Guest essay by Richard J. Petschauer
A skeptic that believes in global warming? How can that be? We have been told that climate skeptics, sometime incorrectly called “deniers”, still believe the earth is flat and disagree with 97% of scientists. Well, first of all, most of us have seen a globe and know what it represents. Second, do you know on what these scientists agree? If not, don’t feel bad. Those making these claims, mostly politicians, probably don’t know either. Actually, a rather poor survey was done looking at a summary of many technical papers. If any one of many climate related points were made, they were put in the 97% camp. This article would probably have qualified too.
But the real question, not covered in the survey: How fast will the earth warm if we do nothing to curtail the growth of man made carbon dioxide emissions? And how much can we reduce the warming if we cut world emissions by some factor? The impact and costs of doing nothing or something will not be covered here, but it is obvious they would depend on how fast warming will occur. This we will discuss.
So what are the skeptics skeptical about? It is the amount and rate of the man made warming estimated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the claims of some spokespeople, many in government, who go much beyond what the IPCC says, like “the planet is having a fever” or “things are getting worse than expected”. But data shows global temperatures have increased much less than models predicted. In fact, unknown to many, accurate satellite data shows very little if any warming in the last 18 years.
Where there is general agreement
There are many areas where most skeptics and the “alarmists”, as they are called, agree. First is the idea of “climate sensitivity”, a useful benchmark for making estimates. It is the final average global temperature rise that would be caused by a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, assuming there are no natural changes. Second, most agree on well established methods to estimate how greenhouse gases absorb and emit heat, and that doubling of CO2 will reduce the heat leaving the planet by a little more than 3.5 watts per square meter. This compares to both estimates and satellite measurements of the total now leaving of about 235 watts per square meter. If the value of 3.5 watts out of 235 seems low, it is because CO2 only absorbs the infrared wavelengths that involve about 20% of the heat leaving the surface, and in this region its action is partially saturated and the second doubling will reduce heat loss by about another 3.5, not 7 watts. A 1% change in energy from the sun or a 7% change in cloud cover would cause about the same change as doubling CO2. Third, there is general agreement on how much the average surface will warm to make up for this heat loss: about 1 C (1.8 F). But here is the rub: this estimate is before the atmosphere and the surface, including oceans, react to this temperature change.
Where there is not agreement
How the climate reacts to the initial warming is the main area where most skeptics have problems with the IPCC and others. These reactions are called “feedbacks”. Positive ones amplify any temperature change (warming or cooling from any cause, not just from CO2). Negative ones diminish a change. There are general agreements on the equations used to define the feedback strengths and how they are combined into one net temperature change multiplier that can be either greater or less than one. The major disagreements are the magnitudes of the feedback values and for clouds, even if it is positive or negative. The final IPCC warming estimates for doubling CO2 range from 1.5 to 4.5 C. The skeptics have no common voice, but their values range from about 0.5 to 1.2 C, a significant reduction. IPCC also uses a 1% annual growth of the CO2 content in the atmosphere, while data shows only about 0.55%. This increases CO2 doubling time from about 70 years to 140.
Two different approaches
One primary complaint is the IPCC and most government funding research have abandoned improving the simple energy balance model and the feedback concept and gone to complex climate models that try to estimate many conditions across the globe and layers in the atmosphere over many years and then a temperature change. Small errors can propagate into unknown large ones. There are over 100 of these models written by different teams and their results differ by a range to 3 to 1. And nearly all overestimate warming compared to observed data. This is settled science? No! And it is bad engineering practice, which some scientists apparently don’t understand, to try to solve such a complex problem without breaking it down into smaller steps that each can be verified and corrected. What is causing the errors in the climate models that cause them to overestimate global warming? How will any proposed correction be tested without waiting about 10 to 30 years?
Corrections to the complex computer models
We believe the complex computer models overestimation of warming is mostly based on a combinations of three factors: overestimating positive water vapor feedback, underestimating negative feedback from increased sea surface evaporation and treating cloud feedback as positive feedback while it is very likely negative. For water vapor (a major greenhouse gas) the climate models show it increases about 7% per degree C of warming. But extensive data over 30 years from 15,000 stations at many latitudes over land and sea show an increase of only about 5% at the surface, the atmosphere’s main water vapor source. (Dia, “Recent Climatology and Trends in Global Surface Humidity”, American Meteorological Society, August, 1997). Water vapor is also an absorber of incoming solar energy, reducing what reaches the surface. Reduced greenhouse action and increased solar absorption cut the computer models positive water vapor feedback in about half. Regarding the cooling effects of increased evaporation, mostly over the oceans, both data (Wentz, et al, “How Much More Rain Will Global Warming Bring?, Science, 13 July, 2007) and basic physics indicate an increase of about 6% per degree C of warming, over double what the climate models average. Finally, the models estimate a value of positive feedback for clouds only because this amount is needed to boost the initial 1 C prefeedback warming up to the models final average estimate. It is more likely that more evaporation and water vapor will increase cloud content, a net cooling effect. Using simple energy balance models with proven greenhouse gas absorption/radiation tools, the result of these changes indicates a warming from double CO2 in a range of 0.6 to 0.9 C, much less than IPCC’s value of 1.5 to 4.5 C. Note the uncertainty range drops by a factor of 10, from of 3 degrees C to 0.3 C, because of the elimination of unreliable complex computer models and their net positive feedback.
A skeptics summary
About 1 C warming in the next 140 years does not seem to be a problem. (It will actually take longer because the ocean heat storage will delay the warming). Furthermore, both simple models and data show that most of the warming will be in winter nights in the colder latitudes. Less water vapor here reduces its competition with CO2. An example is in Minneapolis, Minnesota at 45 degrees latitude. About half of July record highs were set in the 1930s, with only 3 since 2000. However 80% of the record January lows were from 1875 to 1950. This winter warming is a benefit. And what makes people think the climate around 1900 represents the ideal? In 2014 we just saw a very cold winter, typical of that era. Finally, warmer temperatures increase evaporation and precipitation and since CO2 is a plant food, food crop production will increase, contrary to some other estimates. And any climate model that estimates a small, slowly increasing temperature will “disrupt” the climate should be looked at with great skepticism.
Digging deeper – does carbon dioxide really trap heat?
We have heard that carbon dioxide “traps” heat high in the atmosphere somewhat like a blanket that covers everything and is getting thicker as emissions increase, trapping more heat. Well, it’s not so simple and fortunately not that bad. Let us explain what happens.
The above figure is taken from an often cited paper, including by the IPCC, titled “Earth’s Annual Global Energy Budget” by Kiehl and Trenberth from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 1997, with notations that we added. The top curve shows how the intensity of the average heat leaving the earth’s surface varies with infrared wavelength. The lower jagged curve is that leaving at the top of the atmosphere under average cloudy conditions. The area under a curve is its total heat in watts per square meter. Note the large downward notch leaving the atmosphere in the 12 to 18 microns range caused by CO2. It is such a strong absorber here that it cannot release its heat outward until the density of its molecules drops significantly at high altitudes where the temperature is about –60 F. Hence the low radiation rate. If the amount of CO2 increases, the escape altitude moves up causing both the temperature and heat loss to drop further. The area of the CO2 notch below the dashed line is about 22 watts per square meter and represents the impact of the total CO2 given the existing clouds and water vapor. Doubling CO2, taking over 100 years at the current growth rate, would move the notch downward and increase the area by about 3.5 watts per square meter, or 16%. When the heat loss drops, since the net heat from the sun remains at 235, the atmosphere gains heat and warms about 1 degree C until its emissions rise back to 235, restoring balance. A warmer atmosphere reduces the heat loss from the surface, and it also warms about 1 C. This is all that CO2 does. And very slowly. The feedback processes can increase or decrease this warming, as they do for any other temperature change.
Correction: The 140 years cited in two places as the time for CO2 doubling for the compound annual increase of 0.55 % of the last 20 years should be 126 years (1.0055 ^126.4 = 2.0003). The 140-year value is for 0.50 %, consistent with the last 35 years.
As a first post, it is my understanding that no skeptic suggests (I won’t use the word believe) there has been no global warming. It’s a fact; the globe HAS warmed. The point in contention is what is DRIVING that warming. So far we see CO2 is not *THE* driver. Only computer models suggest that. Actual evidence suggests otherwise.
from my research there are major problems with summarized global temperature recording especially previous to our satellites. i don’t believe for a minute that even the .8 c of warming of the last 130 yeas or so is accurate in any way. Even that amount of warming in itself does not support this hypothesis in anyway. It was not linear. There are problems with ground stations that could have made that whole .8 c upward trend. So i’m not so sure all scientists agree there has even been warming or if we can even know that. if that’s what this whole theory is hanging now. That is nothing. the feedback loops never materialized. There is no way around that. I’m sure even the skeptical ones just go along with such a small increase because in the end it proves nothing.
In a radiatively cooled atmosphere, where water vapor is 99.6% of what can cool it, CO2 is incapable of stopping the earths convection cycle. In fact, it may very well allow the convecting cycle to speed up, as we have seen over the last thirty or so years in higher latitudes. The southern hemisphere is a good example of this recently.
Charlie – yes, there are major problems with global summarised temperature based on surface thermometers. But we do now have a way of checking – the thermometer data can be compared with satellite data. If they agree then we can be fairly confident that they are getting it right. If they don’t agree then we get a first estimate of how much one of them might be out. (it doesn’t necessarily tell us which one, of course).
well mike since we’ve switched to satellite there has been no warming for over 18 years. That is not a coincidence. The temp trend stops in it’s track the exact moment we switch to satellite. That is only one of the major obvious problems here.
The temp trend stops in it’s track the exact moment we switch to satellite.
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same with ocean warming when ARGO came on-line. 100 years of rapid ocean warming stopped, almost as though it could sense the floats being added to the oceans.
Bill H April 25, 2015 at 3:17 pm
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Bill, you have hit the nail on the head. It is non-radiative atmospheric energy transports that are the key. This is what climastologists were so desperate to hide, with their main attempts starting with Pierrehumbert in 1995.
The primary energy transports away from the surface are evaporation and convection combined. Radiation is a bit player. But tropospheric convective circulation depends on radiative subsidence of air-masses. This is the accepted meteorology the climatologists were so frantic to hide.
If you increase the radiative cooling ability of the atmosphere, you increase the speed of tropospheric convective circulation, and thereby the speed of non-radiative energy transport from the surface.
All GCM’s are incapable of running CFD accurately in the vertical dimension. Instead they use provably false 2D radiative/convective models to parametrize vertical energy transports. They invoke “immaculate convection” ie: convection thats speed is in no way related to the strength of radiative cooling at altitude.
Our radiatively cooled atmosphere is cooling the surface of the planet, not warming it. Lukewarmers like Richard are as foolish as alarmists. There are no points for “less wrong”. Only “right” passes.
@ferdberple
Thanks for the smile back.
SURPRISE, SURPRISE, ….. and common sense reasoning provides the simple answer to the above perceived emergent phenomena.
Land based Surface Stations and water based ARGO buoys use thermometers for measuring the thermal “heat” energy being conducted to them from any type of molecular mass (gas, liquid or solid) that makes physical contact with said thermometer.
Whereas satellites use IR sensors for measuring the thermal “heat” energy being radiated from the earth’s surface and or being radiated from specific (GHG) gas molecules in the atmosphere. But the satellite sensors can not determine what the actual source is/was for the thermal “heat” IR energy that said specific (GHG) gas molecules are radiating.
Silly is as silly does.
The Medical professionals, etc., do not use their “thermometers” to measures the temperature at 100+- specific “locations” on a person’s body to determine the Average Body Temperature for that person ….. simply because said calculated Average Body Temperature could vary so greatly from hour to hour ….. and from person to person, ….. that it would be nigh onto impossible to make any sense out of, … let alone using said for diagnosing a medical problem or condition.
@Samuel Cogar (apologies if I got the name wrong, I am on a phone).
You said that medical professionals don’t use a thermometer to measure 100 points on a person’s body for diagnostic basis, and gave good reasons why this is true. However, with the advent of FLIR sensors, it can make sense to detect temps and gradients across the body simultaneously, and this is done for diagnostic purposes at least twice to anyone taking an international flight. Done in a doctor’s office with a standard temp reference in the same picture, it has the potential to open up completely new and significantly faster diagnosis of different conditions. Kind of like satellite and ARGO, n’est pas?
Well, look at the Greenland icecap temperature data for the past and it’s pretty obvious that the earth has warmed and cooled to degrees that make the period of warming since the 19th century look trivial in comparison.
There’s absolutely no reason why anyone would expect that the global surface based “Temperature” measurements and the global satellite based “Temperature” measurements would agree with each other. They are not even measuring or trying to measure the same thing.
And the difference has nothing whatsoever to do with instrument calibrations.
Why is it that some people think that satellite measurements are all wonky, because; well they rely on those platinum resistance thermometers which are flying around and not down on earth where they can be compared to some earth based thermometer.
PRTs have a long and reliable record of stability and accuracy in Temperature measurement, and over a range of temperatures with few equals. Almost enough range to measure the million degree core Temperature of the earth.
The rigor of the satellite onboard reference of Temperature is way beyond that of most of the “thermistors to be found in many of the ground based stations.
Now there could be systematic errors between what their on board references say the Temperature they measure is, and the actual temperature of the air or oxygen molecules at whatever altitude they are trying to read. That is a problem with ALL thermometry.
What the instrument readout is saying the Temperature is, is not necessarily the Temperature of what you thought you were measuring; it IS presumably the Correct Temperature of the thermometer, but what the hey is it, that is in thermal equilibrium with the thermometer and hence presumably at the same Temperature (izzat the zero’th law of thermodynamics ?)
For the ground based measurements, there isn’t any reason to believe that the Temperature samples that have been taken and homogenized even represent a real true sampling of the signal, as required by the Nyquist sampling theorem, that governs every kind of sampled data system, which is darn near every measurement system there is.
And those surface thermometers have the same problem. Even if they are properly calibrated, just what exactly are they in thermal equilibrium with and thus at the same Temperature as ??
Even the several earth based recording systems are not reading the same things, so you can’t even expect any two of them to agree with each other.
You would hope that each system is stable so that its variations from time to time are meaningful. But even that is not guaranteed if they aren’t Nyquist legal.
The satellite system are at least scanning systems so they do cover a greater selection of places on the planet, and might therefore be expected to be Nyquist legal.
Why they tend to show little or no significant temperature changes, I have no idea, but I have no reason to believe that they are grossly in error.
But then the surface stations are not even monitoring the same variables and certainly not the same location coverage, so the difference from the satellite data sets, may not have anything to do with system errors; they simply are not measuring the same system.
g
@ george e. smith April 25, 2015 at 9:42 pm
Oh “WOW”, George E, …. now that was great commentary …. and I thank you for posting it.
I should have read it before I posted my learned opinion just above your posting.
Given the context of both postings ….. I’se just hafta say ….. “Great minds think alike”. 🙂
Mr. Smith,
I read all of your comments with interest, and find you to be knowledgeable, thorough and insightful.
I always look forward to reading what you have to say.
Thank you sir, and please keep up the good work.
Might I suggest that, where recording has been done in the same place, with the same properly maintained equipment, and recorded over many years in the same manner, then one can at least get SOME idea of an overall trend for that particular location.
Then compile a list, or map, or graph, of where this same trend has been recorded.
Do this same procedure for each place with such measurements, and let analysts, and everyone else, look at the results and discuss what conclusions can be drawn or inferred.
The more reworking, combining, changing, altering, infilling, homogenizing, and any other such manipulations, the less it means, IMO.
As for satellite data, that methodology and equipment is outside of my direct experience, so I defer to those who know it best. I do think it is clear that the satellites are the only recording method capable of making measurements of the entire globe, rather than selected points. As such, there are biases that the satellites will completely avoid, such as those due to local siting effects like UHI.
“Might I suggest that, where recording has been done in the same place, with the same properly maintained equipment, and recorded over many years in the same manner, then one can at least get SOME idea of an overall trend for that particular location.
Then compile a list, or map, or graph, of where this same trend has been recorded.
Do this same procedure for each place with such measurements, and let analysts, and everyone else, look at the results and discuss what conclusions can be drawn or inferred.”
Curiously, I have done this already.
http://www.science20.com/virtual_worlds
Start with the latest, and at the bottom is a link to data at source forge.
[“source forge” ?? .mod]
George what about trend say over an 18 year period? I realize the temp itself is largely insignifingant.
“””””…..
Charlie
April 26, 2015 at 11:13 pm
George what about trend say over an 18 year period? …..””””‘
Charlie, I honestly don’t have any opinion regarding say an 18 year trend.
Now that said, I do watch for Lord Monckton’s periodic update, and take it as an honest report of just one of the experimental data sources (RSS). Other than that, I have no interest in trends or any of the other machinations of the statistical mechanics. The raw data as recorded from the instruments is the known facts as far as I am concerned, and I am quite unconcerned as to what they show.
In the general scheme of things, and the total world problem, I think the weather or climate are somewhat irrelevant.
Take for example the recent disastrous Kathmandu earthquake. It would appear from the collapsed structures, that these people lived with no expectation of ever experiencing such a tragedy. Such events are quite unpredictable, and they can happen to anyone at any time.
Making a big fuss over a somewhat unproven change of Temperature of one deg. C in the last 165 years, seems like a bunch of juveniles squabbling over a beach ball to me.
We have a lot better things to do.
The trouble even the ‘the globe HAS warmed. claims is not absolute statement.
If we are to define what we need to prove ‘warming ‘ in a scientifically meaningful way , and then compare it to what we actual have , which includes poor proxies , lack of data , inconsistent data , we find the two do not actual match that well.
We have some evidenced there has been warming , however nether the ‘quality’ nor quantity of that evdainced is has good we we like and the amount of ‘warming ‘ is arguable given we forced to use ‘better than nothing ‘ proxy sources.
These are issues that have given problem for weather prediction for many years , a long with its chaotic nature, and as yet there is no sign they do not a equal problem climate prediction outside claims of ‘settled science’
Many of your words and even phrases are agreeable.
Where we differ is the absolutes. These are simple estimates! Calculated, in isolation, using what is supposed to be the best available but definitively incomplete science.
I do not have a problem with the following sentences, so long as it is understood, that the sentences are not absolute.
Though, I would prefer the sentence includes, “…the result of these changes indicates a potential warming from double CO2 in an estimated range of 0.6 to 0.9 C
Then there is the following sentence. The belief that uncertainty is just a calculated result that improves because a few dodgy models are removed from the inputs.
My understanding is that not one of the computer models has ever undergone verification or certification. Nor has any of the model simulations undergone an engineering process determination; let alone fully documented error sources and their potential range of errors. Full identification of error from data through model simulation before attributing uncertainty ranges.
Back on the absolute front.
Those four molecules in every ten thousand bear such a heavy burden. One would think that water vapor must be left out of the action?
Once or perhaps better phrased as while those four molecules of CO2 are saturated, all normally captured infrared frequencies slip by, or would if it wasn’t for that dratted H2O. Face it, water vapor is the heavyweight molecule for trapping infrared. Yes, CO2 does contribute, but I doubt it contributes absolutely one hundred percent of the time.
Which explains why dry environments still cool off, nearly as fast as they used to, once the sun sets.
“Which explains why dry environments still cool off, nearly as fast as they used to, once the sun sets.”
Here here!
But why do you say “almost”?
I think you are overly pedantic here:
I see nothing wrong in the implicit “IF this model were the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth THEN” ….the result of these changes indicates a warming from double CO2 in a range of 0.6 to 0.9 C, much less than IPCC’s value of 1.5 to 4.5 C…
Personally I am of the opinion that water feedback is quite strongly negative, and the changes will be even less than that.
The computer climate models do not even include the relationships we know of in nature as their mathematical equations. They gave up on actually incorporating real science into the models a long time ago and fell back on simply cobbling up algorithms to approximate the laws and then make wanton adjustments to get the results they seek. Computer models are not science anyhow, so they should be given no credence in discussing climate. They are programmers’ fantasies and do exactly what they are programmed to do.
@ Leo Smth April 25, 2015 at 11:46 pm
Do you also see nothing wrong in the implicit “IF a hoppy toad had wings ……” …. thingy?
Water vapor absorption is pretty much done above about 4 to 5 km because at this temperatures there is not much left. The reduction in outgoing radiation with increased CO2 can be shown with well established tools such as from SpectralCalc that I used, but it is much less than 3.5 Wm-2 if looking down at 70 km or higher and partilal clouds are included. Modtran can also be used. These tools agree with satelitte measurements regarding present values. However, the increased back radiation from more CO2 must also be considered.
What is the scientific definition of climate skeptic and global warming?
When you say “global warming” do you mean made made global warming or all warming? Do you include only the effects of CO2, or all man made effects?
How can this be science without precise, agreed definitions of terms? Imagine that we didn’t agree on the length of a meter? We would be arguing all day over distance.
Yes, I meant “man made” global warming through CO2. I assummed that would be understood.
Anyone that assumes the phrase “global warming” always refers to ….. “man made” global warming through CO2 …… is EXACTLY what the proponents of CAGW wants them to assume.
How else could the CAGW’ers possibly get by with their “high-jacking” of all Interglacial global warming temperature increases from 1880 to present?
“DUH”, the Holocene IG “warming” didn’t magically & abruptly “stop and desist” simply because the US NWS denoted that 1880 was the “official” starting date for the recording of surface temperatures.
Yes, I meant “man made” global warming through CO2. I assummed that would be understood.
================
there in lies the rub. there are at least 3 definitions of global warming, and thus at least three definitions of climate change. And no one bothers to define which one they are using. Everyone assumes the other party is using the same definition.
Betrand Russell had a wonder proof years ago, that if you assumed that 1=2, you could prove anything. In this case we have 1=2=3.
1. global warming = AGW + natural
2. global warming = AGW only = ACO2 + AOther
3. global warming = ACO2 only
Also:
4. global warming = change in the equilibrium temperature at Earth’s surface
5. global warming = change in the Y-coordinate of a straight line that is fit to a global temperature time series in a specified interval of time.
Perhaps Russell got the proof from Hardy:
A story is told that the famous English mathematician G.H. Hardy made a remark at dinner that falsity implies anything. A guest asked him to prove that 2 + 2 = 5 implies that McTaggart is the Pope. Hardy replied, “We also know that 2 + 2 = 4, so that 5 = 4. Subtracting 3 we get 2 = 1. McTaggart and the Pope are two, hence McTaggart and the Pope are one.”
well , that the lower atmosphere has “warned”.
Another fact after Climategate is that we also have UNFCCC “human” induced global warming of the data?
The world has warmed from a previously cold period, the LIA, which it entered from a previously warm period, the MWP and so ad infinitum. The intense arguments over such a short period in the earth’s history is quite ludicrous.
The warmest recent temperature peak was in 1938, after which there was a pause of about 10 years, then cooling until 1978, warming to 1988, a pause until 2002, the 1998 anomalous El Nino, and cooling since 2006. Even using 1998 as the recent warm peak, the temperature only rose to equal to that of 1953, when we were already cooling. Overall we have been cooling since 1938, if one insists on drawing (straight) trend lines.
What messes up the picture is all of the unsupportable (dishonest) alterations to the temperature data that cool the past and warm the present—often the adjustments are greater than the overall claimed warming.
Also, the warmist “climate science” model in which CO2 in the upper tropical troposphere (at -17 deg C) sends outgoing IR radiation back to the surface (at 15 deg C), thus warming the surface, is false. As in sunlight, the surface is always warmer than the upper troposphere, the energy levels in the surface equivalent to this IR are already full and the downward IR will be reflected/rejected by the surface. It’s simple thermodynamics, which clearly indicates that the walls of a room do not heat up the people in it.
During sunlight, radiative gases, CO2 and water vapor, absorb, emit, and convert energy from heat to IR and the reverse, such that the effects are a wash in sunlight, they being saturated at the time.
It is at night that these gases actively cool the air, converting heat energy to IR, which can then be lost to space. This is why the air cools down so rapidly after sunset and why little breezes kick up so quickly on partly cloudy days as air rapidly cools in the shadows of the moving clouds.
Remember, none of the computer climate models have night-time. They are all 24/7 day-time. They completely ignore the outward energy flux at night as well as the massive global heat engine called the “water cycle” that carries about 85% of the solar input energy budget from the surface to altitude where it is lost to space. The climate models only consider radiative energy movement; a huge mistake.
This latter omission is massive, as the water cycle is a large negative feedback mechanism that is left out of climate model considerations. Instead, the models pretend that water vapor acts as a positive feedback mechanism, which not only totally ignores the water cycle, but creates a false situation that engenders the “runaway greenhouse” fantasies. The warmist “climate science” is fatally flawed, with the models leaving out over 50 major climate factors that are much larger than that of a trace gas in the atmosphere that, if it does have any effect, would be undetectable.
Do not forget that we cannot double CO2 in the atmosphere, as it partitions 50 to 1 into the oceans. To double the CO2 in the atmosphere, we would have to emit 51 times as much CO2 as 50 out of 51 parts would go into the hydrosphere. If we burned all of the available carbon of all kinds, the best we could do is raise atmospheric CO2 by 20%. As real world data clearly shows that our changing emission rates in the last ten years have no effect on the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere, this exercise ends up being a waste of time.
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html
many people also believe in recycling.
https://youtu.be/rExEVZlQia4?t=848
the advantages of using fossil fuel for energy. confirms Penn and Teller numbers.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/x4995e.htm
“Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s. By 1997, forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920.”
Good article. Thanks.
Patrick. Of course as we move from the last glacial episode the temp should rise …..however, unfortunatly, in their attempts to stack the deck by reducing former temp and eliminating rural reporting stations, we don’t really know for sure that the temp is rising. I keep records here in the Central Valley of Cal, and in the last 10 years their has been virtually no change. With official temp being manipulated we have no real standard to judge by.
Richard Petschauer is wrong. There is only one distinction: those who believe in what they are told by the UN/IPCC, the media, and by various organizations – and verifiable scientific facts and evidence produced, which conclusively support the conjecture that human CO2 emissions are causing dangerous global warming.
Scientific skeptics (the only honest kind of scientists) question man-made global warming (MMGW) for one simple reason: there has never been an empirical, testable measurement of MMGW.
If measurements of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) were found, they would resolve the question of climate sensitivity: how much would global temperatures rise following a doubling of CO2?
Guesstimates for the sensitivity number range from 6º+ C, down to zero. And everything in between. The reason we don’t know the sensitivity number is because no one has ever measured or quantified MMGW. Thus, MMGW remains no more than a Conjecture (the first step in the hierarchy: Conjecture, Hypothesis, Theory, Law). A conjecture is only an opinion. A starting point. It must be supported by scientific evidence, including measurements. But there are no measurements of MMGW.
The public is being sold a pig in a poke. After almost a century of searching by well paid scientists using the latest equipment, no measurable evidence for MMGW has been found. The “carbon” scare is designed to pass carbon taxes. It has nothing to do with verifiable science or scientific skepticism.
Skeptics are not at all like the climate alarmist crowd. What skeptics are saying is: produce verifiable, testable scientific evidence quantifying the fraction of MMGW out of total global warming, including natural warming.
No one has ever been able to produce any such measurements, despite many years of trying. That leads directly to one of two conclusions:
Either AGW is too minuscule to measure, or AGW does not exist.
As a skeptic I am willing to accept the conjecture that AGW exists. But if so, it is obviously very tiny, or it would have been measured by now. More than a billion dollars are spent annually searching for such measurements. The fact that MMGW has never been quantified is very strong evidence that the rise in CO2 presents no problem whatever. In fact, there has been no global warming for many years now, despite a steady rise in that beneficial and harmless trace gas. The rise in CO2 has caused a measurable rise in agricultural productivity. Thus, the only evidence found shows that more CO2 is beneficial. No global harm from CO2 has ever been identified.
There is the Scientific Method, and there is politics. Petschauer is attempting to triangulate skeptics into two separate groups, along with climate alarmists. That is wrong. Scientific skeptics understand that despite decades of searching, no one has ever quantified MMGW. Thus, at this point MMGW is politics, not science, and we are right to remain skeptical.
Of course, that CO2 seems to keep those wavelengths from reaching the earth in the first place.
http://members.ziggo.nl/bartzor/pvtopique/SolarSpectrum.png
Sure, but the other spectra (mostly visible light) do reach the earth and warm it up. It then emits almost totally in the IR. The incoming and outgoing spectra are very different.
Irrelevant. You need to show us some latitude, longitude, altitude, and time of day when the above relationship, specifically the IR, is reversed to has a greenhouse effect.
Well I’m not a fan of opining what other “skeptics” or other “believers in global warming” actually do or do not believe.
But I find myself having to take issue with some of the Guest’s post.
#1 The cited (from Trenberth) number of 390 Wm^-2 is almost exactly the Stefan Boltzmann total emittance for a Black Body at 288 K, the purported average surface Temperature of the earth (+15 deg. C) OK let’s go with that number.
#2 the TOA number of 235 Wm^-2 asserted as being the rate at TOA, where the atmospheric Temperature (per the author) is -60 deg. F or -51.1 deg. C or 222 K.
Now the Black body Temperature corresponding to 235 Wm^-2 happens to 253.7K, and not at all like 222 K.
So according to our author, we have a much less than black body radiator high in the atmosphere where the CO2 must reduce its density of molecules before it is able to send that heat out into space; but it apparently is able to radiate at a much higher rate than even a perfect black body.
The actual black body total emittance at -60 deg F is only 137.7 Wm^-2.
So the guest’s figures, wherever he got them are not correct.
Also I have to say that I get goose pimples all over me, with the hair on my arms all standing up, when I read of “heat leaving the planet.”
The figures cited by the author of 390 or 235 Wm^-2 are units of total radiant emittance which is electromagnetic radiation energy.
There are no such fluxes of “heat” energy coursing through the atmosphere, and “heat” cannot leave this planet; nor can heat arrive here from somewhere else like the sun.
All of the heat is made here right on planet earth.
Yes there is heat conducting and convecting through the atmosphere and also there is heat being deposited high in the atmosphere at times, when water vapor condenses into droplets or even turns into ice crystals.
One very prominent poster here at WUWT recently asserted that the earth’s atmospheric cooling rate, slows significantly whenever you have hot balmy (humid nights).
(EVERY 6PM WEATHER NEWSPERSON KNOWS THAT).
And he went on to add, that it is because H2O is a powerful GHG, and that’s why it traps the heat and stops it cooling at night.
NOTHING could be further from the truth.
Well it certainly is true that when you have a hot humid evening, you will also have high clouds develop, and the Temperature will stay high during the night; but yet it ALWAYS will be cooler in the morning.
What this poster didn’t say, and maybe doesn’t even know, and the 6PM weather geek certainly doesn’t know (apparently) is that on those hot balmy nights it actually is cooling much faster than on a cool dry night.
So what is going on and what didn’t the weather geek tell you on the 6pm news.
#1 “It was a very hot humid bright sunny day today, after the last few days rainy spells.”
#2 “After sunset, it will start to cool (naturally) but will be warmer than normal.”
#3 “You will feel it being muggy, because the relative humidity is higher than normal, so you can’t cool as well by sweating, which is why you feel so hot.”
#4 “As it cools and the warm moist air rises, it will eventually reach the dew point at some altitude, and then wispy clouds will start to develop.”
#5 “The hotter it is during the day, the higher will be the dew point temperature because of the lapse rate, so the clouds will form higher up.”
#6 ” If there wasn’t that much water around today, so that the relative humidity and mugginess were less severe, then the dew point temperature will be lower so the clouds will form at an even higher altitude than if the relative humidity is high.”
#7 ” The water vapor and air that is rising might be perhaps 10-20 degrees C higher than normal at night, so it contains that much more heat; BUT !! the water vapor in addition is carrying an additional 590 or thereabouts calories per gram of latent heat of vaporization that it sucked out of the surface during evaporation, and that is about 40 times as much heat as it takes to heat (or cool) the temperature by 15 deg. C So once the temperature finally gets down to the dew point at whatever altitude that happens, THE TEMPERATURE WILL NOT DROP ANY FURTHER until all of that 590 calories per gram of latent heat is lost in the cooling process, and since the temperature is higher, the rate of heat loss will also be higher, even though the Temperature is NOT falling.
So the actual night cooling rate is much higher when it is humid, and after all the moisture condenses, there might be a second period of stationary Temperature, if the water droplets get down to the freezing point, and then have to give up another 80 calories per gram in turning into ice crystals.
So stop with the H2O GHG effect lowering the cooling rate. It accelerates the rate of loss of heat, by transporting a whole lot of latent heat away from the surface.
COOLING is not synonymous with TEMPERATURE DROP.
And please stop confusing “heat” (which requires real atomic materials) with EM radiant energy, which doesn’t need the presence of ANY material.
And high clouds at night do not make it hot at night; it was the high daytime temperature and humidity that made both the hotter night and also the clouds.
G
Thank you George E Smith. I have learned something here. The basic concept that humidity does not equal higher mean temperature and doesn’t get even close to proving a greenhouse effect was self evident to me, but I lacked a detailed way to describe the actual process of what does occur. Your explaination is very satisfactory.
we land lubbers forget that 70% of the planet is water, and down-welling IR does not penetrate the ocean in any significant fashion. rather IR interacts with the water molecules at the very surface, to increases the evaporation rate, increasing cloud cover, reducing the incoming solar at visible frequencies, which cools the oceans. It is the visible light that penetrates the ocean, and this is blocked by the clouds over the ocean that result from evaporation.
George e, that was wonderful, precise and sufficient.
George e. smith
April 25, 2015 at 3:17 pm
You make good points.
1. It is wrong to theorize about the atmosphere based on how hot or cold a living personfeels.
2. It wrong to say more H2O causes less cooling.
@ george e. smith April 25, 2015 at 3:17 pm
I literally love Science with a passion ….. and you never cease to amaze me with your ability to express your knowledge in/of science in terms that even a “science dummy” should have no trouble at/in understanding of said.
George Smith notes:
I have some quibbles with this, especially the part he shouted.
Most of the cooling on clear nights comes from the ground (and trees, building, cars, roads, etc) radiating heat. As the surface (better word than ground) cools, air is cooled by conduction. With cooler surface level air, convection stops, often turning into a shallow temperature inversion with cool air at the surface and warmer air aloft.
Once the surface gets down to the dew point, then dew forms. As dew forms and is removed from the air, the dewpoint goes down and the air temperature continues to fall, but at a slower rate.
This effect is much more visible in warm temperatures. In New England winters, there is little enough water vapor in the air so that as frost forms, the temperature decline is little impeded, especially at sub-zero (below 20°C) temps.
Let me see if I can find an example from my weather data.
Well, that was pretty easy, I just looked at August data (humid, but the nights are getting longer) and found http://wermenh.com/images/dew_temp_decline.png
(Images may not display for me, you may have to click on it.) if you extrapolate out the exponential curve segments from early evening, say before 2100, before dew forms and then the segment after 2100, I think you’ll see the different rate of cooling I was talking about.
My wind data for most of that month was recorded as zero – an ant colony thought the weather station was a good place for a nest, including the area around the anemometer bearings….
You can look for more examples at http://wermenh.com/wx/query.html
Ric Werme
Good, useful format – but for NH, not the high Arctic. I have ten years of raw data needed to calculate heat transfer for Arctic Ocean seacoast at latitude 83N , but need to work with it to get daily and hourly “averages” for 2 meter temperature, wind speed, pressure, relative humidity (from dewpoint temp and pressure) and relative cloudiness. How do you recommend proceeding?
Here’s one showing the cooling blasting right past the point where frost was forming. (The frost point is a bit higher than the dew point, but I don’t display that on these graphs.)
http://c-73-219-4-25.hsd1.nh.comcast.net/cgi-bin/wx_fetch?table=raw&year=2015&month=2&day=28&len=2&vars=out
It’s very hard to see a change in the exponential decay in air temp. Frost began to form around 2300, that shows up as the decline in dew point as what little moisture in the air freezes out.
RACookPE1978 notes:
I’m not sure what you’re aiming for, and I’m not sure about how things behave at 83N (err, how things behave away from Concord NH would be a better comment), but I’ve thought using clues in my weather data (temperature, relative humidity, wind direction, air pressure, etc.) to look for things like:
Cold fronts (change in air pressure slope, wind direction change, temperature change (sometimes).
Formation and break up of air inversions (calm vs active wind, rate of temperature change)
Sunny days or clear nights (temperature swings, nighttime air inversions)
Time constants of exponential temperature changes (perhaps look for exponential curves, perhaps use clear weather periods). I’m not sure what it would be good for, but it would be interesting and could lead to graphing radiated energy inflow/outflow.
My “last 2 days” weather display lets me pick out a lot of this, see http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wx/current.htm and the technical/software notes at http://wermenh.com/wx/vantage_software.html
If you want to take this offline, my Email address is at http://wermenh.com/contact.html
“””””…..I have some quibbles with this, especially the part he shouted……”””””
special informational message for ric werme.
i don’t shout.
i do use capitals to emphasis a few words, that i wish to draw attention to.
some posters here use italics instead of capitals to emphasize something.
i don’t have an italics keyboard so i use capitals.
some people use blue letters instead of black letters to emphasize something.
i only have a black keyboard so i can’t do blue letters, so i use capitals for emphasis.
some people use text boxes to enclose items they want to emphasize.
i don’t have a text box key so i use capitals for emphasis.
so if in future you see some capitals in my text, that is either for normal written english grammatical reasons, or i am indicating a special emphasis for that text.
if you see that as shouting, then perhaps you have a problem you need to deal with.
i don’t shout; it’s very noisy.
and i believe i said that water vapor once it cools down to the dew point or condensation temperature, will remain at that temperature until it gives up the latent heat of evaporation, and condenses into a liquid or even to a solid. once that phase change has occurred, then the temperature (of that water, or ice) can continue to fall. if i did not make it clear that this was the h2o temperature in the atmosphere, and not the ground or surface temperature, then that was my fault.
in general the temperature of anything else besides the condensing material can cool or warm independently, in any way it chooses to.
now i do understand that some materials like h2o can supercool, below the condensation or freezing point, without the phase change occurring, but in this instance, i presupposed that some appropriate substrate like a dust particle is present to enable nucleation of a droplet.
and if in fact my information is in error and water vapor can just go on cooling beyond the condensation or freezing temperature at will without a phase change occurring then i will have learned something today.
so thank you for that enlightenment; i have always believed that didn’t occur.
g
ps. for some reason this editor keeps on trying to capitalize letters that i typed as lower case.
if that happens then i apologise for that
George noted:
I think one source of confusion is you’re talking about cloud formation and I’m talking about surface cooling, apologies for not being more clear. On clear nights, a lot more cooling happens near the ground, as the surfaces generally can radiate through the entire LWIR spectrum for the temperature. Air is limited to the wavelengths available to water vapor and CO2, and it’s absorbing nearly as much as it radiates.
You can see this at Mt Washington. It sticks a few thousand feet into the general airflow, and on average there’s very little temperature change between night and day. Compare http://vortex.plymouth.edu/mwn24.gif with http://vortex.plymouth.edu/1p124.gif which is a grass strip airport in a valley in Plymouth, NH. Not very nearby, but it’ll do. On clear nights you can see the airport cool down until dawn around 1000Z when the sun warms and disperses the inversion and wind picks up as convection lets the wind aloft come down to the surface. At Mt Washington, it’s all about the airmass, it’s good data for watching stuff like cold air advection.
For the low and mid level cloud forming events you’re talking about (is that right?), there’s usually plenty of condensation nuclei. As soon as water droplets start forming, there’s less water vapor and hence the dew point has gone down, so the temperature has to fall for more condensation to occur. However, the latent heat offsets whatever is causing the cooling so the temperature fall slows. Note the air never dries out completely.
In really, really clean air near the top of the troposphere, water vapor does supersaturate. You can see this on days when airplanes generate contrails that keep growing into broad cirrus clouds. If the air at flight level is not super saturated, then contrails will evaporate as dry air mixes with the exhaust, sometimes the air is so dry that contrails don’t form at all.
@ Ric Werme April 26, 2015 at 7:11 pm
Ric, me thinks you have gotten yourself confused ….. and thus what you are seeing is not what you got.
First of all, the amount of H20 vapor in the air doesn’t determine the Dew Point.
