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.
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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 @ur momisugly 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.