Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
There is a more global restatement of Murphy’s Law which says “Nature always sides with the hidden flaw”. Parasitic losses are an example of that law at work.
In any heat engine, either natural or manmade, there are what are called “parasitic losses”. These are losses that tend to reduce the temperature differentials in the heat engine, and thus reduce the overall efficiency of the engine. In general, as a percentage parasitic losses increase rapidly with ∆T, the temperature differences in the engine. In the climate system, two main parasitic losses are the losses from the surface to the atmosphere by way of conduction and convection (sensible heat), and the losses from surface to atmosphere by way of evaporation and transpiration (latent heat). Both of these parasitic losses act to reduce the surface temperature with respect to the overlying atmosphere, by simultaneously cooling the surface and warming the atmosphere … nature siding with the hidden flaw to reduce the overall system efficiency. So I decided to see what the CERES data says about parasitic losses. Figure 1 shows the parasitic losses (the sum of sensible and latent heat losses), as a percentage of the total surface input (downwelling longwave plus shortwave).
Figure 1. Parasitic losses (latent and sensible heat loss) from the surface to the atmosphere. Percentage of parasitic loss is calculated as the sum of sensible and latent loss, divided by the total surface input (downwelling shortwave plus downwelling longwave).
I was most interested in how much the parasitic loss changes when the total surface input increases. Figures 2 to 4 shows that situation:
Figures 2-4. Scatterplots, parasitic loss in watts per square metre (W/m2) versus total surface input (W/m2). Parasitic loss is loss as sensible and latent heat. Gold line shows the loess smooth of the data. Red dots show land gridcells, which are one degree square (1°x1°) in size. Blue dots show ocean gridcells.
I was very encouraged by finding this result. I’ve written before about how at the warm end of the spectrum, parasitic losses would increase to the point where most of each new additional watt striking the surface would be lost as sensible and latent heat, and that little of it would remain to warm the surface. These graphs bear that out entirely. Here’s why.
The slope of the gold line above is the rate of increase in parasitic loss for each additional degree of warming. As you can see, the slope of the line increases from left to right, although the rate of increase goes up and down.
In order to understand the changes, I took the slope (change in parasitic loss divided by the corresponding change in surface input) at each point along the length of the gold line for both the land and the ocean separately. Figure 5 shows that result.
Figure 5. Change in parasitic loss (in W/m2) for each additional W/m2 of surface input. “Wobbles”, the looped parts in the two graphed lines reflect subtle changes in the loess smooth, and can be ignored.
Now, what are we looking at here? Well, this is how the parasitic loss changes as more and more energy is input to the surface. Where there is little surface input, the loss is low. In fact, at the South Pole the situation is reversed, and the net flow of energy is from the atmosphere to the surface. This is the result of huge amounts of energy being imported from the tropics.
The key point, however, is that as we add more and more energy to a given gridcell the amount of parasitic losses rises, in perfect accordance with nature siding with the hidden flaw. And at the right hand end of the scale, the warmest end, for every additional watt that is added, you lose a watt …
Is this relationship shown in Figure 5 entirely accurate? Of course not, the vagaries of the smoothing process guarantee that it isn’t a precise measure.
But it clearly establishes what I’ve been saying for a while, which is that parasitic loss is a function of temperature, and that at the top end of the scale, the marginal losses are quite large, close to 100%.
Now, as you can see, nowhere is the parasitic loss more than about 30% … but the important finding is that the marginal loss, the loss due to each additional watt of energy gain, is around 100% at the warm end of the planet. Here is the parasitic loss for the planet as a whole versus total surface input as shown in Figure 2:
Figure 6. Change in parasitic loss (in W/m2) for each additional W/m2 of surface input, as in Figure 5, but for the planet as a whole.Change in parasitic loss (in W/m2) for each additional W/m2 of surface input. “Wobbles”, the looped parts in the two graphed lines reflect subtle changes in the loess smooth, and can be ignored.
Note also that across the main part of the range, which is to say in most of the planet except the tropics and poles, about half of each additional watt of energy increase doesn’t warm the surface … it simply goes into parasitic loss that cools the surface and warms the atmosphere.
