Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
Many jumped to the defense of Dr. John Bates, the former NOAA employee who waited until he retired to disclose malfeasance in the science and management at that agency. Bates claimed he told his bosses about the problem but said they effectively ignored him. The problem is everything was already in the public record. I listened to Congressman Lamar Smith tell the general audience at the June 2015 Heartland Conference that subpoenas were filed requesting full disclosure of all the material. He also told us the requests were rejected, but a follow-up was in progress. The same information was reported in the mainstream media, albeit with a bias. Why didn’t Bates go to Smith in confidence and report what he knew? The Smith requests must have been the talk of the office or at least the water cooler.
All sorts of lame excuses were made for Bates, perhaps the only one with limited merit was that his disclosure was better late than never. The problem is he and his supporters can’t have it both ways. He can’t be a knowledgeable climate scientist doing valuable work, when what he and all the others around him were doing was corrupted, unquestioning, naïve, limited, political science. It has to be more than a deliberately blind Nuremberg ‘just following orders’ situation. The larger question is why did he not see what was going on? Even when he realized Thomas Karl had used cherry picked, inadequate data to eliminate “the pause.” It appears he assumed it was an isolated case. He only saw what he wanted to see because he accepted corrupted science without question. How, as a scientist, could he see the consistent IPCC prediction failures and not ask what was wrong with the science?
The most obvious answer is that being a scientist and a bureaucrat are mutually exclusive. Interestingly, the proof of that statement is those scientists, like James Hansen, who openly advocated, proselytized, and publicly acted for what their political masters wanted, could break the Hatch Act. It was specifically designed to limit such activities. He did it in the most brazen way by being arrested outside the White House. Those who knew what was wrong kept their mouths shut and society suffered.
It is impossible to be a scientist and a bureaucrat because by the definition of a bureaucrat you must do what you are told. Walter Gilbert said,
“The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought”
Both are anathema to bureaucracies. There is a larger explanation that encompasses and limits all current understanding, not just science. I wrote about this before and included it in both my books because it is especially true of understanding of climate and climate change. I wrote about it before on WUWT, but the Bates/NOAA case indicates an update is needed. It is a problem of overspecialization that is created by climate science. Almost everybody in climate science is a specialist in another area who happens to apply that specialization to studying climate, usually, because funding was available, and always out of context. Hal Lewis, the late Emeritus Professor of physics, explained the impact,
“the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists… It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.”
Some portions of the following are from my earlier writings. I say this to illustrate how insane, inane, and illogical the world of research has become when quoting yourself without citation is considered plagiarism. Of course, it underscores the satirical comment that to copy from one source is plagiarism to copy from several is research.
The year 1859 was a pivotal year in human understanding because events occurred that appeared to provide a great advance but also produced a serious limitation. In that year, Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, and Alexander von Humboldt died. We are now reaching a point where the effects of those events require a rethinking of knowledge, understanding, and explanation; an updating of what we call the truth. In the Science credit for Arts course I taught my opening comments told them I was going to tell them today’s ‘truth.’ It won’t be yesterday’s ‘truth’ although that was as real to people then as today’s truth is to us. And, it won’t be tomorrow’s ‘truth,’ but they can be assured there will be one because truth, like science, is never settled. Unfortunately, they are all educated as logical positivists for whom there is only absolute truths.
Alexander von Humboldt, who is currently being rediscovered, is considered the last ‘universal person.’ It is a definitive end because he knew all the known science of his time and the sheer volume of known science is now beyond human capacity to know. One thing von Humboldt’s ability allowed was the production of the first weather map. This is important because he took individual discreet pieces of information, atmospheric pressure at a location, and plotted them on a map. He then connected points of equal atmospheric pressure with a line called an isobar thus creating a pattern for the understanding of weather unavailable from the individual pieces of information.
Darwin’s work, which as Alfred Russell Wallace pointed out failed to mention humans, triggered the scientific need for data from which to produce a theory. His work was aided by Carolus Linnaeus who produced a classification system that provided a sorting system. The problem is, it also limited the analysis because when a creature was found that didn’t fit, the Duck-billed Platypus, they simply created another category without considering that it might indicate the classification system was wrong. Regardless, the sheer volume of data led to the creation of different branches of research that became individual specialties. Western universities expanded from two major faculties, the Humanities and the Natural Sciences, to a new and now largest faculty, the hybrid Social Sciences. Within each, the number of specialist areas exploded until conflicts developed in those areas that were trying to work with the real world beyond the Ivory Towers. Some universities responded by creating what they called Inter-disciplinary studies, but even they were problematic because they overlapped the institutional management boundaries causing turf wars.
