By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
My attention has recently been drawn to the existence of a truly repellent pseudo-academic entity – the “Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism” at Chalmers “University” in Gothenborg, Sweden. The impropaganda image below disgraces its homepage:
![clip_image002[4]](https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/clip_image0024.jpg "clip_image002[4]")
The political ideology of this shonky “university”, as if the hate-filled name of its “Centre for Studies in Denialism” were not a dead giveaway, may be gauged from the style of its logo:
![clip_image004[4]](https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/clip_image0044.jpg "clip_image004[4]")
Chalmers “University” was founded in 1829 as a kindergarten to teach poor children reading and writing. It was funded by the eponymous colonialist William Chalmers, who had profited mightily from his directorship of the Swedish East India Company.
The marketing blurb for the nest of vipers in the bosom of the “University” begins thus:
“With Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, as a hub, the world’s first global research network looking into climate change denial has now been established.
“Scientific and political awareness of the greenhouse effect and human influence on the climate has existed for over three decades. During the 1980s, there was a strong environmental movement and a political consensus on the issue, but in recent years, climate change denial – denying that changes to the climate are due to human influence on the environment – has increased, which makes the case for understanding why this is so.
“The comprehensive project, Why don’t we take climate change seriously? A study of climate change denial, is now collecting the world’s foremost researchers in this area. In the project, the network will examine the ideas and interests behind climate change denial, with a particular focus on right-wing nationalism, extractive industries, and conservative think tanks. The goal is to increase understanding of climate change denial, and its influence on political decision-making, but also to raise awareness among the general public, those in power, research institutes, and industry.”
Notice that there is no focus at all on the real reasons why skeptics are sceptical:
First reason: The world is warming at one-third of the predicted rate
![clip_image006[4]](https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/clip_image0064.jpg "clip_image006[4]")
Observed warming from 1850-2011 (lower scale) corresponding to projected Charney sensitivity (IPCC 2013 and CMIP5 2012: upper scale). The 3.35 K CMIP5 midrange projection (red cursor) implies 2.4 K transient warming from 1850-2011, thrice the observed 0.75 K (green cursor) and 2.4 times the 1 K period equilibrium warming to be expected on the basis of net estimated anthropogenic forcing and radiative imbalance to 2011 (orange cursor). The revised Charney-sensitivity interval (pale green zone) found after correcting errors of physics in current models is consistent with observation and with expectation.
Projection vs. observation: IPCC (1990, p. xxiv) had projected 0.33 K decade–1 transient warming, with 1warming expected from 1990-2025 (ibid., p. xii). However, when only 0.35 K had occurred by June 2012 (HadCRUT4: Morice et al. 2012), IPCC (2013) near-halved its transient-warming projection to .17 decade–1, and yet did not reduce its projected [1.5, 4.5] K Charney-sensitivity interval, which remained in IPCC (2013) as in IPCC (1990) and in Charney (1979).
Projection vs. expectation: The midrange net anthropogenic radiative forcing to 2011 is 2.3 W m–2 (IPCC 2013, fig. SPM.5), of which 0.6 W m–2 radiative imbalance (Smith et al. 2015) remained in 2011 and must fall to zero at equilibrium. Therefore, by 2011, 17/23, or 74%, of the 2.3 W m–2 net anthropogenic forcing was reflected in the 0.75 K industrial-era warming from 1850-2011 (HadCRUT4: Morice et al., 2012). Then implicit period equilibrium sensitivity was 0.75 / 0.74, or 1 K, and the implicit system-gain factor or open-loop gain was 23/17, or 1.35. Since reference sensitivity (sensitivity before allowing for feedback) in response to doubled CO2 is 1.04 K in the fifth-generation ensemble of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5: derived from data in Andrews et al. 2012), implicit midrange Charney sensitivity, assuming invariant unit feedback response with temperature, is1.35 x 1.04, or 1.4 K. The 3.35 K ![clip_image008[4]](https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/clip_image0084.png "clip_image008[4]"){kind=small}
midrange estimate of Charney sensitivity derived ibid. accordingly exceeds expectation by a factor 2.4.
Since global warming is not occurring at anything like the projected rate, the imagined harms from global warming are not occurring at anything like the projected rates either.
Second reason: Their predictions were wrong because Their science was wrong
Official climatology has made an elementary error of physics. It imagines that feedback will triple the harmless 1 K direct warming caused by a CO2 doubling (or even, at the high end, multiply it tenfold). But it erroneously defines feedback as responding only to changes in the input signal, which, in climate, is the 255-274 K emission temperature caused by the fact that the Sun is shining. As Professor Ray Bates bluntly puts it, “The IPCC’s definition of feedback is nonsense.”
The bulk of the feedback response comes from emission temperature, but that feedback response gets misallocated and added to the tiny feedback response to the warming from the naturally-occurring greenhouse gases. I recently asked another control theorist what he thought of IPeCaC’s mistake, on a scale of 1 to 10. “It’s a 10,” he gasped, astonished at the sheer magnitude of the error.
Due to that significant error of physics, official climatology imagines, incorrectly, that the direct warming caused by the greenhouse gases drives a feedback response many times greater than itself. That, in a nutshell, is the chief reason why so very much more global warming is predicted than is observed.
But there’s more. Last week I spent some time in Ireland with Michael Connolly and his son Ronan. The Connollys père et fils are two of the sharpest, liveliest intellects it has been my privilege to come across. They are so fascinated by science that they reminded me of Quintilian’s description of the Athenian historian Thucydides as semper sibi instans – always tripping over themselves in their excitement at the wonders of nature. To spend time with them is to be reminded of the classical age of Physics, when the words “I wonder” – indicating awe as well as curiosity – prevailed, rather than the “I believe” or the chilling “You will believe, or else!” of modern totalitarian pseudo-science.
Whenever I asked a dim, layman’s question (and I had to apologize in advance for the sheer stupidity of some of the questions I’d be asking), they would shoot off on various delightful scientific tangents, interrupting each other constantly. Once I had to ask the same question six times before they stopped with the tangents already. Suddenly, they focused, and brilliantly answered the question.
For five years the Connollys have been patiently working on a result so breathtakingly beautiful, so astonishing, so unexpected and so wonderful that it is the first climatological result I have come across that is worthy of the Nobel Prize in physics.
The Connollys kindly met me on my arrival at the airport and carried my bags for me, for I had broken my foot while instructing Christian teenagers at a summer camp in rural Massachusetts last month, and I was strapped up in a giant, splinted boot that doesn’t work for me as a fashion statement, or for that matter as a boot.
On the way to the car, they apologized most charmingly for being socialists. “And so am I, on social policy,” I replied, But we agreed that on economic policy we were all libertarians.
These two are hands-on guys. They built their own house with their own hands and, during the few moments when they are not doing science, they run their property empire. They have the Irish sense of humor, in spades. Michael has written a wickedly perceptive paper called The Greenpeace Business Model, which is well worth a read.
The Connollys are as hands-on in their scientific experimentation as in their house-building. Michael showed me a suitcase in the trunk of his car where he kept what he described, with a broad grin, as “the longest plastic straw in Ireland”. It’s 100 feet long, and he uses it in his public lectures to demonstrate how energy moves through air.
So to the Connollys’ result. They have been studying the 20 million radiosonde records that have been accumulated worldwide since the middle of the last century. Each record is a profile of atmospheric temperature, pressure, humidity and wind direction at various altitudes from the boundary layer (where we live and move and have our being) all the way up to the mid-stratosphere. The radiosonde records give a more detailed picture of what is going on in the atmosphere than measurements taken either from the ground or from satellites.
The two enthusiasts wanted to know to what extent the atmosphere behaves as an ideal gas. An ideal gas is one that obeys the ideal-gas law (1), which, as every schoolboy knows, embodies Boyle’s, Charles’ and Avogadro’s laws. P is pressure, V is volume gas, n is the number of molecules, R is effectively a scaling constant, and T is temperature.
| P V = n R T | (1) |
An ideal gas is one that is in thermodynamic equilibrium. When one plots (1) from the radiosondes, an exasperatingly stochastic (i.e., unpredictably squiggly) curve emerges. Michael deduced that it might be worth rearranging the terms in (1) to give (2), where the molar density D is related to the ratio of pressure to temperature –
| D = n / V = P / RT | (2) |
If the molar density is plotted against barometric pressure, the stochastic curve vanishes and three distinct and very straight lines appear – one for the boundary layer where we live and move and have our being, one for the rest of the climatically-active region of the atmosphere, and one for the tropopause and as far into the stratosphere as the balloons will go:
Molar density vs. barometric pressure at various altitudes in the atmosphere.
So straight are the straight lines that the R2 ccoefficient of determination is at least 0.9997. When Michael discovered them, he went into Ronan’s lab and showed him. Ronan said: “I don’t believe this!” So they spent the rest of the night checking random records. Every record showed similar results. And what the results mean is that the atmosphere in thermodynamic equilibrium.
But here’s the thing. One implication that the Connollys draw from a paper published by Albert Einstein exactly 100 years ago is that, provided that a gas is in thermodynamic equilibrium, as they have now shown it is, the greenhouse effect – though it is present – cannot cause warming (except for a minuscule photo-emission effect applying to only 4% of emissions from particles in collision with passing photons).
Naturally, I asked where the observed warming had arisen. There are two answers to that. One is natural variability, for the warming we have seen is small enough to be consistent with it. The other is that an increase in solar radiation between about 1925 and 1995, according to an analysis by the Connollys of 16 distinct published reconstructions of a century of solar variability, could have caused somewhere between none and all of the observed warming.
But if the Connollys are right that the atmosphere is in thermodynamic equilibrium, and if they are right that in an ideal gas the greenhouse effect cannot cause warming, the climate scam is at an end, for greenhouse gases are not causing warming and cannot do so.
Third reason: The economic case for climate inaction is overwhelming
The economic consequences of the current acceptance of global-warming projections that have proven excessive are severe. Stern (2006), in the first attempt by a civil servant to justify the heroic lunacy of spending anything on mitigating global warming, done on behalf of the then Socialist government in the United Kingdom, took a 3 K mid-range estimate of warming by 2100 as driving a welfare loss of 0-3% of global GDP (cf. 0.2-2%in IPCC 2013). The 11 K upper bound in Stern (2006), assuming a 0.1% pure rate-of-time discount rate that gave “a 1 in 10 chance of the planet not seeing out this century” (Dietz et al. 2007), drove a 20%-of-GDP extinction-level loss. Adding 1.3% per-capita consumption growth without climate change gave a 1.4% mean social discount rate (cf. 1.35% in Garnaut 2008), against a 5% minimum market discount rate (Murphy 2008; Nordhaus 2008).
Since the probability of extinction is actually nil, submarket discount rates such as these are wholly unjustifiable. At the midrange 7% commercial discount rate applied over the 21st century, Stern’s 3%-of-GDP welfare loss would become only 0.3% (or 0.1% given no net loss until preindustrial temperature is exceeded by 2 K), while his 20%-of-GDP high-end welfare loss would fall to just 2% (0.6%).
Then one must take account of the fact that increased CO2 concentration saves lives, as the European tyranny-by-clerk discovered to its dismay when it commissioned some research to try to prove that global warming would kill its subjects in large numbers. The results of the research are shown below. Far more cold-weather deaths were prevented than warm-weather deaths caused.
Even if there were almost 1 K warming per decade from 2020 to 2080, about seven times the observed rate, the calculations carried out for the hated, unelected Kommissars who hold all power in the EU showed that there would be 94,000 more subjects to obey and to serve their successors in 2080 with 5.4 K global warming compared with today than without it:
The World Bank cites global warming as its reason for refusing in principle to fund coal, oil and gas projects in developing countries, where denying electricity to 1.3 billion people shortens lifespans by 15 years.
Fourth reason: Science is not done by consensus – and there is no consensus
The very existence of “denialism studies” is predicated upon the false assumption that there is a scientific “consensus” on global warming. “Consensus” is a totalitarian political construct that plays no role in true science. The notion that one must defer to a Party Line handed down by a supposedly near-unanimous body of “experts” [x, an unknown quantity; spurt, a drip under pressure] is a conflation of two Aristotelian logical fallacies: argument from headcount and argument from appeal to authority (or, as the medieval schoolmen dubbed them, argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad verecundiam).
In any event, the official “consensus” proposition as defined by IPeCaC does not even say that unmitigated global warming would be dangerous. It says no more than that recent warming is chiefly manmade. Yet even that milquetoast “consensus” proposition enjoys negligible support in the peer-reviewed journals of climate and related sciences. As Legates et al. (2015) demonstrated, of 11,944 climate papers published in the 21 years 1991-2011, only 41, or 0.3%, stated that recent warming was mostly manmade, or words to that effect. There is no “consensus”.
True, there are dozens of me-too climate policy statements by scientific societies worldwide, but the common characteristic of these statements is that they were cobbled together by small, activist groups and were not put to the entire membership for approval. They are, in any event, scientifically valueless, because most such societies follow the Royal Society in having an absolute rule that they do not take positions on scientific questions. All these position statements, therefore, defy and deny the very purpose of scientific societies, which is to stimulate scientific debate rather than attempting, for reasons of social convenience, political expediency and financial profit, to shut it down.
What you can do to help
Write to Martin Hultman, Associate Professor in Science, Technology and Environmental Studies at Chalmers “University” (his email address, martin.hultman@chalmers.se, is given on the homepage of the “Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism”), and explain to him that you are sceptical of the climate-Communist Party Line not because you are a “right-wing nationalist”, nor because you are paid by the coal, oil, gas, logging or farming lobby, nor because you have the effrontery to belong to a non-Communist think tank, but because the profiteers of doom have flagrantly exaggerated their predictions, because They did so though perpetrating elementary errors of physics when They borrowed mathematics and methods from other disciplines without understanding what They had borrowed, because the welfare loss arising from attempting to mitigate global warming exceeds the welfare loss arising from adaptation to it by orders of magnitude; and because the much-vaunted “consensus” would be scientifically meaningless even if it did exist – which it does not.
All of these sound – indeed, pressing – reasons for questioning the Party Line on climate owe nothing to politics and everything to science. It is time that those who infest the ill-conceived “Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism” were given the opportunity to realize that it is They, not we, who are the true repudiators of the scientific method; They, not we, who are allowing Their totalitarian political predilections to get in the way; They, not we, who are profiteering at the expense of the jobs of working people, the existence of energy-intensive industries in the West and the very lives of the tens of millions annually who die in the world’s poorest countries because the World Bank, citing global warming, denies them access to domestic electrical power; They, not we, should be the distasteful objects of academic curiosity.
