Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach [Note update at the end]
A short post. I came into my obsession with the climate by a side door. Back around the turn of the century, I read that the global average surface temperature was in danger of going through the roof because of increasing CO2.
But when I got to thinking about it, that seemed unlikely. What made it seem unlikely were the estimates at the time, which were that the global average surface temperature over the entire 20th century had increased by 0.6°C, which is the same as 0.6 kelvins (K).
Now, I’ve done a reasonable amount of work with heat engines. So I knew that if you want to analyze a heat engine, you need to do your calculations in the Kelvin temperature scale. You can’t use either Celsius or Fahrenheit. All of the thermal equations require that you use Kelvin (abbreviated “K”).
So I got to thinking … the earth is at an average temperature of something like 288K.
… so a change of 0.6K over a century is a 0.2% change in temperature.
The earth’s global average temperature has only undergone two tenths of one percent change in a hundred years. I had to scratch my head about that one.
So I first ventured into the climate science arena, not following mainstream scientists looking to find out why the temperature was changing so much, but instead looking to find out why it was changing so little.
I first thought it might be a result of the thermal mass … but then I realized that both the ocean and the land undergo far larger temperature swings on an hourly, daily, monthly, and annual basis. In addition, the temperature is not set by thermal mass, as the temperature is far above the temperature that would be expected purely on the basis of the earth’s thermal mass and distance from the sun.
The unavoidable conclusion for me was that some natural thermoregulatory processes were going on that kept the average temperature within that narrow range, a 0.2% change over a century.
So I was looking for some long-term, slow processes that kept the planetary temperature so stable over a century or more. I wasn’t interested in quick-acting processes. I wanted something that worked over long time spans. I followed lots of wrong trails until one day when I was sitting on the beach. I was living in Fiji at the time (hey, the waves won’t surf themselves), and each day there is much the same.
In the morning, it’s usually cooler and clear. As the day warms up, at some point usually around 11 AM an entire field of cumulus clouds quickly covers the entire sky. This cools the day by reflecting the solar energy back into space. And if the day continues to warm, some of the cumulus turn into cumulonimbus, aka thunderstorms. These further cool the day in a variety of ways, from an increased reflection of solar energy to increased evaporation, cold rain and wind, and other cooling mechanisms including a natural refrigeration cycle.
And what I saw sitting on the beach was that these phenomena are what keep the tropics from overheating every day … and more to the point, because they thermoregulate the temperature daily, they also regulate it weekly, annually, centennially, and millennially.
So I wrote up my hypothesis and got it published in Energy and Environment under the title “THE THUNDERSTORM THERMOSTAT HYPOTHESIS: HOW CLOUDS AND THUNDERSTORMS CONTROL THE EARTH’S TEMPERATURE“, and kept studying the climate.
Since then I’ve uncovered and published a variety of evidence that clouds, thunderstorms, and other emergent climate phenomena keep the temperature from getting too warm or too cold. I’ve also shown that these phenomena mostly occur at sub-model-grid scales, so they are not included in the climate models.
Which brings me to today. I had the honor of being included in an email discussion of some climate issues with some very smart folks with far more education and publications than I have, and some comments got me to thinking about how much solar energy is absorbed at the earth’s surface. This absorbed solar energy is the source of all of the heating of the planet (except for a few tenths of a watt per square meter of geothermal energy). So I dug into the numbers a bit, and this is what I discovered.
Figure 1 (And Only). Percentage of top-of-atmosphere (TOA) incoming solar radiation that is absorbed by the surface, divided by hemisphere and by winter and summer.
The interesting part is that in both hemispheres, as a percentage of the available solar energy at the TOA, in the summer when it is warmer, the surface absorbs less solar energy … and in the winter when it is colder, the surface absorbs more solar energy.
And this is exactly what we’d expect in a thermoregulated system that is generally in a steady-state condition (remember, 0.2% change per century). The system responds to changing conditions by opposing the change and acting to restore the status quo ante. Le Chatelier had something to say on the subject, as I recall …
Told you it was a short post.
[UPDATE] In a comment below, Wim Rost pointed out an interesting additional insight. Per CERES, the northern hemisphere is about 2.3°C warmer than the southern hemisphere. And just as with the winter/summer split, in both winter and summer the warmer northern hemisphere is absorbing a smaller percentage of available solar energy than the cooler southern hemisphere.
Is this thermoregulation at work once again? Hard to tell. It may just be from different land/water amounts, but it’s interesting nonetheless … always more to learn.
And here in our home in the redwood forest, with a tiny triangle of the Pacific Ocean visible through a gap in the far hills, we were blessed by first one bobcat, and then a couple of days later a couple of bobcats wandering through our forest clearing. On the first visit, I captured a passable shot using my iPhone shooting through one side of my binoculars.
By the second visit I had gotten my real camera’s battery charged, and captured this photo …
The raw strength in their walk, the intensity in their gaze … what an inspiration! And the best part?
They remind me that at the end of the day, world politics or online disputes or campus protests or even this post, while important in one sense, also don’t matter that much because the earth abides.
And that, dear friends, is why I live in the forest and not in the city …
My best to everyone,
w.
PS: As usual, when you comment, please quote the exact words you are discussing. And if you want to prove me wrong, here’s exactly how to do it.
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Great post Willis; you put it all into the proper prospective. Made my day!!! Thanks
“The raw strength in their walk, the intensity in their gaze … what an inspiration!”
“The Tyger” by William Blake (1794)
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Its a very striking poem, and Blake has a few of them. Jerusalem, for instance, which is regularly sung to close the UK Labour Party conference. I think its at the close. That and the Red Flag which is also sung on some such occasion.
But, but… Blake is the first clear point in English literature where Romanticism gets explicitly started and expressed. And that, one has much less sympathy with. The emphasis on the sanctity of impulse, the evil of any kind of restraint, the Manicheanism.
The Tyger is free of all that. Ah! Sun-flower only hints at it and loses little from it. But its there at a fundamental level in much of Blake – the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for instance – the insistence on the ethical primacy of impulse.
Yvor Winters makes a deep point about Emerson. Emerson too preached the importance of yielding to, being thoroughly in touch with, ones impulses. But, notes Winters, when Emerson looked at his impulses, he found without realizing it those which had been conditioned by a strict New England puritanical upbringing. When Hart Crane did the same thing, what he found to indulge was very different.
This is also true of Blake. When those who have come of age in a structured and restrained culture come of age, they look at their impulses, think they are entirely natural and universal, and don’t see what they will be like once their advocated removal of all restraints has happened.
You can see this happening in Lawrence 100 years later. Freedom of feeling and sexual communication is lauded. But there is also the cult of Madame Blavatsky, and the very disturbing excesses of the Plumed Serpent, and worse still, The Woman Who Rode Away.
If you want to see where what was first manifested in Blake ended up, read Praz, The Romantic Agony. Its an unfortunate aspect of it for English speaking readers that to get the best out of it you almost have to read French at a good level. But even if you don’t, its worth the effort, you can still get a lot from it. What he documents is the first development of our current cultural crisis. It is there that the cult of irrationality and the unconscious starts, and after you read Praz neither the slaughter of WW1 nor the subsequent orgies of violence in Germany will still surprise you.
Nor will Post-Modernism, or the other various 20th century delusions and manias. We are still living in the Romantic era, and maybe have yet to see its most damaging excesses.
Romanticism (the primacy of emotion over reason) has produced wonderful art, but has absolutely no place whatever in the physical world.
