Originally treating the surface of Earth like a blackbody was just a simplified and erroneous assumption. In order to not correct itself, the orthodoxy applied some interesting “tricks” to justify this assumption. Or is it just incomptence? Judge for yourself..
At the bottom of Trenberth’s chart; [ Net Absorbed 0.9 W/m² ] You may remember that Trenberth’s first iteration of that wondrous opus balanced. It’s rather obvious that someone realized that if warming were to actually occur there had to be a net absorption. You can kinda surmise how that came about:
Once upon a time on a bright sunny morning a few years back, Dr. James Hansen was looking at Kevin Trenberth’s iconic “World Energy Budget” when he choked on his morning coffee because he realized that the darn thing balanced. That’s right, energy in equaled energy out. You see, he’s been saying for some time now that heat energy is slowly building up in Earth’s climate system and that’s not going to happen if the energy budget is balanced.
So he did some fast calculations, snatched up his cell phone and punched in Trenberth’s number.
“Hi Kev, Hansen here, how’s it goin’ with you? Got a minute?”
“Sure Doc, what’s up?”
“Glad you asked. I’ve been looking at your energy budget and it balances, can you fix that?”
“What do you mean fix it, it’s supposed to balance?”
“Kev, listen carefully now, if it balances, heat will never build up in the system do you see where I’m going?”
“Uh I’m not sure, can you tell me a little more?”
“Come on Kev don’t you get it? I need heat to build up in the system. My papers say that heat is in the pipeline, there’s a slow feedback, there’s an imbalance between radiation in and radiation out. Your Energy Budget diagram says it balances. Do you understand now?”
“Gotcha Doc, I’ll get right on it” [starts to hang up the phone]
“WAIT! I need an imbalance of point nine Watts per square meter [0.9 Wm²] for everything to work out right.”
“Uh Doc, what if it doesn’t come out to that?”
“Jeez Kev! Just stick it in there. Run up some of the numbers for back-radiation so it looks like an update, glitz up the graphics a little and come up with some gobbledygook of why you re-did the chart you know how to do that sort of thing don’t you?”
“Sure do Doc, consider it done” [click]
And the new chart was produced
You can run the numbers, and 0.9 Wm² will warm the ocean 600 meters deep about 1/2°C in a little over 40 years. Truly amazing stuff. The noon-day sun puts out nearly 1370 wm² and these guys are claiming they’ve added up all the chaotic movements of heat over the entire planet and have determined an imbalance of 0.9 Wm². That’s an accuracy of what? five of four places? With no plus or minus error bars or anything.
What it means is, all of the components
Reflected by clouds, Reflected by aerosols, Reflected by atmospheric gases, Reflected by surface, Absorbed by the surface, Absorbed by the atmosphere, Thermals, Evaporation, Transpiration, Latent heat, Emitted by clouds, Emitted by atmosphere, Atmospheric Window, AND Back radiation! And they all need to have an accuracy to those five or four places for the 0.9 Wm² to be true.
Perhaps Dr. Hansen didn’t ring up Trenberth and bully him into changing his chart but, Trenberth did change it to show an imbalance and it’s a good bet he did so because he realized that if it balanced like his original version, heat wouldn’t build up.
And we all are supposed to sit still for this sort of thing.
Yep, the irradiance uncertainties are of the order of at least several Watts per cm2, yet these guys claim to calculate energy totals (of averages!) to 0.1 W/cm2 or even smaller. Absurd.
OK, here’s A Really Really Stupid Question incoming….
We’re told that the strength of the solar radiation at 93 Million miles (where Earth is) is 1,370 Watts per square metre
We’re told that Earth, as seen by the sun, presents a flat circular disc towards the sun
We’re told that that disc has an area of πr² (r= radius of Earth)
We’re then told that Earth is a sphere with surface area of 4πr²
Thus it is asserted that The Average Energy falling on Earth’ surface is ¼ of that 1370 figure = as seen in the Trenberth figure
But why?
The flat disc will be absorbing 1,370 watts across its entire area.
Ah you say, Earth is rotating.
So Earth rotates half way round in 12 hours and presents its other side which had previously been = night and receiving nothing.
Thus Earth appears to be like a rotating/flipping coin, as seen from the sun.
So one side will get 1370 watts for 12 hrs while the other side gets nothing.
Then it flips.
Doesn’t that mean that The Average is half of the 1370 figure?
Doesn’t that mean that The Average Temperature should be 331 Kelvin or 58°Celsius
Doesn’t that stack up with:
every observation
that everybody makes
every hour
of every waking day that
The atmosphere, via ‘weather’, does nothing but cool the surface.
I do know what I got wrong there, that The Average Energy falling on a rotating sphere is actually 484 watts per square metre. You need to work the cosine.
i.e. 1370 divided by 2x√2
Thus giving an average temp of 304 Kelvin or 31⁰ Celsius
Strangely enough equal to the very maximum temperature that deep (100+metres) clear water can and does ever get to on this Earth
What did I get wrong there?
Because somebody somewhere has got something very very wrong indeed – and nobody has ever picked up on it.
“Thus Earth appears to be like a rotating/flipping coin, as seen from the sun. So one side will get 1370 watts for 12 hrs while the other side gets nothing. Then it flips.
No, Earth is continuously rotating at an essentially constant rate, it is not flipping.
“I do know what I got wrong there, that The Average Energy falling on a rotating sphere is actually 484 watts per square metre. You need to work the cosine. i.e. 1370 divided by 2x√2”
What you got wrong is that the solar energy intercepted by the effective surface area of hemisphere of the Earth is indeed equivalent to the surface area of a flat disk of the same diameter as the Earth, oriented normal to the incoming radiation from the Sun . . . this equivalency adjusts for the “cosine effect” of radiation falling on a curved surface.
“Because somebody somewhere has got something very very wrong indeed – and nobody has ever picked up on it.”
Well, perhaps some can see who’s “got something very very wrong.”
You are basically trying to prove that ever square meter of that flat disk receives 1370/4 W/m². Sorry a sphere doesn’t work that way. If it did, the poles would be receiving 1370/4 W/m², just like the equator. That assumes that each piece of radiation is normal to the “effective area” of the earth. It just ain’t so!
The equator will receive the entire amount, while the poles receive very little. The flat earth argument just loses this difference. This is where “averages” lose out. Look at a Mercator map. Why are the areas so out of whack? Why do you think most of the models predict a tropical hot spot? Radiation is related to the T⁴th. Averages totally ignore this exponential difference and end up with incorrect values.
“You are basically trying to prove that ever square meter of that flat disk receives 1370/4 W/m².”
No, you misunderstand completely.
A flat disk (with area of pi*r^2) oriented normal to incoming sunlight will receive the average solar constant that exists at Earth’s TOA, equal to 1370 (actually, closer to 1362) W/m², averaged over the course of a year. With a flat disk, there is no variation from top to bottom.
But when one wants to compute the average of this power flux as it is distributed over Earth’s total surface area (on a yearly basis, averaging day vs. night and orbital variations, and across all latitudes), one needs to use the area of a sphere (yeah, an approximation), which is 4*pi*r^2.
So, the flux of solar power as averaged over the entire surface of Earth and over the course of a year is indeed: (1362 W/m² *pi*r^2)/(4*pi*r^2) = 1362 W/m²/4 = 341 W/m², the same value given in the Kiehl and Trenberth diagram of the very first comment above.
The math is straightforward and there is no need to conflate it with cosine effects due to angles of incoming radiation, as long as one understands the 341 W/m² represents a TOA average and not a specific value at a given latitude nor at a given day of the year nor at a given time of day.
The field of mathematics, with its accepted constructs, has “things” (postulates, operators, equations, derivations, “proofs”, etc.) that are true and not true.
Pure mathematics does not deal with physical objects or energy, yet it still has truths.
It is therefore illogical to equate something that is not physical as being not true.
You’re the one that said “… represents a TOA average and not a specific value at a given latitude nor at a given day of the year nor at a given time of day.”
So it represents something that is NOT true at any spot on earth any time of the year. It is not physical.
The mathematical average of 2+4 is 3 . . . 3 is neither the value of 2 nor the value of 4, but it is a real number.
Similarly, the mathematical average of a measured temperature of 20 C and anothered measured temperature of 40 C is 30C . . . is 30 C not a physical quantity because it did not exist in the set of data from which it was derived?
You are simply confusing “physical existence” with “truth”.
The average of 30C is not a physical quantity, especially if “it did not exist in the set of data”!
30C is a statistical calculation of the central tendency of the distribution of temperatures. It may not even have the highest probability of being the highest value. Basically, the mean is simply a statistical artifact that may (or may not) be useful in analyzing the distribution of temperatures in the data set.
The mean of a distribution has nothing to do with finding the value of a constant. The only time it used in measurement is determining the “true value” that an instrument displays.
Power in watts per square meter is a rate, not a quantity.
So the amount that falls in one instant is not divided by two because there is day and night…the Sun is always shining.
The reason one has to do some geometry to convert the solar constant to an average amount of incident radiation for the entire surface is because the disc of the Earth intercepts an amount of photons that is defined by the size of the disc that the Earth shows the Sun.
But that amount does not all on a flat disc, it falls on a hemisphere. So only at one point directly in the center of the disc are the rays falling perpendicularly to the surface, everywhere else they are at some angle. At the edges, IOW where it is dawn and dusk, the rays are nearly parallel to the surface. Think about how large of a shadow a one square meter piece of cardboard casts in each place on the surface at different latitudes and times of day.
Oblique angles mean very little of the solar constant falls on each square meter.
Well, if we are gonna get hung up on semantics, it is properly referred to as a flux density.
Lots of people do not know what those words mean.
But everyone knows the difference between a rate and a quantity.
IOW, rather than simply being an amount, it is an amount per unit of area.
An amount of power, per unit area.
And power is an amount of energy, per unit of time.
“In transport phenomena (heat transfer, mass transfer and fluid dynamics), flux is defined as the rate of flow of a property per unit area, which has the dimensions [quantity]·[time]−1·[area]−1”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux
Nick, according to my heat transfer book the S-B equation is a result of integrating the energy density of radiation per unit volume per unit wavelength.
We’re told that Earth, as seen by the sun, presents a flat circular disc towards the sun
Another unstated assumption is that the Earth absorbs as a diffuse reflector, with changes of angle of incidence creating negligible changes in reflectance. In actuality, for the 71% of the Earth covered by water, and not covered by clouds, the reflectance varies from a low of about 2% to a high of 100%, depending on the angle of incidence primarily, in a complex way. However, even vegetation and snow have a bi-directional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) with a strong forward lobe, particularly for high angles of incidence. Only clouds have a BRDF that approaches a Lambertian reflector. That is why a flat disk model is acceptable for diffuse reflectors like the moon or Mars, but is a poor model for Earth.
Maybe it’s just me, but the above arguments seem to be directed toward establishing the time-averaged effective average solar constant at top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) of Earth, which does not include effects of atmospheric/ground/surface water/cloud reflectance, all of which are wrapped up in the term global “albedo” when determining the net energy entering into the Earth’s energy balance, as designated by the Kiehl & Trenberth diagram provide in the first comment under the above article.
I do know what I got wrong there, that The Average Energy falling on a rotating sphere is actually 484 watts per square metre. You need to work the cosine.
i.e. 1370 divided by 2x√2
It is S / 4 where S is the solar constant of 1360 W/m2. The divide by 4 is a shortcut that exploits the relationship between a sphere’s cross-sectional area and its surface area. The formula you are looking for that does the integration of the TSI down the lit hemisphere is S * (1/2π) * integral[cos^2(θ), dθ, –π/2, π/2]. Note that (1/2π) * integral[cos^2(θ), dθ, –π/2, π/2] = 1/4. So the average flux upon the Earth is 340 W/m2.
I generally agree with your posts but this one has me puzzled. You are comparing the black body spectrum, emitted power per unit wavelength with factors that signify a redirection of that emitted power. They are separate, independent quantities which between them define radiosity.
I seem to recall from years past hearing that the models do actually model a rotating sphere that is illuminated on one side, because the actual situation makes for far more complex calculations.
Do you know anything about that?
Because I can recall thinking that such shortcuts could be highly problematic in getting results that are going to match the actual Earth.
I seem to recall from years past hearing that the models do notactually model a rotating sphere that is illuminated on one side, because the actual situation makes for far more complex calculations.
Do you know anything about that?
Because I can recall thinking that such shortcuts could be highly problematic in getting results that are going to match the actual Earth.
observa
June 18, 2023 2:57 am
Some more musings-
Prof Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder in the US, who was not part of the study team, said: “The key message is that we are pretty much destined to lose the Arctic’s sea ice cover in late summer. The question is: when will this occur? “Over the past decade, there has not been much of a downward trend in September sea ice, which reflects the natural variability in the system. This hiatus will not last, but it shows the difficulties in making predictions. About a decade ago, I mused that the Arctic might lose its summer sea ice by 2030. That may have been an overly aggressive statement. While from the present study 2030 is still in the running, I’m going with sometime in the 2040s – that’s still not very far away.” Too late now to save Arctic summer ice, climate scientists find | Climate crisis | The Guardian
This is standard Climastrology, observa. Something that wouldn’t be an actual problem (indeed a big benefit to navigation) is presented as something ominous. It is certain, but as it clearly isn’t happening on the original prediction timeline, it’s being pushed out to something not happening for a couple of decades.
Thus the old prediction is no longer operative—it’s been explained: “internal variability”, and by the time the adjusted prediction fails, the quack will be safely retired.
Or the next 30 years could be more like the period from 1950 to 1980…getting notably colder and ice everywhere increasing rapidly, but also in an episodic fashion.
These jackasses think every trend is destined to continue forever…California will never have a wet year again, the West is in a perpetual and ever-worsening drought, etc.
The truth is, maps of arctic sea ice now, look almost exactly like what was published many decades ago.
Just like pictures of every ocean side that can be found from the past 150 years, look identical to those same places now.
There are over 150 years of articles and reports of rapidly melting ice that is happening ever faster and is catastrophic. Punctuated by periods where ice grew and accumulated extremely rapidly.
We have even seen this in recent years in the Antarctic.
The best thing anyone can say about guys like Serreze is that he knows which side of the bread has the butter.
Was in Vienna last week and they had Skynews as one of the few English channels so I watched it a bit. Have to say they completely out-BS’d the CBC.
They said the arctic was the planet’s refrigerator (nope) and that once the summer sea ice goes it will never come back (nope, even if it does go it will come back every fall without fail).
Oh, they also mentioned it is “predicted be gone as soon as 2030” without mentioning 2000-2004-2006 etc etc etc.
It was awful and stupid and exactly par for the course.
They literally have no idea what they are talking about.
Space is the planet’s refrigerator.
Every September the Sun sets at the North Pole and does not rise again for 6 months.
So, all refrigerator, no more heater, in a circle that gets bigger and bigger for three months.
“Deep divisions between rich and poor were again apparent, with huge frustration on the part of developing countries that their financial needs are not being met, as climate impacts ramp up around the world.”
Countries can’t have emotions like frustration, only individuals can. Individuals in developing counties, ie. poor ones, are more interested in the opportunities to create personal wealth, exploit the surrounding resources, take advantage of cheap and easily available power and fuels that enable them to develop, or raise their own standard of living. Arcane theories and models of climate change don’t have much application to their own lives. As in the “developed” countries, their undeveloped neighbors have elites that live above the daily frustrations of the poor. Fulfillment of the financial needs of the country don’t necessarily translate into a general increase in the standard of living. Even the poorest countries have wealthy elites that are able to travel to COP affairs. There is no evidence to indicate that climate impacts are “ramping up”. In fact, elites are able to use climate as an excuse for their own failures.
Biden said yesterday about the Chicom spy balloon flying over the United States, that he didn’t think the Chinese leaders knew about the balloon, or what it was doing!
It looks like the Chicoms have Biden well under control. They have Biden singing their tune. The Chicoms figured out they could buy off a U.S. president or two in the past, and do it fairly cheaply. And so they have.
Biden is confident he can tell a lie and get away with it, from past experience. The Media will run cover for him any time it is necessary.
Obama – it’s pretty much an acknowledged fact in the White House apparently. Joe Biden could spend the rest of his term asleep and things would go on exactly as they are now.
Functionally, that would not be much different from what the situation is currently. He has difficulty speaking a coherent sentence without a teleprompter to read, and he doesn’t understand the simplest technologies, such as what “caliber” means. He believes that his son died overseas. He is, at best, semi-conscious.
“So seriously. who is actually running the administration?” The socialist collective called the Democrat Party. Next year it will probably be the socialist collective called the Republican Party.
