Guest Opinion; Dr. Tim Ball
The only place in the world where CO2 increase causes a temperature increase is in climate models, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The assumption that a CO2 increase causes a temperature increase is central to the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis. If incorrect, failure of this assumption alone should guarantee rejection of the hypothesis. In proper scientific procedure if the hypothesis is rejected the null hypothesis is considered. In this case, the null hypothesis is that CO2 is not causing global warming. The IPCC never considered the null hypothesis. Ironically and unwittingly, James Hansen proved the null hypothesis in his first major attempt to push his agenda that CO2 is causing global warming or climate change.
Background
The first IPCC Report appeared in 1990, but the more orchestrated push of the AGW hypothesis occurred with the 1995 Report. Four years later an Antarctic ice core record produced by Petit et al., was published in Nature. The article included a graphic that juxtaposed temperature, CO2, methane, and insolation (Figure 1).
It appeared to provide support for the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis. It looked like temperature increase preceded CO2 increase. I recall one of the authors, Jean Jouzel, warning in an interview not to rush to judgment. He noted it was 420,000 years plotted on a 10 cm long graph, complicated by a 70-year smoothing average that masked much detail. He was prescient. AGW advocates ignored the warning and used the graph as support for their hypothesis. It effectively became the forerunner to the ‘hockey stick’ in grabbing media and public attention.
However, in proper scientific tradition Hubertus Fischer, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was already questioning the cause and effect relationship with a 1999 paper. In 2001, Manfred Mudelsee published another paper that challenged the relationship in Quaternary Science Review.
Lowell Stott followed with a 2007 paper in Science titled, Southern Hemisphere and Deep-Sea Warming Led Deglacial Atmospheric CO2 Rise and Tropical Warming. Sherwood and Craig Idso maintain the best website on all issues related to CO2. They provide a list of papers that yield further evidence that the relationship is opposite to the IPCC assumption. None of this ever received mainstream media attention.
Failed predictions, which began with the 1990 IPCC Report, were one of the first signs of problems. Instead of revisiting the assumptions and science of their hypothesis they made the first political adjustment by creating projections to replace predictions. They compounded their duplicity by allowing the media and public to believe they were predictions. Hansen et al,
produced a forerunner of the projection scenarios in 1988, the same year he appeared before the US Senate committee to kick-start the entire AGW deception. Figure 2 shows the original graph from that article.
In an incisive article on Hansen’s model Anthony Watts provided a modified version of Figure 2 with actual temperatures added (Figure 3).
Hansen et al, postulated three scenarios,
A: increase in CO2 emissions by 1.5% per year
B: constant increase in CO2 emissions after 2000
C: No increase in CO2 emissions after 2000
Naturally, the mainstream media focused on the temperature projections of scenario A. Some of us knew Scenarios A and B were unrealistic, and now we know how wrong they were. I had many discussions in the 1990s with Canadian ice core expert Fritz Koerner about his Arctic Island cores. He told me they showed temperature increasing before CO2. In retrospect, scenario C is more interesting and more telling.
Hansen presents it as the ideal scenario. He is telling political leaders and media what will happen if humans stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere. Salvation! Temperatures will stop increasing. Ironically, this is equivalent to running the model as if CO2 was not causing warming. In doing so, it effectively presents the null hypothesis to the AGW hypothesis. It shows what would happen if CO2 was not the cause of warming. It approximates reality.
Figure 4 shows similar scenario projections from the IPCC AR4 2007 Report overlain with actual CO2 increases. The difference with Hansen is in the low scenario. The IPCC say in AR4,
Model experiments show that even if all radiative forcing agents were held constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming trend would occur in the next two decades at a rate of about 0.1°C per decade, due mainly to the slow response of the oceans.
Figure 4 appears to show that the “Best” and “High” projections are primarily a function of the increase in atmospheric CO2 levels. Even the “Low” projection diverges from the actual temperature trend shown for the surface (HadCrut) and satellite (UAH) records. Besides confirming the null hypothesis the results show that the IPCC claim of continued increase because of slow ocean response is also incorrect.
Hansen limited his research and climate models to human causes of climate change. He produced two projections that argued CO2 would continue to increase. In doing so, he predetermined the outcome. He confirmed his hypothesis that continued human production would cause global warming, but only in the models. However, apparently driven by his political agenda, he had to convince politicians that a reduction in CO2 output would solve the problem. To do this, he ran his model to show what happens with no CO2 increase. It produced a curve that fits the actual temperature trend in the intervening 27 years. This is the result you expect if you accept the null hypothesis that CO2 from any source is not causing global warming. Thanks, Jim, enjoy your retirement.
For the past 20 years…..it just ain’t working as planned
What is surprising to me is that so many people accept that there is a “greenhouse” effect caused by GHG, even among skeptics. 50 years ago we were taught in school that real greenhouses warmed via blocking of outgoing IR by the glass. This is the same mechanism postulated for CO2 — blocking outgoing IR.
However, we now know that this initial explanation for the “greenhouse” effect in real greenhouses was wrong. A greenhouse warms up even without blocking outgoing IR. Instead, we now know that the greenhouse effect is a result of reduced convection.
Thus, we should be going back to the original theory of GHG and CO2, because if we got the original explanation wrong for real greenhouses, then quite likely we have got the greenhouse explanation wrong for the atmosphere as well.
This is especially true given the universal failure of climate models to correctly predict the current rate of warming given the rapid increase in industrial CO2. In any other branch of science, this failure would be strong evidence that the theory is fundamentally wrong.
“What is surprising to me is that so many people accept that there is a “greenhouse” effect caused by GHG, even among skeptics.”
Yes indeed. In spite of all observation and all theory, we have “skeptics” who believe the James Hansen drivel. Oh my my. Someday the CO2 warms the planet myth will be laughed at by all, but I doubt I’ll live to see it — there is a whole lot of money and fame in not understanding the truth.
No, the initial explanation of the greenhouse effect is correct. Dr, Roy Spencer has written on this multiple times, the post that most directly talks about actual greenhouses is here: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/08/does-a-greenhouse-operate-through-the-greenhouse-effect/
“the initial explanation of the greenhouse effect is correct”
No, it’s not. What happens when you open a window on the top of a greenhouse to allow convection?
The temperature equalizes with outside, thus disproving IR backradiation has anything to do with a real greenhouse.
The real explanation of the “greenhouse effect” (gravito-thermal) has been known since the 1823 Poisson relation, and confirmed by giants of physics including Helmholtz, Maxwell, Clausius, Carnot, Boltzmann, Feynman, etc.
Ferd,
That CO2 absorbs parts of the outgoing IR was not only theoretically and practically proven by Tyndall many years ago quite accurately, see the image at Wiki, it is actually measured by satellites in the IR spectrum where CO2 is active.
If that has much effect or is overwhelmed by other effects like the water/vapor/clouds feedback, as Willis figured out, is a different matter. Al we can say for sure this moment is that the effect is way smaller than expected from the climate models, which all fail to show reality…
But you can’t say that there is no effect at all, even if what is measured is by far within the noise around the null hypothesis…
ferdberple October 3, 2015 at 8:44 am
What is surprising to me is that so many people accept that there is a “greenhouse” effect caused by GHG, even among skeptics.
_________________________________
Oh, come on Ferd. The CO2 greenhouse effect is correct, just not very strong or significant.
Check out what a thin layer of stratus clouds can do. A N. European winter stratus layer may only be 200′ thick, but it can keep the surface 10ºc warmer than without it. Does this thin stratus layer stop surface cooling by being a blocking sheet of glass? No, of course not – it simply absorbs and re-radiates LW radiation (however you want to call that process).
And in doing so, the re-radiated LW maintains a much warmer surface temperature. But you need a name for such a process — errr — how about ‘greenhouse effect’ …. 😉
R
What is surprising to me is that so many people accept that there is a “greenhouse” effect caused by GHG, even among skeptics. 50 years ago we were taught in school that real greenhouses warmed via blocking of outgoing IR
What is surprising to me is that so many people still bang on about such nonsense as though it matters. Yes, the Greenhouse effect is poorly named. No, we don’t live in a greenhouse and no, real greenhouses are not warmed in the way you suggest.
Ferdinand says “That CO2 absorbs parts of the outgoing IR was not only theoretically and practically proven by Tyndall many years ago quite accurately, see the image at Wiki, it is actually measured by satellites in the IR spectrum where CO2 is active.”
Of course CO2 absorbs low-energy/frequency ~15 micron IR. You left off the other half: CO2 EMITs within a fraction of a second that exact same low-E/frequency 15 micron IR. Even with all the bouncing around of photons (which according to Will Happer is one BILLION times less likely than transferring quanta of E through collisions with the other 99.96% of the troposphere (accelerating convective cooling)). CO2 thus acts as an “optical delay line” of a few seconds for an average photon traversing to space, easily reversed and erased over each 12 hour night for no net “heat trapping” effect over diurnal, annual, or multi-decadal time periods.
Also note, the very “partial blackbody” mere 15 micron line-emitter CO2, even if it was a true blackbody would have an equivalent blackbody emitting temperature of 193K or -80C. A true or “partial” blackbody at 193 cannot warm an atmosphere much warmer than 193K all the way from the 288K surface to the edge of space.
HS,
It is not only delay: part of the energy in the spectral lines where CO2 is active are lost in the atmosphere in ratio to the CO2 concentration (as measured by satellites) and thus that part of energy is transferred to other molecules, mostly in the lower atmosphere. Collisions have no problem with low-energy transfer, any additional energy will give more vibration for the receiving molecule…
If that was not the case, then a lot of detection apparatus based on UV/light/IR absorption wouldn’t work…
Ferdinand says “HS, It is not only delay: part of the energy in the spectral lines where CO2 is active are lost in the atmosphere in ratio to the CO2 concentration (as measured by satellites) and thus that part of energy is transferred to other molecules, mostly in the lower atmosphere. Collisions have no problem with low-energy transfer, any additional energy will give more vibration for the receiving molecule…”
Ferdinand: What part of my reply “according to Will Happer [re-emitting a photon is] one BILLION times less likely than transferring quanta of E through collisions with the other 99.96% of the troposphere (accelerating convective cooling)” did you not understand?
Here’s Happer’s quote:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/09/why-greenhouse-gases-dont-trap-heat-in.html
And here’s another text explaining that exact same phenomenon of accelerated convection:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/why-greenhouse-gases-accelerate.html
Well, water vapor is supposed to be a greenhouse gas. What happens with it?
H2o molecules rise up through the atmosphere getting more and more diffuse as the space it must fill expands. So how come it rains?
That’s because comparatively, water vapor is a sedentary “fat” molecule, pushed around by the smaller more energetic, faster moving O2 and N2 molecules.
Tyndell described the process of condensation as thermophoresis. Hotter molecules, which is interchangeable with faster moving molecules, push the larger water vapor toward the slower moving (cooler) portion of the air, forming clouds and rain.
The same thing happens with co2. As it rises hotter molecules push co2 into the colder spaces forming clouds of co2. Invisible clouds. Tiny little snow flakes of co2 rain out of these high altitude co2 clouds, and before they reach the surface are sublimated, leaving behind as the evidence of their existence a cold co2 down draft.
There are many of examples of the greenhouse effect. For example, if it is not real, why is it that desert locations cool so much at night compared to their daytime peak temperature (relative to more humid places)? Second, why is it that in the same location, if you have a cloudless night followed by a cloudy night, the nighttime temperature will almost always be cooler on the cloudless night than the cloudy night?
Great.
Thanks a lot.
My IQ dropped by at least 15 points during the minute or two it took me to read this twice, spin my head around like the little girl in The Exorcist, and begin to drool while babbling incoherently.
Thanks a heap!
HS,
My misinterpretation of the ratio between re-radiation and heat distribution…
Still some questions about the redistribution of the extra energy retention: simple gravitation / lapse rate does not increase the temperature of the surface beyond the 33 degrees lower than measured today. Even the second reference alludes to a recycling of the extra 33 degrees in the lower atmosphere due to GHGs. No matter that this is not by radiation, but dynamic via more convection…
papiertigre,
You have a special interpretation of the physics of CO2…
CO2 at 100% in the atmosphere may form solid clouds at – 80°C. Unfortunately for your theory, CO2 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere and its partial pressure is much too low to form any solid (or even liquid) CO2 at any height of the atmosphere…
In contrast to water, CO2 mixes in any ratio with the other molecules and has the same “temperature” (vibration speed) as N2 and O2, except when exited by the capturing of a photon of the right wavelength…
if the radiation theory of the “greenhouse” effect was correct, then adding more non-condensing GHG gas to the atmosphere would make the lower atmosphere warmer and the upper atmosphere cooler. This would make the DALR steeper than 9.8C/km. The DALR would for example, go to 10C/km or even 11C/km.
However, this is not what we observe. The DALR is completely independent of the amount of non-condensing GHG in the atmosphere. No matter if you raised the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to 100%, the DALR would remain at 9.8C/km.
Thus, you cannot make the surface warmer long term by increasing GHG unless you increase the height of the atmosphere in circulation. I’m not saying that GHG doesn’t have a warming effect on the surface. What I’m saying is that this effect can only raise the temperature to the limit imposed by the force of gravity, and the atmosphere is already at that limit.
except in a vacuum, radiation has no special properties as compared to conduction. If radiation can warm the lower atmosphere and cool the upper atmosphere, then conduction will have the exact same effect.
consider this. atmospheric conduction “blocks” IR from escaping the surface of the planet, by removing heat from the surface that would otherwise escape as IR. Conduction then delivers this heat previously removed from the surface back to the surface, where it warms the surface.
Thus in all respects, conduction delivers the same “greenhouse” effect as predicted for CO2. Which means that N2 and O2 also have a “greenhouse” effect.
ferdberple – October 3, 2015 at 8:44 am
It doesn’t surprise me in the least simply because it is an “association belief”. Meaning that, if you tell someone a rumor, an untruth or an outright lie and they can “associate it directly with” something they already know or believe is true or factual …. then they are highly likely to believe the rumor, untruth or outright lie you told them is also true and factual.
“DUH”, everyone and their brother(s) and sister(s) knows what a “greenhouse” or “coldframe” is and what their purpose is for …. and many have know this since Roman times of around 30 AD. Read more @ https://www.rimolgreenhouses.com/blog/entry/the-first-greenhouses-from-rome-to-america
And that is exactly why the James Hansen et els and AGW/CAGW “troughfeeders” keep touting greenhouse warming, …. greenhouse effect, … greenhouse gases, etc.
And the anti-AGW/CAGW’ers, … plus the skeptics and deniers who continue to “parrot” the aforesaid “greenhouse” terms are simply exacerbating those “junk science” beliefs of the general populace.
Thus, there are three (3) literal facts that are unquestionable.
1. There is no such thing as a specifically denoted “greenhouse” gas …. simply because any type gas that is confined within the enclosure of a “greenhouse” or “coldframe” would technically be considered such a gas …… and both structures would still function as intended if they only contained Nitrogen gas or Chlorine gas. (Unless the interior surface of the confined area was 100% reflective.)
2. Both “greenhouses” and “coldframes” function as intended simply because their enclosures permits the Solar irradiance to enter ….. but inhibits the convection cooling of the gasses within the enclosure.
3. The earth is not a “greenhouse” or “coldframe” ,….. nor is its atmosphere enclosed by a barrier that inhibits the convection cooling of the atmospheric gasses.
Cheers
The surface warming due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is 0.1C to 0.2C without feedbacks, not 1.2C. The warming without feedbacks is so small, the with feedbacks warming is basically the same as the without feedbacks warming. The corollary to the correct calculation is the majority of the warming in the last 150 years has due to solar cycle changes not due the increase in atmospheric CO2.
As the planet has warmed, we all assumed (or at least I did) that the cult of CAGW’s fundamental calculation (done more than 20 years ago by a half dozen specialists led by the founding father of CAGW, Hansen) of how much surface forcing a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will produce without ‘feedbacks’ is reasonable, in the right ball park. We all assumed the problem why the IPCC’s general circulation models (GCMs) predicted warming does not agree with measured warming (satellite which to this point has not been tampered with) is due to incorrect modeled cloud feedback, incorrect assumed water vapor
amplification of the forcing, and possibly a delay in forcing response, as opposed to the fundamental no ‘feedbacks’ AGW calculation, itself.
The infamous without ‘feedbacks’ cult of CAGW’s calculation (this is the calculation that predicted 1.2C to 1.4C surface warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2) incorrectly/illogical/irrationally/against the laws of physics held the lapse rate constant to determine (fudge) the estimated surface forcing for a doubling of atmospheric CO2. There is no scientific justification for fixing the lapse rate to calculate the no ‘feedback’ forcing of greenhouse gases.
