Caldeira It seems in the desperation to erase “the pause” in time for Paris, Ken Caldeira has jumped the shark with this claim. Basically he’s claiming that the heat from fossil fuel combustion is a factor, not just the posited slowing of infrared from Earth’s surface to the top of the atmosphere by increased CO2 concentration.
This headline “Greenhouse gas-caused warming felt in just months” is in contrast to what Caldeira previously said in this Institute of Physics publication saying:
…we find the median time between an emission and maximum warming is 10.1 years, with a 90% probability range of 6.6–30.7 years.
Now whether its months, years, or decades, they still have to get around the problem of “the pause” and climate sensitivity, which so far appears to be low in observations as seen here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/29/an-observational-estimate-of-climate-sensitivity/
Washington, DC–The heat generated by burning a fossil fuel is surpassed within a few months by the warming caused by the release of its carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to new work from Carnegie’s Xiaochun Zhang and Ken Caldeira published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. The release of CO2 into the atmosphere contributes to the trapping of heat that would otherwise be emitted into outer space.
When a fossil fuel is combusted, heat is released. Some of this is used to make electricity or heat human-built structures, but eventually all of that energy escapes into the environment and warms the planet. But this combustion process also produces carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas that accumulates in the atmosphere for thousands of years and traps heat that would otherwise escape into space, causing global climate change.
In a modeling study of coal, oil, and natural gas, Zhang and Caldeira compared the warming caused by combustion to the warming caused by the carbon dioxide released by a single instance of burning, such as one lump of coal, and by a power plant that is continuously burning fuel.
They found that the carbon dioxide-caused warming exceeds the amount of heat released by a lump of coal in just 34 days. The same phenomenon is observed in 45 days for an isolated incident of oil combustion, and in 59 days for a single instance of burning natural gas.
“Ultimately, the warming induced by carbon dioxide over the many thousands of years it remains in the atmosphere would exceed the warming from combustion by a factor of 100,000 or more,” Caldeira said.
For a power plant that is continuously burning, the warming caused by atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeded the heat released into the atmosphere by combustion in less than half a year–just three months for coal plants. With this kind of steady continuous combustion, it takes 95 days using coal, 124 days using oil, and 161 days using natural gas.
Caldeira explained: “If a power plant is burning continuously, within 3 to 5 months, depending on the type of power plant, the CO2 from the power plant is doing more to heat the Earth than the fires in its boiler. As time goes on, the rate of burning in the power plant stays the same, but the CO2 accumulates, so by the end of the year, the greenhouse gases will be heating the Earth much more than the direct emissions from the power plant.”
“It’s important to note that heat emissions from combustion are not negligible, particularly in urban areas,” Zhang added. “But carbon dioxide-caused warming is just that much greater. Our results drive home the urgency of cutting emissions immediately.”
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Funding for this work was provided by the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER) and the Carnegie Institution for Science.
The data that used to calculate thermal emissions with thermal contents of fossil fuels and estimate CO2 emissions are available from IPCC AR5 (https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter7.pdf). The historical CO2 emissions data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) fossil-fuel CO2 emissions dataset, and can be accessed via http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/CSV-FILES/global.1751_2008.csv.
I burn something, it creates CO2 and heat. The heat warms the atmosphere and the CO2 created by the initial combustion makes the atmosphere warm even more by preventing the heat energy being radiated into space.
The lack of atmospheric warming for almost 19 years would possibly refute this conjecture. Oh wait a minute, I forgot the Laws of Thermodynamics don’t apply to AGW and all of this heat has disappeared into the oceans where it will pop out at some time in the future!
The cretins that actually believe this drivel need to go back to infant school, preferably in the remedial classes to be taught basic science!
How does the heat going into the oceans refute the laws of thermodynamics?
Between two thermodynamic systems that are not in equilibrium with each other, NET energy transfer can only move in one direction.
Net energy transfer is from ocean TO atmosphere.
For atmospheric heat to penetrate the ocean bulk and heat the ocean, there would need to be a net energy transfer from atmosphere to ocean.
The ocean is generally 1 to 2 degrees warmer than the atmosphere. Heat always moves to cold.
In addition, LW does not penetrate past the ocean skin.
As DLW is the result of c02 (as AGW theory contends) 18 years of ‘missing’ atmospheric heat cannot of penetrated into the ocean bulk.
There are many other reasons that support net energy transfer is from ocean to atmosphere.
