Open Thread

DirkH
One of the aims of double glazing is to keep the moisture out. Filling the intervening gap with water vapour is a bad idea because it condenses and mists the window. I think that’s why they don’t do that.
But you don’t think logically do you? Why didn’t you just say fill it with CO2 instead. Of course, there is no point in doing that either since the glass itself will block IR transmission as well as CO2, in fact a lot better.
But don’t give up hope. Over at Roy Spencer’s site there is a meeting of the Cotton Club. There, Doug Cotton is describing his mind experiment #123987/001 using gravito-thermal hyperbole and a version of physics that no other scientist could understand. Maybe you could help out? You could even elaborate on your theory about Siberian wildlife perhaps? Take Patrick with you.

MikeB says:
March 22, 2014 at 2:26 am
“If the rate of heat loss is restricted by some insulation (say a blanket or a layer of CO2) …”
But, who says that CO2 is necessarily an insulator? See comment above.
Patrick says:
March 22, 2014 at 6:07 am
“MikeB says:
March 22, 2014 at 4:37 am”
“Maybe, however can you please explain how a global average is measured.”
A more pertinent question is, what does the average of an intensive variable mean?

MikeB says:
March 22, 2014 at 8:56 am
“Filling the intervening gap with water vapour is a bad idea because it condenses and mists the window. I think that’s why they don’t do that.”
They do it because the gap, being a vacuum, does not allow heat transfer by any means but radiative, and this is generally much less than that which would be allowed by having a convective or conductive medium between the panes. The principle is used extensively, e.g., in your lowly Thermos bottle, to keep liquids cold or hot.
This is, incidentally, germane to my post above.
Kelvin Vaughan says:
March 22, 2014 at 10:31 am
“My double glazing is full of water vapour. It mists up on the inside when the sun shines on it. Can’t be bothered to get it replaced.”
Then, you are getting much greater heat loss in the winter, and heat gain in the summer, than you should. Once the seal is damaged, the thermal insulative property is greatly reduced. Over time, it would pay you to replace it.

Bart says:
March 22, 2014 at 10:55 am
“This is, incidentally, germane to my post above.”
And, it is a really good additional analogy. The Greenhouse Effect is commonly presented as if the radiating components of the troposphere were separated from the ground by a vacuum, and the only means of heat transfer were radiative. That is, indeed, the thought experiment in Willis E.’s Steel Greenhouse MikeB referred to above.
But, that is not a faithful model of our atmosphere. Here, the lower energy radiative gases which are dubbed “greenhouse gases” are in contact with the surface through convection. The Dewar Flask model does not work in that situation. Indeed, the Dewar Flask works in the first place because radiation is such a miserly heat removal process. Remove the vaccum, and convection becomes much more powerful.
The Earth’s atmosphere is a punctured Dewar Flask. The so-called “Greenhouse Effect” is only looking at a part of the heat transfer through radiation. With convective heat transfer from the surface, the radiative transfer is overwhelmed. The effect of adding more “greenhouse” gases is not at all straightforward – it can result in heating, but is more likely to result in null or negative heating, a.k.a., cooling.

“””””…..MikeB says:
March 22, 2014 at 2:26 am
george e. smith says:
March 21, 2014 at 2:04 pm
First, the Trenberth and Kiehl diagram it is not a ‘Radiation Budget’, it is an ‘Energy Budget’ and it includes other forms of heat transfer besides radiation transfer……”””””
Well Mike it appears that you are correct, and I was wrong. Well somehow I got hold of the wrong version of the official drawing, so somebody else must have labeled it “radiation budget.”
So I would retract my objection to the other included energies, such as the heat flows, except for the fact that such “heat flows”, are entirely internal to the earth. Except for miniscule freak events like cosmic rays, solar charged particles, meteorites, and the like, “heat” energy neither arrives at,nor leaves this planet. So where is his component of heat energy, flowing in the oceans from tropics to poles. All of these internal thermal processes are energy neutral, and don’t change earth’s energy.
My fundamental objection , however still stands. Their ENERGY budget, is in fact a POWER DENSITY budget (areal density) If it was an energy budget, it would perhaps show the total energy arriving at or leaving the earth in say a typical 30 year climate significant period.
Nobody ever observed an “average” event happening; averages are computed, and are thus properties of “models. They are not real world observed measurements.
Now I don’t have a problem with anybody doing mathematical modeling calculations, on sets of data, such as Temperatures measured at different times and places, and included in some data set.
Just don’t represent, that they tell anything about what Mother Nature is doing; Your averages go quite un-noticed by Mother Nature, who deals with energy processes at the time they occur, and then is done with them.
Take a radiometer, and point it at the sun, on any ordinary clear sky day, in any normally inhabitable region of the surface, and see if you can get an incoming solar power reading anywhere near 342 W/m^2. Well try the same thing at night time; maybe you’ll get lucky.
But I do agree with you MikeB. Trenberth et al apparently do call their chart an “energy budget.
People who reprint what purport to be products of someone else, should not change them, from the original. The print, I have which describes it as a radiation budget, is clearly a fake.
If I am not mistaken, Mann’s original “hockey stick ” graph, in an earlier IPCC report, is clearly labeled as a “Northern hemisphere” (local) phenomenon, but people have dropped that, and represented his result to be global.

It seems that MikeB and Dr Strangelove just like to squirm. I have read this entire thread, including the many discussions about other knots on this thread, being debated among others. And it is clear, that most who have commented on my post, have no problem at all understanding the difference between the instantaneous effect, of widely ranging variable phenomena, and some computed “average” of some OTHER measure related to that phenomenon.
The earth does not respond in any linear way to the local Temperature measured in some box on a post, and trying to assert that some linear average of such local events, somehow relates to whether life on earth continues or vanishes, is just wafting in the wind.
And Mike, if you or Dr Strangelove think you are somehow “educating” me to the fact that Watts is Joules per second; let me assure you that I learned that very early in my first year in high school physics class, and that incidentally was a long time before Dr Kevin Trenberth, was knee high to a grasshopper. I didn’t come down in the last shower.
If you think that averaging energy input rates (power) over time, is real, rather than a figment of a branch of mathematics, just try to convince the people of Hiroshima, that nuclear weapons really don’t do a lot of damage (on average).

Doug Allen March 22, 2014 at 7:27 pm,
I agree, that stood out to me as well. Not to mention they only refer to temperature records. Climate Audit had a post about Mandelbrot showing flood records have no discernible cutoff frequency. I was hoping they would allow responses to the answers, but I guess the debate is settled.