Guest Post by Werner Brozek, Professor Robert Brown from Duke University and Just The Facts
Image Credit: Josh
In order for climate science to be settled, there are many requirements. I will list four for now, although I am sure you can think of many more. Then I will expand on those.
1. We must know all variables that can affect climate.
2. We must know how all variables are changing over time.
3. We must know how each changing variable affects climate.
4. We must know about all non-linear changes that take place as a result of changes to variables.
As for the variables affecting climate, Just The Facts has done a superb job compiling many of them on WUWT’s Potential Climatic Variables Reference Page.
If you have an hour, there is lots of good reading here. For now, I will just give the main topics, but note that all main topics have an array of sub topics.
1. Earth’s Rotational Energy
2. Orbital Energy, Orbital Period, Orbital Spiral, Elliptical Orbits (Eccentricity), Tilt (Obliquity), Wobble (Axial precession) and Polar Motion
3. Gravitation
4. Solar Energy
5. Geothermal Energy
6. Outer Space/Cosmic/Galactic Effects
7. Earth’s Magnetic Field
8. Atmospheric Composition
9. Albedo
10. Biology
11. Chemical
12. Physics
13. Known Unknowns
14. Unknown Unknowns
If you know some more that should be added, please let us know.
The above covers my point 1 above. As for points 2 and 3, for all of the items listed above, we need to know if the changes, if any, are linear, exponential, logarithmic, sinusoidal, random or some other pattern. For example, depending on who you talk to and the interval you are considering, our emissions of carbon dioxide could be exponential, but the increase in the atmosphere could be linear, but the effect could be logarithmic. Then there are asteroids which could be totally random. As for point 4 above, the easiest example would be to consider a ball with air at 30 C and a relative humidity of 90%. When this is cooled, the gas molecules do not simply slow down indefinitely. At a certain point, the water molecules move so slowly that the hydrogen bonds cause molecules to stick together after collisions to cause liquid water or ice to form. Further cooling causes the various gases to condense to their liquid states and then to freeze to their solid state.
Further to this last point, Professor Brown offered a very interesting response to a question on a previous post. His comment is reproduced below and ends with his initials rgb:
rgbatduke
October 2, 2015 at 10:36 am
t’s not a law of nature, but outside of Le Chatelier’s principle, a more modern version (in case anyone is still reading this thread) is Prigogene’s Self-Organization of dissipative systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization
Self-organization as a concept preceded Prigogene, but he quantified it and moved it from the realm of philosophy and psychology and cybernetics to the realm of physics and the behavior of nonlinear non-equilibrium systems.
To put it into a contextual nutshell, an open, non-equilibrium system (such as a gas being heated on one side and cooled on the other) will tend to self-organize into structures that increase the dissipation of the system, that is, facilitate energy transport through the system. The classic contextual example of this is the advent of convective rolls in a fluid in a symmetry breaking gravitational field. Convection moves heat from the hot side to the cold side much, much faster than conduction or radiation does, but initially the gas has no motion but microscopic motions of the molecules and (if we presume symmetry and smoothness in the heated surface and boundaries) experiences only balanced, if unstable, forces. However, those microscopic motions contain small volumes that are not symmetric, that move up or down. These small fluctuations nucleate convection, at first irregular and disorganized, that then “discovers” the favored modes of dissipation, adjacent counter rotating turbulent rolls that have a size characteristic of the geometry of the volume and the thermal imbalance.
The point is that open fluid dynamical differentially heated and cooled systems spontaneously develop these sorts of structures, and they have some degree of stability or at least persistence in time. They can persist a long time — see e.g. the great red spot on Jupiter. The reason that this is essentially a physical, or better yet a mathematical, principle is evident from the wikipedia page above — Prigogene won the Nobel Prize because he showed that this sort of behavior has a universal character and will arise in many, if not most open systems of sufficient complexity. There is a deep connection between this theory and chaos — essentially that an open chaotic system with “noise” is constantly being bounced around in its phase space, so that it wanders around through the broad stretches of uninteresting critical points until it enters the basin of attraction of an interesting one, a strange attractor. At that point the same noise drives it diffusively into a constantly shifting ensemble of comparatively tightly bound orbits. At that point the system is “stable” in that it has temporally persistent behavior with gross physical structures with their own “pseudoparticle” physics and sometimes even thermodynamics. This is one of the things I studied pretty extensively back when I did work in open quantum optical systems.
There is absolutely no question that our climate is precisely a self-organized system of this sort. We have long since named the observed, temporally persistent self-organized structures — ENSO, the Monsoon, the NAO, the PDO. We can also observe more transient structures that appear or disappear such as the “polar vortex” or “The Blob” (warm patch in the ocean off of the Pacific Northwest) or a “blocking high”. Lately, we had “Hurricane Joaquin”. Anybody can play — at this point you can visit various websites and watch a tiny patch of clouds organize into a thunderstorm, then a numbered “disturbance with the potential for tropical development”, then a tropical depression, and finally into a named storm with considerable if highly variable and transient structure.
All of these structures tend to dissipate a huge amount of energy that would otherwise have to escape to space much more slowly. They are born out of energy in flow, and “evolve” so that the ones that move energy most efficiently survive and grow.
Once again, one has to bemoan the lack of serious math that has been done on the climate. This in some sense is understandable, as the math is insanely difficult even when it is limited to toy systems — simple iterated maps, simple ODE or PDE systems with simple boundary conditions. However, there are some principles to guide us. One is that in the case of self-organization in chaotic systems, the dynamical map itself has a structure of critical points and attractors. Once the system “discovers” a favorable attractor and diffuses into an orbit, it actually becomes rather immune to simple changes in the driving. Once a set of turbulent rolls is established, as it were, there is a barrier to be overcome before one can make the number of rolls change or fundamentally change their character — moderate changes in the thermal gradient just make the existing rolls roll faster or slower to maintain heat transport. However, in a sufficiently complex system there are usually neighboring attractors with some sort of barrier in between them, but this barrier is there only in an average sense. In many, many cases, the orbits of the system in phase space have a fractal, folded character where orbits from neighboring attractors can interpenetrate and overlap. If there is noise, there is a probability of switching attractors when one nears a non-equilibrium critical regime, so that the system can suddenly and dramatically change its character. Next, the attractors themselves are not really fixed. As one alters (parametrically for example) the forcing of the system or the boundary conditions or the degree of noise or… one expects the critical points and attractors themselves to move, to appear and disappear, to get pushed together or moved apart, to have the barriers between them rise or fall. Finally (as if this isn’t enough) the climate is not in any usual sense an iterated map. It is usually treated as one from the point of view of solving PDEs (which is usually done via an iterated map where the output of one time step is the input into the next with a fixed dynamics). This makes the solution a Markov Process — one that “forgets” its past history and evolves locally in time and space as an iterated map (usually with a transition “rule” with some randomness in it).
But the climate is almost certainly not Markovian, certainly not in practical terms. What it does today depends on the state today, to be sure, but because there are vast reservoirs where past dynamical evolution is “hidden” in precisely Prigogene’s self-organized structures, structures whose temporal coherence and behavior can only be meaningfully understood on the basis of their own physical description and not microscopically, it is completely, utterly senseless to try to advance a Markovian solution and expect it to actually work!
Two examples, and then I must clean my house and do other work. One is clearly the named structures themselves in the climate. The multidecadal oscillations have spatiotemporal persistence and organization with major spectral components out as far as sixty or seventy years (and may well have longer periods still to be discovered — we have crappy data and not much of it that extends into the increasingly distant past). Current models treat things like ENSO and the PDO and so on more like noise, and we see people constantly “removing the influence of ENSO” from a temperature record to try to reductively discern some underlying ENSO-less trend. But they aren’t noise. They are major features of the dynamics! They move huge amounts of energy around, and are key components of the efficiency of the open system as it transports incident solar energy to infinity, keeping a reservoir of it trapped within along the way. It is practically speaking impossible to integrate the PDEs of the climate models and reproduce any of the multidecadal behavior. Even if multidecadal structures emerge, they have the wrong shape and the wrong spectrum because the chaotic models have a completely different critical structure and attractors as they are iterated maps at the wrong resolution and with parameters that almost certainly move them into completely distinct operational regimes and quite different quasiparticle structures. This is instantly evident if one looks at the actual dynamical futures produced by the climate models. They have the wrong spectrum on pretty much all scales, fluctuating far more wildly than the actual climate does, with the wrong short time autocorrelation and spectral behavior (let alone the longer multidecadal behavior that we observe).
The second is me. I’m precisely a self-organized chaotic system. Here’s a metaphor. Climate models are performing the moral equivalent of trying to predict my behavior by simulating the flow of neural activity in my brain on a coarse-grained basis that chops my cortex up into (say) centimeter square chunks one layer thick and coming up with some sort of crude Markovian model. Since the modelers have no idea what I’m actually thinking, and cannot possibly actually measure the state of my brain outside of some even more crudely averaged surface electrical activity, they just roll dice to generate an initial state “like” what they think my initial state might be, and then trust their dynamics to eventually “forget” that initial state and move the model brain into what they imagine is an “ensemble” of my possible brain states so that after a few years, my behavior will no longer depend on the ignored details (you know, things like memories of my childhood or what I’ve learned in school). They run their model forward twenty years and announce to the world that unless I undergo electroshock therapy right now their models prove that I’m almost certainly destined to become an axe murderer or exhibit some other “extreme” behavior. Only if I am kept in a dark room, not overstimulated, and am fed regular doses of drugs that essentially destroy the resolution of my real brain until it approximates that of their model can they be certain that I won’t either bring about World Peace in one extreme or cause a Nuclear War in the other.
The problem is that this whole idea is just silly! Human behavior cannot be predicted by a microscopic physical model of the neurons at the quantum chemistry level! Humans are open non-Markovian information systems. We are strongly regulated by our past experience, our memory, as well as our instantaneous input, all folded through a noisy, defect-ridden, and unbelievably complex multilayer neural network that is chemically modulated by a few dozen things (hormones, bioavailable energy, diurnal phase, temperature, circulatory state, oxygenation…)
As a good friend of mine who was a World’s Greatest Expert (literally!) on complex systems used to say: “More is different”. Emergent self-organized behavior results in a cascade of structures. Microscopic physics starts with quarks and leptons and interaction particles/rules. The quarks organize into nucleons. The nucleons organize into nuclei. The electrons bond to the nuclei to form atoms. The physics and behavior of the nuclei are not easily understood in terms of bare quark dynamics! The physics and behavior of the atoms are not easily understood in terms of the bare quark plus lepton dynamics! The atoms interact and form molecules, more molecules, increasingly complex molecules. The molecules have behavior that is not easily understood in terms of the “bare” behavior of the isolated atoms that make them up. Some classes of molecular chemistry produce liquids, solids, gases, plasmas. Again, the behavior of these things is increasingly disconnected from the behavior of the specific molecules that make them up — new classes of universal behavior emerge at all steps, so that all fluids are alike in certain ways independent of the particular molecules that make them up, even as they inherent certain parametric behavior from the base molecules. Some molecules in some fluids become organic biomolecules, and there is suddenly a huge disconnect both from simple chemistry and from the several layers of underlying physics.
If more is different, how much is enough? There is a whole lot of more in the coupled Earth-Ocean-Atmosphere-Solar system. There is a whole lot less, heavily oversimplified and with the deliberate omission of the ill-understood quasiparticle structures that we can see dominating the weather and the climate, in climate models.
Could they work? Sure. But one really shouldn’t expect them to work, one
should expect them to work no better than a simulated neural network “works” to simulate actual intelligence, which is to say, it can sometimes produce understandable behaviors “like” intelligence without ever properly resembling the intelligence of any intelligent thing and without the slightest ability to predict the behavior of an intelligent thing. The onus of proof is very much on the modelers that wish to assert that their models are useful for predicting long term climate, but this is a burden that so far they refuse to acknowledge, let alone accept! If they did, large numbers of climate models would have to be rejected because they do not work in the specific sense that they do not come particularly close to predicting the behavior of the actual climate from the instant they entered the regime where they were supposed to be predictive, instead of parametrically tuned and locked to match up well with a reference interval that just happened to be the one single stretch of 15-25 years where strong warming occurred in the last 85 years. There are so very, very many problems with this — training any model on a non-representative segment of the available data is obviously likely to lead to a poor model — but suffice it to say that so far, they aren’t working and nobody should be surprised.
rgb
In the sections below, as in previous posts, we will present you with the latest facts. The information will be presented in three sections and an appendix. The first section will show for how long there has been no warming on some data sets. At the moment, only the satellite data have flat periods of longer than a year. The second section will show for how long there has been no statistically significant warming on several data sets. The third section will show how 2015 so far compares with 2014 and the warmest years and months on record so far. For three of the data sets, 2014 also happens to be the warmest year. The appendix will illustrate sections 1 and 2 in a different way. Graphs and a table will be used to illustrate the data.
Section 1
This analysis uses the latest month for which data is available on WoodForTrees.com (WFT). All of the data on WFT is also available at the specific sources as outlined below. We start with the present date and go to the furthest month in the past where the slope is a least slightly negative on at least one calculation. So if the slope from September is 4 x 10^-4 but it is – 4 x 10^-4 from October, we give the time from October so no one can accuse us of being less than honest if we say the slope is flat from a certain month.
1. For GISS, the slope is not flat for any period that is worth mentioning.
2. For Hadcrut4, the slope is not flat for any period that is worth mentioning.
3. For Hadsst3, the slope is not flat for any period that is worth mentioning.
4. For UAH, the slope is flat since May 1997 or 18 years and 5 months. (goes to September using version 6.0)
5. For RSS, the slope is flat since February 1997 or 18 years and 8 months. (goes to September)
The next graph shows just the lines to illustrate the above. Think of it as a sideways bar graph where the lengths of the lines indicate the relative times where the slope is 0. In addition, the upward sloping blue line at the top indicates that CO2 has steadily increased over this period.
Note that the UAH5.6 from WFT needed a detrend to show the slope is zero for UAH6.0.
When two things are plotted as I have done, the left only shows a temperature anomaly.
The actual numbers are meaningless since the two slopes are essentially zero. No numbers are given for CO2. Some have asked that the log of the concentration of CO2 be plotted. However WFT does not give this option. The upward sloping CO2 line only shows that while CO2 has been going up over the last 18 years, the temperatures have been flat for varying periods on the two sets.
Section 2
For this analysis, data was retrieved from Nick Stokes’ Trendviewer available on his website. This analysis indicates for how long there has not been statistically significant warming according to Nick’s criteria. Data go to their latest update for each set. In every case, note that the lower error bar is negative so a slope of 0 cannot be ruled out from the month indicated.
On several different data sets, there has been no statistically significant warming for between 11 and 22 years according to Nick’s criteria. Cl stands for the confidence limits at the 95% level.
The details for several sets are below.
For UAH6.0: Since December 1992: Cl from -0.009 to 1.688
This is 22 years and 10 months.
For RSS: Since March 1993: Cl from -0.014 to 1.597
This is 22 years and 7 months.
For Hadcrut4.4: Since January 2001: Cl from -0.048 to 1.334
This is 14 years and 9 months.
For Hadsst3: Since July 1995: Cl from -0.002 to 1.949
This is 20 years and 3 months.
For GISS: Since September 2004: Cl from -0.033 to 2.020
This is 11 years and 1 month.
Section 3
This section shows data about 2015 and other information in the form of a table. The table shows the five data sources along the top and other places so they should be visible at all times. The sources are UAH, RSS, Hadcrut4, Hadsst3, and GISS.
Down the column, are the following:
1. 14ra: This is the final ranking for 2014 on each data set.
2. 14a: Here I give the average anomaly for 2014.
3. year: This indicates the warmest year on record so far for that particular data set. Note that the satellite data sets have 1998 as the warmest year and the others have 2014 as the warmest year.
4. ano: This is the average of the monthly anomalies of the warmest year just above.
5. mon: This is the month where that particular data set showed the highest anomaly. The months are identified by the first three letters of the month and the last two numbers of the year.
6. ano: This is the anomaly of the month just above.
7. y/m: This is the longest period of time where the slope is not positive given in years/months. So 16/2 means that for 16 years and 2 months the slope is essentially 0. Periods of under a year are not counted and are shown as “0”.
8. sig: This the first month for which warming is not statistically significant according to Nick’s criteria. The first three letters of the month are followed by the last two numbers of the year.
9. sy/m: This is the years and months for row 8. Depending on when the update was last done, the months may be off by one month.
10. Jan: This is the January 2015 anomaly for that particular data set.
11. Feb: This is the February 2015 anomaly for that particular data set, etc.
19. ave: This is the average anomaly of all months to date taken by adding all numbers and dividing by the number of months.
20. rnk: This is the rank that each particular data set would have for 2015 without regards to error bars and assuming no changes. Think of it as an update 45 minutes into a game.
| Source | UAH | RSS | Had4 | Sst3 | GISS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.14ra | 5th | 6th | 1st | 1st | 1st |
| 2.14a | 0.188 | 0.255 | 0.564 | 0.479 | 0.75 |
| 3.year | 1998 | 1998 | 2014 | 2014 | 2014 |
| 4.ano | 0.482 | 0.55 | 0.564 | 0.479 | 0.75 |
| 5.mon | Apr98 | Apr98 | Jan07 | Aug14 | Jan07 |
| 6.ano | 0.742 | 0.857 | 0.832 | 0.644 | 0.97 |
| 7.y/m | 18/5 | 18/8 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 8.sig | Dec92 | Mar93 | Jan01 | Jul95 | Sep04 |
| 9.sy/m | 22/10 | 22/7 | 14/9 | 20/3 | 11/1 |
| Source | UAH | RSS | Had4 | Sst3 | GISS |
| 10.Jan | 0.276 | 0.365 | 0.688 | 0.440 | 0.82 |
| 11.Feb | 0.174 | 0.326 | 0.660 | 0.406 | 0.88 |
| 12.Mar | 0.164 | 0.255 | 0.681 | 0.424 | 0.90 |
| 13.Apr | 0.086 | 0.172 | 0.656 | 0.557 | 0.74 |
| 14.May | 0.284 | 0.309 | 0.696 | 0.593 | 0.79 |
| 15.Jun | 0.332 | 0.391 | 0.730 | 0.575 | 0.77 |
| 16.Jul | 0.182 | 0.288 | 0.696 | 0.637 | 0.73 |
| 17.Aug | 0.275 | 0.389 | 0.740 | 0.665 | 0.81 |
| 18.Sep | 0.253 | 0.382 | 0.786 | 0.729 | 0.81 |
| Source | UAH | RSS | Had4 | Sst3 | GISS |
| 19.ave | 0.225 | 0.320 | 0.702 | 0.558 | 0.81 |
| 20.rnk | 3rd | 4th | 1st | 1st | 1st |
If you wish to verify all of the latest anomalies, go to the following:
For UAH, version 6.0beta3 was used. Note that WFT uses version 5.6. So to verify the length of the pause on version 6.0, you need to use Nick’s program.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tlt/tltglhmam_6.0beta3.txt
For RSS, see: ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_3.txt
For Hadcrut4, see: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/data/current/time_series/HadCRUT.4.4.0.0.monthly_ns_avg.txt
For Hadsst3, see: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadSST3-gl.dat
For GISS, see:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
To see all points since January 2015 in the form of a graph, see the WFT graph below. Note that UAH version 5.6 is shown. WFT does not show version 6.0 yet. Also note that Hadcrut4.3 is shown and not Hadcrut4.4, which is why the last few months are missing for Hadcrut.
As you can see, all lines have been offset so they all start at the same place in January 2015. This makes it easy to compare January 2015 with the latest anomaly.
Appendix
In this part, we are summarizing data for each set separately.
RSS
The slope is flat since February 1997 or 18 years, 8 months. (goes to September)
For RSS: There is no statistically significant warming since March 1993: Cl from -0.014 to 1.597.
The RSS average anomaly so far for 2015 is 0.320. This ties it as 4th place. 1998 was the warmest at 0.55. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in April of 1998 when it reached 0.857. The anomaly in 2014 was 0.255 and it was ranked 6th.
UAH6.0beta3
The slope is flat since May 1997 or 18 years and 5 months. (goes to September using version 6.0beta3)
For UAH: There is no statistically significant warming since December 1992: Cl from -0.009 to 1.688. (This is using version 6.0 according to Nick’s program.)
The UAH average anomaly so far for 2015 is 0.225. This would rank it as 3rd place. 1998 was the warmest at 0.483. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in April of 1998 when it reached 0.742. The anomaly in 2014 was 0.188 and it was ranked 5th.
Hadcrut4.4
The slope is not flat for any period that is worth mentioning.
For Hadcrut4: There is no statistically significant warming since January 2001: Cl from -0.048 to 1.334.
The Hadcrut4 average anomaly so far for 2015 is 0.702. This would set a new record if it stayed this way. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in January of 2007 when it reached 0.832. The anomaly in 2014 was 0.564 and this set a new record.
Hadsst3
For Hadsst3, the slope is not flat for any period that is worth mentioning. For Hadsst3: There is no statistically significant warming since July 1995: Cl from -0.002 to 1.949.
The Hadsst3 average anomaly so far for 2015 is 0.558. This would set a new record if it stayed this way. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in August of 2014 when it reached 0.644. This is prior to 2015. The anomaly in 2014 was 0.479 and this set a new record. The September 2015 anomaly of 0.729 also sets a new record.
GISS
The slope is not flat for any period that is worth mentioning.
For GISS: There is no statistically significant warming since September 2004: Cl from -0.033 to 2.020.
The GISS average anomaly so far for 2015 is 0.81. This would set a new record if it stayed this way. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in January of 2007 when it reached 0.97. The anomaly in 2014 was 0.75 and it set a new record.
Conclusion
After reading this article, do you think climate science is settled? If not, do you think it will be settled in your lifetime?
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Note that these influences …
“6. Outer Space/Cosmic/Galactic Effects”
… challenge the very notion of self-organizing weather or climate structures. In fact, a review of the anomalies associated with lightning …
1. The failure to identify a “seed” of sufficient power to cause it;
2. Its association with the solar wind;
3. The recent observations of a connection with space (sprites, etc);
4. And its still-unexplained emissions;
5. It’s association with the Van Allen radiation belts
… plainly suggest that these electrons might very well come from space, and are merely guided through the thunderclouds because the clouds offer the path of least resistance.
