by Judith Curry
In recent weeks, we are seeing two very interesting debates, both of which involve Richard Lindzen. The first debate involves the recent WSJ op-ed No Need to Panic About Global Warming. The second involves Lindzen’s seminar at the House of Commons.
Lets take a look at the latest response and parries in these ongoing debates.
New York Review of Books
The original op-ed in the WSJ is No Need to Panic About Global Warming. Nordhaus replies in the New York Review of Books Why the global warming skeptics are wrong. The New York Review of Books has published a response by Cohen, Happer and Lindzen entitled In the Climate Casino: An Exchange, which also includes a response from Nordhaus. It is a lengthy exchange, here I focus on the Norhaus’ 6th point related to policy response.
Cohen, Happer and Lindzen:
In his sixth point, Professor Nordhaus says that we did not properly represent his results when we said, “Nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls.” The difference between Professor Nordhaus’s optimal carbon tax policy and a fifty-year delay policy is insignificant economically or climatologically in view of major uncertainties in (1) future economic growth (including reductions in carbon emissions intensity); (2) the physical science (e.g., the climate sensitivity); (3) future positive and negative environmental impacts (e.g., the economic “damage function”); (4) the evaluation of long-term economic costs and benefits (e.g., the discount rate); and (5) the international political process (e.g., the impact of less than full participation).
Professor Nordhaus computes a $0.94 trillion difference between the net benefits of the two policies, just 4 percent of the computed maximum $22.55 trillion in supposed environmental damage. Results are given to three or four numerical significant figures. Yet we do not know the underlying driver for all of this, the climate sensitivity, to even one significant figure.
This relatively small difference, indeed whether it is positive or negative, depends critically on factors such as the five listed above, in particular the value of the climate sensitivity. Professor Nordhaus chooses 3.0 degrees C for doubling of CO2,9 a value that empirical evidence suggests is greatly exaggerated.10 To illustrate the point, for a climate sensitivity of 1.0 degree, a value suggested by a number of empirical studies, Professor Nordhaus’s “DICE” model calculates that the optimum policy’s net benefits drop from about $3 trillion to a net cost of about $1 trillion, and the benefit-to-cost ratio plunges from 2.4 to 0.5. The fifty-year-delay policy is then greatly preferred.
We are asked to take the computed difference between the two policies seriously despite Professor Nordhaus’s finding11 that the optimal policy ultimately “saves” only about 0.1 degree C in global warming relative to the fifty-year delay. Putting this in perspective, 0.1 degree is only about 10 percent of the observed warming since 1850 and is a typical year-to-year fluctuation. This tiny difference is predicted by the DICE model to occur fifty years to two centuries in the future, and yet climate models have failed the test of prediction over twenty years. Furthermore, as outlined in our Op Eds, the strong negative environmental impacts assumed in the DICE model’s economic damage function are acknowledged to be extremely uncertain. There exist potential net benefits of increased atmospheric CO2, especially for a small climate sensitivity (e.g., in agricultural and timber productivity).12
Thus, when one considers the nature and magnitude of uncertainties in the climate sensitivity, the economic damage function, and the discount rate, Professor Nordhaus’s defense of a difference in policies that is tiny compared to these uncertainties is difficult to understand.
The larger point here is that uncertainties in the physical science and the economic science need to be properly considered. As suggested above, a key uncertainty in the economic analysis can be treated by examining the economic impact of realistic values of the climate sensitivity. We have seen that a likely small climate sensitivity turns the optimum policy economic values sharply negative. Mother Nature continues to tell us that the climate sensitivity is likely to be below the range considered by Professor Nordhaus.15 This is not surprising because his choices of its most likely value and its statistical “spread” were strongly influenced by a suite of climate models that have exaggerated past warming and that share common problems. These considerations make Professor Nordhaus’s option of a fifty-year delay the wisest policy choice.
Nordhaus replies (excerpts):
The final part of the response of CHL comes back to the economics of climate change and public policy. They make two major points: that the difference between acting now and doing nothing for fifty years is “insignificant economically or climatologically,” and that the policy questions are dominated by major uncertainties.
But the larger point is that climate-change economics and policies are haunted by vast uncertainties. They mention five: economic growth, physical science, the impacts of climate change, politics, and discounting.
The first is a set of threats from climate change to the “world’s cultural and natural treasures” (to cite the words of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention), among them major glaciers, marine and terrestrial biodiversity, archaeological sites, and historical cities and settlements.
A second and even more dangerous uncertainty is caused by “tipping points” in the earth system. Among the global-scale tipping points identified by earth scientists are the collapse of large ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, changes in ocean circulation, feedback processes by which warming triggers more warming, and the acidification of the ocean.h
The thrust of CHL’s argument is that the uncertainties are likely to resolve in favor of inaction rather than strong action to slow climate change policies, and in any case, they argue, policies are unimportant given the size of the uncertainties.
However, the major problem with the conclusions of CHL is that they ignore the perils of the climate-change uncertainties. To illustrate, think of the issues as if we are playing roulette in a Climate Casino. Each time the roulette wheel stops, we resolve one of the uncertainties. Our best guess is that CO2 doubling will increase temperatures by 3°C, but if the ball lands on black it will be 2°C while a ball on red will produce 4°C. Similarly, a ball in a black pocket will lead to minimal damages from a certain amount of warming, while a ball in a red pocket will lead to much larger warming than we anticipate. On the next spin, a ball in the black will produce low growth and slow growth in emissions, while a ball in the red will produce rapid growth in CO2 emissions. And so forth.
But, in the Climate Casino, the ball also might land on zero or double-zero. If it lands on zero, we find significant loss of species, ecosystems, and cultural landmarks like Venice. If it lands on double-zero, we find an unanticipated shift in the earth’s climate system, such as a rapid disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
CHL suggest in effect that the ball will always land in the black pocket. We might hope that all the balls land to our advantage on black, but the odds of that outcome on five spins of the wheel are only 1 in 50.i Moreover, when the different uncertainties interact, the outcomes are likely to be even more costly because of nonlinearities in the physical system. For example, assume that the climate uncertainties are larger than we thought and that the impacts were much more damaging than we projected. This would lead to disproportionately larger damages than in the “best-guess” case.
The point is that CHL have the impact of uncertainty exactly backward. A sensible policy would pay a premium to avoid the roulette wheel in a Climate Casino. This means that the economic model estimates of the cost of doing nothing for fifty years are understated because they cannot incorporate all the uncertainties—not just the obvious ones such as climate sensitivity but also the zero and double-zero uncertainties such as tipping points, including ones that are yet undiscovered.
It is possible that the world will not warm over the coming years. It is possible that the impacts will be small. It is possible that a miraculous technology will be invented that can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere at low cost. But in view of the evidence we now have, it would be foolish to bet on these outcomes just because they are possible.
Lindzen’s House of Commons presentation
Lindzen’s presentation to the House of Commons was discussed previously here and here. Several blogospheric critiques were pointed out in Part II. There is a new rebuttal out (h/t BishopHill), written by some of the biggest names in UK climate science: Hoskins, Mitchell, Palmer, Shine and Wolf entitled A critique of the scientific content of Richard Lindzen’s Seminar in London, 22 February 2012. Key excerpts:
Introduction
We agree that scientific arguments should be based on physical reasoning and data, without exaggerating either the effects or our certainty (or uncertainty) about them. RSL is right to draw attention to uncertainties in climate change feedbacks e.g. associated with clouds. However, it is wrong to infer from this that we know nothing about these feedbacks. Contemporary science suggests unambiguously that there is a substantial risk that these feedbacks will lead to human- induced surface temperature change considerably larger than 1oC in global average this century and beyond.
Temperature and other data
We do agree with RSL that “obsessing” over the global-average temperature is not useful. However a global average is not exactly “an obscure statistical quantity”. It is certainly true that on time-scales of a decade or less it is usually a residual of positive and negative anomalies in different regions and shows considerable year-to-year variability, associated with, for example, natural variations of sea- surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean. We also agree that “the quantity is easy to abuse”. Unfortunately one of RSL’s slides (Slide 12) on this contains a major error. The slide purports to show that one of the research institutes that performs an ongoing analysis of the global temperature record since 1880 revised its 2008 analysis of past data in 2012 so as to give an increased warming at a rate of 0.14oC per decade. In fact RSL’s figure was obtained by looking at the difference between data from land regions only in the later analysis and land plus ocean in the earlier analysis. Since the land is warming quicker than the ocean, a spurious impression of “manipulation” resulted. RSL has since admitted this error.
Models
At every stage models should be evaluated by exhaustive comparison with observations. The models encapsulate our understanding of the basic science of the climate system, including for example, Newton’s laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics and the quantum theory of radiation. When deficiencies are found at one level then improvements are sought and the lessons learnt should cascade to models at other levels. This is, of course, the ideal: the actual development of the science is rather more irregular but very definitely in this direction. Even the models at the more complete and complex end contain many uncertainties and deficiencies, which are widely recognised within the modelling community, but they are the best guide we have as to how the climate system may change in the future. Their results are not to be accepted in an unquestioning manner; they should be analysed in detail, with the dominant processes behind any climate variability and change thoroughly investigated using observations and simpler models in the hierarchy.
It is interesting that, given his general scepticism over models, RSL is able to “know that the models are correct”, and hence “some of the recent temperature data must be wrong” – Slide 22, in giving a maximum in warming in the tropical upper troposphere – a hot spot. His view is based on the physical argument that the tropical atmosphere will have a temperature change with height consistent with it being neutral to tropical convection. Whatever the cause of surface warming in the tropics, our current understanding, in agreement with RSL’s, is that this warming will amplify into the upper troposphere. Whether this is consistent with observational data from radiosondes and satellites has been a continuing source of debate, and has been used by those who question the validity of models as strong evidence for their rejection. The current understanding is that models and data are probably consistent within the model uncertainty and observational error, but there is still no firm observational confirmation of the “hot spot”. However, RSL uses the possible conflict between models and data to question the accuracy of the temperature data. Surprisingly his focus is not on the data for the middle and upper troposphere but on the surface data, with the suggestion that the warming there is actually less than analyses have given.
Similarly in slides 34-38, RSL surprisingly invokes the lack of change in surface temperatures during summertime in the Arctic as evidence that “CO2 in not a major player”. It has been well-established for decades, using the same models invoked by RSL for his “tropical upper troposphere hot spot” argument, that Arctic summer temperatures are not expected to increase significantlly, in response to increasing CO2 levels, while sea-ice still exists in the Arctic. The physical reasoning is straightforward: once the Arctic sea-ice has been brought to melting point (as it is during summer), any additional energy goes into melting the ice, rather than raising its temperature.
Climate forcing and sensitivity
On Slide 3, RSL claims that the derived sensitivity of climate to a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C, based on the assumption that all the observed warming is due to atmospheric greenhouse gases. This claim would be wrong even without this assumption, because it confuses the transient warming as CO2 rises with the larger warming that would later be achieved as the oceans, with their large thermal capacity, come into equilibrium with the changed atmospheric state. The assumption itself is unjustifiable as it neglects other mechanisms that drive climate change. RSL notes that high sensitivities are possible only by “invoking unknown additional negative forcings from aerosols and solar variability as arbitrary adjustments”. It is indeed true, as is made clear in successive assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that there are considerable uncertainties in estimating the impact of aerosols on climate. However, to characterise these as “unknown” fails to recognise the considerable advances in understanding of the distribution and characteristics of aerosols over recent decades, from individual field campaigns, establishment of new observing networks, and observations of trends in solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface. These present strong evidence that, in total, changes in aerosol concentrations will have cooled the climate system over recent decades. “Uncertain” does not imply “unknown” which in turn does not justify the assumption that their effects are, therefore, zero.
On the other hand, RSL’s assertion that the water vapour feedback may be negative goes against the body of observational, theoretical and modelling evidence which indicates that it is strong and positive. Modelling and observational studies do not rule out the possibility of a negative cloud feedback, though most models suggest a weak to moderate positive cloud feedback (there is not a strong positive feedback in models as RSL insinuates). In short, there is little credible evidence to support the low climate sensitivities that RSL proposes.
Concluding Comments
A pervasive aspect of RSL’s presentation was the conflation of uncertainty with ignorance; in his view, because we are uncertain about some aspect, we therefore know nothing about it and any estimate of it is mere guesswork. In this way we believe RSL does a disservice to the scientific method, which seeks to develop understanding in the face of inevitable uncertainties in our knowledge of the world in which we live. The scientific method has served society well for many hundreds of years, and we see no reason to doubt its validity for trying to quantify the risk of climate change and its impacts on society this century. On this basis we reassert that there is a substantial risk of human-induced climate change considerably larger than 1C in global average this century and beyond. There is nothing in RSL’s talk to cast doubt on the existence of this risk. It is up to policy makers, not scientists, to decide whether governments should take concerted mitigating action to try to reduce this risk. On this we do not comment.
Judge Judy’s verdict: I think that these exchanges have been terrific, getting to heart of the scientific and policy issues, and showing some genuine back-and-forth debate.
With regards to the exchange with Nordhaus, IMO the original 16 and the rebuttal written by Cohen, Happer and Lindzen have come out ahead of Nordhaus in this exchange. In the end, it seems to me that Nordhaus is justifying his argument based upon the possibility of truly catastrophic change on the timescale of a century.
With regards to the Hoskins et al. article. There were weaknesses in Lindzen’s argument, and even some bonafide errors. I agree with Hoskins et al. that Lindzen’s high level of certainty that climate sensitivity is 1C is unjustified. That said, I didn’t find the Hoskins et al. rebuttal to be all that effective. So points go to Hoskins et al. on this one, but far from a knockout.
In summary, both of these public discussions in the media and on the internet have been very very good, and valuable contributions to the debate and discussion on climate change.
So what do the economic numbers look like if we use the “consensus” figure for climate sensitivity? My reading is that the Lindzen figure of 1 is generous. Where is the economic analysis of the money that should be spent on scientific research to clarify the uncertainties. Surely they would take a lot less than 50 years to generate results which would only improve our certainty of atmospheric physics.
Thank you, Professor Curry, for all that you are doing to restore integrity to science. I am increasingly confident that the demise of science, society and confidence in political leaders are linked to decisions to obscure information about the “nuclear fires” that destroyed Hiroshima on 6 Aug 1945 and threatened to consume the rest of the world in the Cuban Missile Crisis in late Oct 1962.
This seems the most viable explanation for:
a.) The abrupt U-turn in astronomy, solar and astro-physics at the end of World War II, and
b.) The subsequent corruption of astronomy, astrophysics, climatology, cosmology, nuclear, particle, planetary and solar science.
Details are posted on my abbreviated profiles:
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/oliver-manuel/47/216/487
Oh! Manuel… once again?
Yes, Jim, the Climategate e-mails and documents released in 2009 solved a sixty-four year (64 yr) mystery: Why the interior of the Sun suddenly changed from iron (Fe) to hydrogen (H) immediately after World War II ended in 1945,
http://www.omatumr.com/AASWashington2002.pdf
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-21
Re: Lindzen, clouds and negative feedback.
Recent measurements from the Terra satellite suggest that cloud heights have decreased by 1% (30-40m) in the last decade, and this would provide a negative feedback, says Professor Roger Davies:
‘In a “negative feedback mechanism”, lower cloud height would allow the Earth to cool to space more efficiently, reducing the surface temperature of the planet and potentially slowing the effects of global warming.’
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/falling-clouds-could-counter-global-warming-20120222-1tmpw.html#ixzz1r6Q8TekM
Have there ever been any negative feedbacks programmed into the models?
I understand the models have paramaterised cloud models – low clouds negative, high clouds positive. The problem is that the accuracy of the cloud models is very suspect, and improving all the time in specific fine resolution cloud models.
Both of these comments are misplaced. “Positive” and “Negative” feedbacks are not programed or parametrized into models, but rather emerge from the model physics (and can be influenced by parametrization schemes, that for example modify convection properties).
There are good physical reasons to expect the presence of low clouds to cool, and high clouds to warm, but that does not demand any specific feedback sign. There’s also an abundant literature discussing the evidence for cloud feedback, and also in evaluating the relative strength of various parametrization schemes and how they can improve. Understanding is incorporated via process-based models and are constantly evaluated against in-situ and remote-sensing measurements. This still remains one the grand challenges in climate modeling and in most big climate problems in general.
What is the difference between being parameterized into the model and being influenced by the chosen paramaterization scheme? Sounds like a distinction without a difference.
As is important in the practice of scientific publication, it is a difference without a distinction; the basis for most publication.
Most papers; more of the same, but different. ie no distinction.
Things like the feedbacks and the sensitivity are properties of the whole system and emerge from the interactions of all the parts of the system.
If one changes a convection parametrisation then that will change the diagnosed feedbacks in the model, but it will also change a whole host of other things as well: the distribution of clouds, the diurnal cycle of cloud development, sea and land temperatures, albedo etc.
The choice of parametrisations is usually done bottom up: a new scheme is introduced because it gives more realistic local behaviour, either by comparison with field experiments, in weather forecasts, or in comparisons with models that can resolve the particular process explicitly.
One could twiddle all the different knobs, swap in different schemes, and run the model over and over again to get a particular feedback – run it top-down, if you like – but that would most likely leave a completely unrealistic distribution of all the interesting parameters at the small scale.
‘“Positive” and “Negative” feedbacks are not programed or parametrized into models, but rather emerge from the model physics (and can be influenced by parametrization schemes, that for example modify convection properties).’
That is not a truthful statement and you know it is not a truthful statement. A model is filled with, a prior, human guesstimates. The way the models are designed is so as to show increasing future temperatures, whilst being trained on past temperatures.
They are not trained on past temperatures.
Steve,
Without regard to model temperature training,
Please, can you quantify what the *future* prediction successes rates of the GCM or other climate models are? What they have been? What predictions and results been cataloged?
Is there any categorized quantification of *real*, prediction-of-the-future, model prediction?
Thanks!
Saying models are not trained on past temperatures is a quibble.
If a model fails to predict past temperatures it is modified or discarded. Any honest arbiter will call that “training”.
Negative feedbacks aren’t programmed into the models. They are programmed out of the models. :-)
Of course this discounts the other means of tweaking the models… if the model doesn’t predict the temperature record then you can adjust the data instead of the model.
In reality both of these are done. Temperature records, proxy reconstructions, and current measurment techniques are subject to modification as well as tweaking of physical models to come into agreement. Anyone who truly believes this does not happen to some extent is naive.
“We seek and offer ourselves to be gulled.” ~Michael de Montaigne
Steven
the models are “trained” on past temps… however, they were not able to get them to predict multidecadel temperature drops and rises properly.
So, they are not very trainable, huh? bad dog!!!
David Springer,
Please list which models have failed to reproduce past temperatures and have for that reason subsequently been discarded.
A list of software that never worked? Really? That’s a bit absurd isn’t it?
Chris,
You keep repeating this bit of AGW dogma, but all you really demonstrate is that if your assertion is correct is that the models are even farther from reality than the current results state. But frankly I doubt your assertion. Something is consistently and systemically wrong with he models, and most especially the confidence believers like you claim the models deserve.
i think Chris is right in a sense but docM’s point about human guesses (minus last sentence as called out by Mosh) is valid. We should just think of this in terms of “scale” and “emergent properties”. The key is if the properties that emerge at large scale in the climate models are the same as the real world.
billc,
You restate my main point well. The models are not working, the people using the mdoles are shown to be massaging data and hiding inconvenient digressions from their models, and hiding this. AGW promoters have gotten a very expensive free ride at the public’s expense. It is time to end the free ride Colose and his ilk have received from us.
“Recent measurements from the Terra satellite suggest that cloud heights have decreased by 1% (30-40m) in the last decade”
Is this the last decade skeptics claim the Earth has cooled?
Because if that’s the case then this represents a positive feedback, not a negative feedback.
“Have there ever been any negative feedbacks programmed into the models?”
Feedbacks are outputs of the model, not inputs.
It is trivial to show that a warmer world is a more beneficial world. It is nearly trivial to show that any effort humanity can make to warm the world will be laudable, worthy of the effort.
So why are we saddled, albatrossed, with shame and guilt? Man deserves plaudits, both for bootstrapping culture and for buffering all the Earth’s inhabitants against chilling.
=========
It’s probably all a western plot to help halt the rise of the advancing eastern economies – make their coal cost more, fill them up with nukes, control their numbers by keeping the winters cold.
Yet again it’s the law of unintended consequences at work with the greenies. They effectively killed nukes and aerosol emissions decades ago with things like the movie The China Syndrome and the acid rain scare. Nukes could have vastly decreased the amount of coal being burned and leaving aerosols in coal exhaust would have cancelled the warming effects of CO2 in those same emissions. Hoist by their own petard. Again.
It’s largely about misanthropy. Greenies hate humans. They think that by limiting cheap energy it will limit the number of people on the planet. This is wrong. When times get tough people have more children, not fewer, so to improve the odds that some of those children will be born fitter and stronger. Thus we find that the nations with the highest birth rates are the poorest in the world and that the wealthiest nations arrive at birth rates at or below replacement level. The greenie agenda will increase the number of people in the world not reduce it. The way to reduce is to raise the living standards of poor countries and the only way to do that (aside from sterilization or other draconian measures) is to make access to energy greater and cheaper which history proves raises living standards lowers population growth.
Thanks again Judge Judy. I couldn’t agree more that the debates in both areas are very good news, involving as they do senior people on both sides. Onwards and upwards.
Judge Judy: In the end, it seems to me that Nordhaus is justifying his argument based upon the possibility of truly catastrophic change on the timescale of a century.
And on the likelihood that intervention can prevent it. It’s possible that $13T spent on reducing atmospheric CO2 would have no effect on atmospheric CO2, but the cost would detrimentally affect our ability to adjust to changes. And even reduce our ability to adjust to the natural variability that will occur in any case.
Cor, hadn’t thought of that.
That was me impersonating certain activists and even it seems to me some scientists. Who is willing to underwrite policy A, B or C for cutting CO2 emissions with a guarantee that they will have effect X on concentrations, let alone globally averaged temperature anomaly? Not to mention extreme events and anything supposedly downstream from GATA. This is very seldom mentioned, for example by Mitchell, Hoskyns and co. Thanks for making up the lack.
You (Judith Curry) should have moderated the debates live!
Judith, you write “I agree with Hoskins et al. that Lindzen’s high level of certainty that climate sensitivity is 1C is unjustified.”
Surely the value of climate sensitivity for CO2 goes to the heart of the differences between the two sides. What Girma’s graph shows is that there has been a signal, from unknown causes, of about +0.06 C per decade since records became available around 1850. The noise in the system is around +/- 0.25 C. Thus we can detect this signal with considerable certainty.
Now the signal from adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is supposedly around, and greater than, +0.2 C per decade. Yet the record clearly shows that this signal cannot be detected. Why is it that we can detect a signal of +0.06 C per decade, but one of +0.2 C per decade is not visible?
The only conclusion that I can come to is that the climate sensitivity for adding CO2 to the atmopshere from current levels is indistinguishabel from zero, And we can make this statement with considerable certainty, since it is obtained from observed data, not the output of non-validated models..
Your conclusion would be demonstrably wrong primarly because you dont understand the temporal evolution of c02 forcing and the lags involved.
We know, in fact Lindzen argues, that from first principles we know that sensitivity ( ECR) is around 1.2C prior to feedbacks. There is no evidence that feedbacks drive this figure any lower and substantial evidence that the figure is higher than 1.2C.
Mosh, once again you give claims with no citations. I know of NO evidence, much less “substantial” evidence, that would allow us to calculate the so-called “climate sensitivity” with any degree of accuracy.
So how about a citation to some of your “substantial evidence”? Please don’t bother linking to climate models, they are only evidence of the beliefs and errors of the programmers.
Mosh has convinced himself that man-made CO2 is the cause of the 20th century temp increase, is the cause of present, purported but statistically non-significant, increases and will continue to drive temperature in future. No other variables need apply.
The fact that temperatures have not only fluctuated but by most historical accounts have been higher that today several during the past two thousand years does not count as in his view [explicitly stated at the Balckboard a couple of years ago in an exchange with me] there is no credible evidence for either the MWP or the LIA – without providing any evidence/citations for that statement other than to deride the multi source non-thermometer evidence that exists in the historical record for both phenomena.
tetris
Mosh seems to have an aversion to ‘historical climatology’ but he’s not alone in this. If it doesn’t emanate from a computer model there are some people that seem to believe its only ‘anecdotal’ and of no value. Anecdotal has become a sub text and pejorative term for ‘of no value’ or ‘unscientific’ even though historical climatopogy was a respected part of climate science long before computer models.
Did you ever catch my artcle that dealt with the LIA?
http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/
tonyb
See julios paper as an example. you need to read more
Who the heck is Julio? You need to cite more.
w.
Willis forgive me for interjecting myself here, but I have a real problem with this “positive feedback” meme. For a start the oceans don’t know where the heat comes from they just know it’s there, so when the world has heated up in previous eras, which despite the Mannic Steady State Theory, it has, why haven’t we seen evidence in the records of postive feedback before? Or have we?
The second issue I have is that a system prone to positive feedback doesn’t start the positive feedback at a fixed point, it is always adding the input (unless of course there are dampeners on the feedback loop that suppress the feedback, but if there are in the case of temperature I’m not sure what they are). So we have warmed by 0.8C in the last 150 years or so, so presumably that has led to more water vapour and we must be experiencing the positive feedback already. i.e. Some portion of the 0.8 C must be as a result of positive feedback, and we should be able to measure it, or at least find it if we look for it. So my question is to Mosh and others if the feedbacks are positive, what portion of current temperature rise is caused by positive feedbacks.
Thirdly, positive feedback is a destructive force, if it has occurred before, then why didn’t it turn the earth into a new Venus? What stopped it, and what is going to stop it going beyond 3C, 7C or 100C.
Finally, while we’re agonising over reducing our CO2 levels China and India, one third of the world’s population are driving CO2 levels to new heights, and they are unlikely to be swayed by warnings of catastrophe, because there people are already experiencing catastrophe’s that we couldn’t imagine in terms, of life span, child mortality, poverty, hunger, lack of education etc. So telling them that it’s important that Tuvula doesn’t disappear into the ocean isn’t going to delay their drive to get their people out of poverty and into the state we’re in where they too can fund thousands of scientist to tell us we’re all going to die unless we become greenies.
geronimo, w.r.t. positive feedbacks you are correct.
A stable system is stable because it has stability; trite but applicable. If you have a mechanism that pushing a steady state in one direction, that’s the way the steady state will go. The opposite of a positive feedback is a true sink, and irreversible component.
Take a kindergarten with 100 kids, and add a trap-door leading to a snake pit. At the end of the school year you will have less children than when you started; the directionality is univectorial. The kinetics depend on the size of the trap and the rugrats random walk, but the thermodynamics is in one direction only.
Same with a positive feedback loop, going one direct is easy and going the opposite way is very hard, so the system will go in one direction.
The best model of positive feedback is biological growth,take a released species on an Island.The species number will come to the same steady state if you introduce one pregenent female or 50.
Mosh said
‘There is no evidence that feedbacks drive this figure any lower and substantial evidence that the figure is higher than 1.2C.’
Please cite this substantial evidence
tonyb.
start with knutti. read more.comment less.
any lgm recon will be a good start. any study on relaxation after volcanoes. seriously tony ur a big boy.start with the bibliography from ar4.
Mosh 1.28
I think you are creating a smokescreen. If I make an unsubstantiated uncited comment you will ask me for evidence, especially if I had claimed there was ‘substantial’ evidence. The rules are the same for both of us. Of course I’ve read the bibliography of AR4 and read through the draft of AR5. You’re surely not going to turn into one of these people who, when they are asked for evidence point to the entire canon of IPCC work?
Of course I already ‘read more’; . I’ve got 8 climate books out from the Met office library at the moment to read and am also ploughing through hundreds of climate papers on the Arctic in preparation for a new article.
I also note what other people say in blogs like this and follow their links and read them. . A couple of days ago R Gates linked to an article behind a pay wall. I went and got it from the Met office library and read it so I could discuss his point . There is already loads of material out there to assimilate and only a certain amount of genuine value. So stop being so cryptic and actually point to the specific stuff you believe to be important. Willis has said the same above about your lack of citations.
As regarding claims of ‘substantial evidence’ generally, it often seems to be a chimera. I had exactly the same problem with the IPCC who asserted there was lots of evidence of abyssal cooling but refused to divulge it as it hadn’t been specfically cited in the AR5 draft. Catch 22..
tonyb
For something simpler start here
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/a-simple-analysis-of-equilibrium-climate-sensitivity/
Or this
Simple model to estimate the contribution of atmospheric CO2 to the Earth’s greenhouse effect,” American Journal of Physics, Volume 80, Issue 4, p. 306 (April 2012)
when you’ve finished reading and understanding those, then start on the AR4 bibliography.
As I said, there is not much evidence for sensitivities lower than 1.2C.
The majority of the evidence that exists argues for numbers higher than this for ECR.
Now, dont get tripped up by confusing TCR for ECR.. and dont expect “proof”. If we had proof that ECR was exactly 3C there wouldnt be any discussion. What evidence there is ( paleo evidence, first order estimation, studies of the observation record ) all points to numbers higher than 1.2C.
Steven, you write “Now, dont get tripped up by confusing TCR for ECR.. and dont expect “proof”. If we had proof that ECR was exactly 3C there wouldnt be any discussion. What evidence there is ( paleo evidence, first order estimation, studies of the observation record ) all points to numbers higher than 1.2C.”
It is easy to say this. It is entirely another issue to provide the appropriate data. What I am saying is that the really good modern data we have from satellite and ground based stations, shows absolutely no sign whatsoever of a CO2 signature. This fact is carefully ignored by the proponents of CAGW. They find all sorts of proxies, and hypothetical estimations. But they carefully ignore the most accurate data that we have.
And the reason is simple. The modern reliable data shows absolutely no sign whatsoever of any CO2 signal; any sign that adding CO2 to the atmosphere actually causes global temperatures to rise. If you claim this modern data proves a CO2 effect, then where is it?
Am I overlooking something or is the simple (and very nice) thought experiment at rankexploits.com making the following reasoning: The difference between black body equilibrium T and actual T is greenhouse effect?
That may be wrong, because earth is not a black body but a gray body. The difference is not large, but large enough for the thought experiment to have a significantly smaller sensitivity.
Mosher
There are a good number of us who do actually read; it’s not just you who are capable doing that. In his piece, SteveF is very careful in wording his conclusions and leaves all sorts of grey zone, so nothing hard there to substantiate your contention. Blowing smoke like that leads nowhere. Will have a look at the AJP article.
And by the way if after all that is known about how the IPCC, its “capi” and their methods you still think that the AR4 bibliography has credibility, you’re not doing your own credibility any favours. Holding up one of the most heavily filtered and cherry picked “bibliographies” as reference is not very clever.
Keep your eye instead on what we already know, and what will no doubt be leaked out as things progress, about how in report #5 everything is being done to eradicate whatever literature exists on any possible impacts of solar activity on climate. Why, because IPCC dogma holds that whatever the sun does, it does not count. Only CO2 need apply.
Reductio in absurdum, and scientifically untenable nonsense.
Steven Mosher: Your conclusion would be demonstrably wrong primarly because you dont understand the temporal evolution of c02 forcing and the lags involved.
What do you mean “would be”? Provide the demonstration. The demonstration will start with some assumptions (possibly the model elaborated in Pierrehumbert’s book.) Show how you know the assumptions are accurate to the degree needed to disprove his Jim Cripwell’s claim. Granted, the claim is based on Girma’s graphs, which you could simply have said were not decisive — but you made a stronger claim which I think can not be convincingly demonstrated.
in fact Lindzen argues, that from first principles we know that sensitivity ( ECR) is around 1.2C prior to feedbacks.
In fact, Lindzen does argue that, from a simple model that you call “first principles”. However, it is not “known” that future CO2 increases will cause future temperature increases: that claim follows from an untested model (well, partially tested but not shown to be terrifically accurate.) Some other untested models have different projections/scenarios/predictions/forecasts/results for future temperature, including short-term and long-term declines. It is assumed from a simple model, but not “known” about the actual atmosphere, that the stationary equilibrium response to a doubling of CO2 is even constant.
Please summarise the nature of the evidence for so that I can convince my mates in the Dog and Duck. They are all very sceptical of AGW and are not inclined to read lengthy academic papers between their beers.
You obviously have it well to hand and have studied it in depth, so are best placed to give us all three short paragraphs on this highly important topic.
Example: We did experiment x and it showed y. Then we did experiment a and it showed b. As conclusive proof we did c and it showed d.
Nature shall do the convincing. The mates at the pub will never be convinced by science no matter how thorough it is when the issue becomes one of potential economic sacrifice. If they really wanted to understand the science behind the current and future energy imbalance of Earth based on increasing greenhouse gas concentrations it is readily available. But when you add potential economic sacrifice into the mix, they’ll find every reason not to want to think the science might be true.
The theory of evolution was mocked and discredited at first because it challenged some people’s religious beliefs. Anthropogenic climate change (and the whole notion that we might actually have transitioned from the Holocene to the Anthropocene) brings out some skeptics because it might require economic sacrifice. Hence, it will likely take increased climate and weather disruptive events until some actually are convinced. And of course, even then, some will never be convinced, just as some people still don’t believe that humans and apes could possibly share a common ancestor.
@r gates
None of my mates in the Dog and Duck have ever expressed the slightest doubts about evolution. Over here in Europe it is not and never has been an issue in my lifetime. I cannot recollect a single instance in any context where it has even been seriously discussed. So there is no point in continuing to whinge about people whose views are not relevant to this discussion.
Your argument seems to be along the following lines:
1. We know that the answers from out theories are all bad future news.
2. You are putting undue weight on the selfish economic consequences of our theory.
3. Therefore we refuse to try to convince you further. We are right you are wrong. Ya Boo!
But I find it very difficult to distinguish your argument form the following
1. We know that our case is very weak and does not stand up to outside scrutiny
2. We must therefore prevent such scrutiny by hiding data and methods and refusing to discuss with people we disapprove of
3. We will therefore cast doubt upon their motives and satisfy ourselves that we have the moral high ground.
My mates at the D&D are not stupid. And while once upon a time a few years ago they were willing to give the ‘scientists’ the benefit of the doubt, as costs increase with absolutely no discernible benefit, they are getting more and more suspicious that the Emperor CAGW is actually naked.
And wittering on endlessly about evolution only reinforces that suspicion.
@r gates
I asked you
‘You obviously have it well to hand and have studied it in depth, so are best placed to give us all three short paragraphs on this highly important topic’
which you have neglected to do. I assume that either you do not have the knowledge you claim to have, or you are wary of revealing it – as per my other remarks. You would rather that we all believe that it is so well known as to need no discussion than show us how weak it is.
‘If they really wanted to understand the science behind the current and future energy imbalance of Earth based on increasing greenhouse gas concentrations it is readily available’
Is just a copout. 3 short persuasive paragraphs on your specialist subject wasn’t a big ask. But somehow it is beyond you.
I expected no better but hoped for more.
The phrase “….the science behind the current and future energy imbalance of Earth based on increasing greenhouse gas concentrations…” is both inaccurate and revealing. It should be the science behind the hypothesis that the energy imbalance is due to increasing GHG concentrations. You are asserting a controversial hypothesis as a fact. And we know the science behind this hypothesis very well. The problem is that we also know the science against it.
There is considerable evidene that feedbacks drive this number lower, Mosher. The highest mean annual temperature ever recorded anywhere is an equatorial sea-level desert with 1-3 inches of annual rainfall.
The whole sensitivity greater than 1.1C hinges on increasing CO2 causing increasing water vapor. That CO2 will increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is not reasonably disputed. However, the empirical evidence is that more water vapor causes a lower mean annual surface temperature. This is because water vapor doesn’t exist in a vacuum and the net effect of evaporation, convection, and condensation is a lower mean annual temperature at the surface.
I have a question.
First Jim Cripwell says:
to which Steve Mosher answers:
So one person says that the real world data does not show a signal from adding more CO2 in the atmosphere, to which the other person states that this is irrelevant because “we know” that the signal is there.
What is a lurker like me to believe? The one guy’s claim based on the real world data or the other guy’s claim based on the belief that we know?
Steve Mosher- Isn’t one of the key foundations of your conclusion that “The sun’s intensity (as measured in space) is reasonably accurate” really incomplete.
For your logic to be sound it would seem to also be necessary to conclude the this intensity is constant over time. That would seem to be an inappropriate conclusion to make based upon available data.
One thing that this layman does not quite get about your arguement Mosh – if CO2 is the forcing, if it is causing a temperature rise, then this rise should start from a warming atmosphere, which then transfers heat to the “rest” of the climate system, right? So lags should be apparent in the ocean heat content, ice melt and so forth, but should be missing from the air temperature data – or did I miss something?
Neil Fisher | April 8, 2012 at 7:17 pm |
CO2 is extremey lagged by mixing and buffering, has huge seasonal variability relative to the increase in CO2 in any one season, is often accompanied by the short-term countereffects of particulates, is often hidden by short-term influences like water vapor feedbacks and albedo feedbacks, and is extremely persistent in a number of ways that do not necessarily reflect in its atmospheric content.
The signal is extraordinarily noisy and the system is complex, chaotic, spread across some four dozen basins that themselves have sometimes multiple regional pseudocycles, and also strata from TOA to bottom of ocean, not to mention biota and land use.
It’s like picking the sound of a mosquito out from a mosquito swarm at a demolition derby while listening to Anthrax on your 8-track tape player, because that’s how old some of the equipment used is.
The atmosphere warming should lead the ocean. The ocean provides a large heat sink and this can accumulate an unrealized warming.
The partitioning of heat between the atmosphere and the ocean has to follow the boundary conditions of the heat equation.The general idea is that it will look like this, which is similar to Hansen’s view back in 1981.
http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/7967/thermaldiffusionbestgis.gif
The diffusion of heat is slow into the ocean so that it has to lag the atmospheric temperature which has a much lower thermal capacity.
It might accumulate an unrealized heating, but warming would probably be recognized.
The oceans absorb in the visible light band to 100m and more. This is the only energy source for heating the oceans.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Topics/energybudgets.html
If you look at the schematic energy budget you will see that emitted IR exceeds ‘back radiation’ by a significant amount. So the oceans lose energy in the IR and it cannot be any other way. Net IR emissions are upward leading to – as IR is emitted and absorbed in the top microns – the cool ‘skin’ effect. Heat can’t diffuse into the ocean at all – the ocean loses heat to the atmosphere which loses heat to space.
As the atmosphere warms a little the back radiation increases and the net loss of heat declines. At the same time evaporation might increase increasing energy loss. If say back radiation increases suddenly by 0.5 W/m^2 – then this is really energy that stays in the ocean for longer – effectively increasing the heat content of the ocean. The energy increase is 1/2 a Joule/s and it is more or less instantaneously. The same thing if clouds change by 2 W/m^2 as a result of ENSO say – the increase or decrease in energy immediately changes the energy content of the oceans by 2 Joules/s.
The world ocean/atmosphere is a coupled system and the concept of heat diffusion from the atmosphere to the ocean is quite wrong.
Robert I Ellison
If I float a black screen on the surface of a swimming pool on a bright day, the pool heats dramatically. This is compared to either a pool without a dark screen on top on a bright day, or a pool with any screen on a dull day.
A heated swimming pool in an unheated enclosure takes more energy to heat to the same temperature than one in an otherwise equivalent heated enclosure.
If I have a glass of cold water next to a hot stove and another in a cool room, the glass of cold water gets warmer faster.
The same if I repeat the experiment with a pair of shallow plates.
Now, if I boil a bucket of water and leave it outside beside another bucket of cold water on a subzero day, the hot bucket freezes first, but that’s different.
These observations do not sound much like what Mr. Ellison suggests.
Clearly, I’m unclear on the concept.
‘If I float a black screen on the surface of a swimming pool on a bright day, the pool heats dramatically. This is compared to either a pool without a dark screen on top on a bright day, or a pool with any screen on a dull day.’
On the remote chance that you are not simply playing games and naming names – let’s see.
The dark cover of course absorbs most of the visible light. The pool can’t lose heat by evaporation. Let’s say it warms up to an equilibrium temperature – it is in local thermodynamic equilibrium with its surroundings. It still must lose more heat in the IR than the pool gets as back radiation because it absorbs and converts SW to heat in the pool. As Homer says we ‘obey the laws of thermodynamics in this house.’ The first law says of course that you can’t create or destroy energy merely change it. The same amount of energy must leave as enters. It just changes from SW to IR.
This is somewhat like the ocean where:
Ein(sw + ir) = Eout(ir) + E(latent) + E(conduc.)
In the pool E(latent) is zero and we will assume that E(conduc) is small relative to the other factors.
Ein(sw) + Ein(ir) = Eout(ir) – so you can see that Eout(ir) > Ein(ir) as it must be if we are to preserve Homer’s delicate sensibility.
The power flux is from the Sun straight into the pool (or black cover) and from the pool to the atmosphere and thence back to space.
In the ocean there can be no diffusion of heat from the atmosphere to the ocean because the ocean is warmer than the atmosphere – you can see that in the net IR flux in the schematic budget I linked to. IR up from the surface of the ocean is greater than IR down from the atmosphere. As well there are latent heat losses for the ocean to the atmosphere.
The atmosphere heating the ocean doesn’t really work directly by diffusion – but it does work by reducing the net IR from the ocean to the atmosphere and therefore more heat stays in the ocean.
‘A heated swimming pool in an unheated enclosure takes more energy to heat to the same temperature than one in an otherwise equivalent heated enclosure.’
The heated pool loses energy to the enclosure – unless the enclosure is hotter than the pool. The second law applies in that heat flows from the warmer to the cooler body. It is all net flows of photons.
‘If I have a glass of cold water next to a hot stove and another in a cool room, the glass of cold water gets warmer faster.
The same if I repeat the experiment with a pair of shallow plates.’
Again this is just the application of the second law.
Now if the water were hotter than the stove – then the water would heat the stove. Perhaps not enough to cook on but somewhat.
‘Now, if I boil a bucket of water and leave it outside beside another bucket of cold water on a subzero day, the hot bucket freezes first, but that’s different.’
The Mpemba – a lad who noticed his hot ice cream makings froze before the cooled makings of his schoolmates – effect is still unexplained. Suffice to say that we are repeating the experiment until we get it right.
“The technician reported that the water that started hot did indeed freeze first and added in a moment of unscientific enthusiasm ‘But we’ll keep on repeating the experiment until we get the right result’ ” – E. B. Mpemba and D. G. Osborne, “Cool?,” Phys. Educ.4, 172-175 (1969).
‘These observations do not sound much like what Mr. Ellison suggests.’
But clearly Captain Kangaroo rides again. Hi Ho Shibboleth – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=blue_horse.jpg
‘Clearly, I’m unclear on the concept.’
Clearly that’s the case. I have noticed a bit of a pattern emerging in that regard – and unlike Girma I have lots of data.
Best Regards
Captain Kangaroo
Bart R | April 9, 2012 at 1:00 am |
Bart, the examples you give above are not relevant to the idea of the atmosphere warming the oceans. A black screen on a pool absorbs all radiation, (its albedo is zero), which then heats the water. No similarity to the real world. The enclosure on your heated pool traps the evaporated water vapour, raising the humidity & slowing any further evaporation, which results in faster warming of the pool. Your post is disinformation to convince people who have no understanding of basic physics, but this layman who was hopeless at physics can see through it. If you have to rely on such methods to advance your theory, than it is obvious your theory sucks.
‘If I float a black screen on the surface of a swimming pool on a bright day, the pool heats dramatically. This is compared to either a pool without a dark screen on top on a bright day, or a pool with any screen on a dull day.’
Sort of,in the real world the pool is rarely clear,we have biology the nearness of the analogy is close,but less important eg Dickey and Falkowski .
One of the clearest examples of biology affecting physical processes is the modulation of upper ocean heating rates by variability in phytoplankton and their associated pigment concentrations and related optical characteristics. Because phytoplankton absorb visible radiation in spectral regions that are relatively transparent for water itself, these photosynthetic organisms are potentially capable of altering the upper ocean heat budget. The extent to which this occurs depends on the concentration and vertical distribution of pigments within the water column, as well as the incident spectral irradiance. Intuitively, one can understand the effect by considering two bodies of water, lying side by side—swimming pools, for example. If one adds black ink to one pool while keeping the second clear, the darker pool will absorb virtually all of the incident solar radiation and become warmer faster. This effect is used to heat water in rooftop solar systems for homes. Similarly, the addition of phytoplankton to the upper ocean can have measurable effects on the rate of heating of the euphotic zone, with consequences for the depth of the upper mixed layer and vertical eddy diffusivity (e.g., Lewis et al., 1983, 1988).
Morel suggest the rates and bio attenuation are important variables eg
At 15m the heating rate in clear oligotrophic water is 100 times higher then in green eutrophic waters. Similar Heat deposition occurs at around 100m instead of 10m in extremely blue and green waters, respectively.In the former case a significant heating may therefore take place below the mixed layer.
This complicates models significantly.
re: floating black screen
Evaporation? Huh.
So.. if I painted the bottom of the pool black, and beside it had another pool with a black bottom.. I should see a dramatically different effect than if I floated a black screen on top?
Because, I can tell you I didn’t.
If you don’t believe me, try it yourself.
And this evaporation thing.. are you saying there are no circumstances where natural oceans don’t have dramatically curtailed evaporation while the air above them is warmer than the water?
Because that flies in the face of my personal experiences too. If you don’t believe me, look it up yourself.
And if the two indoor pools have identical conditions other than the heating of the air.. including ventilation not dissimilar to exchanges above oceans.. how again does your argument work?
I’m sorry, apparently I’m still confused by all these observations that inconveniently don’t fit your explanations.
Second pool with a white bottom, obviously.
And yes, there’s also the comparison of floating black and floating clear screens on pools with white bottoms..
Unsurprisingly, oceans do appear to tend towards thermal equalibration with air; that they seldom get there is that it takes so very very long to heat an ocean with the heat content of surface air.
The idea that hotter surface air doesn’t heat cooler surface water .. that was what was being suggested by someone saying, “Heat can’t diffuse into the ocean at all”, no?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=939
Captain Kangaroo pointed to:
which essentially justifies what Bart is saying.
Bart, Fascinating to actually interact with an imbibing blogger. No other way to explain the Roo’s behavior. Unless the Joey is punch drunk.
Ray Boorman said:
Are you by chance an Australian as well?
Seriously, what is up with the Australians on this site? I realize that Bart implied that skepticism is a national past time down there, but this is way beyond that. This is just clueless grasping at straws.
‘The diffusion of heat is slow into the ocean so that it has to lag the atmospheric temperature which has a much lower thermal capacity.’ Webby
Even scepticalscience disagrees. Heat doesn’t diffuse into the ocean – heat just doesn’t emerge from the ocean. So then he just argues that my link to a bastion of warminista science simply shows they were right despite saying explicitly that they were wrong.
I am well over the endless pointless and trivial remarks from this guy. Someone who seems invariably wrong and treats everything as a tribal bunfight. Perhaps it is an object lesson in the foolish and irelevant but I have wasted too much time on this nonsense to care what the lesson is.
I quite like America and Americans – and I know there is a deep and abiding respect. Our lefties say that we play the deputy sheriff in every idiotic battle on the planet. I say give me a badge and swear me in. But the battle for freedom, democracy and the rule of law is now in our backyards and it is against the neosocialist, authoritarian ideologues of limits and state control.
