Danley Wolfe writes:
The piece below appeared in op-ed pages of many newspapers and online recently, released by by Agence-France-Presse (AFP) one of the largest news agencies in the world. I saw it in the Korean Herald, September 9, 2014 edition, and it appeared in most newspapers all over the world, including and especially developing economies such as Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, etc. This is the latest example of emotional propaganda pieces presenting alarmist one sided messages to push public opinion and policy action.
GENEVA (AFP) — Surging levels of carbon dioxide sent greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to a new record in 2013, while oceans, which absorb the emissions, have become more acidic than ever, the UN said on Tuesday.
“We know without any doubt that our climate is changing and our weather is becoming more extreme due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels,” said Michel Jarraud, the head of the World
Meteorological Organization that released a report on the issue on Tuesday. “We must reverse this trend by cutting emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases across the board,” Jarraud said in a statement. “We are running out of time,” he warned. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide all broke fresh records in 2013, said the report. Global concentrations of CO2, the main culprit in global warming, soared to 396 parts per million last year, or 142 percent of pre-industrial levels — defined as before 1750.
That marked a hike of 2.9 parts per million between 2012 and 2013 alone — the largest annual increase in 30 years, according to the Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. The report also showed that so-called radiative forcing, or the warming effect on our climate attributed to greenhouse gases like CO2, increased 34 percent from 1990 to 2013. A quarter of emissions are absorbed by the oceans, while another quarter are sucked into the biosphere, naturally limiting rates of warming gases in the atmosphere.
But CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years and in the oceans for even longer. The gases stored in the oceans also have “far-reaching impacts,” WMO warned, since more CO2 in the water leads to increased acidity, altering the ocean ecosystem. Every day, the world’s oceans absorb some four kilos of CO2 per person each day, WMO said, calling current ocean acidification levels “unprecedented at least over the last 300 million years.” And things will only get worse, Jarraud said.
“Past, present and future CO2 emissions will have a cumulative impact on both global warming and ocean acidification,” he said, adding that “the laws of physics are non-negotiable.”
The author is a member of the Climate Change Task Force which has three stated objectives:
· To maximize the opportunities offered by the climate negotiations
· “Re-calibrate” the international response to climate change and outline a framework for Copenhagen follow-up
· Promote active engagement of civil society and the wider public in the search for adequate solutions to the challenges of climate change
This press release like most climate advocacy today focuses on CO2 level increase without acknowledging and avoiding mentioning any hiatus in global temperatures – either current or the one that occurred during mid 1940s to mid 1960s. But the hiatus is so important to understand because this appears totally inconsistent with the IPCC position that today (in the AR5) the probability / likelihood now of human activities causing climate change is much greater than in previously, in past AR assessments. So why is it such a difficult question to understand let alone mention?
In attempting to better understand this myself I took brief look at the data – Mauna Loa CO2 (ppm) data vs. NASA GISS global mean (absolute) land temperatures. The CO2 data starts in 1959 which limits the analysis to 1959 to 2014 to date. Basically – for this data set – all of the increase in temperature has taken place during mid 1970s to late 1980s. IPCC’s “climate sensitivity,” which is the modeled temperature increase for a doubling in CO2 relies heavily on the temperature rise during this period of time.
There is significant loss of fidelity in the data with multi period time averaging. But this is a neat thing to do if one wishes to control the messaging, which we see all the time including recently. Of course another huge issue is cherry picking data/ time periods to include in the analysis.
A better way to look at this is in cross plots of the corresponding CO2-temperature data as shown below. If there is 95% certainty that global warming is predominately caused by manmade activities the relationship should be easily discernible … including by the naked eye. In fact the cross plot below covering over the period mentioned there were two hiatuses totaling 35 years out of the total 56 years (nearly two-thirds of the time), exhibiting no or very little correlation between CO2 and global mean temperature. So how can the IPCC in AR5 increase the probability (to 95%) of manmade causes being the overwhelming predominant and by implication the only important forcing of global warming? (my question).
CONCLUSION
Focusing on the most recent hiatus below, both visually and in a 1st order linear regression analysis there clearly is effectively zero correlation between CO2 levels and global mean temperature.