Tuberculosis, affecting all levels of society, also came to be almost celebrated by the Romantics. The resultant skin colour was held to be an ethereal form of beauty in women and some believed it to be a cause of artistic development.
All the Brontë sisters died of the disease.
Edit: For a curable disease it ought to be shocking that TB still kills a huge number of people today. But it seems that Bill Gates et al are too busy saving the planet from global warming to actually address something so trivial.
Ah, Walter. I became aware of that poem when I read Bester’s” The Stars My Destination.” Great story, read it multiple times.
I’ve seen people who when presented with an increase of ~30°F to ~50°F
will say, “That’s an increase of 67%.” The conversation gets interesting
after that.
Even engineers can make this mistake, usually because we are dealing with processes where the delta T driving force is the important consideration.
Toss out the lower latitudes ±20° of the equator and I bet the winter/summer difference becomes even more noticeable.
It’s almost as if this planet we inhabit was created by a very intelligent designer, with all these natural systems in place working together to keep it running along, humans or no humans…
Climate alarmists and their dreaded tipping points. They fail to notice the earth’s climate even when stressed by extinction level events eventually tips itself back to a life supporting equilibrium.
We’ve been on the precipice for 8 months now, per the UN Sec.Gen. and all I have seen is lemmings.
Spring has finally arrived, for a few days in our part of Southern California, in late April / early May – at least a month late. But not to fear, the weather forecast is for cooling into the weekend and it may rain.
So, did that “higher being” literally create the cosmos, or did he merely work out the fundamental laws of physics, had a beer, and watched?
“he”??
Except when humans intervene by injecting 40 billion tonnes of CO2 annually into the atmosphere.
… at which point the CO2 is consumed by plant life, causing plant life to flourish and the Earth greener.
Photosynthesis.
This is basic botany; taught to elementary schoolers for generations. I learned about this in elementary school. Here’s a teacher’s text from 1903 discussing elementary school botany: https://www.jstor.org/stable/992917
Plants absorb between a quarter and a third of human-caused emissions per year. Oceans absorb another fraction. About 45% is taken up by the atmosphere each year. That 45% of human -caused CO2 emissions absorbed by the atmosphere has accumulated since the beginning of the industrial era, and is responsible for all of the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration since 1750, and is the primary cause of the fastest rate of global warming in thousands of years — currently about 0.18C/decade.
Warren,
Proxies do not have the resolution to determine the “fastest rate of global warming in 1000 years”. Plus CO2 is beneficent and an approximate 0.5% Kelvin warming is miniscule. But your kind are desperate to make minor climate perturbations, (whether man made or not) into a scary story.
Using anomalies, Scientists find they do have the required resolution.
Ha, ha, ha
Show us a graph of one that isn’t one single dot for 50 years or more.
You realize making assertions with no references simply marks you a troll, right?
Anomalies aren’t temperatures. They are averages differences per unit time.
Temperature has a unit like Kelvin.
An anomaly based on averages has units of Kelvin/unit time (e.g. K/month)
Anomalies don’t increase resolution – unless you are a climate scientist.
Yes, you are correct about anomalies. But you are wrong to imply it doesn’t matter. Anomalies eliminate much of the systematic error associated with measurement or estimation, and allow the determination of temperature trends with sufficient accuracy to draw the conclusions that appear in the scientific literature.
You do realize anomalies are the difference betwen the means of two random variables, right?
A monthly average of ~30 data points and a subtraction of a baseline monthly average mean of ~30 data points.
Do you know that those random variable means also have a variance/standard deviation that add when you add/subtract means?
Show us how an anomaly of 0.05±3.5°C is statistically significant.
Here is a link to a Tucson, AZ CRN monthly average of Tmax as calculated by the NIST Uncertainty Machine. Notice the uncertainty of u(y)=±7.3°C. Even if the baseline uncertainty was 0, you would end up with ±7.3°C uncertainty in the anomaly.
https://ibb.co/tLwD8sm
Show us how you justify the accuracy portrayed in anomalies
Why is it that you refuse to consult authoritative sources to learn about a topic?
“Anomalies more accurately describe climate variability over larger areas than absolute temperatures do, and they give a frame of reference that allows more meaningful comparisons between locations and more accurate calculations of temperature trends.”
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/global-temperature-anomalies#:~:text=Anomalies%20more%20accurately%20describe%20climate,accurate%20calculations%20of%20temperature%20trends.
Why is it you never support your assertions with data? Nor do you ever answer direct questions.
I showed you a monthly calculation using NIST’s Uncertainty Machine. I asked how an anomaly calculated using that mean could be considered statistically significant considering the wide uncertainty interval.
The term in your quote uses the description “accurately”. Do you consider “0.05±3.5°C” to be an “accurate” number? If so, why?
Why don’t YOU find a paper that describes how the uncertainty of an anomaly is calculated to support your assertion.
He can’t even quote the variance of the data being used and you expect him to find a paper on calculating the uncertainty of the anomalies? All he has to offer is the argumentative fallacy of False Appeal to the Authority. He can’t even reference a single source!
Look it up if you want to. I’m not going to research every jot and tittle of well established science just because you want to play games. Besides, you aren’t a publishing scientist, but the authors at NOAA are. If you want to argue with NOAA scientists then contact them, or better still, publish your ‘refutation’’ in a peer reviewed scientific journal. I’m sure NOAA and NIST will be astounded that you’ve uncovered fundamental errors in their work. 😂
In other words you can’t refute what I said about anomalies by using reputable sources. You can’t even argue about the lack of recent papers shown by NOAA. Nor will you discuss measurement uncertainty of which I gave you an example.
Why is that? You claim to be knowledgeable about these issues by asserting how accurate anomalies are. It appears you are simply parroting consensus science with no knowledge of whether it is correct or not.
As to publishing, I will be asking WUWT to publish an essay about measurement uncertainty at this site very soon. It will have a plethora of internationally accepted sources. I look forward to you arguing with those sources.
You’ll be publishing an ESSAY , not a scientific paper? And on WUWT, not in a scientific journal?
That you will earn you lots of applause from fellow Deniers, but not from the scientific community (nor from me). Good luck with your junk science adventures.
Typical troll! As you’ve been told before, it doesn’t matter where it is published, only if it is right or wrong!
Like some other Deniers, you are under the mistaken impression you can publish any piece of trash in any forum and leave it to the non expert to judge whether it’s right or wrong. However, The only way for a non expert to know what he’s reading is wrong or right is to read it after scientific experts have reviewed it and corrected errors. If the paper has serious defects that cannot be corrected, the paper is rejected. I suspect anything you write will fall in that latter category because you write like a sixth grader who thinks he knows his subject, even though he has only a primitive understanding, uninformed by any education in his subject area.
I suggest you take this advice to heart: either earn an education in your subject area, or take up something in which you have a real skill.
Your trolling is getting ridiculous.
You don’t even realize that you just besmirched everyone on this site as being incapable of adequately addressing the correctness of a subject in an essay. That is mighty big of you!
And, I suppose you are the only expert on this site that properly judge others. Ha! You don’t even realize that in science right/wrong is not the objective criteria. Correct/incorrect is the criteria with which to judge an assertion. That is why references which you are loath to supply are so important.
Go away troll, you are a narcissist and not worth the time it takes to respond to you.
Quite simply, the actual value of the anomaly is part of the GREAT UNKNOWN!
It’s the fastest rate of warming in 10,000 years, not 1000. You can check here: https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/
Where do you get these oft-quoted numbers from. No one pushing these “data” ever bothers to give even one reference to a scientific source. Or did they come from “Climate Scientists”?
Eg: https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/
Is that all you have?