The Democrat Party is highly organized and focused on taking away our individual freedoms. The Republican Party isn’t even close to being organized. This is the problem. Republicans need to get together and get organized. The Democrats present a solid front. The Republicans present anything but.
1 Framing Context & Methods 2 Changing State of the Climate System 3 Human Influence on the Climate System 4 Future Global Climate: Scenario-based Projection and Near-term Information 5 Global and other Biogeochemical cycles and Feedbacks. 6 Short-lived Climate forcers 7 The Earth’s Energy Budget, Climate Feedbacks, and Climate Sensitivity 8 Water Cycle Changes 9 Ocean Cryosphere and Sea Level Change
10 Linking Global Regional Climate Change
11 Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate
12 Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment
I saw several in Zurich yesterday
Warm day
Was a good day
strativarius
June 18, 2023 3:43 am
Even the bruvvers are deluded
Who stands to lose most in the de-growth future? The ordinary working man and woman. You will hear much about many green jobs, but nobody ever states what these green jobs actually are. Cleaning solar panels? Clearing up dead birds and bats etc?
“UK lagging behind in global race to decarbonise, says TUC (Trades Union Congress) leader
… the UK was “limping towards a green future” and he called for a “national collective effort” involving employers, workers and the government to ensure a quick and fair transition to a net zero economy.
It’s no great surprise that the unions are in lock step with Labour, only Labour is nothing like it was pre Tony Blair. It hates ordinary people – they voted for Brexit etc. So is it unanimous with the unions? Who can say, they don’t really represent their members, they marshall them and utilise their subscriptions as a political lever. But we can take note that the GMB and Unite unions said the plan would cause large job losses…
“Gary Smith, the general secretary of GMB, said on Sunday that Labour had “got it wrong” and risked creating “a cliff-edge with oil and gas extraction from the North Sea”.
Sharon Graham, the leader of Unite, said last week that Keir Starmer’s announcement had “left out everything that was important – the detail”, and that he should have been clear workers would not be hammered by the transition.
The number of workers directly employed on oil and gas fields in the North Sea are estimated at 20,000, with a further 200,000 jobs onshore.”
We [sensible people] know full well that we will need our own gas, oil and coal for decades to come, but politicians are determined to be the solar opposite of sensible about anything. First you start with a lie – a big one, too
“The North Sea oil and gas industry is in decline, a shadow business minister has said as she defended plans to block new drilling licences from 2050, a move criticised by trade unions. Seema Malhotra said the proposal was an important part of the transition to net zero, by phasing out new fields from which to extract fossil fuels and boosting Britain’s “sovereign capability” for clean and green energy.” https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/08/labour-mp-defends-north-sea-drilling-plans-against-union-criticism
So, what does “boosting Britain’s “sovereign capability” for clean and green energy” mean?
Oh yes , Wind Europe wrote to Von der Leyen at the EC early in 2022 lamenting the woes of the European wind industry and noting that the industry in Germany had lost over 50,000 jobs in the last 6 years.
Earlier this year Wind Europe also noted that it did not have the capacity to provide all the turbines Europe was planning to install by 2030.
There’s no need to hypothesis test or to debate, so long as the likes of Alyssa Milano and Jane Fonda are the arbiters of truth. To think otherwise, you are a science denier.
The science is settled: The entire planet is in the midst of an ongoing and severe climate crisis, even though every single specific location is exactly the same as it has always been.
As actors I thought they were both great but as soon as they went political they lost my interest. Why on earth do actors, in particular, feel they should enter the political arena?
China is well known for its misallocation of resources due to central planning, as evidenced by ghost cities, for example.
These EVs in the field encapsulate the effect of the green climate movement in general. All of the energy and materials used for this endeavor is wasted and in the end causes more harm than benefit.
Communist central planning perhaps? Look to history of the Soviet Union!
Scissor
June 18, 2023 6:20 am
It’s so interesting that RFK Jr., who seems to be a sceptic at heart, perhaps because his life has been so profoundly injured by the “deep state,” is willing to reconsider his stance on global warming. And further the mainstream media and its mouth pieces are not willing to debate his stance on vaccine safety.
I always have a pretty extensive reading list week by week and two weeks ago I read through Steven Templeton’s book “Fear of a Microbial Planet”. By his way of thinking, and he presents plenty of evidence, much of our health depends on having a proper biome in our digestive tract and by interfering with it via excessive antibiotics use, or an environment devoid of a useful biome to incorporate (too clean) we run the risk of a long list of problems. It was a very interesting read.
It seems to me that RFKs take on vaccines is that we can overwhelm toddlers and infants with too many too soon. The media misrepresent this. However, one of his stances is that the mercury compounds used to preserve vaccines are a problem in and of themselves. I read “Splendid Solution” about the Salk vaccine maybe twenty years ago and recall that the mercury-containing antiseptic Merthiolate, which Salk had argued against adding to the vaccine, became a problem as a confounding factor in the trials. It inactivated the immune response from the vaccine.
Say what you will about the Salk vaccines (administered via injection or orally), but my understanding is that they were instrumental in basically eliminating the prevalence of polio on a global scale. Yes, there have recently been localized outbreaks of polio, particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but no epidemics anywhere since 1955.
By 1962 Salk’s vaccine was replaced by the Sabin vaccine.
As for merthiolate (Thimerosal): “Thimerosal (merthiolate), an ethylmercury compound, at 0.01% concentration was routinely added as a preservative to MMR, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and other vaccines . . . Epidemiological studies from Denmark, Sweden, and Britain found no link between the presence of the thimerosal and the occurrence of childhood autism. In 2004, the US Institute of Medicine, after having reviewed the published studies, concluded that no relationship could be found between the thimerosal in vaccines and autism . . . (but) vaccine producers finally stopped using the organomercurial compound as a preservative. An analysis on the prevalence of autism in California found that between 2004 and 2007, autism cases continued to rise even after thimerosal was withdrawn from the vaccines.” — https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/snippets-vaccine-history-success-failure-and-controversy
These simple facts would falsify that merthiolate in the vaccine “inactivated the immune response from the vaccine.”
The Salk poliovirus vaccine is injected, the Sabin vaccine is oral. The latter can cause paralysis and isn’t generally used in either the USA or Europe except if there’s an outbreak. There’s a new version of the oral vaccine that is meant to be safer, but it can still cause paralysis, but less than the original. Also oral vaccine is live vaccine, which means that they can shed virus in their faeces, in fact when we used it in the U.K. parents were told to be wary when changing their baby’s nappy/diaper.
I remember being given sugar cubes with a polio vaccine in the early-1950s, while in elementary school, which I always believed to be the Salk vaccine.
According to Wikipedia, the Sabin sugar cubes didn’t come out until 1961, by which time I was out of high school!
Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) was administered by injection and was licensed in 1955. By 1957, annual polio cases dropped from 58,000 to 5,600, and by 1961 only 161 cases remained.
A second type of polio vaccine, the oral polio vaccine (OPV) was developed by Albert Sabin (and by 1962 had replaced Salk’s vaccine). Sabin’s vaccine was live-attenuated (using the virus in weakened form) and could be given orally, as drops or on a sugar cube.
I read the Wikipedia article on the polio vaccines. I’m saying that my personal memory is at odds with the official story. I’m certain that I received sugar cubes (I think it was two total) when I was in elementary school, and had been out of high school for two years when the sugar cubes supposedly replaced the shots.
And this source says that Sabin OPV was administered on sugar cubes (or in a sugar syrup) as early as 1960, 1–2 years before most other sources identify the year where the Sabin OPV replaced the Salk IPV: https://magazine.uc.edu/issues/0408/on_campus
Can’t find anything about OPV-on-sugar cubes prior to 1960, though.
The Salk vaccine was indeed a worthy effort. The issue in the case of the Salk vaccine was 1) it had not been tested with Merthiolate (thimerasol) and Salk was opposed to fiddling with the formulation and 2) the time period between mfg and use was so short that it was unnecessary. There was so little organic material in the highly purified vaccine that even at as little as 1:20,000 dilution merthiolate attached itself to the killed virus rendering it unable to produce a correct immune response in some individuals.
I have never heard of Merthiolate, but I am very familiar with the preservative thimerosal, which also contains mercury. But the amounts are so small, it is dwarfed by everyday background ingestion of the element. If you really want less mercury, never eat tuna or any other similar type of top of the food chain ocean predatory fish.
It has been difficult to replace the effectiveness of thimerosal, as we have been recently getting an extreme update on, regarding the increasing number of people going blind and even dying due to bacterial contaminants in things like eyedrops.
But they have removed thimerosal from almost every vaccine except I think one specific flu vaccine formula mostly for elderly people.
Everyone should keep in mind this guy is a lawyer, who has made several vast fortunes suing deep-pocketed companies for things that no one can prove they are at fault for.
If all you know about Roundup/glyphosate is what you hear from those who are panic mongers over every chemical every invented, it would be very hard to not think it is deadly poison that we would all be so much better off getting rid of. The truth is though, it is as safe from a toxicity perspective as a thing could be. There is no objective scientific evidence it causes cancer, but that matters not at all to a jury when a lawyer like RFK is arguing a case to a sympathetic jury that sees deep pockets and wants some unfortunate soul to have a huge payday.
RFK is a lawyer, not a scientist.
So there is that. I recall some thing about convincing a person whose livelihood depends on not being convinced…
” But the amounts are so small, it is dwarfed by everyday background ingestion of the element.”
Would you consider metallic mercury to be as toxic as the vapor or a form such as methylated mercury? There were different batches of vaccine, manufactured by different organizations some of which were done according to Salk’s formulation, and others had merthiolate added. Those which were least effective contained merthiolate.
Merthiolate and thimerasol are one and the same according to my Merck index.
“Merthiolate and thimerasol are one and the same according to my Merck index.” Yes, I saw this was the case after I wrote my comments about it.
I was actually just reading up on this subject recently, I think after watching a video of RFK Jr. on Tony Heller’s you tube channel.
I am familiar with the fact that all mercury compounds are not equally toxic, by any means. I recall vividly the story of the women who got a tiny amount of dimethyl mercury on her rubber glove while working in a lab one day. She was an expert in toxic metal exposure, and she nonetheless died within a year of accidently getting a few droplets of the compound on the outside of her lab glove, back of the hand IIRC.
Tragic and shocking story, should be familiar to anyone who works in a lab, especially chemists like I was trained to be. Karen Wetterhahn – Wikipedia
Thimerosal contains ethyl mercury, which is far less toxic than dimethyl mercury. But since there is no longer any thimerosal used in vaccines, except as noted a certain specific type of influenza vaccine, and it has not been used for many years, and rates of autism continued to increase, and besides for all of that, no link has ever been shown to exist between any of these substances and autism, I really wonder why it keeps coming up?
And I have long been familiar with thimerosal, having worn contact lenses every day since I was a teenager. I recall when they removed it from all of the lens cleaning solutions, rewetting drops, etc.
They replaced it with something more soapy in the solutions I was using at the time.
All of this brings to mind an article I read many decades ago in what was then an actual science magazine, Scientific American.
The article was regarding something that was sold as a health tonic and ingested by wealthy people in certain circles in the US (and I suppose possibly elsewhere), water infused with radium.
So, some guy was browsing around in some old drawers one day and came across an empty bottle of the stuff, and, being a scientist and the curious type, he measured the radioactivity of the bottle with a Geiger counter, and found it was still shockingly radioactive. Dangerously perhaps, I do not recall exactly.
So, this accidental find took him down a path of investigation, and he uncovered the largely forgotten story of a rich and IIRC somewhat famous industrialist who lived and died back in the early part of the 20th century.
He began to suffer at some point in time from a mysterious and quite gruesome case of a wasting disease, which eventually killed him but only very gradually, and in the meantime left him horribly disfigured.
Despite the very best of medical care, no one was able to figure out what was wrong with him or what was causing the symptoms.
Anyway, it turned out it was because he was drinking this radium water stuff. And kept doing so right up until he died, apparently. Now, the obvious question is, why the hell did he not stop drinking the stuff, and why did none of his doctors of friends tell him to or make him stop?
The reason was, because lots of them drank it themselves, and had nothing wrong with them whatsoever. It seems he alone among known individuals had a physiological quirk, or something, that cause him to retain and accumulate the radioactive element or elements in his bones.
The takeaway was not how dangerous radium or radioactive substances are, or can be, but how different individual people can be in how they react to various substances, toxins, poisons, or whatever, including such things that would seem to be invariable amongst people, such as which things get absorbed by our bodies, how and where they accumulate if they do, and how they may or may not effect us if and when that happens?
Sorry, I did not mean to write a long comment about this, but it seems interesting and may be relevant. How so?
I just wonder, if everyone who dripped a drop of dimethyl mercury on their glove will be dead in less than a year?
It seems maybe not.
After all, toxins are listed according to such criteria as LD50…how many milligrams per kilogram of something will kill 50% of individuals who ingest that amount.
Everything is like this to some degree or another.
What is healthy food for some is toxic to others.
The medicine that cures most people has no effect on some others, and they die of a disease everyone else gets readily cured of.
Why?
Who knows. Many reasons.
Differences in physiology, single nucleotide polymorphisms in our digestive enzymes or cytokines, and such things as that?
No one knows. Maybe some people are just really fragile.
And some are decidedly not.
I am in the “not” category, or at least have been so far.
I can recall having mercurochrome put on my boo-boos when I was a kid.
Stung like crazy!
I always keep plenty of iodine in the house myself, both the tincture form and the less potent but less cytotoxic povidone kind.
A while back I was thinking about how we used to use mercurochrome, and was going to look it up to see…does it really have mercury in it? But never got around to it.
As for chromium/chromate, most of my experience comes from various chem lab experiments in college. It comes in so many different oxidation states…
So, looking up mercurochrome, I am shocked to see it is readily available in most countries to this day!
Banned only in Switzerland, Brazil, France, Iran, Germany, Denmark, (&) the United States due to its mercury content. Holy moly, that is crazy and strange to me. No chromium or chromate in it though. Does have bromine.
Suffix -chrome denotes color.
Useful in particular for infections of the nail bed and such, due to high persistence.
It was only banned very recently in the countries that no longer sell it, first was the US in 1998. Very surprising.
So, I was looking up where mercury is mined, and see that the most common source is the ore cinnabar. Which is deposited in alkaline hot springs. Health spas!
At first blush it seems entirely reasonable to hold off on vaccinating kids until they are older…until you get the statistics on who is most at risk from the diseases in question.
Kids are born with zero immune system.
(During the pandemic, the deep dive I did on immunity and antibodies and all related topics necessitated a lot of reading about neonatal immunity)
They are hugely at risk from any and all diseases, and most vaccines require multiple doses to provide full immunity. It has been found over many decades and hundreds of millions of people and their kids, that if they do not get these into kids early, many of them will die, and the diseases will be that much harder to control.
At some point, a person has to decide what they want to believe: Objective evidence, or emotional arguments. We know exactly where the idea that vaccines cause autism came from, and when and by whom. It has now taken on a life of it own, and nothing can kill it, least of all objective evidence.
Making sure every kid…hell, every person…has a “diagnosis” and a lifelong “treatment plan”, is now a very large and lucrative industry.
One need look no further than what they are doing with puberty blockers and genital mutilation of confused teens, to understand facts and science have little to do with what people believe.
When an infant first attaches it mouth to the breast of it’s mother, take a wild guess how many antigens and antibodies it ingests?
We are all exposed to tens of thousands of antigens every day, starting at birth, so from where comes the idea that our immune systems start out needing to take the whole immunity thing nice and slowly?
Actually it starts before suckling, at the point of birth. The birth canal is not sterile, neither is where the baby appears. Also, antibodies from the mother cross the placenta (which is why pregnant women are vaccinated against pertussis in the third trimester as this disease is fatal for neonates). Also antibodies from mum pass to the baby in breast milk.
The neonatal immune system is almost exclusively the innate immune system, the adaptive immune system (this is the antibody part) doesn’t start to develop until the child is three or four years old. In fact the adaptive immune system doesn’t fully mature until 20 years of age.
The risk of environmental mercury is overstated, as with CO2. There is not a single, well-documented case of methyl mercury poisoning in the US, unlike Japan. Probably because methyl mercury is volatile, having a boiling point the same as water, and Americans cook their fish to avoid catching flat worms. Yet, there is extensive monitoring and regulation of the amount of mercury in raw fish, and it is used as an excuse to shut down coal-fired power plants. By extension, people then conclude that even the smallest amount of mercury from other sources is equally dangerous.
RFK Jr is a snake and I do not trust him to do a single thing he says.