As a tactic the anti Australian jibes are mere buffoonery intended to incite some sort of retaliation in kind. However – these particular buffoons are fringe dwellers – not representative of a free and vibrant America. They are beneath contempt but still a threat to be regognised.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
So the Captain Kangaroo doesn’t have a deep feel for stochastic processes. That’s why he makes so many mistakes, and why he can’t even tell whether the quote pulling he engages in supports his agenda.
That’s just the way it goes.
This is just double-speak. The rule is that thermal energy will flow from regions of high concentrations to regions of low concentration, in keeping with an increase in entropy.
Nice. Cliche Olé.
‘Sunlight penetrating the surface of the oceans is responsible for warming of the surface layers. Once heated, the ocean surface becomes warmer than the atmosphere above, and because of this heat flows from the warm ocean to the cool atmosphere above.’ op.cit.
Webby – ya got it arse around as usual as we say in Oz. Ya take something simple like the 2nd law of thermodynamics and totally misapply it to the real world in the service of a warminista agenda. You have still got it wrong misunderstanding skepticalscience in this very simple thing.
We have a couple of options:
a) you don’t understand English;
b) you are just hopeless at simple physics;
c) you are lying and indulging in pointless schoolgirl debates.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
Oh – and the ‘cliché’. I wasn’t talking to you but past you.
No what you’ve done is stick a line through 100 years of up and downing and claim the variation around that line is a “cycle” and so you’ve defined the line as the “signal”.
Effectively it’s circular reasoning.
To my various critics. No-one, so far as I can make out, has ever produced a measure of climate sensitivity calculated from observed data. That is, no-one has ever identified a specific rise in global tempratures, and shown conclusively that it was caused by increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. All the measures of climate sensitivity are hypothetical.
What I am trying to point out is that, some 30 years after CAGW was supposed to have started, there is absolutley no indication whatsoever, in the observed data, that the agreed increase in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, has had any effect on global temperatures.
What surprises me is that people like Dr. Curry cannot see that this is true, and cling to the mistaken idea that we can base firm conclusions on any sort of study that is not based on observed data.
And I am equally surprised that nobody ever seems to have thought of trying some experiments about anything at all in climatology Having done some fancy stuff with IR spectrocopy and CO2, all the experimentalists they seem to have abdicated in favour of pure theoreticians.
The way to do science is to test Mother Nature by experimentation, not just by sitting in computer rooms hypothesising after the fact. Science is an active, not a passive pursuit.
@Jim Cripwell
The radiative forcing of CO2 should be no different than any other forcing. Climate sensitivity is supposed to be a natural characteristic of the earth system. Actually there have been recent volcanic eruptions in which forcing could be reasonably estimated en therefore response to forcing reasonably well separated from the forcing itself. It is not much, but at least it is something.
I’ve asked (and argued) the same point on other blogs but as yet have not been pointed to any definitive proof of such. Maybe someone here will be able to do so without resorting to Ad hominems or argument from authority.
Judith,
One point in Hoskins et al. that caught my eye was:
>>A pervasive aspect of RSL’s presentation was the conflation of uncertainty with ignorance; in his view, because we are uncertain about some aspect, we therefore know nothing about it and any estimate of it is mere guesswork. In this way we believe RSL does a disservice to the scientific method…
As a physicist, it seems to me that they are simply wrong here, scientifically speaking. if we do not have established results, then, yes, we have ignorance. Of course, if you have a good, well-tested statistical model, you may be certain about your statistics, but uncertain about any particular role of the dice. But, obviously, there has been no chance to gather such statistics by multiple experiments in which we again and again subject the earth to the same experiment with increasing CO2 and study the statistical distribution of the results!
I think it was the probability theorist Richard von Mises who distinguished between “probability” and “uncertainty,” the first being the mere statistical uncertainty of a role of the dice (when the dice are known to be fair), the second being the “true” uncertainty where you do not even know the statistical distribution.
It is obvious from these exchanges that all informed people agree that climate change is in the second category. I think a lot of the debate consists of trying to evade that basic fact and somehow coming up with an analytic way of transmuting real ignorance, which is very hard to handle, into statistical probability, which we feel more comfortable with.
But, even in principle, I do not think such a transmutation is possible.
Incidentally, a related question is: can we really ever get the science good enough to resolve these questions? Of course, because of the complex, non-linear, chaotic nature of the equations governing the weather, no one believes that we will ever have weather forecasts good enough to predict, say, whether it will be raining in Boston on a particular date eighteen months from now. Since climate is really just averaged weather, one could therefore suspect that climate might be forever intractable to successful modeling.
Of course, that well might be too pessimistic: perhaps, the unpredictability of the weather can be averaged out over the long term, and climate will turn out to be easier to model than the long-term weather. Certainly, that happens empirically, or it would make no sense to talk of “climate” at all.
But, speaking as a physicist, I have trouble seeing how this can be achieved in terms of any sort of mathematical model. I suspect that truly successful long-term climate modeling might turn out to be similar to controlled, sustainable, practical nuclear fusion, the energy source which has been “just around the corner,” for my entire lifetime, more than half a century: as the joke goes, “nuclear fusion is the technology of the future — and always will be!”
It may be that really good climate models are the technology of the future, and always will be. I think this possibility needs to be kept in mind more than it often is: of course, this does not rule out empirical, phenomenological studies that enable us to understand more and more about pieces of the climate, even if the one grand “Theory of Everything” is never achieved.
Perhaps the slogan should be: “Leave climate to the empirical climatologists, not to computer programmers and physicists like me.”
Dave Miller in Sacramento
Dave, I agree with you re the ignorance issue, this is not sufficiently acknowledged in the climate science assessments.
It’s rather worse than that, Judith. A large part of the CAGW edifice is built on a rejection of Dave’s position. The catastrophists say certain kinds of uncertainty are not forms of ignorance. Dave seems to say they are simply wrong, not that the matter needs more ‘acknowledgement’.
tomfop,
While I agree with your point, Judith’s more diplomatic way of phrasing it may be more effective in communicating that point.
Your (and my) more brusque approach to communication tends to cause people to lump us in with the Myrrhs and the Dragonslayers. Judith seems more skilled at conveying the point that she really is not denying the established physics, but rather merely pointing out complexities, failures to properly test the models, etc. If she gets those points across, well, I see no reason to criticize her for using a different tone than the tone that comes naturally to you or to me.
Dave
Dave I agree totally with what you have said because if the language is not sufficiently civil, the debate becomes personal and people will switch off. Hence if anyone wishes to be more effective in putting their point across then they must address the issue in a neutral tone without recriminations.
Dave–
I am not sure about who gets priority on risk versus uncertainty. In Frank H. Knight’s 1921 book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, the distinction was central and crucial. I find one assertion online that Richard von Mises may have been talking about the same distinction as early as 1919, but do not know where, or how. At any rate Knight didn’t cite R. Mises, and we economists generally credit Knight. It could be a case of independent insight, which does happen.
NW,
Funny coincidence that you bring up economics — I think I first heard about R.Mises’ work in a book by his brother, the economist L. Mises! As I recall, the brothers generally disagreed on philosophical issues, but R. did convince L. of this particular distinction.
I suspect that the point has occurred to numerous people independently over the decades.
In any case, it is an important distinction: we are very lucky when we actually possess a solid statistical description of some phenomenon. Usually (i.e., in most of real life outside the lab), we don’t.
Dave
physicistdave | April 5, 2012 at 5:22 am |
We’re never going to possess a solid statistical description of all of climate.
Our knowledge will always be bounded, and within those bounds both probability (we have a high degree of confidence in the probability distribution, for example we’re pretty sure of the temperature of the freezing and boiling of water under various conditions of pressure) and uncertainty (whether we have better or poorer grasp of the probability distribution, or not enough information at all to speculate on probabilities at all, or don’t even recognize there’s a phenomenon to measure — remember the old days, when we didn’t even know there _was_ Dark Matter or Dark Energy? Wow were we ignorant then, compared to now!) or even realize we’re measuring something that isn’t even really there (someone has a ‘Republican Candidate Sex Appeal’ rating chart!).
While an extreme reductionist might be satisfied with throwing “Uncertainty” up on the wall and leaving it there, it’s been my experience that this often is a dodge, where the uncertainty complained of is in a category easily dealt with by competent analysis, simply to avoid coming to the patent conclusion.
However, in this case, I’m good with shelving the entire CAGW temperature debate as moot from a Policy point of view. Uncertainties or no.
After all, with it or without CAGW, CO2 emission is swept away by the simple and more beneficial expedient of privatizing the carbon cycle per capita.
That’s it. Keep on hammering that theme, as light bulb moments will start to click on. IMO, crude oil prices will also keep going up and up (exclusively due to depletion) until we learn how to respond to the privatized cost properly.
Bart R | April 5, 2012 at 11:19 pm
“However, in this case, I’m good with shelving the entire CAGW temperature debate as moot from a Policy point of view. Uncertainties or no.
After all, with it or without CAGW, CO2 emission is swept away by the simple and more beneficial expedient of privatizing the carbon cycle per capita.”
Bart, ‘moot’ means debatable. Don’t know if that’s what you mean…
How so the privatizing the carbon cycle per capita? Can you espouse on that?
jim | April 7, 2012 at 1:21 am |
“Bart, ‘moot’ means debatable. Don’t know if that’s what you mean…
How so the privatizing the carbon cycle per capita? Can you espouse on that?
Yes. I meant wastefully and pointlessly moot, as in the sense of “not admitting of a final decision.”
Policy loves finality in decision. Makes Policy feel all tingly inside. The Policy preference, if it has a choice between undecideables details and clear big pictures, is to deal with the big picture.
And while I’m already espoused to the precepts of Fair Market Capitalism that engender the privatization argument, I can hope you become espoused to it, and will gladly expound on the privatization case for the carbon cycle:
A longish case is at http://prezi.com/jpced0jg1chv/carbon-pricing/ — I’d be glad of any questions or comments that may help me improve my presentation.
The short case can be expounded on thus: some benefit little from the unpriced lucrative uses of the carbon cycle, a rivalrous, excludable resource; others benefit disproportionately. This is patently unfair, and hence damages the entire precept of the Fair Market economy. The only solution to protect the integrity of the Fair Market Capitalist system is to privatize the carbon cycle for lucrative uses so far as is possible.
This can be done about 70% by straightforward |fee per unit sold and dividend per capita| with the state taking nothing to general revenues and price level determined by maximum revenue level alone, plus;
about 25% |strictly bounded cap & trade| on those impossible to administer uses using the price level determined under Fee & Dividend, plus;
the 5% remaining, should a state so choose, recovered through Pigouvian taxes on proxy activities linked to CO2E emission, such as luxury taxes on extreme vehicles, concrete edifices, inefficient buildings, and asphalt paved surfaces, plus;
a transition program of infant industry export insurance and import restrictions to equalibrate across national borders where foreigners poach from the carbon cycle by failing to fully privatize in their industries.
This plan a) compensates the owners of the carbon cycle for the increased Risk of its overuse and for the depletion of their share, to stop the redistribution of wealth from all to a few flagrant free riders; b) imits the abuses of cap & trade systems, which are inherently vulnerable to scams and inefficiency where they are implemented as the only solution to a resource issue; c) avoids the plague of command and control regulation by putting decision power into the hands of those who ought have it – individual buyers and sellers acting democratically in the Fair Market; d) restores the level playing field which is now abused both by Free Riders within nations and by those who dump carbon-intensive products by failing to price the process that disposes of industrial waste.
Thanks, Bart. What you say is a little confusing (contorted). I’ll probably like to ask a question about it, in a moment.
Thanks for the espousement.
Bart,
“A longish case is at http://prezi.com/jpced0jg1chv/carbon-pricing/ — I’d be glad of any questions or comments that may help me improve my presentation.”
First, re the above: I The ‘prezi’ presentation is a little difficult for me. My criticism of it is that the cartoons (the literal, descriptive, use of the word; not the dismissive meaning) and the motion graphics are used too much. ‘Conservation is the sole of brevity.’ Save the ‘affects’ for when you most need them!
I understand your idea. I desire conservation of resources and and non-human environs. Your idea should be an ‘economical’ means to that end. I’d even espouse it, if I got to write the ‘vows’.
A long time ago I was a radical utilitarian, probably much more radical than you are now. With age, I saw what the greater good of utilitarianism always and ultimately devolves into; a fight over who gets what. I’d go along with your scheme, if I get to decide ‘who gets what’. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’m much more parsimonious than you are. I never jet plane anywhere. I just sit passively in a solar home and read dead tree books; they sequester carbon and only consume gravity, the ultimate non-exhaustible resource. (and I garden my vegetables.) I’m stricter than Calvin and Hobbs. I’ve got only a very small manbear to be gored. No loss that I care about..
That’s the problem. I agree with your plan, and I’ll test your catholicity and doggedness when you install it. But what about every one else. How do you convert them? And after we’re all inside the walls, what will your cathedral be then? It will be our republican democracy, something that every one of us espouses, but we all fight over the true meaning of it. That is; what goodies we get from it… and the ultimate lack of meaning (everyone gets them, no meanness, no meaning)
I agree that incentivizing conservation is an imperative. For our own goodness to the environs and for the sake of future people. I don’t think Nordhaus’s roulette double-zero is a winning argument, to reach that conservative end. And our current path of environmentally industrializing indulgences is worse than wrong!
.
Thinking of your prezi animation, do you know the multimedia and film work of Ray and Charles Eames? They knew impact well.
Bart, if your stomach can take anymore of this, I have a suggestion. your explanation of privatized capitation, above three posts, is not very understandable. It would improve your argument to streamline it. eg no compound sentences.
My suggestion to present it: explain the propose of your plan (and leave “fairness” out of it, fairness is for you-know-whats, close relatives of pixies, if you know Welsh and history)(no one else cares about impersonal fairness) next show the allocations and disbursements of your plan of privatization of carbon exhaustion, in a simple way that shows that they add up to 100%. conclude with the benefits of your plan. do leave out all of the jargon, the jargon makes it read like any page from the fat volume of Marx, where he calculates the value of beets in China… the jargon is sales put-off. make it a strong, simple presentation. The most successful advertising sells to peoples’ insecurities.
Hope that helps…
jim | April 8, 2012 at 12:28 am |
I ought explain, the prezi is intended, as are most of mine, as a whiteboard exercise or mind-map to work out the kinks in my (as you’ve observed) very contorted and confusing mentation on subjects.
Indeed, I’ve exceeded the practical limits of the prezi format with the current whiteboard clutter. Imagine — me, cluttered!
So I will take economy of message to heart, in a later incarnation. To paraphrase Samuel Pepys, I apologize for the length of this communication; had I more time, it would be briefer.
I expect rather than the sparse geometry of the Eames’, I’ll try to integrate Tufte with Scott McCloud at that juncture. Only using small words.
I see the issues you introduce, but as I say in my prezi, the solution to this one problem cannot resolve all problems, or undo every mess, or reduce every complexity and make life wonderful for everyone.
Slicing the Gordion Knot got Alexander the Great pretty far.. but in the end he still had other problems. I don’t see the point of contorting all of them with just this one single issue.
Bart, as Pepys said, shut-up and talk to me. No… that was Feyman’s wife, calculating… No, that is my wife… right now.
Bart, in the big picture, what is your ideal quantity/projection for co2 emission reduction, world wide? Ideal? And achievable?
“A calculated ambiguity that will be clearly understood…”
don’t think you want to be “Green Haigs and Ham”
jim | April 8, 2012 at 2:03 am |
Bart, in the big picture, what is your ideal quantity/projection for co2 emission reduction, world wide? Ideal? And achievable?
I don’t care.
So long as the genius of the democratic will of the Fair Market decides it, my only objective of any import in this debate is achieved:
Integrity is restored to the Market by the distortions endemic to every part of the fossil sector being expunged.
That’s the problem, I do care, when I listen to the dire predictors.
I don’t want to nibble around the edges if we’re all going to die whole hog.
(nice when I say this, but your last sentence (word, not justice) doesn’t have any meaning, that I can divine)
Bart,
“A calculated ambiguity that will be clearly understood…”
don’t think you want to be “Green Haigs and Ham”
I ambiguously dropped it in the wrong spot, above, dooh!
Bart R | April 8, 2012 at 2:18 am |
“…restored to the Market by the distortions endemic…” So says Sam I Am.
I guess you mean ‘Integrity is restored… by the expunging of fossil fuel distortions?’ (my version stinks, too… best to start afresh)
jim
I can’t help the dire predictors, or those obsessed with them.
The best I can do it furnish the technical solution to the technical issue in question.
That so many think there’s some other question, not my fault, and not much I can do about it.
The technical issue of climate that people demonstrably have a driving compulsion to act on is the sense of inequity to do with allocation of scarce climate-impacting resources. Whatever climate impacts there will be or may be or have happened? Immaterial to the solution.
It’s a tried-and-true solution. It’s a classic, traditional solution. It’s been shown to work without failure in every case where it’s been competently applied. Heck, even some broadly incompetent implementations have eventually worked themselves out.
Privatize. Use the Law of Supply and Demand to fix the price level. Let the Market decide the outcome. Hunt down and eliminate cheating.
All else in climatology, fascinating though it may be, is subsumed by the act of correcting the inverted system of incentives.
jim
In plain talk, that means the horse goes in front of the cart.
Yea, my brain’s in my head, and my feets’ in my shoes. And carts (calks) are in the horses’ shoes.
I don’t blame you for any obsessions; I asked you thus to put you someplace on the map. You defend Nordhaus, resident of an inner circle, but your own proffered place seems farther from… the center. Good by you.
Do we agree on this; conservation for the sake of the plants, animals, and people? I agree with a market price for CO2, for the sake of conservation, so long as there is no distortion of the market.
So maybe we agree on something important, without any climate exercises? (being exercised by climates)(climate exorcisms?) If so, the rest of the blog is a mighty large bunch of angles dancing…
“transmuting real ignorance, which is very hard to handle, into statistical probability, which we feel more comfortable with.”
And which, unlike a finding of nullity, is llikely to get you your next grant, or politically useful scare story.
Brick by brick, a wall of statistics and faulty logic has been built to obscure the Null Hypothesis.
10 C??
Don’t count on it.
Maybe all the fuss is just over a typo :)
saw that, but I don’t think it’s a typo
Not a typo – a pdf transcription issue. It was 1°C. See the pdf linked.
50 years is a long time in science. Lawrence Livermore Lab plans to get fusion breakeven in the next year. In 50 years we may have fusion power plants dropping greenhouse gas emmissions to low levels in the developed world. Lots of uncertainties in the future but wouldn’t it be grand.
Scott,
I don’t know what is new at LLNL. But in other times and places, even when I was much younger, ‘breakeven’ was very often a year away… some thing to do with calendars and budgets…
The running joke about fusion is that is it always 50 years into the future. That was the actual number that was usually trotted out by the physicists in question. I haven’t heard it lately, but it used to be pretty common to hear that.
Jim, I don’t know anything real about the LLNL NIF. Before that, I saw a few magnetic confinement experiments. After being trotted around, and maybe hearing the capacitors discharge (dramatic effect), we’d be told that break-even was soon. (What went untold to the unknowing; theoretical “break-even” what was meant, there were no glimpses of any means to recover the excess energy) I do remember a couple of ‘next year’ projections. The cynic in me thought “next funding cycle, and then untill the yet next one” .
“Fusion research has been under way for
a little more than 50 years. Some believe
that commercial fusion power is still an-
other 50 years away.”
http://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion50yr_dean.pdf
Some people like me think that fusion power generation is a humbug. And will always be so.
Project the LLNL NIF test chamber into a design of a practical reactor. Cooling or heat extraction has to happen somewhere. Tritium breeding has to happen somewhere. The reactor/test chamber is a sphere with 200 holes and windows in it “…more glass than wall”
Magnetic confinement doesn’t suffer this, But both will need continuous evacuation and fuel conditioning (recycling). The whole fuel conditioning plant will be ‘hot’. Tritium is not benign.
Neutron economy precludes sustained tritium – deuterium reactions, only one neutron to breed another tritium; how many of them can be caught?. (When the reactor wall is mostly holes and light paths?) Requisite deuterium – deuterium reaction quantities are a big step up.
Fission is the very well practiced answer to the power generation question. Fusion is for weapons!
‘Lawrence Livermore Lab plans to get fusion breakeven in the next year’
Hmm
Sounds like a notice in the Dog and Duck
‘Free Beer Tomorrow’
And after 30 years very regular attendance, I’ve yet to see it.
And you fall for it, every time?!
just in fun!
I hope you’re right, Scott. I think most physicists think it should be possible, but it certainly has proven enormously more difficult than was originally anticipated.
Dave
Dave,
It is being much more difficult than projected, that I can see. Scaling is a big thing. I know nothing about inertial confinement. But for magnetic confinement, scaling hasn’t happened. The proposed international consort is maybe a five-fold increase from initial pratice, nothing to gain much traction.
Scott, LLL and others have been promising fusion energy in a few years for about 60 years. I doubt if fusion is any closer now than it was decades ago.
“Lawrence Livermore Lab plans to get fusion breakeven in the next year.”
ROFLMAO – economic breakeven is maybe in the next millenium however, if ever
Little trumps big.
Check the work at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, (LPPhysics.com), a comparatively miniscule entirely private outfit using DPF (Dense Plasma Focus). It is on the verge of graduating from D-D tuning and experimental work, having attained the highest reaction temps ever (150kev ions, = 1.8bn K), to aneutronic pB11 fuel. Peer-reviewed, published. Using a reaction core you can hold in your hand.
If scientific break-even is attained in 2012, as planned/hoped, about another 4-5 yrs. should see a commercial design for licensing to any and all mfrs world-wide, at very reasonable cost.
Distributed, dispatchable, zero-waste, direct current generation, no radioactivity (below b/g after 9 hrs for maintenance/refueling), at <10% best current costs anywhere.
Cheap solution;
Stop spending money on windmills and solar.
Put a 10% on all non-gas fossil fuels and use that 10% to encourage use of natural gas.
Automatic eventual drop of 25 – 50% in CO2. Since shale gas has resulted in really cheap gas, there will be no net cost.
I picked up a news clip on the LLNL project for anyone interested in what could yet be ahead in 50 years of scientific uncertainty. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7403916n&tag=contentMain;contentBody.
100 years ago the car was starting to replace the horse.
And electric cars were the coming thing!
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1049744_thomas-edisons-1912-electric-car-gets-a-chance-to-shine
Scott – I agree heartily, but it would help if the multiple approaches in the US fusion budget weren’t being cut in order to put all the fusion eggs into one huge, international (and probably unmanageable) megaproject.
http://peakoil.com/alternative-energy/us-cuts-domestic-funding-for-fusion-research/
cui bono,
I disagree. If practical fusion power is ever achieved, public acceptance of deployment of it and nuclear risk would still be difficult. International mega-blame would probably help acceptance. Spread the risk of blame wide and thin, across all borders.
Jim,
I don’t quite understand.
If it works there’s no need for blame.
If it doesn’t work there’s no need for ‘public acceptance’.
What I mean is that if it works, there will not be universal public acceptance. Just as with industrial processes today, none are universally accepted. Not even childhood vaccine. If fusion power generation does work, much of the population will fear it, and will blame ‘bad guys’ for inventing it and promoting it.
If the bad guys have many faces and languages and backgrounds, fusion power maybe could successfully deployed.
If the bad guys are the US government nuclear (weapons) labs people, LLNL formerly and maybe still a nuclear weapons developer, international acceptance and employment of fusion power will never happen.
An mega-national project is not a bad thing, if it works…
I hope this explains better what I wrote above!
Temperatures records measured at the edge of the Arctic Circle
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/RF.htm
do not show any room for the CO2 feedback input; even Lindzen can be wrong.
Milivoje :
Interesting chart. I just did a similar exercise using Norwegian data from http://www.eklima.no to check some numbers in an incendiary article by Lisa Marie Norgaard. I also found no discernible trend in the temperature. It doesn’t matter whether you look at Northern Norway or South-east Norway. Are the GISS adjustments that potent?
I wouldn’t think so. Temperatures in the far reaches of the North Atlantic may be directly controlled by the Icelandic low.
You may find some of my research if you follow this link:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/theAMO-NAO.htm
I’m heartened by any actual debate. This is progress and in my opinion is
to be appreciated as a sign that things are finally changing. That said, the AGw movement is like a massive ocean liner. It’s going to take a very long time to turn it around. The biggest hindrance of course is the many billions of dollars devoted to “climate research.” As long as the government is in effect paying scientists to support Agw it’s going to be slow going.
As a warning, there is what appears to be a copy error:
Presumably that should be 1, followed by a degree sign.
It is one degree. It’s not a copy error. It’s how the kind-of superscript oh comes out when the kind-of superscript can’t be resolved.
Dan Hughes, what you described is a copy error. It’s an error introduced during the copying process. In the original text, it was one thing. When copied, it came out as another.
He shouldn’t have superscripted the letter “o”. There’s a UTF character ‘°’ made specifically for this. So superscripting required.
The problem is that the standard US keyboard is way too simple.
How about a keyboard that can do this: ° ç¢üèöéêÄ£ñô§€$£@#[]{}¬ and more, directly by just pressing one or two keys.
It should be a simple thing to produce a specialized keyboard for scientists that has all the main signs on the keys.
Then one would not have trouble distinguishing 1°C from 10 deg C.
Don’t use the numeric superscripts. Use the degree symbol. On a PC, Alt-248 (numeric keypad). ° Then 1°C won’t look like 10C.
Well, this is strange and an odd coincidence, I was preparing a comment on the Bishop Hill Post and up pops this post by Professor Curry.
At the Bishop’s, and noted in Curry’s post above, is this sentence by “some of the biggest names in UK climate science”:
en cap su late: express the essential features of (someone or something) succinctly
This is yet another display of Bumper Sticker Climate Science. The number of mis-characterizations and omissions are many: so many that it is difficult to encapsulate these in a Blog comment.
Newton’s laws of motion are not included in the models. Instead, models of these laws form the basis of part of the descriptions of fluid motions. And these models are significantly less effective than the basic formulation of these laws. Actually, when the subject is fluid motions, the reference should be to persons other than Newton. The basic mathematical formulation of the generally accepted equations for fluid motions contain only material properties which describe the nature of the fluid. That is, in addition to the dependent variables the equations contain only physical properties of the material and these relate to diffusion of momentum and thermal energy.
For the all-prevailing turbulent flows of interest, characterization by use of “Newton’s laws of motion” does not even begin to correctly describe the situation. In addition to replacing sub-grid gradients in driving potentials with empirical-data based parameterizations, and replacing / supplementing the physical properties with parameterizations, the continuous-equation system itself cannot be closed at the fundamental level.
In contrast to the sentence quoted above, the models are useful only to the degree that the numerous overarching parameterizations are good representations of states that the material has experienced in the past, and that these states are sufficiently close to those that will be encountered in applications of the models.
The characterization completely ignores the fact that the numbers produced by the models are the results of numerical calculations of very large systems of algebraic equations. These numerical methods do not automatically carry over from the continuous-equation domain the fundamental properties of conservation of mass and energy. The theoretical and practical problems associated with numerical methods are far more difficult than those associated with development of the continuous equations. The focus in any discussions about the model results should be on fidelity of the discrete equations to the fundamental requirements of the basic laws ( mass and energy conservation, for examples ) and the fidelity of the numbers relative to actual solutions of the discrete equations.
These comments can be illustrated by the situation with clouds. All aspects of the vertical motions of clouds are parameterizations. Newton is nowhere to be seen. Additionally, all aspects of the physical phenomena and processes associated with cloud formation and precipitation from clouds and everything else are based on parameterizations. The critical importance of clouds relative to future states of the climate has been well documented, including the importance of the altitude of the cloud tops. Modeling of a critically important aspect of climate is solely based on parameterizations: not the fundamental formulation of Newton’s laws of motion and the laws of thermodynamics.
As for “the quantum theory of radiation”, well that is about as far from a proper characterization that one could come up with, in my opinion. Again, in reality, parameterizations rule. And they rule again in a critically important aspect of climate. Modeling of all aspects of the all the physical phenomena and processes associated with aerosols are based on parameterizations. How does one apply the quantum theory of radiation to a situation that involves finite-size aerosols in a radiatively-interacting radiative-energy transport media such as our atmosphere?
I was wondering about where I could leave this comment because it does not fit into the previous discussion of Lindzen’s presentation. It might not fit here, either, and Professor Curry can snip at will.
Corrections for all incorrectos will be appreciated.
Dan, thanks for your comment
Absolutely fabulous Dan. Coarse grained numerical models of quantum processes? This is arm waving gibberish.
Dan,
Very good comment.
That’s exactly what has bothered me about inferences from ‘butterfly effect’ numerical models.
As Basil Fawlty would say, “Everything else OK?” (To the hotel inspector who has just listed a large number of atrocious health and safety problems. Just this is enough to torpedo the GCMs.)
Dan Hughes
Excellent observations.
RE:
A detailed reality check of the global optical depth shows no major trends over the last 61 years based on available data. See Ferenc Miskolczi
The stable stationary value of the Earth’s global average atmospheric infrared optical thickness Slides 16-19.
This complements the evidence of -1.6% decline in cloud cover in China.
Dan Hughes: These comments can be illustrated by the situation with clouds. All aspects of the vertical motions of clouds are parameterizations. Newton is nowhere to be seen. Additionally, all aspects of the physical phenomena and processes associated with cloud formation and precipitation from clouds and everything else are based on parameterizations. The critical importance of clouds relative to future states of the climate has been well documented, including the importance of the altitude of the cloud tops. Modeling of a critically important aspect of climate is solely based on parameterizations: not the fundamental formulation of Newton’s laws of motion and the laws of thermodynamics.
What do you think of these simulations at Isaac Held’s blog?
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/blog/isaac-held/2011/10/26/19-radiative-convective-equilibrium/
As I noted over at Bishop Hill the above is not particularly controversial as far as the scientists involved in the rebuttal are concerned . I’ll take the liberty of reposting one reference (and in particular note comments around uncertainty – see the second issue raised below) even though I think this series received some attention here at the time it was held.
“A very grand challenge for the science of climate prediction”
Palmer, T
http://www.newton.ac.uk/programmes/CLP/seminars/082310001.html
Abstract
A rather prevelant picture of the development of climate models throughout the 20th Century, is for the idealised, simplified, and hence mathematically tractable models of climate to be the focus of mathematicians, leaving to engineers, the “brute force” approach of developing ab initio Earth System Models. I think we should leave this paradigm in the 20th Century, where it belongs: for one thing, the threat of climate change is too important and the problems of predicting climate reliably too great. For the 21st Century, I propose that mathematicians need to engage on innovative methods to represent the unresolved and poorly resolved scales in ab initio models, based on nonlinear stochastic-dynamic methods. The reasons are (at least) threefold. Firstly, climate model biases are still substantial, and may well be systemically related to the use of deterministic bulk-formula closure – this is an area where a much better basic understanding is needed. Secondly, deterministically formulated climate models are incapable of predicting the uncertainty in their predictions; and yet this is a crucially important prognostic variable for societal applications. Stochastic-dynamic closures can in principle provide this. Finally, the need to maintain worldwide a pool of quasi-independent deterministic models purely in order to have an ad hoc multi-model estimate of uncertainty, does not make efficient use of the limited human and computer resources available worldwide for climate model developement. The development of skilful stochastic-dynamic closures will undermine the need for such inefficient use of human resources. As such, a very grand challenge for the science of climate prediction is presented in the form of a plea for the engagement of mathematicians in the development of a prototype Probabilistic Earth-System Model. It is hoped that this Newton Institute Programme will be seen as pivotal for such development.
From the above:
” Firstly, climate model biases are still substantial, and may well be systemically related to the use of deterministic bulk-formula closure – this is an area where a much better basic understanding is needed. Secondly, deterministically formulated climate models are incapable of predicting the uncertainty in their predictions; and yet this is a crucially important prognostic variable for societal applications.”
Are ‘we’ still at the garbage in, garbage out level? Is the above true?
And, re the ensembles of climate models probability distribution for prediction of climate CO2 sensitivity; by the above, that wiggle function curve is just multiple more garbage in, compiled multiple more garbage out times.
Hmmm…
My wife, a biologist, once asked a friend who was a mathematician how to calculate the area of a cell membrane from some electron microscope data she had.
His response? “Define ‘area.” ”
The discussion got angrier and angrier; I finally suggested that she triangulate and use Heron of Alexandria’s formula for the area of triangles. (To any lurking mathematician, yes, I do know that is an approximation to the “true” area. But her *data* was an approximation, too. Can’t be helped.)
In short, I am not sure mathematicians will be of much help. Possibly physicists could be, though, as a physicist myself, I am not optimistic. Frankly, I’m not sure the technical problems you allude to can be solved.
Most problems in math and physics never are solved. We just hear about (and study in school) the ones that someone did manage to solve. And, we use those solutions as Procrustean beds to try to fit the real world.
It’s amazing that sometimes this actually works.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
“My wife, a biologist, once asked a friend who was a mathematician how to calculate the area of a cell membrane from some electron microscope data she had.’
Dave, might this work ? How about enlarging the photo, printing it on waterproof paper, cutting the image out by laser, repeat a hundred times, then sink the bundle of images in water and the volume displaced will tell you the area ?
The surface are a of a proteolipid membrane is fractal and motile. Proteins are added and removed all the time, the surface undergoes endo/exo-cytosis where large patches of membrane are removed (via envagaination) or added. The volume of the cell changes and like the surface of a balloon the cell membrane expands or contracts. Cells typically are undergoing growth, so cells are integrated into the cell cycle, growing and then splitting. The actual protein composition changes, with some protein surface markers having half-lives of 20 minutes and some about a day (which is longer then cell doubling time).
On top of all this we have a heterogeneous population, a mixture of large and small cells, and different morphology.
However, in context, measuring surface area is trivial. What we really want to know is if a cell is dying, and how it is dying.
The only fly in the ointment is, what is a living cell and what is a dead cell? Sounds easy doesn’t it, but we have no working definition of living and dead cells. Some cells are obviously dead and some obviously alive, however, different viability assays interrogate different biological pathways, you can measure viability by three different techniques and for an individual cell get answers ranging from 0,0,0, to 1,1,1. Different people use different guesstimates, and not everyone reports what their viability cut-off’s were.
Doc, That is something I know nothing about, and your description has intrigued me to go and try to learn a little, scratch-the-surface, about it. Thank you!
Doc, “your description > your remarkable description”
I just ran across your reply.
The problem was that she only had a a relatively sparse sampling of data points on the cell surface: this was just a preliminary study back in the early days of electron microscopy. As DocMartyn points out below, there were a huge number of uncertainties that dwarfed any questions about the mathematically best way to define area. Given all that, Heron’s formula was going to do as well as anything else. In context, worrying about the “right” definition of area was simply silly.
Dave
Doc, how does one decide that a surface is to be considered non-flat ? I understand the point you made that the surface is fractal and so you then seem to indicate that a measuring taking that into account is necessary.
My question is general, in that for many measurements, e.g. “area of a city”, we do not take into account all the surfaces that exist within the city. At other times it would not be helpful to disregard all the surfaces when calculating area.
How you measure something depends on comparing it to something else; we compare one thing to a standard. When you measure small things, things get interesting.
When we measure things at an interface, things get even more interesting.
You have a cell, typically stuck to the surface of a plastic dish. The outer membrane consists of a lipid bilayer, with some proteins pocking through and some adsorbed on the surface. The surface has a fixed charge, with polar lipids and polar proteins being asymmetrically distributed on the outer and inner surface. The surface is two dimensional and the inner/outer bulk phases are three dimensional. So a cation like potassium in bulk phase has a concentration, amount/volume, but a potassium ion in an equilibrium with a binding site on the surface has no concentration; amount/area.
The inside of the proteolipid membrane is hydrophobic, having a dielectric constant of about 2, the outer bulk layer has a DE of >100. We could design a fluorescent probe that was hydrophobic, with a linker, then a cluster of charge ammonium groups. We add the probe to the cells, allow the dye to equilibrate with the cell membranes, then do one of two things.
1) Fix the cells with PFA, an amine reactive cross-linking reagent. This holds all the proteolipid in place and will immobilize all the probe that has stuck to your cells, trapped in the lipid bilayer.
2) wash the cells and then add detergent to explode the lipid membrane.
Using 1) you can place the cells in a microscope and measure the level of probe per cell, then compare the fluorescent against spherical liposomes made from proteolipid. As you know the size of the liposomes, you know the surface area, you can do the correlation.
Using 2) again you use liposomes made from proteolipid as a control, measuring them using quasi-electric light-scattering and you can compare the fluorescence signals.
1) and 2) will give you different answers for the amount of probe per amount of lipid surface.
Using 1) you will note that different areas of the cell surface have a different distribution of dye. You will see that some cells have high labeling and some very low. Very small changes in the composition of the membrane, and if the membrane is bound to the plastic surface or not, make a big difference to dye binding.
The biggest difference is in the cells plasma membrane potential, which changes the electrical properties of the surface. This potential is not present in your standards, even the surface potential caused by fixed charges is different. Sphere’s have a different micro-environment on their surface than do the highly invaginated surface of a living cell.
If you can live with guesstimates, knowing that everything you measure is an approximation based on an unrealistic model of a complex process, you can measure just about everything. The trick is not to trust anybodies numbers, including your own.
Thanks!
My comments do not address the many critical and difficult issues surrounding the fidelity of the GCMs relative to the application areas and system-response functions of interest. I think that the characterization offered by the sentence under discussion does a dis-service to climate science, and science in general. The implications being that there are no issues at all, none what so ever, with the continuous-equation systems. The chasm between that characterization and the real world of GCMs is enormous, and I see this kind of statement frequently. I take it to be an attempt to characterize the GCM modeling methodology as a purely computational physics problem, when it is in fact a nitty-gritty, both-feet-deep-in-the-mud process modeling problem.
As I mentioned in my comment all fundamental formulations of the equation systems which capture the basic laws and provide descriptions of all physical phenomena and processes will contain only parameters that relate to properties of the materials of interest. Applications of these equations do not require so-called tuning or calibrations, none. There will be no checking of the sensitivity of the calculated system response to variations in these physical properties. No calculations carried out to investigate the uncertainties associated with the physical parameters. There will be no ensemble averaging of calculated results by many different models having many different numerical values of these parameters and different starting values of the dependent variables and different spatial and temporal resolutions at the discrete-equation level. There will be little chance of getting the right answer for the wrong reasons. In fact, the previous sentences contain information that can be used to differentiate between a computational physics formulation and a process model formulation.
As an example of the mis-leading characterizations, consider that the fluid motions in the Earth’s cimate systems are for all practical purposes always turbulent. The only known computational-physics formulation of turbulent flows will never be incorporated into GCMs. And that does not address the fundamental issues associated with the fact that a computational-physics formulation for turbulent flows of mixtures of solids, liquids, and gases is not yet readily at hand. Newton’s Laws of Motion haven’t yet been quite worked out for these situations. Process modeling will always be present whenever real-world turbulent flows are of interest. Process modeling is needed to close the continuous equations. The difficulties are increased due to the very large spatial extent of the application areas leading to introduction of process modeling that is a function of the size of the discrete increments used in the numerical solution domain.
Finally, the calculated numbers come from the approximate solutions of the discrete approximations to the continuous equations. The parameter-based modeling, in which gradients of smooth functions, present in the fundamental formulations, are replaced by algebraic approximations and switches has the potential to introduce discontinuities into the numerical solution methods and these are known to wreck havoc with calculated numbers.
The parameterizations, not Newton’s laws of motion and not the quantum theory of radiative-energy transport, carry the fidelity, or lack thereof, of the modeling. The Bumper Sticker Climate Science approach, almost always, never mentions this well-known aspect. None of this is meant to say that process modeling, in and of itself, will necessarily lead to lack of fidelity between calculated results and the actual physical world. It is clear, however, that care is required in order to avoid tuning the wrong parameters for the wrong reasons and getting the right answer. There are simply too many free-floating pieces parts, and these are coupled in complicated ways. Both successes and failures can be expected to occur.
Dan – I often find your comments thoughtful and provocative, but here, I think you’ve misfired in aiming your criticisms at the statement by Hoskins et al –
“The models encapsulate our understanding of the basic science of the climate system, including for example, Newton’s laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics and the quantum theory of radiation.”
The bolding was mine, to emphasize the point that the statement was citing examples rather than attempting to be all inclusive. Based on that understanding, I find the statement to be quite accurate.
Newton’s laws are an important element of fluid dynamics, as you indicate, but they are also a centerpiece of hydrostatics, which is a foundation for our understanding of atmospheric temperature profiles underlying climate change mechanisms. An example is cited at Newton’s Second Law and the Hydrostatic Relationship, and many others can be found. Here, the applications are direct, fundamental, and much less vulnerable to the uncertainties that pertain to fluid dynamics. Hoskins et al are justified in citing Newton’s Laws as an example.
The quantum theory or radiation is equally fundamental. Without it, there would be no absorption of IR photons, no radiative transfer codes, and no means to characterize the atmospheric warming or cooling in response to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations. It’s probably not much of an exaggeration to state that without the quantum theory of radiation, modern climate science could not exist.
You have correctly pointed out that attempts to arrive at approximate solutions of differential equations through numerical techniques and discretization require careful monitoring to ensure that the results don’t stray too far from true values, but this is hardly news to those engaged in climate modeling. The critical question is how well do the models perform in this regard, and the answer seems to be that they do well in some circumstances (basic radiative transfer) and less well in others (e.g., internal climate fluctuations, cloud microphysics, and other aspects of fluid dynamics). While this is a well recognized challenge, I didn’t see anything in the statement by Hoskins et al that suggested otherwise.
Finally, as I understand it, Hoskins et al were responding to a Lindzen presentation to a lay audience in an attempt to correct Lindzen’s misrepresentations of our current understanding. Their efforts were therefore conducted on an elementary rather than sophisticated level. Indeed, when it came to pointing out to Lindzen that average Arctic temperatures (sea and land) can’t respond dramatically to summer increases in heating as long as much of the energy is going into sea ice melting, this might even by called climate science at the kindergarten level. I’m sure that these authors share some of your interpretations about challenges to current modeling efforts, but I don’t think you can fault them for making a general statement about models that mentions examples of important principles that the models make use of. They didn’t claim in the statement you quoted that models are perfect, but in the same paragraph, in a statement you didn’t quote, they state “the models at the more complete and complex end contain many uncertainties and deficiencies, which are widely recognised within the modelling community,”. If you had included that statement in your comment, readers might have had a more accurate perspective on what was being claimed.
There’s seems to be a problem with WordPress, which won’t let me log in with my legitimate email and passwords.
A try with a new email/password
hi fred, welcome back
Fred, welcome back. Whilst you were away a subscription membership service was instituted. If you’d just like to pass me your 200 dollar joining fee I’ll make sure Judith gets it. :)
Tonyb
Tony – The check is in the mail.
Wait.. Why does Fred get such a steep discount?
Is he being subsidized? ;)
The statement carries no information relative to: (1) the actual approach to modeling the climate that is used to construct GCMs, (2) the overarching critically important role played by the parameterizations, and (3) the careful, tedious work that is critically necessary to ensure that the numbers presented as results from the modeling correspond to (1). Correct characterization is vitally necessary in order to reach correct understanding
We might as well say that we employ quantum mechanical concepts to determine the energy state of the atoms that comprise a material in order to calculate its temperature and then express that result in terms of the Boltzmann distribution and his constant. While that is fundamental to all of thermodynamics, it is almost never the actual approach for any practical thermodynamic applications.
Deep in this post Arctic Sea Ice Volume: PIOMAS, Prediction, and the Perils of Extrapolation at RealClimate we see
I find this characterization to be somewhat in contrast to this characterization :-)
For more info on Newton’s Laws relative to fluid motions, check this out. Sir Isaac dealt almost exclusively with point mass situations and actions outside, on the boundaries of, the materials of interest. He was successful in analyses of the interactions between two point masses, and failed for three. Decades of additional work were required to bring to fruition concepts relating to actions, and consequent deformations, within the materials of interest. Some of those who contributed to this work included mainly Euler and the Bernoulli boys, and additionally Lagrange, D’Alembert, Leibniz. The Navier-Stokes equations, generally accepted to be a good description of fluids having a linear relationship between rate of strain and the associated stresses, were not formulated until the nineteenth century, almost 150 years following Newton’s Laws.
Hydrostatics, by way of Archimedes, pre-dates Newton’s Laws by several centuries: almost 20. The first edition of his Principia was published in 1687: Archimedes lived until c. 212 BCE. Stevin, somewhat later in the early seventeenth century, also made contributions that pre-date Sir Isaac.
Dan – I think you’re trying too hard.
May I make another point. The people who do these modeling studies are human. Humans, including scientists, are prone to delusions. I am not speaking of insane delusions, but normal, common, day to day ones. We all live in a fictional world of our own design, ignoring evidence of our biases and deliberately weighing incoming information that fits a preformed matrix.
The climate modelers ‘know’ past temperatures and have a good idea which way ‘they want’ future temperature to go; based on the notion that 1) CO2 is going to increase and 2) Temperature is going to track CO2.
What we don’t know is the models that the modelers have discounted.
The models do not emerge from a pristine intellectual background, they are made by people, using interation. A constant is chosen, from a range, to generate a result that is wanted.
Self delusion is very common, and here is a demonstration.
In this video, you are going to see three young men and three young women playing basketball. All you have to is to count the number of passes made by the people in WHITE shirts.
While you watch, just count the number of passes from player in white; easy peasy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
To test a model, what one has to do is to establish a reasonable range of a constant, a prior, and run the model using the reasonable range of this constant. You do that for each constant used. The, a prior, is the most important point. It is very easy to justify any value, post-hoc, as each value is ‘reasonable’.
Thus, models are indeed trained.
That is not hardly what one I would call “training” as a modeler.
Lets get down to specifics. Let’s take NCAR as an example.
“Once the components are coupled, then the only parameter settings that are usually allowed to change are the sea ice albedos and a single parameter in the atmosphere component. This is the relative humidity threshold above which low clouds are formed, and it is used to balance the coupled model at the TOA. ”
As you note we often pick a constant apriori and then run sensitivities around that. Take sea ice albedo. Nice thing about is it varies between zero and 1. we might have a best estimate of it, apriori, of something like,
http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/processes/albedo.html
fiddling with a value like that could hardly be called “training” In fact, it’s precisely the best thing to do when you have a parameter that cannot be easily pinned down. In fact its one of the ways modelling can drive discovery.We have a parameter for which there are only rough estimates.
We fiddle with it. We see large sensitivities to it. That drives research into pinning it down. Still, during the course of this process if we are asked to provide our best understanding, the answer is the output of fiddling.
It’s an entirely different question whether this level of certitude is enough to drive policy. Personally, I think a simple recognition that Co2 causes at least 1.2C of warming is enough to drive a policy. No GCMs required.
“Personally, I think a simple recognition that Co2 causes at least 1.2C of warming is enough to drive a policy. No GCMs required”
Yes, personally. However, policy is a matter of international and national politics.
says who? policy can be local policy. national policy. or international.
For example: a bare boned back of the envelope model of sea level rise over the next century could be enough to drive local policy about building a power plant on the coast. We use all sorts of planning tools to make make policy decisions. can we predict earthquakes? nope. Does that mean we dont account for them in planning? Nope.
“Personally, I think a simple recognition that Co2 causes at least 1.2C of warming is enough to drive a policy.”