Convection cooling is a physical fact not a theory and cannot be ignored in the without ‘feedbacks’ calculation. The change in forcing at the surface of the planet is less than the change in forcing higher in the atmosphere due to the increased convection cooling caused by greenhouse gases. We do not need to appeal to crank ‘science’ that there is no greenhouse gas forcing to destroy the cult of CAGW ‘scientific’ argument that there is a global warming crisis problem to solve.
P.S.The so called 3-dimensional cult of CAGW general circulation models (GCMs) have a hundred different internal settings so they can produce any warming number by adjusting the settings. The GCMs can and have been set to a non-physical setting. The simplified 1 dimensional calculation makes it impossible to hide the shenanigans.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.ca/2015/07/collapse-of-agw-theory-of-ipcc-most.html
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B74u5vgGLaWoOEJhcUZBNzFBd3M/view?pli=1
Transcript of a portion of Weart’s interview with Hansen where Hansen discusses the scam.
In addition to ignoring the fact that ‘greenhouse’ gases increase convection which reduces surface warming by a factor of 4, the without ‘feedbacks’ calculation also ignored the fact the absorption spectrum of water vapor and CO2 overlap. As the earth is 70% covered with water there is a great deal of water vapor in the lower atmosphere particularly in the tropics.
Redoing the double atmospheric CO2 level, no feedback calculation with a atmospheric model that takes into account the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere and the radiation effects of water/CO2 absorption overlap reduces the surface forcing for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from 3.7 watts/meter^2 to 1.1 watts/meter^2 ( also reduces surface for a doubling of CO2 by a factor of four). The 1.1 watts/meter^2 increase in forcing will result in surface warming of ball park 0.1C to 0.2C which is so small, the no feedback case is the same as with feedback case.
Check out figure 2 in this paper.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%281982%29039%3C2923%3ARHDTIC%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Thus, we should be going back to the original theory of GHG and CO2, because if we got the original explanation wrong for real greenhouses, then quite likely we have got the greenhouse explanation wrong for the atmosphere as well.
———————-
Seems like a non sequitur to me.
Ferdinand says “HS, My misinterpretation of the ratio between re-radiation and heat distribution…
Still some questions about the redistribution of the extra energy retention: simple gravitation / lapse rate does not increase the temperature of the surface beyond the 33 degrees lower than measured today. Even the second reference alludes to a recycling of the extra 33 degrees in the lower atmosphere due to GHGs. No matter that this is not by radiation, but dynamic via more convection…”
Surface pressure does enhance or increase the surface temperature above the equilibrium temperature with the Sun. The gravito-thermal GHE redistributes the available energy from the only source the Sun, with more kinetic energy and less graviational potential energy near the surface (Earth’s 33C “GHE) and vice-versa at the top of the troposphere (Earth’s even larger negative 35C anti-greenhouse effect from 255K at 5.1km to 220K at ~10km).
This mass/pressure/gravity surface temperature enhancement is now proven not only for Earth but ALL 8 planets for which we have sufficient data:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/new-paper-confirms-gravito-thermal.html
http://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0273117715005712-gr4.jpg
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/image_thumb25.png?w=644&h=460
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/05/maxwell-established-that-gravity.html
In fact it is only crackpots who argue that the CO2 GHE is due to “reduced convection”. Such statements pretend to be scientific and they often rely on misuse of emissivity and other quantum woo-woo. But the fact is, no body who even understands a little about physics doubts that CO2, H2O and CH4 are “greenhouses gasses”. Furthermore, the greenhouse effect in the air is only like a glasshouse by crude analogy. They all know that the atmospheric CO2 GHE is due to low albedo in the infrared spectrum – not reduced convection. Which is why AGW sceptics trained in actual physics do not doubt the basic CO2 GHE model. For example, Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, Curry, Dyson, Lovelock, Stevens do not doubt it. (Most of their AGW critiques are about negative forcing.) Basically, they are not crackpots. Whereas all CO2 AGW “slayers” are either highly misinformed, or they are outright cranks.
Samuel C. Cogar – do you have any evidence or links that back up your statements?
Chris – October 4, 2015 at 10:25 pm
Chris, I’ll assume that you do not know what a “greenhouse” looks like so here is a picture of one of the numerous designs, to wit.
http://www.hartley-botanic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Bespoke-Greenhouse-1.jpg
I’ll assume that you do not know what the different types of gasses are that are confined within the enclosure of a “greenhouse” so here is a list of said gasses.
Nitrogen ———— N2 — 78.08%
Oxygen ————- O2 — 20.95%
*Water Vapor —– H2O – 0 to 4%
Argon ————– Ar —- 0.93%
*Carbon Dioxide – CO2 – 0.040%
Neon ————— Ne — 0.0018%
Helium————- He — 0.0005%
*Methane ——— CH4 – 0.00017%
Hydrogen———- H2 — 0.00005%
*Nitrous Oxide — N2O – 0.00003%
Ozone ————- O3 — 0.000004%
Source – http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/7a.html
And did you know that a thermometer is used to measure the air temperature inside the confines of a “greenhouse” and it measures the temperature of all the gasses confined within said and not just 1 or 2 of said gasses. An the same is true when measuring thee temperature of earth’s atmosphere.
And did you know that the glass enclosure of a “greenhouse” has nothing whatsoever to do with the imaginary “glass ceiling” being claimed by both female employees and/or the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
The aforesaid imaginary “glass ceiling” does not exist …. and therefore it is incapable of confining anything …. other than one’s delusional thoughts or beliefs.
And ps, … when discussing atmospheric temperatures it would be more sensible, reasonable, intelligent and technically correct if the term “refrigerant gasses” was employed rather than the term ”greenhouse gasses”.
I would concede that the CAGW use of of the term ‘greenhouse effect’ is used as an analogy rather than a literal comparison to a glass greenhouse. However, it is still wrong in a way that can easily be described and understood.
CO2 is a radiative gas that absorbs and emits infrared radiation back to the ground. However, it also emits infrared radiation upwards into space because it is ‘isotropic’ i.e. emits in all directions, not just downwards. The CAGW crowd only want to focus on the downward emissions as proof of CO2 causing global warming. Their simplistic logic is that, if you increase CO2, you will increase downward IR emissions.
Here is the problem: if you increase atmospheric CO2, you also increase upward emissions of infrared radiation into space. An increase of IR emissions into space means the planet as a whole MUST cool as a result!
I agree with ferdberple and find it surprising that so many skeptics don’t challenge the CAGW logic head on. Increases in atmospheric CO2 actually cool the planet because they increase IR emissions into space. You don’t need extensive mathematical modeling of atmospheric lapse rates to understand that!
The only way CO2 can cause an increase in global temperatures is if it emits more downwards IR than upwards IR – in other words, it is not isotropic. Does anyone on this blog argue that?
What do you mean? This is the hottest 10/3/2015 on record!
It is well known that aquatic or marine concentrations of dissolved CO2 and dissolved O2 are inversely related to temperature. As the oceans warmed CO2 was released.
Absolutely, that is why many papers show ocean & lake pH levels are stratified with the same isotherms as temperature, warmer temperatures = higher pH, demonstrating temperature dominates over pCO2 in forcing Henry’s law and pH equilibria.
I’m with Ferdinand on this one. Not so much, but not nothing. Simplistic explanation: Some of that outgoing radiation is absorbed by CO2 and re-radiated in a random direction. Meaning some of it goes back down. Makes it a little warmer than if it all went straight out. (He was also right re. the amount of CO2 emissions, back when.)
Where the CMIP models blew it bigtime was on net feedback. (I like the Lewis/Curry top-down model better.)
Problem here is you don’t define what happens then, so the photon goes down, reinforcing the direct heating making the surface a tiny bit warmer than it would otherwise be right? This photon is now thermalised it will now be reemitted on a different wavelength highly unlikely to be within the CO2 stopband.
It’s now gone, gone ,gone.
Now let’s assume it’s a cloudy humid day, the energised CO2 is dissolved by a water droplet? What happens then?
The energised CO2 is at the surface and is splashed by a wave or spray what happens then?
The energised CO2 molecule is inhaled into plant stromata or an animal, what happens then?
The energised molecule reacts with some other reactant into a larger compound, say a carbonate, what happens then?
The energized molecule is struck by a cosmic ray and ionises, what happens then?
The energised molecule is struck by another photon of a correct energy to enter an even higher energy state, what happens then?
The radiation only model is triviallly simple and doesn’t account the multiple fates an energised molecule might have and what happens next. It is inherrently assumed that the emitted photon stays at the same energy as the incident one no matter what happens in the meantime… naive
The most basic premise in the models is that incoming EMR = outgoing EMR, in a massive, chaotic, open system such as the earth, that speculation cannot be proved and it is NOT going to hold, the fact that outgoing EMR is approximately the same as incoming EMR is a happy accident. An accident that had lead to the speculative assertion that Incoming EMR should equal Outgoing EMR. Why is it that with all our engineering prowess we have never produced a zero loss perpetual motion machine yet we compliantly accept that nature by random chance is capable of this impossible feat.
Every system has losses! No exceptions.
Some of that outgoing radiation is absorbed by CO2 and re-radiated in a random direction.
=============
surface conduction has the exact same effect. consider this:
during daytime, energy that would otherwise escape from the surface is instead conducted away to the N2 and O2 in the atmosphere, were it warms the lower atmosphere. this warmer atmosphere then conducts the heat back to the surface at nighttime, warming the surface.
this delays outgoing IR significantly, which means that conduction from N2 and O2 must produce surface warming via a “greenhouse” effect.
This effect is inescapable. If there is a greenhouse effect due to radiation, then there must be a greenhouse effect due to conduction. And since there is significantly greater conduction flux at the surface than there is CO2 radiation flux in the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect of N2 and O2 must be greater than that of CO2.
ferd,
80% of the heat retention is in the oceans (surface), about 5% in land and 5% in the atmosphere. Forget the atmosphere as heat reservoir, it mainly follows the temperature of the surface below it.
An atmosphere without GHGs doesn’t stop any IR, thus that goes straight out to space. Even without clouds, the dry desert air has a much larger diurnal difference in temperature than e.g. at mid-latitudes with 50% RH over sandy surfaces…
Bobl,
Never heard of the First Law of Thermodynamics? Either incoming EMR should equal outgoing EMR or the planet (surface) will heat up or cool down to get in the direction of an equilibrium…
Ferdinand,
If you are talking EMR then the point of equilibrium is Absolute Zero.
Otherwise it is just an EMR “pendulum” being constantly forced in one direction or the other via the quantity of the absorptions and emissions.
After 14+- billion years the earth’s “EMR budget” has never achieved equilibrium.
I’m not sure anyone can ever “prove” a null hypothesis, or that I even believe the null hypothesis. But he certainly looks to have disproven the al-Gore case.
Andrew
Agreed. The Warmist camp has two key components to their claims:
1. Due to positive feedbacks (esp from H2O), even moderate changes in anthropogenic CO2 will result in large and accelerating increases in global temps.
2. A warmer Earth climate is catastrophic for life in general and humans in particular.
There are “null hypotheses” associated with both of these claims.
:
1. Changes from anthropogenic CO2 will not result in large or accelerating changes in temps.
2. A warmer Earth climate is not dangerous to life or humans (indeed the geologic record is clear that life thrives when is warm)
The physics of IR absorption by CO2 is clear enough to indicate that the will be some warming from increased CO2, but, IMHO, Hansen grossly overestimated the positive feedbacks (and the feedbacks could end up being negative). The actual temperature data is probably best explained by a few tenths of a degree C warming on top of the AMO plus other natural temperature cycles.
My null hypothesis would be a 1.2C rise in temperature from a doubling of CO2.
The physics of IR absorption by CO2 is not that clear, but complicated for example by limits on the residence time and the spectral widths of absorption/emission lines described by the Heisenberg Principle. Accordingly, for each isotopic moiety there is a cutoff concentration above which there is no further increase in absorption/emission rates. Moreover, there is no direct warming of the molecule by IR absorption, as the motions do not involve motions of the centre of mass of the molecule, nor is there any equilibrium with other states that involve such motions.
MY null hypothesis is that I have no money in the bank. The teller just proved it to me.
Thank you Dr. Ball.
I always wonder why s many of the conversations ignore the history and origins of the CAGW hypothesis.
I think it is impossible to completely understand, or have a comprehensive discussion of the state of climate science without recognizing how and why we arrived at where we are today.
Nearly every discussion with warmistas seems to involve a cheery pick by them regarding which aspects of the hypothesis they are even willing to discuss.
Likewise, the blindness of so many alarmists to the long history of failed predictions, and the constantly morphing causes for their concerns, is truly staggering.
It is difficult to understand how a notion (that CO2 is the temperature control knob for the atmosphere of the Earth) which has been so incredibly incorrect continues to garner such support and so many devout adherents.
Shukla’s PrisonGate gives us insight into one reason it continues to do so, as do the conflation of CO2 with pollution, as well as the tie-in with the push for ever greater political and regulatory control of our economies.
I appreciate your taking the time for this look back, and the reminder of long and tortured path that led us to where we are today.
I hope I was able to communicate my point in spite of the typos and punctuation errors(so, cherry-pick…)
Oh, I was quite enjoying the thought of them cheerily picking whatever “fact`’ was going to suit them today!
I was very confused … they don’t seem like a very jovial crowd. I can’t envision them as merry schemers,
I see them as more likely to gloom onto a specific viewpoint (because of their lake of emotional problems) that they can never be free of.
typos; should be:
… glom onto a specific viewpoint (because of their lack of emotional maturity) that they can never be free of.
Menicholas
Were do you find them ( i mean Jo Beaumont, DonM) is it penny saver coupon day at the grocery store? Is there a coupon book I can get? Free trolls? Senior day?
michael
They just sort of have a way of glooming onto me, I guess.
Spelling is not my forte. Where do you.. Digital coupons?
michael
I do not take such barbs in a negative way. I myself am a jovial type, given to joking around.
Besides, my lake of emotional problems is quite shallow, and is warmed readily by such commentary.
🙂
Some are half full, some are half empty. I figured yours was half full or I wouldn’t have typed anything.
No worries.
I have noted that some typos seem to add an interesting twist to the original thought.
+1
Because they would have to admit substantial funding came from evil oil companies on the foundational work they built their theory on. They would also have to explain why they stopped spending research dollars on understanding the past and directed it to predicting the future. They would also need to admit how little they understand about 5he largest carbon sink on the planet.
I fail to see any correlation of CO2 to temp, other than it lags temperature rise and is therefore a result of warming, not the cause. The obvious divergence of CO2 rise from temp shows the lag response time to a shift in its causation.
Mana Loa has slowed in its rate of increase to 1.3ppm/yr from the high of 2.3ppm/yr and this almost 20 years after the warming stopped. This too is a lagging indicator that warming is the driver. I would caution however, that the short empirical evidence of modern records is too short to make any hard decisions/assessments of causation, but the appearance is interesting none the less.
I would say that Dr Ball has hit the ball out of the park. Hansen put his blinders on and continues to wear them today. Funny how those things block objectivity and good, sound, science in general.
Not only is there no apparent correlation of CO2 to temperature, Dr. Salby has shown there is no correlation of atmospheric CO2 content to human CO2 emissions. So why is this shipwreck still afloat?
Sorry DMA, but Dr. Salby only looked at the correlations of a noisy year by year increase, which is heavily influenced by temperature fluctuations, where temperature has little effect on the long term trend. Meanwhile human emissions were double the average measured increase rate, at least in the past 50 years. Looking at correlations with noise doesn’t give you any clue about the cause of the increasing trend…
I thought that the three scenarios were as follows (from Hansen’s June 23, 1988 testimony to the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Figure 3)-
“Scenario A assumes continued growth rates of trace gas emissions typical of the past 20 years, i.e., about 1.5% yr_1 emission growth;
Scenario B has emission rates approximately fixed at current rates;
Scenario C drastically reduces trace gas emissions between 1990 and 2000.”
This comparison in the period 2000 – 2015 indicates that measured temperatures closely follow the scenario C where essentially all CO2 emissions are shut down by 2000. That is markedly different from CO2 emissions being maintained at 2000 levels during the period 2000 – 2015.
From Hansen, Fung, Lacis, Rind, Lebedeff, Ruedy and Russell, J. Geophyscial Research, 93, D8, August 20, 1988, pp 9341 – 9364.