He knows he will need a lot of votes from people who hate that he is the man responsible for banning Fracking in New York, suing the maker of Roundup for things that happened to people who used it and for which there is zero credible evidence of cause and effect, etc.
He is the last person on Earth any skeptic ought to ever vote for.
The list of things RFK Jr has been involved with is gigantic.
Of course, as an environmental lawyer, he has sued and won in some cases of criminally negligent companies polluting on a vast scale, but he has also fought against nearly every source of energy that is not wind and solar. And he has fought against wind and solar, when they wanted to put them where he could see them.
I could copy and paste a list of things he has opposed, like nuclear plants, coal, gas, oil, tar sand, pipelines, hydroelectric dams, etc, but it is such a long list.
Try just looking over this article instead: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – Wikipedia
CD in Wisconsin
June 18, 2023 6:29 am
If there was any doubt remaining that the CAGW is a religion, the Bristol Climate Choir in the UK appears to have put it to a rest…..
They sing nicely though, and it’s a nice-looking church. That is about all I can say about this video that is good. Blessings to Holy Mother Climate. /sarc
Good grief, CD! Before watching that video I was beginning to suspect that we really are in the Biblical ‘End Time’. But now that I’ve seen this bunch of depraved neo-Marxist revolutionaries preaching their delusional anti-christian messages of inescapable guilt and doom in a place of christian worship, I’m sure of it. What’s coming next – a celebration of satanism in Westminster Abbey?
Where’s my sandwich-board – the one with the words “Repent ye sinners!” on one side and “The end is nigh! Prepare to meet thy doom,” on the other? People need to know about this.
Anyone else been investigating how the new AI engines will answer some of the perennial questions that have been argued about on these pages for years on end?
I started to do so recently, and here is one result: Are photons from a cool object absorbed by a warmer object?
That’s interesting Nick. I don’t keep careful track of who holds which opinion on WUWT, but I have a vague recollection that you hold the view that there can’t be a greenhouse gas effect because a warmer object can’t absorb photons from a cooler object. If I am ‘misremembering’ then I apologize. In any case I don’t think that the AI responses provide support for such a view whoever may hold it.
The GHE is about delaying cooling, not warming the surface through back radiation. It’s not that photons emitted by a water molecule near the frigid tropopause need to be absorbed at the surface. Most of the upwelling IR is absorbed by water vapor and also by CO2 near the surface.
Therefore much of the downwelling IR originates a short distance above the surface, from molecules that are similar in temperature to the surface. If the surface has just emitted IR as it cools radiatively, then a photon re-emitted by a nearby GHG molecule is very likely to be of an energy that can be absorbed. Kind of a two steps forward one step back scenario. The surface still cools but not as much as it would have.
Photons from high up that happen to reach the surface (rather than being absorbed by a GHG lower in the atmosphere) may not be able to be absorbed at the surface but will reflect and may end up being absorbed by GHGs somewhere in the atmosphere.
The overall effect is one where more energy is retained in the atmosphere so that it doesn’t cool as fast as it might have. Which means that the surface temperature at sunrise is higher than it would have been and so the sun will warm the surface to a higher temperature by sunset than it would have otherwise. Rinse and repeat.
“… vague recollection that you hold the view that there can’t be a greenhouse gas effect because a warmer object can’t absorb photons from a cooler object.”
No, that is not correct. I invented the thought experiment involving two stars in isolation, one at, for example, 5000°, the other at 6000°. Now, bring them into a close orbit around each other. What happens to the temperature of each star?
Warmer star now has a 5000° star shining on it, where before it had nothing but black cold and empty space.
What happens to photons that impinge upon the warmer star from the cooler star?
Do they somehow fail to get absorbed by the warmer star and heat it up some?
In this exercise, I merely wanted to see what kind of response I would get from this new tool of information technology.
One thing I did note, is that obviously it has the ability to draw from a vast assemblage of knowledge almost instantly.
Not that it is going to be correct all the time or anything, but it may bring into the conversation new details or points of view, etc.
I think the Greenhouse effect is a misnomer, probably.
Semantic aside though, I started out and remained for a long time agnostic on this question, since I was on a regular basis reading heated back and forth arguments from people who were highly educated on this specific subject, and yet nevertheless had opposing points of view and opinions. Certain things that seemed to me to be questions that should be easy to settle one way or the other, showed no sign of being settled even after years of discussion that went on for hundreds of comments.
But over time, I did reach some conclusions.
There is nothing in physics that says photons from cold objects will not impinge upon and be absorbed by a warmer object.
During my questioning of the AI, I came to realize that it may be the actual key to wrecking the warmista cabal.
Ask me if you want to know more on my thoughts about that.
Rich,
I wrote that first comment before I had read your entire comment, so this one is after reading the rest of it.
One thing I always want to keep in mind when thinking about these energy transfers between molecules via photons, is that photons move really fast.
At 186,000 miles per second (in a vacuum, slightly slower in the atmosphere, yes), a photon can and will travel from the surface to the top of the atmosphere and back again, a whole crapload of times in less of an interval than a person can blink an eye.
On Twitter a while back, years ago, this was much discussed, and some papers reviewed, and the amount of time that extra CO2 kept a photon from leaving the Earth was fractions of a microsecond, IIRC.
Considering this tidbit of info along with another one, that in nearly every place on Earth, at every latitude, and on nearly every single day, once the Sun sets, the Air near the surface cools down to near or at the Dew point, and this occurs long before dawn comes to renew the diurnal cycle of solar heating.
IOW…the atmosphere has a huge excess capacity to cool itself down, if for any reason an extra amount of heat is left at the surface during the day.
There is therefore no such thing as heat accumulating in the atmosphere as a result of increasing CO2 concentration.
How could there be, when we can see that there were months all the way back in the early 1980s that were warmer than recent months?
The temperature at every place on earth is determined by how much moisture is in the air, and other factors are trivial by comparison, in this view.
Dewpoint, BTW for anyone who has never studied meteorology, is simply a measure of how much water is contained in air.
It is one of the ways of stating what the absolute humidity is.
Not to be confused with relative humidity, which is a measurement of how much moisture is in the air, compared to how much moisture the air is capable of holding at that temperature and pressure.
Dewpoint is thus a quantity, in grams per cubic meter for example, while relative humidity is a ratio, or percentage.
I don’t know what is currently popular as illustration but when I was in school electrons were said to exist at specific energy “levels” or in particular “shells” such ss the S and P (and several other) shells. Electrons could absorb specific quanta of energy, depending on the material, whereby the electron would move from its ‘rest’ level or shell to a higher energy one. It then had a generally overwhelming tendency to release or emit that quanta of energy and return to a lower or normal level. This all may be only a convenient metaphor to help visualize something that is beyond being seen.
However, descriptions of greenhouse gases say that the energy is absorbed by the molecular bond, causing it to bend or stretch one of possibly several ways, bending back and forth as long as the additional energy is held, but this does not involve an electron changing to a different energy level. This makes the event even more mysterious. Where and in what form is that energy prior to emission?
While some descriptions of greenhouse gas physics do not mention molecular interactions (all greenhouse gases are molecules, not individual atoms), others declare that interaction of the molecules, which transfer energy from one to another as kinetic energy, reduce the absorbed energy so it does not have the potential to be emitted. Supposedly this happens much more frequently than absorption, by a large factor, so little emission occurs. The chatbot description says the atoms and molecules of a gas “do not interact with each other significantly”, which seems to contradict the descriptions that say molecule to molecule energy exchanges are many times greater than emissions. Perhaps asking for elucidation on that would be an interesting forth followup, if one wishes to assume that the chatbot output has any value what so ever.
Once you bring in the notion of photons shooting about in framing the question, you have pushed the engine toward a non-physical notion of energy transfer i.e. make believe. And there is plenty of make-believe to find on the web.
The question should be on radiant energy transfer and there is only one correct answer. Radiant energy goes from warmer to colder. The electric field that all matter exists in equilibrates at the speed of light no different to the gravity field. All mater exists in these energy fields and communicate with the fie fields. The matter is a state of the field.
Separating the two temperature terms in the Stefan-Boltzman relationship and calling the negative term back radiation is utter nonsense. The polydirectional flow of radiant energy has long been discredited. Decsribed here as “arrested development”: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022407314000995:
So, wait…you are disputing the entire notion of quanta of electromagnetic radiation “shooting about”?
How are photons unphysical, in your view? If that is what you are saying I mean.
Photons are, to my understanding, the particle that transfers “radiant energy” from one object to another, or one part of the universe to another, or whatever.
I do not think I have heard this particular line of discussion before, so please forgive me if I am misunderstanding what you are saying here…I am genuinely curious.
On a perhaps related line of inquiry, i asked the AI about that stuff Zooey was going on about a few years back…that photons cannot be emitted in a direction where they will not hit anything. IIRC, she seemed to be stating there is no such thing as a photon that was emitted billions of years ago and will never strike any object and will just go on forever and ever through expanding space. Or something like that.
They AI got mad at me, then told me it did not want to talk to me anymore.
Photons (quanta) and E&M fields are what makes up the duality of wave-particles. Planck spent an awful amount of research into Maxwell’s equations and how matter absorbs E&M waves. It is how he formulated the concept of quanta.
Photons are not bullets, they are energy packets carried by E&M waves. Think of radio E&M waves which are originated with a given power. The energy of an individual photon (quanta) is related to the wavelength/frequency but not the power in the E&M wave. So what does the power represent? The number of quanta (photons) available.
Planck proved that the E&M wave emitted is in all directions and for a given volume the temperature determines the radiated power. That is why photons are not bullets.
I have more than passing familiarity with all of that, but I am wondering, who said anything about bullets?
Where did I use the idea of photons shooting about to frame any of my questions?
I have no idea what either of you are disputing, specifically.
BTW, Planck himself only use the concept of quantization as a mathematical “trick” to make the equations work, which prior to him doing so, no one was able to work out the math.
It was Einstein who put forth the idea that light was actually quantized, Einstein who proposed that there were actually photons of light, emitted in discreet bundles of energy.
Planck was one of Einstein harshest critics when he heard of Einstein’s work. He insisted that he never meant to propose that there were actual photons, that quanta of EM radiation were real. Planck was steadfast in his assertion that such quanta did NOT exist.
It was just a way to make the math work.
Einstein won one of his Nobel prizes for solving the mystery of the photoelectric effect, which he was able to do by assuming photons were discreet particles. Prior to Einstein’s work, no one could explain how light of very low intensity was able to kick loose electrons.
I do not know what either of you mean by “bullets”, as being somehow different that discreet particles…i.e. quanta. Photons!
Nor am I clear on what is meant by saying they are not ”shooting about”?
I never used that terminology. I spoke of them being emitted and absorbed. The two slit experiment makes it clear that they can and do act as particles in some contexts, and as waves in others.
If we put a detector at each slit to determine which slit each photon passes through, the interference pattern suddenly disappears!
And then of course in the aftermath of Einstein, his work and it’s various implications led to the concepts which became what we now refer to collectively as quantum mechanics, De Broglie discovered that everything has a wavelength!
I never said anything about bullets or shooting, so again, I do not know what exactly you guys are saying I got wrong.
Back in the day, where and when I went to college, we learned about the history of the various subjects and subject material. We learned why what is believe to be true, is believed to be true.
We never learned anything by rote, or as a list of facts.
I did not only study chemistry and physical chemistry and physics though…I also took many geology classes, at every level. Earth history is a very important subject.
From what we know about the history of the earth, it is impossible that CO2 controls the temperature of the atmosphere. So complete and accurate answers to these questions about radiative gasses and the laws of physics and the behavior of photons, is really not required to refute the warmista religion.
Do photons exist or are they just a useful concept?
When we refer to “photons”, we are not typically talking about any specific photon, like George, my next door neighbor’s kid photon.
We are referring to the CONCEPT of photons.
Whatever it is we are talking about, is exactly that concept that we have in mind when we say it.
I’m afraid your AI is talking mindless techno-gibberish, Nicholas. It evidently has no understanding of the basic radiative physics which it purports to describe and would seriously mislead anyone who was foolish enough to take its utterances at face value as being authoritative and truthful.
For example, in the 2nd and 3rd sentences in its answer to your first question it says: “According to the Planck’s Law, the energy and wavelength of photons emitted by a black body are related to its temperature, such that higher temperature corresponds to higher energy and shorter wavelength. Therefore, photons from a cool object will have lower energy and longer wavelength than photons from a warmer object.”
This is sheer twaddle. Look up ‘Planck’s law’ in any good encyclopaedia and it will tell you that Planck’s law defines the relative quantities of photons of specific wavelengths emitted by an ideal black body at a given temperature. In Planck’s Law, the term ‘temperature’ refers to the black body which emits the photons and not to the photons which it emits. Also, according to Planck’s Law, every black body at any temperature whatsoever emits photons on an infinite range of wavelengths and energies, but a black body at a higher temperature will emit more photons of the same wavelengths and energies than it would emit if it had a lower temperature, that is all.
This was just one example to demonstrate the AI’s startling ability to misconstrue basic scientific laws and principles and I must now leave it to others so inclined to find more.
There is no doubt the AI says stuff that is plain wrong.
Not sure this is an example of that though.
I agree that what it said is not a very precise or even accurate way to state Planck’s Law.
But lot’s of people do this sort of thing in conversation as well, like when they assert that a certain number of watts per meter of solar irradiance translates into a certain temperature of the planet. That makes no sense to me. For many reasons, not the least of which is, the planet does not have “a temperature”, any more than it has a climate.
“There is no doubt the AI says stuff that is plain wrong. Not sure this is an example of that though.”
OK. I think you will become sure of it though, when you know for yourself, independently of AI, what Planck’s Law really says and what it really means.
“I agree that what it said is not a very precise or even accurate way to state Planck’s Law. But lot’s of people do this sort of thing in conversation as well,…”
Don’t they just. And so much heat and so little light is produced by it.
“….like when they assert that a certain number of watts per meter of solar irradiance translates into a certain temperature of the planet. That makes no sense to me….”
It doesn’t make sense to me either and if that is what some people are actually saying then I think they must be at least as confused about this scientific subject as the current generation of AI’s.
“….For many reasons, not the least of which is, the planet does not have ‘a temperature’, any more than it has a climate.”
Would you care to explain why you think that planet Earth does not have a temperature or a climate? I would like to understand your thinking, but I haven’t a hope of being able to do so without knowing more about your reasons for thinking it.
The earth is not a black body, at best it is a grey body. The radiation pattern is made up of a large number of distinct wavelengths, that when combined appears to conform pretty much to a black body emission at a given temperature.
However, this radiation temperature is not indicative of the atmospheric temperature at 2 meters in height. That makes the radiation curve at TOA worthless in determining the “surface” temperature.
One of the assumptions that CO2 “traps” heat due to the dip in the radiation curve at CO2’s frequency would lead one to believe CO2 keeps that energy to itself. If that were true CO2 molecules at the surface would be much, much hotter than surrounding molecules. That doesn’t seem possible.
The temperature at the surface of the earth is not a temperature per se, it is a jumbled average of “growth” in temperature at various points on the earth. The very “temperatures” used to calculate the so-called daily average are highly correlated, that contaminates every following average and destroys any conclusions based upon the Central Limit Theory.
Climate? Climate scientists have created a bastard definition of climate. The general definition of climate uses several pieces of information to classify locations. From Wikipedia:
Climate classifications are systems that categorize the world’s climates. A climate classification may correlate closely with a biome classification, as climate is a major influence on life in a region. One of the most used is the Köppen climate classification scheme first developed in 1884.
Have you seen major changes in the Köppen classifications of any area due to temperature? New desert areas? New temperate area? Islands disappearing? Why do northern U.S. states see migration to southern states? It isn’t because the northern states are getting warmer! Don’t fall for the climate scientist’s propaganda that temperature defines climate. It just isn’t true!
I agree that the Earth is not an ideal ‘black body’. But who says it is one? I am aware that astronomers treat it as one for the purpose of calculating Earth’s so-called ‘effective temperature’, but that is a purely abstract, theoretical temperature which no-one, to the best of my knowledge, is claiming represents Earth’s actual surface temperature.
The effective temperature of a planet (or a star, for that matter) is the surface temperature which it would have if it radiated its energy-output to space with the same intensity all over the globe. In the case of Earth, that purely theoretical temperature turns out to be approximately –18⁰C.
However, a planet’s effective temperature is also the maximum possible surface temperature which it could have if the energy that it absorbed from its parent star’s radiation was the sole source of its heat (discounting other possible energy-sources in space as negligible, that is). In other words, the planet’s average surface temperature could not possibly be any higher than its effective temperature without some additional source/s of heat being present. But Earth’s actual mean surface temperature is generally estimated to be somewhere around +15⁰C, which is 33⁰C higher than its effective temperature, so there must be an additional source of heat present at Earth’s surface to account for this substantial temperature disparity. Orthodox science accounts for it by invoking the greenhouse effect.