All this triggered an intellectual shift as the dictum in academia became that to specialize was the mark of genius, to generalize the mark of a fool. The problem is in the real world each specialized piece must fit the larger general picture, and most people live and function in a generalized world. The phrase “it is purely academic” means it is irrelevant to the real world. In the twentieth century, the western world went from the dictum that there are general rules with exceptions, to there are no rules, and everything is an exception. This manifests itself in society as condemning generalizations and promoting that everything is an exception – the basis of political correctness.
(Self–Plagiarism alert). A frequent charge is I have no credibility because I only have “a geography degree”. It is an ignorant charge on many levels and usually used as a sign of superiority by specialists in the “hard sciences”. My Ph.D. was in the Geography Department at Queen Mary College because climatology was traditionally part of geography. The actual degree was granted in the Faculty of Science.
Climatology, like geography, is a generalist discipline studying patterns and relationships. Geography is the original integrative discipline traditionally called Chorology. In the late 1960s, when I looked for a school of climatology there were effectively only two, Hubert Lamb’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia, and Reid Bryson’s program in Madison Wisconsin. Neither was a viable option, although I was privileged to consult with Professor Lamb about my thesis.
Ian Plimer said studies of the Earth’s atmosphere tell us nothing about future climate.
An understanding of climate requires an amalgamation of astronomy, solar physics, geology, geochronology, geochemistry, sedimentology, plate tectonics, palaeontology, paleoecology, glaciology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, ecology, archaeology and history.
It’s an interesting observation that underscores the dilemma. Climatology is listed as a subset but must include all the disciplines and more. You cannot study or understand the pattern of climate over time or in a region without including them all. He is incorrect in some of these, but that illustrates the problem, for example, meteorology is a subset of climatology. He leaves out many specializations by limiting his list to an understanding of the atmosphere when the list for climate is much longer. Meteorology is the study of physics of the atmosphere but the number of other disciplines required to understand the atmosphere is implied in Figure 1.
Figure 1, a simple systems diagram of weather (After Kellogg and Schneider 1974). Note that three boxes include the word “flux,” but the 2007 IPCC Science Report says, “Unfortunately, the total surface heat and water fluxes are not well observed.
How many specialist research areas can you list from this diagram?
Climate science is the work of specialists working on one small part of climatology. It’s a classic example of not seeing the forest for the trees. Some think computer modelers are generalists. They are specialists trying to be generalists who don’t know the interrelationships, interactions, and feedbacks in the general picture. Wegman’s identified the problem in his Report on the Hockey Stick fiasco.
As statisticians, we were struck by the isolation of communities such as the paleoclimate community that rely heavily on statistical methods, yet do not seem to be interacting with the mainstream statistical community. The public policy implications of this debate are financially staggering and yet apparently, no independent statistical expertise was sought or used.
It was taken to extremes at the Climatic Research Unit and exposed in the leaked emails of Climategate.
The problem of specialization appeared early in climatology and almost precluded wider cross-specialization perspectives from the start. Two early examples illustrate the problem. An early breakthrough in climatology occurred when Ericson and Wollin published “The Deep and The Past” in 1964 outside of academia. It achieved attention because the authors published it as a ‘trade’ book.
Robert Claiborne realized that he was getting different and conflicting time sequences between anthropology and glaciology courses when studying the natural influences on the pattern and sequence of human history. He proposed a doctoral thesis to examine the problem. Again, it was interdisciplinary so was rejected. Claiborne turned outside academia and wrote a trade book titled, “Climate, Man and History” published in 1970. Apart from the intellectual rigidity that specialization introduced, it also illustrates how the IPCC effectively stopped meaningful research in 1990.