True, but that would be a more rational policy :) Starting with building the UNtopia complex in the Sahel and exiling alarmists to their own fantasy land to mold into perfection. :)
Dan. since the models include orbital dynamics I think the description is accurate
Dan, I generally agree with your observations. The characterization of the models as representing Newton’s laws of motion is a gross distortion. The models have large errors associated with going from the laws of motion to a discrete algebraic system of equations and the only way to claim that they represent the fundamental conservation laws of mass, momentum, and energy is to postulate the doctrine of the attractor, a dubious proposition at best. It is basically a leap of faith that I have evidence has been challenged before in reviews of Hansen’s past proposals. The challenge has not to my knowledge been addressed, certainly not by any posters here, including the imminent communicator Schmidt. I suggest that those who are interested in this look at some of the literature on aerodynamic noise where similar doctrines are invoked with little justification. The difference is that in noise, there is actually data that is reasonably consistent and accurate.
Here (slightly amended) is my first comment at Bishop Hill on the Hoskins et al note. I read it keeping in mind Lindzen’s introductory comment (Slide 2). An extract:
“The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes. The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such.”
Although the note may contain some valid criticism of Lindzen (I leave that to those who are better qualified than I), the test of its validity must be whether or not it demonstrates that he is wrong to state that “the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is … minimal”. That, I suggest, is the key issue: if evidence for such connection is weak, what basis is there for the global economic and political upheaval we’re told is essential?
I believe the paper fails the test in its first paragraph – an extract: “Contemporary science suggests unambiguously that there is a substantial risk that these feedbacks will lead to human-induced surface temperature change considerably larger than 1oC in global average this century and beyond”. But how can you “suggest” something “unambiguously”? And what does “substantial risk” mean? And I can find nothing elsewhere that demonstrates a strong warming/catastrophe connection. Indeed, in places the authors seem to agree with Lindzen. For example, in the section entitled “Models”, they say:
“Even the models at the more complete and complex end contain many uncertainties and deficiencies, which are widely recognised within the modelling community, but they are the best guide we have as to how the climate system may change in the future.”
That “the best guide we have” contains “many uncertainties and deficiencies”, surely demonstrates precisely the weakness of the claimed warming/catastrophe connection?
“suggests unambiguously that there is a substantial risk that” I thought exactly the same thing on reading that. We have a claimed certainty of doubt…
Are all climatologists so far removed from reality that they can no longer even read what they write? Is their own variant of English so far removed from the mainstream usage as to be completely unintelligible to outsiders?
Or do they just think that the normal public, in thrall to the myth of climatological infallibility, are either too stupid or too trusting to notice that they are presenting complete BS most of the time?
We may not be trained in the finer points of Principal Components Analysis (and not alone in that!) but we can see a stupid argument when we see one. There is only one set of fools in this communication transaction and it isn’t the recipients.
Yes, this is an old argument, quite abused, and I can’t understand they are still using it.
but they are the best guide we have as to how the climate system may change in the future.
So? Who told you the “best guide” is good enough to guide you? How do you know you are going to end anywhere near where the guide says? Did you check?
“Best guide”, by itself, has no meaning. You may as well call it “best dream”. Or “best nightmare”, for that matter.
The point of difference in policy superficially relates to taxes or caps. In a deeper sense there are profound differences on economic and political systems that can’t be reconciled. One side stresses the necessity of economic growth and the other critical resource limits. The latter is leading to strident declarations of intent to ‘suspend’ democracy and to dismantle essential elements of free markets. It is a dangerous and disturbing development.
The underlying motivations of the neo-socialists become important in preventing a response to what after all are relatively large emissions of gases that are radiatively active in the atmosphere and chemically in the oceans. Regardless of uncertainties in determining and predicting effects – and they are many and varied – it does warrant a response and there are ways forward that seem less contentious and have immense potential to both increase human well being and reduce emissions. These include reducing black carbon and ozone emissions, conserving and restoring ecosystems, improving agricultural systems, provision of safe water and sanitation and investment in energy technology. The government sector is important in some of these things. The rule of law, democracy, effective corporate governance, management of the monetary system and the provision of some services are all within the essential ambit of government. I would argue that the bigger role is with corporations, farmers and with people in the social context more generally.
I suggest that there are many people who actively resist sensible and pragmatic responses and this is motivated by a disdain for free markets and economic growth and a desire to transform western systems of government and production. This commonly translates into a willingness to dispense with political freedoms – openly advocating suspension of democracy and installation of authoritarian regimes. Thus progress has been so paltry for a generation because we are locked into an ideological battle with these people and the world can go to hell in a hand basket otherwise as far as they are concerned. On one hand we have enlightenment principles and on the other tyranny – the climate war is to be won or lost with far reaching consequences.
We have the high ground in that they have seriously underestimated natural variability – as we have been saying for a long time. So it not warming for a decade or three more – as the science keeps saying. I suggest offering them terms of surrender. Either drop the nonsense and compromise on pragmatic solutions or we roll the dice on climate change.
Robert I Ellison
Captain K, How about putting your hydrologist hat on for a moment.
Since there is an ongoing geo-engineering project, no till or conservation agriculture, I am trying to get a better guestimate of the impact. No till reduces the maximum soil temperature by about 8 degrees F and improves soil moisture retention from about 8% to 12%. It also reduces runoff.
Right now there are only about 200,000,000 acres under no till, mainly in the western hemisphere. It seems to me that that should, or will soon, have a measurable impact on climate. Do you have a good estimate of the overall hydrological impact for no-till versus conventional till?
Low impact versus over grazing pasture land also has a similar impact, so there is whole bunch of land involved in the experiment. Looks like Africa is volunteering to be the control group. If there is a way to come up with a better agricultural land use impact, most of this non-sense would quietly go away.
Hi Dallas,
First of all – conservation farming (and it is not just no till and rotation grazing) is absolutely essential to feed the world this century.
The sunlight captured by vegetation is transformed into organic carbon in an endothermic reaction. Some of that organic carbon ends up in soil carbon stores and this path is significant in relation to agricultural productivity and anthropogenic emissions.
Vegetation absorbs and transforms energy rather than reflecting it back into space as bare earth does. The difference in temperature possibly involves as well the ability of plants to regulate temperature by evaporating water.
The change in infiltration is without a doubt a good thing. A lot of the flashiness of floods disapears and the increased soil water stores contribute to increased base flow and drought resiliance.
Rotational grazing increases biodiversity, agricultural production, reduces erosion, conserves soil moisture, increases carbon soil stores and decreases atmopheric carbon concentration. Conservation farming is entirely a good thing.
Coud it cool the world? Easily I think.
Robert I Ellison
It would have been much more interesting to see Hoskins, Mitchell, etc go head to head with LIndzen and others, on equal terms.. (ie face to face debate)
As others, have commented that Lindzen was talking (as he acknowledged ) to a lay audience..
Is it possible that they would ever agree to have any sort of scientific debate with Lindzen and others directly.. as Andrew Montford has commented, both Mitchell and Hoskins behaviour in the climategate emails, can not really be ignored either. (ie goodwill aspects)
As an aside (perhaps a cheap shot) their is tha video of Sir Hoskins saying computer models were and STILL are lousy.. Perhaps a debate could be had where that could be expanded on…
Dyson already commented on Nordhaus’s book, and said basically the same thing as the 16 – regardless of Nordhaus’s opinions on the matter, his own numbers don’t support doing anything. And Nordhaus responded to Dyson’s review and apparently didn’t argue this point.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jun/12/the-question-of-global-warming/?pagination=false
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/sep/25/the-question-of-global-warming-an-exchange/?pagination=false
Mike, thank’s for the link to Dyson’s review, I doubt I would have seen it otherwise.
Dyson gets shredded by Robert May in this part of the response
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/oct/09/how-long-will-they-stay/
Dyson doesn’t believe that the residence time of CO2 in the environment is very long, and May schools him on this point.
Notice that Dyson’s response to May reads like a dog walking away with his tail between his legs, as he tries to rationalize by suggesting that he was talking about residence time in another context, that of artificially sequestering CO2 with additional plant life. Yet this admission completely destroys Dyson’s original argument as he was using that point to prove CO2’s insignificance for persistent global warming. So Dyson isn’t much of a skeptic after all.
May cites Hansen 2007, ie a giss model studythe abscence of biophysicists amongst the authors is telling,May;s assumptions ,are incorrect as he does not identify the biological potential.
Robert May is discussing the issue of adjustment time versus residence time of CO2 concentrations. A short residence time is likely but the adjustment time is very long. Dyson didn’t discriminate between the two and assumed it was residence time that was important. Thus, May had to write that comment to straighten him out.
As May suggests, that if Dyson was under the impression that a short adjustment time is operable as well, then it is clear how he became a skeptic. As so would I, but I have since learned the slow diffusional aspects of sequestering. Dyson thought that biota was semi-permanent but on the adjustment time scale it is still transitory, as the biota will decay within that period.
I don’t understand why you’re repeating this. It is perfectly clear what Dyson was saying, if you’ll just read his original statement. Attacking a straw-man – a view of Dyson based on “As May suggests” – seems like a bad idea.
sorry web, I know Dyson, don’t care to read someone-against-Dyson who I’ve never heard of. Too old for that…
Shredded? Maybe you didn’t read Dyson’s original review, which was about sequestering CO2 with plant life. Which is what he said. It sounds as though May was just confused.
In any case, you’re changing the subject. Whether or not one agrees with Dyson’s interesting ideas about high-tech futuristic adaptation (he is also invented the Dyson Sphere that would surround the entire sun) has nothing at all to do with his comments on Nordhaus.
WHT-
Tries to rationalize? Another context? Of course this is the context Dyson would be using. Dyson has said that the work of which he is most proud – over his entire career – is his analysis of using carbon sequestration by plants as a CO2 mitigation solution.
Yet this sequestration idea would create legions of losers from those wedded to CO2 tax and trade schemes. Perhaps that is why some of the criticism directed towards Dyson is transparently disingenuous. Be careful not to add to it.
WHT,
You are pooping in your own nest when you asert someone has shredded Dyson.
The Ents march with Dyson.
=======
But I think when the fishes leave they’ll say ‘Thanks for all the plankton’.
============
Dyson: There were giants, once. I remember a few…
I notice WUWT is trying to push the idea that falling cloud cover contradicts manmade global warming.
“A paper published last week finds that cloud cover over China significantly decreased during the period 1954-2005. This finding is in direct contradiction to the theory of man-made global warming which presumes that warming allegedly from CO2 ‘should’ cause an increase in water vapor and cloudiness.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/04/spencers-posited-1-2-cloud-cover-variation-found/
Man-made global warming presumes there will be an increase in cloudiness? No citation given of course. Well this is WUWT we are talking about.
I suspect if cloud cover had RISEN in this study they’d be citing it as evidence of negative cloud feedback reflecting more sunlight…
Well, of course they would, after all, they’re a horrible bunch of denialist scum, aren’t they? Total pond life who don’t deserve to live – I mean, true believers never stoop to those sort of tactics, do they?
‘During the 1997–1998 El Niño, observations indicate that the SST increase in the eastern tropical Pacific enhances the atmospheric convection, which shifts the upward motion to further south and breaks down low stratiform clouds, leading to a decrease in low cloud amount in this region. Taking into account the obscuring effects of high cloud, it was found that thick low clouds decreased by more than 20% in the eastern tropical Pacific… In contrast, most increase in low cloud amount due to doubled CO2 simulated by the NCAR and GFDL models occurs in the subtropical subsidence regimes associated with a strong atmospheric stability.’ http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006JD008174.shtml
Most models include positive cloud feedback but this is not a result of physics but parametisation. Clouds physics are very uncertain – but observation really shuld trump models.
I’m a bit surprised when there finally is actual debate how weak the arguments are. The whole ‘we might roll a double zero’ is just baffling to hear in a science context. He then goes into how odds work on multiple rolls of a roulette wheel, as if his metaphor is now so apt he can use it to calculate the chances of catastrophe. From the footnotes of “but the odds of that outcome on five spins of the wheel are only 1 in 50.”:
“More exactly, it is (16/38) 5 = 0.0238. Moreover, on five rolls of the wheel, there is a 24 percent chance that a zero or double-zero catastrophic event will occur. These probabilities are only illustrative to show how multiple uncertainties interact.”
Whaaaa? Five spins? And that illustrates how multiple uncertainties interact? Is he seriously saying spin one interacting with spin 5? All I can think of reading this is ‘crack cocaine’. The guy has a weak grasp on reason if he thinks saying the forcing could be anything from -10 to +50 makes his point. We would be better to prepare for zombie armageddons if that is the case.
robin | April 4, 2012 at 5:56 pm |
Just so I’m clear, you’re saying the arguments of Dr. William D. Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, an internationally regarded Economist with more books, articles, and citations in the field than the entire Economics departments of some high ranking universities, is making ‘crack cocaine’ arguments, and has a weak grasp on reason?
Well, at least you’ve shattered the myth of deference to authority.
Bart R –
Defer to economists on the grounds that they’re reasonable?
Paul Krugman is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, winner of the 2008 ‘Nobel’ Prize in Economics, expert on international economics, and author of 20 books and over 200 scholarly articles in professional journals.
And he still writes total b*ll*cks every week.
No Fair! You’re citing a crack cocaine krugman economist… Nordhaus might not be one.
Bart,
What if I said “Dr Nordhaus is incorrect in his understanding of and representation of the climate debate, in a few places”, without reference to any drugs?
jim | April 4, 2012 at 10:01 pm |
Then I’d conclude, based on word count, that you’re not an Economist. ;)
Support your claims with reasoning and data, and I’m all ears.
It’d still shatter the myth of deference to authority, but it’d also move the discourse forward.
Who wouldn’t prefer that?
I think the problem here is that the good professor is postulating a highly specific kind of catastrophe. It isn’t as he characterises it, one that just might happen within our imagination (in fact the roulette wheel analogy suggests it has to have a finite probability); it is one that is within our imagination and that we know with some kind of certainty spending some trillions (in NPV) we can stop happening.
Much rarer kind of catastrophe IMHO.
Outright, I don’t defer to authorities. I question them. (I remember at a Beckman Hall lecture, Feyman closed it with the exhortation “Question authority!” A kid yelled “Why?”. It brought the house down.)(There is a reverence to authority! The next best substitute for deference?)
I am an economist, all of us who seek reasons for human behavior are economists. Economics is all that there is to explain humans behavior. That, and sex. Sex is the unpublished, elephantine en roomy, part of economics. That is how I know that most all academic, published economists are full of s***. They don’t acknowledge the sex part. The stripper who blogs is a better micro economist than Krugman, Nordhaus, Freedman, etc. Sex workers know micro things and cheapskates when they see them.
When I have time, I’ll support what you wish to see supported with reasoning. But not data. Data is for the young, those with excess time and energy. Old people retreat to reason.
Seriously, I’ll parse Nordhaus and then comment on it.
But to me, this sensitivity argument is something of a pinheaded argument. And a pointless one. Without regard to the warming consequence of continued world wide combustion, I cannot see how we rich and wise people of the world will compel the poor peoples of the world to leave extractable carbon in the ground, The poor peoples, each and every, see the easy lives that we live. Why would they forgo our comforts? They’ll say, ‘You’ve got yours, we’ll extract ours!’. So far as our sacrificial green renewable energy effort goes, it is all the better for them. We use less carbon > means more, and cheaper, carbon for their lives’ improvement. I’d like to see their lives improved, and I’ll give up some of mine, for them to do so. I directly give some now, and would allow the taking of a little from others like me, to improve the comfort of the world’s poor. But down at the bottom line, the world wide combustion quantity isn’t going to change, in any future that I can foresee!
Above is reply to Bart
is the word now count at the economical quantity?
Bart R,
I’ve studied under economists far more prominent than Nordhaus, including Nobel prize winners and some of the biggest names in finance, so I don’t find his “authority” particularly impressive. I’ll concede that I only have a masters degree unlike Dr. Nordhaus, but I I’ll warrant that I have far more practical experience. I find Nordhaus’ rebuttals rather weak.
One point he gets right is that in capital budgeting, higher uncertainty on a cost that is unlinked to revenue results in a higher (negative) NPV. This is the reverse of the standard situation where increased risk requires a higher discount rate. However, his extrapolation of this well known principle to climate and the rest of his argument is surprisingly poor. His comparison, for example, of Exxon funding dollars to Yale receipt dollars is a head-scratcher. You can’t meaningfully compare payers to recipients – it is an old trap and Nordhaus really should have known better.
I find Nordhaus following statement (in his original paper) also puzzling: “The first problem is an elementary mistake in economic analysis. The authors cite the “benefit-to-cost ratio” to support their argument. Elementary cost-benefit and business economics teach that this is an incorrect criterion for selecting investments or policies. The appropriate criterion for decisions in this context is net benefits (that is, the difference between, and not the ratio of, benefits and costs).”
I fear that Nordhaus is showing a lack of real business experience here. What he says is correct in a world unconstrained by capital. The real world doesn’t work that way and capital rationing is a major factor that those of us who make investment decisions have to respect. Benefit-to-cost ratios (or NPV per investment dollar) are not the only metric to consider and should not be considered in isolation, but they are very far from an elementary mistake. Again Nordhaus should have known better (and he seems to implicitly concede this point in his second rebuttal by ignoring the Lindzen et. al. response to this specific point). Rather embarrassingly, Lindzen shows that Nordhaus used the same metric in his own book.
But ultimately, I agree with Judge Judy that real weakness in Nordhaus’ approach is his reliance on the zero and double zero argument. When you include what is essentially an unconstrained scenario, you get a meaningless economic answer. Nordhaus’ argument is really just an appeal to the precautionary principle.
estry | April 5, 2012 at 4:57 pm |
Best commentary on Nordhaus’ arguments all thread.
Not said explicitly in my spoof of Nordhaus v. Lindzen below, but one more reason the match was closer than it ought have been, when an Economics professor successfully engages a meteorologist while holding the weatherman to almost all Economic arguments.
Who knows how much closer it may have been, had you been Lindzen’s corner man?
Bart R | April 4, 2012 at 9:34 pm,
We’ll need at least 5 sterling professors (and 12 TA’s) to overturn the idea that five spins of a roulette wheel do not illustrate how multiple uncertainties interact, which in turn does not illustrate the potential catastrophes we face in future climate. Sorry, it is kind of old semi-revered math and I don’t make the rules.
Until then we’ll just have to take weak arguments on their merits.
Bart,
I had an offer to do a post-doc in econ after I got my Ph.D. in physics (should have taken it — I could have been one of those quants who got rich and helped wreck the financial system!).
I know enough econ to be quite certain in pointing out that, to put it diplomatically, economics does not have anything like the firmly established results, confirmed by empirical tests and generally accepted in the field, that the natural sciences possess.
To be less diplomatic, economics is closer to theology than to physics.
Your “argument from authority” (Yale, Nobel, etc.) is stunningly weak in the case of econ.
Dave
physicistdave | April 5, 2012 at 5:50 am
I’m entirely cool with shattering deference to authority in scholarship of any sort, as well as in general.
It’s more or less my point.
Last topic was Authority(?) in political debates involving science. This topic is a political debate involving science that shows no one yielding any advantage to authority, and that’s a good thing.
Moreover, I say it’s par for the course, and illustrates yet again that scientists do not have much grease in determining political outcomes.
Who does? The opportunists and operatives, lobbyists and contributors and rent-seekers who float around the seats of power.. proximity and face time are what matter in who determines outcomes of Policy. That’d be more marketers and philosophers than either hard or soft scientists, in the case of Washington DC.
As Lindzen is the hard scientist and Nordhaus the soft scientist in this case, scientists don’t even determine scientific outcomes very much.
Which also is a good thing. Predetermined science is just showmanship and flim flam. Lindzen and Nordhaus draw back the curtain a little in this exchange; if both of them help inform the thinking of each of them, and of the readers, it’d be nice of that happened more through reasoning than iteration of hardened positions and illegitimate argument.
And while I’m not saying your characterization of Economics is entirely wrong.. though it may be a bit dated and blinkered.
Thirty years ago there was more deference to scientific authority perhaps. At that time what you say of Econ may have been true. Economics today, in my experience of it largely because of the work of the likes of John Nash and not deference to their authority, is closer to Mathematics than Physics is, which now even in its mainstream touches nearer and nearer to Theology (where once only iron sun crackpots and perpetual motion thermodynamicists dwelt) the farther from the scale of the directly observable and more into the constructions of philosophers it goes.
Economics today uses the scientific method (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zvrGiPkVcs) more than ever before. The religious debates about loop quantum gravity vs. strings could be nailed to a door by Martin Luther. Economists are getting their hands dirty with actual data and real observations these days coming closer and closer to real time. Discourses on the mysteries of Dark Energy could sit side by side with Ouija boards. Economists are able to provide workable solutions to human-made issues. Steven Hawking’s conclusions about the creation of the universe are as closely followed by the Physics faithful as are the dogma of the Pope.
I’m relieved many more people are checking Hawking’s math, and the rarified opinionation about Physics that can never be proven or disproven are also more and more being recognized for the arguments from authority they have become, leading to sometimes better arguments. Certainly better than iron suns and skydragon slaying.
It wasn’t Economics that built the greath Cathedral of CERN. ;) Though dollar for dollar, it’s pretty sure few physicists yet can be blamed for squandering a fraction as much tax money as the average economist. But they were making progress that way for a while.
Bart,
A big difference between the hard sciences and economics, that I see, is that the practice of science seldom needs compulsion of people. All the practice of economics in our history has as some level needed guns and prisons.
In this argument, the economist hasn’t explained how he, and we, would compel people to forego using cheap fire to make themselves comfortable. International carbon trading maybe?(joke)
You, me and he may value icecaps, what if the rest of the people don’t?
All that I can see at present are industrial titans pocketing money for boondoggles like solar farms and electric windmills.
Bart,
Your criticisms of some of the recent trends in physics is fair: fundamental physics has been starved for new experimental data in recent decades, and, yes, the result has been strong theorists, etc. spinning off into the nether regions, rather like theologians, or, dare I say it, economists.
Nor will I challenge your quip aimed at CERN: although I, as a physicist, find CERN’s work entertaining (e.g., the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle”), I’d be hard put to explain why some poor working guy should be forced to pay taxes to support it!
However, I have indeed followed the recent micro-empirical turn in economics: I am not impressed. The “empirical data” seem more like four-colour illustrations designed to trick the reader into believing in the a priori theories than like real scientific empiricism.
At any rate, the large-scale models of the economy are most assuredly no better (maybe even worse!) than the GCMs. On that I trust, there can be no honest dissent.
By the way kudos for following enough of the physics to be able to zap us physicists: as I said above, your criticisms in that direction are largely correct.
Dave
jim | April 5, 2012 at 1:45 pm |
You’ve confused Economics with Republican Policy.
No one needs a gun to convince two people to exchange goods on fair terms in the Market.
If anything, they need guns to instill fear of taking away their rights in governments, and prisons to frighten corrupt politicians.
Bart, no confusion. Prisons and guns are needed to prevent the stronger person from taking all the goods from the weaker person. The threat of them is need to compel you to make your payroll deduction contribution to my income. ;-)
Bart R. wrote:
>No one needs a gun to convince two people to exchange goods on fair terms in the Market.
Ummm, Bart, I detect no lack of enthusiasm for the free market among the commenters on this blog! (An enthusiasm I am, indeed, inclined to share.)
Even most of the scientific illiterates hereabouts do seem to grasp that, usually, government is, at best, an imperfect solution to problems.
Dave
Bart, ‘Economics in the Trenches 101a – Trade or crime?’
Some economists recognize this: ‘Your Need and The Cost to Satisfy Your Need.’
1) You need something, you make it yourself. Opportunity Cost vs direct cost of trade.
2) You need something, you trade for it. Direct Cost of Trade vs opportunity cost .
3) You need something, you steal it. Intangibles now. Likelyhood of getting caught x consequent outcome vs imaginary direct cost; ie you the criminal wouldn’t have payed anything at all, at any point, ever, ever.
Economists vs the real world; several Secretaries of Labor who have never, never, actually employed an employee. Never actually calculated paycheck with holdings. Economist professors and writers who have never, never, never earned money from an employee, eg Krugman.
Painful truth; an employer sells an employee’s labor, for a profit. Painful, unavoidable truth, how can it be otherwise?
physicistdave | April 5, 2012 at 5:43 pm |
*blush*
*cough*
You give me far too much credit, and are too kind.
Erm, I have credentials in Physics, too; enough to realize I don’t exactly cover myself in glory. Imagine my chagrin, to realize I’d misspelled Hawking’s name.
It’d be great if Economics were better at what it does, and the scoundrels were hounded out of the field. Far more difficult work to be done there than in Physics, likely.
Though I’m surprised to hear the four-color mapping so disparaged. It’s one of my favorite solutions.
Nordhaus’s argument reminds me of a Yogi Berra story. He was driving to the Hall of Fame induction when he got lost in upstate New York looking for Cooperstown. One of the representatives for the ceremony got him on the phone and asked how long it would be before he arrived. Yogi responded, “we’re lost but we’re making good time”. Perhaps another Berra quote might be more appropriate here, “when you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
In the climate case would that be “we’re lost but we’re making good money.” Time is money, after all.
+10!!
‘We’re not actually lost. We are making very good money!”
ie, We know where we are. We are here, could be anywhere at all, where we can make very good money.!
I asked directions once and the person said ‘I don’t think you can get there from here’. I’m starting to appreciate the deep truths in that remark : ).
Negative Cloud Feedback
The greatest uncertainties are reportedly in cloud feedbacks. Hoskins can only weakly say:
Now it appears that:
Spencer’s posited 1-2% cloud cover variation found
See: Ann. Geophys., 30, 573-582, 2012 http://www.ann-geophys.net/30/573/2012/ doi:10.5194/angeo-30-573-2012
Significant decreasing cloud cover during 1954–2005 due to more clear-sky days and less overcast days in China and its relation to aerosol
X. Xia LAGEO, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China
While this needs to be confirmed, this negative cloud feedback would appear to very seriously upset the global warming applecart giving direct major evidence against Hoskins and for Lindzen & Spencer.
Uncertainties ignored
In Proxy Science and Proxy pseudo science Pat Frank address the very high systematic uncertainties that are ignored in most proxy temperature papers. i.e., systematic (bias) uncertainties may be of similar magnitude to statistical uncertainties giving ~ 50% increase or more in total uncertainty, especially as the quantity of data increases.
Very low benefit/cost
Christopher Monckton and others provide strong evidence that global warming mitigation exhibits much higher costs and benefits. Consequently the best policy is to not insure.
Why mitigating CO2 emissions is cost ineffective
Monckton’s Slide Presentation to the California Assembly
While Hoskins and Nordhause give highly emotional alarmist arguments, I find they do not quantify why we should insure when the benefits/costs are so low and the uncertainties so great.
Ethical priorities
When we consider the ethically critical issues of caring for the poor, the widows and orphans, then of the 30 largest humanitarian projects, global warming mitigation comes in dead last. See Copenhagen Consensus 2008.
Transport fuels to sustain economies
We have very strong reasons to focus on fuels to try to keep our economies afloat in the impending economic roller coaster. See Sam Foucher
Analysis of Decline Rates
Other than continuing the global alarmists’ gravy train, I see no reasons to spend massive funds on climate mitigation, and very strong reasons to invest in much higher priorities.
David,
I agree. The co2 combat has been a lurch sideways for the real environmental movement. Banning fire won’t save species, restore habitat, remediate pollution damage, improve the condition of the third world poor, or make us any more wise and less profligate in our use of resources.
Thanks Judith for introducing this topic. The level of debate on some of the central issues facing climate science has been most gratifying to read.
In the words of Freeman Dyson the debate on AGW has been “a dialogue of the deaf” and as a result, very little common ground has been discovered.
Thanks to all who have contributed to this thread so far.
Can I just say that ‘Judge Judy’ is worth the price of admission alone. Without humour we are all lost anyway, and it encourages open conversation.
Thank you, Judith Curry.
Your “denizens” are awesome, interesting, compelling, thoughtful folk.
I be running as fast as I can: the world will be better. Science will return…
This is a beginning, possibly an important beginning…
…Lady in Red
Dr. Curry..
More conventionally, one may allude to “parry and riposte”?
I’m not impressed with the “Roulette Wheel” analogy, as the “Climate Wheel” has unusually large slots for certain outcomes and tiny slots for events that are very unlikely to happen. The likelihood of a 1C rise or fall in global temperatures is far from equal, and linking CO2 amelioration measures to temperature variations is fraught with peril, not the least of which are large economic consequences measured against CO2 changes that are borderline equivalent to normal noise in the data stream. Even Agung could only knock off a few ppm from the winter CO2 levels!
Last but not least is an almost doubling leap in CO2 over the peaks of the last 4 interglacials while temperatures still have about 2C left before they catch up to those maxima. Yet climate panic has virtually set into concrete. I applaud Messrs. Lindzen, et al for keeping the concrete from curing around the feet of humankind and keeping us away from the edge of River Styx.
Scoring Lindzen et al. vs. Nordhaus, Rounds 1-6
(omitting the preliminaries, for the sake of time)
Round 1
The first point contorts the obvious fact that there has been no statistically significant warming for about the past fifteen years into a claim that we did not make: that there has been no warming over the past two centuries.
Point to Nordhaus.
We examine what Dr. Nordhaus actually said, and compare it to this claim.
There was no contortion. There was context. These are not the same.
The 16 claimed “well over 10 years”, Nordhaus clearly spoke to not getting lost in the tiniest details. Out of 200+ years, 15 years does come across as a tiny detail, and Lindzen as lost, complaining words were put into his mouth that occur nowhere in Nordhaus’ remarks.
Professor Nordhaus proceeds to confuse this with the issue of attribution, i.e., the determination of what caused the warming. Attribution is a distinctly different matter. While there is much to contest in the published temperature records, there is general acceptance that there has been a net increase in global mean temperature similar to that shown in Professor Nordhaus’s first graph.
Look for signs of confusion in Nordhaus. Lindzen fails to connect.
Look for signe Nordhaus mentions attribution in Point 1. Lindsen fails to connect.
Again, it appears Nordhaus is on the mark, and Lindzen misses the point. Twice.
The prior two- to three-hundred-year period was much cooler and is known as the Little Ice Age, and, of course, a longer record would have shown still-earlier periods as warm or warmer than the present.
As Nordhaus went back centuries, some latitude in allowing Lindzen a few more centuries is granted, but Nordhaus wisely showed relevance, relating his point back to the original claims clearly and succinctly..
The observation that the last few years include some of the warmest years on record no more implies future warming than record stock market highs imply a steadily rising future market.
Here, Lindzen blunders badly, stumbling blindly into territory where Nordhaus is a master and Lindzen is entirely unfamiliar. On the scale of centuries — which Lindzen extended to his peril — ‘steadily rising future market’ is axiomatic in Economics. Lindzen has argued against a tautology of his own choosing, and forfeits this point.
The fact that warming has greatly slowed does imply that, at the least, there are other processes that are currently competitive with the impact of steadily increasing greenhouse gases.
A point for Lindzen, and a point for Nordhaus en passant.
Lindzen here acknowledges ‘currently competitive’ with the impact of steadily increasing greenhouse gases. His definition of ‘current’ appears to be on the scale of 15 years or so.
Failing to counter, despite plentiful scope, Nordhaus on the connection of warming to GHG concentration, and acknowledging steadily increasing GHGs, Lindzen has trapped himself in the corner of “other processes are too small except in the short term” and “GHG’s are long term and increasing.”
Round 1 to Nordhaus, 5:1
Bart B wrote:
>On the scale of centuries — which Lindzen extended to his peril — ‘steadily rising future market’ is axiomatic in Economics.
Hoo, boy! You just lost all credibility. You don’t know much about ancient and medieval economic history, do you?
I take it that “axiomatic” means “demonstrably false, but we’ll see if we can get away with it anyway.”
physicistdave | April 5, 2012 at 5:55 am |
No one knows much about ancient or medieval economic history; it’s a fiction to believe anyone does.
Systems of barter and exchange, standards of welfare in city states run as much by superstition and brutality as by exchange of goods? These even have an objective econometric correlative?
Talking about economic history prior to the dawn of fiat currency is like talking about planetary motion in the first second after the Big Bang.
The axiom of the Market is that it grows. There’s a little dispute around the fringes of Economics about this (of which I’m glad), but it’s a given in discussion of the topic.
As conditions of exchange near the ideals of a Free and Fair Market, economic efficiency drives optimal allocation of scarce resources and innovation to increase the wealth of the market as a whole. Whether it’s an accurate model of physical reality or not (obviously not), in the long term the market steadily rises, absent a catastrophe.
Which Lindzen argues isn’t going to happen.
Bart R wrote to me:
>Talking about economic history prior to the dawn of fiat currency is like talking about planetary motion in the first second after the Big Bang.
So, nothing important happened before the creation of the Fed in 1913?
Talk about temporal parochialism!
Bart also wrote:
>The axiom of the Market is that it grows. There’s a little dispute around the fringes of Economics about this (of which I’m glad), but it’s a given in discussion of the topic.
Y’know, I like free markets. But, to call that an “axiom”… well, look at Japan’s experience in the ’90s. You seem to use the word “axiom” for what is usually called “wishful thinking.”
Now, if you want to maintain that *totally* free markets, properly policed to avoid fraud, would be impressive engines of growth, then I am inclined to agree, though I would not call that an axiom. But, that is not the world we live in, and it seems to me that it would be nice for economists to pay at least a tiny bit of attention to the world we really do live in.
Bart also wrote:
>Systems of barter and exchange, standards of welfare in city states run as much by superstition and brutality as by exchange of goods? These even have an objective econometric correlative?
Hmmm…. I’d say that “barter and exchange,” etc. ought to be what economics is about! To define economics simply as econometrics is like the GCM guys who want to define the climate as whatever their models predict: If reality disagrees with the models, let’s chuck reality.
Perhaps, both in economics and in climatology, reality should have priority.
Dave
physicistdave | April 5, 2012 at 5:53 pm |
I think we can both agree fiat currency predates 1913, which perhaps is closer an analogy to the birth of our planet in the subject of planetary motion, than to the very exciting time before there were planets or stars at all.
Not that barter and exchanges without currency aren’t informative, or exciting to economists; however, when not being econometrists for a paycheck, most end up concerning themselves with utility and factors of production and centers of decision influence these days, now that we’ve gotten beyond lances, pikes, exorcism and trading a cows for magic beans.
Speaking of, calling Japan up to the 1990’s anything like a Market economy is a bit of a fairy tale, so the axiom more applies in the converse: where the Market is too interfered with by the state or strong trusts, growth is stunted. I call this a win for my argument.
Some economic systems perform at some levels how some Economics predicts. Imagining ourselves or any government wise enough to outguess the genius of the Fair Market is as big a failing as imagining we can fine-tune or outguess the climate.
The best we can do knowing how little we ever can understand in that comutual field that Economics and Climate Physics intersect over is to privatize the carbon cycle per capita, price CO2 emission to the point of maximum return to the per capita owners, and let the Fair Market sort it all out.
Bart wrote to me:
>I think we can both agree fiat currency predates 1913, which perhaps is closer an analogy to the birth of our planet in the subject of planetary motion, than to the very exciting time before there were planets or stars at all.
Indeed — last I heard it was invented in Song dynasty China. But, it really got going as the dominant monetary system in the twentieth century. Its record is less than perfect.
Bart also wrote:
>Speaking of, calling Japan up to the 1990′s anything like a Market economy is a bit of a fairy tale, so the axiom more applies in the converse: where the Market is too interfered with by the state or strong trusts, growth is stunted. I call this a win for my argument.
Well… not a *totally* free market, for sure! But, neither is any other economy on earth.
Bart also wrote:
>Imagining ourselves or any government wise enough to outguess the genius of the Fair Market is as big a failing as imagining we can fine-tune or outguess the climate.
Oh, I’m a Hayekian in that respect — the “uses of knowledge in society,” and all that.
Dave
physicistdave | April 5, 2012 at 10:54 pm |
See, now it’s starting to sound like we’re in good accord on most issues, and even thing somewhat alike.
The safest thing for both of us is to reassess where we went wrong. :D
Bart R | April 5, 2012 at 11:41 am | Reply
“standards of welfare in city states”
Yep, those standards were “You build this wall and we’ll give you a little bread and water, otherwise …”
physicistdave, there is a much bigger reason Bart R’s commentary on that point is idiotic. Pay attention to what Lindzen says rather than Bart R’s misrepresentation.
Bart R claims a “rising future market” is axiomatic. This is irrelevant. Whether or not such was axiomatic is irrelevant. Whether or not it was true is irrelevant. Whether or not it is valid says nothing about whether or not it is implied by “record stock market highs.” Bart R acts as though Lindzen is arguing a point he never made. In other words, Bart R misrepresented Lindzen and created a straw man.
Nevermind the misrepresentation around what “steadily” means.
Brandon, very good!
The random walk, as exampled the sequential sum of a million coin flips, can deviate very far from 50%, very much farther than intuition allows.
Brandon Shollenberger | April 6, 2012 at 12:48 pm |
In strict predicate logic, all axioms are implied by all true statements within the system.
Lindzen’s statement is automatically an own-goal, in this sense.
I understand what he _meant_ to say.
He simply said it using an invalid parallel construction.
He could have said, with some internal validity, ‘The observation that the last few years include some of the warmest years on record no more implies future warming than record prices of real estate or tulips imply a steadily rising future real estate or tulip price.’
That was the matter of my quibble, as a logician. It’s something of a shibboleth, as anyone who doesn’t immediately recognize the reference is pretty clearly a poor student of formal logic.
However, Lindzen would still be somewhat overstating his case; there are a number of practices on record, and at least one signal:noise argument published, deprecating practices that use spans of time less than 30, or 25, or 17 years for discussing climate trends.
Nordhaus simply acknowledges this in referring to the entire temperature record, changing from a basis of simple linear trendology to a frequentist analysis, which is a valid method often used for examining data.
Lindzen’s too narrow to disparage this valid alternative paradigm.
Can it really be that Lindzen knows so little, not just of formal logic, but also of analysis of data?
If you are to score like a boxing match, you need to use the standard 10 point must system. The winner of a round gets 10 points and the other 0-9 points, if the round is a draw, both get 10 points.
bob droege | April 6, 2012 at 12:00 pm |
Do you really believe the exchange worthy of spoofing by _accurate_ comparison to the sweet science?
I believe we may all agree I’ve already done enough disservice to boxing.
Also, my original intention had been to use fencing terms, to fit with the “parry and riposte” theme, but I got distracted.
Bart – Are you being paid to do this? If not, do you do anything other than post here? You are so prolific, I am just curious why.
He’s retired or unemployed, as are all the rest of us here
Jim2
It’s simple courtesy to our host.
What I lack in quality, I’m endeavoring to make up in quantity. ;)
Truthfully, I’m beginning to suspect there’s something wrong with anyone who would post one tenth so compulsively to any blog. :D
The ‘A’ alternative left unwritten…
It is the ‘A’ alternative…
jim | April 9, 2012 at 11:21 pm |
He’s retired or unemployed, as are all the rest of us here
Sorry; wrong on all counts.
A full and healthy family and social life, never blog from (full time) job, maintain regular exercise routine, part-time studies, and do charity work besides, as well as regular reading for enjoyment and some television watching.
Technology, typing like a demon, Evelyn Wood, and neglecting to proof-read will do wonders.
When I was an undergraduate, there was some speculation by fellow physics students about the Schwarzschild radius of the object in my brain responsible for the spontaneous .. well, let’s just say, it’s not a new habit, and related to why I pursued seven minor degrees back then.
However, I’m not paid to post here, no.
You may accept either that I lost a bet, or http://xkcd.com/386/ :D
It’s good to know this isn’t all you do. For me, life has intervened in my on-line ramblings.
Climate models suck at predicting the future. Econometric models suck at predicting the future. Just how much does a model attempting to predict the effect of climate and climate policies on the economy suck?
We don’t understand the climate enough to make long term predictions on climate. We don’t understand how the economy works enough to make long term predictions on the economy. Computer based phrenology is no basis for making critical decisions on policy in either field, let alone combined.
I understand Lindzen is arguing that, even if you accept there is value in Nordhaus’s model predictions, his own results do not justify the policy he urges. But I think even engaging in the debate is counterproductive.
Rather than explaining that Nordhaus doesn’t have any more of a clue about the economic future than darts thrown at a dartboard, we get long dissertations on the proper interpretation of his results. He who frames the debate, usually wins. Which is why I think it is a mistake to get lost in the weeds of arguing what the models show, rather than whether they should be given any weight in the debate at all.
Gary M wrote:
>Econometric models suck at predicting the future.
> We don’t understand how the economy works enough to make long term predictions on the economy.
And, anyone who knows *anything* about economics is painfully aware of that
I think we have now proven that Bart B. is playing some kind of game, maybe to measure how dumb some people can be!
Round 2
The second point concerns our observation that current computer climate models appear to exaggerate warming due to CO2. This bears on the critical issue of the climate sensitivity, the temperature rise for a doubling of atmospheric CO2.
No points awarded to either side, failure to engage.
Professor Nordhaus presents two graphs from the IPCC 2007 report2 that purport to show that without anthropogenic emissions, models successfully simulate the global mean temperature until about 1970 but cannot do so thereafter. This is the basis for the IPCC’s claim that it is likely that most of the warming over the past fifty years is due to man’s emissions.
No points awarded to either side, failure to engage.
Such a procedure absolutely requires that the model include correctly all other sources of variability.
Point to Lindzen. Point to Nordhaus. While Lindzen slightly overstates ‘absolutely requires’, the many limitations of the models is a valid point.
Yet Nordhaus is not refuted on his assertion that Lindzen et al simply misrepresented the model failures.
However, the failure of the models to predict the hiatus in warming over the past fifteen years is acknowledged to indicate that this condition has not been met.3
Point to Lindzen. Point to Nordhaus.
People who ought know better clearly made silly gaffes in presenting the models, and this does not bode well overall about the IPCC that they have such poor presentation.
Nordhaus, however, did allude to the fact in Round 1 of plentiful variability in the natural record; presence of a like hiatus in the past 15 years would only show model failure if models failed to exhibit any similar 15 year pauses or slowings.. which happen some 17 times in the various models over their 8 decade runs.
Furthermore there is the embarrassing fact that the models do not reproduce the 1910–1940 warming, which is nearly identical to the 1970–2000 warming but occurred before man’s emissions became large enough to be considered important.
Point to Lindzen.
With respect to climate sensitivity, it should be noted that the IPCC referred to all of man’s emissions rather than just CO2. The reason is that without the cooling effect of aerosols formed from certain emissions, the models significantly overpredict warming from greenhouse gases. However, each model needed a different value for the aerosol cancellation.4 This lack of consistency means that aerosols were merely an adjustment factor to bring the models into agreement with the historical record, while preserving a high climate sensitivity.
Point to Nordhaus. Introducing new material without precedent is allowable, of course, but it ought be accompanied by relevance to Nordhaus’ arguments, which simply does not materialize.
Therefore, the claim that the models cannot account for post-1970 warming without including human emissions means nothing scientifically.
Point to Nordhaus. Lindzen’s argument here does not have sufficient foundation for such certainty as Lindzen expresses.
Point to Lindzen. His rally through Round 2 is substantive and brings him back into the match.
Round 2 Final: Draw 4:4
My final note …
Tallbloke’s comment on the ‘Slayers’ …
This is what Roger has just written yesterday …
In the rush to condemn all things associated with ‘the Dragonslayers‘ some babies may have been thrown out with the bathwater. A lot of non-scientific baggage comes along with some of their members, and this has coloured people’s perceptions. However, because this is a site which sticks to discussing the science, and ‘censors’ off topic and inflammatory comment, we can dispassionately examine the scientific content without having discussion degenerate into a ruckus of noisy invective and insult. Last year on Judith Curry’s site ‘Climate Etc‘, this fate befell Joseph Postma’s paper on the greenhouse effect. It was a technical paper, and argument over its more controversial aspects and ‘slayer politics’ submerged its central point, as I noted at the time. Ulric Lyons has drawn my attention to a less technical paper by Joseph reiterating this central point which I think merit’s discussion.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/joseph-postma/
Tallbloke isn’t entirely wrong.
He’s a bit late to the party, if he just saw Postma’s graphic so lately or only now recognized that it has some potential as an analytical tool if cleaned up and properly applied, but it’s hard to fault him there either.
The Skydragons threads are so impenetrably awful I feel like I need a shower any time I go near them.
I say this having engaged in thread with Postma on that graphic and paper extensively before and after he wrote and posted it. It’s his best work, and he shows some promise. He’s dead wrong in his conclusions and premises, but he has a bit of a grasp of methodology that may help him out in time.
“My final note …”
promises? pretty please!
Round 3
“The third point concerns our statement that CO2 is not a pollutant, that we were perhaps using a commonsense, dictionary definition of pollutant.
Standing 8 count against Lindzen. Claiming commonsense, at this late date, in a Climate Change match is simply preposterous.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines pollutant as “a polluting agent; esp. a noxious or poisonous substance which pollutes the environment.”
A second standing eight count against Lindzen. Citing OED under the banner of “16 Scientists?” And only partially citing OED, omitting entries against his own interest?
Point for Lindzen. Nordhaus _is_ too dismissive of plain-language definition. It’s the WSJ, not a classroom at Yale.
Professor Nordhaus says, “The contention that CO2 is not a pollutant is a rhetorical device.” Rather he takes a 5–4 Supreme Court decision to be definitive. In fact, the Supreme Court majority did not rule CO2 a pollutant; it merely found that the Clean Air Act’s definition is so broad that CO2 falls under the statute, regardless of the facts of the matter.
Point to Nordhaus. A Supreme Court ruling, even 5-4, even with stipulation that the Act’s definition is broad, is a very solid foundation.
The concurrence of an economist (Richard Tol) is then taken as confirmation of the existence of specific externalities associated with CO2.
Point to Nordhaus. A classical definition in Economics withstands dismissive handwaving, and is substantive and relevant; given the clarity of Nordhaus’ description, ‘rhetorical device’ misses the mark for Lindzen.
We consider such references to be the real “rhetorical devices” because they obscure the key scientific issue: whether this critical component of the earth’s biosphere will cause significant and destructive global warming.”
Point to Nordhaus. Point to Lindzen.
While Lindzen is correct that this is a key scientific issue, it hardly makes him immune to the mauling Nordhaus has delivered unanswered in this round.
Round 3 score: Nordhaus over Lindzen 5:2.
Bart, thanks, I disagree, but good fun none the less!
jim, I’d agree if not for the outright inanity of some of the things Bart R said. Reasonable disagreements are one thing, but Bart R goes far beyond the reasonable.
Brandon Shollenberger | April 5, 2012 at 2:57 am |
Technically, it’s the literary device known as ‘mock heroic’, a type of parody or satire.
Send-up?
Comedy?
Taking the Mickey out?
Popping the balloon?
Bursting the bubble?
Irony is wasted on the young.
I have no idea what you are referring to when you say “it’s.” Nothing you said has any bearing on my comment, so this seems to be you using a pronoun without an antecedent.
Brandon, real fight scores are exactly as Bart scores it. That’s why there are three judges. No tie scores. You can be one of the other judges…
My thoughts are just as inane as Bart’s are. So there!
Bart,
‘Youth is wasted on the young’
You can’t be old, if you got that wrong!
jim, the difference in scores from judges in boxing are almost always fairly small. You don’t see judges saying someone won 22-6 while others say it was a tied match or 11-15. You also don’t see judges simply make things up about what happened in a boxing match.