It’s something that everybody should be keeping in mind — as most of our theories for space originated at a time when it was thought that space was an empty vacuum. We learned that was not true in 1959 with the first rocket, of course. Space is a plasma; it’s not empty.
Then there is the issue of where our little star and its captive planets are in relation to that giant monster nearby which is mostly concealed by thick layers of cosmic dust: the Milky Way which is actually this devouring entity that is eating all the things trapped in its gravitational pool and our little star has been captured by this giant and for the last several billion years has been steadily drawn inwards, bit by bit.
Sometimes, we are surrounded by lots of cosmic debris and other times, clean sailing with nothing to disturb our solar system. Certainly, nothing is stationary.
From the way they got out of the embarrassing pause, there is no doubt in my mind what ‘control knobs’ are in climate science. The IPCC actually made it their job description.
PS, this rgb is an international treasure (I’m not American). Like his other contributions, I’m going to have to read this carefully and frequently. I’d hate to have to sit a 3 hr exam in one of his classes unless somehow I could get a week’s head start!
Since people are self-organized chaotic systems whose behavior cannot be predicted by measuring their physical parts we’ve developed soft sciences like psychology and sociology in which the parts studied are situations and behaviors which can be observed to conform to rules that exist at the level at which we exist. Since climate is also a self organized chaotic system why don’t we do the same for it? For instance meteorology is anchored at our level of existence by the need to make sufficiently accurate predictions or be discarded as worthless. Why not expand the scope of meteorology to include observations of past meteorological events and trends to inform the future. Call it paleo-meteorology or geo-meteorology or whatever. I know they already do that with correlating say sunspot activity and weather . . . and get laughed at for doing so. And true, psychology and sociology aren’t exactly great predictors of what people will do and so geo-meteorology probably wouldn’t be a great predictor of what climate will do either but It would still probably be better than what we’re currently doing and it wouldn’t have the undeserved patina of hard irrevocable deterministic science that’s being used to persuade people now.
This fixation on analyzing the minor fluctuations in the temperature of the atmosphere, whether at the surface boundary layer, or higher up where the satellites are recording temps seems completely misplaced to me. Thank you RGB for your cogent points about chaotic processes and energy/heat transfer.
The recent NOAA response to the Congressional inquiry made the point that the satellite data are irrelevant because humans live on the surface and that’s where we “live, work and grow our food…” Good grief. Could there be a more ignorant point of view? Maybe we should also simply drop out all the sea surface data, since most of us don’t live there–of course then the hiatus is preserved and we can’t have that.
Careful scientists are forced to conclude that this climate science arena is populated by poorly trained, second rate practitioners (good evidence supports this) with little appreciation for the scale of the problem that is “settled” in their view. The alternative, more disheartening notion is that there are decent scientists studying the climate who have been corrupted by the cause and the gravy train. Either way, it’s extremely damaging to the scientific enterprise.
I remain fascinated by this very thorny problem of energy absorption and release in the Earth’s climate system. As RGB points out, these periodic, quasi-predictable events such as the ENSO are ignored by modelers when they should instead be studied in detail to understand their development and dissipation. The heat content represented by an ENSO event is stunningly large. From where does it arise? It seems clear that this energy eventually finds its way off the planet. It seems that this would be a net cooling event with profound implications for the energy of the system.
Measuring total heat content of the planet and its variation seems to me to be the more appropriate goal. The vast heat sinks of the deep oceans and polar ice are where the action is. Arguing about the accuracy of averaging readings from a handful of thermometers measuring the air at airports near large cities or whether sparse buoys or water intakes are the better measure of sea surface temperatures are distractions from the real and very difficult problem of understanding the system.
There are lots of global/climate heat balances available as Bing images.
IPCC AR5 attributes 2 W/m^2 of unbalancing RF due to the increased CO2 concentration between 1750 and 2011. In the overall global heat balance 2 W (watt is power, not energy) is lost in the magnitude and uncertainty of: ToA, 340 +/- 10, fluctuating albedo of clouds, snow and ice, and the absorption and release of heat from evaporation and condensation of the ocean and water vapor cycle. (IPCC AR5 Ch 8, FAQ 8.1)
If you know some more that should be added, please let us know.
You could add land/ocean arrangements and mean land elevation.
Lunar possible influences.
The rogue extra terrestrial impact which must have happened from time to time.
Agree plate tectonics should be on the list. Arguably the effects of that process are subsumed under other factors listed, but IMO it’s so important in the formation of ice house and hot house periods that it merits its own bullet point or equivalent.
They are all already on the reference page;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/research-pages/potential-climatic-variables/
e.g. here’s what we have for “land/ocean arrangements and mean land elevation.”
Earth’s gravity is the primary driver of Plate Tectonics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics
“It involves the shifting of about a dozen major plates and is what causes most earthquakes”;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake
Volcanoes;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcano
and Mountain Formation;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_formation
which can create Mountain Jets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_jet
and influence the creation of Atmospheric Waves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_wave
“The Slab Pull;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_pull
force is a tectonic plate force due to subduction. Plate motion is partly driven by the weight of cold, dense plates sinking into the mantle at trenches. This force and the slab suction force account for most of the overall force acting on plate tectonics, and the Ridge Push;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridge_push
force accounts for 5 to 10% of the overall force.”
Isostasy also exists whereby a “state of gravitational equilibrium between the earth’s lithosphere and asthenosphere such that the tectonic plates “float” at an elevation which depends on their thickness and density.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isostasy
Plate Tectonics drive “cycles of ocean basin growth and destruction, known as Wilson cycles;
http://csmres.jmu.edu/geollab/fichter/Wilson/Wilson.html
involving continental rifting;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rift
seafloor-spreading;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seafloor_spreading
subduction;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction
and collision.”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_collision
“Climate change on ultra-long time scales (tens of millions of years) are more than likely connected to plate tectonics.”
“Through the course of a Wilson cycle continents collide and split apart, mountains are uplifted and eroded, and ocean basins open and close. The re-distribution and changing size and elevation of continental land masses may have caused climate change on long time scales”;
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ice/chill.html
a process called the Supercontinent Cycle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent_cycle
which, “has shaped the geology and climate of the earth and provided a force for biological evolution.”
http://www.as.wvu.edu/biology/bio463/Nance%20et%20al%201988%20Supercontinent%20Cycle.pdf
“There are two types of global earth climates: icehouse and greenhouse. Icehouse is characterized by frequent continental glaciations and severe desert environments. Greenhouse is characterized by warm climates. Both reflect the supercontinent cycle. We are now in a little greenhouse phase of an ice house world.
Icehouse Climate:
Continents moving together
Sea level low due to lack of seafloor production
Climate cooler, arid
Associated with aragonite seas
Formation of supercontinents
Greenhouse Climate:
Continents dispersed
Sea level high
High level of sea floor spreading
Relatively large amounts of CO2 production at oceanic rifting zones
Climate warm and humid
Associated with calcite seas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent_cycle#Relation_to_climate
“In order for climate science to be settled, there are many requirements. I will list four for now, although I am sure you can think of many more. Then I will expand on those.
1. We must know all variables that can affect climate.
2. We must know how all variables are changing over time.
3. We must know how each changing variable affects climate.
4. We must know about all non-linear changes that take place as a result of changes to variables.
###############
Wrong.
1. Epistemically no science is ever “settled”. no science ever meets
your 1-4.
2. When people refer to climate “science” being settled they mean
the following
“no working scientists find your PARTICULAR objections interesting”
For example: if you say c02 is not a GHG… sorry that question is settled.
It has been settled for a long long time. That is NOBODY who does science
for a living will waste their time challenging it.
if you say increasing C02 will not warm the planet… sorry… nobody will waste their time listening to you.
if you say… humans are not responsible for the rise in c02… working scientists will just ignore you.. or have you removed from the faculty. tough love.
Not many on WUWT listen to you Steve,
1. We must know all variables that can affect climate.
2. We must know how all variables are changing over time.
3. We must know how each changing variable affects climate.
4. We must know about all non-linear changes that take place as a result of changes to variables
Exactly 100% correct and this is why the climate models can not replicate past climate, can not forecast the present climate and will fail even more miserably going forward as the climate cools rather then warms as called for by the models.
But increasing CO2 has already repeatedly been shown not to warm the planet. That hypothesis has been falsified, ergo so-called climate science is anti-science. That is settled.
Now it may be that more CO2 does warm the planet, but the effect is not measureable, is subject to negative feedback a or is swamped by more powerful factors. Or some combination thereof. But the observed, scientific fact is that rising CO2 does not necessarily warm the planet over decades of observation.
That the settled consensus ignores and tries to change this fact just shows how corrupt the endeavor is.
Consider the past 70 years. CO2 rose rapidly from 1945 to 1977, ie almost half the study period, yet earth cooled so dramatically that scientists were concerned that a new ice age was approaching. Callendar considered his 1938 CO2 hypothesis falsified by the frigid early ’60s. Rightly so.
Climate Lysenkoists have tried rewrite, i.e. “adjust”, the history of the first three post-war decades, but NCAR’s own temperature data series from the ’70s show how cold was that period.
Then from the late ’70s to some point in the ’90s, temperature recovered slightly, thus accidentally coinciding with rising CO2. The PDO flip of ’77 is implicated.
Since the ’90s, GASTA has been flat to down in satellite observations, despite continued monotonous rise in CO2 levels. Thus the supposedly settled science is falsified.
Just because you think more GHG should cause the world to warm doesn’t mean Mother Nature has to get on board your gravy train.
I agree with all three points with respect to CO2. However what is not settled by a long shot is how much the temperature will change with a doubling of CO2. Is it between 1.5 C and 4.5 C or could it be as low as 0.5 C?
I think it is more like .2c Werner. That assumes the climate does not control the GHG effect.
Most of the estimates are between 2 and 3 C; there is this nice summary of various results a few days old at Laden’s place: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/11/03/evidence-of-high-climate-sensitivity/
He makes the interesting point that higher values (in the fat tail) have not yet been eliminated as possible. If the value turns out to be over 4, we are screwed.
traffy sez:
If the value turns out to be over 4, we are screwed.
Based on what? Your irrational fear?
Global T has been much higher than +4ºC from here, without any adverse effects. In fact, the biosphere did exceptionally well when the planet was warmer.
really traf?
Quoting greg laden????
.. gees next you will be citing SkS or some other brain-dead site !!!
So funny ! 🙂
dbstealey November 7, 2015 at 2:51 am
More projection. Everyone else disagrees with you.
You’re out of step with reality.
James McGinn:
Myself and Feynman disagree with you.
Feynman:
“Now I’m going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it (audience laughter), no, don’t laugh, that’s the truth. Then we compute the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works.
If it disagrees with experiment, it’s WRONG. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
McGinn,
You stated before that Prof Feynman is wrong, so it’s interesting that you would use him to try and support your weird beliefs (that water vapor does not exist in the atmosphere, among others).
You have the onus of supporting your beliefs with convincing evidence and experiments. But all you do is assert. You refuse to do real world experiments, and you provide no convincing evidence of your assertion that H2O does not exist as a gas in the atmosphere.
That is an astonishing claim, which requires exceptional evidence. But all you do is insist that it’s true. That isn’t nearly good enough.
Mainstream physics says that water vapor is a component of the atmosphere. You claim it isn’t. But you have no supporting experiments or evidence, and you try to turn the Scientific Method on its head by insisting that skeptics of your conjecture have the onus of proving you wrong.
That’s backward. You have the onus of supporting your ‘no water vapor’ conjecture, not skeptics. But so far, you have failed to produce any convincing evidence.
DB,
Well said. Every actual experiment shows James’ baseless assertion false.
Here’s one using GPS satellites:
http://www.csr.utexas.edu/texas_pwv/midterm/gabor/gpsspace.html
James, please state how do you explain dew. Where do you imagine it comes from if not out of the air as it cools during the night. Fairies?
Thanks.
dbstealey:
Mainstream physics says that water vapor is a component of the atmosphere.
James McGinn:
So do I.
dbstealey:
You claim it isn’t.
James McGinn:
Stop putting words in my mouth. Quote me directly.
dbstealey:
But you have no supporting experiments or evidence, and you try to turn the Scientific Method on its head by insisting that skeptics of your conjecture have the onus of proving you wrong.
James McGinn:
If you were to claim to have seen bigfoot I wouldn’t be able to disprove that either.
dbstealey:
That’s backward. You have the onus of supporting your ‘no water vapor’ conjecture, not skeptics. But so far, you have failed to produce any convincing evidence.
James McGinn:
It’s not possible for me to dispute the existence of what has never been detected. It’s not necessary either.
You sound like an AGW advocate telling us we have to disprove the greenhouse effect.
McGinn says:
If you were to claim to have seen bigfoot I wouldn’t be able to disprove that either.
And your claim, which is contradicted by everyone who understands physics, is that water vapor does not exist in the air.
The onus is on you to support that claim. But all we get are your constant and baseless assertions. They are not supported by any verifiable, real world experiments, and modern physics experiments thoroughly refute what you claim.
Once again for the slow learners here: the onus is on you to support your claim.
dbstealey November 8, 2015 at 1:59 pm
DB:
The one thing every Conjecture, Hypothesis, Theory and Law has in common is their ability to make correct predictions, repeatedly. If they don’t, their conjecture (that’s all it is if they can’t make correct predictions) has been falsified.
JM:
We could say the same of the convection model of storm theory. How, for example, can it be said to predict/explain the jet streams? It doesn’t. It fails.
The energy of storms comes from the jet steams (not convection). My theory explains the jet streams explicitly. And from there it goes on to explain all the phenomena that has been mistakenly attributed to convection.
A river that has no banks is not a river, it is a flood:
http://t.co/kxqpWcbCeN
You’re hiding out from all the evidence posted supporting the fact that H2O(g) is found throughout the atmosphere, from the poles to the tropics.
So now you’re deflecting onto convection and jet streams.
Got it.
And hey, congrats on your tough election fight! What were the vote totals again?
Steven,
Correct, but if you say that humans are responsible for all the warming since 1950 or that natural contribution to global warming has been negligible, you will find that those matters are not settled at all, and they are crucial to understand how much warming we are producing. If let’s say we are producing just 30% of observed warming, we could just sit down, relax and enjoy the weather.
Javier:
Not content with getting a mugging for posting unsubstantiated assertions on two other threads, you now say
As I have repeatedly explained to you, there is no evidence that we are producing any of the observed warming.
I stress again, there is no evidence for anthropogenic (i.e. man-made) global warming (AGW); none zilch, nada.
If were producing as much as “30% of observed warming” then it would be discernible.
Richard
Hahahah, good joke.
How? How do you distinguish man-made from natural warming? (talking about unsubstantiated assertions).
Javier says:
How do you distinguish man-made from natural warming?
Good question. MMGW has never been quantified, so no one knows the fraction of AGW out of natural warming.
But the fact that AGW has never been measured indicates that it is too tiny to worrry about.
Javier:
You ask me
Well, you would know one of the ways if you had payed attention to the information given to you in the thread where you were thrashed for making silly and unfounded assertions.
I there told you
If you had used that link to John Daly’s excellent summary then you would have known the method used by Santer which showed there was no discernible AGW although his method would have shown AGW if it existed.
You have made many unsubstantiated and demonstrably untrue assertions but have refused to consider evidence that reveals your errors. Your question I have answered here is but one example.
Richard
“As I have repeatedly explained to you, there is no evidence that we are producing any of the observed warming.”
Like Mosh said, is any working scientist listening to you?
traffy,
I keep asking for you or anyone else to produce a measurement quantifying your “observed” man-made global warming (also called ‘dangerous AGW’; DAGW for short).
But no one has ever produced an empirical, testable, verifiable measurement quantifying the percentage of DAGW, out of global warming from all causes including the natural rebound from the LIA. There isn’t any such measurement.
Therefore, DAGW is merely a conjecture; an opinion.
Get it? No one can point to a verified measurement and say, “There it is! That’s the fraction of AGW that we’ve been telling you about!”
So what have you got, besides some indirect (model-based) evidence, and lots of (mostly bought and paid for) opinions?
trafamadore
97% of government-paid scientists believe that their next government-paycheck, their next year’s budget, their next research paper publication, and their tenture application relies SOLELY on whether or not they “believe” in CAGW.
trafamadore:
All scientists accept what the available data indicates.
Anybody who does not accept what the available data indicates is not a scientist.
There is no evidence for man-made global warming; none, zilch, nada.
If you think you have found some evidence for anthropogenic (i.e. man-made) global warming (AGW) then publish it because your finding would be the first such evidence and would certainly result in you being awarded at least one Nobel Prize.
Richard
dbstealey:
I keep asking for you or anyone else to produce a measurement quantifying your “observed” man-made global warming (also called ‘dangerous AGW’; DAGW for short).
James McGinn:
I keep asking for a measurement quantifying the notion that moist air is lighter than dry air, in the context of meterology’s storm theory.
dbstealey:
But no one has ever produced an empirical, testable, verifiable measurement quantifying the percentage of DAGW, out of global warming from all causes including the natural rebound from the LIA. There isn’t any such measurement.
James McGinn:
But no one has ever produced an empirical, testable, verifiable measurement quantifying that dry air is heavier than moist air.
dbstealey:
Therefore, DAGW is merely a conjecture; an opinion.
James McGinn:
Therefore, meteorology’s notion that moist air is lighter than dry air is merely a conjecture; an opinion.
dbstealey:
Get it? No one can point to a verified measurement and say, “There it is! That’s the fraction of AGW that we’ve been telling you about!”
James McGinn:
Get it? No one can point to a verified measurement and say, “There it is! That’s the the reason we assume moist air convects up through dry air!
dbstealey:
So what have you got, besides some indirect (model-based) evidence, and lots of (mostly bought and paid for) opinions?
James McGinn:
So what have you got, besides some indirect (model-based) evidence, and lots of (mostly bought and paid for) opinions?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/03/el-nino-events-and-drought-linked/
dbstealey:
So, if I post an experiment that was published in a peer reviewed journal demonstrating direct evidence of gaseous H2O in the atmosphere, will you concede the argument?
James McGinn:
Sure. Knock yourself out. But make sure it controls for all other factors and make sure they are specifically testing for that. Don’t be fooled by that mass spectrometer stuffs. Some of that is worse that voodoo when applied to the H2O molecule.
The simplest experiment would directly measure the weight of moist to dry air. It easy to control the variables and its very simple. And doesn’t require actually looking at the molecules, which is very difficult, maybe impossible (Heisenberg).
When you fail will you retract your claim about “millions” of experiments?
Also, before you post, if you experiment does involve spectrography I suggest you go to Roger Tall Bloke’s site (it’s a bunch of kooky engineers) and look for an article entitled: Unsettled science: Uncertainty around the continuum absorption of water vapour. Read all the comments.
dbstealey:
Next: what if the heads of M.I.T.’s, and Harvard’s, and Stanford’s, and Berkeley’s Physics and Chemistry departments all told you unequivocally that gaseous H2O (steam) is a component of the atmosphere?
James McGinn:
Sure. I would accept this. I will make it easier on you. You only have to get one of the above and I will accept that. Or you could even get any recognized meteorologists, including Anthony Watts. I will accept that. But they have to be willing to stake their reputation on it. Fair enough?
When you are unable to get any of them to address the issue (and let me assure you, they won’t) will you make a retraction of your claim that there have been millions of experiments that confirm the existence of gaseous H2O (steam) is a component of the atmosphere?
Is that not reasonable?
James McGinn
James,
I haven’t followed the whole thread, but it appears that you doubt the existence of water vapor in earth’s atmosphere. Or is it steam, ie gaseous H2O at higher temperature? I can assure you that steam does in fact exist in air, although it tends to cool quickly. I’ve put it there myself and observed it around volcanic vents. I saw steam waterfalls around Mt. St. Helens in 1980.
Cooler water vapor indubitably exists in earth’s air. Its concentration ranges from more than 400 parts per 10,000 dry air molecules in the moist tropics to just a few ppm in dry, cold polar regions, ie comparable to CO2 levels.
Every means of measuring H2O in the air shows this to be the case.
https://books.google.com/books?id=pNg6f_4-_xsC&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=detecting+water+vapor+atmosphere&source=bl&ots=EDKli-uh3B&sig=JIJeSO_dVxflHCjekTkkRJVTATo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CF0Q6AEwCWoVChMInuWo05r9yAIVCfVjCh3ZmgyC#v=onepage&q=detecting%20water%20vapor%20atmosphere&f=false
Gloateus Maximus:
I haven’t followed the whole thread,
James McGinn:
That is apparent.
Gloateus Maximus:
but it appears that you doubt the existence of water vapor in earth’s atmosphere. Or is it steam, ie gaseous H2O at higher temperature?
James McGinn:
I deny the existence of steam at temperatures below the boiling/pressure point.
Gloateus Maximus:
I can assure you that steam does in fact exist in air, although it tends to cool quickly. I’ve put it there myself and observed it around volcanic vents. I saw steam waterfalls around Mt. St. Helens in 1980.
Cooler water vapor indubitably exists in earth’s air. Its concentration ranges from more than 400 parts per 10,000 dry air molecules in the moist tropics to just a few ppm in dry, cold polar regions, ie comparable to CO2 levels.
Every means of measuring H2O in the air shows this to be the case.
James McGinn:
I don’t deny any of this.
You really should read the threads (see link above) before you respond. Sorry to be so obstinate.
dbstealey:
Get it? No one can point to a verified measurement and say, “There it is! That’s the fraction of AGW that we’ve been telling you about!”
James McGinn:
Get it? No one can point to a verified measurement and say, “There it is! That’s the the reason we assume moist air convects up through dry air!
Facts are irrelevant to consensus sciences.
You know you will never receive resolution on this, right?
As do I.
Now do you get it?
James McGinn
McGinn, I get this much: you are the only one who denies that convection matters.