Good examples of researchers struggling to end run the tunnel vision of academic specialization and the later limitations of the IPCC to understand better climate and climate change include;
· Sun, Weather and Climate, (1978) by John Herman and Richard Goldberg
· Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery, (1979) by John and Kathrin Imbrie
· The Manic Sun: Weather Theories Confounded, (1997) by Nigel Calder
· The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-Earth Connection (2003) by Willie Soon and Steven Yaskell
· Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming. (2003) Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick
· The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, (2007) by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder
Society has deified specialized academics, especially scientists. Consider the phrase “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist” used to indicate “hard science” intellectual superiority. Substitute a different occupation and prejudices emerge. “You don’t have to be a farmer”. Now consider the range of specialized areas required for success on a modern farm. A farm, like so many working segments of society, can only succeed as a generalist operation. I realized the problem when a farmer told me he suspected he had problems with his soil. He went to the University Faculty of Agriculture to learn that they had no ‘soils’ people. They had people who could help with nematodes, clay-mineral complexes, trace minerals, all subsets of soil, but no ‘soil’ person.
Climatology is a generalist discipline that requires incorporating all specialist disciplines. The modern glorification of specialization allowed climate scientists to dominate by claiming their piece of a vast puzzle was critical. IPCC climate scientists misused specialized areas, especially in climate models, to achieve a predetermined result. It is only exposed when other specialists, like Steve McIntyre for example, examine what was done, or climatologists find a piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit.
The Bates event is a symptom of a much wider problem. It is much more than just the fear of speaking out about malfeasance in the workplace. It is more than the problem of bureaucrats doing science or people using science for a political agenda. All those exist and require attention. However, they mask the larger problems of our inability to describe, understand, and advance in a generalist world that has developed a research structure that glorifies specialists who know a great deal about a minuscule piece but don’t even know where it fits in the larger picture.
I have a small point which needs to be set in a larger context.
Western science begins with the embrace of Aristotle and Greek empiricism in 13th century Christendom. Aristotle’s philosophy was rooted in direct observation of immutable reality through the senses. Aquinas synthesized this with Christianity, and the result set the wheels in motion for everything that followed (ref: “Aristotle’s Children”, Richard Rubinstein) Man’s gaze turned from the heavens to his surroundings, and remarkable things happened from his new understanding of his physical world. The important qualifier was that everything had to be part of the same world. There were no different “truths”. Aristotle’s simple logical demonstration that contradictory ideas could not be simultaneously true was, and is, irrefutable.
The startling progress that followed in the next several centuries was hijacked in the early 19th century by Hegel, the grandfather of “progressives”. With a philosophical slight of hand, he nudged aside observed reality with an abstract concept, namely that progress is an inevitable consequence of the passage of time. It was an easy enough theory to advance in the West of the time, which had experienced centuries of economic, technological and (outside of war) population growth.
The “progressive” philosophy was quickly conscripted by others who used it to justify their dialectics (narratives), the most successful of whom was Marx. From the mid 19th century onwards, the intellectual climate began to shift, at first in the Humanities, and in recent years into the science faculties. The intellectual process slowly shifted away from observation of reality to selecting facts which fit a prescripted narrative. At the same time, the concept of a truth based in observed reality was marginalized, and Aristotle’s dictum was cast aside. Now contradictory ideas could both be true, and consistency became the “hobgoblin of small minds.” (Emerson)
Darwin was a relentless self promoter, a likely plagiarist, and someone who understood how to provoke a controversy. He understood that his theory sat in the border region betwen fact and narrative, and saw his opportunity. His continuing fame speaks to his success in seizing that opportunity. But his contribution to the larger intellectual shift is not significant.
To return to Dr. Ball’s conclusion: “…in a generalist world that has developed a research structure that glorifies specialists who know a great deal about a minuscule piece but don’t even know where it fits in the larger picture.” This is unquestionably correct, but Dr. Ball’s earlier assertion that truth changes with time is not. If there is a root problem it is the failure to test one’s specialist hypothesis against the hypotheses of other related fields. If they yield contradictory results, they cannot both be true, and there is only one truth.
It seems to me that you overestimate the contribution of speculative philosophy to actual science. Aristotle was a philosopher and scientist, but the other philosophers you mention had really very little impact on science.
A big deal used to be made of the “atomists” — the Greek philosophers that developed the idea of atoms as the smallest units of matter. The problem with this is that they just made it all up. Atoms might be round; no, others said, they are shaped like little hooks, which allows them to hold together. None of their ideas is relevant to modern science, and if the name “atom” had not been retained out of reverence, they would by now be wholly forgotten. With the exception of Aristotle and a few others — Aristarchus of Samos, Hippasos of Metapontum — the ancient philosophers took no notice of the applied physical science of the day. Balances with arms that differed in length, pressurized pipes, air guns, metallurgy — there was food for thought aplenty, but the philosophers took no notice and engaged in pure speculation instead. Getting rid of this sort of philosophy, of the misconception that the world can be understood using reason alone was the crucial step towards modern science.