Ice sheets melting – because of CO2.
Oceans warming – because of CO2
Temperatures increasing – because of CO2
On and on. Didn’t see one piece of actual data on the site. Lots of papers, the newest of which was 2020. Most were early 2000s or older. The science must be settled since there is little new information.
Read this and tell us it wasn’t as warm in the not too distant past.
Ancient Forest Thaws From Melting Glacial Tomb | Live Science
Here is another.
Glaciers reveal tree stumps from a warmer period – CFACT
Explain why you think it was less warm in these periods than it is now. For sure, the glaciers did not cover these areas when trees and forests grew there. Why no glaciers?
You clearly haven’t read much science. I’ve tried to help you with some basic concepts, but now it’s time for you to start learning on your own. So until you;ve read the IPCC 6th Assessment in its entirety (or at least the science sections) please don’t bother me with any more questions.
LOL! Running away are you? I haven’t ask any questions for you to answer. I HAVE asked you to show references for your assertions.
I see you refuse to deal with the forests and cultural items being found underneath glaciers. You can’t think of any possible reasons?
Real scientists and engineers keep a bibliography of reference books and papers for ready reference. I use Microsoft OneNote for my reference library.
You obviously don’t do that. I suspect you suck up propaganda from CAGW sites as “science”.
I’m not a scientist. I’m an engineer. With many interests beyond being your research assistant. Including setting the record straight with real science instead of the hogwash perpetrated by Deniers.
You clearly haven’t read the IPCC 6th Assessment, have you? Or the NASA Climate website? Or reports by the National Academy of Sciences? But you do ask a lot of questions that are really argumentative, and are Denier talking points from blogs. Not inquiring. As with most Deniers, I’ve lost patience with you. Good bye.
Why don’t you contact the NASA scientists and argue your points. Have you published your arguments in a peer reviewed scientific journal? If not, why not?
That NASA link reads like it’s describing normal variations during an Ice Age.
You must have missed the very first bullet point on the web page:
The world’s temperature declined from the 1940s through the 1970s when air pollution AND CO2 levels rose.
The world’s temperature has been rising since the late 1970s as air pollution has declined and CO2 have risen.
Direct correlation between air pollution levels and temperature. Not so with CO2 levels.
Global temperatures are correlated with both, since both have an effect on the climate. Atmospheric CO2 has always been a powerful climate forcing , and is no longer offset by pollution driven climate forcing because the majority of pollution reductions have already occurred, in the 1940s-1970s time period.
So are postal rates and fentanyl deaths. Do any of these correlation prove a causal connection?
Of course not. Do you understand the physics of the greenhouse effect? You might want to study up a bit.
Should NH summer and SH winter add to 100%? Should NH winter and SH summer add to 100%?
If so each is missing about 4%.
What am I missing?
No, winter and summer don’t need to sum to 100%.
===
winter % = winter absorbed / winter TOA TSI
summer % = summer absorbed / summer TOA TSI
===
Since the denominators are different, there’s no requirement that they add to 100%
w.
It is interesting, though. to examine the combinations of NHsummer/SHwinter and vice versa. as they occur simultaneously. The striking difference between the pairings probably says something about the greater land area in the NH vs the SH.
SH has more water/oceans.
What’s the cause of the fastest rate of warming in thousands of years?
Cleaner air.
The Earth cooled significantly from the 1940s through the 1970s due to air pollution.
Once we started cleaning up air pollution, the Earth’s temperature has been rising.
Does a warmer Earth concern you when the Earth is in an Ice Age? Yes, the Earth is in an Ice Age. Please fact check it.
Yes, cleaner air removed pollution, and less sunlight was reflected to space. Allowing the underlying warming trend to be seen. Since about 1970, that rate of warming has accelerated and continued at a rate of about 0.18C/decade, the fastest rate of warming in thousands of years. Caused by man-caused emissions of CO2 at an annual rate of 40 billion tonnes/year, due to the burning of fossil fuels.
What caused the rapid warming of the Younger Dryas?
From Encyclopedia Brittanica:”In this second warming interval, average global temperatures increased by up to 10 °C (18 °F) in just a few decades.”
Much faster than today.
The Younger Dryas warming was caused by a significant reduction in, or shutdown of the North Atlantic Conveyor due to a sudden influx of freshwater from Lake Agassiz and deglaciation in North America. It resulted in a decline of temperatures in GREENLAND by 4–10 °C (7.2–18 °F. A REGIONAL, NOT GLOBAL TEMPERATURE CHANGE , which temporarily reversed the ongoing warming trend.
Warren, this is the first time I’ve seen it suggested that the warming in the Younger Dryas was regional.
Do you have data to back up your assertion?
The Younger Dryas was globally synchronous or very nearly so. However, the magnitude of the drop in global mean surface temperature was modest; the Younger Dryas was not a global relapse into peak glacial conditions. In Western Europe and Greenland, the Younger Dryas is a well-defined synchronous cool period.
Do you have global proxies with sufficient resolution to know that the current rate is faster than anything “thousands of years” ago? Show them to us.
I don’t but scientists do. You might check the peer reviewed research, or reports from the National Academy of Sciences, or from NSAS, or the IPCC, if you haven’t before, and learn about those proxies.
So you have nothing. Your assertion is absolutely unsupported. It is your assertion and it is up to you to support it with evidence.
Otherwise, it is a typical troll straw man. 🤡
You’re right, I have nothing on this topic — but Scientists do, as do all the institutions of Science. You can easily check my statement for validity by reading the scientific literature on the topic. Unless, as I suspect, you’re allergic to it.
Which scientists? If the literature is as ubiquitous as you imply you should be able to provide a reference for us to peruse. We can then indulge in a discussion using a common baseline.
“Scientists do” is nothing more than an argumentative fallacy known as a False Appeal to Authority”.
The literature on proxies is voluminous, and i think you’re more than capable of finding and reading the scientific literature on proxies. It’s well established science. Start with Google Scholar.
The question is not about proxy research. The question you refuse to answer is what their time resolution is. YOU made the original assertion that proxies do not show any rapid increase in temperature like we are experiencing. Find some proxies covering 10,000 years BP or more that has a time resolution of less than 50 years to support your assertion.
i Trust NOAA. If you don’t, submit your contrarian paper to a reliable scientific journal for publication. I’m sure they’ll eagerly publish it 😅
In other words you have nothing but an argumentative fallacy.
Ah, those magical ‘scientists’.
So there’s a difference? Don’t the Laws of Thermodynamics require that earth warms or cools if there’s a difference?
Strawman argument from a troll. Doesn’t deserve any kind of answer.
You don;t think that the bulk temperature of a body is affected if the energy leaving the body and the energy entering the body have different values?
I think it is much more complicated than this typical strawman argument.p you present here.
These physical processes all deal with time based gradients and not averages nor instantaneous points in time. So yes, a body can store energy in the form of heat and release it as heat at later time with different temperatures. You are looking at bodies with various masses and specific heats. They are not black bodies.
Your strawman doesn’t deserve any better answer.
So you think the First Law of Thermodynamics sometimes doesn’t hold because it’s ‘more complicated’?
If you want to make a well posed problem that adequately describes the system you are mentioning, then maybe there will be something to discuss. Until then, you are a troll.
Sure. Let’s take earth and its atmosphere as the system. Does the 1st Law of Thermodynamics apply?
I think if one body is a pound of CO2 and the other tons of water or tons of earth, then your simple strawman assertions don’t begin to describe a well posed problem that deserves an answer.