And iffen you are talking about the actual formation of “dew” or “frost” (H2O droplets/ice crystals) on a surface … it is the temperature differential between said surface and the air that caused the H2O vapor to condense on said surface. And when that condensation occurs …. said surface will absorb the 590 calories per gram of latent heat that is lost by the phase change of the H2O (vapor to liquid) ….. plus an additional 80 calories per gram of latent heat if said phase change is from H2O vapor to ice crystals (frost).
And remember, the air temperature is determined by the temperature of all the gas molecules in the air, ….. not just the H2O molecules.
And you can’t see the “dew” that forms on the surface until those water droplets get big enough for you to see them. And that is why your walls, ceilings and windows get so dirty so easily. Those tiny drops of “dew” that you can’t see, …… collects dust particulate and then evaporate ….. leaving said particulate “stuck” to said surface. And after that occurs several dozens of times then things start looking pretty “dingy” ….. and ya gotta wash that “crud” off your windows and walls.
Samuel C Cogar commented
Are you sure? It might not the be the only thing determining dew point, but isn’t it one of the main parameters?
And that 670 calories is lost to space, as I know my car isn’t any warming due to the dew. I’ve also notice a reduction in cooling rate under clear skies as temp nears dew point (ie rel humidity goes up), at least where I live (i’m beginning to think this is a big factor in our personal view of climate).
Not just H2O, but I think it has a much larger effect than is realized, think of the millions (billions??) of gallons of steam is evaporated out of the oceans in the tropics, and then carried to the extra-tropics. Again, I live in a location that experiences both polar and mid-latitude Hadley cells, and the mid-latitude cell is chock full of warm water that the polar cells lack, and I think is the main reason there’s a temp difference between a few clear days of mid-latitude air and a few clear days of polar cell air when experienced at a single location within a hand full of days from each other..
Molecule for molecule, CO2 is going to block as much incoming as outgoing. How much is blocked is determined by the amount of CO2, not the amount arriving or leaving.
Trying to warm the Earth with CO2 is like trying to brighten a room by sprinkling silver in the room’s one glass window in order to “trap” the light in the room. The silver will of course reflect outgoing light back in — and equally reflect incoming light back out.
Evidently, my post regarding clouds and cooling at night came out somewhat unintelligible, and my point apparently was missed by some readers.
My comment was really intended to be a simple comparison between two different weather situations; and I assumed that would be quite apparent. Well we all know about assume.
Actually we should compare three different situations.
#1 would be an actual real planet model, such as Planet Trenberth. This planet sits at thermal equilibrium bathed continuously on all side (4pi steradians) by a uniform shell sun at a modest 342 W/m^2 all the time. which is about the total emittance of a 278 K black body radiator. But due to reflectances from the surface, this flux can only bring a BB up to about 255 K.
But a uniform component of CO2 in its atmosphere warms it up to an isothermal 288 K everywhere, by trapping some of the LWIR radiant energy trying to leave the planet.
That Temperature has remained stable within one deg.C for the last 165 years, but the inhabitants live in constant fear that it will rise catastrophically by two more deg. C if they let the CO2 increase from its present idyllic 288 ppmm up to 560 ppmm, which will lead to the extinction of 80% of all life forms.
We are all totally familiar with Planet Trenberth that I completely omitted it in my earlier post.
The other two conditions are fictional and not representative of any real planet.
#2 is also a case I didn’t mention, because I assumed (there I go again) that readers would see that as a comparison for themselves.
This is the case of a dry desert planet, with only CO2 as a pollutant in its atmosphere and no water vapor. It is illuminated only over half of its spherical surface and only for half of the day, but its sun supplies radiant energy at a high rate of 1362 W.m^2 which is capable of heating a black body up to much more than 278K, in fact about 394 K, but with some reflectance losses, and the thermal time constant it generally doesn’t get hotter than about 330 K before the sun sets.
At that point the planet starts to cool rapidly, with the CO2 pollutant slowing down the escape of the LWIR energy; but the CO2 needs to be wet in order to maintain the Temperature, so without any H2O, the computer models say that it gets really cold at night on such a fictional planet.
#3 is the case I tried to present, which is a fictional planet like #2 except this one has lots of H2O around, which the incoming 1362 W/m^2 can evaporate lots of during the day, but because H2O can also absorb some of the incoming sunlight, the irradiance of the surface generally isn’t more than about 1,000 W/m^2 so it doesn’t get as hot as #2, maybe only 310 K by the end of the day.
So when the sun sets, the ground starts cooling by radiation and conduction and convection.
What I failed to say in my earlier post, was anything about what happened to the ground, but I concentrated on what was happening to all of that water vapor that got evaporated during the day.
When I said that the Temperature fell to the dew point and then stopped while the H2O condensed, I was referring …… only ….. to the Temperature of that water vapor; not to the whole atmospheric column.
Because of the high thermal capacity of H2O compared to dry air, the air around the water vapor and eventually water droplets / ice crystals will stay close to the water temperature until the phase changes are finished before that particular water can go on cooling as radiation extracts further energy from it.
The ground or anything else of course will do its own thing, since it isn’t going to undergo a phase change (we hope).
So if I didn’t make it clear that I was focused on the atmospheric water vapor and its cooling, then please accept my apologies, I assumed that would be self apparent.
G
george e. smith
I would, rather, try to make a real-world (non-atmosphere) “planet” climate simulation work first at every “planet” (airless moon) we can find. Real world solar radiation number, diameters, real world rotation times and solar-distance and planet surface values for measured albedos at every latitude.
THEN. After the airless planet climate models are correct for every latitude for every moon and Mercury, we know we have begun the problem simulation correctly. Then you can go to the simplified Martian and Neptune models (no water vapor). Then we can assume the earth models can begin to be initiated.
I hear the thump of your head banging against a brick wall. A good response is another chart, one that shows blackbody radiation at normal surface temperatures. When done that way, CO2 and water vapor dominate the absorption spectrum.
So the roaches come in at 5250 C but they don’t go back out.at 30 C! (not very fast anyway; they do get out but pile up trying to get out) The earth’s surface is a converter of the dominant wavelengths of radiant energy.
@ micro6500 April 27, 2015 at 5:38 am
Yes, H2O vapor is, …… because without it there would be no dew or Dew Point.
Uh, … NO, …. you car absorbed those 670 calories. Whenever those 590 or 670 calories are lost to space …… the resulting precipitation is called raindrops or sleet, …… not dew.
Now that requires a more complex response …. involving High Pressure verses Low Pressure air masses, … Cold Fronts verses Warm Fronts, …. convection winds, etc., so best you read up on those terms.
Samuel C Cogar commented
I think it’s radiated upward, and under a clear sky that’s 80F colder than the surface air, I see no reason why it wouldn’t. I do know that my car retains none of the heat liberated.
Ric Werme raised some issues relative to my post, that indicated that the ONE point I had intended to make had not really been brought to the fore front.
So in a few words, here is what that issue is; (relative to the formation of clouds).
The latent heats of evaporation and freezing of water are huge in comparison with the specific heat of water.
For example at freezing or melting, the latent heat of that phase change is 80 calories per gram (roughly). so if you have a gram of ice at zero deg. C and you add 80 calories of heat to it still at zero degrees C, then your gram of ice will melt, and in general the whole will remain at zero deg. C until the ice is all gone.
If now you add another 80 calories to the ice water, that same amount of heat energy will raise the Temperature of the ice water up to about 80 deg. C; getting near to the boiling point, in fact it could boil at some altitude. So the latent heat is an impressive amount of energy, and for a water droplet cloud, it will take some time to get rid of that heat so the ice cloud can then cool further.
But the situation is a little different for the vapor / liquid transition as Ric pointed out.
There is a fixed “boiling point” at 100 deg. C at 760 mm Hg pressure, since that is the saturated vapor pressure over water at 100 deg. C. The latent heat of boiling at 100 deg. C is given as 538.7 calories per gram, in my Handbook of Chemistry and Physics 48th edition 1967-68 (I need anew one).
BUT ! water can and does evaporate at almost any Temperature, and the latent heat of evaporation varies with the Temperature, as will the equilibrium vapor pressure (partial pressure) of water vapor over water. I have always used a simple “rule of thumb” to figure the latent heat at any Temperature thusly: If you need 538.7 cal/g at 100 deg. C, then at a lower Temperature you will need more, and a good guess would be that you need an additional calorie for each deg. C that you are below the boiling point.
Ergo water at 60 deg. C could be heated to 100 deg. C with 40 calories (per gram) and then you would need the 538.7 to boil it, so it would be 578.7 cal per gram at 60 deg. C
That is NOT accurate and it is 562.8 at 60 deg C, but it is closer. And if you take that down to zero deg. C water you would guess 638.7 cal per gram, but the correct value is only 595.4 cal per gram at zero deg C.
So as Ric pointed out, you will get condensation at night, as rising water vapor gets colder, so the relative humidity climbs until droplets form, so his point was that the Temperature will still be falling, as there isn’t really a fixed phase change Temperature comparable to the zero deg. C freezing point.
And my point was that the amount of heat (latent heat) that has to be removed to condense into water is HUGE compared to the amount of heat you need to remove to cool the water (or the air) down from that catastrophic 2 deg C overheating that will extincticate 50% of all species, if we let it happen.
So the cooling rate of the water vapor by conduction, convection AND radiation will take much longer than does just dropping the temperature once the phase change has happened.
And remember H2O rally is the ultimate GHG so it is very infrared radiation active, due to that 104 deg bend in the molecule.
Water has a permanent electric dipole moment because of that bend, whereas CO2 being straight has NO electric dipole moment until it distorts such as bending about the C atom. I guess CO2 is really two electric dipoles end to end in opposite directions (if you are an antenna geek) and although the then oppose each other they do in fact form an electric quadrupole, and that antenna is capable of sending and receiving EM radiation although the antenna radiation pattern is nothing like that of a radiating dipole.
So Ric did raise some interesting issues that I had not properly addressed. I was focused on the relatively huge amount of latent heat that had to be gotten rid of, which would slow the Temperature fall rate down from what it is in a dry desert at night.
G
If I’m not mistaken (often am) it is the Clausius-Clapeyron equation that describes all that vapor pressure and latent heat business.
Prof Wiil Happer at Princeton, sicced me onto the CC equation and suggested I learn how to derive it. I still need to do that; I’ve got all kinds of time to fill. (I wish)
George,
I can see this effect in my nightly weather station data, as the air cools, rel humidity increases, when it starts to get in the 80-90% the rate of cooling (of air temp) starts to slow down, from 6-8F/hour near midnight, down to 1-2F/hour at dawn, even when an IR thermometer pointed straight up reads the same -40 to -60F or even colder.
It’s the energy from water getting “wrung” out of the air has to be “lost” for the air to cool any further. I also think the energy for these two state changes sets up a obstacle for air temps to cross these temps.
But as I said this morning, I think it’s getting radiated to space.
George, here’s a few years showing the impact on temp from humidity (and vise-versa)
Link, please?
http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/geomorphology/geo_index/Appendix_A_images/FigA.2.gif
in more detail
disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/geomorphology/geo_index/Appendix_A_images/FigA.2.gif
So visible light 3.8 to 7.5 doesn’t have CO2 affecting it.
And visible light is .37 of the entire range of the .2 to 3.2 . Or .37 of about 3
[around 1/9th of spectrum].
And this 1/9th of spectrum is less 1/2 of the power of sunlight:
“sunlight at Earth’s surface is around 52 to 55 percent infrared (above 700 nm), 42 to 43 percent visible (400 to 700 nm), and 3 to 5 percent ultraviolet “- wiki
The .7 to .1.3 of near infrared being .7 of the .2 to 3.2 spectrum also isn’t affected by CO2, and roughly appears to be more 1/2 of infrared of sunlight which reaches the surface.
And after 1.3 both H20 and CO2 seem to be preventing the sunlight from directly reaching the surface.
What seems like the greatest attenuation is not the listed gases of the O3, O2, H2O, or CO2 but rest of atmosphere- such as perhaps N2, dust, and/or unknown/unlisted gases.
What I called the dew point, means the temperature at which condensation (phase change) occurs. if that’s an incorrect usage, then my apologies. I mean the temperature at which phase change occurs, whatever the correct term for that is.
g
First place to respond to George e. Smith from April 25, 2015 at 3:17 pm.
You question the 235 Wm-2 escaping from the planet. It comes mostly from 4 sources each with a different average temperature. (1) The surface at 15C and 390 Wm-2 with about 10% going to directly to space (the atmospheric window passes nearly 25% but with 60% cloud cover only 10% gets through). (2) Clouds at the about 2.5 km (about –1.5C) through the full atmospheric window of 25%. (3) Water vapor at about 5Km (-17.5C) at its radiation wavelengths that are less that from the surface where about 80% goes directly to space because C02 is all that is left and it only covers about 20% of the bandwidth, (4) CO2 at around 10 Km at -50C which emits blackbody intensity but only from about 12 to 18 microns (where the 20% comes from).
Use Planck’s equation and integrate over the range). Rounding, I got the following values. (Wm-2)
Surface: 40
Cloud tops: 30
Water Vapor: 112
CO2: 53
Total: 235
Adding these approximations gets the 235 Wm-2, which agrees closely with the values from Kiehl and Trenberth cited in my essay and satellite data from that time. I changed these all by +1C and got a new value of the outgoing radiation with an increase of 3.73 Watts, more than 3.2 that IPCC uses. If ones use the 235 Wm-2 value and calculates an equivalent radiation temperature, it is -19.3 C. Using the Sefan-Boltzmann equation with a 1C increase gives an outgoing radiation of 238.73, also an increase of 3.73, which shows the simpler method is good. DO NOT confuse this with what IPCC uses for the 3.7 Wm-2 DECREASE in outgoing radiation from 2x CO2. They estimate increasing the surface temperature (and the atmosphere with the same lapse rate) will increase outgoing radiation by only about 3.2 Wm-2, hence a larger surface temperatutre rise is needed to offset the 3.7 Wm-2 drop.
For micro6500 above.
I would agree with you that the energy is lost to space.
It is a common misconception that the formation of clouds results in heating, because of all the latent heat energy that is dumped out up there.
NO ! The clouds don’t even form until that latent heat energy is sucked out of the water vapor, either thermally by collisions with even colder air molecules or as you point out by radiation, since H2O is a perfectly good LWIR active radiating molecule, and of course once the liquid droplets form, that liquid is also a perfectly good thermal (BB like) radiator.
And any substrate like a dust particle or a microbe, makes a perfect droplet nucleation site.
g
The solar spectrum graph below posted by probono, is actually from ” Handbook of Geophysics and Space Environments.” Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, Bedford, Mass, edited by Shea L. Valley.
It is usually referred to simply as Valley, 1965
Of particular note is all of the H2O absorption lines starting around 700 nm, which means that atmospheric H2O acts to reduce ground level solar energy, and is therefore a cooling influence in that regard. Note also the very significant Ozone absorption even in the 600 nm region.
So solar UV makes atmospheric Ozone (after making atomic oxygen (O) and then longer wavelengths of solar radiation can also destroy that ozone.
The graph doesn’t say anything about the Raleigh scattering that makes the sky blue, but I suspect that is a good part of the peak clipping in the blue green region.
And CO2 starts to show up at 1.4 microns, so it too does have a cooling effect by absorbing some incoming solar radiation before it get to the ocean surface or the ground.
g
More a comment to the replies above mine and that is, haven’t we only recently discovered that co2 is far from evenly mixed in the atmosphere?
Is this factored into any of the calculations/models?
Questions from a total amateur.
No, we haven’t discovered that.
CO2 is evenly mixed in the atmosphere.
Of course, in the region of a forest fire or active volcano it is temporarily elevated but, in general, it is evenly mixed.
…http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/21/settled-science-the-ipccs-premature-consensus-is-demonstrated-by-the-orbiting-carbon-observatory/
There is a graphic at this WUWT post that shows CO2 not so evenly mixed.
This is from the Orbiting Climate Observatory -2, OCO-2.
Thanks, RobRoy
Rob Roy: To me that chart suggests that CO2 concentrations shown were about 395 +/-8 ppmv which seems fairly even to me. The range would have widened slightly if the poles had been included, and there is a well known small seasonal effect in different localities, but not enough to undermine a “fairly evenly mixed” conclusion.
387 to 402.5 PPM is what it is. “Evenly Mixed” is not defined. Call it what you will.
@ RobRoy April 26, 2015 at 4:51 am
Me thinks you are utterly confused at what you think you are “seeing” on that cited graphic.
A satellite can neither see nor detect the actual CO2 molecules in the atmosphere regardless of whether they are or are not evenly mixed.
Thus what you are seeing on the cited graphic is 11 days accumulations of detected IR radiation at the same emission frequency that CO2 emits said ……. and … the location on the vertical axis that said CO2 was when it emitted said IR radiation.
And don’t be fergettin, ….. the earth is rotating west to east ….. underneath that IR radiating CO2 …. and the Trade Winds are pushing that CO2 faster east to west than the earth is rotating ……thus it is more than likely that they are recording IR emissions from the same CO2 for said 11 sequential days.
http://www.rossway.net/tradewinds.jpg
Not to much surprising about the CO2 map which shows higher concentration near the warmer equator than the cooler poles.
Well Richard P’s post above is a big surprise to me. Namely his statement that The Kiele Trenberth radiation to space includes an assumption of 60% cloud cover.
In my view, if you are going to observe the effect of GHGs such as CO2, from outer space, you should be limiting your field of view to include ONLY areas of the earth that are completely clear of clouds.
Then you may have a reasonable chance to measure a correct emission spectrum for the atmosphere and surface.
Cloud properties are simply too variable to expect a realistic model of CO2 effects if clouds are present.
If his statement is correct, then that simply make my view of the Trenberth earth energy budget just that much more jaundiced.
How many times have the modellers told us that they don’t model clouds very well.
All the more reason to measure regions that currently are completely free of clouds.
Where I live in California, I often can go for many days on end, and never ever see even the faintest wisp of a cloud at any time during the day.
So I know it is possible to look down from space, and select a field of view that has no clouds in it, to make your measurements of the surface / atmosphere radiation spectrum.
g
Well at the north pole the atmospheric CO2 varies 18-20 ppmm cyclically every year, while at Mauna Loa, it only varies by about 6ppmm, and at the south pole, it varies about -1 ppmm (because it is out of phase with the north polar cycle.
So if you consider 19-21 ppmm difference from pole to pole as being well mixed then, why would you even wonder about any variation in CO2 at all.
Geroge E. Smith wrote,
“It is a common misconception that the formation of clouds results in heating, because of all the latent heat energy that is dumped out up there.”
and he says,
“NO ! The clouds don’t even form until that latent heat energy is sucked out of the water vapor, either thermally by collisions with even colder air molecules or as you point out by radiation, since H2O is a perfectly good LWIR active radiating molecule . . . . ”
George, you are confused here regarding radiation from water vapor and its transfer of heat with other gases and the much larger latent heat that is generated when water vapor turns into the liquid phase, at which time the amount of water vapor or humidity drops. Cooling of water vapor as it rises does not subtract from the latent transfer when it later turns into the liquid form. This action is usually associated with cloud formation which are made of small water droplets that radiate over thefull spectrum of a black body. At times one can see the results of this warming in the rising of the tops in cumulus clouds.
And this latent heat warms the atmosphere and clouds which increases the radiation to outer space, the final step in the negative feedback from increased sea surface evaporation from warming there.
Probono your graph shows that CO2 only affects the tail of the downwelling radiation – almost negligible. Some of this light is reflected (e.g. from snow) and thus goes up again also unaffected by the CO2. But a significant fraction gets absorbed as heat, and it is that heat that Petschauer shows in the first graph, trying to re-radiate into space. This happens at all latitudes, longitudes, altitudes, and times of day, though of course your downwelling graph only happens in the daytime.
Well this is as close to Richard’s reply to my post as I can post.
Here is a do it yourself in your kitchen experiment that I would strongly recommend that everyone try for themselves.
What you need is a 16 ounce or thereabouts metrically ultra thin plastic water bottle. The one shot drink it and chuck the bottle types, have gotten extremely thin, so less plastic mass for the land fill. They are so thin that it is extremely easy to crush the bottle just by trying to pick up the empty bottle.
So now you need a supply of cold water (ice cold would be great), and you need a supply of really hot water, near boiling. Those hot and cold red and blue water machines are good for this.
Phase one of the experiment is the cold phase.
You gingerly take hold of the bottle near the top just before it narrows down. The waisted “coke” bottle shape is best, between your thumb and forefinger, using as little pressure as possible to hold the bottle under the cold water tap, while you slowly let ice cold water flow into the bottle. Initially your fingers holding the bottle will feel nothing (much).
As the bottle slowly fills with ice cold water taking care to not run the water down the bottle, the bottle will get heavier, but otherwise you will feel nothing.
As the water slowly rises in the bottle some heat will try to flow down the very thin plastic bottle walls to where the ice cold water level is; but you will find, that the ice water level gets almost to your fingers, before you ever feel the icy cold of that water, which will be dramatically apparent, one the water is above your fingers, and heat can flow straight through the thin wall of the bottle from your fingers, which is why it will suddenly feel icy cold.
So that is phase one. You feel NO heat transport, before the ice water reaches your fingers.
Now for phase two: You repeat phase one, but this time instead of ice cold water running into the bottle without touching the walls at the top, you have the near boiling water (slowly) flowing into the bottle while you lightly hold it between thumb and fore finger.
This time, the result will be dramatically different, and you must be careful to not burn yourself.
The instant that you have as much as a teaspoon full of hot water in the bottom of the bottle, your fingers will feel burning hot in about two seconds, and you haven’t even covered the bottom of the bottle with the hot water yet.
So what is happening. We already proved that heat has a hard time flowing along the very thin shell of the bottle, and you couldn’t feel the cold, until the bottle filled up to your fingers.
But now, you instantly feel a burning heat in your fingers.
What has happened, is that the water at say 90 deg C , is near boiling, and a whole lot of very hot water vapor at near 90 deg. C will fill the bottle right up to where your 98.6 deg. F fingers are, and suddenly you have 90 deg. C vapor right next to your 98.6 deg F fingers, and that will burn you; and the cooler Temperature of your fingers, will cool that near steam, and as it turns back into water, you will receive a dose of latent heat of around 540 cal per gram of vapor, which is SIX TIMES the number of calories of heat it took to heat that water from freezing Temperature to the 90 deg C hot Temperature.
AT NO TIME, will the Temperature at your fingers EVER exceed the 90 deg C that the water vapor (steam) was at, but a whole lot of heat energy will get dumped into your fingers, which are a nice heat sink for the heat from the condensing steam. A gram of steam condensing on your fingers will deposit 540 calories of latent heat, and before it cools down to the 98.6 deg F of your fingers, it will drop another (90-37) = 53 calories per gram, or about 593 calories total.
I repeat; at NO TIME, will the Temperature of your fingers exceed the 90 deg. C that the steam was at as it escaped from the near boiling water.
On second thoughts, you should do this with the hot water at no more than 50 deg C, so you don’t scald yourself. I have done it with virtually boiling water that I did boil and waited till it quit boiling before dropping it through a funnel into the bottle, and the end result was that I did drop the water bottle because otherwise my fingers would have been in bad shape.
Then when you have done the experiment and have convinced yourself what is happening, come back here and tell Richard Petschauer whether you agree with him.
When ice at ANY temperature melts in warmer water, the Temperature NEVER EVER rises above the Temperature it was at when the ice started to melt; the Temperature goes down. And when water vapor (steam) at any Temperature condenses, into water, the Temperature NEVER EVER rise above the original Temperature of the water vapor; the Temperature goes down.
g
probono – Some strange visual talent in your solar spectrum. Aren’t you a bit optimistic with seeing ultraviolet at 375 millimicrons? Nominal shortwave limit is 400. Best I could do beyond this was to pick up the cyanogen bands at 3883 Angstroms but that disappeared when I got cataracts.
Regarding Geroge E. Smith and his experimemnt with steam above.
It is not clear what this has to do with the atmosphere. The following from a college physics textbook in the “Thermodynamics of the Atmosphere” section regarding cloud formation:
“The water vapor condenses on the hygroscopic nuclei present and forms the base of the cumulus cloud. As the water vapor condenses, it gives up its heat of condensation (539 cal gm) to the rising air. And this liberated heat immediately raises the temperature of the rising air above that of the surrounding air. The air is thus accelerated upward by the buoyant force of the more dense air of the environment.“
Well known to meteorologists, when air rises, it expands because of the reduced pressure, which causes it to cool. Dry air will cool by about 10°C for every 1 km it rises, but moist air will only cool by about 5°C for every 1 km, because of warming from condensation of water vapor. The typical value used for this “lapse rate” is 6.5 C / km.
In evaporation the statistical variation of the kinetic energy of the water molecules allows some of those near the surface with the MOST energy to escape the binding force of surface tension and become a water vapor molecule. This REDUCES the average energy of the remaining molecules and hence the water temperature drops.
In condensation, as the air temperature drops enough the LEAST energetic water vapor molecules that are near liquid water or a suitable nuclei will get attracted and become a water molecule. This INCREASES the average energy of the remaining water vapor molecules in the air and hence the air temperature rises.
Notice in evaporation, the water cools while in condensation the air warms. After either of these happen, there may be heat transfer between water and the air.
If a piece of ice is placed in a glass of water, the ice will cool the water and become warm until it reaches the freezing point after which its temperature will not change. However, until all the ice is melted, the water will continue to cool as its heat is transferred to the ice. Just because the ice temperature does not change does not mean that heat is not being transferred and the water temperature will continue to drop.
Part One: Heating the earth
A popular global heat balance shows 340 W/m2 incoming radiative flux at the top of atmosphere. A watt is a power unit, energy over time, equaling 3.41 Btu of energy/heat/work per hour. Over a 24 hour period the earth’s ToA semi-spherical surface would collect 7.13E18 Btu of energy.
Dry air is mostly nitrogen and oxygen with a heat capacity of about 0.24 Btu/lb-F. For dry air to absorb 7.13E18 Btu would require a temperature increase of about 2.63 F. Over 24 hours.
Water vapor evaporates/absorbs, condenses/releases, energy/heat at about 1,000 Btu/lb. For atmospheric water vapor to absorb 7.13E18 Btu through evaporation would require an amount equal to 25.5% of the current atmospheric water vapor content, i.e. more clouds, more albedo, more reflection, a self-correcting thermostat. That’s the entire ToA!
Part Two: IPCC RCPs
IPCC AR5 states that between the years 1750 and 2011 man generated GHGs increased the RF by less than 3 W/m2. (Is that the downwelling?) Contrast that figure with the ToA.
IPCC bases its various computer model predictions on four cases:
Case………….…CO2 ………….……Radiative……Dry air, ΔF………..Increase in atmospheric
………………….Concentration……..Forcing………………………………water vapor content
RCP 2.6…………421 ppm CO2……..3.0 W/m2………0.02……………..……….0.2%
RCP 4.5…………538 ppm CO2……..4.5 W/m2………0.03………………………0.3%
RCP 6.0…………670 ppm CO2……..6.0 W/m2………0.05………………………0.4%
RCP 8.5…………936 ppm CO2……..8.5 W/m2………0.07………………………0.6%
It’s the water vapor thermostat that controls the greenhouse, not CO2. It’s the water vapor thermostat that controls the simplistic blanket analogy as well. The hiatus heat went into a few more clouds, not the ocean.
Could we then assert that in a real greenhouse, it is water vapor that controls the temperature and not CO2? If the CAGW crowd want to use the greenhouse analogy as their favorite terminology, shouldn’t their model be complete?
I say Yes!
In a real greenhouse, of which I have built several (120,000 sq ft or so), the walls and roof and sun control the temperature. They work by blocking convection and advection.
Technically, the “greenhouse” effect has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the type of gases that are confined within a “greenhouse” structure, ….. but everything to do with their confinement within said structure. NO confinement = NO greenhouse = NO greenhouse effect, …. and that’s a FACT, … whether you like it or not.
Nice summary. Pretty much what I believe. But, I have not done all the math myself — and may be wrong about part of it. Even so, CAGW does not seem to be a likely problem, to me.
Yet there are untold tens of billions of taxpayer dollars per year spent on CO2steria, countless municipal, regional and federal regulations worldwide, and innumerable government, academic and NGO jobs based on FUD.
It is a lot to spend for something that the people awarding the grants and doing the research claim is “settled”, no?
The US federal expenditure, alone, spent $21.408 for climate change for 2014. Keep in mind that this has been going on for quite a few years at circa $20 Billion.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/legislative_reports/fcce-report-to-congress.pdf
Does anyone think we got out money’s worth?
Think how much good this would do to mankind and our economy if the money had been spent wisely.
Agreed. I do wish Mr. Petschauer had extended his remarks on the question of negative or positive feedback from clouds.
I cannot for the life of me see how increased cloud cover could ever be understood as a positive feedback. More clouds are certainly going to make the planet “whiter”, and white reflects the incoming high energy visible radiation very effectively indeed. Increased cloud cover therefore is surely and plainly a large, primary NEGATIVE feedback.
Any increased thermal blanket effect in the IR will surely pale in significance compared to the primary reflection of incoming visible radiation. I’d actually appreciate some comments on this point. How in the world can the primary reflection of incoming visible radiation be considered a weaker effect, than the outgoing IR thermal blanket effect?
One reason is that the air is much thinner in the upper atmosphere where the reflection of incoming solar occurs. The “trapping” of heat occurs in the lower layers. BTW, the CO2 molecule is heavier than N2 and O2, which are 99% of the atmosphere. Therefore, it is somewhat more concentrated near the surface.
There is also the small point that water absorbs visible and ultraviolet light at the surface and converts it into heat. Clouds are also made of…..? That’s right, water! Clouds are not steam, nor is water vapour in the atmosphere which hasn’t formed clouds. It is droplets of liquid or frozen water. Small ones, true, but still possessing all the same properties as water in an ocean at the surface.
One reason is that the air is much thinner in the upper atmosphere where the reflection of incoming solar occurs.
———————
Wrong, reflection of incoming solar only occurs in the upper atmosphere when it is thicker with H20 and/or particulate matter.
It is generally agreed including the IPCC and Trenberth that the cooling from clouds from reflection of part of sunlight to back outer space (and I think also from some absorption by the atmosphere of that not reflected thus reducing the net to the surface) more than offsets the reduction in cooling at night from more clouds. So more clouds are a negative feedback. Using my three level energy balance model (planet, atmosphere and surface), I estimate an increase of about 3% in cloud cover will cut the warming of CO2 in half. The problem is to estimate how much cloud cover will increase with higher temperatures and some expected increase in water vapor. The climate models showed a slight increase in clouds with warming, but even the modelers admit that cloud formation is chaotic, unstable and very difficult to estimate. As I stated in the essay, the only reason the IPCC claims positive feedback for clouds (and a big one) is so that a simple energy balance model with feedback will agree with the average of climate models (they do not use feedback but try to get the final warming directly. Then they can estimate the feedbacks separately, except for clouds that they treat as a “residue” (AKA, a fudge factor). There was a period of time when fewer clouds and warmer temperatures correlated, but it probably was the reduced clouds causing the warming, not the reverse.
Thank you Mr. Petschauer for your response. For me it has always boiled down to whether and how much the feedback is positive or negative. First principles suggest strongly that more clouds would be a large negative feedback, and it certainly seems reasonable that more evaporation means more cloud coverage.
Thus, to find that more clouds are given by the IPCC a large positive feedback value just stinks to heaven.
We believe the complex computer models overestimation of warming is mostly based on a combinations of three factors:
1. overestimating positive water vapor feedback,
2. underestimating negative feedback from increased sea surface evaporation and
3. treating cloud feedback as positive feedback while it is very likely negative. [formatting mine.]
The “correct” politics require the input in incorrect physics.
IPCC AR5 7.2.1.2 Effects of Clouds on the Earth’s Radiation Budget
The effect of clouds on the Earth’s present-day top of the atmosphere (TOA) radiation budget, or cloud radiative effect (CRE), can be inferred from satellite data by comparing upwelling radiation in cloudy and non-cloudy conditions (Ramanathan et al., 1989). By enhancing the planetary albedo, cloudy conditions exert a global and annual short¬wave cloud radiative effect (SWCRE) of approximately –50 W m–2 and, by contributing to the greenhouse effect, exert a mean longwave effect (LWCRE) of approximately +30 W m–2, with a range of 10% or less between published satellite estimates (Loeb et al., 2009). Some of the apparent LWCRE comes from the enhanced water vapour coinciding with the natural cloud fluctuations used to measure the effect, so the true cloud LWCRE is about 10% smaller (Sohn et al., 2010).
!!!!!The net global mean CRE of approximately –20 W m–2 implies a net cooling!!!!
(emphasis mine)
Anthropogenic GHGs add less than 3 W/m2. CRE cooling is six times as much as GHG warming.
“We believe the complex computer models overestimation of warming is mostly based on a combinations of three factors:
1. overestimating positive water vapor feedback,
2. underestimating negative feedback from increased sea surface evaporation and
3. treating cloud feedback as positive feedback while it is very likely negative.”
This about sums up my feelings too.
Add in the altered historical records, improper accounting for UHI, CO2 trailing temps in the ice cores, CO2 uncorrelated in longer (and shorter) term data, and how much more does anyone need to doubt the whole thing?
Do not underemphasis that the ‘right results ‘ from these models can make a real difference to those driving them and their careers . And so given the models ‘only’ do what they are told , you can see how the selection of what you tell them can be subject to the need for the ‘right results ‘
And when tweaking a few parameters takes minutes and models runs hours at most , it is not even a hard thing to do to run a few ‘versions’ until the ‘right results’ pop out.
There are so many hurdles the IPCC believers much surmount before the whole Climate Change thing can be taken seriously.
CO2 must cause a lot more warming that is observed, there must be a tipping point that has never been observed (even in billions of years of proxy data), the detrimental effect must outweigh the positive effects, it must be possible to change the climate, and the cost of changing climate must be cheaper than the cost of adaptation.
I don’t think ANY of those things have been proven, and it’s impossible to prove several of them. Every year they just crank up the volume on their klaxon, and pretty soon I expect the lights to go out and to be issued ration cards by our new Gaia overlords.
I forgot a big one. They also have to prove that we are causing any warming; that’s it’s not just natural variability.
They haven’t proven anything and expect the whole world to give up their freedom and trillions of dollars to box this shadow. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost (money and lives) of the billions already spent on this adventure is staggering.
We DO produce heat locally. I was able to correlate urbanisation with local temperature rise, well above the IPCC figures. Anyone suggesting that urban thermometers represent global temperature are plain stupid. Those are hotter than IPCC.
Urban heat islands are a measurable fact. A Manmade Global Climate Change Disaster is not.
“Urban heat islands are a measurable fact.”
How this is even in dispute is a Twilight Zone crazy!
@Menicholas,
I don’t know where that came from either.
@chris Hanley,
That’s a tight list. Lord Monckton is a genius.
Nicely put.
Reminds me of Monckton’s ‘mighty mountain’:
Step 10. Would the benefit outweigh the cost?
Step 9. Can we afford the cost of CO2 mitigation?
Step 8. Will any realistic measures avert the danger?
Step 7. Will warmer worldwide weather be dangerous?
Step 6. Will temperature feedbacks amplify that warming?
Step 5. Will greenhouse-gas emissions cause much warming?
Step 4. Are humankind raising CO2 concentration substantially?
Step 3. Are humankind increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration?
Step 2. Is a consensus among climate experts compatible with science?
Step 1. Has any climate warming beyond natural variability taken place?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/09/how-to-convince-a-climate-skeptic-hes-wrong/
I don’t understand why Step 2 is relevant. Just because Step 2 is answered “No” should not prevent the alarmist continuing his ascent. In my mind only step 10 needs to be considered by policy makers (as benefits can fund cost).
There’s also the matter of certain man-made emissions not counting – like the production and burning of bio-mass and ethanol. What do they do with those emissions that aren’t counted, but definitely do count? They blame everything on burning fossil fuels – but fossil fuels aren’t the only ones emitting CO2. They have the total increase in CO2 emissions all computed, but how much of that increase in the total volume are we responsible for? Never mind they’ve over-estimated the effect of CO2 to start with.
I would add that relative humidity higher in the troposphere has fallen during the past 60 years or so. Those altitudes are where CO2 can be a more important GHG than it is lower, where water vapor may have increased. The GHE is also a lot more significant at higher altitudes, as well.
As the author correctly notes, the same thing happens in dry, cold polar regions, where there is less water vapor than at the moist poles. Raising average winter night temperatures over the South Pole from -79 degrees F to -75 & over the North Pole from -30 to -26 F would have little effect on global climate.
relative humidity higher in the troposphere has fallen during the past 60 years or so
===========
Partial Pressure Law.
as you add CO2 to air, it raises the mass of the atmosphere, increasing pressure. As pressure increases, water precipitates out of the atmosphere because water vapor is the only gas that is condensing at atmospheric pressure, reducing relative humidity.
No such law!
“I am a climate skeptic who believes in global warming”
IMO that is a fail right off the bat!
“a climate skeptic” What is a climate skeptic?
And “…believes in global warming”. To believe is to base that belief on ZERO facts, as it is, in any “faith”!
Belief is not fact.
Close, but no cigar.
You are absolutely right to question the idiotic term climate skeptic, which is in the same category as climate d e n i e r.
Some skeptics fall into the trap of allowing the opposition to define terms for them. Critical thinkers appraise and use language precisely, so that the alarmist cannot conceal themselves behind equivocation and other tricks used to construct specious arguments, such as inventing and putting into circulation idiotic terms without vague let alone accurate meanings, and meant to infest the unwary who may be quick to latch onto terms in popular parlance without considering what they really mean, if anything.
For that reason, it is foolish to argue about Global Warming, which happens. We know that for many reasons, not least of which is the relatively recent warming since the Little Ice Age, which is indisputable.
The argument is about CAGW – catastrophic man-made global warming.
I may have said that, or similar, in another post in another thread. It’s 6:35 am where I am, that is my excuse…and I am sticking to it!
There has been warming since the LIA ended, but also decades of cooling, and decades of static temps.
But these are being manipulated out of the historical data. Because it is hard to make a case for unprecedented warming, and that it has to be anthropogenic and caused by CO2, if there was similar warming, followed by cooling, during the 20th century. Making the case for certain catastrophe is just perplexing, considering that the warmer periods of the past few thousand years have been long seen as more prosperous times.
“…inventing and putting into circulation idiotic terms without vague let alone accurate meanings, and meant to infest the unwary who may be quick to latch onto terms in popular parlance…”
These idiotic terms also posses superpowers of persuasion and authority if they rhyme or alliteration is used in their formation.
An UNFCCC sceptic?
It is not a trap to understand and acknowledge Science.
It is a trap to deny it. That destroys the credibility of ALL sceptics.
Some of us favor science and oppose pseudoscience. Are you with us on that?
I know what a weather septic is. I was one this morning when I wanted to go on a motorcycle ride. I looked outside and was pretty skeptical of the weather.
I don’t understand your point in this statement:
“For water vapor (a major greenhouse gas) the climate models show it increases about 7% per degree C of warming. But extensive data over 30 years from 15,000 stations at many latitudes over land and sea show an increase of only about 5% at the surface, the atmosphere’s main water vapor source.”
Since over 30 years the earth has warmed well under a degree C, (about 0.8 C in the last hundred years), it would seem that the models would predict less than a 5% increase in water vapor.
What are you meaning to write here?
Richard, I am afraid you are still missing the point. You say the models predict a 7% rise in water vapor per degree C. Then you say that water vapor actually rose 5% in 30 years, during which the temperature rose by LESS than 1 degree C. (I used the phrase “well under a degree,” which you seem to have interpreted as “well over a degree.” These two facts suggest that the models are not far off. Again I ask what point are you trying to make here?
Sorry. To make it more clear I should has written 5% per C. I thought that would be inferrred since I was comparing to the 7% per C value. The 30 year reference was to only indicate many date points over a along time period. And with a larger variation in latitudes and seasons, a wide temperature range resulting in a better estimate.
Models do not do scientific predictions. In genuine science, at least one highly confirmed universal generalization must be used in a prediction. Think Einstein’s equations.
Models are scenarios and nothing more. The results of a model are no different than drawing a few thousand lines on a graph. A line on a graph is drawn through data points. No universal generalization is involved. People really should not be taken in by the romance of the computer.