Why does this matter? Simple. If the climate Communists get their way, we shall soon be silenced forever. They are working themselves up to a frenzy of fabricated fury against us for having dared to raise proper and legitimate scientific questions such as those that I have outlined here.
Already, the Connollys have suffered the same fate as so many of us: outright blacklisting in a manner not seen since the 1930s. When the Connollys were recently invited to speak at a university, the climate Communists protested to the dean of the faculty and the vice-chancellor and threatened violence. Then the university said it could only allow the meeting to take place if the Connollys, at their own expense, took out public liability insurance. So they did. The university, thwarted, waited until close of business on the Friday before the Monday morning on which the Connollys had been invited to speak and then announced that they also needed personal insurance, which it knew they could not obtain in time.
Thus it is, by little and little, by shoddy devices, and by the shameful inaction and feebleness of libertarian politicians, that freedom of scientific research is being taken away. A new Dark Age is at hand. I, for one, propose to fight for the light, and for freedom of inquiry, of research, of speech, of thought and of action, whether the totalitarians that are now a plague upon academe like it or not.
Christopher,
If you are surprised or impressed by the gas law issue raised by the Connollys (and also mentioned many times in the past by me and others) then you should be interested how, given that what they say about equilibrium, the greenhouse effect actually arises as a consequence of atmospheric mass being convected up and down:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/27/return-to-earth/
My colleague Philip Mulholland has taken my initial concepts and prepared a thorough, mathematical model which shows how a greenhouse effect must inevitably occur with no GHGs present at all.
If you have the time you might also wish to browse some of my other articles here:
https://www.newclimatemodel.com/
where you can find many articles setting out the importance of the gas, laws, hydrostatic equilibrium and the relevance of the specific gravities of non radiative gases.
Love your stuff Stephen – for years and years now :0
You know it’s not about the science with these creatures. In this case it’s about Sweden. A whopping chunk of their economy is tilted toward windmills etc.
Know thine enemy:
wedonthavetime.org
because:
http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/01/17/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/
They want the “… 100 trillion dollars from pension funds …” to save the planet for the children dontcha know.
Thanks Henry.
It is hard to know whether my work has any impact so your comment is much appreciated.
Also, Christopher, please beware of the Connollys’ concept of ‘pervection’.
It is wholly unnecessary since conduction and convection do the job perfectly well enough as per the model created by me and Philip Mulholland.
It is not necessary to try to introduce novel methods of energy transfer in order to counter the radiative only model promulgated by the alarmists.
Mr Wilde makes a compelling case when he says that there are enough non-radiative transports in the atmosphere to make the concept of pervection otiose. However, the Connollys have accepted that they should not attempt to argue for pervection in the paper in which they present the argument for the thermodynamic equilibrium of the whole atmosphere and the consequent incapacity of the greenhouse effect to cause warming.
The graphs etc are very interesting but to claim that the turbulent troposphere is in “thermodynamic equilibrium” is thermodynamic delirium. Tropical thunderstorms do no arrise out of equilibrium conditions. Doubtless CoB thinks the hurricane ripping up the east coast is just a sign of this “equilibrium”.
The fact that there is a different slope in the stratosphere is also a very interesting finding. So now we have two different values of the “constant” R.
At least there seems to be some serious atmospheric physics behind all this.
The effect of recent changes in CO2 is minimal at best. Why would we even expect it to visible in such a graph? What would it look like? What magnitude would it have on the graph?
A disequilibrium enough to cause 0.1deg/decade is not going to massively disrupt the ideal gas laws, so how can we draw any such conclusions from this?
Certainly going to have a closer look at the Connellys work, though.
The thermal equilibrium that matters is that which is averaged from surface to space so one can have differing thermal gradients within discrete layers.
The observed instability within the troposphere is simply the system working to maintain the necessary equilibrium state on average overall.
Hi Stephan,
“the system working to maintain the necessary equilibrium state” .
So if it is “working” it is NOT in thermodynamic equilibrium. That ‘instability” goes right the way up to the tropopause, the nice straight line in the graph. The climate system is a heat engine, it makes little sense to claim it is in thermodynamic equilibrium.
” so one can have differing thermal gradients within discrete layers.”
The slope of that graph is not a thermal gradient. It is supposed to be a physical constant R. If you get two different values from two clearly different quite clean straight lines you have a problem.
No single location is ever in equilibrium except transiently but that does not preclude the system as a whole being in equilibrium on average over time.
Your line of argument seems to say that if you take a long enough average nothing ever changes and thus is in equilibrium. You are creating a definition which makes the word of little use and defines a condition which tells us nothing.
These straight lines are certainly remarkable for experimental data, especially meteo data. The first thing we need to know is how you can have a different gas constant in the stratosphere. I also suspect that the graph shown from one station with just a few lines is a cherry pick and it is not always that clear and not the same from year to year or tropics to the poles.
Stephen Wilde,
Yes, your articles are good. The matter was first proposed by Hans Jelbring decades ago and is the ‘Jelbring Hypothesis’.
Richard
Hans had a point but I have taken it several steps forward and with the help of Philip Mulhollamd’s modelling expertise that should soon be apparent to all.
The surface temperature enhancement occurs at surfaces beneath convecting atmospheres and is thus related to atmospheric mass and not the radiative characteristics of radiative gases.
In so far as radiative gases have any effect that effect is neutralised by convective adjustments.
Otherwise no planet with any radiative gases could ever retain an atmosphere.
No convection, no greenhouse effect.
GHGs are irrelevant.
Stephen Wilde, I had accepted that there was some effect of radiative gases on temperature, most particulary water vapor, but had objected to the notion of large multiplying forcings attributed to CO2. My familiarity with the Le Chatelier Principle in chemistry (and its finding application in many systems far outside of chem ones) which states simply that adding any agent to change a system in equilibrium meets a resistance to the change by the behavior of the other components and the subsequent shift to a new equilibrium is markedly attenuated. It acts, of course, whether equilibrium exists or not.
Willis Eschenbach’s articles on emergent phenomena in his heat engine “governor” theory of earth temperature control and similar ideas by others (tropical cloud and storm systems, etc) that appear when heating of the sea or land surface occurs, and act to combat the temperature change, to me is Le Chatelier P in action.
I had seen your comments many times but was put off by your adamant rejection of GHG as a player in the mix. Willis’s stuff prepared me to at least take a look at your idea, that convection/ advection of the atmosphere is sufficient to explain the entire temperature regime on the planet. Your and Mulholland’s modelling of Triton’s atmosphere was a powerful demonstration of your idea. In a normal world, this would have been a major part of the conversation on climate by now. I look forward to any future studies you may do.
Gary,
GHGs have an effect as do aerosols, volcanic emissions and a plethora of other factors but the truth is that all such destabilising factors must be neutralised for an atmosphere to be retained.
Willis’s ideas are correct as I have told him many times but he never gets to the bottom of why they are correct. He obstinately refuses to accept the scenario that I put to him even though it supports his hypothesis.
The truth is that any destabilising factors are offset by convective changes which leave the system as a whole in long term hydrostatic equilibrium.
All one needs to do to ensure long term hydrostatic equilibrium in the face of radiative imbalances is to vary the proportion of surface energy between that going out to space via radiation and that being transferred to and from the atmosphere via conduction and convection.
Since convection responds to changes in the thermal gradient with height it is well able to provide the necessary mechanism whereby all destabilising factors can be neutralised.
The formulae set out so thoroughly by Philip Mulholland in his modelling of my concept work for every planet with an atmosphere whether it has a radiative atmosphere or not and additionally accommodates every level of atmospheric radiative capability whether it be Mars, Venus, Titan or Earth.
All one needs to do for any individual planet is to adjust the energy partition ratio between radiation to space and conduction/convection to and from the mass of the atmosphere on both the day and night sides.
Once that is done, the only remaining variables are atmospheric mass, the strength of the gravitational field and the level of insolation determined by the distance from the sun.
I want to see Greta Thunberg and others address these issues rather than simply accepting the biased narrative fed to them.
Will she accept the challenge ?
In response to Mr Wilde, I take the rather stern approach of inviting him to do what my team and the Connollys’ team are striving to do: namely, to submit his theory for peer review. Yes, the odds are stacked against us; no, the playing-field is not level; but we must try nonetheless.
So far, none of the peer reviews of our paper has found any errors significant enough to justify refusing publication: but it is being refused. We shall keep trying, and, unless the reviewers can come up with a genuine reason why we are wrong, we shall carefully file the correspondence and then, after three or four journals have all exhibited the same pattern of refusing even to address the main point of our paper, we shall ask certain public authorities to look at the matter from a criminal perspective.
As best I can discern from Mr Wilde’s postings here, he has not proven that the atmosphere is in thermodynamic equilibrium, and he has not drawn upon Einstein’s 1917 paper to demonstrate that the greenhouse effect cannot cause warming in an ideal gas. It intrigues me that the Connollys have a) examined the radiosonde records in some depth and they think that they have proven the atmosphere to be in thermodynamic equilibrium; and b) drawn the conclusion from Einstein’s paper that the greenhouse effect – though real – cannot cause warming.
These two results – if the Connollys can stand them up and get them through peer review – will constitute the most important result ever presented in climatology.
The fact of hydrostatic equilibrium within an atmosphere which also requires thermostatic equilibrium is a given and needs no additional proof. It is a well accepted scientific principle.
Similarly it is self evident that CO2 or any other radiative material in an atmosphere is unable to destabilise that equilibrium otherwise atmospheres would never be retained indefinitely.
If the Connollys rely only on those two points then they are saying nothing new.
In contrast, the model produced by myself and Philip Mulholland is novel and explains exactly how atmospheric equilibrium is maintained without any need of GHGs
Obviously it’s difficult to work out your entire concept from a paragraph, but Stephen, you appear to be talking sense.
The analogy i use for the temperature gradient of the atmosphere is that of a pile of sand. We all know that sand tends to assume a characteristic slope (at least I do). And no matter how much more sand we pour onto the top, the bulk of the sand will remain very close to that slope.
Likewise, if you put energy into the bottom of the atmosphere, it is like pouring sand onto the top of a pile of sand. If the atmosphere is at thermo equilibrium, the added energy at the bottom will “fall” all the way to the top.
If however in either situation you change the gradient (below the critical slope for sand), energy from the top/bottom will move along the slope until it reaches the discontinuity where the energy will “fill in” the gradient, This will continue until the gradient is back at the thermo-equilibrium.
As such, I suspect the discontinuity at the tropopause shows that this is a region of concentrated emission of energy to space (probably due to cloud, but also perhaps due to a discontinuity in the water vapour level).
In effect (for most energy) this is the top of atmosphere … so from a planetary temperature point of view, the atmosphere behaves as a convecting body below with a temperature gradient of the lapse rate, and above it then behaves (largely) as if it were not there.
That is why Ned’s rather fanciful theory that pressure and only pressure (not Ir Active gases) determines surface temperature whilst total BS scientifically, may practically work.
Dear Monckton of Brenchley,
Christopher,
We already have the rejection letters from the editors of both Icarus and also the International Journal of Climate. I started my collaboration with Stephen in January of this year. I am a peer-reviewed published geoscience author, so I know how stringent the criteria for excellence are. However, even I was surprised to the response to our original paper, both editors on their own cognisance refused to even forward our work to suitable external experts for peer review.
We therefore adopted a different approach. I broke our paper into individual sequences and presented the resulting essays to Anthony for publication here on WUWT. Anthony was kind enough to allow us to use his blog to publish our work and have the opportunity to defend our ideas in front of his knowledgeable and critical audience.
The final paper on Titan captures the benefits of this critical exposure and is the work that I am most proud of.
If there is any publisher out there who can match the courage of Antony Watts I would be happy to work with them with a view to critical assessment and publication of our work.
Philip Mulholland
https://www.researchgate.net/project/Dynamic-Atmosphere-Energy-Transport-Climate-Model
Are you saying that Mr Watts received threats if he published?
As he is the owner of this blog, he does not answer to grant funders and I doubt he has many ecofascist advertisers.
He is therefore uniquely capable of airing your work. In effect your worked is being peer-reviewed online and as far as I am aware, Mr Watts runs something closer to a digital climate periodical than a peer-reviewed science journal.
It appears to be more fit for purpose in advancing climate science than many elitist publications, currently…
Rhys Jaggar,
Fear of ridicule is the greatest censor of all.
The issue is intellectual courage.
That is the courage which Anthony has.
How sad humanity hass become, that if Michael Connolly and his son Ronan can prove that CO2 or methane are not causing global warming, they are enemies of the planet. How can extinction rebellion gather such funds to voice its words, yet proven science cannot?
Sunny, here is another link you might be interested in:
Banned by Big Oil — Jo Nova’s Christmas speech for geologists cancelled by Woodside
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/09/banned-by-big-oil-jo-novas-christmas-speech-for-geologists-cancelled-by-woodside/
We are going to have to do something legislative to prevent “universities” from no-platforming those who do not conform to the Communist Party line on a growing range of topics. They should be defunded, dechartered and ignored, and their Mickey-Mouse “degrees” should be derecognized.
Follow the yellow brick road.
Please sign our petition”There is no climate emergency” thanks.
https://saltbushclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/european-petition.pdf
How does one sign this? Im not a scientist. Not sure what you are looking for here. Plus i dont see any signatures of the names that are present. Seems like this doc could hold alot more weight to the viewer when in its current state who knows who composed it etc. what am i missing?
No climate emergency
https://klimatsans.com/2019/07/28/no-climate-emergency/
If you feel that you are a member of the company, please email us at one of the following (translated):
Prof. Guus Berkhout guus.berkhout at clintel.org
Prof. Richard Lindzen richard.s.lindzen at mit.edu
Prof. Alberto Prestininzi alberto.prestininzi at uniroma1.it
Jim O’Brien jim at jimobriencsr.co
Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt fritz.vahrenholt at kaltesonne.de
https://globalwarmingsolved.com/about-us/ This is Michael Connolly and his son Ronan website..
Why set up research on reasons for ‘climate change denial’ when they could just read the material on skeptic websites – the work has been done for them!
Susan
Grants.
Follow the money.
Perhaps research is needed on why people feel the need to do this kind of research.