So you claim that the 1st Law of Thermodynamics doesn’t always apply. Ie, only when you ‘think’ it does. Hmmm… interesting.
That isn’t what he said at all. What is the temperature of your car going down the highway at 50 mph?
In order to know you have to know what is happening with all the components. The engine block, the cooling radiator, the internal temperature of the cylinder wall, the temperature of the exhaust gases at the exhaust valve, the temperature of the gases leaving the tailpipe, the air temperature flowing over/under/around the car, and so much more …….
Not only do you need to know all of the component temperatures you need to know how they interact. Does the heat exchanged to the air by the radiator interact with the air inside the car?
Think about it. The Earth is a heat engine just like your car. How long will your car travelling at 50mph coast if you just shut off the fuel to the engine? How long with the heat engine known as Earth continue to run if the Sun dies? It certainly isn’t going to instantly freeze! There’s too much residual heat in the oceans and land for that to happen. That heat engine known as Earth will continue to run as well for a period of time, probably for weeks if not months before it turns into an ice ball. We’ll all be dead by then from lack of food — no sun, no plants; no plants and the animals die – including the human animals.
So your 1st law of thermodynamics doesn’t mean squat if you can’t do the time series for how fast the Earth as a heat engine will run down. You may as well say the entire universe is going to die a heat death – the issue is when!
You say ‘The 1st Law doesn’t mean squat if you can’t do the time series, etc, etc” . So what are you saying? That the 1st Law applies to earth’s system (the planet plus its atmosphere) ? Or that it doesn’t? It has to be one or the other.
What am I saying? I am saying you have absolutely NO understanding of the physical world at all, including thermodynamics.
Thermodynamics *is* the study of heat and energy transfer over time for a *system*. The Earth is not an isolated system therefore you can’t apply the 1st law solely to the system known as Earth. Your attempt to do so is proof you have no understanding of thermodynamics at all.
You need to learn thermo:
Within an isolated system, the total energy of the system is constant, even if energy has been converted from one form to another. (This is another way of stating the law of conservation of energy: that energy can not be created or destroyed but merely converted from one form to another.) If the system is not isolated, the change in a system’s internal energy ΔU is equal to the difference between the heat Q added to the system from its surroundings and the work W done by the system on its surroundings; that is, ΔU = Q − W.
Again, the Earth is *NOT* an isolated system.
And nothing you state here indicates you understand thermodynamics at all!
Again, the 1st law applies to the entire system, not to just one piece of it! You can’t just apply the 1st law to the “atmosphere” because the atmosphere is made up of multiple parts and the atmosphere itself is just part of the entire system. The Earth itself is part of a system.
The Earth and its atmosphere is *NOT* an isolated system. Both matter and energy can enter and leave the “system” the Earth and its atmosphere are parts of. That means that energy does *not* have to be conserved in those pieces of the system. The mere fact that the biosphere radiates heat to space should tell you that the biosphere (i.e. the Earth and its atmosphere) does not conserve energy within it.
YOU’VE JUST WRITTEN SIX PARAGRAPHS OF BEGINNER THERMO TO DENY YOUR PREVIOUS WAFFLING, AND ANSWER “YES” TO MY QUESTION “DOES THE 1ST LAW OF THERMO APPLY TO EARTH’S SYSTEM.” CONGRATULATIONS!
“3. …. You can define a system any way you want to …”
That’s what those pushing perpetual motion machines do.
“5. … “Blindingly obvious. When you apply dU=Q-W to a piece, dU may be non-zero.”
Really? You said in No. 3 that you could define the system however you wanted to. Now you are saying that you can’t?
Pick one and stick with it!
Everything i said was correct. Maybe i have to explain in baby talk?
You are still trying to have your cake and eat it too.
…………………..
The conservation of energy law applies to all systems – except some systems.
………………….
Go away troll!
“The conservation of energy law applies to all systems” . I’m glad you finally realized that. (Initially You refused to admit that thru many exchanges) But you haven’t understood the meaning of statement 2.
It applies to energy but not heat/temperature that you tried to equate it to. Look up adiabatic and see if heat/temperature is conserved!
Temperature is an intrinsic variable. The term “Conservation” — which applies to extrinsic variables–is not applicable to temperature.
And as far as earth’s system is concerned, more heat energy enters earth’s system from the sun than leaves it via IR. So the process is not ‘adiabatic”
So do you now understand that for earths system (the planet + atmosphere) if W is zero and Q is positive, dU must be positive? And that if greenhouse gases restrict the flow of IR thermal energy from leaving earth, Q is positive, and therefore earths internal energy, U, must increase? And therefore earths temperature must rise?
You again betray your lack of study in the physical sciences using calculus.
Look at SB for an example. Do you think those temperatures are static for all time? Take T₀ at 300K and T₁ at 250K. You can calculate a radiation amount, right? In the next infintely small increment of time, what are the temperatures of each? How about the next infintely small increment of time? And the next and the next ad infinitum. Do you recognize a use for calculus here?
How about bodies with different masses, different specific heats, absorptance? These all go into describing gradients of each of the bodies.
SB uses simple algebra due to assumptions made.
I = Aεσ(T₀ – T₁) assumes similar bodies, but that is seldom the case.
You should consider it as
I = A₀ε₀σ₀T₀ – A₁ε₁σ₁T₁
then substitute the time based gradients for T₀ and T₁, and integrate that entire function until I = 0!
This doesn’t even address the absorptivities which are part of the temperature functions.
When you can address these factors cogently, we can begin to address the 1st law impacts.
You’re avoiding the question: either the 1st law applies to earths system, or it doesn’t.which is it?
“in the summer when it is warmer, the surface absorbs less solar energy … and in the winter when it is colder, the surface absorbs more solar energy.”
Any of this from vegetation changes ?
Of course, at least some of it is. Good question.
Thanks for an interesting article … again!
Clouds can reflect up to 90% of the incoming solar radiation and cover about 67 percent of the Earth’s surface, yet the IPCC models don’t consider and forecast them.
Considering that the CO2 influence is only a small fraction of a percent of solar radiation, that seems like the influence of clouds completely overshadows the effect of CO2.
If they did consider them, they would be utterly unable to make any determination that CO2 is causative of any of the changes that occur. Then they would be unable to justify the severe restrictions and taxation of Western countries in order to curtail CO2, on the presumption that it controls the climate.
Their unwillingness to properly consider clouds is not some mere oversight, otherwise they would correct it as they are informed of that oversight (which they have been many times for many years). What is left is to invoke Hanlon’s Razor, which would require them to admit utter incompetence. The alternative is that they are aware of the issues and are deliberately ignoring them in order to maintain the status quo, or as a form of Noble Cause Corruption, whereby they know it is false, but believe (religiously) in their cause so much that they are willing to blatantly lie to support it. All they have left is to assert that clouds have no significant effect. But that assertion is not supported by any evidence at all and flies in the face of common sense and honest scientific enquiry.
No accurate data exist for clouds
Also, they can not explain warming at night
That’s the urban heat island effect.
And that makes for the largest temperature difference between cities and countryside. Stone retains heat and radiates it out at night. And the countryside has more blockage through vegetation. That difference is substantial.
Btw, old style stone based heat storage systems work that way.
Interesting that the urban heat island effect is warming the Arctic.
How does that work?
Unclear why the down votes, unless it is merely due to reputation, which is not scientific.
Fun bobcat story. A few years ago at our north Georgia mountain cabin, I was fixing to grill some chicken for dinner. Set the chicken on the porch railing while waiting for the grill to heat. A bobcat came out of the woods and was aiming for the chicken until I shooed it away.