Due to the concentrations of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, and due to the fact that the molar mass of diatomic nitrogen is 28 and that of diatomic oxygen is 32, we get an average molar mass of 29. This covers 99% of all gases so let us ignore everything else for the moment. So 1000 air molecules have an average mass of 29. But if we have 4% water vapour, then 1000 “air” molecules consist of 960 with an average mass of 29 and 40 with an average mass of 18 for water vapour. Of course this assumes the most abundant isotopes of hydrogen (1) and oxygen (16). So equal numbers of molecules of moist air are lighter than equal numbers of molecules of dry air providing the water molecules in the moist air are in the gas phase and not the liquid phase.
As far as I know, even deserts and Antarctica have relative humidities of at least 5%, so all air has water in the gas phase. And if the temperature of the Antarctic air is -50 C, then the water vapour molecules are also at -50 C. However the word “steam” seems misplaced in this case. At least I associate “steam” with water molecules coming out of a hot kettle.
Werner Brozek: November 6, 2015 at 7:53 pm
James McGinn:
I keep asking for a measurement quantifying the notion that moist air is lighter than dry air, in the context of meterology’s storm theory.
Werner Brozek:
So equal numbers of molecules of moist air are lighter than equal numbers of molecules of dry air providing the water molecules in the moist air are in the gas phase and not the liquid phase.
James McGinn:
And in the liquid phase moist air is heavier, always. Right? And since water’s gaseous phase is strictly determined by temperatures over 212 F (100 C) and since temperature of the atmosphere is always lower, moist air is heavier (not lighter) than dry air. Thus meteorology’s notion of moist air convection is resoundingly refuted.
Do you disagree with any of this, Werner?
Werner Brozek: November 6, 2015 at 8:03 pm
James McGinn:
When you are unable to get any of them to address the issue (and let me assure you, they won’t) will you make a retraction of your claim that there have been millions of experiments that confirm the existence of gaseous H2O (steam) is a component of the atmosphere?
Werner Brozek:
As far as I know, even deserts and Antarctica have relative humidities of at least 5%, so all air has water in the gas phase.
James McGinn:
Steam (gaseous H2O) only occurs above 212 F (100 C). So there is no steam in earth’s atmosphere. Thus meteorology’s notion of moist air convection is resoundingly refuted.
Werner Brozek:
And if the temperature of the Antarctic air is -50 C, then the water vapour molecules are also at -50 C. However the word “steam” seems misplaced in this case. At least I associate “steam” with water molecules coming out of a hot kettle.
James McGinn:
It’s misplaced at any ambient temperature. Moist air is heavier than dry air. The convection model of meterology’s storm theory is resoundingly refuted.
If you respond to this I would appreciate it if you made a concerted effort to remain dispassionate.
dbstealey: November 6, 2015 at 7:27 pm
dbstealey:
I get this much: you are the only one who denies that convection matters.
James McGinn:
Consensus is for suckers.
More projection. Everyone else disagrees with you.
You’re out of step with reality.
Javier says:
If let’s say we are producing just 30% of observed warming…
“If”.
That is no more than baseless speculation.
Richard,
I see. So you don’t know how to distinguish man-made from natural warming or you would be able to explain it with simple words. That’s what I thought.
Things get complicated really fast. Liquid water is way denser than the individual unattached water molecules. That is why lakes and oceans are at the bottom and air on top. However if liquid or solid water is small enough, such as with fog or hail or snow, they can easily be suspended in air until the particles of rain or hail get too large to remain suspended and fall. That is why clouds are in the sky. Normal laws of buoyancy do not apply to fine mist for example, nor do they apply to chlorofluorocarbons which is why they can end up extremely high. So density is sort of a meaningless concept if particles like fog or even solid dust are fine enough.
But as for the 100 C, that is not correct. If the Antarctic is at -50 C, then the few individual gaseous water molecules are also extremely cold. But we must be careful here! Temperature is a macroscopic property and not a microscopic property. So individual molecules cannot have a temperature, but a group of molecules can. However the speeds of individual molecules at -50 C is way lower than at 100 C. So gaseous water molecules can indeed move extremely slowly when all other molecules around them are cold.
Werner Brozek:
And in the liquid phase moist air is heavier, always. Right? And since water’s gaseous phase is strictly determined by temperatures over 212 F (100 C) and since temperature of the atmosphere is always lower, moist air is heavier (not lighter) than dry air.
Things get complicated really fast. Liquid water is way denser than the individual unattached water molecules. That is why lakes and oceans are at the bottom and air on top.
James McGinn:
Wait, wait, wait! Stop here. What you said so far is true. But it is not comprehensive. Gravity is one of many forces that play a role in our atmosphere. There is also electromagnetic forces. These are instrumental in helping heavier objects/particles stay suspended in our atmosphere. And there are winds. And there is the collective effect of these two together. Many people want us to believe that gravity is the only force that plays a role and that, therefore, all movement in the atmosphere must be described in context of (or strictly as the ultimate result of) convection/buoyancy. And it just ain’t so.
In my estimation, convection/bouyancy plays a much smaller role than most everybody else is assuming.
Werner Brozek:
However if liquid or solid water is small enough, such as with fog or hail or snow, they can easily be suspended in air until the particles of rain or hail get too large to remain suspended and fall. That is why clouds are in the sky. Normal laws of buoyancy do not apply to fine mist for example, nor do they apply to chlorofluorocarbons which is why they can end up extremely high. So density is sort of a meaningless concept if particles like fog or even solid dust are fine enough.
James McGinn:
Well stated! (What I wrote above I wrote before reading this last paragraph.)
Werner Brozek:
But as for the 100 C, that is not correct.
James McGinn:
At 1 ATM it is correct. The boiling temperature/pressure of H2O is/are immutable laws.
Werner Brozek:
If the Antarctic is at -50 C, then the few individual gaseous water molecules are also extremely cold.
James McGinn:
What you are suggesting is impossible. I repeat, the boiling temperature/pressure of H2O is/are immutable laws.
Werner Brozek:
But we must be careful here! Temperature is a macroscopic property and not a microscopic property. So individual molecules cannot have a temperature, but a group of molecules can.
James McGinn:
Sorry to be a contrarian, but you are wrong, Kinetic energy is kinetic energy. It can be speed, vibration, or spin, but it is just kinetic energy. (BTW, spin is greatly overlooked.)
Werner Brozek:
However the speeds of individual molecules at -50 C is way lower than at 100 C. So gaseous water molecules can indeed move extremely slowly when all other molecules around them are cold.
James McGinn:
Except for situations that involve spin (which is beyond the scope of our discussion) there is exactly zero gaseous H2O in earth’s atmosphere. See what I stated above about it being an immutable law.
Your understanding is much better than that of most people I encounter.
This whole subject has been discussed at length at the links below, follow the discussion threads to the end if you are interested.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/22/missing-component-found-in-the-evaporation-process-making-water-vapors-role-even-more-uncertain-in-climate-models/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/03/el-nino-events-and-drought-linked/
James,
It appears that you don’t understand evaporation, but confuse it with boiling. I refer you to Boyle’s Law, regarding temperature and pressure.
When liquid water is in contact with dry air, it is not in equilibrium; water molecules evaporate off the surface until the amount of water in the air creates enough vapor pressure to achieve equilibrium. When water is heated to a temperature of 100 degrees C, the vapor pressure equals that of sea-level air pressure.
An H2O molecule is less massive than other molecules in the air, ie N2, O2, Ar, CO2, O3, etc.
I hope this helps.
PS:
Cooler air holds less water vapor than warmer air.
Consider the dew.
I am sure you have sweated and then that sweat evaporated and your skin was dry again. Your body temperature is 37 C and not 100 C. However water molecules even evaporate when only at 1 C, although very little evaporation takes place then.
It is basic thermodynamics that if a very hot solid or liquid or gas is immersed into a cold environment, the hot object and the cold object will reach a common temperature after a while. H = mct and the total heat before equals the total heat after in a closed system.
The laws of thermodynamics are immutable laws. A boiling temperature is not a law.
See:
http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Physical_Chemistry/Physical_Properties_of_Matter/Phases_of_Matter/Gases/Kinetic_Theory_of_Gases/Kinetic_Theory_of_Gases
“Thermal Energy
Keep in mind that the temperature of a gas is actually a measure of its average kinetic energy, and kinetic energy of a particle is related to its velocity according to the following equation:
KE=12mv2
where KE represents kinetic energy of a particle, m equals mass, and v2 is the square of its velocity. As velocity increases so does kinetic energy. Of course the inverse is also true, that as kinetic energy increases so does velocity. You can see from this relationship how a molecule with a higher temperature will be moving faster. The temperature of the system is the average kinetic energy of its particles. Thermal energy is the total kinetic energy of all the particles in a system. Temperature, thermal energy, and the speed of a molecule are all directly related. “
So kinetic energy only depends on speed.
Also see:
http://faculty.umf.maine.edu/gretchen.legler/public.www/antarcticawebsite/sci5.htm
“Antarctica is also incredibly dry-in fact it is the driest place on the planet. The average humidity is around 5-9 percent”
If the relative humidity is above 0 percent, then there are some H2O(g) in the air. It is as simple as that.
Gloateus Maximus November 7, 2015 at 10:34 am
Gloateus Maximus:
It appears that you don’t understand evaporation, but confuse it with boiling.
James McGinn:
I understand them perfectly. You appear incapable of distinguishing between them.
Gloateus Maximus:
I refer you to Boyle’s Law, regarding temperature and pressure.
When liquid water is in contact with dry air, it is not in equilibrium; water molecules evaporate off the surface until the amount of water in the air creates enough vapor pressure to achieve equilibrium. When water is heated to a temperature of 100 degrees C, the vapor pressure equals that of sea-level air pressure.
An H2O molecule is less massive than other molecules in the air, ie N2, O2, Ar, CO2, O3, etc.
James McGinn:
You appear to not have a point.
Gloateus Maximus:
I hope this helps.
James McGinn:
If you can’t even figure out what your point is that should be a clue that there is something you don’t understand.
Werner Brozek:
If the Antarctic is at -50 C, then the FEW INDIVIDUAL GASEOUS WATER MOLECULES are also extremely cold. (Emphasis mine.)
James McGinn:
What you are suggesting is impossible. The boiling temperature/pressure of H2O is/are immutable laws.
Werner Brozek:
I am sure you have sweated and then that sweat evaporated and your skin was dry again.
James McGinn:
I don’t understand how this anecdotal evidence of evaporation (which is also a thermodynamic process–false distinction) addresses my point that the existence of gaseous water in the atmosphere is impossible given that it requires temperatures over 100 C to maintain steam (gaseous H2O) and our atmosphere is never that hot.
If you are not yet aware, allow me to hereby assert to you (and anybody reading this) that nobody has yet produced any empirical evidence for the existence of gaseous H2O (Steam) in earths atmosphere (at ambient temperatures). There is widespread belief in such, but it is just that, belief. It is not verifiable science.
Werner Brozek:
A boiling temperature is not a law.
James McGinn:
It hardly matters what semantics we use. My point is that a belief in “cold steam” is but a belief unless it has been tested/verified empirically, regardless of whether it is or is not a law.
Thanks for the response. If you are inclined to continue to insist on the existence of what has never been detected empirically I can only suggest that you view the more comprehensive discussion that has already taken place at the links previously provided.
Kindest Regards,
James McGinn
Solving Tornadoes
Werner B,
So that “self-taught” person has moved up from:
THERE IS NO STEAM (GASEOUS H2O) IN EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE.
To this:
If the Antarctic is at -50 C, then the FEW INDIVIDUAL GASEOUS WATER MOLECULES are also extremely cold.
An improvement, I suppose.
Still nonsense. Water vapor is found everywhere in the atmosphere.
Werner B,
Apologies for my mistake! I thought the newbie was saying there are a few molecules of H2O in the air. My bad.
But you had set him straight:
(Even if) “…the relative humidity is above 0 percent, then there are some H2O(g) in the air. It is as simple as that.”
Water vapor is a component of the atmosphere. Just because some self-‘educated’ person says, “Is not!” means nothing.
He just fails to understand the basics.
WB:
So kinetic energy only depends on speed.
JM:
Vibration may be negligible, but I don’t think we should dismiss spin, but I don’t want to belabor the point.
WB:
If the relative humidity is above 0 percent, then there are some H2O(g) in the air. It is as simple as that.
JM:
Okay, but why assume it is gaseous? How do you know it is not, actually, H2O(L) (Or ice or superchilled H2O)? Do you see my point?
(Don’t just assume what the consensus assumes. The consensus hardly ever knows why it believes what it believes.)
dbstealey November 7, 2015 at 4:48 pm
Werner B,
So that “self-taught” person has moved up from:
THERE IS NO STEAM (GASEOUS H2O) IN EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE.
To this:
If the Antarctic is at -50 C, then the FEW INDIVIDUAL GASEOUS WATER MOLECULES are also extremely cold.
James McGinn:
Those are Werner’s words, not mine.
And I’m not completely “self-taught”. I’m just not an automaton.
Yes, Werner’s words. If you notice the time stamps, I was acknowledging that at the same time you posted. I guess when you find a ‘gotcha’ you use it. Because you certainly don’t have a physics or chemistry argument.
And I should have known that your mind is closed to any possibility that gaseous H2O exists in the air. If you admitted that, your entire belief system would fall apart,
Werner:
Good point about sweat evaporating. McGinn believes that all water in the air is in its liquid state. He explains that by saying water molecules “clump” when they’re evaporated. But that is so trivially easy to debunk that I won’t even waste time on it.
We need to get two definitions straight before going any further. They are the meaning of “relative humidity” and “water vapour”.
For “relative humidity”, it is:
“Relative humidity (abbreviated RH) is the ratio of the partial pressure of water vapor to the equilibrium vapor pressure of water at the same temperature.”
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_humidity
For “water vapor” it is:
“water vapor
n.
Water in a gaseous state, especially when diffused as a vapor in the atmosphere and at a temperature below boiling point.”
See: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/water+vapor
So you cannot escape the fact that if the relative humidity is even 1%, you have H2O(g) mixed in with the other air molecules. If what you say is true, then everything that has ever been written about relative humidity is a bunch of garbage. As well, clouds can never form higher up where it is cooler so it can never rain nor snow nor hail.
I thought I was a pretty good high school physics and chemistry teacher before I retired. Am I losing my touch?
Am I losing my touch?
Not at all, Werner. But some folks are incapable of learning.
Werner Brozek: November 7, 2015 at 5:25 pm
JM:
Why assume it is gaseous? How do you know it is not, actually, H2O(L) (Or ice or superchilled H2O)? Do you see my point?
WB:
We need to get two definitions straight . . .
For “relative humidity”, it is: “Relative humidity (abbreviated RH) is . . .
For “water vapor” it is: “water vapor n. Water in a gaseous state, . . .
JM:
Definitions can be very seductive. They can lead your mind by the nose. Definitions can conceal false assumptions. If I define my bicycle as a Ferrari it isn’t going to go 100 miles an hour.
GB:
So you cannot escape the fact that if the relative humidity is even 1%, you have H2O(g) mixed in with the other air molecules.
JM:
Since gaseous H2O was just assumed in the definitions (not empirically determined) there is nothing to escape from. The first RH gives you no reason whatsoever to assume Gaseous H2O. The second WV simply assumes it to be gaseous. So, as it regards the issue at hand, these definitions are useless, possibly misleading. (And, as per my assertion, blatantly erroneous.)
GB:
If what you say is true, then everything that has ever been written about relative humidity is a bunch of garbage.
JM:
For the question at hand, yes, they are, “a bunch of garbage.” (However, if you are trying to predict when the moisture in moist air will collect into big enough drops to fall out of the sky, then they are very useful.)
GB:
As well, clouds can never form higher up where it is cooler so it can never rain nor snow nor hail.
JM:
This is a much more complicated issue/question. Actually, given your earlier comments I am kind of surprised you are saying this. It’s almost as if you are suggesting that the only process in the atmosphere that causes moisture to go up is convection. See my previous comments in this regard. (Also, don’t close your mind to the fact that there may be another process that you have not discovered yet that can explain how heavier moisture gets all the way up to the top of the troposphere–and sometimes even up into the lower stratosphere.
James McGinn
Solving Tornadoes
dbstealey:
And I should have known that your mind is closed to any possibility that gaseous H2O exists in the air. If you admitted that, your entire belief system would fall apart,
James McGinn:
I admit that admitting it would be very painful, because it would essentially refute my whole hypothesis on tornadogenesis, which took me four years to develop. But if it could be demonstrated empirically I would have no choice but to accept that. So, it is no small matter for me.
So you still haven’t figured out why your belief that water only “clumps” is nonsense?
The explantion is trivial. But I guess I’m not surprised that you haven’t figured it out…
dbstealey:
DB: Good point about sweat evaporating.
JM: Well, I think Werner’s point was that evaporation is a thermodynamic process and, therefore, involved the creation of steam. The implication being that only the creation of steam can be thermodynamic. Or, at least, that is how I interpreted the following:
WB: I am sure you have sweated and then that sweat evaporated and your skin was dry again. Your body temperature is 37 C and not 100 C. However water molecules even evaporate when only at 1 C, although very little evaporation takes place then. It is basic thermodynamics . . .
JM: I countered along the lines that that simply isn’t the case, the evaporation of micro droplets would also be thermodynamic. (Hydrogen bonds are still being broken, but they are the weaker bonds associated with evaporation, as explained on my webpage entitled: Why Water is Wierd.) So Werner is making a false distinction.
DB: McGinn believes that all water in the air is in its liquid state. He explains that by saying water molecules “clump” when they’re evaporated.
JM: Right. DB is correct. I believe that all water in the air is in its liquid state (and ice at lower temps). But there is exactly zero steam (except at volcano vents and such).
DB: But that is so trivially easy to debunk that I won’t even waste time on it.
JM: You insult the intelligence of our readers: who, after reading this thread, is going to be dumb enough to not realize that if you could debunk it you wouldn’t do it in a heartbeat? Also, if you could debunk it you would destroy my whole hypothesis, and I would have to make all kinds of retractions, and the retraction you owe me would be forgiven. You need to think before you make these kinds of statements.
… if you could debunk it you wouldn’t do it in a heartbeat?
Naw, I like to watch a know-it-all who can’t figure out the simple answer. ☺
dbstealey November 7, 2015 at 6:57 pm
So you still haven’t figured out why your belief that water only “clumps” is nonsense?
The explantion is trivial. But I guess I’m not surprised that you haven’t figured it out…
James McGinn:
Okay, I’m calling your bluff. Present your “trivial” explanation. Go ahead. Make my day. LOL.
It’s not a bluff, you just can’t see it.
Here’s a clue, since you’re all out: where do you draw the line?
Going to bat for dbstealey, below is your direct quote. Do you agree?
So we will ignore spin as you suggest, not that it makes any difference anyway, you say “there is exactly zero gaseous H2O in earth’s atmosphere”. So dbstealey did not put words into your mouth.
THAT is your problem! You say “water vapor is a component of the atmosphere”, but unlike dbstealey, you do not use the standard definition of water vapor, but your own concept of water vapor is, whereas dbstealey knows the true definition of water vapor.
It greatly matters! If we do not agree that water vapor is H2O(g), then any further discussion is totally pointless.
Not at all. Water evaporates from lakes or oceans and H2O(g) can naturally diffuse up into the higher atmosphere, just like any gas can diffuse in any other gas. Of course convection can happen as well.
Werner Brozek:
However if liquid or solid water is small enough, such as with fog or hail or snow, they can easily be suspended in air until the particles of rain or hail get too large to remain suspended and fall. That is why clouds are in the sky. Normal laws of buoyancy do not apply to fine mist for example, nor do they apply to chlorofluorocarbons which is why they can end up extremely high. So density is sort of a meaningless concept if particles like fog or even solid dust are fine enough.
James McGinn:
I’m not trying be contrarian here, but is there really a law of convection. Or is this just something that people arrived at by a process of elimination before they had all the facts. Moreover, if there are the exceptions that you mention (you are very perceptive, by the way, [that is unusual]) might these actually be the exceptions that refute the law.
Something to think about. (Personally, I think convection is nonsense. It plays almost no role whatsoever in our atmosphere, in my opinion.)
I have never heard of clumps of water evaporating. Of course a strong wind on a lake can create this effect, but that is not evaporation. If you have a reference for clumps of water evaporating, please let me know. The site below just talks about individual molecules evaporating:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23574252
“In the observed minimum free energy process, the water molecule diffuses to the surface, and tends to rotate so that its dipole and one O-H bond are oriented outward as it crosses the Gibbs dividing surface.”
Werner Brozek
November 7, 2015 at 7:27 pm
IMO the moderators of this blog bend over backwards to allow raving lunatics to spew errant nonsense ad infinitum, but if those whose name dare not be mentioned for advocating a scientifically defensible position (to which I don’t subscribe) contrary to the consensus on radiative forcing and the GHE, then surely this totally unsupportable drivel should be banned.
Does every monomaniacal, uneducated ignoramus get his say here forever, or is there a limit? How divorced from objective reality are commenters allowed to remain for how long?
That water vapor, ie gaseous molecular H2O, is a vital component of earth’s atmosphere is a fact. All the evidence in the world supports this observation, with none against it. The hydrological cycle could not exist without it. The marvelous human cooling system wouldn’t work without evaporative cooling. Meteorology would be a nonsense without relative humidity.
James still refuses to state whence the loon imagine dew originates.
Time to shut James’ running off at, if not indeed foaming at, the mouth off for good, IMHO. The spigot of spew should be turned off. The self-appointed El Presidente has already gotten far more free publicity for his crazed site than the fool deserves.
Do you have a definition of convection that is different from everyone else? Have you never seen a campfire where the hot air rises right above the fire? And if hot air rises, other air has to take its place from the sides and wind is created. This happens on a global scale as well. Convection is what causes sea breezes and land breezes.
Werner Brozek November 7, 2015 at 7:27 pm
WB:
It greatly matters!
JM:
It’s simple. Don’t fret over this:
Gas (mono-molecular H2O): gaseous H2O, steam, H2O (g)
Everything thing else is liquid:
Liquid (multi-molecular H2O): evaporate, water vapor, vapor, moist air, condensate, H2O (L)
BTW, there is no standard. You have to be explicit and consisent. And you have to ignore the peanut gallery that refuses to be explicit and consistent.
Unfortunately, in the larger world there is no convention, there is no standard. All of these words are used interchangeably/ambiguously. (This is the source of much of the confusion.)
