Drought in West Africa
(wwwDOT)sciencemag.org/content/324/5925/377.abstract
Multidecadal to multicentury scale collapses of Northern Hemisphere monsoons over the past millennium
(wwwDOT)pnas.org/content/110/24/9651.abstract
A 2,300-year-long annually resolved record of the South American summer monsoon from the Peruvian Andes
(wwwDOT)pnas.org/content/108/21/8583.abstract
Samuel C Cogar says:
“I really don’t think anyone is silly enough to compare “team-sport’s scores” over time to determine how each of the sport teams is going to perform in future years. The performance of a sports team is also subject to multiple “emergent phenomenon”, ….. are they not?”
I try not comment as I suffer from self dellusions, but this caught my eye because American football has begun to do just this, though on a shorter scale. Just watch a week of analysts before any big game (like the recent Super Bowl) and there are statistics and past performances out the wazoo. “So and so is this good in the post season”, “this team has the best point differential”, “on paper this is an even game”, and so on. Yet each game is a different game and so many factors apply, to even rate it off one player is silly. Anyway, just goes to show that we humans love speculation and it can override commen sense if we aren’t careful.
Love the post Mr. Eschenbach, your combination of experience and education is fully evident and makes your articles fascinating. Makes me wonder at how these phenomena were set in place to begin with.
gbaikie says: @ur momisugly February 14, 2014 at 2:22 am
I don’t think there enough energy from the sun to fry us to a crisp.
A clear sky at noon has about 1000 watts per square meter.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
This is another one of those peas under the thimbles that Steve McIntyre cautions us to watch.
The earth is NOT the surface. At Top of Atmosphere you get the full 1,368 W/m2. At this point the sun’s energy interacts with the atmosphere. See: NASA: Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite: A Program to Study Global Ozone Change (Full of Man destroys the atmosphere garbage but has some of the chemistry.) and Solar Storm Dumps Gigawatts into Earth’s Upper Atmosphere
Other NASA articles state “Clouds, aerosols, water vapor, and ozone directly absorb 23 percent of incoming solar energy.” On November 5, 2013 there was X-class solar flare, the ionosphere absorbed it. “The burst of energy triggered electric currents in the ionosphere, which in turn generated a magnetic field. The quick burst of energy caused a surge of electric currents in the ionosphere. All electric currents generate magnetic fields, and the fast surge caused by the flare creates a magnetic field strong enough to be measured from the ground.”
Unfortunately there is no incentive to actually connect changes in the upper atmosphere to climate unless you can hang the blame on Mankind so changes in ozone are the most studied upper atmosphere phenomenon.
That does not mean we at WUWT should let the paid propagandists sweep what is happening to the upper atmosphere as the sun changes over the current and next cycle under the rug. The sun ma ybe constant as a rock and therefore completely out of the picture as far as climate goes but that does not mean we should ignore the possibilities Cycle 24 and 25 may uncover.
The position Green House Gas Belief Religion is in isn’t all that funny.
The post is about ”emergent phenomena.”
Without any atmosphere, there can’t be any
”emergent phenomena”
There can’t be conductive cooling
There can’t be convective cooling
There can’t be 30% energy never arriving.
A cold atmosphere can’t heat an object
otherwise heated in vacuum.
Emergent phenomena called reflection and convection and conduction arise.
This post is a perfect example of why those who believe the atmosphere can warm the planet are never going to be found to be correct. Your observation that 30% of the sun’s energy never even arrives at the earth because of the atmosphere seals that off never to end-run the inescapable fact that less energy in must by definition mean less energy in.
+++++++
Willis Eisenbach says
“See, the planet is in a funny position. We’re only running at about 70% throttle.
About 30% of the sunlight hitting the planet never makes it into the climate system.
So never mind CO2, there’s enough energy from the sun to fry us all to a crisp … but that’s never happened.
The reason it hasn’t happened
is that there are a host of emergent phenomena
that stand in the way of overheating …”
I think that if people who believed the atmosphere can warm the earth would read what Mr Eisenbach says
they would realize all these effects stemming from the atmosphere couldn’t exist,
if there were no atmosphere at all.
There would be no 30% of the energy giving the earth it’s temperature, never arriving.
I saw on youtube many videos of people who were making water boil at room temperature.