In “statistician speak” the correlation between CO2 and temperature is not significantly different than zero. Specifically for the period 1998-2014 (to date) the XY plot has an R squared of 0.0068. The AR5 climate sensitivity is 2-4.5oC for a doubling of CO2, with most like value of 3oC, whereas these data suggest a value more like 0.4 oC for a doubling of CO2 (which is indeed meaningless given the R squared).
Data Sources
Mauna Loa: ftp://aftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/products/trends/co2/co2_mm_mlo.txt
NASA GISS: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts.txt
“Every day, the world’s oceans absorb some four kilos of CO2 per person each day, WMO said, calling current ocean acidification levels “unprecedented at least over the last 300 million years.” And things will only get worse, Jarraud said.”
The fingerprints of the Department of Redundancy Department notwithstanding, my biggest problem with this is that I’d guess it’s a bald-faced lie. 300 million years ago, the oceans had FAR less salinity than today. My best SWAG effort would put the ocean pH at something in the ballpark of 7.5. Hell, even if it were 7.8, it’d still be a far sight more ‘acidic’ than it is today.
The more I read from Messr. Jarraud, the less I respect him.
Just spotted this after making my comment below.
“Department of Redundancy Department”
Don’t crush that dwarf, hand me the pliers! (A Firesign Theatre reference, for those less fortunate)
I’m surprised that nobody pounced on this bit of mendacity:
“…oceans…have become more acidic than ever, the UN said on Tuesday”
A version of this story appeared in the September 9 Washington Post as “CO2 levels in atmosphere rising at dramatically faster rate, U.N. report warns,” by Joby Warrick.
“Levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose at a record-shattering pace last year, a new report shows, a surge that surprised scientists and spurred fears of an accelerated warming of the planet in decades to come.”
In the same issue was an opinion piece by the CEO of the Audubon Society asking us to “give birds a fighting chance” against global warming.
@ur momisugly
Nick Stokes September 12, 2014 at 5:02 am said:
“……That is expected to take centuries.”
So, if the “equilibrium is expected to take centuries”, how can the 2100 CO2-dependent temperature increase be estimated?
And most importantly, how can you exclude the possibility of intervening (still not detected/understood) forcing(s) that could totally revert the hypothesized (but not “proven”, let alone “quantified”) CO2 effect in the future? (and preventing an equilibrium to be reached). Would you bet the world economy only just on this number?
Odd little facts in the chaos of it all.
Mt Rushmore had a nice snow yesterday. The gov. tax payer webcam recorded it.
This hour snow still on the trees, ground, mountains of Glacier National Park.
The gov. tax payer webcams have it live now. The one at Goathaunt is nice three others show the still remaining snow cover.
Myself I am betting lots of seed wheat, ferterlizer, hard work that I have enough CO2 to make a good wheat crop to feed the loons who say CO2 is a danger.
The more you study the climate/weather chaos the more you find growing chaos.
Sorry for a dumb question, but why is it that we can accept a single station in Hawaii for global Carbon Dioxide levels, but need a mixmaster to create temperatures. Ignoring proxies for both, we could still look at 100 years of data. And every pristine, documented, unmoved, properly sited, rural temperature record I’ve ever seen does not support much warming at all, much less catastrophic warming.
Because CO2 is much better mixed that warm and cold temperatures. There are other sites looking at CO2, e.g. Antarctica and the OCO-2 satellite. http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/oco2/carbon-counter-20140811/
Basically a day’s worth of sunlight has a lot less impact on Mauna Loa CO2 concentrations than it does on ground level temperature. Ditto traveling some distance on the ground.
Also because the ocean surrounding it is relatively barren, and Mauna Loa is relatively high and locally barren (which is why the astronomical observatory preceded Keeling’s location choice), so that local biological impacts on atmospheric CO2 concentration are minimized.
Richard is completely right. Of course a sunny day will lead to a high temperature. So use the 12 month running average of a well sited rural station.
Every constant set ever examined that is not affected by UHI shows no Global Warming.
http://crapstats.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/global-warming-%e2%80%93-who-knows-we-all-care/
My musing. Look to the past for this increased outgassing of CO2. It takes 700-1000 years for the biggest CO2 sink we have to cough it back up again. The Medieval Warming Period saw incredible greening of northern latitudes that to this day are now under ice. Where did all the CO2 in the over-abundant flora and fauna disappear to? The oceans, where it has been slowly meandering through the abyssal bottom conveyer belt and then back up to the surface. This time lag could explain the lag we see in ice cores. And could explain the current CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere. The steady source of ancient CO2 could explain the steady pump we see in the Mauna Loa data as opposed to the fits and starts of current human sources. I think the CO2 is ancient and its source is the ocean overturning circulation.