Money … done now send me my grant money please.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Great job as always but maybe a few corrections…
” but because the profiteers of doom have flagrantly exaggerated their predictions, because (T)hey? did so
thoughthrough perpetrating elementary errors of physics when (T)hey? borrowed mathematics and methods from other disciplines ……”The atmosphere and its albedo reflect away 30% of the incoming solar energy making the earth cooler. Remove the atmosphere, the earth receives 25% to 40% more kJ/h and as a result gets hotter. Radiative GreenHouse Effect theory claims exactly the opposite.
That the earth without an atmosphere would be similar to the moon, blazing hot lit side, deep cold dark, is not just intuitively obvious, but that scenario is supported by UCLA Diviner lunar mission data and studies by Nikolov and Kramm (U of AK).
This actual and indisputable fact negates, refutes, guts and tosses RGHE theory straight onto the long established rubbish heap of failed scientific theories together with Vulcan, phlogiston, Martian canals, luminiferous aether, spontaneous generation, tabula rasa, phrenology and cold fusion.
Zero RGHE, Zero CO2 warming, Zero man caused climate change.
Since the earth is actually hotter without an atmosphere, radiative greenhouse effect goes straight into the historical trash bin of failed theories and all the handwavium, pseudo-science, thermodynamic nonsense pretending to explain it follows close behind.
Nick,
Yes, there is a radiative greenhouse effect and, Yes, there is CO2 warming (but more H2O warming),
The amount of heat being radiated from one surface to another is
q/a= [k/(1/ehot+1/ecold-1] x (Thot^4-Tcold^4).
The ground is at Thot due to being warmed by sunshine,
If the atmosphere was only N2 and O2, it would be completelely transparent to Infrared. In that case, Thot would be ground temperature and Tcold would be outer space at -270 C. But CO2 and H2O readily absorb and reradiate IR. Because the H2O and CO2 are the same temperature in the atmosphere as the N2 and O2, the ground radiates to “the sky” instead of outer space, and the “sky” is much warmer than outer space. You can take an IR thermometer and typically read the temperature of clouds at about freezing and blue sky down to -80, but $40 IR guns do not have proper emissivity settings to be accurate for this job. Anyway my point is that the ground temp will warm more in the sunshine in order to radiate the same amount of heat it receives from the sun, when there are radiating gases between the ground and outer space. That extra temperature is caused by the Sun, but is a result of the greenhouse gases mixed with the Nitrogen and Oxygen in the atmosphere. That is the Radiative Green House effect, RGHE. And you should not forget that by the top of the troposphere, H2O concentration is only half that of CO2. Your denying RGHE is an embarrassment. You can easily calculate it yourself at your stated technical education level.
Yes, it is foolish That some assume a constant Albedo of .3 to come up with the often stated 33 C number for the “no greenhouse gases” case, when Albedo is so dependent on clouds and clouds are made of water, but people who make this generalization are only trying to show how the radiative gas effect works.
Hi, DMacKenzie! Nice reply to Nick (it’s important that WUWT showcase opposing arguments in order to show that we can disagree with civility, unlike those in the CAGW cult). Your point about Greenhouse gases CO2 and H2O is true: they absorb and then re-emit infrared (IR) which ultimately escapes to outer space. However, the atmosphere as a whole is not a Planck black body (the spectrum observed by satellites looking down on the Earth is a 288 K Planck black body spectrum with bites taken out of it by net absorption by greenhouse gases).
Therefore the net 240 W/m^2 escaping to outer space, which is equivalent to that of a 255 K Planck black body with emissivity 1, does not mean that the IR suddenly escapes at an altitude of (288-255)/6.8 = 4.85 km, where I have used the observed decrease in temperature of 6.8 degrees for every km increase in altitude. This calculated altitude of “emission” is also inconsistent with the tropopause at 10 km, which is also not a Planck black body emitter (which at 220 K would emit only 133 W/m^2, way too small for energy balance with incoming Solar radiation).
What’s missing in the climate change literature is the true mechanism for the greenhouse effect: when a CO2 molecule absorbs an IR photon (centered at 667 cm^-1), it is boosted from the v=0 ground vibrational state to the v=1 first excited state in bond-bending. If this excited state molecule then simply re-emits a 667 cm^-1 photon, there will be no net change in the atmospheric temperature, for the energy emitted would simply be equal to that absorbed. This argument also explains why “back-radiation” as a mechanism for the greenhouse effect is also wrong: any IR emitted back to the 288 K surface is powered by an equal amount originally emitted by the 288 K surface which IS powered by incoming Solar visible radiation (there is little 667 cm^-1 energy in the incoming Solar spectrum, so CO2 cannot be excited directly by Solar radiation).
But the v=1 excited state CO2 molecule is surrounded by N2 and O2 molecules which outnumber CO2 by a factor of 2500:1 (at 400 ppmv CO2). Inelastic collisions between v=1 CO2 molecules and N2 and O2 molecules result in radiation-less quenching of the v=1 CO2 molecules, with the excitation energy ending up in translation and rotation of the departing molecules. I.e. the atmosphere as a whole warms up. At normal surface temperatures and pressure, gas molecules undergo about 10^10 collisions per second, and it takes only a couple hundred or thousand collisions for quenching to occur. The mean radiative lifetime of a v=1 excited state is of the order of seconds or fractions of seconds, so collisional deactivation is most probable.
But this transfer of energy from v=1 CO2 molecules to N2 and O2 is not 100%. At 288 K, about 3% of CO2 molecules would be boosted to the v=1 state by high energy collisions, without the need for IR photons [the fraction of molecules in the excited state is given by the Boltzmann relation, exp(-E/kT) ]. So if the concentration of CO2 is doubled, there will be an increased amount of net absorption in the atmosphere, the temperature will increase slightly, and so will the % of v=1 CO2 molecules. This reflects a shift in the equilibrium, as given by LeChatelier’s Principle: CO2(v=0) + energy = CO2(v=1). Since the heat capacity at constant pressure, Cp, of linear molecules like N2 , O2 and CO2 is given by 7k/2 per molecule, where k is Boltzmann’s constant, most of the absorbed heat deltaH = Cp.(deltaT) will end up in N2 and O2 (2500 times that in CO2). Being homonuclear molecules with no permanent electric dipole moment, N2 and O2 do not absorb or emit any significant amount of IR, so the heat absorbed remains in the atmosphere.
At any instant, there will be convection currents trying to transfer energy from hot to cold, since equilibration by radiation alone is slow. However, the linear plots shown in the article IMO mean that overall the atmosphere is in thermodynamic equilibrium (which is agreed to by all). However, this does not mean that Stephen Wilde’s theory is right, for convective results are smoothed out. It seems to me that Stephen’s theory is like back-radiation: yes, descending air warms up, a consequence of adiabatic changes when dU/dh = – dH/dh , where U = mgh is the gravitational potential energy of a molecule of mass m. But ascending air is driven by temperature/density differences from a heated Earth’s surface, and as air rises, it cools by the same rule, dU/dh = -dH/dh.
Net result, zero change to surface temperature.
As for Stephen’s explanation for the temperature profiles on other planets and moons, the dry adiabatic lapse rate can be simply derived from dU/dh = -(dH/dT).(dT/dh) , where we have used the Chain Rule for derivatives on the right side. For the Earth, this is dT/dh = -9.8 K/km.
But the observed lapse rate is -6.8 K/km, which means that the Earth’s troposphere cools less per km than the dry adiabatic rate (i.e. when no heat is injected into each km layer). This is a direct proof that there is a greenhouse effect, for we can derive this observed lapse rate as follows:
From the MODTRAN spectrum available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing (the 4th Fig.), 260 W/m^2 escapes the TOA (Top Of the Atmosphere) at 300 ppmv CO2. At 288.12 K (15 degrees Celsius), and emissivity 0.98, the Earth’s surface emits 383 W/m^2 (as given by the Stefan-Boltzmann law). Therefore 383-260 = 123 W/m^2 is absorbed by the atmosphere (this would be zero if there were no greenhouse gases). I.e. 123(100)/383 = 0.321 or 32.1% of the Earth’s emission is net absorbed.
If no heat is absorbed per km, the temperature change would be 9.8 degrees (this is the dry adiabatic lapse rate).
If 100% of the Earth’s emission is absorbed by the atmosphere, by Kirchhoff’s law that a good absorber is a good emitter, then 100% of the energy would be re-emitted upward through a 100% opaque layer which would be isothermal (no change in temperature), until final escape at some upper surface which would be at 288 K. The difference in lapse rate from dry adiabatic would be 9.8 K/km.
Since 32.1% of the Earth’s emission is absorbed, according to the MODTRAN computer calculation, the temperature change expected would be 32.1% of 9.8 = 3.1 K/km (since enthalpy change, deltaH, is proportional to temperature change, deltaT, since Cp is constant) . Subtracting this from 9.8 gives the expected lapse rate of 6.7 K drop in temperature for every km increase in altitude. This is close enough to the observed 6.8 K drop per km that we can say we now understand the observed linear lapse rate of the troposphere.
To be sure, there are complications with more detailed temperature profiles: in the tropics, particularly, where rapid evaporation followed by cloud formation injects the heat of condensation into the lower troposphere, the lapse rate will show a lower rate of cooling. And water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas (twice as much warming compared to CO2, as shown by the MODTRAN spectrum), so the mechanism of energy transfer from high water vapour concentration to non-radiating N2 and O2 will increase the heat absorbed per molecule, also lowering the rate of cooling per km.
Finally, if increased CO2 throttles the IR escaping at the TOA, and increased temperature evaporates more water vapour which also throttles the IR escaping (providing a physical mechanism for positive feedback), then there will be an imbalance in the energy budget. Therefore the same incoming Solar radiation will warm the Earth’s slightly above 288 K, so that the IR escaping the gauntlet of CO2 and H2O (water vapour, as opposed to liquid water droplets) molecules will once again balance the incoming Solar radiation (after reflection to outer space from clouds, etc. has been taken into account). At the new equilibrium, the Earth’s surface and every km of the troposphere will be slightly warmer, but amazingly the lapse rate will scarcely change. This explains why regardless of latitude, the observed lapse rate of -6.8 K/km shows up in parallel temperature profiles (except in polar winters when temperature inversions occur in the first several hundred metres). The explanation from statistical mechanics is the law of equipartition of energy: the most probable distribution of added energy among a fixed number of molecules occurs when each molecule gets an equal share of any added energy (surface temperatures drop with increased latitude due to less incoming Solar radiation, of course).
BTW, my own calculations show that climate sensitivity is about 0.6 K on doubling CO2, not 3 K or even the now-revised value of 1.5 K (why has no one commented that if 3 K was bad for decades, then halving it to 1.5 K should be OK, or at least destroy the argument to control CO2 to cut global warming to 1. 5 K?). As CO2 increased from 280 to 400 ppmv from 1850 to 2018, temperatures rose by 0.8 +/- 0.1 K. Since there is a logarithmic, not linear, relation with CO2 increases, then the maximum possible global warming consistent with the historic record would be 0.8[ln2/ln(400/280)] = 1.55 K , and this would include possible changes in Solar output as the Earth recovered from the Little Ice Age. 3 K climate sensitivity has been wrong from the start.
The long-quoted climate sensitivity of 1 K (not including feedbacks) comes from MODTRAN-like computer calculations for a cloudless 10 km of the troposphere. But 62% of the Earth’s surface is covered by clouds which absorb 100% of the 288 K emission (so doubling CO2 below the cloud tops has no net effect, since any extra CO2 absorption means exactly that much less absorption by the cloud particles) and then re-emit at a lower temperature (so the initial emission for the absorption cell is less). In the shorter path length from the cloud tops to the TOA, there will be fewer CO2 molecules for absorption, and more importantly, even fewer v=1 excited state CO2 molecules since the temperatures drop, and therefore the % in the v=1 state. Almost all absorption lines for the v=0 ground state CO2 molecules are saturated, and it is the v=1 state molecules that provide the extra absorption, as shown by the two small areas between the green and blue calculated curves in the MODTRAN spectrum, which correspond to absorption bands centered at 618 and 721 cm^-1. As for positive feedback from water vapour, I calculate the % is about 33% (which could be boosted to 50% if we use the formula for an infinite geometric series), not 200%, and this is likely almost all cancelled by a slight increase in cloud cover with increased water vapour (and infinite geometric series are approximated by dropping the higher terms when the common ratio is about 10%).
Roger
I don’t think you have read my material or absorbed the implications of Philip Mulholland’s maths.
The return of KE to the surface via recovery from PE in descending air does warm the surface since it represents energy loss delayed and so must be added to ongoing insulation.
Yes, the absorption curves of IR absorbing gases are not similar to the black body curve. But it is very difficult to get to a proper level of detail without losing blog readers. BTW you did an excellent job in your response. I am also a “cloud dude” of the opinion that a 1 degree warming at ocean surface causes 7% more water vapor, which “wants” to form 7% more clouds, the clouds then reflect a few watts of incoming solar back to outer space, causing a 1 degree cooling long before 7% more clouds form. Many people seem blissfully unaware of the fact that when a cloud obscures the sun, the SW intensity drops by hundreds of watts per square meter, for example the readings of solar radiation at this weather station
http://weatherstation.uwinnipeg.ca/
Roger, if you’re still checking this post, I would be interested in what references you are using for your calcs, so I could confirm yours, which do look correct to me. On my bookshelf, “Radiative Heat Transfer” by Modest, “Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate” by Salby, “Microclimate, Vegetation, and Fauna” by Soutjesdijk, various thermo and fluid mechanics and heat transfer textbooks and handbooks, ASHRAE handbooks, all somewhat lacking in atmospheric CO2 IR absorption calculations except for Modest. I can be found at http://www.gasliquids.com
Excellent article, sums up exactly why IR-active gases (falsely named GHGs) prevent us from deadly heat.
Nick you are making a mistake. You are comparing an atmosphere with radiative gases to a planet with no atmosphere. That is an IPCC-scale error.
Determine the air temperature at 2m altitude with and without GHG’s. That is the comparison we need. The influence of GHG’s is to be made in an atmosphere. What happens when there is no atmosphere is irrelevant to the question.
When clouds and GHG’s are removed, the ground receives about twice the insolation, gets hot, heats the atmosphere by convective heat transfer, and the air cannot cool by radiation. It will not be colder than it is now.