Chris, by definition CO2 is a greenhouse gas, therefore as a consequence of an increase in the amount CO2 the atmospheric temperature will rise. Hot air will rise and then cool and fall by convection, if this convection takes place over water a similar process is taking place in the water but the driver is radiant solar heat. Therefore some of the heat energy in both systems is lost (due to movement of air and water, First Law of Thermodynamics), The temperature gradient consists of cool air and relatively warm surface water, which on the face of it should make energy exchange less likely to occur (Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy will always increase ie temperatures will equalise). BUT the other problems are as follows, the specific heat capacity of water is a great deal more than that of air and the other problem is that the only mechanism whereby heat can transfer from the warmer air is by conduction, which in fluids is highly inefficient because both air and water are very poor conductors.
These factors, in my view make atmospheric heat heading into the depths of the oceans as highly unlikely. Please let me know if I have missed something.
Why do they always skirt around the Pause like it would be something entirely unnatural and impossible, building up problems where there are none?
Thanks, Anthony.
I had a good laugh. Then I thought: people like Caldeira have influence, God save us!
See Perpetual Futility, at https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/people/people.htm (A short history of the search for perpetual motion, by Donald E. Simanek)
Water changes phases at normal Atmospheric temperatures of 0 Degrees and 100 Degrees Centigrade. The vast absorption of heat energy to vaporize water and the vast release of heat energy when water vapor condenses overrides anything else in the atmosphere, even the greenhouse gas effect of Water Vapor itself. With Water Vapor 95% of the greenhouse gasses, this leaves little old CO2, that only changes phases at -109F degrees out in the cold. If there is any temperature effect of burning fossil fuels, it is buried in the overriding effects of the Sun in driving the Water Cycle. See my article with graphs to take this “Unified Field” explanation, all the way to ice ages. http://wp.me/p4unP5-5W
I was going to remark that for Ken Caldeira to be consistent, he should also do a calculation to demonstrate how much heat is trapped by the water vapor that is formed from the combustion of fuels. For the sake of alarmism, we can just ignore these phase changes, can’t we?
The energy being trapped or slowed or whatever you want to call it, is happening at the “speed of light” and at the speed of molecular photon absorption/retention/emission.
This process has to work within hours or days not decades.
A very small percentage of the energy can end up being trapped for hundreds of years in the ocean, but on average, the greenhouse effect operates on a scale of just tens of hours.
That is just the physics.
Exactly. Atoms don’t delay their reactions in the real world. In an alarmists model atoms apparently take coffee breaks for up to a thousand years before deciding to do what they do. Think of what all that extra heat emanating from the coffee is doing to the atmosphere!
Water changes phases at normal Atmosheric Temperatures of 0 degrees and 100 degrees C. Water absorbs vast amounts of heat energy when it Evaporates and releases vast amounts of heat energy when it condenses. This energy exchange far surpasses the greenhouse gas effect of water vapor itself. Water Vapor is 95% of the Greenhiuse gas, so it leaves tiny CO2 out in the cold. CO2 changes phases at -109 degrees, a temperature not normal in the atmosphere, even in Antarctica. The heat released by burning fossil fuels is absorbed in the water cycle and is dwarfed by the energy input of the Sun. See my article that explains this as a “Unified Field” explanation all the way to why ice ages occur: http://wp.me/p4unP5-5W
The link at the end of my post is a twitter link, and may not work without a twitter account.
That link is a Twitter link, and requires a twitter account. Here is a link that works for anyone:
https://paullitely.wordpress.com/2014/11/28/how-in-the-universe-can-you-connect-any-weather-or-climate-event-to-human-caused-co2/
This is a continuous process since industrialization. Therefore, the rise in temperature must follow this even with a lag. There must not be any pause. This is not happening. This shows some thing wrong in the argument.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Wouldn’t the OCO detect and record accumulations like those in the article?
Seems like a bunch of hot air to me. (well, somebody had to say it)
This nonsense got published?
Well from memory, annual fossil fuel consumption is about 155,000 TWhr per year. Insolation is 173,000 TW so we get more energy in an hour from the Sun than we get in an entire year from burning fossil fuels.
So the article is quite possibly correct, but it is a shell game. They’ve taken a number which is tiny and said Hey! Look! it is bigger than this other number, which is minuscule. And we’re not going to quantify in the article what the actual numbers are because they are so small that the average reader would LOL and they wouldn’t want that.
dmh,
Amen. Even if true, the “revelation” is trivial. One hundred thousand times a vanishingly small quantity is still miniscule.