When a model is run, what is happening is that some data points have been changed and the model will generate some new lines among the thousands of lines on the graph. That is the new scenario. It is worthless for science, though it might be a great aid to imagination.
Actually in the limit a scientific theory – even the best and moist widely accepted one – is just another model.
Worse, there are strong arguments to assert that the ‘facts’ on which its predictive power can be judged, are in themselves utterly dependent on a still deeper model.
Science as a whole ins merely the explication of the rules of a particular model whose chief assumptions are metaphysical principles that we assume, but can never prove, are true.
Namely:
1/. We exist.
2/. Not-we, also exists.
3/. WE and Not-we are subsets of IT, which by definition, also exists.
4/. IT can be accurately and completely defined as a series of states against a vector axis we know as TIME. (Space and Time have independent existence rather than being ways to interpret human experience).
5/. Those states are ultimately the vector values of a series of quantities reflecting matter-energy in various patterns,. (The physical Universe)
6/. Each state is utterly and completely determined by the previous state, convoluted by immutable (time independent) Laws. (Causality and determinism)
7/. The actual state at any given instant is very very closely to the perception our actual consciousness has of that state, even though we ourselves and our consciousnesses are presumably part of that state..(material realism)
8/. We can observe the state accurately and completely without actually affecting it (the detached observer, a godlike spirit who dispassionately observes and measures the world whilst somehow being above and beyond it).
Need I go on?
Not one of these propositions can be proved correct. All we can say is that as with the science that is derived from the worldview that these produce, is that assuming they are, sorta works. For some stuff, some of the time.
In short its not turtles, its models, all the way down. The physical world is just another model of what is ‘really there’ …just a way of describing the relationship between ‘US’ and ‘NOT-US’ which in itself is an arbitrary distinction anyway.
For students of theology, I would draw your attention to proposition 8, which is at the heart of the ability to do science. Science, which as far as I can tell regards consciousness as an emergent property of matter, has at its core a tacit and profoundly spiritual assumption that takes a completely different stance. Namely that the first principle of Mind is that what goes on on Mind stays in Mind and doesn’t affect the world in any way. Cogito ergo sum is to be understood as ‘The fact that I think is indicative of my existence’ not ‘ ( My?) existence is a result of my thinking’.
I mention these points not because I am anti-science, and want to show that science itself is based on shaky assumptions which men it’s ultimate validity can be questioned. That is of course true, but not helpful. Neither is it helpful or valid to say that because its based on shaky assumptions anything goes, and crystal gazing and aromatherapy are in fact real science instead.
It is however useful to consider the proposition that Science itself, grew out a a profoundly spiritual view of the world, that man was in fact Spirit cloaked in Flesh, and that by dint of God Given Reason, his Spirit could arrive and an understanding of the Fleshly nature of things (but never the spiritual nature of himself).
Now dont get me wrong here – I am as near atheist as it is possible to get, in that although I hold that there is more in Nature than is dreamt of by your philosophy, Horatio, I dont think imbuing the ultimate with a consciousness and a Nature of an anthropic kind is in any way helpful. Any more than I think imbuing the weather and climate with anthropic attributes is.
But the whole AGW scenario makes instant sense to me if it is considered as the logical analysis of a worldview which – as any religion does – takes an unprovable assumption as an article of faith. Indeed it may be that AGW is the direct result of the loss of religious faith, by a culture that has discovered its not very good at doing without it. AGW is, I aver, based on a worldview that has as its core assumption the profoundly Christian – and indeed Catholic – concept of Original Sin. That is, that man is, by definition, bad, and deeply guilty, and the cause of all the evils in the world as he stumbles from one temptation to another. And without the cleansing effect of the confessional, this deep sense of guilt can never be lifted. Man is in the end the source of all evil, and its merely a question of deciding what is the worst of it, and allowing the self appointed immans of moral hygiene to dictate to us how we may absolve ourselves of it and atone for it.
In short all the ills of the world are the fault of White Male Heterosexual Chauvinism, and a deep sense of guilt and repentance is the only possible salvation, and we need to hand the world over to anyone who isn’t white male or heterosexual, and that will solve everything.
Sure I jest, but not completely.
This underlying assumption does seem to run through the broad Left and Green tendencies, and is exploited by the marketing departments of political and commercial entities.
To AGW believers, I propose that they simply take the above for granted as axiomatic. Man – Western Man – is obviously guilty. That goes without saying. The only question is, of what?
And if the climate changes – and it certainly has in the last 60 years – then of course he is guilty of that. And since he has been ion charge in his White Heterosexual Male form than its ipso facto a Sin that has been committed, ergo global warming is bad bad bad. Western civilisation is always Bad, so if its done anything at all, its a mistake:-)
So all that is needed is to discover the linkage, and proclaim it, and realise that if anyone objects, they are probably a white male heterosexual chauvinist, or the Koch brothers (is there a difference?) and ergo they can safely be derided and ignored.
One last point: part of the Left – that art often considers as ‘Trotskyites’ – considers that the ills of humanity are down to the ‘oppressions’ ’caused’ by the systems and institutions that have stood the test of time and have at least up till now not been counter-survival of the species, society or its culture.
So to them, the moral act is to undermine them. All of them. And in the resultant anarchistic chaos, new and better systems will emerge to reflect the underlying goodness of human nature when not corrupted by them.
I will leave you to ponder that one.
One final point: “Give me the child until he is seven and I care not who has him thereafter.”
Te success of the Left and the moral relativists has not been in winning the war, but in setting the terms of engagement. The most powerful coercive forces in society come not from coercion itself, but from the implanting of assumptions so deep and so fundamental that to question them at all risks such a complete realignment of the personality that is is simply inconceivable.
When I look at all the weird and peculiar political and ideological movements of the last 100 years, without exception what is curious, is not whether they won the day, but that they were issues at all.
Let’s consider ‘gay marriage’ – a concept that has swept the western world and resulted in ‘affirmative legislation’ .
But what on earth is ‘gay marriage’? Marriage from time immemorial has been a formalised more or less irrevocable commercial and emotional union of a heterosexual partnership for the purposes of propagation and the protection of the interests of children.
It is meaningless when seen this, when applied to a homosexual partnership, and arguably fairly meaningless when applied to a childless union.
To even talk about ‘gay marriage’ is therefore to destroy the implicit historic meaning of what marriage is, irrespective of whether or not people take one side or the other. In short once they accept the IDEA of homosexual marriage, the damage – or the positive change, depending on your perspective – has already been done.
What counts is not which concepts win the battle, but which concepts you are applying to the world to judge it and discriminate it into its presumed constituent parts.
The success if the warmist agenda has not been to demonstrate how much warming humans cause by their activities, but to place on the table the implicit assumption that change is caused by humans, (when you cant find a more immediate and easy explanation) and its necessarily a change for the worse.
The models you use constrain at every level the type of result you will get – can get.
Somewhere in a book I have on Buddhist philosophy and the art of meditation, is a reference to something like the ‘47,358 demons that you will meet on the path to enlightenment’.
Its a large and exact number, anyway. That some enlightened being has actually counted them, even presupposing their existence, is so preposterous that I can only conceive that the author, with dry Buddhist wit, is poking fun at those who would tie all matters down to precise definitions..and that is one of the meta agendas perhaps of Buddhism, to reveal the preposterous arrogance of our presumptions about the nature of the world.
And it is a valid point: The warmist agenda, that we spend so much time arguing about here, is the success story. Not whether its true or not. The mere fact that we take on board into our every day lives the concept of human induced climate change, and the associated guilt. THAT is the true agenda of the Trostkyites, and those who climb on their destructive bandwagon.
We have been made to doubt the moral integrity of our institutions, our customs, our culture, our own natures. Even the struggle to survive, by dint of using technology, has been made repulsive. Pride in real valid human achievement, is a sin.
And a culture that has a deep sense of shame in its own success, is a culture that is about to commit suicide.
The Trotskyites say ‘bring it on’
While espousing the ‘precautionary principle’ that says that unknown futures should not be actively encouraged….
Ho hum. Doublethink again.
I finally want to apologise for taking up so much of your time in these philosophical ramblings: And yet it is still Sunday, and that is traditionally a day for spiritual contemplation – and it is to me the only way I can understand the nature of the transformations have seen over the years in Western culture. Namely that, as a feature of something I associate clearly with the Left side of the political and intellectual spectrum, a culture that enjoyed extreme success as a result of science and technology, that were all based on a worldview of a mixture of religion and rationality, has comes to be ashamed of its own success, and feel extreme guilt over it, to the point of accepting its imminent collapse with equanimity. Or even joy.
AGW is just one part of that picture, that generalised assault on the culture and institutions that lead briefly to world dominance of the Western model of society. By redefining that dominance as a negative – as ‘cultural imperialism’ and ‘post colonial oppression’ we have been made to feel ashamed of that success, and to revoke our support for the systems of thought – the very worldviews themselves – that made it possible.
AGW is but one more step along the way.
However we cannot defend real science on the basis that it is demonstrably true, either. Or that it is ‘model free’.
True science is defensible, as Karl Popper finally realised, only on the grounds that within the context of some broadly held assumptions, it is more effective than anything else at predicting that part of human experience we define as ‘the future’
Science itself is just another model. It’s sole justification is that the model is useful and effective in predicting the future.
Science chooses its a prioris on the basis that they give a consistent coherent and effective picture.
The Left chooses its a prioris on the basis of emotional commitments to deep feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Naturally the ‘science’ that emerges is of a different order.
Post Nazism, we are too afraid to re-engage with Nietzsche. Might may well not be morally right, but it is at some level functionally effective: And to be on buried in a grave in the moral high ground is perhaps less of an option than to sneak away in sinfulness to the valley of moral compromise.
History is littered with Dead Heroes. Mankind is descended from cowards and morally suspect individuals who lived a bit longer.
If that is the sort of pictures you like to think in….
The conclusion that “The physical world is just another model…” is an application of the fallacy that Whitehead called “misplaced concreteness” and that others call “reification.”
Thanks, Leo Smth, for the Sunday morning rumination, most of which I find agreeable. As for AGW,
That is the nub of the problem we (unbelievers, heretics) face. To deny the assumption is a sin, and in the minds of the faithful, punishable. Notice how frequent the threats are becoming. It is interesting to consider the origins of the ‘global warming’ (now ‘climate change’) liturgy: It was apparently a deliberate invention of the Left in order to rally the faithful around a cause that would bring millions (both people and dollars) into the fold, using the same mechanism (fear) as the witchcraft scare of the 17th century. But CAGW is a more insidious vehicle, as the aim is really the utter transformation (from our point of view, destruction) of Western civilization.
Can the heretics turn the fanatical tide, when the nominally-secular President of the United States is a fervent Believer, and even the Catholic Pope is being seduced?
Watch out for the punishers.
/Mr Lynn
I should add that this is why I cringe at statements like the headline of the post today: “I am a climate skeptic who believes in global warming.” The implicit claim is that he accepts AGW, “anthropogenic global warming,” as a convert to Christianity might accept the divinity of Christ, just hedging on the details. Once you have put the assumption (it is not a fact) on the table, you have given away the store; you are no longer a skeptic. But there you go; he says he “believes.”
/Mr Lynn
Leo Smth
April 26, 2015 at 1:55 am
Way wrong on the fundamentals, Leo. Scientific theories consist of statements that are true or false. Models produce nothing beyond lines on a graph. Do you think that a line drawn through some data points is true or false?
Ask NOT if a line drawn through some data points is true or false, …….. ask if the data points plotted on the graph are true or false?
The line isn’t a “highly confirmed universal generalization” aka predictive inference.
Actual data. 120ppm rise in CO2. 0.8C rise in global mean temperature (assuming you trust the ability of mankind to measure this correctly). If you believe the two pieces of data are linked, then you have, also in this data, the feedback mechanisms included. Rational logic would dictate future predictions would have to be based from your actual historical data. All you need to do now is agree amongst yourselves what relationship the first 280ppm of CO2 has with temperature to make a 3rd point on your graph so you can do some real calculations about your greenhouse assumptions. Good luck with that!
Richard Petschauer,
Lance Wallace raises a good point as to just what you mean. Please read his messages and reply to his question (I have the same question).
I also have a related comment. It sounds like you are basing your claim on one location. Global data, discussed in the IPCC report, supports the near constant RH model result (it is not an assumption) for the near surface troposphere. The issue in dispute by genuine skeptics (as opposed to the naysayers who dominate the discussion here) is whether that is also the case in the upper troposphere, which is the region of importance for the greenhouse effect.
If the IPCC uses specific humidity, as I suspect than a 5% / C rise in water vapor could look very close (or “generally consistent” as they often say) to a 7% / C rise.
Example: Compare 3 water vapor pressures (mbar). These are proportional to specific humidity.
V1 at 15 C and 70% RH = 11.9283
V2 at 16 C and 70% RH = 12.7185
V2/V1 = 1.0662 or a 6.62% increase
For a 5% increase from V3 = 11.9283 * 1.05 = 12.5247
Note that V3/V2 = 0.9848. Many people if biased would call that close enough to 1 so and to say “near constant RH.”
In fact if the RH drops from 70% to 69% we get,
V4 at 16C and 69% RH = 12.5368
V4/V1 = 1.0510, a 5.1 % increase. And since 69% is close to 70%, IPCC can make the claim you cite.
BTW, from work I have done with SpectralCalc, water vapor drops fast with altitude and escape level to outer space is around 4 to 5 Km, about the middle of the troposphere.
The comparisons are based on a warming of 1C, since the feedbacks are normalized to that value so they can be combined in to one net value. The 0.8C you site or any other historical rise is not an issue. The 5% value from data that I cited has the benefit of a large temperature range since many latitudes and seasons are included. The larger range reduces the percent error of the measuring equipment since we are considering differnces in humidity. The 7% value from the models is not based on data. It is close to the commonly assumed constant relative humidity, inn this cases with a temperature at a few Km in the atmosphere. Many assumptions include constant RH with warmimg. Data shows it drops about 0.5% per C of warming at the surface.
Richard Petschauer commented
One of the things I noticed was that at night rel humidity goes up as the temp falls, and where I live, we get dew, but this reduces the amount of water vapor in the air, in the morning some of that water is lost (dirt, plants, run-off,etc) so there’s less water to evaporate as temps go back up, I think this process regulates general land rel humidity.
If I understand the probono comment, the solar radiation spectrum is not the same thing as the earth radiation spectrum. There is very little overlap in the two, due to very different temperatures of the sources, so there is very little energy in the solar spectrum at 15 microns (15000 nm) for CO2 to absorb on the way in. The 15 micron energy is generated by the earth’s radiation of “heat”, after it has absoprbed the solar radiation. What am I missing???
Well Dan your statement is not true; about there being very little energy in the solar spectrum at 15 microns.
For any black body emitter, a body at a higher temperature always emits more energy at ANY wavelength, than does a body at a lower temperature.
The 390 W/m^2 is the correct BB total emittance (per m^20 for 288 K, (15 deg C or 59 deg F), and the spectral peak is at 10.0 microns wavelength.
But with the day time sun beating down upon the earth , let’s say that same BB like area that was emitting 390 W/m^2, the solar energy power density at the surface is more like 1,000 W.m^2 and that wiil heat the surface to much more than 15 deg C.
Dan Sage, you are correct in saying that only a tiny fraction of the Sun’s radiation reaching Earth occurs at 15 microns, whereas a much larger fraction of radiation leaving Earth does. A hotter body (e.g., the Sun) does emit much more energy, as George says, but the Earth intercepts only a tiny fraction of that. It is the RELATIVE FRACTION of energy received and emitted at 15 microns that must be compared and these are very different.
No quarrel from me on that.
g
Well Dan your statement is true, there is nothing you are missing.
It’s safe to say that if we detect radiation shorter than 4 microns then it is from the Sun (or a rocket engine or a furnace). The corollary is that infrared radiation above 5 microns is from the Earth or its atmosphere
That’s about as well put as can be.
g
Mr. Petschauer, It is one thing for you to assert your belief that CO2 causes the temperature of the earth to rise. It is quite another to mischaracterize MANY (I believe it is most, but will not assert that here, having no solid proof…) of us science realists who firmly disagree with you.
1. You: “There are many areas where most skeptics and the “alarmists”, as they are called, agree. First is the idea of “climate sensitivity”, a useful benchmark for making estimates. It is the final average global temperature rise that would be caused by a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, assuming there are no natural changes. Second, most agree on well established methods to estimate how greenhouse gases absorb and emit heat, … .”
Science Realists:
1) Only in highly controlled laboratory conditions HIGHLY UNLIKE the climate system called “earth,” has CO2 exhibited any significant warming potential.
2) Never has CO2 been proven to cause any warming on earth at all. And, so far, the evidence points against it (CO2 UP. WARMING STOPPED.).
3) There is good evidence (See Dr. Murry Salby, for instance) that CO2 increase lags temperature increase on earth by a quarter cycle.
*******************************************************************
2. “We believe … .” No, Mr. Petschauer, YOU believe — and many others, no doubt, also believe as you do about CO2 — but, not “most” (as you brazenly and inaccurately assert).
*************************************************
CAVEAT TO ALL READERS: Richard Petschauer does NOT represent the views of MANY of us science realists on WUWT, we who:
1. Believe the earth is cooling overall, since about 6,000 years ago (at least);
2. Believe the earth warmed after the end of the “Little Ice Age;”
3. KNOW CO2 has never been proven to have caused any warming on earth; and
4. Believe the temperature of the earth has been flat or is slightly decreasing for over 18 YEARS, now.
Science doesn’t deal with proof but with falsification. Proof is for mathematics.
That CO2 does warm the earth at low levels has not IMO ever been shown false. But its GHE is logarithmic, hence higher levels have less effect.
To quote David Archibald:
http://humanevents.com/2014/03/24/the-carbon-dioxide-level-is-dangerously-low/
“Thankfully, the relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature is logarithmic, not arithmetic. The first 20 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere provides 1.6°C of warming, after which the effect drops away rapidly. From the current level of 400 parts per million, each addition of 100 parts per million adds only 0.1°C of warming. By the time we have dug up all the rocks we can economically burn, and burned them, we may reach 600 parts per million in the atmosphere. So perhaps we might add another 0.2°C of warming over the next two centuries. That warming will be lost in the noise of natural climate variation. So much for the problem of global warming! As a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is tuckered out. On the positive side of the ledger, it is very beneficial as aerial fertilizer. The carbon dioxide that mankind has put into the atmosphere to date has in fact boosted crop yields by 15 percent. This is like giving the Third World countries free phosphate fertilizer. Who could possibly be so heartless as to deny under- developed countries that benefit, at no cost to anyone?”
“Science doesn’t deal with proof but with falsification. Proof is for mathematics.”
I’ve seen that statement before.
Here is my question. Do you content that the earth orbits the sun is not PROVEN?
You CAN prove a black swan exists.
David in Texas, milodonharlani is correct. The problem here is partly semantic. Perhaps a way to avoid mis-understanding is to substitute “highly certain” for “proved”. Science offers only approximate truths. We can increase the breadth and accuracy of our approximations, but they are still always only approximations.
The word proof implies in most people’s minds, absolute certainty. That is never achievable, not even for mathematics. Any mathematics system relies on postulates, which are by definition given, not proven. In addition, the number of postulates necessary for a non-trivial mathematics rises to infinity as shown by Kurt Godel in his incompleteness theorem. Quite apart from that, it is always possible to make logical errors in reasoning. Can one be INFINITELY certain that no such errors have been made?
To take your example of the earth orbiting the sun. Of course, there is much strong evidence that that contention is true, and a very high level of certainty is warranted. However, if one wishes proof in the sense of INFINITE certainty, that is not available. Can one be infinitely certain that we aren’t in a dream state or immersed in a Matrix pod, or victims of a conspiracy, or simply that the science is wrong. We can’t be that certain.
I tend to roll my eyes whenever someone insists that they can reject whatever contention is on the table because it is not “proven”. The problem is that ANY evidence brought forward can be attacked, since the evidence itself is never infinitely certain, quite apart from uncertainties in the inferences drawn from that evidence.
If the standard in courtrooms were “guilty beyond any conceivable doubt” rather than “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”, no one would ever be properly convicted of anything.
David In texas, The earth clearly does not orbit the sun, The central gravitational point of solar system is dependant on the location of all the different masses in the solar system. The very notion of “Proof” holds you back from challenging assumptions that sometimes lead to scientific advancement. The scientific method that is based on empirical falsification is designed so that adherents to the method are encouraged to challenge all assumptions.
milodonharlani (April 25, 2015 at 1:36 pm)
“Science doesn’t deal with proof but with falsification. Proof is for mathematics.”
Yes, but science starts from the null hypothesis.
The null hypothesis is that all warming that has been currently observed (whatever that may be) is the result of natural variation.
The null hypothesis has yet to be falsified.
AND that is the issue as far as this debate is concerned.
Grammar and Philosophy vs. Science
> The problem here is partly semantic.
If you redefine the definition of “prove” or “orbit” or whatever word that interferes with your statement, you will never be wrong.
The moon orbits the earth, the earth orbits the sun, the sun orbits the solar system, etc. You can redefine orbit to make your point, but that is “grammar”. That is not science.
> Can one be infinitely certain that we aren’t in a dream state…
You are taking philosophy, not science. If you use your definition of “prove”, you cannot “falsify” anything either. You are just refining the meaning of the word “prove”.
When you falsify a hypothesis, you “prove” that it is not so. And yes, it is easier to “prove” something false then to prove something true. If there are no proofs in science, there are on falsifications either.
There are an infinite number of thing that have been proven, there are black swans, energy exists, matter exists and on-and-on.
And yes, it is easier to “prove” something false then to prove something true. It is especially difficult to prove something that is not true. And yes, just because you can’t prove something to be true that doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.
A scientific theory is a generalization that is made under insufficient information for a deductive conclusion to be reached. Thus, the conclusions from such a theory are not true but rather have probabilities of being true.
@ milodonharlani April 25, 2015 at 1:36 pm
And your aforesaid stated opinion only applies to …. the Rule of Junk Science Law.
Iffen you want to make a wild, unsupported claim that “CO2 does warm the earth at low levels” …… then the Burden of Proof is your responsibility.
No one is obligated to prove your fanatical claim is false, ….. otherwise, … next you might be claiming that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists and demanding someone prove you wrong.
Science deals with falsification, not with proof, which is for mathematics.
IMO, the hypothesis that low levels of CO2 warm the planet has never been shown false. However, its GHE is logarithmic, so the effect at higher levels drops.
Please read David Archibald on the logarithmic effect of CO2-induced warming.
http://humanevents.com/2014/03/24/the-carbon-dioxide-level-is-dangerously-low/
In any case, CO2 is obviously essential for life on earth.
“””””…..However, its GHE is logarithmic, so the effect at higher levels drops……”””””
Well there is certainly no proof of that statement.
Not only is there no experimental measurement data to support that, but neither is there any physical theory that would predict that.
Remember that if the function is logarithmic, then a doubling of CO2 from 280 ppmm to 560 ppmm would be expected to produce exactly the same Temperature change as a doubling from 1.0 ppmm to 2.0 ppmm, or for that matter from one CO2 molecule in a mole of air to 2 CO2 molecules in one mole of air.
Logarithmic means logarithmic; it does not mean “not quite linear”.
And if you take the best available evidence for Temperature and CO2 starting say with the beginning of the Mauna Loa record, during the 1957/58 geophysical year, you can plt delta T against log CO2 ratio, or delta T against CO2 ratio or log T ratio against delta CO2 and get equally good curve fits. The data is not statistically different from linear.
And the so-called Beer-Lambert law, which supposedly provides a theoretical expectation of logarithmic relationship. does not even apply to absorption in materials which are radiative or fluorescent if you wish. It only applies in non radiative cases where the absorption of a photon never involves the subsequent emission of a photon carrying any portion of the absorbed energy. The absorbed photons have to stay dead.
With CO2 or any GHG,, the absorption of a LWIR photon results in a prompt re-emission of a similar photon.
george e. smith
Wrong!
The logarithmic effect only applies at current concentrations of CO2. At low levels the effect is linear.
Wrong!
MikeB April 26, 2015 at 2:29 am
Mike B
Rarely have I seen a less helpful response.
Rather than bare assetions (bare denials), please exopand on your case, and where your assertions are backed up with evidence, please detail and link the evidence that is claimed to back up your various assertions.
“””””…..However, its GHE is logarithmic, so the effect at higher levels drops……”””””
————————
The above claim never did make any logical sense to me ….. but I didn’t wish to engage in a “peeing contest” with anyone.
That statement is akin to claiming that …. the electrical charge can only increase to a specified voltage …. regardless of how big the capacitor is. Or akin to inviting more n’ more hungry people to dinner and then claiming the total food consumed will be logarithmic less as the number of hungry people increases.
A molecule of CO2 in the atmosphere could care less what the other CO2 molecules are doing. And iffen you add 100 ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere ….. that 100 ppm of CO2 could care less what the current 400 ppm of CO2 is doing.
“””””……Remember that if the function is logarithmic, then a doubling of CO2 from 280 ppmm to 560 ppmm would be expected to produce exactly the same Temperature change as a doubling from 1.0 ppmm to 2.0 ppmm, or for that matter from one CO2 molecule in a mole of air to 2 CO2 molecules in one mole of air.
Logarithmic means logarithmic; it does not mean “not quite linear”……””””””
Well evidently the word logarithmic means different things to different people.
To me, “logarithmic” means that it follows a specific mathematical form over ALL values of the variable for which the logarithm function exists; which I believe means ALL real numbers greater than zero.
It certainly does NOT mean over any restricted range of variable.
“””””…..The logarithmic effect only applies at current concentrations of CO2. …..”””””
I’ll be generous with that claim MikeB. I’ll give you the longest modern record, from Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since the IGY in 1957/58.
As near as I can read that chart, it ranges from 315 ppmm to around 400 ppmm today.
So we know the officially recorded values for that CO2 measurement location, and I’ll take the GISSTemp, or any of the modern global Temperature recognized data sets you prefer. I presume that there are daily recorded values for both of those variables.
And since CO2 is “well mixed” in the atmosphere (they claim) that must be representative of the whole earth, as well as GISSTemp is.
You’ve asserted that those two variables are logarithmically related (presumably for some part of that range but perhaps not all; because you say at lower values they are linearly related.
So over what if any contiguous part of that range (presumably at the low end) is the relationship linear, and over what contiguous part of that range (maybe the more recent upper end) is it logarithmic ??
It would be nice to see a proof that the ersatz logarithmic region of that range has a lower standard deviation, than would be obtained from a linear fit over that same range.
The ML CO2 record, is a fairly well behaved data set.
Over the same period; from 1957 to today, I can discern no evidence from the published GISSTemp, or any of the other recognized global Temperature anomaly sets; that there is any mathematical functional connection between those data sets (CO2 and Tem).
The CO2 has a monotonic annual increase, with a small regular cyclic annual oscilation on top of that monotonic trend.
The Temperature anomaly data sets, show no comparable behavior whatsoever, they don’t even go in the same direction as each other from year to year.
So there isn’t even any evidence of a linear tracking, let alone of a logarithmic tracking.
At no point, would knowledge of the current ML CO2 value, enable prediction of the GISSTemp recorded value for that year, within whatever the claimed error bounds are for that GISSTemp data set. They are about as unrelated as throwing a dart would be.
I believe I could match those two sets of data to the mathematical form :
y = exp(-1/x^2) where x is a linear function of the CO2 ppmm value, and y is a linear function of the global Temperature anomaly from GISSTemp.
And fit them as close as you can fit them to a logarithmic function of a form similar to:
T2 -T1 = a ln ((CO2,2) /( CO2,1)) where those terms have their quite obvious meanings.
I wonder if you have a one word proof of YOUR contention, that my two statements you cited, are wrong.
g
Janice,
Science deals with confirmation and falsification, not with proof. That’s for mathematics.
IMO, the hypothesis that low levels of CO2 warm the planet has never been shown false. However, its GHE is logarithmic, so the effect at higher levels drops.
Please read David Archibald on the logarithmic effect of CO2-induced warming.
http://humanevents.com/2014/03/24/the-carbon-dioxide-level-is-dangerously-low/
“(T)he relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature is logarithmic, not arithmetic. The first 20 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere provides 1.6°C of warming, after which the effect drops away rapidly. From the current level of 400 parts per million, each addition of 100 parts per million adds only 0.1°C of warming. By the time we have dug up all the rocks we can economically burn, and burned them, we may reach 600 parts per million in the atmosphere. So perhaps we might add another 0.2°C of warming over the next two centuries. That warming will be lost in the noise of natural climate variation. So much for the problem of global warming! As a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is tuckered out.”
1. Believe the earth is cooling overall, since about 6,000 years ago (at least);
2. Believe the earth warmed after the end of the “Little Ice Age;”
3. KNOW CO2 has never been proven to have caused any warming on earth; and
4. Believe the temperature of the earth has been flat or is slightly decreasing for over 18 YEARS, now.
We hold these truths to be self evident……. because the historical data directly supports them.
I’m with you and Janice, I think.
My question is why does everybody who’s trying to drive a position cherry pick the start date?
Some like 20 years or so to show there’s no CO2 – temperature connection.
(proof AGW is a hoax)
Some like the 1950s (a very cold period) to show how bad the warming is.
(proof it’s worse than we thought and we’re all gonna die)
Some like the 1850s during the Little Ice Age (I think I read the glaciers were advancing)
(proof AGW has been relentless and we must take action…NOW!)
How come…
If they have data supporting this entire interglacial, why don’t they show it all?
If they’re showing a graph why don’t they include error bars?
If scientists know something why do they hide information even if they can’t explain it or even if it clouds the issues.
Trying to understand difficult and cloudy issues is science.
Or do the start date and error bars not matter and I’m just too ignorant to know it.
(Snip. -mod.)
Richard Petschauer,
I strongly suggest you read this paper by James Hansen:
“Earth’s energy imbalance and implications”
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2011/2011_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
The satellite measurements of outgoing radiation DO NOT confirm the energy imbalance allegedly caused by increase levels of CO2. Please read Section 14.6.1.
I would say that the number of alarmists saying transcendently silly things greatly exceeds that of skeptics doing so. But that is no reason not to call out people on “our side,” too, when they make bad arguments, and I’m afraid that on this site we tend to give the more-prominent clowns a pass.
We should be keeping everyone’s feet to the fire.
The “money” quote in Hansen’s study is this:
“The precision achieved by the most advanced generation of radiation budget satellites is indicated by the planetary energy imbalance measured by the ongoing CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) instrument (Loeb et al., 2009), which finds a measured 5-yr-mean imbalance of 6.5 W m−2
(Loeb et al., 2009). Because this result is implausible, instrumentation calibration factors were introduced to
reduce the imbalance to the imbalance suggested by climate models, 0.85 W m−2 ”
The satellite measurement error is over 600% so they introduce a phony “calibration” factor to make the imbalance read the value suggested by climate models (0.85 W m-2).
Thanks for that. There are some of us who really don’t think CO2 does what James Hansen claimed at all. I have never seen any good evidence of it, and I have seen plenty of evidence against it. Nice to see someone say that boldly here at WUWT.
It doesn’t disprove it. The climate could have cooled (and probably did) if the CO2 levels had not increased. There is a longer period of warming as well as an obvious oscillation with a 60 year period. Whether that is due to CO2 levels increasing is uncertain (and unlikely that all of it was and what could be attributed to CO2 is comparable to the fudging).
One thing is indisputable and that is if you had a black surface with an internal heat source and a layer that is opaque to certain wavelengths then there will be an effect if the surface of the layer is cooler than the black surface. Both surfaces would warm up until the energy leaving is the same as the energy from the heat source, and the black surface before the layer was applied.
Nothing like the Earth so there are plenty of things to argue about.
“It doesn’t disprove it. The climate could have cooled (and probably did) if the CO2 levels had not increased …”
The climate will warm, cool, and stay the same all independent of the CO2 levels in the atmosphere — just as it does independent of the numbers of unicorns in Ireland.
Janice,
Those of us with strong scientific backgrounds who believe that equilibrium climate sensitivity is zero are apparently scum of the earth, worse than warmists, and are labeled the “D” word by the likes of Fred Singer, in an earlier WUWT article. There are many scientists such as Gerlich and Tscheuschner who do not accept the validity of the greenhouse effect.
But you are correct. Richard Petschauer completely missed the boat on this.
Like
Skeptic;
“Those of us with strong scientific backgrounds who believe that equilibrium climate sensitivity is zero are apparently scum of the earth”
Yeah, I’ve been called a “D word” and a “Lunatic” here on this site, been caricatured with big ugly knobs on the top of my head and crooked “dragon” teeth.
All for simply pointing out that nowhere in the whole broad field of real engineering has anybody yet figured out how to do anything useful with this alleged “Greenhouse Effect”. Holy c–p, this alleged effect has been around longer than nuclear fission and nobody has figured out how to use it to kill masses of people yet ??
The “Climate Engineers” are really slacking off, if the “Defense-Industrial Complex” could have simply gotten the old USSR to sweat so much that they would have said “Uncle” in the old “Cold War” we sure as s–t would have used the “Greenhouse Effect” to defeat the enemy…..
Cheers, KevinK.
SkepticGoneWild,
“who believe that equilibrium climate sensitivity is zero”
That is easily disproven: ice ages. If the climate sensitivity were zero. the global average temperature would never change.
Mike M.
There is much to be debated about the issues of climate sensitivity to alterations of atmospheric GHG concentrations.
Such debates are hindered by people on all ‘sides’ of such discussions making ridiculous and blatantly untrue assertions.
For example, you write
Your assertion is absolutely untrue nonsense!
Milankovitch cycles have nothing whatsoever to do with climate sensitivity.
Richard
richardscourtney,
With zero climate sensitivity, Milankovitch cycles have no effect on global average T. Neither does changes in solar output have an effect. Zero means zero. Change the input, no change in the output.
MikeM,
Petschauer is talking about climate sensitivity to CO2. If it is zero, all it means is CO2 is not the control knob. There are a multitude of factors that can change global average temperatures. You are not making sense.
The affect that Milankovitch cycles has on earth’s temperature has nothing to do with CO2. Changes in deep ocean currents can affect global temperatures as well. Changes in albedo, etc.
The climate sensitivity to CO2 is, however, a scientifically and logically illegitimate concept.
SkepticGoneWild,
There is no such thing as “climate sensitivity to CO2”. Climate sensitivity is the temperature response to a change in radiative forcing. Changes in CO2, Milankovitch cycles, volcanoes, solar cycles, cloud cover, etc. produce changes in radiative forcing. You do not get to arbitrarily change the meanings of words.
Mike M.
The “climate sensitivity to CO2” is the quantity that has a value of about 3 Celsius per CO2 doubling according to the IPCC. The change in the “temperature” is actually the change in the equilibrium temperature. As the change in the equilibrium temperature is insusceptible to being measured, the climate sensitivity to CO2 is necessarily a pseudoscientific concept. This concept is, however, the basis for persistent alarms over ascending CO2 concentrations, calls for regulation of CO2 emissions and enforcement of cap and trade laws in places such as California.
Reply to SkepticGoneWild regarding Hansen Paper.
I am not claiming measurements from space are accurate enough to measaure energy IMBALANCE, only the value of the outgoing value for a genreral refernce point to compare with that from spectral calculations of the emmisions within a few Wm-2. It is the changes in the spectral calculations with CO2 content that is used, not a satellite measurement or its change.
Well You go Janice !
I for one don’t believe in either “Climate Sensitivity” or that any Temperature response to CO2 is logarithmic with CO2 abundance.
The Beer Lambert Law; more accurately named Bouguer’s Law does not apply to absorption by radiative materials including the atmosphere. The logarithmic, or exponential depending on how you view it, absorption formula A = Ao.exp (-alpha. s) where s is the absorbing path length and alpha the absorption coefficient is the formula for the absorption of the incoming species. It is not related to the energy transport through the medium, because it presumes that absorbed photons stay dead, and do not re-incarnate at some lower photon energy.
CO2 absorbs, and almost immediately it re-radiates, so the energy keeps propagating, even though it may be slowed down. It does NOT get trapped.
G
George wrote;
“The Beer Lambert Law”
This law is an observational law only. It cannot be derived from Maxwell’s equations. Note that “Born and Wolf’s Principles of Optics” (a seminal text describing how light in all it’s forms propagates) does not mention “Beer’s law” at all. As with any observational law it only applies when the conditions under which it is observed are very close to the conditions under which it is applied. Beer’s law is observed when the light passing through a substance is much more energetic than the light being emitted by the substance. For example, visible light (with a nominal color temperature of 1000-6000 Kelvin) passing through a neutral density filter at room temperature. When the absorbing medium is also emitting at about the same spectrum as the light passing through the medium Beer’s law does not apply. In summary, there simply is no logarithmic response, or “saturation” of IR absorbing gases in the atmosphere. There simply is no saturated “Greenhouse Effect”, or unsaturated “GHE” in the atmosphere of the Earth.
George wrote;
“CO2 absorbs, and almost immediately it re-radiates, so the energy keeps propagating, even though it may be slowed down. It does NOT get trapped.”
Well, here we will need to disagree, yes the CO2 absorbs and it almost immediately re-radiates the energy, but this results in a simple delay of the energy as it flows through the system. Since the velocity of light is still quite speedy (compared to other energy transport mechanisms like conduction) this “re-radiation” process acts like a hybrid optical/thermal delay line. Given the dimensions involved (5 miles to top of atmosphere) times the speed of light times a statistically distributed chance of single or multiple passages through the atmosphere this results in the energy being delayed by a few tens of milliseconds. This delay is significantly less than the length of a day (about 86 million milliseconds) and has no effect on the average temperature at the surface of the Earth.
INDEED, the energy DOES NOT GET TRAPPED……
George wrote;
“I for one don’t believe in either “Climate Sensitivity” or that any Temperature response to CO2 is logarithmic with CO2 abundance.”
I agree, the “Climate Sensitivity” is exactly equal to ZERO (with lots and lots of decimal points), and there is no reason to expect any logarithmic response.
Cheers, KevinK.
if it immediately transitions it will, but that depends on the environment it is in. it will just become more excited if not. eg in a saturated environment it will most likely transition.
George, your understanding here of quantum-caused absorption and emission of radiation is flawed. For a given electron-bond in a given molecule, the photon energy absorbed must be within a narrow range. (Exception exists for multiple body collision situations at higher gas densities.) When that photon is absorbed it is MUCH more likely to convert that extra energy to kinetic motion and heat than to immediately re-radiate a photon. That is, the time constant for re-radiation is much longer than collisional lifetimes for one atmosphere gas density.
I do agree that the Beer-Lambert Law was formulated for lab-like situations, and that atmosphere absorption and re-radiation does not strictly meet these conditions. Some distortion likely results.
Well I believe that I wrote that “the energy keeps propagating”, in fact I believe that is an exact quote of what I said.
Nowhere did I say in what direction(s) it propagates. In fact each re-emission is a random event with an isotropic radiation pattern; the emitted photon can go in any direction with equal probability.
The Temperature and density gradients of the atmosphere tend to reduce the width of the emission and absorption lines at higher altitudes, and this result in a bias that favors the escape path to space over the return to earth path.
At lower altitudes the probability of recapture is greater than at higher altitudes, so an LWIR photon has a harder time making it back to the surface than making it out to free space.
Not much but a bias.
But anybody is free to disagree with anything I write here.
As I often say, these are only my own opinions, and I am generally not going to provide supporting references, as any that exist are available to anyone who wants to search for them. So don’t cite me in your PhD dissertation or you may get an F.
And “Born and Wolfe” is but one of perhaps a hundred reference texts that I have sitting beside me, that I use as more dependable than the peer reviewed pay wall literature.
If you would like a reference on Bouguer’s Law, which Born and Wolfe do not mention along with their non mention of Beer’s Law (which is a Law from Chemistry), try “The Science of Color.” Published by the Commission on Colorimetry of the Optical Society of America, which is one of the founding member groups of the American Institute of Physics; and of which I also happen to be a member, along with the SPIE.
g
Yet again misconceptions are being posted here regarding absorption of light by gases.
At low concentrations Beer’s law applies, i.e. absorption is linearly dependent on concentration.