D. P. Laurable
“But his contribution to the larger intellectual shift is not significant.”
And in regards to Darwin, surely there are not that many scientists whose contribution made a more significant intellectual shift.
D. P.,
Aristotle was not an empiricist and most 13th century Christian philosophers weren’t either, with few possible exceptions, such as Roger Bacon.
Modern science arose in rebellions against the authority of the ancient pagans and the Church. Copernicus, a canon, felt the need to delay publishing his heretical heliocentric theory for 36 years, until literally the end of his life. At the same time, Vesalius dared to challenge the authority of Galen.
Your baseless assertion of plagiarism by Darwin is libelous. There is ample evidence that he formulated his theory of evolution by natural selection in 1837, if not before. Like Copernicus, he waited until publishing, although not quite as long, since he his hand was forced by Wallace’s having the same insight 20 years later.
While the facts of evolution and natural selection are now trivial observations, in 1859 they were epochal. Few scientists have had a greater impact on thought than Darwin. Wallace could not have marshaled all the evidence that Darwin brought to bear because he had not worked on the problem for 20 years. He sent his note to Darwin because it was already widely known among naturalists that the eminent Darwin was a “transmutationist”.
Nor of course did Wallace ever accuse Darwin of plagiarism. Many of Darwin’s fellow naturalists were privately familiar with his theory from at least the 1840s onwards. His notebooks are irrefutable evidence of his priority in discovering natural selection. It’s more clear-cut than the case of Newton and Leibniz for inventing calculus.
Also, hard to be a self-promoter when you’re practically a recluse, especially after the onset of his illness. He had allies like Huxley to promote the theory of evolution through natural selection.
What many don’t realize is that the facts of evolution and extinction were recognized long before Darwin. Evolution was called “development”, plainly visible in the fossil record to both Christian naturalists (like Darwin’s geological mentor Sedgwick) and free-thinkers alike. The issue was what caused it, ie were there natural process or did God periodically kill off some old species and create new ones, as devout scientists believed.
Great article. Medicine is suffering from the same thing. So are our universities in a general sense. The word university means to find unity in diversity. We celebrate diversity for its own sake. None of the disciplines tie together. For example go to a university’s medical research department and they will tell you they are working to extend the human life span. Then go to the philosophy department and they can’t give you a compelling reason to live out the span that you have now.
What they are really working on in those medical departments though is extending the lifespan of mice. The problem is that nature hasn’t optimized mice for longevity yet, so it is easy to improve on nature here; with man, nature has already done most of the work, and thus very few of the tricks that work on mice will work on humans.
Don’t knock whistle-blowers! These guys are crusaders for Truth!
Are we better-off for Bates (perceived warts ‘n all), or worse-off?As to any shame that many would heap upon his shoulders, “A red-face costs you nothing so long as your inner principles stand strong.”
The more Bates’ the better … let’s encourage them, not knock-’em!@ur momisugly
he wasn’t a whistle-blower … he was a coward who waited until there was no consequence to coming forward …
OK so it is clear what Karl did.
he did NOT have data manipulated, he did not change data himself to produce warming.
What did he do, he changed the rating of data according to Bates. Changing the rating, upping it will by process guide scientists to use that data.
Karl did not have the data assessed in order to attain a higher ranking. This is the misdirection used (he did not follow protocol). Thing is, what he did also ensured scientists would use data he decided should be used via his changing of the rating of said data, so the scientists did nothing wrong, karl did, he at best misled them to think data was better than it was.
That is scientific malfeasance.
The explainations from Karl defenders will keep saying it is all about just not following protocol, but the very act of what Karl did in not following protocol led to warmer un-assessed data being used.
Karl intentionally did this, because you cant change the rating of data by accident.
Case closed, malfeasance. No wonder he ran from NOAA after that paper. A leaving political present for the warmists
So we can see the misdirection being used by Karl’s defenders here, they say “protocol” but wont mention the actual way in which karl broke protocol that led to warmer data being used.