Anthony Watts wrote: “he’s claiming that the heat from fossil fuel combustion is a factor … This headline “Greenhouse gas-caused warming felt in just months” is in contrast to what Caldeira previously said”
So where are this headline and the claim to be found?
What?
Caldeira explained: “If a power plant is burning continuously, within 3 to 5 months, depending on the type of power plant, the CO2 from the power plant is doing more to heat the Earth than the fires in its boiler.
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I guess the British poor who were burning books, because they couldn’t afford coal or gas, should take solace that they’ll get warmer outside their homes. Makes homelessness pretty swell using atmospheric heat for free…
Has this Caldeira exploded its top or what?
If this rubbish was true, then we should have no need of blankets at night ever again based on the fossil fuels already burned. Caldeira is an idiot.
Why no need of blankets? The area being heated when fossil fuels are burned (homes, buildings, efficiency losses, etc) is tiny compared to the surface area of the volume of the earth’s atmosphere.
Name calling, incorrect models, and the number of papers published using incorrect models does not change the physical reason why there has been no warming for the last 18 years. The cult of CAGW do not understand how to solve scientific problems, do not understand the scientific method. Ignoring anomalies and paradoxes that disprove a cult’s favor theories does not change what is or is not true. The IPCC’s scientific premise is incorrect in its entirety.
The majority of the warming in the last 150 years was due to solar cycle modulation of planetary cloud cover. There are cycles of warming in the paleo record. The cyclic warming in the paleo record has not caused by CO2 changes. The past warming and cooling cycles correlate with solar cycles changes. The solar cycle changes caused the past warming and cooling cycles.
The solar cycle has been interrupted. The planet is going to cool. The cooling has started which is the reason why there is now record sea ice in the Antarctic for every month of the year.
There is now evidence of cooling in the Arctic. The Greenland Ice Sheet yearly spring melt is roughly 1 month late, compared to the 1990 to 2011 mean. Greenland ice sheet snowfall has been above the 1990 to 2011 average for all months this winter. Greenland Ice Sheet temperatures dropped 2C last winter.
http://beta.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/
This is significant as this is a complete reversal of Greenland ice sheet warming in the last 20 years. Multi-year Arctic sea ice has increased and total Arctic sea ice volume has increased.
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper. William: 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
In addition to significant planetary cooling due to the abrupt change in the solar cycle, if Humluum et al and Salby are correct atmospheric CO2 levels will stop rising and will start dropping. Salby calculated using three independent methods that natural sources of CO2 are responsible for no less than 66% of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2. Humluum et al’s phase analysis of CO2 increases which determined there is no correlation of anthropogenic CO2 emissions and the rise in atmospheric CO2, supports Salby’s assertion.
Comment: Phase analysis is a standard analysis technique to determine cause and effect.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818112001658
I know I am going to regret asking this and exposing the shallowness of both my thinking and knowledge of the current state of research, but I am curious enough to ask anyway.
It seems to me that deserts are the best place to look for CO2 warming. Virtually absent the confounding variables of water vapor and clouds, temperature trends would reflect CO2 warming if the theory is correct. Temperatures during the night, particularly, should show a distinct warming if CO2 is reducing the energy lost to space to the extent claimed.
Surely, someone somewhere has been taking actual data at least for a decade, but I have seen no such research. Any attempt at an online search for it brings up a ton of papers postulating what global warming would do to deserts, but no data of actuals.
Does anyone have any info on this? Is my basic premise wrong?
Jtom, you surely cannot expect a simple climate alarmist to check his theory by actually going into the field & observing things do you? And of course, your premise is a very good one. Anywhere with really low humidity is the logical place to test the theory. You could even do it in a laboratory if you really wanted to prove your theory – but then you would also have to be prepared to be proved wrong in short order, & I suspect the alarmists love the fact that not disproving their theory enables them to claim it will all go pear-shaped in “the future”.
See natural experiment 1 and natural experiment 2 in this 1998 peer reviewed published paper that analyzed a natural step change of forcing in a desert climate to determine the earth’s sensitivity to a change in forcing. The same paper analyzes other natural phenomena which supports the same assertion.
The cult of CAGW is not interested in the analysis of natural phenomena step changes as natural phenomena analysis supports the assertion the warming from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will be 0.4 C or less. The explanation for the end of global warming (18 year period with no warming) is that a majority of the warming in the last 150 years was not due to the increase in atmospheric CO2.
http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/idso98.pdf
Vol. 10: 69–82, 1998 of Climate Research
Jtom,
Also check this one.
http:// watts up with that.com/2015/02/25/almost-30-years
Be sure to read the various comments. Also note the scale increment on the plot contained therein is 0.1 W/m^2, and that the solar flux at the Earth’s orbit is roughly 1360 W/m^2.