Did you find your shoe after throwing it?
Is the bobcat the same animal as the lynx?
No.
Lynx genus: There are four species belonging to this group — Eurasian lynx, the Spanish,and the Canadian. The cat native to North America is the Bobcat (Lynx rufus).
Slight correction. Bobcat covers most of CONUS. Had a family (Mom, two kits) caught on a fall trailcam at my Wisconsin dairy farm. Canadian lynx is mainly Canada and Alaska—maybe a little in the extreme northern Rockies of Idaho and Montana. Is larger, with longer legs and bigger paws because of deeper winter snow in its environment.
20 years ago seven Federal and and Washington State biologists showed that a very rare sub-species of invisible lynx also inhabit a large portion of Washington State.
Real lynx do hang out in part of Washington…
(here kitty kitty kitty)
No.
The Canadian Lynx is the only one I’ve seen. They’re like the world’s largest bobcat after taking steroids and pumping iron. They’re built for the snow, with big feet and long legs.
Once, and only once, in Alaska I saw a lynx crossing the road a ways ahead of our car, then stopping and looking at us from the shoulder after crossing, then taking one endless soaring leap way over the roadside ditch to vanish in the bushes .. magical.
Not my photo, but that’s what it looked like.
w.
I also guessed lynx. Lynx are apparently bigger.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-a-bobcat-and-a-lynx-If-they-are-different-species-why-do-they-look-so-similar
Enjoyed the post.
We have lynx, bobcat and mountain lions in Colorado. Never saw any of these critters but nearly every year the big ones make their presence known by stalking and attacking joggers in the foothills.
True mountain lion (cougar) story from eastern Washington State. My sister’s former husband went on a two person black powder (early) elk hunting trip with a buddy up into the eastern mountains on horseback. (My sister raises pinto horses on her 760 acre ranch.) So they got an elk, boned it out, and were bringing the meat down the mountain on horseback that evening. Were jumped by a cougar just at dark. Next thing Gary remembered was waking up in the morning on the trail clutching his rifle to his chest. Elk meat was gone. Trail horses were spooked down the trail. He survived. Horses survived. Cougars do not waste hunting energy.
Rud: Fellow Wisconsin land owner here. When my family moved to the country in the 1960s there was a bobcat skin hanging over the mantle in the old farm house we bought. It was the only bobcat I ever saw until about 15 years ago. I was thrilled to see one on our land while deer hunting. Since then we’ve seen bobcats regularly on trail cams and occasionally during the day including a mother with 3 kits a few years ago. Their return appears to be natural as there has been no reintroduction program as far as I know. A friend contends that their return is largely related to the prolific return of wild turkeys which was a successful reintroduction program. I’ve seen enough piles of turkey feathers in the woods to conclude that bobcats are really good hunters.
Agree. Fun side story. The original Wisconsin wild turkey release (just 50 pair from Arkansas) was in Governor Dodge State park, just 15 miles from our Uplands dairy farm. Not 5 years after, we were seeing wild turkeys. So knew reintroduction would be successful. Easy bobcat food. When we bought the farm 40 years ago, no trail cams, no turkeys, no bobcats. Now lots of turkeys, bobcats, and trail cams.
Willis,
I agree with everything you wrote. As a thermal engineer, and a laser engineer, I am well versed in the math associated with temperature and gases.
But what I wanted to add is this:
As the sun arrives each day, its heat quickly heats the surface, which then increases its rate of radiation. In addition, that additional heat warms the air in contact with the surface, due to conduction. That air then rises, due to convection. So there are all three ways of moving heat that exist – radiation, conduction and convection – during the day when the sun is shining.
Now, ignoring your thunderstorms for a moment, the tables are turned at night. The surface cools, lowering its rate of radiation which is proportional to the surface temperature. The surface then cools the air in contact with it via conduction – this time from the air to the surface. There is no convection present in this situation. So at night, radiation lessens, convection does not exist, and conduction is reversed, with the earth then acting as a heat sink.
So, although the surface heats quickly in the presence of the sun, it does NOT cool as quickly, because the ONLY method of cooling the atmosphere at that point is via conduction (except radiative gases can cool and thus cool air molecules that collide with the lower energy radiative molecules).
The surface becomes cooler, air in contact with it cools, and air in contact with the cooled air is cooled. The cooling process works from altitude down to the earth’s surface, with the surface being the ‘cool source’ for energy to travel, always from warmer to cooler. Any weather balloon trace will show this at night.
There are no special gases needed to explain this – it is automatic, and it follows the thermal and gas laws. The atmosphere is quickly warmed each day, and slowly cools each night. That is why the earth’s temperature is above the so-called ‘black body’ temperature. It has nothing to do with gases at all, except that the atmosphere is made of many gases, all acting in the same way, as the ideal gas laws dictate. It is the NON radiating gases that contain the day’s heat, not the radiative gases that are claimed to be ‘heat trapping’.
Noteworthy also, this process explains the seasons. More or less sun per average day warms or cools the relative surface temperature. And since the sun’s energy output is virtually stable, earth’s overall temperature is also stable, other than ‘weather’.
Surely, during the night, the surface, if it’s a heat sink as you say, will cause convection if it’s warmer than the air above it? The process will only stop when temperatures are equalized.
Perhaps I was not clear. The surface radiates at night, which causes it to cool below the temperature of the air in contact with it. That causes the heat in the air to move via conduction to the surface. And air molecules above that also transfer energy to those which were cooled by the surface. There is no convection at light. Convection only happens when warm air/water, etc, rises through that which is cooler above it.
Thanks for the discussion and clarification. An accurate summation. However, there are more issues than that. A few thoughts.
First, what you describe for the atmosphere is reversed in the ocean—it is stratified during the day and overturns during the night. This overturning brings warmer water from below to the surface, and the cooler water sinks.
Because of the warmer water constantly rising to the surface, the net heat flow once overturning is established is from the water to the air.
This greatly complicates the cycle you accurately describe above for the land.
Next, as you point out, energy loss via radiation can take the surface below the air temperature. This effect was known to the people of the US Southwest, who before refrigeration would put out water in shallow trays overnight. Because of the large surface area/volume ratio, the water in the trays would freeze even though the air was above freezing.
HOWEVER, and it’s a big one, the effect only works on clear dry nights. If there are clouds, or if the humidity is high, the downwelling radiation from the clouds or the water vapor is constantly adding energy to the surface, and keeping it from freezing.
And as usual, the climate is more complex than we imagine.
Thanks again for your post,
w.
Yes, I should have clarified that my statements applied to land and not water, snow or ice. Thanks for catching that. At 80, I find I am not as precise as I once was.
If we consider the atmosphere under a clear sky at thermal equilibrium with the adiabatic lapse rate (and corresponding pressure profile), and calculate the profile of infrared radiation absorbed by the atmosphere (both water vapor and CO2) as a function of altitude, it can be shown that increasing the CO2 concentration for a constant absolute humidity increases the IR radiation absorbed only close to the ground, up to about 4 to 10 meters altitude (depending on temperature and humidity), and the net IR radiation absorbed at higher altitudes actually decreases with increasing CO2 concentration. This means that, all other parameters held constant, increasing CO2 concentrations only warms the atmosphere close to the ground, and results in a very slight cooling at higher altitudes (i.e. above treetops).
If we use the Stefan-Boltzmann law for a blackbody to estimate the required temperature increase to account for the maximum increase in absorbed IR radiation, if the CO2 concentration was doubled from about 424 ppm to 848 ppm, the predicted temperature rise would be about 1.0 K at high Northern latitudes in winter, at Northern Hemisphere middle latitudes about 0.5 K in summer to 0.8 K in winter, and about 0.3 K in the tropics in all seasons. In the Southern Hemisphere, the “sensitivity” is closer to 0.5 K in middle latitudes, as these latitudes are dominated by oceans.