A really good article but it’s missing too many references to sources.
The only other point I’d make is that the political comments drag it down. I’m a lefty. want the UK out of the EU, believe man made climate change is a con and I think references to “Komissars” and a host of others, etc, just make a good article seem a bit too directed. They distract from the essential point.
They dragged it down. Don’t do it again! 😉
The essential question is how such shoddy science is allowed to continue. CAGW should be dead and buried for many scientific reasons but it is not. The sad fact is that it’s not about science. It seems crystal clear to me that the whole thing is political.
It’s the “Political” Science that we have to be afraid of. It is the reason CAGW is, not only, still alive but advocating Socialist agendas to strip the people of their liberties through central global Government regulations that will drive up the cost of living while driving down the quality of life.
Science doesn’t do such horrible things, only politics does. Those driving this political hobgoblin are evil doers with self serving motives. Those marching in their parades are brainwashed simpletons, overly emotional and sorely under educated.
>>
Those marching in their parades are brainwashed simpletons . . . .
<<
I believe the term is “useful idiots.” A term often attributed to Lenin (though not verified).
Jim
I don’t know mate, seems to me leftism and fascist environmentalism are part and parcel. I’m glad you’re on our side, but it might behoove you to look at the larger picture.
Me too.
I’m a lefty. want the UK out of the EU and believe man made climate change is a con.
What makes me different from other lefties is that I’m a scientist.
Teddz: I’m not a lefty but I agree fully on your point. I love what Monckton does so effectively and I do agree with him that тотaliтarуаиisм is a big part of the C-Anthro Global Warming back stage puppetry, but I wish he wouldn’t mix the the politics in so lavishly that it dilutes the science.
On the popular identification of sceptics as right wing agendaists, I’ve always wondered why lefties who know a fraud when they see one haven’t come together to say so in some organized way. I’ve often pointed out that the constant finger pointing at conservatives ultimately makes it look like we are the only martyrs and champions of integrity, rigorous science and even spokespersons for poor citizenry and poverty stricken countries. When the meme bites the dust, it looks like “righties stand to have greatness thrust upon them.
Finally, I own up to bashing “lefties” out of frustration with the global transformation that is going on with the traditional left. Much of my family are decidedly Left, but my main argument with them is the Party they support is no longer what they think it is. Its constituency is certainly not the poor anymore.
Gary
I suspect your family, like much of mine, hang onto the romantic notion of the working class labour movement.
What they fail to recognise is that in the UK at least, the traditional left has taken a lurch to the far left because there is no longer the traditional, barely educated, ill informed, working man. Votes must now be sought from the low paid immigrant community, many of whom are Muslims with sympathy for Palestine, so the labour party fully embrace the plight of the Palestinians and identifies itself as antisemitic.
The educated western world informed itself out of socialism. That’s why the left work so hard to brand racism, nazism, fascism, antisemitism, and political violence as right wing phenomenons when, in reality, all these disgusting traits emerged from the left.
What the right has for so long failed to do is to be proud of the achievements of Capitalism. Whilst socialists have spent the last two generations successfully undermining Capitalism, the right have done nothing to counter their propaganda and have instead, apologised for our success.
Gary asks:
“On the popular identification of sceptics as right wing agendaists, I’ve always wondered why lefties who know a fraud when they see one haven’t come together to say so in some organized way.”
Possibly because you are confusing the Left/Right “this is what I feel is right” concept of defining the political spectrum (ie If you believe in justice and hugs and welfare you are Left, and if you want to send children down the coal mines and flog the servants you must be Right) with the entire mental thought processes involved in a Left/Right brainset.
Put simply, Lefts believe that are correct and that everything would be better if only they were in charge.
Rights, or more correctly conservatives, believes that everything would be better for their immediate friends and family if everyone else stopped trying to change the way they did things.
Lefts want to be in charge for the good of everyone. Conservatives don’t really feel the need to care for everyone, only their immediates. Conservatives are in many ways more selfish than Lefts, but, and here is the paradox, are more socially flexible and easier to get along with because they understand the need to compromise for mutual benefit.
A Conservative will usually support a free market. You give me money. I am happy. I give you service you desire. You are happy. Win/Win, but only in a situation where both parties are willing (able?) to come to a mutual arrangement.
To a Left none of his is fair. Everything must be equal. If you disagree you are standing in the road to fairness and it is my moral right to force you to change. Hence a Left doesn’t need to be sociable because they are right, you are wrong and morally they don’t have to listen to your selfish evil mean and nasty attitude.
The problems expand because since a Left already knows they are right and everything would be better if only they were in charge (using their clear superior cleverness to make the world better for everyone… because they know best), for them to admit that they are actually wrong throws their entire world view into question. If they are wrong about one thing then maybe the world wouldn’t be better if they were in charge and in fact, maybe most of their life has been for nothing… or… No, I am still right and… ummm… racism!
Lefts believe they are the best people to be in charge. Minor set backs like actual facts clash with this entire mental process and are best rejected. The important thing is making the world a better place. This is why you start to see such statements like “can you afford to take the risk?” Facts are making them question.. but… saving the world is STILL the end game because after all, they know best and everything would be better if only they were in charge.
Lefts will not and cannot reject. They might see the fraud but it is probably something they can rationalise out later and besides, they still know best. The moment they do accept facts and change their mind set and admit that MAYBE they don’t know what is best and MAYBE their is another way involving compromise then they stop being Lefts and evolve instead to Centralist with liberal social beliefs.
Left isn’t a political viewpoint. It’s a core logic mindset.
As long as the climate gang keeps pushing AGW as an excuse to impose leftwing politics, the rest of us will keep pointing that out.
Teddz
Seems to me that if you are a ‘lefty’, but don’t conform to the ‘settled science’ of AGW, but you presumably conform to the political science which is, as has been stated on many occasions, to use climate change as the means to a New World Order.
But if you don’t believe in the settled science, then you can’t conform to the left’s vision of a climate change driven New World Order, therefore you’re not a lefty.
Besides, you have taken advantage of all the benefits Capitalism has to offer, so now telling everyone there is a better future in socialism, when every possible attempt at it has proven an abject failure, is ever so slightly deranged. How does it even make sense?
I suspect, like most of the rest of us, you recognise the admirable objectives of socialism, but also recognise it just doesn’t work. I also suspect that unlike most of the rest of us you have become complacent with the familiar ease of Capitalism. Perhaps you are even a little dissatisfied with your own performance under a system that allows people to flourish.
Unlike Capitalists, I can’t think of a lefty that leads by example. I mean, there are lots of wealthy people out there who tell everyone else they can follow their example and become wealthy, some even write about it.
I have yet to see a lefty leading by example. I don’t see labour politicians in the UK or Democrat politicians in the US giving away much of their wealth to the needy in society, then writing self help books about it.
What I do see is a lot of disgruntled failures in life telling everyone else how good socialism is and marching/demonstrating etc. but still giving away nothing to the less well off.
I don’t see Amazon bursting with books on how to become poorer and how best to distribute what little ‘wealth’ one might accumulate over a working week.
Of course not; all the books on socialism are written by people earning nice royalties and leading comfortable lives from the earnings of others desperate to understand how they can become rich and powerful by virtue signalling their way up the socialist wealth ladder.
I have never met a wealthy socialist who didn’t get wealthy thanks to Capitalism. Thankfully I never lived in the USSR, the PRoC or N. Korea.
In response to Teddz, I have not provided detailed references because all the main documents to which I refer are readily obtainable online by a keyword search.
As to my use of terms such as “climate Communism”, one of the most successful campaigns conducted by the million willing, unpaid, Western Communists recruited to assist the Disinformation Directorate of the MGB/KGB under the 33-year-long direction of Ion Mihai Pacepa was to deter people from calling Communists Communists. “Reds under the bed” was one of their favorite phrases.
If it is not evident to Teddz that the motivation for the climate scam is as much totalitarian as it is financial, then he should read the homepage of the dreadful “denialism” institute.
It is true that there is no sound scientific basis for the climate scam. It is simultaneously true that it is the totalitarian far Left that are promoting that scam with the greatest vigor. Let us not be afraid to speak the truth, however absurd we may at first appear.
“One implication that the Connollys draw from a paper published by Albert Einstein exactly 100 years ago is that, provided that a gas is in thermodynamic equilibrium, as they have now shown it is, the greenhouse effect – though it is present – cannot cause warming…”
— I don’t understand why this is the case. Can someone provide a more detailed explanation?
It’s not the case.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, Steven. /sarc
For once Steven is correct … you don’t prove something is NOT in equilibrium you assume it isn’t because that is the default state based on the 2nd law. To put it bluntly finding silica does not mean you have found glass 🙂
Given the universe, our solar system, our sun, our moon and our Planet aren’t themselves not in equilibrium why the hell would you assume the Atmosphere is in equilibrium?
In case you missed the memo
– our planet will eventually be stripped of some light gases
– the moon is drifting away from Earth at 40mm per year and will fly off
– the sun is shedding 5.5 Billion tonnes per second and will one day die
– the galaxy is slowly tearing parts of itself
– the universe is expanding
So now unless you are going to do a Nick Stokes and define equilibrium in a special way you are going to have to mount a really good case for me to believe the atmosphere is in equilibrium.
If you want to be picky, nothing in the universe is ever in absolute equilibrium on any timescale. But that’s not a very helpful insight, is it? The way I read it, the Connollys are saying that over climatic timescales (that is to say, decadal, which is what most climate scientists use), the atmosphere is very close to being in equilibrium; so close in fact that we can say for all practical purposes (do I have to say climatically?) it is in equilibrium. Given how stable the climate is, this should not be a surprising result.
Come now, Steve, I know you can do better. If you wish to contradict Albert Einstein, shouldn’t you bring 99 allies?
Maybe an explanation of what isn’t the case, and why, or a reference or two?
Here we go. Mosher the ‘scientist’.
The fact that Mr Mosher says the Connollys are wrong – apparently without having studied their result – is a powerful indication that they are right. For Mr Mosher is what sociologists call a “negative reference group”.
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/energy-and-enzymes/the-laws-of-thermodynamics/v/the-second-law-of-thermodynamics
A greenhouse effect is a … cause ?
This has always seemed like a misuse of language to me — an effect is a cause — a cause precedes its effect.
Troubling.
Welcome to the well-established theory of chains of causality.
The naming is correct .. the cause is Radiative Transfer and QM … you are simply naming the effect of the cause.
Unless you want to argue there is something or someone called “Greenhouse” and it is a cause 🙂
This is unlikely to be the case, given that absorption lines from greenhouse gases are observed in the spectrum of energy radiated from Earth. The total area under the spectral curve is fixed when equilibrium is reached, so those absorption lines mean that other parts of the spectrum must be higher than if those lines did not exist. It could be the shortwave spike from reflections that is higher (more reflections from more clouds perhaps, or from more aerosols), but in the absence of clouds/aerosols the radiating surface of the atmosphere must be warmer than it would be in the absence of those lines.
Clouds are the main hope, and since their tops are probably part of the radiating surface, it is conceivable that a reduction in their height (and hence an increase in their temperature) might allow energy balance with less effect on the surface than advertised.
In response to “climanrecon”, the Connollys do not contend that there is no greenhouse effect: as he points out, that effect can be measured. Their contention is that, since they have demonstrated that the atmosphere is an ideal gas and since Einstein has demonstrated that in an ideal gas the greenhouse effect cannot cause warming, though the greenhouse effect is present it cannot cause warming because, as Kirchhoff had established by classical methods, and as Einstein had further and more completely demonstrated by quantum-physical methods, absorption and emission are equal and – for all practical purposes – simultaneous in an ideal gas.
The greenhouse effect is misnamed.
If you are a grower and you want a greenhouse, you might build one yourself. It will be a framework covered with polyethylene. The air inside the greenhouse is heated by the sun and/or by a furnace. The polyethylene keeps the heated air from escaping. It isn’t a particularly good insulator and can lose heat by conduction. If you want to reduce conductive heat losses, you will build a double wall polyethylene greenhouse. The easiest way is to create a positive pressure between the layers of poly which keeps them separated. The thus enclosed air is a reasonable insulator.
Wait a second, you erupt, what about infrared. Oh well, it goes right through poly. link What? It’s true. A greenhouse doesn’t prevent the escape of infrared in any way shape or form. Greenhouse growers are in business to make money. That’s why they build double wall poly greenhouses. You might be willing to spend thousands of bucks on special infrared coatings for the windows in your house but for a grower, that would result in them ceasing to be a grower, having gone into bankruptcy and all.
The only way the Earth loses heat to outer space is by infrared (and a bit of visible) radiation. Practically speaking infrared radiation is irrelevant for greenhouses. Ergo, the Earth is not a greenhouse. Just ask a grower.
It is misnamed because it was misunderstood, the same is true of hundreds of effects in physics.
Here is a youtube video by Connelly that is an excellent summary of the issue which includes a brief history.
Balloons in the Air: Understanding weather and climate
In the video that William Astley links below, at about 48:30, that question is directly addressed.
If that means what I think it means, Holy Moses!
I think they spend most of the video demonstrating that the various layers in the atmosphere are at thermodynamic equilibrium. Then at 48:30 they nail the zinger.
Their work has been up for public peer review for quite a while. Apparently nobody has come up with anything that has caused them to change their mind.
I strongly suspect that Mosher is smarter and more knowledgeable than I am but I also strongly suspect that he hasn’t watched that video.
Better yet Christopher Monckton of Brenchley,
WHAT PAPER?
AndyHce may care to read Einstein’s paper “On the quantum theory of radiation”, which he will find at the Princeton Einstein archive, in German and in English. For a more complete account of the quantum theory of radiation, he may like to study the work of Paul Dirac. If he is a layman, he may find Daniel Kleppner’s “Rereading Einstein on radiation” (Physics Today, February 2005) helpful.
You need to be very careful using Einsteins paper they are very wrong in a number of key areas
1.) Blackbody radiation laws .. he used Wien’s Law
2.) Calculation of the volume when the radiation is compressed by an external force is wrong
3.) Transverse mass calculation is wrong.
4.) Molecule sizes are wrong because of atomic model.
They would give some very funny answers if you actually used them for real world calculations 🙂
Yep. In the context of the video, I don’t think it’s necessary to invoke Einstein anyway. Scientists like to cite the original source of an idea. A good engineering text would be a heck of a lot safer.