You will understand why you don’t see much experimental support for CAGW.
Darn adaptive typing!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/25/almost-30-years-after-hansens-alarm-on-global-warming-a-claim-of-confirmation-on-CO2-forcing/
Some day, I’ll start using a real computer for this stuff, and it will keep the site title scrunched.
Well, you’d need measurements from the exact same location covering enough years of CO2 increase to transcend the uncertainty; that would have to be local CO2, not global, inferred.
Temperatures would have to be exactly matched; relative humidity, specific humidity, cloud cover, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and direction, gases other than CO2, dust…
Easier to model it and publish.
Yep, the great thing about models is that you can adjust them till output meets expectations.
Thak you all for your replies.
I have looked at all your suggested readings. They attempt to measure everything – radiative forcing, water vapor, dust – except actual meteorological data – temperature, pressure, himidity, wind speed – versus local area CO2 levels. None of them even showed a straight-up temperature graph.
Someone must be collecting the data. Analysis should start with simple temperature and CO2 graphs by year. Then the same data graphed using just daytime temperatures, nightime temperatures, and the daily degree drop between daytime highs and nightime lows. I would hypothesize that the differential between daily highs and lows for equivalent periods in respect to humidity and wind conditions would decrease as CO2 increased if the theory were correct, i.e., I would expect less nightime radiative cooling.
I can’t even find a raw temperature graph.
EdA, I’m afraid your link is still broken (looks like there’ a ‘1988’ missing in it), but you gave me enough information to find it. Thanks.
Thak you all? No, “thank” you all, and I really mean it.
When late spring becomes early winter some,will still claim it is due to warming from CO2.
““Ultimately, the warming induced by carbon dioxide over the many thousands of years it remains in the atmosphere would exceed the warming from combustion by a factor of 100,000 or more,””
Wow. These people really have no intuition at all do they. Its always see an increase and extrapolate it off (in their minds) to oblivion.
Rubbish! what happens to a gas, freely moving molecules when heated?visit: devbahadurdongol.blogspot.com for details. Troposphere is a homogenous mixture of gases. Who can make it layered with gases?
Anything timed to coincide with Paris would have a political component. Timing is a marketing tool, not a scientific one.
With the current level of CO2 and diminishing impact of increased CO2 their conclusion is scientifcily imposable.Outside that point they have still not proven resident time or man-v-nature contribution to total CO2.
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Rarely have I seen such trash. This is supposed to be science?
Look. Forget power plants. Surface insolation is around 89,000 TW. World energy production is around 160,000 TW-hours. That is, the Earth receives more surface energy in two hours than all the power plants in the world produce.
How many hours are there in a year, he wonders? A bit of arithmetic and we learn that the answer is a bit over 8760. 2/8760 = 2.28 x 10^{-4}. That is, roughly 0.02% of the energy the Earth’s surface receives in a year is from humans burning stuff. This is so far down in the friggin’ noise that nobody sane could possibly care. It is like the batshit crazy stuff dragonslayers spout about how global warming is caused by internal heat generated by the Earth itself. Sure, all 44 TW of it. At that, the power through the crust is still over twice as great as the total power we generate — the two might even be comparable once waste heat is accounted for — and neither one of them matters compared to solar energy.
Here’s a simple rule. When considering the Earth’s climate, you only need to worry about three things as energy sources. The Sun. The Sun. The Sun.
Oh, wait, that’s only one thing because all of the other sources of power put together don’t even make up 0.1 % of solar input!
So gee, if CO_2 is a greenhouse gas (and it is), and if doubling its concentration can bump effective total surface radiation by a few watts per meter square (and it probably can), and the total BOA insolation is on average a few hundred watts per square meter, then CO_2 could have a much larger effect on the temperature than the energy release of the power plants that release it because to anybody capable of doing arithmetic it is perfectly obvious that the latter is completely negligible in all discussions of climate where the former is probably not.
So unless I’m missing something, this isn’t a “scientific paper”, this is high school science not quite good enough for a science fair. The effect of doubling CO_2 could be as much as a 1-2% of insolation, where power plants are less than 0.03%, some thirty or more times smaller, with both of them are dwarfed by direct solar heating. Which leads one the question — what is the point of this? It certainly isn’t science — Wikipedia contains a better, and more accurate, summation of this sort of thing which is basically simple arithmetic based on some reasonably well known numbers (bookkeeping, in other words). One is tempted to conclude that the point is political — that by making it sound like worldwide energy production is somehow significantly heating the planet and CO_2 released by the energy production plants is going to heat it even more almost immediately, we need to panic and turn off all of our energy production to save the Earth.