Best to all,
w.
PS—If you disagree with what I’ve said please quote my words. That lets all of us know just exactly what you disagree with …
Convective/conductive losses are primary. Radiative loss from the surface itself lags far behind as soon as air motion begins.
This is a reversed-mechanisms blog post about something having to do with hot cold but it hasn’t got anything to do with global atmospheric energy handling.
Steven Mosher says:
March 26, 2014 at 12:39 pm
Well, I agreed with you until you switched from models to physics. They used radiative transfer MODELS … but you say that PHYSICS says doubling CO2 will warm the planet.
In fact the physics says nothing on the subject of how a resonant, driven, chaotic system will respond to a slight change in one of the inputs. This precise fallacy is one that drives AGW, the crazy idea that the laws of physics say that the climate MUST do X or Y … doesn’t work that way. We have nowhere near that level of understanding of the climate to say anything like that.
Agreed.
Not true in the slightest. You seem to forget that there are models, and models, and then there are models. The CERES folks used two different groups of models.
First, they used several models to convert the sensor data from the various sensors (which as you point out is a changing voltage or other analog signal) to the final result, e.g. the strength of the sun at that point in time and space.
Next, once the observations were converted to numbers, they used a second set of models (and a bunch of other data from both ground and satellite observations) to calculate the instantaneous surface radiation flows corresponding to the instantaneous TOA radiation flows.
But neither of those two sets of different models that they used were GCMs, global climate models. Nor were they attempting to calculate (as GCMs do) the century-long evolution of a chaotic system.
So your claim seems to rest on the idea that if I use one group of computer models (say modeling the numbers from the analog voltages from the sensors) I have to accept the results of totally different models which are being used for a totally different purpose … or as you put it,
Bad news for your theory, Mosh. Accepting the results of the CERES computer models converting instantaneous voltages to instantaneous numbers doesn’t mean that we have to accept the results of radically different computer models trying to say what will happen to a chaotic system in fifty or a hundred years, or even the next couple of decades … speaking of which, how is that “pause” thing going? You know, the one that can’t happen according to the computer models? Not the CERES models of course, they don’t do predictions/projections/forecasts/scenarios or whatever the weasel word is these days, but the GCMs. How are their predictions working out?
My thanks to you, when you are not drive-by commenting you usually raise interesting issues,
w.
Curt says:
March 26, 2014 at 12:47 pm
Thanks for that explanation, it’s an excellent one.
That’s a most interesting question, Curt. For me, they are losses from a perfect theoretical greenhouse, something like my “Steel Greenhouse”. With a perfect single-shell greenhouse system, you can double the watts/square metre (W/m2) at the surface. As you expect this would raise the temperature by the fourth root of two.
Now, for a perfect greenhouse to attain that 100% efficiency, it has to have a vacuum between the shell and the planet. Otherwise, in addition to losing energy via radiation the heat can “leak” from the surface to the atmosphere. Remember that the ∆T of interest in the game is the fact that anywhere you might go on this planet, there are freezing temperatures only a few miles from where you are standing … and it is exactly that temperature difference that allows the formation of the natural heat engines we call thunderstorms. Like any heat engine, they run off of the difference in temperature ∆T between the hot and cold ends of the engine. In the climate system, that is provided (inter alia) by the surface at one end and the atmosphere a couple of miles up at the other end.
So when you have sensible and latent heat loss, it reduces the ∆T, and thus the efficiency of the entire system.
I mentioned it above, but an excellent read about this is from Adrian Bejan, called “Thermodynamic optimization of global circulation and climate“.
w.
Oh I see Willis you’re using the term parasitic as in the original meaning of the word parasitic as in ”taking from one to give to another.”
Nevermind.
D.J. Hawkins says:
March 26, 2014 at 3:19 pm
Than\ks, D.J. You’re right, but by the time I noticed it, it was already up on the silver screen and I couldn’t be bothered … I figured folks would figure it out, so I consoled my self with some choice expletives and kept moving.
w.