You say: “One of the assumptions that CO2 “traps” heat due to the dip in the radiation curve at CO2’s frequency would lead one to believe CO2 keeps that energy to itself.”
Yes, it’s badly put. Of course, the radiant energy which greenhouse gases like CO2 capture tends to dissipate throughout the atmosphere in accordance with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
“The temperature at the surface of the earth is not a temperature per se, it is a jumbled average of ‘growth’ in temperature at various points on the earth.”
Let’s not conflate the good science with the bad. Earth’s surface temperature is one thing but what the inscrutable climate establishment is really doing to measure its variations in time is entirely another.
I’m speaking from memory but I understand that the fundamental, universal concept of temperature is rigorously defined in physics as follows:
The absolute temperature of a body is the average kinetic energy of the particles which compose the body.
So, a parcel of air near the surface does have a definite temperature: it is the average kinetic energy of the particles of air which make up the parcel. Likewise, Earth’s surface also has a definite temperature: it is the average kinetic energy of the particles which make up the planet’s surface.
However, although Earth’s surface temperature at any one time is clearly and rigorously defined, the task of actually measuring it with a useful degree of accuracy is a huge can of worms and, to the best of my knowledge, none of the organisations that purport to be able to do it are really able to do it with the state-of-art instruments and mathematical techniques currently available. I think it follows that those people and organisations such as NASA and the UK’s Met Office who purport to be able to measure the global mean surface temperature accurately must either be tragic victims of delusional fantasies or else be engaging in deliberate scientific fraud.
“Climate? Climate scientists have created a bastard definition of climate.”
I agree that the scientific definition of climate has been bastardised, but I think the people who have done this could not be honest climate scientists, because they would be shooting themselves in the foot to degrade the definitional basis of their science in this way. To me it looks more like the work of duplicitous, politically-motivated technocrats engaged in gas-lighting all of society. (I’m just speculating of course.)
“Don’t fall for the climate scientist’s propaganda that temperature defines climate. It just isn’t true!”
Fear not, Jim; I already know that it isn’t true – or authentic either.
Lots of things are missed in climate science. Here is one. When the surface absorbs the sun’s radiation it does not all immediately radiate away. A goodly portion is absorbed and via conduction is diffused to depths in the soil. The surface then stores heat for later release. Think capacitor. Does this heat the atmosphere? No. Also something you didn’t mention is very important, latent heat. Both of these are are not measured by atmospheric temperature. It means the 33 degree increase in temperature is a bogus calculation.
The quoted uncertainty of temperature and anomalies are far, far below the resolution of measured temperature. It is the mathematics cians that have little to no appreciation of the vagaries of physical measurements.
Currently flying home from Zurich, just got coverage back over northern canada, happy to report that Greenland seems strangely ice covered with no traces of greenery.
Spent two weeks meandering from Vienna westward, north and south into germany and Austria and Italy.
One guy in western Austria helpfully told me than many types of trees were dying back due to climate change so I watched very closely on all the drives and I don’t recall seeing any dead trees tho I looked really hard.
From deep valleys to above the tree lines, everything looked lush and happy.
I’m posting to request funding for continued research.
Won’t work – not alarmist enough, needs more climate change!
Interestingly enough there may be something in the ‘dying trees’ idea, or at least sick trees. There have been some stories of rising numbers of tree infections or parasites in the last few years – all from regions with wind farms close to or nearby. Generally speaking trees can fight off parasites or infections fairly well normally, as long as they have available water, but what has been found are trees with drier than average soil around them, attributed to ‘climate change’. However, as a recent WUWT article mentioned, this could very well be down to the drying out action from extensive wind turbines.
Or a decline in bat populations and avian insectivores?
bdgwx
June 18, 2023 12:25 pm
My mid-month expectation for UAH TLT 2023/06 is 0.36 ± 0.22 C. We still have a slight La Nina influence, but it is waning now. I’m showing a La Nina attenuation of temperature for June of -0.06 C. I’m expecting July and August to have a mostly neutral influence with September finally switching to a slight El Nino influence. The odds of an annual mean >= 0.40 C in the UAH TLT are pretty low for 2023 so I’m not expecting a new record this year.
It is a good thing that you have such a ‘small’ uncertainty. Otherwise the best you could say is somewhere between zero and a number less than one. Worst case scenario is possible cooling or warming. BTW, is your uncertainty one or two sigma?
I thought the uncertainty was quite large myself. As a point of comparison my mid-month expectation for GISTEMP has an uncertainty of ±0.14 C. By the end of the month I can only get down to ±0.20 C for UAH TLT, but for GISTEMP it is ±0.06. What is interesting is that type A evaluations of satellite observations yields an uncertainty of about ±0.15 C (though Christy et al. 2003 say ±0.20 C via type B) and for surface observations it is ±0.06 C (Lenssen et al. 2019 say ±0.05 C via type B). So I believe my methodology is hitting the limits of what is possible given the observational uncertainty in the measurements themselves.
I always report as 2-sigma unless otherwise noted.
Which datasets publish uncertainty analysis for the GAT that are 1-sigma and are not stated as such? I’ll make sure I double their values if I know which ones they are.
Sorry, I don’t keep a list. I’m just sharing from memory how often it isn’t even mentioned whether the uncertainty is 1 or 2-sigma, and when it is mentioned that it is frequently 1-sigma.
“I always report as 2-sigma unless otherwise noted.”
Thanks for the clarification. I’ve had to replicate your results more than once to figure this out. Not a compliant, as, per Mr. Spencer’s trailing comment, it is not always clear elsewhere. For both you and others, it’s often easier to figure it out on my own.
morton
June 18, 2023 12:59 pm
wanted to post this article to get some feedback.
thanks.
(sorry, couldn’t get the images to load, just the address)
Global warming completely stopped in 2018. Temperatures will likely remain steady until 2025 and may decline slightly by 2030. A strong El Niño in 2023 is unlikely. I’ll explain all of my predictions — after we hear from the experts.
NOAA recently predicted a 55% chance of a strong El Niño in late 2023. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) threw more fuel on the fire when it announced, “There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.” Obviously, the MSM had a field day with this. Take for example this headline from USA Today: “Scientists warn an El Niño is likely coming that could bring scorching heat to Earth.”
Rather than taking the well worn path of pointing out flaws in the predictions of NOAA, the IPCC, or the WMO, I’ll instead show how the sun is likely responsible for almost every detail in global temperatures over the last 125 years, and that it is also responsible for triggering strong El Niños.
Two empirical, or black-box, models were created to predict global temperature. The first model uses solar magnetic field data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO). The second model uses sunspot data from WDC-SILSO, the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels. Both predictions will be compared to global temperature anomaly data from NOAA.
Solar magnetic field data collection began in 1976. The complete WSO dataset can be viewed in a single graphic, often referred to as a butterfly diagram. It looks complicated, but it’s really not. It’s just a plot of solar magnetic field intensity over time as a function of the sun’s latitude. The two colors represent north and south polarity magnetism. Unlike the Earth, where magnetic north has conveniently stayed in the Northern Hemisphere for the last 780,000 years, the sun’s magnetic field changes polarity every 11 years.
Notice how the colors fade from left to right? That’s the sun’s magnetic field getting weaker with time. As the sun’s magnetic field weakened, the Earth warmed. Why? Well, I can’t answer that — nobody can — but with weaker magnetic fields, there’s more interaction between the atmosphere and galactic cosmic rays (CGRs). There are several, complicated, and often competing theories on how these interactions affect climate. As we tend to associate lower solar activity with cooling, not warming, as shown here, the sun’s total solar irradiance (TSI) likely plays a significant longer-term role in global temperatures. TSI hasn’t changed much over the short amount of time we’ve been able to reliably measure it, so TSI is not included in either model.
Using only the data shown in the butterfly diagram, it’s possible to predict temperature with a simple 11-year moving average to smooth out the 11-year cycles. The averaged data is then negated to account for weaker magnetic fields causing rising temperatures, shifted forward by 2.8 years to account for the Earth’s delayed global response to the sun, and finally scaled to convert from units of Tesla to degrees. Since we know what the sun is doing now, we can predict how the Earth will respond 2.8 years from now. That’s it! A little data-smoothing and a minus sign. It’s not a very complicated model.
Note how closely the average global temperature tracks the predicted temperature. We’ll see this same two-step temperature change shape again with the longer sunspot-based model. Without the minus sign, one might conclude that the sun doesn’t cause global warming.
Here’s what the sun can tell us about the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO). NOAA’s ENSO index shows two strong El Niño events starting in 1997 and 2015 (El Niño events are positive values and La Niña events negative). As predicted by the model, prior to both events, global temperatures rose dramatically. This is a key point. Rapid sun-induced warming triggers strong El Niños. El Niños don’t cause global warming, and they most certainly don’t affect the sun’s magnetic fields. The correct order of causality is sun → global temperatures → strong climate oscillations.
The magnetic field model predicts stable temperatures until 2025, so while there could be an El Niño event later this year, as predicted by NOAA, solar history suggests that the event would likely be mild-to-moderate. In particular, the small ENSO around 2009 seems to be more in keeping with the steady temperatures we’re currently experiencing. This type of El Niño will affect local climates but will likely cause only a small ripple in global temperatures.
Using sunspot data as a proxy for solar activity, it’s possible to extend accurate temperature predictions back to 1900. Whereas the magnetic field model was only 11 years long, the sunspot model varies in length between 99 and 126 years, depending on the model variant. This increased length allows the model to extract information from the longer solar cycles (which also drive TSI).
To explain a lack of prediction accuracy, greenhouse gas models tend to require a lot of help from pollution, buckets, volcanos, fires, data refinements, and climate oscillations. This is especially true over the last eight years where temperatures have not followed the exponential rise in CO2 contributions.
Without any extra help, the sunspot-based model correctly predicts falling temperatures to 1910, rising temperatures to 1947, slightly declining temperatures to 1970, rising temperatures to 2012, slowly rising temperatures to 2018, and steady or slightly declining temperatures to date. The other model variants predict steady, or slightly declining temperatures to 2030.
The model does support the inclusion of a simple CO2 warming model. While the use of both models does have a slightly lower error with 0.2°C of CO2 warming, the CO2 model is likely just correcting for sunspot model inaccuracy in the years prior to 1910. Here, CO2 compensation is disabled.
Strong El Niño events are indicated by the red arrows. In all cases, the strong El Niños are preceded by a sudden rise in the predicted temperature. The two strongest events occurred in 1940 and 1982. Black arrows indicate the solar events that appear to have triggered them.
These models predict that global temperatures will remain steady or decline slightly. Deep ocean temperatures will continue to rise, ice may continue to melt, and local temperature records may be set — at least until a new equilibrium is reached, or temperatures begin to fall. The models also predict that fear-mongering climate change headlines will continue until politicians start claiming victory for having saved us all from global warming.
For complete transparency, the models and code used predict global temperature from sunspots and solar magnetism are available here. Robert Cutler is an engineer with decades of experience in signal analysis.
Robert, try taking a look at how the earth’s energy imbalance is affected by the sun’s variable irradiance. Over a period of about ten years, the energy from the sun varies by about 0.3 W/m2; it’s a pretty clean sine wave. The EEI, as reported by NASA from CERES satellite data, shows no such variation. An FFT on the EEI shows no particular cyclic nature. The question is not “Is the earth warming?” but rather “Can we control the EEI and change whether the earth cools or warms?”. And the answer to that is apparently “no”. If the sun’s energy variation cannot change the EEI, neither can CO2. It would seem the earth is a pretty robust system. What a surprise.
Yeah, 0.3 W/m2 is about right. From 1979/01 to 2022/12 I get a range of about 0.30 – 0.35 W/m2 on each cycle with a standard deviation of 0.08 W/m2 and an linear regression change of about -0.05 W/m2.
Anyway, solar variation can definitely change EEI. That is a consequence of the 1st law of thermodynamics. I’m wondering if you aren’t seeing the cyclic behavior in the EEI because its variation is dominated significantly by the outgoing radiation and not the incoming radiation. In other words, I’m thinking the signal you are looking for is getting swamped by the noise. Maybe one day when I get time I’ll download the CERES EEI and play around with it myself. I just have so many other things in the queue right now.
Morton, as an engineer with a decade of sun-climate work, I can evaluate his claims.
Mr. Cutler’s views are somewhat similar to mine, but he also relies on CO2 in his model, which I don’t. His Python coding and graphics work are admirable, although I haven’t actually studied his code yet to see how his model really works and if it is truly reliable and falsifiable.
I don’t know why he didn’t try to publish it rather than posting it on American Thinker. At the very least he should post his article to Researchgate like I do my work.
Robert Cutler said:
“Rapid sun-induced warming triggers strong El Niños. El Niños don’t cause global warming, and they most certainly don’t affect the sun’s magnetic fields.”
His first sentence is a description of what I call ‘solar-supersensitivity’, the oceanic reaction to high TSI and rapidly increasing TSI. He is right. I have reduced this idea down to a science by establishing a sun-ocean decadal warming threshold, then testing it against reality. Recent ocean warming is from this solar cycle’s high solar activity, just as I predicted it would last year.
His second sentence is not quite true. Predominately positive MEI from El Niños, and global warming are synonymous, occurring together from the solar driver as the common denominator.
He used two models together to calculate the temperature evolution, which I first did in my 2018 AGU presentation, “Extreme Weather Events and Climate Extremes are Limited by the Duration of Solar Cycle Irradiance Extremes“. His two models look to be different than mine though.
“Since we know what the sun is doing now, we can predict how the Earth will respond 2.8 years from now. That’s it! A little data-smoothing and a minus sign. It’s not a very complicated model.”
This idea has nuance. 2.8 years ago the sun had just left the solar minimum. The only forward signal from the sun at the solar minimum is the strength of the polar fields, which are used by solar scientists like Leif Svalgaard et al to predict the next cycle’s maximum sunspot number.
Unless Mr. Cutler is better at that task than Dr. Svalgaard, I suggest there’s a bit of curve-fitting and hand-waving going on here from him, but who knows, maybe he figured out something new.
Lastly, his 98 year running average might be useful, I don’t know. It is reminds me of my own finding of the 109y SN average and the 30y HadSST3, which is useful:
i have a naive(?) question.
I know the physics behind the aurora at the atomic level, electrons pushed into higher orbitals or given sufficient energy to ionise the atoms. The light produced being the aurora with the colours being element specific. Does this have a more general effect on the energy of the gas molecules, i.e. does the temperature increase? Are there any components of the aurora outside the visible part of the spectrum?
Open Thread
Mr. Layman here.
I just saw a commercial for something with a solar panel.
I got to wondering.
If a solar panel, say 3ft x 3ft, could convert every bit of solar energy to electricity with no loss (100% efficient), just how much would that be?
Trenberth and the energy budget..
Originally treating the surface of Earth like a blackbody was just a simplified and erroneous assumption. In order to not correct itself, the orthodoxy applied some interesting “tricks” to justify this assumption. Or is it just incomptence? Judge for yourself..
https://greenhousedefect.com/basic-greenhouse-defects/the-anatomy-of-a-climate-science-disaster
At the bottom of Trenberth’s chart; [ Net Absorbed 0.9 W/m² ]
You may remember that Trenberth’s first iteration of that wondrous opus balanced. It’s
rather obvious that someone realized that if warming were to actually occur there had to be a net absorption. You can kinda surmise how that came about:
Once upon a time on a bright sunny morning a few years back, Dr. James Hansen was looking at Kevin Trenberth’s iconic “World Energy Budget” when he choked on his morning coffee because he realized that the darn thing balanced. That’s right, energy in equaled energy out. You see, he’s been saying for some time now that heat energy is slowly building up in Earth’s climate system and that’s not going to happen if the energy budget is balanced.
So he did some fast calculations, snatched up his cell phone and punched in Trenberth’s number.
“Hi Kev, Hansen here, how’s it goin’ with you? Got a minute?”
“Sure Doc, what’s up?”
“Glad you asked. I’ve been looking at your energy budget and it balances, can you fix that?”
“What do you mean fix it, it’s supposed to balance?”
“Kev, listen carefully now, if it balances, heat will never build up in the system do you see where I’m going?”
“Uh I’m not sure, can you tell me a little more?”
“Come on Kev don’t you get it? I need heat to build up in the system. My papers say that heat is in the pipeline, there’s a slow feedback, there’s an imbalance between radiation in and radiation out. Your Energy Budget diagram says it balances. Do you understand now?”
