(Note: this originally published on Dr. Spencer’s blog on April 25th, and I asked if I could reproduce it here. While I know some readers might argue the finer points of some items in the list, I think it is important to keep sight of these. – Anthony)
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
There are some very good arguments for being skeptical of global warming predictions. But the proliferation of bad arguments is becoming almost dizzying.
I understand and appreciate that many of the things we think we know in science end up being wrong. I get that. But some of the alternative explanations I’m seeing border on the ludicrous.
So, here’s my Top 10 list of stupid skeptic arguments. I’m sure there are more, and maybe I missed a couple important ones. Oh well.
My obvious goal here is not to change minds that are already made up, which is impossible (by definition), but to reach 1,000+ (mostly nasty) comments in response to this post. So, help me out here!
1. THERE IS NO GREENHOUSE EFFECT. Despite the fact that downwelling IR from the sky can be measured, and amounts to a level (~300 W/m2) that can be scarcely be ignored; the neglect of which would totally screw up weather forecast model runs if it was not included; and would lead to VERY cold nights if it didn’t exist; and can be easily measured directly with a handheld IR thermometer pointed at the sky (because an IR thermometer measures the IR-induced temperature change of the surface of a thermopile, QED)… Please stop the “no greenhouse effect” stuff. It’s making us skeptics look bad. I’ve blogged on this numerous times…maybe start here.
2. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT VIOLATES THE 2ND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS. The second law can be stated in several ways, but one way is that the net flow of energy must be from higher temperature to lower temperature. This is not violated by the greenhouse effect. The apparent violation of the 2nd Law seems to be traced to the fact that all bodies emit IR radiation…including cooler bodies toward warmer bodies. But the NET flow of thermal radiation is still from the warmer body to the cooler body. Even if you don’t believe there is 2-way flow, and only 1-way flow…the rate of flow depends upon the temperature of both bodies, and changing the cooler body’s temperature will change the cooling rate (and thus the temperature) of the warmer body. So, yes, a cooler body can make a warm body even warmer still…as evidenced by putting your clothes on.
3. CO2 CANT CAUSE WARMING BECAUSE CO2 EMITS IR AS FAST AS IT ABSORBS. No. When a CO2 molecule absorbs an IR photon, the mean free path within the atmosphere is so short that the molecule gives up its energy to surrounding molecules before it can (on average) emit an IR photon in its temporarily excited state. See more here. Also important is the fact that the rate at which a CO2 molecule absorbs IR is mostly independent of temperature, but the rate at which it emits IR increases strongly with temperature. There is no requirement that a layer of air emits as much IR as it absorbs…in fact, in general, the the rates of IR emission and absorption are pretty far from equal.
4. CO2 COOLS, NOT WARMS, THE ATMOSPHERE. This one is a little more subtle because the net effect of greenhouse gases is to cool the upper atmosphere, and warm the lower atmosphere, compared to if no greenhouse gases were present. Since any IR absorber is also an IR emitter, a CO2 molecule can both cool and warm, because it both absorbs and emits IR photons.
5. ADDING CO2 TO THE ATMOSPHERE HAS NO EFFECT BECAUSE THE CO2 ABSORPTION BANDS ARE ALREADY 100% OPAQUE. First, no they are not, and that’s because of pressure broadening. Second, even if the atmosphere was 100% opaque, it doesn’t matter. Here’s why.
6. LOWER ATMOSPHERIC WARMTH IS DUE TO THE LAPSE RATE/ADIABATIC COMPRESSION. No, the lapse rate describes how the temperature of a parcel of air changes from adiabatic compression/expansion of air as it sinks/rises. So, it can explain how the temperature changes during convective overturning, but not what the absolute temperature is. Explaining absolute air temperature is an energy budget question. You cannot write a physics-based equation to obtain the average temperature at any altitude without using the energy budget. If adiabatic compression explains temperature, why is the atmospheric temperature at 100 mb is nearly the same as the temperature at 1 mb, despite 100x as much atmospheric pressure? More about all this here.