Andres Valencia says:
March 26, 2014 at 3:39 pm
Thanks for that, Andres. The beauty of climate science from my perspective is that it is such a new science, and is so full of fascinating datasets, that finding novel oddities and curiosities and relationships and correlations is not that hard …
w.
James Rollins Jr says:
March 26, 2014 at 5:31 pm
Say what? Convective/conductive losses (sensible and latent) are only about one-fifth of total losses from the surface (about 100 W/m2 out of half a kilowatt/m2) … how is that “primary” on anyone’s planet?
w.
insightful and thought provoking, as always. Thanks Willis.
James Rollins Jr says:
March 26, 2014 at 6:06 pm
Not really. I’m using it in the sense it is used as regards engines and machinery. Here’s one of many examples from the web:
For example, when you drive your car, the energy it takes to overcome wind resistance is referred to as a “parasitic loss”. Here’s an example from the DOE:
That’s the sense in which I am using it. It is a loss of energy which reduces overall efficiency and generally increases with increasing speed/load/temperature/rpm/work performed.
Hope that clarifies it,
w.
Willis, it’s not out of half a kW/m2. It’s out of around 160 W/m2.
Willis concludes with-
“Note also that across the main part of the range, which is to say in most of the planet except the tropics and poles, about half of each additional watt of energy increase doesn’t warm the surface … it simply goes into parasitic loss that cools the surface and warms the atmosphere.”
Bill Gray stated the same thing on page 3 of his 2012 paper-
“The Physical Flaws of the Global Warming Theory and Deep Ocean Circulation Changes as the Primary Climate Driver”
http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2012.pdf
“Only half of the blockage of 3.7 Wm-2 at the surface should be expected to go into temperature rise. The other half (~1.85 Wm-2) of the blocked IR energy to space will be compensated by surface energy loss to support enhanced evaporation.”
You are in good company!
No, I read through it again fully and you’re claiming that more heat arriving makes things colder.
It’s rank warmist rubbish from beginning to end. I see you claimed the surface is predominated by radiation and that the parasitic losses are only 30%,
this is a well known falsehood for anyone who ever designed or studied heat removal in the atmosphere at normal operating air pressures.
Convection and conduction always predominate.
Always. It’s why every single air cooled object on earth is – air cooled – not radiation cooled.
Omg LoL.
Woah.
Willis I suggest you figure out what you tried to claim and why everywhere you go people laugh at you when you bring this with you because in the atmosphere things don’t cool, primarily,
radiatively.
You’re supposed to have sense enough to know that.
Woah in a big way. I saw you claim parasitic losses rise to 30% because you believe
looking at every set of motorcycle fins, heat cooling fins on light ballasts, volkswagon motors, computer chips, large fan cooled equipment –
you’re not aware things predominately convection cool in air on earth?
Mosher writes “The satellite sensor records the signal AFTER it leaves the atmosphere. Any inferences about what happens below this depends upon modelling. how signals pass through the atmosphere. radiative transfer equations.”
Absolutely true but you have to look even deeper to understand the satellite measurements. For example a satellite cant “see through clouds” so it cant know how thick they are and consequently cant know how to apply the radiative transfer model for an accurate picture of anything other than the top of the cloud and hence TOA. In that case any derived surface measurements have much more assumption built in than say a clear day over desert where there are no clouds and we can expect little water vapour.
IMO the best thing about satellite measurements is not their “absolute” precision but rather their reproducibility of results which means they can see trends quite well but even those can be artifacts of how the underlying model is applied.
rgbatduke says: “I sometimes think that they are ringers who come to the site just to ensure that its science is never taken seriously, because there is often a sort of religious contempt for algebraic argument or even common sense that accompanies their assertions. ”
I’m starting to suspect Mr Cotton is one of those fabrications.
typo there at the end of my own last post sorry.
Things primarily convectively cool in air.
If you think because CERES calculations don’t indicate it, or if you think for whatever reason radiant transfer predominates in air, all I can say is the only people I ever heard who believed in that were global warming alarmists.
[I figured that’s what you meant. Fixed. -w.]