An original idea is often described in a confusing manner. Later, if it is widely used, the description becomes more robust and simpler and whatever garbage existed in the original work is dropped.
Just more charlatans who are eager to join in the most rampant popular mass delusion to ever infect the human flock.
Brilliant ploy by this Chalmers University… they are studying climate skepticism, so need subjects to study… get Lord M to urge a large sample contact the university… simples.
Drive by griff these days.
griff, have a listen to the Balloons in the Air: Understanding Weather and Climate.
The Connelley’s are for real.
It is odd that there are past scientists that reached the same conclusion that the primary mode of heat transfer in the troposphere is convection, not radiation.
Any one who has spent any time flying small airplanes knows this. The lower troposphere is all about convection. I guess that’s why I am so puzzled by the importance given to radiative heating in the AGW theory. It just doesn’t make sense.
Where you fly small planes is not in contact to space .. take you plane up to where low earth satellites orbit (which is where the heat is going) and we will talk again 🙂
Gotta agree w/you, LdB. That’s where most of the Earth’s heat is lost to space (some is lost directly thru the atmospheric “window”).
The conventional version of the Earth’s energy budget is shown in this graphic.
Note the small amount of heat attributed to convection. On the other hand, the weather and atmospheric transport of heat from the equator to the poles is all about convection. The conventional version doesn’t come close to describing that. It just displays global (cooked?) figures. So, that’s one serious problem.
The thing that currently irks me is that the atmosphere emits radiation equally in all directions. That implies that the back radiation should be smaller than the total outgoing long wave infrared radiation, just because the Earth is a sphere, not a flat surface. That is simple geometry.
As should be obvious to any glider pilot, the conventional version of the Earth’s energy budget seems to be out of whack with reality.
commieBob
In this essay on WUWT An Analysis of the Earth’s Energy Budget I discussed the issue of the small amount of heat attributed to convection. It appears that the standard energy budget diagrams hide the fact that for energy flux recycling to occur in the atmosphere there must be a closed mass transport loop. Put simply it is impossible to transfer latent heat by radiative processes. Latent heat can only ever be transferred from the surface into the atmosphere by mass transfer of water vapour as part of the process of convection.
Because what goes up must come down it follows that part of the back radiation power intensity flux must in fact be carried by air returning to the surface. It is this clear requirement for the role of convection in the process of climate that is the basis for Stephen Wilde’s conjecture. When I built the Dynamic Atmosphere Mass Transport model for Stephen it was to address this failure to close the mass transport loop in the atmosphere that is hidden inside the standard climate radiative diagram.
One of the key differences between alarmists and sceptics is that alarmists view AGW as a unique unprecedented event while sceptics see similarities between AGW and other things. Sceptics class AGW as a “Millennial Fear”.
This is not to say that sceptics don’t believe that the issue exists. It means sceptics believe that we have seen similar issues in the past and should moderate our response accordingly. The end of the world is predicted quite regularly.
Yet we haven’t run out of oil. We didn’t all starve in the 1980s. The ozone layer didn’t diminish until we were all blinded by the Sun. Trees survived the Acid Rain. We haven’t even run out of zinc.
And the Millennium Bug didn’t trigger WW3.
The reasons are at least two-fold.
Firstly the mere possibility of the catastrophe means actions are put in place to monitor and prevent. The problem then becomes “how much to spend on monitoring and prevention”. The Millennium Bug was a case in point. Making sure the nukes didn’t launch was probably worth the effort. Buying a new system which was Y2K compliant in the 1990s when you were going to upgrade anyway was certainly worth the effort. Hiring consultants for six months to save having to reboot the computers on January 1st (or 2nd) was often not worth it.
Secondly, the people who are most vocal about any issue are obviously the people who are most concerned. Therefore the self-declared experts are also self-selecting as being most alarmed. As evidence comes in the issue is always not as bad as first feared.
“This time is different” the Alarmists cry. They always do.
M Courtney – I don’t know about the Y2K thing. It was obviously very dangerous. Why else would US Government agencies be required to report on readiness for Y2K until 2017, when Trump ended the regulation requiring it?
Oh, yeah – because government – and committees – are remarkably stupid.
“University”, formerly known as “kindergarten”. Brainwashing starts really early, I wonder if Greta has a diploma from them. Surely this is 1930s re-played, Our Party and Our Fuehrer are the best, signed by 100 German scientists against Einstein.
We’re replaying the 1870-1920 Progressive Era. That’s when the left decided to usurp control of the education system and the brainwashing began.
It’s also the last time that “consensus science” was pushed on the masses in the US in order to bolster a political ideology and inevitably lead to hundreds of millions of deaths and inhumane treatment around the world. And apparently the progressive ideologists are not done yet.
Similar situation at Jo Nova — — she was ‘dis-invited’ to speak at a gathering of petrophysical analysts by a small cadre of snowflakes … … …
From the last dooming-
https://www.adelaiderememberwhen.com.au/adelaides-tidal-wave-the-one-that-never-happened/
“Hopefully, the lesson we should all have learnt from yesterday’s pathetic anticlimax is to rely more on our common sense and less on the silly and unscientific speculation of self-appointed soothsayers.”
Amusingly I can say it was like something going viral on the internet at the time where everybody was talking about it likely because the MSM picked it up and Nash was adamant with selling his house and moving interstate which probably gave it some veracity to begin with. Now while everyone you talked to didn’t take it seriously everyone knew someone else who’d heard from someone else that someone they knew of was selling up or at least moving up into the hills or inland for the dreaded day of reckoning.
The bottom line was nobody you actually knew was doing any of that but it was always the odd fruitcake that would get interviewed on telly or get quoted in the newspaper or write letters to the editor about what they were going to do to avoid doomsday so it just gained enormous traction and was largely fun which the Premier picked up on with the King Canute bit. The trouble with the latest crop of doomsdayers is they have no sense of humour but they’ve gone viral globally with the power of the internet and without a set date and time they simply have to burn out. Such is the madding of crowds and superstition.
NASA/NOAA say the ToA is 100 km or 62 miles.
However, 99% of the atmospheric molecules are below 32 Km or 20 miles.
That’s the effective atmosphere where PV = nRT applies.
That’s also where Q = U A (Tsurf – TTOA) makes the surface warmer than ToA the same way the insulated envelope of a house functions, warmer inside than out on a winter’s day.
Pierrehumbert even alluded to this in his 2011 paper, although in his RGHE induced haze overlooked the implications.
Minor changes in albedo change Q and as a consequence the temperature difference and surface temperature.
If there is an actual warming trend of any consequence it could easily be explained by minor albedo changes.
No RGHE, LWIR, GHG hocus pocus required.
Space begins at 100km by international convention, not from science. For the purpose of determining reentry characteristics of spacecraft, the sensible atmosphere begins at slightly over 400k feet.
Isn’t this essentially the same conclusion that Nikolov and Zeller arrived at by a different path?
In response to Terry, the Connollys appear to have demonstrated empirically that the atmosphere is in thermodynamic equilibrium, and to have drawn the conclusion, based on Einstein’s paper of 1917, that in an ideal gas the greenhouse effect cannot cause warming.
Nikolov and Zeller have sought to maintain that there is no greenhouse effect, which is silly, since it can be detected by measurement.
And physically built and studied using Meta-materials. Most 3rd year physics groups mess around with it and heat cloaking 🙂
That is not exactly what Ned Nikolov says when question ed.
I am not exactly sure, but I think they are saying mostly the same thing. I will ask him.
That second image from the top of the gold crest/seal….
I’m partially blind and had my glasses off, and I thought the motto said “Wankers.” Yes I did.
It took a few minutes to get everything into focus – still can’t make out all the letters – but then I realized it was their seal and not a parody image by Christopher Monckton. Too bad. I much prefer the image and motto my poor eyes were seeing :o)
Viticulturists and surveyors have understood for thousands of years how a slope increases the surface for irradiance, but climatstologists are still grappling with elementary geometry – a 60 degree sloped surface is about double the surface area of a flat surface.
The entire +33 C mythology stems from their conceptualizing of the Earth as a perfectly smooth surface, rather than the topographically irregular and vegetated surface of reality. They also ignore that 75% of it is covered by water, and that the Earth itself and especially the water fraction have a capacity to hold heat.
If the entire “science” is derived from a gross oversimplification and worked backwards from their, then rejection is the proper reaction. I’m certainly no denier, I am a rejectionist.
Robert,
288 K (assumes average) – 255 K (assumes 0.3 albedo) = delta 33 C warmer (complete garbage)
Refer to the Dutton/Brune Penn State METEO 300 chapter 7.2: These two professors quite clearly assume/state that the earth’s current 0.3 albedo would remain even if the atmosphere were gone or if the atmosphere were 100 % nitrogen, i.e. at an average 240 W/m^2 OLR and an average S-B temperature of 255 K.
That is just flat ridiculous.
NOAA says that without an atmosphere the earth would be a -430 F frozen ice-covered ball.
That is just flat ridiculous^2.
Without the atmosphere or with 100% nitrogen there would be no liquid water or water vapor, no vegetation, no clouds, no snow, no ice, no oceans and no longer a 0.3 albedo. The earth would get blasted by the full 394 K, 121 C, 250 F solar wind.
The sans atmosphere albedo might be similar to the moon’s as listed in NASA’s planetary data lists, a lunarific 0.11, 390 K on the lit side, 100 K on the dark.
And the naked, barren, zero water w/o atmosphere earth would receive 27% to 43% more kJ/h of solar energy and as a result would be 19 to 33 C hotter not 33 C colder, a direct refutation of the greenhouse effect theory and most certainly NOT a near absolute zero frozen ball of ice.
https://sos.noaa.gov/Education/script_docs/SCRIPTWhat-makes-Earth-habitable.pdf
(slide 14)
With 30 % albedo: 957.6 W/m^2, 360.5 K, 87.5 C, 189.5 F
With 11% albedo: 1,217.5 W/m^2 (27.1%), 383.2 K, 109.8 C (22.3), 223.8 F
With 0% albedo: 1,367.5 W/m^2 (42.8%), 394.0 K, 121.0 C (33.5), 250.0 F
Professor Lindzen has published a paper saying that the true emission temperature of the Earth is not 255 K but 274 K, if one removes the albedo from clouds (which are a consequence of feedback and should, therefore, not be taken into account when deriving emission temperature).
Actually, we need to study Climate Belief – its history, how it grew and established itself to the detriment of science, truth, democracy, and all humanity, and why, despite being based on total lies it still persists. Part of the study would include their tactics, including setting up bogus departments at universities like the “Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism”. Fascinating stuff. In the future, the period of time of roughly the early 90s to perhaps early 2020s, when the CAGW ideology/industry will collapse under the weight of its own lies will be the subject of study in schools for centuries hence. How did man become such a dupe, and enslaved to such a false, extremely harmful idea?
“Actually, we need to study Climate Belief – its history, how it grew and established itself to the detriment of science, truth, democracy, and all humanity, and why, despite being based on total lies it still persists.”
They ought to study the Global Cooling Scare of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Back then, climate scientists were worrying that the Earth was entering another Ice Age. Many were very sure of themselves in this diagnosis, and many claimed that human activity was the cause of this cooling.
And, just like today, there were many studies in the scientific literature that made claims about the Earth’s climate which were never backed up with facts. All we got from climate scientists back then was pure speculation. And they were ultimately proven wrong.
That’s what made me skeptical of human-caused Global Warming. I had seen this movie before, with the human-caused Global Cooling Scare.
When I first started seeing these claims of human-caused Global Cooling, I didn’t dismiss them out of hand. I thought those making these claims were reputable scientists and were sincere in their claims and I was prepared to accept that humans were causing the Earth to cool. But as time went along, I noticed something disturbing: No real evidence was ever presented to confrim the Global Cooling claims. It was all speculation and guesses and never anything I could sink my teeth into. Never.
Then along comes the Global Warming Scare, and it’s the very same thing: all speculation and no evidence! Of course, by the time Global Warming came along I was a confirmed skeptic about human-caused climate change claims.
And to this very day and minute, CAGW is all speculation and fraud, and no evidence. If you want to prove this statment just ask an alarmist to provide you with evidence that CO2 is doing what the alarmists claim it is doing. They won’t be able to provide you with any evidence because there isn’t any evidence. Instead, they will tell you something meaningless and untrue, like 97% of climate scientists agree with alarmists. Or the alarmists will point you to the bastardized Hockey Stick chart as evidence. Neither the “97%” claim nor the Hockey Stick are evidence of CAGW, they are both only evidence of climate change fraud.
From the article: “The World Bank cites global warming as its reason for refusing in principle to fund coal, oil and gas projects in developing countries, where denying electricity to 1.3 billion people shortens lifespans by 15 years.”
How many people will the Climategate Fraud end up killing?
Don’t worry. The Chinese are supplying the cash and tech for third worlders to get coal-fired electricity. We all know what a philanthropic bunch they are (“Africans” in Mandarin translates to “black devils” – although Wiki and other China apologists have obfuscated this by saying how horrible white people are with the “n” word which really began simply as the Portuguese word for the color black!). In addition to the West’s miserable attitude towards African and Asian poor countries’ development, they have in one generation turned over economic, political and cultural influence to China. Nothing could go wrong here…d’ye think?
The Chinese are supplying a “Debt Trap” for the 3rd World.
Just 3 examples:
https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/navy-league/2018/04/09/sri-lanka-cedes-major-port-to-china-fueling-tensions/
https://amazonwatch.org/news/2018/it-doesnt-matter-if-ecuador-can-afford-this-dam.-china-still-gets-paid
https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/kenya-risks-losing-port-of-mombasa-to-china
Erudite, Entertaining and Informative.
Prorogue the IPCC I say.
Erudite, Entertaining and Informative.
Prorogue the IPCC I say. And Get Lord Christopher and Lord Lawson to run the shower.
i sure hope someone is writing all these names down so these people/institutions can be given their just desserts when this scam falls apart.
The internet is forever, and the worst offenders will never be able to run away from their words and behaviors.
I think some will likely be enshrined in the history of science, and possibly the lexicon itself, with their names tied tightly to this entire horrible episode in the history of science.
As always, our dear Monckton has produced a tour-de-force on the physics of climate change. Unfortunately, physics is the simplest science, reducible to math, which is very hard for most of us, and reasoning, which is observably impossible for most. Physics and engineering require the highest IQ’s, Chemistry and other hard sciences next. That is why WUWT and Monckton get nowhere.