7. WARMING CAUSES CO2 TO RISE, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND The rate of rise in atmospheric CO2 is currently 2 ppm/yr, a rate which is 100 times as fast as any time in the 300,000 year Vostok ice core record. And we know our consumption of fossil fuels is emitting CO2 200 times as fast! So, where is the 100x as fast rise in today’s temperature causing this CO2 rise? C’mon people, think. But not to worry…CO2 is the elixir of life…let’s embrace more of it!
8. THE IPCC MODELS ARE FOR A FLAT EARTH I have no explanation where this little tidbit of misinformation comes from. Climate models address a spherical, rotating, Earth with a day-night (diurnal) cycle in solar illumination and atmospheric Coriolis force (due to both Earth curvature and rotation). Yes, you can do a global average of energy flows and show them in a flat-earth cartoon, like the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budget diagram which is a useful learning tool, but I hope most thinking people can distinguish between a handful of global-average average numbers in a conceptual diagram, and a full-blown 3D global climate model.
9. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GLOBAL AVERAGE TEMPERATURE Really?! Is there an average temperature of your bathtub full of water? Or of a room in your house? Now, we might argue over how to do the averaging (Spatial? Mass-weighted?), but you can compute an average, and you can monitor it over time, and see if it changes. The exercise is only futile if your sampling isn’t good enough to realistically monitor changes over time. Just because we don’t know the average surface temperature of the Earth to better than, say 1 deg. C, doesn’t mean we can’t monitor changes in the average over time. We have never known exactly how many people are in the U.S., but we have useful estimates of how the number has increased in the last 50-100 years. Why is “temperature” so important? Because the thermal IR emission in response to temperature is what stabilizes the climate system….the hotter things get, the more energy is lost to outer space.
10. THE EARTH ISN’T A BLACK BODY. Well, duh. No one said it was. In the broadband IR, though, it’s close to a blackbody, with an average emissivity of around 0.95. But whether a climate model uses 0.95 or 1.0 for surface emissivity isn’t going to change the conclusions we make about the sensitivity of the climate system to increasing carbon dioxide.
I’m sure I could come up with a longer list than this, but these were the main issues that came to mind.
So why am I trying to stir up a hornets nest (again)? Because when skeptics embrace “science” that is worse that the IPCC’s science, we hurt our credibility.
NOTE: Because of the large number of negative comments this post will generate, please excuse me if I don’t respond to every one. Or even very many of them. But if I see a new point being made I haven’t addressed before, I’ll be more likely to respond.
Well, apart from the No.9 (which seems to come down on whether there is any utility on calculating a average global temp), it seems the biggest arguments are about whether warming causes CO2 to rise (No.7). and it seems to me that people are arguing about different issues.
The ice cores show increase in T prior to increase in CO2 (there is no argument about this is there?). As this was used the other way round by Al Gore and many others in the initial scares, refuting it has been an important skeptic argument. However, what Dr Spencer is referring to is the recent increases in CO2 (50-100 years) and pointing out that out-gassing of ocean-dissolved CO2 does not account for the increases in atmospheric CO2, but anthropogenic sources do account for these. As such, his point 7 is addressing the argument that recentwarming is the cause of current CO2 increases and not anthropogenic emissions.
The geological record and the direct measurements of recent (50-100 years) are such different sources of information that I really don’t think we can talk about them in the same breath, let alone use explanations from one to argue causal effects on the other. The resolution of the ice cores is such that we would not even see the current increase in CO2 for another 2-300 years, let alone the temperature change. Using one argument for them both is wrong and I support Dr Spencer in his explanation since he is talking about just the recent changes in CO2.
Roy, regarding #9, are you perhaps referring to Essex et al. – and you can call me al)? I don’t know of anyone who’s argued you can’t construct an average from temperature data, and if anyone did then I would add my Duh to yours. But your example shows you haven’t grasped the real point. Your straw man should be phrased: There is no general theory of how to reduce the temperature field of a non-equilibrium thermodynamic system to a scalar in such a way that the laws governing the dynamics of the field also provide a theory governing the dynamics of the scalar. But phrased thus, it’s not a straw man. In fact I’d say it would be pretty hard to dispute. There might be examples where it is true, but it is not generally true.