Climate change is very real. For example, the average climate of the northern hemisphere is so cold as to cause the ground to be buried under a thousand feet of ice. The cycle of glacier on/glacier off takes place every several hundred thousand years and can be clearly seen in many ways. Even as the science is settled that glaciation has taken place, the causes are still undergoing vigorous debate.
With respect to the idea that humans are causing harmful changes to the climate at this very moment, I am waiting for some peer-reviewed papers that propose what the optimum climate is for our biosphere. The first question that would naturally flow would be where is our current climate and trend in relation to this finding.
Strangely, nobody seems interested in this vital comparison. Not so strangely, the solutions that are frequently demanded in the most urgent voice, all converge on a socialist worldview: statism, bigger government, higher taxes, less personal liberty. That bigger picture tells me all that I need to know about “climate science”.
Nick Stokes says: “No scientist expects a relation between an instantaneous change in CO2 and temperature.”
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So, what is a good lag time to use for the lab experiments that supposedly show CO2 increasing temperature? Days? A few weeks? What?
The ice core lag suggests a long slow source and response mechanism. Our sudden little blip of human-caused CO2 that is CALCULATED (NOT measured) should therefore not be considered as the driver of this CO2-temperature dance. Too sudden (the slow rise of CO2 just happened by chance to occur during a natural warm weather pattern variation fluctuation).
I continue to speculate that there must be a greater CO2 source with a long steady outgassing rise time. Oceanic outgassing of a long stored huge source of CO2 seems the likely place to look. The nearest past climate that would necessitate a large absorption of CO2 would be the MWP and its slide into colder temperatures (all that cold weather caused dead and decaying carbon rich flora and fauna along with the CO2 it produced would eventually sink into the oceans at the end of the MWP). The outgassing we see today, which is global and at all monitoring stations, suggests this wide spread source. Wide spread through the action of the turtle slow and global-wide meandering store of carbon and CO2 finally brought back to the surface from whence it sunk in the first place via the oceanic overturning circulation CO2 cycle. The addition of this ancient CO2 from the oceans would add to the natural warming pattern we are in, but not be the major driver of that warmth.
The current greening of the Earth, confirmed via satellite, will one day be the source of another episode of outgassing some 1000 years into the future. Do you suppose the Chicken Littles will rise from the dead and once again gather panicky people round them saying the world will end lest we repent?
Come on Nick, talk to me. I won’t bite. You know that this ancient CO2 premise is possible. There is plenty of evidence for MWP CO2 to be revisiting us about now.
Pamela,
“There is plenty of evidence for MWP CO2 to be revisiting us about now.”
No, it doesn’t work that way. There is evidence that warmth after an ice age caused CO2 to rise over a period of about 800 years. That’s because it stayed warm. An electric kettle might take a minute to boil. Expecting CO2 to emerge now from the MWP is like switching a kettle on for just ten seconds and expecting it to boil a minute later.
Nick Stokes,
So now you admit that ∆CO2 is a function of ∆T? That ∆T causes ∆CO2?
If so, then we are on the same page.
What happened?? Did you take a wrong turn, and end up on Damascus Ave?
CO2 is less soluble in warm water than cold. That is well known. So if water warms, CO2 will be added. It seems to settle at about 10 ppmv/°C.
CO2 is also added to the air when you burn fuels. We’ve burnt about 400 Gt carbon. Air CO2 has increased about 120 ppmv. The sea temp did not rise 12°C.
So Nick, another argument of both sides. The oceans are becoming more acidified because they are cold, or are the oceans absorbing heat, making them less likely to absorb co2… Which?
This article appears to be a red herring. There is no direct correlation claimed by any “mainstream” between any CO2 value and some immediate reaction of a climate system in terms of “temperature”. In other words: a climate system will respond only over time and largely dependent on many other factors. This is also why you cannot bring in historical charts where CO2 en temperature doesn’t appear to be in lock-step. All one is doing in proving an over-simplified graph would be … over-simplified.
For the record: I do not believe man-made warming is significant enough in terms of alarms. But I don’t think the debate needs more red herrings than there already are.