The real issue is biology and that is so full of variables that gullibility is the order of the day. With “climate change,” we are concerned with effects on food crops, and living organisms generally, including the wild world. The questions on ideal temperatures were asked and answered by paleogeologists in the 1970’s: a “climate optimum” is a warm period. Obviously, science and reality have nothing to do with the debate.
As to catastrophic climate change, there IS something deadly going on. The real danger is not warming and is not caused by fossil fuels. Fossil fuels, and only fossil fuels, increase the carrying capacity of the Earth for Life–because we are carbon-based life forms. The real danger is an end to the practicability of plow-based farming of annual crops. We can certainly keep SOME of that, a lot of that, but we have overdone it to the point that soil-based carbon is HALF what it was a few decades ago. (I have seen widely varying figures on that).
Poison-based mono-cropping has totally taken over most of the US and most of the world. This leaves soils bare for an extended period, causing loss of fertility, and loss of soil structure–varied sizes of soil particles. The consequences can be understood by getting a piece of bread, which is similar to highly structured soil, and a heap of flour, which is similar to the dust we have all over America’s plains. Sprinkle or pour a little water over each. The bread will absorb it, but it will bead off the flour. America had unusually heavy rains this Spring, which delayed the planting of corn and other crops. We had floods, and may have lost a million calves.
Flood means the water ran off and is gone. It is no longer present in the soil. Water takes a lot of heat to change temperature one degree. With less moderation of temperature, the plains are baking right now, and that reduces rainfall (high-temperature air holds more water before it falls as rain). That is drought, which is now severe throughout the plains. The annual grasses (crops including wheat and corn) are drying up. Corn may fail to set seed.
We will almost certainly see much higher food prices world-wide this year. Long-term food storage is one of the best investments you can make. Just make sure you choose foods you like and WILL eat, and that you protect them properly against vermin.
No need to panic–the old agriculture is on its way out, while much more profitable and sounder permaculture and poly-cropping are coming in. The best single book for farmers is Restoration Agriculture, available from Acres USA.
The best book explaining water is Judith Schwartz’ “Water in Plain Sight.”
The physics and biophysics of poison-based agriculture and mono-cropping reveal that neither is sustainable in the proper sense of that word. This is not a matter of consensus or popularity or political correctness or will. These methods are slowly failing.
The new agriculture is gaining ground–but panic is much more fun than calmness. You can be a hero. And this is a good year for panic. Farmers are very worried and in two weeks, they’ll be desperate. This fall, they can begin to convert a little acreage to perennial methods. They should be able to get Federal Disaster Relief to help.
They will make a lot of mistakes. People always do with “new” methods (even when they are really very old–but to us, this is new). We need to help them past that.
RE: “Flood means the water ran off and is gone. It is no longer present in the soil. Water takes a lot of heat to change temperature one degree. With less moderation of temperature, the plains are baking right now, and that reduces rainfall (high-temperature air holds more water before it falls as rain). That is drought, which is now severe throughout the plains. The annual grasses (crops including wheat and corn) are drying up. Corn may fail to set seed.”
Not sure what plains you are talking about, but in my part of the North American Great Plains there is certainly NO drought. Soil moisture is above the 10 year mean. In August we’ve had 11 days of rain here and only 7 clear days. Growing degree days are near a 30 year low. The high on the 31st was only 65°F. And if “the old agriculture” is so bad, please explain why average yield/acre has doubled since 1970 and increased by 7X since 1930? These methods are NOT slowly failing, they are succeeding at a remarkable rate. There is NO Panic here, and nobody is desperate, and the only real worry is that with the unusual cool temps this year, an early freeze could be a problem.
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTrends.html
This is the medicalization of climate dissent. The objective is not to understand. They don’t want to reason with us. They want to declare us mentally ill and discredit all who do not agree with the “consensus.”
In response to jep, one has seen this medicalization before: in western Europe in the 1930s, and in eastern Europe from 1917-1990. It should be firmly resisted.
Back in the 70’s and 80’s, lots of so called academics were launching studies into how to deal with those who denied that communism was the best possible political system.
Lord Monckton, what we are observing here is pretty typical behaviour for male primates as I outline in my book “The Academic ape”. This is a territorial response to those they perceive as “invading” their territory and the pitch and intensity of the faeces throwing, vocalisation and general tree thrashing will undoubtedly increase because society is changing so that academics no longer have the power and influence over us they once had.
I really do urge you to have a look at a wildlife video showing the behaviour when one group of chimpanzees invade another’s territory as you will recognise ALL the behaviour shown by these academics.
I have forwarded a copy of the book to the email.
We at the Institute for Research of Academia will be interested to see how they respond.
@Momckton Enjoyed doing what you suggested.
Dear Professor Martin Hultman,
I am a Dane who has lived and worked in wind turbines, diesel generators, ships and software industry in Denmark, United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Netherlands and Sweden, where I am now enjoying my retirement and a lovely summer this year.
I am writing to you, because your new center “Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism” appears offending to political and scientific freedom, and I would like the opportunity to explain why it is so.
For a general detailed explanation, please read through:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/09/02/the-thermageddonites-are-studying-us-be-afraid-be-very-afraid/
where Christopher Monckton of Brenchley points out the major issues.
My personal viewpoint:
By now it ought to be clear, at least for the well educated, that Maurice Strong and the United Nations (UN-IPCC) created the dictatorial Agenda21 for political reasons, to reduce world population to between 500 million and 1000 million, by mainly deindustrializing the west and keep the developing countries from developing. The climate issue and so called sustainable points, are just expensive tools to archive this.
I understand the viewpoint, that we should all be equal a la communism or green socialism or Germany’s National Socialism in the 30’s. On the surface the principles may be fine to some, but history shows that it ends in dictatorship, suppression of freedom – this is exactly where the Climate Debate is leading us.
President Václav Klaus’ book “Blue Planet In Green Shackles” ISBN-13: 978-1889865096 is one of the most interesting books to read. President Klaus was a supporter of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) as you undoubtedly also are. However, he actually took his time to go past the news headlines, Pal Reviewed Papers, and went to a major conference hosted by the Heartland Institute. He learned the scientific science there, and realized that the CAGW policy or climate policy would have thrown his country right back to what he and his predecessor had worked so hard to free the country from; namely communist dictatorial and suppressing regime.
May I lastly point out that neither I or anybody else, appreciate to be called a denier. I hope you are just unaware about the underlying tone and it’s meaning. Please refrain from using such a term. Just call us skeptics, because that is what we officially are, and all scientists has an obligation to be skeptic; contrary to politicians, they are almost expected to run with half a wind and proclaim this and that.
So, very urgently you should change the title of you studies/faculty to something less absurd, less shameful to the university and less aggravating.
Yours sincerely
Carl Friis-Hansen
Ljungby, Sweden
I bet you got a nice, polite and emollient reply.
Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Klaus are not the same persons and had contradicting points of view about CAGW.
Tak
Congratulations to Mr Friis-Hansen on his excellent letter to the dismal “denialism centre”.
PV = nRT has been mentioned by many here and other blogs for decades. Tony Heller wrote a post on that here years ago. SOD said he had not considered it years ago when he was asked about it. Nikolov-Zeller wrote on similar idea several yrs ago.
Folks get kicked off blogs for bringing up ideas like this. I and others here were thrown off LGF blog.
Soon the epithet “gas heads” will soon appear.
The specific heat of CO2 accounts for its radiative ability. As we swap an oxygen molecule for a CO2 molecule the atmosphere gets more mass and will require more energy to heat to the same temperature. Q = Cp * m * dT coupled with ideal gas law rule.
Anthony’s CO2 jar experiment clearly demonstrates that increased CO2 does not cause increased temperature.
mkelly,
You say,
“PV = nRT has been mentioned by many here and other blogs for decades. Tony Heller wrote a post on that here years ago. SOD said he had not considered it years ago when he was asked about it. Nikolov-Zeller wrote on similar idea several yrs ago.”
YES. The matter is a rehash of the ‘Jelbring Hypothesis’.
Hans Jelbring argues that observation implies that all atmospheric effects interact such as to provide an average planetary surface temperature defined by atmospheric mass, gravity and distance from the Sun.
All the planets with atmospheres do seem to obey the hypothesis except for Mars which has a thin atmosphere with mass which varies with the seasons.
Richard
In response to mKelly, making mention of the ideal-gas law is not enough. One must demonstrate that the entire atmosphere, rather than individual 1 km slices of it, is an ideal gas, and one must also demonstrate that in an ideal gas no net warming can arise from the greenhouse effect. The Connolly’s have done the former empirically, and Einstein has done the latter theoretically. If both are correct, then the Connollys’ joining up the dots have proven that our sins of emission are not causing warming.
I was first introduced to the Connollys by their long-time coauthor (and mine) Dr Willie Soon, a first-class, award-winning astrophysicist who, in James Delingpole’s phrase, is “right about everything”. If Willie says they are on to something, then their theory cannot be instantly dismissed.
As a mere layman, I am intrigued by what they appear to have found, and am urging them to get on with putting together a paper for one of the top ten journals of physics on their discovery.
As I recall from way back when, the ideal gas law must be slightly modified to account for van der weals forces active at the atomic level.
As I recall from way back when, the ideal gas law must be slightly modified to account for van der weals forces active at the atomic level.
Sir Christopher,
I find it somewhat hypocritical that you are scandalised by the establishment of “Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism” at Chalmers “University”.
Proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have been trying (and succeeding to a large extent) in establishing their (what should have been a scientific) hypothesis as a religion. And they are copying some approaches from the history of your own Church.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is the oldest among the nine congregations of the Roman Curia – it was formerly known as Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. It was founded by Pope Paul III in 1542, to “spread sound Catholic doctrine and defend those points of Christian tradition which seem in danger because of new and unacceptable doctrines.” In a nutshell, to spread Roman Catholic religion and combat heresy.
So what’s new?
One hypothesizes that Miso Alkalaj is no theologian. It is a settled tenet of moral theology that one cannot draw the conclusion that because one entity is considered to have behaved immorally it becomes legitimate for another entity to behave immorally. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Sir Cristopher would be correct in hypohesizing that I am no (Roman Catholic) theologian – I am a mathematician. However, he would be wrong (perhaps intentionally so) in implying that I have supported the notion “that because one entity is considered to have behaved immorally (I.e., the Roman Catholic Church) it becomes legitimate for another entity (i.e., the AGW supporters) to behave immorally.” I have merely stated the fact that religious organizations tend to spread and enforce their dogma in the same manner – and that is nothing new.
To its most fervent supporters AGW has become a religion; to others it is a source of profit, or just compliance to avoid “making waves” – the common motivation of intrinsic and extrinsic believers in most religions.
Greater minds (than mine) have already noted that scientific facts can not sway the conviction of intrinsic or extrinsic believers of any religion. To understand this please consider that your own religious belief is as strongly held as that of AGW supporters.
Miso Alkalaj,
I am confused, why do you bring up an activity of a Religious Organization from over 400 years ago and then attack a man’s faith? It seems that you have nothing to offer to the current discussion and just wish to hurt others.
For a list of 20-plus things that would be happening (but aren’t) if climate contrarians were actually well-organized and well-funded, see my 2012 WUWT guest-thread, “Notes from Skull Island” at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/16/notes-from-skull-island-why-skeptics-arent-well-funded-and-well-organized/
When you have no facts to argue, the only avenue open is emotional appeals. From fear of calamity to fear of prosecution this sounds very much like the witch hunts does it not?
In response to Mr Miller, the perpetrators of the fraudulent aspects of the climate scam will in due course face prosecution, and deservedly so: they have cost the lives of millions, to say nothing of the destruction of whole industries. Prosecution of those who deserve to be prosecuted is not a witch-hunt: it is the function of the criminal law.
“But there’s more. Last week I spent some time in Ireland with Michael Connolly and his son Ronan.”
The material that follows deserves a thread of its own.
PS: Aren’t we going to get a thread on Dorian?
Now that Dorian has struck, the unspeakable BBC has already blamed “climate change”. However, there is no evidence that the frequency, intensity or duration of hurricanes or tropical cyclones has increased in recent decades. If anything, there has been a decline.
My old alma mater, how utterly disappointing to see what they have become. It was once an excellent university.
The global warming scare appeared to originate in Sweden. Acid raid was a rehearsal and Olaf Palme hyped up the global warming scare to push for nuclear power in Sweden (see: “Green Tyranny” by Rupert Darwall).
Frankly who cares what a load of feminised, brain-washed Swedes push out of Chalmers University? They are only copying some really top-rate (?) US universities, and I’m afraid, Bristol in the UK (where Ledanowsky has settled). They will push out a load of scientifically illiterate bo**ocks that will resonate with true believers and make the rest of us roll our eyes in confirmation bias for our view of Swedes.
I meant to add for Lord Monckton’s delectation:
“Utinam populus Scandinavicus unam cervicem haberet!”
Gratias ago tibi, excellentissime Saumarez!
Ja. Ja. As I said before, I could not find any man made warming in all of my investigations.
(Click on my name)
There is of course a great possibility of droughts coming up, just about from now onward,
on the higher latitudes, as predicted,
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/09/01/the-next-great-extinction-event-will-not-be-global-warming-it-will-be-global-cooling/#comment-2784565
but hey…that is just my opinion!
Wow!
The green/yellow/orange/red/blue chart . . .
. . . reminds me of too many hours looking at
a Keuffel & Esser Log Log Duplex Slide Rule
That was in the mid-1960s. Maybe that is the problem.
~~~~
A bit more serious (but not really)
With a last name signifying Swedish ancestry,
but only ¼ such,
I ought to change my name.
Very seriously, I do not relate at all to the Swedish thermageddonites.
“…but in recent years, climate change denial – denying that changes to the climate are due to human influence on the environment…”
This statement is absolutely false and should be tasked to embarrass the Alarmists/Globalists.
There are changes to the climate caused by human influence, but CO2 is is not registering – deforestation is probably the biggest influence, especially Borneo and Amazon.
I object to Skeptics and Deniers letting these charlatans get away with using ‘climate change’, which was simply done to confuse the public.
It wasw and is Global Warming.
I could accept that it is close to equilibrium, not that it is at equilibrium. Makes skeptics look bad to make that claim. When equilibrium is reached there are no changes, no gradients, and nothing moves.