“Section 4.1 Trace Gases
Scenario A assumes that growth rates of trace gas emissions typical of the 1970s and 1980s will continue indefinitely; the assumed annual growth averages about 1.5% of current emissions, so the net greenhouse forcing increases exponentially.
Scenario B has decreasing trace gas growth rates, such that the annual increase in greenhouse climate forcing remains approximately constant at the present level.
Scenario C drastically reduces trace gas growth between 1990 and 2000 such that the greenhouse climate forcing ceases to increase after 2000.”
Seems pretty clear that greenhouse climate gas emissions must essentially cease by 2000 in order for greenhouse climate forcings to cease increasing after 2000.
You are overlooking/ignoring the fact that all three scenarios are based on “growth rates” of trace gases, and the fact that scenario A assumes that net greenhouse forcing occurs exponentially (to Hansen). B assumes that both emmisions and greenhouse forcing are still increasing, but annual emission growth rates are “less than” 1.5% more than the previous year. C. assumes that by 2000, we’ve reached a rate of emmissions that stops increasing every year, but is constant/stable thus climate forcing stops increasing after 2000.
The “growth rate” stops, not the emissions themselves. Dr. Ball is correct.
Aphan-
I still contend that in order to achieve Hansen et al.’s stated “greenhouse climate forcing ceases to increase after 2000” in scenario C requires that greenhouse gas concentrations do not increase, which in turn requires that emissions of greenhouse gases go to essentially zero.
Hansen and the IPCC believe that greenhouse gases are long-lived once emitted, taking centuries to decay away. For example, from IPCC FAQ 10.3- “If Emissions of Greenhouse Gases are Reduced, How Quickly do Their Concentrations in the Atmosphere Decrease?” comes this response:
“Complete elimination of CO2 emissions is estimated to lead to a slow decrease in atmospheric CO2 of about 40 ppm over the 21st century.”
http://co2now.org/Know-GHGs/Emissions/ipcc-faq-emissions-reductions-and-atmospheric-reductions.html
The IPCC claims that if emissions stopped today, it would take 85 years for atmospheric concentrations to drop from 400 ppm to 360 ppm, a 10% drop. That is about 0.1% drop per year. On the several decade timescale of Hansen’s graph, CO2 levels remain essentially constant after 2000 for Scenario C, therefore maintaining essentially constant greenhouse gas forcing.
“I still contend that in order to achieve Hansen et al.’s stated “greenhouse climate forcing ceases to increase after 2000” in scenario C requires that greenhouse gas concentrations do not increase, which in turn requires that emissions of greenhouse gases go to essentially zero.”
You can contend anything you wish to. 🙂 But you’re contending something that James Hansen et al 1988 was NOT contending. Maybe because he understood the difference between increases in CO2 ppm and the forcing caused by it. Or maybe because he understands the difference between something increasing, that something stabilizing, and that something decreasing. (Hint…it’s possible for greenhouse gas concentrations to not increase AND not decrease at the same time…)
“The three scenarios used by Jim Hansen were based on assumptions about how society would produce emissions forward from 1988. Key assumptions were made for methane (CH4), Nitrous Oxide (N2O), and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) – For scenarios A and B in developing and developed countries, and for the global total in the case of Scenario C. Here are the assumptions from Hansen’s 1988 paper for growth rates in CH4, N2O, and CO2:”
Scenario A
CH4 0.5%
N2O 0.25%
CO2 3% developing, 1% developed
Scenario B
CH4 0.25%
N2O 0.25%
CO2 2% developing, 0% developed
Scenario C
CH4 0.0%
N2O 0.25%
CO2 1.6 ppm increase annually
http://cstpr.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/000836evaluating_jim_hanse.html
This is what James Hansen et al assumed in 1988. (It’s about growth rates) You posted a link to what the IPCC said in a report in 2007…9 years later. (about concentration levels of CO2) Hansen’s scenarios are discussing yearly growth rates of “net trace gas emissions” (not JUST CO2) per year, and not one of them discusses or suggests that CO2 emissions would completely stop in 2000, OR that CO2 levels would drop over time. Jim’s scenario C INCLUDES a 1.6 ppm INCREASE in ppm, per year. (So your IPCC response is talking about something different than Hansen et al 1988 is discussing)
The climate’s response to CO2 is logarithmic, meaning it takes more and more of it over time to produce the same forcing. So if 20 ppm increase causes X degrees of “forcing”, then to get another X degrees of forcing, you have to increase the ppm by 40 ppm in the future. It’s perfectly mathematically possible to put a very small amount of CO2 into the atmosphere every year without also increasing the forcing it causes. And because Nature doesn’t just ADD CO2 to our atmosphere, it also REMOVES a great deal of it through the carbon cycle, only a very, VERY small percentage of the ppm currently in our atmosphere today was actually put into the atmosphere TODAY…or yesterday, or last year, or ten years ago, or 40 years ago by human emissions. (Your assumption that CO2 additions must stop in order for CO2 forcings to stabilize
The ppm isn’t exactly a precise scientific measurement either. Check the Scripps site. From noon on September 28th to noon on September 29th 2015, CO2 ppm went from 394 ppm up to 401 ppm and then back down to 392 ppm.
Do you understand now that there is a difference between “greenhouse climate forcing ceasing to increase after 2000” and “CO2
Aphan
Further to Aphan October 3, 2015 at 5:24 pm
…
Scenario C
CH4 0.0%
N2O 0.25%
CO2 1.6 ppm increase annually
/////////////////////////////
For the sake of argument let us assume that in the year 2000, the total CO2 concentration was 390 ppm.
You say that in Scenario C, CO2 emissions continue at the rate of 1.6ppm per year. Let us assume that for the next century, CO2 emissions follow that path such that by the year 2100 the total atmospheric CO2 now stands at 550 ppm [ie., 390 + (1.6 x 100)].
The question is this: Is the (greenhouse climate) forcing from CO2 at a concentration of 550ppm (ie., the year 2100 concentration) more than the (greenhouse climate) forcing from CO2 when it stood at 390 ppm (ie., the year 2000 level)? or is the forcing the same? or is the forcing less at 440ppm than it was at 390 ppm.
When considering this question you should bear in mind that the greenhouse climate forcing, is better known as climate sensitivity to CO2 (with feedbacks) currently estimated to be somewhere between 1.2 and 4.5 degC per doubling.
If the answer to the above question is that the (greenhouse climate) forcing from CO2 at a concentration of 550 ppm is more than the (greenhouse climate) forcing from CO2 at a concentration of 390 ppm, such that the “greenhouse climate forcing” has increased, then how do you square that answer with “Section 4.1 Trace Gases…Scenario C drastically reduces trace gas growth between 1990 and 2000 such that the greenhouse climate forcing ceases to increase after 2000.”
It seems to me that chris y (October 3, 2015 at 9:19 am) comment is apposite given the strict wording used in Section 4.1.
In your comments, you talk about “The “growth rate”” stopping, but Section 4.1 C does not talk about growth rates, but rather only about growth, and it states that the growth will be curtailed through to the year 2000 such that after the year 2000. “the greenhouse climate forcing ceases to increase after 2000.”
Now you might be right that that was not what was intended, but one would need to ask the author of section 4.1 what he meant since on a literal reading of the language used (and I presume that it was intentionally and deliberately used after careful consideration had been given by the author of what he desired to convey), Section 4.1C does not appear to be saying what you are saying, but rather what chris y is suggesting.
Perhaps Hansen was just being very sloppy, and this is perhaps indicative of his science.
RealClimate put up Hansen’s 1988 assumptions and temperature forecasts awhile ago.
GHG concentration assumptions (a little messy until one gets it into Excel). Scenario C has CO2 stabilizing at 367 ppm in the year 2000 along with the other minor GHGs. The actual CO2 concentration is very close to Scenario A (or maybe in between A and B)
http://www.realclimate.org/data/H88_scenarios.dat
Temperature forecasts by Scenario here.
http://www.realclimate.org/data/scen_ABC_temp.data
I believe Hansen said ^CO2 and other greenhouse gases,^ and since methane and other GHGs haven’t increased as he anticipated, he’s not as far off in his projections as it looks.
Bill Illis-
Scenario C assumed stabilizing CO2 at 367 ppm in the year 2000.
Interesting.
Thanks for the information.
Hansen was wrong on every count. Emissions have followed scenario A, maybe higher. The fact that atmospheric CO2 and methane have not increased as he thought demonstrates that his assumptions of the earth’s ability to absorb CO2 were wrong.
The observations by the best data sets we have (the satellites) are below scenario C, which I always understood to mean no increase in GHG forcing with warming to equilibrium continuing at a slow pace.
The post is excellent because by the observable record Hansen does indeed prove the null hypothesis of natural climate change; we can emit at scenario A or higher levels, and get scenario C or lower results.
My opinion is the models only model “Model World” and the 0 CO2 forcing essentially flat lines the temperature which coincidently matches what’s been measured for 27 years. My belief is the existing models will continue to show no skill in forecasting.
I enjoy the results of the graph and it shows a good talking point anyway but, I think it gives too much credit to the models predicting anything.
Why do the models use the “Global average SURFACE temperature” for these prognostications?
If they use the Surface as the source and the Black body radiation correction factor based upon the albedo for the earth, is this not ignoring the fact that the atmosphere is at a different (warmer) temperature than the surface and thus would not provide a true measure of the energy radiated. In fact would not the atoms, molecules in the atmosphere have a different BB temperature and albedo? Also, since the atmosphere is also radiating the energy, would they not need to adjust for the fact that the distance that the energy has to pass through the atmosphere would need to be modeled for each of the various layers of atmosphere?
The surface of the ocean (21˚C) is warmer than the air temperature (15˚C).
It is the ocean that creates the actual green house effect.
How can that be possible? Are you talking average temperature? I have never gone swimming, skiing or boating in a lake, ocean, bay, or river that was perceptibly warmer than the air surrounding my body, other than at night!
I thought the mean was much closer with the ocean surface slightly warmer. Usurbrain, the “at night” is critical, and also for the ocean surface, on many winter days the ocean has warmer surface T then the atmosphere at most latitudes. The dog (oceans) wag the tail (atmosphere)
Thanks, Dr. Ball.
I think you are correct in concluding that CO2 from any source is not causing global warming.
The Arctic Sea Ice Volume Anomaly measurements have been recovering since 2012 (see graphic at http://psc.apl.uw.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrentV2.1.png):
“The April 2015 volume was 24,200 km3, close to the April 2010 value. The April 2015 volume was 26% below the maximum April ice volume in 1979 and 13% below the 1979-2014 mean, and about 1 standard deviation above the long term trend. The June 2015 volume was 18.500 km3, 900 km3 above to the 2014 June value.” “The long term trend is about -2,800 km3/decade.”
From PIOMAS Arctic Sea Ice Volume Reanalysis (Polar Science Center, Arctic Sea Ice Volume Anomaly)
Global Low-Troposphere temperatures as measured by the University of Alabama UAH and Remote Sensing Systems (REMSS) have stopped increasing after the great El Niño in 1998.
Even some of the much adjusted and infilled land thermometers data sets show this.
Interesting thought, Dr. Ball, but two minor points of criticism are:
First, in inferential statistics of the Neyman-Pearson variety, if the alternative is reject then the null is accepted provisionally. I am not much inclined to such statistical methods, but I doubt classical statisticians would think of proving a null hypothesis.
Second, you state “…1988, the same year he appeared before the US Senate committee to kick-start the entire AGW deception…,”
the deception was well underway beforehand. I recall a seminar at MSU in the fall of 1974 or spring of 1975 where a physicist (I recall from one of the national labs, Idaho or Hanford) who maintained that an achievable temperature rise from CO2 emission would hold all water as vapor in the atmosphere. I was a senior in physics at the time and not prone to raising an objection in seminars, but no one else in the audience objected to such a ridiculous claim.
AGW and associated research leads to foggy groupthink, poor methods, and always has.
Extremely interesting. It would be nice to know who this physicist was and what happened to it (the physicist) later on.
what I find most interesting about the atmosphere is the dry air lapse rate of 9.8C/km, which is exactly the same as the conversion between kinetic and potential energy due to vertical circulation. the condensation of water reduces this to something like 6.4C/km.
If the atmosphere was isothermal as predicted, then due to solar radiation its temperature is predicted to be about 33C lower than observed surface temperatures. However, if one adds in the 6.4C/km lapse rate, one gets an altitude of about 5km, which is pretty close to the center of mass of the vertically circulating portion of the atmosphere.
Thus, it is possible that the 33C warming at the surface is simply a result of the lapse rate and vertical circulation, not a “greenhouse” effect due to IR. the lower 1/2 mass of the atmosphere is warmer than predicted from solar radiation, while the upper 1/2 mass is cooler.
This suggests that a non-condensing gas like CO2 cannot change the surface temperatures except by changing the height of the atmospheric circulation. Blocking outgoing IR in itself will not be sufficient, because the lapse rate will simply adjust the rate of vertical circulation to balance the change.
That’s something that has bothered me. AGW proponents claim that increasing CO2 concentration increases the effective radiating level, thereby increasing surface temperatures. Yet, we know that increasing water vapor decreases the lapse rate from the dry, adiabatic level. Why would we not expect that further increasing water vapor would further decrease the lapse rate? I.e., why would we not expect water vapor to be a negative feedback on increasing temperatures?
In mathematical terms, an equation describing the temperature profile within the troposphere for the dry adiabatic lapse rate is
T(h) = T(h_ERL) + L*(h_ERL – h)
where h is the altitude, h_ERL is the height of the effective radiating level, and L is the lapse rate. As altitude h increases, temperature decreases.
The AGW hypothesis claims that, as CO2 increases, h_ERL increases so, at the surface
dT(0) = L*dh_ERL
and so, for every unit differential change in h_ERL, we get an increase of L in surface temperature. But, the full differential expansion is
dT(0) = dT(h_ERL) + L*dh_ERL + h_ERL*dL
Focusing just on the last two terms, since we know that water vapor decreases L from the dry, adiabatic level, dL should be negative. So, even if L*dh_ERL is positive, h_ERL*dL should be negative, i.e., water vapor should be a negative feedback, and the total differential could be positive, negative, or zero, regardless of whether h_ERL increases or not. There is no assurance that I can see that surface temperatures necessarily should rise.
Agreed Bart, water vapor is a large negative feedback, by multiple mechanisms:
Negative lapse rate feedback (which alone cools up to 25C from LR change 9.8K/km to 5K/km at saturation)
Clouds
Accelerates convection
Increases radiative surface area to space
Latent heat transfer/condensation
Evaporative cooling
I’ve seen, e.g., Dessler’s analysis claiming water vapor to be a positive feedback. He claimed this on the bases of a least squares fit to a scatterplot, assuming instantaneous response. Jejune and facile are just two of the most charitable descriptions of such an analysis.
Well said ferdberple, and a good summary of the Poisson, Maxwell, Feynman et al gravito-thermal GHE
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=maxwell+clausius
In fact the US Standard Atmosphere (the only atmospheric model verified with millions of observations) that the 255K equilibrium temperature of Earth with the Sun occurs at ~5100 meters, which as the HS greenhouse equation calculates, is the same location as the average center of mass of the entire atmosphere.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=greenhouse+equation
Why does the center of mass matter? Because the force of gravity by Newton’s 2nd law F=mg for a system of particles is calculated based upon the center of mass of those particles (the atmosphere).
All that gravity does is redistribute the available kinetic energy (KE) from the only source the Sun, more KE and less gravitational potential energy near the surface, and vice-versa at the top of the troposphere.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/09/lapse-rates-for-dummies-or-smarties.html
In contrast, CO2 preferentially (by a factor of 1 billion times) transfers quanta of energy to the other 99.96% of the troposphere, accelerating convective cooling. Although CO2 acts as an “optical delay line” of a few seconds for photons on the way to space, this effect is easily reversed and erased over each 12 hour night.
HS,
Not my favorite part of knowledge, but two points here:
– As far as I know, CO2 collisions with other molecules, transferring its extra energy into heat are mainly in the lower atmosphere and less and less when the air dilutes. Above the troposphere, radiation wins the contest.
– If you heat a part of the atmosphere evenly over a large area at a certain altitude segment, how can that accelerate convection?
Ferdinand says, “Not my favorite part of knowledge, but two points here:
– As far as I know, CO2 collisions with other molecules, transferring its extra energy into heat are mainly in the lower atmosphere and less and less when the air dilutes. Above the troposphere, radiation wins the contest.”