Hugh Eaven
Taking your assertions as being true, please explain how the anthropogenic (i.e. man-made) global warming hypothesis could be falsified.
Richard
Hugh, since you seem to think you understand something about how it all works, perhaps you could answer the question Nick Stokes is avoiding: what sort of lag would be expected between the change in CO2 and the temperature rise.
The basic linear model thinking of the IPCC would indicate a change in forcing would intially cause rate of change in temperature. Due to the overall, net negative feedback in the system this will eventually settle to final temperature change. This is the basis of the concept of climate sensitivity .
A fairly steady rise like that of CO2 will cause a lagged rise in temperature where the lag will be close to the time constant of the principal heat reservoir. For the Bern model this would seem to be something in the range of 20 years, depending on who is fitting the model.
I don’t see any evidence that any sort of lag will improve the correlation but I’m open to checking out any suggestions.
Maybe you and/or Nick Stokes would like to make a suggestion of what this lag should be.
Hint: inconvenient truth is that it is d/dt(CO2) that correlates well with SST, not dT/dt correlating with CO2.
BTW , I’ve just run the cross-correlation, unless I’ve made an error it very clearly peaks at zero lag.
That is big problem for a causational argument which maintains substantail lags in the response. Unless of course there are other confounding factors that far out weight the effects of CO2.
“A fairly steady rise like that of CO2 will cause a lagged rise in temperature where the lag will be close to the time constant of the principal heat reservoir. For the Bern model this would seem to be something in the range of 20 years, depending on who is fitting the model.”
I disagree Greg, the IPCC has stated there is no lag. More co2 = higher temperatures. How could it be otherwise? What is the heat reservoir? The oceans? Then according to the graph when the temperature spike in 1997/1998 during the el Nino the oceans were releasing retained heat? Are you going to guess and say 50%? Then what does that do to the math that the IPCC uses to calculate current warming? Are you going to say that half of the warming wasn’t due to co2, and that the math model was in error? The IPCC is very cleat that co2 is responsible for all of the global warming since the Industrial Revolution began. Next, I suppose you will argue about whether it’s between 30 -70% and 50% is the half point. Still, what model could even claim to be partly correct at 30% error? That’s the low end.
All 20 years is doing is saying, ‘well so far we haven’t been right, wait another 20 years’. There are no lags in the IPCC graph. The temperature should still be going up. The temperature was going up when the oceans were storing heat before 1997/1998. You can’t have the arguments go both ways without explaining why. One you have the temps going up and storing heat, and now temps are level or actually falling, and storing heat? How is this time period different? After all, we’ve added tons of co2 to the atmosphere. If anything, we shouldn’t be seeing what we are seeing according to the IPCC.
Please post your result.
My bet is sun cycles 24&25 has us in a new grand minimum before the Eco fascists stop claiming CO2 is the problem.
Walter J Horsting on September 12, 2014 at 9:07 am
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Walter J Horsting,
Are you presuming that the pattern of behavior of the solar cycles for the early to mid part of the Maunder Minimum are a basis for reasonably considering that the pattern of behavior of the recent solar cycles indicates that we are likely going into another LIA?
An interesting hypothesis if you are suggesting it. It does beg the question of whether the Maunder Minimum was the cause of the LIA. How was it the cause?
John
I wonder what is the reason for such a large readjustment for last year,s co2 gain. The ESRL page shows last year as the 3rd largest yearly gain at 2.54. The two highest years shown are 1998 at 2.84, and 1987 at 2.71. What is all of this talk about last year setting a record rate for co2 increase? Those numbers are for global co2.
Mauna Loa is slightly different..2.05 for 2013…2.93 for 1998…2.29 for 1987. Then they show 5 other years which register higher than 1987…2002, 2003, 2005, 2010, 2012.
“In other words: a climate system will respond only over time and largely dependent on many other factors”
Yes, and those many other factors are written into the computer models. The FAILED computer models. I guess you know what physics those models are issing.
As is the common response to you Walter, what is your proposed mechanism? Both sides of a debate should be subjected to equal challenge.
Nick Stokes
Well if it settles in c 70 years, lets call that 5 time constants. you’re talking about time constants of 15 years, roughly.
This is not supported by the cross-correlation function, which peaks at zero.