“Gotcha Doc, I’ll get right on it” [starts to hang up the phone]
“WAIT! I need an imbalance of point nine Watts per square meter [0.9 Wm²] for everything to work out right.”
“Uh Doc, what if it doesn’t come out to that?”
“Jeez Kev! Just stick it in there. Run up some of the numbers for back-radiation so it looks like an update, glitz up the graphics a little and come up with some gobbledygook of why you re-did the chart you know how to do that sort of thing don’t you?”
“Sure do Doc, consider it done” [click]
And the new chart was produced
You can run the numbers, and 0.9 Wm² will warm the ocean 600 meters deep about 1/2°C in a little over 40 years. Truly amazing stuff. The noon-day sun puts out nearly 1370 wm² and these guys are claiming they’ve added up all the chaotic movements of heat over the entire planet and have determined an imbalance of 0.9 Wm². That’s an accuracy of what? five of four places? With no plus or minus error bars or anything.
What it means is, all of the components
Reflected by clouds, Reflected by aerosols, Reflected by atmospheric gases, Reflected by surface, Absorbed by the surface, Absorbed by the atmosphere, Thermals, Evaporation, Transpiration, Latent heat, Emitted by clouds, Emitted by atmosphere, Atmospheric Window, AND Back radiation! And they all need to have an accuracy to those five or four places for the 0.9 Wm² to be true.
Perhaps Dr. Hansen didn’t ring up Trenberth and bully him into changing his chart but, Trenberth did change it to show an imbalance and it’s a good bet he did so because he realized that if it balanced like his original version, heat wouldn’t build up.
And we all are supposed to sit still for this sort of thing.
Yep, the irradiance uncertainties are of the order of at least several Watts per cm2, yet these guys claim to calculate energy totals (of averages!) to 0.1 W/cm2 or even smaller. Absurd.
Ummmm . . . that would be assumptions/calculations to 0.1 W/m2, but your point is still valid.
I recall a version that had +/- numbers on it.
Often +/ values of 20 or more (iirc)
And then the final balance was + 0.6 or something like that.
It was HILARIOUS !
bnice
maybe the IPCC version
OK, here’s A Really Really Stupid Question incoming….
But why?
The flat disc will be absorbing 1,370 watts across its entire area.
Ah you say, Earth is rotating.
So Earth rotates half way round in 12 hours and presents its other side which had previously been = night and receiving nothing.
Thus Earth appears to be like a rotating/flipping coin, as seen from the sun.
So one side will get 1370 watts for 12 hrs while the other side gets nothing.
Then it flips.
Doesn’t that mean that The Average is half of the 1370 figure?
Doesn’t that mean that The Average Temperature should be 331 Kelvin or 58°Celsius
Doesn’t that stack up with:
The atmosphere, via ‘weather’, does nothing but cool the surface.
I do know what I got wrong there, that The Average Energy falling on a rotating sphere is actually 484 watts per square metre. You need to work the cosine.
i.e. 1370 divided by 2x√2
Thus giving an average temp of 304 Kelvin or 31⁰ Celsius
Strangely enough equal to the very maximum temperature that deep (100+metres) clear water can and does ever get to on this Earth
What did I get wrong there?
Because somebody somewhere has got something very very wrong indeed – and nobody has ever picked up on it.
till now?
A spherical cow likes to graze at the bottom of the hill.
The answer to these questions and more at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj6ORbRBZ2s
and
No, Earth is continuously rotating at an essentially constant rate, it is not flipping.
What you got wrong is that the solar energy intercepted by the effective surface area of hemisphere of the Earth is indeed equivalent to the surface area of a flat disk of the same diameter as the Earth, oriented normal to the incoming radiation from the Sun . . . this equivalency adjusts for the “cosine effect” of radiation falling on a curved surface.
Well, perhaps some can see who’s “got something very very wrong.”
You are basically trying to prove that ever square meter of that flat disk receives 1370/4 W/m². Sorry a sphere doesn’t work that way. If it did, the poles would be receiving 1370/4 W/m², just like the equator. That assumes that each piece of radiation is normal to the “effective area” of the earth. It just ain’t so!
The equator will receive the entire amount, while the poles receive very little. The flat earth argument just loses this difference. This is where “averages” lose out. Look at a Mercator map. Why are the areas so out of whack? Why do you think most of the models predict a tropical hot spot? Radiation is related to the T⁴th. Averages totally ignore this exponential difference and end up with incorrect values.
No, you misunderstand completely.
A flat disk (with area of pi*r^2) oriented normal to incoming sunlight will receive the average solar constant that exists at Earth’s TOA, equal to 1370 (actually, closer to 1362) W/m², averaged over the course of a year. With a flat disk, there is no variation from top to bottom.
But when one wants to compute the average of this power flux as it is distributed over Earth’s total surface area (on a yearly basis, averaging day vs. night and orbital variations, and across all latitudes), one needs to use the area of a sphere (yeah, an approximation), which is 4*pi*r^2.
So, the flux of solar power as averaged over the entire surface of Earth and over the course of a year is indeed: (1362 W/m² *pi*r^2)/(4*pi*r^2) = 1362 W/m²/4 = 341 W/m², the same value given in the Kiehl and Trenberth diagram of the very first comment above.
The math is straightforward and there is no need to conflate it with cosine effects due to angles of incoming radiation, as long as one understands the 341 W/m² represents a TOA average and not a specific value at a given latitude nor at a given day of the year nor at a given time of day.
So it represents something that is not physical (not true).
The field of mathematics, with its accepted constructs, has “things” (postulates, operators, equations, derivations, “proofs”, etc.) that are true and not true.
Pure mathematics does not deal with physical objects or energy, yet it still has truths.
It is therefore illogical to equate something that is not physical as being not true.
You’re the one that said “… represents a TOA average and not a specific value at a given latitude nor at a given day of the year nor at a given time of day.”
So it represents something that is NOT true at any spot on earth any time of the year. It is not physical.
I’ll try to dumb it down as much as possible:
The mathematical average of 2+4 is 3 . . . 3 is neither the value of 2 nor the value of 4, but it is a real number.
Similarly, the mathematical average of a measured temperature of 20 C and anothered measured temperature of 40 C is 30C . . . is 30 C not a physical quantity because it did not exist in the set of data from which it was derived?
You are simply confusing “physical existence” with “truth”.
End of discussion.
The average of 30C is not a physical quantity, especially if “it did not exist in the set of data”!
30C is a statistical calculation of the central tendency of the distribution of temperatures. It may not even have the highest probability of being the highest value. Basically, the mean is simply a statistical artifact that may (or may not) be useful in analyzing the distribution of temperatures in the data set.
The mean of a distribution has nothing to do with finding the value of a constant. The only time it used in measurement is determining the “true value” that an instrument displays.
Power in watts per square meter is a rate, not a quantity.
So the amount that falls in one instant is not divided by two because there is day and night…the Sun is always shining.
The reason one has to do some geometry to convert the solar constant to an average amount of incident radiation for the entire surface is because the disc of the Earth intercepts an amount of photons that is defined by the size of the disc that the Earth shows the Sun.
But that amount does not all on a flat disc, it falls on a hemisphere. So only at one point directly in the center of the disc are the rays falling perpendicularly to the surface, everywhere else they are at some angle. At the edges, IOW where it is dawn and dusk, the rays are nearly parallel to the surface. Think about how large of a shadow a one square meter piece of cardboard casts in each place on the surface at different latitudes and times of day.
Oblique angles mean very little of the solar constant falls on each square meter.
Actually, power in watts per square meter is correctly called a flux (quantity of something passing through a unit area).
Power itself is a rate, in this case energy per unit time.
Well, if we are gonna get hung up on semantics, it is properly referred to as a flux density.
Lots of people do not know what those words mean.
But everyone knows the difference between a rate and a quantity.
IOW, rather than simply being an amount, it is an amount per unit of area.
An amount of power, per unit area.
And power is an amount of energy, per unit of time.
Still digging?
“In transport phenomena (heat transfer, mass transfer and fluid dynamics), flux is defined as the rate of flow of a property per unit area, which has the dimensions [quantity]·[time]−1·[area]−1”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux
Nick, according to my heat transfer book the S-B equation is a result of integrating the energy density of radiation per unit volume per unit wavelength.
Another unstated assumption is that the Earth absorbs as a diffuse reflector, with changes of angle of incidence creating negligible changes in reflectance. In actuality, for the 71% of the Earth covered by water, and not covered by clouds, the reflectance varies from a low of about 2% to a high of 100%, depending on the angle of incidence primarily, in a complex way. However, even vegetation and snow have a bi-directional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) with a strong forward lobe, particularly for high angles of incidence. Only clouds have a BRDF that approaches a Lambertian reflector. That is why a flat disk model is acceptable for diffuse reflectors like the moon or Mars, but is a poor model for Earth.
Maybe it’s just me, but the above arguments seem to be directed toward establishing the time-averaged effective average solar constant at top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) of Earth, which does not include effects of atmospheric/ground/surface water/cloud reflectance, all of which are wrapped up in the term global “albedo” when determining the net energy entering into the Earth’s energy balance, as designated by the Kiehl & Trenberth diagram provide in the first comment under the above article.
In the context of climatology and global warming, what gets absorbed at the surface of is greater importance than what arrives at TOA.
It is S / 4 where S is the solar constant of 1360 W/m2. The divide by 4 is a shortcut that exploits the relationship between a sphere’s cross-sectional area and its surface area. The formula you are looking for that does the integration of the TSI down the lit hemisphere is S * (1/2π) * integral[cos^2(θ), dθ, –π/2, π/2]. Note that (1/2π) * integral[cos^2(θ), dθ, –π/2, π/2] = 1/4. So the average flux upon the Earth is 340 W/m2.
The area of a disk is pi x r^2, the area of a sphere is 4 x pi x r^2….. ergo, ratio of 4….
I generally agree with your posts but this one has me puzzled. You are comparing the black body spectrum, emitted power per unit wavelength with factors that signify a redirection of that emitted power. They are separate, independent quantities which between them define radiosity.
I seem to recall from years past hearing that the models do actually model a rotating sphere that is illuminated on one side, because the actual situation makes for far more complex calculations.
Do you know anything about that?
Because I can recall thinking that such shortcuts could be highly problematic in getting results that are going to match the actual Earth.
I seem to recall from years past hearing that the models do notactually model a rotating sphere that is illuminated on one side, because the actual situation makes for far more complex calculations.
Do you know anything about that?
Because I can recall thinking that such shortcuts could be highly problematic in getting results that are going to match the actual Earth.
Some more musings-
Prof Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder in the US, who was not part of the study team, said: “The key message is that we are pretty much destined to lose the Arctic’s sea ice cover in late summer. The question is: when will this occur?
“Over the past decade, there has not been much of a downward trend in September sea ice, which reflects the natural variability in the system. This hiatus will not last, but it shows the difficulties in making predictions. About a decade ago, I mused that the Arctic might lose its summer sea ice by 2030. That may have been an overly aggressive statement. While from the present study 2030 is still in the running, I’m going with sometime in the 2040s – that’s still not very far away.”
Too late now to save Arctic summer ice, climate scientists find | Climate crisis | The Guardian
This is standard Climastrology, observa. Something that wouldn’t be an actual problem (indeed a big benefit to navigation) is presented as something ominous. It is certain, but as it clearly isn’t happening on the original prediction timeline, it’s being pushed out to something not happening for a couple of decades.
Thus the old prediction is no longer operative—it’s been explained: “internal variability”, and by the time the adjusted prediction fails, the quack will be safely retired.
Or the next 30 years could be more like the period from 1950 to 1980…getting notably colder and ice everywhere increasing rapidly, but also in an episodic fashion.
These jackasses think every trend is destined to continue forever…California will never have a wet year again, the West is in a perpetual and ever-worsening drought, etc.
The truth is, maps of arctic sea ice now, look almost exactly like what was published many decades ago.
Just like pictures of every ocean side that can be found from the past 150 years, look identical to those same places now.
There are over 150 years of articles and reports of rapidly melting ice that is happening ever faster and is catastrophic. Punctuated by periods where ice grew and accumulated extremely rapidly.
We have even seen this in recent years in the Antarctic.
The best thing anyone can say about guys like Serreze is that he knows which side of the bread has the butter.
Was in Vienna last week and they had Skynews as one of the few English channels so I watched it a bit. Have to say they completely out-BS’d the CBC.
They said the arctic was the planet’s refrigerator (nope) and that once the summer sea ice goes it will never come back (nope, even if it does go it will come back every fall without fail).
Oh, they also mentioned it is “predicted be gone as soon as 2030” without mentioning 2000-2004-2006 etc etc etc.
It was awful and stupid and exactly par for the course.
They literally have no idea what they are talking about.
Space is the planet’s refrigerator.
Every September the Sun sets at the North Pole and does not rise again for 6 months.
So, all refrigerator, no more heater, in a circle that gets bigger and bigger for three months.
Serreze has already made a complete goose of himself way more than once.
Now he is doing it again.
D-OH !!
At least this time he has pinpointed a date which will be after he is retired.
STORY TIP:
I assume this also applies to Green lobbyists.
“It’s actually no small thing that for the first time ever, all participants, will have to be honest to the world about who they are.”
However-
There will also be no requirement to say who’s financing the trip to the COP.
LOL.
“Deep divisions between rich and poor were again apparent, with huge frustration on the part of developing countries that their financial needs are not being met, as climate impacts ramp up around the world.”
Countries can’t have emotions like frustration, only individuals can. Individuals in developing counties, ie. poor ones, are more interested in the opportunities to create personal wealth, exploit the surrounding resources, take advantage of cheap and easily available power and fuels that enable them to develop, or raise their own standard of living. Arcane theories and models of climate change don’t have much application to their own lives. As in the “developed” countries, their undeveloped neighbors have elites that live above the daily frustrations of the poor. Fulfillment of the financial needs of the country don’t necessarily translate into a general increase in the standard of living. Even the poorest countries have wealthy elites that are able to travel to COP affairs. There is no evidence to indicate that climate impacts are “ramping up”. In fact, elites are able to use climate as an excuse for their own failures.
“… frustration on the part of developing countries that their financial needs are not being met…”
Sheesh, then they should get to work producing stuff/services with value!
“… elites are able to use climate as an excuse for their own failures”
Good point!
(Quotes from a gun control speech here in Connecticut by the demented puppet we’re supposed to believe is leading the country).
So seriously, who is actually running the administration?
Very good question.
Don’t forget the part where Brandon claimed that a pistol brace allows one to increase the caliber of their handgun…
Biden said yesterday about the Chicom spy balloon flying over the United States, that he didn’t think the Chinese leaders knew about the balloon, or what it was doing!
It looks like the Chicoms have Biden well under control. They have Biden singing their tune. The Chicoms figured out they could buy off a U.S. president or two in the past, and do it fairly cheaply. And so they have.
Biden is confident he can tell a lie and get away with it, from past experience. The Media will run cover for him any time it is necessary.
Its a pimps job to make excuses for their whores shortcomings.
Obama – it’s pretty much an acknowledged fact in the White House apparently. Joe Biden could spend the rest of his term asleep and things would go on exactly as they are now.
Functionally, that would not be much different from what the situation is currently. He has difficulty speaking a coherent sentence without a teleprompter to read, and he doesn’t understand the simplest technologies, such as what “caliber” means. He believes that his son died overseas. He is, at best, semi-conscious.
“So seriously. who is actually running the administration?” The socialist collective called the Democrat Party. Next year it will probably be the socialist collective called the Republican Party.
The Democrat Party is highly organized and focused on taking away our individual freedoms. The Republican Party isn’t even close to being organized. This is the problem. Republicans need to get together and get organized. The Democrats present a solid front. The Republicans present anything but.
If you download all 12 chapters of the IPCC’s AR6 and do a [Ctrl F] word search for “observ” and “model” you get some interesting results:
obs mod Chapter#
472 898 1
396 205 2
808 1818 3
128 986 4
222 608 5
224 476 6
371 969 7
373 927 8
502 1230 9
523 1346 10
701 1336 11
230 318 12
4,950 11,117 Totals
Chapters:
1 Framing Context & Methods
2 Changing State of the Climate System
3 Human Influence on the Climate System
4 Future Global Climate: Scenario-based Projection and Near-term Information
5 Global and other Biogeochemical cycles and Feedbacks.
6 Short-lived Climate forcers
7 The Earth’s Energy Budget, Climate Feedbacks, and Climate Sensitivity
8 Water Cycle Changes
9 Ocean Cryosphere and Sea Level Change
10 Linking Global Regional Climate Change
11 Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate
12 Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment
I have observed the models and the models are……..