The warming effect is larger in cold and/or dry climates and seasons (in areas not covered by snow or ice), and smaller in warmer and/or humid climates and seasons.
This model is based on IR radiation only, and does not consider the effects of clouds or convection, or the “thunderstorm cooling” described by Willis in the above article.
However, this model does show that the “equilibrium climate sensitivity” for doubling of CO2 concentration due to IR absorption is really about 0.3 K to 1.0 K, instead of the 2.0 to 5.0 K/doubling estimated by the IPCC. This model applies to dry land only, and the sensitivity should be less over the oceans, since maintaining a constant relative humidity requires evaporation of water into the atmosphere, and the required latent heat would tend to cool the atmosphere near the surface, creating a negative feedback.
ECS is unknown
Your guess is no better than any other guess
The main mysteries are a water vapor positive feedback and cloud changes with more water vapor and warming.
Those data do not exist so ECS must be a guess.
Lab spectroscopy of CO2 in dry air suggests 0.7 to 0.8 C. but that would be a best case guess.
Don’t forget that the surface is also a heat sink. Heat does diffuse downward into the earth. That is one reason you can get heaving with pipes sank into the earth. Water lines especially must be below the freeze point at its coldest. I would have to check again, but here in Kansas it’s like 30 inches.
The heat in that heat sink doesn’t cycle based on the day/night difference. Some of that cycle is months long as summer/fall/winter/spring seasons.
Also don’t forget the dew point. As temperatures of surface structures cool, water can precipitate releasing its latent heat and keeping air temperature warmer.
Heat latency is the term for water phase changes. It is real.
There is also fluid dynamics that shift air and water around transporting heat.
“earth’s overall temperature is also stable, other than ‘weather’”
Earths temperature is not stable
Not even in the past few decades.
The main mechanism whereby the surface of the Earth cools is not radiation, but evaporation. The heat lost by evaporation is carried deep into the atmosphere by convection and is realized as heat by the atmosphere when water vapor condenses into rain and snow. Much of this heat is released above 6 km.
The ground routinely starts to cool after the sun sets because it emits more radiation than it gains from the atmosphere. In other words, the temperature of the ground starts to lower because it runs a radiation deficit (more losses than gains).
The sun radiates heat to earth in the day. At night the reverse happens when the warmer earth radiates heat to the cold night sky
Night and day aren’t directly relevant to heat transfer. Processes like conduction, convection, and radiation do not depend on the sun or on the time of day, but mostly depend on relative temperature difference.
Stick to engineering
By claiming earth’s overall temperature never changes (quote below), you demonstrate that you have no idea what you are talking about
“And since the sun’s energy output is virtually stable, earth’s overall temperature is also stable, other than ‘weather’.”
Earth’s temperature is stable in the context of minor deltas in K.
Day-night and seasonal variations do not contest stability.
Runaway greenhouse effect, runaway global warming, tipping points, precipice all denote instability.
Dry sand does not have evaporation. Oceans, yes.
Now,
“And since the sun’s energy output is virtually stable, earth’s overall temperature is also stable, other than ‘weather’.”
He did not say “never changes.” He said stable. There is more than a mere semantics difference.
You did not mention evaporation and condensing and precipitation, likely playing the greatest role regarding distributing of energy. CO2 plays a less than 1% role
See my below comment
I would discuss your definitions of conduction and convection, but that would not add to your concise analysis other than improving the language.
Thanks once again Willis for your insights and observations.
I’m finding increasingly that in laypersons’ discussions about weather and (unavoidably it now seems) climate, I can cut the climate alarmist position off at the knees by saying they’re getting all bent out of shape over a number that has no real-world existence or application to anyone’s life.
That is, the so-called “Global Average Temperature” construct.
I mean, the probity and provenance of much of the “data” that go into the GAT construct are beyond suspect, lacking consistency of capture, bordering on dishonesty.
Numerical “torture” comes to mind.
A construct totally not fit for purpose.
Even if such a purpose was in any way rational or practical in the first place.
Heresy, hey?
So when you write –
I somehow feel a bit vindicated in my assertion about the ‘un-worldly’ substance of the GAT construct.
So I’m content to just not play along any more with the alarmists’ ludicrous obsession over a 1.5C rise in a nonsense, ephemeral construct that has no applicability to the real world, with its hundreds of unique climates all around the planet.
Let’s “keep it real” as the rappers say.
“Global Average Temperature” is as nonsensical as the concept of a “global climate”.
Climate, like weather, is always regional.
What is the global weather, right now?
Totally agree that GAT is “not fit for purpose”.
That’s 1.5 from what 13°C (~55°F). We couldn’t produce sufficient food at that temperature.
1.5 K out of 290-300 K?
Willis,
Heating up usually requires increasing the retained energy.
I made some calculations for only the atmosphere for 2023 and 1900, to keep it simple.
Make sure to watch the 3-minute video regarding the non-role of CO2
If CO2 plays no role in cold places, why should it be credited with any role elsewhere?
For your info
Excerpts from
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/natural-forces-cause-periodic-global-warming
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/hunga-tonga-volcanic-eruption
Retained Energy in Atmosphere
The retained energy in the atmosphere is ONE net effect of the interplay of the sun, atmosphere, earth surface land and water, and what grows on the surface and in water. CO2 plays a 0.69% retained energy role.
.
Dry Air and Water Vapor
ha = Cpa x T = 1006 kJ/kg.C x T, where Cpa is specific heat of dry air
hg = (2501 kJ/kg, specific enthalpy of WV at 0 C) + (Cpwv x T = 1.84 kJ/kg x T), where Cpwv is specific heat of WV at constant pressure
.
1) Worldwide, determine enthalpy of moist air: T = 16 C and H = 0.0025 kg WV/kg dry air (4028 ppm)
h = ha + H.hg = 1.006T + H(2501 + 1.84T) = 1.006 (16) + 0.0025 {2501 + 1.84 (16)} = 22.4 kJ/kg dry air
About 16.1 kJ/kg of dry air is retained by air and 6.3 kJ/kg by WV
.
2) Tropics, determine enthalpy of moist air: T = 27 C and H = 0.017 kg WV/kg dry air (27389 ppm)
h = 1.006 (27) + 0.017 {2501 + 1.84 (16)} = 70.5 kJ/kg dry air
About 27.2 kJ/kg of dry air is retained by air and 43.3 kJ/kg by WV
https://www.wikihow.com/Calculate-the-Enthalpy-of-Moist-Air#:~:text=The%20equation%20for%20enthalpy%20is,specific%20enthalpy%20of%20water%20vapor.
.
CO2
h CO2 = Cp CO2 x K = 0.834 x (16 + 273) = 241 kJ/kg CO2, where Cp CO2 is specific heat
Worldwide, determine enthalpy of CO2 = {(423 x 44)/(1000000 x 29) = 0.000642 kg CO2/kg dry air} x 241 kJ/kg CO2 @ur momisugly 289 K = 0.155 kJ/kg dry air.
.
Retained Energy In 2023; 16 C
World: (16.1 + 6.3 + 0.155) kJ/kg dry air) x 1000J/kJ x 5.148 x 10^18 kg x 1/10^18 = 1.161 x 10^5 EJ
Dry air, WV and CO2 played 71.38%, 27.93% and 0.69% retained energy roles.