I gather that the value of the “global temperature” is a point along one of the three line segments in the plot of Temperature Vs CO2 concentration; the position in the associated space of each segment is determined by least squares regression analysis. This method for determination of the value of the “global temperature” has the downside of defining the “global temperature” in terms of this particular data set. If we change the data set in any way the definition of the “global temperature” changes. Traditionally and for sound reasons the value of a climatological variable is made independent of the associated data set.
– – – – – – – – –
Terry Oldberg,
What climatological variable would you consider to be independent of the associated data set?
John
John Whitman:
Good question. Thanks for asking it.
One possibility is the average values over specified periods of time of the global surface temperatures in a specified global temperature time series. As it is a real number, however, one of these values is extremely unlikely to recur with the result that the associated predictive model lacks falsifiability. Thus, a kind of “abstracted state” is a better choice. One possibility is the proposition “T1 OR T2 OR…TN” where the elements in the sequence T1, T2… are global temperatures in an interval in global temperatures when they are averaged over a specified time series. This proposition matches the description of the outcome of an event thus being the kind of entity upon which probabilities and relative frequencies are defined. In AR5, such a state is called a “bin.”
@ur momisugly Terry… Basically you’ve said nothing. Once the meaning was clear and precise about the relationship between co2 and temperature. When the first alarms were being sounded about AGW and all you had was what you have now, what do you think the result would be? You’re going to great lengths to keep a failing theory afloat. There are no least square regressions in the relationship between co2 and temperature in the IPCC graph. Otherwise, they couldn’t trot it out as being true.
rishrac:
I’ve lost the thread of the conversation. Prior to your entry into this conversation, Mr. Whitman asked me a question and I answered it. The topic of his question was not the relationship between CO2 and temperature and the topic of my answer was not this relationship. On the other hand, your interest seems to be in this relationship. I’m not trying to keep a failing theory afloat nor have I ever done so but you accuse me of trying to do so.
sorry if I misinterpreted it. And my interest is in the relationship between co2 and temp. That is the entire reason why this debate keeps going on. The parameters keep changing but the basic premise does not. I keep referring back to previous arguments that have been explanations for AGW. The bottom line is that the IPCC and Associated. have it co2 is the sole cause of global warming and is causing run a way warming.
Terry Oldberg on September 12, 2014 at 10:46 am
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Terry Oldberg,
Please clarify something. Is the AR5 approach you referenced considered by yourself to be a valid example of a “climatological variable . . . independent of the associated data set” ?
John
John Whitman:
To clarify, the climatological variable that I described earlier for you is independent of the associated data set. The “AR5 approach” as described in Chapt. 11 of the report of Working Group 1 appears to have the same property. The latter is based upon a class of sets that is a partition of the complete set of numerical values of 10 year averages of sea surface temperatures. In Chapter 11, each element of this class is called a “bin.” An abstracted state may be formed from a bin by placing its elements in an inclusive disjunction. This state is an example of an outcome of an event.
The complete set of these outcomes is an example of a sample space. The authors of Chapt. 11 define statistical quantities that include probabilities and relative frequencies on this sample space. For earlier IPCC assessment reports, these quantities did not exist. A consequence is for the associated climate models to fail to provide makers of governmental policy with information about the outcomes of their policy decisions. All of the information that policy makers were led by previous IPCC assessment reports to believe that they had in making policies was fabricated.
Terry Oldberg on September 13, 2014 at 12:07 pm
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Terry Oldberg,
Your clarification helped in getting an impression of your views.
John
It’s very hard to believe that anything could have such a measurable effect on our resilient atmosphere simply by CO2 going from 3 to 4 parts per 10,000 .
Good point. 300 to 400 sounds scary. 3 to 4, not so much.
Dalany said – “In attempting to better understand this myself I took brief look at the data – Mauna Loa CO2 (ppm) data vs. NASA GISS global mean (absolute) land temperatures.”
Just curious: Why use land temperatures when this ignores over 70% of the earth’s surface?
YES!! I asked that question earlier in the thread. Land only is more sensitive to UHI and to greater variance in the tropics.
This is the BBC version of the story:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p026gnxc
The correlation of note is between temperature anomaly and the rate of change of CO2.