The bubbles from the water form about an inch or two down into several inches of water.
When the pressure is lowered over the top of the water, it begins to lose water not just from the surface but also from deeper within the column.
This lends credence to the concept that the presence of more and more atmospheric mass, retards water within that column from evaporating.
But there is no question at all that if there were some object down inside any of those flasks, which had a thermocouple attached to them the object if being heated from without that flask,
was a whole lot cooler, distributing the heat it picked up throughout the bath, than just if the bath were not there at all.
I was thinking about this when I came across Mr. Eisenbach’s post on the reason that dust devils appear: they appear because an atmosphere provides additional ways for heat that is building up in something to be removed from it.
Thanks to the author of the post for another writing of interest.
Sometimes, i feel like an ’emergent phenomena’.
I know about something called a ‘thermal low’, warmer air rising and cooler air moving in to replace it. Might it be that when air masses of different heat or density colide, alot of times, they start revolving ? Warmer air/substance is more ‘active’ so it tries to equalize with the cooler air. Open air having low resistance to movement , then it spins ? So, the ‘dust devils’ emerge when you have that bonfire going (massive up lift) and when cooler air rushes in some gets isolated/grouped(?) and causes local spining updrafts, that disappear when the temp. equalizes.
So. does that not happen globaly?
Warmer air/water rising (near equator) cooler air subsiding (near poles)
spinning off storms like the ‘dust devils’ around that fire…..
Maybe i’m not ‘getting it’? or my style is just beyond redemption.Whatever…
If we are running about 70% throttle then i wonder what turning up the throttle would do?
Maybe this real life anecdote might apply:
When grilling in below freezing temps. with a compressed gas at ambient air temp.to start with, as i rapidly expand (burn) it, the container of compressed gas forms ice on the outside.
So, either way we burn the fuel(from out of the ground) or we have expansion of compressed gas(if the poles ever warm up to release all that stuff on the bottom of the ocean) and then ice forms and pushes everything out into the sea.
Sorry for the ‘alarmism’ with that last part but i couldn’t resist. 😉
Thanks for the interesting articles and comments.
The atmosphere is a homeostatic systemj and the thermostat is called “water”.
Konrad says:
February 14, 2014 at 4:02 am
Konrad, before you declare victory, please locate a quote where I ever said that the net effect of radiative gases in the atmosphere warms the atmosphere. I don’t recall ever saying it, I don’t believe it, and in fact I hold that the greenhouse gases both cool the atmosphere and warm the surface. Here’s why:
The atmospheric cooling occurs because without the greenhouse gases, the only way the atmosphere can lose heat is through conduction to the surface. The GHGs allow the atmosphere to radiate to space, which (as you point out) allows the atmosphere to cool much more rapidly than it would without the GHGs.
But that’s only half the story, because only half of the radiation goes to space. The other half goes back downwards, making the surface warmer than it would be in the absence of the GHGs.
So as usual, you are very passionate about your claim, which is a good thing … but as occurs far too often with you, that claim is 100% wrong … you are attacking me for a position I don’t hold, and never have held.
And also as usual, you’ve picked a thread which has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR IDÉE FIXE … so here’s a polite request, Konrad.
Could you please discuss the thermal effect of GHGs on the atmosphere elsewhere, and restrict your comments here to 1) emergent phenomena, and 2) dust devils?
TIA,
w.
Joe Born says:
February 14, 2014 at 5:21 am
Good to hear from you as always, Joe.
The problem I’ve read about is not the lack of computational power, although that may be the case as well. It is that the solution of the Navier-Stokes equation in the models has never been shown to converge to the correct result, and that reducing the gridcell size makes the problem worse rather than better.
In any case, the gridcell size in the climate models tend to be on the order of 100 km on a side or so, far to large to even begin to show (not calculate, but display) anything but the largest of cyclones … and as for dust devils, fugeddaboutit …
But as many people here have testified, the dust devils are a regular and very active feature of the warmer landscapes. Not only that, but they extract the heat just from the warmest spots, so they are very efficient. And not a bit of that shows up in the climate models.
Regards,
w.