I saw several in Zurich yesterday
Warm day
Was a good day
Even the bruvvers are deluded
Who stands to lose most in the de-growth future? The ordinary working man and woman. You will hear much about many green jobs, but nobody ever states what these green jobs actually are. Cleaning solar panels? Clearing up dead birds and bats etc?
“UK lagging behind in global race to decarbonise, says TUC (Trades Union Congress) leader
…
the UK was “limping towards a green future” and he called for a “national collective effort” involving employers, workers and the government to ensure a quick and fair transition to a net zero economy.
“All of our unions are signed up to delivering net zero …
…
“This is not about me or the TUC or a few union leaders. What trade unions bring to the table is a network of tens of thousands of union reps up down the country that can be actively mobilised to help shape what this green future will look like,” he said. “
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/16/uk-lagging-behind-in-global-race-to-decarbonise-says-tuc-leader
It’s no great surprise that the unions are in lock step with Labour, only Labour is nothing like it was pre Tony Blair. It hates ordinary people – they voted for Brexit etc. So is it unanimous with the unions? Who can say, they don’t really represent their members, they marshall them and utilise their subscriptions as a political lever. But we can take note that the GMB and Unite unions said the plan would cause large job losses…
“Gary Smith, the general secretary of GMB, said on Sunday that Labour had “got it wrong” and risked creating “a cliff-edge with oil and gas extraction from the North Sea”.
Sharon Graham, the leader of Unite, said last week that Keir Starmer’s announcement had “left out everything that was important – the detail”, and that he should have been clear workers would not be hammered by the transition.
The number of workers directly employed on oil and gas fields in the North Sea are estimated at 20,000, with a further 200,000 jobs onshore.”
We [sensible people] know full well that we will need our own gas, oil and coal for decades to come, but politicians are determined to be the solar opposite of sensible about anything. First you start with a lie – a big one, too
“The North Sea oil and gas industry is in decline, a shadow business minister has said as she defended plans to block new drilling licences from 2050, a move criticised by trade unions. Seema Malhotra said the proposal was an important part of the transition to net zero, by phasing out new fields from which to extract fossil fuels and boosting Britain’s “sovereign capability” for clean and green energy.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/08/labour-mp-defends-north-sea-drilling-plans-against-union-criticism
So, what does “boosting Britain’s “sovereign capability” for clean and green energy” mean?
Hoping the wind blows and the Sun shines.
Who better to deliver zero than a union boss?
Real Union leaders like Hugh Scanlon, Jack Jones and the like would not recognise this lot as anything other than grifters.
Green jobs?
Oh yes , Wind Europe wrote to Von der Leyen at the EC early in 2022 lamenting the woes of the European wind industry and noting that the industry in Germany had lost over 50,000 jobs in the last 6 years.
Earlier this year Wind Europe also noted that it did not have the capacity to provide all the turbines Europe was planning to install by 2030.
It so happens that the most powerful and destructive unions are political parties.
Always trust the settled science and the scientists-
‘Scientists became the mice’: Marine Physicist on scientists being analysed for reliability (msn.com)
There’s no need to hypothesis test or to debate, so long as the likes of Alyssa Milano and Jane Fonda are the arbiters of truth. To think otherwise, you are a science denier.
The science is settled: The entire planet is in the midst of an ongoing and severe climate crisis, even though every single specific location is exactly the same as it has always been.
As actors I thought they were both great but as soon as they went political they lost my interest. Why on earth do actors, in particular, feel they should enter the political arena?
Because politics is acting so it’s a natural progression.
They get so used to hero worship that they actually begin to believe that they are smarter and wiser than the average person.
Story tip?
Thousands of EV’s rotting in fields in China
China is well known for its misallocation of resources due to central planning, as evidenced by ghost cities, for example.
These EVs in the field encapsulate the effect of the green climate movement in general. All of the energy and materials used for this endeavor is wasted and in the end causes more harm than benefit.
Communist central planning perhaps? Look to history of the Soviet Union!
It’s so interesting that RFK Jr., who seems to be a sceptic at heart, perhaps because his life has been so profoundly injured by the “deep state,” is willing to reconsider his stance on global warming. And further the mainstream media and its mouth pieces are not willing to debate his stance on vaccine safety.
https://rumble.com/v2uxjkc-big-pharmas-infomercial-star-peter-hotez-is-a-total-idiot.html
I always have a pretty extensive reading list week by week and two weeks ago I read through Steven Templeton’s book “Fear of a Microbial Planet”. By his way of thinking, and he presents plenty of evidence, much of our health depends on having a proper biome in our digestive tract and by interfering with it via excessive antibiotics use, or an environment devoid of a useful biome to incorporate (too clean) we run the risk of a long list of problems. It was a very interesting read.
It seems to me that RFKs take on vaccines is that we can overwhelm toddlers and infants with too many too soon. The media misrepresent this. However, one of his stances is that the mercury compounds used to preserve vaccines are a problem in and of themselves. I read “Splendid Solution” about the Salk vaccine maybe twenty years ago and recall that the mercury-containing antiseptic Merthiolate, which Salk had argued against adding to the vaccine, became a problem as a confounding factor in the trials. It inactivated the immune response from the vaccine.
The more things change…
All very rational.
RFK Jr. may be mistaken but he’s not totally crazy, and I agree with him that mRNA “vaccines” are one change that we could live without.
Introduction of an antigen to evoke an immune response makes sense. The debate should be over benefit and costs.
Genetic transcription of instructions to make an antigen in one’s cells is foolhardy, especially when fate of the mRNA is not well known.
Say what you will about the Salk vaccines (administered via injection or orally), but my understanding is that they were instrumental in basically eliminating the prevalence of polio on a global scale. Yes, there have recently been localized outbreaks of polio, particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but no epidemics anywhere since 1955.
By 1962 Salk’s vaccine was replaced by the Sabin vaccine.
As for merthiolate (Thimerosal):
“Thimerosal (merthiolate), an ethylmercury compound, at 0.01% concentration was routinely added as a preservative to MMR, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and other vaccines . . . Epidemiological studies from Denmark, Sweden, and Britain found no link between the presence of the thimerosal and the occurrence of childhood autism. In 2004, the US Institute of Medicine, after having reviewed the published studies, concluded that no relationship could be found between the thimerosal in vaccines and autism . . . (but) vaccine producers finally stopped using the organomercurial compound as a preservative. An analysis on the prevalence of autism in California found that between 2004 and 2007, autism cases continued to rise even after thimerosal was withdrawn from the vaccines.”
— https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/view/snippets-vaccine-history-success-failure-and-controversy
These simple facts would falsify that merthiolate in the vaccine “inactivated the immune response from the vaccine.”
The Salk poliovirus vaccine is injected, the Sabin vaccine is oral. The latter can cause paralysis and isn’t generally used in either the USA or Europe except if there’s an outbreak. There’s a new version of the oral vaccine that is meant to be safer, but it can still cause paralysis, but less than the original. Also oral vaccine is live vaccine, which means that they can shed virus in their faeces, in fact when we used it in the U.K. parents were told to be wary when changing their baby’s nappy/diaper.
I remember being given sugar cubes with a polio vaccine in the early-1950s, while in elementary school, which I always believed to be the Salk vaccine.
According to Wikipedia, the Sabin sugar cubes didn’t come out until 1961, by which time I was out of high school!
Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) was administered by injection and was licensed in 1955. By 1957, annual polio cases dropped from 58,000 to 5,600, and by 1961 only 161 cases remained.
A second type of polio vaccine, the oral polio vaccine (OPV) was developed by Albert Sabin (and by 1962 had replaced Salk’s vaccine). Sabin’s vaccine was live-attenuated (using the virus in weakened form) and could be given orally, as drops or on a sugar cube.
source: https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/history-of-polio-vaccination
I read the Wikipedia article on the polio vaccines. I’m saying that my personal memory is at odds with the official story. I’m certain that I received sugar cubes (I think it was two total) when I was in elementary school, and had been out of high school for two years when the sugar cubes supposedly replaced the shots.
Clyde,
Not saying that your memory is right or wrong, but I did come across this very interesting tidbit of music history in researching the topic:
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/08/954413533/his-vaccine-story-inspired-his-father-to-write-a-disney-classic
And this source says that Sabin OPV was administered on sugar cubes (or in a sugar syrup) as early as 1960, 1–2 years before most other sources identify the year where the Sabin OPV replaced the Salk IPV:
https://magazine.uc.edu/issues/0408/on_campus
Can’t find anything about OPV-on-sugar cubes prior to 1960, though.
The Salk vaccine was indeed a worthy effort. The issue in the case of the Salk vaccine was 1) it had not been tested with Merthiolate (thimerasol) and Salk was opposed to fiddling with the formulation and 2) the time period between mfg and use was so short that it was unnecessary. There was so little organic material in the highly purified vaccine that even at as little as 1:20,000 dilution merthiolate attached itself to the killed virus rendering it unable to produce a correct immune response in some individuals.
I have never heard of Merthiolate, but I am very familiar with the preservative thimerosal, which also contains mercury. But the amounts are so small, it is dwarfed by everyday background ingestion of the element. If you really want less mercury, never eat tuna or any other similar type of top of the food chain ocean predatory fish.
It has been difficult to replace the effectiveness of thimerosal, as we have been recently getting an extreme update on, regarding the increasing number of people going blind and even dying due to bacterial contaminants in things like eyedrops.
But they have removed thimerosal from almost every vaccine except I think one specific flu vaccine formula mostly for elderly people.
Everyone should keep in mind this guy is a lawyer, who has made several vast fortunes suing deep-pocketed companies for things that no one can prove they are at fault for.
If all you know about Roundup/glyphosate is what you hear from those who are panic mongers over every chemical every invented, it would be very hard to not think it is deadly poison that we would all be so much better off getting rid of. The truth is though, it is as safe from a toxicity perspective as a thing could be. There is no objective scientific evidence it causes cancer, but that matters not at all to a jury when a lawyer like RFK is arguing a case to a sympathetic jury that sees deep pockets and wants some unfortunate soul to have a huge payday.
RFK is a lawyer, not a scientist.
So there is that. I recall some thing about convincing a person whose livelihood depends on not being convinced…
Would you consider metallic mercury to be as toxic as the vapor or a form such as methylated mercury? There were different batches of vaccine, manufactured by different organizations some of which were done according to Salk’s formulation, and others had merthiolate added. Those which were least effective contained merthiolate.
Merthiolate and thimerasol are one and the same according to my Merck index.
“Merthiolate and thimerasol are one and the same according to my Merck index.”
Yes, I saw this was the case after I wrote my comments about it.
I was actually just reading up on this subject recently, I think after watching a video of RFK Jr. on Tony Heller’s you tube channel.
I am familiar with the fact that all mercury compounds are not equally toxic, by any means.
I recall vividly the story of the women who got a tiny amount of dimethyl mercury on her rubber glove while working in a lab one day.
She was an expert in toxic metal exposure, and she nonetheless died within a year of accidently getting a few droplets of the compound on the outside of her lab glove, back of the hand IIRC.
Tragic and shocking story, should be familiar to anyone who works in a lab, especially chemists like I was trained to be.
Karen Wetterhahn – Wikipedia
Thimerosal contains ethyl mercury, which is far less toxic than dimethyl mercury.
But since there is no longer any thimerosal used in vaccines, except as noted a certain specific type of influenza vaccine, and it has not been used for many years, and rates of autism continued to increase, and besides for all of that, no link has ever been shown to exist between any of these substances and autism, I really wonder why it keeps coming up?
And I have long been familiar with thimerosal, having worn contact lenses every day since I was a teenager. I recall when they removed it from all of the lens cleaning solutions, rewetting drops, etc.
They replaced it with something more soapy in the solutions I was using at the time.
All of this brings to mind an article I read many decades ago in what was then an actual science magazine, Scientific American.
The article was regarding something that was sold as a health tonic and ingested by wealthy people in certain circles in the US (and I suppose possibly elsewhere), water infused with radium.
So, some guy was browsing around in some old drawers one day and came across an empty bottle of the stuff, and, being a scientist and the curious type, he measured the radioactivity of the bottle with a Geiger counter, and found it was still shockingly radioactive. Dangerously perhaps, I do not recall exactly.
So, this accidental find took him down a path of investigation, and he uncovered the largely forgotten story of a rich and IIRC somewhat famous industrialist who lived and died back in the early part of the 20th century.
He began to suffer at some point in time from a mysterious and quite gruesome case of a wasting disease, which eventually killed him but only very gradually, and in the meantime left him horribly disfigured.
Despite the very best of medical care, no one was able to figure out what was wrong with him or what was causing the symptoms.
Anyway, it turned out it was because he was drinking this radium water stuff. And kept doing so right up until he died, apparently. Now, the obvious question is, why the hell did he not stop drinking the stuff, and why did none of his doctors of friends tell him to or make him stop?
The reason was, because lots of them drank it themselves, and had nothing wrong with them whatsoever. It seems he alone among known individuals had a physiological quirk, or something, that cause him to retain and accumulate the radioactive element or elements in his bones.
The takeaway was not how dangerous radium or radioactive substances are, or can be, but how different individual people can be in how they react to various substances, toxins, poisons, or whatever, including such things that would seem to be invariable amongst people, such as which things get absorbed by our bodies, how and where they accumulate if they do, and how they may or may not effect us if and when that happens?
Sorry, I did not mean to write a long comment about this, but it seems interesting and may be relevant. How so?
I just wonder, if everyone who dripped a drop of dimethyl mercury on their glove will be dead in less than a year?
It seems maybe not.
After all, toxins are listed according to such criteria as LD50…how many milligrams per kilogram of something will kill 50% of individuals who ingest that amount.
Everything is like this to some degree or another.
What is healthy food for some is toxic to others.
The medicine that cures most people has no effect on some others, and they die of a disease everyone else gets readily cured of.
Why?
Who knows. Many reasons.
Differences in physiology, single nucleotide polymorphisms in our digestive enzymes or cytokines, and such things as that?
No one knows. Maybe some people are just really fragile.
And some are decidedly not.
I am in the “not” category, or at least have been so far.
Merthiolate and Mercurochrome were popular topical antiseptics for cuts and abrasions in the 1950s.
I can recall having mercurochrome put on my boo-boos when I was a kid.
Stung like crazy!
I always keep plenty of iodine in the house myself, both the tincture form and the less potent but less cytotoxic povidone kind.
A while back I was thinking about how we used to use mercurochrome, and was going to look it up to see…does it really have mercury in it? But never got around to it.
As for chromium/chromate, most of my experience comes from various chem lab experiments in college. It comes in so many different oxidation states…
So, looking up mercurochrome, I am shocked to see it is readily available in most countries to this day!
Banned only in Switzerland, Brazil, France, Iran, Germany, Denmark, (&) the United States due to its mercury content. Holy moly, that is crazy and strange to me.
No chromium or chromate in it though. Does have bromine.
Suffix -chrome denotes color.
Useful in particular for infections of the nail bed and such, due to high persistence.
It was only banned very recently in the countries that no longer sell it, first was the US in 1998. Very surprising.
So, I was looking up where mercury is mined, and see that the most common source is the ore cinnabar. Which is deposited in alkaline hot springs. Health spas!
At first blush it seems entirely reasonable to hold off on vaccinating kids until they are older…until you get the statistics on who is most at risk from the diseases in question.
Kids are born with zero immune system.
(During the pandemic, the deep dive I did on immunity and antibodies and all related topics necessitated a lot of reading about neonatal immunity)
They are hugely at risk from any and all diseases, and most vaccines require multiple doses to provide full immunity. It has been found over many decades and hundreds of millions of people and their kids, that if they do not get these into kids early, many of them will die, and the diseases will be that much harder to control.
At some point, a person has to decide what they want to believe: Objective evidence, or emotional arguments. We know exactly where the idea that vaccines cause autism came from, and when and by whom. It has now taken on a life of it own, and nothing can kill it, least of all objective evidence.
Making sure every kid…hell, every person…has a “diagnosis” and a lifelong “treatment plan”, is now a very large and lucrative industry.
One need look no further than what they are doing with puberty blockers and genital mutilation of confused teens, to understand facts and science have little to do with what people believe.
When an infant first attaches it mouth to the breast of it’s mother, take a wild guess how many antigens and antibodies it ingests?
We are all exposed to tens of thousands of antigens every day, starting at birth, so from where comes the idea that our immune systems start out needing to take the whole immunity thing nice and slowly?