But I think what confuses people the most is the fact that H2O (L) (water vapor, vapor, moist air and evaporate) can and often are perfectly invisible. People tend to assume that only steam can be invisible, and it just ain’t so. The moist air (H2O(L)) that is in the room that you are in at this very moment is invisible.
BTW, gaseous H2O (H2O (g)) and steam are always invisible. People talk about seeing steam, what they are actually seeing is water vapor, vapor, moist air, condensate, or evaporate.
There are many ways to be confused on this subject. Unfortunately there are a lot of people that just refuse to be explicit and consistent (dbstealey).
WB:
Water evaporates from lakes or oceans and H2O(g) can naturally diffuse up into the higher atmosphere, just like any gas can diffuse in any other gas.
JM:
I agree. (Except with the assumption that it is a gas.) And the same is true of H2O (L) (water vapor, vapor, moist air, condensate, and evaporate). It too can diffuse and it too can be suspended. So, diffusion is not evidence that confirms the existence of H2O(g) since the same processes apply to H2O(L).
WB:
Of course convection can happen as well.
JM:
I mostly disagree. In my opinion convection is a very weak, slow, benign process. (It’s has never been measured or tested. And there is no quantitative analysis/assessment of it that does not involve a lot of unsubstantiated assumptions [convection is to meteorology what CO2 Forcing is to climatology]). Another problem with convection is that it is hard to come to any kind of agreement as to what it is or how to define it, thus it is hard to quantify. And what can’t be quantified can’t be tested. So, it persists mostly because it is so vague nobody can test it.
Wind happens also. And the strongest winds are located in the jet streams. And when a jet steam entrance is pointing downward (the most explicit example of which being tornadoes) it can cause updrafts. When the exit of a jet stream is pointed down it can cause downdrafts.
McGinn says:
You have to be explicit and consisent. And you have to ignore the peanut gallery that refuses to be explicit and consistent.
But McGinn refuses, or is unable to provide any verifiable, testable, real world experiments that show water vapor does not exist in the atmosphere. As other readers have shown in their links, numerous experiments over many decades explicitly demonstrate that water in its gas state exists everywhere in the air.
How does McGinn get around that inconvenient fact? He does it by refusing to admit the results of experiments done using the necessary instruments!
Once again McGinn violates the Scientific Method, by saying in effect that measuring the quantity of H2O(g) cannot be done by using instruments (mass spectroscopes and related instruments) to measure it! As usual, the onus is on McGinn to falsify the results of those instruments.
Next, McGinn says:
Quote me directly.
OK, I will. McGinn says:
It’s not possible for me to dispute the existence of what has never been detected.
But it is possible. And the onus is on you to show convincingly that H2O(g) does not exist in the air; the onus is not on those skeptical of your conjecture because skeptics have nothing to prove. You do. But your only support is via endless assertions: you have no other empirical, testable verification of your claims.
Next: you insult the intelligence of our readers:
Good science involves prevarication.
Translation: ‘Good science requires lying.’ I do not agree. I think that was asserted to cover up McGinn’s own prevarication.
Next, from McGinn:
I’m just a scientist who happened upon a notion…
Wrong, and wrong. When McGinn cannot support his strange beliefs (“water vapor (steam) does not exist in the atmosphere”, and: “Personally, I think convection is nonsense”), he typically asserts that everyone else is wrong:
Yourself, Phil, and Micro6500 failed to provide any empirical support for your opinions. …
…ignoring the posted links to experiments showing that water vapor does in fact exist in the air.
And followed by more of McGinn’s baseless assertions:
You lost the argument… Deal with it (You never had a chance.)… You believed something that isn’t true. Don’t waste time griping about it. …you lost the argument. & etc.
And after several of us supported Prof Richard Feynman, McGinn stated that Feynman was also wrong, then said:
…your hero, Feynman, knew nothing
I suspect that other readers here would disagree with McGinn.
McGinn is blind to the links posted by other readers. He said:
…you provided all the anecdotal observations, imaginary experiments (complete with claims of data that nobody can find) and consensus claims that are typical of pathological sciences. …it is incredibly strange how irrational people are when it comes to the atmosphere.
The talent I brought to the subject.
As I’ve pointed out repeatedly: McGinn is inflicted with psychological projection. He routinely takes the comments of other readers, and turns those comments back on them. That’s McGinn’s tactic, but all it shows is his projection.
And McGinn quotes the same Dr. Feynman…
“If it disagrees with experiment, it’s WRONG…”
…but after McGinn was repeatedly asked for experiments verifying his conjecture that H2O(g) does not exist in the atmosphere, he never produced any verifiable, testable, empirical experiments to support that belief.
McGinn says:
The time has come for you to make some retractions, as we agreed. Get on with it.
And once again I ask: where did we ever agree to that?? It appears that McGinn just makes up things as he goes along.
Finally, Richard Courtney has asked McGinn this question repeatedly:
I yet again ask you, who elected you President of the strangely named Solving Tornadoes, and when?
I would also ask McGinn: when are the next nominations for President held? What are the requirements for nomination and election. And finally I ask McGinn: isn’t it true that you fabricated being ‘elected’ as President, and that there was never any official nomination/election process?
If I’m wrong I will apologize. Just provide verifiable evidence that the process was done; when, where, and where were nominations and the election results published?
Or is that just like everything else; completely fabricated nonsense?
There is no moist air in my room. The relative humidity is probably 30% so all water is the form of individual gas molecules of H2O(g). And H2O(g) is perfectly transparent. If the air outside is at 30% humidity, you can see for miles and the moon and stars are perfectly clearly visible. But when you have clouds or fog due to small liquid droplets, then the moon cannot be seen clearly.
H2O(l) always blocks light, but H2O(g) never blocks light. If I am in a wet sauna, then I can see the fog and I know there are clusters of H2O(l) suspended in the air. If there is no fog in my room, there is no H2O(l) in my room. Why should properties of H2O(l) change in my room versus everywhere else?
Werner Borzek:
Your claim that “H2O(g) never blocks light” is falsified by the evidence ( http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_vibrational_spectrum.html ).
Javier:
I have just now noticed your daft post that says to me in total
NO!
Your reply that I have quoted here demonstrates that you cannot read and don’t understand plain English. That’s what I already new.
For the benefit of you and anyone else who cannot read, the method considers the pattern of warming in the troposphere.
Model emulations of greenhouse gas (GHG) warming indicate between 2 and 3 times as much warming at altitude as at the surface. If there is not enhanced warming at altitude (and there is not) then any warming is not of the kind that climate models emulate for GHG warming.
Please desist from your childish behaviour: it is boorish.
Richard
Richard,
You are reaching the wrong conclusion from that experiment. There are many alternative explanations for a model not agreeing with real data being the most obvious that the model does not represent reality. We have had so much experience with models failing to reproduce reality that I am surprised that you can extract conclusions other than the model is not working.
It is only a hypothesis that there should be 2-3 times as much warming at altitude as at the surface, we don’t really know how much extra warming we should expect at altitude and if that depends on water vapor local concentrations or not. This could be really variable as local water vapor concentrations are very variable.
I agree that since GHG theory predicts more warming at altitude (the amount depends on suppositions), that speaks against GHGs being responsible for all the warming, but since we do not know based on theory how much warming should be produced as that depends on GHG transient sensitivity and after 25 years we have not been able to determine it, we have no idea of how much warming to expect at altitude and thus this test does not measure the fraction of natural vs. man-made warming. To pretend that it does is to take your hypothesis and suppositions to the category of facts.
You have not told me how to distinguish natural warming from man-made warming, you have just told me a hypothetic way of doing it that has failed.
Javier:
I drew no conclusions and I made no mention of any “experiment”. I reported the data analysis method used by Ben Santer to detect anthropogenic (i.e. man-made) global warming (AGW).
If you want to argue with that then take it up with Santer and not me. You also need to take it up with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) because they say the same.
You make another of your daft and unsubstantiated assertions when you write
NO!
I have reported the ‘fingerprint’ of AGW is absent from the balloon data obtained since 1958. This absence demonstrates there is no discernible contribution of AGW to global warming since 1958.
You are claiming AGW exists but does not exhibit the ‘fingerprint’ Santer and the IPCC say it has: so take up your unsubstantiated claim with them, not me.
Furthermore, the AGW ‘fingerprint’ is a warming rate at altitude of between 2 and 3 times the warming rate at sea level. Hence, if there were faster warming at altitude then the difference between the two rates would indicate the range of possible percentages of the warming which is AGW.
As is your usual practice you demonstrate complete inability to accept any information which contradicts your superstitious belief in AGW.
Richard
Thank you! Would it be totally correct to say that H2O(g) is totally transparent to visible light? Granted, there might be an odd wavelength that is absorbed here and there, but not that anyone would notice without special equipment.
Werner Brozek November 7, 2015 at 10:41 pm
(BTW, I am really enjoying the clarity of your presentation–its refreshing.)
JM: People tend to assume that only steam can be invisible, and it just ain’t so. The moist air (H2O(L)) that is in the room that you are in at this very moment is invisible.
WB: There is no moist air in my room. The relative humidity is probably 30% . . .
JM: That *is* moist air.
WB: . . . so all water is the form of individual gas molecules of H2O(g). And H2O(g) is perfectly transparent.
JM: It’s not H2O(g), in my estimation. It’s H2O(L). (if it was H2O(g) it would be over 212 F. The reason it is transparent is because the microdroplets are smaller than the wavelength of a photon. (Which is the same reason H2O(g) is transpaent.)
WB: If the air outside is at 30% humidity, you can see for miles and the moon and stars are perfectly clearly visible. But when you have clouds or fog due to small liquid droplets, then the moon cannot be seen clearly. H2O(l) always blocks light, but H2O(g) never blocks light.
JM: H2O(l) does not always blocks light. Only if its diameter is larger than a photon will it block (refract) light. Thus the clarity of air is not evidence of H2O(g). That the clarity of air is evidence of H2O(g) is kind of a scientific version of an urban myth.
WB: If I am in a wet sauna, then I can see the fog and I know there are clusters of H2O(l) suspended in the air. If there is no fog in my room, there is no H2O(l) in my room. Why should properties of H2O(l) change in my room versus everywhere else?
JM: It’s simply a function of the diameter of the microdroplet. If it is larger than a photon it will refract light. High humidity allows drops to be bigger. When a lot of them are bigger than a photon they become visible as fog.
It is interesting to note that the argument that you presented was based on absence of evidence to the contrary. And the evidence you presented was anecdotal. What if I didn’t have knowledge of photons and droplet diameter, would you have thought you presented a slam dunk dispute of my assertion? A year ago I had the same discussion with somebody except that I didn’t yet have this explanation regarding photon length. Afterwards they seemed to think that they had proven their point. Actually they hadn’t proven anything. All they did was present me with some anecdotal evidence and they then went on to form a conclusion based on absence of evidence to the contrary. This is very common. Us humans tend to be most easily convinced into believing something that coincides with our existing beliefs. New discoveries have an uphill battle to be established in the human mind.
Terry Oldberg November 8, 2015 at 8:03 am
Werner Borzek:
Your claim that “H2O(g) never blocks light” is falsified by the evidence ( http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_vibrational_spectrum.html ).
Excellent website! Thank you for this. Wow. The more I learn about water the more confusing it appears. (In that regard, I have some contributions from my own website which I will soon post in this thread. It deals with the non-Newtonian aspect of H2O.)
Along those lines here is another contribution to the confusion:
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/unsettled-science-uncertainty-around-the-continuum-absorption-of-water-vapour/
If you read the comments you will see that just about everybody has their own unique interpretation of the meaning of the information in this paper. I too am a contributor: Solving Tornadoes
Werner Brozek November 7, 2015 at 7:55 pm
(Personally, I think convection is nonsense. It plays almost no role whatsoever in our atmosphere, in my opinion.)
WB: Do you have a definition of convection that is different from everyone else? Have you never seen a campfire where the hot air rises right above the fire?
Hot air balloon, dirigibles, these are the examples everybody uses. But these are not definitions, these are descriptions. And you don’t see much discussion of the exceptions that you mentioned above.
On the site Quora I asked whether it had ever been tested and that caused somewhat of an uproar from the thought police:
https://www.quora.com/Has-the-buoyancy-that-supposedly-underlies-storms-ever-been-measured
WB: And if hot air rises, other air has to take its place from the sides and wind is created. This happens on a global scale as well. Convection is what causes sea breezes and land breezes.
Does it? How do we know?
Johannes:
However, there is no support for the claim that unsaturated moist air is heavier than dry air
Jim McGinn:
I believe there is support for the claim, albeit indirect. For more on this follow this link: http://wp.me/p4JijN-3X Start reading where it mentions, “history of the steam engine.” I argue that this is hard evidence that demonstrates H2Os tendency to clump up at ambient temperatures. In the context of Avogadro’s Law this would prove it must be heavier. Beyond that I also would mention that there is no dispute for the claim that unsaturated moist air is heavier than dry air.
Johannes:
. . . this effect is well accounted for in quantitative descriptions of convective storms.
Jim McGinn:
Not much of anything is well accounted for in “quantitative descriptions of convective storms,” in my estimation. It’s about as vague as vague can be. And most of the math is there to create the illusion of sophistication and conciseness when in reality none of it is measurable, testable.
Is convection just the refrigerator door upon which we attach the postcard of what we want storms to be?
http://t.co/cpQIoREmtp
McGinn asks:
So what have you got, besides some indirect (model-based) evidence, and lots of (mostly bought and paid for) opinions?says that hot air balloons don’t count when it comes to bouyancy. That’s because that example is very inconvenient.
Not true, hot air balloons are an empirical demonstration of bouyancy. Hot air balloons have very high water vapor content. That is part of the reason they are bouyant. Burning hydrocarbons produces a lot of H2O.
**********
So, when are the next nominations for President of your tornado organization, Mr President? Same month as last time?
Photons can interact with just electrons in an atom as can be seen with the photoelectric effect and the Compton effect. If wavelength was important, this should not happen.
Anyone who believes there is no water vapor in the air cannot accept the lapse rate, either.
Sooner or later people who comeup with new ‘theories’ will either be proven to be correct, or their ‘theory’ will get tangled up in many other aspects of physics. Like the lapse rate. That’s what I see happening with McGinn and Javier.
But McGinn can easily prove he’s right, in the one way that is not arguable: produce a series of consistent, accurate predictions based on his conjecture that there is “no water vapor (steam) in the atmosphere”.
The one thing every Conjecture, Hypothesis, Theory and Law has in common is their ability to make correct predictions, repeatedly. If they don’t, their conjecture (that’s all it is if they can’t make correct predictions) has been falsified.
We read a lot of McGinn’s conjecture here. But he never posts a replicable, verifiable, empirical experiment he has done to support his beliefs. So, his conjecture remains a conjecture.
Werner Brozdek November 8, 2015 at 11:56 am
The reason it is transparent is because the microdroplets are smaller than the wavelength of a photon.
Photons can interact with just electrons in an atom as can be seen with the photoelectric effect and the Compton effect. If wavelength was important, this should not happen.
James McGinn:
Individual H2O molecules, H2O(g), also have electrons, so . . .
dbstealey:
dbstealey:
Not true, hot air balloons are an empirical demonstration of bouyancy.
James McGinn:
Yes, hot air balloons are an empirical demonstration of the bouyancy of . . . hot air balloons.
dbstealey:
Hot air balloons have very high water vapor content. That is part of the reason they are bouyant. Burning hydrocarbons produces a lot of H2O.
James McGinn:
I wonder why they don’t spray mist into the flames? Hmm.
(LIkewise, I wonder why nobody has built a car that runs off the power of evaporation? Hmm.)
Werner Brozek November 7, 2015 at 7:41 pm
the evaporation of micro droplets would also be thermodynamic
I have never heard of clumps of water evaporating. Of course a strong wind on a lake can create this effect, but that is not evaporation. If you have a reference for clumps of water evaporating, please let me know. The site below just talks about individual molecules evaporating:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23574252
JM: That seems to be the conventional assumption. Why, nobody knows. However, judging from some of the comments I’ve gotten on other threads recently this assumption might stem from a talk that Richard Feynman did over 60 years ago on evaporation. That is strange because if you see the talk (available on youtube and other site) you will see that he was bending over backward to express that his talk was not definitive and was only address the brownian motion implications of evaporation.
There is no accounting for what people think they see. The human imagination tends to fill in details, like children with fairy tails. And they are more attached to their created detals than they are to what was actually presented.
“In the observed minimum free energy process, the water molecule diffuses to the surface, and tends to rotate so that its dipole and one O-H bond are oriented outward as it crosses the Gibbs dividing surface.”
I took a different approach to theorizing H2O polarity, hydrogen bonding, and implications thereof. I decided that I would develop an understanding that explained all of the outlier phenomena, one of which is non-Newtonian fluids:
Solution to the molecular mechanism underlying non-Newtonian fluids?
http://t.co/Uftino7mHm
What is the molecular mechanism underlying non-Newtonian fluids?
http://t.co/o8ZWxviFEX
You lost me here. The oxygen end of water is always negative and the hydrogen end is always positive. This is because of the large electronegativity difference between oxygen and hydrogen. There are strong polar covalent bonds between each oxygen and hydrogen of each individual water molecule in a liquid. Furthermore, there are always attractions between the positive hydrogen end of one water molecule and the negative oxygen end of the adjacent water molecule. This is the hydrogen bond and it is never neutralized since you simply cannot reduce the partial charges to zero, regardless how wish to rearrange the water molecules relative to each other. So partially positive hydrogen atoms never “just kind of float”. They are always attracted to this or that oxygen atom nearby. And hydrogen bonds are broken when a liquid water molecule evaporates or when a solid water molecule sublimates.
When a solid water molecule sublimates, the hydrogen bond is broken, but the escaping molecule does not magically reach a temperature of 100 C. The most basic laws of thermodynamics would not allow that. However should it happen that a water molecule reaches 100 C due to the bell shaped distribution of energies, that escaped water molecule would rapidly lose its energy to the nearby gas molecules.
Werner Brozek November 8, 2015 at 4:01 pm
You lost me here. The oxygen end of water . . .
Werner, this thread is becoming too long so I started a new one at the end of this comment section. See my response there.
James McGinn November 7, 2015 at 6:40 pm
dbstealey:
And I should have known that your mind is closed to any possibility that gaseous H2O exists in the air. If you admitted that, your entire belief system would fall apart,
James McGinn:
I admit that admitting it would be very painful, because it would essentially refute my whole hypothesis on tornadogenesis, which took me four years to develop. But if it could be demonstrated empirically I would have no choice but to accept that. So, it is no small matter for me.
Consider it refuted, apart from your complete misunderstanding of the phase diagram which leads to this error there is a basic experiment which shows that you are wrong.
Take an evacuated vessel at 30ºC, ~2.2 L volume, add to it ~0.09 gm H2O, all the water will evaporate giving a pressure of ~5.5kPa. If your hypothesis of the water only being in clusters of ~10 molecules were correct the pressure would be at least ten times less.
A simple benchtop experiment to measure the vapor pressure of water is described here:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed059p337
See also:
http://www.fizica.unibuc.ro/Fizica/Studenti/Cursuri/doc/VFilip/IntThPh/Lucrari_practice/Vapour_pressure_of_water_at_high_temperature.pdf
Actually, I read Mr Mosher’s posts with interest. All positions are welcome on this site, I thought (other than those that violate the site’s rules, which Mosher obviously doesn’t.)
And he is right – there is no science that is “settled”. None. If you think there is, please tell us which one. Otherwise, admit that our knowledge is limited, and there is more to discover.
I hope that Steve will tell his comrade in arms Mann that the science isn’t settled:
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/08/11/global-warming-is-settled-science-michael-mann-on-bill-maher/
Also the academic unions Mann says claim that catastrophic man-made global warming is “settled science”.
I too look for Steve’s comments because they tend to add some missing perspective and alternative thought. Even if I don’t agree, I still am stimulated to broaden my considerations.
As a stationary engr. who managed the facility for a dental research institution, I gained the meager scientific knowledge I possess by ‘osmosis’ (if you will) from the generosity of the staff I worked in support of. I am always willing to consider the writings of those who are educated and/or more experienced in my chosen topics of study.
Steven, you have to add the killer caveat to your key “settled science #2”: ceteris paribus. Certainly the almost 2 decade pause with continuing rise in CO2 (I’m sure you don’t seriously buy into the pause buster paper) must be because something else is going on that is at least a partial match for CO2 – i.e. CO2’s effect is not as large as advertized. The possibility also exists that a healthy feedback is negative, directly arising from the resistance to the ceteris paribus warming. This is not a trivial critique. The blatant broad daylight crime of the ‘pause buster’ by those whose theory is under question is strong evidence that it has been a worry. I would say enough of a worry to have made a number of warming proponent climate scientists psychologically ill.
Actually Steven, CO2 is just another conduit for atmospheric cooling and regulation.
It does not and can not “trap” heat in the atmosphere.
Your brain is stuck in a LIE !!!
And let’s not forget that the ONLY warming in the whole satellite era was the 0.26C step from the Large El Nino and associated events.. certainly nothing to do with CO2.
That means that there is absolutely no CO2 warming signature in the whole 37 years of reliable global temperature measurements.
Yet this is where CO2 has been rising the quickest.
This is something you cannot get around.
+1
For christs’ sake read the missive. My believe is that as an English teacher the science has past beyond your ability to understand. If that is the case it is best that you do not comment and prove it conclusively.
This is meant for Mosher !!
You should not teach English, so many mistakes in just 3 short sentences.
emsnews,
I was gonna say something similar, until he made it clear which side he was on.
I don’t generally critcize any skeptics. The alarmist contingent does that enough. After all, it’s their job.
I will agree with you on the first part, Steven. RGB makes the point himself IMO that complex systems have emergent phenomena that can potentialy be understood, modeled, predicted without knowing the details of the underlying physics. The layers, in large part, can speak for themselves. That is not to say that the climate can be successfully predicted long term, but rather, that the 1-4 may not be a very good guide to achieving that prediction. In fact, I see 1-4 as more of a brute force/doomed for failure approach. After that Steven, your post drifts political more than scientific.
