(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.
Hi Roy, great points. However, I think your bullet point concerning the Global Average Surface (or near surface)Temperature is the weakest. A bathtub full of water is homogenous. Global temperatures as measured over a 24 hour period are not. Yes, we can and do measure such a parameter. However, it is more of an abstraction than anything else – a human construct. This is especially true when measuring the average global temperature over long periods of time. It is such an abstraction that we must construct 30 year intervals and measure departures from that interval.
In effect we are using a proxy (global average surface temperatures) to reflect changes across and within the lower 1/3 troposphere.
With regard to item 6, part of my scepticism is the belief that a Watt of warming in the upper atmosphere will have a much lower effect on surface temperature than a Watt of warming applied at the surface. Heating something always produces a temperature (or effect) gradient, less temperature change as you move away from the place of warming.
Should I be deprived of this part of my scepticism?
[snip ]
REPLY: Mr. Wilde we’ve already covered this in a previous essay. I’m not going to start a food fight here again. Take this notion elsewhere. – Anthony
The thermodynamics 2 and entropy problem for CO2 “greenhouse” warming goes far beyond just cold and hot objects. The Russian-Belgian scientist Ilya Prigogine established the field of nonlinear thermodynamics and “dissipative structures”:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system
The term “dissipative” is where the fundamental problem lies for CO2 warming since it entails loss of heat. Essentially nonequilibrium dissipative systems acquire emergent structure (thunderstorms, circulation cells, depressions etc. ) or asymmetry. This means a loss of entropy – dissipative systems export entropy. And the atmosphere as a whole can only export entropy by heat loss to space.
CO2 backradiation warming is modest and declines logarithmically. Thus CAGW requires it to be amplified by positive feedbacks. It is in this question of feedback that the biggest problem lies for CO2 catastrophism. Prigogine’ dissipative structures are the underlying principle why the feedbacks to CO2 warming are negative.
Political Junkie says:
May 1, 2014 at 11:17 am
Waiting for the congratulatory Presidential tweet! Should be up any time now!
The problem I have with point 9 is that the global average temperature needs to be calculated in a consistent manner for it to used for any meaningful results. Is there a method that all groups/scientists use? Every group seems to use different methods of statistical analysis with different variables “allowed for”.
Watching the consistent reduction of heating in the past and “adjustments” made to current temperature readings I get the feeling that many calculations are modified to best support the worst possible outcome.
My grandfather recorded temperatures at a weather station in southern Oregon. I looked at his log books in 2005 and compared them to what is listed for the the decade of the 30’s in the current official temperature record. His station is now shown to be an average of 2 degrees lower than what he recorded. 20 years ago it was an average of 1 degree different. From the 30’s to the 70’s his records matched. If you told him that scientists today thought his measurements were consistently off by 2 degrees he would have flipped out.
Excellent article
It wouldn’t have hurt to make the list a little bit longer, here are my suggestions:
11. “There is no global warming. The increasing temperature records are caused by urban heat island effect”
The urban heat island effect is real, but it cannot explain increased sea temperature, increasing satellite and balloon measurements and melting glaciers.
12. “There is no increase in the sea level. It is not possible to measure sea level to such accuracy from a satellite”
The satellite measurements have been confirmed by lots of buoyancy measurements.
13. “There is no increase in the CO2 level. The Mauna Loa measurements are erroneous and influenced by gas from the volcano.”
There are a lot of measurement stations all over the globe, and all are agreeing on the increase.
14. CO2 has so short lifetime in the atmosphere
It is right that each CO2 molecule has a short lifetime, but that is irrelevant. What’s count is that an elevated level of CO2 has a very long lifetime in the atmosphere.
/Jan
Phil’s imperfect analogy does raise a useful point — if you continue to breath air containing 400 ppm CO2, eventually you’ll be dead.
Dr. Roy,
Thank you!
I especially want to thank you for correcting my thinking on point #5.
Most people (not the ones who hang out here, but normal people 🙂 get hung up on point #1. They will deny the greenhouse effect when they mean to deny catastrophic AGW. They aren’t up to speed on the subject and confuse the terms.
Conversely, the ardent warmist will say that the greenhouse effect was caused by man. They will assert that if we had not invented the combustion engine the CO2 level in the atmosphere would be “pure” at 0 PPM.
Both extremes are ignorant. I would guesstamate that 80+% of Americans would be in one camp or the other.
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” – Winston Churchill
sabretruthtiger says:
May 1, 2014 at 11:19 am
7 is wrong, “where is the 100x as fast rise in today’s temperature causing this CO2 rise?”