You refer to bathtubs and freezers, both of which are isolated systems in equilibrium, where a single number works to represent the temperature field of the whole. But to make it relevant to the actual issue, try to define “the” temperature of the [water in your bath + the air in your freezer]? Not the average of the two, “the” one temperature of the items in the brackets. Obviously there isn’t one, there are two (or more). You and I both could write down an infinite number of ways of combining them into a single number. But that one number is not the temperature of your freezer or your bath, and it isn’t necessarily the temperature that would result if you put your bathwater in your freezer or vice versa, or came up with some other mechanism to bring them into equilibrium with each other.
There are valid grounds for saying this issue doesn’t matter much or ad hoc averages seem to do just fine for most purposes. But stock market analysts are also fond of ad hoc averages. They at least bear in mind the rule “it works until it doesn’t.” Don’t confuse an ad hoc averaging rule with a theory that the world is obliged to follow.
Well, point 7. has several negative comments. As a big fan of point 7, here my comment:
Warming causes CO2 to rise
Temperature changes cause CO2 changes. That is true over short time and very long periods:
– The seasonal temperature variation of ~1°C global average causes a variation of +/- 5 ppmv global average. The change is much larger in the NH than in the SH and mainly caused by vegetation with a lag of a few months.
– The year by year temperature variations caused by ocean oscillations like ENSO or caused by volcanic eruptions like the Pinatubo cause a change of 4-5 ppmv/°C with a lag of several months.
– The multi-decadal to multi-millennia changes give a quite fixed change of 8 ppmv/°C over the past 800,000 pre-industrial years. The lags varies from ~50 years (MWP-LIA) to 800 +/- 600 years (deglaciations) to several thousands of years (glaciations).
Based on the ice cores, the maximum change from a temperature change is 8 ppmv/°C. The MWP-LIA change of ~0.8°C shows a drop of ~6 ppmv, or ~8 ppmv/°C with ~50 years lag after the drop in temperature:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_1000yr.jpg
graph from the Law Dome ice cores, Etheridge e.a. 1996.
Besides that, the equilibrium of seawater only shifts ~17 ppmv/°C. But as vegetation in general takes more CO2 away with higher temperatures, the 8 ppmv/°C is how the equilibium between atmosphere, oceans and the biosphere shifts with temperature.
If we may assume that the increase in temperature since the LIA was maximum 1°C, then the maximum increase of CO2 caused by temperature was 8 ppmv… The rest of the 100+ ppmv increase is from the 200+ ppmv that humans emitted in the recent past.
Not the other way around
There is no physical reason that a modest influence of temperature on CO2 levels (8 ppmv/°C) excludes a modest influence of an excess amount of CO2 on temperature (0.9°C for 2xCO2). All what happens then is that temperature as well as CO2 get somewhat higher with a feedback on each other, no matter if there is a lag or not:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/feedback.jpg
As long as the fortifying factor is modest, there is no runaway effect.
As always, I use the Lipid Hypothesis as historical point of reference for government funded philosophy/religion. Unhealthy animal fat causes heart disease, so eat healthy plant food. That is the company line/dogma – easy, to the point and backed up with thousands of peer reviewed papers of confirmation bias. Skeptics, on the other hand, are all over the place (paleo, low carb, very low carb, no carb, no wheat, no grain, no sugar, some starch, resistant starch …). What they all agree on, even those who are “out there”, is that government threw fear into our kitchens in the 1970s when there was no scientific basis for doing so.
It is the same with the Human Carbon Dioxide Hypothesis. Human carbon dioxide causes warming and is bad for the planet – easy, to the point and backed by thousands of papers of peer reviewed confirmation bias. Government has thrown fear into the geology class with no scientific basis for doing so. As with nutrition, skeptics are all over the place, with government backed theologians ignoring all of what they say.
Thank you Dr. Spencer. Very timely, informative post for those of us geologists that are less informed on this topic, and are endeavouring to separate the wheat from the chaff. If there is not one already available, I would gladly buy your future book containing expanded versions of all 10 points.
pokerguy:
At May 1, 2014 at 9:15 am you write
This goes to the heart of the issue as I raised it in my above post here.