Anyways, thank you RGB for the post. As usual it has sent my mind in many enjoyable directions, the least of which is climate.
In answer to Mr Mosher, very nearly all sceptics (apart from a tiny fringe most of whom seem to be paid by believing activist groups to discredit true sceptics) accept that the greenhouse effect has been experimentally demonstrated, that (all other things being equal) CO2 will cause some warming, and that Man has caused some fraction of the increase in CO2.
It is, however, legitimate to question the magnitude of our influence on climate, particularly in view of the empirical evidence that the world is not warming anything like as fast as the models had predicted. To accept the empirical evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas but to deny the evidence that it is not warming the Earth as predicted is to be inconsistent.
Monckton of Brenchley:
You say
YES!
For the benefit of any newbies who don’t understand this matter I again post the following 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 discernibly (but may be altering global temperature estimates) although there are good reasons to think UHI has some effect on global temperature. 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.
Richard
Richard,
The global melting of glaciers is 5000 years unprecedented in magnitude. The null hypothesis is falsified. Glaciers are specially sensitive to GHGs so they constitute a good place to test the null hypothesis.
http://i1039.photobucket.com/albums/a475/Knownuthing/Glacier%20fluctuations_zpslp2fbufk.png
http://kochj.brandonu.ca/pages_2006.pdf
Ötzi doesn’t lie.
Javier says:
The global melting of glaciers is 5000 years unprecedented in magnitude.
Javier, that is a baseless assertion, and flat wrong. It shows you are not familiar with the Holocene:
http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg
Looking back 5000 years we see that the planet was much warmer than it is now, so ipso facto there were more retreating glaciers then.
Furthermore, the planet is still recovering from the LIA, so naturally there will be retreating glaciers. It’s all natural, and as Dr. Roy Spencer points out: the climate Null hypothesis has never been falsified.
“In answer to Mr Mosher, very nearly all sceptics (apart from a tiny fringe most of whom seem to be paid by believing activist groups to discredit true sceptics) accept that the greenhouse effect has been experimentally demonstrated, that (all other things being equal) CO2 will cause some warming, and that Man has caused some fraction of the increase in CO2.” ~ Monckton
So, the real skeptics who don’t think CO2 does what “Dr.” James E. Hansen says about CO2 warming the surface by 33 degrees are all paid by “big oil” or “big green” or “big socialism” or something else sinister? Wow. That is what the alarmists are always saying about all of us who don’t buy the “97%” consensus. Where may I send my invoice for services rendered?
Over time I have collected a lot of posts from all over the place that question the very idea that CO2 does what Hansen claimed. I grew up during the space race and remember the development of the “US standard atmosphere” in which thousands (or more I guess) of our best scientists worked to develop a theory of how the atmosphere worked to aid our space efforts and the developing aviation industry. I just can’t persuade myself they were all in the pay of some dark and sinister group seeking to discredit the luke-warmers.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/search?q=1976+US+Standard+Atmosphere
I will not link to those “evil” people who site policy says we can not mention. But the following two short posts give a different view from the normal luke-warm stuff that is now supposed to be the “skeptic’s consensus” according to Monckton.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/11/even-lukewarmer-position-on-global.html
https://okulaer.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/why-atmospheric-mass-not-radiation-p2/
The Scottish Sceptic who posts here often once did a very nice post on the most evil group according to many here that he called “[self snipped banned word]: good physics – appalling PR.” I would link to that short post by that would send the whole post to the automated purgatory.
The take away from this post is that there are a lot of skeptics who don’t buy that the atmosphere operates like Hansen preaches. We are right and after this CO2 delusion is over (perhaps centuries from now) we will be proven correct. No one pays us Monckton.
dbstealey,
Precisely the point. The planet has been cooling on average for the last 5200 years so it is not normal that glaciers have retreated to a point last seen 5200 years ago. In these last 5000 years the glaciers have not retreated so much or Ötzi could not have been found. And Ötzi is not alone. We are uncovering things buried in ice 5200 years ago all over the planet’s glaciers.
Javier says:
And Ötzi is not alone. We are uncovering things buried in ice 5200 years ago all over the planet’s glaciers.
You really can’t see the point??
If things that were frozen are now thawing out, that can mean only one thing: at one time, they were warmer than now. Then they froze.
This is seen in villages in Greenland, which are now thawing out for the first time in a ≈thousand years; when they first froze over, it was as warm as now. Before that, it was warmer.
So rather than your argument supporting your belief, it debunks what you believe; it shows that the MWP was warmer than today — and before the MWP, there were even warmer periods. Did you not even look at the charts I posted?
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
Sorry about your belief system. It just cannot withstand reality.
dbstealey November 7, 2015 at 3:17 am
climate4you.com – Ole Humlum – Professor, University of Oslo Department of Geosciences – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
That’s a good Alley reconstruction, I’ve added it to the WUWT Paleoclimate Reference Page:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/paleoclimate/
This one below, that shows the GISP2 temperature and EPICA DomeC CO2 reconstruction, also helps people to see that we are not at the warmest point of this interglacial, and we are in fact on the down-slide into another glacial period or “ice age”:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="578"]
dbstealey,
You are the one not seeing the point because:
I am talking glaciers’ length and you are jumping to global temperatures and showing pictures of Greenland ice-core temperature proxies.
Now, the argument that there is AGW is incontrovertible. Let’s see it:
1. 5,200 yr BP glaciers advanced globally as a result of an abrupt cooling event and lots of organisms got buried in ice all over the world, between them:
– Ötzi, the ice-man from the Alps
– The Quelccaya plant (Peru). Thompson, L.G. et al. 2006. Abrupt tropical climate change: Past and present. PNAS 103, 10536–10543.
– A tree-trunk uncovered by Mark Meier in the South Cascade Glacier (Washington State; same citation).
So climate was warmer immediately before 5,200 yr BP than at any time afterwards until present.
2. Present warming has unburied those remains.
This demonstrates that glaciers are now shorter than during Medieval Warm Period, Roman Warm Period and Minoan Warm Period. I am not saying climate is warmer, just that glaciers are shorter. Why?
You have put an ice-core delta 18-O temperature proxy. I will show you another one that has been taken from Huascarán Glacier in Peru, that agrees with the fact that glaciers are now shorter than in any period in the last 5,000 years.
http://i1039.photobucket.com/albums/a475/Knownuthing/Huascaran%20glacier_zpseki9rkkg.png
Global reconstructions of glacier length say the same: Glaciers are now shorter than in any period of the last 5000 years. You can face the evidence or ignore it, but you cannot say that the evidence doesn’t exist or that it doesn’t say what it says.
Javier,
You’re hanging your hat on a single, very unusual anomaly: the 5200 year cooling event. When you have to pick such an unusual event, your premise is very shaky. You say:
You are the one not seeing the point…
Oh, I see your point all right: you are a climate alarmist, trying to argue that the current natural global warming is unusual and unprecedented. It’s not, as I’ve shown in the posted charts.
Next, you say:
So climate was warmer immediately before 5,200 yr BP than at any time afterwards until present.
Yes, the planet was warmer many times both before and after that than it is now. Each warming episode was entirely natural, just like the current natural warming. There is nothing observed now that cannot be completely explained by natural variability.
Next, you assert:
The null hypothesis is falsified.
A baseless assertion, and 100% wrong. I’ve pointed out that a well known Climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer, stated years ago that the climate Null Hypothesis has never been falsified. You assert otherwise, but who are you? You’re just someone who claims that:
Glaciers are specially sensitive to GHGs.
Nonsense. By ‘GHG’ everyone knows you mean CO2. That tiny trace gas has risen from 3 parts in 10,000, to only 4 parts in 10,000 over more than a century. You claim that is causing glaciers to recede! That is ridiculous.
Next, you say that global warming…
…demonstrates that glaciers are now shorter than during Medieval Warm Period, Roman Warm Period and Minoan Warm Period.
Well, DUH. Currently, the planet is still emerging from one of the coldest episodes of the entire Holocene. Naturally, glaciers have started retreating. And you ignore all the evidence showing that Greenland was much warmer than now during the MWP — and warmer still before that. Just like now, the planet’s temperature fluctuates naturally, and you have no convincing evidence showing that human CO2 emissions affect glaciers at all. That is just a baseless assertion on your part.
Your belief in the magical qualities of CO2 is silly. It must be your religion, because science does not support the belief that a small change in a tiny trace gas is making the planet’s 160,000 glaciers retreat. All you are doing is cherry-picking those that are retreating, and ignoring all advancing glaciers. That’s called confirmation bias, and you have it bad. If well-mixed CO2 caused glaciers to retreat, they would all be retreating. But they aren’t. Just like your Arctic ice scare, that isn’t happening.
Monckton of Brenchley:
You err in claiming that the models “predict.” Instead they “project.”
A prediction is a kind of proposition. That it is a proposition ties a model that makes predictions to logic. A projection is not a proposition. That it is not a proposition frees a model that makes projections from logic.
Predictions are falsifiable but projections are not. Predictions convey information to a policy maker about the outcomes from his/her policy decisions but projections do not. In making policy a policy maker needs information about the outcomes from his/her policy decisions hence he/she needs predictions. Climatologists have given him/her only projections. Thus there is not currently a logical basis for making policy. When “prediction” and “projection” are treated as synonyms it can sound as though this basis exists when it does not.
Javier
November 7, 2015 at 8:56 am
What makes you think that whatever warming has occurred since the end of the LIA is man-made?
It is not just remains from the Holocene Optimum 5000 years ago that have been uncovered, but also from intervening warm periods, such as the Minoan, Roman and Medieval Warm Periods. Passes in the Swiss Alps now opening up again for the first time since the Medieval WP have revealed items not just from Oetzi’s time, but from about 3000, 2000 and 1000 years ago.
The warmer and cooler cycles are naturally-occurring phases in all interglacials. There is no evidence of man-made global warming.
Terry Oldberg
November 7, 2015 at 8:56 am
Yet IPCC relies on model “projections” to recommend policy actions for political leaders.
Gloateus Maximus:
Yes, though projections do not support policy actions IPCC represents to political leaders that they do. It does so by drawing false or unproved conclusions from arguments.
dbstealey
November 7, 2015 at 9:23 am
The largest by far and most important mass of ice on the planet is growing, as are the glaciers which flow from it. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet contains most of the fresh water on earth. With the much smaller West AIS, Antarctica is covered by 90% of all the world’s ice and 70% of its surface fresh water.
Antarctica has not warmed, as the falsified hypothesis of AGW predicts it should, and both sea ice and land ice there is growing. Javier’s faith in AGW is thus shown false.
Mark,
Does the Maxwell mass/gravity/pressure model correctly predict the temperatures of the surface and atmospheres of Venus and Mars?
Mark,
I found this, claiming that the model works for Venus but not Mars, due to thinness of its atmosphere:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/11/derivation-of-entire-33c-greenhouse.html
dbstealey,
Nope. I am hanging my hat on all evidence showing global glaciers not being so short since 5200 years ago… until present. This is undeniable.
You are as wrong on this as you are on everything else. I’ve been accused of being a right-wing science d*n**r in other fora for defending that most of the warming is natural, as if I could care less for petty US politics.
Science conclusively demonstrates that world glaciers are now shorter on average than at any time in the past 5000 years. You pick your favourite explanation for this anomaly. A lot of glacierologists think that this is because the planet is now warmer than in the past 5000 years. I don’t. I believe glacier dynamics have been affected by a small change in a tiny trace gas that science defends is capable of such localized warming.
Until you come up with a convincing explanation on why global glaciers average is now shorter than past 5000 years any discussion on Greenland temperatures or vikings is way beyond the point. We are not discussing that. We are discussing glacier length. An anomaly that only AGW can explain.
Javier,
Your statement is not only deniable, but easily shown false.
Many retreating glaciers have revealed remains much less than 5000 years old. Here are some 1000 year-old tree stumps recently exposed in Alaska:
http://www.livescience.com/39819-ancient-forest-thaws.html
Glacial advance and retreat happening now is no different from in previous warming and cooling cycles of the Holocene.
As noted, the ice sheet that matters by far the most, the EAIS, is growing.
Sorry, but glaciology provides no support whatsoever for the repeatedly falsified hypothesis of man-made global warming.
Gloateus Maximus,
Nothing. Probably most of the warming since LIA is natural, but on top of that we are getting some AGW. It is simply not possible to be otherwise. Claims that is 100% natural or 100% man-made are ridiculous. Simply we have no way of quantifying natural and man-made fractions of warming. But we do have proof that AGW is occurring. Glacier length is in my opinion the strongest proof.
Gloateus Maximus,
That you find some glaciers retreating less than 5000 years does not demonstrate that current glacier retreat is not anomalous, as not all glaciers retreat at the same speed or at the same time. The finding of glaciers that have retreated 5000 years in different parts of the world and the global average showed in the figure from Koch and Clague 2006 are conclusive proof of anomalous glacier retreat.
Richardscourtney said “For the benefit of any newbies who don’t understand this matter I again post the following explanation.”
Thank you Lord Monckton and Dr. Courtney, from a newbie who is still trying to make sense of all this!
Javier
November 7, 2015 at 11:54 am
There is no proof of AGW. There is not even any evidence of it. If you can find some, there’s a Nobel Prize in it for you.
Glacier length shows only that the LIA is over. Glacier length now is well within normal limits. Not that glaciers are retreating everywhere. Quite the opposite. Local conditions affect their ebb and flow.
Glaciers in many areas are where they were during the Medieval Warm Period or are longer. All the montane glaciers on earth are not a pimple on the posterior of the EAIS, which is growing. Earth is getting icier, not less.
Thus, glaciers offer no evidence whatsoever of a “human footprint”. In any case, since AGW can’t be significant, even if it were happening and measurable, it’s not catastrophic nor likely to be, given earth’s geologic history.
Gloateus Maximus,
You will have then no problem in supporting that assertion on scientific literature. And I am not talking about some particular glaciers. I have already shown scientific evidence from Koch and Clague, 2006 of the opposite on global scale. Can you present scientific literature that supports your assertion and contradicts mine?
I thought that, following Arrhenius, most scientists (and others) agreed that CO2 prevented the planet from cooling, or reduced the rate at which it would cool, rather than CO2 itself caused the planet to warm.
I listen to Steve. I agree with him. CO2 is a GHG. Increasing CO2 will almost certainly warm the planet all things being equal (with a lot of room for disagreement on how much, and allowing for the possibility that in a multivariate system the planet could cool due to other factors by enough to cancel the warming and then some). Humans are almost certainly responsible for some if not all of the rise in CO2.
But that isn’t what I’m asserting, if not the entire top article. I’m asserting that climate models suck in the specific sense that they do not work to predict the climate, in the specific sense that we shouldn’t even expect them to be able to predict the climate. I’m asserting that computations of the temperature anomaly, which are themselves models, suck to the point where (as I pointed out above) it is 99.99% certain (according to HadCRUT4) that BEST is wrong, and vice versa, if one is to believe the contemporary error bars for either one, and yet we continue to use them as if they have some meaning. The top article is pointing out that they are (all three) diverging from tropospheric temperatures in ways that are almost impossible to comprehend if both are accurate, meaning that we can add another 99% certainty that at least 2/3 of the anomalies and/or all of them are wrong. I’m not talking about wrong in the remote past, either, I’m talking wrong over the last 30 years, where we have modern and consistent instrumentation at far better instrumental densities than we had in (say) 1850. The claims for error in the global anomaly records are a statistical travesty, but nobody seems to even notice the inconsistency or adjust the error bars so that they make some sort of sense because that would make it obvious that we have only the very crudest idea of how much or how little it has warmed, globally, over the last 165 years.
I’m asserting that there isn’t a shred of a mathematical basis for presenting the average over many chaotic trajectories as a predictor of a specific trajectory for a chaotic system, especially when one numerically integrates those chaotic trajectories with an absurdly enormous stepsize. There is no empirical basis for asserting that the Earth is not in radiative balance, when the ability of CERES to resolve the integrated intensity of both TOA incoming and outgoing radiation is an order of magnitude larger than the supposed imbalance (according to its own website). I’m asserting that there are a small mountain of things we don’t know about the climate system, as well as things that we can see happening that we cannot explain or quantitatively predict or understand (such as the multidecadal oscillations) that clearly have a major impact on both the local time development of the climate and its global trajectory. I’m asserting that all of this science is far from settled, is key to the assertions that we are en route to a climate catastrophe that empirically is far from being observed, and is being deliberately misrepresented to convince the public to spend its collective surplus wealth on preventing a catastrophe at the expense of dealing with serious global issues such as ending world poverty, bringing about world peace, bringing the benefits of a modern civilization to the 17th and 18th century misery that dominates the lives of the poorest 1/3 of the world’s population.
I’m even asserting that the settled science on the benefits of added CO2 — for example the fact that it is directly responsible for substantial increases in the growth rate of most temperate zone trees, that its impact on food crops makes it likely to be directly responsible for feeding roughly a billion people a day compared to the food that would have been grown with precisely the same cultivation at an atmospheric CO2 of 280 ppm, the increased productivity resulting from longer growing seasons, all of this is deliberately misrepresented or ignored when computing the relative projected net present value of the hypothetical future “catastrophe”. And note well that I’m not even talking about the benefits to the users of all of that carbon-based electricity — clean water, sewage systems, public health, air conditioning, refrigeration, lighted nights, and a strong industrial base with full employment.
I’m asserting that all of the panic is over a climate change that even according to the catastrophists is on the same order of magnitude as shifting every growing zone on the planet one half a number south — a few hundred miles. A climate change that over my entire lifetime has been about the difference in average temperatures observed at stations within a 30 minute drive of my house that all have the same climate, which is a climate change that is clearly in the noise of a normally functioning climate, even as atmospheric CO2 went from 300 to 400 ppm. I’m asserting that it is curious that NC’s official weather page, which showed no global warming at all over the last century (and said so), was recently taken down and when I asked why, I was told that it was “in error” and that they were going to put it back up after they fix it.
Anyone want to guess what the “fix” will look like? And of course, every change will have some reason, and the people making the change will convince themselves that they aren’t really participating in a complex process of confirmation bias as they make the choices of changes to apply (and not apply) so that the end result shows that NC really warmed, of course it did, forget the silly little things called thermometers that failed to show it before being properly “adjusted”.
To put it bluntly, Paris is not about climate catastrophe, it is All About the Money. It is about surpressing the third world to be able to continue to rape them of resources. It is about lining the pockets of all the people who aren’t invested in the current energy infrastructure who want in. It is about lining the pockets of the existing energy infrastructure even more (who are you kidding if you think otherwise, given that anything that makes energy more expensive increases margina profits of those that provide it). It is about pandering to the “Greens” whose unstated agenda is to bring about a reduction in world population of some unstated billions of living souls, as rapidly as possible, and whose stated agenda is pretty much the elimination of civilization as we know it — usually for everyone else since they enjoy driving their cars and flying in jets and air conditioning and electricity just as much as you or I.
So yes, I absolutely agree with Steve that some parts of the science are settled to the point where most rational people would immediately reject certain assertions, but those parts are irrelevant to the major point, which are indefensible assertions of global catastrophe based on the computations of future global warming due to increased CO2 using models fit to models that do not agree particularly well with the models fit to data that don’t even agree with each other.
This bit is not settled science but is carefully presented to both policy makers and the public as if it is.
So I’m curious, Steve. Do you agree with this? If not, which specific points do you disagree with?
rgb
I concur that CO2 is a GHG and that humans are probably largely responsible for most of the increase in CO2 since the 19th century. However, the fact remains that there is no actual physical evidence for man-made global warming during that period. The warming cycles of the late 19th, early 20th and late 20th centuries are not in any way out of the ordinary, compared with previous such intervals and with each other. Thus, observations do not support rejecting the null hypothesis, nor do they support the hypothesis of man-made global warming.
Clearly, the climate system has not responded to increased CO2 as “climate scientists” assumed it would, so no wonder the models based upon those assumptions fail miserably.
Reasons for this failure include, but are not limited to, the negligible effect of added GHGs, given the logarithmic nature of the effect; other climatic factors swamping out any actual warming, and prompt and powerful negative feedback effects, rather than the strongly positive feedbacks assumed by “climate scientists”, ie computer gamers. That earth hasn’t experienced runaway global warming under much higher CO2 concentrations and similar insolation should have given “climate scientists” a clue that earth is self-regulating.
The money-grubbers should also have been tipped off by the fact that the initial response of the planet to rapidly rising CO2 from 1945 to 1977 was to cool dramatically. The man-made global warming hypothesis was thus born falsified.
Yes, this is a very important point. The only graph I have seen with error bars is this Met Office Monthly Global Average Land Temperature – 1850 to Present graph:
Met Office – Hadley Center – Base Period 1961-1990 – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
Bob Tisdale – bobtisdale.wordpress.com – Click the pic to view at source[/caption]
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="578"]
and I think that grossly understates the uncertainty. Especially as that graph relies on the highly suspect “bucket model” adjustments;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/25/historical-sea-surface-temperature-adjustmentscorrections-aka-the-bucket-model/
where Jones, Wigley, Briffa and several of the other usual suspects adjusted sea surface temperatures before 1945, based on some highly suspect estimates about how bucket insulating effects ship based ocean temperature measurement. These estimates resulted in a large upward adjustment to ocean temperatures before 1945:
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="850"]
If you eliminate the bucket model adjustments, than there was more warming during the first half of the 20th century versus the second half. Given that anthropogenic CO2 contribution before 1950 was insufficient to have a significant impact on Earth’s temperature;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/29/when-did-anthropogenic-global-warming-begin/
then the warming during the first half of the century was natural. As such, the warming in the second half of the century is less than what our crude measurement of normal/natural temperature variation was during the first half of the century. Even when taking the bucket model adjustments into account, Phil Jones admitted during a 2010 BBC interview that, “As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different.”
Our understanding of Earth’s climate system is rudimentary at best, our measurement capabilities are crude and our historical measurement record is laughable brief. The science isn’t settled, it’s barely begun…
justthefactswuwt
November 7, 2015 at 9:07 am
Climatology might have been growing out of infancy and childhood into adolescence by now, had its development not been stunted by “climate science”.