Convection dominates radiative-convective equilibrium (by a factor of >8 times) throughout the troposphere all the way from the surface to the tropopause at 0.1 atm. Above 0.1 atm, the atmosphere is too thin to sustain convection. This was proven by Robinson & Catling Nature 2013, not only for Earth, but ALL planets in our solar system with thick atmospheres.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=catling
“– If you heat a part of the atmosphere evenly over a large area at a certain altitude segment, how can that accelerate convection?”
Throughout the entire troposphere up to 0.1 atm tropopause, CO2 is many orders of magnitude more likely to transfer quanta of E via collisions with the other 99.96% of the atmosphere. This increases the kinetic energy KE of N2/O2, which results in the adiabatic expansion, rising, cooling of such air parcels. Meanwhile, an equivalent amount of cold air parcels from the top of the troposphere descend, compress, and warm due to exchanging their gravitational potential energy PE with kinetic energy KE to create the gravito thermal GHE.
In other words, since heat rises, CO2 passing E to N2/O2 accelerates the adiabatic rising and expansion, i.e. convention of the warmed parcels, which thereby cools the surface due to the necessarily equivalent descending amount of cold air parcels. Carnot used the atmosphere as his thought experiment for one big heat engine (i.e. an air conditioner) and his book proved gravito-thermal GHE (after Poisson but before Maxwell).
HS,
No problem with the first part, but still don’t see how the second part works:
CO2 is distributed rather evenly over the atmosphere. If it is hit by the right IR, it will heat the surrounding atmosphere rather evenly in ratio to the amount of IR/frequencies radiated from the surface. More in the tropics than near the poles, that is sure. Thus additional to the normal air circulations between equator and poles caused by temperature differences, the GHGs may increase the flux rates over longer distances. That is only possible if there is a substantial increase in temperature difference between warmer and colder air columns.
The latter implies that the tropopause locally increases more near the equator than near the poles. That should be measurable, and as far as I can see was used as argument that the GHG effect was real, based on measurements of an expanding tropopause.
The main problem I see there is that the increase is mainly in the cooler parts of the earth, according to (tweaked) models and reality:
https://str.llnl.gov/str/March04/Santer.html
Santer (2004) still sees the model heating of the higher tropical troposphere, which is completely absent…
Anyway, the difference in temperature/tropopause height between equator and poles seems to get less, thus suggesting less circulation?
Ferdinand:
Why the atmosphere is in horizontal thermodynamic equilibrium but not vertical equilibrium:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/11/why-atmosphere-is-in-horizontal.html
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pzprGKL17pA/VHtJsFb8RZI/AAAAAAAAG2o/LWzKkGo84vY/s1600/horizontal%2Bequilibrium%2Bplot%2Btropics.jpg
Observations show no correlation between tropopause height and troposphere temperature:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/11/why-global-warming-is-not-explained-by.html
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-aCXErZgG8R4/VF_n4oyxdhI/AAAAAAAAGrw/SE6Gu1WtYng/s1600/erl%2Bheight.png
HS,
Thanks for the graphs, learned now that there is no correlation between temperature (changes) and tropopause height…
Where I still see problems is that GHGs do transfer energy into the atmosphere, thus increasing convection, but that gives higher temperatures mainly in the descending branch of the convection, which increase is beyond the gravity/lapse rate without GHGs…
Ferdinand says, “Thanks for the graphs, learned now that there is no correlation between temperature (changes) and tropopause height…
Where I still see problems is that GHGs do transfer energy into the atmosphere, thus increasing convection, but that gives higher temperatures mainly in the descending branch of the convection, which increase is beyond the gravity/lapse rate without GHGs…”
No Ferdinand, heat rises. Air parcels warmed by CO2/GHG collisions adiabatically expand, rise, and cool, and obviously an equal volume of cold air parcels from the colder, higher troposphere must be simultaneously compressing, falling and warming. This creates the huge atmospheric heat engine/air conditioner than Carnot talks about continuously in his book.
ferd,
As far as my (limited) knowledge of the matter goes: if there were no GHG’s, any radiation received from the sun would be radiated out to space from the earth’s surface without any restriction at a temperature of average about 33 degrees lower than measured today.
Thanks to the heat retention of water and to a lesser amount land and air and the short day length, the differences between day and night temperatures are not so extreme as on the moon.
What about the GHG effect? The retention of IR by mainly water and some by CO2 and other gases is in part redistributed to adjacent inert molecules like N2 and O2 by collisions, thus increasing the local temperatures, mainly in the lower atmosphere. That gives that for the same lapse rate, the local temperature shifts upwards until the radiation balance between short wave input and outgoing IR is re-established, this time at a virtual height of about 5 km.
Of course, air circulation makes a lot of difference too, but I don’t see an increase in circulation if the total air mass within an altitude segment is heated in equal amounts by GHGs.
At lower altitudes it appears all the intercepted LWIR would be thermalized through conduction to a local TDE. At higher altitudes less would be thermalized and more energy either liberated to space, or sent to lower altitudes.
The question is how much energy does any acceleration in conduction and convection use that is not thermalized, and or accelerates the process by which more heat energy is elevated to altitude and released.
The distinction of a scientific hypothesis from a superstition is that a superstition cannot be falsified. To the extent AGW is a scientific hypothesis, it is reasonable to say it’s been falsified by empirical evidence. To the extent AGW is just another superstition, believers will remain faithful regardless of even the most damning contrary evidence. Particularly if it pays well.
Hansen may have been responsible for the waste of $trillions and untold deaths. Truly evil.
The longer the standstill, the further Hansen will shrink into obscurity. CAGW has already been falsified by Warmists themselves.
Great links.
And there have (according to satellite data) been two periods of more than 15 years without warming. The first period being from launch of the satellite in 1979 through to the run up to the 1998 Super El nino 9which El Nino started in 1997). This first period when there was no warming runs for about 17 years.
The Second period is the present day ‘pause’ that runs for more than 17 years (according to satellite data).
So had NASA looked at the satellite data, even when it made its first comment in 2008, it ought to have realised that cAGW had been falsified by virtue of the fact that there was no temperature rise between 1979 and 1996. It was already a busted flush. And of course, by 2008, the second ‘pause’ was already apparent (I recall that at about this time Phil Jones in one of the emails released in Climategate said that the globe was cooling) albeit it was not yet circa 15 years in duration.
I’ve lurked WUWT for a few years now; it’s posts like these that keep me coming back because, quite honestly, some of the discussion here is too specialized or outside my capacity to fully comprehend. But this one… this one I bookmarked.
That being said, I am partially stealing a comment from another post to put this here:
“…before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.”[snip] – Purportedly part of an Aristotle quote.
Isn’t this very applicable to the brainwashed lemmings and tools of the warmist camp? How can you educate/convince/instruct someone who accepts CAGW as a tenet of their (factually incorrect and intellectually dishonest)faith. Because so many of the shrill CAGW voices I am subjected to are young, it makes me think of another (purported)Aristotle snippet:
“They(young people) have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things — and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning; and whereas reasoning leads us to choose what is useful, moral goodness leads us to choose what is noble. They are fonder of their friends, intimates, and companions than older men are, because they like spending their days in the company of others, and have not yet come to value either their friends or anything else by their usefulness to themselves. All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They disobey Chilon’s precept by overdoing everything, they love too much and hate too much, and the same thing with everything else. They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it; this, in fact, is why they overdo everything.”
How do you convince a young person, who, having already been indoctrinated by schooling and peer pressure and media, believes any attempt to convince them of anything to the contrary is an attack??
I wonder how they convinced people who thought the Earth was flat that is was actually round(I know, oblate sphere)… as I recall, horrendous things were done to people for saying otherwise.
Insight, anyone? Links to “Deconstructing Indoctrinated Kids for Dummies”?
You’re making me experience flashbacks. I do so miss those days when I knew everything 😉
How do you convince them? A nudge here, a push there. I have memories of my elders trying to give me guidance. I laughed and shot down their obviously limited and shallow thinking. But, some of their advice stuck in the back of my mind, and made it to the fore when the teacher of bitter experience forced me to recognize their wisdom.
Don’t give up on the young. Don’t be discouraged by their taunts, or assume that you are making no headway. It is a delayed response, a seed planted that will flower in its own time.
@James Smith Thank you.
“having already been indoctrinated by schooling and peer pressure and media,” That is just the tip of the iceberg of the problem! It starts in the cartoons the parents set their kids in front of on TV to “occupy” them, It is part of every, and I men every nature documentary on TV describing anything associated with the land, ocean, mountains, animals, plants etc. to the point of ridiculousness. It is part of every “Scientific” magazine the inquisitive student may read in hope of satisfying their quest for knowledge. and every educational film they ma be shown in the class. And I am in no way limiting this list to just those describing the land or the atmosphere. Even when there is no connection to man destroying the globe the AGW meme is woven into the document or media.
Two recent articles remind me of this. A few years back National Geographic had an excellent article about the blue hole caves in the Bahamas. http://www.bahamascaves.com/blueholes.html (not a NatGeo link for reference only) In their explanation they described how the depth of water had changed numerous times every 100,000 years (approximately and from memory so may be wrong) BUT the last ten percent of the article was an admonishment of mankind in that these beautiful caves will be ruined for all eternity because of man releasing CO2. Thus every HS student writing a report/paper or reading this will be indoctrinated with how “bad” man is to the globe. Excuse me, but what caused the numerous massive decreases in the depth of the water? Why is it at the deepest elevation now? Where are answers to these obvious questions. Several month later another article as to how the increased levels f CO2 in the ocean are causing a plague of death to the coral. Complete with sickening color photographs of the dead coral and of good live coral elsewhere. It took me about 15 minutes to determine the place they were describing was at the site of a new, volcanic vent of the nearby volcano. What the h.ll does that have to do with manmade CO2 in the atmosphere? No where in the entire NatGeo article could one determine that this was the case. Again the average HS student just got another HEAVY dose of brainwashing. All I could do is cancel my subscription (of more than 50 years) to Nat Geo. NEVER again will even read it in the dentists office.
” I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”.
The Chicago Climate Exchange, Chicago, IL was private company which included Board Members:
Richard.L. Sandor
Rejendra Pachauri, IPCC until about Feb., 2015
Maurice Strong
http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/board.asp?privcapId=24912469
Connect the dots from IPCC to trading CO2 and the money that was to be made.
“How do you convince a young person, who, having already been indoctrinated..”
I have great faith in younger generations. As they get older they start to question there indoctrination just as we did as we got older.
Yes, I have thought this for years. It’s not the argument I start with but with mindless AGW proponents who have never thought of the real science, it make for a a convincing anectdote, at a minimum, that the models have the effect of CO2 all wrong. Temps keep tracking Scenario C, but we’re not doing scenario C. It’s a good thing we didn’t implement scenario C back when proposed. Otherwise he’d be taking full credit for the pause. You would think modelers would care. But if modelers stopped scaring the world the cash flow would dry up.
Another great essay Dr. Ball. Thanks for all you do.
What is the global temperature dataset used in Figure 3?
Are models technically part of this world?
It has been mentioned a lot that in the ice core record, CO2 lags temperature by an average of 800 years. For more than 99.9% of that time, the sum of carbon in the biosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere was generally constant, and atmospheric CO2 changed only by shifting carbon to/from the biosphere and hydrosphere, especially the hydrosphere. CO2 served as a positive feedback for temperature changes initiated by other causes.
Nowadays, we have carbon being transferred from the lithosphere to the atmosphere. Atmospheric CO2 has increased about 40% despite the combination of the hydrosphere and biosphere (primarily the hydrosphere) removing CO2 from the atmosphere due to lack of equilibrium between the atmosphere and hydrosphere.
Don –
I have been wondering and exploring this since reading comments the other day by ristvan. Haven’t found much but did happen across this widely used reference:
Ballantyne, A.P., Alden, C.B., Miller, J.B., Tans, P.P. and White, J.W. 2012. Increase in observed net carbon dioxide uptake by land and oceans during the past 50 years. Nature 488: 70-72.
Paywalled at Nature, of course, but perhaps someone has access or can find open source document better than I.
This study is referenced both by IPCC (AR4) and NIPCC (2012) (and Idso’s) with NICPP blurb here:
http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2012/dec/26dec2012a3.html
“The five U.S. scientists say their mass balance analysis shows that ‘net global carbon uptake has increased significantly by about 0.05 billion tonnes of carbon per year and that global carbon uptake doubled, from 2.4 ± 0.8 to 5.0 ± 0.9 billion tonnes per year, between 1960 and 2010’.” (my bold)
Their work is based on data – “Ballantyne et al. used ‘global-scale atmospheric CO2 measurements, CO2 emission inventories and their full range of uncertainties to calculate changes in global CO2 sources and sinks during the past fifty years’.”
I cannot as yet speak to the quality of this work, but I am requesting a reprint from Dr. Ashley Ballantyne in Montana. If I get that and more, I’ll draft something for Anthony. I think this matter of sinks and sources will be very important in times ahead. I have no idea how models handle this – anyone??
Here is Dr. James Hansen in 2013 writing for Huffington Post. First the graph accompanying his article.
He goes onto note:
He is learning about those pesky negative feedbacks.
It’s so ridiculous. The sinks haven’t gotten more active. They are, and always have been, taking out all but a fraction of human generated CO2. The increase in atmospheric CO2 observed over the past century is a natural, temperature dependent process.
There is a one word analogous description of the effort to ascribe the observations to increasing sink activity: epicycles.
Donald and Bubba,
The main sinks for any extra CO2 in the atmosphere above equilibrium are the deep oceans (the ocean surface is fast responding, but limited in capacity) and vegetation. The response of both is near unlimited in capacity, but limited in speed: for the current about 110 ppmv above long-term equilibrium (per Henry’s law for the oceans), the ocean surface sinks about 0.5 GtC/year, the biosphere some 1 GtC/year and the deep oceans some 3 GtC/year. Human emissions are currently around 9 GtC/year, thus even with 110 ppmv extra CO2 pressure, the oceans and biosphere can’t cope with human emissions.
The response of the natural net sinks is surprisingly linear over the past 55 years (within the noise caused by year-by year rapid temperature changes) with the increase of CO2 pressure.
The sink rate of about 2.15 ppmv/year at 110 ppmv extra pressure gives a net e-fold decay of any extra CO2 above equilibrium of slightly over 50 years. The same as what Peter Dietze found over a decade ago:
http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm
Taking the e-fold rate as base and the influence of temperature changes at ~16 ppmv/K for the past 55 years, the average CO2 increase in the atmosphere can be simulated from human emissions within the noise:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em6.jpg
Forgot to add some references:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/287/5462/2467.short
and
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
thank you too, Ferdinand (and Jimbo of course)
Ferdinand Engelbeen
October 3, 2015 at 1:12 pm
The response of the natural net sinks is surprisingly linear over the past 55 years (within the noise caused by year-by year rapid temperature changes) with the increase of CO2 pressure.
—————-
Hello Ferdinand.
Is the above a suggestion and a clarification that actually for the last 55 years at least the OA is just a myth and a fantasy which actually did not happen at least up to the moment,,,,,,,, and most probably the net sink remains actually “constant” (with very little variation) even in the long term or the very long term, regardless of the much bigger variation of the net emissions?
Is not that actually a debunking of the Ocean Acidification?!
Nature disagreeing with our assumptions…….?!
cheers
That’s not noise, Ferdinand. It’s signal. And, your estimate doesn’t match it. You’re not even close.
Whiten,
The deep oceans have no problem at all with more CO2 in the atmosphere, if all human made CO2 up to now was absorbed in the deep, that would be less than 1% of all C and hardly measurable.
The ocean surface is a different point: as not all extra CO2 is removed at once (whatever the source), that influences the C level in the surface at a rate of 10% of the change in the atmosphere. That also means a small difference in pH of about 0.1 pH unit since the start of the industrial revolution.
That doesn’t give any problem for any kind of fish or corals or carbonate shells plankton like E-hux. Thus for the foreseeable future no problems at all…
Bart,
It is noise as the trend is a 70 ppmv increase over the past 55 years and the variability is not more than +/- 1 ppmv around the trend, here for the period 1990-2000 with the largest temperature variability (Pinatubo, El Niño).
Besides that, it is proven beyond doubt that the variability is caused by the influence of short term temperature variations on (tropical) vegetation, while vegetation in general is an increasing sink for CO2, thus giving a zero to negative slope over the same time frame.
Whatever caused the 70 ppmv increase, it is not the same process that caused the variability around the trend, so you can’t deduce anything about the cause of the increase from the variability…
BTW, I am near ready with a guest article to end our discussion for once…
You’ve chosen a bad time, if it is next week. I will be on vacation. Responses will be spotty at best.