As concentration increases the center of the line/band becomes saturated and the response is no longer linear but is approximately logarithmic, this is where the Earth’s atmosphere is at presently. Further increase leads to greater influence of the broadened wings of the line/band and therefore a square root response
This is known as the ‘Curve of Growth’ in astrophysics:
http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~idh/PHAS2112/Lectures/Current/Part4.pdfSee section 9.2.
The broadening of the lines is a result of the Doppler effect and collisions.
CO2 does not ‘almost immediately reradiate’, in fact at atmospheric pressure the deactivation is dominated by collisions because the radiation lifetime is orders of magnitude greater than the time between collisions (0.1 nsec).
@ Phil. April 27, 2015 at 7:44 am
The above “weazelwording” does not impress me any.
“””””…..
Phil.
April 27, 2015 at 7:44 am
Yet again misconceptions are being posted here regarding absorption of light by gases.
At low concentrations Beer’s law applies, i.e. absorption is linearly dependent on concentration.
As concentration increases the center of the line/band becomes saturated and the response is no longer linear but is approximately logarithmic, this is where the Earth’s atmosphere is at presently. Further increase leads to greater influence of the broadened wings of the line/band and therefore a square root response
This is known as the ‘Curve of Growth’ in astrophysics:
http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~idh/PHAS2112/Lectures/Current/Part4.pdfSee section 9.2.
The broadening of the lines is a result of the Doppler effect and collisions. …..”””””
It would appear that this comment is directed at me.
I have said on many occasions, that ” logarithm , or logarithmic” is a very specific and well defined mathematical function that is valid for ALL real numbers greater than zero.
Evidently, in the field of climate science, “logarithmic” is an acceptable synonym for “not linear”.
It can used to mean anything besides the strict form : y = m.x +c
I note that for small values of x the function Ln (x) is approximately (1+x)
I might also point out here that for small values of x it is also true that :
sqrt (1 + x) is approximately (1 + x/2)
So both functions are approximately linear for small values of x.
All three of those functions share a common property.
The value of the function ALWAYS changes in the same direction as the value of x.
They NEVER go in opposite directions for any real value of x.
Yes I did use the words “almost immediately re-radiate” in reference to LWIR emission from CO2 or other GHG. I believe I first used the word “prompt” in this regard.
I should have been more specific. I meant times of the order of one millisecond or less; that being how long it would take an unimpeded photon from the earth surface to propagate 300 km to essentially extraterrestrial space.
No I certainly did not mean times of the order of 100 ps or less.
And I certainly did not intend to imply that re-emission of an LWIR photon by CO2 in the lower troposphere was a spontaneous event, rather than the result of a collision with some other molecule.
I’m well aware that spectral absorption and emission lines get broadened from their intrinsic line widths due to collisions between molecules, and also due to the Doppler effect which varies with gas Temperatures.
I was NOT aware that the probability of a photon absorption or emission at ANY frequency within the line broadened spectrum, by a GHG molecule (such as CO2); which is an event occurring at a SINGLE molecule, could be influenced by the presence of other molecules of that species, so remote from the absorbing molecule, that they could be acting in concert with each other.
An average CO2 molecule in the atmosphere at 400 well mixed parts per million, will have about 13.6 spherical shells of air molecules around it, between it and a nearest neighbor CO2 molecule.
I don’t see how one CO2 molecule, could possibly affect the probability of absorption or emission by another CO2 molecule, at their statistical average separation.
That is “action at a distance” that I was completely unaware of until now.
g
george e. smith May 2, 2015 at 4:45 pm
It would appear that this comment is directed at me.
I have said on many occasions, that ” logarithm , or logarithmic” is a very specific and well defined mathematical function that is VALID for ALL real numbers greater than zero.
Evidently, in the field of climate science, “logarithmic” is an acceptable synonym for “not linear”.
When I use the term ‘logarithmic’ it has a specific meaning too.
At low concentrations the absorption is governed by Beer’s Law and is linear with concentration.
At higher concentration the center of the line is completely removed, consequently the wings of the line dominate the absorption, if you integrate the resulting profile you end up with a logarithmic response.
At still higher absorption the remote wings yield a square root response.
The derivation of this can be found here:
http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~idh/PHAS2112/Lectures/Current/Part4.pdf
Yes I did use the words “almost immediately re-radiate” in reference to LWIR emission from CO2 or other GHG. I believe I first used the word “prompt” in this regard.
I should have been more SPECIFIC. I meant times of the ORDER of one millisecond or less; that being how long it would take an unimpeded photon from the earth surface to propagate 300 km to essentially extraterrestrial space.
No I certainly did not mean times of the order of 100 ps or less.
One millisec is the order of the time it takes a single excited molecule of CO2 to emit a photon, however during that time it collides with a neighboring molecule about every 100psec. At atmospheric pressure there will be sufficient collisions to remove the excess energy before a photon can be emitted, (emission is a Poisson process so there will still be some emission).
Perhaps: Never has CO2 been “shown” to cause any warming on Earth at all.
Being shown something, to most, is proof enough.
When anyone starts the CAGW diatribe, I say .
Show me some man-made global warming.
Show me some and then we’ll discuss it.
To: Janice Moore & Richard J. Petschauer,
The best articulation I have seen of the fundamental ‘real question(s)’ to be used to demarcate what is within observation verified climate science (Feynman based science) and what is outside of observation verified climate science (pre-science of Post Normal Science variety that we find a lot in the IPCC assessment processes) is from Richard Lindzen.
And also there is the following from Lindzen in the conclusion of the chapter.
So, Richard Petschauer and Janice Moore, please note the last of his questions, “Is the notion of global mean radiative imbalance driving global mean temperature relevant to actual climate change?”. Think about that question for a moment. It is, arguably, the most important fundamental climate science question that a skeptic could address. Richard Petschauer’s question “How fast will the earth warm if we do nothing to curtail the growth of man made carbon dioxide emissions?” is an inappropriate leading question that does not address the most fundamental remaining issues at task in the climate science dialog.
John
I do not know about number 1 (which I think is unimportant for this issue), but I agree with the other 3 points of yours. But that does not mean that, ASSUMING NO OTHER CHANGES, that more CO2 will not cause SOME warming. In fact I can’t think of anything that would prevent it. But as I stated negative fedback can reduce it. Based on the last 18 years with no warming it looks like the warming from 10% increase in CO2 has been cancelled by natural causes, both of which could be quite small. My estimate for the CO2 part during this time is about 0.09C, but it could be less.
Well written summary of the positions many of us who DO NOT accept the conclusions of the IPCC of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) theory of CO2 causing Global Warming. There are other loose ends not addressed by this essay, but it does highlight many of the inconsistencies between the IPCC “Science” and the observable data and mathematics. Perhaps those who accept the IPCC’s stance can at least have a better understanding that those of us who DO NOT accept the conclusions of the IPCC are not ignorant of science, but are in fact basing our positions on real data and accepted physics and climate science.
My hope is to encourage all of us to take a closer look at the evidence and data available and engage, positive, meaningful discussions as opposed to name calling and the closed mindedness that seems to accompany the mentioning of Climate Change and Global Warming.
Regards,
Matthew Epp
Thanks, Matthew. Well said.
I believe in evidence.
No you don’t!
Better : I am a global warming skeptic who believes in climate.
Don”t we all?
CO2 does not correlate to water vapor /temp. profile of the tropical troposphere (DATA SUGGEST IT IS ENSO/PDO PHASE), due to no positive feedbacks apparent between CO2 /water vapor, and CO2 via IR does not effect sea surface temperatures(DATA SUGGEST IT IS SOLAR VISIBLE LIGHT /LONG UV LIGHT WAVE VARIABILITY).
In addition CO2 according to data follows the temperature does not lead it and it’s effect becomes less as it increases for it is near it’s saturation point with respect to the IR wavelengths it absorbs. In addition past historical temperature data shows no tie in with CO2.
Given that, I would say AGW theory is on shaky grounds. Where is that hot spot?
Yeah – I believe in global warming too. Otherwise, here in Alberta, Canada, where I live it used to be covered by 2-3 miles of ice. In fact, here in my province we still have evidence of these glaciers in the Rocky Mountarins, lots of them, left over from when my province was under that 2-3 miles of ice. Without that global warming back 12,000 years ago there would be no Canada. That was indeed global warming without the humans. What and who do you blame that on?
The first part of the answer to your question: Periodic changes in Earths Orbit -The Milankovitch cycles with lengths of 10s of thousands of years. Temperature falling, then rising, over several 10s of thousands of years.
The next part of the answer: modern day warming since 1880 ~1.6F, the fast rate seen in millennia. And a CO2 rise of 40%. Similar? No. Same cause? If one says yes, that’s the same logic as saying ‘I have a fever, and since I had a fever 20 years ago caused by Measles, I don’t need another diagnosis — I have the Measles again!’.
You appear to be your own doctors to yourself – what can possible go wrong?
Whatever the modern warming rate has been, it is far from the fastest in millennia.
The early 18th century warming was more rapid, coming out of the depths of the LIA during the Maunder Minimum, before the major coal-burning phase of the Industrial Revolution, for instance.
IPCC doesn’t even try to connect the late 19th century warming with CO2 increases. It considers only the period after WWII to be primarily man-made. The first century of the modern warming period (c. 1850 to 1950) was primarily or totally natural in origin, as the world heated up after the end of the LIA in the middle of the 19th century. Increased CO2 then was an effect of warmer temperatures more than a cause.
Nor is there any evidence supporting CO2 as the cause of whatever warming has actually occurred since the late 1940s. From c. 1945 to 1976, CO2 rose as temperatures fell. Then for 20 years rising CO2 accidentally coincided with rising temperatures. But since 1997, despite a super ENSO, temperatures have fallen again or stayed flat, even while CO2 rose even more rapidly.
Warren, why do you only analyze one factor at a time? Climate mechanics are much more complex than you observe!
Believe it or not, I had the Measles twice.
@Gloria Swansong
The Planet is not ‘Recovering’ from the LIA. The factors which contributed to the LIA cannot account for the global warming of the past 50-100 years, which is far larger than anything seen in the LIA. Furthermore, it is not physically accurate to claim that the planet is simply “recovering” from the LIA. This argument is akin to saying that when you drop a ball off a cliff, it falls because it used to be higher. There is a physical mechanism for these changes. In the case of the ball, it falls because of the gravitational pull at the Earth’s surface. In the case of the global temperature, it is warming from the increased greenhouse effect due to human activities.
“Furthermore, it is not physically accurate to claim that the planet is simply “recovering” from the LIA. This argument is akin to saying that when you drop a ball off a cliff, it falls because it used to be higher. There is a physical mechanism for these changes. In the case of the ball, it falls because of the gravitational pull at the Earth’s surface.”
warren, for your analogy to work, both the ball and temperature would necessarily have to rebound similarly after each had fallen, for each to qualify as haven “recovered”.
For a dropped ball (one that isn’t made of elastic bouncy rubber) that has lost gravitational potential to be properly compared to the recovery of temperatures from a lower to higher state, as Earth has done since the LIA, would entail that the ball, after having fallen, would have to ‘recover’ altitude on it’s own, without a force pushing it upwards, which is obviously impossible, unless it is a case of an elastic ball that can deform and therefore store potential energy like a spring, in which case, there will never be enough “bounce” in the ball for it to ever reach it’s original height, so it can’t “recover” on it’s own to the original height or higher without additional energy imparted from an outside force.
Likewise, the Earth’s temperature cannot “recover” to a higher energy state (ie temperature) on it’s own without additional outside energy added to the system, no matter what influences are present between the ocean floor and ground, and the top of the atmosphere, whether it’s GHE or natural variability.
The additional energy that raised the Earth’s temperatures came from the increase in solar energy during the modern maximum of solar activity that occurred between 1936 and 2003. My research does go back further than that too, back before 1850, in case someone wants to accuse me of “cherry-picking”.
Using SIDC sunspot numbers, for the 68 years from 1936-2003, in terms of sunspot activity, the Sun had 89% more activity than the previous 68 years,1868-1935, (annual SSN of 76 vs 40.2). Using Dr. Svalgaard’s preliminary revised SSNs from 2014 (to be finalized in August), the disparity was 71.7% (73.5 vs 42.8).
The Sun caused global warming!
Which means that I agree with Janice Moore’s evaluation of the author’s post.
warrenlb
You claim to have made an important discovery which you do not explain when you write
What are “The factors which contributed to the LIA” and how do you know they “cannot account for the global warming of the past 50-100 years” which – contrary to your assertion – is typical of ALL the other recovery from the LIA?
You are the first person to have publicly asserted that you know “The factors which contributed to the LIA”. Why should anybody believe your assertion when you are keeping this information to yourself?
Richard
Albertalad at 1:35 – from one Albertan to another – there have been lots of warm and cold periods. Heck, we got 4 cm of snow last night up my way.
The thing is, it has been suggested that there have been periods of rapid warming long before humans were driving SUV’s all around the planet. Here is one of many references:
From page 49 of http://www.acia.uaf.edu/PDFs/ACIA_Science_Chapters_Final/ACIA_Ch02_Final.pdf
++++++++++++++
“The inception of warming appears to have been veryrapid (NRC, 2002). The rate of temperature changeduring the recovery phase from the LGM provides a benchmark against which to assess rates of temperature change in the late 20th century. Available data indicate an average warming rate of about 2 ºC per millennium between about 20 and 10 ky BP in Greenland,with lower rates for other regions. On the other hand, very
rapid temperature increases at the start of the Bølling-Allerød period (14.5 ky BP;
Severinghaus and Brook,1999) or at the end of the Younger Dryas (~11 ky BP) may have occurred at rates as large as 10 ºC per 50 years over substantial areas of the Northern Hemisphere. Almost synchronously, major vegetation changes occurred in Europe and North America and elsewhere (Gasse and van Campo, 1994). There was also a pronounced warming of the North Atlantic and North Pacific (Webb et al., 1998).”
+++++++++++++
OK, so the Northern Hemisphere MAY have warmed by 10 degrees C over 50 years without human help 11,000 years ago.
Some how I am having a lot of trouble worrying about a little warming after putting hay out in the snow today. But hey, I’m going skiing for a few days next week so from that side, it’s all good. 😉
The more I read, the more I know that people don’t know how the climate works . Pick your poison I reckon.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/13/3945/2013/acp-13-3945-2013.pdf
The solar side of things.
The 2nd from last stage in the process of a skeptic’s journey towards accepting the Science of AGW:
‘It’s warming, but not as much as predicted by peer-reviewed science.’ (This article)
The Last Stage:
‘Man’s burning of fossil fuels is causing the warming, and it’s likely to warm in the range of 1.5C to 4.5C for a doubling of CO, and I always believed that!’
You describe a journey towards Belief and ignorance. Sorry, doesn’t work that way. Nice try.
Bruce Cobb,
You’re exactly right. He says:
The Planet is not ‘Recovering’ from the LIA. The factors which contributed to the LIA cannot account for the global warming of the past 50-100 years…
That’s called an ‘assertion’. In warrenlb’s case it is a completely baseless assertion. Everything observed over the past century is well within past parameters. There has been no acceleration in global warming, which appears to be entirely natural. In fact, global warming stopped many years ago.
The true believers in man-made global warming have no credible evidence to support what they believe. That’s why they fall back on assertions like warrenlb uses to argue with. He’s got no good, testable evidence to support his belief in CAGW, so assertions are what he uses.
The alarmist crowd has lost the science debate. Now it’s just politics, which doesn’t require any testable evidence.
Warren. Maybe you have been breathing too much CO. That is what has resulted in your statement:
“Man’s burning of fossil fuels is causing the warming, and it’s likely to warm in the range of 1.5C to 4.5C for a doubling of CO[CO2], and I always believed that!”
@Alberta Slim.
You say ‘my statement’.
No, not mine. It is what the skeptic says upon leaving the last stage of skepticism.
Typo correction: CO2, not CO.
CO would have been just as appropriate by me, sir, try some other blog.
by the way, CO is what you’ll get running a gas generator at 10 euros a liter in your garage because it’s too cold to start it outside!
“There are many areas where most skeptics and the “alarmists”, as they are called, agree. First is the idea of “climate sensitivity”, a useful benchmark for making estimates.” Let’s analyze your first idea. How do you measure a climate sensitivity? With what precision is it known?
To my best knowledge (correct me by all means if I am wrong), the sensitivity is only estimated. Meaning that you are making estimates based on estimates.
How much YOU think it is, and what are the error bounds?
Richard – I am afraid that your parable of a partial derivative is not the best one. It may be not be intuitive, but I know how to compute – not estimate – them. Can agree, that the best we can do to determine a climate sensitivity, is to estimate it? In that case you are making estimates based on estimates.
The fact that CAGW depends heavily on a quantity that can not be measured can be viewed as an unfortunate one, a fortunate one, or an extremely fortunate one. Take your pick.
“””””….. after the planet reaches a energy new balance. …..”””””
Well there’s your stage exit cue Richard.
This planet never ever does reach a new energy balance; it is constantly rotating and the sun only hits half of it at anytime, unlike Planet Trenberth which is bathed in sunlight all over; 24 hours per day.
You can’t claim that a “modelled” value of Temp increase for a doubling of CO2 (before anything else happens) is valid, if the description of the modelled environment is incorrect.
You can’t transport a laboratory measurement of CO2 absorption of LWIR radiation, into the behavior of the same CO2 in a non laboratory environment, where the source and spectrum of the LWIR radiant energy are nothing at all like the globar source used in those laboratory measurements.
The earth surface emission of LWIR radiant energy which CO2 addresses, is close to that emitted by an ordinary bottle of water chilled to about 15 deg C (288K).
Try that in your lab measurement, and see how much the CO2 in air sample warms up.
“You can’t claim that a “modelled” value of Temp increase for a doubling of CO2 (before anything else happens) is valid, if the description of the modelled environment is incorrect.” ~ G. E. S.
I completely agree with that and am left to wonder why, apparently, the majority of climate “scientists” do not agree. Did they not take any science in college?
Richard,
Per the scientific method, when on proposes an hypothesis, one has to MEASURE the results of an experiment to confirm that the measured data supports the hypothesis. If one cannot measure anything to confirm the hypothesis, what you have is a “faith based” hypothesis, i.e., religion.
We cannot measure CO2 climate sensitivity since there are many other factors affecting global temperatures. But is still a usefull concept.
What use does the CO2 climate sensitivity have other than the one of deceiving people?
Terry Oldberg,
The climate sensitivity number would be known if there were any verifiable measurements of AGW. But there aren’t.
Why aren’t there any measurements of AGW?
Two possibilities present themselves:
First, AGW is just too minuscule to measure. Or, AGW simply does not exist.
Most skeptics (not all) accept the conjecture that AGW exists to some extent. However, despite decades of searching by highly educated, well paid scientists using the latest instruments, no empirical measurments of AGW have ever been produced.
Again, there are two possible reasons: either AGW does not exist, or it is so small that the background noise swamps any signal. In either case, AGW can be completely ignored for any policy purposes. It simply does not matter. Anything too small to measure should be disregarded.
Measurements are the key to science. With only a few exceptions (the uncertainty principle; or a signal that is too small to find), measurements are necessary to make decisions. That is the weak link in the climate alarmists’ argument. They are trying to convince skeptics that something is a grave threat, but they can’t even produce evidence that it exists.
dbstealy
By definition, the equilibrium climate sensitivity (TECS) is the ratio of the change in the equilibrium surface air temperature to the change in the logarithm of the CO2 concentration. The former is not observable thus the value of TECS cannot be observed.
“Doubling CO2, taking over 100 years at the current growth rate, would move the notch downward and increase the area by about 3.5 watts per square meter”
As the Earth moves through its apogee and perigee around the sun we get a 100 watts per sq m variation … with zero impact on climate.
With all respect, you meant to say aphelion and perihelion. Apogee and perigee refer t the motion of the moon around he earth, or any other object with respect to earth. Gee=geo=earth. Helios=sun.
Peace
🙂
Thank you.
I never heard that nor figured it on my own.
Thanks
Ditto, cool, and thanks.
========
“As the Earth moves through its apogee and perigee around the sun we get a 100 watts per sq m variation”
More like 17 W/m^2.
I assume 100 W/m^2 is the maximum? 17 M/m^2 is still 5 times the claimed theoretical effect of a doubling of CO2 … and it has ZERO effect on climate.
Tony,
17 W/m^2 is the maximum. 100 W/m^2 is the top-of-atmosphere variation in insolation. The two sets of units are different by a factor of 4, the former is per unit area of the earth, the latter is per unit area normal to the radiation. Also, the former includes the effect of albedo, the latter does not.
By the definition of climate, the seasonal variation in insolation can have no effect on climate, just as the diurnal variation at any given location has no effect on climate. Setting that aside, the seasonal variation is largely soaked up by the heat capacity of the oceans.
But since the dependence of the rate of the Earth’s motion also changes with distance from the sun there is zero change over the year as a whole.
Phil.
But reflection (of incoming heat energy/radiation) from a horizontal surface at sea-level is instantaneous, and absorption of heat energy (by that surface) is also instantaneous. Transfer of the absorbed energy into the substrate (if land) or down further into the water column (if sea or lake) creates a delay time that can allow averages to be useful. Sometimes.
First start with about 90, not 100. Factoring in averaging over a 24 hour period cuts it by 4. Factoring in cloud cover, atmosphere absorption, surface reflections, I get down to 11 Wm-2, still much more tham 3.5, but you can’t separarte this out from seasonal variations. And we see a lot of temperature differnce from winter to summer, except at the equator. But we have to include the delay of the heat stored in the soil and ocean.
Sadly, the author shows no ability to distinguish between actual heat transfer (a conservative metric) from the surface through the atmosphere to space and LOCAL radiative intensity (a NON-conservative metric). That’s what traps him into uncritical acceptance of the AGWers’ simplistic take of the “greenhouse effect,” far removed from geophysical reality.
What happens when one integrates the local effects?
Excellent point. That seems to be what drives most people’s perspective.(Given the urban nature of mankind).
I recommend you re read my last paragraph on the heat transfers involved. I cover the only way it leaves the planet: radiation. I also breifly cover the heat transfer from the surface to the atmosphere which goes down as the atmosphere warms, forcing the surface to warm also. To keep my article simple I did cover all the details of the heat leaving the surface. Two that do not depend on the atmosphere are radiation direcly to space (about 22% on clear days dropping to 10% on average cloudy days and latent heat from evaporation. Besides convection, the major heat loss from the surface that depends on the atmosphere temperature (and the greenhouse content) is from net infrared radiation. Net, because the atmosphere, mostly greenhouse gases, radiate downward (but less than that upward from the surface) based on their temperatures of the final emmission level where the photons are not reabsorbed before reaching the surface. BTW, unlike warming caused by CO2, this downwelling can be measured.
I recommend that you read George E. Smith’s lengthy comment to gain some comprehension of the vital distinction between heat transfer and radiative intensity.
Has anyone considered the energy consumed in photosynthesis in all of this ? or am i being too simplistic?
Richard,
you simply aren’t getting it. Sir George Simpson of the Royal Meteorological Society warned Callendar against your radiation only approach in 1939. It is still as foolish as it was then. Nothintg has changed.
CO2 does not trap heat in the atmosphere, nor does radiation emitted from CO2 in the atmosphere slow the cooling of the surface.
The primary heating of our atmosphere is via non-radiative means. The primary cooling is via radiative means. Seriously, how hard can this be?!
In advancing the tired old ERL or “effective radiating level” argument, paraphrased, what you just claimed was –
Does that sound inane to you Richard? It should.
Some say it is hard sceptics like me that give sceptics a bad name by publishing instructions and build diagrams for simple empirical experiments that utterly disprove the radiative GHE. I say it is quisling lukewarmers giving sceptics a bad name, with your foolish pseudo scientific “warming but less than we thought” Realpolitik attempts. There can be no soft landing for this hoax, resistance is futile.
Are you seated comfortably Richard? Then I’ll really begin…
1. 71% of the surface of our planet is ocean.
2. Liquid water is an extreme short wave selective surface not a near blackbody.
3. Incident LWIR cannot heat nor slow the cooling rate of water free to evaporatively cool.
4. The sun alone could drive our oceans to 335K or beyond if it were not for atmospheric cooling.
5. The primary cooling mechanism for the atmosphere in turn is radiation to space.
6. The current average surface temperatures of the oceans are 288K.
What is the NET effect of our radiatively cooled atmosphere on surface temperatures Richard?
(hint – it begins with the letter “C”)
“I recommend that you read George E. Smith’s lengthy comment to gain some comprehension of the vital distinction between heat transfer and radiative intensity.” ~ 1sky1
Agreed. I would add that one should read carefully just about any comment that George E. Smith makes here.
Dawg,
I had tried to calculate at one time the amount of energy released by the lightning in all the lightning bolts all over the earth everyday, and where this energy went (1.4 billion strokes per year, avg about 500 megajoules per stroke).
Does it go into the ground? Does it come out of the ground into the clouds? Does it wind up in the ionosphere?
In the end, I decided that I was not going to be the one to answer any of these, or the one to calculate the effect of more or less lightning on the energy budget of the earth. My guess is that what is captured by photosynthesis is a small fraction of the energy coming and going everyday. And much of it is rereleased fairly soon anyway.
Konrad,
As one of the very few engineers who actually performs experiments, your comments carry weight. I’m not completely convinced that AGW does not exist. But you make a strong case, and there is still no verifiable, empirical evidence for AGW. I think it’s just a very small, 3rd-order forcing that simply doesn’t matter.
The author asserts:
…unlike warming caused by CO2, this downwelling can be measured.
He is admitting that AGW has not been measured. That is the crux of the alarmists’ problem (and I classify the author as a closet alarmist). Skeptics simply say: show me. Provide convincing evidence to support your conjecture. But so far, there is no convincing evidence.
Nice well written blog. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) / Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change (CACC) believers continually categorize those of us who are climate realists as “deniers” that don’t believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that climate changes or that the earth has warmed. They characterize realists this way because it makes realists seem unreasonable, to be unscientific in thinking and seem to be dangerous kooks.
But climate realists or skeptics of the CAGW/CACC belief system agree that the earth HAS warmed. The climate HAS changed. The world is warmer than it was in the Little Ice Age. In fact, the climate has continually changed throughout history. Climate realists know that this is true based on overwhelming evidence. On the other hand, there is no scientific evidence that CO2 has had any large impact on temperature. There is more evidence that CO2 does not have a large impact on temperature. It is true that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and is contributing to the “greening” of earth.
There is therefore no evidence supporting the view that increased anthropogenic CO2 emissions will cause catastrophic warming or catastrophic climate change.
Politically speaking, if we (the United States) wanted to stop the increase in CO2, we could not do that by reducing our CO2 emissions. That is because CO2 emissions are increasing rapidly from countries like China and India. There is no good way for the US to reduce our own emissions by even 30% without having a huge economic impact. An economic impact that would like cause whichever political party forced such reductions to lose power and the next political party would reverse such cuts. The same thing would happen in many other countries around the world. Therefore, politically speaking, reducing world emissions of CO2 in any meaningful way is basically impossible. The only thing we can do is needlessly harm our economy and way of life for no benefit.
To Konrad,
Regarding your 6 points that “I don’t get”:
1. “71% of the surface of our planet is ocean.”
I knew that and included the negative feedback from it in evaporation cooling at over two times what the IPCC does in their lapse rate.
2. “Liquid water is an extreme short wave selective surface not a near blackbody.”
For radiation, not true. I can read the temperature of a swimming pool with a gun type infrared thermometer within about a degree of a normal thermometer. For radiation, except for reflections (accounted for in surface albedo estimates), nearly all the heat is absorbed in the first few Km. The surface warming will be partially offset with cooling from evaporation, but not enough to stop all warming. I have seen data where the sea surface skin increases 3C from dawn to 2 PM on a sunny day. Evaporation should be up close to 30% during this time because the air RH cannot increase fast enough to keep it at about 18% or 6%/C.
3. “Incident LWIR cannot heat nor slow the cooling rate of water free to evaporatively cool.”
Again not true. The warming from absorbed heat will only be partially offset with cooling from evaporation. Such evaporation will depend on water temp, wind speed, wave action and air humidity. At 100 RH, there is no evaporation regardless of the wind speed
4. “The sun alone could drive our oceans to 335K or beyond if it were not for atmospheric cooling.”
Where did you get that? At an emissitivity of 0.95, using the Stefan-Boltzmann equation at 335K gives a radiation of about 678 Wm-2. Even with no clouds, atmosphere solar absorption or surface reflections, the average solar input over the entire surface over 24 hours is only about 342 Wm-2.
5. “The primary cooling mechanism for the atmosphere in turn is radiation to space”
Agree for the planet as a whole. The atmosphere including clouds also transmits heat back to the surface. Again it can be measured with instruments. Are you one of those who thinks a colder body cannot send radiation to a warmer one? In this case I can again use my hand held infrared thermometer. From a warm room and my freezer door open, I can read the freezer temperature. In this case, I just read 2.8F. For clouds, I can estimate their altitude by their temperature difference from the surface. For clear skies, I get a reading that is too cold because the gases emit only of part of a black body’s wavelength spectrum. The clouds and the atmosphere may not “warm” the earth in the normal sense, but they can reduce the cooling of the surface, which will raise its temperature compared to the case with no atmosphere. Using algebra, reducing the size of a negative is the came as creating a positive, so from the math standpoint the atmosphere and clouds can “warm” the surface.
6. “The current average surface temperatures of the oceans are 288K.”
Very close. Data I have seen has the total surface at about 288K, the oceans at 290K.
Konrad, in summary, yes I don’t “get it”, as you say, if you mean thinking what you claim is true.
Yes. Feedback is the critical issue. Top-down modeling advocacy is excellent. The ECS numbers sound a little low, but the point is correct.
That was a very good post.
“So what are the skeptics skeptical about?”
Here is my answer:
1. The “C” in CAGW [very similar to your answer]
2. Kyoto type treaties [keep your eye on the bottom line]
There are more than a few beliefs a Warmist has to accept as true to justify a Kyoto type treaty. Most of those beliefs are scientific in nature. Several beliefs are political in nature (feasibility of a treaty yielding the intended results). One belief is economic in nature (positive cost vs. benefit of a treaty).
You can be an “alarmist” and have your doubts about a Kyoto type treaty. If that were the case, you would still be a (treaty) “skeptic”. All skeptics are welcome.
““So what are the skeptics skeptical about?”
Here is my answer:
1. The “C” in CAGW [very similar to your answer]
2. Kyoto type treaties”
Exactly.
For me, it all about error bars. All the supposed changes are within the error bars of the studies.
This means there IS debate, and confusion on someone’s part. But whom?
Excellent post.
But I wonder if you could expand on this, which is new information to me: “both data (Wentz, et al, “How Much More Rain Will Global Warming Bring?, Science, 13 July, 2007) and basic physics indicate an increase of about 6% per degree C of warming, over double what the climate models average.”
Also, I’m curious about how this result was arrived at: “[About 1 C warming] will actually take longer [than 140 years] because the ocean heat storage will delay the warming.”
Again, I appreciate your effort.
Actually Joe, that Wentz et al paper says 7% increase in total global evaporation, and 7% increase in total global precipitation (lucky for us) and 7% increase in total atmospheric water content for a one deg C increase in Temperature.
I wonder if a 7% increase in total global precipitation is accompanied by any perceptible increase in cloud cover, either as increased cloud area or increased cloud optical densoity, or increased cloud persistence time, or some hodgepodge of all three.
Where I live we always get clouds when it rains.
And the GCMs agreed with Wentz on the 7% evap and precip rates, but said 1-3% for the increase in total atmospheric water (unless I got those two mixed up again) . In any case it is as much as a factor of seven disagreement between X-Box models, and measured reality.
If that doesn’t spell cloud modulation (of INCOMING SOLAR ENERGY) feedback !
The climate feedback system has incoming TSI solar energy as the INPUT, and global Temperature as the OUTPUT.
Re radiation to the surface is NOT the feedback signal; cloud modulation is and it goes directly back to varying the input amount which is the incoming (captured) solar energy.
There was a study by Susan Wijffels and others a while ago on extreme storms (or something like that. Sorry I can’t find the paper quickly). A major finding was that precipitation from extreme storms increased ~7% per global 1 deg C. She was pretty excited about it – a finding that demonstrated theory – and she is a mainstream climate scientist. Fortunately some do real science. The main problem for certain others was that her finding was at odds with the 2-3% allowed in the climate models. At a presentation where the question arose, the “warmist” scientist accepted her finding, but argued that there was no evidence that non-extreme weather followed the 7% pattern. A very suspect argument, I thought, but … well, that’s climate science for you.
Consider the reduction in aerosols that some say have caused more increase in precipitation than that suggested by Global Warming MODELS:
EXCERPT:
“For precipitation changes, the effects of declining aerosols are larger than those of increasing GHGs due to decreasing atmospheric absorption by black carbon: 63% of the projected global-mean precipitation increase of 0.16 mm per day is caused by declining aerosols. In the Northern Hemisphere, precipitation increases by 0.29 mm per day, of which 72% is caused by declining aerosols. ”
++++++++++++++++++++++
From:
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics An interactive open-access journal of the European Geosciences Unio
Atmos. Chem. Phys., 13, 10883-10905, 2013
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/13/10883/2013/
doi:10.5194/acp-13-10883-2013
© Author(s) 2013. This work is distributed
under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
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Research Article
07 Nov 2013
Projected effects of declining aerosols in RCP4.5: unmasking global warming?
L. D. Rotstayn1, M. A. Collier1, A. Chrastansky1, S. J. Jeffrey2, and J.-J. Luo3
1Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Aspendale, Vic, Australia
2Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts, Dutton Park, Qld, Australia
3Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Vic, Australia
Received: 21 June 2013 – Published in Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss.: 11 July 2013
Revised: 01 October 2013 – Accepted: 11 October 2013 – Published: 07 November 2013
Abstract. All the representative concentration pathways (RCPs) include declining aerosol emissions during the 21st century, but the effects of these declines on climate projections have had little attention. Here we assess the global and hemispheric-scale effects of declining anthropogenic aerosols in RCP4.5 in CSIRO-Mk3.6, a model from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). Results from this model are then compared with those from other CMIP5 models.
We calculate the aerosol effective radiative forcing (ERF, including indirect effects) in CSIRO-Mk3.6 relative to 1850, using a series of atmospheric simulations with prescribed sea-surface temperatures (SST). Global-mean aerosol ERF at the top of the atmosphere is most negative in 2005 (−1.47 W m−2). Between 2005 and 2100 it increases by 1.46 W m−2, i.e., it approximately returns to 1850 levels. Although increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) and declining aerosols both exert a positive ERF at the top of the atmosphere during the 21st century, they have opposing effects on radiative heating of the atmosphere: increasing GHGs warm the atmosphere, whereas declining aerosols cool the atmosphere due to reduced absorption of shortwave radiation by black carbon (BC).
We then compare two projections for 2006–2100, using the coupled atmosphere-ocean version of the model. One (RCP45) follows the usual RCP4.5; the other (RCP45A2005) has identical forcing, except that emissions of anthropogenic aerosols and precursors are fixed at 2005 levels. The global-mean surface warming in RCP45 is 2.3 °C per 95 yr, of which almost half (1.1 °C) is caused by declining aerosols. The warming due to declining aerosols is almost twice as strong in the Northern Hemisphere as in the Southern Hemisphere, whereas that due to increasing GHGs is similar in the two hemispheres.
For precipitation changes, the effects of declining aerosols are larger than those of increasing GHGs due to decreasing atmospheric absorption by black carbon: 63% of the projected global-mean precipitation increase of 0.16 mm per day is caused by declining aerosols. In the Northern Hemisphere, precipitation increases by 0.29 mm per day, of which 72% is caused by declining aerosols.
Comparing 13 CMIP5 models, we find a correlation of –0.54 (significant at 5%) between aerosol ERF in the present climate and projected global-mean surface warming in RCP4.5; thus, models that have more negative aerosol ERF in the present climate tend to project stronger warming during 2006–2100. A similar correlation (–0.56) is found between aerosol ERF and projected changes in global-mean precipitation.
These results suggest that aerosol forcing substantially modulates projected climate response in RCP4.5. In some respects, the effects of declining aerosols are quite distinct from those of increasing GHGs. Systematic efforts are needed to better quantify the role of declining aerosols in climate projections.
Citation: Rotstayn, L. D., Collier, M. A., Chrastansky, A., Jeffrey, S. J., and Luo, J.-J.: Projected effects of declining aerosols in RCP4.5: unmasking global warming?, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 13, 10883-10905, doi:10.5194/acp-13-10883-2013, 2013.
For Joe Born,
For Wentz see: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5835/233
For evaporation,
Water evaporation is primarily dependent on the difference of the water vapor pressure of the water and the air at the interface. The water vapor pressure has been accurately measured. We use Bolton’s equation (Bolton, D., The computation of equivalent potential temperature, Monthly Weather Review, 108, 1046-1053, 1980. More accurate than Clausius-Clapeyron.
+- 0.3% from -35C to +35C.
With T in degrees C, the water vapor pressure is:
P=6.112 * exp((17.67*T) / (T+243.5))
The vapor pressure of the air equals that of water at the air’s temperature times the air’s relative humidity (RH) expressed as a fraction.
However as evaporation starts, the water at the interface cools and the air RH increases, reducing the initial evaporation. But the cooler water drops and the moist air rises, refreshing the interface, so some evaporation continues. In the oceans, wind and waves accelerate this and are key factors besides air and water temperatures and air RH.
For the same wind and wave action,
E = (K + a)(VP(water temp) – VP( air temp)*RH))
Where K is a function of wind speed which also determines wave action (ignoring the time lags). Taking the ratio of two E values, the values of “K” and “a” cancel out.
For constant water and air temperatures and fixed RH, from 15C to 16C we only need the ratios of the vapor pressures and get a value of 1.066 or an increase of 6.6%. At 17C to 18C it is 6.5%. If the air temperature tracks within +-2 degrees of the water temperature, there is little change in the percent change and is within 6% to 7%.
However small changes in RH (relative humidity) can make big differences. At a typical 70% initial humidity, a rise of 1C and 1% increase in RH will cut the evaporation increase from 6.6% per C down to only 3.1%. The IPCC models get values in the 2.5 to 3% range. We think this is because they underestimate cloud formation and the resulting precipitation, the latter of which is the primary driver in reducing humidity. Incidentally, if the water vapor increase supports only a 5% increase in water vapor or a 0.5% drop in RH per C warming as data shows, evaporation will increase about 8% to 10% per C of warming, further increasing the negative feedback.
Regarding the140 years, thanks for spotting a problem. The 140 years corresponds to an annual compound increase of CO2 of 0.05%. For the last 20 years it has been closer to 0.055%, which gives about 126 years, still much longer than about 70 years per IPCC at a 1% growth rate.
log(2)/log(1.0055) = 126.4 or 1.055 ^126 =1.996.
Thank you very much. That was very helpful. (And refreshing; I’ve recently suffered a blizzard of evasions and non-answers, so your response was a welcome contrast.)
“Second, most agree on well established methods to estimate how greenhouse gases absorb and emit heat, and that doubling of CO2 will reduce the heat leaving the planet by a little more than 3.5 watts per square meter. ”
This is oversimplified and does not reflect the real heat exchange process.
The heat exchange between surface and CO2 happens within a short distance of less then 50 meters. If CO2 increases in the atmosphere the distance where this heat exchange happens will be only shorter.
The way how the climate sensitivity to CO2 is calculated as well as the total greenhouse effect and the CO2 part of it is far away of being settled science to put it mildly.
Models do include a lot of aerosol forcing to compensate for the lack of warming that should happen with the increase in CO2:
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/climate-unsettled-science
From historical records we know that in the past we have seen warm and cold periods with low and respective high CO2 concentrations exactly as it shouldn’t be if CO2 would be driving anything in the climate. It is rather the oceans and the respective currents.
Even if one would accept the 1°C hypothesis for CO2 doubling this cannot cause any issue. The climate was relative stable in the past and was gradually cooling:
http://climate4you.com/ClimateAndHistory.htm#General%C2%A0
On a longer timescale even more.
On the other side, most plants do like CO2 and would do better with more.
In reality increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere is one of the few things that we did well. Accidentally we did the right thing.