Steven – I agree, those tests are far too severe and broadly your three areas of agreement between knowledgeable scientists are quite correct. I suspect that few would disagree with the proposition that climate system is fundamentally chaotic and that even the best modelling methods will find it hard to replicate the dynamics of such a system to the degree of resolution that Robert Brown specifies. The argument, to my mind, is about how sensitive the climate system is to changes in CO2 forcing. It’s the same proposition that if by some mischance the earth was pushed closer to the sun by 27000 miles then what would be the effect on the climate (or 56000 miles if you assume an ECS of 2). That is where the argument should be and where it should remain.
There is no evidence supporting an ECS higher than the ~1.2 degrees C that should arise in the absence of feedback effects. This is confirmed by the failed models themselves, which, in deriving gains of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C for a CO2 doubling from 280 to 560 ppm, far overestimate how much warmer 2015 “ought” to be from 1990 than it in fact is.
Mosh:
Your rhetoric is weak.
I simply cannot believe that you would engage in this inane exercise of reification of Brown’s central thesis.
Perhaps RGB wants the reader to conclude for herself that no science is ever “settled”.
Certainly the field of Quantum Mechanics seems to elude the comprehension of many people sucking on grantors’ teats, even though it is about 100 years in the making, as they declare such things as “science doesn’t deal in probabilities” remember that gem? You wrote that.
Hard to polish that piece of excreta Mosh….
It is funny that you should employ that phrase “or have you removed from the faculty” when youre not a member of any faculty… and youre responding to a guy who is a tenured professor with orders of magnitude more papers published in peer reviewed journals( you know Mosh…the hard work of science) than you.
From just what faculty can we remove the public voice of BEST?
Steven,
I agree with most of the above except one – the part about what people mean when they refer to “settled” climate science. You and I may agree on what is settled, but there are a lot of people out there, including some scientists, who mean more than what you have stated.
And that is the rub. Whenever I raise the points you touch on above and ask exactly what it is I’m denying, I get no response from the types who like to claim the science is settled and we need to start following policy proscriptions they are putting forth.
I’m willing to stipulate that the assertions below are more or less settled, although both are subject IMO to valid questions, since, among other reasons, science is rarely if ever truly “settled”:
1) CO2 is a so-called “greenhouse gas”;
2) Humans are probably responsible for most of the allegedly observed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration since AD 1750, 1850 or whatever start point is currently most fashionable, and
3) So far, increased CO2 levels have been good for living things.
Beyond this, nothing is settled, IMO.
On reflection, I’ll add that it’s probably settled that:
4) The world is warmer now than at the depths of the LIA during the Maunder Minimum, c. AD 1680-1709.
Before debating the issue of whether global warming science is settled we should have a mutually agreed upon definition of “science.” A strong argument leads to the conclusion that is should be defined as the mutual information between the sample space and condition space of a model. This is the information that is available for the control of a system including the climate system. For global warming science, the mutual information is nil. Thus in claiming that the science is settled one is claiming that the mutual information is perfect when it is nil.
Terry,
True.
My definition of science in this case would be “according to the scientific method”, according which the hypothesis of man-made global warming is so far from settled that it’s in fact antithetical to the scientific method. It stands the method on its head by changing “data” instead of the massively failed models.
Gloateus:
Your conclusion is similar to mine.
“After reading this article, do you think climate science is settled? “
Just out of curiosity, who do you think has claimed that “climate science is settled” — ie that every issue related to climate is now fully understood? Can you point to any competent scientist who has said this? If not, what is the purpose of this article? Who are you trying to convince? Everyone with a modicum of knowledge about this issue already agreed before you even started!
PS Paraphrasing Willis, if you disagree please provide a quote and a source for a scientist making the “every single aspect of climate science is settled”. It doesn’t count to find a quote about specific topics like “CO2 causes warming” or “temperatures have risen in the past x years”.
Tim
“Just out of curiosity, who do you think has claimed that “climate science is settled.”
Just google “climate science settled.” Doing a little of your own homework would help.
Here’s the thing — I *DID* do my own homework. Here are a few early hits.
* “Skeptics often claim that the science of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is not “settled”. But to the extent that this statement is true it is trivial, and to the extent that it is important it is false. No science is ever “settled”; science deals in probabilities, not certainties …. Some aspects of the science of AGW are known with near 100% certainty. The greenhouse effect itself is as established a phenomenon as any” http://www.skepticalscience.com/settled-science.htm
* “The debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.” President Obama State of the Union address. Note that he is addressing the existence of climate change, not that every last detail is known.
* A WSJ article a year ago also makes my point. “The idea that “Climate science is settled” runs through today’s popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. … The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself. Rather, the crucial, unsettled scientific question for policy is, “How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences?” ” http://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-science-is-not-settled-1411143565
tjfolkerts,
Thanx for you opinions. But that’s all they are.
There has yet to be a measurement quantifying AGW produced by anyone. That means AGW is still not much more than a conjecture (I personally think AGW exists. But the fact that there are no measurments quantifying it means it must be very tiny).
You comment like a true believer, with no real skepticism. Having a belief system is fine. But don’t confuse that with science, because it’s not.
Tim,
The little that could be considered “settled” doesn’t lead to any policy prescriptions.
It is definitely settled that the climate changes. Earth’s climate has ranged from the planet’s being covered in molten rock to covered in frozen water. No one disputes the scientific fact that climate changes.
It is sufficiently settled IMO that gas molecules composed of two different elements (or three of the same element, as with ozone) can absorb photons of various energies, then release that energy in all directions, usually via collisions with other atmospheric molecules. I could be wrong about this.
Beyond those observations or possible facts, very little is settled. The baleful influence of anti-scientific “consensus” science for going on 30 years has stifled learning more about how the climate system actually functions.
It is definitely not settled that human activities have a major effect on global climate, although they clearly do on local climates and microclimates. Science cannot even say with any degree of certainty whether the net effect of human activity on global climate is to cool or warm it. In any case, the effect is negligible, based upon all available evidence, as opposed to GIGO advocacy-based modeling.
Science can also state with a high degree of probability that so far increased CO2 in the air has been a boon for the planet and its living things, not a catastrophe, nor is disaster at all likely to result from fossil fuel burning on our self-regulating planet.
If people like Gore and Obama make statements that imply this, and if they are not challenged by leading climate scientists, then the silence of these climate scientists speaks volumes.
Werner he quoted Skeptical Science. WTF
Yep, if you use SkS as a citation…(except in mockery)
…. you can only be considered a brain-washed, know-nothing, ignoramus.
You have marked yourself as such, Tim.
The source is only relevant for plagiarism purposes.
I am a member of a prestigious scientific professional society (surprised even me). I participate in an online forum, at which I made the mistake of disparaging “the science is settled”. Boy, did I get a screenful from scientists around the country. They all told me the science is settled, the time for debate is over, we must act now. I shall not, here, name that society, or those corespondents, out of an abundance of caution to avoid any libel suits, claims of violation of privacy, and to spare them embarrassment. As Nicholas Schroeder says, Google “climate science is settled” and read, and weep for science.
“… prestigious scientific professional society …”
Jim, it is my considered opinion that there are no prestigious professional societies left. Everywhere one looks he sees only politically motivated groups of rent-seekers. One man’s opinion.
You’re being disingenuous when you say things like “every single aspect of climate science is settled”. Of course no one says that. If you asked Obama whether he believes that , he would demur. But as we know he’s on the record as saying “the science is settled” meaning CAGW is bearing down upon us. That’s the problem (as, I suspect, you already know).
Tm the biggest problem would be pointing to a competent climate scientists. Like a neutron fired at a gold atom.
We must wait for all the cycles to show themselves to be properly observed and understood, now that mankind has the capability to do so. This could be centuries for some terrestrial cycles and several magnitudes of time greater for galactic cycles.
Will we understand and control gravity by that time either?
Thanks for reprinting rgbatuke’s comment. It’s awesome. Should be circulated as a pdf.
It’s my hunch that a full understanding of climate relies on our knowledge of the heliosphere and the star we orbit, and that star’s galactic influences.
Bingo.
The lack of interest in our little twinkling star, the sun, baffles me.
Convection moves heat from the hot side to the cold side much, much faster than conduction or radiation does
….
— moderate changes in the thermal gradient just make the existing rolls roll faster or slower to maintain heat transport.
=============
this argues strongly that the lapse rate is due to such a structure, and one cannot change the surface temperature of the earth without changing the lapse rate.
back radiation to the surface via more CO2 will not do it, because convection will simply increase to offset the increased radiation due to CO2.
The money line is this: Convection moves heat … much faster than conduction or radiation does
This IMO is an important reason why the expected (ie, “settled”) retardation of LW energy escape from 40% more CO2 in the atmosphere hasn’t actually been observed.
The models have the wrong weight given to items that effect the climate, do not have the initial state of the climate correct and have incomplete and inaccurate data.
The result is what you get, which is the models fail miserably when trying to predict the future climate and this will only be getting worse as we move forward.
Never forget interactions. Every variable interacts, potentially, with every other variable. In a well designed experiment, each interaction is treated as a variable. Interactions alone should make us all doubt the predictive value of any of these models.
And, I keep saying, if these models worked, the modellers would be rich from the wheat futures market.
If it was settled, there would not be some 90 or so Climate Models, but rather just 3 setting out predictions (not projections) for the 3 future CO2 scenarios. Being generous, there might be a total of 9 models producing predictions (not projections) as above but as varied with the 3 manmade future aerosol emission scenarios.
So one only has to look at the IPCC Reports themselves to know that the science is not settled.
Further, the most important aspect is the so called Climate Sensitivity. However, they are unable to put a figure on Climate Sensitivity, instead a wide range is set that has not been narrowed in some 35 years notwithstanding countless billions of dollars spent on the issue, and they are not even able to set out a consensus view on this topic.
I don’t consider that it is necessary to go into any more detail than that, to realise that the claims that the science is settled is patently not the case, and the proposition that it is settled is farcical in the extreme. One does not have to get into the fact that there are so many uncertainties surrounding known factors and that it is almost certainly the case that there are unknowns yet to be discovered and understood.
We have some 90 or so different models all projecting different outcomes. As the Dire Straight’s song goes ‘two men claim they are Jesus, one of them must be wrong’ applies. We know as fact that at least 89 of the 90 models are wrong! Should one have confidence that with this skill, the other remaining model is right? I would say NO. Further, we cannot in advance identify which one of the 90 or so models is the right one. Of course, if this current El Nino does not deliver up a long lasting step change in temperatures, as was seen coincident upon the 1997/8 Super El Nino, it appears that by 2019 all the models will be outside their 95% confidence bounds, and we will by then be able to say that all the models have been disconfirmed.
As the Elton John song goes ‘sorry is the hardest word’ and it is only because of this that the IPCC cannot admit that the science is far from settled and that it has got some fundamentals seriously wrong and has no idea as to how the future will unfold and whether man has any control whatsoever over that future and if so how man can control it.
With the socialist ideologues Obama (Biden, Kerry et al.), Bon Ki Moon (his IFCCC, IPCC and WMO) and Latin-Pope Francis, Climate Socialists do not need Science, nor want it.
Agenda 21 is their actual goal and has nothing to do with climate change or saving the planet !!!
RGB:
“Self-organization as a concept preceded Prigogene, but he quantified it and moved it from the realm of philosophy and psychology and cybernetics to the realm of physics and the behavior of nonlinear non-equilibrium systems.
“To put it into a contextual nutshell, an open, non-equilibrium system…will tend to self-organize into structures that increase the dissipation of the system, that is, facilitate energy transport through the system.”
Hence, life.
Life may be as inevitable as “rocks rolling down a hill”:
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1478-3975/10/1/011001;jsessionid=87C1E8FE3E61D214420ED19C5415731C.c2.iopscience.cld.iop.org
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/
Meteorites are loaded with lots of amino acids and other complex organic compounds. They carry far more different organics than those which serve as the chemical constituents of living things.
RNA forms spontaneously in ice, and is capable both of acting as an enzyme to catalyze reactions, leading to peptide polymers, and of storing and transmitting genetic information, leading to replication. At this elementary level, the two processes, ie metabolism and replication, are similar.
“Meteorites are loaded with lots of amino acids and other complex organic compounds. They carry far more different organics than those which serve as the chemical constituents of living things.”
And so many “scientists” laughed at Fred Hoyle and pansperima. There is at least some evidence that life could have come from the cosmos — much more evidence than CO2 warms the surface by 33 degrees as the present delusion has it.
Mark,
True. And getting more plausible all the time, while catastrophic man-made global warming becomes ever more remote a possibility with each passing year under higher CO2 without any warming.
It’s possible that life first developed five to ten billion years ago in space rather than in the past four billion years on earth. Asteroids and comets contain ice (& maybe even liquid water). The little droplets of liquid water within ice in these bodies could be where RNA first started replicating itself and using energy to conduct metabolic chemistry.
Has anyone else noticed that climate alarmists have problems with spelling, grammar, and sentence structure?
Not to mention punctuation and capitalization.
And matters of fact. I haven’t ever read anything skeptical of the “consensus” published by “Big Oil”, although Gore, Mann and other alarmists are of course financed by Big Oil.
Not to mention rational thought and common sense.
dbstealey November 6, 2015 at 11:26 am
Has anyone else noticed that climate alarmists have problems with spelling, grammar, and sentence structure?
Eye dint knowtiss.
Gloateus Maximus,
This is your comment upthread about Mr. McGinn’s preposterous conjectures, reposted for effect:
IMO the moderators of this blog bend over backwards to allow raving lunatics to spew errant nonsense ad infinitum, but if those whose name dare not be mentioned for advocating a scientifically defensible position (to which I don’t subscribe) contrary to the consensus on radiative forcing and the GHE, then surely this totally unsupportable drivel should be banned.
Does every monomaniacal, uneducated ignoramus get his say here forever, or is there a limit? How divorced from objective reality are commenters allowed to remain for how long?
That water vapor, ie gaseous molecular H2O, is a vital component of earth’s atmosphere is a fact. All the evidence in the world supports this observation, with none against it. The hydrological cycle could not exist without it. The marvelous human cooling system wouldn’t work without evaporative cooling. Meteorology would be a nonsense without relative humidity.
James still refuses to state whence the loon imagines dew originates.
Time to shut James’ running off at, if not indeed foaming at, the mouth off for good, IMHO. The spigot of spew should be turned off. The self-appointed El Presidente has already gotten far more free publicity for his crazed site than the fool deserves.
He does it across the blogosphere, unless those site owners put a stop to it. Maybe he will just MovOn with his failed conjectures. We can hope, anyway, because all of physics would collapse if he was right.
Actually, if he just admitted what people educated in the hard sciences know – that water vapor is a component of the atmosphere – I wouldn’t have that much of an issue with it (maybe I’d add his ridiculous conjecture that convection doesn’t affect weather). But his “no water vapor (steam) exists in the atmosphere” assertion is as loopy as saying that gravity doesn’t exist… (well, maybe he thinks that too, because in his conjecture the lapse rate couldn’t exist, either).
So I’m with you, GM. James has wired around his On/Off switch. It’s permanently ‘On’, so I doubt that the scales will ever fall from his eyes.
dbstealey:
McGinn’s conjecture that steam, H2O(g) (gaseous H2O) does not exist exists in the atmosphere is as loopy as saying that gravity doesn’t exist because in his conjecture the lapse rate couldn’t exist, either.
James McGinn:
If you think that true, that the lapse rate could not exists unless steam, H2O(g) (gaseous H2O) does exist in the atmosphere, then you should present an argument to that effect, after all if I was to deny the existence of the lapse rate I would have to be a complete loon.
And please stop the incessant whining.
McGinn,
Don’t you have a productive job? Because you post your pseudo-science here 24/7, and on lots of other blogs, too, day in and day out.
Oh… I forgot, you do have a job! You’re the “President” of a giant organization that’s going to “solve tornadoes”, whatever that means. ☺
Hey, you never answered my questions: was getting elected President a tough fight? Who were you running against? And what was your final vote tally? When are the next nominations being published, and where?
Finally, no one is ‘whining’, that comment is just your usual projection. Because the fact is, you’re whining about it. As stated, that comment was simply a response to some truly preposterous claims. It was so pertinent that it deserved to be re-posted. IMHO, of course.
You are a complete loon.
That much is glaringly obvious.
Please go away and pollute some other blog.
Thanks!
DB,
I wonder if James is really now convinced that water vapor exists in the atmosphere or finally ostensibly accepted the obvious reality of this fact just to be able to keep sliming this blog.
My guess is that on the other sites the loon infests, he will continue peddling such errant nonsense.
Gloateus Maximus November 9, 2015 at 12:07 pm
Leave me out of your delusions. I’ve never denied that water vapor is prevalent in the atmosphere.
Then why did you repeatedly make that assertion?
Have you gone off your meds?
Gloateus Maximus November 9, 2015 at 3:01 pm
Then why did you repeatedly make that assertion?
Quote me directly you strawbaiting nitwit.
Here you are, blithering ignoramus loon, saying that water in its gaseous state, ie vapor (which is not droplets of liquid), doesn’t exist in the atmosphere, only liquid water. You don’t get to invent your own scientific terminology.:
Jim McGinn
October 28, 2015 at 2:02 pm
Micro6500:
What’s the kinetic energy of a water molecule that has the energy to leave the liquid and become vapor,
Jim McGinn:
A single molecule cannot break off, except upon boiling, in which case many break off. (Beyond that I don’t know the answer to your question, sorry.)
Water’s polarity increases when one bond is broken, making the second very hard to break.
Evaporation doesn’t produce gas. H2O gas (steam) can only exist above its boiling point. Evaporation produces vapor, which is not a gas but small droplets.
BTW, this completely refutes meteorology’s notion that convection causes storms. There is no steam in earth’s atmosphere and only if it did exist would meteorology’s notion of convection make any sense at all.
Gloateus Maximus November 9, 2015 at 3:45 pm
Here you are, . . .
James McGinn:
You lost me. I stand by everything you quoted here. I still don’t get what your point is. Sorry.
Can you possibly really be this dumb? Or are you just trying to waste everyone’s time?
You maintain that “water vapor” is liquid, contrary to all actual observations of nature. It is not. It is H2O in the gaseous state, ie individual molecules, as with N2, O2, Ar, CO2, etc.
The atmosphere does indeed contain water in liquid droplet form, as in clouds, fog and mist, which is visible. The gas isn’t. Yet science knows for a fact that it is there.
Gloateus Maximus November 9, 2015 at 7:29 pm
Yet science knows for a fact that it is there.
James McGinn:
Does it? How so?
If one has a hard time distinguishing between arguments based on evidence and arguments based on absence of evidence I would suggest avoiding science in general and the atmospheric science in particular.
McGinn,
Wait, what??
YOU are the one who invented this new conjecture, claiming that water in its gas state does not and cannot exist in the air. You wrote this more than once:
“THERE IS NO STEAM (GASEOUS H2O) IN EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE.”
Therefore, YOU have the onus of producing some proof, or at least convincing evidence, showing that your conjecture is true.
That’s how the Scientific Method works. Skeptics of your new conjecture have nothing to prove, but you keep trying to put the onus back on them.
That’s wrong. You have the duty to suppoert your belief, no one else does, and no one else has anything to prove. But so far, all you’ve done is assert that it’s so.
James,
You have provided not a single shred of evidence in support of your insane assertion.
As I said, all the evidence in the world shows that water vapor, ie gas, exists in the earth’s atmosphere. It can be observed and measured. It varies from over 4% of air molecules in the moist tropics to just a few molecules per 10,000 dry air molecules in polar regions.
In the tropics, one H2O molecule will on average be surrounded by 19-20 N2 molecules, five to six O2 molecules and maybe an Ar molecule. The concentration at any one place varies with time of day and season.
Your rejection of reality means you’re nuts. No amount of evidence appears to sink into your cracked pot.
Gloateus Maximus November 9, 2015 at 7:29 pm
GM:
The atmosphere does indeed contain water in liquid droplet form, as in clouds, fog and mist, which is visible. The gas isn’t.
JM:
Much of, or maybe even most of, the liquid droplets in earth’s atmosphere are invisible also. That is what has you (and many others) confused. Read this very, very, very carefully:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/06/is-climate-science-settled-now-includes-september-data/#comment-2066794
Read it slowly. Don’t respond until after you’ve read it two or three times. Take a deep breath. Read.
Why would I subject myself to such drivel yet again?
Water vapor is not tiny liquid droplets. It is a gas, ie molecular.
You might as well try to convince the scientists on this blog that the moon is made of green cheese as that water vapor, ie gaseous H2O, doesn’t exist in the atmosphere.
Here is an image of water vapor, which to NOAA, just as to everyone else, means molecules of H2O(g):
http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/PCPN/DATA/RT/NA/WV/20.jpg
Since for you seeing is not believing, please go peddle your errant nonsense somewhere else.
Here’s an IR animation of water vapor on the move:
http://weather.unisys.com/satellite/sat_wv.php?inv=0&t=l12®ion=ea
Invisible to humans but visible in the IR.
Well, I re-read McGinn’s nonsense again. The only one here who’s confused is James McGinn.
Aside from violating basic physics, McGinn’s belief: that only liquid water is in the air, but not water vapor, is nonsense. It goes against common sense: McGinn is claiming that H2O can exist in the air by water molecules “clumping” <–(that's his word, not mine) together. So two or more H2O molecules (or two million molecules) can float around in the air, just so long as they "clump" together.
But Ginn’s claim is that ONE molecule of H2O cannot exist in the atmosphere. He has stated repeatedly that no individual molecules of H2O are in the air, or can even exist in the atmosphere.
As if.
It’s obviously easier for a single molecule to remain airborne than for a droplet or “clump”, of whatever size. Cloud droplets require a condensation nucleus.
James is a raving lunatic.
There is a wealth of laboratory evidence that clearly and unambiguously indicates that the boiling/pressure point of H2O is immutable. Should we just, offhandedly, assume that the laws of nature are different in the atmosphere than they are in the laboratory? If you want to do that then you do that. You are free to believe whatever you want. Go with the consensus. But here’s the thing, the consensus rarely knows why it believes what it believes. Sheep just follow sheep. They don’t know why.