PS—surface area of the planet = 5.11e14 sq metres. A square 100 km on a side covers 1×10^10 sq metres. This means there are about 5e4, or 50,000 gridcells at that size. Note that these are replicated on (typically) a dozen or more atmosphere levels, and perhaps half that number of oceanic levels. If we assume say 50k gridcells on 15 levels, that’s 750,000 gridcells. For each of these, we need to calculate a dozen variables or so—pressure, temperature, velocity in the x, y, and z directions, vorticity, vertical lapse rate, water content, cloud cover and the like.
So that means that at present, the models are handling on the order of call it 10 million variables … and the number of variables goes up as the square of the grid size. So if we wanted say a 25-km grid size (still way too small to catch the emergent phenomena), we’d need to keep track of sixteen times that number of variables, 160 million variables …
So yes, I’d agree that the computational power needed for even that small increase in resolution is prohibitive, and thus getting down to the level of emergent phenomena ain’t gonna happen any time soon …
mbur says:
February 14, 2014 at 10:22 am
That’s an excellent insight, because In fact, life is the prototypical emergent phenomenon—living things tend to have most or all of the various characteristics I listed above for emergent phenomena … they have a lifespan, they emerge when conditions are favorable, they can do work on their surroundings, they create copies of themselves, they move about the landscape, and so on.
w.
When I was looking at the people making water boil at room temperature it also occurred to me that I saw a film clip where some people made a bicycle pump into a vacuum pump
by reversing the internal flap-valve; and they stuck a tire valve, in a drilled out Mason jar lid.
They put a thermometer of some kind, I think it was one of the miniature key ring ones encased in resin, into the jar.
They then proceeded to pump air out and show the thermometer climb several degrees as more air was removed.
There can not be any ”Emergent Phenomena” arise to remove heat when there isn’t any heat handling medium for the phenomena to emerge.
This is also born out by another educational film I remember: the one where the air is pumped out of a vessel and an object is blown with a fan. The thermocouple is shown, at one temperature, inside a vacuum chamber, through a port, and the temperature is shown.
The fan is started, the temperature goes down in spite of the fan’s motor adding heat to the equation, because the distribution in air of the vessel creates better thermal, conductive cooling, to the outside.
The test is started over, and the temperature is shown to rise when the air is pumped out.
Then, when the fan is started, the temperature hardly moves at all. The narrator noted the fan had to be turned off because in the chamber with much less air, there was very little cooling without the conduction capacity presence of air provided, and it would burn out.
They weren’t on youtube, and weren’t done by the same people.
The one with the jar was just a simple one in someone’s home work shop.
The one I saw with the fan and thermocouple were in some sort of scientific environment, they were patched together as part of a tutorial on the effects, of not having an atmosphere.
The effect they were demonstrating is the one causing astronauts and space equipment
to need to be insulated with light reflective insulation:
In space, you can’t just fan off the heat.
There isn’t anything to fan the heat off, with: the blades of a fan will spin,
in vacuum conditions, but no cooling happens. Not even enough for a fan to cool itself.
The earth is in the identical situation as Mr. Eisenbach notes:
“The earth can never reach full throttle,”
there is an atmosphere keeping the temperature lower
by: keeping 30% from ever arriving,
by the scrubbing effect that’s creating the dust devils,
by the storm system that constantly washes the world in cold water
All of these being the ”Emergent Phenomena” that having an atmosphere creates.
I did not read this part before I’m sorry.
You are of the opinion that after green house gases are responsible for at least some of the sunlight never making it to the earth, and the cooling done by water,
that the earth is warmer because of them? That seems very counter intuitive.
Willis Eisenbach says: “But that’s only half the story, because only half of the radiation goes to space. The other half goes back downwards, making the surface warmer than it would be in the absence of the GHGs.”
Willis, I am troubled by the use of the term “emergent phenomena”. Isn’t that term simply renaming individual phenomena associated with how heat engines behave & “organize” according to the laws of thermodynamics and entropic tendencies ? I am not very good at physics, but why “rebrand” something for which a system & terminology already exists ?
BioBob says:
February 14, 2014 at 2:02 pm
Good question, Bob. Identifying which phenomena are “emergent” is important because we need different types of analysis for systems which contain emergent phenomena.