I agree. +10
Jim
Mr Hart says he would prefer it if the atmosphere were almost in thermal equilibrium. If the Connollys are right, so it is – to an R-squared of 0.9997. Just as thermal equilibrium in soup is achieved by stirring it, so the non-radiative processes within the atmosphere stir it to keep it in near-perfect thermal equilibrium. So say the Connollys, and I have challenged them to get a paper through peer review proving it, and proving the devastating consequence – that in the real atmosphere the greenhouse effect cannot cause net warming.
Hydrostatic equilibrium requires the surface temperature to be no more and no less than sufficient to create an upward pressure gradient force equal to the downward force of gravity.
If that temperature is exceeded or not achieved then the mass of an atmosphere is lost to space or falls to the ground.
Established science that the AGW proponents ignore .
Is that all that the Connollys are saying ?
If, “One of the most bizarre premises of quantum theory, which has long fascinated philosophers and physicists alike, states that by the very act of watching, the observer affects the observed reality.”
=============
Could not the reverse be just as plausible ?
Triple Agent:
A spy who pretends to be a double agent for one side, while he or she is actually a double agent for the other side.
—
I wouldn’t put it past any of Mother Nature’s other ploys.
U.k.(us) may be interested in studying the delayed-response quantum-eraser experiment, which demonstrates – more than somewhat spookily – that the mere act of observation causes changes to that which is observed. Richard Feynman gave an excellent lecture on the subject.
I’ve now had time to think about the science and I’m confused me.
First you say that if the line is straight … it means “what the results mean is that the atmosphere in thermodynamic equilibrium.” I’m too rusty to remember why a straight line means thermal equilibrium – can we get an explanation?
But in any case, the line is not straight, instead there are one (two?) changes in gradient. Is the change in gradient near the tropopause due to a change in molar mass due to a change in the way water vapour is/isn’t present? This is a key part of the atmosphere where energy is being lost, so I don’t think the argument that “it’s not straight” carries much water. Likewise, is something similar happening near the surface to change the gradient? Or could this be something like low level cloud/rain or Dust changing the molar density.
In response to Mike Haseler, there are phase-changes in the state of the atmosphere at the boundary layer in the Arctic at certain times of year, and there is a noticeable phase-change at the boundary between the troposphere and the tropopause.
Great article! So the primary reason for denialism is science. Let me tell you my story.
I believe that mankind’s burning up of the Earth’s very finite supply of fossil fuels is not such a good idea and I wanted to use AGW and as another reason to conserve. At first the AGW conjecture would appear to be quite plausible but upon closer inspection one finds that the AGW conjecture is based on only partial science and cannot be defended.
For example in Al Gore’s first movie, Al points to a correlation between CO2 and temperature that has been taking place for at least the past 600,000 years. Upon close inspection one finds that CO2 does not appear to cause warming but instead warming causes more CO2 to enter the atmosphere. The reason is obvious because warmer oceans do not hold as much CO2 as do cooler oceans. Based on Al’s own chart, if CO2 caused warming then it should now be a heck of a lot warmer than it actually is. The reality is that there in no real evidence in the paleoclimate record that CO2 has any effect on climate.
The AGW conjecture ignores the fact that good absorbers are also good radiators and that in the troposphere heat energy transport by conduction, convection, and phase change dominates over heat transfer by LWIR absorption band radiation. A real greenhouse does not stay warm because of the action of trace gases with LWIR absorption bands. A real greenhouse stays warm because the glass reduces cooling by convection. So too on Earth, where instead of glass at the top of the atmosphere, gravity and the heat capacity of the atmosphere acts to limit cooling by convection. As derived from first principals, the Earth’s convective greenhouse effect keeps the surface of the Earth 33 degrees warmer than it would otherwise be. 33 degrees warmer is the mount derived from first principals and 33 degrees C is what has been measured. Any additional warming caused by a radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed on Earth or anywhere else in the solar system for that matter. The AGW conjecture depends upon the existence of a radiant greenhouse effect caused by gasses with LWIR absorption bands. Such a radiant greenhouse effect is nothing but science fiction so hence the AGW conjecture is nothing but science fiction as well.
Then there is the issue of the climate sensitivity of CO2. Radiametric calculations performed decades ago came up with a value of 1.2 degrees C warming for a doubling of the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere, that is ignoring the effect of feedbacks. The AGW feedback theory is that CO2 based warming will cause more H2O to enter the atmosphere which will cause even more warming because H2O is the primary greenhouse gas and is molecule per molecule a stronger absorber than is CO2. What the AGW conjecture totally ignores is that besides being the primary greenhouse gas, H2O is a primary coolant in the Earth’s atmosphere moving heat energy from the Earth’s surface to where clouds form via the heat of vaporization The over all cooling effects of H2O is evidenced by the fact that the wet lapse rate is significantly less than the dry lapse rate in the troposphere. So instead of providing positive feedback to any CO2 based warming, H2O must provide negative feedback and hence retards any warming effect that CO2 might have. Negative feedback systems are inherently stable as has been the Earth’s climate for at least the past 500 million years, enough for life to evolve because we are here.
A researcher from Japan pointed out that the radiametric calculations performed decades ago assumed that a doubling of CO2 would not change the dry lapse rate in the troposphere but that assumption is false. A doubling of CO2 will cause a slight drop in the dry lapse rate which is a cooling effect. The slight decrease in the dry lapse rate would cause a decrease in the climate sensitivity of CO2 by a factor of more than 20, that is from 1.2 degrees C to less than .06 degrees C. and the negative feedback of H2O would decrease that amount even more to numbers very close to zero. Others have argued that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is really negative and that CO2’s cooling effects dominate. The AGW conjecture argues that the so called greenhouse gases are heat trapping because they absorb LWIR absorption band radiation. But these gases are also good radiators and radiate to space much more efficiently than the non-greenhouse gases. If any gasses are heat trapping it would be the non-greenhouse gases that are such poor radiators to space. The AGW conjecture totally ignores the cooling aspects of the so called greenhouse gases. I have concluded that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is effectively zero.
So based on science, I have concluded that the AGW conjecture is nothing but science fiction and that the climate change we are experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate. I believe that there are many good reasons to be conserving on the use of fossil fuels but climate change is not one of them.
William,
“As derived from first principals, the Earth’s convective greenhouse effect keeps the surface of the Earth 33 degrees warmer than it would otherwise be. 33 degrees warmer is the mount derived from first principals and 33 degrees C is what has been measured.”
What first principles?
288 K (assumes average) – 255 K (assumes 0.3 albedo) = delta 33 C warmer (complete garbage)
Refer to the Dutton/Brune Penn State METEO 300 chapter 7.2: These two professors quite clearly assume/state that the earth’s current 0.3 albedo would remain even if the atmosphere were gone or if the atmosphere were 100 % nitrogen, i.e. at an average 240 W/m^2 OLR and an average S-B temperature of 255 K.
That is just flat ridiculous.
“A researcher from Japan pointed out that the radiametric calculations performed decades ago assumed that a doubling of CO2 would not change the dry lapse rate in the troposphere but that assumption is false. A doubling of CO2 will cause a slight drop in the dry lapse rate which is a cooling effect. The slight decrease in the dry lapse rate would cause a decrease in the climate sensitivity of CO2 by a factor of more than 20, that is from 1.2 degrees C to less than .06 degrees C. and the negative feedback of H2O would decrease that amount even more to numbers very close to zero. ”
Interesting argument if true, but because the lapse rate is g/specific heat capacity, and because there is so little CO2, I’ve never thought there’d be any significant change. That however is not the wet lapse rate which always looks like voodoo data.
This new site might make a good foil.
Be exited! Once they start studying climate denialism, they will find there is no such thing.
All they will find is that there are still people around requiring scientific evidence for theories and require scientists to abandon their theories once an incidence of the contrary has been found.
Alexander Vissers
That’s sweet.
They’ll also find, as others already have (and published peer-revied papers on it), that Climate Skeptics are as a group better informed on science and engineering than climate change believers. Believers are mostly sheep with no to little science background to understand the climate crap they are being fed by the media today really is just shit.
Non-scientific propagandists are going to come to scientifically based conclusions? Dream on.
Unfortunately, that is not how social scientists work. They start by deciding what they want to find and then they set up to find evidence to support their view. As a result, in this field, they never look at actual evidence and instead spend their whole time reading & citing the utter trash from other deluded academics who started with the same belief. It is simply a system of a vicious cycle of groupthink.
Your own concept is one of independent research and verification. This is the typical attitude of sceptics: a sceptic understands that even the best research needs to be understood and if necessary verified and validated. This is because sceptics tend to be much more competent at analysis than social scientists (for whom even basic maths is a struggle). The sceptic “way” is an anathema to the groupthink climate cult, because any kind of verification or validation is a challenge to the “consensus”.
“denying that changes to the climate are due to human influence on the environment”
At least they acknowledge we ‘deny’ the human influence and don’t state, unlike most that we deny climate change.
“The comprehensive project, Why don’t we take climate change seriously? A study of climate change denial, is now collecting the world’s foremost researchers in this area.”
Betcha they get idiots like Lewandowsky and Cook involved. 😀
https://www.chalmers.se/en/departments/tme/news/Pages/Climate-change-denial-strongly-linked-to-right-wing-nationalism.aspx
Climate change denial strongly linked to right-wing nationalism
With Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, as a hub, the world’s first global research network into climate change denial has now been established. Building on a brand-new research publication showing the links between conservatism, xenophobia and climate change denial, the network will study how the growth of right-wing nationalism in Europe has contributed to an increase in climate change denial.
Scientific awareness of the greenhouse effect, and human influence on the climate has existed for over three decades. During the 1980s, there was a strong environmental movement and a political consensus on the issue, but in recent years, climate change denial – denying that changes to the climate are due to human influence on the environment – has increased.
”Two strong groups have joined forces on this issue – the extractive industry, and right-wing nationalists. The combination has taken the current debate to a much more dramatic level than previously, at the same time as our window of opportunity is disappearing.”
_______________________________________________________
The combination has taken the current debate to a much more dramatic level than previously,
at the same time as our window of opportunity is disappearing.” – isn’t it good!
_______________________________________________________
Norwegian Wood
The Beatles
I once had a girl
Or should I say she once had me
She showed me her room
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?
She asked me to stay
And she told me to sit anywhere
So I looked around
And I noticed there wasn’t a chair
I sat on a rug biding my time
Drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said
“It’s time for bed”
She told me she worked
In the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn’t
And crawled off to sleep in the bath
And when I awoke I was alone
This bird had flown
So I lit a fire
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood?
source: LyricFind
Songwriter: John Lennon / Paul McCartney
Songtext von Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
What the Beatles maybe didn’t know / what the world sure knows today –
“Norwegian wood” = https://www.google.com/search?q=ikea+swedish+furniture+company&oq=IKEA+Sweden+company+&aqs=chrome.
The musings of Joseph Postma regarding the fact that the sun only illuminates half of a rotating earth at a time (which exposes the incorrect math and assumptions of the IPCC and vacates the 33 degree argument), combined with the work done by the Connolly family starts create a more complete picture of the earth’s energy budget. Both parties use simple and readily understandable language which, when viewed together provides a convincing argument that CAGW is simply a pseudoscience fraud.
A bit time poor so no snarky replies but I thought n was calculated from P/T rather than directly measured.
The Swedes and Scandinavians in general are the ‘virtue signalers’ par excellence, for instance the Norwegian government incentivizes electric cars etc. but their wealth and entire economy is based on fossil fuel exports.
The Swedes built their wealth on industrial growth particularly through neutrality during both world wars exporting “… strategically important products such as steel, to be used in the armaments industry …”.
Prof Lindzen has drawn a parallel between the current climate catastrophism and eugenics that was fashionable earlier last century; the Swedes don’t like it known that ‘… from 1934 to 1974, 62,000 Swedes [mostly women] were sterilized as part of a national program grounded in the science of racial biology and carried out by officials who believed they were helping to build a progressive, enlightened welfare state …”:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/08/29/sweden-sterilized-thousands-of-useless-citizens-for-decades/3b9abaac-c2a6-4be9-9b77-a147f5dc841b/
‘They borrowed mathematics and methods…’
One of the important mistakes has been the use of digital computer models to ‘predict’ the future. Aside from all the issue of chaotic non-linear systems, they made a most fundamental mistake by assuming computers do perfect arithmetic.
Aside from a limited range of integers, computers are very poor at arithmetic, and they use a whole class of number representations called ‘floating point’ arithmetic which is nothing less than an imperfect approximation to the domain of real numbers. Leaving irrational numbers aside (and they do occur in these models, Pi is one example, e is another, and even square roots are often irrational) the approximations inherently have errors in their arithmetic and these accumulate over the millions of iterations.
I have looked at the software (I am a software engineer and have implemented floating point emulation routines, so understand this deeply) and there is zero awareness by the programmers of the errors inherent in these calculations.
Aside from those errors, even basic commonly accepted axioms are not valid in floating point, for example it can’t be assumed that (A + (B + C)) will be exactly the same as ((A + B) + C).
S. Dave, I believe Christopher Essex makes exactly your point in this video lecture.
The beginnings of Chaos Theory, using a computer weather model, came from a firm understanding of this aspect. Use of floating point provides a way to reduce the quantization error to an insignificant level in many applications. I suggest the real problem with general circulation models is much more a lack of too many not understood factors and too little computational power to do more than use pretend values for many processes. Plus, quite possibly, some whooper biases.
Lord Monckton,
I am indeed surprised that you do not appear to have seen my published papers on the molar mass version of the ideal gas law, and how it invalidates any warming from more atmospheric CO2;
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Holmes24/research
“Molar Mass Version of the Ideal Gas Law Points to a Very Low Climate Sensitivity”
DOI: 10.11648/j.earth.20170606.18
and
Thermal Enhancement on Planetary Bodies and the Relevance of the Molar Mass Version of the Ideal Gas Law to the Null Hypothesis of Climate Change
DOI: 10.11648/j.earth.20180703.13
This all leads to a climate sensitivity of 0c.
Which means that there is no so-called ‘greenhouse effect’ from any so-called ‘greenhouse gases’.
We met at one of your talks in Newcastle, Australia in 2012, and it inspired me to do a PhD in climate science, which I now have.
Best Regards to you!!
Dr Robert Ian Holmes
(aka You-Tube’s 1000Frolly)
“One must demonstrate that the entire atmosphere, rather than individual 1 km slices of it, is an ideal gas, and one must also demonstrate that in an ideal gas no net warming can arise from the greenhouse effect.” – Lord Monckton.