Who would like to live in a CO2 starved world with 280 ppm? That would mean that more then 1 billion people would be in danger to starve. Even reducing CO2 to 350 ppm would reduce global food production.
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/dry/dry_subject_a.php
The benefits from increased CO2 outweighs by far the potential dangers. There are other much more important things to fix like pollution, famine, underdevelopment. Once we fix these we have the time in 50 -60 years to look with more data and cool heads at what we do with CO2, if there is any need.
Excellent.
The global carbon cycle is biological. I think biologists understand the atmosphere better than physicists.
Lars P. says:
…most plants do like CO2 and would do better with more.
In reality increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere is one of the few things that we did well. Accidentally we did the right thing.
Excellent point, and one which the alarmist crowd cannot ever accept. The rise in CO2 has been entirely beneficial. There has never been any global harm identified due to rising CO2.
If the IPCC honestly accepted those facts, they would be out of business.
It has always been Climate Catastrophism, not Climate Change or even Global Warming, that brings out our skepticism. We have to call CAGW what it is, Climate Catastrophism. The other two terms I’ve always been generally okay with, right up until I try to explain the difference to a Catastrophist. In their black and white worldview either one believes that the End is Nigh and its all our fautl, or one is a “denier.”
The reason for that is something the Catastrophists have on their side and we don’t. Money. They have 100 times as much as we do (or 1000 times from another article this week). But the reason for the money differential is something else they have on their side, Tikkun Olam, Hebrew for The Repair of the World. According to Judaism, the repair of the world is the very definition of Happiness. You don’t have to be the least bit Jewish to feel that way.
To me, it matters that the alarmists are harming the world and badly. But just saying this is unlikely to convert any of them. They need to repair the world. You will be a lot more fun if you look at NASA’s graph of global CO2 patterns and realize the high spots are places where vegetation is being burned in primitive agriculture plus Turkey and Brazil with new dams killing a lot of Life. And yes, China’s coal plants. Western civilizations are carbon sinks. Killing of Life on a grand scale–ooh, that sounds horrible, doesn’t it?
And it has the wondrous advantage of being true. That means they can actually make the differences they want to make. Truth is kinda essential for that.
Get books on permaculture and Restoration agriculture, which solve many of the real problems. Look up the website http://www.originalsonicbloom.com and use it, if only on houseplants. Realize that dams are the most destructive energy source, followed by bird slicers and solar PV panels, both of which involve Chinese rare earths extracted under poisonous conditions.
Now, if you study this stuff, you will no longer take all their fun away, and that will be the end of the CAGW meme. In fact, we will all be able to work together.
Thanks, Richard J. Petschauer. A very good article.
The Berkeley Earth Land + Ocean Data anomaly dataset shows no global average temperature increase since 1998.
It shows a warming from 1910 to 1940 of 0.45°C, then a pause to 1975, and a warming to 1998 of 0.55°C.
That’s about it, and doesn’t seem catastrophic at all.
“There are over 100 of these models written by different teams and their results differ by a range to 3 to 1.”
Should be:
“There are over 100 of these models written by different teams and their results differ by a range from 3 to 1.”
Its a bit like this blog http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/dont-be-a-skeptic-the-noun-problem
I understood that a little bit of CO2 was supposed to warm the atmosphere which increased humidity…
The increased humidity would then increase the temperature…
It was a snowball effect of warmer…humidity….warmer…more humidity……wash rinse repeat
Run away global humidity
Which we all knew was crazy think………
As long as the increased humidity would not increase clouds. Damn them clouds.
like Global Warming morphed into Irritable Climate Syndrome…..did run away global humidity morph into “all about CO2”?….because it was never supposed to be all about CO2
YES Latitude! That was indeed the meme not that long ago, that CO2 would drive the earths atmosphere into the wall of Venus’ type hell world concrete wall. Run away CO2 and sulfuric acid rain was the prediction after reaching …. oooooo ahhhh …. Tipping Points …. scary . Clearly this is not happening.
Yes, but if the feedback factor is less than 1, it is like an infinite series that converges to a final of multiplier of 1 / (1 -F ). For example if F = +0.5 and the initial change is 1C, we get 1 + 0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125 +0.0.625 + . . . that with enough terms sims very close to 2. For F= -0.5, we get 1 – 0.5 + 0.25 -0.125 + 0.0625 + . . . that takes more terms but converges to 1/(1 + 0.5) or 0.6667.
This one will make you laugh …..or cry
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/apr/21/university-offering-free-online-course-to-demolish-climate-denial
Laugh.
I have an image of a horde of graduates emerging all wearing polar bear suits waving hockey sticks exclaiming something like “repent oh ye deniers before Armageddon!”.
“The impact and costs of doing nothing or something will not be covered here, but it is obvious they would depend on how fast warming will occur. This we will discuss.”
Why is it obvious that the impact and costs of doing nothing depend on how fast warming will occur? What empirical evidence have we so far for this?
No evidence, but seems likely. But not a major point, except what most of the gloom and doom the alarmists predict is based on large warming in the middle of the century.
Where is research that shows the optimum climate for our biosphere? The first question must 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, even fewer people. That bigger picture tells me all that I need to know about “climate science”.
When their primary answer is make more billionaires out of Wall St. millionaires and/or give the governments more tax money and power it all seems so shallow.
On top of it all, everybody knows it will not affect the earth’s temperature.
with 2% of the planet urbanized and 27% of the temp stations in these areas not hard to come up with some warming. Throw in all the estimated areas- more easy salaaming upwards of temps, especially across Africa where the WMO want to install 5000 temp stations. I call bull on all of it.
That’s why the satellte data should be more reliable and shows less warming. And no need to “adjust” the data.
While I agree with much of what Petschauer says there are some points I disagree with strongly. Firstly at 280 ppm the total absorbance of the CO2 column is about 2000 abs. The logarithmic effect starts once he line center saturates which can be considered to be somewhere between about 1-2 abs. The logarithmic effect comes about because further increase in concentration causes line broadening so that the CO2 absorbs over a slightly greater wavelength span. That means at 280 ppm we have about 10 doublings since onset of saturation. If the total impact of CO2 is 22 watts/sqM then each doubling will increase energy retained by 2.2 watts/sqM not 3.5 wats/sqM. In fact my calculation of the total impact of CO2 is more like 28 watts/sqM but that’s still only 2.8 watts/sqM per doubling not 3.5.
The second point is his claim that with increasing concentration the emission altitude will rise and thereby further drop the emission temperature. Emission to space only occurs from the top 2 abs of the CO2 column which at 280 ppm means the top 1/1000 of the CO2 column. This is in the stratosphere not the troposphere and in the stratosphere temperature rises with altitude it does not fall. However if CO2 in the stratosphere was indeed well mixed as I have seen claimed then the emission altitude would be so high the temperature would be around 0C not -60C and the impact of CO2 would be about zero. In fact CO2 is a heavy molecule and the stratosphere exhibits negligible convection and is indeed very calm and this allows the CO2 to stratify or pool in the lower stratosphere just above the tropopause, a region that is at about the same temperature as the tropopause. This also explains why most of the CO2 notch shows constant temperature corresponding to the tropopause temperature – there is a lot of CO2 in a small altitude region just above the tropopause. It also explains the very small spike in the middle of the emission notch. This is at the line center and comes about because of the very small amount of CO2 higher in the stratosphere emits at the higher temperature that prevails there. Given the pooling, increasing the concentration has only a very small impact on the altitude of the top of the pooled CO2 column. Further it would tend to increase the emission temperature not lower it. Of course one could argue that the increased emission would cool the lower stratosphere so that higher emission temperature would not occur in practice. Against that however is the strong likelihood that the temperature of the tropopause is also strongly impacted by a balance between near infrared absorption of solar energy by water vapour (in the 0.8-2 micron range) and far infrared emission by water vapour (beyond 20 microns) which dilutes the impact of CO2. Note the emission temperature in the 20 micron + spectral region also corresponds to the tropopause temperature and the tropopause almost by definition sets the top of the water vapour column in the atmosphere.
Michael, at 400 ppmm there is one CO2 molecule per 2500 air molecules. That means that on average any single CO2 molecule is surrounded by about 13.6 spherical shells of air molecules, before you get to any nearest neighbor (on average ) CO2 molecule.
So the CO2 molecules are totally unaware that there is another like them in the entire universe.
They act ALONE which is exactly how photon absorption is anyway.
So any notion that somehow there is a “line broadening” because of the density of CO2 molecules is just total BS; that is the only polite way to describe that theory.
Phil posted the paper that purports to show that the T versus CO2 is linear at very low concentrations, then changes to logarithmic at intermediate concentrations, and then changes again to a square root relationship at higher concentrations.
I took a look at the paper, and it is a grossly simplified one dimensional analysis, that presumes a collimated beam passing straight line through a uniform slab of medium.
That too is total BS as the LWIR in the atmosphere is essentially isotropic at any point, with radiation going in every which way, and being re-emitted in uncontrolled isotropic re-radiation directions.
In other words you have a nonsense analysis of an absorption process, which isn’t even real.
The absorption of a 15 micron or thereabouts LWIR photon by a single CO2 molecule in no way can have any physical effect on the likelihood of any other CO2 molecule absorbing any wavelength of photon which might come along, to which it is receptive.
This CO2 band (edges or shoulders) “broadening” with CO2 abundance is sheer poppycock.
The CO2 molecules do not conspire to gang up on the infrared radiation spectrum and decide to absorb a photon which previously was of no interest to them.
Photon absorption in gases at least is an individual atom or molecular event, and it is unaffected by the presence or absence of any other molecule whether the same or a different species..
And certainly at one in 2500 there is no “group effect.”
And no I am NOT saying that 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere is simply not enough to do anything. It most certainly is.
We are ALL having this chat, because we own some silicon that has areas into which impurities have been deliberately introduced at concentrations in the neighborhood of “ONE” ppm or less; and those negligible impurities give the silicon the important properties we have come to take for granted.
Typical single crystal semi-conductor grade raw silicon, today probably has something like 8 “nines” purity, as in 99.999999 % purity; certainly seven nines.
When I was in the LED business, we routinely made our own seven nines purity raw gallium from our scrapped material including the sawdust from slicing up GaAs single crystal ingots.
So at 400 ppm in the atmosphere, CO2 is very noticeable; but each molecules think it is unique, and they behave as if they believe that; so they do not gang up on radiation.
Thanks, George. Very well explained, I liked your solid-state physics analogy.
The density of silicon atoms in single crystal silicon is around 5 x 10^22 atoms per cc.
In CMOS circuits such as you will find in your ipad/ped/pid/pod/pud, or laptop or mainframe, there will be devices with layers carrying dopant atoms at levels between 10^16 and 10^19 atoms per cc to create the CMOS transistors.
So that is a range of one in five million to one in five thousand.
So the notion that a doping level of 400 ppm can’t possibly do anything in the atmosphere is a position of ignorance.
Efficient LEDs employ doping levels in the same range as CMOS transistors, as they are just junction diodes in different semiconductor materials.
Higher doping levels lead to higher numbers of dislocations, and an increase in non radiative recombination sites, which drops the internal quantum efficiency. Current leading technology LEDs have internal quantum efficiencies pushing very close to 100% (photons per electron). Their lower external efficiencies are due to internal optical trapping by TIR at the interface between very high (3.5) refractive index semiconductors, and lower (1.5) index of compatible encapsulants.
g
Sorry George you are wrong! Simple explanation, the absorption spectrum of a green house gas is very close to a Gaussian. If I double the CO2 concentration its the equivalent of putting 2 of the original CO2 layers one on top of the other. The output of the first is the input of the second so the overall effect is the square of the original Gaussian or if you like the original Gaussian multiplied by itself. The interesting property of Gaussian profiles is that the product of two Gaussians is itself a Gaussian but with a larger standard deviation (ie: a broader spread). It has nothing what so ever to do with CO2 molecules mysteriously interacting with each other.
By the way I should mention, I have spent the last 40 odd years carrying out research for a major international spectroscopic instrument manufacturer.
Ganging up like this?
George, Doppler and Pressure broadening of absorption lines is a well known and measured effect, the Curve of Growth has been used for interpreting observed absorption lines by Astrophysicists for about 50years.
@ Michael Hammer April 26, 2015 at 12:57 am
Me thinks you were talking silly on that one.
If you double the atmospheric CO2 concentration (ppm) ….. then all you are doing is doubling the “odds” that a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere will be struck by a photon of IR energy. And because of all the “free space” …. the output of one might never be the input of a 2nd one.
“””””…..
Phil.
April 27, 2015 at 8:12 am
George, Doppler and Pressure broadening of absorption lines is a well known and measured effect, the Curve of Growth has been used for interpreting observed absorption lines by Astrophysicists for about 50years…….””””””
Well Phil, you are not telling me anything that I didn’t learn in school sixty years ago.
So I completely agree with this statement of yours that I cut and pasted above.
But we are not talking about how the emission or absorption spectral line widths vary with gas Temperature (Doppler) or Pressure (collisions). I don’t have any argument with that.
We are talking about how such absorption or emission by ONE CO2 or other GHG molecule can be affected in any way, by the very remote presence of another molecule of the same species.
Unless two CO2 molecules collide with each other or come into close proximity with each other I don’t see how one such molecule can affect the absorption spectrum of another identical molecule.
Whether the mole abundance of say CO2 was 100 ppm or 1,000 ppm, I don’t see how the Doppler and pressure broadened absorption spectral lines of one CO2 molecule, at some specific atmospheric pressure and Temperature, can be affected by the presence of another remote CO2 molecule.
Absorption of a photon in gases is a property of a single molecule of a given species; they don’t remotely share in the capture of any single photon, by ganging up on it.
Well unless quantum mechanics is even crazier than the QM experts tell me it is. (crazy wild, not crazy invalid).
@M.H.
Actually the “emission height” for final IR emission from CO2 mainly occurs in the troposphere, except in cold polar regions where the tropopause is located in the stratosphere. But here the low temperature means emission rate is low anyway. Satellites looking down at upwelling IR detect the emission height through temperature and demonstrate this point. The “notch” in the emission spectrum is the true quantum energy, whereas the “line broadening” effects are kinetic sharing of photon energy with other molecules, and thus are pressure (not CO2) dependent.
Atmospheric species, including CO2 are reasonably well mixed whether in the stratosphere or not. Not just convection, but importantly kinetic motion produce such. Only very light gases like He show significantly different scale heights.
For a given wavelength and distance the probability be transmitted (T) (not absorbed) is raised to a power equal to the increased factor in CO2 concentration. For example for doubling CO2, T2 = T1^2. If P1 = 0.6 for example, then T2 = 0.36. The corresponding probabilities of being absorbed, A, are 1 – T. In this case A1 = 1 – 0.6 or 0.4 and A2 is 1 – 0.36 or 0.64. Note probabilities cannot exceed 1.The same relationship holds if the concentation is constant and the distance of travel changes.
Michael Hammer,
I don’t think this matters at the surface, I know (and I think so does Richard P.) that from the ground an IR thermometer reads very cold sky temperatures (at least @41N), I know my thermometer does not measure Co2 IR, but we can add that, and when the humidity is low I measure temps 80-100F colder than my air temp.
I don’t know what altitude I’m measuring, again not sure it matters, as that is the sky the surface “sees”.
So, my point is there could be a layer (or more) between what the surface “sees” and what a satellite “sees” that is a buffer between them (surface and space).
Now I will point out I don’t particularly care if the stratosphere’s(or???) temp changes, if the surface doesn’t.
‘Hence the low radiation rate. If the amount of CO2 increases, the escape altitude moves up causing both the temperature and heat loss to drop further.”
So, where’s the hot spot?
So, where’s the hot spot?
Exactly.
I do not claim any hot spot no understand why it was expected by some.
I have very little science background but I simply do not have confidence in agw. Why ? Because over my lifetime I have heard many many times PhDs from prestigious schools announce cures for diseases like cancer, which the media hypes up. These cures never seem to see reality. Most of the time the studies or models do not translate to reality.
A mouse is a medical model for a human. Drugs are tested and developed for mice, and work on mice. But the mouse model does not translate to human being reality.
We see the mouse model is not all that great. In general the more complex the thing a model is trying to model the less reliable the model will be.
I believe in evidence based science.
And dubious science and dodgy statistics are used for deceptive marketing purposes. Example: “Doing this can reduce your chance of X by 50%!” Not mentioned is that the 50% reduction is from 0.01 to 0.005. And the test mouse was fed 7 pounds of Bad Stuff.
The impact of water on our climate is extremely interesting. There are two quite separate effects. The first is the “green house” impact of water vapour in the atmosphere. This like any “green house” gas causes warming and again like any green house gas the impact rapidly becomes logarithmic as the concentration rises. The second impact is of course clouds which are droplets of liquid water not water vapour. Here the repeated rapid changes in refractive index between that of liquid water and the air between the water droplets causes scatter and reflection which is a broad band effect occurring at all wavelengths. The amount of incoming solar energy reflected back out to space exceeds the long wave thermal energy reflected back towards the earths surface so the net impact of clouds is cooling. This impact is much more nearly linear (ie: double the percentage cloud cover. roughly double the impact). At very low water vapour concentrations green house warming dominates over cloud cooling so the net impact is warming but as the concentration of water increases the diminishing incremental impact of warming coupled with the close to linear incremental impact of cooling means the balance shifts in favour of cooling. The result is that the impact of water on our climate is to set an equilibrium point for temperature, an equilibrium point that is maintained by strong negative feedback. The strength of that feedback is underlined by the exponential relationship between saturation water vapour partial pressure and temperature. Yet another of the utterly remarkable properties of water and the impact it has on life as we know it.
Isn’t there a third impact of water? It absorbs heat as it evaporates, cooling the surface. Then it releases that heat when it condenses higher in the atmosphere, where some of the heat radiates into space. So this is another negative feedback, I think.
To Bryan,
Yes, you are correct! And this is the biggest error in the climate models, I think. They claim to include this in negative “lapse rate” feedback, but with their low estimates of evaporation increase with warming they underestimate it and I doubt if they include the added heat lost to space from warmer clouds as you point out. I cover this here:
http://climateclash.com/improved-simple-climate-sensitivity-model/
Hi Bryan; wrt to a third impact of water, it depends in what context. Certainly latent heat effects have a big impact on heat distribution within the atmosphere. If you argue (as I think your are) that this heat distribution affects energy loss to space, that can only be by changing the temperature profile of the atmosphere with altitude and indeed in this context I would agree with you. I was thinking only in terms of direct radiation to space and absorption of incoming solar energy from space. My back of the envelope calculations suggest however that radiative processes even within the atmosphere are larger than normally thought and the convective + latent heat processes possibly somewhat smaller but the less your point is well made.
You are correct Bryan, but I would put it differently:
It evaporates as it absorbs heat, cooling the surface. Then it condenses when it releases that heat higher in the atmosphere, where some of the energy radiates to space. Heat does not radiate to space.
Key difference is it is the ABSORPTION of the heat (from the surface) that causes evaporation, and it is the loss of that heat to cooler surroundings by conduction or by thermal radiation, that causes condensation. Condensation does NOT result in any Temperature rise as a result of the loss of the latent heat. The water droplets do not get any higher Temperature than the water vapor Temperature was.
When steam condenses on your skin (and scalds you) your skin NEVER gets any hotter than the steam Temperature was .
I don’t know why people think that latent heat causes clouds to get higher Temperature than the water vapor was before it condenses into water. The latent heat has to be lost to something cooler for condensation to occur, or energy has to be lost by radiation, and water vapor is a good LWIR radiator.
Clouds, fog and mists are all forms of water vapor which have collected into larger “droplets” of water and are visible to the naked eye, …. and are the same as humidity which can not be seen with the naked eye. And that is because of the density of the larger “droplets” of water and the fact that any source of light that strikes them will be absorbed more readily and/or reflected away from them more easily.
But now the effects of clouds, fogs and mists relative to incoming solar energy and re-emitted energy from the earth’s surface ….. are quite different (extremely more pronounced) than the effects of humidity. Again, this is because of their density (mass).
Clouds, fogs and mists act as a unidirectional buffer to both the incoming solar energy and the re-radiated energy from the earth’s surface. And the best way to explain this is by examples.
Night time cloud cover or fog will prevent near surface air temperatures from cooling off as fast because they per say buffer the re-radiated energy.
Day time cloud cover or morning fog will prevent near surface air temperatures from warming up as fast because they per say buffer the incoming solar energy.
And this conundrum is what confuses the ell out of scientists who are trying to calculate “average surface air temperatures” ….. and which wrecks havoc with their Climate Modeling Programs ….. because it is such an important but indeterminate variable. ……. And thus, because they can not accurately calculate their affect, …… they completely ignore and omit said from any of their calculations …… and attempt to CTA by blaming everything on atmospheric CO2.
There is probably as much, or maybe even more, fog and mist coverage of the surface of the earth each and every 24 hour day ….. as there is cloud coverage, … but no one that I know of tries to keep track of that coverage ….. which could be just as important as cloud cover.
Does anyone believe in the next 20 years we will reach a tipping point of no return? Given the last 20 years I would say not. So why not let Bill Grays ideas play out and see where global “temperatures” stand by 2030. The current climate cycle is very close to the late 1950s. We have been showing that on Weatherbell constantly. We have been measuring via satellite since the flip in the PDO to warm in the late 1970s, so of course it started at a cooler point. In the late 50s we saw the same kind of thing go on as now, after the overall flip in the early 50s, there was 3 years of warmth in the PDO. When it was done, the Atlantic went into the cold AMO , so they were cold in tandem for 2 decades, almost like we have had that lead to the warmth
Bills paper
http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Publications/gray2012.pdf
I have stated time and time again, and showed time and time again, the drop of mixing ratios over the tropical oceans is almost a perfect fit with the PDO. We are constantly looking at temps, when the greatest warming is where its dry and cold in the N polar winters ( please see Danish site) while summers have started to cool) WATER VAPOR IS THE CLIMATE CONTROL KNOB AND SPECIFICALLY OVER THE TROPICS! The trapping hot spot theory is shot to the 4 winds when one simply watches the multi year reaction to enso events. Remember these people were pushing multiyear warm ensos, and for good reason, that would lead to their conclusion. The past 7 years overall has blown that away, and so that is why they go nuts when they see a warm event. The cooling event after this is liable to be a monster drop, and this time the Atlantic will be heading to the cold AMO. That is why you are seeing summer ice melt less and less, as that is a key idea behind the ice cap theory. This year again, is likely to be nowhere close to the death spiral years that had these people speculating about an ice free arctic as early as 2013. There seems to be an intuitive cap on temps, we now have the means to measure without all the nonsense with pre satellite normalization that goes on. It seems more obvious every day that people simply do not want to let this play out, for when we get to the end, it would have been as Bill Gray outlined years ago. And alot of people will be out of jobs and have egg on their face. Of course never underestimate the idea that it simply will be played as worse than we thought, but just later
Joe, I know some physics, but I don’t have your uncanny ability to relate current patterns to the past patterns.All I can say, given the current state-of-art of General Circulation Models, I would always bet on you.
Don’t worry about people out of jobs and with eggs on their faces. After losing their bets, they will be presidential science advisors.
thanks Joe….
Joe, do you think they will find a way to make it “anthropogenic” if we get substantial cooling during SC25 and beyond?
Sure. It’ll be aerosols from developing countries. It’s always “our” fault.
Joe Bastardi,
Your contributions are appreciated here!
I really look forward to your Saturday Summaries on http://www.weatherbell.com/ as well!
Mac
Thanks for pointing to William Gray’s 2012 paper. It is an important study.
Completely agree Joe. Solar activity was at the highest in about 1,000 years during the late 1950’s – the ‘happy’ days – when solar F10.7cm flux averaged 139 sfu/day, as compared to the 1960’s during SC#20, when flux averaged 113 per day. Cycle 21 was 135, #22 was 123, #23 was 122, and this cycle so far is at 104, the lowest in 100 years, and by the time it reaches the next minimum, the daily average solar flux for SC#24 will be in mid 90’s.
Since the next cycle is looking to be even lower, we will definitely be seeing temps drop as they did in the 1960’s and early 70’s, and probably lower – a monster drop indeed. Some of us solar researchers have good reason to think the AMO and PDO are solar-controlled overall, which fits in with your commentary.
Which is why I say The cause of the ‘pause’ was the cause before the ‘pause’. The Sun.
“And alot of people will be out of jobs and have egg on their face.” ~ J. B.
The left wing in America will claim that the Obama climate rules and regulations mitigated “our” CO2 contributions and hence stopped the march toward Thermo-Armageddon. This is like tossing virgins in a volcano and shouting that the sacrifice did, indeed, keep the volcano from erupting.
So , in 2030 skeptics hovelled in the Greenpeace Gulag can cough out “See we were right.”.
Joe is right on target with several points. The PDO cycle, has in the the past been defined with ~30 years, with a tendency to be in a +PDO, then ~30 year with a -PDO.
We’ve been in a -PDO regime for ~ 15 years, so one might suspect be at the halfway point.
During the previous -PDO regime, the halfway point was the late 1950’s and there was a spike higher into +PDO territory that lasted for a couple of years, then back down into the -PDO regime that lasted for another ~15 years.
You can see that here:with monthly PDO values:
http://research.jisao.washington.edu/pdo/PDO.latest
Of importance is the recent spike higher(starting in early 2014) to some impressively high values late last year into +PDO territory.
This is huge. Does it mean we are repeating what happened at the halfway point of the last -PDO in the late 1950’s?
Or, does it mean that the -PDO regime has ended after only ~15 years?
It’s huge because the meaning to those following this powerful oceanic oscillation can be interpreted completely different, depending on which way it goes.
Generally speaking, if we are back to a +PDO for the next decade, we should expect more El Nino’s and more global warming. If this was just a spike higher(like the late 50’s) and go back to another ~15 years with a -PDO, we would expect a tendency to have more La Nina’s and at the very least, a continuation in the global warming “hiatus”.
Also, if we back to a +PDO, then the periodicity of the PDO phases must be shortening.
The last -PDO cycle was ~30 years but this was followed by a +PDO(with global warming) that started in the late 1970’s that looks like it only lasted a bit over 20 years.
If this -PDO regime has lasted even less than that, it will have a profound meaning for us in understanding the Pacific ocean and it’s circulations.
Another great point that Joe made, is why aren’t we letting this play out? By playing out, he is speaking with regards to authentic atmospheric scientists(in this case, operational meteorologists) that are actually looking at the atmosphere every day and have been for decades.
Right here and now, the PDO is in a critical place, along with the AMO for instance, the global warming hiatus, the weak solar cycle. We are at a point in time when we will quickly be learning more than ever before that can be applied to climate science and maybe even dialed into global climate models to make them MUCH better.
Based on what we will learn during the next 5 years, this is the dumbest time imaginable for our governments be so hard pressed to make decisions that will ultimately cost trillions of dollars……..here at a point in time when the rate of the global temperature increase is projected to be lower and lower by legit atmospheric scientists using observational science.
Knowledge is power. We have an abundance of climate science knowledge that will be entering the picture right around the corner. This includes our first detailed views of an accurate measurement of global CO2 levels/sources taken from satellite. Why are we not waiting for this?
Answer: Because it doesn’t matter to those that have already made up their minds and care less about the scientific method.
” 6.Reproduce the experiment until there are no discrepancies between observations and theory”
http://www.livescience.com/20896-science-scientific-method.html
Instead, the driving force has more to do with this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Joe,
“without all the nonsense with pre satellite normalization that goes on.”
It doesn’t have to be this way, I’ve taken NCDC’s Global Summary of Days, and calculate the previous day’s warming from min and max, then subtract last night’s falling temps, and for stations with greater than 360 samples per year and the daily average is slightly negative for 50 of the last 74 years, 30 of the last 34 years, and the overall average is negative.
What ever is causing warming it isn’t from a lack of cooling over night.
Just averaging stations with a full year of data.
Joe Bastardi respect for you and a lot of health.
Richard writes “Second, most agree on well established methods to estimate how greenhouse gases absorb and emit heat, and that doubling of CO2 will reduce the heat leaving the planet by a little more than 3.5 watts per square meter.”
A little more than 3.5W/m2 ? Well I don’t believe that because it implies feedbacks must be positive when in fact they’re unknown. Furthermore my instinct on physical processes tells me feedbacks are likely to be negative so count me out of that one…
The most qouted number is 3.7 Wm-2 before feedback.
Joe Born- does this help: Wentz, et al – Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1140746) GK
Yes, thanks.
Actually, I had gotten a link (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5835/233.full) but haven’t read it all yet. The issue, though, is whether the mainline climate models had taken this into account. George E. Smith says above that they accept the precipitation figure but nonetheless assume a significantly lower atmospheric H2O-concentration increase.
I can’t say I’ve sorted out what it all means, so I was hoping Mr. Petschauer might expand on what he sees as the implications.
If I remember correctly, the ipcc and the team were busy raising the alarm as to devastating AGW induced droughts, when Wentz released his surprise results. Considerable pressure was put on Wentz to not publish his results until later. I think the 5% figure was agreed upon as a “better” number, despite the results. This is when they came up with the “yes, precipitation will increase, however it will only fall in flood zones – NOT in arid areas – meme.
Btw – http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/planning-picnic-in-warming-world-satellite-forecasts-more-rain/ is an article reference. There used to be a good comment debate following the article, however, SA decided years later to edit the skeptical arguments out completely. They are so Unscientific American. GK
Joe, See my paper on WUWT
Major Errors Apparent in Climate Model Evaporation Estimates
WUWT, April 15, 2014 in Modeling.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/15/major-errors-apparent-in-climate-model-
evaporation-estimates/
I think the reason the climate models underestimate evaporation is because they alr low on precipitation (very hard to estimate this and cloud formation). Precip reduces humidity which increases evaporation.
G. Karst & Richard Petschauer.
Thank you both again for your help. Even though I’ve recognized for a long time that H20 was the real controller, I’ve for some reason allowed its behavior to remain a mystery to me. To an extent it will undoubtedly remain so, but your responses may help me narrow the issues.
Physicists correct me if I am wrong. My understanding is that energy entering as sunlight will exactly balance energy leaving as heat or other forms. Carbon dioxide causes the energy to bounce around more, thus slowing the escaping heat. The system will still reach an equilibrium where that equality has been achieved. With more CO2 (or methane or any other greenhouse gas), the temperature near the planet’s surface will be slightly higher at that equilibrium.
This is similar to the “warming” you get from a blanket or sweater. The blanket does not actually warm you unless it is an electric blanket. It simply slows down the rate of heat loss from your warm body until you are more comfortable.
Or so goes the theory. A few years ago, WUWT posted an article on NASA measurements of heat loss in the upper atmosphere, showing that more CO2 meant lower temperatures. They said that this meant incoming heat was being bounced back to space, while the effect would be the opposite nearer the surface.
Last summer, a physicist post here experiments indicating that “radiative gases” would have a cooling effect over the oceans. I bought me a dual thermometer with a humidity gauge and some yeast for generating CO2 but never went outside enough to do the research.
Paleontology graphs of temperatures versus carbon dioxide over eons suggest that there is no important effect at all.
The claim is that the energy gets in through the “blanket” without warming it, then warms the surface but has to warm the blanket on the way out, keeping the surface warm. Idiotic for many reasons, but reason was never a strong point with believers.
wickedwenchfan April 25, 2015 at 5:16 pm
The claim is that the energy gets in through the “blanket” without warming it, then warms the surface but has to warm the blanket on the way out,
Evidence shows the claim is wrong. The atmosphere ( blanket ) takes up 20% of incoming energy from the sun and warms it. It is not warmed from the surface up , it warmed from the top down.
Suppose you throw a blanket over your house in mid-winter. If you don’t turn down the heat, you are going to get hot. If the rate of heat inout doesn’t change and the blanket retards the flow rate, the temperature will have to rise to push that heat trough the blanket. But that thermostat on the wall senses the temperature rising and turns down the gas. This was a hot discussion topic on RealScience.
You are bundled up & out chopping wood on a cold day. After an hour you start to sweat. As the sweat evaporates it cools you body because evaporation absorbs heat, evaporating water vapor has a large negative feedback.
Even IPCC knows this.
IPCC AR5 7.2.1.2 Effects of Clouds on the Earth’s Radiation Budget
The effect of clouds on the Earth’s present-day top of the atmosphere (TOA) radiation budget, or cloud radiative effect (CRE), can be inferred from satellite data by comparing upwelling radiation in cloudy and non-cloudy conditions (Ramanathan et al., 1989). By enhancing the planetary albedo, cloudy conditions exert a global and annual shortwave cloud radiative effect (SWCRE) of approximately –50 W m–2 and, by contributing to the greenhouse effect, exert a mean longwave effect (LWCRE) of approximately +30 W m–2, with a range of 10% or less between published satellite estimates (Loeb et al., 2009). Some of the apparent LWCRE comes from the enhanced water vapour coinciding with the natural cloud fluctuations used to measure the effect, so the true cloud LWCRE is about 10% smaller (Sohn et al., 2010).
!!!!!The net global mean CRE of approximately –20 W m–2 implies a net cooling!!!!
(emphasis mine)
Per IPCC AR5 between 1750 and 2011 anthropogenic GHGs added less than 3 W/m2. The water vapor thermostat, i.e. evaporation and CRE cooling is six times as powerful as GHG warming
ladylifegrows,
Your understanding is mostly sound. But it is not a matter of energy bouncing around. More CO2 means the emission into space is from higher in the troposphere, where it is colder; so emission is less until those altitudes warm, which requires that the surface warms.
The cooling in the stratosphere occurs because the stratosphere is not heated from below, it is heated by absorption of solar UV. So more IR emitters means that a lower T is needed to balance the absorption.
“Paleontology graphs of temperatures versus carbon dioxide over eons suggest that there is no important effect at all.”
Actually, periods of high CO2 are warm and low CO2 ages are cold. During the ice ages, the correlation is surprisingly good. The problem is that the implied climate sensitivity is two or three times the IPCC values. So there must be something else going on.
@ ladylifegrows April 25, 2015 at 4:04 pm
You can correct yourself via 10 seconds worth of “common sense” thinking.
Just ask yourself …… “How is it possible for the earth to have experiences the per se Late 20th Century Warming?”
“Still Obsessing On Climate Sensitivity”
The consensus “greenhouse effect” does not exist in the real atmosphere (on Earth or on Venus, as the definitive evidence shows and I have tried for 4 and 1/2 years to inform everyone). Quite obviously, it is the vertical temperature gradient (as defined in the Standard Atmosphere, which my definitive evidence precisely confirms as the stable reality) that governs the global mean temperature (at any given pressure, such as at the surface). And this is entirely despite the fact that this stable atmosphere is subject to continuous, localized and transient variations, known as winds and weather–those variations (even between night and day, even between the seasons) simply don’t, ever, override (or even come close to overriding) that stable global state (their transient temperature effects are largely relegated, indeed, to the bottom kilometer or so of the atmosphere). The real-world data don’t support the consensus climate models, because the “settled science” used in those models is fundamentally wrong (it has nothing to do with the size or sign of the supposed “feedbacks”), and the Venus/Earth temperature-vs-pressure comparison makes the reason why obvious, to any competent physical scientist (which alarmists and “lukewarmers” are definitely not).
And the vertical temperature gradient is not dependent upon any of the causes and effects touted by both sides in the ongoing climate science arguments–which are at best transient and localized, not global– and especially not large-scale convection of heat from the surface. It only depends upon the hydrostatic condition of the atmosphere–which is a fundamental constraint upon the pressure as a function of depth in the atmosphere–and as such, it is conduction (because that, and nothing else, is what pressure entails, all you atmospheric “thermodynamics experts” who believe otherwise–such as Chris Colose, “ScienceOfDoom, and “Eli Rabbitt”), not convection, that maintains it. The governing lapse rate owes nothing to a spurious, radiative, “greenhouse effect” either (again, it is just conduction, via the hydrostatic pressure distribution); it is supreme in the real atmosphere. The troposphere is warmed by direct absorption of incident solar infrared radiation; heat from the separately, and quite unevenly, warmed surface does not further heat the atmosphere, globally–its vertical component merely “falls down” the ruling temperature gradient, without affecting it, while its horizontal component drives the winds and weather–without changing the global mean surface temperature (and at this point, the light bulb should go on in your heads, and you “experts”, at least, should SEE the truth of this). I do not believe the physics can be any simpler, or those who oppose it (on such ridiculous grounds as the belief that the surface radiates IR of the same intensity as a blackbody, at the same temperature, radiates into a surrounding vacuum) can be any more fundamentally deluded, than they are in their continued opposition to the definitive Venus/Earth evidence–which, after all, merely reveals WHY all the other evidence does not support the consensus science, and, by itself, corrects climate science so fundamentally and precisely, on so many points.
Thank you! I am with you all the way! What is most gauling is that you can see acknowledgement of this physics in standard text books about the gas giants whilst a stubborn refusal to even consider the same process remains for solid planets with atmospheres remains.
Jupiter at 20Bar has a mean temperature of 20C but we are expected to believe that Venus’s surface temperature at 92Bar is all due to a “Greenhouse Effect”. Madness!
http://www.universetoday.com/15097/temperature-of-jupiter/
“Quite obviously, it is the vertical temperature gradient (as defined in the Standard Atmosphere, which my definitive evidence precisely confirms as the stable reality) that governs the global mean temperature”
So why isn’t the temperature at any altitude 50 degrees colder, or warmer, than it is? And how could it have been different during the ice ages?
harrydhuffman, you truly do not understand the difference between a temperature gradient, and a value of the temperature. The simple fact is that a gradient is only a slope, not a level. You have to separately determine an absolute temperature value at a fixed altitude and combine that with the gradient to get surface temperature.
Leonard Weinstein April 25, 2015 at 8:20 pm
You have to separately determine an absolute temperature value at a fixed altitude and combine that with the gradient to get surface temperature.
I don’t agree.
Surface temperature = fixed temperature + (fixed gradient x variable height of tropopause)
= tropopause temp + ( Lapse rate x tropopause height )
= 220K + 6.5K/km x tropopause height
tropopause height determines surface temperature
Roger Clague ,
You wrote “tropopause height determines surface temperature”. But you contradict yourself since, from your calculation, you also need tropopause temperature, just as Leonard Weinstein said. And what determines tropopause height and T?
You need a temperature at some altitude. The way it works in the Earth’s atmosphere is that the temperature, 255 K, is determined by what is needed to radiate the energy received from the sun. The altitude, about 5 km, is determined by the optical density of the atmosphere, radiation from much lower does not make it to space and there is not much radiation from much higher.
Of course, the above is an oversimplification since the optical depth of the atmosphere varies with wavelength and at any given wavelength the emission to space comes from a wide range of altitudes. So the above numbers are really suitably defined averages that are complicated to calculate.
Roger Clague says, April 26, 2015 at 9:46 am:
“tropopause height determines surface temperature”
Er, no. Surface temperature (and, quite likely, the IR opacity of the atmosphere) determines the tropopause height.
Unfortunately if you look at this https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/ there has been no warming. Its quite likely that the earth is cooling somewhat. LOL
BTW there is going to be a major inquiry into the temperature Fraud.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11561629/Top-scientists-start-to-examine-fiddled-global-warming-figures.html
Quick question, is the spectrum in Figure 1 even a typical midday above the tropics example?
Figure 1 came from the source indicated (Keihl and Trenberth). It is supposed to represent the global average situation under typical cloudy conditions of about 60% and with, I think, giobal average evaporation based on estimates of rainfall equaling evaporation over the long term.
I have to admit , I’m a skeptic who hopes for global warming to continue as it has for the present interglacial period. at least as long as I live…
But i’m not a climate skeptic, I’m an alarmism skeptic.
The problems go much deeper for deniers like myself. It’s the violition of basic arithmetic and the numerous examples where one part of the theory directly contradicts another part. It is the inability of proponents to even agree on the starting contribution of each gas to the proposed 33C greenhouse effect. Does CO2 contribute 9% or 26% to the 33C? Or is it somewhere inbetween? Was this percentage calculated before the industrial revolution, sometime during it, or when the Wikipedia info claiming it was written? Is the claimed effect of 33C a claim before man supposedly added 120ppm and 0.8C of temperature to the planet, or is 33C the total greenhouse effect as of today?