Moreover, misconceptions are built into the language. For example, above I mentioned the boiling/pressure point of H2O. I might have also mentioned it as the condensation/pressure point. But if I had that would have probably confused you, because the word condensation is, in common usage, considered the reversal of boiling AND it is considered the the reversal of evaporation. And boiling and evaporation are very different processes (one produces atmospheric H2O[l] and the other produces H2O[g]).
So, you see, the language conspires against us. The only thing you can do is be tough minded about it. And that is not something that comes easily to many people. (As you can see, however, Werner seems to be doing pretty good with it.)
Unfortunatelty, this is one of those things that some people get and some just don’t. And there isn’t much I can do to change that. All I can suggest is that you work at it.
No one considers condensation to be the reverse of boiling. There is no reverse of boiling. A liquid is either boiling or not boiling.
Evaporation is the reverse of condensation.
Before I answer your question let me ask you if you understand the difference between the following:
Amospheric H2O(L). (Droplets suspended in the air.)
and
H2O(g) gaseous H2O
Do you realize these are not one and the same? Can you explain the difference. Go ahead. Answer the question and I will answer yours. Okay?
You clearly understand nothing. Less than nothing.
Anyone with high school physics and chemistry can answer your moronic question.
Can you really possibly be as idiotic, ignorant, lazy, crazy and arrogant as you appear?
McGinn says:
Answer the question and I will answer yours.
Yes, I understand the difference. One is in a liquid state and the other is a gas.
Your turn. Name one who agrees with you.
dbstealey November 10, 2015 at 7:50 pm
That question was not directed at you it was directed at DM.
But to answer your question, I know not of even one physicists, chemists, and/or peer reviewed papers, or who teach in universities, or who write critically acclaimed physics or chem textbooks who have stated such.
But I also know of no laboratory evidence that indicates otherwise.
You stick with what is important to you. I will stick with what is important to me.
Fair enough?
McGinn,
That says it all, so I guess I can’t complain. Fair enough. But next time, please address whoever it is you’re replying to.
So, there isn’t one person in the whole wide world with any real credibility who agrees with you. Most folks would take that as an indication that maybe their strange conjecture needs a little work. To put it politely…
After so much time and effort mud wrestling with a pig, it’s time to stop. You only get dirty and the pig enjoys it.
Why, oh why, does this prize-winning blog allow such idiocy at such length?
McGinn says:
Have you all considered the possibility that you may all be wrong?
Speaking for myself, I considered that when you first proposed your conjecture that droughts increase downwind from windmill farms. I was intrigued.
But you tucked tail and ran when it was proposed that your conjecture would be very easy to check. You could do a straightforward experiment using free, publicly available precipitation records downwind of the literally hundreds of wind farms all over the globe.
But you just made excuses rather than do that very simple experiment. For me at least, that took all the air out of your credibility, and you’ve done nothing since then to resurrect it.
(And by the way, when you wrote: That question was not directed at you it was directed at DM Did you notice the time stamps make that claim highly questionable?)
dbstealey November 10, 2015 at 8:40 pm
McGinn says:
Have you all considered the possibility that you may all be wrong?
Speaking for myself, I considered that when you first proposed your conjecture that droughts increase downwind from windmill farms. I was intrigued.
The coorelation does seem uncanny. The one that most intrigued me was Brazil. And then there’s India. I didn’t know they had wind farms going back to 1996. And it would seem that the drought began immediately thereafter. And then all the farmer suicides.
It’s especially ironic that one of the solutions to the financial hardship of drought being suggested to farmers is wind turbines.
Why don’t you see if you can get a meteorologists to do the study. I mean, its not like they have a theory to flesh out.
McGinn says:
Why don’t you see if you can get a meteorologists to do the study. I mean, its not like they have a theory to flesh out.
More excuses…
McGinn says:
I think we have to do more than just accept the Scientific Method. We have to apply it.
The central problem here is that you never apply your ideas to an experiment. Instead, you constantly challenge skeptics of your ‘steam’ conjecture to do experiments. Apparently you either don’t realize, or don’t care, that such experiments support basic physics, and they have been done over many decades. The onus is not on established physics to prove anything to you. Rather, the onus is on you to provide convincing experiments that support your conjecture.
But the one time you were given the opportunity to do a very simple and conclusive experiment (your ‘wind farm/drought’ conjecture), you tucked tail and ran away, emitting excuses in a cloud of pixels like a squid emits a cloud of ink to escape. But those excuses don’t hold water; none of them did. They were just lame excuses, like your attempts to get skeptics to do the work you refuse to do.
Your true motive became clear in one of your comments, when you stated what you intended to do if you couldn’t convince anyone else to buy in to your pseudo-science. You stated that you would:
Become a thorn in their side.
Now you are just a crank, incessantly posting past the point of threadjacking. I do not think you will last much longer here.
dbstealey November 10, 2015 at 8:14 pm
dbstealy:
Most folks would take that as an indication . . .
I agree. Most folks would stop, accept it. Not me, though. I look at it this way:
1) Is there anything that proves the proposition true or false. If yes, stop. All is well and good. If no, go to next step.
2) Is the issue critical (does the truth or falsity of the proposition have any bearing on an existing body of work?). If no, stop. It’s not worth pursuing. If yes, go to next step
3) Are the people in the discipline to whom for which the issue is critical aware that the proposition has not been effectively proven true or false? If no, stop and inform them. If yes, move to next step.
4) Are the people actively seeking to test/falsify the proposition? If yes, stop. All is well. If no move to next step.
5) Become a thorn in their side.
What you are saying about the temperature of H2O(g) violates a law of thermodynamics. So there is no need to go further.
Werner Brozek November 11, 2015 at 7:15 am
Not me, though. I look at it this way:
1) Is there anything that proves the proposition true or false. If yes, stop. All is well and good. If no, go to next step.
What you are saying about the temperature of H2O(g) violates a law of thermodynamics. So there is no need to go further.
JM:
As with cold steam, is this law allergic to laboratories?
A laboratory is not even needed here. We all know that if a hot marble is dropped into a cold bowl of water, the hot marble cools off and the water warms up. If you are questioning such basics, we perhaps need to give up talking.
You know nothing about anything.
Fair enough?
How about this laboratory experiment? Put water in a dish and let it evaporate at room temperature. Measure the water vapor concentration before the evaporation and after. Guess what? There will be more water molecules in the air above the dish after the evaporation than before, with all other factors controlled.
Wow! Who would have thought that?
H2O(l) is what we have in a fog or in clouds. There are hundreds or thousands of water molecules clumped together. And if large enough in clouds, these drops fall as rain.
H2O(g) is just individual molecules of H2O without a second H2O attached to it via hydrogen bonding. When the relative humidity is 99% or less, that is what you have, namely H2O(g) whose temperature is as cold as the surrounding air, which could be -60 C in Antarctica.
Werner Brozek November 10, 2015 at 9:23 pm
H2O(g) is just individual molecules of H2O without a second H2O attached to it via hydrogen bonding. When the relative humidity is 99% or less, that is what you have, namely H2O(g) whose temperature is as cold as the surrounding air, which could be -60 C in Antarctica.
James McGinn
How would you substantiate these this moisture is not really, really small ice crystals and, therefore, not “cold steam.” Seriously, think about that. I mean, it’s not like there is every rain at that temperature.
James McGinn:
You ask
Individual molecules cannot be a crystal. And “really, really small ice crystals” would be liquid because the surface of every ice crystal is coated in liquid.
This surface property of ice is why ice is slippery and it was first discovered by Michael Faraday (you may have heard of him, he did some work on electricity when he was one of those scientists whom you claim know less than you). It has been investigated in the centuries since.
If the crystals were really, really small then their surface layers of molecules would be their entire volume. In other words, they would be droplets of liquid and not crystals. And if they were larger than that then their solid surfaces would be coated in liquid water. And the liquid water would wet my clothes: it does not.
The reason that the water in the air does NOT wet my clothes when there is not fog is because the water is vapour – i.e. a gas – and not droplets of liquid water and not crystals coated in liquid water.
So, Mr President, I reply to you, think about that. I mean, it’s not like you know anything about water in the air.
Richard
richardscourtney November 11, 2015 at 2:58 am
If the crystals were really, really small then their surface layers of molecules would be their entire volume. In other words, they would be droplets of liquid and not crystals. And if they were larger than that then their solid surfaces would be coated in liquid water.
And the liquid water would wet my clothes: it does not. The reason that the water in the air does NOT wet my clothes when there is not fog is because the water is vapour – i.e. a gas – and not droplets of liquid water and not crystals coated in liquid water.
JM:
Richard, I would hardly consider this a controlled experiment. You are claiming a depth of understanding that isn’t possible. And your evidence is anecdotal. Steam is quite intrusive. (Steam cleaning.) Yet the anecdote you present appears to indicate otherwise.
You all behave like people whose religion has been criticized. If the science of meteorology can’t stand on its own two feet then the best thing you can do is let it fall–and not take it personally.
It’s just science.
James McGinn:
Centuries of study of the surface property of water is NOT “anecdotal”. Recent methods have revealed how and why solid ice is always coated in a layer of liquid water.
What “understanding” do you claim is “not possible”?
I certainly agree that you are incapable of understanding much, but I and most others reading this understand that liquid water is not a gas: water vapour is a gas.
Water vapour does not wet my clothes because it is a gas, but liquid water does wet my clothes. When steam condenses to water it wets.
Now, Mr President, I suspect that wetting is something else not understood by Your Ignorance. For example, I doubt you know why and how washing up liquid makes water wetter.
So, Your Ignorance, please go elsewhere until you have learned some basic physical chemistry.
Richard
James McGinn
How would you substantiate these this moisture is not really, really small ice crystals and, therefore, not “cold steam.” Seriously, think about that. I mean, it’s not like there is every rain at that temperature.
Do the experiment I suggested up thread: Add a known mass of ice to an evacuated vessel and heat the vessel until all the ice has evaporated. Measure the pressure in the vessel, you will find that it corresponds to a gas of molar mass 18grams, not the 180+ gms that your hypothesis suggests.
You, sir, are a blithering imbecile, scientific ignoramus and foaming at the mouth lunatic. Sorry, but that’s all there is to say.
Have you never in your whole miserable, worse than worthless existence stinking up this planet noticed the phenomenon of evaporation? Water molecules go into the air at far below the boiling point.
I don’t know which is harder to credit, that anyone could possibly be as stupid and crazy as you or that moderators on this site would have been so lenient as to let you keep spewing such garbage at such length.
(Hey! Don’t blame us! It’s not our call. -mod)
OK, I won’t.
I guess it’s my fault and that of all others here who fed the troll.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
Goombayah November 10, 2015 at 6:28 pm
Why are you getting angry?
I’ll tell you why. You looked for laboratory evidence that confirms what you believe (and that contradicts what I stated) and you couldn’t find it. It’s incomprehensible to you that this evidence couldn’t exist. Yet you couldn’t find it. You know it must be out there, right? It must be out there, right?
And do you know the reason you couldn’t find it? Because it doesn’t exist. And do you know why it doesn’t exist? Because the notion that gaseous H2O (steam) can exist in our atmosphere is complete nonsense.
It’s that simple folks. There is no such thing as cold steam. It is but an urban myth. The H2O that is in clear moist air is not invisible because it is gaseous H2O(g). It is invisible because it consists of microdroplets that are too small to be seen.
When all else fails, do an experiment.
J. McGinn,
You wrote this to me one hour after I replied to you:
Answer the question and I will answer yours. Okay?
OK. I’ve answered your question. Quit prevaricating and post a name if you’ve got one.
(Note: for some unknown reason WordPress mixes up the comment order. Readers should review the time stamps on comments to see the correct order. -mod)
Not only every lab on earth, but the air everywhere on earth shows that H2O gas exists in the atmosphere. Only a raving lunatic or sick troll would even consider arguing otherwise.
I and every other reader here is sick of your act. There can be no other reason for your pollution of this blog than to discredit it.
Go away! Beat it! Scram! Shoo!
You are a worse than worthless, lame-brained, lying, lunatic, idiotic, ignorant, insane splat of subhuman garbage. And those are your best points.
What if we had a bowl of liquid water at 1 C with a vacuum above it? Would we then not get cold steam?
Werner Brozek November 10, 2015 at 9:41 pm
There is no such thing as cold steam.
What if we had a bowl of liquid water at 1 C with a vacuum above it? Would we then not get cold steam?
Don’t you think quoting people out of context is beneath somebody of your advanced status/maturity:
http://t.co/2Hfa6TiovV
McGinn,
Since prof Brozek replied you have posted comments to Hipper, to me, and to Werner at 9:56 pm, and 10:06 pm, and at 10:07pm, at 10:30 pm, again at 10:39 pm, at 11:30 pm and at 11:50 pm, at 12:07 am, and at 12:21 am, and again at 12:37 am. People are not replying to your thread-jacking.
So far you’ve been entirely in your own world, expounding your baseless beliefs. You refuse to do anything except argue by using your personal opinions and assertions. You never defend your conjecture with any real world experiments, even though the onus is entirely on the one making the conjecture.
Skeptics of your conjecture, which includes everyone else, have nothing to prove. You do. But you always deflect from that, and try to make skeptics in effect prove a negative. If you accepted the Scientific Method you would have been gone from here long ago, because other than your assertions, you’ve got nothing but your opinion. You’re trying to contradict basic physics, which skeptics are not required to defend.
Please give up posting your nutty conjectures here. This is a science site, and you’re wasting the time of everyone else with your pseudo-science. We’re interested in real science, not in the fantastic ideas that only exist in your own mind.
You’ve worn out your welcome, don’t you think? It’s a big internet out there; you have millions of places to argue to your heart’s content. Thread-jacking is against site policy here, so please stop it. Really. You have not convinced one person of anything, and you seem to take pleasure in antagonizing people with your incessant arguments.
If you can find even one credible scientist or educator who supports your ‘no steam in the air’ conjecture, I will acknowledge that you are not the only one in the entire world with your ideas, and I’ll bow out. But if you can’t, it’s time to move on. That’s fair, no?
dbstealey November 11, 2015 at 1:05 am
dbstealey
Skeptics of your conjecture, which includes everyone else, have nothing to prove. You do. But you always deflect from that, and try to make skeptics in effect prove a negative.
James McGinn
Wait a minute. You all are saying cold steam exists in Earth’s atmosphere. That is not a negative. That is a positive assertion. The fact (which not one of you can deny) that it has never been tested is something YOU ALL should be concerned about. This notion is not part of my model. It is part of your model.
You are disputing/dismissing my model based on the fact that my model contradicts a notion that you refuse to test. It doesn’t bother me that you dispute my model. Nor does it bother me that you use this notion (cold steam) to dispute it. I would just suggest that you wait until after you have tested it before you do so–so that you don’t look even more ridiculous than you do already.
dbstealey
If you accepted the Scientific Method
James McGinn
I think we have to do more than just accept the Scientific Method. We have to apply it.
I apologize if you feel I quoted you out of context. But let me just repeat what I said before. If Antarctica has a temperature of -60 C, and if the relative humidity is 5%, then you have no H2O(l) nor H2O(s) in the air, but just very slow moving H2O(g) molecules.
Werner Brozek November 11, 2015 at 8:13 am
If Antarctica has a temperature of -60 C, and if the relative humidity is 5%, then you have no H2O(l) nor H2O(s) in the air, but just very slow moving H2O(g) molecules.
James:
If there was evidence of H2O(g) at -60 C I would have no choice but to concede the argument. But that is the case at any temperature 99 C (at 1 ATM) and below. You still have the problem of how you detect/verify its existence.
Your argument is starting to resemble that of paranormal researchers. They go to increasingly exotic locations to chase their elusive evidence — locations where a controlled experiment is difficult or impossible. That way they always have an excuse in their back pocket for why their experiment failed.
Believers always leave a back door from which the can escape any attempt to genuinely test what they wish to continue to believe. If there was any such thing as cold steam it would be detectable under laboratory conditions of one kind or another. But I suppose when you are chasing ghosts you have to go where the ghost go. And I guess ghosts really don’t like laboratories.
You once stated that H2O(g) cannot exist in air at under 212 F, correct? So let us assume a desert at 110 F and a relative humidity of 5%. If a space probe above the desert were to analyse infrared waves given off, it would detect certain frequencies that are not getting through that would get through if the relative humidity were 0%. And furthermore, these frequencies would be those that can be proven to be from H2O(g) and nothing else. Do you agree?
Werner,
Please correct me if wrong, but could not refraction of the IR light traveling through the air above the desert distinguish between the presence of individual molecules (gas) and water droplets or “clumps” of molecules (liquid) suspended in it?
Refraction would be sightly different with different gases, so air at 99% relative humidity would refract light slightly differently than at 5% relative humidity. The refractive index of air is 1.00029.
From:
http://www.kayelaby.npl.co.uk/general_physics/2_5/2_5_7.html
“The refractivity of water vapour is less than that of air, so that if the air is moist its refractive index will be smaller than the value calculated for dry air. This water vapour term is dependent upon wavelength.”
Since the above applies to visible light and different amounts of water vapor, I see no reason for it to not apply to infrared and water vapor as well as to infrared and droplets of H2O(l). However droplets as in clouds would have a greater influence by reflecting and scattering light in my opinion.
Thanks.
That was my impression as well. Thus your space probe observer could determine whether the vapor were actually a gas, as is demonstrably the case, or the mythical, magical tiny droplets of liquid imagined without any basis whatsoever by James.
James, are you aware that other liquid compounds besides H2O also evaporate and sublime, producing gas molecules?
Remedial education for James:
https://www.boundless.com/chemistry/textbooks/boundless-chemistry-textbook/liquids-and-solids-11/phase-changes-90/liquid-to-gas-phase-transition-390-3658/
Werner Brozek November 11, 2015 at 11:30 am
This is extremely contrived. A simple measurement of the relative weight of moist to dry air, controlling for all other factors, would suffice.
There’s another guy on the internet, an Australian, who dispute AGW based on sketchy information from Venus. That is what this reminds me of.
Keep it as simple and straightforward as possible.
And furthermore, these frequencies would be those that can be proven to be from H2O(g) and nothing else. Do you agree?
Surreal.
How could I possibly agree.
Stick to your books.
Please make up your mind. When I stick to my books, you want an experiment. When I propose an experiment, you tell me to stick to my books.
Both my “books” and experiments show the same thing. How could it be otherwise?
Werner,
I am as frustrated as you are. McGinn hasn’t responded to my comment either, in which I asked him what the difference is between two or more molecules of H2O “clumped” together (which he says is OK and can be found throughout the atmosphere) and a single molecule of H2O, which he insists cannot exist in the air, and which cannot be found as a component of the atmosphere.
That is McGinn’s central conjecture, which underlies his whole belief system, and which he has argued over several hundred comments. I would like to see his answer explaining why 2 or more molecules of water are acceptable in his strange world, but one is not possible. But he avoids that problem by not answering.
One other thing (besides his incessant thread-bombing) that irks me is is McGinn’s refusal to ever conduct any experiment that would falsify his conjecture. In fact, he never conducts experiments; he only gives his endless opinions.
McGinn constantly attempts to put the onus on those skeptical of his weird beliefs. That is wrong, of course; someone proposing a new conjecture or hypothesis has the duty of providing convincing supporting evidence that what he says is valid. But he will not do anything other than express endless opinions. He refused to acknowledge Phil’s experiment, and his comment above shows that he can’t refute either your textbooks, or your experiments. And of course, the very simple experiment I proposed that would either prove or falsify his windmill conjecture was dismissed with such pathetic excuses that it is clear he is running away.
Now, after several hundred comments by McGinn we are no farther along than when he first appeared here. He might just as well be arguing that Scientology is valid physics. He has become nothing more than a crank who dodges and weaves constantly, while promoting such anti-science nonsense that rational readers only roll their eyes. There is no reason this science site should tolerate a crank like that. Science is a cooperative effort; it doesn’t progress via the invention of what is clearly errant nonsense, which can never be corrected. It’s past time to show him the door, no?
I know that there are some topics that are not tolerated here at WUWT. But even those topics often have many people that believe in them. Of course that does not make them right or wrong, and the consensus was often wrong in the past. People at the cutting edge like Einstein did have brand new ideas that no one else shared for a while. But disputing high school chemistry and having no one who agrees with you or even with your definitions is another matter.
As for showing him the door, that is not my call, nor would I want it to be my call. On the other hand, by not challenging his ideas, I would not want new readers to think he was on to something on the grounds that they were not challenged. Of course I do not always comment on all errors I see, but in this case, being one of the authors, I feel I have an extra responsibility to do so. And its been fun!
(P.S. As I pointed out before, along the lines of leaving wrong things unchallenged, I was never a professor, just a high school physics and chemistry teacher. I know you mean well by calling me a professor however I would feel as if I would be committing a sin of omission by not correcting you on this as I did earlier.☺)
Hi Werner,
You’ve made it clear before that you were a physics teacher (I didn’t know you also taught chem). So I used small ‘p’ professor. Robert Brown gets the official big P on his title. ☺
Anyway, what McGinn is promoting here isn’t science, it is only his personal fantasy. If he could get just one other person to agree with him, I wouldn’t say that. But what he’s claiming isn’t any more credible than astrology. Maybe even less.
dbstealey
FYI:
Duke University’s physics department lists Robert Brown as a “Lecturer” rather than a “Professor.”
Terry Oldberg,
I didn’t know that. Is there a difference? More importantly: does it really matter?
dbstealy:
Good question! In deciding on whether to accept the conclusion of a person’s argument, a human sometimes employs a heuristic that takes the rank of this person into account. To do so is illogical but common.
OK, but see:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-g-brown-robert-g-brown-125b2b16
“Robert G. Brown
Professor at Duke University”
Any way, Robert G. Brown has never corrected me on this.
Goombayah November 10, 2015 at 6:28 pm
. . . that moderators on this site would have been so lenient as to let you keep spewing such garbage at such length.
[Snip. Please don’t speak for the moderation team. We have enough work going through 1000+ comments and spam every day without dealing with that. -mod.]
That hurt. I knew it would. Try to see it in terms of relative good and bad. The time has come to take Meteorology behind the barn and shoot it.
James McGinn:
So, my most recent refutation of your nonsense “hurt”. Good! Now, perhaps you will take your nonsense elsewhere.