The historical increase/decrease of CO2 was 8 ppmv/°C. The transition from a glacial periode to an interglacial did take ~5000 years for a temperature change of ~12°C and a change of ~100 ppmv CO2, or 0.0024°C/year and 0.02 ppmv/year. The temperature change over the past 150 years was around 0.8°C or 0.005°C/year and decreasing, but the CO2 change was average 1.5 ppmv/year and still accellerating…
Thus where nature needed 5,000 years for the CO2 buildup, we are doing that in only 150 years…
In my house it is warmest in the rooms that have pellet stoves that are fired up. The rooms farthest away are cold in comparison. I could possibly do an average temp for the entire house but my point is there are hot spots and there are cold spots. And they ain’t changing. Call it regional warming and cooling- pretty much what we have on Earth.
Ken R. says:
May 1, 2014 at 11:45 am
Same with T records in NE Oregon. NASA GISS, NOAA, HadCRU & IPCC are shameless, bold-faced liars.
Beta Blocker: Now THAT’S funny!!!
1. Len says:
May 1, 2014 at 6:46 am
i third- fourth, whatever the “average” question. with a CO2 caveat.
what IS the “BEST” average temp for humans/the planet?
what is the “Ideal” PPM for CO2 in the atmosphere for Plants.
where -supposedly- did humans Evolve, would not that general climate be “ideal” for us-after all we evolved there…
so that would be -africa-around kenya to be precise according to Berkeley’s evolution website…average temp in kenya is what.. about 23c or so? or about 8c warmer than the earth’s average temp…hmm…..
Just because humans evolved at a particular level of CO2 and a particular temperature does not mean that particular environment is “ideal” for humans. Undoubtedly, evolution works toward making organisms better suited to their particular environment. But it’s a gradual process, taking hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. And temperatures (and CO2 to a lesser extent, at least pre-industrial era) can change a lot, in both directions, during the evolutionary timescale. In fact temperature itself is so variable, at the daily, yearly, multi-decadal, and millenial time scales, it seems to me that natural selection would favor an organism which could better tolerate a WIDE RANGE of temperatures as opposed to an organism that is ideally suited for the exact temperature that existed at any specific point in time, or even an average temperature over say a millenium. Just look at cold-blooded vs warm-blooded species. Warm-blooded vertebrates are considered an evolutionary advancement over cold-blooded veterbrates. Why? Because they can tolerate a wider range of temperatures.
Moreover, I’d be careful about using evolution to prove anything about ideal environments for “life”, for humans or in general. Almost by definition, what is good for “evolution” is NOT good for “life”. Though random mutations happen all the time, the ones that result in true evolution are those that happen at a time when survival is threatened. If there was no environmental crisis, i.e., conditions were “ideal” for life, then an individual with a particular mutation would be, at best, no more likely to survive than the general population. And in fact, the mutated individual would be considerably LESS likely to BREED than other members of the species, because it would probably violate the species’s standards of desirability in a mate (and even if it did find a mate, the mate would most likely be closer to “normal” since the mutated individual would still share its species standards of desirability, and thus the mutated genes would be successively watered down over the generations). And so, in times of favorable environments, evolution occurs slowly, if at all. It is only when the environment becomes harsh and intolerable that evolution really takes off. In these times, mutations occur both ways, making some individuals more likely to survive than their ancestors, and others less likely, but the ones that are more likely to survive are … well, more likely to survive. And it might take a few generations to change hundreds of thousands of years of a species’s “desirability standards” but at some point, eventually the drive to survive in harsh conditions would trump those standards for long enough to rewrite them. And so, during periods of harsh and inhospitable climates, evolution occurs far more rapidly. And that same harsh and inhospitable climate causes the unevolved members of the species to die off. And so any time someone points to a period of time that was “good” for evolution, you can presume, with near certainty, that that period was BAD for “life”, and that it was only through evolution that life managed to survive at all. And to the extent that the evolution of a specific new species can be pinpointed, you can say that, at least for the species that preceded and gave birth to that new species, the conditions at that point in time were intolerable and unsurvivable, and most likely just BARELY tolerable survivable for the new species.
That said, I do believe that warmer temperatures would be better for humankind, and for life in general. History, anthropology, and paleontology all prove that life flourishes more in warmer weather, with no “diminishing returns” on the life/temperature relationship, at least not at any temperature that ever existed on earth. Sure, as one alarmist pointed out a few years ago, we evolved during a cooler climate than what we are experiencing now, and never in the history of the species were temperatures as warm as they will be a century from now. But the impication of that statement is that those cooler conditions were “ideal” for human life, and warmer temperatures would be “less than ideal”, if not completely intolerable, and that’s just not true. We did not evolve into humans because the specific genome that comprises humanity was “ideally suited” for the climate that existed 300,000 years ago. We evolved into humans because our specific genome made us better able to TOLERATE and SURVIVE those HARSH conditions than the Cro Magnons or Neanderthals were. But that does not at all mean that we can’t tolerate a warmer climate than that in which we evolved, nor even that a warmer climate wouldn’t be even MORE tolerable, even IDEAL for the species.