There is no separation of the processes, Ferdinand. There is no phase distortion. You have made up how you want things to be, and are avoiding counter-evidence in order to convince yourself.
The removal rate of CO2 increased five-fold since 1960.
http://csas.ei.columbia.edu/files/2014/12/Fig.-2.jpg
Graphical portrayals of the discrepancy between the measured temperature record and old projections of future temperatures are the most compelling evidence against alarmists’ credibility, but I’m constantly disturbed that the “what they predicted” curves on these graphs are dubiously documented. The above discussion of Figure 4, to its credit, points to a specific IPCC article, but that article doesn’t contain an actual chart resembling Figure 4, and I expect that an alarmist confronted with Figure 4 would argue that Figure 4 misrepresents the IPCC’s words, for example by making some unjustified assumption about the starting date.
If these “look how wrong they were” charts are honest, I suggest they would be much more effective if the “They said” curves were clearly connected to specific charts, data, or words. Without that connection, they’re just an appeal to emotion, almost as vacuous as a photo of a stranded polar bear.
Elegant. That is a good one Dr. Tim Ball.
John
Open a bottle of coke from the refrigerator and open one that’s been left at air temps of 30C. That is all you really know to understand the Co2-temperature relationship
Ii still fail to understand the difference between projection and prediction.
His grandchildren’s storms are gonna be …..stormy though.
What may happen == projection
What will happen == prediction
What does happen == observed
Being wrong = Wrong
Not being correct = Wrong
Being wildly inaccurate = Wrong
Saying something will happen that never does happen = Wrong
Saying something may happen which never does happen = Wrong
Being wrong time after time = Not a credible person
Being a scientist who has no credibility = Someone who should be ignored
What I find particularly interesting is the relationship between temperature and CO2 as measured at Mona Loa since 1958. Temperature still leading. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/scale:0.2/plot/hadcrut4gl/isolate:60/mean:12/from:1958
CMS
October 3, 2015 at 11:03 am
Hello CMS.
You say:
“What I find particularly interesting is the relationship between temperature and CO2 as measured at Mona Loa since 1958. Temperature still leading.”
——————–
“Temperatures still leading”, according to reality is not correct. That is the main problem AGW is facing.
The “pause” in the temp increase for ~ the last 17 years means the temps are no any more leading.
The AGW “SCIENCE” technically has no problem with the ” Temperature still leading.” , but it seems to be in big trouble with “the temperatures no leading any more”.
Any turn of the trend towards cooling when the CO2 concentration keeps going up in the same manner, can be interpreted as the CO2 actually leading the temps in a negative relation……..
Completely devastating to the AGW point.
hope you get the point.
cheers
Funny how the entire future of a certain German car company can be put in doubt by the simple manipulation of some Co2 data by an onboard firmware.
I wonder how is it possible we can get where we are with the futures conflated and rosy for companies that blatently are doing exactly the same things for subsidised, biomass, solar, wind and electric powered vehicles charged up by burning coal.
Fiction is indeed more comfortable and easier to live with than fact.
It is an unfortunate constant failing of AGW doubter’s that they consider that by proving the science to be incorrect that they are winning. Sadly the reality is that is not and has not be for a long time about ‘the science’
+1
Interestingly Joe Bastardi agrees with you. If you disprove AGW, he believes it is still to late to stop the ship. To much money, ideological tribalism, prestige, careers (both political and academic) invested to admit defeat. The discourse has gotten so emotional and so far away from rational analysis, that it is immune to reasonable analysis, no matter what the real costs are to civilization. http://www.weatherbell.com/saturday-summary-october-3-2015 He by the way has outlined what it would take to change his mind on the subject.
Probably true. Without a very pronounced and prolonged cold spell, the juggernaut will likely continue. But, who knows? We may be in for just such an event.
I think the history of 20th century experiments with state socialism is relevant here.
Recall that State Socialism was considered correct by all right thinking and up-to-date intellectuals. It was “rational”, “atheist”, “scientific”, “historically inevitable”. Only those with a selfish private interest could deny the superiority of the socialist model.
As it actually played out, there was a lot of lurching about from country to country. The talk was everywhere, but only some countries really took the plunge.
It took a long, long time to admit error, and many intellectuals in the west have never frankly admitted error, much less accepted personal culpability for the multitude of ensuing disasters.
Now, 100 years later, socialism is back. The painful lessons all largely forgotten. Now we call it “regulation” rather than “state ownership of the means of production”, even though the meaning is essentially the same.
Not a particularly reassuring history, but is I think a bit more complicated than “too late to stop the ship”.
“Now we call it “regulation” rather than “state ownership of the means of production”, even though the meaning is essentially the same.”
We call it “crony-capitalism”, or “corporatism”, or “fascism”. Benito Mussolini preferred “corporatism”. Private “ownership” with state control via various means is the norm and has been for many, many generations. In the end, the state is a gang of thieves writ large.
“Anatomy of the State”
https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Anatomy%20of%20the%20State_3.pdf
“Venus.”
Proof Venus surface temperature has nothing to do with CO2 content or a Hansonian “runaway greenhouse effect,” and is merely a function of the Maxwell et al atmospheric mass/pressure/gravity “GHE”:
From NASA’s fact sheet for Venus:
Venus atmospheric pressure 92000 mb
density is 67 kg/m^3
mean molecular mass is 43.45
Using the Ideal Gas Law, we calculate temperature of T = PV/nR = 92000/(67000/43.45*0.082) = 727K for Venus
According to NASA, the actual surface temperature is 737K
It is almost as if no one gives a hoot about the many facts that disprove the erroneous myth of CO2 warming. The delusion is deep in this generation.
Nnngghhglrmph…
Thank you for this. It is so relevant, I plan to screencap your reply and use it immediately. I just had the Venus factor thrown in my face 2 days ago and had no idea how to respond… until now. Many thanks.
Hockey , You know I consider your comments and calculations to be among those that finally made me see the light wrt gravity being the factor explaining the higher temperature at the base of atmospheres than that given by their effective ToA spectrum . I think the point that it is gravity which creates the pressure and makes it stable needs to be emphasized because that is the “source” of the energy which must be in balance at the radiative surface .
I would add that my Heartland presentation , http://cosy.com/Science/HeartlandBasicBasics.html , just shows the quantitative absurdity of the notion that Venus’s surface temperature can be explained as a spectral phenomenon . At the time I had no good answer for why the surface was so hot , just that it could not be Hansen’s qualitative non-computational word-waving .
Lots of people get hung up on the paradigm of null versus alternate hypotheses which comes from the field of statistics , eg , Fisher . In quantitative physics , a hypothesis can be disproved even when the alternate hypothesis is simply “I don’t know” .
I love the warm air a Chinook brings down from the mountain. Don’t you Ferdinand Englebeen?
Thank you Bob Armstrong for your kind words.
Many reject gravity as the source of the “GHE” since gravity is a conservative force, but as Feynman eloquently explains, it is the interconversion back and forth between kinetic energy KE and gravitational potential energy PE that is the source of the tropospheric temperature gradient in a PURE N2/O2 atmosphere, and has nothing to do with “radiative forcing” or backradiation from IR-active gases.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/07/feynman-explains-how-gravitational.html
After “acing” highschool physics , I went by a circuitous route thru psychophysics back to finding late in grad school that math provided the only satisfying answers . I got Feynman’s 4 volume intro physics texts which are Feynman lucid and he has a chapter on “The Exponential Atmosphere” . But he essentially only explains pressure in it as I remember .
I mentioned previously meeting Alan Guth and being impressed by the simplicity of his arguments in a brief appendix to his Inflationary Universe book on gravity being usefully thought of as a “negative” energy . Certainly that works well in considering this situation .
Dr. Ball’s name on an article guarantees its quality and readability. — Eugene WR Gallun
Agreed.
In various blogs and warmist Facebook posts no one has ever explained how CO2 achieve this feat lots of crap links but they cannot or will it explain, everything I read leaves conduction and convection out of the theory and experiments, surely it needs to be included??
“To do this, he ran his model to show what happens with no CO2 increase.”
can also be restated as
To do this, he ran his model to show what happens with no global temperature effects from any CO2 increase.
As you say, QED.
The feedback that controls Ice Ages in fig 1 is albedo, not CO2.
CO2 can give a change of about 4 wm2, which may or may not be assisted by another 4 wm2 of water vapour. Ok, lets give the combined pair about 10 wm2 of feedback-forcing – max.
But a change from 10% albedo (land and water) to 60% albedo (mature snow and ice) can give a change of 230 wm2 in a northern latitude summer. (Average summer insolation at 60ºN about 460 wm2.) Now that is some change in warming potential.
So what is going to be the primary driver of temperature changes and Ice Ages – the widespread 10 wm2 derived from CO2 and water vapour, or the localised northerly latitude 230 wm2 derived from albedo changes?
R
What is the changed caused by greening the planet some 20% since the mid-eighties (Or whatever the exact number is)?
Is a world which experiences more, and more intense, thunderstorms via Willis’s convection hypothesis, enriched in nitrogen as well, via the effects of lightning induced fixation, above what is the case without such enhanced convective activity?
>>What is the changes caused by greening the planet?
Not very much, I imagine, because the cloud thermostat will act to stabilise temperatures. There are two positive feedbacks and one negative.
Positive — Ice-snow albedo change – fairly significant warming due less ice.
Positive — CO2 and water vapour – insignificant warming due more CO2.
Negative — Cloud albedo – significant opposition to the effects above (in this case cooling).
And since cloud albedo is as strong as ice albedo, and much stronger than CO2, the clouds can and will act to regulate and stabilise the temperature.
Bob Tisdale’s cloud graph shows clouds and therefore cloud albedo increasing in the late 20th century, to counter the increased ice-albedo warming, and then leveling off as temperatures stabilised in the 21st century. This is much as you would expect with a cloud regulated thermostat.
http://i42.tinypic.com/20kacuf.jpg
My understanding is the portions which have greened have been disproportionately the margins of deserts and other places where there was sparse or absent vegetation to begin with.
So the greening may represent somewhat of a “reverse UHI” effect, by taking bare rock and dirt and moderating the temperature of it.
It may well be the case that there are compensating mechanisms, separate from the direct affects on heating and cooling of bare surfaces.
If there are such compensating mechanisms, then the situation would presumably work the other way as well, and compensate for the actual UHI by the inverse of these compensatory processes occurring.
We know that vegetation tends to moderate temperature, all else being equal…it will get less how in the afternoon sun, and less cool during nighttime heating, vs areas with no vegetation.
Sorry, …less hot in the afternoon…
OLD DEATH TRAIN HANSEN —
Always Good For A Laugh
More holy than thou
He warns you of Venus
The only thing now
That hardens his penis
He rants at the crowds
A coot with the hypers
His mind in the clouds
A load in his diapers
He quotes from the Greens
We work for the many
(Diversity means
The colors of money!}
He quotes from the Reds
Consensus is dictum
(Good Socialist heads
Are all up one rectum!)
A Fascist he cries
This Goebbels of weather —
THE TRUTH IS IN LIES
THE BIGGER THE BETTER!
So just like a skunk
His sight is alarming
His science is junk
There’s no global warming
Eugene WR Gallun
Hansen seems to be a person utterly obsessed with himself. When you examine his public life everything he has ever done is about putting himself at center stage. That is why he has troubles with others in the “global warming scam”. Hansen psychologically needs to be the one and only “Global Warming Poster Boy”. A sick man.
Eugene WR Gallun
The null hypothesis is already satisfied. Hansen didn’t beed to do anything.
As a reply to Bubba Cow, it is well-known that the oceans uptake yearly about 50 % of the CO2 emissions of the mankind. The absorption rate of the oceans varies a lot and there is a pretty good correlation to the temperature of the oceans (r2= 0.75). Today the early emission rate is about 10 Gt carbon – 50 % stays in the atmosphere and 50 % is absorbed by the oceans. In 1960 the CO2 flux emission was only 2.5 Gt carbon but the division between the atmosphere and the oceans was about the same 50/50.
If you like to read a short overall description about the CO2 fluxes between the atmosphere, the oceans and the biosphere, you can find it in my English blog by name “Simulation proves that the anthropogenic CO2 portion in the atmosphere is 7.7 % – not 28 % as argued by IPCC”. From this title you can see that I have cancelled out IPCC’s claim about the high anthropogenic CO2 content in the atmosphere. The link: “http://www.climatexam.com/”
The blog in question is the 6th in the row in the subsection “English blog”.
thank you Dr. Ollila – as well as for the additional excellent readings at your site
Cheers
Virtually no one in the general public, including many educated folks, even scientifically educated people do not realize that CO2 is only .04% of our atmosphere. When informed of this it makes the concept of CO2 being the boogieman much less believable for most. This trace gas does nothing but enable photosynthesis! We spend too much time playing on the other side’s field and using their rules in the way we measure increases in CO2 and tenths of a degree temperature anomalies. The magnitudes of the quantities being measured are miniscule and in many cases the results of those measurements are well outside of any true statistical significance when all of the potential sources of error are considered.
Many in the general public have no idea what to make of a number like 0.04%.
There are legions of innumerate folks, and even more with no perspective on what such a number signifies in real terms, even if they do understand that this is a small amount.
But I would not make too much of this fact.
As I have pointed out on other threads, there are dyes which will prevent the passage of light through water at concentrations many orders of magnitude below the amount of CO2 in air.
A chemical compound can have effects far out of proportion to the concentration of that substance in a medium.
Menicholas,
My point is that due to the unending propaganda people think that CO2 is 20, 30,…..50% of the atmosphere and when they find out what a small percentage it is they begin to have doubts about the propaganda they have been fed. As you point out regarding their lack of understanding of numbers, such would be also true regarding their knowledge of the dies you speak of. This is a propaganda war with regard to most of the general public and we continue to use the competition’s rules! Even showing properly scaled graphs of actual temperatures rather than anomalies is helpful in changing people’s minds about CAGW. I always start off by indicating that there has been global warming for about 12, 000 years but we are not causing it. It is a natural process. Picking fly shit about real science and die concentrations is not helpful as most folks will look at you with a blank stare.
Jim,
Do not get me wrong, please. I was not disagreeing with you in the least…merely extending the thought.
You are absolutely correct when you say that there is widespread lack of knowledge, and in fact startling ignorance, of actual CO2 concentrations.
Sadly, this is only the tip of the iceberg…as many people are functionally illiterate when it comes to factual matters of science.
Similar situation exists with matters of history.
And when you get into Earth history…fuggedaboudit.
Even many so-called climate scientists seem to know almost nothing about the actual documented knowledge in Earth history texts.
Clarification…not disagreeing in regard to the knowledge or lack thereof of the general public.
I am agnostic at this point re the discussion here of whether there is a GHG warming affect.
I am a physical chemist, and a geographer, with a smattering of knowledge of biology and Earth history…sort of a generalist, my first degree pursued was interdisciplinary natural sciences…a degree since discontinued…I am not a condensed matter physicist, and many here are. Or at least seem to be and purport to be. If they cannot agree on the radiative properties of the atmosphere, who am I to jump in and offer an opinion one way or the other?
I do love the debate though, and go back and forth on which way I am leaning depending on who is talking.
I understand the persuasive arguments on both sides, and just hope I do not run out of popcorn.
How can it be that there is such a seemingly stark and basic disagreement over this topic?
It would seem that experiments could and should be devised to put the mater to rest and settle it once and for all.
I find the arguments put forward by Mr. Bob Armstrong, Fedberple, and Hockeyschtick compelling. But much of the counter-argumentation seems compelling as well. If the statements regarding Venus are not true, those on the other side of this question should dispute them in clear and plain language and argument.
Ditto with the temperature profile of the Earth’s atmosphere being completely and adequately explained without regard to the specific composition and mixture of gasses.
” AGW advocates ignored the warning and used the graph as support for their hypothesis.”
As usual, no quotes or support offerred. In fact, it has never been part of AGW theory that ice age terminations are caused by rising CO2. The theory says that CO2 blocks IR, and if you put a whole lot of CO2 in the air it will warm. But that doesn’t mean that all warming is caused by CO2, and back in the past, no-one was actually forcing new CO2 into the atmosphere.
Petit Nature 1999 actually referred to and commented on Fischer’s paper:
So did the IPCC ignore Fischer? No, the AR3 (2001) quoted it directly:
Are you sure the theory says it blocks IR? And doesn’t this same sketchy theory say it is logarythmic and the effect is statitsically negligable at this point? Also doesn’t the theory and subsequent experiments omit convection and conduction entirely?