Richard
J. McGinn,
There are literally thousands of physicists who are known to the public; in the public eye. Chemists, too. Those who have published peer reviewed papers, or who teach in universities, or who write critically acclaimed physics or chem textbooks.
Name one of them who has stated that water vapor (steam) cannot be found in the atmosphere, and that it is not a component of the atmosphere.
Name just one.
dbstealey November 10, 2015 at 6:28 pm
J. McGinn,
There are literally thousands of physicists who are known to the public; in the public eye. Chemists, too. Those who have published peer reviewed papers, or who teach in universities, or who write critically acclaimed physics or chem textbooks.
Name one of them who has stated that water vapor (steam) cannot be found in the atmosphere, and that it is not a component of the atmosphere.
Name just one.
James McGinn:
I cannot. Nor can I name one that has done anything but just assume it to be true.
I bet you can’t either.
Am I right?
McGinn cannot find one credible person anywhere to support his ‘steam’ conjecture. When asked, he admitted it:
I cannot. Nor can I name one that has done anything but just assume it to be true.
I bet you can’t either.
Am I right?
No, you are wrong as always.
To begin, there’s prof Werner Brozak and Professor Robert Brown, authors of this article. Either they are right, or you are right. But you cannot all be right.
Since you cannot name one credible person out of the millions available who will agree with your invented beliefs, you have become a crank. You are a site pest who has decided to pester everyone here with your silly ideas. Those ideas are merely asserted, based on your weird chemistry ideation, but they are not based on anything observed in the real world.
That the air contains H2O(g) is not an assumption, as James so falsely and crazily presumes without any evidence at all, but a fact, that is, a scientific observation.
Are you now suggesting that all of the water that evaporates from the lakes and oceans of the world become H2O(g)? GREAT!!!
By the way, boiling also produces H2O(g).
James McGinn November 10, 2015 at 6:10 pm
There is a wealth of laboratory evidence that clearly and unambiguously indicates that the boiling/pressure point of H2O is immutable. Should we just, offhandedly, assume that the laws of nature are different in the atmosphere than they are in the laboratory?
Well?
I am obviously missing your point. Of course water boils at 100 C and 1 atmosphere pressure. No one denies that. But the oceans lose water all the time and they are not boiling.
Werner Brozek November 11, 2015 at 8:22 am
No one denies that. But the oceans lose water all the time and they are not boiling.
Evaporation happens in the laboratory also. But it seems to not produce H2O(g). I wonder why?
Water evaporates everywhere to produce H2O(g). It not only does not seem not to do so, but demonstrably does.
Did you sleep through chemistry class?
See Phil’s experiment above. Consider your crackpot hypothesis well and truly falsified.
Phil.
November 11, 2015 at 10:14 am
Comment with experiment showing your delusion false.
Happy Veterans Day to all who served!
Just give the link by clicking the date and copying and pasting:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/06/is-climate-science-settled-now-includes-september-data/#comment-2069349
Thanks.
No doubt James has read Phil’s experiment but is ignoring it.
No doubt James has read Phil’s experiment but is ignoring it.
This is extremely contrived. A simple measurement of the relative weight of moist to dry air, controlling for all other factors, would suffice.
Can you really be as dumb as you sound?
Phil’s experiment disposes of your loony conjecture. The crackpot notion has been thoroughly falsified. Better try to imagine a new crazy idea.
James McGinn November 11, 2015 at 1:37 pm
“No doubt James has read Phil’s experiment but is ignoring it.”
This is extremely contrived. A simple measurement of the relative weight of moist to dry air, controlling for all other factors, would suffice.
Which is what the International Committee for Weights and Measures did. Extremely accurate balances require a correction for the buoyancy effect, this requires an accurate knowledge of the density of moist air. One of the methods they used was to weigh two objects of the same mass and surface area but different volume, the density of the air was then determined using Archimedes’ Principle. The equation of state that they determined using these measurements (CIPM-2007) includes a correction to the Gas Law for the mass fraction of water vapor. This correction is negative indicating that moist air has a lower density than dry air, thus falsifying McGinn’s hypothesis.
http://www.nist.gov/calibrations/upload/CIPM-2007.pdf
James McGinn November 7, 2015 at 6:40 pm
dbstealey:
And I should have known that your mind is closed to any possibility that gaseous H2O exists in the air. If you admitted that, your entire belief system would fall apart,
James McGinn:
I admit that admitting it would be very painful, because it would essentially refute my whole hypothesis on tornadogenesis, which took me four years to develop. But if it could be demonstrated empirically I would have no choice but to accept that. So, it is no small matter for me.
So now that McGinn’s hypothesis has been falsified I assume that he will accept that fact and publish a retraction on his website?
James McGinn November 11, 2015 at 1:37 pm
No doubt James has read Phil’s experiment but is ignoring it.
This is extremely contrived. A simple measurement of the relative weight of moist to dry air, controlling for all other factors, would suffice.
Like the International Bureau of Weights and Measures do, for very precise balances a correction for the density of air is necessary. The method they use is to weigh two different objects of the same mass and surface area but different volume and determine the density of air using Archimedes’ principle. These measurements are extraordinarily precise (they recently changed their recommended formula to account for an improved value for the mol fraction of Argon in air).
The equation of state for moist air (CIPM-2007) they determine is the gas law with a negative correction term for the mass fraction of water, i.e. they find the density of air to decrease as the concentration of water increases. So controlling for all other factors they find that moist air is less dense than dry air. McGinn’s hypothesis is therefore falsified, I take it that James will now concede the argument and publish a retraction on his website?
James:
If there was evidence of H2O(g) at -60 C I would have no choice but to concede the argument. But that is the case at any temperature 99 C (at 1 ATM) and below. You still have the problem of how you detect/verify its existence.
Picard A and Fang H 2004 Mass comparisons using air buoyancy artefacts Metrologia 41 330–2
http://www.nist.gov/calibrations/upload/CIPM-2007.pdf
Phil. November 12, 2015 at 6:31 am
James McGinn November 11, 2015 at 1:37 pm
No doubt James has read Phil’s experiment but is ignoring it.
This is extremely contrived. A simple measurement of the relative weight of moist to dry air, controlling for all other factors, would suffice.
Like the International Bureau of Weights and Measures do, for very precise balances a correction for the density of air is necessary.
Uh, did you read the paper?. Let me clue you in:
THEY DIDN’T MEASURE/COMPARE THE WEIGHT OF MOIST AIR TO DRY AIR. THEY CALCULATED IT! and the ASSUMED H2O as steam.
It’s right there in black and white.
Believers need but a feather of evidence to see confirmation of what they want to believe. They then put that evidence in their cap and go on their merry way.
Meteorologists are the dumbest of the dumb.
{really? OK bud, you’re done here – bit bucket for you – Anthony}
It should be noted that the equation in the link above has been compared to measured air densities and found to be correct to within a very small factor (see e.g. Picard A, Fang H and Glaser M 2004 Discrepancies in air density determination between the thermodynamic formula and a gravimetric method: evidence for a new value of the mole fraction of argon in air. Metrologia 41 396–400). If moist air were heavier than dry air the comparison documented in this study would have found huge differences between the calculated and measured densities.
There is absolutely no uncertainty here: moist air is less dense than dry air.
Not surprising, since H2O is lighter than other air molecules, ie N2, O2, Ar, CO2, CH4, etc.
I wonder if departed James also imagines that evaporating liquid or sublimating solid carbon dioxide and methane also form “clumps” rather than existing in air as single molecules in their gaseous phase.
Distinguished host,
Thanks!
[Deleted. Mr. McGinn, you have made 299 comments claiming that your beliefs are valid. But you have consistently refused to provide any experimental data as requested, and your recent comments are simply threadjacking in violation of site policy. We wish you the best of luck wherever you decide to post. ~mod.]
I dare you to post what this is in response to.
(Done. But that’s it. ~mod.)
Uh, did you read the paper?. Let me clue you in:
THEY DIDN’T MEASURE/COMPARE THE WEIGHT OF MOIST AIR TO DRY AIR. THEY CALCULATED IT! and the ASSUMED H2O as steam.
Yes I did read it and you are wrong, they measured the buoyancy force acting directly on the object which is equal to the weight of the air displaced, so they directly compared the weight of moist air to dry air.
The only calculation necessary is to divide by the volume to determine the density.
There is no assumption of the state of the water.
The ‘believer’ here is you, McGinn, stretching everything to find confirmation of what you want to believe.
You asked for ‘a simple measurement of the relative weight of moist to dry air’, which is exactly what I gave you! Time to retract your falsified hypothesis.
Your attempt to malign meteorologists has no effect on me since I’m a physical chemist, however the scientists who did this work are metrologists (look it up).
Do you really imagine that only boiling water produces water vapor?
In that case, you’re not only ignorant and stupid, but nuts.
If there is no conclusive evidence one way or another then its best to just agree to disagree. (Or do an experiment.)
“Can’t we all just get along?”
Rodney King
We know the heat of vaporization of water to be 2260 J/g. I assume this is when a single water molecule at a time escapes into the air. So if many break off, would the heat not be way less? For example, let us presume that 100 H2O molecules at a time break off at a time. Since the bonds between these same 100 molecules would not be affected if 100 broke off at once, would the heat of vaporization not be 1/100 as much or 22.6 J/g?
Water’s polarity does not change when one bond is broken. The electronegativity difference between H and O does not change when one molecule escapes by breaking a hydrogen bond. The second molecule needs just as much energy to escape as the first. If this were not the case, then as a sample of liquid boils, the heat of vaporization should get higher and higher as more liquid boils. Would that be a logical conclusion if you are correct saying: “ making the second very hard to break”?
Water’s polarity does not change when one bond is broken.
Actually, it does.
The electronegativity difference between H and O does not change
True. Electronegativity differences are a constant. (As I indicated previously.)
when one molecule escapes by breaking a hydrogen bond. The second molecule needs just as much energy to escape as the first. If this were not the case, then as a sample of liquid boils, the heat of vaporization should get higher and higher as more liquid boils. Would that be a logical conclusion if you are correct saying: “ making the second very hard to break”?
You are not making sense here. Each H2O molecule can share a bond with four neighbors. In cool, calm liquid water (except along the surface) the vast majority of them (but not all) do just that.
When it comes to polarity, electronegativity differences are only part of the puzzle. In cool, calm liquid water the prevalence of bonds reconciles the assymetry that underlies the polarity (read this sentence again, slowly). It’s got nothing to do with the electronegativity. Electronegativity differences are a constant. As you stated, “The electronegativity difference between H and O does not change.” It’s the achievement of symmetry (the fact that the electronegativity is no longer lopsided) that is the significant change that neutralizes the polarity. AND THAT IS WHY WATER IS FLUID.
Think about it. If your statement about polarity being a constant were true then the fluidity of water would not exist. Compare hydrogen bonds (in water) to ionic bonds (in salt). Think about it: the force that brings water molecules together is not that much greater or lesser in magnitude than the force that brings the Na and the Cl together in table salt. Yet table salt is hard, and water is fluid. Why? Because in water (hydrogen bonds) the force that brought them together is neutralized (specifically, the polarity is neutralized by the achievement of the symmetry restoring hydrogen bonds). In salt there is no neutralization. The forces (ionic) that brought them together is not neutralized. So salt is hard.
If what you are saying was true we’d be able to walk across the oceans.
You can walk across the oceans if the temperature is low enough and ice forms. Even salt (NaCl) melts at 801 C.
It seems that your concept of what constitutes water vapor is not what real scientists consider water vapor.
Your semantic games are beyond stupid. Kindly STFU and crawl back into whatever stinking hole out of which you crawled.
The Control Freaks around the Big Machine look deceptively benign. The significant variables and their controls should also have polarity signs, no?
An interesting and enjoyable article, but then I don’t need much convincing. There must be items that should be added to the list of inputs, but I’m more concerned about the ones that should be removed. Physics? Biology? Chemical? You have included a rider before the list, but given the last two items in your list, the other items should be the known knowns.
I can settle once and for all the question posed by the article. Of course the science is settled; it has been settled for a long time. And it’s high time we kicked the settlers out — that bunch of undesirables and ne’er do wells are ruining the whole neighbourhood.
&
How to answer the questions “. . . do you think climate science is settled? If not, do you think it will be settled in your lifetime?”? Do I answer them in the context of the broader intellectual issues or in the narrower context of the actions and works of the IPCC? For this comment I will go with IPCC context. Perhaps I will comment separately about the other broader intellectual context.
To the question ‘do you think climate science is settled?’ – I answer that the IPCC endorsed hypothesis** is unsupportable in any sense based on any clear objective scientific perspective. One can find the evidence that the hypothesis is unsupported in the IPCC’s FAR, SAR, AR3, AR4 & AR5. My view of the current disposition of the hypothesis is that it is unsupported by observation.
To the question ‘If not, do you think it will be settled in your lifetime?’ – I answer that the emphasis on the climate science discussion is likely to morph its focus to a more fundamental intellectual struggle to save the integrity of science from subjectivism in the philosophy of science; save climate focused science from the IPCC’s commitment to and endorsement of the subjective process. Assuming that at my current age of 65 it is possible that I will live ~20 more years (hopefully). Then I think I will live to see the end of that intellectual struggle in the philosophy of science focused on climate and that a much more objective philosophy of science focused on climate will prevail and I think it will persist for a while, perhaps 100 years.
** The IPCC endorsed hypothesis is dualistic and the hypothesis is there must be significant anthropogenic climate change (aka AGW) from burning fossil fuels which must cause an overall net dangerous/negative effect on the manifold lifeforms that are exposed to the ‘coupled Earth-Ocean-Atmosphere-Solar system’.
NOTE: I really love the intellectual vibrancy in these kinds of threads. Thanks WUWT and thanks to rgbatduke /Werner Brozek /Just The Facts. The responses by commenters are wonderfully stimulating.
John
The moon may well influence the reported increase in sea level because there are several periodicities in the tides and I never see any reference to the lunar influences when I read articles about the recent increases.
Thanks to the authors for a great article.
to your list I would add under (2) nutation, imparted by (3) the moons gravity tidal forcing.
I would really like to hear your analysis of the following article’s suggestion:
“Are Lunar Tides Responsible for Most of the Observed Variation in the Globally Averaged Historical Temperature Anomalies? ”
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/are-lunar-tides-responsible-for-most-of.html
http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/part-b-are-lunar-tides-responsible-for.html
Piers Corbyn has thoughts on this here:
https://weatheraction.wordpress.com/2015/10/22/piers-corbyn-the-mid-atlantic-cold-blob-is-a-total-defeat-for-co2-warmist-delusion-and-vindication-of-solar-lunar-driven-wild-jet-stream-mini-ice-age-conditions/#more-5079
Piers Corbyn – “The Mid-Atlantic ‘cold blob’ is a total defeat for CO2 warmist delusion and vindication of Solar-Lunar driven Wild Jet stream / Mini Ice Age conditions”
My inclination is to take what he says seriously.
It’s not that complicated.
1. Mankind’s contribution to the earth’s CO2 balance is trivial.
2. CO2’s contribution to earth’s heat balance is trivial.
3. GCM’s don’t work.
Werner,Robert -you ask
“After reading this article, do you think climate science is settled? If not, do you think it will be settled in your lifetime”
Before answering we must first define “settled ” more precisely. I would suggest that in order for it to be settled we must think we have enough knowledge of the climate system and certainty about our future
climate forecasts that we can decide whether there is a climate problem that needs to be addressed.
The climate models on which the entire Catastrophic Global Warming delusion rests are built without reference to the natural 60 and more importantly 1000 year cycles so obvious in the temperature record. The modelers approach is simply a scientific disaster and lacks even average commonsense.
Section1 of my blog-post at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
has a complete discussion of the uselessness of the climate models. I’m sure that rgb would agree with me that the forecasts of the scientific establishment provide no useful guidance with regard to this question .A new forecasting method needs to be adopted.
The core competency in the Geological Sciences is the ability to recognize and correlate the changing patterns of events in time and space. This requires a mindset and set of skills very different from the reductionist approach to nature, but one which is appropriate and necessary for investigating past climates and forecasting future climate trends. Scientists and modelers with backgrounds in physics and maths usually have little experience in correlating multiple, often fragmentary, data sets of multiple variables to build an understanding and narrative of general trends and patterns from the actual individual local and regional time series of particular variables.
Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between various quasi-cyclic processes of varying wavelengths combined with endogenous secular earth processes such as, for example, plate tectonics. It is not possible to forecast the future unless we have a good understanding of the relation of the climate of the present time to the current phases of these different interacting natural quasi-periodicities.
In other words, to have any meaning ,any projections of any temperature time series into the future must set that data segment into the context of its position in the natural cycles.
In this regard the Brozek, Brown analysis above is seriously lacking because it does not provide any working hypothesis of climate change other than an implied simple straight line projection from past to future.
For forecasts of the timing and extent of the coming cooling based on the natural solar activity cycles – most importantly the millennial cycle – and using the neutron count and 10Be record as the most useful proxy for solar activity check the blog-post linked above
The most important factor in climate forecasting is where earth is in regard to the quasi- millennial natural solar activity cycle which has a period in the 960 – 1020 year range. For evidence of this cycle see Figs 5-9. From Fig 9 it is obvious that the earth is just approaching ,just at or just past a peak in the millennial cycle. I suggest that more likely than not the general trends from 1000- 2000 seen in Fig 9 will likely generally repeat from 2000-3000 with the depths of the next LIA at about 2650. The best proxy for solar activity is the neutron monitor count and 10 Be data. My view ,based on the Oulu neutron count – Fig 14 is that the solar activity millennial maximum peaked in Cycle 22 in about 1991. There is a varying lag between the change in the in solar activity and the change in the different temperature metrics. There is a 12 year delay between the activity peak and the probable millennial cyclic temperature peak seen in the RSS data in 2003.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zZLVnsvgYTw/Vj0GEDv2q7I/AAAAAAAAAag/eumhxpS9ciE/s1600/trend11615.png
As to the question of when we will know enough to have confidence in our predictions.
The temperature data in the link shows that the temperature peak in 2003 was close to a peak in both the 60 and the 1000 year cycles . If we are now on the downslope of the 1000 year cycle then the next peak in the 60 year cycle at about 2063 should be lower than the 2003 peak and the next 60 year peak after that at about 2123 should be lower again, so, by that time ,if the peak is lower, we will be pretty sure that we are on our way to the next little ice age.
That is a long time to wait, but we will get some useful clues a long time before that. The neutron curve in Fig 14 – shows that from the beginning of 2007 to the end of 2009 solar activity dropped to the lowest it has been for a long time. Given the 12 year delay between the 1991 solar activity peak and the 2003 temperature peak, if there is a similar delay in the response to lower solar activity , earth should see a cold spell from 2019 to 2021 .
It should also be noticeably cooler at the coolest part of the present 60 year cycle – halfway through the cycle at about 2033.
We can watch for these things to happen but meanwhile keep in mind that the overall cyclic trends can be disturbed and hidden for a time in some years by the El Nino weather patterns in the Pacific and the associated high temperatures that we see in for example 1998 and 2010 and that we are just beginning to see in the RSS data Oct 2015.
Personally, I think many changes are sinusoidal. See an earlier post of mine here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/09/are-we-in-a-pause-or-a-decline-now-includes-at-least-april-data/
It shows the graph from Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu. http://clivebest.com/blog/?p=330
Thanks for the links. The Akasofu graph shows nicely the joint 60 year and millennial peak at about 2003.Projections beyond that point should include the declining trend of the millennial cycle modulated by the 60 year cycle.
.The temperature curve is an emergent phenomena ,the result of the stacking of a large number of quasi cyclic processes.
The simplest assumption ,which Ockams razor says should be used for starters, is that the shape and amplitude of the next millennial cycle will be like the last one.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4nY2wr6L-WY/U81v9OzFkfI/AAAAAAAAATM/NA6lV86_Mx4/s1600/fig5.jpg
As you can see the shape is more saw toothed than sinusoidal with a down leg of about 635 and an uptrend of about 365 years.
In short any forecast which doesn’t include the relatively large amplitude millennial cycle is worthless.
Dr Page
I do not consider that from a 1000 years of data, one can say that “the shape is more saw toothed than sinusoidal with a down leg of about 635 and an uptrend of about 365 years” as if this is meant to signify something of substance such that this is a trend that will be repeated throughout the inter glacial.
Your plot (Fig 5) does not tell one, what the future will hold, although I do consider that it is likely that natural cycles, especially oceanic ones and the amount of solar insolation getting through to the oceans, will dominate and control the future, more than the so called control knob of CO2.
And you should NOT be putting trend lines across the 1997-2001 El nino step event.
This graph shows the actual reality.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/plot/rss/from:2001.2/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:1996/trend/plot/rss/from:2001.2/trend/offset:-.26
Anyone is free to draw the trend lines wherever they think best illustrates their ideas. You wish to illustrate a step jump . This is certainly a possibility .Whether is “actual reality ” is something else entirely.
I guess if you consider the El Nino as part of the general slight warming trend from 1979-1997, you should display it as such…….
…. even though it was a large step event, separate from that slight warming trend. 😉
Andy
I am with you in that if you are seeking to wean out some underlying background warming trend, then one should remove the El Nino from the data since this is not part of the background trend that one is seeking to discover.
The satellite data set clearly shows no correlation with CO2 induced warming, but of course it is a short data set but one in during which a significant part of all manmade emissions of CO2 has taken place.
Mr CFC, stick around and read what’s here. Bring on your best arguments. Leave your predispositions behind and test everyone’s comments on the rules of scientific debate.
What is naive is accepting a consensus of opinion from authority which is all paid by government based upon their performance in support for the present political agenda of “planned austerity”.
We are here to try and help each other think independently and rationally. Maybe it might rub off on you.
By the way, if settled science can’t explain the pause, then it can’t explain the cause. IT HAS FAILED and must be replaced with whatever actually explains reality. (h/t R. Feynman)
That’s why NOAA’s trough-feeding, anti-scientists felt the need to get rid of the Plateau, just as Mann used tricks to try to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age.
Have you got the legend for the red and the blue lines mixed up ?
Relativistic effects should be added and “physics” should be removed…
Physics is conceptual ideas of how nature works, relative effects are a proven concept of how nature works lol just elaborating 🙂