Warmists abuse language and obfuscate as Zeke has done, Zeke immediately threw some bs together the minute the story broke, in damage limitation mode.
remember Zeke is the same guy warming data that moves down the latitudes when he should be cooling it. He hung himself out to dry on twitter with that one, debunking his own lies
Thinking through things is extremely difficult for the biased and dogmatic because they suffer internal resistance to the truth if it is not palatable
There has been a huge change in the scientific method over the past 50 years, which is in large part responsible for the explosion of false positives.
Previously, replication and successful prediction was the gold standard for science. Peer review meant nothing, other than you had permission to publish – that your work might be worth reading.
Today, peer review is held up as some sort of gold standard for science, but in reality it is meaningless. Just because some peer agrees your material might be worth reading, doesn’t mean it is correct.
Every scientific paper should have stamped on it when published:
NOT REPLICATED
NO EVIDENCE OF SKILL
Peer review is part of a for profit operation now and the reviewing is done by folks on the public payroll and if your bucks come from government it is certainly going to affect how you review papers on climate science
I don’t think that many scientists have illusions about the limitations of peer review. The abuse of peer review for science propaganda is another matter. In a way, it is actually quite useful — each time someone invokes peer review like a totem or magic spell you know they are naive and clueless.
Excuse me if I speak to the subject of the post, rather than the warmist smokescreen the trolls have emitted. I heard this story a long time ago, not sure where: At a great European University, perhaps in Germany or Switzerland, there was a Physical Sciences building shared by the Chemistry and Physics departments. Each science had its own wing. Where the wings met, there was a large door. That door had been locked when the building was completed and never opened in over twenty years.
Oceanography literally means mapping the oceans which has gone from topography to whatever the technology thinks it can measure. Maybe instead of geography we should use the term cartography because that is what a lot of this is. Most of my education (un?)fortunately predates the modern age of specialization, so, with some affirmative action that I am still catching up on, I saw quite a bit of the evolution to specialization. Marine laboratories, with which I have a lot of experience, were conceived to bring together specialties in the broad sense, essential to understand this huge and complicated system. A marine geologist not long ago reminded me of the failure here and specialization was one of the not always stated excuses to move away from this concept.
An early, by modern standards, but still useful textbook of mine, The Oceans (Sverdrup, et al.), may not now have possible counterparts, but it is past time for a synthesis, which may need to be done outside of the current system. Certainly putting more emphasis on geography and history back into early education would help, and the teaching of oceanography too early has resulted in, or helped cause, part of the conservation ideology that we experience.
The morality deconstruction part is more difficult to understand, but it seems that defamation and its roots, perhaps in rumor and innuendo, have increased. I guess it went along with what was warned about and science is always susceptible.
To H.D. Hoese: “Certainly putting more emphasis on geography and history back into early education would help” I could not agree with you more.!!!
Who knows.. Legal threats? Bates doesn’t seem the sort to just blurt out something and retract it. He just have had reasons to say what he did.
I have seen official human reports retracted almost fully because of political pressure, like the UN’s Goldstone report for example. Humans cave to pressure but at the moment we don’t know.
Don’t mind Mosher, he’s playing the role of cheer leader for people who actually have scientific skills because he’s a nobody. 5 seconds of talking with the guy proves that. Cut and paste merchant
If you ever want to destroy your own brain, read Mosh’s twitter feed.
@ur momisugly Forrest Gardener 😀 +1
At the end of the day, it all comes down to personal integrity, as it always does.
In part to provide evidence to support the AGW conjecture the IPCC sponsored development of a plethora of climate models in the form of climate simulations. The fact that so many models were created is evidence that a lot of guess work was involved since ony one model can be correct. The large number of models generated a wide range of predictions for today’s global temperature. But they all have one thing in common. They have all been wrong. Apparently they hard coded in that increased levels of CO2 causes warming which really begs the question. The result was that the climate models predicted global warming that did not happen. Well either the models must be wrong or Nature in the form of actual temperature measurements must be wrong. Because to admit that AGW may not be nearly as great as previously thought might result in a reduction of the IPCC’s funding. apparently the IPCC decided that Nature was wrong and “adjusted” previously published data to fit the models. So the IPCC’s world is no longer the real world but rather a fantasy world as defined by their models. Since the IPCC has yet to reduce the number of models under consideration it is clear that they do not know what the real world really is.