The EPA, in COURT FILINGS, has said “never mind” to their earlier claims about ocean acidification:
The EPA admits in court that previous official statements about ocean acidification were not supported by available evidence.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/25/epa-ignore-our-previous-statements-on-ocean-acidification/
“there clearly is effectively zero correlation between CO2 levels and global mean temperature.”
But not between CO2 levels and the integral of global mean temperature.
Or in other words, between the differencial of CO2 concentration and Global Temperature.
That is what Beenstock and Reingewertz found in their polynomial cointegration test for Granger causality. Meaning; a linearly rising CO2 level might lead to a constant step up in temperature but not more.
BUT; this might be an artefact of the short record. CO2 might just as well be irrelevant on all accounts; whether differentiated or not. (Being a bit player compared to water vapor)
“Meaning; a linearly rising CO2 level might lead to a constant step up in temperature but not more.”
More likely, that causation is the other way, and temperatures drive the rate at which CO2 evolves.
Otherwise, you reach the absurd conclusion that we could drive CO2 to a million ppm and, once we stopped pumping, temperatures would decline back down.
“Otherwise, you reach the absurd conclusion that we could drive CO2 to a million ppm and, once we stopped pumping, temperatures would decline back down.”
You are extrapolating too far. Exchanging the entire atmosphere against CO2 would establish a completely different system. If you avoid the absurd extremes, you can see that what I conjectured is a possible reaction of a system with negative feedbacks.
There are many ways that changing temperature could produce a change in the rate of CO2. E.g., this one.
What possible mechanism could make temperatures dependent on the rate of change of CO2, and not its absolute level?
Someone put up a comment a while ago that the derivative (12 month smoothed) of Mauna Loa CO2 data had a good correlation with HadCRUT3 southern hemisphere land data. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3sh/from:1958/plot/esrl-co2/scale:3.2/derivative/mean:12/offset:-0.3
The correlation is poorer with NH temp anomalies and even the NH sea temps.
Any noise in the data is amplified when you take the derivative so even though it is smoothed and even if there is a very good correlation between world CO2 concentration and global temperatures, that there is such a good correlation between the measurements is highly suspicious. What is more damning is that the SH land data is the most homogenised. The raw data for SH inland stations show a minimum at 1940 unlike he maximum in NH stations in 1940 (raw data).
The best correlation, though, is with the best data. Here, with the UAH satellite data.
Has anyone had an experiment work that well?
Regarding the lags, the energy we are talking about here (photons in the long-wave spectrum) operate at the speed of light. At 300,000,000 metres/second, it takes long-wave radiation exactly 0.0003 seconds to be emitted from the Earth’s surface until it is back into outer space if it is not intercepted by an atmospheric molecule.
Now, most photons are intercepted by atmospheric molecules and the average CO2 molecule holds onto the energy from that photon for just 0.000005 seconds.
On average, a photon from the surface spends time in 8,000,000 different atmospheric molecules before it is finally emitted to space at an average delay of just 44 hours (including the average time spent in land and ocean surface molecules in addition to the atmospheric molecules).
So where does the 30, 70 or 100 year lags come from exactly? The numbers are in fractions of a second and hours, not decades.
The basic physics is not really out-lined anywhere where these lags are supposed to come from.
The only heat accumulation numbers (in ocean water and land/atmosphere/ice molecules) we can point to is 0.235 W/m2/year to 0.535 W/m2/year which is not going to raise the Earth’s temperature very much at all in the long-run versus the instantaneous 0.000005 seconds to 44 hour impact that CO2 is supposed to have.
So far, temps are up 0.5C (excluding the fake temperature adjustments) and we are supposed to be closing in on 1.4C if the theory was correct. At the rate the oceans are warming, they will get to 0.22C by the year 2100 and few extra metres of glacier will be exposed. The math just don’t work .
Bill, you said, “On average, a photon from the surface spends time in 8,000,000 different atmospheric molecules before it is finally emitted to space at an average delay of just 44 hours (including the average time spent in land and ocean surface molecules in addition to the atmospheric molecules).”
Fascinating. Any idea of the residence time of disparate SW insolation?
BTW, I earlier asserted to Nick that the direct affects of CO2 must be essentially right now, or in this case 44 hours. Are not all the delayed responses predicated on hypothetical amplifying feedbacks, such as lowered albedo etc?
I may have misunderstood matters early in the morning after a late night before, but where do you get the underlying data from? For example:
where do you get the 8,000,000 from?