As I said to Dr Spencer in that post
A parameter has no usefulness to science when it has no accuracy, no precision, and no reliability but can be altered at will. However, such a mutable parameter can be useful (misused?) for political purposes and politicians use them (e.g. various definitions of GDP).
Hence, I do not entirely agree with rgbatduke when he argues herethat
Yes, “global average temperature is a poor, and enormously variable, metric for energy balance” and that is said in the Appendix B which I linked and cited. And average global temperature has no scientific usefulness but much political usefulness because it has no agreed definition, and I think that is very important.
Richard
NO 7 is arguing against prominent scientists who know the problems of CO2 measurements and ice cores much better than Roy Spencer: Zbignev Jaworowski and Tom Segalstad.
Gregory, mere assertion is not an argument. Note that measured effects of arsenic exist for concentrations 1000 times smaller than that of CO2, so if you are making a picky point about how to measure concentration, adjust the metric and the point holds. If you do not like the example of arsenic, there are many other such examples, where a concentration far below that of CO@ur momisugly is definitely meaningful.
Phil
barry:
Thankyou for your post addressed to me at May 1, 2014 at 9:15 am. It is answered by my post addressed to pokerguy but is stuck in moderation.
If my post does appear it should be here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/01/top-ten-skeptical-arguments-that-dont-hold-water/#comment-1626340
For now, I suggest that you read the post from Ross McKitrick at May 1, 2014 at 9:32 am.
Richard
The other Phil – sure I’ll down it in one, if it’s a thimbleful.
Thanks for an informative post. I am happy to go along with all Dr. Spencer’s 10 points.
My questions arise from “Climate models address a spherical, rotating, Earth with a day-night (diurnal) cycle in solar illumination and atmospheric Coriolis force (due to both Earth curvature and rotation)”. So far as I recollect the earth is not perfectly spherical, neither has it a smooth surface. How do the models allow for such imperfections? How many parameters are used in climate models just to cover those points – or are they deemed constant over time or ignored as trivial.
Incidentally, I once reckoned that there were as many as forty factors affecting global temperatures, including at least six greenhouse gases of which, as Jimbo has posted the IPCC statement “Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide (CO2) is the second-most important one.”
How do the models allow for these other greenhouse gases? How do they allow for all the other thirty or so factors affecting global temperature? Are all these factors independent? And if not how many affect others? And if some do, do they do so to an extent that they would render all linear models mathematically unsound?
There is a lot about which to be sceptical without doubting that CO2 is a greenhouse gas which plays a part in global warming.
Dr. Spencer has a top ten skeptical arguments list up.
You answered ‘…’ And our survey said: DING!
CG, point taken. Ludicrous was too strong a word.
Er, I meant a top ten good skeptical arguments list.
No. 5 seems to be directed against Ferenc Miskolczi who claims that the greenhouse effect is constant, i.e adding CO2 would not change global temperature at all.
What all those people have in common is the following: if they are right, Roy Spencer’s work on cloud feedback and climate sensitivity would be far less important. Nobody would care. So, basic thrust of his text is to attack the dangerous competition.
Unfortunately, not too impressed.
Although there is value in pushing back on most of these 10 issues, saying that they are all “skeptical” arguments and saying that none of them “hold water,” is much too broad of a brush. Worse, it does the disservice of masking some of the more nuanced issues that are related to — if not always described exactly in the words of — the 10 items listed.
Substantively, several posters have already given good reasons why some of the items (maybe 4, 7 and 9) are issues that deserve careful discussion. It doesn’t serve anybody (and will certainly be trumpeted by the CAGW’ers) to simply dismiss them with the waive of the hand as bad arguments — and, therefore, the natural implication is, issues that aren’t worthy of discussion.
Additionally, there are some terminology clarifications (say, in #1), that are germane to the debate and that are also worthy of discussion, even if the underlying substance is as Dr. Spencer says it is.
So, unfortunately, while this had the opportunity of being a very helpful article, the tenor and approach give it the potential of doing as much harm as good. Not enough acknowledgement of open and reasonable issues. Too much baby thrown out with the bathwater.