Also, bear in mind that while the category of emergent phenomena includes heat engines, it is by no means restricted to them. Consider the emergent phenomenon of Rayleign-Benard circulation, for example …
Analyzing e.g. heat flow a system which is subject to the emergence of Rayleigh-Benard circulation is very different from analyzing heat flow in a system without that circulation.
In terms of climate the distinction is critical because in climate, the temperature control system is composed of emergent phenomena. These include tornadoes, snowstorms, El Nino/La Nina, tropical cumulonimbus, the PDO, dust devils, and more. In the realm of climate, emergent phenomena are not just some kind of sideshow—they are the means by which the temperature is regulated and constrained to a ±0.3°C variation over an entire century …
And finally, the entire global climate system, the natural heat engine composed of the Hadley, Ferrell, and Polar cells that is fired by the sun and fueled by the thunderstorms of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone is itself an emergent phenomenon.
So that’s why I single emergent phenomena out for discussion. From the smallest dust devil to the global heat engine, they are part and parcel of the system we call climate.
w.
Matthew Benefiel says:
February 14, 2014 at 8:53 am
“but this caught my eye because American football has begun to do just this, though on a shorter scale.”
—————-
I thank you for your response, Matthew, ….. and “yes”, I know about football statistics “modeling”.
As a matter of fact, it t’was back in the early 70’s when I wrote/coded an “NFL Modeling Program” for a friend of mine where we both worked. He told me what “input parameters” he wanted to “model” and the program produced a “weekly report” on all the NFL teams as well a “match-up” comparison for all of “next week’s games” based on the schedule.
But only one (1) week in advance and/or ….. until the next games were played.
NO PROJECTIONS past the next scheduled game.
Genghis says:
February 14, 2014 at 7:29 am
People have many wrong assumptions about the models, including how they calculate things. They definitely do not simply take the various phenomena and average them. Instead, they keep track of the individual “fluxes”, which include the flows of sensible energy, latent energy, radiative energy, and water vapor. They are tracked and accounted for separately.
What the models don’t have is any representation of emergent processes.
The limit is just above 30°C. See Argo and the Ocean Temperature Maximum.
The planet’s surface, on a 24/7 average, receives about half a kilowatt of energy per square metre. Of course, it loses the same amount, otherwise we’d either boil or freeze.
Of the half kilowatt per square metre that is lost by the surface, about 400 W/m2 (80%) is lost as radiation, about 20 W/m2 (4%) is lost in the form of sensible heat (conduction/convection), and about 80 W/m2 (16%) is lost as latent heat (evaporation/transpiration). You are correct that as the temperature increases, so does evaporation. However, radiative and sensible heat losses increase with temperature as well, so the gain is not as large as might seem at first look.
Regards,
w.
” Gail Combs says:
February 14, 2014 at 9:21 am
gbaikie says: @ur momisugly February 14, 2014 at 2:22 am
“See, the planet is in a funny position. We’re only running at about 70% throttle. About 30% of the sunlight hitting the planet never makes it into the climate system. So never mind CO2, there’s enough energy from the sun to fry us all to a crisp … but that’s never happened.”
I don’t think there enough energy from the sun to fry us to a crisp.
A clear sky at noon has about 1000 watts per square meter.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
This is another one of those peas under the thimbles that Steve McIntyre cautions us to watch.
The earth is NOT the surface. At Top of Atmosphere you get the full 1,368 W/m2. At this point the sun’s energy interacts with the atmosphere. ”
Well, I believe this pointing at how Venus gets as how as it does. But unless you structures at around the top Earth troposphere and have sun heat them, I don’t think it could work with Earth.
So at 10 km up, one has lapse rate difference of 6.5 C times 10, or 65 C difference. If you could warm enough air [and this is a big if] this could cause surface of earth exceed 80 C. So surface would heat by the air rather than sunlight heating our normal surface.
I didn’t include this because it’s unrelated to greenhouse theory and unrelated to Willis Eschenbach’s 100% throttle.thingy.
Now greenhouse believer does go on about idea of heating upper troposphere- they talking about greenhouse gases doing this. Plus we have looked, and we aren’t getting a “hotspot” from CO2. Most would thought this alone was enough to disprove the greenhouse theory, but I digress.
But with surface [or case of Venus droplets] which could be warm to 80 C or hotter and thereby heating the air above it, such heated air could possibly generate higher the 80 C.