Until warmists and skeptics alike can answer simple questions like these and still make sense, you will excuse me if I reject the theory in its entirety!
Richard Petschauer wants to know:
” How fast will the earth warm if we do nothing to curtail the growth of man made carbon dioxide emissions?”
The question is not well phrased because it pre-supposes warming in response to growth of man made carbon dioxide emissions. But contrary to this warming propaganda drummed into us for decades, direct observation tells us that man made carbon dioxide simply does not warm the air.This follows most immediately from the existence of the hiatus/pause/cessation of warming (pick one) we are living through now. The relevant fact is that carbon dioxide is constantly increasing yet the greenhouse warming that should follow it according to the Arrhenius greenhouse theory is absent. This is an unequivocal prediction failure that falsifies the Arrhenius theory in use by the IPCC. This theory should be cast into the waste basket of history, along with phlogiston, another wrong theory of warming. With it dies AGW, that anthropogenic global warming which IPCC imputes to the non-existent greenhouse warming. The correct greenhouse theory to use is the Miskolczi greenhouse theory, MGT. It tell it like it is: addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere does not warm the atmosphere. If you still want to play with the greenhouse warming concept, consider the fact that at no time within the last 200 years has global temperature followed atmospheric carbon dioxide content as displayed by the (extended) Keeling curve. Keeling curve is smooth but it goes contain a repetitive seasonal oscillation that is totally absent from all global temperature curves. Put temperature side by side with the Keeling curve and observe that it goes up and down while Keeling curve remains smooth and steady. There are periods of warming and periods of standstill within the last century that are totally absent from the Keeling curve. An example of a standstill is the current hiatus that has lasted for 18 years by now. It is not the only hiatus that has existed although you don’t know that. This is because there was another 18 year hiatus in the eighties and nineties that is covered up in temperature curves by false warming, courtesy of GISS, NCDC, and HadCRUT.. Fortunately they still don’t control satellite data that display real global temperatures. The hiatus of eighties and nineties is clearly visible in satellite records as figure 15 in my book “What Warming?” demonstrates. Or take the early twentieth century where we had a steady warming from 1915 to 1940. It had a sudden start and an equally sudden end. According to laws of physics you cannot start or stop greenhouse warming like that. IPCC knows that so now they do not even bother to claim it for their own. They simply start their warming observations with 1950, clayming that earlier warming is too weak to measure. That of course contradicts their own claim that anthropogenic warming started in 1850. . Their problem is now that none of the warming after 1950 parallels the Keeling curve. Global temperature record shows an abrupt warming from the mid-seventies to about 1980 while the Keeling curve does not. This is followed by a hiatus of 18 years that Keeling likewise ignores. Next warming spurt that Keeling also does not know about takes place from 1999 to 2002. In only three years it lifts global temperature by one third of a degree Celsius and then stops. It, too, is followed by a hiaus that Keeling ignores. Clearly, there is no way that any temperature changes since 1950 can be assigned to carbon dioxide as a causative agent.Our conclusion must be that any attempt to claim that carbon dioxide is causing global warming is either fraudulent or pseudo-scientific, or just plain stupid, or all three.
I agree you can’t verify (or falisfy) warming due to CO2 from data up until now because of the natural variations and not enough time. But with the last 20 years of little or no warming, CO2 warming can’t be too big, but that does not mean it is a zero. But basic physics seems to indicate that more CO2 will cause some warming. It may be beneficial.
The average of yesterday’s rising temp minus last night’s falling temps since 1940 is negative.
A more fundamental reason for why we cannot falsify warming is that climatologists have not yet defined “warming” such that it satisfies properties of a measure in measure theory.
There is a fundamental flaw in the argument about CO2 absorptivity here. It is inappropriate simply to compute areas under the irradiance curves to arrive at total watts per square meter in such areas because the energy of radiation is not constant across the spectrum. Rather, it increases with increasing frequency. Therefore, given two equal areas, one on the left side of the diagram and one on the right, the power content in watts per square meter of the area on the left side will be many times higher than the power content of the area on the right side. In other words, areas on the left side are much more heavily power-weighted than are equivalent areas on the right side. By Planck’s relation, E=Hv, for example, UV-B irradiance is about 48 times more energetic than is IR radiation in the spectral band most readily absorbed by CO2.
Which one can also use to make the case that energy arrives predominantly in higher energy spectrums from the sun and leaves Earth in the lower spectrum. Sun= very hot temperatures, thus radiates in black body like spectrum, Earth converts this back into heat, but due to distance only receives a fraction of what the Sun emitted and heats to lower temperature. Thus the Earth only emits in lower frequencies.
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics ALWAYS applies. “Back radiation” happens at a lower energy state than radiation emitted from the surface and so does not add extra heat to it.
Energy transfer during the day is net Earth bound, at night it is net space bound. Insulators work both ways. The energy source is above the “blanket”. If it takes longer to get out, it also took longer to get in!
I disagree. When using the Max Planck radiation equation with wavelength (not wave number), the area under the curve is the total value in W/m^2. Using the equation for many incremental wavelenths and summing them (an area estimate) gives the total radiation agreeing with the Stephan Boltzmann equation. The same applies to regions within the spectrum.
Hi Richard; I totally agree, thermal radiation at any given temperature obeys Plank’s law and the curves you show are Plank law curves. The integral of the area under the curve is indeed the total radiation to space (assuming an emissivity of 1 which is a pretty good estimate).
Richard – Max Planck equation you are diddling with is irrelevant if there is no radiation to apply it to. That is the reality I pointed out in my comment above. We are living through a hiatus where no greenhouse warming to which radiation laws could be applied exists. Hopefully you understand that without that greenhouse warming there can be no anthropogenic global warming.The present hiatus is not the only one as I point out above. There was another one in the eighties and nineties that is fraudulently hidden by official temperature curves. And there also may have been a third one that lasted from 1950 to 1975 for which my records are still incomplete. These hiatuses collectively take up 77 percent of the time that IPCC has even existed but these people either don’t have a clue about it or pretend they don’t..Unless there is an explanation for this the rest of your analysis is just plain irrelevant. The answer is likely to be found in the mathematics of the Miskolczi greenhouse theory. You ought to seriously tackle it if you want to have a hope of understanding what is going on. And take account of the last sentence in my comment above.
Petschauer and Hammer: This important concept is frequently misunderstood. Any Planck black-body radiation curve is a histogram describing a gradient of radiated energy with higher energies on one end and lower energies on the other. In any histogram, the bins on one side have higher values than the bins on the other side. Therefore, a given area on one side of the histogram will necessarily contain more energy than the same area on the other side. The only possible way to compute (approximately) energy content by area in a histogram is to divide it into bins that average the x values within each division. Areas of portions of these bins (or entire bins) may then be measured for energy content, as the bins have been homogenized with respect to energy (i.e., the energy gradient has been removed by averaging). Remember that the Planck equation is only an EMPIRICAL fit to the energy distribution that happens to reproduce the form of the distribution, and therefore simple measurements of areas beneath the curve will yield meaningless results. Calculations of energy that are based on a misunderstanding of this important constraint are erroneous. Unfortunately, the mistake is commonplace, and it has resulted in significant overestimation of the power content of upwelling and downwelling IR radiation.
On the contrary, when plotted vs wavenumber equal areas represent equal energy totals.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0HiXKAFhRJ4/SxsZggMXGsI/AAAAAAAABFI/xCtTfYo3nqA/s1600/10km.JPG
“””””…..
Phil.
April 28, 2015 at 7:12 am
On the contrary, when plotted vs wavenumber equal areas represent equal energy totals……”””””
Your graph has “Wavenumbers” (cm^-1) as an X axis, and “Intensity” ( W /(m^2. wavenumber) as a Y axis, and therefore the units of area under the graph must be the product of those two which would be simply W/m^2.
However your graph is NOT a graph of Planck functions or approximations to Planck functions.
The Planck function is a plot of Spectral Radiant Emittance which would be
W/(m^2 .wavenumber) when plotted against wavenumbers, or W/(m^2.micron) when plotted against wavelength (in microns).
Intensity (or radiant intensity) is W/steradian; not W/m^2, and is a property of point sources, which have no area. But of course, one can talk about the intensity of a finite area source, with reasonable accuracy (better than 1/2 % error) for measurement distances greater than ten times the source diameter.
But then you knew that already. Using intensity instead of emittance is my only quibble.
However your point that the area under the Planck curve or a real spectrum approximation to it, is the total power (actually power density) is correct, and of course the same is true for the Planck function plotted against wavelength, since the spectral emittance is also per wavelength in that case.
However the Planck spectral peak is at a different location for the wavelength or wave number forms. I have seen Planck functions based on photon numbers rather than Watts, and the peak is once again in a different location.
Off topic but emergent:
http://www.spaceweather.com/images2015/25apr15/bullseye.jpg?PHPSESSID=bfkktmlq8lf8nmq1ji20s41j81
An opportunity to study a climate effect!
Sorry. that didn’t link to the article. here’s a video:
https://youtu.be/_MdUQY6xQG4
Will this have an impact on the SH winter?
Reply to Phil,
Well then it looks equal areas represent equal energy totals when plotted vs wavelenth or wavenumber.
Absolutely, but remember it is actually total power areal density, not total energy. But I’m sure you and Phil both know that. Just want to make sure that others understand the difference.
g
Did Anthony just post a paper from 18 years ago?
Oh, the nostalgia!
Nice touch, having a medium channel Petschauer’s postings.
Such an interactive, cyber-like, experience!
…..see if you can find “2014” in the article
Hey Latitude:
Some folks post first and then, maybe, read the article.
It appears that jonesingforozone is one of them.
What you gentlemen are missing is the lack of observational evidence of AGW over the last 18 years with regard to surface temperatures, and the lack of evidence since the satellite age for the mythical “hot spot” in the lower troposphere.
The lack of a meaningful definition for “global warming” inhibits one from concluding there is a lack of evidence of it in a recent period.
I’m not sure I’m reading his chart correctly, but does it imply that the atmosphere is absorbing 155 W/m^2 without a corresponding increase in temperature?
Also, if it implies the earth surface radiates 390W/m^2, then the atmosphere is absorbing significantly more than that from the conduction/mass convection effects carrying heat from the oceans surfaces. All this yet somehow it only radiates away 235W/m^2.
What am I missing here?
When water evaporates it carries about 1,000 Btu/lb away from its surroundings without any change in temperature. That evaporation is what makes an evaporative cooler work. The process is described and can be visualized on a moist air psychrometric cart.
But has no net effect on the temperature of earth because it doesn’t represent an exchange of heat with the planet’s surroundings.
But has no net effect on the temperature of earth because it doesn’t represent an exchange of heat with the planet’s surroundings.
Wrong. The phase change of liquid water to gas requires heat (latent heat of evaporation). Evaporation at ground level consumes heat (2,260 kJ/kg). When water vapor is lofted high into the troposphere in a developing cumulonimbus storm cloud, the water vapor condenses, allowing the latent heat (now latent heat of condensation) energy to be released. The heat energy is released at altitudes approaching the tropopause (60,000ft) in the form of Long Wave Infrared Radiation. At these altitudes, the probability of LWIR being radiated into space is greatly enhanced.
Water evaporation at sea level, transported and condensed in the high troposphere, is the primary means of ‘exhausting’ heat to outer space. This is the primary feedback mechanism regulating our planetary temperatures. This is the heat transport mechanism that in real vertical terms ‘blows holes’ in the CO2 ‘blanket’ and the ‘green house’ hypothesis. Clearly, low altitude water evaporation and high altitude condensation does represent an exchange of heat from the planet’s ground level surroundings to outer space.
The Figure does not show all the heat flows. Only the radiation to space, the only way the planet cools. The radiation from the surface is shown for comparison. To see all the heatflows, see the last Figure in http://climateknowledge.org/figures/Rood_Climate_Change_AOSS480_Documents/Kiehl_Trenberth_Radiative_Balance_BAMS_1997.pdf
The Figure cited above in Keihl and Trenberth shows that the heat in and out is balanced at the surface, the atmosphere and the planet as a whole.
Hi Gino; Earth’s surface emits 390 watts/sqM but only receives 235 watts/sqM from the sun. However it receives a further 155 watts/sqM from the atmosphere. That 155 watts/sqM you mention is absorbed by the atmosphere but the atmosphere then radiates 155 watts/sqM back to the surface. 235 + 155 = 390 so the surface is receiving a total of 390 watts/sqM and radiating 390 watts/sqM the two are in balance as reuqured by a stable surface temperature.
Mr. Hammer says: “Hi Gino; Earth’s surface emits 390 watts/sqM but only receives 235 watts/sqM from the sun. However it receives a further 155 watts/sqM from the atmosphere.”
————
Since temperature is not additive the 155 of which you speak does nothing. How do you tell emission from reflection?
What I’m curious about then is the mechanism that allows the atmosphere to radiate more in one direction than another.
Al the energies in and out are balanced (or close to it before stablizing at the surface, atmosphere and the planet. I am only showing that leaving the surface and planet.
How do those that attempt to compute the Earth’s surface temperature rise due to CO2 alone explain the low surface temperature rise of the planet Mars due to its CO2. if one stands on the Martian surface and looks up through its atmosphere, he will be looking through far more CO2 than a similar observation made on earth as Mars’ atmosphere, while very thin, is almost entirely CO2
It seems to me that, on Earth, the CO2 must transfer kinetic energy through collisions to the other dominant gases in the Earth’s atmosphere instead of immediately radiating a photon like many seem to assume. I also suspect that triatomic molecules must have metastable (non-radiating) vibrational states similar to diatomic molecules, although the physics of these metastable states don’t seem to be well understood.
The computation is also complicated by the lack of a sea level reference so one must use some other elevation reference such as the average elevation and the Martian gravity to arrive at a standard Martian atmospheric pressure. Years ago, I came up with this – on Mars, one would be looking through more than 25 times the CO2 than the similar sea level observation on the Earth.
I am prone to making errors.so if anyone else out there has made the same calculation It would it would be nice if you would post your results to see if we agree.
Warmists don’t like to acknowledge information about other planets in the solar system, it contradicts their understanding of physics! Try reconciling your observations of Mars not just with Earth but also adding Venus into the mix, in a Greenhouse paradigm and really make your head spin!
Regarding CO2 emmissons, I believe you are correct in that CO2 molecules after absorbing radiation quickly assume the temperature of the surrounding gases whether they are a greenhouse type or not, and which have a much larger content. Then when the CO2 radiates, it is at its new temperature. Thats why the heat leaving the atmosphere to space is less than that leaving the surface
Nice, clearly written, article. Intelligible even for a non-techie like me. And no egregiously misplaced commas.
The assumption/calculation that a doubling of CO2 will cause an increase in forcing of 3.5 watts/m2 is incorrect.
There are multiple errors (at least five fundamental errors) in the base simplistic model of forcings.
Observations indicate the warming due to doubling of CO2 will be less than 0.5C with the majority of the warming occurring in high latitude regions. The majority of the warming in the last 150 years (roughly 75%) was due to solar cycle changes not the increase in AGW.
The analysis should not have been whole flat earth ignoring the night and day effects, but rather piecewise latitudinal comparing bands of the earth, including day and night effects, and modeling a spherical earth rather than a flat earth. The piecewise latitudinal models should then have been compared to observations to correct the models and to find fundamental errors.
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/icing-the-hype/the_flat_earth/
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/EnergyBudgetTF.jpg
Tropical Troposphere Not Warming Greenhouse Gas Paradox
As the earth is a sphere TSI changes and greenhouse gas forcing changes should have the greatest effect in the tropical region. The warming in the last 30 years is the same pattern of warming (high latitude warming) that occurs in the paleo record cyclically. The majority of the warming in the last 30 years has been in high latitude regions, which supports the assertion that the majority of the warming in the last 30 years was not caused by increases in atmospheric CO2 and was not caused by TSI changes.
http://www.eoearth.org/files/115701_115800/115741/620px-Radiation_balance.jpg
http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/152458/
Those creating the models have ignored the fact that the region of atmosphere on the planet (tropical troposphere at 8km above the surface of the plaent) that should have theoretically experienced the most amount of warming (the amount of warming due to the change in atmospheric CO2 is directly proportional to the amount of infrared radiation emitted at the latitude in question prior to the increase in greenhouse gas and as there is an overlap of absorption of H2O and CO2 higher majority of the warming should occur higher in the atmosphere where there is less water vapor, the greenhouse gas warming then increases the amount of water vapor at saturation which is the amplifying mechanism which if there was warming which there is not, cause further warming) on the planet has experienced almost no warming.
There is and must be a physical reason why there is almost no warming (this is a paradox, not a modeling error) in the tropics at 8km and there must be a reason why there has been almost no warming of the tropics. There is a key physical phenomena – that is not modelled – that causes saturation of all greenhouse gas warming in the upper regions of the atmosphere.
There is no tropical tropospheric hot spot, Douglas and Christy paper.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/DOUGLASPAPER.pdf
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/TMI-SST-MEI-adj-vs-CMIP5-20N-20S-thru-2015.png
The Keihl and Trenberth paper use global averages both day and night and does not assume the earth is flat. The energy flows are global. Nearly all the energy enters and leaves at the top of the planet. Most everthing else just moves the heat to different location and states.
Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
Not all people who believe global warming is a genuine phenomenon are cultists or watermelons. Bjorn Lomborg is one, and Mr. Petschauer apparently is another. Recommended reading.
Re: Climate skeptic believer, 4/25/2015:
A skeptic that believes in global warming?
Skepticism is a virtue among scientists, beliefs a vice.
97% of scientists
Creationist/scientist Roy Spencer addressed the widely popularized figure of 97% in his 7/18/2013 testimony before the US Senate Environment & Public Works Committee. He attributes the phrase to a paper by Cook, et al. [2013], an update to an original work by Naomi Oreskes (2004). This infamous study and its update only pretend to measure an opinion of scientists. They measure the agreement with the AGW conjecture expressed by authors in peer-reviewed climate journals. The studies show that 97.3% of published papers in peer-reviewed professional climate journals buy into the dogma. They demonstrate that peer-reviewed climate publications essentially never publish non-conforming papers, a fundamental breakdown in Post Modern Science.
The topic before the committee was Climate Change: It’s Happening Now. Pielke, Jr., Spencer, and Francis discussed the matter with the Committee, but with no one defining climate change. Among IPCC fellow travelers, climate change, as well as acidification, means the obvious, but necessarily due to humans! As Popper, the father of Post Modern Science, famously said, Definitions do not matter.
How fast will the earth warm if we do nothing to curtail the growth of man made carbon dioxide emissions?
The answer requires prediction of solar output, as filtered by Earth’s transfer function with its major lags of about 150 and 50 years. CO2 is not a cause, but a lagging surrogate for surface temperature.
So what are the skeptics skeptical about? It is the amount and rate of the man made warming estimated by the [](IPCC) … .
In the 2013 Senate hearings, star witnesses Roger Pielke, Jr. and Roy Spencer testified that manmade global warming exists. They shared the opinion that IPCC reports were reliable, the witnesses were just skeptical about the attribution between human and natural causes. At one point, Spencer couldn’t agree to a point being urged by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). Whitehouse put the matter to the panel for help, calling on Jennifer Francis, a Rhode-Island trained PhD oceanographer, for help. She testified about the reliability of climate models as follows:
[W]e who have used model output for many years for various things are as aware as anyone that they’re not perfect[?]. We know they’re not perfect. But they get the general sense of change correct[?]. Some of them do a darn good[?] job and there are variables that in fact they project are changing slower than the real world, so in fact they’re more conservative[?] than the actual change that we’re observing in the real world. … I think it’s very possible to look through the model output and find problems, but over-all, the models do an amazingly good job[?] of simulating what is an incredibly complex system. This climate system [that] involves the oceans, and the atmosphere, and the ice, and the biosphere, and the soil moisture and (neverthless, the models are) coming up with very close[?] representation[?] of what the real world has undergone[?].
When Sen. Whitehouse asked her about modeling difficulties because the present day CO2 concentrations were beyond the bounds of atmospheric CO2 that had persisted for over 800,000 years, she answered:
That’s … very possible, although the models are based on physics, the laws of physics, and the laws of physics are not changing. We understand what happens to the Earth when you increase greenhouse gases. That has been known … for 100 years[?], generally … . You can’t model it exactly. The models have those kinds of variability built into them, but to have the changes happen in the ocean exactly the same year in the model as they happen in the real world, you know, they, … To create … graphs like this, they run the same model many times to create what they call ensembles because the, the models have natural variability in them just like the real world has.
This applauding with faint damnation is fraught with technical irregularities, but putting those aside, the three witness, Francis, Pielke, and Spencer, and writer Petschauer as well, might have pursued that lead to express skepticism over IPCC’s omissions and butchering of laws and principles of physics. They include the following.
• Omission and concealment of Henry’s Law and the nature of Henry’s Coefficient for the solubility of CO2 in water.
• Misplaced reliance on thermodynamic equilibrium and equations dependent on it, esp. the carbonate equations.
• Failure to recognize that the atmosphere normally contains a surplus of Cloud Condensation Nuclei, ready to increase cloud cover with increasing water vapor, which mitigates any effects of galactic cosmic rays or warming.
• Application of the Clausius-Clapeyron equation to increase water vapor in response to global warming in order to create a positive greenhouse feedback for ACO2, but failing to increase cloud cover accordingly, the most powerful feedback in all of climate, one negative with respect to warming.
• Ignoring the powerful positive feedback of cloud cover amplifying solar radiation, called the burn-off effect.
• Creation of a bottleneck to CO2 absorption in the ocean’s surface layer by the inappropriate application of the carbonate equations.
• Application of a manufactured bottleneck to ACO2, but not to natural CO2, a flux 15 or more times as great. IPCC alleges that the ocean absorbs a quarter to half of annual ACO2, but nearly 100% of nCO2, an impossibility under Henry’s Law.
• Suggesting that the ocean can respond differently to ACO2 than to nCO2, when the two species are irreversible mixed in the atmosphere to create a new, variable species.
• Failure to model the MOC (aka the THC and the Great Conveyor Belt) as a principal transport for natural CO2, through the deep ocean, to upwellings, and then across the surface, re-entering the ocean depths at the poles.
• Use of chartjunk to manufacture faux human fingerprints on atmospheric oxygen depletion, and on the isotopic lightening of atmospheric CO2.
• Ignoring that ice core records are heavily low pass filtered by the closure time for the firn, as large as a couple of millennia. That closure time substantially attenuates the records, and in the process making them unable to show an event like the half-century MLO CO2 history. Nonetheless, IPCC appended the modern, instrument records onto the end of the paleo records to support its presumption to attribute the present histories, especially of temperature and CO2, to humans, and moreover dangerously unprecedented. The records should not connect.
• Failure to demonstrate the Principle of Causation, i.e., that a cause must precede its effects, especially with CO2 vis-à-vis surface temperature.
• Relying on Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity, which by definition requires warming to follow increases in atmospheric CO2, when what is measured is warming that precedes atmospheric CO2 increases. The vector of causation is reversed. The toast fell jelly side up for the public because if the measured ECS were larger, it would be wrongly confirming of AGW – wrongly because the sign is wrong.
• Relying on a small signal model for manmade emissions on top of a natural background of CO2 fluxes presumed to be relatively constant, with no attempt to show that the presumption might be valid.
• Termination of on-going natural processes in temperature and CO2 upon model initialization (circa 1750), causing IPCC to attribute subsequent natural changes incorrectly to humans.
• Modeling of the surface layer of the ocean in thermodynamic equilibrium, when instead it is active and plays a major role in all three components, mechanical, thermal, and chemical, for the distribution of heat and CO2.
• Failure to model the most powerful negative feedback to global warming, dynamic cloud cover.
• Manufacturing a bottleneck to solubility, justifying the conjecture that atmospheric CO2 is long-lived, many decades to as much as 350 centuries, when by IPCC’s own high-school valid formulas and data, its residence time is between 1.7 and 3.5 years.
• Implying that the increase in ocean CO2 content is in the ratio of a faux accumulation of ACO2 to total atmospheric CO2, when for the purposes of acidification, the increase is about 6 GtC yearly added to a total of about 38,000 GtC in the ocean, or less than 1.6% per century.
• Depending for its AGW conjecture on the work of Callendar (1938) (radiative forcing, leading to the Kiehl & Trenberth (1997) radiation budget), leading to the work of Revelle & Suess (1957) (the Revelle Factor), in the first instance, two failed studies.
Skepticism about the attribution of climate between human and natural causes is orders of magnitude too timid. The abuses of physics are sufficient not just to be skeptical, but to reject the AGW conjecture and the work of IPCC.
Very needed comment Jeff, thanks. Well worth saving and appreciate you compiling such a detailed list.
Great list Jeff. Thanks.
All this is so full of… sound and fury.
Meanwhile, it is snowing in South Colorado.
April 25th? Maybe a Not-So-Little Ice Age is coming.
Sound and fury notwithstanding.
Note to Self:
Start rebuilding the firewood stack early this year.
And add an extra cord to the usual 4 cord split.
Right. Firewood will be important next few years.
Once upon a time, people used to talk about weather so they could avoid squabbles.
Now they squabble about weather. You know, what I really think?
I think this is all about them peasants losing religion. They desperately need a new one but the Sun doesn’t cooperate lately. That fickle thing in the sky. Let’s worship it again, dear comrades… I mean, pyramid builders. Climate septic ones.
That’s funny. I was going to split some blocks of wood I put up last fall this weekend but it snowed …
Alexander,
You are welcome to stop by my place anytime to argue about the weather!
If it is a chill winters day where we can enjoy the warm glow of the wood stove and a bit of scotch and water, even better!
Mac
I don’t know why it matters what is causing the warming. Or, at least, it doesn’t matter much. The damage is done. We can reduce emissions and make the problem get worse more slowly than before but that sounds like cutting it short, yet THAT is in contention. We need to stop slowing down the problem and formulate solutions. Focus our strengths in engineering on climate control rather than monitoring. Do something right rather than less of something wrong.
Cameron, what damage or problems are you blathering about. The only demonstrated effect of slight warming and increased CO2 to date is increased crop and tree production and less cold weather deaths (and cold weather deaths greatly outnumber hot weather deaths)
climate control… funny. That term goes well with “Climate Change” as a man-made phenomenon. Both filed under the heading: Man’s hubris.
Lordy. And Cameron, I assume, grew up before the new Science Standards came about. For that matter, so did Mickey.
Control Climate?? Boy…does Mother Nature ever have a surpirse in store for you. Planning on installing a massice thermostat to control the climate like you control the climate inside a house? Good luck with that
Truthfully, I don’t think we can control the climate. But there are feasible feats of engineering involving co2 converters or ways of deflecting sunlight. It is all a distant future kind of thing but you don’t cool off a planet just by stopping what is accelerating the temperature. That may, but probably won’t, just work to stabilize temperature. And to the skeptics…it is not human’s hubris to think that we 6-7 billion individuals which have altered most of our planet’s surface could potentially alter it’s atmosphere too. Or if you want a little bit more human humility, consider the idea that we may well be accelerating a natural process, which still is not good for our current global state. We are using what has been stored for millions of years and using the supply over a couple hundred. That is far from natural. The beauty of nature is that she always corrects. The problem with that then becomes human (we can’t destroy nature) because those “corrections” are storms and droughts which can be deadly and/or disruptive to modern day life. We will continue to see large, unusual storms, rain in dry places, droughts in wet places, etc. Skeptics, like believers, would be wise to simply keep a wary eye if nothing else. If nothing happens, great. If things seem to be getting worse and the evidence mounts, then be open to that as well.
Currently, is impossible to control the climate for to control a system one must have information about the outcomes of events of the future given the actions are taken in attempting to control them but today’s climate models provide policy makers with no such information. If governments were to modify the methodology of their research such that it provided this information then there is the possibility that the climate could be brought under a degree of control.
Reblogged this on Utopia – you are standing in it! and commented:
I just don’t think it’s a large economic problem
The implicit claim that the “climate sensitivity” has a constant numerical value is non-falsifiable, unscientific. and conveys no information to us about the outcomes of events of the future. Rather than being “a useful benchmark for making estimates” it is a deception by which warmists join skeptics in fabricating information.
As for feedback effects of water vapor including cloud cover:
If warming or cooling occurs with constant relative humidity, then water vapor concentration varies directly at a rate of 7% change for a 1 degree C change in temperature. If the actual change is only a 5% increase for 1 degree C of warming, then warming is reducing the relative humidity of the atmosphere. That would make the atmiosphere less cloudy.
It is notable that photos of our planet show cloud cover over tropical areas as a whole not being more than over polar areas a whole, despite the tropics having more water vapor by an order of magnitude. Relative humidity seems to be what forms or does not form cliuds, rather than absolute humidity.
Warming seems to be making clouds more efficient and more compact, as warming increases the presence of water vapor. This would mean warming causes decrease of temperature variation across the globe, decrease of wind globally, and decrease of cloud cover, along with decrease of relative humidity.
So, it appears to me that water vapor feedback (other than related to clouds) being less positive than IPCC favors it being comes along with the cloud albedo feedback being positive. Not necessarily as greatly positive as IPCC likes to report, but positive. As for evaporative cooling from the surface – I expect rainfall to increase proportionally – and less than 6-7% per degree C of warming due to winds slowing on a global scale.
Overall, I consider it useful to oversimplify the the sum of feedbacks related to water vapor to that of radiation balance change if temperature change does not change relative humidity, evaporation/precipitation rates, or cloud cover because if these items vary, they somewhat cancel each other out in terms of their effect on planetary surface temperature.
As in, equivalent to 7% increase of water vapor content in the lower troposphere per degree C of warming of the surface and lower troposphere with cloud cover and water heat transport by evaporation/precipitation not changing.
The lapse rate (reduction in temperature with altitude) is what drives cloud formation, because cold air holds less water vapour than warm. The alarmists claim that warmer conditions will create more unstable weather, but the actual picture is not as simple as that. When the atmosphere is uniformly cold or warm, you have stable conditions. When the surface layer is warm but the upper troposhere is cold, expect weather phenomena.
Climate Change is no longer about science — it hasn’t really been about science since at least 1997. Even then it was only about science when the ardent proponents (Hanson) could hide behind the curtain. That curtain has been pulled back. The science failure of Climate Change has been exposed by many, most certainly a few key individuals like Christopher Monckton, have been instrumental.
The early (two) IPCC reports may have been honest efforts based on best available science, models and data at the time, but starting with TAR (#3), and especially #4, the IPCC reports have become a fraud perpetuated on the public from ideology, ego, power, and greed.
Climate Change is now in the hands of the politicians and their fake scientist enablers at NOAA, GISS, UKMO, and BMO, along with a handful “top” scientists addicted to an adulterated grant process. The truth is not on the side of Climate Change proponents. Sadly though, that still may not be enough to stop the socialist-politicians with their army of believers following cult-like behind them from driving the Western economies into the snowbank.
The author states that “data shows global temperatures have increased much less than models predicted” but in a post to the blog of the journal “Nature”(circa 2007) the climatologist Kevin Trenberth insists that the models do not predict. According to Trenberth, they “project.”
For a distinction to be made between a prediction and a projection is important because: a) a prediction is falsifiable but a projection is not and b) predictions convey information to policy makers about the outcomes from their policy decisions but projections convey no such information. Predictions would make it possible for governments to exert a degree of control over the climate but the climate models of today make projections and these do not support control. Governments think they can exert a degree of control as a result of conflation of “prediction” with “projection” by people who include our author.
Terry Oldberg:
climatologist Kevin Trenberth insists that the models do not predict. According to Trenberth, they “project.”
===
When alarmists call people “d e n i e r s” that is also projection.
😉
10 out of 10!
Terry Oldberg, 4/25/15 @ 10:18 pm:
… a prediction is falsifiable but a projection is not …
Oldberg observed the tip of the iceberg. More fundamental than even physics in climate is that two distinctly types of science are at play in the controversy, Modern Science (predictions) vs. Post Modern Science (projections).
In MS, knowledge resides in models of the Real World with predictive power. No such requirement exists in PMS. The latter has five tenets. Models must possess (1) Falsifiability, (2) Peer-reviewed publication, (3) Established Type I (false alarms), (4) Consensus, and (5) Political correctness. These are in the order determined by the US Supreme Court (Daubert v. Merrell Dow), and, unsuspected by the Court, all five are attributable to the writings of philosopher Karl R. Popper. Philosophy scores in truth value – true or false. Science, on the other hand, scores in the probability of successful predictions.
Falsifiability and false alarm rate are two sides of the same coin. Popper erroneously believed that all scientific propositions were equivalent to Universal Generalizations (famously, All ravens are black), whose truth value cannot be established à posteriori (by experiment). Nevertheless, UGs can be disproved with a single counter-example, hence falsifiable. Popper’s field included symbolic logic.
In Modern Science, definitions are UGs. Popper handled that by explicitly dismissed them, saying Definitions do not matter.. Under Popper’s UG-view of science, Type II errors, which result from scoring successes, were irrelevant, finite drops from an infinite reservoir. In his mind, they were unacceptable attempts to establish truth by empirical induction. When Francis Bacon introduced true induction (Novum Organum, 1620) to replace Aristotle’s childish induction (historically his Organum), Bacon focused too much on Aristotle, misnaming his own opus. He was actually introducing deduction into scientific models by candidate Cause & Effect propositions. Despite the little error, Bacon thus created Modern Science. Popper never understood Bacon, and instead explicitly dismissed Cause & Effect. Modern Science holds as an axiom that every Effect has a Cause.
The second tenet of PMS divides itself in two, peer-review and publication, creating six tenets. Of these six, three – peer review, publication, and consensus – are what Popper called intersubjectivity. Popper believed that objectivity was impossible, made explicit with regard to a single scientist. So he declared that models in his science could only be established by subjective methods. Modern Science begins with the definition of science as the objective branch of knowledge. MS models are mappings on existing facts to future facts, where facts are observations reduced to measurements and compared to standards. PMS has no such requirements.
The remaining proposition, 5 of 5 (or 6 of 6 in v.2), is that scientific models must make socially responsible projections. The Supreme Court accepted that in the negative, saying expert testimony, the subject of its deliberations, must not preempt what is the ultimate duty of the trier of fact. The Court could tell when its ox was being Gored. IPCC Working Groups II and III provide that necessary social pull and political consequences for its Working Group I postmodern scientific modeling.
Bottom line: MS and PMS are, in MS terms, orthogonal, meaning neither can predict the other.
Climatology, like many other academic physical sciences, is currently rooted in PMS. Intersubjective tenets are equivalent to Publish or Perish, but even better, they empower well-placed academics to build tenure and perpetuate conformity to their conjectures. Modern Science grades its models progressively as (1) conjectures, (2) hypotheses, (3) theories, and (4) laws, as those models become (1) complete, (2) make predictions, and are validated (3) locally, then (4) globally, all by facts. No such grading exists in PMS, where models only need team approval, and need not (better not) predict at all.
IPCC’s latest Assessment Report adds a whole chapter on projections vs. prediction. It begins the discussion thus:
The nonlinear and chaotic nature of the climate system imposes natural limits on the extent to which skilful predictions of climate statistics may be made. Model-based ‘predictability’ studies, which probe these limits and investigate the physical mechanisms involved, support the potential for the skilful prediction of annual to decadal average temperature and, to a lesser extent precipitation. AR5, Ch. 11, Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability, p. 955.
Thus IPCC blames the Real World for its incompetence in attempting to model it. Nonlinearities and chaos are by definition parts of models, not of the Real World. But in PMS, “Definitions do not matter.” Hence, in keeping with IPCC excuse-making, GCMs only make projections, i.e., irresponsible predictions.
The AGW movement will run out of gas – not when we run out of money to feed it, nor when it cripples Western economies in a war on unicorns, but when enough politicians come to realize that we’re dealing with two different kinds of science here – one real, one faux. Epistemology rules.
One of the characteristics of the faux science is that the projections from its models convey no information to a policy maker regarding the outcomes from his/her policy decisions. That the projections convey no information has the significance that the climate cannot be controlled.
Though it cannot be controlled governments persist in trying to control it. Why they should persist in trying to do something that cannot be done is a question that has interested me for many years. The answer that I come to is that governments are successfully deceived by applications of the equivocation fallacy. I make this argument in the peer-reviewed article at http://wmbriggs.com/post/7923/ . A result from this deception is what Vincent Gray calls “the triumph of doublespeak” in a paper of the same name. “Doublespeak” is a synonym for “equivocation.”
All in principle correct, though I would add one further point, that CO2 does not strictly ‘absorb’ anything.The term ‘absorbtion spectrum’ is a figure of speech to describe the situation where a beam of light is attenuated by a gas. What actually happens is that the beam is re-radiated in all directions, reducing the energy in the original direction and thus creating a darker line in the spectrum.
In the greenhouse gas case, it is (IIRC) uncertain as to what proportion of ‘absorbed’ energy is re-radiated in random directions, and what proportion is transferred to the bulk gas (thermalised) through molecular collisions.
If we assume that some photon energy is thermalised, then By Kirchhoff’s Law the reverse must also be true. That raises the interesting point that at high altitiudes, CO2’s molecular fluorescence, excited by collisions, may provide a mechanism for the nonradiating gases nitrogen and oxygen to liberate their heat to space. If so, the more CO2 the cooler the upper atmosphere.
CO2 causing cooling? Satan actually the good guy? That should mobilise the Inquisition, methinks. =8-0
Ian Macdonald April 25, 2015 at 11:10 pm
All in principle CORRECT, though I would add one further point, that CO2 does not strictly ‘absorb’ anything.The term ‘absorbtion spectrum’ is a figure of speech to describe the situation where a beam of light is attenuated by a gas. What actually happens is that the beam is re-radiated in all directions, reducing the energy in the original direction and thus creating a darker line in the spectrum.
Not true, what actually happens is that a photon of the appropriate energy is absorbed and the vibrational energy of the molecule is promoted to a higher energy level. That excitation energy can then decay back to the ground state either radiatively or via collisions.
Mr. Petschauer, it is very curious that I search this entire stream of comments, mainly by those skeptical as they should be, and find zero references to the word “adjustment” referring to the global temperature records. Have you ever considered what the published (about +0.8 C) adjustments that closely match the supposed same magnitude ‘global warming’ could possibly imply? Ever considered? Finally more formal investigations have begun, see for yourself for more details on this matter:
http://www.tempdatareview.org/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11561629/Top-scientists-start-to-examine-fiddled-global-warming-figures.html
I’m just surprised that of over 200 comments not one questioned or mentioned this highly suspect matter.
wayne April 25, 2015 at 11:50 pm Just beat me to it. The announcement about the review of global temperatures by GISS, UEA and NOAA was launched by The Global Warming Policy Foundation here in United Kingdom
http://www.thegwpf.org/inquiry-launched-into-global-temperature-data-integrity/
This should be the subject of a separate article here in WUWT to encourage informed contributors such as Bob Tisdale to make a submission.
Hello, will someone, someday please differentiate between natural and man made C02 in all this so called warming gobbledygook and separate the effects?
Thank you WUWT and Richard Petschauer and everyone else for the many erudite comments.
As pointed out in comments the energy of a photon increases as the radiation frequency increases.
I note that the 2.7 and 4.3 micron bands of CO2 are not discussed. Surely these bands must
be absorbing energy from the sun? When a photon is absorbed it ceases to exist thus the
Earth’s SURFACE is shielded from a lot of the energy in those two bands?
The 15 micron band of CO2 comprises some 3,800 absorption emission lines which would
constitute some 18% of black body radiation with a peak temperature of 288K (15C).
The claim that CO2 in the atmosphere can absorb that energy I find difficult to believe as
the CO2 in the atmosphere is TOO WARM to absorb ANY of that radiation until local
air temperature is close to 243K (-30C).
From this I can understand CO2 will be radiating over the 15 micron band (actually 13 to 17 microns)
and slightly less than half this radiation will reach the surface but as explained in the science
of radiation when photons BELOW PEAK TEMPERATURE arrive they CANNOT warm the target.
Maybe the science of radiative heat transfer has been rewritten and I have missed it?
The science of radiation does NOT say that a photon emitted by a cooler object and absorbed by a warmer object cannot raise the temperature of the warmer object. This is such a common and seriously wrong view. What the science of thermodynamics says is that net heat flow is always from the warmer object to the cooler object and that is because the warmer object is emitting more photons towards the cooler object than vice versa.