In determining the effects of global warming there is nothing more important for the IPCC then to make an accurate determination of the climate sensivity of CO2. In their first report the IPCC published a wide range of possible values. Only a single value can be the correct value. In their last report the IPCC published the exact same range of values for the climate sensivity of CO2. So after more than two decades of study the IPCC has learned nothing that would allow them to narrow the range of their guesses one iota. The IPCC also refuses to recognize the efforts of others that would indicate that the climate sensivity of CO2 must be less than the IPCC’s publiahed range of guesses. For example, one researcher found that the original calculations of the Planck climate sensivity of CO2 were too grreat by a factor of more than 20 because the original calculations failed tha take into consideration that a doubling of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere would cause a slight decrease in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere which is a cooling effect. So instead of a Planck sensivity of 1.2 degrees C for a doubling of CO2, a better value is a value of less than.06 degrees C which is a trivial amount.
Then there is the issue of H2O feedback. The rational is that warming caused by adding more CO2 to the atmosphere would cause more H2O to enter the atmosphere. Since H2O is also a greenhouse gas, adding more H2O to the atmosphere would cause additional warming and hence amplify the climate change effects of CO2. It is true that H2O has LWIR absorption bands but H2O is also a major coolant in the Earth’s atmoshere moving heat energy from the Earth’s surface to where clouds form via the heat of vaporization. More heat energy is moved by H2O via the heat of vaporization then by both conduction, convection, and LWIR absorption band radiation combined. Evidence of H2O’s cooling effect is the fact that the wet lapse rate is significantly greater than the dry lapse rate which is a cooling effect. Also for the Earth’s climate to have been stable enough for life to evolve the feedback must be negative because negative feedback systems are inharently stable. So attenuating .06 degrees C because of H2O’s negative feedback gives us a climate sensivity of CO2 as a very small number close to zero and is in keeping with the fact that there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate.
At first the AGW conjecture sounds plausable but a more in detph analysis reveals major problems. The most glaring is that there in no radiative greenhouse effect upon which the AGW conjecture is based. A real greenhouse does not stay warm bacause of the action of LWIR absorbing and radiating gases but because the glass limits cooling by convection. It is a convective greenhosue effect that keeps a real greenhouse warm. So too on Earth. Gravity limits cooling by convection and, as derived from first principals, keeps the surface of the Earth 33 degrees C wamer because of the atmosphere. 33 degrees C is the calculated amount and 33 degrees C is what has been measured leaving no room for an additional radiative greenhouse effect. The Earth’s convective greenhouse effect is a function of garvity, the heat capacity of the atmosphere, and the depth of the atmosphere and has nothing to do with the LWIR absorption properties of some trace gases. The non existance of a radiant greenhouse effect anywhere in the solar system renders the AGW conjecture as science fiction.
I have to wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with where he lives. Asheville is a very leftist city. It’s a lot like Portland, OR, and called by some the San Francisco of the south. You can expect to be shunned there if you express doubts about global warming. So perhaps he had second thoughts when he realized the kick back he would receive there, and decided that he didn’t want to spend his retirement as a local pariah.
A typo perhaps, but the opposite is true re. “the wet lapse rate is significantly greater than the dry”.
Moisture in the air reduces the dry lapse of 10ºC/km to on average 6.6ºC/km by warming the air by 3.3ºC/km.
This deviation from the dry means that at a 10km tropopause the air is 33ºC warmer than it should be for its height (still a lot colder than the surface of course).
Mixing of the colder air from below with the warmer air above by winds and turbulence averages out the difference to make for a potential temperature increase at the surface of 16.5ºC.
This is not heat a heating mechanism overall as moisture is produced by evaporation which has cooled a surface somewhere by the same amount. But it helps to spread warmth around.
I maintain that water in all its forms is a moderator of extremes of temperature on Earth by moving surplus solar energy from hot places to cool. Talk of average global temperatures is meaningless.
Water acts as storage heater (oceans), central heating (ocean currents), insulator (ice), and air conditioning (evaporation) all in one.
If looking at the reduction of the moist lapse rate as seen looking downwards from 5km up and Earth’s effective temperature zone at -18C. then it appears to be a direct cooling mechanism to the surface of 17.5ºC.
Moist: -18 + (5 x 6.5) = 14.5 at surface
Dry: -18 + (5 x10) = 32 at surface
One more.. parasol (clouds and water vapour)
And another….blanket (night time clouds)
willhaas, Alan above posted this link to a WUWT article
3 is definitely wrong. See
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/24/refutation-of-stable-thermal-equilibrium-lapse-rates/
It describes how an atmosphere with no radiation would uniformly warm to the surface temperature.