If you ignore all the quibbles, then everything the good doctor says is true. However, is ignoring the quibbles the right thing to do? I think not. The quibbles are very important and should not be dismissed as irrelevant details.
For example, I long have quibbled over the use of the term “Greenhouse Effect” simply and exactly because the earth has no glass ceiling. The putative effect is supposedly that the earth’s surface is at a higher temperature with an atmosphere than without. This even though such a state has never been measured but only calculated using the (wait….you guessed it) “Greenhouse Effect” theory. This circular reasoning is used as proof that the effect exists. In the words of the SNL Church Lady, “Isn’t that special”.
Assuming what must be proved is invalid reasoning from the get go. The alternative I offered a long time ago is why not call it the “Atmospheric Effect”? At least that would neither be misleading nor counter factual to an actual atmosphere having no glass ceiling. Then we could get on with the process of actually identifying what the effect is and, in particular, measuring it.
I strongly suspect that the motive behind the use of the term “Greenhouse Effect” is less than honest and honorable as all kinds of mischief has and can be had from its use. Not the least of which is that CO2 “traps” heat as if it were a molecular thermos bottle. Yet, at the same time, it is presumed that increased CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming. Apparently, the thermos bottle molecule pops and releases its heat when the level of CO2 gets too high. Thereby facilitating being used to justify global taxes, global regulations, and dictatorial global governance.
The good doctor’s motivation may not be as pernicious as this but I am still skeptical of the honesty and honorableness of his responses to any question of his position. Especially when he insists that there is nothing wrong with using a false to fact term in his discussions.
I was surprised that Lord Mockton supported Spencer, but then I saw that SPPI “disappeared” from their website a paper by Mikols Zagoni, published in 2009 which elaborated Miskolczy’s theory. Sapienti sat.
Dr Roy Spencer;
What an excellent list. A couple of turnips showing up trying to prove that 2+2=5, but that was to be expected. I suspect that the majority of the readership will figure out which ones can be safely ignored. Two of them have made appearances upthread already, I’ve debated them so many times I see no use in naming them. On the other hand….
I was about to raise a similar point to rgbatduke and richardscourtney. They not only beat me to it, but did so in eloquent detail, of which I am simply incapable. Bottom line though is that while I think the “average temperature” as calculated by yourself and others has value, I think it obscures the real discussion, which regards both energy balance as a whole, and changes in distribution of the energy fluxes across the globe. If the tropics cool and the temperate zones warm and the over all average is the same, then the average temperature provides us rather little information as to what is happening in the system and why.
Warming does cause CO2 to rise, by however much or little, that is evident, beyond reasonable doubt, from the records. It has not been proven that CO2 causes warming – that it does is not evident, beyond reasonable doubt, anywhere. Only in a minimalistic, none (world)complex thought experiment, does the potential ‘greenhouse effect’ from a molecule of CO2 operate – so to speak ‘in theory’ and logically. Application of this to the hugely complex world dynamic, especially with levels of CO2 in parts per million and water vapour parts per thousand, is not consistent with good scientific practice. So what if humans are making CO2 rise faster, the original premise is still valid, just not the reason for the whole increase we are seeing.
AlecM says:
”3. Oh Dear! The Tyndall experiment has been badly misinterpreted. There can be no ‘thermalisation’ of the GHG-absorbed energy because that would breach The Law of Equipartition of Energy, as basic a physical principle as quantum theory. “
What?!?
So, if a CO2 molecule absorbs IR causing it to vibrate and happens to collide with a nitrogen molecule in just such a way as to impart that vibrational energy into translational motion of the nitrogen molecule that wouldn’t cause the temperature of the volume of gas to be higher? (Of course it would.)
Temperature of a gas is a measure of translational motion ONLY, vibrational energy stored in molecules in a gas (unlike in solids and liquids) has no effect on temperature (as normally measured).