Edim says:
March 26, 2014 at 6:37 pm
Edim, both rgb (Dr. Robert Brown at Duke) and I have tried to point out exactly where you are wrong. Undeterred, you just keep up the nonsense. Look, Edim, it’s not working. Nobody is buying what you want to sell.
Please, please, re-read what I said and what Dr. Brown said. If you can’t understand why scientists look at the individual energy flows and not just the NET energy flows that you keep harping on, then read it again until you can understand it. And if you still can’t understand how we are analyzing the individual flows, then go buy a text on radiative energy exchanges.
Because here, what we’re discussing are the individual flows, not the net flows, You seem to want to discuss net flows, which is fine, but I’m sorry, that’s not what this thread is about.
So if you can’t wrap your head around the mathematics of using individual flows instead of net flows, well, then please go somewhere that people are discussing net flows. At that point you can jump in and actually say something that makes sense.
Here … not so much …
w.
Your web assertions noted, I wasn’t asking you what you were using I was noting independently what usage you were using until I re-scanned and saw you specify losses parasitic as sensible heat losses for purpose of your post.
You then mistakenly asserted things at nominal atmospheric pressures lose most energy through radiant loss which is wrong, which is why the cooling fins on a volkswagon or a computer chip or any other heat dumping object in atmospheric air, aren’t arranged for best radiation dispersal but best solid-to-atmospheric-air transfer.
So I was correct: it was all a bunch of non-reality based pseudo science.
Willis says: “Not really. I’m using it in the sense it is used as regards engines and machinery. Here’s one of many examples from the web:”
Willis wrote;
“There is a more global restatement of Murphy’s Law which says “Nature always sides with the hidden flaw”. Parasitic losses are an example of that law at work.”
Well…. Highly trained engineers know all about “parasitic losses”. It’s why we insulate heat reservoirs to “trap” the heat (actually we just slow the velocity at which the heat escapes from the source, everybody knows that you can’t “trap” heat, well, except of course for climate scientists).
Well skilled electronic engineers know all about “parasitics” and we carefully consider them when selecting components to build an actual physical representation of a theoretical circuit design.
There are such things as “low inductance” resistors available (have been for decades), these are in some cases a wound up coil of wire that produces the desired resistance but by alternating the direction of the wires cancels out the “parasitic” inductance.
Any well practiced engineer understands the effects of parasitic losses within their design and has carefully selected components to mitigate those effects. They are hardly a “Murphy’s Law” effect, if you understand them correctly.
A nice analysis when applied to climate science, but it does not extend into well executed engineering designs.
Cheers, Kevin.
The individual throes of not having realized the earth is cooled via infrared gases linger on.
Willis I don’t suppose it means a thing to you that the entire world of cooling uses air as soon as any cooling need arises because it’s the predominating effect on the earth, does it.
Has it ever occurred to you that if the entire world of cooling repeatedly says ”put a fan on it, or build it so the air flows well across it because in most environments, convection predominates as soon as it starts competing with radiant loss”
it means the people who told you it’s actually reversed from that
whose work has also been found filled with willing mathematics fraud
are in need of assuring you somehow the
entire world of cooling
has their cooling model for objects in the atmosphere wrong?
James Rollins Jr says:
March 26, 2014 at 7:15 pm
James, as I recall you’ve made the claim before that for the planet the loss through conduction/convection far exceeds that from radiation.
Now, every authority on the subject that I know of disagrees with you, as do my own calculations using the CERES dataset, and my own calculations using the TAO buoy array.
So if you want to establish the opposite position, that conduction/convection is the predominate method of heat loss, you need to stop making claims and start producing actual data that supports your case. And given the breadth and depth of the evidence (not theory but evidence) that you are wrong, you need to produce a lot of data to support your unusual claim.
Looking at the fact that all of the things that you listed are man-made, constructed of metal, and specially designed to enhance the conduction/convection, I’m certainly aware that IF man-made metal objects need to lose more heat than they lose by radiation, we add fins to them.
To use your style and tone … you’re not aware that objects on the surface of the planet notably are not man-made, are not constructed of metal, and lack fins?