Now then, I could post an overview/judgment of the debate if there is some interest. However, it would be quite different than pointing out the fabrications and nonsensical statements made by Bart R. I’m not sure which approach would be more desirable by people, assuming anyone would care about what I have to say.
Come to think of it, I discusse4 Nordhaus’s first response on this very blog a while back. I wish I could find that.
Brandon, I’m on your side.
But boxing scores are usually wildly erratic. And you do see the judges making-things-up in their scores.
Like Ukrainian ice skating judges!
But as I posted some where above or below on this thread, nothing we are talking about here will bother the most of the people who fill the rest of the world. They don’t care, for good or bad.
My anger at the IPCC CGW crap is that is is derailing all of the good, making-things-better environmental efforts in the world. Sanctimonious carbon de-intensification is simply industrial rent seekers and eastern European criminals are stealing our money, and making the world environmental condition worse.
jim:
Really? I don’t watch much boxing, but of the couple dozen matches I’ve seen, the scores were never different by much. Is it maybe different because I’ve only seen the “big name” fights?
Brandon,
Yes, the big name ones are scored close, when the judges think that it could be a difficult walk, or run, out of the arena. Especially when it could be, or might be, a win by decision. A split decision is worst, only one judge has to escape. Being fastest is no matter, when you’re the only one running!
Brandon, as a favor, tell me how you guys do the quote, italic, etc code in posts here. Is it html or a bb code?
Thank you!
jim:
Ah. That could my confusion then.
It’s HTML (quotes are done with the blockquote tag).
Brandon, thank you!
jim, glad to help!
jim | April 5, 2012 at 4:07 am |
While I’m not so old as Oscar Wilde, I did intentionally misword the quote, to avoid deletion, yes.
Round 4
In another rhetorical flourish, Professor Nordhaus’s fourth point misrepresents us as claiming that “skeptical climate sci-entists are living under a reign of terror about their professional and personal livelihoods.” This reductio ad absurdum is inappropriate, but we observe that individuals like climate scientist James Hansen, environmental activist Robert Kennedy Jr., and economist Paul Krugman have characterized critics of climate alarm as “traitors to the planet.”
Point to Lindzen. Discourtesy overlooked or excused ought not be tolerated.
Point to Nordhaus. It was funny.
We noted the systematic dismissal of editors who publish peer-reviewed papers questioning climate alarm, as well as the legitimate fears of untenured faculty whose promotions depend on publications and grant support. We note here that editors like Donald Kennedy at the prestigious Science magazine have publically declared their opposition to the publication of papers finding results in opposition to climate dogma.5
Point to Lindzen.
The Climategate e-mails6 specifically describe these tactics, and numerous examples are given in Lindzen (2012.)7 While defense of existing paradigms is normal in science, the present situation is clearly pathological in its imposition of conformity.
Point to Lindzen. Climategate exhibited excesses of attitudes not in the best traditions of Science, and revealed that backstabbing and sniping of extremely unprofessional types were routine.
We cannot speak to the situation in economics, but the notion that dissident voices and new theories are encouraged in climate science is downright silly, though Professor Nordhaus is correct to view such encouragement as critical to a healthy science.
Point to Nordhaus. Judith Curry’s activism in encouraging dissident voices and new theories alone disproves Lindzen’s contention, so bright a star it is in Climate Science.
Point to Nordhaus, admitted by Lindzen.
Point to Lindzen. Recognized his limitations and stayed out of Economics this time.
Unfortunately, the current situation in climate science is far from healthy. Professor Nordhaus contributes to this when he succumbs to the introduction of the false analogy with tobacco, and his call for political leaders to “be extremely vigilant to prevent pollution [sic] of the scientific process by the merchants of doubt” is not atypical of the current situation.
Point Lindzen. Nordhaus had opportunities to deliver his case more strongly, and without exposing the vulnerabilities of the parts of Climate Science Nordhaus has been too high-minded to descend into himself, where Lindzen clearly has superior familiarity.
Score: Lindzen edges up on Nordhaus, 3:5
Round 5
Regarding Professor Nordhaus’s fifth point that there is no evidence that money is at issue, we simply note that funding for climate science has expanded by a factor of 15 since the early 1990s, and that most of this funding would disappear with the absence of alarm.
Point Nordhaus. Lindzen barely lifts his gloves except to flail wide of the mark. Nordhaus is sharp, focused, in his element and scores directly an uncontested blow that staggers the opposition.
Climate alarmism has expanded into a hundred-billion-dollar industry far broader than just research. Economists are usually sensitive to the incentive structure, so it is curious that the overwhelming incentives to promote climate alarm are not a consideration to Professor Nordhaus.
It would be refreshing were Lindzen to score a point against Nordhaus’ strengths, but again, Lindzen falls short here. If Lindzen did more than imagine the facts, he might have scored at least one telling hit here, but he fails to deliver on the promise shown last round.
There are no remotely comparable incentives to the contrary position provided by the industries that he claims would be harmed by the policies he advocates.
Lindzen again trips up badly. This is not just Nordhaus’ strong suite, but the fans’ favorite of Nordhaus’ side; they can see Lindzen’s real vulnerability here and the powerful body blow Nordhaus delivers shakes Lindzen’s side.
Point Nordhaus.
Round 5 Score: Nordhaus over Lindzen 3:0
Sorry. Clearly the passage above is my commentary, not Dr. Lindzen’s:
“t would be refreshing were Lindzen to score a point against Nordhaus’ strengths, but again, Lindzen falls short here. If Lindzen did more than imagine the facts, he might have scored at least one telling hit here, but he fails to deliver on the promise shown last round.”
Something confuses me about the Arctic summer temperatures discussion. It seems to me that large stretches of the Arctic such as Northern Alaska are essentially ice free during the summer. Under those conditions, it does seem to me that Lindzen is right about radiative balance determining the temperature. What am I missing?
The temperature profile slides in Lindzen’s briefing refer to the area above 80ºN. Northern Alaska reaches about 70ºN.
Round Six.
Knockout Nordhaus, first exchange of the round.
Seriously, disputing the man about the interpretation of his own book?
Lindzen is on the matt, and though he gets back to his feet to beat the eight count, and ought retire, he gamely hobbles on.
“However, the major problem with the conclusions of CHL is that they ignore the perils of the climate-change uncertainties.”
This is a knockout blow that Lindzen et al do not recover from. While shakey on other analyses, they are completely missing from the engagement on policies for coping with Uncertainty. This is Nordhaus’ turf, and if they were going to win the match they’d have to engage here.
They fail.
Round 6 Score: Nordhaus over Lindzen, Knockout.
No, the other judges may have scored it differently…
Actually if we aren’t allowed to dispute his book then he loses here with an “own goal”. From the 2007 version:
“We cannot rule out the potential for catastrophic impacts that might overwhelm the billions and trillions of dollars of impacts and abatement costs. But fears about low-probability outcomes in the distant future – which
are unlikely to be verified or refuted in the near future – should not impede our taking constructive steps to deal with the high-probability dangers that are upon us today. We should start with the clear-and-present dangers, after which we can turn to the unclear-and-distant threats.”
So in his book he directs us to put aside “Abrupt and Catastrophic Climate Change”, and by so doing Lindzen et al hoist him on his own petard. When you do that the cost benefit analysis suggest little to favour action over inaction.
HAS | April 5, 2012 at 12:58 am |
I greatly disparage argument from authority. It has been used and abused to great harm, and reflects mental laziness.
However, if there is one case where it might be conceded – as there is little recourse to better method – it must be in the interpretation of the author’s own works.
If you can construct arguments critical of a book internal to its own logic, that’s well and good. Where the author of the book steps in, provides a fulsome and extended explanation of the authoritative intention, and answers the criticisms, that’s a debate of whether the author was right or wrong.
Where its purely a question of who interpreted what the author meant correctly and how to apply the author’s methods, that’s simply no contest.
Except for this one case: Greedo definitely did not shoot first.
Bart,
You have said such absurdly silly things about economics, as we have pointed out above, that the only people who will take you seriously are those who are 100 percent ignorant of economics.
Disagree Bart, uncertainty cuts both ways, with the number of green-tech businesses going under there is considerably more uncertainty in the Economic estimates than there is in the climate estimates. Economic “forcings” have unintended consequences.
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 | April 5, 2012 at 8:20 am |
Uncertainty is symmetric, now?
Green tech business ought go under at the same rate and for the same causes as any other business in its class. Where torpedoed by big-shouldered giants that don’t want the competition, or where state interference creates supply while simultaneously suppressing demand, it’s not uncertainty.. we can be more certain most green tech will fail under prevailing circumstances.
The intentions of people who don’t know what they’re doing or don’t think of consequences are hardly the ones to be taken into account.
And again, the reason for this added negative certainty is inversion of incentives. It is simple Tragedy of the Commons.
But back to symmetric Uncertainty. Fascinating topic.
Suppose we have 100 agricultural weather basins. They can have killing frost, killing heat, drought, fair conditions, or flood.
Case 1A: Suppose perfect knowledge of which condition will happen over 50 years, for 25 basins. Farmers will build exactly the right long-term irrigation/retention/etc. structures and invest in exactly the most profitable arrangement of slow-return plants (like trees that take years to mature, eg).
1B: another 25 basins have wide uncertainty of all conditions. Farmers must invest wastefully in both drought- and flood-proofed fields, and cannot risk as much on slow-return plantings. If at the end of 50 years any hazard didn’t occur, that insurance is wasted. That’s 5 opportunities to lose an investment.
1C: For 25 basins suppose perfect knowledge of the coming 50 years that there will be no droughts and no killing heat. Farmers have uncertainty about floods and frosts, but need only insure against those specific risks. At the end, if no floods or frost, that insurance went to waste. 2 opportunities to lose an investment.
1D: For 25 basins, only floods are uncertain. This requires the lowest cost to insure against the risk, with heavy investment in dykes and diversion, and optimal selection of plants and crop rotation, etc. If at the end of 50 years no floods happened at all, that insurance is wasted.
Now suppose each measure could be opted into or out of each of the 50 years.
Which case is most like symmetric uncertainty? Not 1A, there’s no cost to uncertainty at all. It’s 1D, either there will be a flood or not; there’s no additive, cumulative, or multiplicative effect of uncertainty involved. Symmetric uncertainty is the lowest cost kind. And it isn’t what we have.
We have unsymmetric uncertainty, and climage change increases its cost.
Bart, the only reason we have confidence that future climate will be warmer is because of the reduced likelihood of a major glacial period which is because of anthropogenic climate change. Sometimes ya got to take the bad with the good.
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 | April 5, 2012 at 3:37 pm |
As we’re not due for an ice age in the next 10,000 years or so, or any time CO2 is above 240-260 ppmv, anything we do right now to avoid one is just as good as expending a fire extinguisher when there’s no fire.
It leaves our reserves depleted for when we may need them.
How is that ‘the good’?
I think it was Branson said that during his Antarctic tour. Anyway, the timing of the next glacial depends on the wobble in our orbit which has decreased. Unbalanced glacial mass is supposed to cause the wobble. The glacial mass is reduced because of mankind’s agricultural and industrial endeavors. Less glacial mass, less wobble, more climate stability.
BTW, land use is pretty amazing. Did you know that plowed land or over grazed pasture typically has a maximum soil temperature of 3 to 5 degrees C higher than low impact pasture or no till land? It also retains more moisture along with reducing erosion by both wind and rain.
There is an impromptu science experiment in progress right now. Over 200 million acres of land in the western hemisphere has been converted to conservation agriculture. I have been a proponent of wetland restoration for a long time, I just never knew how much impact no till agriculture could have.
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 | April 5, 2012 at 5:32 pm |
Land use is indeed a too-neglected topic, and so nuanced, complex and wicked as to need perhaps a blog all its own for every word in every climate blog on the Internet to give it coverage proportionate to its importance.
However, wobble decrease is a tricky thing. I hardly foresee a top-heavy world where the average elevation of glaciers increases while that of liquid water finds its natural level more quickly as one that will over the long term wobble less.
The Antarctic is likely millions of years from reducing its average elevation, no?
The Antarctic more like the point of the top stabilizing the spin. The northern hemisphere with large land areas for glaciation, the imbalance. The magnetic poles may be a good proxy for the imbalance.
http://modernsurvivalblog.com/pole-shift-2/pole-shift-north-races-south-crawls/
Which leads to the competing theory of magnetic field reversal as the cause of the glacial periods. But did the field reversal cause the glacial or did the glacial cause the field reversal?
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 | April 5, 2012 at 6:44 pm |
Dude, look at any map. The South Pole is totally on the bottom.
;)
(For those who can’t tell, yes, this is a joke.)
Bart, my score of this thread: Bart against the rest – 11 points. The rest against Bart – 27 points. No musts or tries, deduction for floutlance and flauntulance. ;-)
(Don;t take it wrong; I score negative on flauntulance)
I’ll score this even…
(I think my one is better than your two. Synergy is nowhere evident in this Faber food fight thread.. YMMV).
drat, ruined it again… above next one; “floutlance > floutulance”
drang it and drats
jim | April 7, 2012 at 3:01 am |
Just to confirm, 27 divided six ways is 4.5 each, putting me well more than double the average score of each of my opponents.
I claim ironic, or perhaps pyrrhic, victory.
Divide 11 six ways…
Statistics, a two way street.
“ironic” > the opposite of what was intended…. sorry ;-)
jim | April 8, 2012 at 10:53 pm |
It’s a 16 lane superhighway.
Divide 27 6! ways to represent each opportunity for synergistic partnership. That’s 1/16 earned by each opponent.
By all means, play number games. :D
“By all means, play number games.”
Who started the scoring numbers? Nordhaus?
Who started the mildly cutting, scoring, numbers?
Tu plus tu equals who?
(wrong spot above: Out,out… for a new thread)
I’ll score this even…
(I think my one is greatter than your two. Synergy is nowhere evident in this Faber food fight thread.. YMMV).
The limitation in thinking of the Climate Casino and a roulette game as the appropriate metaphor, a long time ago, Riverboat Gambles figured out the odds. Riverboat Gamblers made their bets on known odds, not chaos. For the Climate Casino game, the odds are not known, guessed at, believed and defended, but ultimately not known. Any bet is…a waste of money.
For me however, the most important cost is opportunity lost cost. Spending money on something that won’t make a difference. Did I read correctly that an optimal policy in keeping CO2 emissions at current levels would result in a 0.1 degree mitigation in 50 years? Hmmm. As I recall 0.1 degrees now or a hundred years from now does not amount to a hill of beans.
The opportunity lost cost needs just as prominent position as catastrophic costs, only I believe catastrophe is really an incalculable long shot.
This final comment by Hoskins et al is relevant to the previous thread. This is typical of the scientists’ view.
“It is up to policy makers, not scientists, to decide whether governments should take concerted mitigating action to try to reduce this risk. On this we do not comment.”
A good exposition Bart. It seems that Lindzen has only won one round so far and is heading for an overall point loss. The weaknesses shown by both fighters would make a knockout result highly unlikely.
peterdavies252 | April 4, 2012 at 11:56 pm |
It shouldn’t have been a knockout, but Lindzen made repeated tactical errors.
Nordhaus kept bringing the match back into his own domain; where he kept Lindzen out of Lindzen’s melieu, he was successful.
Nordhaus made us forget he wasn’t dealing with Lindzen on Lindzen’s turf; moreover, he made Lindzen forget it.
While others might score it differently, Nordhaus’ technique is very good, and Lindzen’s appears to have gotten flabby in the echo chamber.
It’s not so surprising; we’re pretty sure Lindzen hasn’t faced four decades of Yale-level sparring partners. MIT’s many excellent — and not a few outstanding — things, but it isn’t the shark tank Yale is that way.
And Nordhaus is in the superheavyweight class. Lindzen’s.. just not.
” And Nordhaus is in the superheavyweight class. Lindzen’s.. just not.”
Agreed. So who will you put Nordhaus up against next? Who will you have him spar against?
WRT challengers: Who do you see for a defense against? Keep your cards too close to your vest, and you won’t attract an opponent!
Sub rosa, who do want to see against Nordhaus? I won’t tell!
jim
I prefer to remain impartial.
I don’t want to be seen as biased. :)
Really, between you and me, who is the big challenger? What’s his punch, policy or radiative transfer? What’s his reach, radiation is a very very long one… Carbon capitation is ED dysfunctionally short!
jim | April 5, 2012 at 4:18 am |
While I can’t say what outcomes I’d expect, it’d be nice to see Nordhaus and McKitrick or a first rate Economist square off, to illuminate the Economics where Lindzen just couldn’t and didn’t.
It’d be interesting to see Nordhaus debate McIntyre, too; that would be a chance to see some real artistry.
Remembering, there is no _serious_ in such exchanges of opinions. They can only be taken with a grain of salt, valuable though they are to read and understand and consider. They’re not the science themselves, and can only inform about metascience, in that sense.
So I revere them in the ancient form of spoof, and leave it to the reader to decide if they have a sense of humor.
I personally don’t share Lindzen’s belief that a reliable cost benefit analysis can be constructed that justifies a do nothing approach.
It seems like no one is considering that just as there might be a range of outcomes due to the sensitivity of climate forcing, there may also be a range as to what the opportunity costs might be for taking no action at all.
Both Curry and Lindzen have a good understanding of the strengths and shortcomings of climate science. But they seem to discount the expertise of Nordhaus whose specialty is how to evaluate the economic impacts.
Actually Nordhaus’s own analysis shows that his “backstop” scenario is the most cost effective. It isn’t do nothing, more like the “no regrets” approach that Judith, Pielke Jr and other have advocated.
All of the extreme responses have negative playoffs when discounted for the time value of goods.
John Vetterling | April 5, 2012 at 2:15 am |
While I don’t disagree entirely with you, I’m more of Pythagoras’ view.
“No regrets” approaches are well and good in theory, so far as they go, but the approaches so far as I’ve seen proposed by Curry and Pielke Jr. don’t add up to more than twenty percent or so of the effectiveness of for example straightforward privatization, which in itself is a tried and true no regrets approach.
Worked for bandwidth in mobile phones. For television. Cable. Farmland..
What’s the downside of privatizing the carbon cycle? I see no regrets.
What is “…privatizing the carbon cycle” ??
What is it??
jim | April 7, 2012 at 3:13 am |
The same as privatizing apples or cell phone bandwidth, food service in restaurants, or HBO.
http://prezi.com/jpced0jg1chv/carbon-pricing/
As a scientist, I must ask: where is the evidence — real evidence, please, not just plaudits from his own social circle! — that Nordhaus has any real “expertise” in “how to evaluate the economic impacts.”
As a physicist, I can point to physical devices I have designed/built that work very nicely to show I have some actual knowledge. What on earth can Nordhaus point to?
Yeah, yeah — Yale, Nobel, etc. The guys who ran the Inquisition were socially respected, too.
Where’s the beef?
I work as an engineer and in my job I require to consult with a variety of experts outside my own discipline–materials and process engineers, quality engineers, test and instrumentation technicians, etc. I’ve learned a long time ago that my expertise is limited to my own speciality. And where I have picked up some knowledge in other areas in my career, I know that my knowledge in these other areas is not deep knowledge.
It is human nature to look at someone else’s job and de-value their efforts and to simplify the work that they do. Consequently, I’m pretty skeptical when scientists practice “economics without a license”. I think it is fair to challenge the economic methodology and to question the assumptions of any study whether it is economic or scientific. But in this entire global warming debate, I see too much of climate scientists weighing into the discussion in areas that they really aren’t qualified to evaluate. (Curry, frankly, has much more credibility when she sticks to the commentary on the hard science.)
If you are a practicing climate scientist (or physicist for that matter), you don’t have the time to be an expert in your own discipline let along be an expert in how to evaluate the economic consequences.
Pythagoras wrote:
>Consequently, I’m pretty skeptical when scientists practice “economics without a license”. I think it is fair to challenge the economic methodology and to question the assumptions of any study whether it is economic or scientific.
Hmmm…. if we take seriously your point, only practicing astrologers can judge the quality of astrology, only practicing phrenologists can judge the truth of phrenology, only practicing “Aryan race scientists” can judge the validity of “Aryan race science,” etc.
Anyone willing to spend a full day in a decent university library in the economics sections can confirm that there is almost nothing upon which economists generally agree. That is conclusive proof that economics lacks results that have the validity of science.
Isn’t it possible that a guy like Nordhaus has bucked the trend and actually knows what he is talking about? Possible, but statistically unlikely. Therefore, one needs evidence. Otherwise, he is just the most popular phrenologist or astrologer in town: not very impressive.
Dave
Pythagoras
Re Nordhaus’ expertise on cost/benefit, see Monckton:
Why mitigating CO2 emissions is cost ineffective,
Monckton’s Slide Presentation to the California Assembly, and
Copenhagen Consensus 2008
Everything else has a very much better benefit/cost than mitigating global warming. Even unrealistically low discount rates cannot rescue the argument. Those advocating mitigating global warming have an extremely high hurdle to jump to even be credible, regardless of honors.
Judith wrote: “In the end, it seems to me that Nordhaus is justifying his argument based upon the possibility of truly catastrophic change on the timescale of a century.”
That seems odd. Nordhaus points out that CHL base their argument on one possible outcome out of many, and he argues that all possibilities should be taken into account.
i.e. CHL are guilty of (the inverse of) what you accuse Nordhaus of, it seems to me.
I can see you now – unable to move – taking all possible outcomes into account.
It’s all about which possibilities (and it seems if it wins the argument – near impossibilities) you take into account, and how much weight you give to them.
If you see what I mean.
HAS,
I agree that the probability attached to the different outcomes should be taken into account. But my understanding is that Judith Curry doesn’t believe that comparative probabilities can be attached to different outcomes.
The science does not yet make it possible to know the probabilities. But, as you concede, any legitimate analysis of the sort you praise has to take the probabilities into account.
Therefore, a legitimate analysis of this sort is really, truly not (yet) possible.
The world is just like that.
Tough.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
A system in which the inflow of energy exceeds the outflow will probably warm up. That’s the case for the kettle on your stove as well as for the earth.
That the earth will warm up in response to a positive energy imbalance is more likely than that it will cool down.
Uncertainty is not the same as knowing nothing.
Plus, uncertainty goes both ways.
Plus, if the uncertainty range includes very bad outcomes (and esp if the damage function is convex, http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyUncertainty.html ), doing nothing is risky. What to do in response is a personal evaluative judgment of course, but making that judgment based on the logical fallacy of confusing uncertainty with ignorance seems unwise to me.
Bart April 6, 2012 at 3:49 am
The thing about complex systems is that it is always worthwhile thinking about, dare I say it, the more complex system. The jug boils, the tea is made, ends up in everyone, giving a warm and contented feeling and the water (temporally) ends up at body temperature.
I trust I don’t need to explain anymore than that.
And on very bad outcomes these cut both ways. While you are worrying about the potential downside on climate sensitivities how much attention are you paying to meteorites? When it comes for a competition for scarce resources to mitigate very uncertain risks, it pays to have all such risks on the table. Otherwise you end up making trade-offs between very uncertain, very high cost events, and those that are very much less so on both accounts.
Apples and pears is never easy.
These are the subjective probabilities of inductive logic so there are no “the” probabilities. Probability here merely measures opinion, which in the climate case has a huge range. The concept is useless here. Objective probability is based on the distribution of outcomes in an infinite series of identical events. Subjective probabilities are just opinions. They are useful when opinions converge, but not when they diverge, as with the climate case.
David Wojick | April 5, 2012 at 9:04 am |
“Subjective probabilities are just opinions”?
How very pre-Bayesian that sounds.
Isn’t it nearer to fact to say subjective probabilities represent beliefs in unknown probability distributions, which may be bounded and can be tested to establish confidence levels?
While everyone ought agree pretending to more knowledge than observation and reason can provide is an error, isn’t it worse to pretend to less knowledge, too?
That depends on whether you are talking about knowledge of the real world or knowledge of opinions about it (they may converge at the extremes but they are sufficiently different that find it useful to distinguish between them in our discourse)
Succinctly put,. David W.
Can Nordhaus or anyone, anyone, else propose a do-able means to ban fire and combustion world wide?
Absent that, all else is word play and number play.
yes I think Judith has it exactly backwards.
Thirty years of ‘professional’ climatology. Over $100 billion of Joe Public’s money spent
And still we seem to be no nearer getting an answer to the basic question of ‘what is the climate sensitivity?’ than we were in Arrhenius’ day.
I’m hard pushed to be persuaded that it hasn’t all been a complete waste of time and money.
Can somebody convince me that they have a way of ever getting there? And an estimate of the future costs to do so?
If not, why should we continue any of this ‘work’ at all? Times is hard, climatology is a complete waste of time and costs a fortune. Why not just stop it now?
Joe Sixpack. +100 Everything you say is absolutely spot on. There is no evidence for a climate sensitivity that is distinguishable from zero.
On reflection, it is even worse than I thought.
Is there *anything at all* that we know now that we didn’t know before we spent $100 billion?
Lots of ‘in my opinion’ and ‘indications are consistent with’, but no actual hard knowledge that I can think of. Even the most basic idea…that increasing CO2 in the global atmosphere necessarily leads to increased global temperature has never been actually demonstrated to be true.
We have an entire ‘scientific’ field with not even a firm grounding in basic experiment and observation. What a scandalous waste of effort. Close it down now and spend the money on something useful.
Joe, It is even worse than that. The modern data that we have acquired over the last 30 years or so since the satellite era, shows conclusively that there is no CO2 signal in the data. Despite the fact that CO2 levels are rising at an unprecedented rate, the observed data shows that this is having no discernable effect on global temperatures. We can easily detect a signal +0.06 C per decade from unknown causes, but we cannot find a signal of +0.2 C per decade from CO2. The only sensible conclusion that we can comne to is that the actual climate sensitivity of adding CO2 to the atmosphere from current levels is indistinguishable from zero.
@ Joe Sixpack. You said: “We have an entire ‘scientific’ field with not even a firm grounding in basic experiment and observation.”
Of course not; the entire ‘scientific field’ is based on an axiom: The planet is warming rapidly, at an increasing rate, as a result of the injection of CO2 into the atmosphere as a byproduct of mankind’s use of combustion as its primary energy source. The consequences of this warming range from undesirable to catastrophic and can only be ameliorated by establishing a worldwide government with absolute control over all aspects of energy production and consumption.
Climate data is collected, analyzed, and disseminated by ‘climate scientists’ in support of the prime axiom. Experiments, observations, or opinions that cast doubt on the prime axiom are instantly attacked by the ‘climate scientists’; any scientists who question it are attacked personally and professionally. There is widespread opinion at the pointy end of the ‘climate science pyramid’ that questioning the prime axiom should be criminalized.
Climate science may be a lot of things; scientific isn’t one of them.
And it’s wishful thinking to think that someday Climate Science is going voluntarily move off the Big Lie Not a chance in hell.
Andrew.
Climate science can blame policy, and policy can blame science. The power of this ironic, unholy, alliance will win through to victory, or damn both parties to less relevance than they would have had otherwise.
===================
A black-flagged pyrhhate victory. A blindered, eye-patched, victory, much less than they could have been contending.
============
“I coudda beena contenda!”
They coudda beena contenda’s
Yep. Think what they could have done had they followed science instead of yielding to the influence of politicians, the money men. Sit on the waterfront long enough, you’ll see the bodies of your enemies float & flutter by.
=================
Example: Gleick blows-up his carer and AG Warmism to reveal the Heartland boogeymen are funded by the Power Strip Industry.
So very much lost for such little gained. Churchillian heroism in reverse.
That’s what Brando was, Churchill in reverse! First time I noticed that…
On the Climate Front.
===========
Yea, it’s not “On the Weather Front”
‘Climate isn’t water’, or something sounds like that…
‘Warming isn’t water (vapor)’
Formalizing Brando and heroes in a quantun theory: Brando is the anti-person (the anti-particle) of Churchill, Brando is an actor-particle hole in the Dirac sea of heroes.
I’ve theoretically explained Hollywood! For every real hero that’s created in the world, a virtual person, empty quantum hole anti-hero is created in Hollywood.
Orwell said of a not-even-a-stuffed-shirt politician, “…he’s a hole in the air.” Quantum Political Dynamics explains politicians as anti-persons, anti-hero holes in a Dirac-like sea of heroism.
I think you’ve got it.
=========
It is clear now that the expectation of AGW is a false illusion due to technical errors collectively committed by climate scientists. Two most fatal ones are comprehensively briefed below:
1) False assumption of a black-body earth surface
Thermal radiation energy per unit time and unit area the Earth emits into space is written as ε σT^4, where T is the mean temperature of the earth surface, and σ the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. The symbol ε denotes emissivity which has a value between 0 and 1; 0 is for white and transparent bodies, and 1 for black bodies. Most substances are grey bodies with 0 < ε < 1. In current climate research, ε is either missing or asserted to be a unit, implying a black-body earth surface. Truly this is illogically wrong.
2) Omission of the thermal emission property of CO2
We all know that CO2 absorbs significant amount of earth’s outgoing radiation. However, this is only half of the story for CO2. According to the Kirchhoff’s law of 19th century physics, an object that absorbs emits. As a result of emission of thermal radiation, CO2 is cooler than, gains heat by molecular collision from, and dissipates heat by radiation for nitrogen and oxygen. It is N2 and O2 that award the Earth a warm liveable atmosphere.
http://www.jinancaoblog.blogspot.com.au/
This is very interesting Jinan Cao. What you are saying is that the GCM’s are not parametized correctly for thermal radiation and for the cooling effect of CO2 emissions as opposed to the warming effects of N2 and O2 radiation?
In the absence of codes yet to be provided by the GC modellers for effective verification and review by their scientific peers, we all must continue to guess what parameters have actually been used.
What’s with these people with SFB coming out of Australia?
Are they given a list of robotic talking points from some ministry?
We of the antipodes have a lot of catching up to do before we may finally achieve the level of enlightenment attained by certain superior beings in the NH. ;)
Again this is a violation of blog rules. Judith I refuse to put up with this constant niggling rubbish. Contentless rubbish from a discredited climate extremist. Continuing in this vain is pointless – for different reasons than Chris expresses below. More to do with arrogance and a silly information deficit assumption. That it comes from from those with little knowledge, curiosity or wonder.
BTW – including emissivity in SB for a grey body? Yes – what’s the problem. But emmissivity is also variable with albedo – clouds in the short term. That oxygen and nitrogen are a store of kinetic energy in the atmosphere. Yes.
In most of the discussion here emissivity is assumed to be black body. It certainly isn’t in more accurate charcterisation. But if you make assumptions a
constant albedo it is certainly wrong as well.
Judith – please step up the moderation o I for ine will not be returning for much longer.
Robert I Ellison
…or I for one…whatever
@ Captain Kangaroo | April 5, 2012 at 9:00 pm said: Judith – please step up the moderation o I for ine will not be returning for much longer.
Attention PLEASE: most of Australians are not sissy like those two blokes. Them two are getting irritated by the American freedom of speech. They are used in Australia; agree with what they say, or be silenced. Thanks to the Australian national broadcaster ABC & SBS; the most politically corrupt /ideologically driven media, south of Pyongyang.
They are stuck into: albedo, positive . negative forcing, radiation crap up to their eyebrows; but cannot see what is happening in OZ, because of bigots like them. 1] the green leader in the senate made himself a name, by preventing hydro-electric dam to be built (to blame CO2), because dams improve the climate. That hydro dam would have produced more electricity than all the stupid solar panels on the planet. Since then, no dam was built on the driest continent on the planet.
Smallest continent, surrounded by the biggest water on the planet, 3 oceans, and is the driest; because clouds from the sea avoid dry lands as cars around traffic island. Those clouds, when get in – improve the climate. When finally get in; because of no permanent moisture inland, essential bacteria in the soil dead = soil doesn’t absorb / retain moisture = flash devastating floods. It’s illegal to save stormwater on the land + are repossessing farmer’s water to drain in the estuary. For billions of dollars in every capital city has being built desalination plant – to desalinate that same stormwater after it mixes with the seawater. If you visit Brisbane, capital of the tourist state – you will be drinking filtered sewage water. Instead of building another dam upstream, to save water for dry days – they had full dam of water the day Brisbane started getting flooded – when the flood finished, was less water in the dam. Instead of opening the floodgates before the flood, close them during the flood – they did the opposite, to prove that dams are useless. Billions of dollars damages, people drowned, because they don’t know what the name ‘’floodgates’’ means.
Our two Primadonnas + the ‘’chief hydrologist’’ cannot see that inland Australia 2/3 of the continent is no tree to be seen; ON SAME LATITUDE in Brazil is beautiful rainforest. Those rivers are filling Amazon river; on same latitude in Australia; first floods, then dry river beads for 4-5 months every year – same ‘’albedo, negative / positive forcing, same sunspots and radiation’’. Billion of protected birds / animals die from dehydration, people scorched in bushfires. Not because is too much CO2 around Detroit and Stuttgart – but because the dry heat from inland is vacuuming all the moisture for the previous 10 months. Dams decrease evaporation, attract extra clouds from the sea in dry months.
Because of the spinning of the planet eastwards, Australian dry heat goes west into the Indian ocean. The warmest ocean is constantly clear sky as map of Australia, just west, because Australian dry heat is destroying those clouds – that affects the Indonesian archipelago from Port Moresby to Sumatra. Part of that moisture belongs for replenishing the ice on Antarctic and the waters around. For 8-9 months from Antarctic blow cold winds north ‘’highs’’ – to avoid vacuum – air from Indian ocean goes to Antarctic – by freeze-drying is replenishing the ice that is constantly melted from below, by the geothermal heat; plus on the water around Antarctic. Not much, when Australian dry heat has destroyed that moisture when was created in Indian ocean. The ice on the water is insulating the warmwater that currents bring from the north, from the unlimited winter coldness in the air. Under that ice in the water krill / plankton is shielded; less ice = less shield. The morons threaten that the phony GLOBAL warming will melt the ice; on Antarctic average temp is minus -33C, that is twice as cold than in your deep freezer. B] there is permanent ice far north in New Zealand and Patagonia; but needs logic, to know that: amount of ice on the polar caps depend only on the amount of raw material in the air available to replenish it every season, not on bloody temperature. Polar caps have enough coldness, to make another 7-8km new ice on the top of the existing – if it was enough moisture. Australians are repossessing farmer’s water to drain in the estuary – more dry heat for bigger bushfires and to destroy the moisture above the surrounding waters. I don’t know what offended them, but if all Australians people know what is on my website, those 3 bigots would have being taken for treason.
Happy Easter from Australia, to everybody on the whole non-warming globe!!!
Yes.
From the input and output, we do have some clue about how the codes are organised in those GCMs. If one has studied Figure 2 in “Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature” (by A. Lacis and G. A. Schmidt et al., Science, page 356-359, Oct. 2010), one may found that the first physical principle of CO2 has been incorrectly incorporated in the codes.
If you are familiar with computer simulation, you would know how “Variables” are vital. In current GCMs, radiative gases, e.g. CO2, are thought to have the same temperature as N2 and O2 in air, so it is one variable (ref. Figure 1, R.Pierrhumbert “Infrared Radiation and Planetary Temperature” Physics Today, page33-38, 2011). But actually it should be two (or more) different variables due to different radiative nature.
Jinan Cao wrote:
>In current GCMs, radiative gases, e.g. CO2, are thought to have the same temperature as N2 and O2 in air, so it is one variable
Well, Jinan, I am a physicist. *I* certainly would expect CO2 to have the same temp as N2 and O2, simply because the average time between collisions is awfully short. It should all equilibrate very, very rapidly.
My intuition might of course be wrong (wouldn’t be the first time!). Have you done any detailed calculations (or experiments) indicating that what we scientists would expect is in fact wrong?
If not, you are going to have trouble getting us to take you seriously.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
PhysicistDave;
Sure, heat exchange between N2O2 and CO2 by molecular collision is rapid; but heat emission by CO2 to space is equally rapid. Calculations show it takes less than a micro second for CO2 to drop 1°C by radiation when it is at 15°C.
We all know that air is a good insulator. Please do not confuse heat exchange rate with parameters such as the mean free path of air molecules, which is related but not equal. Also, the heat exchange rate by molecular collision decreases as air pressure decreases with altitude. But most importantly, one shall compare the CO2 temperatures as detected by outgoing radiation spectroscopy with the temperature-altitude profile.
Jinan Cao wrote:
>Sure, heat exchange between N2O2 and CO2 by molecular collision is rapid; but heat emission by CO2 to space is equally rapid. Calculations show it takes less than a micro second for CO2 to drop 1°C by radiation when it is at 15°C.
Well, Jinan, you seem to be saying that CO2 mixed in with other gases is *always* significantly cooler than the other gases. Is that your claim?
If it is your claim, I suggest you try to take it up with atmospheric physicists. Perhaps, you could get Lindzen or Judith to engage you on this. I can only say that I will be surprised if they do not punch holes in your analysis. I’d be awfully surprised if the very basic stuff everyone is taught in intro p-chem is wrong.
But, I’ll defer to the atmospheric guys on this.
Dave
PhysicistDave:
CO2 absorbs radiation from the earth ground surface on one hand, it emits on the other. The energy absorbed is only enough for CO2 to emit at a very low temperature. CO2 gains further energy from N2 and O2 by molecular collision, which cools off N2 and O2 and warms up CO2. Note that N2 and O2 do not have any mechanism to dissipate heat if there is no help from radiative gases.
Gases are well mixed in the atmosphere. Air flow and molecular collisions tend to homogenise the temperature of different gases; however, radiative absorption and emission tend to differentiate it. Depending on the source of radiation, the absorption and emission properties, pressure and temperature, gases in the atmosphere could have different temperatures from each other.
If you change an angle to re-consider these things, you may not surprise any more.
Jinan, I agree 99%. CO2 enhances the “forth-radiation” and thereby cools the atmosphere. Don’t tell the warmists – they will become coolists.
In the paleo, CO2 rise always precedes temperature fall, but by nothing so tidy as an average of 800 years as does CO2’s rise follow a temperature rise.
===========
If there is a serious scientific disagreement, the right thing to do is to have a “shootout” in a science (physics in this case) lab. Don’t physicists do experiments any more????
I don’t see the point anymore, since this entire blog has become dominated by “self-educated” people who think they have some sort of hidden knowledge without ever cracking a climatology textbook or reading scientific papers. To be blunt, half the people here are just idiots.
The argument by Jinan is just plain wrong. There are many papers investigating surface property emissivities, but in any case, it’s precisely because the Earth has a greenhouse effect that its bulk planetary emissivity deviates so much from one (for a bare rock it would be extremely close to one). There’s also many databases where you can get information on the reflectance or emissivity spectra of different surfaces, and this plays a critical role in remote sensing analysis for example.
Do we need to go digging in the history of science to find “self-educated” people who challenged the “scientific wisdom”, who didn’t turn out to be “idiots”?
Fortunately, science has a method for determining what is science and what isn’t.
blouis79 wrote:
>Do we need to go digging in the history of science to find “self-educated” people who challenged the “scientific wisdom”, who didn’t turn out to be “idiots”?
Yes, you do. It is very rare, almost unheard of, in fields such as physics in recent decades. We have pretty much picked the “low-hanging fruit” in the sense that we now understand very well the things that an uneducated amateur (say, a Ben Franklin) might have stumbled upon in previous generations.
Yes, I can think of no case whatsoever in which an uneducated person (i.e., not at least a grad student) has made a serious contribution to fundamental physics or math in the last four decades. It really is not happening anymore.
Dave
physicistdave | April 8, 2012 at 2:41 am |
While I’m not claiming it’s a ‘serious’ contribution, not a few names of phenomena and objects were volunteered by nonphysicists.
James Joyce coined the word ‘quark’?
Google, more a term of numerical curiousity, was suggested by a small child.
And I recall one particularly nasty rumor about why Top and Bottom stopped being called Truth and Beauty.. But that’s no doubt a myth.
More interesting, several crowdsourced projects have resulted in such minor curiousities as Hanny’s Voorwerp and the like.
Hint:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts#Scientists.2C_historians.2C_and_educators
Anyone who looks though blouis79’s link will see that it supports my point: lots of examples from before 1900 (including, not surprisingly, the example I gave above, Ben Franklin), but no examples in fundamental physics or math in the last four decades. If there are any at all, they are certainly few in number.
Four decades isn’t that long ago, certainly not pre-1900. Are you referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect ?
The point actually was that properly educated and trained scientists do not have a monopoly on scientific knowledge. Others are not necessarily “idiots” just because they have no formal training.
blouis79 wrote to me:
>The point actually was that properly educated and trained scientists do not have a monopoly on scientific knowledge. Others are not necessarily “idiots” just because they have no formal training.
I’m afraid that science is now complicated enough that, yes, in the last half century or so when non-scientists claimed to have found a fundamental error in well-established scientific principles, they have pretty much always turned out to be wrong.
This was not true a couple hundred years ago, as your wikipedia article shows. And, it does not mean scientists are unimpeachable by non-scientists when they fail to apply the scientific method to check new, recent results (cold fusion, the GCMs., etc.). And, of course, when scientists go beyond science to talk politics, philosophy, etc., they are as open to error as the next guy.
But, if you or anyone else can point to a single case of a non-scientist since 1950 showing that a basic, well-established principle of science was wrong, well, I would certainly be interested to see the example.
Dave
So you didn’t comment on the Mpemba effect. But if anyone asked you which would freeze sooner, a warm or cool ice cream, and answer from physics would be rather obvious…the cool one obviously.
Chris there are quite a few people that have issues with the estimates of emissivity because it is fairly complex. Not that the albedo of objects is not fairly easy, but the rate of absorption versus the rate of emission varies. The ocean has an albedo very nearly one, however, 10 percent of the energy absorbed is below one meter, so the emission of that energy is delayed by the thermal properties of the ocean which vary with surface wind velocity. It is not a slam dunk, “there ya see dummy!” kind of explanation. If the change in TOA emissivity were larger, then it would be a slam dunk, but we are talking about 0.609 to 0.602 depending on the initial conditions you choose. So a tolerance of +/- 0.001 could be a +/- 14% error. When the accuracy of the direct measurement of TOA flux imbalance is greater than +/-1 Wm-2, that is a 25% error range for the 3.7Wm-2 change in forcing for the full doubling of CO2. Trenberth and Keihl estimated the imbalance at ~0.9Wm-2 where the more current estimate is 0.5Wm-2, nearly a 50% margin of error.
I am thrilled that you have such great confidence while faced with the inability to prove your point, but there is significant uncertainty.
BTW, the obvious errors in the K&T energy budgets did not serve to instill confidence in the majority of people that objectively read them. Missing 20Wm-2 is not exactly stellar science.
Even people that are not self educated have issues, http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/staff/stevensbjorn/Documents/StevensSchwartz2012.pdf
capt. dallas wrote:
>Chris there are quite a few people that have issues with the estimates of emissivity because it is fairly complex.
Indeed. And, a lot of us who are scientifically educated (including, notably, our hostess) have pointed to many of those complexities.
But, Chris is correct that a number of people here are using arguments that would (or should, if not for the mercy of the teacher!) cause a student to flunk a frosh physics (or even high-school physics) class.
Personally, I find such posters of sociological and psychological interest, as data points for research in abnormal psychology.
But, scientifically speaking, they are morons.
Dave
OTOH, anyone who claims to be able to predict the consequences of x degrees of warming is a moron of a different kind.
PhysicistDave said, “But, scientifically speaking, they are morons.”, Most likely, then the number of morons is directly proportional to the complexity of the problem.
“It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulations and in understanding its conceptual foundations, enhances a person’s ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision-making.” Alan Greenspan (pre mortgage finance collapse)
“Looks like we missed that one.” post mortgage finance collapse
One of the biggest issues is the communication of the GHG effect.. The “all things remaining equal” should indicate to the non-morons that the estimates are based on perfection, a Carnot GHE engine if you will. Since perfection cannot be obtained, the 1.5C for doubling of CO2 is unlikely to be obtained and the 2x water vapor multiplier also unlikely. So perfection is used as a base estimate and it is multiplied to show uncertainty with an nice fat tail. The true sensitivity appears to be less than estimated, imagine that?
And then there was the sad tale of Long Term Capital, a hedge fund peopled by Nobel Prize winners. Like so many other brainiacs, they too had to be bailed out with our tax payer money.
When it comes to the economy and climate science, everyone is a moron, whether they realize it or not.
Look at today’s unemployment numbers. After almost 4 years of deficit spending the economy is still sucking wind. Academics with impressive credentials support deficit spending, but there are equally impressive people that take the other side of that argument. Morons, every one.
Jim2 wrote to me:
>And then there was the sad tale of Long Term Capital, a hedge fund peopled by Nobel Prize winners. Like so many other brainiacs, they too had to be bailed out with our tax payer money.
Economists, not scientists. My opinion of Black (of “Black-Scholes” fame) is particularly low.
Jim2 also wrote:
>When it comes to the economy and climate science, everyone is a moron, whether they realize it or not.
I think you have a valid point there.
Dave
Chris,
Do you mean that because there is a greenhouse effect, the emissivity of earth surface is not 1; otherwise, it would?
Why is it that alarmists always have to stoop to ad hominems when discussing AGW? Clearly they serve no scientific purpose, the sole purpose being to try to intimidate the opposition into silence.
Before calling others idiots, it is best to look at your own fallacies and foibles.
Well Chris, could you give us a talk through of each of the numbers in the ‘Trenberth and Keihl’ style Energy Budgets that you are reliant on?
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/images/earth_rad_budget_kiehl_trenberth_1997_big.gif
Could you tell me where in the atmosphere we have a band of gas that emits 324 w/m2 downwards and 165 W/m2 upwards.
Just give us a convincing talk through Chris, and we will bow like supplicants to your sagacity.
Coming soon is a new way of approaching this kind of analysis with error bars (Graeme Stephens, personal communication)
Chris
Your grasp of historical climatology -which would enable you to put things into context- has always seemed rather shaky to me. So perhaps your education in climate science-a very broad discipline not confined to radiative physics-is not yet as complete as you seem to think?
A little humility would go a long way or are you practising to be Sheldon?
tonyb
AND THE WET DIAPERS AWARD GOES TO……. TONY BROWN !!!!
For recognition, as the most dedicated ‘’researcher’’ on the sandpit; Tony rightfully deserves ‘’the Wet Diapers Award, congratulation Tony! From monitoring the temperature in the bucket, he can get more GLOBAL warmings than any other toddler. He admits that: it’s not the most reliable; but he is proceeding, anyway. He suspects that: if he gets off the sandpit, his daddy may tell him that; Atlantic at that time probably had more than one bucketful of water, maybe even 2,5 bucketfuls – and if that half bucketful had different temperature, may not be a reliable data…? When is windy / ruff water for couple of hours, more water evaporates – evaporation is cooling process – surface water cools by 2-3C… but because only water from the surface evaporates – below the temperature doesn’t change; irrelevant for our best ‘’researcher’’ It’s important for him to muddy the water; people not to discover that is NO such a thing as GLOBAL warming. Last weekend I was here on the Barrier Reef, snorkeling. In 10 feet radius, there were at least 3 different temperatures.
A drunken sailor filling the bucket with surface water for Tony, wasn’t able to know if below the surface is 5mm of water at 18C and 500m of water at 16C; or was it 500m of water at 16C and 6mm of 18C… If the next day that drunken sailor filed up the bucket from where the dolphin urinated – in that pool of water was 5C warmer = Tony will declare GLOBAL warming for that day by 5C, what a marvelous science. The dolphin didn’t urinate on the WHOLE globe; but the naughty, naughty dolphin did wet Tony’s diapers, Tony didn’t do it!!! So, everybody give a big applause to Tony, for the award!