To forestall the next comment that the cooler atmosphere cannot make the surface warmer by the law I just stated this is also not true. The critical issue is how you interpret the term warmer. Without an atmosphere the earth would be radiating to outer space temperature 4K. With an atmosphere it radiates to an atmosphere much warmer than 4K so the radiation back from the atmosphere is more than the surface would receive from outer space hence the surface loses less net energy and is therefore less cold. Think this is all double speak? Consider the following, you go out on a clear night in winter and immediately feel cold. But as soon as you go back inside you feel warmer yet you body is at 37C while the room is at maybe 20C so how can the colder room warm the warmer you. A further experiment, you are outside on the cold clear night and simply walk in front of a window fronting a warm room. The air temperature around you has not changed but you can still feel the warmth radiating from the window yet the window and room behind it is colder than you are.
Mr. Hammer says: “Without an atmosphere the earth would be radiating to outer space temperature 4K.”
So you agree CO2 has nothing to do with a elevated temperature it is just that earth has an atmosphere regardless of make up?
“”The science of radiation does NOT say that a photon emitted by a cooler object and absorbed by a warmer object cannot raise the temperature of the warmer object.””
Really? The warmer object is emitting photons at any specific frequency at a greater rate than the cooler object. The warmer object can indeed absorb a photon from the cooler object but only because it has just emitted a similar photon. Energy in equals energy out thus no change. What happens is the RATE OF COOLING of the warmer object is delayed. Radiation from the cooler object does NOT warm up the warmer object.
If you want to show that a colder body can transfer heat to a warmer body, please don’t select the human body. The skin has nerve endings receptors sensing temperature or heat flow. And, it is not an inert body:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/heatreg.html
mkelly April 26, 2015 at 2:03 am
Mr. Hammer says: “Without an atmosphere the earth would be radiating to outer space temperature 4K.”
So you AGREE CO2 has nothing to do with a elevated temperature it is just that earth has an atmosphere regardless of make up?
No that is not true, with an atmosphere of N2 the Earths surface would also radiate directly to space at ~4K.
Richard111 April 26, 2015 at 12:53 amThe 15 micron band of CO2 comprises some 3,800 absorption emission LINES which would
constitute some 18% of black body radiation with a peak temperature of 288K (15C).
The claim that CO2 in the atmosphere can absorb that energy I find difficult to believe as
the CO2 in the atmosphere is TOO WARM to absorb ANY of that radiation until LOCAL
air temperature is close to 243K (-30C).
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the physics of light absorption by matter.
For a CO2 molecule to absorb a photon all that is necessary is that the energy of the photon exactly match the energy difference between the rotational/vibrational state of the molecule and an excited ro-vibrational state. Photons don’t have a temperature, just energy.
The transitions in the 15micron band are the 010 bending mode of CO2 and the transition requires about 667 cm-1.
Phil. commented on
They have a Planck temp
Such that it’s common knowledge that the CMB is ~3K
Isn’t 15u and 667 cm-1 kind of redundant?
micro6500 April 27, 2015 at 11:20 am
Phil. commented on
“Photons don’t have a temperature, just energy.”
They have a Planck temp
Such that it’s common knowledge that the CMB is ~3K
No they don’t, the distribution of photon energies indicates what the temperature of the CMB is.
Isn’t 15u and 667 cm-1 kind of redundant?
Yes, so is 7.979 kJ/mol, do you have a point?
Phil. commented on
Yes they do.
See, even you recognize that the photon energy is sometimes referred to as a temperature (Planck).
micro6500 April 27, 2015 at 1:59 pm
Phil. commented on
“They have a Planck temp”
No they don’t,
“Yes they do.”
the distribution of photon energies indicates what the temperature of the CMB is.
“See, even you recognize that the photon energy is sometimes referred to as a temperature (Planck).”
Can’t you read? I clearly did not say that, you’re repeating your previous error, photons do not have a temperature. Anyone, like you, who says that they do, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Phil. commented
And the energies of the photons can be expressed as a temperature. As you just did.
micro6500 April 28, 2015 at 7:54 am
And the energies of the photons can be expressed as a temperature. As you just did.
As I did not, tell me what is the temperature of a 667 cm-1 photon?
Phil. commented
Whatever, the CMB is expressed as a temperature routinely.
A 15u photon’s energy expressed as a planck temp is 193.13K
The Planck Temperature is Tp = 1.41 × 10^32K
A 15u photon’s energy expressed as a planck temp is 193.13K
Really, so 15 micron photons emitted from molten Tin at 500 K have a ‘temperature’ of 193 K?
micro6500 you don’t have a clue.
Phil. commented on
LOL, now those of us who actually understand this know from here on you have no clue.
Of course it’s 193.13K, all photons of 15u are identical, they all have the same energy and the same equivalent temperature. A 500K photon has a wavelength ~38 percent as long(~5.8u) and carries ~2.58 times the energy.
Phil. commented on
Hey, I was thinking you might want to go look at a 500 K Blackbody spectrum, which would be representative of 500 K molten tin and look at 15u, maybe you’ll understand it then.
micro6500 April 28, 2015 at 11:19 am
Phil. commented on
“Really, so 15 micron photons emitted from molten Tin at 500 K have a ‘temperature’ of 193 K?
micro6500 you don’t have a clue.”
LOL, now those of us who actually understand this know from here on you have no clue.
Of course it’s 193.13K, all photons of 15u are identical, they all have the same energy and the same equivalent temperature. A 500K photon has a wavelength ~38 percent as long(~5.8u) and carries ~2.58 times the energy.
On the contrary you have revealed exactly what your misunderstanding of the subject is!
What you termed the ‘Planck Temperature’ in fact derives from the Wien displacement law, which states in this case that: the distribution of wavelengths emitted by a black body at T=193K will peak at 15 microns.
micro6500 April 28, 2015 at 11:29 am
Phil. commented on
“Really, so 15 micron photons emitted from molten Tin at 500 K have a ‘temperature’ of 193 K?”
Hey, I was thinking you might want to go look at a 500 K Blackbody spectrum, which would be representative of 500 K molten tin and look at 15u, maybe you’ll understand it then.
I suggest you do so, you’d see that ~25 times more 15 micron photons are emitted by a black body at 500K than one at 193K. The peak wavelength of the 500K black body emission is at 5.8 microns, and to reiterate, photons do not have a temperature.
Phil. commented on
No, I wasn’t talking about Wien’s law, I was talking about 15u photons, I didn’t mention BB spectrum’s until you mentioned the 500K tin, which would have a bb spectrum, and does have both 5.8u and 15u photons, but they are not the same photons, they are different wavelengths.
I suppose if your only knowledge of photons comes from BB’s, maybe you’re just not familiar with other sources.
Who cares, the number of photons was not mentioned.
The photons energy has an equivalent temperature.
micro6500 April 30, 2015 at 2:35 pm
Phil. commented on
“On the contrary you have revealed exactly what YOURmisunderstanding of the subject is!
What you termed the ‘Planck Temperature’ in fact derives from the Wien displacement law, which states in this case that: the distribution of wavelengths emitted by a black body at T=193K will peak at 15 microns.”
No, I wasn’t talking about Wien’s law, I was talking about 15u photons, I didn’t mention BB spectrum’s until you mentioned the 500K tin, which would have a bb spectrum, and does have both 5.8u and 15u photons, but they are not the same photons, they are different wavelengths.
You used Wien’s Law to calculate the temperature you assigned to a 15 micron, namely:
T= 2900/lambda
I suppose if your only knowledge of photons comes from BB’s, maybe you’re just not familiar with other sources.
Since I’ve run a world-class laser diagnostic laboratory for over 20 years I am certainly familiar with other sources of photons. You apparently do not have such familiarity since you continue to claim that photons have a representative temperature, which is not true.
The photons energy has an equivalent temperature.
As stated previously a 15 micron photon has an energy equivalent of 7.98 kJ/mole, that causes an equivalent rise in temperature of a mole of CO2 of about 300K. The ‘temperature equivalent’ of the photon’s energy depends on the use to which it is put.
This is about the only place where one can jump in here and comment.
So I have read all of the following back and forth comments between Phil, who as it happens is someone completely unknown to me, and I presume the verse vicea of that, and also micro6500, who is also unknown to me.
And for anyone else reading this also.
For the record, I am in essentially complete agreement, with what Phil has stated here.
Electro-magnetic radiation knows nothing at all about Temperature, which is a macro property of large assemblages of very many interacting (colliding) particles; real matter consisting of atoms/molecules.
The Temperature reflects the sum total of the quite unsummable kinetic energies of all of the particles and all of their mechanical degrees of freedom, at an equipartitioned amount of kT/2 per degree of freedom. They are unsummable because they are all going in different directions.
That is what Temperature is, and EM radiation knows nothing at all about such things.
Phil has explained how photons can be emitted and absorbed by essentially resonance phenomena involving energy levels or states of specific physical structures; atoms and molecules.
Radiation of the Thermal or Planckian Black Body radiation form, which is a continuum radiation with no spectral lines is a consequence of the acceleration of electric charge, as a consequence of Maxwell’s equations. Acceleration of charge is the same thing as a varying electric current, and electric currents give rise to magnetic fields. When you have varying currents over any non zero distance, Maxwell’s equations say that you get electromagnetic radiating fields, which in the quantum era we describe as photons.
I’m NOT a quantum mechanic, so I don’t understand exactly how that stuff works; so I have a classical physics picture that explains how electrically neutral atoms or molecules which do not have asymmetric electric charge distributions, can deform when in collisions with each other so as to create a non zero electric dipole moment, that makes a perfectly good EM radiating antenna during the collision, and the interaction time of those thermal collisions is an eternity compared to how long it takes for that radiation to occur.
I do have some difference of understanding with Phil’s position on how photon excited molecules (such as CO2) behave when they collide with another molecule; as to what happens to that photon excited oscillation, and its energy; and that is because of my Quantum mechanical ignorance.
Now if you have a whole radiation spectrum that is a consequence of thermal emissions rather that spectral lines of an atomic or molecular energy level structure; then you can deduce from that entire spectrum, what the Temperature of the radiating body might have been; but from any one photon, or any one narrow frequency range of photons you can tell nothing about Temperature because photons carry or convey, no such information.
So as I said at first. I agree with Phil on that subject.
I would not like to try and defend the contrary position.
Well that is just my opinion for what it is worth.
g
“However the form of the law remains the same: the peak wavelength is inversely proportional to temperature (or the peak frequency is directly proportional to temperature).”
Wien ‘ s law from wiki.
George, you’re right it does not have a “temperature, it does have an equivalent temperature, again it’s why the CMB has a temp of ~3K.
micro6500 May 2, 2015 at 9:00 pm
George, you’re right it does not have a “temperature, it does have an equivalent temperature, again it’s why the CMB has a temp of ~3K.
No that’s not what George said, in fact he said the opposite and agreed with me!
Now if you have a whole radiation spectrum that is a consequence of thermal emissions rather that spectral lines of an atomic or molecular energy LEVEL structure; then you can deduce from that entire spectrum, what the Temperature of the radiating body might have been; but from any one photon, or any one narrow frequency range of photons you can tell nothing about Temperature because photons carry or convey, no such information.
So as I said at first. I agree with Phil on that subject.
As in the examples I gave above there is no way to know whether the 15micron photon was emitted by an object that was at 193K or 500K.
It’s much more likely that you have not understood the science of heat transfer but since you don’t say specifically what you are refering to it’s impossible to say what you got wrong.
It sounds like yet more attempts to to rewrite the second law.
Looks to me as if wattsupwiththat has been captured and those who’ve captured it are working on capturing the readers . . . If this post is accurate in its claims then it would seem that AGW sceptics are all warmists/believers now and the differences are only of degree . . . Didn’t used to be that way on here, and no-one would have assumed for a second it was the case that most readers were soft warmists. . . And yet here we are . . . It’s all a wee bit strange because, if anything, the evidence is going the wrong way – given the absence of warming since around 2001/2 – . . We still don’t know the extent to which any change has been natural, and the temperature record – hardly to be taken at face value in its raw state – has been processed so much that the extent of any change, natural or otherwise, is open to question. As a long term reader on here, I’ve definitely seen a shift, but I’ve seen no reason for the shift in reality – only in models and theorising . . . It’s encouraging to see though that there are still some who, despite the wall of warmist music – haven’t been herded into the warmist camp in any way, shape or form . . The thing is too big and too complex with too many unknowns for any position to be adopted that’s more than mere guesswork . .
Compromise. We need to leave an escape road for the warmists. It is almost acceptible to admit you were wrong on the detail of ‘how much’ where it is unacceptable to admit you were totally and completely so utterly wrong that you dont deserve to still be in the position you now are…
And of course EVERYTHING CAUSES CLIMATE CHANGE In the limit everything that will happen tomorrow has been ’caused’ by everything that happened down the recorded and unrecorded corridors of time right back to the big bang.
The principle of determinism says that today is a direct inevitable and irrevocable consequence of what happened at Big Bang Time – T0 – and all events are interconnected – and possibly quantum entangled – to such an extent that you either say nothing is caused by anything, that’s just the way it is – or that everything is caused by everything, including by itself. Chaos analysis of climate probably shows that the biggest driver of climate change is yesterday’s climate….
Philosophically speaking its a free choice.
In practical terms, the amount that climate is affected by CO2 is in my long and deeply considered opinion so small as to be of little or no relevance in determining future climate, and no relevance whatsoever in determining human political strategies if those are in place to ascertain what steps we should take to mitigate the effects of, or prevent changes in, climate.
That is not to say that the political strategies now in place have no effect that is useful. Clearly they are all extremely effective in implementing political control over energy – the lifeblood of civilisation – and education and science – its brain.
Whether you consider that a good or a bad things is up to you to decide, and the ballot box and the blogosphere are there to make your opinions and feelings known.
Jim it’s just one of the many propaganda tactics..isn’t that obvious?
+1
It appears were are observing the start of the cooling phase of a Dansgaard-Oechger cycle. If the planet cools we will have chance by observation to see how much of the warming in the last 150 years was due to solar cycle changes and how much was due to AGW.
If it walks like a duck, quacks, and looks like a duck, it’s a duck.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
There are of course cycles of warming in the paleo climatic record that correlate with an increase in the solar cycle (periodicity 1400 years with a beat of plus/minus 500 years). All of the cycles of warming are immediately followed by cycles of cooling (sometimes abrupt cooling, the abrupt cooling occurs with a periodicity of around 8000 years and 10,000 years and is sufficient to terminate an interglacial period which are roughly 10,000 years in duration, the Holocene interglacial is 11,900 years old) when the solar cycle slows down.
The past cycles of warming and cooling were not caused by changes in atmospheric CO2. They were all caused by changes to the solar cycle.
The solar cycle is of course abruptly slowing down and is showing multiple observational anomalies. The past Maunder like minimums have last for 100 to 150 years.
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/440/1/012001/pdf/1742-6596_440_1_012001.pdf
The Antarctic peninsula is outside of the Antarctic polar vortex and hence records the temperature of the Southern sea. The Antarctic peninsula ice cores shows cyclic warming that matches what we have recently observed. Obviously the past cycle warming was not caused by atmospheric CO2 changes.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/05/is-the-current-global-warming-a-natural-cycle/
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper. William: As this paper shows there the Greenland Ice data shows that have been 9 warming and cooling periods in the last 11,000 years.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
Until the temperature of today rises to above that of the Holocene Optimum, roughly 6000 years ago, only then can we say humans may have had an effect. Until then it is all natural.
mkelly
I think it could get warmer than that and it would still be natural.
From Wiki (so it must be right)
The warmest peak of the Eemian was around 125,000 years ago, when forests reached as far north as North Cape, Norway (which is now tundra) well above the Arctic Circle at 71°10′21″N 25°47′40″E. Hardwood trees such as hazel and oak grew as far north as Oulu, Finland.
At the peak of the Eemian, the Northern Hemisphere winters were generally warmer and wetter than now, though some areas were actually slightly cooler than today.
Agreed. But until it goes above the HO then we should concern ourselves with CO2.
Should read “not concern”. Tablets are nice but typing on them sometimes is irritating.
Just because natural temperature reached a certain value in the past does not mean that any temperature rise below that value is also natural.
I think that the simplest answer is often the correct answer without adding loads of complexity. I think that carbon dioxide has little effect on temperature for the simple reason, there is not enough of it. Think of it like this, a thick duvet and you are warm and cosy at night but a thin one and you are cold.The seas cause a lag in any temp rises or falls caused by varying solar radiation. Millions of years ago the earth was tropical even near the poles. There might have been much more atmosphere back then with much higher atmospheric pressure but the solar wind may have gradually eroded it away during periods of very high solar activity until a level of equilibrium has be reached such as today.
Paul: Maybe this is a bit of topic but the issue of shedding of our atmosphere is something that has intrigued me for years. It is said that Pterosaurs would have difficulty flying in our less dense atmosphere of today. The issue of flight in more dense air has been debated, but the fact of the atmosphere being more dense seems to be accepted. We know we are shedding atmosphere to space all the time. I often wonder what the atmosphere of Mars would have been like a few hundred thousand years ago … and what earth’s atmosphere will look like in a few hundred thousand years from now. How much atmosphere are we shedding each year? It is said the earth has lost up to 25% of its water: http://sciencenordic.com/earth-has-lost-quarter-its-water
Most articles on the loss of atmosphere are pretty light though I am sure there are detailed research papers somewhere, but a nice summary seems hard to find.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-planets-lose-their-atmospheres/
http://gizmodo.com/5882517/did-you-know-that-earth-is-getting-lighter-every-day
Clearly the loss is small in human terms.
Atmospheric loss isn’t relative to changing climate in the short term, but it seems to me the make up of our atmosphere is constantly changing and we have a rather myopic short term view of what is happening.
It would be interesting to revisit earth in a hundred thousand years or so to see what the top level beasts are up to … and how they adapted to whatever climate and tectonic changes took place.
The discussions here are interesting, but in the end, the earth really won’t care.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend, the snow is melting and it’s time to take a ride in the sun.
It is not only flight that is an issue, but so too how [blood] was pumped up to the brain that leads some to speculate that AP was higher in the past. See for example: Atmospheric Pressure at the Time of Dinosaurs
http://www.levenspiel.com/octave/OL_images/DinosaurW.pdf
if this issue wasn’t a cash cow or a political weapon the Hansen or the IPCC co2 hypothesis would have been thrown out over 20 years ago. They are completely invalid scientifically. This article reminds me of the parents that try to keep their kids in advanced classes in high school even when they are failing. They think that there is a misunderstanding about the kids work ethic or intelligence. Meanwhile the grades speak for themselves. This article in some ways is even worse than the Huff post climate pornography. It’s damage control for a complete scam.
I have become increasingly sceptical about the promotion of probably dubious science, the evading of proper “scientific method” and the political agendas that have invested so much into confirming the assertion of Catastrophic / Dangerous Man-made Global Warming from the emission of CO2 from burning fossil fuels.
So, from being a credulous Believer I have become a Sceptic and thus would be branded as a “Denier”.
Thus with my views I am derided as a “denier”, but I do not deny the following:
I do not deny that climate changes: it can go either way warmer or colder.
I do not deny that the world got warmer in the latter half of the 20th century, just as it did in the earlier half of the 20th century at about the same rate and to about the same degree.
I do not deny that the world has gotten significantly warmer since the Little Ice Age and that this warming has produced a more congenial climate for man-kind and the biosphere.
I do not deny that the earlier Medieval and Roman warm periods of the Holocene were warmer than current temperatures.
I do not deny that according to Ice Core records the previous millennium 1000 – 2000 AD was the coldest millennium of the current benign Holocene epoch
I do not deny that the Holocene climate “optimum”, around 6000 BC, was more than 3°C warmer that the depths of the Little Ice Age.
I do do not deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas: it is one of several.
I do not deny that CO2 has a minor warming effect on world temperature, in comparison to the effect of water vapour and clouds in the atmosphere, and the influence of CO2 on temperature diminishes with increasing concentrations.
I do not deny that man is contributing to the increase of atmospheric levels of CO2.
I do not deny that Man-made CO2 output is inevitably going to continue to rise until the underdeveloped world, about 50% of the world’s population, has universal access to electricity and other life enhancing affordable energy sources.
I do not deny that Man-kind does pollute and does significant environmental damage to the planet.
I do not deny that variations in the output of the Sun at its full spectrum of visible and non-visible wavelengths has a significant but unappreciated influence on the World’s climate.
I do not deny that and the planetary mechanics of the Solar system has a major influence on the World’s climate.
From my examination of the Climate question I do deny the following:
I do deny that CO2 from any source is a dangerous pollutant: It is the foundation of photosynthesis – thus the basis for all life on earth.
I do deny that CO2 is currently at dangerous levels in the atmosphere: rather it is at low levels compared to the historic past of the planet
I do deny that Man-made CO2 can ever be the most significant control knob for world climate.
I do deny that any moderate warming within normal limits, (less than +2°C) is a global catastrophe.
I do deny that +2°C could ever be attained by Man-made CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels, because of the radical diminution effects that apply to increasing concentrations of CO2 into the future.
I do deny that any additional warming is significantly enhanced by positive feed-backs that radically increase the effective warming that may be produced by higher CO2 concentrations.
I do deny that there are major worldwide negative and catastrophic risks caused by Man-made Warming / Climate Change.
Far from it; it appears you don’t understand what science is.
Isn’t this reply misplaced? It should be to MikeB April 26, 2015 at 4:23 am.
What’s with this garbage about ‘the earth is warming’ when it is colder today than during the Minoan Era nearly 4,000 years ago? Each warm cycle every 1,000 years is colder than the previous warm cycle.
Far from this being the warmest era ever, the brief warmup from the cold period of the 1970’s cycle is brief and already over as we decline yet again into another cold cycle that may last more than 100 years. Our present Interglacial is nearing an end and we are in dire danger of sliding into another Ice Age.
If increased CO2 were to prevent a return of mile thick glaciers covering most of Canada, northern USA and northern Europe, this would be wonderful but I seriously doubt it will have the slightest effect.
I don’t see where the figure of 20% of warming for CO2 absorption comes from. The IR band is about 100um while CO2 is opaque to IR at 2.7um, 4.3um, and 15um. I have no problem seeing how CO2 would generate warming due to incoming IR at those frequencies. Outgoing IR at those frequencies are emitted from material at about 32C for the 2.7 band and about -50C for the 4.3 band. Those frequencies just don’t seem to be enough to account for 20%.
That’s because you don’t understand thermal emissions, those temperatures you mention are not relevant, the 15 micron CO2 band is near the peak of the Earth’s IR emission.
Is that graph an actual experimentally measured extra-terrestrial earth LWIR spectrum, or is that something that is computed from a model.
I have some similar purported spectra in the chapter 3; “The Earth as Seen from Space.” of the Infra-Red Handbook published by ERIM.
Only these plots are based on a Wavelength X-axis, from 5 to 30 microns, and the Y-axis spectral “Radiance” so the units are: micro-watt per square cm per steradian per micron of wavelength increment.
The origin of those graphs, which it says are calculated, is from H. Rose, et al, “The Handbook of Albedo and Thermal Earthshine.”, also published by ERIM
Report No. 190201-1-T 1973.
The curves are calculated for three observed zenith angles; 0, 60, and 85 deg. and for North Latitudes, 10-20 deg., 30-40 deg., 50-60 deg., and 70-80 deg. all over land (North America), both sunlit, and not sunlit in both Winter and Summer.
They peak at from 9.0 microns for summer sunlit 50 deg. N lat.
Both the CO2 and the Ozone dips show a little spike very close to 15 microns for CO2 under all conditions and about 9.6 microns for O3 under all conditions.
The Ozone dips vary greatly with zenith angle, which I would attribute to the Ozone being in a thin high layer, through which the slant path length changes radically with zenith angle.
I assume there is some QM explanation for the little pips in the middle of the dips, which I notice your curve also has.
So does that mean your curve is also calculated from some model, rather than measured ??
In any case, the peak wavelength or wave number of the envelope BB curves, seems to match global average surface Temperature, rather than some high stratospheric Temperature, from where earth is supposedly really radiating; rather than the surface.
g
George, it’s an actual measured spectrum:
Caption from Petty: Fig. 6.6: Example of an actual infrared emission spectrum observed by the Nimbus 4 satellite over a point in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Dashed curves represent blackbody radiances at the indicated temperatures in Kelvin. (IRIS data courtesy of the Goddard EOS Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) and instrument team leader Dr. Rudolf A. Hanel.)
Both the CO2 and the Ozone dips show a little spike very close to 15 microns for CO2 under all conditions and about 9.6 microns for O3 under all conditions.
The Ozone dips vary greatly with zenith angle, which I would attribute to the Ozone being in a thin high layer, through which the slant path length changes radically with zenith angle.
I assume there is some QM explanation for the little pips in the middle of the dips, which I notice your curve also has.
Those ‘pips’ are a feature of the spectra, termed the Q-branch, this is a very strong absorbing part of the spectrum and absorbs into the stratosphere. Consequently those emitting molecules are at a higher temperature than the frequencies on either side.
In any case, the peak wavelength or wave number of the ENVELOPE BB curves, seems to match global average surface Temperature, rather than some high stratospheric Temperature, from where earth is supposedly really radiating; rather than the surface.
The regions around 900 and 1100-1200 cm^-1 are transparent and consequently those regions are direct emission to space, the emissions in the absorption bands are generally from the upper troposphere and therefore cooler (except for the strong absorbing Q-branchs etc.)
High resolution spectrum showing Q-branch:
http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn107/Sprintstar400/CO2101copy.jpg
To be clear, if this is correct, it would be the molecules that are emitting on either side, that could be at a lower temperature, for any specific frequency the energy of the photon is a constant, you can have more photons, but the energy and therefore temperature are a constant of that wavelength.
If you are referring the 2O% in my article, this is about the amount of energy leaving the surface where most of the CO2 action is (from 12 to 18 microns). Many people thing it is absorbing heat over the entire range. I did not say that it is causing 20% of any warming. But it is reducing the heat leaving the planet and always was.
Interesting posts. There is no question about LWIR bands being absorbed and re-radiated by CO2 and CH4 etc, this is well established fact. The point in contention is the IPCC hypothesis that only the ~3% of 400ppm/v CO2 from humann emissions is *the* DRIVER of climate change, *and* that change will be catastrophic. So far, there is no evidence of that in the real world.
The fixation on CO2 is totally cynical. These geniuses figured out how to tax the very air we breathe. This turned out to be the biggest free money generator system for our rulers who are in a constant effort to figure out ways to profit on nothing.
These are the same people who figured out how to print money endlessly which is why the US dollar has lost 99% of its value it had 100 years ago.
Leo Smth.
“Namely that, as a feature of something I associate clearly with the Left side of the political and intellectual spectrum, a culture that enjoyed extreme success as a result of science and technology, that were all based on a worldview of a mixture of religion and rationality, has comes to be ashamed of its own success, and feel extreme guilt over it, to the point of accepting its imminent collapse with equanimity. Or even joy.”
Leo – I enjoyed reading your philosophical observations and agree on many points. Especially significant for me is the success enjoyed by the left to set the terms of the discussion on GW and other issues and finally to make us feel guilty for existing. The world has bought into their assumptions largely or none of their arguments would get past first base.
The thing a lot of people don’t seem to get is that yes, adding CO2 to the atmosphere the way man has should, IN THEORY have some warming effect. The trouble is, no one can point to said warming. Sure, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist but that’s a sraw man. If it can’t be measured, then its’ existence is theoretical only. Due to the quasi-chaotic nature of climate, most likely it will never be measured. It is of little, if any consequence.
Man made CO² causing warming is a political fiction.
Yeah, since circa early 1800s – CO² atmospheric concentrations have probably risen, CO² rises always are as a consequence of natural warming, for it is fairly accurately reckoned that: average world T’s have risen modestly since the ‘recent’ LIA.
What mankind adds to world atmospheric concentrations of CO² = so bloody what.
Scientific methodology usually proceeds as followed.
1) Something is observed, for which an explanation is sought.
2) Data are collected and analysed.
3) A model is proposed.
4) The model makes predictions – the model explains the observed data.
5) The model predicts something that has not yet been observed – an experiment is conducted to confirm that what has been predicted actually happens.
6) Confirmation validates the model.
The downfall of Climate Science is that it does not follow these steps in the exact order. It usually starts at step 3 and then goes to step 5 and ignores step 6 if confirmation is not forthcoming.it then goes back and changes the data in step 2 and tries again.
Thus in science, the model is chosen to fit the data.
In climate science the data is chosen to fit the model.
A scientist believes what she sees.
A climate scientist sees what she believes.
Don’t know if this is the best place for my questions, but considering the audience and participants the answers should be nearby.
Many moons in the past I spotted a footnote in the World Bank 4 C report that gave me pause. It’s about the chemical difference between carbon and carbon dioxide. As we chemists and combustion engineers know burning one pound of carbon produces 3.67 pounds of CO2, 44/12, pretty basic.
World Bank 4C report Chap 2, Fig 1
“Different conventions are used are used in the science and policy communities. When discussing CO2 emissions it is very common to refer to CO2 emissions by the weight of carbon—3.67 metric tons of CO2 contains 1 metric ton of carbon, whereas when CO2 equivalent emissions are discussed, the CO2 (not carbon) equivalent is almost universally used. In this case 350 billion metric tons of carbon is equivalent to 1285 billion metric tons of CO2.”
When someone says xxx.x Peta (E15) grams, Giga (E9) tonnes (1,000 g = kg & 1,000 kg = tonne) of Carbon, do they mean carbon carbon or carbon dioxide?
Attempting to resolve this I used data from IPCC AR5 Chapter 6.
“CO2 increased by 40% from 278 ppm about 1750 to 390.5 ppm in 2011.”
“Anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere were 555 ± 85 PgC (1 PgC = 1015 gC) between 1750 and 2011.”
“About half of the emissions remained in the atmosphere (240 ± 10 PgC) since 1750.”
(240/555=43%, World Bank 4C report says 45%)
………Atmospheric dry air = 5.14E18 kg (Wiki)
1750…………..278 ppm……..1.43E18 g
2011………….390.5 ppm…..2.01E18 g
Difference……112.5 ppm…..5.78E17 g
If C stands for carbon carbon than the 555 PgC must be multiplied by 3.67 to get CO2 and then by 45% for the amount left in the atmosphere or 9.17E17. That’s 159% of the amount added between 1750 and 2011 based on ppm.
When you eliminate the impossible what is left no matter how improbable…..
So in this case PgC carbon must mean carbon dioxide. Applying the 45% atmospheric component to the 555 PgC/y gives 250 PgC/y or about half, 43%, of the CO2 grams increase between 1750 and 2011.
I have frequently read/heard that man’s CO2 was responsible for 100% of the atmospheric CO2 ppm increase between 1750 and 2011. The analysis above says less than half. Should this 50/50, (man’s CO2)/(no man’s CO2), relationship hold steady what does that do to all of the GCMs and RCPs that might be based on 100% man’s CO2?
This AGW/CC ground has been plowed thoroughly and deeply (while flogging dead horses) and chances are several of you plowmen have covered this ground before, have the answer and related links at hand, and can simply paste them into your replies.
Thanks.
We’ve already experienced about half of the warming from the first “doubling” of “the precious air fertilizer” (CO2), over the last 70 years. The result is that the climate is, on average, ever so slightly milder than it was before, with no measurable effect on the rate of sea-level rise. The best projection is that the other half of the first doubling — expected over roughly the next eighty years — will have similarly benign consequences.
Beyond that, CO2 levels probably will not continue to rise, due to increasing scarcity and cost of fossil fuels, and due to the fact that CO2 uptake by the biosphere and oceans increases with CO2 levels, making it progressively more difficult to raise CO2 levels.
I have a masters degree mostly in numerical methods, what today is called modeling. Many of my coop terms in electrical engineering involved mathematics either statistical or modeling. Then I spend my whole career in the software area mostly compiler production. I wonder, with these godlike computer models, when the predictions do not agree with what occurs how one knows if the model physics is faulty or if one has a bug in the programming of the model? Other compiler development groups in our company and the one I worked in had a rule that every valid bug had to result in a test case that got run either daily, weekly or occasionally depending upon how long the test case needed to execute. We had thousands of test cases, in the hundred thousand range and still new releases even after all the testing we did still found bugs in the customers shop. The compiler groups needed lots of computer hardware to run their test cases including multiprocessor systems as you might imagine. I wonder if most of the climate modelers follow the same kind of best of breed software engineering practices. Somehow I doubt it and expect that the programmers think they are so skilled that they do not create new bugs in the codes as they evolve the code. DaveW
These models do not make predictions. They make projections. Unlike predictions, projections are not falsifiable.
Except to the AGW fans these projections are quite falsifiable? 🙂 By the way we were always taught to use numerical models for interpolation and neither for predictions or projections which ever BS word the fans of AGW want me to use. I was on an email group with a retired scientist from one of the US National Labs and he said that was how they used their models that apply to atomic weapons. Strange how when one gets to climate the normal rules don’t apply.
A projection is not falsifiable as it does not possess a truth-value. It does, however, exhibit error. Often, people with interests in global warming climatology appear to confuse the property of exhibiting error with the property of falsifiability thusly arriving at the erroneous conclusion that projections satisfy falsifiability.
Models make predictions about how the model will behave; otherwise the model is no good.
Models do not make predictions about how the real universe will behave, but modellers hope it isn’t too different from what the model predicts.
george e. smith (May 4 at 10:35 am):
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Models are of two types. Models of the first type make predictions of the outcomes of events. Models of the second type make projections; there are no events. In the absence of events, the counts of observed events called “frequencies” cannot be made. Thus, one cannot construct a histogram. There are no relative frequencies or their theoretical counterparts – the probabilities. Truth and falsity correspond to probablity values of 0 or 1 but there is no truth or falsity because the corresponding probabilities do not exist. Thus, a model of the second type is not falsifiable. Falsifiability is one of the characteristics of a model that is “scientific.” A longer argument than I wish to present in this post leads to the conclusion that a model of the second type conveys no information to a maker of public policy on climate change making control of the climate impossible. Models of the second type are, however, all that a maker of public policy currently has. Makers of policy think they have the ability to make policy when they do not have it.
This absurd situation is created by the fact that the word “model” is polysemic (has more than one meaning). When a polysemic word is used in making an argument and changes meaning in the midst of the argument this argument is an example of an “equivocation.” Upon superficial examination an equivocation looks like an argument having a true conclusion (a “syllogism”) but isn’t one. Consequently, one cannot draw a logically proper conclusion from an equivocation. To draw such a conclusion is the “equivocation fallacy.”
A number of polysemic words and word-pairs are in common use in making arguments about global warming and change meaning in the midst of these arguments. It is by drawing conclusions from the resulting equivocations that alarm-mongering climatologists arrive at their conclusions.
Further information on this topic is available in the peer-reviewed article at http://wmbriggs.com/post/7923/ . This article provides means by which one can disambiguate the language in which a global warming argument is made thus avoiding the possibility of drawing false or unproved conclusions from equivocations. When this is done, IPCC climatology is revealed to be a pseudoscience dressed up to look like a science through applications of the equivocation fallacy. If you like me favor a scientific approach to climatological research and argumentation you can help this cause by always making your arguments in a disambiguated language and by joining me in pointing out to our fellow bloggers the importance of always stating one’s argument in a disambiguated language.
“1 The cited (from Trenberth) number of 390 Wm^-2 is almost exactly the Stefan Boltzmann total emittance for a Black Body at 288 K, the purported average surface Temperature of the earth (+15 deg. C) OK let’s go with that number.”
Regarding Trenberth’s figures:
Since a blackbody has the theoretical maximum emissivity, and the earth’s actual emissivity is somewhat less, maybe 95 %, I’d guess the actual emissivity of the earth would be about or 380 watts. I suppose the 17watts of convection should also be adjusted by this 5% figure. In contrast , the 80 watts of latent heat of evaporation should be correct, based on the energy it takes to convert liquid water to vapor. The net effect is the percentage of latent heat in the system is greater than that estimated by Trenberth’s figures.
I also question that “well mixed” argument. I’ve read that as an allegation, but never seen actual figures. Since CO2 is a lot heavier than N2 or O2, the scale height should be significantly lower, only about 60 or 70% of the O2/N2 atmosphere. If the atmosphere was truly “well mixed”, that would mean that convection was playing a major role in removing heat from earth’s surface- and removing large volumes of warm “well mixed” O2-N2-CO2 to higher levels in the atmosphere.. How much would that 3.5 or 2.8 watts change if the atmosphere were NOT “well mixed” but CO2 kept its own, not well mixed, scale height?
Alan McIntire April 26, 2015 at 8:15 am
I also question that “well mixed” argument. I’ve read that as an allegation, but never seen actual figures.
There’s plenty of data out there, plus or minus 1% is well mixed, well mixed does not mean ‘perfectly mixed’.
Since CO2 is a lot heavier than N2 or O2, the scale height should be significantly lower, only about 60 or 70% of the O2/N2 atmosphere.
Not true, the troposphere is part of the homosphere where the molecular mass of the components does not effect their distribution, diffusion and turbulence rapidly mixes all components of the atmosphere. The hemisphere is about 70km thick.
The last sentence should be: “The homosphere is about 70km thick.” Spell checker error!
“Using simple energy balance models with proven greenhouse gas absorption/radiation tools, the result of these changes indicates a warming from double CO2 in a range of 0.6 to 0.9 C, much less than IPCC’s value of 1.5 to 4.5 C. Note the uncertainty range drops by a factor of 10, from of 3 degrees C to 0.3 C, because of the elimination of unreliable complex computer models and their net positive feedback.”
—————————–
That is funny.
It seems more like the real rate mentioned above in the way considered is no more than a factor of 5 not 10., as far as I can tell.
cheers
You write:
“So what are the skeptics skeptical about? It is the amount and rate of the man made warming ”
That is one of at least two things skeptics are skeptical about. I am also a skeptic who believes in warming, an economist with a doctorate in physics. While I agree with you that the IPCC probably overestimates the amount of warming to be expected, the main thing I am skeptical about is not the amount of warming but its effects.
Almost everyone in the discussion takes it for granted that warming is bad, probably very bad, but I do not see why. The current climate was not designed for us, nor we for it, and humans currently prosper across a range of climates much larger than the change projected due to AGW. Roughly speaking, if the IPCC is correct, warming by 2100 will have brought Minnesota to the temperature of Iowa.
The only reason I can see to expect warming to have negative effects is that both humans and other living creatures are currently optimized against their current environment, making a change in either direction presumptively bad. For a rapid change that would be a serious problem, but we are talking about warming measured in tenths of a degree per decade.
On the other hand, human populations are currently limited by cold, not heat—the equator is populated, the poles are not. Mortality is higher in winter than in summer. Due to the physics of AGW, we can expect more warming in cold times and places, when warming is on the whole good, than in hot times and places, when it is on the whole bad. Longer growing seasons and more CO2 can be expected to increase agricultural output. Putting all of this together, it seems to me at least as likely that warming of a few degrees C will, on net, make things better as that it will make things worse.
For a longer discussion of these points see:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-is-wrong-with-global-warming.html
Interesting Post and comments.
Why must sceptics believe?
Surely this science based conjecture can be supported via science without introducing theology to the mix?
The Cult of Calamitous Climate deserves no respect, nor do those submersed in it deserve a easy exit.
Without the adjusted numbers they have nothing.
There is and has been no unusual warming in our time.
The minutia of an “estimated global average temperature” is blatant idiocy.
The result of averaging estimated numbers from imaginary grid points has an error range one could drive an ice age through.
The so called signal gleaned from massaging historical weather station data is of a magnitude smaller than the known measurement error range. This is idiocy at best but becomes open fraud if the user knows and persists.
When deluded persons get angry and start screaming vile names, it is not time to surrender to their delusion.
Belief in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is a signal I can read. For me any who are so gullible as to buy such nonsense are self labelled as unfit for public office.
Any office.
Also, the signal power must be nil else there is a violation of relativity theory.
“Why must skeptics believe?” In some parts of the English speaking world “I believe” is shorthand for “I think it is probable that” and has nothing to do with religion. Having traveled in the USofA a fair amount I found the in some areas I believe always or usually has religious connotations. DaveW
I like the way you think.