Equipartition of energy means that energy will spread out among all available degrees of freedom. There is no “violation” of equipartition of energy for energy to be converted from vibrational to translational and vice versa so long as on average each degree of freedom has the same amount of energy at equilibrium. The flow of energy is from highly utilized degrees of freedom to lower utilized degrees of freedom; in that way it’s akin to diffusion of matter and could be thought of as diffusion of energy from high energy concentration “areas” (energy storage forms: vibration, rotation, translation, etc.) to low concentration energy storage “areas”.
But really all that is beside the point that an increase in GHG absorption is likely to increase its emission therefore on whole the “backradiation” increases thereby decreasing the net transfer of energy by radiation from the surface to the atmosphere i.e. has an insulating effect. There’s no “thermilization” required for a GHE increase to increase the surface temperature.
Rob says:
May 1, 2014 at 9:31 am
The resolution of the ice cores is such that we would not even see the current increase in CO2 for another 2-300 years, let alone the temperature change.
The resolution of the ice cores strongly depends of the snow accumulation rate, which is extremely high near the coast and very small more inland Antarctica. 2 out of 3 Law Dome ice cores have a resolution of a decade, the 3rd of ~2 decades.
There is even a 20-year overlap between the Law Dome ice cores and direct CO2 measurements at the South Pole:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_sp_co2.jpg
The drawback is that the high resolution cores go only 150 years back in time before rock bottom was hit and the third core, taken more downslope, only 1,000 years. But anyway, one can stack the different ice cores on each other giving a lower resolution back in time. Here for the past 1,000 years:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/antarctic_cores_001kyr_large.jpg
or 10,000 years:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/antarctic_cores_010kyr.jpg
Anyway, even the worst resolution ice cores like Vostok (~600 years over 420 kyr) or Dome C (~560 years over 800 kyr) would show the current 100+ ppmv rise in 150 years. The repeatability of ice core CO2 measurements is +/- 1.2 ppmv – 1 sigma for the same core, +/- 5 ppmv between different cores.
Temperature is a proxy from dD and d18O changes, the resolution is even better than for CO2, as there is no years of mixing during accumulation, which is the case for air/CO2. For the inland ice cores, that represents the ocean temperatures of most of the SH oceans.
Solomon Green says:
May 1, 2014 at 9:51 am
Water vapor concentration of course varies greatly (high in the moist tropics & low over the polar deserts), but averages about 30,000 ppm in the troposphere. Carbon dioxide is currently around 400 ppm. The three next most common GHG levels are measured in parts per billion: methane at around 1800 ppb (or 1.8 ppm), nitrous oxide at ~325 ppb & tropospheric ozone at 337 ppm. The many halocarbons are measured in parts per trillion.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html
That’s a good list, well presented.
I have comments on two of the items:
8. THE IPCC MODELS ARE FOR A FLAT EARTH I have no explanation where this little tidbit of misinformation comes from.
The “flat Earth” models (so-called, hence the quotes), with uniform surface and uniform input, are what underlie the “equilibrium” calculations such as those that appear in the book “Atmosphere, Clouds and Climate” by David Randall, pp 45-49. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert’s book “Principles of Planetary Climate” addresses the inaccuracy of the equilibrium assumption right at the start, and addresses the shape of the Earth fairly late, but basically by stretching/compressing the “flat Earth” model via trig functions. So I think it fair to say that “some” IPCC models are for a “flat Earth”, even though “other” IPCC models are for a spherical, rotating Earth. I can’t tell which models dominate anyone’s thinking.
2. THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT VIOLATES THE 2ND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS.
Besides what you wrote, people need to remember that the temperature of a parcel of mass is proportional to the average kinetic energy of the molecules in the parcel, and the molecules do not all have the same kinetic energy. Thus it is possible for the highest energy molecules in a relatively cool parcel to radiate energy toward the molecules in a relatively warm parcel, wherein some of the molecules have below average energy; even as the net flow of radiant energy is from relatively warm to relatively cool.
Ivan, you assume too much. #5 doesn’t contradict Miskolczi’s theory, which was that the increased greenhouse effect from more CO2 was OFFSET by decreasing vapor, keeping a net constant effect. This is entirely possible, although it’s speculative, and does not contradict the point I’m making. Please don’t create a new controversy where none exists.