Billions off taxpayer’s dollars are squandered on similar ‘’researches’’ … that’s why more GLOBAL warmings are in the Fake Skeptic’s camp, than you can’t poke as stick in it; to discredit Warmist lie of GLOBAL warming in a 100y, with their bucketfuls of GLOBAL warmings in the past… Congratulation for the good job, Tony! Al Gore, Hansen love ‘’researchers’’ like you and Vukcevic… to keep the misleading propaganda alive.
Because water vapor suppose to be a GLOBAL warming gas (declared by the propagandist from both camps) dams are built no more; dams produce extra water vapour. The 2 examples I gave before, to mention again: 1] in Australia 170 people burned in one bushfire; not because is too much CO2 around Kyoto city and too much water vapor in Brazil; but because for the previous 11months, the dry heat from inland was vacuuming the moisture from the vegetation in Victoria. 2] in Pakistan the flood did lots of damages; because is no dams upstream, to regulate the water. B] if that water was saved in dams – used for hydro-electricity and irrigation – would have being much more water vapor – would have gone west to the Horn of Africa and prevented drought and starvation. It’s hard to say: stefanthedenier has proven that warmings / coolings are NEVER GLOBAL. Less water on the land and in the atmosphere = hotter days / colder nights; that’s not GLOBAL warming. More H2O in the atmosphere, milder climate, replenishes the glaciers and ice on the polar caps in winter… but that’s not suitable for the propagandist…
As long as ‘’the researchers’’ for the phony GLOBAL warmings blame CO2 + H2O = they are part of the ‘’premeditated mass murder’’. In Australia is no water vapor, as the driest continent, billion of protected birds and animals die from dehydration every year… Be proud of it Tony. Water vapor in the atmosphere is naughty, replenishes the glaciers, produces milder climate – we don’t want that – Warmist cannot scare the Urban Sheep with milder climate… Seat on the top of the sandpit and show them proudly your wet diapers, tell them; the dolphin did it. Happy Easter Tony!
Stefan
I won’t pretend that i have the faintest idea what you’re talking about but it’s very entertaining.
Tonyb
I would have constructed this sentence in a manner such that I did not potentially include myself in that half.
Given my experience with Colose, I’d guess it was a Freudian slip.
But then, I’ve accused him of dishonest editing practices used to misrepresent people at his blog when they know more about a subject than he does, so maybe I’m just biased.
I thought Bart R’s impersonation of a Cold War-era East German Olympics figure skating judge to be a spot on parody.
Everyone should get a good chuckle from his over-the-top, ludicrously biased scores for the participants which were totally disconnected from the actual performance that everyone else witnessed.
CTL, how can you tell it is a parody? You say what he posted was “over-the-top,” but it is actually indistinguishable from what plenty of people would say. This is aptly demonstrated by the fact everyone posting about his comments (but you) has taken them seriously.
I’ll admit I have no familiarity with Bart R, so maybe someone who knows him better would get something I’ve missed, but as far as I can see, there’s no way to tell it is anything but serious.
Brandon is correct. Bart was being serious about the debate itself but couched in sporting parlance.
Hall of comedic mirrors, reflecting tortuous ironies.
===============
kim | April 5, 2012 at 10:01 am |
Are they the sad days, or the happy ones, when you’re the only one who gets the joke?
peterdavies252 | April 5, 2012 at 8:07 am |
If you _want_ to take the points seriously, there’s plenty of room in the thread to lay out sober, reasoned debate. I’m entirely pleased by the idea serious people can look in detail at a discourse and form their own opinions.
Whether Bart R (to disambiguate from the other Barts) is serious or no, who really cares? What does Bart R’s authority amount to?
CTL | April 5, 2012 at 6:02 am |
Thank you.
Though the point of parody is for everyone to get a good chuckle at their own totally disconnected over-the-top, ludicrous biases when pointed up by the jest. ;)
The instant anyone has recourse to “tipping points”, I know that they’ve lost the argument, and are in desperation trying to invoke the Precautionary Principle in its bloodiest, scariest guise. It is the last refuge of con artists.
Have I cracked the GMT model?
Here is my GMT model (http://bit.ly/HRvReF) from the 30-years GMT trends (http://bit.ly/HjXkTC ):
Thanks in advance.
Girma | April 5, 2012 at 11:30 am |
Mr. Orssengo.
1. Your model has no skill prior to 1910 on any dataset.
2. It has remarkably poor correlation on any span of 60 years or less within the century of actual data you do use, when compared to other proposed functions.
On 1 & 2 it fails on verification.
3. It is not based on your 30-year GMT trends plot. If it were, it would have fewer and shorter downward phases over time, and none after approximately 2045. Not only can’t we believe in your graphs, but clearly you don’t either, since the two graphs are mutually exclusive in what they appear to say.
4. It is missing mechanism, and various other key elements necessary for validation.
Bart. You missed the major issue. Does the model predict the correct future temperatures? Surely, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Jim Cripwell | April 5, 2012 at 4:55 pm |
Sorry, not even close.
While Mr. Orssengo’s graphs are mutually contradictory — neither can be right if the other is — it doesn’t mean they aren’t also both wrong.
One needn’t seek any further issues, major or minor, besides.
The IPCC argument, as Nordhaus delivers, is more nuanced.
Without accounting for human activity, any forecast is simply inept. That’s a major issue, and there’s no getting around it, but there’s no need for it when dismissing Mr. Orssengo’s .. whatever they are.
Doesn’t make the IPCC model projections right, even if they’re far more right for far more reasons than competing explanations.
From the outset, anyone ought know the models can’t deliver prediction. IPCC must know it, else why go with so many model runs? A few IPCC spokespeople forget this, and make ridiculous claims from the models..
But that still doesn’t make Mr. Orssengo’s claims less so.
Bart you write “From the outset, anyone ought know the models can’t deliver prediction.”
Utter garbage. Those models which have been fully validated, nearly always deliver accurate predictions. Top of the list are wind loading models for structures which have never been built before; e.g the suspension bridge recently built in Hong Kong. The output of these models is certified by a Professioinal Engineer, and if the model answers turn out to be wrong, that PE can be sued.
And the way to validate models, is to make predictions on a time scale that is short enough so that the prediction can be verified, and if this happens so frequently that the results cannot have happened by chance, then the model can be validated.
That is what I hoped Girma would do.
Bart R (April 5, 2012 at 5:45 pm)
“Without accounting for human activity, any forecast is simply inept.”
———–
Jumping sharks. All the warming, cooling, warming and flatlining over the last 100 years may be natural. It’s yet to be beyond reasonable doubt.
Jim Cripwell | April 5, 2012 at 8:34 pm |
Models are great. Models are good. Almost everything in science one way or another that is part of an experiment is a model, from the computer simulations used in climatology to computer simulated wind loading models for structures, to the pair of objects of different weights dropped from the leaning tower of Pisa.
The problem isn’t with ‘models’ per se.
The problem is these particular models are built based on too little data and too little granularity, in a way that is mathematically provable to deliver outcomes that cannot be relied on for direct predictions of actual weather.
This is known, was known beforehand, has been validated, and isn’t an issue, except for those people who still can’t absorb this fact, such as that unfortunate fellow who suggested the models meant there’d be a 0.2C rise in temperature every decade.
Sorry to disappoint. People who think the climate models have power to directly predict real weather are simply wrong, and all logic that proceeds from their wrong premise is erroneous.
Can the models still be used to determine whether human influences shape climate? Absolutely, within some bounds. That, too, can be illustrated mathematically, although Dr. Wojick’s opinion may differ.
Seeing that Mr. Orssengo _is_ a professional engineer, one recommends you consult your counsel with regard to initiating proceedings, if you mean to stand by your words to sue where he is wrong. You’d have experts willing to confirm Mr. Orssengo’s error circling the block.
Bart R | April 5, 2012 at 9:36 pm |
I read what you have written, and cannot understand what you are getting at. Let me be specific. Girma’s model, http://bit.ly/HRvReF, has an equation in it, which I am not sure I understand. However, I am sure that it should allow anyone to calculate what his prediciton is for the global temperature anomaly for 2012, according to the HAD/CRU data that he used.. This value, and the values for other future years are fundamental to the drawing of the prediction graph.
Assuming I am correct, are you claiming that if we were to calculate the predicted temperature for 2012, then when we get the actual figure in January 2013, this predicted figure would be wrong? And if every year in January we were to calculate the predicted value for the next year, the predicted values would always be wrong when we get the actual data? I am curious.
.. and yes, it’s unlikely any computer simulation, regardless of the amount of data and granularity, could directly predict weather, either.
The problem of computability of chaotic systems would become the dominant issue, were such an effort pursued.
I dated a model once. She was alright, but I would never trust her :)
Jim Cripwell | April 6, 2012 at 7:01 am |
More to the point, Mr. Orssengo’s approach is so off bubble as to not even be wrong.
Merely unsupportable.
He’s demanding his local hospital put his car in their MRI device, despite warning that such action would merely break the device and produce nothing but noise, on the argument, “But there’s a chance the noise might happen to match what’s really going on!”
Have a look at this depiction of Girma’s graph:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:11/mean:13/from:1910/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2000/trend/offset:-0.1/detrend:0.031/plot/best/from:1999/trend/offset:-0.11/detrend:0.15/plot/best/from:1999/trend/offset:-0.445/detrend:0.15/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend
Which line most closely matches the data as a trend starting from the HadCRU3 temperature linear average, Series 4 (cooling phase), or Series 6(0.2C/decade)?
We have 12 years of the 0.2C/decade trend actually being pretty much in the range of recorded temperatures, and 10 years of Mr. Orssengo’s claimed cooling phase going farther and farther away from any seeming correlation with the HadCRU3 observations.
Will 2013, or 2023, or 2033 clear this all up for us?
I’d hope not. For us to be able to completely dismiss or accept either prediction at a high level of confidence, we’re going to see some extremely unusual conditions of weather.
Bart, You write “More to the point, Mr. Orssengo’s approach is so off bubble as to not even be wrong.
Merely unsupportable”
What this has to do with our discussion, I have no idea.
I wrote “Assuming I am correct, are you claiming that if we were to calculate the predicted temperature for 2012, then when we get the actual figure in January 2013, this predicted figure would be wrong? And if every year in January we were to calculate the predicted value for the next year, the predicted values would always be wrong when we get the actual data? I am curious.”
You have not addressed this question. I wonder why not.
cui bono | April 6, 2012 at 7:36 am |
“All the warming, cooling, warming and flatlining over the last 100 years may be natural. It’s yet to be beyond reasonable doubt.
I once believed this state of doubt would last at least through my expected lifetime.
However, BEST and better analyses in multiple fields have reduced the doubt from a reasonable about one-in-nine chance natural variability could account for observations to less than three in a thousand odds.
If you think three in a thousand is reasonable doubt, that’s fine.
I happen to think it’s fairly weak.
Roy Spencer’s analysis indicates that UHI accounts for much of the observed warming.
These odds are your opinion Bartr. But I believe AGW has actually been falsified so the chance that it is not natural is effectively zero at this time. Thus there is a rather large spread.
David Wojick | April 6, 2012 at 6:22 pm |
You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.
It’s not very difficult to do a Bayesian analysis to establish how likely AGW is based on the given information and our beliefs about the quality of our observations.
Before BEST, the data was extremely poor and proposed mechanisms somewhat cludged-together. With BEST and slightly refined descriptions of processes, there’s been a more than order of magnitude change in the confidence we can assign, on temperature alone. Toss in a few hundred other research papers published and reviewed between the time before BEST began and now, and the ‘reasonable doubt’ argument simply stops holding water.
What’s your belief AGW has been falsified based on?
Simply listing unqualified beliefs along qualified ones doesn’t make them equal, except in a popularity contest.
Do I seem interested in being popular?
Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Anastasios Tsonis.
Here is BEST – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Best-1.gif – it doesn’t change anything in what was understood about the trend of 20th century temperature change.
I note numbnut linking to Tamino blaming ENSO and solar decline for the decadal lack of warming.
Here is the SORCE data – http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_640x480.png – the cycle is at or near peak and declines over this decade in the Schwabe cycle. Of course this is hardly noticeable at the surface. About half of the greenhouse gas forcing.
Have a look as well at the TSI reconstruction from the authoritative (?) source. Can we drop a couple of Watts/m^2 in 40 years – Lockwood et al suggest an 8% chance – http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/2/024001. Of course that is barely noticeable at the surface. A fraction of the greenhouse gas forcing.
Can we predict where ENSO is going?
‘This study uses proxy climate records derived from paleoclimate data to investigate the long-term behaviour of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). During the past 400 years, climate shifts associated with changes in the PDO are shown to have occurred with a similar frequency to those documented in the 20th Century. Importantly, phase changes in the PDO have a propensity to coincide with changes in the relative frequency of ENSO events, where the positive phase of the PDO is associated with an enhanced frequency of El Niño events, while the negative phase is shown to be more favourable for the development of La Niña events.’ Vernon and Franks (2006). This is understood to be the case in hydrological circles with overwhelming supporting evidence.
So we are looking at increased intensity of La Niña over a decade or 3 more. Does this have a climate impact? Well it seems to – http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/zFD/an9090_SWup_toa.gif – sudden and quite startling changes in TOA flux coincident with – in the case of 1998/2001 – Pacific Ocean shift.
It appears in ERBE as well – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Wong2006figure7.gif
If you have a problem with this – take it up with NASA and not me. By all means read the Wong et al (2006) – Reexamination of the Observed Decadal Variability of the Earth Radiation Budget Using Altitude-Corrected ERBE/ERBS Nonscanner WFOV Data
Hand waving about papers you have not read – Le Pétomane – doesn’t cut it. The planet is not warming for decade or 3 – get used to it.
Jim Cripwell | April 7, 2012 at 6:50 am |
Asked, and answered. You just missed it.
The assumption you are correct is false.
You’re not correct.
No logic based on a false premise has any meaning at all.
Ergo, the answer cann’t “yes” or “no”.
The only valid answer is, “your question is meaningless.”
I think that’s that’s Dr. Orssengo.
Robert I Ellison | April 7, 2012 at 5:18 am |
If he started acting the part, perhaps.
Le Pétomane,
If everyone were addressed according to their behaviour – we would know where we stand minutes before the demise of civilisation.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
Robert I Ellison | April 7, 2012 at 10:34 pm |
One observes some projection on your part here with regard to name-calling, Mr. Ellison.
Or is that Captain? Chief? Le? Sir? Major? Ambassador? Lord? Abbot? Pardner? Comrade?
A man of your age, still doesn’t know who he is? Tch.
Le Pétomane,
As my specialty in hydrology and Masters Degree in environmental science evidently qualifiess me to be a plumber – I find it amusing sometimes to respond in kind. I find it less amusing to be morally instructed by an ex economics tutor, Peace Corps volunteer and professional flatulist.
I am but only a poor man who has foresworn the humble pursuits of a natural philosopher to take a commission in the climate war. I know who I am. I am and shall be a climate warrior on the side of freedom and justice. Captain Kangaroo rides by dire necessity.
‘O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro’ the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?’
Does it Le Pétomane? Or are you willing to betray our common enlightenment heritage for a tryranny of global government and the suspension of democracy? That is what is at stake and you are either a friend or an enemy – and it may yet come to real battles and real bullets. So the rhetoric hardens and the war continues. Such is life.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
Robert I Ellison | April 8, 2012 at 12:39 am |
For all your disguises, you’re a hardened statist. You’ve sat on, and believe in, commissions of experts who decide for people what’s in their best interest, at the behest of Granny Government.
I get that you can mouth the words to the greatest anthem ever set to the music of free hearts. Big deal. I can hum a few bars of Waltzing Matilda.
I’m not a rabidly fanatical Fair Market individualist. I’m a reasonable and considerate Fair Market fanatic. But at least I don’t, like you, pretend to be everything except what I really am: a rent-seeker who glories in lording his vast vocabulary over those he supposes his inferiors.. which is to say everyone else.
You’d be a pleasant person, but for this singular flaw. As it is, you’re at least an amusing person. You might even be worth the hefty salary for preventing flooded basements and blocked drains you demand as an independent contractor to people who have to hire you because the government forces them to.
And I see you’ve made significant progress over the past year in your thinking about the climate. You’ve gotten through denial there’s even anything to acknowledge, and you’re making great headway on your anger issues.
I expect you to get to negotiating any month now.
Le Pétomane,
You keep telling me what I am – but it seems far from the case. I am merely a humble contractor. I help my clients use water wisely and well – and avoid the worst effects of inclement weather. And – to put on my greenie hat – protect downstream environments from the worst effects of urbanisation. To be immodest for a moment – I am very good at it. If I am not a workman worth my wages – then I am afraid I don’t get paid. That would be very unfortunate.
I think you might have delusions of relevance and a manifesto – much like the unabomber. I have seen that you have voilent fantasies. How close to the edge are you? How close can you get?
You are known by the company you keep and your allies are amongst the most disagreeable authoritarians ever seen. You may dissemble and lie – you may even be a deluded fool – but you remain the mouthpiece of a dangerous ideology.
The negotiation is over. You have been offered terms of surrender. Accept them or not – it is all one.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
Robert I Ellison
That’s it. Let it all out. Some say venting is good, and speeds the healing process.
I call it a load of crap, but I’m willing to try anything for as extreme a case as yours.
So, where was I?
There, there. We hear your anger. We validate it. Your feelings are as real and .. pfft.
Who’m I try to kid?
Snap out of it, man.
You’ve had your fun.
Get on to the grieving part, and try to not make as much of a shambles of acceptance as you did with denial and anger.
Le Pétomane,
There you go riffing on incompetence, irrationality and incoherence as per usual. Let’s just take a deep breath – count to 10 if you can – smoke if you got ’em and I suspect you have been – and really I don’t care what you say in the least. As I said – I think you are a liar or a deluded fool – a bully and a very noxious person. Appalling personal qualities – oh you can be even charming – but that last’s until someone disagrees with your obviouly superior views.
‘In short, we are already past the point that locks in 2C of warming, and will without question go well beyond it. Even a 3C rise is looking very hard to avoid.
Very few people, even among environmentalists, have truly faced up to what the science is telling us.
This is because the implications of 3C, let alone 4C or 5C, are so horrible that we look to any possible scenario to head it off, including the canvassing of “emergency” responses such as the suspension of democratic processes.’
I won’t even say where that comes from – it is a generic example of something emerging from the fervid imagination of the socialist underground. I can’t really see that you can be a world removed from suspending democracy – or else let’s vote on your idiotic tax. Far from anger there is a cold determination that suspension of democracy would be grounds for a shooting war.
Best regards
Captin Kangaroo
The man made global warming king has no clothes => http://bit.ly/HRvReF
Don’t you agree?
No. Your curve fitting is not a physical model.
1. Plug in numbers for years before 1880–like back to the holocene or before. No hind cast skill. Do the same for years centuries from now.
2. A model has to have correct units. You are predicting temperature. The units on the RH side of your equation are not physical. In a climate model we put WATTS in and we get Temp out. The physical modelling in between transforms watts into temperature and other physical characteristics.
That is how you tell a PHYSICAL model from a statistical model.
3. Your model is incomplete. what’s it say for SST? for the arctic? for NH and SH? A physical model would give you the spatial distibution as well as the temporal evolution.
Steven
I agree with all your points.
However, man built bridges long before the discovery of the beam equations!
We need empirical relationships for complex problems. What matters is whether they work in the short term. My empirical model worked for the last 100 years, and it is reasonable to assume it will also work for at least the next 20 years.
Don’t you agree?
– Am I allowed to say “I don’t know, it’s a complex issue” ?
Often people’s CERTAINTY on an issue is often a sure sign that they don’t know what they are talking about. (to them the issue is so simple they think they can see right thru to the end) It’s part of what I call COMPLEXITY DENIAL.
– When it came to Saddam’s WMD I would also say “I don’t know”, but is interesting to note that the same people who most strongly assert we must take action on CAGW said there was no need to take action on Saddam.
So I conclude that for many people/experts the certainty about necessary actions is LINKED TO POLITICS rather than to true understanding of the issues & cost benefit analysis.
30+ Years into the Climate Wars I feel bad Dr. Lindzen has to go through this abuse. The technical war is largely over and the skeptics won long ago. Like an aging Babe Ruth I hope at least enjoys going on like this. The technical debate phase adds hope to the warming dream and I hope he passes the torch. The technical front can’t be surrendered but it isn’t the key area any longer.
Political motivations of participants are the key broad driver, some of the technical people can’t seem to accept this. I think Dr. Lindzen understands but he shouldn’t be elevating the advocates by doing all of this ground work. He should be an icon leader not a soldier in the trench at Climate War Gallipoli.
Gulled by fear and albatross guilt
Makes us rather tax technologies we have,
And fly to renewables we know not of
Their Golden Age effects. Such conscience
Doth make cowards of us all.
HT/ Kim and Hamlet.
Steven Mosher | April 5, 2012 at 2:44 am | Reply
I read that and found it to be cartoonish in its simplicity, and lacking in its understanding. It assumes that conditions at equilibrium are the same as conditions leading up to equilibrium. Why on earth would that be so?
If that’s an example of your arguments (followed by an invocation of the entire IPCC report), I’m not impressed in the slightest.
Folks who cite the entire IPCC report in support of their claims are not scientists.
Sorry,
w.
I”m still waiting for Mr. Mosher’s defense of his recent statement that the worst that can be said about the AGW models is that “some” have erred on the “high side,” (That is, have been too extreme.)
Some? I think most. And “on the high side” is entirely misleading especially with respect to binary predictions such as more of this, or less of that, or more extreme something else.
I’d like to know a bit more about their bias – particularly given they are modelling non-linear systems (or perhaps we can safely assume that at the margin they are sufficiently linear, or perhaps not?)
William Nordhaus (if it is the same person) is a co-author of Samuelson, Paul Anthony, and William D Nordhaus. Economics (12th Ed). 12th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985
In this they wrote: (p778, Economic and Political Freedom). “There is no doubt that totalitarian regimes can destroy both economic and political freedoms But a modern democracy, proceeding carefully and applying the best of accumulated wisdom, can have the best of both worlds. And at the same time it can preserve those best things that can never be measured in the GNP: freedom to speak, freedom to change, and freedom to live as we please.”
As an aside:
In the third edition (1955), they covered both the socialist and fascist economic systems. In the twelfth edition, the fascist economic system was gone, a disappointing omission. The latter economic system is essentially rule by “political-economic power elites”.
IMO, this is remarkably similar to current “contemporary progressivism”: elected politicians and elite, professional administrators. Per Wikipedia, “The main current national progressive parties are the Democratic Party and the Green Party of the United States.” Wikipedia has briefs on Progressivism, Corporate Statism (a.k.a. Corporatism) and Corporate Nationalism. See also http://spider.georgetowncollege.edu/htallant/courses/his225/progmovt.htm
While I.G. Farbin did have a lot of political power in WWII Germany, it is only because Hitler needed this behemoth of a company to prosecute the war. Even in this case, the government was superior to and controlled business.
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_02.htm
Same in Italy.
http://www.banned-books.com/truth-seeker/1994archive/121_3/ts213l.html
Fascism is closer to socialism that classical liberalism. When compared to classical liberalism, the differences between socialism and fascism are barely noticeable. I agree that the current flavor of progressivism in the US is similar to fascism. The government buddies up with the likes of GE and other big companies while regulating them more than any time in US history.
Jim2 and others. I think we agree that “fascism” as used here is an economic system, not the despicable, anti-Semitic National Socialist regime of Germany in the 1930-1940s. The authoritarian, economic and state control mechanisms, however, were not limited to Germany. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
It has, sad to say, been promoted here as well.
Dixie – I guess you can separate politics and economics on a conceptual level, but you can bet the Hitler’s super-sized jack boot helped enlist big businesses there.
Peter Davies @ 25/2 8.25 pm.
LOL. And I thought my antipodean take on Hamlet was ok :-(
Have to say WHT’s comment is posted in wrong thread , more relevant to ‘Republican Brain,’ Democrat Brain’ discussion. Seems we now have another dichotomy, ‘Northern Hemisphere Brain,’ Antipodes Brain.”
Doesn’t sound like science to me , bur heck, what do I know, I’m just a …
Yeah – I am very tired of the faux chauvinism of these twits. Don’t they know that despite our differences we simply close ranks when an outsider tries it on?
I have suggested – in fact I have demanded it in high dudgeon – that Judith pick up the moderation. It is all very tedious. He drops in with an Australian sh_it for brains comment and expects to have it go unremarked.
This after he invoked Bose-Einstein boson particle statistics for climate. I did this as a joke – bazinga – but never expected that it could ever be serioulsly proposed. He seems to be one of those ‘ugly Americans’ we hear about but never meet. So trivilly wrong on so many counts to boot. Truly bizarre behaviour.
You have been surprisingly tactful lately for the alter ego. You know the only difference between the US and Aus is that they set the whackos here and the convicts there :)
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 | April 5, 2012 at 9:37 pm |
Tch. The British began the long tradition of transporting convicts to an area near the Maryland coast in the 1600’s, which the USA to this day continues to mark by celebrations every two to four years.
Even now, the preliminaries to that pageant are ongoing in America.
Children of convicts were taller and stronger than their parents and educated by Scottish enlightenment political prisoners.
Getting out of England was the best thing ever.
This is odd. Explain the high percentage of fruit loops from Australia appearing here.
Its kind of hard to miss the fact that Chief Kangaroo, Girma, Doug Cotton, StefTheDenier, Fitzhenry, Ian, now Jinan Cao and probably other Australians have crossed my path and directed pointed attacks at my comments (no problem, they are free to). Yet, IMO, each one of these cats has a problem with scientific reasoning at the most fundamental level. So that is statistically odd and if that same ratio was extended to the USA population, we would have almost 100 of these guys running open loop on this site spreading nonsense.
It’s possible that this is just a statistical glitch but I have a feeling that the odd theories by scientists such as Plimer and Salby and bloggers such as Nova and Marchasy stir things up down there, and it bubbles up.
Tim Lambert at Deltoid has a full time job blogging about Plimer, et al.
Name some other Australians who have contributed some insane theories to this site.
Again this violates blog rules being contentless drivel. Add some content and I will address the issue and not the person. Just like I did here.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/03/authority-in-political-debates-involving-science/#comment-190259
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/03/authority-in-political-debates-involving-science/#comment-190307
And in many other instances.
WebHubTelescope
Is the following data nonsense?
http://bit.ly/HRvReF
It was a try on but its best not to react because that’s what trolls feed on.
I seem to have got up WHT’s nose lately and he has called me a concern troll and then having SFB. Perhaps I am touching a raw nerve someplace – sorry about this :)
I was referring to Jinan Cao who had an Australian address. I didn’t realize that you are Australian.
WHT
There are more Australians here than any other nationality; and not only at Climate Etc., but also if you check the trends on Google for climate change topics, on the Internet as a whole.
While perhaps one American in a million might be so interested in the issue as yourself, in Australia it’s taking on the dimensions of a national pastime.
Which is part of why I’m always so deferential to the Australian experience of the world. I wouldn’t want to offend the most climate-conscious people on the planet.
This is typical – I quote Chris Colose to Webby to try to educate him on some simple radiative physics – and away from the serious nonsense of Bos-Einstein boson statisitics, the old delusion of these danged notches appearing in the IR record. And I am the denier.
‘Both of you plainly don’t understand a thing about photonics, and especially are clueless on how Bose-Einstein statistical mechanics describes how electromagnetic radiation gets dispersed across an energy spectrum.
It’s a very straightforward concept that greenhouse gases have a scattering cross-section that can partially reflect specific bands of photon frequencies until they redistribute to maintain an energy balance.’
Here are both comments – judge for yourself.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/03/authority-in-political-debates-involving-science/#comment-190259
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/03/authority-in-political-debates-involving-science/#comment-190307
Now I don’t mind so much mad theories – really the speculative can be discussed with a lack of emotion and even some fun but when it is code for an insane agenda then nothing can be discussed with any civility or amusement. I keep saying that CO2 is radiatively active in the atmosphere and chemically in the oceans. How much and to what effect is questionable. I would prefer to move away from carbon emitting technologies – and here is a roadmap. I am a trifle bored with saying that. Why do I need to? And it is never enough for them. Their underlying agenda involves government setting a price on carbon sufficient to make carbon emitting technology unviable. The underlying motivation is negative economic growth. Nothing I say is valid unless I agree with the agenda.
Australians are certainly very aware of carbon taxes. 60% will vote next year to rescind them. I am very bored with the predictability of comment by the obsessive climate tragics. They lie and insult, bully and berate in the insane hope to convince us on a tax and reverse economic growth. It would come to real wars and real bullets well before then. Une merde dans leur chapeaux – the war continues.
Robert I Ellison
Peter, Webby is a little bit testy from time to time. His problem is that he doesn’t know that some of us actually have real credentials and experience and are much better trained than he is. Alas, we don’t know who Webby really is so we have no way to know if he is a poseur or not. He does like global conservation of energy however. It is indeed strange that climate science spends so much effort on GCM’s and then says “I know the errors are large, but the results agree with global conservation of energy arguments, ergo, the GCM’s must be telling something of value.”
I think you can tell by the content David. Bose-Einstein boson statistics keeps is amusing me lately. The comment I link to above uses a novel concept of statistical mechanics – instead of a far more obvious role for absorption and reemissions of IR photons. I don’t mind people being wrong – after all if being wrong were a hanging offence…well. It is being so emotionally committed to a position that it is defended with copious arm waving and gutter level brawling. They just keep coming back with it relentlessly. Back to the battle of meaningless drivel passing back and forth. I am more than a little bored with it.
Have you ever tried to derive Planck’s Law ?????
It is straightforward from first principles, using partition functions and quantum wavelength arguments.
Like PhysicistDave was, I was taught statistical mechanics via F.Reif’s classic text. If there is a better scientific textbook with the same level of accessibility, I have yet to see it.
Note that this level of knowledge doesn’t come with some effort on our part — both Dave and I invested in our educations and stand with mouth agape when we take a look at what is happening on this site. It is just astoundingly amateurish to see what passes for scientific reasoning here.
We evidently don’t talk on the same wavelength. And probably never will. Touch luck on your part.
‘In physics, Planck’s law describes the amount of electromagnetic energy with a certain wavelength radiated by a black body in thermal equilibrium.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blackbody-lg.png
The distribution is constant with temperature but shifts in frequency. What this has to do with the real world is always your problem. I don’t know about Dave – we are not talking team sports here – I will let him speak for himself.
Sorry I studied as you know physics, chemistry, hydrology, environmental science, macro and micro as well as environmental economics, etc etc. Physics is a bit of a hobby – and maths is a love. Wish I was better at it. I do quite a bit of modelling of rivers and coasts – that’s always fun. One day perhaps climate may be reduced to a unifying theory with exact data and neat little expressions. Until then I will continue my studies of ENSO, SAM, NAM, DMI, PNA, NAO, AMO and PDO.
Reminds me – you said on your pathetic little website on your ridiculous list of ‘climate clowns’ that I was claiming prescience by looking at ocean and atmospheric indices and predicting weather. This is how it’s done for SAM – http://poama.bom.gov.au/sam_mw.shtml – I won’t go into the rest. Again -your problem is with the real world.
Ther is the other Webby idea in here. That IR bounces of greenhouse gases and is smeared across the frequency band. That’s why the earth doesn’t emit in IR. Oh…wait…
OT but may I pass onto ALL contributors the very best wishes for Easter and may it be safe and enjoyable for everyone.
“Models should be evaluated by exhaustive comparison with observations” – Well yes, but first we need to take a step back and examine the physics behind them to see if they have a ghost of a chance of getting off Square 1. Consider the following …
In my view we need to focus on the assumed problem, namely carbon dioxide and, to a lesser extent, methane perhaps. If I refer to trace gases take it to mean these, because I refuse to call them greenhouse gases.
We have what we have in the Earth’s total system. Somehow, in some way we may never fully understand, a long-term near equilibrium situation has developed. We have some energy being generated in the core, mantle and crust, most likely by fission I think, but I won’t go into that. But it does set up a temperature gradient from the core to the surface which is very stable below the outer kilometre or so of the crust. However, it may vary in long-term natural cycles that have something to do with planetary orbits. Likewise, the intensity of solar radiation getting through the atmosphere to the surface may also vary in natural cycles which may have something to do with planetary influences on the Sun, and on the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit and on cosmic ray intensity and on cloud cover, ENSO cycles etc.
There is much to be learned about such natural cycles, and we have seen papers by Nicola Scafetta for example which appear to provide compelling evidence of the natural cycles. I believe that in fact such natural cycles are quite sufficient to explain all observed climate change, including what has happened in the last half century or so, right up to the present. The world has just been alarmed because the 1000 year cycle and the 60 year cycle were both rising around 1970 to 1998, just as they did by about the same amount 60 years earlier, and 60 years before that and no doubt further back. We cannot escape the obvious fact that there is a ~1000 year cycle which is due for another maximum within 50 to 200 years. Then there will be 500 years of falling temperatures.
But the central issue is whether or not trace gases are really having any effect at all on climate.
In my paper I have explained the physics of heat transfer and demonstrated why trace gases cannot have any effect whatsoever on what we call climate.
Climate may be thought of as the mean of temperature measurements, usually made in the air between 1.5 and 2 metres above the ground. Thermometers are affected by the thermal energy in that air near the surface. As you can read here thermal energy is distinct from heat. It is transferred by molecular collision processes (conduction and diffusion,) by physical movement (convection) and by radiation. . The energy in radiation is not thermal energy. Thermal energy is first converted to electromagnetic (radiated) energy and then that EM energy has to be converted back to thermal energy in a target. Hence, in a sense thermal energy only appears to be transferred by radiation.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics (SLoT) tells us that in any (one way, independent) spontaneous process, entropy cannot decrease unless external energy is added. There are no two ways about it. If spontaneous radiation emanates from a cooler object (or atmosphere) its EM energy cannot be converted back to thermal energy in a warmer target, such as Earth’s surface. This point is not debatable. A violation of the SLoT cannot be excused on the grounds that there will be some subsequent independent process (maybe not even radiation) which will transfer more thermal energy back to the atmosphere. If you disagree, you are mistaken.
However, the radiation from a cooler body can affect the radiative component of the cooling of a warmer body. Although such radiation undergoes what I call “resonant scattering” this does involve the “resonators” in the warmer body and uses up some of its radiating capacity. Because the incident radiation supplies the energy, the warmer body does not need to convert an equivalent amount of its own thermal energy. Hence it cools more slowly.
But, the resonating process involves all the (potential) different frequencies in the incident radiation. There will be far less effect when there are limited frequencies as is the case for radiation from a trace gas in the atmosphere. Furthermore, the effect depends on the temperature of that gas and is less when it is cooler. It is far less from space (equivalent to about 2.7K) and so there is no slowing of cooling for that portion of radiation which gets through the atmospheric window.
The remaining radiation (when we look at net figures, not all that backradiation) represents less than a third of all the cooling processes from the surface to the atmosphere. The other non-radiative processes can, and will, simply speed up in order to compensate, because they do so if the temperature gap increases. There are further reasons discussed in Q.3 in the Appendix of my paper.
So there is no overall effect at all due to trace gases on the rate of cooling of the surface. Thus there can be no effect upon climate.
Discussion on this continues on this thread.
“If spontaneous radiation emanates from a cooler object (or atmosphere) its EM energy cannot be converted back to thermal energy in a warmer target, such as Earth’s surface”
Ever seen a furnace? Wonder why they line the inside with Firebricks?
Ever seen a fire place and grate?
http://img.carters.com.au/87702.jpg
wonder why this, black body, increases the temperature of the coals?
That was why I said “spontaneous” and reinforced this by also adding the words “unless energy is added.”
Is there something you don’t accept in the standard definition of the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
Lasers, radar, microwave ovens, furnaces etc etc all have external energy added and thus cannot violate the SLoT.
Please read my peer-reviewed paper and some of well over 200 comments on the dedicated thread where tallbloke (along with 7 other climate sites) also published it.
Doug wrote:
>Lasers, radar, microwave ovens, furnaces etc etc all have external energy added and thus cannot violate the SLoT.
So, does the earth — solar energy.
Yes, your analogies are valid and disprove your point.
The CO2 slows the cooling, which means that the earth gets hotter than it otherwise would *because of the ongoing input of energy from the sun*.
Just like, in your words, “Lasers, radar, microwave ovens, furnaces etc etc ”
That is what we keep trying to tell you. That is why it does not violate the Second Law.
But you won’t listen.
Dave
Dave, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the “ongoing input of energy from the sun” is discontinuous. Positive feedback requires 360 degrees (or nearly) of phase shift. Is the CO2 feedback delay in phase with the 24-hour cycle?
Maybe someone here can explain to me how a solar cooker doesn’t work at night. I can’t figure out where all the CO2 is sending the IR radiation.
Ken Coffman wrote:
>Dave, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the “ongoing input of energy from the sun” is discontinuous. Positive feedback requires 360 degrees (or nearly) of phase shift. Is the CO2 feedback delay in phase with the 24-hour cycle?
Oh, c’mon! That *is* a joke, isn’t it?
I assume anyone else here as familiar with feedback theory as I am (e.g., competent electronics engineers) will treat it as such. (Hint to any such: we are not talking about the 24 hr. component in the frequency domain! We are talking about a long-term quasi-DC effect.)
Doug wrote:
>Please read my peer-reviewed paper…
Doug doesn’t it bother you that both you and the climate catastrophists keep repeating the phrase “peer-reviewed paper” as if it were a magic mantra that could substitute for actual *evidence*?????
Look… “peer review,” in and of itself, is of absolutely *zero* value. It would be the easiest thing in the world to establish a “peer-reviewed” journal in astrology. That would change nothing: astrology would still be nonsense. To put is simply, the real issue is whether or not the “peers” doing the reviewing are morons and/or fellow con artists.
More broadly, the issue is whether or not the “peers” are competent members of a discipline that has shown itself to be worthy of respect because it has been ruthlessly tested against external reality.
As smart as Thomas Aquinas might have been, I do not need to take his views on transubstantiation seriously, because neither the doctrine of transubstantiation nor his broader philosophy has ever been ruthlessly challenged by empirical tests.
Real science has been so tested. As I keep saying, I and other physicists have built very complex devices — from lasers to integrated circuits to nuclear bombs — that work very spectacularly. Does that prove we are right and you are wrong? Well… it strongly, very strongly, suggests that we know some things about the material world that you and most people do not. And, it certainly creates the presumption that you would be wise to thoroughly study what we know before you claim that we are wrong.
Conversely, there is no such presumption that we should take your views seriously. Where are the truly novel, highly complex devices you have created using your novel theories?
Nada.
Neither I nor any honest scientist will argue that it is impossible that some amateur will work out something that we have missed. But, we will not and should not, take such amateurs seriously unless and until they recognize the enormous presumption, proven by our tangible, spectacularly useful successes, that we do know quite a lot, and unless such amateurs are willing to show that their theories have some value by actually showing similarly tangible results.
In short, a mere barrage of words from you guys in some no-name “peer-reviewed” journal is just a joke.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
blouis79 | April 6, 2012 at 5:42 pm |
If you are standing on the ground wearing IR night vision goggles looking up into the sky at a balloon that is cooler than the ground – will you be able to see the balloon with the goggles?
Jim2 | April 6, 2012 at 6:11 pm |
Never used night vision goggles, but have used night vision video recorder. I think the balloon would be visible, but don’t understand the point of the question.
The radiative insulation theory (front runner of the greenhouse warming theories) says that the CO2 in the sky traps heat, so the CO2 IR haze should make the balloon invisible.
The point is that you seem to be arguing that a cooler body can’t shoot a photon towards a warmer one. Maybe I misunderstood what you were getting at.
There may be a need to clarify the above statement that less than a third of the cooling process of the Earth’s surface is by radiation that does not go straight to space. I was using this net energy budget and calculating the percentage that the 15% radiated to the atmosphere is of the 51% absorbed by the surface. In fact it is only 29.4% as shown below …
Evaporation 45.1%
Diffusion (conduction) 13.7%
Radiation to space 11.8%
Radiation to atmosphere 29.4%
Total 100.0%
I know it looks different on the diagrams showing backradiation. But, if the backradiation were really absorbed and converted to thermal energy (which is isn’t anyway) then the diagrams would have a further enormous error, because the new thermal energy supposedly from the cooler atmosphere would be no different from other thermal energy, so it also should be broken down as above, not 100% radiation as they assume.
And remember, not all “backradiation” is actually radiation that is sending surface radiation back down again: some of it would have been generated as new radiation using energy that came up by convection or latent heat, or was absorbed from incident solar radiation.
You see, there would really be an infinite number of up and down trips if they were right. It is only appropriate to consider net radiation upwards, because that is the only way the thermal energy travels. When the diagrams imply thermal energy is coming back down with the backradiation they are mistakenly misleading.
Doug Cotton wrote:
>You see, there would really be an infinite number of up and down trips if they were right.
There are. That’s how random walks, diffusion, etc. works.
Some of it keeps getting out, but some of it (an increasingly small amount) goes back and forth an arbitrarily large number of times.
One of the things we scientists here are trying to tell you guys is that you really, *really* need to learn (and understand) basic statistical physics, kinetic theory, random-walk/diffusion theory, etc. and that this is going to take you years of hard work that you are not, alas, willing to pursue.
But, the math on all this is well-worked out, and no technically competent person doubts that math, only people who have never seriously studied itr.
Dave
Indeed, my take on the enhanced greenhouse effect is that the GHG increase may increase the average time taken for entering energy to random walk it’s way through the earth system, before it exits. It is like the lines getting longer in the bank so there are more people inside, only it is more heat. But I have never seen anyone try the math, or collect the data, so who knows? It is all arm waving based on the SB equation.
Daves, it’s all cringe-worthy unscientific nonsense. Stand in a room with two walls as parallel mirrors. The light bounces back and forth forever. There are multiple images of you in the mirror. How long does it take for the image to appear in the distance? Turn on a torch. It must be completely blinding with all that light in there with nowhere to go.
Oh, the math is actually quite easy for a simple model (I mean easy for well-trained technical people, not for our lingering anti-scientists!), though it’s certainly not the most efficient way to get the solution. The real problem, of course, is that the real earth is *not* a simple model: you have vertical inhomogeneities, convection, clouds, and all the rest. Then, all you can do is computer models, which, as everyone knows, makes it all too easy to hide the assumptions built into your code.
It should be an absolutely rigid rule, by the way, that no scientific journal would ever publish a paper that involved computer simulations *unless* the computer code were completely released to the public for inspection. Alas, this seems not to be the norm in the GCM community: many of the modelers seem to think they “own” their code, though, legally, the taxpayers should own it since they paid for it.
Dave
blouis79 wrote to me and Dave W:
>How long does it take for the image to appear in the distance?
Speed of light, louis — simple calculation. You’re supposed to lave learned that in grade-school math.
Louis also wrote:
>It must be completely blinding with all that light in there with nowhere to go.
You haven’t ever been in a fully mirrored room, I take it?
Yes, it does get “blinding.”
Why doesn’t it get “completely blinding”? Because there are no perfect mirrors — you can actually see this in the more “distant” reflections, which tend to get a bluish, greenish tinge to them due to the fact that glass preferentially absorbs some colors more than others . So, the mirrors (and your own body, of course) do eventually absorb the light and turn it into heat energy. Therefore, not “completely blinding.”
Those of us who are scientists actually *know* the answers to questions like this: I am a scientist because, when I was a kid, I used to wonder about problems like this, and started learning science precisely so I could understand what was happening.
You guys keep throwing out these examples as if they prove we scientists are wrong. In fact, every single one of your examples proves that *you* are wrong and we are right. But, no matter how many of your examples we patiently respond to, it has no effect on you. You just throw out more examples. Eventually, we get tired of explaining grade-school science to you, and you think you have “won.”
Can you see that this is very strange, not to mention childish?
I fear that the expert that is needed here is not a scientist but a psychiatrist!
Dave
physicistdave, so if a CO2 molecule emits IR towards the ground which is warmer than itself, how long does it take to come back (2nd law). If a CO2 molecule emits IR to space, how long doe it take to come back? (hint: universe) What will be the net direction of radiation of CO2 in the atmosphere? How long will be the delay of heat send by IR in the atmosphere? (hint: c)
Blouis, the energy packet need never return to that molecule as it random walks back into space. Most never do. For example, it might be absorbed by the surface, then help warm the air, then rise via convection, moving constantly around from molecule to molecule via collision as it goes, then warm a water molecule, which emits IR into space. Each quantum of energy probably goes through numerous state and location changes from the time it enters the atmosphere from the sun until it leaves.
Energy comes in lumps, which have a life of their own. How GHGs affect these lives is the question. I do not think it has been answered.
How long does a random IR walk take at the speed of light? I’m sure one could apply a bit of statisicial physics to that problem.
But when the answer is “not long”, where goes the “radiative gaseous insulation theory”?
BTW, when I say IR to “come back”, I am inferring to *any* CO2 molecule in the atmosphere, not necessarily the specific one. We are talking about a collective mass of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere which absorb/reemit IR with a net flow from warm to cool, according to the second law. Those who fantasise about radiative gaseous IR insulation have yet to pin down a mechanism or any experimental verification of whatever the postulated mechanism might be.
I am waiting to be convinced by some proper science.
Actually David, that is spot on. Instead of ‘GHG’ I prefer ‘photon recycling’, as this is all that is happening to the IR.
There are two distinct putative effects of CO2; one based on its actually absorbance of IR, which is generally agreed upon and the second due to water-CO2 potentiation. This second mechanism of ‘photon recycling’, where CO2 enhances the effect of CO2 and CO2 enhances the effect of water is where the majority of Termogeddonist vs. Denialists come from.
The former camp suspect a doubling of CO2 from 280 ppm to 560 ppm with cause between a 3-8 degrees rise and the former think somewhere between 1-3.
The simplest way to establish the CO2 doubling value, the so called climate sensitivity’, is to plot average temperature vs. the natural log of [CO2] ppm. From the slope one can calculate the climate sensitivity; about 2.2 degrees.
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/LNCO2vstemp.jpg
I’m not bovered.
DocMartyn, and if you build in a ten-year lag it becomes 3 degrees per doubling, which is near the middle of the IPCC range. I don’t know what everyone is arguing about when these are the facts.
DocMartyn | April 7, 2012 at 1:03 pm |
Ointment. Flies:
a) R^2=0.7701393?
Considering the not-well-explained mid-century bulge, if we’re seeing a millennial ‘anti-bulge’ of some equally unexplained sort, then your 2.2 becomes 4.4 or more, no? By the same token, 2.2 could be 0.4 just as easily, given how much we don’t know.
b) Why is 2.2 so much better than 3.1, again?
I could see if sensitivity were an order of magnitude different, but it’s only a marginal distinction at the level of your (albeit sensible, and probably not so bad as I suggest above) guestimate, isn’t it?
Jim D | April 7, 2012 at 1:17 pm |
In the limit, I’d suggest an irreducible 12 year lag, based on the famous 17-year minimum signal:noise argument.
Looking at BEST, it appears the earliest signal:noise limit is much larger than 17 years, and the ratio by the end indicates 13 or 14 years.
It seems reasonable to conclude a mixing limit from the extrapolation to have an asymptote at 12.
Bart R, my rationale for the lag was based on the ocean thermal inertia, but there is some arbitrariness depending on what depth you consider is part of the surface climate system. By my reckoning, 10 years puts this depth at 400 m, which seems reasonable. But to your point, the lagged data I would use would be a ten-year average which also serves to reduce the noise level.