Any true sceptic does not believe. They come to considered views/conclussions, the certainty of which varies with the strength or weakness of evidence.
I was amazed and disappointed when I read the title. I understand that some can hold a luke warm position since we all evaluate the strengths and weakness of competing evidence differently, but to assert that I believe in global warming is wholly unscientific, and certainly not something that a sceptic should simply believe in.
Further, I am surprised that no one has picked up on the global mantra. There is nothing global about the warming (even if one accepts the thermometer record at face value), still less about climate change, given that climate is a regional phenomena.
Personally, I do not accept that there is any evidence that holds muster supporting the contention of climate change. Climate is not stasis, but rather it varies within bounds; temperarure being only one of many facets. If you like, natural vbariation is simply climate. It is only once there is a shift beyond natural variation that one can argue that climate change is happening.
I would enquire, which region of the globe do warmist argue is changing its Koppen (or equivalent) classification? I do not see that there is any evidence that strongly supports that climate is changing even if one were to accept that there has been some slight warming of some areas of the globe and that winter seasons in some areas is slightly shorter. Changes of this nature have been seen before in the past few thousand years, so why is this climate change? Isn’t this exactly what climate does?
Keeping a close eye on regions that are key indicators of either warming or sliding into another Ice Age is very simple. For example, like the last three years, if it becomes very cold in the Hudson Bay region and ice forms earlier and earlier and melts later and later, this is a clear indication of global cooling because all Ice Ages show up first in Hudson Bay.
This is why I can say, with firm data, that we are now entering a global cooling cycle again, the second one in my lifespan.
Is CO2 protect Canada from the cold spring and southern Australia before the cold winter?
Ah, the old Medieval question of how many angels can dance on the point of a pin. Very complicated and utterly meaningless arguments.
I have just been reading about the Pleistocene Ice Age, which has been on the go for two and a half million years, with interglacials like our own Holocene every 100,000 years or so for much of the past million. The Pleistocene Ice Age ‘ended’ 10,000 years ago we are told. Why should the Pleistocene Ice Age have ended? Just because a minor gas has increased by 0.01% over the past 150 years? Dance on angels….
By definition, we are still in the Ice Ages. Significant parts of both pole regions are under a mile of ice.
So many of you people present with *impeccable* credentials and such _amazingly_ thorough and referenced source material, that’s an absolute wonder why anyone would dismiss your claims. If your (anonymous) opinions carry so much weight, and you’ve done so much “research,” why do you think nobody listens to you?
People whose opinions matter (beyond those who are science educators) don’t post in places like this and can very safely ignore you while not missing anything important. They’re too busy debating other people whose opinions matter. As if the IPCC works in a vacuum of the few people on the board who haven’t heard and considered your elementary objections.
Your models & methodologies have been _well_ considered and dismissed. Consensus has been reached. It is evolving and broad based and is beyond the conspiracies you see. You are not “skeptical” and have conflated that noble concept with “contrarian.” Your stubbornness and contempt do us all a disservice.
Please, consider that you might be wrong, and that indeed your arguments have been heard and have been shot down by people who are just plain smarter than you. Learn something from your failure and try again, but don’t be surprised if you continue to be wrong.
No. Allen, you are wrong, but will be unable to convince anyone reading your words if your argument is nothing more “listen to the politicians and Big Government and Big Finance because they claim they know better than you and are smarter than you are.”
My guess is that Allan’s argument is an application of the fallacy of argument by assertion: it is asserted that the conclusion is true, regardless of contradictions.
Likely correct. Add in the “higher education bias” of “I am a college superior who has been educated by college-educated people who were college-educated , therefore my thoughts and conclusions are much better and clearly more profound than you yokel fundamentalist deluded fools who I know I should look down upon …”
Anonymous Allen complains about posters not using their names. Rich.
Allan:
You reach the conclusion that “people whose opinions matter (beyond those who are science educators) don’t post in places like this” but fail to share with us the argument by which you prove this conclusion to be true. I’d like to see this argument, if there is one.
And so saith Allan the Great! We should all bow down! Thank you, you have changed my mind. If there were just more of the likes of you we would be saved! In the meantime were did I put my pitchfork and torch?
No warming for more than 18 years, anonymous Allan. How has this fact been shot down by people who are “smarter?”
Allan you realize that this website along with many others is free for the public to post? I have read countless threads on the science of global warming. I haven’t see any proof of the co2 hypothesis to date. Your empty rant is no different. Maybe you can share how you came to your highly educated scientific opinion using actual science?
@Allan. Well reasoned advice, that most on this forum will never follow; and its not because they aren’t smart, or are simply missing the point. Rather its that they refuse to accept the conclusions of science with respect to AGW, regardless.
You see conspiracy theories posted all over this forum, or accusations of incompetence levied at Climate Scientists. Even the fact that all the world’s scientific institutions conclude AGW is met with ridicule.
There’s a reason none of these individuals have published in peer-reviewed journals: their constitutional inability to follow the evidence because it leads where they don’t want to go.
The incompetents are not scientists but rather are pseudoscientists. Many bloggers are incapable of distinguishing between the two.
I agree. But just for fun.
Now, on the same beach on the same day, 4 hours after sunset.
The sunbather is still there. The clouds are still there, same as in the afternoon. One hour latter, the clouds are gone. What is the sunbather feeling? Cooler or warmer after the clouds are gone?
That person is no longer a sunbather. Perhaps he or she is a sunstroke victim; the cooler air, though not the ideal treatment, should do some good.
I live by the coast, less than 1 km from the sea.
In summer, warm balmy evenings/nights are cloud free, cooler evenings/nights are usually cloudy.
As a general rule, I would expect a cloud free summer night (mid July to late August) to be about 28 deg to 32 degC through to about 3 am, if the night is cloudy, I would expect it to be about 3 or so degrees cooler.
I have always considered this to be a function of humidy, but where I live it is cooler in Summer at night when the night is cloudy.
I suspect that the claim that clouds keep temperatures up due to back radiation is based upon a lack of research. I suspect that two factors are at play that are not fully accountered for.
First, when it is cloudy in the winter there is geneally more water vapour such that the low atmosphere as a whole contains more energy and therefore it takes longer to dissipate that energy (becuase there is simply more energy to give up). This means that nightime temperatures take longer to cool down, hence the reason why people perceive cloudy nights to be warmer.
Second, clouds inhibit convection. and this too slows down the rate of heat loss.
I suspect that these two factors are not fully accounted for and go a long way to explaining why cloudy winter nights appear warmer than cloudless nights..
richard verney commented
I can tell you that it is quite apparent in the temp readings with a IR thermometer, cloud bottoms can be +80F warmer than clear skies (8-14u) day or night.
In fact, it is my belief that it’s the back-radiation from clouds that accounts for almost all of Trenberth back-radiation forcing, more slight of hand by team AGW.
For example, last night I measured -55F overhead (8-14u), that’s about 137W/m^2, but it’s missing the 22w/m^2 Co2 forcing (14-16u), brings it up to ~159W/m^2 (-39F). And that doesn’t even bring up that the 22w/m^2 can’t be a constant, it’s just “reflected” heat from the surface, and there’s no way that forcing is the same in the arctic vs the tropics.
My experience with the cloud is in the desert.
During the day we have very few or no cloud. Temperature is very warm.
At night again there is no cloud. Bring some very warm clothing.
rd50 April 27, 2015 at 7:13 am
How about:
Deserts are cool at night since the air is dry, and hence there is little in the way of energy in the low atmosphere and hence it cools down quickly. Not much energy to give up.
Contrast same latitude with clear skies say over the ocean, night time temperatures remain high.
Why is a cloudy night only a few degrees warmer when backgroud space is 3K. Why is a desert not colder at night?
PS, I am not doubting that we can measure an IR signal on the underside of a cloud.
The increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere causes an increase in energy absorbed by the photosynthesis process in plants, and we have observed this in the so called “greening of the earth”. As far as I know this absorbed energy is not being accounted for in the calculations which seem to assume that all of the energy retained by CO2 goes into warming the surface. My contention is therefore that the amount of energy warming the surface for a doubling of CO2 would be 3.5W per square metre minus the amount absorbed by extra plant growth. I don’t see how this could be accurately quantified, as the only data I know of is about trees, which apparently are now growing from 20% to 70% faster, and no data at all about other plants, algae, etc.
You are correct in that as far as I know, energy absorbed in the by photsynthesis process is not accounted for the the present energy balance. On the other hand, energy released by decaying leaves and rotting wood is also ignored. Roots and wood that stay in the soil would be a net reduction in energy coming in, but only the changes in this because of increased rain, temperature and/or CO2 would be of interest. I doubt they add up enough to compensate for increased CO2 radiation to space loss.
The total photosynthetic efficiency of the Earth is about 1%, the data exists, see for example:
Pisciotta JM, Zou Y, Baskakov IV (2010). “Light-Dependent Electrogenic Activity of Cyanobacteria”. PLoS ONE 5 (5): e10821. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010821. PMC 2876029. PMID 20520829
David Oakley Hall; K. K. Rao; Institute of Biology (1999). Photosynthesis. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64497-6.
Richard J. Petschauer.
Where do you think the climate scientists have gone wrong and you are correct? The IPCC is a review of a lot of global warming research.
They all base their research on the model of how Co2 drives surface temps. Which they assume is correct, that is preconceived bias, that’s not science. It’s the basis of GCM’S as well as surface temp reconstructions.
micro6500.
That is not true.
Is too.
How so?
harrytwinotter
You say
Do you believe that fallacy or are you deliberately asserting a falsehood?
The IPCC provides a biased selection of global warming research.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only exists to produce documents intended to provide information selected, adapted and presented to justify political actions. The facts are as follows.
It is the custom and practice of the IPCC for all of its Reports to be amended to agree with its political summaries. And this is proper because all IPCC Reports are political documents although some are presented as so-called ‘Scientific Reports’.
Each IPCC Summary for Policymakers (SPM) is agreed “line by line” by politicians and/or representatives of politicians, and it is then published. After that the so-called ‘scientific’ Reports are amended to agree with the SPM. This became IPCC custom and practice when prior to the IPCC‘s Second Report the then IPCC Chairman, John Houghton, decreed,
This was done and has been the normal IPCC procedure since then.
This custom and practice enabled the infamous ‘Chapter 8′ scandal so perhaps it should – at long last – be changed. However, it has been adopted as official IPCC procedure for all subsequent IPCC Reports.
Appendix A of the most recent IPCC Report (the AR5) states this where it says.
This is completely in accord with the official purpose of the IPCC.
The IPCC does NOT exist to summarise climate science and it does not.
The IPCC is only permitted to say AGW is a significant problem because they are tasked to accept that there is a “risk of human-induced climate change” which requires “options for adaptation and mitigation” that can be selected as political polices and the IPCC is tasked to provide those “options”.
This is clearly stated in the “Principles” which govern the work of the IPCC.
These are stated at
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles/ipcc-principles.pdf
Near its beginning that document says
This says the IPCC exists to provide
(a) “information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change”
and
(b) “options for adaptation and mitigation” which pertain to “the application of particular policies”.
Hence, its “Role” demands that the IPCC accepts as a given that there is a “risk of human-induced climate change” which requires “options for adaptation and mitigation” which pertain to “the application of particular policies”. Any ‘science’ which fails to support that political purpose is ‘amended’ in furtherance of the IPCC’s Role.
The IPCC achieves its “Role” by
1
amendment of its so-called ‘scientific’ Reports to fulfill the IPCC’s political purpose
2
by politicians approving the SPM
3
then the IPCC lead Authors amending the so-called ‘scientific’ Reports to agree with the SPM.
All IPCC Reports are pure pseudoscience intended to provide information to justify political actions; i.e.Lysenkoism.
Richard
richardscourtney.
Really – facts eh. Sounds more like your opinion, not facts.
harrytwinotter
You say to me
Say what?!
I cited, linked to, and quoted verbatim the official IPCC “Principles” which govern the work of the IPCC as stated by the IPCC on the IPCC’s own website.
Those are FACTS. They may be facts you don’t like, but they are facts.
Richard
richardscourtney.
I do not agree with your interpretation of the IPCC’s charter. You “shoot the messenger” types are an odd lot. At best you are mistaken, at worst you are delusional.
harrytwinotter says:
I do not agree with your interpretation of the IPCC’s charter.
And:
Really – facts eh. Sounds more like your opinion, not facts.
Richard posted the IPCC language, verbatim. But your response is that you don’t agree.
How does that work? Do you think your baseless assertions trump Richard’s posting of the IPCC’s charter language?
That’s about average for the way climate alarmists think. The problem you have is your lack of credibility. Just asserting that someone is wrong means nothing. In this case, you failed completely to show why.
dbstealey.
You could not be more ironic if you tried.
I thought I made that clear. They went wrong in using complex untested and unverified computer models instead of simple improved simple energy balance models and spectral radiation and absorption and emmission tools and well established feedback concepts. All CO2 can do is a small temporary chage in the planet’s heat halance. Plus, the summary for poiicy makers (about all that most people including other scientists read) is written by hand picked government workers who would be looking for a new job if man made warming was not a problem. The computer models are so complex that only the program writers understand them. And why so many versions? But for the workers, not a bad job. Your results can’t be verified for many years and you can always then later blame the “aerosols” or ocean heat storage for serious errors.
Otherwise, much of the reasearch they cite is good.
Actually, the results can’t be verified at all. While predictions can be verified, the models make projections and they are not verifiable.
Richard Petschauer.
I suspected you did not have evidence for what you say. You make a lot of claims – but anyone can do that.
“complex untested and unverified computer models” – not true. They have tested them and they have verified them. Perhaps you do not understand the computer models and how they are used.
“All CO2 can do is a small temporary chage in the planet’s heat halance” Wow, that is quite a claim. Got any scientific evidence to back that one up?
harrytwinotter commented
Well they were evaluated, they just didn’t do very well.
http://icp.giss.nasa.gov/research/ppa/2002/mcgraw/
http://icp.giss.nasa.gov/research/ppa/2001/mconk/
Or perhaps I do, for most of 15 years I was the simulation expert for 100-150 design engineers, including many at 3 and 4 letter gov agencies.
Sure, here’s the Rise/Fall daily temperature difference averaged by year for 65 million surface records (stations with greater than 360 days of samples per year)
YEAR RISING FALLING DIFFERENCE in F SAMPLE COUNT
1940 15.71097157 15.6830136 0.027957973 40450
1941 15.51280724 15.52291128 -0.010104032 37104
1942 17.19708086 17.18970456 0.007376309 50974
1943 18.49100199 18.49760266 -0.006600669 106368
1944 18.09759878 18.09670445 0.000894331 171413
1945 17.1321793 17.12947072 0.002708585 109356
1946 16.5656968 16.58263341 -0.016936611 75818
1947 17.02919548 17.01359006 0.015605421 104547
1948 18.61353831 18.62331222 -0.009773913 196738
1949 18.88868122 18.87702793 0.011653284 274738
1950 18.59500561 18.59388211 0.001123508 294791
1951 18.50607786 18.48544244 0.020635422 301060
1952 18.71132731 18.72543796 -0.014110651 366071
1953 18.42814736 18.43695155 -0.008804188 380160
1954 17.9957428 17.98496993 0.010772869 396199
1955 17.42433676 17.43215448 -0.007817724 361934
1956 17.72695923 17.71825583 0.0087034 355229
1957 17.5963675 17.62517297 -0.028805471 396449
1958 17.92289163 17.91920132 0.003690311 497221
1959 17.95581365 17.95448641 0.001327244 451085
1960 17.9869764 18.01315115 -0.026174748 508024
1961 18.03388368 18.03508739 -0.001203715 511500
1962 18.22151176 18.22907951 -0.007567744 514658
1963 18.34429315 18.33326835 0.011024797 507837
1964 18.15873062 18.15302857 0.005702056 485246
1965 17.3675503 17.35766173 0.009888569 335812
1966 17.50450441 17.52169516 -0.017190748 393037
1967 17.36575907 17.3679094 -0.002150335 397752
1968 17.55711991 17.5692133 -0.012093387 362322
1969 17.40666311 17.40243898 0.004224134 416322
1970 18.07845446 18.08878884 -0.010334386 486444
1971 17.41842199 17.41011975 0.008302247 176121
1972 17.24428991 17.23699402 0.007295899 172782
1973 18.29953951 18.30869743 -0.009157925 564178
1974 18.01006162 18.01329035 -0.003228731 805208
1975 18.61680029 18.63771804 -0.020917758 792671
1976 18.60309034 18.64140958 -0.038319245 1111465
1977 18.55697684 18.53033801 0.026638833 860841
1978 18.23385269 18.25044722 -0.016594529 1093975
1979 18.32688642 18.31058265 0.016303773 1028032
1980 18.25960534 18.27724383 -0.017638483 1129689
1981 18.31705388 18.3222249 -0.005171018 1099474
1982 17.62293309 17.63431024 -0.011377151 1055440
1983 17.42864046 17.4414735 -0.012833048 1166200
1984 17.37740432 17.38125902 -0.003854703 1220950
1985 17.48307532 17.48756305 -0.004487731 1185677
1986 17.58500848 17.58717123 -0.002162743 1254703
1987 17.4050167 17.40805318 -0.003036479 1235016
1988 17.77354186 17.78007015 -0.006528295 1365931
1989 17.55334589 17.5506176 0.002728288 1265629
1990 17.46665232 17.47565155 -0.008999233 1247673
1991 16.8231994 16.83149181 -0.008292409 1171457
1992 17.02449214 17.03832609 -0.01383395 1304978
1993 17.05782469 17.06297818 -0.005153482 1277117
1994 17.68736749 17.67993302 0.007434471 1298317
1995 17.33133396 17.33992032 -0.008586358 1293354
1996 16.91674692 16.9202606 -0.003513682 1318816
1997 17.21316377 17.20476681 0.008396956 1321324
1998 17.43171297 17.45367591 -0.021962934 1169739
1999 17.78586036 17.80618396 -0.020323599 1147533
2000 18.01024792 18.04020913 -0.029961211 1582673
2001 18.47831326 18.48061249 -0.002299226 1455055
2002 18.20320992 18.21497998 -0.011770051 1534148
2003 18.34413085 18.3384575 0.005673355 1562356
2004 18.25971399 18.26013423 -0.000420242 1769217
2005 17.95410103 17.95819944 -0.004098412 1928381
2006 18.31533458 18.3236668 -0.008332224 2058850
2007 18.26982812 18.28168462 -0.011856501 2070282
2008 18.23365477 18.24080168 -0.007146907 2324740
2009 17.87566685 17.88050967 -0.004842814 2401806
2010 17.88415593 17.88582125 -0.001665325 2506477
2011 18.00993136 18.012606 -0.002674635 2529280
2012 18.42713328 18.44643677 -0.019303489 2632177
2013 18.36008308 18.36336279 -0.00327971 2488421
All Yrs 17.80549016 17.80964193 -0.004151764 69864812
50 of the last 74 years are negative (cools more at night compared to the prior day’s warming.
30 of the last 34 years are negative
The over all average since 1940 is negative.
Whatever is happening to surface temps it is not because it didn’t cool enough “last night”, and that is the daily energy balance at the surface, where we live.
micro6500,
Oh I love it when someone appeals to their own authority – care to list your stuff in the peer-reviewed scientific literature? Otherwise your claims of modelling experience are worth exactly zero.
Pointing to a couple of studies done in 2001 and 2002 then not bothering to relate them to the IPCC AR5 2013 report – pathetic really.
I have yet to meet a “computer model skeptic” who knows what they are talking about. They do know a lot about hot air, I will grant them that.
micro6500,
You first,You seem to think you know they’re good.
And yet they show GCM’s (at least GISS/NASA’s Model E) have no fidelity.
What’s your expertise? At least I was a professional Simulation/Modeling expert, and was paid to do it for 15 years and have professional references on my expertise. You can dismiss it all you want, but I’d be surprised you have even that much experience with simulators.
Perhaps Mr. Petschauer would be willing to cast his view into the form of an argument so one can check whether the premises are true and the conclusion follows logically from the premises. It would be helpful also were he to provide citations to alleged facts e.g. observational findings.
in my “All CO2 can do is a small temporary change in the planet’s heat halance.” reply,
remove the word “temporary” This is only true for one time change such as doubling CO2 where the system restores balance in a number of years. But we have a constantly changing content, so we never quite reach balance.
Richard S. Courtney: Thank you for that nicely-documented summary of the IPCC’s political raison d’etre and modus operandi. The IPCC should be de-funded and shut down. Here in the USA we should hold Congressional and Presidential candidates’ feet to the fire and insist they pledge to do so.
/Mr Lynn
If we lived in a world where such immediate and obvious steps would be taken, then we wouldn’t be having these endless discussions about the true role of CO₂ as an agent of catastrophic climate change on planet Earth.
There are any number of important issues that deserve the attention of the world’s best minds, but unfortunately, many of these are banging heads over precise details of not only the number, but also the vibrational dispositions of the various fairies which dance on today’s pinheads. The presentations are riveting, the squiggles delightful, and yet they wriggle.
The raw data rotates so that low becomes high and high becomes low. You can’t make this stuff up, but they did.
So there you are. Even Swift would be amazed and could scarcely do better.
The IPCC does the ‘ends justify the means’ science. The cart is before the horse. The goal is to control the planet and tax thin air as a tool of domination. It is NOT ‘science’. It is anti-science.
Petschauer like many skeptics and the PCC modelers makes his forecasts without regard to the natural 60 and more importantly 1000 year periodicities so obvious in the temperature record. This approach is simply a scientific disaster and lacks even average commonsense .It is exactly like taking the temperature trend from say Feb – July and projecting it ahead linearly for 20 years or so. The IPCC models are back tuned for less than 100 years when the relevant time scale is millennial. This is scientific malfeasance on a grand scale.
The temperature projections of the IPCC – UK Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them have no solid foundation in empirical science being derived from inherently useless and specifically structurally flawed models. They provide no basis for the discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a foundation for Governmental climate and energy policy their forecasts are already seen to be grossly in error and are therefore worse than useless.
A new forecasting paradigm needs to be adopted.
For forecasts of the timing and extent of the coming cooling based on the natural solar activity cycles – most importantly the millennial cycle – and using the neutron count and 10Be record as the most useful proxy for solar activity check my blog-post at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
The most important factor in climate forecasting is where earth is in regard to the quasi- millennial natural solar activity cycle which has a period in the 960 – 1020 year range. For evidence of this cycle see Figs 5-9. From Fig 9 it is obvious that the earth is just approaching ,just at or just past a peak in the millennial cycle.
I suggest that more likely than not the general trends from 1000- 2000 seen in Fig 9 will likely generally repeat from 2000-3000 with the depths of the next LIA at about 2650. The best proxy for solar activity is the neutron monitor count and 10 Be data. My view ,based on the Oulu neutron count – Fig 14 is that the solar activity millennial maximum peaked in Cycle 22 in about 1991. There is a varying lag between the change in the in solar activity and the change in the different temperature metrics. There is a 12 year delay between the neutron peak and the probable millennial cyclic temperature peak seen in the RSS data in 2003. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980.1/plot/rss/from:1980.1/to:2003.6/trend/plot/rss/from:2003.6/trend
There has been a cooling temperature trend since then (Usually interpreted as a “pause”) There is likely to be a steepening of the cooling trend in 2017- 2018 corresponding to the very important Ap index break below all recent base values in 2005-6. Fig 13.
The Polar excursions of the last few winters in North America.are harbingers of even more extreme winters to come more frequently in the near
Quite true.
I keep saying, if anyone wishes to predict the future global climate, they must observe ice conditions in Hudson Bay most closely. This is literally the ‘bellwether’ of our planet in these Ice Age cycles.
I note that the warmists all focus on central Alaska and the edge of the Arctic Ocean there…the one place in the North American continent that never glaciated during Ice Ages except in the mountains along the southern coastline.
This is where the humans crossed from Siberia into North America on foot because there was little glaciation in this half of Siberia, too.
The choice of focusing only on the warmest parts of Alaska (during Ice Ages) is deliberate fraud designed to further the demand to tax CO2 (the air we exhale and plants ingest!) which is taxing thin air.
I did not make my estimates based on temperature records. Did you read the article? I only estimate what CO2 would do to the temperature, as I said “assuming there are no natural causes”. Using the superposition thorem, these changes would add to other natural causes. It is the IPCC, not I, that claims to know what part of recent warming is due to increased CO2, which is impossible. Please do not include me with them in this regard.
IPCC AR5 SPM RCP scenarios.
Scenario………GTC…….GTCO2……RCP ppm…..Anthro grams……..Anthro ppm……….%…………W/m2
RCP 2.6………..270…..….990…………421……….…9.90E17….………….86.8…………….21………..3.0
RCP 4.5………..780…….2860……….…538………….2.86E18……………250.6…………….47………..4.5
RCP 6.0………1060…….3885……….…670……….….3.89E18…..……….340.4……….……51……..…6.0
RCP 8.5………1685…….6180……….…936…….…….6.18E18……..…..…541.6………..….58……..…8.5
The RCPs are based on various assumptions and computer modeling.
GTC and GTCO2 are the projected/modeled amounts of man generated C/CO2 added to the atmosphere. RCP ppm is the projected/modeled atmospheric concentration of CO2.
Anthro grams is the amount of GTCO2 in grams with 45% remaining in the atmosphere.
Anthro ppm is the ppm increase compared to based on atmospheric weight.
% is the percentage of the RCP ppm due to anthropogenic sources of CO2 ppm.
W/m2 is the modeled radiative forcing due to RCP ppm.
Seems that not-man CO2 comprises half of the CO2 ppm & RF.
At least in the last moment we should realize that ocean is the main actor in the climate change process and that climate is the continuation of oceans by other means. I am sorry that we don’t pay more attention to the water and that in the past 150 years the only thing we did to the ocean was to fight naval wars. You can read on http://www.1ocean-1climate.com a collection of reasons for which today’s global warming is taking place.
Too bad increasing ice in Antarctica, Greenland and Canada are pointing in the opposite direction from ‘warming’.
Richard J. Petschauer,
You have stimulated a noteworthy discussion on this thread.
That said, I disagree with the context / theme of your post. I think using the concept of skeptic in a philosophical sense is problematic when also using the concept of belief in a philosophic sense.
So, arguably (in the history of philosophy) in a fundamental sense, the skeptical human would prima fascia not believe anything he/she is skeptical about. Believing is an un-skeptical position. Applied reasoning is the skeptical position
John
“Applied reasoning is the skeptical position”
It seems reasonable to believe a claim while still being skeptical of it; depending on various factors. If someone tells me I parked in an avalanche path and ought to move, I am willing to believe in the possibility absent proof simply by a Pascal’s Wager kind of thing.
Now if that person told me I had parked in an avalanche path and for a thousand dollars would be assured that the avalanche would not happen while parked there, of that I would be highly skeptical.
Michael 2
Ah, but we are told we must pay Big Government to bulldoze our house (destroy the world’s economic system and artificially raise energy prices, kill millions by starvation and illness) BECAUSE we might live in an avalanche zone … But our houses are in Florida, Alice Springs AU, Lubbock TX, Belgium, and Hudson Bay Canada.
Michael 2 on April 27, 2015 at 9:42 pm
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Michael 2,
You seem to suggest that believing is a way to acquire scientific (and philosophy of science) knowledge. If that is your suggestion then I disagree. Applied reasoning is the only way to acquire scientific knowledge. Applied reasoning is not a process of believing.
John
John Whitman says “You seem to suggest that believing is a way to acquire scientific knowledge.”
That’s an interesting conclusion from my words. But you have a remarkable insight; for that is exactly correct. When you were a child, you were taught that 2+2=4 (and similar facts). Your choice is to believe it or disbelieve it (and substitute for some other result of 2+2). As you went through your schools, nearly every fact offered to you is to be believed or disbelieved. Such as you believe becomes part of what you know which is also exactly what you believe since there is no reason to not believe what you know (even though it does actually happen). “Belief” is emotional, right brain; “Know” is rational, left brain, but the same kind of thing. It is proper to both know and believe. When you know but don’t believe, or believe but don’t know, it creates tension in your mind.
Suppose you conduct a scientific experiment seeking knowledge. When you inspect the result, you will make a conclusion, and it is necessary and appropriate to believe your own conclusion as surely as you know it.
In the case of climate science, I see a great deal more belief than knowledge.
Consider the far side of the moon. IS there a far side? Have you personally seen it? Probably not. Yet you choose to believe the photographs made by satellites and astronauts, and from that you think you know about the far side.
“If that is your suggestion then I disagree.”
Of course you disagree. It wouldn’t be much of a discussion otherwise so I am grateful for your disagreement.
“Applied reasoning is the only way to acquire scientific knowledge.”
Now it is my turn to disagree. No amount of applied reasoning is going to reveal the far side of the moon. But it has its place especially in using deductive logic on bare facts.
Michael 2 said “That’s an interesting conclusion from my words. But you have a remarkable insight; for that is exactly correct. When you were a child, you were taught that 2+2=4 (and similar facts). Your choice is to believe it or disbelieve it (and substitute for some other result of 2+2). ”
Actually the whole 2+2 = 4 thing is a construct that we are all used to, but in junior high school, a half century ago, we were taught that computer language was base 2, i.e. just 0’s and 1’s or basically “on” or “off”. The concept of different bases was taught way back then, along with a lesson that we should understand that much of what we see and believe is a result of our upbringing and culture. If I remember my lessons, in base 3, 2+2 = 11 and in base 4 it would be 10.
Sometimes things that appear to self evident are not so clear from a different perspective. We all “assume” base 10 when we do numbers as that is what most of us are used to. The concept of different base systems can open your mind to different ways of looking at things in all areas of endeavour including climate.
Great thread but it sure clogged up my email. 😉
RACookPE1978 on April 28, 2015 at 3:42 am
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RACookPE1978,
Yes, ‘Michael 2’ is using analogy. Worthless are analogies in matters of applied reasoning in science, but in the non-scientific process called believing analogies like his might be the way to convey mythology.
John
Believing in “applied reasoning” as your Dog is also mythology.
To John Whitman. I used the terms because I am tired of the media referring to those who do not agree with the bad projections as “deniers”, tryng to make it a black or white issue. Plus the title was intended to attract attention. But it is not a question about philosophy, but one of getting the Physics right.
“I am a climate skeptic who believes in global warming”
Yeah, me too and I suspect that is so for just about everyone here.
I have a doubt it is all my fault, or that it is a doom, but the fact of warming since 1850 seems indisputable despite some major ups and downs along the way. That a potential path to danger exists seems hard to argue with; but then, many dangers exist quite a lot more certain and imminent; World War 3 being at the top of my list. If the world manages to avoid that; next up is simply running out of fuel.
The earth’s warming up since the end of the Little Ice Age has been declining since the 1930’s warm cycle. This latest warm cycle (these come along in 30-60 year waves) was definitely weaker than the previous one and this cycle is ending soon and we are already into a colder cycle in key areas such as Hudson Bay and both poles cooling down rapidly.
So global warming has been slowing down already for over 50 years and this has been ‘fixed’ by the ‘climatologists’ who believe in ‘the earth is heating up relentlessly’ by literally tampering with the data and making the 1930’s in particular, look colder.
It appear since 1930 the global sea level has rise by about 6 inches and most of that sea level rise is due to a slightly warmer ocean. It also seems to me that in next 85 years sea level will rise somewhere another 4 to 8 inches.
And such slow warming of the oceans over last century means to me the world in warming and since I think it will likely increase another 4 to 8 inches within a century, that I believe world continues to warm up from one coldest period of interglacial period- called the Little Ice Age.
As for air temperature, I think it’s largely related to oceanic cycles, and it seems we starting the cool phase, but over longer periods I expect air temperature to continue rise.
Global air temperature appears to be currently warming at rate of about 1 C per century, but it seems to me unlikely, though possible that in 100 years will add 1 C or more to global average temperature,
and more likely between .5 and 1 C by 2115.
And during this hundred year period, it seems unlikely sea levels will trend lower or air temperatures could lower as much as 1900, or that rising decadal trend in air temperatures which could exceeds the peak temperature of the 1998 Super El Nino temperature by 1 C
Reblogged this on Spin, strangeness, and charm and commented:
A pretty good summary on where CAGW skeptics (a.k.a. “climate realists”) agree with climate alarmists (more than you might think), and where they part company.
The conflict between the sceptics and alarmists is not the only conflict that currently rages. Another is the conflict between the legitimate scientists and the pseudoscientists. The pseudoscientists argue over the magnitude of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (TECS). The scientists point out that the magnitude is insusceptible to measurement thus TECS is a scientifically illegitimate concept.
TCR and ECS are common acronyms in the literature.
..
I have not found TECS anywhere.
Ollie:
The acronym usually used is ECS but this usage fails to capture the implication that this is property of Earth’s climate and a constant.
It’s me again, I’m going to take another shot at this.
After further investigation it appears that my ppm gram weight based method in an earlier post has some flaws. Let’s discuss ppm.
The IGSS site (Mass of atmos CO2 page) says ppm is volumetric based. I have seen other sources that refer to ppm as volumetric based including references to Mauna Loa. ppmv
My approach posted earlier suggested that ppm is gram weight based. ppmgw
World Bank 4C report says ppm is mole based. See earlier post in this thread. ppmmol
Which is it? Which one did IPCC use? Why don’t they specify?
Since the specific volume of CO2 is less than that of air, the anthro CO2 ppm volumetric or mole basis will be even less than the gram weight based. All of these cases use the residual 45% atmospheric component.
IPCC AR5
Year……ppm
1750……278
2011……390.5
Diff…….112.5
Additional CO2 due to man…….555 PgC (As noted in my earlier thread this C is carbon dioxide. If this C were carbon one would have to multiply by 3.67 and the result would be more than the ppm & mass difference.)
ppm gram weight based=(grams CO2 added)/(atmospheric grams)
(5.55E+17/ 5.14E+21)*.45 = 48.6 ppm or about 50% of the 112.5 ppm CO2 increase between 1750 and 2011.
ppm volumetric based=((grams CO2 added)/((1.842 grams CO2)/m^3 ))/((grams air)/((1.205 grams air)/m^3 ))
(5.55E+17 * 1.205)/ (5.14E+21 * 1.842)*.45 = 35.4 ppm or about 30% of the 112.5 ppm CO2 increase between 1750 and 2011.
ppm mole based=((grams CO2 added)/((44.01 grams CO2)/mole))/((grams air)/((28.97 grams air)/mole))
(5.55E+17 * 28.97)/ (5.14E+21 * 44.01)*.45 = 35.6 ppm or about 30% of the 112.5 ppm CO2 increase between 1750 and 2011.
What it all boils down to is: 1) mankind’s CO2 output contributed about 30% of the CO2 increase between 1750 and 2011 and 2) evaporating water vapor absorbs the increased RF from CO2 without increasing the global temperatures.
You are mistaken about the cumulative total emissions of CO2, the figure of 555 PgC is of Carbon not CO2 so needs to be multiplied by the factor of 3.67.
Total cumulative emissions from 1870 to 2013 were 390±20 GtC from fossil fuels and cement, and 145± 50 from land use change. The total of 535±55GtC was partitioned among the atmosphere (225±5 GtC), ocean (150±20 GtC), and the land (155±60 GtC).
http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/14/hl-full.htm
Some Generall Comments
This article was intended for the general audience, to be short and hopefully simple. I have other much more complicated and detailed ones, some available on the Internet. For example see
Major errors apparent in climate model evaporation estimates at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/15/major-errors-apparent-in-climate-model- evaporation-estimates/
Where we show the reason climate modelers use to explain why their evaporation increase with warming rates are so low, i.e., “Not enough energy to support more evaporation” is based on bad physics. The energy for evaporation derives from the temperature of the water only impeded by the humidity of the air. We suspect their estimates are low because they have relative humidity increase with temperature, not remain constant.
Improved simple climate sensitivity model at:
http://edberry.com/blog/climate-clash/g90-climate-sensitivity/improved-simple-climate-sensitivity-model/
where we define equations for a three level global energy balance model. This gets around the present simple model serious limitation that only considers energy balance at the planet level, looking down from the top of the atmosphere. The new model adds the requirements of balance at the surface and the atmosphere as a separate entity. This allows forcing at all three levels. This is the best way to handle latent heat transfer from the surface the atmosphere, a major negative feedback now being ignored except for an attempt to include it with lapse rate feedback. For the expected 6% change C in evaporation per C, the model gives a negative feedback factor of -0.739 C / C. The IPCC value for the lapse rate is only –0.2625 C / C. These compare to the IPCC value for water vapor of 1.8 Wm-2 / C x 0.3125 C / Wm-2 or +0.5625 C / C.
The new model also allows a better estimate of feedback from changes in cloud cover. Changes in clouds effect four parameters in the model. The model also handles changes in atmospheric solar absorption from clouds and things such increased water vapor, now neglected as a feedback factor. Later versions of the paper have been completed, but not published or posted.
A Closer Look at Carbon Dioxide Radiation Forcing at the Top of the Atmosphere
Does the Tropopause Limit Carbon Dioxide Warming?
at
http://edberry.com/blog/climate/climate-physics/climate-sensitivity/does-the-tropopause-limit-carbon-dioxide-heat-trapping/#more-18372
which goes into much detail how heat transfers layer by layer in the atmosphere.
It also uses results from many detailed runs using SpectralCalc’s spectral calculation tools for atmospheric paths using the Hitran 2008 database. It is similar to the free version of Modtran, but with many more features while also more time consuming to use. Because of this I do not respond much to all the opinions on how CO2 absorbs and omits radiation. It showed rather that 3.5 Wm-2 for doubling CO2, only 2.53 under a combination of clear and different cloud conditions. (Modtran gives results less than 3 looking down at 70 km as pointed out by others). However, not realized by many, this does not include the increased downwelling radiation with the emission level being moved to lower, warmer levels in the atmosphere. Later I did this and found looking up from the surface increased downwelling 3.21 and 0.716 Wm-2 for clear and cloudy conditions, with a weighted average of 1.99 Wm-2. However to convert this to an equivalent at the top of the atmosphere the ratios of downward and outward radiations must be used, so we end up with 1.99 x (195)/(324) or 1.20 Wm-2, where 195 and 324 are the total radiations leaving the top and bottom of the atmosphere including clouds. Adding this to the 2.53 we get a total of 3.73, very close to 5.35 log (2) or 3.71 the value many including IPCC which I rounded down to 3.5 for simplicity. However using 3.73 and that rate of change of outward radiation with temperature, one gets a final surface temperature rise of 3.73 x 3.73 or 1.01 C compared with IPCC value of 3.7 x 0.3125 or 1.16 C. Incidentally IPCC’s value of 0.3125 is close to an earlier simple one of 0.3047 that merely takes the rate of change of radiation with temperature at the surface times the “greenhouse multiplier” or 390/235, the ratio of the radiations from the surface and the atmosphere. However, the radiation of the atmosphere increases with temperature at a faster rate than the surface, and 0.27 Wm-2 / C is a closer value. The more accurate three level model described above that can handle changes in downwelling directly without referring to the TOA gives 0.9819 for 2x CO2, a little higher than 1.01 above.
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about CO2 climate sensitivity and observed temperature changes and whether their historical trends are accurate. Since we can’t measure CO2 climate sensitivity that does not mean we should try to estimate it with basic physics. This is where I think the simple energy balance model extended down to the surface and including feedbacks is much more reliable method than the complex computer models.
Some comments that I read that I do not think are true or have any significant meaning
(1) “If we can’t measure warming from CO2 it cannot be science”
That reminds me of the question, “If a tree fell in the forest and no one heard or saw it, did it really happen?”
But it is seems that with so many natural changes in global temperature, many still unknown, we will never be able to measure climate sensitivity directly. But that does not mean it does not exist. Can we “prove” it exists? No. But we can’t prove it does not exist either. On the other hand statements such as the IPCC claims that there is high confidence that the majority of warming since some date is caused by CO2 or anything else is mere speculation and not based on science.
But with more time we might be able to put some estimated bounds on CO2 climate sensitivity. In fact with the recent 18+ years with little or no warming, whatever exists is being cancelled by net natural cooling. And we have seen no natural cooling as large as the warming rate that the IPCC estimates, so CO2 climate sensitivity must be much less.