Tropics: (27.2 + 43.3 + 0.155) kJ/kg dry air x 1000J/kJ x 2.049 x 10^18 kg, atmosphere x 1/10^18 = 1,448 x 10^5 EJ.
Dry air, WV and CO2 played 38.5%, 61.28% and 0.219% retained energy roles.
.
The Tropics is a giant energy storage area, almost all of it by evaporating water. At least 35% of the Tropics energy is transferred, 24/7/365, to areas north and south of the 37 parallels with energy deficits
Humans consumed 604/365 = 1.65 EJ/d, in 2022
.
Retained Energy in 1900; 14.8 C
World: (14.8 +5.8 +0.106) kJ/kg dry air) x 1000 J/kJ x 5.148 x 10^18 kg x 1/10^18 = 1.066 x 10^5 EJ
Dry air, WV and CO2 played 71.48%, 28.01% and 0.51% retained energy roles.
.
The 2023/1900 retained energy ratio was 1.089
.
NOTE: This video shows, CO2 plays no retained energy role in the world’s driest places, with 423 ppm CO2 and minimal WV ppm, i.e., blaming CO2 for global warming is an unscientific hoax.
https://youtu.be/QCO7x6W61wc
My method of calculating retained energy for 2023 and 1900, may not include all energies, or may be over or understated, but the ratio of my two retained energies is likely correct.
This means the 2023 atmosphere retains about 8.9% more energy than the 1900 atmosphere. That change is due to many factors, not just demonized CO2
Thanks, Wil. What is lacking in order for me to comment on your ideas is a clear bright-line definition of whatever it is that you are calling “retained energy”.
As one example, if the sun melts ice, is that “retained energy”? Etc.
Best regards,
w.
My calculations are based on three well-known items. See text.
I have assumed 16 C in 2023 and 14.8 C in 1900, as the temp of the entire atmosphere, which is overstated, but helps simplicity.
I think, the ratio of my two REs would not be much different, if complex analyses were performed, such as how do my three items vary with altitude and temp.
I think the complex stuff would subtract from both REs, leaving the ratio in tact
The terms at play here are specific heat, heat capacity, and heat latency. Just a helpful note.
Enthalpy, the contained energy of a system
In my case the entire atmosphere, i.e., dry air, WV and CO2.
I leave out clouds, which are water droplets/ice crystals surrounded by saturated air. They are a minor part of the weight of the entire atmosphere
There are other actors, but they are very small.
Weight of entire atmosphere 5.148 x 10^18 kg (I used this number)
Weight of dry air 5.132 x 10^18 kg
Weight of WV 0.016 x 10^18 kg, includes clouds
Co2 effect can only be properly calculated/measured at Earth’s surface level and should be seen in context w H2o in various forms. It seems to me that ‘calculating’ the effect of Co2 higher up in the atmosphere always lead to wide speculations. The error bars are simply too wide to make definite statements. Lawyers would (and do) have a field day. It’s ‘certainty’ is always implied by alarmists using energy balance and the speculative role of molecules using some basic physics but often include silly ideas like ‘back radiation’ which actually goes against some physics laws like the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Or Co2 as the mouse ‘forcing’ the effect of the H2o elephant.
I brought in the lawyer aspect because those focused on Co2 being the forcing actor usually neglect uncomfortable counter facts. The prosecution always deflect attention and stays ‘on message’. If you see it that way the whole climate alarmism makes sense. It is used for various reasons quite often not at all environmental. It is mainly political and not very scientific. It is as if they are FORCING the issue.Some posters here clearly display that behaviour. I think it is best to simply ignore them. Those to and fros are often tedious and distracting and rarely lead to insights. And they turn nasty real quick, as witnessed.
I think some of the complexity is deliberately introduced/kept alive by a cabal of fanatic, self-serving folks for distractive purposes.
People are not allowed to see the “real picture”.
The short video at the end of my comment shows CO2 has no/minimal effect in the coldest, driest places on earth,
It should be required in all grade and high schools and colleges, as a wake up call, similar to Martin Luther’s protest proclamation on the Church door against the Roman Catholic Church
“and some comments got me to thinking about how much solar energy is absorbed at the earth’s surface.”
Willis, this short, simple article is a jewel! The hallmark of all your fine work is its clarity and compelling conclusions, easily understood by a broad readership. I say this is a jewel because a simple graph of reliable data speaks for itself to climate ‘science’ and the layperson.
I’ve come over time to the conclusion that we need to try harder to speak to the layperson. The best science in the world will not convince the doctrinaire ideologue crisis climate folk, and is Greek to the layperson who are buffaloed by ‘the science’. These people need info that allows them to enjoin the debate (they do most of the voting and suffer the unnecessary costs and mental anguish over the doom).
Here’s my favorite ‘graphic’ that tells a story at a glance (I tested it on my 14 yr old grandson whose been brainwashed on climate doom for years)
The Tukuyaktuk village white spruce remnant, still rooted, on the far NW Canadian Arctic coast was dated at 5000ybp. It is 100km N of today’s treeline and another 100+km N of living white spruce of this size! This makes Tuk’s location some 6 to 8°C warmer 5000ybp. Considering Arctic Amplification of 2x, the global anomaly was at least 3°C warmer than today. This dendro proxy doesn’t need.any ‘novel’ statistics to give a T° estimate.
Here is another that may assist too.
Scratch marks from glaciers in Central Park.
CO2 was about 250 ppm during glaciation periods, which covered New York City with a km of ice, and water levels were 120 METERS lower.
Long Island Sound, and the North Sea, and the Irish Sea did not exist
CO2 was 291 ppm in 1900, so 41 ppm did all that melting?
I have a bridge…..
CO2 was a feedback to changes in ocean temperatures in the ice core era. Only after 1975 have manmade CO2 emissions as a climate forcing become large enough to affect the global average temperature CO2 as a forcing is a much larger process than the CO2 as a feedback process.
Three main CO2 related processes
CO2 as a feedback
CO2 as a forcing
CO2 seasonal variations in the annual carbon cycle.
Mr. Greene says:”…global average temperature…”
Mr. Greene also says:”I have read a thermodynamics textbook…”
If the second comment is true then you would know that temperature is an intensive property and cannot added to get an average.
Nope and Tyndall’s experiments and Foote’s too, proved that.
What’s more is CO2 can not independently create energy.
The paltry contribution of CO2 to the Cp of the atmosphere is nearly zero.
As shown by my above calculations of retained energy in atmosphere
A picture is worth a thousand words, as that old truism goes.
Thanks for the post.
“The raw strength in their walk …”
About 5 years ago I watched a cougar cross US Route 2 east of Stevens Pass, WA. Side to middle, then to side, and next jump it was gone in the uphill vegetation. Color me impressed!
As the JWT is showing, everywhere we look there are planets beyond counting. This infinity will eventually give rise to a race of creatures that demonize the single most important atmospheric gas on the planet. A gas which regulates the internal chemistry of the creatures themselves A gas that without which they would all perish. Fact is stranger than fiction.
Very nice Willis.
Dear Willis, Your bobcat story reminded me of an incident when I was out hunting wild hogs with a brace of friends. One of my pals was sitting at the bottom of a small hill when a female bobcat ran at top speed over the hill almost into his lap. The female was followed by a giant male with lust on his mind. The female got away while my friend was persuading the male not to shred his epidermis. I was sitting about 40 yards away on the other side of a pond; the first I knew of it was when this monster cat stalked out of the trees and strutted along the edge of the pond. It was so big I thought at first it was a cougar. Then I saw the bobbed tail and mottled fur and knew it was the biggest wildcat I had ever seen. It loped over to the pond’s dam and made its way towards me, striding along with majestic feline grace. It looked me in the eye, totally unafraid of me. The rifle in my lap did not win me any respect whatsoever. I was about to shoulder my rifle when the wildcat turned away and disappeared into a thicket at the edge of the dam. Unforgettable
Nicely told.
w.