Why lags?
You are aware that the Earth warms and cools every 24 hours, and that during the annual seasons, it also changes temperature? The Diurnal cycle dwarfs the century changes. Look at the MSU data, the oceans very in heat output by huge amounts in monthly periods.
The whole ‘lag’, hidden heat argument is tosh.
DocMartyn, the lag is because of thermal inertia. An imbalance of 1 W/m2 would take 13 years to warm the top 100 m of the ocean by 1 degree, and longer if it is diffused to greater depths. With CO2 we are talking about imbalances of this order and increasing that are sustained for a century. It is subtle to see against a diurnal cycle, but it is changing the ocean temperature. Therefore the global temperature now is a response to the forcing some years ago, and if the CO2 stopped increasing warming would continue for a while just like the summer solstice is not the hottest part of the summer, or noon is not the hottest part of the day. If you want to measure the effect of solar forcing it would be a mistake to use the noontime temperature as a daily maximum, you have to look at a lagged temperature, similarly for the annual max where the lag is longer because deeper layers are affected for longer sustained forcings.
It seems the focus should be on the effect of the change in CO2 concentration on water vapor. Water will tend to condense below 100 C, taking itself out of the short term temperature equation. And more thermal energy speeds up convection, helping dissipate the extra energy. This doesn’t even take into account the shading effect of clouds.
It seems always to devolve into some superficial discussion about right or wrong interpretations of radiative physics. There is I suggest a universal misunderstanding of climate – it is much more complex than radiative physics in an important sense. The energies must balance at TOA having taken into consideration the ever changing state of the Earth. Our ways of defining the changing Earth is merely language and intuition after all – I call it natural philosophy – and can only be proximately consistent with data that itself is known only within broad uncertainties.
The social, political and economic questionseems barely of any interest. Although I m sure it is bubbling along under the surface. We know where Nordhaus stands – http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/12/carbon-tax-should-replace-kyoto-protocol – an immediate carbon tax that is just politically impossible even if it were desirable. We know where Lindzen stands – we want 50 years to try out some alternatives. We even have a road map. KO win for Lindzen.
As far as I am concerned BAU is better than carbon taxes in any universe. I am prepared to vote on it in our very next election – but I am not prepared to argue it again (or still) with Le Petomane. I can see the argument – I don’t buy it at all never have and never will. Don’t have to nobody wants it and the world is cooling for a decade or three at least (hah hah). Times getting on guys – I suggest we stop talking and start filling details for Plan B.
Robert I Ellison
The DICE model? That’s ridiculous! Monkeys throwing darts would be a lot more scientific than Mann.
I agree with the comments of others here that to say that models merely solve the fundamental conservation laws of physics is very deceptive. It’s a gloss on the truth which is that you must transform these conservation laws into a finite dimensional system of equations that can actually be solved in finite time. This is where the problems begin. The scales of the motions of the atmosphere range from millimeters to thousands of kilometers. Unless you have an infinite computer, approximations must be made and then we get into subgrid models and all the problems hiding there. For those who are interested, we discussed this at length on the previous thread on Lindzen’s seminar at the House of Commons. You can see Lacis, Moolton, Chief, and myself go over the issues. By the way Fred, did you look into turbulence modeling?
David,
Obviously this grid issue s a potential problem. Also obviously, any scientifically literate person (and I do include Hansen et al. in that group) knows this. The modelers must think they have some ways of handling that — some procedure to renormalize parameters or something.
Do you know how they think they can handle this?
And, do you know if there are any good reasons that show convincingly either that this problem is solvable or that it can never be solved?
My own “gut feeling” is that it cannot be solved. However, I have, again and again, had that “gut feeling” in many similar situations, and some bright person ended up coming up with a clever solution that showed I was wrong.
So, I don’t know.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
physicistdave | April 6, 2012 at 4:41 am |
I don’t entirely disagree with your gut, however an educated gut never hurts:
http://www.fi.isc.cnr.it/users/antonio.politi/Reprints/017.pdf
If it’s possible to improve GCM performance much, it won’t be until we collect two orders of magnitude more data at least.
If you wish to educate us – Le Pétomane – you need a link that works.
Le Pétomane
No sorry – it is working now. Here’s a couple of more recent studies – http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.1376 – http://www.pnas.org/content/105/38/14308.full
Woods Hole have at long last updated their abrupt climate change page. We should summarise and do a post for Judith. I am just a bit busy for a couple of weeks.
We probably don’t have 10,000 years – I reckon next Tuesday it all comes crashing down.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
Actually, one of the hot subjects in physics the last few decades has been a multi-grid method known as the “real-space renormalization group,” originally developed for solid-state physics and then transferred to relativistic quantum field theory.
I myself invented a technique to combine this technique with the “conjugate gradient method” to produce a really fast algorithm to calculate the potential with complicated boundary conditions. And a friend of my wife’s independently utilized the technique in a computer vision application.
So, I have some real experience with solving problems involving multi-grid issues.
Is any of this useful in GCMs? I don’t see how. On the other hand, I figured out my own application as a result of chuckling over a skit on a sitcom: I suddenly saw how a time-reversal joke on the tube could actually make my technique work.
So, maybe the GCM guys just need to watch more sitcoms.
Dave
physicistdave | April 6, 2012 at 7:00 am |
I myself invented a technique to combine this technique with the “conjugate gradient method” to produce a really fast algorithm to calculate the potential with complicated boundary conditions. And a friend of my wife’s independently utilized the technique in a computer vision application.
Nice. Tell more?
And yes, GCM guys do seem to need a bit of light comedy in their lives.
They’re hardly alone. Some of us really could stand to loosen up.
Bart R wrote to me:
>Nice. Tell more?
Well, it was a standard relaxation approach to solving the Poisson/Laplace equation but applied at multiple grid sizes to enhance convergence. And, then I realized it could be mated to the conjugate-gradient method when I was idly thinking about the sitcom skit. More details than that would, I think, be way too far off topic.
The grid problem leads to ‘structural instability’. Certainly there are some researchers who understand the instability of the solutions within feasible limits for inputs. Most people don’t understand the math. Most scientists even don’t understand the math.
‘AOS models are therefore to be judged by their degree of plausibility, not whether they are correct or best. This perspective extends to the component discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupling breadth: There are better or worse choices (some seemingly satisfactory for their purpose or others needing repair) but not correct or best ones. The bases for judging are a priori formulation, representing the relevant natural processes and choosing the discrete algorithms, and a posteriori solution behavior.’
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.full
I think that’s funny as hell.
A posteriori solution behavior? Yes folks – they pull it out of their arse.
Here for example is a description of the checks used by ModelE:
Conservation of Energy fluxes
—————————–
0 = Global: HEAT RUNOFF
Note that the dynamics by itself does not guarantee that the energy
lost from total potential energy is gained by the kinetic
energy. There is a fix to put in this energy term (calculated a
posteriori) at the end of DYNAM. Similarly, dissipation of KE is added
in locally after surface friction, dry convection, atmopsheric
turbulence and moist convection. There is similar coding in the FILTER,
SDRAG and GWDRAG. If all of these energy changes are in place, then
the total energy (KE+TPE+ENRG WAT) should be conserved.
Now where was that law of “conservation of energy fluxes”????
leaving aside for the moment the climate physics,the first non trivial problem is how robust is the intergration of economic classical theory into a coupled model.
If the so called growth model is so robust,why have we seen the greatest destruction of wealth in history ie an economic tipping point.eg 2009 figures.
Credit related losses $2 trillion
Equity markets $30 trillion
Housing market $4 trillion
Lost productivity $3 trillion
This is the fundamental debate,rather then the physics .The arguments by Nordhaus etc are limiting,and often counterproductive ie centrist focused.
The debate needs to be broader so as to move from partisan ideological idioms.
A number of contrasting POV abound of interest is Hallegate 2008
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268107001114
From the paper
The key parameter in NEDyM is investment flexibility. For certain values of this parameter, the model reproduces classical business cycles with realistic characteristics; in particular, NEDyM captures the cycles’ asymmetry, with a longer growth phase and more rapid contraction. The cyclical behavior is due to the investment{profit instability and is constrained by the increase in labor costs and the inertia of production capacity. For somewhat greater investment flexibility, the model exhibits chaotic behavior, because a new constraint intervenes, namely limited investment capacity. The preliminary results presented here show that complex behavior in the economic system may be due entirely, or at least largely, to deterministic, intrinsic factors, even if the economic long-term equilibrium is neo-classical in nature. In the chaotic regime, moreover, slight shocks { such as those due to natural or man-made catastrophes { may lead to significant changes in the economic system.
This paper introduces a modeling framework for macroeconomic growth dynamics that is motivated by recent attempts to formulate and study \integrated models” of the coupling between natural and socio-economic phenomena. These attempts are driven, at least in part, by public debate about global issues, such as anthropogenic climate change. The challenge is to describe the interfaces between human activities and the functioning of the earth system over the very long term. In this context, economists have used primarily longterm growth models in the Solow tradition, relying on the idea that, over time scales of decades to centuries, the golden-age paradigm is an acceptable metaphor. This approach appears, however, to be increasingly at variance with the nature of the policy debates in the field. Advocates of stringent emission limits are concerned about the cost of damages caused by climate change, while their opponents worry about the cost of greenhouse gas abatement. But balanced growth models that incorporate many sources of flexibility tend to suggest that the damages caused by disruptions of the natural | i.e., physical and biological planetary systems, as well as the mitigation policies proposed to prevent these disruptions, will entail only a few percent” of losses in gross domestic product (GDP) over this century (IPCC, 2001). Both categories of activists tend thus to suspect that the figures suggested by current models underestimate either type of costs, since real economies rarely manifest a tendency to steady-state behavior
Another with a different interpretation is energy security
eg V. G. Gorshkov, A. M. Makarieva, B.-L. Li
Comprehending environmental and economic sustainability: Comparative analysis of stability principles in the biosphere and free market economy
Abstract
Using the formalism of Lyapunov potential function it is shown that the stability principles for biomass in the ecosystem and for employment in economics are mathematically similar. The ecosystem is found to have a stable and an unstable stationary state with high (forest) and low (grasslands) biomass, respectively. In economics, there is a stable stationary state with high employment, which corresponds to mass production of conventional goods sold at low cost price, and an
unstable stationary state with lower employment, which corresponds to production of novel goods appearing in the course of technological progress. An additional stable stationary state is described for economics, the one corresponding to very low employment in production of life essentials such as energy and raw materials. In this
state the civilization currently pays 10% of global GDP for energy produced by a negligible minority of the working population (currently ~0.2%) and sold at prices greatly exceeding the cost price by 40 times. It is shown that economic ownership over energy sources is equivalent to equating measurable variables of different dimensions (stores and fluxes), which leads to effective violation of the laws of energy and matter conservation
In other words if structual asymmetry and instability is already present in both global business and the energy markets,.does poorly thought out policy redress the imbalances and create stability,or further extend both problems.
maksimovich wrote:
>If the so called growth model is so robust,why have we seen the greatest destruction of wealth in history ie an economic tipping point.eg 2009 figures.
Because there are such things as politics, dishonesty, a willful ignorance of history, and just plain human stupidity.
Anyone who is a serious student of history, and any serious political scientist, knows that. One of the problems with many contemporary economists (apparently the ones you cite!) is that they don’t.
Why the housing bubble? Government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac faced a “moral hazard”: everyone believed (correctly, as it turned out) that the government would bail them out and so they and their investors felt no need to be responsible in evaluating risks (I remember trying to point that out four decades ago in an econ class — the professor could not see it). And, then there was the stupidity — the belief by supposed financial “professionals,” contrary to all historical experience, that housing prices could only go one way, ever and ever upward. Or the idiotic belief in valuation models for financial assets that made grossly over-simplified assumptions simply to make the models mathematically tractable.
You are never going to successfully include such factors in the mathematical models used in economic forecasting. And, therefore, those models will never work.
And, people with vested interests will keep denying that fact.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
20% down? Why? It’s just a hoary tradition with no real reasoning. Of course it might have been an emergent rule of an ecologically rational solution to various problems of credit, but the constructivist rationality at the Boston Fed (and frankly in certain banks as well) somehow forgot about that possibility.
We tamper with old, widespread rules we do not understand at our own peril. You don’t need to be Edmund Burke to get this.
‘There is an interesting physics newsfeed/blog called http://physorg.com, which Oliver kept on spamming with his nutso ideas. As of late last year, he disappeared because apparently he couldn’t take the relentless mocking by the physics crowd that wanted nothing to do with him. A team of guys kept on bringing up his troubles, and that’s that.
Notice that this is not an authoritarian approach but rather a case of ordinary nerds using the mock and needle instruments of destruction. Some call it uncivilized, whereas I find it effective. Lots of people are fans of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and think they do a pretty good job at marginalizing people that need to be marginalized. I heard that Ben Franklin used to do this as well with mocking letters to the editor.’ Webby
You got a girlfriend yet Webby.
Cap’n Kangaroo wrote:
>Notice that this is not an authoritarian approach but rather a case of ordinary nerds using the mock and needle instruments of destruction. Some call it uncivilized, whereas I find it effective.
Well, I don’t favor being pointlessly mean to people who are ignorant of science and honestly want some answers. However, the strange thing about the anti-scientists who are so widespread on the Web is that they are absolutely sure they are right, despite their intransigent refusal to learn any science, *and* they think it is our duty to spend an infinite amount of time explaining their errors to them, and yet they are extremely abusive when we try to do so.
I ran into one guy in another forum who had actually published a book “proving” Einstein’s general theory of relativity was wrong. I went to the trouble to tell him that one of his equations was mistaken. He was furious and abusive, accusing me of being incompetent, malicious, etc. Finally, I posted a link to the wikipedia and explained exactly which symbols in his equation were wrong. Rather than apologize and admit I’d been right, he then got even angrier at me: you see, it was my duty to have told him all those details *right away* so that he could immediately fix one of the countless errors in his book. How dare I merely point out that he was wrong without helping him fix all the errors in detail so he could make more money off poor suckers buying his book?
And, of course, if you start pointing out the idiotic behavior of these guys (almost always guys, by the way, very rarely women), countless other posters chime in saying that we scientists are indeed slaves to the ignoramuses and *must* patiently explain their errors, no matter how incredibly abusive they are to us.
It’s hopeless.
This does help explain the behavior of Hansen, Mann, et al.: when they run into guys like the “Dragonslayer” group, it does make it easier for them to convince themselves that any critics or questioners, such as Judith, belong in the same bag. That, of course, is dishonest, but it can be convincing to people watching the whole debate who are not themselves scientifically literate.
Dave
I saw the Einstein website – it is very funny.
You mean these people who are utterly convinced they are right and the world is wrong and then insult and belittle those who have the temerity to disagree? In Oliver’s case it was entirely something personal they used – not the technical issues. It is a blood sport with no purpose.
Usually I find that arrogance and egotism are covers for a deep ignorance. You will find that there is very little of any substance with Webby.
Robert I Ellison
Bose-Einstein statistics determines the statistical distribution of identical indistinguishable bosons over the energy states in thermal equilibrium. These condense at low temperature to form a Bose-Einstein condensate. A volume of atmosphere in thermal equilibrium has similar energy distributions at room temperature but it is not a BEC. It is irrelevant at any rate as we are interested in the average of the macro state and not the statistics of the micro state.
The other rookie error concerns IR spectral absorption. It means that greenhouse gases are resonant in those frequencies. They absorb photons and reemit by Steffan-Boltzmann (proportional to T^4) for a grey body in nearly the same frequency – Wein’s Displacement Law does apply but it is minor at these temperatures – to move toward equilibrium at TOA.
Captain Non-sequitor continues with his amazing run of copy&paste gibberish. This one took awhile to devise as it sets up a strawman. The first sentence is plagiarized from any one of several dictionary web sites, such as this Australian kids science site:
http://encyclopedia.kids.net.au/page/bo/Bose-Einstein_statistics
The strawman comes in when he switches over to a B-E condensate and then tries to compare that to atmosphere at room temperature. Never mind the fact that B-E condensates occur at temperatures approaching absolute zero, so that a condensate really has no equivalence to room-temperature statistical mechanics. Moreover, and this is the astonishing part, he compares this to a volume of atmosphere. Photons are not like gas molecules, HydroMan. Amospheric gases are not bosons, as gas molecules are distinguishable particles.
This argument is really so badly constructed that I should not even try to engage in trying to clarify what Captain Hydrologist is trying to say. One just gets sucked into a morass of nonsensical sentence fragments.
That is probably his intent and like Bart is saying, it must be some Australian pasttime to take part in fabricating bizarre pseudoscientific worlds.
Girma does this with his graph trendology.
Doug Cotton does this with his radiative physics theory.
StefTheDenier does this with his gas expansion theory.
Fitzhenry does this with his barometric heating of the atmosphere theory.
Newcomer Jinan Cao does this with some theory he just presented on this thread.
Chief does this with his “excess atmospheric CO2 is natural” theory, and his non-sequitor riffing.
Who is winning the crackpot sweepstakes?
What the heck is going on down there?
‘In statistical thermodynamics, Bose-Einstein statistics determines the statistical distribution of identical indistinguishable bosons over the energy states in thermal equilibrium[?]. Bose-Einstein (or B-E) statistics are closely related to Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics (M-B) and Fermi-Dirac statistics (F-D). While F-D statistics holds for fermions, M-B statistics holds for “classical particles, i.e. identical but distinguishable particules, and represents the classical or high-temperature limit of both F-D and B-E statistics.’ Here is the first paragraph from the Austrlian kids physics site.
You called it Bose-Einstein rather than Maxwell-Boltzman which I correct you on and then you insist that I made the error and then embeelish it with insult to me – see if i give a rats arse – and my country. You are a very ugly American.
Here is what I said – ‘These condense at low temperature to form a Bose-Einstein condensate. A volume of atmosphere in thermal equilibrium has similar energy distributions at room temperature but it is not a BEC. It is irrelevant at any rate as we are interested in the average of the macro state and not the statistics of the micro state.’
I think we know who wins the crackpot award.
Captain #2,
You can go on and try to wiggle your way out of the situation. The funniest part is where you conflate the statistics of gas molecules in the atmosphere with photon statistics.
The volume containing a large number of molecules which is in thermodynamic equilibrium is merely the neccessary condittion for Maxwell-Planck statistics to be true. Why don’t you work on your comprehension skils instead of a nasty little w@nker.
Photons are not molecules. They follow Bose-Einstein statistics strictly, while in the high temperature limit the trend merges with an exponential making it asymptotically approach Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics.
BTW, I don’t know what “Maxwell-Planck” statistics are. Making screw-ups like that is very common for beginners who combine plausible terms that they have heard but not intellectualized.
I commend you on your continued mastery in impersonating Professor Irwin Corey.
Hell – meant Maxwell-Boltzmann. I was thinking Planck in relation to another little correction of you above. ‘The Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution applies to ideal gases close to thermodynamic equilibrium with negligible quantum effects and at non-relativistic speeds.’ It is of little relevance – statistical mechanics is about explaining the microstate properties that lead to the macrostate properties of heat and pressure that we are interested in.
We can’t quantify the macrostate from statisitical mechanics. ‘Atmospheric and oceanic forcings are strongest at global equilibrium scales of 107 m and seasons to millennia. Fluid mixing and dissipation occur at microscales of 10−3 m and 10−3 s, and cloud particulate transformations happen at 10−6 m or smaller. Observed intrinsic variability is spectrally broad band across all intermediate scales. A full representation for all dynamical degrees of freedom in different quantities and scales is uncomputable even with optimistically foreseeable computer technology. No fundamentally reliable reduction of the size of the AOS dynamical system (i.e., a statistical mechanics analogous to the transition between molecular kinetics and fluid dynamics) is yet envisioned.’ McWilliams 2007 – you seem to use statistical mechanics as a metaphor and bieve at the same time that it has some fundamental explanatory power. Borring and wrong.
Integer and a half counting vs integer counting, simple.
Don’t know how that got into the atmosphere…
Spins and a half vs full spins.
WHT
Uh.. I didn’t exactly say it quite the way you (amusingly) phrased it, you know. Indeed, my implication was the Australian pastime ought be accorded some respect. At least they’re interested.
Also, Jinan Cao isn’t entirely blowing smoke.
He’s inflating a well-known, but relatively minor, consideration vastly out of proportion, and getting a couple of little details somewhat wrong, but it’d be nice to hear out a fulsome exploration of the dynamics involved, as they’re fun.
Actually, how relatively minor the consideration is with respect to the major consideration determines how much out of proportion Jinan poorly communicated consideration is :)
If water vapor were coupled to CO2 doubling so that it would produce the 2 to 3 C required to achieve the 3 to 4.5 C upper end of the estimate, Jinan’s concern is unwarranted. If not, the conductive transfer at and below the average radiant layer is significant.That is actually one of the main points I have been trying to make, with transient climate sensitivity less than 1.6C, the conductive impact eliminates the majority of the “in the pipeline”, by increasing the negative feedback response of H2O. Comparing the rates of warming of the tropics to the Antarctic, that seems to be the case. In fact, it would mean that the Antarctic surface temperature records are significantly higher than actual, which also appears to be the case.
It is likely a game changer.
BTW, if you compare mid-troposphere satellite temperature data to the surface station data, the only region in which there is significant disagreement is in the southern extent which happens to have the shortest instrumental record and the poorest coverage. It also has the most extreme minimum temperatures which would have the poorest instrumental accuracy. Check the tolerances of the “as installed” instrumentation (lab instruments typically don’t do as well in the real world).
It seems to me that the Hoskins et al note is a critique, not of the talk Lindzen actually made, but of the talk they thought – or possibly wished – he had made. Essentially they say that the fact that there are many uncertainties doesn’t mean there’s no problem – assuming that by “the conflation of uncertainty with ignorance” that’s what Lindzen was saying. But he wasn’t: they’ve missed his point.
He was talking to a lay audience. And the question he addressed was the precisely the question we (I am no scientist) are asking: has a sound scientific case been made for a connection between anticipated warming and “innumerable claimed catastrophes”? For years, we have been bombarded with alarming warnings of catastrophe and disaster from climate change – warnings that go far beyond a view that there might be some problems or concerns arising from a warmer climate. They’ve come from politicians, from the MSM, from august institutions – and from “climate scientists”. James Hansen is probably the prime example of the latter but even Brian Hoskins himself has referred in a presentation to “a very dangerous experiment with planet Earth”**. And it’s these scary warnings that are used to justify the draconian and damaging political/economic measures that we are told are essential “to combat climate change”.
In his conclusion, Lindzen dismisses fears of catastrophe: “ … I think that there won’t be much warming due to CO2, and without significant global warming, it is impossible to tie catastrophes to such warming. Even with significant warming it would have been extremely difficult to make this connection. Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. … I am quite willing to state that unprecedented climate catastrophes are not on the horizon though in several thousand years we may return to an ice age.”
Interestingly, the note’s authors would seem to agree with Lindzen. For example, in the section entitled “Models”, they say: “Even the models at the more complete and complex end contain many uncertainties and deficiencies, which are widely recognised within the modelling community, but they are the best guide we have as to how the climate system may change in the future.” That “the best guide we have” contains “many uncertainties and deficiencies”, surely demonstrates precisely the weakness of the claimed connection between warming and catastrophe?
**https://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/horizons/Public/Imp%20Horizons%20Jan%202012%20-%20Lecture%201.pdf
guenier | April 6, 2012 at 4:12 am |
“That “the best guide we have” contains “many uncertainties and deficiencies”, surely demonstrates precisely the weakness of the claimed connection between warming and catastrophe?”
Respectfully, no.
I have an ice cream cone on a hot day.
It has the deficiency that the cone is a messy way to hold dripping, runny ice cream.
I am uncertain of how long before the heat of the day will melt the ice cream, leading to its complete loss if I wait too long to finish it.
However, the deficiency of the cone is bounded by my learned skill and understanding of how to hold the cone, what to do to prevent drips, and so on. It’s a limited deficiency, because the need is limited too. I don’t need a perfect bowl so long as I have the skill to use the cone well.
The uncertainty is a messier issue. I don’t want to devote all my efforts and attention only to gobbling up ice cream as quickly as possible, or becoming slave to the need to duck out of the sun. I have to manage my resources and attention.. and even if I have only the one uncertainty, it’s an uncertainty, I can’t know my odds of outguessing it.
So I _will_ put more effort into eating the ice cream than if my knowledge were perfect. I will divert attention from watching people out enjoying the sun. I will risk an ice cream headache by eating too fast. I will savour the treat for less time. Because uncertainty is costly in a way probability is not.
With probability, I can calculate the exact ratio of times my choices will pay off against the times the pay off is lost by the catastrophe of dropped ice cream, and my choice over the long term of many ice cream cones can be optimized to account for the odds.
Whatever I’m missing from that probability model – knowledge, a regular probability distribution, stable external conditions – means I’ll always make less-than optimal decisions.
The uncertainties and deficiencies in the GCMs are like that. They don’t diminish the aspects of the models that serve to illustrate, indeed statistically prove to a high confidence level, that human influences are affecting the climate. They simply mean we’ll never be able to respond with perfect rationality to that effect, be it by BAU, or Precautionary Principle, or any other policy response. We’ll always pay too much, no matter what we do or don’t.
Where we can bound that uncertainty and limit it, we might reduce how much we over-pay.
I’m sorry, Bart R, but that’s a poor analogy. With your ice cream you can be sure that, if you do nothing or do the wrong thing, you can be certain of catastrophe – a dropped or completely melted ice cream. With GCMs there is no such certainty. Anyway, like Hoskins et al, you are wholly missing the point: Lindzen’s talk was not about whether or not, as you put it, “human influences are affecting the climate” – indeed he specifically said that they “should cause some warming”. No, he was concerned specifically with whether or not there is a sound scientific case for linking anticipated warming to “the innumerable claimed catastrophes” – an alleged link that has, for example, justified action inflicting damage on our already tottering Western economies (with grim consequences for our children’s and grandchildren’s quality of life, for fuel bills and energy availability and for our precious and fragile local environments) and that threatens to harm some of the poorest people in the Third World, for whom more expensive or non-existent energy (a consequence of CO2 restriction) means that clean water, proper sanitation, fresh food, adequate health care, better education, etc. will be either unavailable or hopelessly expensive. And his conclusion that the case for alarm (and therefore for such action) is wholly inadequate is plainly confirmed by the Hoskins et al statement that “the best guide we have” contains “many uncertainties and deficiencies”.
guenier | April 6, 2012 at 9:26 am |
“I’m sorry, Bart R, but that’s a poor analogy.
The quality of analogy depends entirely on the meeting of the minds by the will of collaborative mutual delusion. All analogy is poor. A GCM is not an ice cream cone, a pair of weighted balls dropped from a tower in Pisa are not the moon and stars.
Let us work with each other toward understanding, if we can, through this poor tool, each a puppeteer with only some of the marionette’s strings in our hands. (An analogy is not a marionette.)
“With your ice cream you can be sure that, if you do nothing or do the wrong thing, you can be certain of catastrophe – a dropped or completely melted ice cream.
Assuming no father figure to reach down and rescue our ice cream, no child to pass the ice cream on to make it a future generation’s problem, no unfounded expectation the weather will suddenly cool to keep us from the outcome of our inattention and gluttony, no unsupported belief in warming-proof ice cream?
Sorry, guenier; the analogy performs perfectly as a model of Lindzen’s mind here.
“With GCMs there is no such certainty.
With no future event is there certainty.
In business, we manage future events in terms of Risk and expected return on investment (ROI). The ROI-Risk sustainability (ie profit) model is fairly universally accepted.
Uncertainty means the Investment term (denominator) must increase to mitigate Risk, which has a nonlinear impact on our sustainability (profit). As Uncertainty grows, expected profit shrinks.
External perturbation of chaotic systems increase uncertainty. We enter unmapped terrain, and our past knowledge becomes of less and less use.
GCMs somewhat bound the uncertainty of chaotic systems; they do this of course poorly – with deficiencies – far better if we do not perturb the climate, and so retain the utility of our past knowledge, than to rely on GCMs.
Far better to have GCMs than nothing at all to bound our uncertainty.
“Anyway, like Hoskins et al, you are wholly missing the point: Lindzen’s talk was not about whether or not, as you put it, “human influences are affecting the climate” – indeed he specifically said that they “should cause some warming”.
When Lindzen offered a nail, Hoskins supplied what in his estimation was the best hammer he had. That the hammer also has a claw end that delivers evidence of human influence on climate in a somewhat deficient and uncertain way doesn’t mean Hoskin doesn’t also nail home his point on Lindzen. (A GCM is not a hammer).
Some of the uncertainty and deficiency with GCMs are with the claw side of the hammer. Some with the driver side. As they are bounded faults, not absolute faults, Lindzen is simply wrong to dismiss the entirety of the GCM argument by pretending what amount to little more than cosmetic issues are fatal to the GCM case. Who cares if the hammer is pink or blue or polka dot, when the issue is driving nails?
“No, he was concerned specifically with whether or not there is a sound scientific case for linking anticipated warming to “the innumerable claimed catastrophes” – an alleged link that has, for example, justified action inflicting damage on our already tottering Western economies (with grim consequences for our children’s and grandchildren’s quality of life, for fuel bills and energy availability and for our precious and fragile local environments)
I don’t deny some few inept things have gone on to date in laggardly implementation of climate policy by the same incompetent governments as let so many other mischief come to pass.
Wouldn’t it be better to look into root causes? Poor Risk management by allowing Risk instruments to circulate with huge hidden uncertainties reliant on deregulated (hence increasingly uncertain) enterprises in turn reliant on a continuing economic boom that turned sour when a triplepoint of high food, fuel and fertilizer prices contracted the market due to bad harvests and planting conditions due to global weather extremes causing floods and droughts in the majority of the food producing regions of the world.
So.. step one, manage human perturbations on climate better.
Step two, get government out of the game of propping up bad business decisions by bail out.
Step three, stop trusting businesses not to act against their own interests just because you’ve inverted incentives so businessmen are rewarded for acting against their business’ interests.
But I digress.
and that threatens to harm some of the poorest people in the Third World,
OMG. I AM SO SICK OF PEOPLE WHO KNOW NOTHING OF THE POOREST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD EXPLOITING THEM FOR THEIR OWN AGENDA.
It was unforgiveable when Lord Lawson did this White Man’s Burden shtick in his obscene little work of fiction. It’s shameful it lingers in the echo chambers of the climate debate. Even if it were true — which it demonstrably isn’t — it isn’t right to presume to speak for this very large group of people who happen, by and large, to violently disagree with you from what I’ve seen.
Look, I don’t pretend to speak for the poorest people in any world. I’ve studied development issues, gotten a degree in it, spent time in NGO work on these issues, gone to developing nations, walked, talked, learned and worked among the people you pretend to defend.. and I didn’t meet you or anyone who sounds much like you there, nor hear of you being elected to represent them, nor hear those who were saying anything but the opposite of what Lawson and you some sort of authority to argue.
It makes me want to puke when I see this utter crap repeated.
“..for whom more expensive or non-existent energy (a consequence of CO2 restriction) means that clean water, proper sanitation, fresh food, adequate health care, better education, etc. will be either unavailable or hopelessly expensive.
You have it backwards. In documented case after case, the poorest of the poor find themselves uprooted and made worse off by megaprojects and pipelines, not by carbon reduction. They’re the most exposed to the Risks, the least able to afford to mitigate, the most marginalized by climate change, and they say so themselves.
Further, the best of the actual solutions, carbon cycle privatization, will provide the means for all the best means of mitigation due to the owners of the carbon cycle per capita: better education, health, food, sanitation, water, lower cost efficient energy and lower cost energy appropriate to their needs.
“And his conclusion that the case for alarm (and therefore for such action) is wholly inadequate is plainly confirmed by the Hoskins et al statement that “the best guide we have” contains “many uncertainties and deficiencies”.
Deficiencies you play up that amount to the color of the coat of paint on the hammer.
The ice cream is melting while you spend all your time arguing that the color of the hammer makes a difference, mixing metaphors while mixing up fiction with fact.
Let’s forget analogies, Bart R. I rarely use them: like your ice cream and hammer, they usually work to the disadvantage of their deviser. BTW I was amused to see you accusing me of mixing metaphors.
I attended the Lindzen talk – but, to be sure I had not misunderstood him, yesterday I watched the talk video along with his slides. It wholly confirmed my view that a short and accurate summary of his argument would be – “there is no sound scientific case for asserting a clear link between anticipated warming and the innumerable claimed catastrophes”. That argument is important: over the years, we’ve been deluged with scary and alarming warnings about the dreadful consequences of failing to “tackle climate change” and it’s that alleged link that has been used to justify the draconian and damaging (and often absurd) political/economic measures we are told are therefore essential – amounting to rather more, I suggest, than your “a few inept things”. And, as I’ve said before, a careful reading of the Hoskins et al note confirms that it, far from showing that Lindzen is wrong, supports his view on the weakness of the alleged link.
(BTW your suggestion that “Lindzen is simply wrong to dismiss the entirety of the GCM argument” is a strawman: there was no such dismissal in his talk. I rather wonder if you’ve actually listened to it.)
As for your unpleasant and intemperate attack on me regarding the world’s poor, although I usually decline to engage with people who shout, I’ll say this: I first visited China in 1979 and, having spent time there and in India since then, have observed with growing interest (and some admiration) how over the years the lot of hundreds of millions of people in those countries (and elsewhere in S E Asia) has been vastly improved – largely by the provision of fossil fuel derived energy. OK, there are ghastly local pollution problems – but I’m confident that, as happened in the West, these will be overcome with growing prosperity. (However, I don’t think they’ll ever be interested in your “managing human perturbations on climate”.) I’ve also visited and taken an interest in Africa – my first visit (extensive) predated my first trip to China. Africa raises vast, complex and especially challenging issues and, given your expertise, I’m sure we might have a useful and interesting exchange of views about them – assuming of course that you were able to discuss things courteously. But we’re already way O/T, so I don’t think we should go into that now.
Cherry picking.
You just don’t get to hear about what goes on in the lives of the poorest of the poor.
But some of us have actually lived in those countries, and seen with our own eyes.
For every person who’s displaced by some project or whatever, there’s at least another 100 who suffer the burden of insufficient/unavailable/expensive energy.
“OMG. I AM SO SICK OF PEOPLE WHO KNOW NOTHING OF THE POOREST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD EXPLOITING THEM FOR THEIR OWN AGENDA.”
Bart – Your protest is really loud, but in your rant you fail to demonstrate how all these carbon control schemes benefit the poor or at least are neutral WRT them. Of course, this will be another exercise in “may,” “might,” “could,” etc. But you could have at least tried to justify your rant.
Bart R | April 6, 2012 at 5:31 pm |
“OMG. I AM SO SICK OF PEOPLE WHO KNOW NOTHING OF THE POOREST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD EXPLOITING THEM FOR THEIR OWN AGENDA.”
Without regard for your sickness or my exploitation, how do you convince the poorest of the poor, and also the richest of the poor, to not desire to exploit fossil fuels?? We show them every second how beneficial combustion is.
guenier | April 7, 2012 at 8:07 am |
You liked the irony of the mixed metaphor thing?
Excellent.
So long as you got that you brought the mixed up, I brought the metaphors, Nordhaus came with facts, and Lindzen supplied fiction.
“there is no sound scientific case for asserting a clear link between anticipated warming and the innumerable claimed catastrophes”
The same logic applied, for example, were Lindzen caught peeing in the village well, would be patently absurd. This claim would be immaterial, even if it were on some level palatable to some. Lindzen completely fails to support his case in elementary logic and taking into account the observations and science available.
But that doesn’t matter.
The claim that matters much more is, “there is sound scientific case for asserting a clear RISK between CO2E emission and innumerable nonspecific costs”.
We never demand the trespassed-against villagers to prove pee drinking bad for them. See, catastrophe isn’t necessary, specific claims aren’t necessary, even clear links aren’t necessary.
All that’s needed is a Risk to require action to reduce costs.
More simply, all that’s needed is for an excludable rivalrous resource to be unfairly distributed — as the carbon cycle is now — to require action to preserve the Capitalist Fair Market. As Lindzen’s demonstrated no real competence to discuss capitalism, I’m fine with sticking to Risk recovery.
There’s been scare and alarm on both sides. Saying “draconian and damaging” is so redundantly alarmist as to make a bit of sea level rise pale in comparison. Draco decreed tyrannical death penalties for even the most minor of crimes.
As you’ve implied there _are_ crimes by using the word draconian, we’re agreed some action is necessary.
If you’re one of those soft-on-crime types, more’s the pity.
However, asserting ‘damaging’ is an extraordinary claim. It requires extraordinary evidence. Furnish some.
See, I’ve looked all over for ‘damage’ from privatizing the carbon cycle by pricing CO2 emission by the law of supply and demand. I see Free Riders ‘damaged’ by having to finally pay their fair share; I see laggards damaged by having to innovate; I see wastrels damaged by having to clean up their act; I don’t call these things damage, I call them restoring integrity to capitalism and democracy in the free Market.
Which is it you and Lindzen are against, guernier? Capitalism, democracy, integrity or freedom? All of the above?
(And if you don’t think Lindzen is dismissive of GCM’s, one wonders if Lindzen’s listened to his own talk; as that’s the effect carried away by most commentators.)
And yes, how your tourism in China and Africa imbue you with authority to speak for two continents is O/T, so I’m glad to dispense with it. I don’t think I can be courteous to someone still in 2012 claiming the mantle of the White Man’s Burden.
Peter317 | April 7, 2012 at 8:41 am |
Cherry-pi..?!
“You just don’t get to hear about what goes on in the lives of the poorest of the poor.
I don’t? Well then, I guess the years I spent getting a degree in the topic were wasted.
“But some of us have actually lived in those countries, and seen with our own eyes.
Hey, me too. Guess what? I didn’t see you there. Were you behind chain link and barbed wire on one of the construction sites building and maintaining oil wells?
Either way, how did this authorize either of us to speak for those people you refer to, in place of, for example, Nelson Mandela who made his opinions clear in Copenhagen and by hosting the Durban Conference?
“For every person who’s displaced by some project or whatever, there’s at least another 100 who suffer the burden of insufficient/unavailable/expensive energy.
Who am I, or who are you, to compare the misery of being plucked from one’s homeland by force, seeing it destroyed, and being resettled to, what is it you say, having to pay a bit more to gas up your SUV?
And really, 1:100? Are you sure? Isn’t it 1:1000? 1:10,000? What ratio does it have to be to justify jackbooted thugs turning state power against some people so others can enjoy unearned rewards?
Look, there are worldwide projects to improve access to clean drinking water and to sanitation. At last tally, the project on drinking water is slightly ahead of schedule, and on sanitation is slightly behind.
The biggest impediment? Diversion from the efforts by those same fossil-fuel giants who want water for fracking and land and materials for pipelines and megaprojects.
So, just stop with the falsehoods, they don’t wash.
Jim2 | April 7, 2012 at 9:56 am |
I have a small note about what you ask in my prezi. Click on my name, it’s about a third of the way through the path.
In short, just who do you think is being ripped off by BAU? The people who under BAU have gotten increasingly rich for no additional benefit to society, or mainly for no benefit to society at all?
However, my rant had nothing to do with that. I’m as sickened by the White Man’s Burden cliche in all its guises, be it buying kidneys from the oppressively poor to guernier’s abusive illogic.
jim | April 7, 2012 at 1:43 pm |
A narrow question. We show every second how beneficial energy is.
The best benefit is to be obtained from the most efficient energy.
This clearly isn’t fossil fuel any more. Otherwise, fossil fuel wouldn’t be subsidized so much worldwide. Taxes on fossil fuels wouldn’t have dropped more than fifty percent in the past 20 years as a proportion of their overall price. Governments wouldn’t be subsidizing biofuel scams to complement and stretch an obsolete fossil fuel paradigm.
Those who lean on the fossil fuel combustion crutch, unwittingly, show everyone the crippling cost of this addiction more and more every second.
You have absolutely no idea…’nuff said
Bart R | April 7, 2012 at 3:21 pm |
“The best benefit is to be obtained from the most efficient energy.”
Agreed. And platituded.
“This clearly isn’t fossil fuel any more. Otherwise, fossil fuel wouldn’t be subsidized so much worldwide. Taxes on fossil fuels wouldn’t have dropped more than fifty percent in the past 20 years as a proportion of their overall price. Governments wouldn’t be subsidizing biofuel scams to complement and stretch an obsolete fossil fuel paradigm.”
In America, what “subsidies” of fossil fuels are there besides the Section 179 and Section 190 deprecation, amortization, and depletion? Same “subsidies” for all businesses, fossilized or not. Yes, biofuel is subsidized a scam.
“Those who lean on the fossil fuel combustion crutch, unwittingly, show everyone the crippling cost of this addiction more and more ”
What do you mean? What is “unwittingly” about US electricity generation? Where is the “crippling cost” “combustion crutch”?
(how many of the world poor experienced experts, on this thread, sailed boats to and from the distant lands? pots and krutches?)
I think that the world poor would rather take a plane ride to where we are…
jim | April 7, 2012 at 7:12 pm |
“In America, what “subsidies” of fossil fuels are there besides the Section 179 and Section 190 deprecation, amortization, and depletion? Same “subsidies” for all businesses, fossilized or not.
How many businesses in America have substantial portions of their production bought by the government and pumped underground?
Have huge tracts of land expropriated with the owners forced to accept firesale prices and handed over to them for so low a price ‘free’ is the best adjective, after the ‘legitimate tax allowances’ are considered?
How many have their waste products bought by all levels of government and spread out by the mile to use.. that’s right, to carry the vehicles that consume the main products of the businesses?
And the vehicles.. largely subsidized by allowances for their own customers (remember the HUMVEE allowance scam?) and biofuel subsidy scam, and international trade pressure and deals, and let’s check out this part — the legislation like the Halliburton Loophole that for example makes it illegal for medical practitioners to tell their patients what chemicals used in fossil processes are causing their illnesses!
And do you really believe flames coming out of peoples taps in the vicinity of fracking are, as government reports claim, ‘unrelated’? It’d seem to me that suppressing the truth is a pretty big subsidy.
Did you know that in Canada, it’s _illegal_ for government scientists to admit that fracking can cause earthquakes? How close the USA gets to that level of tyranny of politicians over scientists is disgusting.
Look, I’m a huge booster of business. Private business. When government meddles to this extent, it’s not private. It’s a distortion of the Market, and denies the democracy of individual citizens in their buying and selling decisions, as bad as any dishonest election.
What do you mean? What is “unwittingly” about US electricity generation? Where is the “crippling cost” “combustion crutch”?
Other than the huge distortions in the Market, the narrowing of choice in the Market that results, and the loss of innovation?
Bart R | April 8, 2012 at 3:29 pm |
“How many businesses in America have substantial portions of their production bought by the government and pumped underground?”
Pumped underground for future use. No taxes or subsidies there.
“Have huge tracts of land expropriated with the owners forced to accept firesale prices and handed over to them for so low a price ‘free’ is the best adjective, after the ‘legitimate tax allowances’ are considered?”
Agreed! Not taxes or sobsidies. Takings. Bad, bad Kelo.
“How many have their waste products bought by all levels of government and spread out by the mile to use.. that’s right, to carry the vehicles that consume the main products of the businesses?”
I’m glad that you, for only one, have noticed that! Not taxes or sobsidies. Pollution. You won’t like the following; where I live environmentalists, since recently, require us to pave asphalticly to a theoretical limit; ie every last square unit, where none is necessary now… This is brought to us by the proto-of-SWIPS; it’s coming soon to you, too. It is a very funny and stupid thing to see a pavement screed parked on a thin sheet of plastic, after it has been used to pave miles of ground… And all the requisite wattles and fabric end up as geo-trash; those and orange construction fence and the new roadside trash.
“And the vehicles.. largely subsidized by allowances for their own customers (remember the HUMVEE allowance scam?) and biofuel subsidy scam, and international trade pressure and deals, and let’s check out this part — the legislation like the Halliburton Loophole that for example makes it illegal for medical practitioners to tell their patients what chemicals used in fossil processes are causing their illnesses!”
Expenses, not sobsidies; do your taxes! Humvee is a canard. Bio fuel is pink slime; get rid of it, and agricultural subsidies, and the FDA.
Bart, don’t put on the Halliburton foil hat: You’re talking to your own, when you do that. Same for flaming taps. Way out there, from where I sit.
“Did you know that in Canada, it’s _illegal_ for government scientists to admit that fracking can cause earthquakes? How close the USA gets to that level of tyranny of politicians over scientists is disgusting.”
Did you know that the only country with an explicit right to unrestrained speech is the US?? Unintended things happen when we think that ‘not hurting some peoples’ feelings’ is a higher value than free speech.
And still no taxes and subsidies…
“Look, I’m a huge booster of business. Private business. When government meddles to this extent, it’s not private. It’s a distortion of the Market, and denies the democracy of individual citizens in their buying and selling decisions, as bad as any dishonest election.”
Yes! So we agree! Stop the governments meddle-ings!
“Other than the huge distortions in the Market, the narrowing of choice in the Market that results, and the loss of innovation?”
What are you talking about?? You just keep saying the same thing. The only distortions in my electric bill, that I see are the T. Boones Pickpocket kind; electric windmills, electric cars, the ‘hydrogen economy’, photovoltaic infeed tariffs, IRS direct investment credits…
How are any of these caused by your ‘con-bustion’ of fossil fuels?
Above: “unrestricted speech” is wrong. I mean unrestrained speech, ie no prior restraint.
Wasn’t my thinking, twas autocomplete.
Kelo, Kelo, Bo Belo, Banana Fana Fo Felo. Fee Fie Fo Fum, I smeello the blood of a bad precedent.
========
“Halliburton” > Hallibur-tin
Antecedents, and the whole family tree, are bad bean stalks. As Bart pointed out.
above, yet again, a mistake; “…get of the FDA” > get rid of the Ag Dept.
I am not a kook!
See, jim?
You’re learning.
Numbers aren’t a weakness for me.
On obscure spellings and typo’s, I’m completely vulnerable. :D
not obscure spellings, I make some of my words work twice at a time; meanness with meaning, as I only pay them for once.
but do you get the “tu plus tu equals…” ?
that was a good one, like you du tu, I hate to think that I wasted it here…
The man made global warming king has no clothes => http://bit.ly/HRvReF
Mr. Orssengo
I don’t know why I persist, however, as you persist..
Your latest appears to choose rather the most inconvenient possible starting point for the competing 0.2C line. Above the top of the highest peak, not even the midpoint, of your own projected curve?
Do you have so little regard for your own curve that you won’t assume it is the reasonable starting point for comparing other projections?
One notes, if you do start the IPCC projection at the midpoint your own calculation determines is the correct one, then the correlation of actual to projection favors the IPCC.
Is this why you feel you must cheat?
Bart
It is the direction (trend) not the values I was looking at: Increasing versus flat.
I will change it if you want.
Bart
Updated as per your instruction:
The man made global warming king has no clothes = > http://bit.ly/HRvReF
Except: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/decadal-trend-in-temperature/
lolwot
Counterfactual history, where the ‘might-have-beens’ play with the ‘ifs’.
It would be really warming now if it wasn’t for the Sun / ENSO.
We’d be in a huge Depression now if we hadn’t thrown trillions at the bankers.
If the Anglo-Saxons hadn’t invaded Britannia, the Welsh wouldn’t have a chip on their shoulder and Australia’s Prime Minister would be more reasonable. (sarc before I get accused of racism).