But I tend to think one needs a much larger atmosphere than 1 atm.
As also suspect that Venus at Earth distance work stop working nor do if think we had the enormous droplets of sulfuric acid clouds of Venus that this would warm Earth- though Earth the water planet could not have such clouds- but assuming we could, I don’t think they would work as far adding heat. Whereas parking lots at 10 km might have better chance of doing this.
Perhaps it could work if had asphalt top surface facing sun and underneath it had material reflective of IR.
gbaikie says: @ur momisugly February 14, 2014 at 6:42 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I was pointing out that when it is useful to them the Alarmists conveniently forget the earth doesn’t start at the troposphere. At this point there is not much on the effects of variation in sunlight (not variation in TSI) on the higher atmosphere and what effect that has on the weather systems below, cloud cover, movement of the jet stream position…
@Willis Eschenbach-It’s interesting you should mention Rayleigh–Bénard convection, Willis.I recall that in 2006, Lindzen spoke at a symposium in memorial of Jim Holton. He mentioned that they were in the Harvard Class of 1960 together and that, at the time, he (Lindzen) had been working on Rayleigh–Bénard convection, when Holton described to him a talk he had attended by Ooyama on the parameterization of cumulus convection, and Lindzen described being struck by how profound the differences between the two sorts of convection were. Sadly he didn’t really elaborate much, but it’s kind of interesting. I do sort of wonder what he meant by that.
Here’s the talk, which is kind of interesting in it’s own right:
https://ams.confex.com/ams/Annual2006/techprogram/paper_99813.htm
I’ll try again to explain why talking about heat is not very helpful. Heat is a perception to a great many people who bother to think about it. They don’t think of it as energy state because we’re over exposed to the term in it’s other meaning. I understand that heat transfer and energy transfer are finally the same thing, but “heat” is an overloaded term. Using your dust devils example, how many heat units are needed to create a dust devil of some specific dimension, say dust devil units. How many heat units are relocated by your emergent phenomena? It actually isn’t possible to know even if we restrict the conversation to joules but that’s another issue. Best we can do is hope to detect the sign.
When you say that heat is moved to the poles or that emergent phenomena counters the heat from a “hot sun”, what are the units? Saying heat leaves the earth system is logically correct but useless in a quantified sense. (you’ve never shown, BTW, that emergent phenomena causes energy to leave the system, or that it prevents energy from entering the system.) We can’t use a thermometer yet that is the first thing people think of when heat is mentioned because of the overloaded nature of and common usage of the term. We can’t say 3º of heat got absorbed by a pond on a sunny day without also describing the initial temperature, nature of the pond and the chemical makeup of the water and any possible phase changes. We’re not going to do that so “heat” becomes meaningless. We can say with perfect clarity that n joules were absorbed by the pond, or that no more than n joules can have been absorbed by the pond to be more perfect. It doesn’t matter what the resulting temperature is.
Many people don’t even believe that radiant heat absolutely flows from a low temperature object to a high temperature object. Because they don’t believe that they can’t understand net flow. We see this argument all the time (If this were not true we could not directly see the Earth lit surface of a waning Moon).
We know how many joules are transferred to the earth system per unit of time. We can’t guarantee what the resulting temperature will be else we’d all be at some other interesting blog. But we can discuss exactly how many of those joules are converted forever to biomass and chemical energy, are reflected back to space immediately, are transferred to space eventually, and what our balance of incoming vs outgoing joules is. We can say that we are or are not accumulating energy and whether or not that results in detectable changes in temperature doesn’t matter. The temperature argument is then properly nullified. We don’t care what the temperature is – it will be what it will be. We can have a warming land surface and still have a negative balance of real energy because ours is a world of fluids and gases and energy concentrations and voids are guaranteed when energy is free to move about.
What I see in discussing joules in terms of heat is the conversation gets hung up on regional temperatures (meaningless), polar ice coverage (pointless), hidden heat where we have no technology to verify it, etc. Knowing that the poles are warming up does not tell us anything about our balance of energy.
The term Global Warming is misguided because it is so easily misused. It immediately requires clarification. What do we mean by that? But if we say the sign of incoming minus outgoing joules is negative even the New York Times climate staff will understand it (and mis-report it, surely).
Anyway – it’s my peeve and I’ll live with it.