How are you defining “available solar energy”?
In the UK we get an average 8 hours of low solar angle daily daylight in winter, and an average 16 hours higher solar angle daily daylight in summer.
The average summer has 500 hours of sunshine, but the average winter has only 160 hours of sunshine.
Well I cannot vouch for your numbers, Ulric. I spent four days in Lancashire recently and I reckon we saw about 18 minutes of sunshine during my visit.
An early summer?
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-temperature-rainfall-and-sunshine-time-series
I believe I specified available TOA solar energy, let me check … yeah, I both used and specified TOA solar.
w.
You specified “ Percentage of top-of-atmosphere (TOA) incoming solar radiation that is absorbed by the surface “
Yes, I did. I looked at how much of whatever solar energy is available during a given season makes to to be absorbed by the surface. Sorry, but I fear your point isn’t clear.
w.
“A larger proportion of available solar energy is absorbed at the surface in winter in both hemispheres.”
So you need to show your calculations of how much solar energy is available in summer compared to winter, and how much is absorbed at the surface in summer compared to winter. Greater cloud cover in the winter is not uncommon.
For some reason every day I read a new Willis post feels like a good day. Something about requiring common sense before diving into the deep weeds.
For example, thinking in Kelvin and limited by common sense, one sees that a complex dynamic system like the Earth’s climate, having varied only by a few percent over hundreds of millions of years, must be dominated by negative feedbacks. No “tipping points”.
Thank you, Willis.
Yep, negative feedbacks all the way. ‘Tipping points’ are used when something dramatic happens like a meteor impact or a large vulcanic eruption (krakatoa). Alarmists use it in times of relative ‘climate’ stability to highlight the coming of some future calamity using warped linear climate models that contradict and/or deviate from actual measurements. And they imply highly dubious claims of things like: a 2 degree Celsius temperature rise will be catastrophic to…fill in the blanks. Then you know you’ve been had.
Willis: “The interesting part is that in both hemispheres, as a percentage of the available solar energy at the TOA, in the summer when it is warmer, the surface absorbs less solar energy … and in the winter when it is colder, the surface absorbs more solar energy.”
Figure 1:
?resize=720%2C675&ssl=1
WR: There is more in Figure 1, something very important. The colder hemisphere is the Southern Hemisphere. Both winter and summer the colder Southern Hemisphere absorbs more available solar than the warmer Northern Hemisphere in the comparable season.
What will happen when all of the Earth cools down, like what happens during a glacial? Simple logics say that both hemispheres would absorb a considerably higher % of available solar energy, at some temperature level probably ending further cooling of the oceans.
If so, the Earth’s (H2O) temperature system has a mechanism preventing excessive warming and another mechanism preventing excessive cooling, keeping surface temperatures within limits.
It would be interesting to relate ocean temperatures per hemisphere Summer/Winter with the % available solar that becomes [ocean] surface absorbed.
Part of the summer winter difference is due to the tilt of the planet, and the effective thickness due to a spherical geometry versus the solar radiation vector.
Thanks, Wim, your contributions are always valuable. You’ve noted a very important point that had bypassed me completely.
The southern hemisphere, per CERES, averages ~ 2.7°C cooler than the Northern Hemisphere. The natural thermoregulatory system is constantly working to reduce the temperature difference between the two hemispheres.
I’ll add a note to the head post.
Best to you and yours,
w.
Thanks Willis, thanks for your post and thanks for your remarks. The following sentence brings me to another important point:
Willis: “The natural thermoregulatory system is constantly working to reduce the temperature difference between the two hemispheres.”
WR: When extremes in temperatures are mitigated by important processes at the surface and when even hemispheres tend to reduce the temperature difference between each other, it seems, there is a constant ‘search’ by the natural system for a certain ‘average’ level of surface (!) temperatures. The regulating molecule is the H2O molecule, abundantly present on the Earth’s surface. It is not a big step to assume that the intrinsic properties of exactly that molecule result in processes that set surface temperatures for each geological period.
The fundamental intrinsic property is that the triple point of the H2O molecule is found at the actual pressure of one atmosphere and 0 degrees Celsius. Water-Earth’s surface temperatures are always close to that temperature.
Phase changes of the H2O molecule (solid, fluid, gas) happen around that temperature. Large quantities of energy are involved: clouds reflect about a quarter of the incoming Sunlight before it can reach the surface, and the atmosphere absorbs about the same quantity, for a large part by shortwave absorption by atmospheric water vapor, a gas. Oceans (fluid) absorb much more incoming sunlight than Land, while evaporation of water vapor is the main cooler of the surface. The quantity of atmospheric water vapor in the atmosphere drives convection at actual relatively low temperatures and convection brings (latent and sensible) surface heat to dry atmospheric layers above clouds from where that ‘excess energy’ efficiently is radiated to space. Sea ice (solid) is the reason oceans never cool below -1.8 degrees Celsius. H2O sets temperatures and its phase changes around 0 degrees Celsius are fundamental for actual temperatures: functions of the H2O molecule (warming or cooling the surface) change when their phase changes.
Phase changes are temperature-dependent. H2O-phase changes set surface temperatures and a change in temperature results in H2O-phase changes.
Compare this to CO2: its triple point is at minus 56.4 degrees Celsius and at a pressure of 5.11 atmosphere. Apart from the small quantity of CO2 molecules at and near the surface, this triple point is why we don’t find CO2 oceans or CO2 clouds on Earth. And so, CO2 misses the most important of Earth’s surface temperature-regulating mechanisms. The mechanisms that finally set surface temperatures.
By its triple point, CO2 can never play the immense role the H2O molecule has in setting surface temperatures: by H2O-oceans, H2O-ice, and H2O-clouds.
My guess: double CO2 only has some initial warming effect on the surface, mostly mitigated by correcting H2O mechanisms: the temperature-dependent H2O-phase changes at work. All that remains is natural variation, simply said: by ‘sloshing oceans’.
Great description of what H2O does and how climate science has missed the boat (sic)!
Well, you can also use Rankine.
Yes, but that’s silly.
Not if you’re someone educated in engineering in the 1970s.
In my experience, the word “Bobcat” and “disappeared” always go together. Occasionally, you’ll get to see them in the wild, but not for very long.
What I want to know is: When is Willis going to get nominated for a Nobel Prize for discovering the fundamental climate-control knob?
Looking at that bobcat, I’d say it had something more substantial in mind than a bunny for dinner tonight.
Willis,
Nice article. Two comments.
One, doing temperature work on measurement uncertainty recently introduced me to your Kelvin point. I have always converted my temps from °F to °C and finally to K. My thermodynamics training in electric engineering and design of boilers was always done either in Rankine or Kelvin. Think of steam tables for critical temperature boilers. Kelvin was easier for conversion. Anyway, guess what, the variance in monthly averages has quite a range depending on what system you use. The values of variance go from small to larger as you go from °C to °F to K. If you think about it, the smaller the numbers are, the smaller the values of variance. I haven’t gotten around to seeing how that affects anomalies. However, I suspect combining anomalies based °F with anomalies from °C will have an effect.
Two, I have noticed the variance of winter months is noticeably higher than summer months. This goes along with what you see in your bar chart.