The Sun, has unexpectedly burned out. How long will it take for the seas of the world to still, the winds to stop, with a curst of ice thick enough to skate on?:o) Over the face of the globe—we may only Hope & you will already have your answers ready. Think of the minutes saved… gosh.
Girma | April 6, 2012 at 6:52 am |
I’m afraid I don’t see any difference between the link in “Girma | April 6, 2012 at 6:52 am |” and the original (same) link in “selti1 | April 6, 2012 at 5:51 am |”?
I’ve approximated your graph on wft:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:11/mean:13/from:1910/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2000/trend/offset:-0.1/detrend:0.031/plot/best/from:1999/trend/offset:-0.11/plot/best/from:1999/trend/offset:-0.445/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend
As you can see, using BEST from 1999 (wasn’t that when the 0.2C prediction was meant to start?) gives a pretty good projection of that trend, (about 15% high, at slope = 0.0227678 per year in Series 5) when adjusted to the HadCRU3 linear mean temperature as a starting temperature in 1999, and is a significantly better match for actual temperatures than the downward phase indicated by your formula.
When you draw the IPCC trend prediction, _starting_ a third of a degree above the value your model claims is the expected mean, of course you make it seem a ridiculous straw man.
Bart
IPCC’s projection starts at 0.4 deg C for 2000, 0.6 deg C for 2010, 0.8 deg C for 2020 and 1 deg C for 2030 as shown => http://bit.ly/xQBnVn
Girma | April 6, 2012 at 7:14 pm |
I stand corrected. It starts, then, at 0C in 1990?
That’d be this: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:11/mean:13/from:1910/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2000/trend/offset:-0.1/detrend:0.031/plot/best/from:1990/trend/detrend:0.3/plot/best/from:1990/trend/offset:-0.27/detrend:0.3/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend
Note how much worse by comparison this makes your premise. Series 6 looks pretty spot on, and Series 4 looks dead wrong.
Your own graphs betray you.
I love how you cant even align the projected trend of the IPCC in the correct fashion. jeez. Here is a thought.
Go to Lucia’s. Try to post your nonsense there. See how long you last in a room full of highly skeptical talented people. Or try getting a guest post at jeff Ids. He often posts nonsense for his readers to tear apart.
Nice little graph! How long before AGW (and IPPC) hypothesis is falsified for good?
Err …. IPCC :(
“hypothesis” are never falsified. If it continues to warm more slowly than expected you can expect climate science to change at the periphery to account for the imprecise prediction s
Hypotheses are never falsified? What a strange view of science. Care to elaborate?
Statements are falsified, leading to ad hoc fixes, until the weight of the ad hoc garbage becomes considered too great to logically support any longer.
I guess those guys who thought the earth was the center of the universe are still working on their updated position.
selti1, for sure it’s better than the GHG-Model, but I don’t think the linear term is really linear. It’s oscillations all the way up the time-scale. All the way down too. The model (blue line) will be down at 0.0 until 2020.
For the next twenty years, with 100% confidence, the global mean temperature will lie between 0.2 and 0.6 deg C.
Let’s hope not….that would be very cold.
On average?
or for every year?
when you are wrong will you admit it
Mosh
Just the person. You made mention of a bibliography and papers by such as Julios. So many posts have sped by on the variuous threads you were postng in I can’t trace your links. Can you repost them here please? Thanks.
tonyb
Girma | April 6, 2012 at 8:40 am |
“For the next twenty years, with 100% confidence, the global mean temperature will lie between 0.2 and 0.6 deg C.”
“100% confidence” Seems like anomaly is missing, somewhere…
elti1 | April 6, 2012 at 5:51 am | said: ”The man made global warming king has no clothes =>”
YES HE DOES; the Fake Skeptics are his ”Fig Leaf”
Stefan
In your web site you have a ‘sceptics problems’ section.
I appreciate your first language is not English, but there is one phrase in particular you may wish to change;
‘Warmist are wining’
Presumanly you mean ‘winning’
tonyb
Maybe he saw this?
http://www.durbanwinefestival.co.za/
Capt dallas
The context is that he meant ‘win’. But ‘wine’ or whine’ would be even more appropriate :)
tonyb
Warmists are waning.
===============
I believe we have identified the essential problem revealed by Climategate – world leaders focused on the advantages of their plan and overlooked the two disadvantages (1) and (2) listed in the abstract.
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
Probably few would object to the proposed solution shown below the abstract.
Still missing: A leader to implement this, someone with the strength of character of Moses, Indira Gandhi, Nelson Mandela or Abraham Lincoln.
Nordhaus writes:
“The point is that CHL have the impact of uncertainty exactly backward. A sensible policy would pay a premium to avoid the roulette wheel in a Climate Casino. This means that the economic model estimates of the cost of doing nothing for fifty years are understated because they cannot incorporate all the uncertainties—not just the obvious ones such as climate sensitivity but also the zero and double-zero uncertainties such as tipping points, including ones that are yet undiscovered.”
I cannot imagine a better example of the folly that alarmist thinkers embrace. In plain English, Nordhaus clearly believes that spending taxpayer money now and restricting human freedom now will make the climate roulette wheel go away. This belief is actually the primary postulate of alarmism, AGW, and CAGW. The belief is that nature is stable and nurturing until humans cause it to become something like a roulette wheel but that humans can destroy the roulette wheel and return nature to its normal benevolent state. This fundamental postulate echoes in Mann’s Hockey Stick and in Trenberth’s demand that we should “reverse the Null Hypothesis.” Yet there is neither historic nor scientific evidence to support the claim. To the contrary, science and history teach us that nature is not stable and nurturing by any stretch of the imagination.
The only evidence for AGW and CAGW comes from alarmists who claim that they speak in the name of science. Yet their science amounts to no more than poorly conceived “paleo” studies such as Mann’s and models that remain not only unvalidated but unexplicated. There is no evidence available to sophisticated common sense. If there were then legislators would be hearing descriptions of novel phenomena associated with AGW that are of practical and pressing concern to the broadest range of their ordinary constituents. The point that must be emphasized is that the climate roulette wheel, the one that humans created and that humans can remove, is entirely a product of bad science.
Alarmists who have integrity as scientists surely must understand that they bear the burden of proof. They must show that increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 do cause some dangerous changes in climate that would not have happened without increasing concentrations of CO2. Then they must show that mitigation efforts can be effective at a reasonable price. Only then can they claim that there is a roulette wheel that they can remove from our future. But today alarmists, such as Nordhaus, begin with the assumption that there is a human created roulette wheel and that they can destroy it. Their belief in the roulette wheel is not a matter of science or common sense but a matter of religious belief.
Culture and Nature are both plastic, but one loses all structure at a much lower temperature.
========
What is the upper limit of global average temperature that can be acheived by the so-called greenhouse effect?
It must have an upper bound. I believe the fact of an upper bound has been lost in the conversation. In fact the upper bound is limited by solar power input. A temperature exceeding the black body temperature for a given level of power input is not physically possible. A body at a temperature X emits power Y. The power has to come from somewhere otherwise conservation of energy is violated. So to get more Watts emitted from the earth’s surface than the sun provides at the top of the atmosphere is physically impossible.
The sun provides 342W/m2 at the top of the atmosphere. If the atmosphere were totally transparent so that every joule of that energy could be absorbed and converted to thermal energy by the earth’s surface then the maximum possible mean temperature is 6C. The average temperature of the global ocean happens to be 4C. The earth would appear to be within just a few degrees of the maximum possible mean annual temperature it could ever reach without more power coming from the sun.
But what do I know? Thermodynamic realities are the stock in trade of engineers and I’m an engineer. Perpetual motion is not possible and yet, anyone claiming the solar constant is 1366W/m2 can drive the earth’s mean annual surface temperature higher than 6C is proposing perpetual motion.
If necessary, or desired enough, engineers will harvest solar energy that would otherwise not reach Earth.
==============
We already do. ISS for instance.
all those hot microwaves on you…
That’s a long extension cord trip into a deep potential well…
Microwaves.
========
…extension cord trips… I hate it when that happens…
microwave trips are worse, all that hot stuff on you
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/phyopt/albedo.html
My emphasis.
So there you have it. The greenhouse effect works by lowering albedo. But it has a ceiling. You can’t get an albedo lower than zero and S-B ideal blackbody law tells us the maximum temperature for that ideally absorptive surface and here’s a lovely online calculator for those wanting to play with the numbers.
Given the earth receives 342W/m2 (solar constant 1366W/m2 point source projected onto a rotating sphere) the mean temperature for albedo 0 (or emissivity=1) is 6C.
http://www.spectralcalc.com/blackbody_calculator/blackbody.php
Realization of this is what inspired the change from global warming to climate change to global climate disruption. There’s a good scientific reason for rebranding. Plausible arguments can be made that more CO2 may have disruptive effects. However, ask anyone trying to farm in Canada whether they’d consider a longer growing season and bigger harvests to be a positive or negative disruption. Nordhaus is all wet. He might know economics but he doesn’t know beans about beans or about any relevant natural sciences by the looks of it.
You are forgetting the variability in the response across the spectral lines.
The cumulative energy is the integral across the spectral lines and the temperature affects the statistical distribution. Since certain bands of spectral lines are no longer as productive in generating outgoing energy, the statistical physics of the photons dictate that the distribution gets shifted upward along the wavenumber axis, i.e.hotter, where the profile is narrower. The direction of that shift also comes about from following the increase in entropy.
That is the first-order effect. All the second order effects come about from non-uniformities in the atmosphere.
So I would suggest that the ceiling can almost go arbitrarily high. Read again what PhysicistDave had to say about Venus.
Pull in all the frequencies in the spectrum and then release only a fraction, and the temperature will increase beyond a pure black-body.
It is closer than his original formulaion but he is still trying to prove that certain frequencies are not transmitted through the atmosphere so you get the spectral absorbance curve at the TOA – not true.
Do the math.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiens_law.svg
Wein’s displacement law states that: λ(max) = b/T where b = 2,897,768.5(51) nm·K.
lamba is the frequency of the max energy emission – the distribution is constant with temperature but frequency shifts. At Earth temperatures there is no measureable difference.
Greenhouse gases absorb and emitt at the same frequency in accordance with the Steffan-Boltzmann law for a grey body.
J* = ɛσλT^4
In fact the more interesting question is whether the frequencies are not exactly the same. The quantum state is that the molecules are resonant at the relevant frequencies. Molecules absorb a photon and electron orbits shift into a higher energy state according to the energy of the photon. When the molecule goes to a lower energy state a photon is emitted with the same energy and therefore frequency according to the quantum formula – E = hf
What’s the limit? It may be about what it is now with ocean circulation changes resulting from hydrological changes. ‘Thinking is centered around slow changes to our climate and how they will affect humans and the habitability of our planet. Yet this thinking is flawed: It ignores the well-established fact that Earth’s climate has changed rapidly in the past and could change rapidly in the future. The issue centers around the paradox that global warming could instigate a new Little Ice Age in the northern hemisphere.’
Robert I Ellison
link for the quote – http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=83339&tid=3622&cid=10046
Captain Hydrologist might as well copy&paste from the phone book considering the lack of insight he brings to the table.
WebHubTelescope | April 6, 2012 at 11:58 pm |
“Captain Hydrologist might as well copy&paste from the phone book considering the lack of insight he brings to the table.”
You might as well be quoting from crank science sites like zero point energy if you believe the greenhouse effect has no temperature limit. It is limited by the power input from the sun. Period. A higher temperature for any brief period of time requires a functional Maxwell’s Demon and is a Perpetuum Mobile of the Second Kind (second because it violates the second law of thermodynamics – entropy). A higher temperature forever is a Perpetuum Mobile of the First Kind (which violates the first law of thermodynamics – conservation).
Get a clue.
I was placing it in terms of the 33 degree rise in the earth’s temperature due to greenhouse gases. You seemed to be under the impression that the mean temperature of the earth couldn’t exceed 6 C, and you said so right here:
I then said that if one applies a GHG the temperature can rise arbitrarily high. Perhaps arbitrary is not the right word, and instead suggest variably high depending on the concentration and band characteristics of the GHG. Something has to raise it 33 degrees and I was wondering why you didn’t mention this.
David Springer wrote:
>Thermodynamic realities are the stock in trade of engineers and I’m an engineer.
Which kind of engineer, David? I’ve worked with lots of electronics engineers, and most of them, including some brilliant ones, understood very little statistical mechanics, even the stat. mech. relevant to EE. The same could be said of their knowledge of quantum mechanics, optics, and even general electromagnetic theory outside of what was needed in EE.
Your question is an interesting one, though. Empirically, look at Venus — I think that conclusively disproves your conjecture — the surface of Venus is a *lot* hotter than your conjecture would imply. (Of course, Venus also conclusively disproves all of our anti-blanket guys: one way or another, it is surely Venus’ atmosphere that manages to keep it so hot! When they keep spouting off, perhaps we should just keep replying with one word posts: “Venus.”))
I think I can prove (though I’m not sure) that no greenhouse effect can possibly make the earth hotter than the surface of the sun. Of course, no one has ever suggested it could, anyway.
Is there a lower absolute bound? I’m not sure, but Venus does show that it is going to be unbearably hot.
Dave
<iI think I can prove (though I’m not sure) that no greenhouse effect can possibly make the earth hotter than the surface of the sun. "
That’s an interesting thought, Dave. I think you’re probably right, although certainly greenhouse effects could in theory make the earth’s surface hundreds of degrees hotter than it is currently, although CO2 isn’t capable of achieving that, given its limited absorption spectrum.
The essence of the greenhouse effect lies in the relative transparency of greenhouse gases to visible wavelengths, while they are capable of absorbing well in the IR. If the Earth became as hot as the sun’s photosphere (at about 5700 K), its main emissions would be in the visible range, allowing them to escape to space via the same transparent atmosphere that let them in. I expect that would establish a radiative equilibrium that precluded further heating, but maybe I’m overlooking a theoretical means of circumventing that obstacle.
It’s pretty much right that the greenhouse effect acts to bring the surface temperature somewhere between the “effective” blackbody temperature and the photosphere temperature.
The hyperphysics link is embarrassingly wrong about why the greenhouse effect warms. It’s certainly possible to change the albedo by adding greenhouse gases, either by direct Rayleigh scattering (though you need a lot more CO2 than anything relevant to the Earth case for this to matter), or by feedbacks, but the greenhouse effect itself works independently of the planetary albedo.
Yeah, of course, I am pretty sure that, in practical terms, the earth cannot get anywhere near the photosphere temperature with any sort of plausible greenhouse gases. What I meant, of course, is that I think there is a fairly simple argument showing that the photosphere temperature is an upper bound, and that moving that upper bound down to more realistic levels requires a more complicated argument.
What I have in mind, by the way, is a fairly obvious Second Law argument. I think it’s right, but it’s easy to get fooled by the Second Law: a chemical engineer once explained to me how heat exchangers worked, and I confidently told him that this violated the Second Law. His response: “Well,, they do work, Dave!” Of course, he was right: it is an interesting exercise for the student to see why the Second Law does not forbid heat exchangers. And, of course, our anti-scientists in this forum (and Creationists everywhere!) constantly misunderstand the Second Law. So, I’m cautious.
The other thing I have in mind is a theorem from classical optics that you cannot focus light so as to produce a brighter image than the original source. I am again cautious because I vaguely remember this from various sources, I am not sure I really understand it, and I am not sure it is applicable to this problem, though it feels as if it should be relevant.
Anyway, I suspect that there are various ways to put bounds on how hot the earth can get, but the example of Venus shows that these bounds are unlikely to matter much in terms of the climate debate: no one on any side of the debate really is suggesting it could get as hot as Venus from anthropogenic CO2.
Dave
I agree that it would be difficult to get something like this. One very hypothetical way that this could be possible would be to have some sort of substance high in the atmosphere that had a perfect albedo of one, but at infrared wavelengths, and allowed visible energy in but no IR out (while at the same time, not requiring the atmospheric layer to heat up as occurs in the absorption case). Eventually the planet would heat up until it radiated in visible wavelengths and the planetary albedo was the same for planetary and solar radiation. I do agree it would violate the second law to get hotter than the photosphere, provided that was the only source of energy for the planet.
In more realistic cases it’s not at all uncommon for planetary temperatures to be well in excess of 1000 K and with overlap between the stellar and planetary spectrum. This happens for the ‘Hot Jupiter’ type of planets that orbit very close to their host star, that have been found in great numbers.
Back to Venus and Earth, I’ve maintained in a number of places that a runaway greenhouse is physically impossible( at current solar luminosities) on Earth without the help of implausible cloud feedbacks that have no basis in reality. Somehow the idea seems to persist, and then gets associated with other scenarios like methane releases, etc.
Dave – I don’t think there’s any question that the Second Law precludes a passive heat sink (the Earth) warming more than the source. In an isolated system, the two could approach thermodynamic equilibrium. In a dissipative system, such as the Earth, there must always be a gradient between source and sink as a function of the strength of the dissipation.
PhycistsDave, I still think that 1361Wm-2 is the most plausible upper limit. In order to exceed 1361Wm-2, the Earth would have to radiate 1361Wm-2 in all directions from some surface either in the atmosphere or the true surface. Then the true surface could be twice the 1361Wm-2 if the radiant surface was in the atmosphere. There is not enough mass available for that to happen. If the average surface temperature did approach 373K, water vapor radiation to space would completely overwhelm the available solar energy. That would limit the maximum surface temperature to some number of degrees below 373K for eons.
Then if all the carbon on Earth were converted to CO2, that would only increase the mass of the atmosphere by a factor of 100. Earth would barely have enough heavy greenhouse gases to reach 393.6K, and do the Venus thing. Anything over 393.6K would require geothermal boost :)
Dallas – If you read the U. Arizona reference I cited (or Raypierre’s book), you’ll understand why your statement is completely wrong. In fact, it’s inevitable that in some millions of years from now, the Earth’s surface will greatly exceed 400 K and the emission will greatly exceed the solar constant. I won’t go into all the details, but the reason has little to do with CO2 and everything to do with the massive increase in total atmospheric water and atmospheric mass as temperature increases, once the Kombayashi-Ingersoll limit is reached. You should probably read up on it.
Here’s another Raypierre article on the Hydrologic cycle discussing the enormous increase in surface temperature that ensues once the Kombayashi-Ingersoll limit is exceeded, as it inevitably will be in the Earth’s future.
‘When the solar forcing exceeds the Kombayashi–Ingersoll limit, the temperature continues to increase until the surface temperature is several
thousand degrees, at which point all the ocean has been evaporated into the atmosphere. This is followed by disassociation of water into
hydrogen and oxygen, after which the light hydrogen escapes to space making the water loss irreversible.
TSI wouold need to increase by a lot. It seems very unlikely in a main sequence star.
Fred, the K-I limit is approximately 330Wm-2 or 1/4 of the incoming solar. Water vapor is a poor absorber of SW but does absorb SW with a long enough path length. As Raypierre’s article says, what happens after that depends on the mass of the planet and the increase in the absorbed solar to 300Wm-2. If that absorption is in the atmosphere, it reduces the surface absorption which is likely going to limit the surface temperature to
373K or below until the water boils off. The higher atmospheric absorption with more dense water vapor concentration would increase the rate of disassociation of water into O and H. So I highly doubt the 400,000K is in Earth’s future by the Venus condition, 393K plus geothermal may be, but not in the next few hundred millinia.
Dallas and Robert Ellison – The Kombayashi-Ingersoll limit (about 310 Wm-2) leading to a runaway climate for Earth and temperature rises of probably thousands of degrees will occur inevitably, probably in about 1.7 billion years. (It could also occur much sooner if the Earth’s albedo declined dramatically, since total mean solar radiation is about 340 Wm-2, but I don’t see a mechanism for that occurring). No-one has claimed a warming of 400,000 K.
The runaway for Earth becomes possible at about 700 milllion years; it’s at about 1.7 billion years that it becomes inevitable.
So we go from millions of years to 1.7 billion. As long as we can know where we stand.
1.7 Billion years? It may take that long to figure out climate sensitivity :)
crossed responses Fred – interesting idea but of course not of much immediate relevance. I was reading the hydrological paper you linked to just this morning.
Speaking of water…
2Pe 3:10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
2Pe 3:11 [Seeing] then [that] all these things shall be dissolved, what manner [of persons] ought ye to be in [all] holy conversation and godliness,
2Pe 3:12 Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?
2Pe 3:13 Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
& looking on The Light side, we won’t have to wait so long.
Fred, Fred, Fred…
By the time the light from the sun’s photosphere has reached the earth it has declined in power by the square of the distance. The only way for it to heat something hotter than its power density permits is to concentrate it with mirrors or lenses which increases the power density at the focus while decreasing it by the same amount outside the focus.
You really have no clue about any of this and should really just STFU.
I’ve explained below, David, that your misconceptions on the greenhouse effect lead you to these inaccurate statements, and you should review this. Because of the greenhouse effect, the Earth’s surface can warm far hotter than the temperature dictated simply by the amount of solar radiation the climate system absorbs. This is easily shown to be in no conflict with any laws of physics – the First Law of themodynamics, Second Law, Kirchoff’s Law, etc..
I believe you have a problem, though, that you will have to deal with. When you are shown to be wrong, you can choose to bluster your way through it, hoping that readers without much understanding of the subject will be convinced by your assertive tone and the contempt you show for your critics. On the other hand, there are readers here who actually know this subject matter and will judge you accordingly.
You have a choice – either impress the less knowledgeable readers and earn some disrespect from the knowledgeable ones, or concede that this is an area you don’t know well, placate the people who do know it, and learn something in the process.
The First Amendment to the Constitution gives you the right to express yourself either way, and so it’s your choice. My happiness doesn’t depend on which one you make, but it might have some importance for you
—
Here’s what you are proposing with a greenhouse effect limited by the temperature of the sun’s photosphere.
We (meaning an engineer like me) could take a very well insulated box black on the inside execept for one side where we’d put a one-way mirror. This is the ultimate greenhouse. If the maximum internal temperature was limited only by the photosphere’s temperature we could get the inside of that box hot enough to generate high quality dry steam to run a turbine which is a mere 500C not the 5500C of the photosphere.
It simply can’t be done. In order to heat things that hot in the real world (as opposed to your fevered imagination) we have to use lenses and/or mirrors to concentrate the energy which by necessity deprives some other surface from that amount of energy.
Do you have any idea whatsoever how f***ing much of a laughingstock you are for proposing something physically impossible?
Just one more piece of advice, Dave, meant sincerely. Instead of responding impulsively here, you should consider what I said in the privacy of your own conscience, and decide what’s best for you. I think you probably do want to understand things correctly, and a public confrontation isn’t always the best way to reach a receptive state of mind for that. The points I’ve made about the greenhouse effect and surface warming will be seen as correct by anyone knowledgeable in the subject, Nothing you or I say will change that. You have to decide whether it’s more important for you to arrive at a correct understanding or to protect what you perceive to be your public image. Remember though that your public image in the eyes of people who understand the science isn’t helped by insisting you’re right when it’s clear to them you are wrong..
If it helps you to understand, Dave, the greenhouse effect is like a partial one way mirror in that it is more opaque to outgoing IR radiation than incoming solar radiation. However, I recommend that you read the articles I linke to below in this thread for a more detailed discussion.
I don’t want to add too much to your current level of indignation, but if you get a chance to simmer down, there are serious misconceptions with another area you’ve discussed – the ability of IR back radiation to add thermal energy to the ocean. We can leave that for another time, but again, knowledgeable readers are aware of the actual nature of this phenomenon, and you might want to think about correcting your misconceptions by addressing some of the issues quantiatively. We can save that for later, though.
And, it’s a miraculous mirror that can reflect outgoing radiation and make the source hotter than it was by 10%. Where did the energy come from to make the source hotter? Uh, from the source, of course. Wait, it’s not hotter, it’s hotter than it would have been and from that we get dangerous Global Warming and more and more record temperatures, tipping points and catastrophe we should spend trillions of dollars to avert.
David,
You are right about a great many things, but you’re plain wrong about this. While there’s more energy entering a body than leaving it, the body will continue heating. The maximum possible temperature is the temperature of the source. It’s not limited by distance.
physicistdave | April 6, 2012 at 5:36 pm | Reply
“I think I can prove (though I’m not sure) that no greenhouse effect can possibly make the earth hotter than the surface of the sun. Of course, no one has ever suggested it could, anyway.”
I don’t see how you can possibly be a physicist. You can’t raise the temperature of anything hotter than the sun using solar energy. This effectively limits the theoretical maximum temperature that can be attained by concentrating sunlight with lenses or mirrors. Otherwise we could just concentrate sunlight to heat things to many millions of degrees and have cheap hot fusion power.
You are incredibly poorly versed in basic thermodynamic constraints in the real world.
So when the actual average temperature is 15 C, doesn’t that prove you went wrong somewhere? If you take the albedo as 0.3, the temperature you would get for the net solar radiation is -18 C (255 K). The actual temperature is 33 C higher than what you would expect. Where have we seen 33 C before?
Jim D;
We now make an examination how the 33°C greenhouse effect for the Earth is obtained. 33°C = 15°C – (-18°C). The -18°C is obtained by radiative equilibrium between incoming absorbing radiant flux from the Sun and outgoing emitting radiant flux from the Earth:
(1) pi r^2 (1-α) S0 = 4pi r^4 ε σT^4
where, ε is the emissivity of the earth surface (explanation for other symbols omitted).
In current climate research, ε is either missing in the equation or is assumed to be unit. Inserting the value of α = 0.3 and ε = 1 into and rearranging Eq. (1) leads to:
(2) T = 254.9 (K) =~ 255 (K) =~ -18°C
However, by adopting ε = 1, one has assumed that the earth surface is a black-body surface, which of course is not true. If ε is not 1, but 0.9, 0.8, 0.7 and 0.6, T would be -11.5°C, -3.6°C, 5.5°C or 16.5°C respectively. This -18°C is simply a result of technical error.
On the other hand, the Earth’s mean near-surface air temperature, as measured by global weather stations, is around 15°C (=~ 288K). N2 and O2, which are literally transparent bodies, consist of 99% dry air. Because white and transparent bodies do not emit at whatever temperatures, this 15°C is totally irrelevant with the equations shown above. In other words, it is a different physical quantity.
You can check that the emissivity of water is about 0.99. Most of the surface is water, but other types of land and ice surface are also in excess of 0.9. Polished metals have low emissivity, but not much else.
Clouds reduce global emissivity to around 0.62. Although I am at a loss to see the relevance.
Jim D;
1) Most substances have a high emissivity over absorption band 4-14 um; the reported value for water 0.95-0.98 is for this range;
2) Water has much lower emissivity outside the absorption band;
3) Water emissivity shows lower value with higher incident angles. This is to say that actual emissivity of ocean is lower than the lab value because of constant waves;
4) Water covers 70% of the earth ground surface.
CK, you are talking about the effective emissivity looking from space including the atmosphere with GHGs and clouds. To get the surface radiation balance you need the surface emissivity which is actually near 1. This is where the 255 K temperature comes from because it is the balance with a transparent atmosphere to IR.
Jinan, unlike water vapor, a water surface absorbs very effectively at all wavelengths. It is close to a black body as are most ground surfaces.
Lazy. Go find it. Like this from Mi. Sidran, “Broadband reflectance and emissivity of specular and rough water surfaces”:
http://scienceofdoom.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/sea-surface-emissivity-lge-sidran-1981.png
Note that at shorter wavelengths it is still close to one, and at lower wavelengths it starts to decrease, yet of course that comprises less energy (both because of the short wavenumber~1/lambda plus because of the lower density of states). At normal incidence, this will remain between 0.9 and 1 for the practical spectral range of emitting radiation. Or do you think that 100 micron radiation is that important?
Lower incident angle is colder regions thus less contribution. Also less incidence angle the lower cross-sectional contribution to incoming solar, so this makes it marginal to the overall effect.
Jim D, the emissivity of the ocean surface is about 0.9995. What is the emissivity of the ocean at 0.5 meters? What percentage of the solar radiation incident on the ocean surface is absorbed below 0.5 meters?
So the longwave emissivity is nearly one, but that is not the end all, there is more than just longwave energy involved because the energy absorbed below the skin layer of the ocean has to move to the surface skin layer by other than radiant means. If the ocean is in stead state, the energy out would equal the energy in which would appear to be emissivity equal to 1.
Another example is the emissivity of plants. A 50 meter tall tree and well fertilized landscaped lawn would both have a low albedo and a high emissivity. The energy absorbed by the tree would be transferred mainly to the air and the lawn mainly to the soil (and photosynthesis). The release rate of the energy from the soil is different than that of the air.
The simplistic version of radiant physics does not cover the more complex interaction of the total thermodynamics of the system.
CD, I am not sure of the point you are making. The longwave outward energy for a planet with no GHGs would depend only on the surface emissivity and surface temperature. You need to tell CK and Jinan that the emissivity is near one, which is all I was trying to correct.
Jim D, they both know that it is near one but not one. The impact depends on the third and fourth significant digits. If you take a volume of water at 0.001C and heat it with a infrared heat lamp, it will absorb 100% of the radiation to three significant digits. If you turn the lamp off and measure the emission of the volume of water, it will emit less because some portion of that energy is conducted below the surface emission layer. Emissivity is not a constant unless the system is in equilibrium.
CD, emissivity doesn’t depend on the history of what it absorbed, it depends on what it emits versus its temperature at that time.
Jim D, Emissivity depends on the energy that can be emitted. e=P/(alpha(T^4)), a block of iron at 0C emits less than a block at 200C.
Estimates are just that Jim, The S-B constant has a lot of significant digits for a reason.
That much is true and why Mosher keeps harping on the significance of transient climate sensitivity (TCS). The fact is that heat is still getting absorbed and it does not controvert the basic GHG theory, just that the response is deferred by these latent effects.
This is amplified by the fact that CO2 has a huge adjustment time and this factor will keep the energy imbalance in effect for a long while, even if we try to halt its rise. The ocean is not a ticking time bomb but a huge heat sink that will release its heat over a long period of time going forward.
JimD is correct in saying that it “emissivity doesn’t depend on the history of what it absorbed, it depends on what it emits versus its temperature at that time.”
Like I said.
My response was to CD, who seems to have just echoed what I said previously.
Web, whether or not the ocean is a ticking time bomb depends on the long term average heat content which is at best a guess. With approximately 0.5Wm-2 imbalance at the TOA during an obvious warming cycle it is not possible to accurately determine what portion of that imbalance is due to CO2. A prolonged solar minimum may allow a better estimate, but presently, the greater than 1.6C warming seems unlikely. You are aware I am sure that more of the current estimates indicate lower sensitivity values.
‘a huge heat sink that will release its heat over a long period of time going forward’. Web, do you promise?
===========
JimD
Actually water is NOT a good absorber at all frequencies. Pure water is almost perfectly transparent to visible light. It’s the impurities in the ocean which absorb sunlight. Thus the distance to which light penetrates a body of water is dependent on turbidity. I’m pretty sure this is taught in primary school so children know why you can see a long ways through clear water such as a mountain lake or a glass bottom boat on the ocean but you can’t see your hand in front of your face in a muddy river.
I’m amazed some of you people can tie your shoes with such hideously flawed knowledge of the how things work.
Jim
Yes, this is where Kirchoff’s Law comes into play. A body’s absorptivity and emissivity are equal over all frequencies in equilibrium. Thus if the earth’s bond albedo is 0.3 then at equilbrium its emissivity is 0.7. As you’ve indicated an E of 0.7 yields a blackbody temperature of 6C which is a few degrees above the average temperature (top to bottom) of the global ocean. The average surface temperature of the ocean is close to 16C however. The reason is that the mean power input from the sun in the tropics is about 500W/m2 which is sufficient to heat the ocean’s surface to a maximum of 35C (which, not coincidently, is the highest temperature ever recorded by an ARGO buoy and is the record mean annual temperature anywhere in the world). Since warm water floats above cold water this warm layer spreads northward where it eventually cools and sinks and returns along the bottom to the tropics. So the so-called greenhouse effect is really just an artifact of measuring only the warm, topmost portion of circulating ocean currents. Given the entirely of the atmosphere has a heat capacity equal to the first 5 meters of the ocean and the mixed layer of the ocean is 30 times that depth then it becomes clear the ocean is the dog and the atmosphere its tail.
Ugh… should have written warm water spreads poleward from the tropics not northward. My northern hemisphere bigotry is showing! :-)
JimD
No, it proves that the mean temperature isn’t 15C or the solar constant isn’t 1366W/m2. Or it proves that 200 years of classical thermodynamic laws that have never been violated to anyone’s knowledge and from which the theory of operation of innumerble devices are wrong. Takes yo pick. I’m picking the mean temperature of the earth as being wrong because the others seem far better measured and tested.
I don’t think you even believe what you are saying. Hundreds of years of surface temperature measurements have given us a pretty good idea of the mean global surface temperature and it is 15 C, perhaps 14 C. Area-wise 40% of the surface is in the tropics. That by itself says it is going to be warmer than your number, which, as far as I know, you invented for the purposes of this blog.
The difference is because you’re quoting the average surface temperature of the ocean not the average temperature of the entire ocean. The ocean’s average temperature, top to bottom, which is what is what it would be everywhere if it were in equilibrium, comports quite well with what Kirchoff’s Law demands for an earth in equilibrium with a 1366W/m2 solar constant.
The higher temperature of the ocean surface is because the earth isn’t heated evenly. The tropics receive about 500W/m2 which can heat the ocean’s surface to a maximum of 35C. Since warm water floats atop cold water this warm surface layer at the tropics thins and spreads poleward where it eventually sinks and returns to the topics as a cold bottom current. There’s is where your imaginary greenhouse warming comes from – it’s purely an artifact of the simple physics of an unevenly heated global ocean.
Jim D
It is courageous to assert that the earth surface is a black-body surface. The emissivity of the earth surface can be determined by measurements according to equation
ε = p / (σT^4)
where, p is the outgoing radiation energy per unit area and unit time, and T the actual surface temperature of the earth surface.
Satellite measurements show p = 240 W/m2. The surface temperature T, however, is the mean temperature averaged in terms of radiation across all the wavelengths of satellite outgoing spectra. E.g. for the 15 um wavelength band, the temperature is the temperature of CO2 (=~ -50°C) within the air layer starting from TOA down to its absorption depth. One can similarly work out the absorption bands for other radiative gases such as water vapour. The temperature for the earth ground surface is around 12°C that is for the rest of bands. The mean temperature is around 5.5°C.
Inserting p = 240, and T=(273.15 +5.5) into the equation, one obtains ε = 0.702.
Jinan, you seem to be trying to calculate the atmospheric emissivity rather than the surface one. However, the effective radiative temperature for 240 W/m2 is 255 K, so it acts like a black body at 255 K. This is a well known result.
JimD is correct.
Plug in T=255 K , and ε = 1.0.
Jim D;
Many appear to have trouble in understanding what “surface” and “surface temperature” mean in the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. My calculation is for the earth surface, not for the atmosphere only.
The temperature value must be the actual temperature value obtained from measurements to calculate emissivity. The 255 K calculation is simply a result of misuse of the SB equation. It is a widely spread since J. Hansen’s 1981 Science paper.
WebHubTelescope;
If you put 214 K and 194 K into the equation, you will obtain the emissivity ε=2.0 and 3.0 respectively.
Jinan, if you were trying to get a surface emissivity, why use 5.5 C when the surface temperature is near 15 C? Also why use 240 W/m2 when that is the value seen from space including the emissivity of the atmosphere?
Jim D;
The 15°C is largely of the temperature of N2 and O2 that are transparent bodies. Their emissivity is literally 0; as such N2 and O2 do not emit at whatever temperatures, with no relevance with the SB equation.
It is crucial to identify the surface properly. If there is no air at all, the surface means the earth ground surface, and its temperature is the surface temperature. If there is air but all N2 and O2, the surface is still the earth ground surface, and the temperature of the ground surface is the surface temperature – N2 and O2 can be at whatever temperature.
In addition to N2 and O2, there are radiative gases in the real atmosphere. In this case the “surface” has different meaning for different wavelength. E.g. for the 15 um CO2 absorption band, the surface means a layer of air from TOA down to its absorption depth; and surface temperature is the temperature of CO2 molecules within the layer (=~ -50°C, note not the air temperature of the layer). For wavelengths outside the absorption bands of the radiative gases, the surface means the earth ground surface; and its temperature is the surface temperature (=~ 12°C). Averaging all the wavelengths in terms of radiation leads to the mean temperature of 5.5°C.
Satellites are far above TOA, so they measure the outgoing radiation from the earth-atmosphere as a whole. Thus for wavelengths of absorption bands of the radiative gases, a satellite “sees” the radiative gases, but is “blind” to the earth ground surface. For the rest of wavelengths, a satellite “sees” the ground surface. Therefore, we use this 240 W/m2 and 5.5°C to determine the emissivity of the earth surface (as a whole).
Jinan Cao | April 10, 2012 at 8:09 am |
When you say TOA, surely you’re describing not the actual TOA, but instead the heteropause, no? Well, it doesn’t sound like the heteropause either, so perhaps you’re approximating or simplifying?
CO2 100km up at top of heterosphere (TOH), while still probably proportionally higher than at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution by some 40% like it is everywhere else in the atmosphere (a very speculative guess, given no one was measuring the heteropause for CO2 in 1750), is only a bit above 100 ppmv, about one quarter to one fifth the concentration at the tropopause (where it’s still proportionally higher than it was 260 years ago by some 40%, we guess).
While the differences in the heteropause puncture the (nonsensical) arguments some have of CO2 reaching an in-atmosphere absorbtivity saturation limit, the simple structural nature of the stratosphere and mesosphere (approximately 20% of the mass of the atmosphere) means that unlike the logarithmic response of the troposphere (lagged by probably decades due nondeterministic noise), the net response above the tropopause (lagged for mixing) is due this attenuation greater than logarithmic.
As outgoing IR must transit every layer of the GHE onion as it attempts to get to TOA (or TOH), it’s difficult to see how your treatment of CO2 as a homegenized dimensionless filter applies.
Jinan, you have a conceptual problem with the idea of the CO2 temperature. The CO2 is in thermal equilibrium with the air and at the surface it is also 15 C. Unlike N2 and O2 it emits radiation at some wavelengths, but at those wavelengths it does it at its thermal temperature. If you want the thermal emissivity of the ground surface, you don’t measure it from space, you measure it immediately above the ground, and there you find it is close to 1.
Jim D;
No, I do not think I have conceptual problem with CO2 temperature. Instead I consider this is the key originality how my point of view differs from that in the current climate research.
CO2 constantly emits thermal radiation at an expense of its temperature. It also constantly absorbs thermal radiation from the earth ground surface to raise its temperature. N2 and O2 neither absorb now emit, remaining the temperature they have. In the atmosphere, gases are well mixed. Molecular collisions tend to homogenise the temperature of different gases; however, radiative absorption and emission tend to differentiate it. Depending on the source of radiation, the absorption and emission properties, pressure and temperature, gases in the atmosphere could have different temperatures from each other. This will be in particular true in high altitude where molecular collision becomes less frequent due to low pressure.
Yes, if I want the thermal emissivity of the ground surface, I measure the emission power (energy per unit area and time) leaving the earth ground surface, and I measure the ground surface temperature. We then determine the emissivity of the ground surface, which will be a figure close to 0.8. Black-body is a highly idealised physical concept, how can so many species on the earth are all black-bodies?
Bart R
I did mean TOA, probably an approximation and simplification. Imaging an incident radiation wave (wavelength 15 um) comes from the space travelling down towards the Earth: we set an air lay starting point where there are CO2 molecules existing regardless its concentration, and we mark the end of the lay where the incident radiation wave has been absorbed 99%. The thickness (= the ending point – the starting point) is the absorption depth, aka optical thickness.
One can easily image that anything below that absorption layer is “inside” not “surface” to radiation with 15 um wavelength. Therefore only matters the radiation by the CO2 molecules within the absorption layer for the outgoing radiation spectra. I am not so sure if I have answered your question.
Jinan Cao | April 11, 2012 at 9:12 am |
“..starting point where there are CO2 molecules existing regardless its concentration, and we mark the end of the lay where the incident radiation wave has been absorbed 99%. The thickness (= the ending point – the starting point) is the absorption depth, aka optical thickness.”
You appear to be referring to the very rarified, extremely hot Thermosphere and Exosphere, then, as your 10,000 km outer shell that curtails inbound IR; as it always has despite the low concentration of GHGs up there. The tiny fraction of inbound light that is IR has never made it down to the Karman line undimmed; There is still a good deal of IR passing up and down through that line, however, as re-emitted and scattered backradiation.
Here’s a pretty picture (the bottom of the article): http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/layers_activity_print.html Note that, like visible light, it represents IR making it all the way down to the surface. Unlike visible light, this is somewhat of a gloss; IR virtually all gets absorbed and re-emitted on its way down, but there’s so little of it and so much outbound from the energy of all those other wavelengths converted by absorbtion to IR, all of that IR bouncing around and scattering and backradiating over and over again, that it’s not really measureable as a distinct entity.
It seems impossible for your reasoning to affect the vast majority of IR in transit below this shell in the way you say it does. One can draw many, many layers of ‘onion’ in the atmosphere below your first 99% shell that each have equivalent optical density.
Bart R
Let me answer your question from bottom back to top. Yes, we can draw many layers of onion in the atmosphere, with equal optical thickness (99% absorption). But how much IR leaves the onion is determined only by the outmost layer, which is the “surface” and the rest are “inside”.
All the CO2 molecules emit 15 um IR as long as the temperature is not 0 K. In other words, every CO2 molecule is a radiation source for the 15 um IR. Therefore, wherever within the onion, there is the 15 um IR radiation, “scattering and backradiating over and over again.”
Your onion model may be useful to help explanation. The inner most layer absorbs the IR from the bottom by the earth ground surface, and the IR from the top by the inner 2nd most layer. The inner 2nd most layer absorbs the IR from the inner most and the inner 3rd, and so on and so forth until the outmost layer.
There is no countable CO2 absorption in the thermosphere. Therefore for the 15 um IR, the outmost layer of the onion starts somewhere below the thermosphere downwards.
Jinan Cao, I noticed that you have a blog where you try do some of your calculations in depth. Where exactly do you describe the propagating slab model that is required to match your words with the math?
As it stands, you are frantically hand-waving, not realizing what will come out of the wash if you do the math bookkeeping correctly.
Jinan Cao | April 12, 2012 at 8:17 am |
“..how much IR leaves the onion is determined only by the outmost layer..”
I’d say it rather as how much IR leaves is measurable only above the outermost layer.
Clearly there are many significant determinants:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/coolingthermosphere_prt.htm
Note:
: any molecule containing two different elements emit IR.
: CO2 and NOx are found above 100 km (albeit at reduced concentrations compared to below)
: there’s 10,000 km of Exosphere
James Russell III, SABER principal investigator and co-director of the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at Hampton University in Hampton, Va., agrees adding, “The atmosphere is a coupled system. If you pick up one end of the stick, you automatically pick up the other – they’re intrinsically linked. To be as accurate as possible, scientists have to understand global change throughout the atmosphere.”
JimD
You are making the mistake of presuming the ocean is a two dimensional surface with emissivity close to 1.0. It’s a three dimensional object which is transparent to shortwave energy and is warmed by impurities in the water absorbing that energy at depths typically reaching to 100 meters before being extinguished. Conversely, water is almost completely opaque to far infrared so it can only radiate the absorbed solar energy from a microscopically thin skin layer. The solar heated water at greater depths must be mechanically transported to the surface where the energy is released largely by evaporation and secondarily by radiation. Treating the ocean as a two dimensional blackbody surface leads to absurd mistakes.
This is an interesting side thread with the typical talking past each other.
Jim D, Okay the emissivity of the ocean is one, so at 288K it emits 390Wm-2. How many meters square are there on a ten foot sea day versus a flat calm day? The surface emissivity may be the same but the rate of energy flow changes.
The average energy flow out is 240Wm-2 or about 255K . If the surface temperature were truly uniform, there would be uniform convection (approaching isothermal like Venus that rotates extremely slowly), the average area of the 255K emission temperature would be easy to calculate, the imbalance of surface temperatures creates non-uniform convection that produces varying convection heights (kinda like waves!) that changes the effective surface area.
All the confidence in knowing what this emissivity is or the precise albedo of that is, is fine, but the dynamics change everything.
The radiative emission of the ocean is just a fraction of the shortwave energy absorbed. The vast majority of energy leaving the ocean is in latent heat of vaporization. See here:
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter05/chapter05_06.htm
So one cannot possibly measure the ocean surface temperature from IR emission since the majority of said emission is in latent heat of vaporization. One is measuring the IR emission from clouds where that latent heat once again becomes sensible.
Even the AVERAGE net emission of IR from the surface including land is only 63W/m2 according to K&T diagram. Latent heat is 80W/m2. How do you measure latent heat with a spectrometer? That last question is rhetorical, by the way.
Bart R;
When I say “determined”, it means that the measured outgoing 15 um radiation is determined by the temperature of CO2 molecules and concentration etc within the outmost layer. True, the atmosphere is coupled; and many factors are linked. Those factors determine the temperature of CO2 molecules and concentration etc within the said layer. The statement does not contradict with yours.
Jinan Cao | April 14, 2012 at 7:21 am |
..except that for your claims to be true, the atmosphere must be treated as an entirely homogeneous single layer of the onion, and you’ve agreed that there are ‘many’ layers.
No? Can you illustrate how your mechanism overcomes the onion?
Jinan Cao | April 8, 2012 at 10:54 pm | Reply
“Inserting p = 240, and T=(273.15 +5.5) into the equation, one obtains ε = 0.702.”
We call that a sanity check in engineering. Sanity checks prevent us (usually) from doing something stupid that appears correct at first blush. 0.7 is the reciprocal of the earth’s bond albedo of 0.3. Good sanity check.
@ Jinan Cao
From your web page:
Outstanding! 90 bar of CO2 covering a crust at 500C (3.75um). That peak emission frequency of 3.75um is right in a CO2 IR absorption sweet spot. If we dig down into the rocks on the earth when we to a depth of 10 miles the temperature is the same as the surface of Venus. The uber-dense layer of CO2 covering the crust on Venus with a surface temperature right in CO2 sweet spot makes that gas layer a wonderful insulator with an R-factor at 500C equivalent to 10 miles of rock. Easy peasy. One might say there is a greenhouse on Venus but that greenhouse is sequestering internal heat of the planet not external energy from the sun!
David are you saying that Venus is a sauna not a greenhouse :)
capt. dallas
Yeah that’s a good way of putting it.
Trivia: we’ve known Venus’ lower atmosphere is isothermal since 1969 as inferred from radar soundings.
David Springer:
CO2 has 3 narrow absorption bands at 2.7, 4.3 and 15 um respectively. The widely accepted 460°C greenhouse gas effect for the Venus is unlikely to be true if one perform a physical analysis to the Venus-CO2 atmosphere system. I am sure there are better alternative interpretations.
capt dallas asks what the surface area of 10 foot seas are compared to calm seas
the distance between wave crests averages 75 meters
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter16/chapter1
6_01.htm
so we’re essentially looking at a curved line with a length 20 times its radius
in the first approximation that’s a flat line so there’s no practical difference in surface area
http://www.handymath.com/cgi-bin/arc18.cgi
Actually the surface area of 10 foot seas compared to calm seas is 1:1 in the first AND second approximations.
In the online calculator above plug in 225′ for the width (average peak to peak distance between wave crests) and 10′ for the height. The resulting length of the arc is 226.18′ which is less than 1% greater than flat line and so it’s still flat in the second approximation.