Actually it starts before suckling, at the point of birth. The birth canal is not sterile, neither is where the baby appears. Also, antibodies from the mother cross the placenta (which is why pregnant women are vaccinated against pertussis in the third trimester as this disease is fatal for neonates). Also antibodies from mum pass to the baby in breast milk.
The neonatal immune system is almost exclusively the innate immune system, the adaptive immune system (this is the antibody part) doesn’t start to develop until the child is three or four years old. In fact the adaptive immune system doesn’t fully mature until 20 years of age.
The risk of environmental mercury is overstated, as with CO2. There is not a single, well-documented case of methyl mercury poisoning in the US, unlike Japan. Probably because methyl mercury is volatile, having a boiling point the same as water, and Americans cook their fish to avoid catching flat worms. Yet, there is extensive monitoring and regulation of the amount of mercury in raw fish, and it is used as an excuse to shut down coal-fired power plants. By extension, people then conclude that even the smallest amount of mercury from other sources is equally dangerous.
RFK Jr is a snake and I do not trust him to do a single thing he says.
He knows he will need a lot of votes from people who hate that he is the man responsible for banning Fracking in New York, suing the maker of Roundup for things that happened to people who used it and for which there is zero credible evidence of cause and effect, etc.
He is the last person on Earth any skeptic ought to ever vote for.
The list of things RFK Jr has been involved with is gigantic.
Of course, as an environmental lawyer, he has sued and won in some cases of criminally negligent companies polluting on a vast scale, but he has also fought against nearly every source of energy that is not wind and solar. And he has fought against wind and solar, when they wanted to put them where he could see them.
I could copy and paste a list of things he has opposed, like nuclear plants, coal, gas, oil, tar sand, pipelines, hydroelectric dams, etc, but it is such a long list.
Try just looking over this article instead:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – Wikipedia
If there was any doubt remaining that the CAGW is a religion, the Bristol Climate Choir in the UK appears to have put it to a rest…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9EgcRLjrJQ
They sing nicely though, and it’s a nice-looking church. That is about all I can say about this video that is good. Blessings to Holy Mother Climate. /sarc
Good grief, CD! Before watching that video I was beginning to suspect that we really are in the Biblical ‘End Time’. But now that I’ve seen this bunch of depraved neo-Marxist revolutionaries preaching their delusional anti-christian messages of inescapable guilt and doom in a place of christian worship, I’m sure of it. What’s coming next – a celebration of satanism in Westminster Abbey?
Where’s my sandwich-board – the one with the words “Repent ye sinners!” on one side and “The end is nigh! Prepare to meet thy doom,” on the other? People need to know about this.
God save the Queen. And God help America.
Quick. Pennsylvania State University professor and Elizabeth Warren donor (same person) arrested for dog sex.
https://freebeacon.com/democrats/liz-warren-donor-dog-sex/
Penn state again – what is wrong with the people there?
Wouldn’t it have been something if it had been Piltdown Mann tho?
What this guy was doing is a slang for lazy people, like climate Scientologists
Anyone else been investigating how the new AI engines will answer some of the perennial questions that have been argued about on these pages for years on end?
I started to do so recently, and here is one result:
Are photons from a cool object absorbed by a warmer object?
I asked a few follow ups:
And this:
That’s interesting Nick. I don’t keep careful track of who holds which opinion on WUWT, but I have a vague recollection that you hold the view that there can’t be a greenhouse gas effect because a warmer object can’t absorb photons from a cooler object. If I am ‘misremembering’ then I apologize. In any case I don’t think that the AI responses provide support for such a view whoever may hold it.
The GHE is about delaying cooling, not warming the surface through back radiation. It’s not that photons emitted by a water molecule near the frigid tropopause need to be absorbed at the surface. Most of the upwelling IR is absorbed by water vapor and also by CO2 near the surface.
Therefore much of the downwelling IR originates a short distance above the surface, from molecules that are similar in temperature to the surface. If the surface has just emitted IR as it cools radiatively, then a photon re-emitted by a nearby GHG molecule is very likely to be of an energy that can be absorbed. Kind of a two steps forward one step back scenario. The surface still cools but not as much as it would have.
Photons from high up that happen to reach the surface (rather than being absorbed by a GHG lower in the atmosphere) may not be able to be absorbed at the surface but will reflect and may end up being absorbed by GHGs somewhere in the atmosphere.
The overall effect is one where more energy is retained in the atmosphere so that it doesn’t cool as fast as it might have. Which means that the surface temperature at sunrise is higher than it would have been and so the sun will warm the surface to a higher temperature by sunset than it would have otherwise. Rinse and repeat.
“… vague recollection that you hold the view that there can’t be a greenhouse gas effect because a warmer object can’t absorb photons from a cooler object.”
No, that is not correct.
I invented the thought experiment involving two stars in isolation, one at, for example, 5000°, the other at 6000°.
Now, bring them into a close orbit around each other.
What happens to the temperature of each star?
Warmer star now has a 5000° star shining on it, where before it had nothing but black cold and empty space.
What happens to photons that impinge upon the warmer star from the cooler star?
Do they somehow fail to get absorbed by the warmer star and heat it up some?
In this exercise, I merely wanted to see what kind of response I would get from this new tool of information technology.
One thing I did note, is that obviously it has the ability to draw from a vast assemblage of knowledge almost instantly.
Not that it is going to be correct all the time or anything, but it may bring into the conversation new details or points of view, etc.
I think the Greenhouse effect is a misnomer, probably.
Semantic aside though, I started out and remained for a long time agnostic on this question, since I was on a regular basis reading heated back and forth arguments from people who were highly educated on this specific subject, and yet nevertheless had opposing points of view and opinions. Certain things that seemed to me to be questions that should be easy to settle one way or the other, showed no sign of being settled even after years of discussion that went on for hundreds of comments.
But over time, I did reach some conclusions.
There is nothing in physics that says photons from cold objects will not impinge upon and be absorbed by a warmer object.
During my questioning of the AI, I came to realize that it may be the actual key to wrecking the warmista cabal.
Ask me if you want to know more on my thoughts about that.
Rich,
I wrote that first comment before I had read your entire comment, so this one is after reading the rest of it.
One thing I always want to keep in mind when thinking about these energy transfers between molecules via photons, is that photons move really fast.
At 186,000 miles per second (in a vacuum, slightly slower in the atmosphere, yes), a photon can and will travel from the surface to the top of the atmosphere and back again, a whole crapload of times in less of an interval than a person can blink an eye.
On Twitter a while back, years ago, this was much discussed, and some papers reviewed, and the amount of time that extra CO2 kept a photon from leaving the Earth was fractions of a microsecond, IIRC.
Considering this tidbit of info along with another one, that in nearly every place on Earth, at every latitude, and on nearly every single day, once the Sun sets, the Air near the surface cools down to near or at the Dew point, and this occurs long before dawn comes to renew the diurnal cycle of solar heating.
IOW…the atmosphere has a huge excess capacity to cool itself down, if for any reason an extra amount of heat is left at the surface during the day.
There is therefore no such thing as heat accumulating in the atmosphere as a result of increasing CO2 concentration.
How could there be, when we can see that there were months all the way back in the early 1980s that were warmer than recent months?
The temperature at every place on earth is determined by how much moisture is in the air, and other factors are trivial by comparison, in this view.
Dewpoint, BTW for anyone who has never studied meteorology, is simply a measure of how much water is contained in air.
It is one of the ways of stating what the absolute humidity is.
Not to be confused with relative humidity, which is a measurement of how much moisture is in the air, compared to how much moisture the air is capable of holding at that temperature and pressure.
Dewpoint is thus a quantity, in grams per cubic meter for example, while relative humidity is a ratio, or percentage.
I don’t know what is currently popular as illustration but when I was in school electrons were said to exist at specific energy “levels” or in particular “shells” such ss the S and P (and several other) shells. Electrons could absorb specific quanta of energy, depending on the material, whereby the electron would move from its ‘rest’ level or shell to a higher energy one. It then had a generally overwhelming tendency to release or emit that quanta of energy and return to a lower or normal level. This all may be only a convenient metaphor to help visualize something that is beyond being seen.
However, descriptions of greenhouse gases say that the energy is absorbed by the molecular bond, causing it to bend or stretch one of possibly several ways, bending back and forth as long as the additional energy is held, but this does not involve an electron changing to a different energy level. This makes the event even more mysterious. Where and in what form is that energy prior to emission?
While some descriptions of greenhouse gas physics do not mention molecular interactions (all greenhouse gases are molecules, not individual atoms), others declare that interaction of the molecules, which transfer energy from one to another as kinetic energy, reduce the absorbed energy so it does not have the potential to be emitted. Supposedly this happens much more frequently than absorption, by a large factor, so little emission occurs. The chatbot description says the atoms and molecules of a gas “do not interact with each other significantly”, which seems to contradict the descriptions that say molecule to molecule energy exchanges are many times greater than emissions. Perhaps asking for elucidation on that would be an interesting forth followup, if one wishes to assume that the chatbot output has any value what so ever.
Once you bring in the notion of photons shooting about in framing the question, you have pushed the engine toward a non-physical notion of energy transfer i.e. make believe. And there is plenty of make-believe to find on the web.
The question should be on radiant energy transfer and there is only one correct answer. Radiant energy goes from warmer to colder. The electric field that all matter exists in equilibrates at the speed of light no different to the gravity field. All mater exists in these energy fields and communicate with the fie fields. The matter is a state of the field.
Separating the two temperature terms in the Stefan-Boltzman relationship and calling the negative term back radiation is utter nonsense. The polydirectional flow of radiant energy has long been discredited. Decsribed here as “arrested development”:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022407314000995:
This paper gives insight into radiant energy transfer through Earth’s atmosphere:
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/mmishchenko/publications/corsica.pdf
It is all based on field theory.
So, wait…you are disputing the entire notion of quanta of electromagnetic radiation “shooting about”?
How are photons unphysical, in your view? If that is what you are saying I mean.
Photons are, to my understanding, the particle that transfers “radiant energy” from one object to another, or one part of the universe to another, or whatever.
I do not think I have heard this particular line of discussion before, so please forgive me if I am misunderstanding what you are saying here…I am genuinely curious.
On a perhaps related line of inquiry, i asked the AI about that stuff Zooey was going on about a few years back…that photons cannot be emitted in a direction where they will not hit anything. IIRC, she seemed to be stating there is no such thing as a photon that was emitted billions of years ago and will never strike any object and will just go on forever and ever through expanding space. Or something like that.
They AI got mad at me, then told me it did not want to talk to me anymore.
Photons (quanta) and E&M fields are what makes up the duality of wave-particles. Planck spent an awful amount of research into Maxwell’s equations and how matter absorbs E&M waves. It is how he formulated the concept of quanta.
Photons are not bullets, they are energy packets carried by E&M waves. Think of radio E&M waves which are originated with a given power. The energy of an individual photon (quanta) is related to the wavelength/frequency but not the power in the E&M wave. So what does the power represent? The number of quanta (photons) available.
Planck proved that the E&M wave emitted is in all directions and for a given volume the temperature determines the radiated power. That is why photons are not bullets.
I have more than passing familiarity with all of that, but I am wondering, who said anything about bullets?
Where did I use the idea of photons shooting about to frame any of my questions?
I have no idea what either of you are disputing, specifically.
BTW, Planck himself only use the concept of quantization as a mathematical “trick” to make the equations work, which prior to him doing so, no one was able to work out the math.
It was Einstein who put forth the idea that light was actually quantized, Einstein who proposed that there were actually photons of light, emitted in discreet bundles of energy.
Planck was one of Einstein harshest critics when he heard of Einstein’s work. He insisted that he never meant to propose that there were actual photons, that quanta of EM radiation were real. Planck was steadfast in his assertion that such quanta did NOT exist.
It was just a way to make the math work.
Einstein won one of his Nobel prizes for solving the mystery of the photoelectric effect, which he was able to do by assuming photons were discreet particles. Prior to Einstein’s work, no one could explain how light of very low intensity was able to kick loose electrons.
I do not know what either of you mean by “bullets”, as being somehow different that discreet particles…i.e. quanta. Photons!
Nor am I clear on what is meant by saying they are not ”shooting about”?
I never used that terminology. I spoke of them being emitted and absorbed. The two slit experiment makes it clear that they can and do act as particles in some contexts, and as waves in others.
If we put a detector at each slit to determine which slit each photon passes through, the interference pattern suddenly disappears!
And then of course in the aftermath of Einstein, his work and it’s various implications led to the concepts which became what we now refer to collectively as quantum mechanics, De Broglie discovered that everything has a wavelength!
I never said anything about bullets or shooting, so again, I do not know what exactly you guys are saying I got wrong.
Back in the day, where and when I went to college, we learned about the history of the various subjects and subject material. We learned why what is believe to be true, is believed to be true.
We never learned anything by rote, or as a list of facts.
I did not only study chemistry and physical chemistry and physics though…I also took many geology classes, at every level. Earth history is a very important subject.
From what we know about the history of the earth, it is impossible that CO2 controls the temperature of the atmosphere. So complete and accurate answers to these questions about radiative gasses and the laws of physics and the behavior of photons, is really not required to refute the warmista religion.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14319392-200-science-do-photons-really-exist/
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/303132/do-photons-truly-exist-in-a-physical-sense-or-are-they-just-a-useful-concept-lik
https://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/08/05/whats-a-photon-and-how-do-we-k
I had a chemistry professor who said that electrons do not really exist.
Do photons exist or are they just a useful concept?
When we refer to “photons”, we are not typically talking about any specific photon, like George, my next door neighbor’s kid photon.
We are referring to the CONCEPT of photons.
Whatever it is we are talking about, is exactly that concept that we have in mind when we say it.
I’m afraid your AI is talking mindless techno-gibberish, Nicholas. It evidently has no understanding of the basic radiative physics which it purports to describe and would seriously mislead anyone who was foolish enough to take its utterances at face value as being authoritative and truthful.
For example, in the 2nd and 3rd sentences in its answer to your first question it says:
“According to the Planck’s Law, the energy and wavelength of photons emitted by a black body are related to its temperature, such that higher temperature corresponds to higher energy and shorter wavelength. Therefore, photons from a cool object will have lower energy and longer wavelength than photons from a warmer object.”
This is sheer twaddle. Look up ‘Planck’s law’ in any good encyclopaedia and it will tell you that Planck’s law defines the relative quantities of photons of specific wavelengths emitted by an ideal black body at a given temperature. In Planck’s Law, the term ‘temperature’ refers to the black body which emits the photons and not to the photons which it emits. Also, according to Planck’s Law, every black body at any temperature whatsoever emits photons on an infinite range of wavelengths and energies, but a black body at a higher temperature will emit more photons of the same wavelengths and energies than it would emit if it had a lower temperature, that is all.
This was just one example to demonstrate the AI’s startling ability to misconstrue basic scientific laws and principles and I must now leave it to others so inclined to find more.
There is no doubt the AI says stuff that is plain wrong.
Not sure this is an example of that though.
I agree that what it said is not a very precise or even accurate way to state Planck’s Law.
But lot’s of people do this sort of thing in conversation as well, like when they assert that a certain number of watts per meter of solar irradiance translates into a certain temperature of the planet. That makes no sense to me. For many reasons, not the least of which is, the planet does not have “a temperature”, any more than it has a climate.
“There is no doubt the AI says stuff that is plain wrong.
Not sure this is an example of that though.”
OK. I think you will become sure of it though, when you know for yourself, independently of AI, what Planck’s Law really says and what it really means.
“I agree that what it said is not a very precise or even accurate way to state Planck’s Law. But lot’s of people do this sort of thing in conversation as well,…”
Don’t they just. And so much heat and so little light is produced by it.
“….like when they assert that a certain number of watts per meter of solar irradiance translates into a certain temperature of the planet. That makes no sense to me….”
It doesn’t make sense to me either and if that is what some people are actually saying then I think they must be at least as confused about this scientific subject as the current generation of AI’s.
“….For many reasons, not the least of which is, the planet does not have ‘a temperature’, any more than it has a climate.”
Would you care to explain why you think that planet Earth does not have a temperature or a climate? I would like to understand your thinking, but I haven’t a hope of being able to do so without knowing more about your reasons for thinking it.
The earth is not a black body, at best it is a grey body. The radiation pattern is made up of a large number of distinct wavelengths, that when combined appears to conform pretty much to a black body emission at a given temperature.
However, this radiation temperature is not indicative of the atmospheric temperature at 2 meters in height. That makes the radiation curve at TOA worthless in determining the “surface” temperature.
One of the assumptions that CO2 “traps” heat due to the dip in the radiation curve at CO2’s frequency would lead one to believe CO2 keeps that energy to itself. If that were true CO2 molecules at the surface would be much, much hotter than surrounding molecules. That doesn’t seem possible.