Of the 8,000,000 molecules how many of these are CO2 (I presume that this will be the ratio of say 400ppm), and how many are other molecules, and of the other molecules how long do they retain any energy absorbed from a collision?
What is the difference between photons emitted from the land surface, and that from water, in the number of collisions and the residency time?
Where do you get your 44 hours from?
is not 8,000,000 x 0.000005 secs = 40 seconds?
One of the problems with the K&T energy budget cartonn is that it is based on averages, whereas in the real world there is day and night (and no homogenised average energy budget as K&T suggest anywhere on the planet; it is in constant flux).
One issue is that we get dolops of incoming energy and long periods of no incoming energy. At the equator/tropics, in essence, this occurs in 12 hour bursts every 24 hours, but at higher latitudes this is quite different, and at the poles it is extremely different (with, at times, no significant incoming energy for months).
So if one consders the life of an incoming photon which is absorbed by the land and later re-radiated, is there sufficient time for this photon or its re-radiated cousin (or the vast majority of them) to get re-radiated out to space before the next incoming burst of energy?
If the answer to this is yes, then GHGs do not significantly increase the temperature of planet Earth. At most, they simply alter the time when the lowest low during the 24 hour solar cycle occurs, eg., they push back the coldest part of the day from say 03:30:00 am to say say 03:30:40 am or to 03:31am or even to 04:00am.
But so long as all the incoming energy received during the day has time to leave during the night before the next daily burst of incoming energy, increasing the concentration of GHGs would appear to do little.
And if there was any gradual build up during the year, there are days when one sees temperature inversions when large amounts of energy is flushed out of the system to space; ditto at the poles where copious amounts of energy can be dumped during the winter, thereby restoring the system to balance..
.
Sorry, I was going off memory, the number of molecules is actually 8 billion, not 8 million. The average residency time of 44 hours includes the averages from land and ocean molecules which will hold onto the energy longer the atmosphere molecules. Its a global average. Think of it as, if the Sun shut-down tomorrow, how long would it take before the Earth’s surface temperature lost 33C, the greenhouse effect, then how much longer before it would get to the background radiation level of 2.7K (plus a small amount from internal core temperature). Not long at all.
richard verney says, September 13, 2014 at 2:04 am:
“One of the problems with the K&T energy budget cartoon is that it is based on averages, whereas in the real world there is day and night (and no homogenised average energy budget as K&T suggest anywhere on the planet; it is in constant flux).”
I can’t see why this is a problem per se. It’s an energy budget diagram. Not a BB temperature diagram. If you time 165 J with the number of square metres covered by Earth’s global surface and with the number of seconds in a 24h day, then you will end up with the total amount of energy from the Sun absorbed by the global surface across an average diurnal cycle. It doesn’t matter, then, how this energy input was distributed in time and space. That’s the total absolute amount. Period. Not some kind of average. And this total amount has to be shed by the system also, within an equal amount of time. Or else you get warming (or cooling, if more is shed than coming in). Again, it doesn’t matter where from or when within our time frame the energy escapes, as long as it does.
It’s fine averaging fluxes when simply doing energy budgetting. It is NOT fine if trying to determine temperatures directly from any or more of the instantaneous flux intensities within the budget.
If the feedbacks in the theory were correct. We are actually almost dead on the track expected if CO_2 were the only source of warming with net neutral feedbacks, but of course natural variation is almost certainly of the same scale (to neatly reverse the stated position in all of the SPMs from the alarmist ARs) and so we have no good way — yet — to even dream of disentangling the two. We certainly can’t do it based on obviously failed models, or on models that use very different parameterizations of the feedbacks that “happen” to cancel out and produce similar tracks in a reference period, as those models will (and have been observed to, in toy planet model calculations) diverge from each other, let alone the climate, as they proceed.
And how can we even speak of “feedbacks” in a supposedly a priori coupled highly multivariate nonlinear PDE problem? They aren’t separable! The mere fact that people refer to things like “water vapor feedback” as if it is a separable entity means that they are either getting the physics badly wrong before they start or they programmed in the assumption that this would occur in a certain way instead of letting the model determine what the net effect of water vapor (which includes clouds and latent heat transport and direct interference with in-band CO_2) is, and the fact that it might well vary or suddenly reverse its sign in response to other, quite small, variations in state and drivers.
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