What are your thoughts on how this fits with the 33K temperature difference?
Darwin’s work, which as Alfred Russell Wallace pointed out failed to mention humans, triggered the scientific need for data from which to produce a theory.
How many scientific theories have been produced over the centuries that did not need data? Kepler would not have been able to produce his laws of planetary motion without access to the mass of accurate astronomical observations made by Tycho Brahe. Going even further back into the history of astronomy where did the Ptolemaic system come from? It lasted for centuries because it was sufficiently consistent with the data for it to be useful.
Einstein’s relativity was much more a thought experiment than data driven, I think.
Observational data were required to confirm relativity.
Clearly, data were required for science before Darwin. Copernicus and geocentric models both relied on the same data, but had different explanations for those observations. Correct that Kepler used Tycho’s observations to derive the eccentric orbit of Mars, for which Newton provided an explanation.
Yes, data were needed for confirmation, you will always need data for science (according to most common definitions) but the origin is interesting. Darwin observed lots of things, noted similarities and differences and produced his theory. Einstein thought “what if…” and pursued it to its conclusion. Special relativity is not that hard to follow (unlike general relativity) when explained, but thinking it up in the first place was hard.
The theory of evolution via natural selection might depend more upon particular observations than does the theory of special relativity, but even the latter thought experiment (with math) requires some reference to everyday observations and experiences.
Yes, Gloateus, there will always need to be data and observations, but the question was “How many scientific theories have been produced over the centuries that did not need data?”
Given definitions of science one could argue that any theory that did not need data was not science, so the literal answer is “none”. Nonetheless, I thought the example of relativity was an interesting exception to the balance of data/theory that one usually finds in science. It was fundamental, one of the great breakthroughs, but required little data.
It relied on an acceptance of previous theory that the speed of light in vacuum was constant. That itself is somewhat counter-intuitive. Not sure how that one was arrived at, but probably data was needed somewhere.
Specialization is for insects.
And for blue whales, which subsist almost exclusively on krill (admittedly a number of different species thereof), with some incidental small fish, crustaceans and squid.
Seaice1 – just a quick note to thank you for your contributions in this thread. I don’t agree with a number of them necessarily, but I appreciated your line of thought and in particular how professionally you engaged with a large number of others who challenged your assertions. Well done. This is how we learn and overcome our own biases.
Thank you Dan.
True, but I think there are other more important factors such as:
1) The time-scales in climatology are so long that a climatologist can be retired and dead before their work is proved definitively wrong.
2) The computer modellers can crank out five “peer reviewed” papers while the experimentalists are still putting their lab coats on. Guess who wins the publications-war?
Bates was a climate change wh-ore — taking the taxpayers’ money for his salary (and pension) was more important than being a whistleblower while a Democrat was president.
He knew leftist politics was overriding good science at NOAA … and had the credentials to be believed if he went public … but kept quiet for too long.
The climate change cult has created a false CO2 boogeyman to get money and power.
Since no human can predict the future climate, those who do so MUST have an ulterior motive (such as getting attention, money and power).
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Edmund Burke.
Keep up the good work on climate politics, Dr. Ball, … while the fools debate tenths of a degree “adjustments”.
Why are rainforests cooler during the day? Evapotranspiration and clouds. The shielding of OLWR by upper canopy species keeps it warmer at night.
The surface of the earth cools by evaporation during sunlit hours. This is why deserts are warm during the day. The movement of water vapor then drives circulation of air but the work done on said atmosphere is adiabatic and only latent heat is transferred.
Yes, specialization is for insects. I am the embodiment of Lazarus Long.
LOL, Most excellent!
As always, Thank you Dr Ball. I have studied the “system” for many years as a computer tech in many offices including the government. What we see is the power of the pension. Control of the moles in the system is absolute as the public pension is the golden egg. Politicians will create any belief out of whole cloth and will get their disingenuous workers to toe the line. And if you point it out they will admit you are correct as they slip the blade in your back. I imagine Dr Ball’s back has many knife scars.
One of may favourite academic specialists in her own little world-
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/national/academic-toilet-paper-opens-doors-on-dunny-business/news-story/8220ddc0993592c0daa5b4bb8e4fdadf
Gender spaces? No maam, my parents called them toilets and you did your business and didn’t hang around in them was their general rule.