Sketchy? You doubt the greenhouse effect?
CO2 doesn’t “block” IR, other than acting as an “optical delay line” of a fraction of a second, whereupon it either transfers those same quanta of energy to the other 99.96% of the atmosphere via collisions (ONE BILLION times more likely throughout the entire troposphere AND accelerates convective cooling) or re-emits a photon (again within a fraction of a second) of the exact same ~15 micron IR. The alleged “heat trapping” of all CO2 in the atmosphere results in a mere delay of seconds from the surface to space, easily reversed and erased during each 12 hour night for no net diurnal, annual, or multidecadal effect.
Arrhenius-believers confuse the cause (gravito-thermal GHE of Poisson, Maxwell et al) with the effect (IR absorption & emission from IR-active gases).
Bill- I don’t doubt it I flat out say it’s hokum! Grade school science used to tell us how to see the gaping holes in its theory. Maybe that’s the trouble crap teaching today making people gullible! They hate kids who can think for themselves they want Stepdord kids!
Here is my problem. Using an electrical circuit as an analogy where a 1 ohm resistor represents the energy absorbed by radiation from the sun and the voltage represents the radiation from the Sun. With a constant voltage source of 1 volt (the Sun). Apply this to a 1 ohm resistor. It will generate 1 watt of heat at that resistor. Let this represent the energy adsorbed by an area of land on the Earth. Now place a 100 ohm resistor in series with that 1 ohm resistor. The 100 ohm resistor represents the energy blocked by the CO2 in the atmosphere that does not reach the earth. Yes, the 1 ohm resistor will no longer have 1 watt of power, however, now the 100 ohm resistor will be delivering ~ 1 watt of heat. Point is, even though the CO2 “blocks” the suns energy from reaching the Land/Ocean it does not block it from reaching the Earth and becomes part of the energy balance. It is NBOT reflected it is adsorbed. This becomes intuitively obvious when you look at any radar images of the earth. The lakes, rivers and oceans are BLACK. They do not reflect back the radar signal, they adsorb the radar signal and are “heated” by that radar signal. Just where does all of this heat from the sun that is adsorbed by the CO2 (and all of the other GHG0 go? It must warm the atmosphere and then warm the earth. It definitely will warm the water vapor and this warmed water vapor will be carried somewhere to release this heat somehow.
I agree fully with hockeyschtick here.
We need a time perspective on radiation physics because it is happening at the speed of light and at the miniscule amount of time that a molecule absorbs that energy before passing it on through emission or collisional exchange. CO2 holds onto an absorbed IR photons for an average 0.000005 seconds before it is emitted or passed onto another molecule, Every atmospheric molecule hits another atmospheric molecule every 0.00000000015 seconds, an emitted IR photon from the surface could escape the atmosphere in just 0.000016 seconds at the speed of light – yet it actually takes 40 hours to make the journey. In the Sun, the average photon takes 200,000 years to make it out. It is not CO2 absorption which is slowing the energy/photon getting out from the Sun. It is all the molecules here operating at the quantum level where all this actually happens and quantum theory includes “TIME”. Greenhouse theory does not.
– the energy represented by a solar photon spends time in 5 billion individual molecules on Earth before it escapes to space. That means it is bouncing around from molecule to molecule to molecule almost continuously. The IR emitted by the surface is not skipping Nitrogen and Oxygen molecules and preferentially seeking out CO2 and H20 only. Every molecule on Earth and in the atmosphere is participating in this process and does so continuously. Maybe CO2 or H20 provides the initial absorption, but that energy is shared amongst the rest of the atmospheric molecules almost immediately. What happens to it then? That is a question which seems to have no meaning in Greenhouse theory.
usurbrain:
Not the way it works.
The sun is putting out a 3000k spectrum. CO2 is largely invisible to this spectrum. Sunlight hits a surface and some is reflected and most is converted to kinetic energy (heat) in the surface of the ground or converted to heat in about the first 100 meters of water. This material is heated to some temperature (~27C (call it 300K) for the oceans pn average and whatever the climate zone is for the land (somewhere between 230K and 320ishK)) and emits IR radiation around that temperature spectrum and heats the adjacent air by conduction. The air then also emits at its temperature.
CO2 absorbs at 15 microns which corresponds to a temperature of about 193K. This is way down the power spectrum of the 230K emissions which is peaked at 12.6 microns while the 320k is centered at around 9 microns. The oceans make up most of the surface and average about 300K or a peak of 9.6 microns. CO2 is simply not in the peak of any IR emission for temperatures experienced on earth.
Because of the nature of the Wien’s law curve, there is SOME energy there for CO2 to absorb, but it is well below the peak. When CO2 absorbs this photon it excites the bond to a higher quantum level. This quantum excitation of the bond has a very short statistical lifetime and will relax back to ground state either through collision with other molecules or by emission of the same wavelength photon in some random direction. This is repeated over and over as the packet of energy is absorbed and re-emitted. As the atmosphere becomes less dense at higher altitudes, it becomes more likely that the packet will be emitted as a photon rather than kinetic energy through collision.
The lower altitude collisions will slightly raise the temperature of the air. This will cause the air to rise to stabilize PV=nRT, (rises to expand to a volume that makes its density the same as its surroundings,lowering its temperature as a side effect,) thus raising slightly the mean altitude of the center of mass of the atmosphere and thus the mean emission altitude for the atmosphere. If I really wanted to find how much each collision added to the temperature of air would take more statistical manipulation of the Maxwell distribution than I want to do, but it is tiny in the grand scheme of things.
At night, all emissions are for the temperature of the material surfaces and the air. Because of the fourth power temperature law, the surface quickly gives up its heat. In a body of water this leads to overturning of the top layers, so a new layer gives up its heat over and over. In the atmosphere this leads to contraction of the atmosphere slowly over the whole night and a lowering of the average height of the center of mass. This helps to maintain the surface temperature by converting some potential energy in the atmosphere to kinetic energy and is why the surface temperature doesn’t drop to the cold of space. The water content of the air mass also slows the cooling by both the increased mass density and water’s own IR absorption effects that are centered closer to the temperature emission peaks than CO2.
I know this got long, but there have been whole books written on the basics of atmospheric dynamics that go into far more detail than I did here.
Bill says:
Bill, I rarely disagree w/you, but that’s one of my pet-peeves. Most every time a photon hits something, it’s actually absorbed (destroyed) and re-emitted (created). No individual photon survives more than the tiniest fraction of a second — in the sun at least. I do get the gist of what you’re saying, tho.
beng135,
Yes, you are right. It is more the energy released in a fusion reaction in the core of the Sun. This eventually results in photon emission from the surface of the Sun, but the point is it takes TIME for the energy to get out, a surprisingly long period of time in fact. And it is no different for energy emission from the Earth as well.
Aren’t we looking at two different, independent phenomena? The gravitational / lapse rate is one effect and forms the base of the temperature distribution on any planet with an atmosphere.
Isn’t the GHG effect, which mainly redistributes its capturing of IR in the lower atmosphere as heat, simply additional? I still don’t see that the additional warming simply is redistributed from warmer to colder places by convection without any effect on surface temperatures…
THANK you gentlefolk for your explaining effort. This re-re-radiation business seems at times to us not-so-physics persons like some zany but fantastic game of photon billiards sinking balls right and left playing out in Pikachu-seconds, leaving one to imagine if it were ‘true true’ the Universe would have been game over by now. I look around and see there are still balls on the table. What a relief.
I know explaining Greenhouse must be tired old hat to you all by now but we sincerely appreciate it. As a side trip you may find it fun to visit the archived Talk pages for the Wikipedia ‘Greenhouse Effect‘ page, the hidden places where articles are gnashed and churned into consensus. As with many Wiki pages, the GH page itself appears serene and informative but it has a history of tumult. I poke fun at the tumult and link directly into some of those Talk pages in this romp last year where I honor Dr. Seuss by coining Fourier’s blocks-convection greenhouse as Thing One and the Re-radiation explanation as Thing Two. Some people show up at the GH Wiki page to become confused because they thought they implicitly understood Thing One. Others show up to revel in Thing Two and become confused and annoyed that Thing One is even mentioned. The definition of Greenhouse can be a real Circus McGurkus at times.
Ferdinand says, “Aren’t we looking at two different, independent phenomena? The gravitational / lapse rate is one effect and forms the base of the temperature distribution on any planet with an atmosphere.
Isn’t the GHG effect, which mainly redistributes its capturing of IR in the lower atmosphere as heat, simply additional? I still don’t see that the additional warming simply is redistributed from warmer to colder places by convection without any effect on surface temperatures…”
The source of the 33C “greenhouse effect” and the even larger negative 35C “anti-greenhouse effect” from 5100m to the top of the troposphere is entirely gravito-thermal. Arrhenius-believers have confused the cause (gravito-thermal) with the effect (IR absorption and re-emission from IR active gases).
There cannot be both a 33C Arrhenius radiative GHE and a 33C gravito-thermal GHE, because if so the GHE would be doubled to 66C. One and only one GHE is correct: gravito-thermal, as proven by giants of physics including Poisson, Helmholtz, Maxwell, Clausius, Carnot, Boltzmann, Feynman, et al.
Hockeyschtick, if conduction is so much faster then LWIR radiation, then, sans GHGs in an equally dense atmosphere, and assuming an initially cooler atmosphere, would not more energy conduct (as conduction happens faster) from the surface to the atmosphere, until the atmosphere equaled the surface T?
Also would not atmosphere become more isothermal?
“David A October 4, 2015 at 8:35 pm
Hockeyschtick, if conduction is so much faster then LWIR radiation, then, sans GHGs in an equally dense atmosphere, and assuming an initially cooler atmosphere, would not more energy conduct (as conduction happens faster) from the surface to the atmosphere, until the atmosphere equaled the surface T?”
By “conduction” I assume you are really talking about collisions between gases in the atmosphere. However, convection dominates by a factor of >8 times the heat transfer throughout the troposphere, thus dominates radiative-convective equilibrium in the troposphere from the surface to 0.1 atm tropopause.
The 68K tropospheric temperature gradient is a linear function of gravity (g) and the heat capacity (Cp) set by the adiabatic lapse rate equation (which is in turn derived from the Ideal Gas Law and 1st Law of Thermo)
dT/dh = -g/Cp
and has nothing to do with radiative transfer or radiative forcing from IR-active gases.
“Also would not atmosphere become more isothermal?”
No temperature is a function of pressure, which is in turn a function of mass/gravity/geopotential height. Nothing to do with GHG concentrations.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/07/physicist-richard-feynman-proved.html
True on Earth, Venus, Titan, and all 8 planets in our solar system for which we have adequate data.
David A : “Also would not atmosphere become more isothermal?”
To amplify :
This is exactly why nothing other than gravity can explain the gradient . The Divergence Theorem would demand the atmosphere be isothermal without it .
From below Figure 1, referring to Petit et al:
‘…It looked like temperature increase preceded CO2 increase….”
Is there a typo in there? Or am I confoozed?
The CO2 Warming hypothesis is that CO2 rises, and that then causes temperatures to rise later
The reality is that temperatures rise, then a few hundred years later CO2 starts to rise.
Temperature increase prior to CO2 rise shows that CO2 is out-gassing (likely from oceans) in keeping with all we know about the gas laws and CO2 solubility; and that CO2 is not a cause, but a result, of warming. Therefore the CO2 causes Global Warming is shown false. QED.
Yup, the cause cannot follow the effect.
QED simples.
Not really what the IPCC/warmistas say: the start of the warming after a glacial period is by the Milankovich cycles, which warms the oceans, which release some extra CO2. The latter helps the temperature increase, but is not the primary cause. According to Hansen (2003) GHGs are responsible for about 40% of the increase in temperature during a deglaciation (fig. 3):
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2003/2003_Hansen_1.pdf
BTW, there is no problem with the mutual influence to both sides, as long as the overall gain is less than one: a response of CO2 after temperature followed with a small response of temperature on CO2 levels will run both a little higher without runaway effect:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/feedback.jpg
Which doesn’t imply that Hansen was right: as there is a huge overlap between T and CO2 rise during a deglaciation, it is quite impossible to separate the influences. But during the onset of a new glacial period, CO2 remains high while T decreases to a new low with CO2 lagging thousands of years. That was the case at the end of the last interglacial (the Eemian). The subsequent drop of 40 ppmv CO2 after temperatures reached a new minimum (and glacial ice a new maximum) had no measurable influence on (proxy) temperatures…
Regards the Ice Age record. It has been confidently determined and widely accepted that surface temperatures begin to rise (or fall) first, while CO2 concentrations follow between 200 and 800 years later. So CO2 is a follower, not a leader.
However, they also assert that CO2 and water vapour provide positive feedbacks that assist the temperature increase (or fall), creating an Interglacial (or an Ice Age). However, as per my post above (12:05 pm), the most significant feedback during Interglacial or Ice Age formation is actually albedo, which can provide up to 20 times as much forcing as CO2 and water vapour combined.
So what is going to be the primary positive feedback enhancing the Interglacial warming (or Ice Age cooling) – the puny CO2, or the mighty albedo? Personally, I think that these so-called ‘scientists’ backed the wrong horse – possibly for political-economic reasons (you cannot tax albedo).
Ralph
“It appeared to provide support for the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis. It looked like temperature increase preceded CO2 increase.”
I stumbled over this too. Prima facie, if temperature increase preceded CO2 increase, it would be a problem for AGW, rather than ‘appearing to provide support’. I assumed that it was a slip of the pen; that what Dr Ball meant to say was something like: ‘At first sight it looked like CO2 increase preceded temperature increase, but on closer analysis this was not the case.’ Maybe Dr Ball could look at this again.
David
October 3, 2015 at 2:50 pm
David. It is actually simple if you consider it carefully and without prejudice..\
AGW hypothesis is about anthropogenic forcing due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Anthropogenic emissions do not depend and do not follow temps. This is the first point.
The overall CO2 emissions follow the temps, and will be increasing with the increasing of temps (personally I do not completely agree with this), which the hypothesis claims it will increase (the temps) due to anthropogenic forcing as a result of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions….and the warming will keep going up as the CO2 concentrations keep going up in a “limbo effect” due to the temps keep going up……and the whole thing turning in a runway global warming at some point.
So if somewhere in all this mess the data show that actually the CO2 concentration keeps going up with no regard to temps, as during the last ~17, with no any sign of caring to follow the temps but even considered as overtaking the temps in the variation path , then the AGW is in a big trouble……….
cheers
Whiten,
There is no runaway effect as long as the overall gain between T -> CO2 -> T is less than one, see my previous message…
So still pushing half a theory? So CO2 is transparent to sunlight but absorbs one band of ir and re emits it? So if it gains energy then it takes up a greater volume( correct me if I am mistaken) this energy will transfer to and other gas in contact and so conduction and then convention need to be considered. In fact back to the greenhouse! The experiments effectively have taken place in greenhouses thus removing convection from the equation, how ironic
increase in mass. Mass = Energy
Just look at ‘constitution’ of the IPCC. It was established with on the basis that acceptance that anthropogenic global warming was a confirmed scientific fact. This was its starting point. So much for the ‘science is settled’ .Now move along please.
Very well done. Just nicely terse and complete at the same time. Bravo!
The shaded area on Hansen’s 1988 graph labelled “Estimated Temperatures During Altithermal and Eemian Times” is highly misleading; Eemian temperatures: “… [the] Eemian climate was significantly warmer than the climate of the current Holocene interglacial – probably about 5°C warmer …” (Centre for Ice and Climate Copenhagen).
I’m sorry to be so stupid, but can someone explain in layman’s terms what ” Null Hypothesis” means ?
null = no or nothing so –
in a relational set-up: (correlation stats r=0 and R squared =0)
null hypothesis then would be = there is no relationship between temperature and CO2
as CO2 increases, temp doesn’t follow (could go up, down, or “pause”)
in “experimental” set-up: (F and t = big numbers (without getting obscure))
null hypothesis would be = changes in CO2 do not cause changes in temperature
the alternative hypotheses are that one thing is related to the other of the one thing changing causes the other to change – this is where IPCC is and it is generally unacceptable practice in traditional science research to test the alternative unless there is overwhelming evidence as a basis
I didn’t think so 🙂
If the claims of an hypothesis are observed to be false then the null hypothesis is satisfied. The original hypothesis is wrong. The null hypothesis is a construct that identifies what it takes to indicate an hypothesis wrong.