However, I do believe it is safe to say that a warmer climate would be bad for evolution. We are not very likely to advance, as a species, beyond what we are now, because there will be NO NEED to do so.
The only one of those I ever heard was number 7, and historically, it’s true.
Agreed. But not just one. All volcanoes including undersea. I don’t know how these ideas spread.
I have often heard that this creature or that creature releases more co2. So what? The total ppm in the atmosphere IS going up and we are causing it. We may argue about Mona Loa et al but it does not change the facts.
WUWT seriously needs to think about creating one page called ‘MYTH BUSTERS’ with the volcano nonsense put to rest. It does not help our position to have people spewing [no pun intended] this garbage.
EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union
Vol. 92, No. 24, 14 June 2011
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/climate.php
http://www.agu.org/pubs/pdf/2011EO240001.pdf
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/index.cfm
There is 6,000 ppm of CO2 in Martian atmosphere, but its theoretical and practical temperature is the same /see NASA Planetary fact sheets/. How come that 1/120th of that supposedly warms Earth, but does not warm Mars at all?
Is that 300W downwelling coming from GHG only? How is nitrogen and oxygen losing its heat?
The GOSPEL, according to Roy,
BELIEVE !!!
[snip sorry Tim, not interested in starting this food fight – Anthony]
I see some are challenging some of the items, not because they are wrong, but because they haven’t heard them
I hope many of them never get repeated, but some have been used, and do bring disrepute to honest skeptics.
For those who have never seen anyone challenge the very existence of the Greenhouse effect, read:
http://johnosullivan.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/breaking-u-s-national-academies-find-greenhouse-effect-doesnt-exist/
If you don’t read the whole thing,, read the title “Breaking: U.S. National Academies Find Greenhouse Effect Doesn’t Exist”
RE:
milodonharlani says:
May 1, 2014 at 10:57 am
milodonharlani,
Thanks for the correction. I meant to say what you said.
RE: Volcanoes
There is also the myth that underwater volcanoes are melting the arctic ice. Not true…
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/volcanos-in-gakkel-ridge-not-responsible-melting-the-arctic-ice/
Those who doubt that anyone is making the second argument (violation of the second law of thermodynamics) out to read
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/12/18/turning-tricks-cashing-in-on-fear/
This admission edges close to acknowledgement of a huge core problem – that “greenhouse” theory and the vaunted greenhouse models violate the second law of thermodynamics which says that a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body XX. Greenhouse gasses in the cold upper atmosphere, even when warmed a bit by absorbed infrared, cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. Readers interested in the science can read mathematical physicist Gerhard Gerlich’s and Ralf Tscheuchner’s detailed paper published in The International Journal of Modern Physics, updated in January , 2009, “Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics”.
ROY’S #7 STATEMENT IS BADLY FLAWED AND NEEDS FIXING.
Roy says “WHERE IS THE 100X AS FAST RISE IN TODAY’S TEMPERATURE CAUSING THIS CO2 RISE?” His point here seems to be that because we don’t see warming “100 times as fast as any time in the 300,000 year Vostok ice core record” that means warming doesn’t cause CO2 to rise. As I pointed out in an earlier comment, that argument would only apply if warming was the ONLY cause of increased CO2 and that clearly isn’t true. As written, the logic in #7 is badly flawed and violates the basic tenet that Roy is talking about in his 10 issues. So what can we do to fix #7?
First let’s agree that there are at least two causes of rising CO2:
1. ATMOSPHERIC WARMING, as shown in ice cores where CO2 always lags rising temperatures by several hundred years. (I know of no ice cores where CO2 precedes rising temperature) and more recent short warming intervals from 1982-2012 that were followed by increased atmospheric CO2.
2. HUMAN CO2 EMISSIONS.
How can we separate these two causes? One way is to look at times when CO2 rose when one of them couldn’t have been a factor. CO2 emissions began to rise sharply after 1945, so any warming prior to then cannot have been caused by CO2. After 1945, CO2 could have risen by either warming or human emissions. Warming during interglacials in the ice cores falls in the category of non-CO2 caused warming and clearly shows that warming caused rise in CO2 NOT the other way around.
How about post 1945 when both warming and human emissions could have caused rising CO2? How can we separate out these two possible causes? The problem is that we can’t really do that very well quantitatively. We know roughly the amount of CO2 emissions, but separating out how much of the rise in CO2 is due to warming and how much to emissions is difficult. Humlum et al. (2012) showed that short periods of warming from 1982 to 2012 were always followed by spikes in CO2 levels so we know that some of the modern CO2 rise is being caused by warming.
So I propose rewording of Roy’s #7 as follows:
7. Warming AND HUMAN EMISSIONS cause CO2 to rise. The rise of CO2 levels during past interglacials was caused by global warming, not by CO2. Rise in CO2 levels since 1945 could be caused either by global warming or by human emissions.
How about it, Roy? Do you agree?
Sorry, “ought to read” not :”out to read”