The temperature at the surface of the earth is not a temperature per se, it is a jumbled average of “growth” in temperature at various points on the earth. The very “temperatures” used to calculate the so-called daily average are highly correlated, that contaminates every following average and destroys any conclusions based upon the Central Limit Theory.
Climate? Climate scientists have created a bastard definition of climate. The general definition of climate uses several pieces of information to classify locations. From Wikipedia:
Have you seen major changes in the Köppen classifications of any area due to temperature? New desert areas? New temperate area? Islands disappearing? Why do northern U.S. states see migration to southern states? It isn’t because the northern states are getting warmer! Don’t fall for the climate scientist’s propaganda that temperature defines climate. It just isn’t true!
I agree that the Earth is not an ideal ‘black body’. But who says it is one? I am aware that astronomers treat it as one for the purpose of calculating Earth’s so-called ‘effective temperature’, but that is a purely abstract, theoretical temperature which no-one, to the best of my knowledge, is claiming represents Earth’s actual surface temperature.
The effective temperature of a planet (or a star, for that matter) is the surface temperature which it would have if it radiated its energy-output to space with the same intensity all over the globe. In the case of Earth, that purely theoretical temperature turns out to be approximately –18⁰C.
However, a planet’s effective temperature is also the maximum possible surface temperature which it could have if the energy that it absorbed from its parent star’s radiation was the sole source of its heat (discounting other possible energy-sources in space as negligible, that is). In other words, the planet’s average surface temperature could not possibly be any higher than its effective temperature without some additional source/s of heat being present. But Earth’s actual mean surface temperature is generally estimated to be somewhere around +15⁰C, which is 33⁰C higher than its effective temperature, so there must be an additional source of heat present at Earth’s surface to account for this substantial temperature disparity. Orthodox science accounts for it by invoking the greenhouse effect.
You say:
“One of the assumptions that CO2 “traps” heat due to the dip in the radiation curve at CO2’s frequency would lead one to believe CO2 keeps that energy to itself.”
Yes, it’s badly put. Of course, the radiant energy which greenhouse gases like CO2 capture tends to dissipate throughout the atmosphere in accordance with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
“The temperature at the surface of the earth is not a temperature per se, it is a jumbled average of ‘growth’ in temperature at various points on the earth.”
Let’s not conflate the good science with the bad. Earth’s surface temperature is one thing but what the inscrutable climate establishment is really doing to measure its variations in time is entirely another.
I’m speaking from memory but I understand that the fundamental, universal concept of temperature is rigorously defined in physics as follows:
The absolute temperature of a body is the average kinetic energy of the particles which compose the body.
So, a parcel of air near the surface does have a definite temperature: it is the average kinetic energy of the particles of air which make up the parcel. Likewise, Earth’s surface also has a definite temperature: it is the average kinetic energy of the particles which make up the planet’s surface.
However, although Earth’s surface temperature at any one time is clearly and rigorously defined, the task of actually measuring it with a useful degree of accuracy is a huge can of worms and, to the best of my knowledge, none of the organisations that purport to be able to do it are really able to do it with the state-of-art instruments and mathematical techniques currently available. I think it follows that those people and organisations such as NASA and the UK’s Met Office who purport to be able to measure the global mean surface temperature accurately must either be tragic victims of delusional fantasies or else be engaging in deliberate scientific fraud.
“Climate? Climate scientists have created a bastard definition of climate.”
I agree that the scientific definition of climate has been bastardised, but I think the people who have done this could not be honest climate scientists, because they would be shooting themselves in the foot to degrade the definitional basis of their science in this way. To me it looks more like the work of duplicitous, politically-motivated technocrats engaged in gas-lighting all of society. (I’m just speculating of course.)
“Don’t fall for the climate scientist’s propaganda that temperature defines climate. It just isn’t true!”
Fear not, Jim; I already know that it isn’t true – or authentic either.
Lots of things are missed in climate science. Here is one. When the surface absorbs the sun’s radiation it does not all immediately radiate away. A goodly portion is absorbed and via conduction is diffused to depths in the soil. The surface then stores heat for later release. Think capacitor. Does this heat the atmosphere? No. Also something you didn’t mention is very important, latent heat. Both of these are are not measured by atmospheric temperature. It means the 33 degree increase in temperature is a bogus calculation.
The quoted uncertainty of temperature and anomalies are far, far below the resolution of measured temperature. It is the mathematics cians that have little to no appreciation of the vagaries of physical measurements.
Currently flying home from Zurich, just got coverage back over northern canada, happy to report that Greenland seems strangely ice covered with no traces of greenery.
Spent two weeks meandering from Vienna westward, north and south into germany and Austria and Italy.
One guy in western Austria helpfully told me than many types of trees were dying back due to climate change so I watched very closely on all the drives and I don’t recall seeing any dead trees tho I looked really hard.
From deep valleys to above the tree lines, everything looked lush and happy.
I’m posting to request funding for continued research.
Won’t work – not alarmist enough, needs more climate change!
Interestingly enough there may be something in the ‘dying trees’ idea, or at least sick trees. There have been some stories of rising numbers of tree infections or parasites in the last few years – all from regions with wind farms close to or nearby. Generally speaking trees can fight off parasites or infections fairly well normally, as long as they have available water, but what has been found are trees with drier than average soil around them, attributed to ‘climate change’. However, as a recent WUWT article mentioned, this could very well be down to the drying out action from extensive wind turbines.
Or a decline in bat populations and avian insectivores?
My mid-month expectation for UAH TLT 2023/06 is 0.36 ± 0.22 C. We still have a slight La Nina influence, but it is waning now. I’m showing a La Nina attenuation of temperature for June of -0.06 C. I’m expecting July and August to have a mostly neutral influence with September finally switching to a slight El Nino influence. The odds of an annual mean >= 0.40 C in the UAH TLT are pretty low for 2023 so I’m not expecting a new record this year.
It is a good thing that you have such a ‘small’ uncertainty. Otherwise the best you could say is somewhere between zero and a number less than one. Worst case scenario is possible cooling or warming. BTW, is your uncertainty one or two sigma?
I thought the uncertainty was quite large myself. As a point of comparison my mid-month expectation for GISTEMP has an uncertainty of ±0.14 C. By the end of the month I can only get down to ±0.20 C for UAH TLT, but for GISTEMP it is ±0.06. What is interesting is that type A evaluations of satellite observations yields an uncertainty of about ±0.15 C (though Christy et al. 2003 say ±0.20 C via type B) and for surface observations it is ±0.06 C (Lenssen et al. 2019 say ±0.05 C via type B). So I believe my methodology is hitting the limits of what is possible given the observational uncertainty in the measurements themselves.
I always report as 2-sigma unless otherwise noted.
The reason I asked is because 2-sigma is a standard for most sciences, but climatologists more commonly use 1-sigma, often without making it explicit.
Which datasets publish uncertainty analysis for the GAT that are 1-sigma and are not stated as such? I’ll make sure I double their values if I know which ones they are.
Sorry, I don’t keep a list. I’m just sharing from memory how often it isn’t even mentioned whether the uncertainty is 1 or 2-sigma, and when it is mentioned that it is frequently 1-sigma.
“I always report as 2-sigma unless otherwise noted.”
Thanks for the clarification. I’ve had to replicate your results more than once to figure this out. Not a compliant, as, per Mr. Spencer’s trailing comment, it is not always clear elsewhere. For both you and others, it’s often easier to figure it out on my own.
wanted to post this article to get some feedback.
thanks.
(sorry, couldn’t get the images to load, just the address)
Global warming completely stopped in 2018. Temperatures will likely remain steady until 2025 and may decline slightly by 2030. A strong El Niño in 2023 is unlikely. I’ll explain all of my predictions — after we hear from the experts.
NOAA recently predicted a 55% chance of a strong El Niño in late 2023. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) threw more fuel on the fire when it announced, “There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.” Obviously, the MSM had a field day with this. Take for example this headline from USA Today: “Scientists warn an El Niño is likely coming that could bring scorching heat to Earth.”
Rather than taking the well worn path of pointing out flaws in the predictions of NOAA, the IPCC, or the WMO, I’ll instead show how the sun is likely responsible for almost every detail in global temperatures over the last 125 years, and that it is also responsible for triggering strong El Niños.
Two empirical, or black-box, models were created to predict global temperature. The first model uses solar magnetic field data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO). The second model uses sunspot data from WDC-SILSO, the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels. Both predictions will be compared to global temperature anomaly data from NOAA.
Solar magnetic field data collection began in 1976. The complete WSO dataset can be viewed in a single graphic, often referred to as a butterfly diagram. It looks complicated, but it’s really not. It’s just a plot of solar magnetic field intensity over time as a function of the sun’s latitude. The two colors represent north and south polarity magnetism. Unlike the Earth, where magnetic north has conveniently stayed in the Northern Hemisphere for the last 780,000 years, the sun’s magnetic field changes polarity every 11 years.
Notice how the colors fade from left to right? That’s the sun’s magnetic field getting weaker with time. As the sun’s magnetic field weakened, the Earth warmed. Why? Well, I can’t answer that — nobody can — but with weaker magnetic fields, there’s more interaction between the atmosphere and galactic cosmic rays (CGRs). There are several, complicated, and often competing theories on how these interactions affect climate. As we tend to associate lower solar activity with cooling, not warming, as shown here, the sun’s total solar irradiance (TSI) likely plays a significant longer-term role in global temperatures. TSI hasn’t changed much over the short amount of time we’ve been able to reliably measure it, so TSI is not included in either model.
Using only the data shown in the butterfly diagram, it’s possible to predict temperature with a simple 11-year moving average to smooth out the 11-year cycles. The averaged data is then negated to account for weaker magnetic fields causing rising temperatures, shifted forward by 2.8 years to account for the Earth’s delayed global response to the sun, and finally scaled to convert from units of Tesla to degrees. Since we know what the sun is doing now, we can predict how the Earth will respond 2.8 years from now. That’s it! A little data-smoothing and a minus sign. It’s not a very complicated model.
Note how closely the average global temperature tracks the predicted temperature. We’ll see this same two-step temperature change shape again with the longer sunspot-based model. Without the minus sign, one might conclude that the sun doesn’t cause global warming.
Here’s what the sun can tell us about the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO). NOAA’s ENSO index shows two strong El Niño events starting in 1997 and 2015 (El Niño events are positive values and La Niña events negative). As predicted by the model, prior to both events, global temperatures rose dramatically. This is a key point. Rapid sun-induced warming triggers strong El Niños. El Niños don’t cause global warming, and they most certainly don’t affect the sun’s magnetic fields. The correct order of causality is sun → global temperatures → strong climate oscillations.
The magnetic field model predicts stable temperatures until 2025, so while there could be an El Niño event later this year, as predicted by NOAA, solar history suggests that the event would likely be mild-to-moderate. In particular, the small ENSO around 2009 seems to be more in keeping with the steady temperatures we’re currently experiencing. This type of El Niño will affect local climates but will likely cause only a small ripple in global temperatures.
Using sunspot data as a proxy for solar activity, it’s possible to extend accurate temperature predictions back to 1900. Whereas the magnetic field model was only 11 years long, the sunspot model varies in length between 99 and 126 years, depending on the model variant. This increased length allows the model to extract information from the longer solar cycles (which also drive TSI).
To explain a lack of prediction accuracy, greenhouse gas models tend to require a lot of help from pollution, buckets, volcanos, fires, data refinements, and climate oscillations. This is especially true over the last eight years where temperatures have not followed the exponential rise in CO2 contributions.
Without any extra help, the sunspot-based model correctly predicts falling temperatures to 1910, rising temperatures to 1947, slightly declining temperatures to 1970, rising temperatures to 2012, slowly rising temperatures to 2018, and steady or slightly declining temperatures to date. The other model variants predict steady, or slightly declining temperatures to 2030.
The model does support the inclusion of a simple CO2 warming model. While the use of both models does have a slightly lower error with 0.2°C of CO2 warming, the CO2 model is likely just correcting for sunspot model inaccuracy in the years prior to 1910. Here, CO2 compensation is disabled.
Strong El Niño events are indicated by the red arrows. In all cases, the strong El Niños are preceded by a sudden rise in the predicted temperature. The two strongest events occurred in 1940 and 1982. Black arrows indicate the solar events that appear to have triggered them.
These models predict that global temperatures will remain steady or decline slightly. Deep ocean temperatures will continue to rise, ice may continue to melt, and local temperature records may be set — at least until a new equilibrium is reached, or temperatures begin to fall. The models also predict that fear-mongering climate change headlines will continue until politicians start claiming victory for having saved us all from global warming.
For complete transparency, the models and code used predict global temperature from sunspots and solar magnetism are available here.
Robert Cutler is an engineer with decades of experience in signal analysis.
Robert, try taking a look at how the earth’s energy imbalance is affected by the sun’s variable irradiance. Over a period of about ten years, the energy from the sun varies by about 0.3 W/m2; it’s a pretty clean sine wave. The EEI, as reported by NASA from CERES satellite data, shows no such variation. An FFT on the EEI shows no particular cyclic nature. The question is not “Is the earth warming?” but rather “Can we control the EEI and change whether the earth cools or warms?”. And the answer to that is apparently “no”. If the sun’s energy variation cannot change the EEI, neither can CO2. It would seem the earth is a pretty robust system. What a surprise.
Brock, sorry, didn’t mean to mislead.
Here is the link to the article I posted. It is written by Robert Cutler, not me. I was just wondering if this theory had any merit.
Sorry for confusion.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/a_strong_el_nio_in_2023_not_likely.html
Yeah, 0.3 W/m2 is about right. From 1979/01 to 2022/12 I get a range of about 0.30 – 0.35 W/m2 on each cycle with a standard deviation of 0.08 W/m2 and an linear regression change of about -0.05 W/m2.
Anyway, solar variation can definitely change EEI. That is a consequence of the 1st law of thermodynamics. I’m wondering if you aren’t seeing the cyclic behavior in the EEI because its variation is dominated significantly by the outgoing radiation and not the incoming radiation. In other words, I’m thinking the signal you are looking for is getting swamped by the noise. Maybe one day when I get time I’ll download the CERES EEI and play around with it myself. I just have so many other things in the queue right now.
Morton, as an engineer with a decade of sun-climate work, I can evaluate his claims.
Mr. Cutler’s views are somewhat similar to mine, but he also relies on CO2 in his model, which I don’t. His Python coding and graphics work are admirable, although I haven’t actually studied his code yet to see how his model really works and if it is truly reliable and falsifiable.
I don’t know why he didn’t try to publish it rather than posting it on American Thinker. At the very least he should post his article to Researchgate like I do my work.
His first sentence is a description of what I call ‘solar-supersensitivity’, the oceanic reaction to high TSI and rapidly increasing TSI. He is right. I have reduced this idea down to a science by establishing a sun-ocean decadal warming threshold, then testing it against reality. Recent ocean warming is from this solar cycle’s high solar activity, just as I predicted it would last year.
His second sentence is not quite true. Predominately positive MEI from El Niños, and global warming are synonymous, occurring together from the solar driver as the common denominator.
He used two models together to calculate the temperature evolution, which I first did in my 2018 AGU presentation, “Extreme Weather Events and Climate Extremes are Limited by the Duration of Solar Cycle Irradiance Extremes“. His two models look to be different than mine though.
This idea has nuance. 2.8 years ago the sun had just left the solar minimum. The only forward signal from the sun at the solar minimum is the strength of the polar fields, which are used by solar scientists like Leif Svalgaard et al to predict the next cycle’s maximum sunspot number.
Unless Mr. Cutler is better at that task than Dr. Svalgaard, I suggest there’s a bit of curve-fitting and hand-waving going on here from him, but who knows, maybe he figured out something new.
Lastly, his 98 year running average might be useful, I don’t know. It is reminds me of my own finding of the 109y SN average and the 30y HadSST3, which is useful:
i have a naive(?) question.
I know the physics behind the aurora at the atomic level, electrons pushed into higher orbitals or given sufficient energy to ionise the atoms. The light produced being the aurora with the colours being element specific. Does this have a more general effect on the energy of the gas molecules, i.e. does the temperature increase? Are there any components of the aurora outside the visible part of the spectrum?
Joule heating from particles in the thermosphere is a well-known mechanism.
It’s doubtful there are unseen wavelengths. Hard to see, probably
Open Thread
Mr. Layman here.
I just saw a commercial for something with a solar panel.
I got to wondering.
If a solar panel, say 3ft x 3ft, could convert every bit of solar energy to electricity with no loss (100% efficient), just how much would that be?
El Hierro’s difficult December