@ DP
Can you deconstruct that comment for a poor layman ?
It’s starting to sound like philosophy.
Easy to find many usable definitions of such a term.
Here is one:
“In inferential statistics the null hypothesis usually refers to a general statement or default position that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena …”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis
Here is another couple:
”
null hypothesis
n.
A hypothesis that is assumed to be true for purposes of statistical testing against an alternative hypothesis. The null hypothesis is usually that there is no treatment effect or no difference between groups.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
null hypothesis
n
1. (Statistics) statistics the residual hypothesis if the alternative hypothesis tested against it fails to achieve a predetermined significance level. Compare hypothesis testing, alternative hypothesis
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Null+hypothesis
u.k.(us):
You are not being “stupid” when you ask
In hope of helping, I again provide an explanation.
The Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed a system has not experienced a change unless there is evidence of a change.
The Null Hypothesis is a fundamental scientific principle and forms the basis of all scientific understanding, investigation and interpretation. Indeed, it is the basic principle of experimental procedure where an input to a system is altered to discern a change: if the system is not observed to respond to the alteration then it has to be assumed the system did not respond to the alteration.
In the case of climate science there is a hypothesis that increased greenhouse gases (GHGs, notably CO2) in the air will increase global temperature. There are good reasons to suppose this hypothesis may be true, but the Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed the GHG changes have no effect unless and until increased GHGs are observed to increase global temperature. That is what the scientific method decrees. It does not matter how certain some people may be that the hypothesis is right because observation of reality (i.e. empiricism) trumps all opinions.
Please note that the Null Hypothesis is a hypothesis which exists to be refuted by empirical observation. It is a rejection of the scientific method to assert that one can “choose” any subjective Null Hypothesis one likes. There is only one Null Hypothesis: i.e. it has to be assumed a system has not changed unless it is observed that the system has changed.
However, deciding a method which would discern a change may require a detailed statistical specification.
In the case of global climate in the Holocene, no recent climate behaviours are observed to be unprecedented so the Null Hypothesis decrees that the climate system has not changed.
Importantly, an effect may be real but not overcome the Null Hypothesis because it is too trivial for the effect to be observable. Human activities have some effect on global temperature for several reasons. An example of an anthropogenic effect on global temperature is the urban heat island (UHI). Cities are warmer than the land around them, so cities cause some warming. But the temperature rise from cities is too small to be detected when averaged over the entire surface of the planet, although this global warming from cities can be estimated by measuring the warming of all cities and their areas.
Clearly, the Null Hypothesis decrees that UHI is not affecting global temperature although there are good reasons to think UHI has some effect. Similarly, it is very probable that AGW from GHG emissions are too trivial to have observable effects.
The feedbacks in the climate system are negative and, therefore, any effect of increased CO2 will be probably too small to discern because natural climate variability is much, much larger. This concurs with the empirically determined values of low climate sensitivity.
Empirical – n.b. not model-derived – determinations indicate climate sensitivity is less than 1.0°C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 equivalent. This is indicated by the studies of
Idso from surface measurements
http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/Idso_CR_1998.pdf
and Lindzen & Choi from ERBE satellite data
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf
and Gregory from balloon radiosonde data
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/OLR&NGF_June2011.pdf
Indeed, because climate sensitivity is less than 1.0°C for a doubling of CO2 equivalent, it is physically impossible for the man-made global warming to be large enough to be detected (just as the global warming from UHI is too small to be detected). If something exists but is too small to be detected then it only has an abstract existence; it does not have a discernible existence that has effects (observation of the effects would be its detection).
To date there are no discernible effects of AGW. Hence, the Null Hypothesis decrees that AGW does not affect global climate to a discernible degree. That is the ONLY scientific conclusion possible at present.
And that conclusion is also explained by the above article from Tim Ball.
Richard
“In hope of helping, I again provide an explanation.
The Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed a system has not experienced a change unless there is evidence of a change.”
Would you care to provide a reference? (it isn’t true)
IWO, If one is unable to find evidence for something, the possibility that no evidence exists must be considered.
As stated, this is the bedrock foundation of evidence based science.
“the bedrock foundation of evidence based science.”
Well, maybe, bu that isn’t the Null Hypothesis. You can generally tell that people don’t know much about it if they use capitals. The Merriam-Webster definition is:
“a statistical hypothesis to be tested and accepted or rejected in favor of an alternative; specifically : the hypothesis that an observed difference (as between the means of two samples) is due to chance alone and not due to a systematic cause”
And it’s not quite so simple – in formulating a null hypothesis you have to postulate a stochastic distribution – give a meaning to “chance alone”. There could be more than one null hypothesis that you could test.
Nick Stokes:
Science is NOT statistics.
Some good science uses statistics. Most good science does not.
As I said, in science
Statistics adopted its version of a Null Hypothesis in the twentieth century and long after science had been using the Null Hypothesis. Indeed, Newton’s Laws of Motion are a formulation of the Null Hypothesis for dynamic systems.
Richard
Crikey! Why on Earth has that reply gone into moderation!?
Also closely related to modern theory of jurisprudence…namely, that a person is presumed to be innocent until/unless proven guilty.
The burden of proof is on the person or body seeking to propound a conclusion.
Being accused of a crime was, at one time, considered to be strong evidence of guilt. Under this presumption of guilt, various methods, including physical torture, were used to extract confessions from the accused.
Once one was accused, such methods would be employed for as long as it took, and in whatever severity needed, to extract said confession.
It was up to the accused to prove that they did not commit the charged offense.
It is now generally regarded as a truism that it is a logical impossibility to prove a negative proposition.
One cannot arrive at conclusions first, discard exculpatory evidence, magnify the significance of incriminating evidence, and call the result justice.
One may not do the same and call the result science.
Thanks for trying everyone.
Avoid Nick’s last name.
Dr Ball, thanks for a very interesting and generally accurate article. But there is one serious error:
You say “Ironically, this is equivalent to running the model as if CO2 was not causing warming. In doing so, it effectively presents the null hypothesis to the AGW hypothesis. It shows what would happen if CO2 was not the cause of warming. It approximates reality.“. That is incorrect. The models are not able to model any of the natural drivers of climate http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/17/how-reliable-are-the-climate-models/ , therefore a model run without CO2 would simply show an unchanging climate. In no way does that show “what would happen“. A change of wording is needed!
Mike Jonas
October 3, 2015 at 2:55 pm
Hello Mike.
I think you do not get the point that Dr. Ball was making.
What I think it really needs a change of wording is this:
“The models are not able to model any of the natural drivers of climate http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/17/how-reliable-are-the-climate-models/ , therefore a model run without CO2 would simply show an unchanging climate. In no way does that show “what would happen“.”
It is a paradoxical statement or conclusion.
Also I think you referring to GCM models, when the Hansen models in question I think (not sure though) are not GCM models.
And as far as I can tell there is not a suggestion about any model run in question as in without CO2.
Please try do be a little more specific, otherwise, as far as I can tell, you can easy end up with a paradoxical statement, which in turn will be very difficult to unravel and understand at its main point, if it ever has one.
cheers
I continue to be astounded by the ignorance of the most basic physics this entire displayed in this endless Pinky & the Brain nonscience . I use the term “ignorance” because most have had this classical physics presented to them in college , but they ignore it . They treat it as interesting anecdotes , but not as adamantine non-optional constraints on the quantitative understanding of a planet’s surface temperature . Perhaps some of it comes from the fact that “climate scientists” start from the wrong perspective to analyze the problem . They are looking up at the turbulent complexities of weather when what is needed in determining global means is a more abstracted view from the outside .
First of all , if you are going to quantitatively explain the temperature of a planet , you have to be able to explain the temperature of a radiantly heated ball . And the entire conversation starts derailing right there . The 33c , 255k “atmospheric green house” computationally useless meme based on a hypothesized step-function spectrum becomes pervasive rather than computationally fundamental value calculated simply by summing the total energy impinging on the planet , which in our orbit corresponds to about 278.6K +- 2.3c from peri- to ap- helion . The 33c meme disguises the important fact , demonstrated in the 1830s , that a flat spectrum gray ball comes to that same 279K however dark or light .
The effect of the color , ie , spectrum , of the ball can then be expressed as a simple ratio of dot produces of source and object spectra times that gray body value . Other than my Heartland presentation , I know of no place on the web where this most essential quantitative relationship is explained . It should be required in the first week of an curriculum leading to a degree in climate science .
So , the equilibrium temperature of a radiantly heated ball is determined by its spectrum as seen from the outside , eg , for a planet , more or less by its “Top of Atmosphere” spectrum . This boundary is actually not a simple surface but is wavelength dependent reaching down to the surface of the Earth itself ( or clouds ) over much of the visible spectrum .
But let’s be sure we can calculate the experimentally testable temperature of a simple ball first .
Next , we run into a profound and exacting constraint : the Divergence Theorem . This is at most second year calculus , but at least that much math should be required of anybody claiming to be a “climate scientist” or they simply do not have the education to have any useful opinion on issues of global mean temperature .
At this point we have left Gore and apparently Hansen behind . Essentially the theorem shows that the mean temperature of the interior of a ball must equal that calculated for its surface unless their are internal sources of heat . That is , you cannot explain our estimated 3% warmer than gray body temperature on the basis of spectrum . Especially given that our ToA spectrum apparently is more towards that 255K extreme than towards warming . Hansen’s claim that Venus’s extreme surface temperature 225% its orbit’s gray body temperature is due to an extreme greenhouse spectrum simply does not compute . It requires a spectrum an order of magnitude more extreme than anything humanity has yet to be able to create .
The changes to Earth’s ToS spectrum are , as one would expect from Beer’s Law , so minuscule as to be a minor factor in the ~ 0.3% change in our estimated surface temperature we have seen .
So how can it be warmer down here than it is up there ? What can “trap” heat ?
The apparent answer finally got thru to me in a discussion on http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/22/why-we-live-on-earth-and-not-venus/ : the obvious precisely understood radial parameter which must be considered is gravity . In order for the divergence theorem to be satisfied at equilibrium over the radiative boundary , the total energy , including gravitational , must be in balance . That requires increasing thermal energy as one descents in the gravitational well .
This is non-optional , persistent not dynamic , and simply calculable . And apparently matches measurements on all planets to which it has been applied . I’ve added some notes and links on this to http://cosy.com/Science/HeartlandBasicBasics.html .
I think I resisted considering gravity as the next non-optional parameter in any planetary temperature model because I didn’t think it was significant enough and because it implies a very deep relationship between gravity and temperature . For one thing , it implies Lord Kelvin was wrong — with or without radioactivity . There is a calculable temperature , much hotter than the surface , the core of the Earth will stay at as long as the Sun shines with its current power .
With respect to AlGoreWarming , it implies that CO2’s molecular weight has as much to do with our surface temperature as does its spectrum .
Please excuse several typos . Some mechanism is badly needed here to allow at least a few minutes for corrections as most other blogs have . I , at least , see things in the posted font I miss in the draft .
I agree Bob…Exact same thing happens to me. I get typos that I am sure I spelled correctly when I typed it.
Typos were the least of the problems with that post. What a pile of woo.
The presentation on Heartland is rubbish.
Alice : Please show us your equations or experiments which falsify the classical physics I present . To start , please show how the computation I present of the 255K value so widely parroted is wrong when it produces the same value , just presents the computation for arbitrary spectra .
Do you have anything specific to say Alice?
“What a pile of woo” makes for the start of a real feisty criticism,, but it does not sound like much of a refutation to a what Mr. Armstrong had to say unless you have even one specific counterpoint to make.
Finally wrote one about little Jimmy Hansen
back in the day when sceptics were called “cautious scentists”:
Blowing hot and cold in the greenhouse, by Fred Pearce, New Scientist, 11 Feb, 1989
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=fA9tecLhj9wC&pg=PA32&lpg=PA32&dq=blowing+hot+and+cold+in+the+greenhouse&source=bl&ots=hYN04thvsS&sig=BR-lfRBNpgp0iU4k-HuSqtaoun8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAWoVChMI1LvM3rWnyAIVSCKmCh2DFQYH#v=onepage&q=blowing%20hot%20and%20cold%20in%20the%20greenhouse&f=false
shame Hansen’s co-author died so long ago. doubt if he would have followed down Hansen’s activist path:
2 Nov 1990: Obituary: Sergej A. Lebedeff, 62, Atmospheric Scientist
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/02/obituaries/sergej-a-lebedeff-62-atmospheric-scientist.html
The null hypothesis stuff kills me. In the case of climate science the null hypothesis is that increasing human CO2 is increasing global temperatures which is globally increasing the number and intensity of dangerous weather patterns which then eventually damages all life on earth.
The burden of proof is with whomever is making a positive claim, climate alarmists are making the positive claim so they they need to prove it, Skeptics do not need to disprove anything, the true null hypothesis is that human CO2 has no exclusive measurably negative impact to life on earth. But the climate null hypothesis problem is worse than that, it is not for skeptics to disprove the AGW ill-gotten and preposterous null hypothesis, but skeptics must just accept it like gravity or the speed of light. The ignorance and hubris is staggering.
This is similar to debates about religion which go nowhere when the religious side claims the null hypothesis is the existence of God. While I do not deny people may feel in their heart and spirit the reality of God, in the realm of science there is no proof of God. In truth, concerning religion, there is nothing to debate scientifically or empirically. The same is true for the Climate Science null hypothesis.
Whether the word “greenhouse effect” is right or wrong, whether it is obserbed or reflected, —- the basic issue is in nature the process is not unlimited. It has a limit some where. In the nature CO2 is part, it controlling the Sun’s energy wavelength and Earth’s energy wave lenghs — vary with albedo factor –. This natural process reached a plateau. Any increase in CO2 has a limited impact and thus rise in temperature. Because of this IPCC is trying “rial and error” concept to relate the CO2 with global warming” and this is reflected in sensitivity factor sharp decline. In global temperature raise, there are factors contributing which are not related to the word greenhouse effect. With all these confusion, now a day IPCC and other pro-warming groups use “human actions” and “Climate Change” and not by the specific words “anthropogenic greenhouses gases” and “global warming”, because they are not quantitative figures to prove what they are talking.
Let us look at pollution [CO2 is not a pollutant] and natural variability in climate and local/regional ecological changes impact on climate to help developing nations in specific and globe in general.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
But CO2 is the (current) fulcrum of the lever to control.
In other words, if CO2 (man-made) is not the cause of in the seasonal swings in the weather us “old guys” have lived long before enough to experience, then there is no justification for trying to control it.
There’s much more power-grabbing and politics going on here than actual science.
Typo!
” lived long before enough to experience,”
Drop “before”.
Not quite a “typo” but:
Replace “control it” with “control civilizations’ source of energy.”
Dr. Roy Spencer says the convective heat loss if there’s no greenhouse is almost exactly as the convective heat loss with a greenhouse present. Yes he said convective both times.
But that’s ridiculous. A greenhouse with the windows closed will have close to zero convective heat loss.
One could compare it to conductive heat loss through the glass of the greenhouse, but he doesn’t say that. And anyone who lives in a house with windows in the winter knows you lose heat much faster when you open the windows.
His “facts”, and hence his whole argument about the greenhouse effect, are discredited.
I tried to post this on his website, but that page is no longer accepting replies or at least I didn’t see how to post one.
David,
Do you have a reference? In general Dr. Spencer knows where he is talking about. In this case I suppose he is comparing two open window cases, one with extra heat retention and one without…
David, is this the reference?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/06/what-causes-the-greenhouse-effect/
Seems that Dr. Spencer shows the opposite thoughts as the gravitational theory shows?
No comment of mine on this controversy, need some more reading.,.
The problem anybody who proposes a spectral , ie , greenhouse , explanation of increasing temperature below the effective ToA radiative “surface” is the Divergence Theorem , which being centuries winnowed math is more certain than even such things as conservation of mass=energy .
On the political side of the science there are all of the elected Washington representatives who get elected by voters who want the money from hosting/having solar panels and wind turbines to continue flowing.
Iowa is a good example of votes for wind turbine cash and California for solar panel cash. So global warming alarm suits the voters from these states just fine.
Ferdberple’s use of Tyndall’s experiment also proves the null hypothesis! Why and how, some may ask?
Tyndall was a great experimenter, and his complex apparatus, as shown in Wiki, used a galvanometer to detect radiation flux successfully via heated CO2. The flux was from a source to a sink, of course. A cooled sink. Because it would not nor will ever work any other way. Read the ‘Methods and Materials’ as I would term it. He may not have realised exactly what was happening,or/and had another aim in mind. But, by Jove, he made a good machine there.