But like I said, this is just discussion. I cordially invite you to either come up with hard evidence for your theory and lots of it, or to stop making unsubstantiated claims.
Regards,
w.
KevinK says:
March 26, 2014 at 8:16 pm
Thanks, Kevin, your comments are interesting. Actually, when I parse what you said, it seems you are saying that they are indeed a Murphy’s Law effect. I mean, nature must be siding with the hidden flaw rather than with the engineers, or else the engineers wouldn’t need to take special measures and select special components in order to counteract the tendency implied by the Law … n’est pas?
I mean … you don’t hear much about “parasitic gain”, do you?
w.
The CERES outputs aren’t absolute flux, they’re layered shots with interpolation. The fact you try to tell people you thought 4/5ths or whatever of the loss of energy from objects at large is radiant is staggering to even try to imagine how you visualize energy loss.
If there was in fact predominate energy loss in most cases we would all understand the ins, and the outs, of the various ingenious ways, all these different mechanisms for exploiting your mythical majority of loss of energy through radiant transport.
Whereas in actual fact we all know of the many varied ways the atmosphere is manipulated so it’s predominative effects can be maximized throughout civilization.
LoL. wow Willis. Just woah. That’s a biggie there bud, you are going to have to just get mad or whatever you do when you don’t get told you’re right, but there are so many ways just off top of the head to check that claim it’s not even like one book is the best example: all books everywhere describe the maximization of convection where possible, to cool nearly everything under the metaphorically and literally correct, sun.
Go tell someone who builds things that generate heat, that – you don’t really see why they’re paying all that attention to making sure there’s enough clearance for air to get to it because
that’s only about one fifth, average, of most objects’ energy loss,
and try to not get laughed out of the place.
Not meaning to be insulting to you, you obviously seem to have put a lot of thought into what you are saying but woah – I don’t know what else to say LoL because – obviously you’re not working in the heating/cooling heat removal/containment fields.
Willis if everything cooled predominately radiatively there wouldn’t be all the attention paid to wind breaks and making sure air movement through a place is good, we’d all design our properties so the radiant losses were maximized.
I just am sorry but you just had someone call total b.s. Willis I thought about what, I thought you said the first time and I wasn’t wrong, I just didn’t realize I had it exactly the first time as I see I did.
This is errant thermodynamic analysis. End of story fella. Sorry to disagree so firmly but there’s a dozen ways to point out the absurdity of that call Willis.
I like your high seas stories; no I love em.
But you aren’t a trained thermodynamicist.
Than\ks, D.J. You’re right, but by the time I noticed it, it was already up on the silver screen and I couldn’t be bothered … I figured folks would figure it out…
Yep, five whole seconds shot to heck. If that. Good post.
Wilis your calculations from the CERES data are based on a layered interpolative model system not actual measurements, it’s why we don’t all talk about CERES as a surface temperature sensing device in the thermodynamics management fields, normally.
The fact you even mention having calculated such from CERES is all anyone in instrumentation would need to know about your claim Willis thanks for the discussion but I consider your words alone to be sufficient to convince anyone with any technical training at all or even not having any,
which of us is trained and experienced thermodynamicist and which of us isn’t.
Like I said your “I was a roving south seas guitar player” stories are very good.
Your thermodynamics, not.
You just really need to ask yourself how many times you’re going to argue with why every human inhabitant of the planet doesn’t know the ins, and outs, of a dozen ways to help with radiative heat loss from something,
rather than what we all over the earth actually learn about as we go through our individual lives,
how to maximize the predomination of convective thermal losses wherever and whenever possible.
I’ll just leave you to explain how you and your climate model friends all insist everything’s cooling by radiation
but the entire humanity on earth,
all discusses and buys products at the store to maximize convective losses
and the radiative heat loss products for all your stuff – they aren’t right there by the fans, or the air conditioners, or the misters.
LoL Willis I can not believe what I read but I see you continue to insist it’s so.
Just explain to us all where the radiative heat loss augmentation products are, over near the fans, the air conditioners, and the misters,
which all use conduction/convection, to cool things,
and we’ll compare the size of that section at all the stores, to your claims.