.
That is easy.
Measure pressure, density and molar mass anywhere in the troposphere, or if the entire planetary average surface temperature is required, from the surface averages for these three gas parameters and it will be shown that the temperature easliy is obtained from;
T=PM/Rρ
Therefore the ideal gas applies to the entire atmosphere.
From there it is very simple;
A final proof that the greenhouse effect does not exist in any thick atmosphere (one of >10kPa).
Postulates;
• The Ideal Gas Law is correct.
• The same external conditions such as insolation and auto-compression prevail.
My papers prove that for a GHE to occur in a convecting atmosphere (one of >10kPa), a large anomalous change must happen in the density, pressure or both.
No anomalous changes of this magnitude have been seen in any planetary atmospheres.
This is not really a surprise, since anomalous changes are actually forbidden by the ideal gas law and its derivatives like the molar mass version, which treat all gases equally.
To provide the proof in excruciating detail;
Different concentrations of gases at the same or at different times can provide the same temperature or different temperatures;
BUT – the same concentrations of gases cannot provide different temperatures at different times. The formula T = P M / R ρ forbids it.
This fact disproves the greenhouse gas hypothesis, as it is presented by the IPCC*.
*Because there is said to exist a time delay to reach ‘equilibration’, due to the (ECS) climate sensitivity to CO2 being in the range of 1.5C – 4.5C.
The IPCC reports state that if there was a sudden doubling in the atmospheric greenhouse gas CO2, the greenhouse effect from this would operate slowly, causing an eventual ~3c of warming over centuries to millennia.
Therefore the claim is that the temperature would rise significantly over time, with the same prevailing atmospheric gas concentrations, and there would be no rapid equilibration, as the Ideal Gas Law demands. This represents a terminal conflict between the IPCC’s greenhouse effect and the molar mass version of the ideal gas law.
Therefore the climate sensitivity to, for example, a doubling of atmospheric CO2, must be close to zero. This means that essentially, there is no GHE.
Game Over.
Dr Robert Ian Holmes
No ‘radiative’ GHE.
There is however a surface temperature enhancement from conduction and convection which amounts to the same phenomenon.
Otherwise we are in agreement.
Stephen,
“There is however a surface temperature enhancement from conduction and convection which amounts to the same phenomenon.”
No, it doesn’t.
Q=UAdT is not the same as Q=sigma*epsilon*A*T^4
Agreed. Different phenomenon but the outturn is similar.
Stephen,
Agreed!
Certainly there is a thermal gradient leading to a surface thermal enhancement, and this comes from conduction and convection; the gradient arises from what I prefer to call auto-compression. This is the process;
The kinetic energy of tropospheric gas rises when it descends. It’s because some of its potential energy is converted to enthalpy, so producing an increase in pressure, specific internal energy and hence, temperature in accordance with the following equation;
H = PV + U
Where;
H = enthalpy (J/kg)
P = pressure (Pa)
V = specific volume (m³)
U = specific internal energy (kinetic energy)
Good comment.
The IPCC problem is that they think the solution for a one-dimensional column of gas is valid for a three dimensional planetary atmosphere. Here is my take on it in the simplest terms that I can manage.
A basic assumption in the greenhouse gas theory is that in the absence of greenhouse gases the atmosphere would be isothermal at 255 K. The 288 K surface temperature is then attributed to the presence of greenhouse gases. The 33 K warming is said to be caused by about 140 W/m2 down-welling IR radiation from greenhouse gases, leading to a climate sensitivity, without feedbacks, of about 0.24 K/W/m2. Thus the claim is made that a 4 W/m2 increase in down-welling IR will lead to an initial warming of about 1 K.
Coombes and Laue (1985) (https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1119/1.14138?journalCode=ajp) actually have a “proof” that an isothermal atmosphere will exist in the absence of greenhouse gases. However, this “proof” is flawed. It is valid only for the one-dimensional case where there is no temporal variation heating at the surface.
For an atmosphere to be isothermal on a planet, it would need to be isothermal from equator to pole. It would need to be isothermal from winter to summer. It would need to be isothermal from day to night. It can’t be isothermal from equator to pole since they receive very different amounts of solar radiation that warm the atmosphere. If it is not isothermal from equator to pole, then there will be heat transport from the warmer region to the cooler region. The heat transport will be via air currents or wind. Initially the winds would travel straight from the equator to the poles, but since the Earth is rotating, the air currents will follow curved paths. Various air currents will collide. This will lead to upward and downward motions of the air. In short, a convection regime will arise very quickly.
Once upward and downward motions occur, the downward motions will lead to warming and the upward motions will lead to cooling. The net effect will be a vertical temperature gradient. As a result, an isothermal atmosphere surrounding a planetary body is impossible. The vertical temperature gradient will be the one that produces maximum entropy production, name the ratio of g to Cp, where g is the gravitational acceleration and Cp is the heat capacity of the gas at constant pressure. This is called the Loschmidt Effect. The temperature gradient is there even when there are no so-called greenhouse gases present. It is impossible for a planet with uneven heating spatially and temporally to have an isothermal atmosphere.
Thus, the claimed 33 K warming due to greenhouse gases is wrong. The claimed 1.5 to 4.5 K warming for a doubling of CO2 is wrong. The actual sensitivity to increasing CO2 is very low and close to zero.
It is a mistake to apply the results of 1D model to a 3D case. It is a mistake to think that the static case is valid for a dynamic case. As a result, the very basis of the greenhouse warming theory is a case of inappropriately applied physics since it is based upon a simplified 1D model instead of the correct 3D situation.
As an added note, one reason that the 140W/m2 is not very effective in heating the Earth since the index of refraction for water in the thermal wavelengths (10 to 20 microns) is very high so the thermal radiation only penetrates into water about 15 microns (and as a comparison the diameter of an average human hair is 100 microns). Hence, it cannot heat any wet surface such as oceans, clouds, lakes, snow, ice, vegetation, wet soil, and so forth. The incoming radiation at 15 microns from CO2 will be thermalized in the upper 15 microns of the water and re-emitted at all thermal wavelengths, so much of it will escape to space and not do bulk heating of the Earth. This physics is not in the climate models. An analogous situation would be trying to heat a mirror with a flashlight.
These comments should be sufficient to disprove the IPCC version of climate change.
And as final note, the assumed isothermal 1D model that the IPCC uses has clouds in it, which is implied by the use of the same 255K top of the atmosphere temperature in both the isothermal and non-isothermal atmospheres. It is impossible to form clouds in an isothermal atmosphere, meaning the thought experiment is invalid for this reason as well.
In summary to believe there is an isothermal atmosphere, if no greenhouse gases exists and as the IPCC insists, one has to believe the following as well:
1. There is no diurnal heating of the surface.
2. There is no seasonal variation in heating.
3. The Earth has a uniform albedo everywhere (that is, sea breezes are impossible).
4. The Earth is flat (no planetary curvature).
5. Clouds form in an isothermal atmosphere exactly in the same way and same amount as an atmosphere with a vertical lapse rate.
None of these 5 beliefs by the IPCC are true and therefore the 33 K warming attributed to greenhouse gases is wrong. The actual climate sensitivity is very small.
Douglas
The simple version that I put to Roy Spencer and many others over recent years was that an isothermal atmosphere around a sphere illuminated by a point source of light is impossible because of temperature differentials in the horizontal plane which inevitably lead to convection with the conversion of KE to PE.
Good to see that people like you can see it clearly.
For my pains I am no longer allowed to post at Roy’s site.
I also pointed out to Willis that the ‘proof’ of Robert Brown upon which he placed reliance was flawed because the sides of the column did not allow expansion in three dimensions as occurs for gases around a sphere.
Only by allowing expansion in three dimensions can one replicate the exponential reduction in density and pressure with height which leads to a linear lapse rate slope.
Basic geometry.
Thanks for the comments. IPCC proponents don’t seem to understand abstract explanations, so I hope my low-brow explanation can make some progress on that front.
I think this is one of the clearest and most concise explanations I have ever read.
Thank you!
I am most grateful to Douglas Hoyt (of Hoyt & Schatten, I think?) for his most fascinating and distinguished intervention. Would he be willing to extend his contribution and make it into a head posting for WUWT? I have long suspected that emission temperature was not likely to be only 255 K: Dick Lindzen makes it 274 K. Yet another demonstration that global warming caused by greenhouse gases is likely to be very small.
Monckton of Brenchly, you will have to ask Watts if it can be a head posting, since I don’t know how to do that. I also don’t see how to extend it and want to keep it simple, non-numerical, and visual. There is one typo in the article where “name” is used instead of “namely”.
Very interesting comments, Douglas. Your explanations make sense to me. Bottom line: CO2 is a benign, beneficial gas and the more we have in the atmosphere, the better. The Alarmists have been driven insane by CO2 BS (Bad Science).
The so-called one-dimensional radiative convection model is a toy model. Toy models are widely used in science and are very useful if there are conceptually correct.
The problem is the cult of CAGW, Hansen in this case 1981, 1) fixed the lapse rate for the one-dimensional study and 2) ignored the fact that the atmosphere is saturated with water vapor in the tropics which greatly reduces the greenhouse effect in the lower atmosphere due to the infrared frequency overlap of water and CO2.
Greenhouse gases increase the convection cooling in the atmosphere this cause the ‘lapse rate’ the rate of cooling as one move higher in the atmosphere. A decrease in the lapse rate enables the higher regions of the atmosphere to warm with less warming of the surface.
The reduction in the lapse rate reduces the surface warming for the one-dimensional study from 1.2C to around 0.2C.
This is a link to a copy of a peer reviewed paper that provides an excellent historic and technical summary of the issue.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B74u5vgGLaWoOEJhcUZBNzFBd3M/view?pli=1
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.ca/2015/07/collapse-of-agw-theory-of-ipcc-most.html
The linear lapse rate is an observational fact.
1. Failure of the fixed lapse rate assumption of 6.5K/km
The modern anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory began from the one dimensional radiative convective equilibrium model (1DRCM) studies with the fixed absolute and relative humidity utilizing the fixed lapse rate assumption of 6.5K/km (FLRA) for 1xCO2 and 2xCO2 [Manabe & Strickler, 1964; Manabe & Wetherald, 1967; Hansen et al., 1981].
William: Comments:
1. Lapse rate is the change in temperature with elevation as one goes higher in the atmosphere. As the CO2 molecules transfer heat by contact to other gases in the atmosphere and all gases in the atmosphere transfer any excess heat by convection to maintain a linear lapse rate (Temperature change in degrees Kelvin per kilometer increase in elevation.)
2. It is given in degrees kelvin which is confusing as it is a change so Celsius could have been used as a change in temperature per kilometer change in elevation is the same for the Kelvin and Celsius temperature systems as the only difference in the two temperature systems is selection of what temperature zero is to be.
..In the 1DRCM studies, the most basic assumption is the fixed lapse rate of 6.5K/km for 1xCO2 and 2xCO2.
There is no guarantee, however, for the same lapse rate maintained in the perturbed atmosphere with 2xCO2 [Chylek & Kiehl, 1981; Sinha, 1995]. Therefore, the lapse rate for 2xCO2 is a parameter requiring a sensitivity analysis as shown in Fig.1. In the figure, line B shows the FLRA giving a uniform warming for the troposphere and the surface. Since the CS (FAH) greatly changes with a minute variation of the lapse rate for 2xCO2, the computed results of the 1DRCM studies in Table 1 are theoretically meaningless along with the failure of the
FLRA.
In physical reality, the surface climate sensitivity is 0.1~0.2K from the energy budget of the earth and the surface radiative forcing of 1.1W.m2 for 2xCO2. Since there is no positive feedback from water vapor and ice albedo at the surface, the zero feedback climate sensitivity CS (FAH) is also 0.1~0.2K. A 1K warming occurs in responding to the radiative forcing of 3.7W/m2 for 2xCO2 at the effective radiation height of 5km. This gives the slightly reduced lapse rate of 6.3K/km from 6.5K/km as shown in Fig.2.
In the physical reality with a bold line in Fig.2, the surface temperature increases as much as 0.1~0.2K with the slightly decreased lapse rate of 6.3K/km from 6.5K/km.
Since the CS (FAH) is negligible small at the surface, there is no water vapor and ice albedo feedback which are large positive feedbacks in the 3DGCMs studies of the IPCC.
…. (c) More than 100 parameters are utilized in the 3DGCMs (William: Three dimensional General Circulation Models, silly toy models) giving the canonical climate sensitivity of 3K claimed by the IPCC with the tuning of them.
The followings are supporting data for the Kimoto lapse rate theory above.
(A) Kiehl & Ramanathan (1982) shows the following radiative forcing for 2xCO2.
Radiative forcing at the tropopause: 3.7W/m2.
Radiative forcing at the surface: 0.55~1.56W/m2 (averaged 1.1W/m2).
This denies the FLRA giving the uniform warming throughout the troposphere in the 1DRCM and the 3DGCMs studies.
(B) Newell & Dopplick (1979) obtained a climate sensitivity of 0.24K considering the
evaporation cooling from the surface of the ocean.
(C) Ramanathan (1981) shows the surface temperature increase of 0.17K with the
direct heating of 1.2W/m2 for 2xCO2 at the surface.
Transcript of a portion of Weart’s interview with Hansen.
did you guys notice the sign of the penta cross?
With the droughts coming up in the next decade, like I said, the ‘need’ for planetary control will play, because of the climate crisis…
The next(last?) anti-christ could well be a woman, later binding with the false prophet(s) like Mohammed, Bhudda, etc
I just luv the title of this article because as I do my daily unwind – I scroll through the titles and this one makes me laugh out loud – thank you
yes I’m shaking in my boots!
To understand the weather it might be an idea to look how they measured it before they started with the CO2 nonsense and even much longer before that. Click on my name to read my updated web page.
An office of the truth – how very fitting. They should get some speakers from ISIS. Those folks also have the only and undisputed truth and threaten everyone who disagrees with death and mayhem. Or, what do you think happened to those questioning the motives and methods of the Nazis during the Third Reich? They had the ultimate truth as well. Of course, the great comrade was also a bringer of ultimate truth. Those that tried him did not live to tell us about the experience. Now, the new beacon of truth is in Sweden. The next step or a last-ditch effort of some lunatics on the decline?