As the then still-developing laws of thermodynamics inform us, emittance can be everywhere, but flux is only down the gradient. No exceptions, not physically possible. The real world demonstrates this all the time, but apparently not the ivory tower lifestyle.
The sayings of AGW’s other ‘ancient sages’, Fourier to Callendar, are likewise misconstrued.
Par for the course.
In short, a simple Tyndall gas galvanometer in every Physics 101 Lecture room for the last century, like my university’s Foucalt pendulum, but far smaller, might have saved us wasted trillions….
Sorry, I seem to have gotten my Ferds mixed up. “@ Ferdinand Engelbeen
October 3, 2015 at 11:54 am”: is the Tyndall posting. Incidentally, the allusion there to CO2 bites out of the OLR spectrum, is really looking at pressure-broadened kinetic transfers to good ol’ H2O, the giant of spaceward flux. A giant of many means. Brett
If I were a Viking in Greenland growing barley or an Englishman growing wine grapes this macro intensified greenhouse effect theory might not even be of more use to me. Otherwise the rest of the world sees western politicos and paid from scientist jingos blowing a bunch of CO2 from their lips.
It makes absolutely no sense for CO2 to lead temperature. By what mechanism is there for CO2 to lead warming to bring us out of an ice age? None. The oceans must be warmed to release CO2, ie Henry’s Law. The ice must be melted for things to grow and decay and burn. There is simply no credible model or theory that would have CO2 lead temperatures. The natural mechanisms simply don’t exist. Globes covered in ice store CO2, they don’t release it unless warmth is first introduced into the equation.
https://youtu.be/0LbqU3spW90?t=9m4s
SHHHH!
You’re making sense.
(Expect a RICO letter any day now.)
co2islife October 4, 2015 at 2:10 am
I wish that I had seen this video earlier. It is well worth a view. I note that it makes a point that I made in the recent Article by Dr Brown and Werner Brozek regarding evidence of adjusting unsuitable data.
(http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/01/is-there-evidence-of-frantic-researchers-adjusting-unsuitable-data-now-includes-july-data/)
The video makes the point that due to the constantly changing number and location of stations that go to the compilation of the global temperature anomaly data set, they are mixes oranges and apples. In my opinion this is a very important point since the reconstruction is nothing more than a proxy and what goes into the proxy is constantly changing such that nothing reliable is produced.
I commented (and I consider that it is worth repeating since many may not take time to review that video);
QUOTE:
I doubt that many are still following this thread, but this is a point that should be made.
The land based thermometer record is a proxy record, and GISS, BEST and the like keep on using different proxies in their reconstruction.
If the record is to show the warming going back to 1880, then one should identify the stations that were returning data in 1880. One then identifies how many of those stations have a continuing and extant record going from 1880 to today. One should then use only those (ie., the ones which have a continuous record from 1880 to date) stations in the reconstruction.
Thus for example, if in 1880 there were only 350 stations and of those stations 100 have fallen by the wayside, one is left with 250 stations and it is these stations and these alone that should be used in the presentation of global temperatures between 1880 to date.
If by 1900 there were say 900 stations of which say 250 have fallen by the wayside then one would have 650 stations which should form the basis of any reconstruction between 1900 to date. Only the 650 stations that have a continuous and existing record throughout the entire period should be used.
If by 1920 there were say 2000 stations of which 450 have fallen by the wayside, one would be left with 1550 stations, and it these stations, and only these stations, that should be used in the temperature reconstruction from 1920 to date.
The land thermometer data should not consist of a constantly changing set of station data in which the siting and spatial coverage (and hence weighting) is constantly changing. This does not produce a valid reconstruction time series.
Those producing the record should present data which contains precisely the same stations throughout the entirety of the time series. What could be presented is a series of plots in 10 year intervals to date, ie., 1880 to date, 1890 to date, 1900 to date, 1910 to date etc etc. On the top of each separate time series the number of stations being used in the reconstruction could be detailed with an explanation as to their split between NH and SH.
UNQUOTE.
If Steven or Zeke are around, it would be interesting to hear from them as to why separate and distinct reconstructions are not made on a decadal basis using only stations that have complete data/records for the period of reconstruction.
Richard,
It goes somewhat farther than that. If the station changed out thermometers or housings or changed housing coatings, then it is no longer the same station. Changing thermometers can be overcome if the two instruments are run in tandem for some period to ascertain a calibration error, otherwise it is a NEW station (even then it can be argued to be a NEW station as we are not likely it go through the full range of local temperature and humidity during the calibration period.) If the old Stevenson screen is changed out for some newer easy care material, it is a NEW station as there is no way to ascertain a calibration factor (and looking for a step change and banging it back into line isn’t a good way to go since we have shown that sometimes climate really does make step changes.) If one goes from whitewash to latex, it is a NEW station as again there is no way to correct for this sudden change in readings since step changes DO HAPPEN in the climate – especially on a local level. (I know our host did a study on the whitewash/latex thing, but applying his statistical correction means we have gone from data to a statistical representation of the probable data i.e. a proxy reconstruction of the site.)
Applying this standard, we are lucky to have 15 years of reliable data.
if the radiation theory of the “greenhouse” effect was correct, then adding more non-condensing GHG gas to the atmosphere would make the lower atmosphere warmer and the upper atmosphere cooler. This would make the DALR steeper than 9.8C/km. The DALR would for example, go to 10C/km or even 11C/km.
However, this is not what we observe. The DALR is completely independent of the amount of non-condensing GHG in the atmosphere. No matter if you raised the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to 100%, the DALR would remain at 9.8C/km.
Thus, you cannot make the surface warmer long term by increasing GHG unless you increase the height of the atmosphere in circulation.
I’m not saying that GHG doesn’t have a warming effect on the surface. What I’m saying is that this effect can only raise the temperature to the limit imposed by the force of gravity, and the atmosphere is already at that limit.
ferd,
How then do you explain the periods of history that were significantly warmer if we are at the gravity limit?
I think the theory needs some work – may have a partial explanation of one mechanism in there, but hotter in the past means hypothesis tested and failed.
I have a feeling this theory suffers from a similar failing found in many studies of climate – looking at one dimension of a 20 dimensional problem, without the ability to hold anything constant while changing one thing to measure response of a single other variable. All our partial derivatives are cross-linked and can not be easily swept into the constants realm or even given a straight function value.
20 dimensions was a notional guess, by the way, representing some large number I don’t know…I am sure some of the meteorologists out there can provide a better SWAG than my admitted WAG.
How then do you explain the periods of history that were significantly warmer if we are at the gravity limit?
=================
the gravity limit is simply an energy limit on how much temperature difference there can be between the upper and lower troposphere. you can still raise or lower the total energy in the troposphere, which would change the height of the circulating portion of the troposphere and thus change the surface temperature.
So for example, if one was to observe the predicted tropical hotspot signature for global warming, that would be pretty good evidence that the total energy in the circulating portion of the atmosphere was increasing due to increasing CO2, and should result in increasing surface temps as the height of the troposphere expands.
However, the failure to observe the predicted hotspot would be pretty good evidence that the total energy in the circulating portion of the atmosphere is not increasing due to CO2. Instead it may simply be a change in the turn over rate between the upper and lower oceans.
If the oceans were well mixed vertically, the surface temperatures would be something like 6C as compared to 15C currently. This would have a dramatic effect on climate, plunging the earth into deep ice age conditions.
Climate science makes the simplifying assumption that the mixing rate of the deep oceans is relatively constant, with random noise, but this highly unlikely to be true.
The oceans are continually pumped by the oscillating effects of the tides, as well as the seasonal effects of the winds. It is highly likely that there are long term oscillations in the turn-over rate of the oceans that drive long term climate oscillations.
These oscillations would not affect climate the same way as random noise. Rather they should be expected to behave as 1/f noise. Thus, the longer we observe climate, the greater the variability we should see. Climate extremes are thus not the effect of climate change. they are the effect of a longer period of observation.
In other words, a 1 in 100 year storm is more extreme than a 1 in 10 year storm, not because climate is changing, but rather because the observation period is changing,
ferdberple
October 4, 2015 at 8:05 am : Thankyou, fb, superbly well-said. Brett
“Why do the models use the “Global average SURFACE temperature” for these prognostications?”
Because although they are a total fail for the surface, they are worse for the lower Troposphere temperatures, and worse still for the Stratosphere. This also applies to water vapour concentration.
I am dealing with a company that makes EPA certified NDIR CO2 and water vapour detection instruments. The maximum concentration of water vapour they can work with is 2.5% and the reason for that is it is very difficult to extract a CO2 signal out of a mix.
The important thing is the level of CO2 they are having trouble detecting (because of the water vapour signal swamping the CO2). It is supposed to report CO2 from 0-20% to a 100 ppm precision. It is difficult enough to find 1% CO2 in 2.5% water vapour, the interference is so great, i.e. 10,000 ppm quantified to the nearest 100 in the presence of 25,000 ppm H2O. My point is, it is a fool’s errand thinking that a tiny amount of CO2 is going to have a detectable effect when it is dispersed through an atmosphere chock-a-block with water vapour, water ice and liquid water (all of which are strongly interacting with IR).
Exactly the same problem presents itself to an IR photon looking for the Great Beyond. A drop of something like 50 ppm H2O would cancel 100% of the GH effect of all the CO2 in the atmosphere. I would appreciate further comments from readers on the H2O drop required to balance a change of 350 ppm CO2.
Further to the above comment, the amplification predicted from H2O rising in the atmosphere heretofore assumed to be the feedback from CO2 forcing is larger than the CO2 forcing itself. I am pointing out that like the confirmation of the null hypothesis for CO2, this prediction cuts both ways on both counts.
If the water vapour is supposed to increase with a rise in surface temperature, and the temperature drops somewhere else in the system, then the water vapour concentration may drop at that point/region. That drop will amplify the temperature drop just as CO2 is supposed to increase it.
There is, therefore, another null hypothesis: that a change in water vapour concentration is a stronger driver of temperature than CO2, and that the total column water vapour has been dropping. The result should be a stabilisation of temperatures at the surface, something clearly observed.
It is true that as the CO2 rose, the average surface temperature remained constant for years, confirming one null hypothesis. It is also true that as the CO2 rose, the water vapour dropped though the magnitude of that drop was smaller. The ratio of the changes provides the feedback ratio: 1 unit of H2O drop offsets 3 or 4 units of CO2 rise and the temperature remains unchanged. One can then claim that a drop in H2O makes no difference to lower Tropospheric temperature (the null hypothesis for water vapour).
However one can also hypothesize that they cancel each other exactly.
If there is a separate mechanism that stabilises the surface temperature, like the tropical thunderstorm and cloud hypothesis, then the water vapour level can never get out of hand. If the water vapour is thereby stabilised, additional forcing by additional CO2 cannot cause temperatures to get out of hand because any forcing invokes the mechanism of cloud based cooling, whatever the temperature, because it is separate. We see from the historical proxies that the upper limit of the planet’s average temperature is 24 C. As the tropical temperature is stabilised by the cloud effect, it means the poles will warm by maybe 12 degrees C maximum to get the figure 24 C. The higher the sea level, the greater the effect of tropical clouds (more sea surface area). This is a self-governing system that can tolerate a very large range in CO2 concentration while maintaining a constant tropical surface temperature. The temperature at the poles rises and falls according to the combination and ratio of CO2 and H2O.
Menicholas , All of the computations of the classic quantitative relationships I assert are included on the Heartland presentation slides ( linked at http://cosy.com/Science/HeartlandBasicBasics.html ) and executable in a freely downloadable APL .
Somehow I’m supposed to give a specific reply to “What a pile of woo” ?
Let me echo Willis Eschenbach’s standard admonition to please state precisely what statement of mine you take issue with .
To which I’ll add my standard request : show us your equations .
I don’t have time a “real feisty criticism” . All I see in your replies is vacuous ad hominem .
Bob:
Wait, what?
I think you must have me mixed up with someone else.
Here is my comment, addressed to Alice, and then yours, addressed to Alice.
Me:
“Do you have anything specific to say Alice?
“What a pile of woo” makes for the start of a real feisty criticism,, but it does not sound like much of a refutation to a what Mr. Armstrong had to say unless you have even one specific counterpoint to make.”
You:
“Alice : Please show us your equations or experiments which falsify the classical physics I present . To start , please show how the computation I present of the 255K value so widely parroted is wrong when it produces the same value , just presents the computation for arbitrary spectra ”
I agreed with you hear, and in fact I referenced your comments elsewhere as being particularly interesting.
I have never been accused before of being vacuous, and I try not to make any comments that are ad hominem, except to point out t the clueless that they seem to be clueless.
I think you must have seriously mixed me up with someone else, or did not read my comments very carefully.
No apology needed.
PS, I think maybe you should scroll up and reread my comments again.
Menicholas , Yea , re-reading everything I see it got kind of out of sync . It’s partially due to having 0 time for vacuous even if “fiesty” discussions a the time — or now .
Sorry to have gotten the story line tangled .
After re reading the entire thread, I do not find one instance of me making a personal insult on anyone.
I did say this though:
“Menicholas
October 4, 2015 at 8:17 am
Clarification…not disagreeing in regard to the knowledge or lack thereof of the general public.
I am agnostic at this point re the discussion here of whether there is a GHG warming affect.
I am a physical chemist, and a geographer, with a smattering of knowledge of biology and Earth history…sort of a generalist, my first degree pursued was interdisciplinary natural sciences…a degree since discontinued…I am not a condensed matter physicist, and many here are. Or at least seem to be and purport to be. If they cannot agree on the radiative properties of the atmosphere, who am I to jump in and offer an opinion one way or the other?
I do love the debate though, and go back and forth on which way I am leaning depending on who is talking.
I understand the persuasive arguments on both sides, and just hope I do not run out of popcorn.
How can it be that there is such a seemingly stark and basic disagreement over this topic?
It would seem that experiments could and should be devised to put the mater to rest and settle it once and for all.
I find the arguments put forward by Mr. Bob Armstrong, Fedberple, and Hockeyschtick compelling. But much of the counter-argumentation seems compelling as well. If the statements regarding Venus are not true, those on the other side of this question should dispute them in clear and plain language and argument.
Ditto with the temperature profile of the Earth’s atmosphere being completely and adequately explained without regard to the specific composition and mixture of gasses.”
Menicholas , You’ll see my apology for misreading your comment as implying I should spend time replying to caca which I think is spanish for “woo” .
I am astounded that the field of “climate science” has gone decades now essentially ignoring the constraints of extremely basic classical physics . I’ve , perhaps , had the advantage of only having a background in basic classical physics and being an APL programmer , implementing quantitative relationships in order to play with them and to have very little patience of qualitative claims presented with no computable equations , ala Hansen , and also Raymond Pierrehumbert . How these people can have ever been given a pass on the quantitative assertions and proofs on any real field of physics is a sociological phenomenon I will never understand .
After figuring out the general equation for the equilibrium temperature for arbitrary source and object spectra ( which I have yet to see presented anywhere else on the web ) I should have immediately realized that gravity was the next parameter which must be considered . Not only because it’s obviously there , but it is the only force which is asymmetric . Cascading layers of color filters , which is essentially the arguments — presented without equations by both Hansen and Pierrehumbert — and for that matter all theories which rely on spectral properties can’t do it . They are intrinsically symmetrical processes which offer no possibility of evading the Divergence Theorem .
Only gravity provides the essential asymmetry . And as HockeySchtick shows was both classically understood , and is compellingly accurate when tested against observation .
From my perspective , it’s case closed . The greenhouse gas theory is pathetically bad physics and it is now “dead theory walking” .
Well, no.
Nature did. 20+ years ago.
We are actually very lucky the temperature has not continued to go up for the last 20 years. If it had gone up disproving the AGW hypothesis would be far more difficult, despite aphorisms like “correlation is not causation”…
Peter
You can get anything you want, at ALICE’S restaurant . . .. excepting a fact – based response.
What I find ironic is that Hansen’s scenario “C” closely resembles what we have with the hiatus, and what I have calculated in a response curve of solar change equitation through a solar/ocean/atmosphere coupling, and using numbers of another paper from Hansen.
http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x262/Wild_Cobra/Global%20Warming/TSI%20Equalization%2060%20pct%20at%2081%20to%20120%20years_zpsdmysznnd.png
(Note: [IMG] tags removed. You don’t need them here. ~mod.)
There are no failed “predictions” as today’s climate models do not make “predictions.” As the “projections” that these models do make are not falsifiable it is impossible them to fail.