Which is absolutely insane. This paper changes nothing, and contributes nothing whatsoever to climate science that wasn’t known and dismissed by anyone capable of adding on their fingers and toes.
Yes, anthropogenic CO_2 almost certainly is warming the planet compared to whatever its temperature might be without it (in some sort of mean-field average sense, since in a chaotic system it is difficult to know what the temperature would be without it). We do not have a good idea of how much of the warming observed is due to CO_2, how much is due to natural causes, how much is due to thumbs on the anomaly computation scales, how much is due to non-natural non-CO_2 causes (like land use changes and UHI effect). Personally I suspect that warming since (say) 1700 has been at most half due to anthropogenic stuff and that if we realized how beneficial CO_2 is to the planetary ecology we might have chosen to burn coal to release it to bring up the concentration to at least 400 ppm even if we’d had fusion energy from (say) 1950 on. I suspect that as people start to realize how beneficial it is, there may be a lot less resistance to letting it go as high as 500 ppm or even 600 ppm without worrying about a planetary meltdown.
Direct greenhouse experiments on the effect of CO_2 concentration on plant growth strongly suggest that almost one billion people ate today thanks to the extra 100 ppm of CO_2 added to our atmosphere over the last century or so. Crops grown in higher CO_2 have smaller stoma, are more drought resistant, and have 10 to 15% higher yield, scaling up with concentration. Trees grow faster and produce more foliage (which confounds tree ring analysis of past climates as well). Growing seasons in the temperate zones are longer.
There are still some good reasons to want to stop burning coal to make energy. And it is quite likely that within the next twenty to forty years, we will. But there is no good reason to panic about future catastrophe and try to stave it off by induce a contemporary one.
rgb
Energy released by human activity, however, is not a plausibly significant source of global heating, many orders of magnitude smaller than only direct source of heat that matters, the Sun.
“Rarely have I seen such trash. This is supposed to be science?” A rarely mentioned consequence of anthropogenic CO2 is that it completely destroyed the peer review process.
bit over 8760. 2/8760 = 2.28 x 10^{-4}
typo?
If you are doing research in this field at duke can you please post the links that your #s are based on so others can climb into the details and decide for themselves?
Also please put in all the #’s of your math for 0.02 human to solar insolation ratio.
89,000 TW
per second?
per hour?
per year?
When I know #s and am trying to make a point I tend to miss these details myself. But it does a disservice to those trying to learn the truth. You get stuck without the facts.
Please include them so we can crunch ourselves.
I believe the author is not incorrect in showing the ratio of IR reflection caused by the integrated rising CO2 levels relative to a short term event of burning fuel.
People here are right to be critical when the ratio to solar insolation is not also mentioned.
This is more important ration as many point out. If the author had included this ratio and explained why the small increase in % of heat trapping over time can be a problem then others not in climate science could get a better understanding.
I fear this time in Paris, they may actually succeed. China and India have both already been given a complete pass until 2030. They have to do nothing towards reducing CO2 emissions. The big thing the participants will be doing in Paris is figuring out how to get around the US congress, Obama and Kerry are already on board. Other than that, it is pretty much a done deal I’m afraid. The whole goal has nothing to do with AGW, it is all about bringing an end to capitalism.
Al, thanks.
Warmunists are becoming comical…
First the warmunists emphatically deny “The Pause” is occurring, then they FINALLY admit “The Hiatus” is real and has been going on for 15~17 years (actually now closer to 19 years), but catastrophic warming will resume shortly, and now some warmunists are suggesting that flat/falling global temperature trends could continue for another 20 years, but it’s always been known this was a possibility, but in no way implies CAGW is a disconfirmed hypothesis…
Now we get this garbage paper proposing that thermal radiation emitted from the mere combustion of fossil fuels is “not negligible” (lol) and adds to CO2 induced global warming…. What the heck does “not negligible” actually mean….and what warming over the past 19 years are they referring to?….
Historians will be perplexed how so many people could have been brainwashed into beliiiiieving this CAGW tripe….
I really can’t comprehend how this CAGW hypothesis is still taken seriously given the now overwhelming evidence that CO2 induced warming will be “negligible” at best…