I’m lazy so I just conceptualized it in my head in the first response then it occured to me there must be an online calculator for length of an arc and sure enough, there was, so I got a precise answer! My first answer was still correct just not as precise as this one. :-)
David, nothing like a ground swell with a nice long period :)
http://www.mxak.org/weather/pdfs/waves.pdf
David, The seas was a bit of a trick question. http://dust.ess.uci.edu/ppr/ppr_CaZ08.pdf
According to that, the average global surface wind velocity is about 15 knots, that would be an average 2-4 foot wind generated seas seas. Variations from that change the radiant and conductive heat transfer at the surface. A good part of the natural internal oscillations, ENSO, PDO etc. is due to changing patterns in surface wind velocities, which change the average seas. The approximation of a flat ocean leaves irks me a touch since I spend a great deal of time on it :)
Tony b 05/04 4.15am
Read your climate studies with interest.
Crossing boundries between knowledge areas is fruitful – Ports in the Renaissance, East meets West, North meets Antipodean )
History can be a cross reference for climate studies, famine, flood, drought,
Thames snow fairs – this is empiric evidience, citation’s important, back up, feed back loop.
what Winston Churchill called taking map reading coordinates
Hey, things have been hotting up around here but open forums are great
Beth
Thanks for your comments. The ‘long slow thaw’-for example-had literally hundreds of citations but some people complainded about the length. If I mention a key point I like to back it up with as many differing types of evidence as possible. The bad news therefore is that my forthcoming article ‘ historic variations in arctic ice part two’ is likely to be the longest yet as it covers 7000 years. The good news is that free popcorn will be supplied
Tonyb
Well…..if there’s free popcorn ….. LOL
Beth
Whilst the popcorn is free the obligatory drink is VERY expensive. Please leave your credit card details.
Tonyb
3 degrees is not the “best” guess for climate sensitivity, it is merely the most popular guess. It is popular mostly because a high sensitivity drives a higher level of funding for climate science. The real best guess in the absence of hard data or models which are actually fit for purpose rather than “the best we have” should be 1.2 degrees. All higher values are increasingly conjectural and are therefore decreasingly likely.
In light of Bart R’s ridiculous commentary on the exchange between Nordhaus and Lindzen et al, I’ve decided to post a bit of commentary of my own. I won’t be using sporting parlance.
The first point of contention begins with Lindzen et al saying:
Nordhaus responds by saying:
This is obviously not a fair representation. It is technically true, but the wording makes it unclear the claim is only discussing the last 10 years. This would just be a matter of Nordhaus being unclear except Nordhaus then goes on to say:
Nordhaus claimed the argument was “the planet is not warming,” then he showed a temperature record (created through an asinine process) which showed the planet had warmed over the last ~130 years. He never addressed the fact Lindzen et al were only referring to the last ten years. Instead, everything he said discusses a different issue all together. In other words, his entire response is a misrepresentation. Lindzen et al accurately respond by saying:
Nordhaus responds by flagrantly making things up:
Lindzen et al never said temperatures have declined. The most they said is there has been a “lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.”
In any actual debate, this would be grounds for dismissing Nordhaus. Misrepresenting an opponent’s arguments is unpalatable, but flagrantly making things up about what an opponent has said is completely unacceptable. Nordhaus can’t even claim it is a casual mistake as this was in a prepared comment, and he had accurately quoted Lindzen et al in a previous response.
To put it bluntly, this shows Nordhaus is either an incompetent or dishonest debater.
Brandon Shollenberger | April 7, 2012 at 12:58 am |
Why thank you; ‘ridiculous’ is high praise indeed, when my aim was a much more modest ‘comic’.
I love your quibbles. Your spoof is much, much more nuanced a depiction of the pompous, arrogant, astigmatic proponents on both sides than is mine — “parlance” is just awesome. It so captures that spirit of the unwittingly absurd drama queen! And “contention” is pure over-the-top genius!
That whole ‘it’s true, but’ thing, I howled! So like the people too caught up in their own prejudices to even let little things like truth stand in their way.
And the switch from sporting parlance to high school debating society judging — masterful. Very Glee! of you.
The incidental insult, invective, prevarication, poisoning the well, argument from authority, begging the question, straw man — why a whole cheerleading squad of straw men — irrelevancy and repetition of a pimply high school judge swooningly trying to support the side of the girl he hopes even notices him!
Man, I wish I could write comedy like that.
Bart R, thank you for your insightful response. This shows beyond any doubt, CTL was wrong.
Bart R | April 7, 2012 at 12:31 pm | Reply
“Man, I wish I could write comedy like that.”
We all wish you could.
David Springer | April 13, 2012 at 1:01 pm |
Difference being, I can tell when I don’t, and it appears you can’t tell when you do.
Here’s a hint. This isn’t it.
That wasn’t it, either.
The second point of contention is related to the first (emphasis added):
How does Nordhaus respond? By not addressing the issue. Instead, he relies on the position:
In response to Lindzen et al saying models have over-predicted climate’s sensitivity to forcing, Nordhaus claims no models have worked without including anthropogenic influences. Think about that.
Nordhaus simply ignored the point raised by Lindzen et al. He doesn’t dispute the claim that models have exaggerated things. Instead, he basically says, the models show there must be some anthropogenic influence, therefore Lindzen et al are wrong. It’s a complete non-sequitir.
Lindzen et al unfortunately fail to point this out, instead choosing to point out the short-comings in the experiments Nordhaus refers to. Peculiarly, Nordhaus then ignores what they say and goes back to the original claim they made, saying:
The constant changing of subjects is obnoxious and dumbfounding. It’s mind-boggling why Nordhaus would not choose to simply respond to what he is responding to. It’s even worse when you realize this paragraph from Nordhaus doesn’t give any reason to believe Lindzen et al are wrong about anything. He basically just says, “They’re not special.” That’s his entire argument.
So again, we see Nordhaus being either dishonest or incompetent.
The third point of contention begins with Lindzen et al saying:
Nordhaus responds by saying:
The disagreement here mostly stems from there being multiple definitions of words. Lindzen et al had an expected audience of casual readers, and they used the definition of “pollution” those readers would be familiar with. Nordhaus criticizes them for not using a different definition which those readers wouldn’t be familiar with.
From a debating perspective, this was a horrible move by Nordhaus. All it can do is alienate any readers who would have used “pollutant” the same way Lindzen et al used it.
The problem is that this is no longer some high school debate with outcomes determined by English-class judges, as you seem to think.
Let me guess, it is judged by people who randomly posting things about me as an individual while ignoring every substantial point I make?
Gosh darn. I guess I should resort to misrepresentations, ad hominems an trolling.
The rhetorical aspects cover only a few percent of the issues concerning climate change and fossil fuel depletion, yet you have this habit of deconstructing ambiguous wording like it is a point scoring system.
So you have like 5 points of contention which cover approximately zero percent of the important aspects of the problem. Spare me.
I welcome you to come after me with every technical comment I make. Let loose so that you can demonstrate to everyone your omnipotent CC skillset.
Nordhaus specifically responded to six points. I showed his responses to five of those points displayed some mixture of incompetence and dishonesty. You claim I’ve covered “zero percent of the important aspects of the problem.”
Well gosh jolly. I can’t believe I didn’t cover anything important when discussing Nordhaus’s writings. I guess that means his writing is incompetent/dishonest and irrelevant. Good to know.
I wouldn’t engage you in a serious discussion of anything. Your trolling aside, you just say too many stupid things.
I bet your high school debate judges would detract some points for that statement. It’s too vague and general, without any concrete evidence.
The fourth point of contention begins with Lindzen et al saying:
Nordhaus doesn’t do anything to refute this. Instead of discussing this very important point, he focuses solely on Lindzen et al saying:
You should ask yourself why would anyone focus on an example while ignoring the point the example is used to highlight? You should also ask yourself if offering that example justifies Nordhaus saying:
Does giving an example mean you’re claiming things are as bad as they are in the example? Obviously not. Despite this, Nordhaus says:
Claiming there are some parallels between two situations does not mean one is claiming the two situations are equal. Nordhaus either ignores or fails to understand this.
For his fourth point, Nordhaus ignores the substantial argument of Lindzen et al and focuses on an example, the significance of which (to Lindzen et al’s argument) he greatly exaggerates. Again, this is either a sign of incompetence or dishonesty.
The fifth point of contention begins with Lindzen et al saying:
Nordhaus claims this is historically inaccurate because:
Lindzen et al specifically referred to “alarmism,” not the idea of global warming. As such, Nordhaus’s comment here is completely nonsensical. He then goes on to say:
He doesn’t provide any basis for this claim, so it’s nothing more then empty hand-waving. Contrast to Lindzen et al who respond by saying:
Nordhaus responds to this specific claim by saying:
It is hard to imagine anything more nonsensical than this. Nordhaus’s claim is one company has spent more money on the matter than his university has received on it, therefore it is “ludicrous” to say money is a far bigger incentive on the alarmist side. Not only is it silly to compare a single university’s funding to a single companies spending, the difference in the funding he discusses is only half a million dollars a year.
It is mind-boggling how Nordhaus could say things which are so obviously stupid.
Speaking of ExxonMobile and money funneling. In 2009 ExxonMobile entered into an agreement to funnel $600 million in private venture capital to a spinoff of the J.Craig Venter Institute. The spinoff’s purpose is to exploit Venter’s world class expertise in synthetic biology to create a suitably modified cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) to economically produce biofuels that can directly place existing liquid fuels used in internal combustion engines.
ExxonMobile is aware of the problem with a finite supply of fossil oil. The misguided efforts of CAGW activists is actually killing the goose which lays the golden eggs. ExxonMobile needs the profit from its fossil fuel business to fund the effort to find an economical replacement for them.
This might be a little off topic, but extremely relevant to Australians (and perhaps to others).
Using results from the Nordhaus RICE (2010) model and estimates of the damage the ETS will do to Australia’s GDP, I calculate the benefit/cost of the Australian ETS is 0.03. For those not familiar with this expression, the benefit/cost ratio needs to be greater than 1.0 to justify proceeding.
CO2 pricing will have near zero benefit but high cost
The benefit/cost ratio for the Australian CO2 tax and ETS is near zero given that we are in effect acting alone. But the cost is very high.
“What is the ratio of benefit to cost of the Australian CO2 tax and ETS from 2012 until 2050? Is it true that the benefits are near zero and the cost (in lost GDP) would be about $1,350 billion? Is it true that these facts are known to the world’s leading authorities and have been known for years? If so, why is the government apparently not aware of these facts?”
Rough calculations indicate the benefit/cost is 0.03 using the damages from the Nordhause Yale-RICE (2010) model and the cost of the ETS from Professor Henry Ergas.
Henry Ergas applied Garnaut’s discount rate to Treasury’s estimate of the loss of GDP that would be caused by the government’s Clean Energy Future legislation. The cumulative loss of GDP to 2050 is $1,350 billion.
The damages due to AGW, according to the default values set in RICE, scaled to Australia’s share on the basis of Australia’s share of world GDP, is $41 billion
2012 US$ billion PPP
World Damages if no Ctax, cum to 2050 (RICE with $0 Ctax) = $3,529
World GDP (2011) = $78,853
Australia GDP (2011) = $919
Australia GDP proportion of world GDP = 1.17%
Australia damages if no Ctax, cum to 2050 (RICE with $0 Ctax) = $41
Australia ETS cost (cum GDP loss to 2050) = $1,350
Benefit / cost of ETS to 2050 = 0.03
References:
Yale-RICE Model (2010):
http://nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/
Henry Ergas:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/climate-policy-a-burning-issue/story-e6frgd0x-1226072611617
World and Australian GDP (2011): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) “
Peter Lang | April 7, 2012 at 2:14 am |
Off topic? It’s practically the only topic.
You say, “CO2 pricing will have near zero benefit but high cost”; I answer CO2 pricing will have near zero cost but high benefit.
First, the trivial part of the cost question, administration.
To actually administer carbon pricing in a fee and dividend system (which I know, Australia doesn’t exactly have, but please bear with me for a moment), has next to no marginal cost, and a net marginal return.
Nations are already obliged by treaty to track CO2E inventory; the formulae for converting carbon content to CO2E emission in most cases, straightforward.
The retail tax system of any nation can be used to piggyback the carbon fees at little to no additional expense.
The dividend portion actually significantly reduces tax churn, thereby actually paying for the cost of administration in itself.
Next, while there are many studies claiming high social costs or industrial costs or so forth, frankly they are patently biased and fail to consider the whole picture. Of course the fee is going to cost the wastrels and the free riders — their free riding wastrels! That’s the whole point of putting fees on scarce resources in a Capitalist system — to squeeze out the waste and flush the free riders down the drain.
A system clearly constipated with the massive backlog of free riders and waste needs treatment. Anyone can figure this out.
Le Pétomane,
We have heard this song before and it has not grown any less smelly with repetition. There is as well now a distinct whiff of deceased Equus caballus.
When asked about the Australian carbon tax President Obama did not say:
a) the Australian carbon tax is a “bold strategy”;
b) it is stupid and we will do the same when hell freezes over;
c) America will make more fuel-efficient cars;
d) America will invest in clean energy technology research;
e) America will wait until there is a global agreement (i.e. when hell freezes over).
You need a new act – it is growing very stale.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
.. well, you’d _hope_ a plumber could figure it out.
As you’re in Australia, and clearly all politicians there leave you with the impression they’re honest, forthright, say what they mean and unswayed by special interests, judging by your expectations of President Obama, let me break the news to you: Obama doesn’t always tell it the way it is.
Le Pétomane,
The level of comprehension is however what we would expect from an ex economics tutor, peace corps volunteer and professional flatualist.
I concentrated – as I do with any politician – on what is not said. In this case the answer is clearly (b).
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
Captain Kangaroo | April 7, 2012 at 9:57 pm |
*yawn*
Yes, yes. Australian comprehension is famous the world over for delivering what isn’t in a message to the audience.
And on that note, it seems you’re committed to sobriety for your posts today. Are you abstaining for health reasons? I hope all is well.
Obama’s made it clear previously, the USA’s committed to irresponsibility and inaction until at least 2020. What of it?
I’m getting attacked from both sides – must be doing something right. I thought I would attempy to inject a note of rationality instead of just brawling with dingbats.
Bart r April 7, 2012 at 10:21 pm
The Ghost of Christmas to come
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9192066/Can-the-USA-save-the-world.html
When I hear the words quantitative easing I reach for my gun – damned I left it in my other pants.
maksimovich | April 8, 2012 at 4:10 am |
Whatever happened to the good old days before the whole world depended on America for everything?
Oh. Yeah. That would’ve been two centuries ago.
The USA is in the midst of complete political paralysis. Get used to it. If you’re American and smart, you’re likely already ignoring anything to do with the government as much as you can. If you’re not smart, not too soon to start.
If you’re not American, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to ignore America for the next decade or so while things work themselves out. Learn to stand up on your own two feet. It’ll do you good.
The problem is the currency imbalances,having only two reserve currencies the euro and us dollar.The significant imbalances by fixed currencies are entraining the problem.
http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html
The IMF requires Aus/nz to provide around 0.8 b$ for the euro bailout ,will they require more.
Bart R,
You said: “To actually administer carbon pricing in a fee and dividend system (which I know, Australia doesn’t exactly have, but please bear with me for a moment), has next to no marginal cost, and a net marginal return. “
Firstly, I am not aware that any country is seriously considering implementing a fee and dividend approach. It is an idea promoted by an Alarmist scientist. No something anyone takes seriously.
However, any carbon pricing policy has huge compliance costs (i.e. administration costs if you prefer). Consider the following (referring to Australia but the same would be true in the USA, or anywhere else; imagine the problems with implementing it in Eretria or Mogadishu for example).
What would be the compliance cost for the ETS once it is fully implemented and running at the level of accuracy required for trading the commodity (CO2-e) and at the level of financial security from fraud that will be expected? For example, what will be the annual cost for:
– Public servants in DCCEE, Treasury, ATO, Australian Federal Police, state police forces, state bureaucracies, Attorneys’ General Departments, Federal Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism, ABARE, BREE, the equivalent state departments of energy, resources, agriculture, forestry, environment, Prime Minister and Cabinet, State departments of Premier and Cabinet, the law courts, High Court, goals, any others I haven’t thought of?
– The businesses that have to report their emissions – what is the cost to implement and maintain the monitoring equipment and to report? What is the cost to update and replace equipment, reporting systems and legacy data each time the rules change (as they do every few years)?
– Farmers and all the upstream and downstream industries (farming will be included eventually if the tax and ETS remain)
– Accountants, lawyers, accounting firms, law firms, courts?
– Firms that use the data, analyse it and report? What is the cost for them to have to maintain and continually update their systems and legacy data?
– What about the compliance cost for purchasing overseas carbon credits?
I understand some of the costs involved in doing what the US legislation requires the EPA to do (clearly we would have to move to that level of accountability and well beyond it eventually), would be in the order of $21 billion per year. These two links provide some insight into the current requirements in the USA http://www.epa.gov/airmarkets/business/ecmps/docs/ECMPSEMRI2009Q2.pdf
http://www.epa.gov/airmarkt/emissions/docs/plain_english_guide_par75_final_rule.pdf
We can only guess what the costs would be for the businesses involved and all the organisations who take this data and analyses it. Notice that the rules have been changing (for emissions other than CO2) every few years for about the last three decades (roughly); think of the compliance cost that imposes.
The EPA recently stated in a court submission that the cost to the EPA alone to implement and manage in accordance with the existing laws would cost $21 billion per year. That is not a typo. They estimated they would have to increase their permanent staff numbers from 17,000 to 233,000 permanent employees. (It is clear from this why the unions want a carbon tax and ETS – it means lots more public servants and hence lots more union dues). The cost to business could be expected to be at least ten times the EPA’s cost, and the other departments who have a role to play would probably double the EPA’s cost.
What does this mean for Australia? Well, initially Australia does not intend to monitor or measure its emissions. It will simply estimate them (very crudely). The system set up by AEMO to estimate electricity system emissions is very crude. It is nowhere near the standard the USA or even the Europeans are doing. I am sure we will have to get up to best practice eventually. That means big increases in compliance cost as time goes on. And this is for electricity emissions only. What happens when the compliance requirements are extended to all businesses emitting CO2 emissions, as will be required eventually.
We should also ask what is the likely benefit to be gained from this expenditure?
1. By how much will the CO2 tax and ETS reduce global emissions?
2. By how much will the CO2 tax and ETS change the climate?
3. What effect will the CO2 tax and ETS have on the ecology of the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu National Park?
4. What effect will the CO2 tax and ETS have on sea level?
Peter Lang | April 7, 2012 at 7:14 pm |
A Fee & Dividend system is not an Emission Trading System. An ETS is an example of a type of F&D. As is a Pigouvian tax that delivers revenues to specific remedial programs. Altogether, the total of these two combined would never constitute more than 30% of an effective, well-run F&D program for CO2E. They might make up less, or none.
Only an ETS would have ‘significant’ compliance costs; any competent government could minimize F&D costs for retail carbon fees to marginal additions on the few large sources at the top of fossil fuel distribution chains and through harmonization with current retail revenue systems. And, through whatever income tax systems a nation has, the dividends will reduce tax churn and finance adaptation and mitigation by citizens per capita, as is only fair.
If you don’t think Australia’s bureaucrats are up to the challenge of competently administering an F&D, that’d Australia’s problem, not mine.
This main retail carbon F&D indicated, by the Citizens Climate Lobby (that’s an American group; Google it if you like), by the experience of British Columbia which has had a successful and stable version much like this retail carbon F&D system for four years with positive marginal returns(which you can Google, if you like), and so forth by anyone honestly examining all practical solutions, not just the stooge targets so easy to shoot down, works.
As for ETS costs; as you say, the USA has the EPA, so it’s bound to spend treasure protecting the wealth of the nation from free riders and opportunists who waste and spoil, as a matter of the defense of the country’s valuable outdoors, air and water anyway.
If Australia doesn’t take such measures and is determined to become a bleak and desolate wasteland, so long as it doesn’t come begging to America for a bail out, what do I care, other than the trade measures the USA will have to impose for damage done to those global resources we do share?
Reworking the EPA into a branch that protects America’s bounty by a small, tight, well-bounded ETS (that due to the wider retail carbon F&D net in the marketplace won’t be as expensive or vulnerable to corruption and failure as the European scams) would solve many of the problems most complained about in the USA to do with the EPA. Not that that’s any business of any Australian.
F&D isn’t an ETS. F&D doesn’t particularly need an ETS if it doesn’t have the sort of industry that isn’t possible to administer under the lower cost F&D system and isn’t vulnerable to dumping by trading partners who do.
So, to answer your sincere and honest questions with equal sincerity and honesty (or, I hope with better):
1. By as much as the democratic will of individual buyers and sellers deems under a fair pricing system, no more nor less.
2. Same as #1 above.
3. What’s Australia’s internal business to me?
4. See #1 & 2.
Bart R,
First, as I said in my previous comment, F&D is not being seriously considered anywhere. It is not an option on the table. Notwithstanding this, emissions measurement is required for any type of transaction in commodities (e.g. CO2).
You said:
Not true. Any system that puts a price on CO2 emissions must be able to measure the emissions. We must be able to measure emissions sufficiently well for trade, tax or any other type of transitions. And all sources must be included (eventually). I discuss some aspects of this below.
What level of precision and accuracy will ultimately be required for measuring CO2-eq emissions? Will we need to measure all emissions caused by man to a level of precision of 1 t or 1 kg (value $50 or $0.05)? If not what level will be required? And to what level of accuracy, e.g. +/- 1%, 5%, 10%? At 10% accuracy the total amount readily available for fraud (in Australia) would be 10% of 600 Mt/a @ $50/t = $3 billion per year.
Consider what happened to force the government to run numerous enquiries into the petrol distribution and retailing industries. Petrol station owners and consumer groups were concerned they were being ‘ripped off’. For example, there was concern that the petrol delivered at the petrol bowser was less dense (and therefore contained less energy per litre) than when it was loaded into the petrol tanker because it would warm up along the way. So people reckoned they were getting less than they were paying for. There were many inquiries over the years. The issue was found to be trivial, but it kept getting raised again and again about once a decade.
This demonstrates that people will become concerned about the accuracy of measuring CO2-eq emissions once pricing (for any reason; ETS, CO2 tax, F&D) is well established. That implies we will be forever having to tighten the regulations on emissions monitoring. That suggests ever increasing cost of compliance at a rate well above inflation.
It strains credulity to believe some sources will have to participate in emissions pricing while other sources of emissions will not. We can foresee the fuss if that situation is allowed. “Why me, but not him?” Eventually, emissions measurement and reporting will have to apply to all sources, even down to cow farts. How can this be done sufficiently accurately from all emissions sources? What will be the total cost of compliance ultimately?
Bart R,
You said:
The $1,350 billion cost of pricing carbon is the amount by which GDP will be reduced. It does not fully include the compliance cost, because there is no official estimate of the damage cost. It is clear from my comments above that the damage cost is likely to be much higher than is currently being envisaged by the time the system is implemented to the standard that will ultimately be required.
If we add what is likely to be the full, ultimate compliance cost to the loss in GDP, the benefit/cost ration would be even less than 0.3.
The benefit/cost ration should exceed 1 to be viable. Usually it would need to substantially exceed 1 to get the go ahead. Any benefit/cost below 1 is not viable. Benefit/cost of 0.3 is ridiculous.
Typo. The benefi/cost ratio referred to should be 0.03, not 0.3
Peter Lang | April 8, 2012 at 1:39 am |
I understand well the issue.
I read the EPA submissions you refer to, much much closer to the date they were made than you may believe. So I know you’re not using them in any manner remotely faithful to their original context.
For retail provision of carbon fees, no emission measurement whatsoever is required. None. At all. The fees are based on the CO2E Indices kept by international treaty; no nation in the world would have any more significant trouble applying these fees than they would with any other routine aspect of their retail taxes.
Given that many nations have trouble with any retail system whatever, they likely have bigger fish to fry, and the same sort of measures as the world applies to failed states like Greece would apply here. Big deal, what of it? Citing the worst of the worst as a reason for the best and brightest to flout reason and principle in a way that makes things _worse_ for everyone else has a name: (http://www.cracked.com/article_17199_the-7-most-horrifying-parasites-planet.html)
So you see, I do understand the issue.
Some people _like_ being free riding parasites.
Peter Lang | April 7, 2012 at 11:39 pm |
The $1,350 billion cost of pricing carbon..
I wasn’t really up to taking on this bombastic figure earlier.
$1.35 TRILLION?!
..
Nope, still not up to talking this incredible fantasy number.
I’ll come back to it if it ever seems worthy of comment.
Don’t hold your breath.
Bart R,
You said:
Is that comment referring to you and your comrades?
Getting to the substance: I am pleased to hear you feel you understand the EPA requirements for measuring CO2 emissions from fossil fuel power stations. I wonder if you have any idea what it would cost to implement, maintain and frequently upgrade a scheme with these requirements for other industries and for other countries (for all emissions sources). If you think it is not necessary, why did Congress legislate it and why is EPA implementing a version of it (a massively reduced version, though)?
I understand your position is we do not need to measure emissions; you think the world can agree to CO2-eq indices for every component of every traded commodity. You must be joking. Do you really believe USA, China, India or anyone else will enter into binding international legal agreements, with penalties for breach, on such a basis? If you are not joking, you clearly don’t understand the issue at all. I think the latter is the case.
However, just to make sure we do not miss the point, even if the compliance cost was zero (which clearly it is not), the loss of GDP for Australia due to carbon pricing is estimated $1,350 cumulative to 2050, and the benefit is $41 billion, for a benefit/cost ratio of 0.03. That’s a no go. Carbon pricing is a no go for Australia acting alone (which it is).
I think because of your clearly ideological basis and abusive language, nothing more can be gained by me discussing this subject with you.
Bart R doesn’t like the figure of $1.35 trillion for reduction in GDP to 2050 (clearly doesn’t understand it) so he ridicules the figure and me for posting it. That provides insight into the credibility of Bart R. What a waste of my time it’s turned out to be. I assumed people conversing on Judith Curry’s site were of a much higher level of credibility and integrity.
Yeah
As I suspected all along, another Nova-Lomborg type throwing bombastically huge numbers around baselessly thinking the world’s so innumerate they won’t be called on their nonsense.
You can build any straw man you like in your upside-down fantasyland, and really, I don’t care. But if you’re not American, what business of yours is the EPA, again?
Do I tell you how to milk dingos or saddle a kangaroo or curtsey to a queen? I don’t think so. Foreigners telling Americans about America sounds no less ignorant.
With zero discount the figure is in line with government modelling – $42 billion off GDP by 2020. Of course that assumes that America joins the conga line of all day suckers by 2016. Oh wait – that’s not happening.
Lucky it is all academic. The only question is just how badly the greens/labor lose the 2013 election.
You will have to forgive Le Pétomane – it is quiet in Minnesota in January and he has developed this rapid unabomber thing. You know they have 8 names for snow?
Read the original post for the source of the $1.35 trillion.
Read the other posts and make an attempt to understand.
You have convinced me you are a loud-mouth, bombastic ideologue, with nothing ov value to contribute.
Peter Lang | April 8, 2012 at 1:39 am |
Crude?
*shrug*
When an American fills out an Income Tax return, rounding to the nearest dollar is allowed.
For most of us, that’s at least as accurate as the bulk of the CO2E inventory.
For those parts of the lucrative CO2 exchange that can’t be captured reliably, then sure, a ‘small ETS’ might be arguable. But with a full F&D wrapped around the majority of the economy, that ‘mini-ETS’ is less susceptible to leakage and less vulnerable to gaming, so long as we learn from past experience.
Peter Lang | April 7, 2012 at 7:14 pm |
Again, not really true.
F&D is going on in British Columbia, albeit in a minor way, not the way I’d do it.
It’s a serious proposal in the USA, so far as having a sponsor in congress makes anything serious.
International treaties already create the requirement to maintain a carbon inventory, from which the CO2E of every retail product in a nation may be easily and cheaply derived, to allow correct imposition of fees without additional measurement of CO2E emission at all.
Obligations of international treaties and national commitments already globally require the sort of measurement you proclaim is too onerous to sustain; actually using those measurements in a practical system to privatize the exclusive, rivalrous carbon cycle resource has only marginal additional costs and significant immediate side benefits that more than pay for these costs, before one even begins to count the main benefit of restoring integrity to the Market, and all the downstream benefits that flow from reducing waste and increasing innovation.
We’re speaking of a Market mechanism, not an omnipotent godlike government out of some biblical science fiction dystopia. While it may strain your credulity, only lucrative emissions, of course, need be considered by Market mechanisms; your measurement ‘down to the kg per person’ of CO2E is a red herring, unless you propose some mad cult of hidden secret CO2E emitters will spring up just to spite the system. (Given you’re Australian, it’s a possibility there, but how is that any business of an American?)
I personally can think of things I’d rather do than put on a hood and sneak out at night to burn peat as a show of rebellion against ‘the man’.
We can go back and forth with these speculations of yours all day, but as we have a clear counterexample to all your claims, why bother?
You’re either willfully ignorant of the facts, or deliberately dissembling.
Bart R,
You said:
This statement is false. The UNFCCC data are based on very crude estimates. The US EPA measurements of emissions from fossil fuel power stations are the only serious attempt at measurements in the world. The remainder of the data is estimates, not measurements. There is a very long way to go until the world can measure emissions. Study the two EPA links I provided in my first comment. Then imagine how you would apply that to all sources of Kyoto gas emissions. Then take it the next step and consider how you would apply it in countries like Eretria and Mogadishu.
If you think carefully about what I’ve said, you’ll understand the issue.
Great attempt at comedy but it comes off just looking sad. If you’re going to be a clown you have to exagerate your ignorance not just lay out it out naked like that.
*sigh*
I hate talking about foreigners’ internal problems.
Always messed up in the most banal ways when looked into at any level of detail, and generally can be traced back to too much cheese.
Henry Ergas whose wikipedia entry says as an expert witness – In the 2005 Qantas-Air New Zealand case, Ergas was criticised by the Australian Competition Tribunal for uncritically pushing a party line, avoiding challenging questions and seeking to obscure the real issues in contention. Additionally, in 2006 a Federal Court judge dismissed much of Ergas’s evidence in the Queensland Rail-Pacific National case, stating “In my view, Mr Ergas’s argument is pure economic theory unsupported by the facts of the case.”[2] The Australian Financial Review suggested that economists and lawyers are now questioning whether any litigant would risk calling Ergas again.[3]?
It looks like a typical wikipedia hatchet-job, perhaps by someone who didn’t like this guy’s take on Net Neutrality, until you follow up on the sources and it looks like Henry Ergas does turn out to be the sort of Economic theorist who has no interest in facts, nor time for unimportant little people like judges, so long as he gets his consulting fee.
Why are you quoting this guy outside of Australia, again? Hasn’t Mel Gibson done enough for your image abroad?
Ergas’ math as reported is a bogus construction that would not fly in any competent discussion of actual Economics above the sophomore level.
Thankfully, most links I can find to the writings of this loon are blocked from the USA, sparing me the need to wade through his bilious meanderings.
It seems Bart R must have had a few too many Easter bunnies, of forgotten to take his tablets. He sure knows lots of nasty adjectives, and is clearly xenophobic as well. But appear to be innumerate.
The criticism of Professor Henry Ergas is a classic case of ad hominem. Bart R hasn’t bothered to address the substantive issue; instead he’s tried to discredit th person who wrote the article that included the numbers. How pathetic is that?
The NPV Professor Henry Ergas quoted is the cumulative loss of GDP 2012 to 2050 from Treasury estimates. So tell Treasury they are wrong. I expect Treasury is more likely to have underestimated than overestimated the economic damage the ETS will do to Australia. In fact, I believe Treasury have massively underestimated the damage, given the assumptions they’ve used. For example, one of the assumptions is that the USA will have implemented a country wide Cap and Trade scheme by 2016. Furthermore, they assume the world will adopt an economically efficient ETS by 2020. That is totally unrealistic. But there are many other assumptions that are just as unrealistic.
However, anyone even half numerate could see that, even if you halved the Treasury estimate it makes negligible difference to the result. It would change the benefit/cost ration from 0.03 to 0.06.
Anyone with any sense of numbers, or any engineering judgement would see this. Instead, this clown rolls out abuse after abuse and shows he is a half-wit. And a xenophobic one to top it all off.
Peter Lang | April 8, 2012 at 5:43 am |
Care to compare ratio of nasty adjectives, your posts vs. mine?
Or ad homs?
Dimwitted pot/kettling and who-started-its will get us nowhere.
As I’ve said, I have zero interest in sticking my nose into the internal affairs of others. Australia’s a big country, it can figure out its own problems. I’m not a xenophobe. Indeed, I fairly enjoy Australian .. well, I’m sure there’s something from Australia that’s enjoyable.
Australia aside, in general, as a principle of Economic argument, the case you’ve so far presented suffer from some very large deficits of information and methodology.
Will the coal industry of Australia suffer some sort of fiscal impediment?
Well, duh.
They’re going from _not_ paying for waste disposal of CO2 at all to paying a tiny share of the cost they impose on the carbon cycle users around the world, including the cost of measurement, as a signal to buyers that they are obtaining individual benefit at a high cost to the Commons.
They’ve been free riders up to now, as pretty much every lucrative user of the scarce resource have been.
On the positive side not accounted for is the impetus to innovation — and I agree with critics who find the particular way Australia went about their hack version of F&D disappointing, for example the idea that governments can inspire innovation through subsidy and spending program, which will inevitably be regressive and inefficient — and the restoration of faith in the fairness of the Market.
This $1.35 TRILLION isn’t new loss, just because it hasn’t been recorded in the account books. It’s a puny partial recognition of the actual amount of free riding going on, and the losses to others in terms of real Risk and real perception of inequity. (Hale 2002)
Do we complain of the cost of maintaining systems of weights and measures? Do we count the benefits of weights and measures by the sales of scales and rulers and yardsticks? Or do we count the integrity of the Market, the invisible increase in faith in grocers and gas pumps and realtors to deliver to us what they advertise by weight and volume and area?
For anyone to in effect do a cost-benefit of a system of standards to just the sales of bathroom scales is an absurdity.
Yes, there’s plenty about the specific internal program in Australia for Australians to take issue with, and that’s not a subject for me to address; it seems as an outside observer, however, that many of the specific criticisms are founded on incorrect analyses drawn from ignoring facts and misunderstanding first principles.
Scurilious nonsense from a disreputable partisan.
http://henry-ergas.epik.com/bio
Robert I Ellison
“Scurilious [sic] nonsense from a disreputable partisan,” sums up much of the content of your link, according to that source introduced by Peter Lang in this exchange, wikipedia;
However, for balance, we don’t know wikipedia is objective in its appraisal. If only you became a wikipedia contributor and went to the trouble of helping improve the quality of entries.
Then we’d know what wikipedia contained was factual and authoritative.
Some sources are more reliable than other – you for instance are entirely unreliable.
Bart R said:
< I provided links to people who I also set the expectation of unreliability about, pointing out the shortcomings of wikipedia.. which Mr. Lang himself cited first (though without pointing out such shortcomings).
Bart R has been shown to be totally disreputable, xenophobic twit on this discussion about the benefit/cost of Australia’s ETS.
Instead of apologising for his ad hominem attack on Professor Henry Ergas (which any honest person would have done once he saw his excellent CV), Bart R continues to defend his indefensible actions.
Then he tries to link me into his despicable behaviour. The Wikipedia quote I gave was to a table of NPV from the IMF. Hardly the sort of trash Bart R dug up from Wikipedia to support his ad hominem attack.
The fact is that Bart R preferred to attack the messenger rather than the substance of the argument. Pathetic. Not only that, I’ve provide more information about the =Treasury modelling assumptions and also showed that even if you halved the GDP loss, the Benefit cost of Australia’s ETS changes from 0,03 to 0.06. Given that the benefit / cost needs to be greater than 1 to make the ETS a viable policy, it should eb clear to anyone that the ETS is bad policy. Bart R’s inability to comprehend this, or to acknowledge he is wrong, suggest he is innumerate or has no ability to reconcile scale – He would be described as lacking engineering judgement.
He has been shown to be wrong and/or a complete fool with each of his statements. Everyone has been refuted.
Robert I Ellison | April 8, 2012 at 5:34 pm |
“..you for instance are entirely unreliable.”
When do I claim otherwise?
Indeed, I provided links to people who I also set the expectation of unreliability about, pointing out the shortcomings of wikipedia.. which Mr. Lang himself cited first (though without pointing out such shortcomings).
Unlike you, I’m not obsessed with anyone taking me as an authority on anything, whereas you appear, and not just sockpuppetwise, to wish to be regarded as _the_ authority on everything. It’s a mug’s game, Mr. Ellison.
There’s zero point in argument from authority, and that you believe your own advertising about yourself only makes you look sillier to the rest of us.
Which is a shame. You’ve got some gifts.
Henry Ergas is cited in several sources as so off-putting an expert witness, so often slapped down by judges he appears before on matters of Economics — and do you really think he’s the only Economist they’ve ever entertained testimony from, so unable to tell a good witness from bad? — that it’s said any litigant or lawyer would not wish to consider using him in court.
And he’s Mr. Lang’s go-to guy.
Why?
For the same reason as Mr. Lang leans on the irrelevant argument exploiting the misery of Eretria and Mogadishu, because heart-tugging over-the-top dog and pony show charades are all the argument he has.
He trots out a painted poodle, and expects no cat-calls from the audience?
Peter Lang | April 8, 2012 at 8:19 pm |
You chose wikipedia. You chose Henry Ergas.
I chose to look up Henry Ergas on wikipedia.
What’s to apologize for on my part? Using what you provided?
Am I to apologize for what several Australian judges said, as quoted in several Australian sources?
I have no doubt Henry Ergas’ actual arguments are much more refined, nuanced and advanced than what you report of them.
However, I don’t have access to those arguments; as I’ve explained, those links don’t work for me. I must rely on hearsay, like your own.
Were I an Economist of Henry Ergas’ stature and renown, it’d be you who I’d be demanding an apology from, for such ill representation.
In the meantime, you may also want to apologize to Mogadishu and Eretria for grossly exploiting their misery, kicking them while they’re down, to vainly sustain your invalid argument on the back of their sufferings.
At least, simple human decency would lead most to.
Getting back to the substance of my first comment on the issue of the viability of the Australian ETShttp://judithcurry.com/2012/04/04/lindzen-et-al-response-and-parry/#comment-190778 , the benefit/cost of the Australian ETS is about 0.03. It would have to be improved by a factor of over 30 (to over 1) to be viable.
The ETS is bad policy.
The figures are based on Australian Treasury estimates of the GDP reduction the ETS will cause (cumulative to 2050) and the estimated benefit (the estimated value of AGW damage the ETS would avoid) from the default values in the Nordhaus Yale-RICE (2010) model.
The Treasury estimates are likely to significantly underestimate the damage the ETS will do to Australia’s GDP. In this case, the benefit/cost would be less than 0.03.
However, to test the sensitivity, if we halve the estimate in the lost of GDP, the benefit/cost ratio would be 0.06. This is still far below the value of 1 needed to make the ETS a viable option.
Furthermore, many believe the estimates that AGW will cause are overstated. If this is the case, then the benefit cost of the ETS is lower.
All in all, it is quite clear that the ETS is no even close to being justified.
Peter Lang | April 8, 2012 at 9:24 pm |
In isolation, ETS alone would be a poor investment. The European experience demonstrates that.
Though the EU also demonstrates the cost-benefit analysis you use is off by almost an order of magnitude, if yours is merely as bad as theirs.
One would hope Australians bright enough to not jump off all the same bridges as the Europeans.
However, the BC retail carbon F&D is three or more orders of magnitude better than the European case. Sure, it’s a small jurisdiction, only about a little higher in GCP than Western Australia, but then Australia’s small compared to the EU, too.
A retail carbon F&D covering 70% of the carbon economy would generate _positive_ economic outcomes; done as BC is doing theirs with a substantial transition period and gradual rise in both fees and matching dividends to individual participants, or even better if it were done per capita through paycheck adjustments as CCL recommends, it would be a churn-reducing, playing field leveling standard avoiding command and control, and putting decision power in the hands of consumers and sellers, removing distortions from the Market.
If a small and expedient ETS within that system is needed to seal the cracks in carbon leakage, so be it; it’ll be more efficient still than what you complain of now.
Really, I do have sympathy for you. Australia could’ve gone with a gold standard in privatization. Instead, it went with something that smells more like vegemite.
Bart R says: “Though the EU also demonstrates the cost-benefit analysis you use is off by almost an order of magnitude, if yours is merely as bad as theirs.”
Which, of course, it isn’t. Neither the costs nor the benefits are comparable. Not even close. Perhaps Bart R should attempt to understand the figures provided before making any more superficial statements. So far all his statement shave been refuted and his comprehension has been shown to be lacking.
And he continues to display his xenophobia.
Again – we are not doing either a tax or a cap.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/poll-shows-carbon-tax-needs-sale-of-the-century-to-change-voters-views-20120401-1w6le.html
The greens/labor can’t survive in office past 2013 – if the minority government lasts that long. The tax will then be dismantled.
WebHubTelescope | April 6, 2012 at 9:09 pm | Reply
“You are forgetting the variability in the response across the spectral lines.”
You are forgetting Kirchoff’s Law which states that at equilibrium absorbtivity equals emissivity at all frequencies. According to our best satellite measurements the earth/sun system is within 0.1% of equilibrium i.e. 1366W/m2 in and 1365.5W/m2 out. The half watt going in that isn’t coming back out (at the moment, it eventually will) is anthropogenic forcing throwing it out of equilibrium.
That said the system is close enough to equilibrium so that Kirchoff’s Law rules the day. Without violating longstanding classical thermodynbamic laws formulated in the 1800’s which have withstood the test of time there is no physical way for any given input power to produce a temperature higher than that of an ideal black body. Engineers designing steam engines 200 years ago had to deal with these laws and so do climate scientists today. The big difference is steam engines have to work in the real world where AGW claims only have to work in the fevered imaginations of those who hold them.
Actually Web, in more concise terms, you appear to be stating that greenhouse gases are acting as Maxwell’s Demon. Good luck with that. No one has produced a working Demon yet and the first person who does will revolutionize the way we harness and use energy.
Kirchoff’s Law was the empirical foundation which derived from observations. Gustav Kirchoff stated this back in 1860, well before the advent of quantum mechanics.
Planck’s Law is the quantification and theoretical justification of Kirchoff’s Law based on quantum mechanical and statistical physics considerations. This obviously had to wait to the 20th century before getting resolved.
When you say that:
you are weasel-wording the fact that this is an integral across all frequencies. The point is that this doesn’t have to equate one-to-one emission and absorption for every frequency in the spectrum.
If that is the case, that you just forgot to mention the integration aspects, then we are in agreement.
As an example of where Kirchoff’s Law holds, consider a powerful visible-light laser heating up a black bowling ball suspended in a vacuum. If the bowling ball heats up to a steady-state value, the integral of its emission spectrum will equal the incoming radiation impinging on the bowling ball. We use Kirchoff’s Law to set up the premise, and then work with Planck’s Law (or Wiens or …) to estimate the deviation from theory. Essentially a single incoming frequency (or a very narrow band) corresponding to laser light is balanced by a wide range of infrared radiation emitting from the bowling ball.
If certain frequencies in the ball are suppressed, by some sort of filter, then the other frequencies will have to make up for it by upping their amplitude. That will conserve power across the spectrum according to Kirchoff’s Law. The integration is the key to the energy balance.
Kirchoff applies to bodies in thermodynamic equlibrium and it is not useful to think of the planet as in thermodynamic equilibrium. There is a quasi energy equilibrium at top of atmosphere for which you need nothing but the first law in the simple global energy balance.
Energy in – Energy out = d(S)/dt – where d(S)/dt is the change in global energy storage.
Greenhouse gas molecules absorb energy in the infrared resulting in bond stretching and bond bending (increases in kinetic energy) – which transfers to the surrounding non-active molecules. In a well mixed atmosphere diffusion occurs rapidly. So the atmosphere as a whole warms up. If there are more molecules more photons are trapped and the atmosphere warms. More photons are emitted – at the same frequency as they were absorbed for quantum mechanical reasons – moving towards the quasi energy equilibrium at a higher atmospheric temperature.
Indeed I argue that anthropogenic CO2 is emitted at temperatures far higher than they are ever likely to subsequently get. No need to absorb IR to get initially hot at all.
It is probably not quite that simple if UV – for instance – changes atmospheric and ocean coupling to change cloud albedo.
Try this one – http://www.wag.caltech.edu/home/jang/genchem/infrared.htm
Simple stuff – I suggest both sides go back to basics.
I said somewhere else that the discussion descends to idiotic interpretations of basic physics. Chuck in Kirschoff and go off into meaningless deviations. Same with statistical mechanics, diffusion, random walks etc – sorry Dave – because none of the real world is as simple as all that. The real world is not warming for a decade or three more as a result of natural variation. Try getting that from one dimensional physics. Perhaps the real problem is that physicists don’t understand oceanography, hydrology or biology.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
That what you don’t understand, you marginalize. The world is messy and those are the tools that physicists use to describe the mess.
I was looking for Jim D, but this is a good spot to stir things up :)
Jim D,
There are quite a few issues that are confusing to people that are not total morons because of the complexity and the inconsistent terminology of climate science. Jinan’s are some of the more common.
Equilibrium emissivity: An object in equilibrium with no significant internal source of energy production will emit the same amount of energy it absorbs, Ein = Eout. Equilibrium is a hypthetical condition for a complex thermodynamic system. When a value of emissivity is given, many incorrectly assume that that is an equilibrium emissivity and that absorption at that moment in time is equal to emissivity. The oceans have an average emissivity nearly equal to one. The absorptance of sunlight in the ocean is less than one, varying with conditions, but the average absorption is approximately 0.96. Of the energy absorbed, 10% or more can penitrate below the surface emission layer where the energy is not available for imediate emission. While the emissivity is close to one, it does not imply that the energy in is equal to the energy out. There are significant lag times involved in the energy transfer. In steady state, the emissivity would equal the absorption. Before the oceans reach steady state, the emissivity could be much lower, 0.8, indicating that the oceans are gaining energy. Should solar energy at the surface be reduced, the emissivity could be greater than 0.96. By definition emissivity is limited to the range of 0 to 1, but due to the thermal mass of the oceans, the energy emitted can be greater than the energy absorbed for lengthy periods of time.
Emissivity: The emissivity of a perfect black body is unity. While a perfect black body does not exist, the approximation of a perfect black body is acceptable if the difference between actual and true emissivity is not significant with respect to physical process being modeled. The ocean has an approximate emissivity of 0.996 (0.993 to 0.998 in the 10 to 12 micrometer region, sorry misplaced the link). At a surface temperature of 288K the energy flux would be between, 387.25 and 389.22 with an ideal black body emissivity of 390Wm-2. Considering that a doubling of CO2 should produce a 3.7Wm-2 change in forcing, a 2.75Wm-2 potential error margin for the surface emissivity of the ocean creates some level of concern for those uninitiated to climate science.
Webby
My response is and always has been that one must build a conceptual – an imagined visual model – in some detail before maths can be applied in any sensible way. For me the most revealing mathematics is the Tsonis ‘toy’ model of the ‘distance’ between ocean and atmospheric indices.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL030288.shtml
This reveals somethiing that doesn’t fit within the scope of simple physical models but has similarities to the broader class of complex dynamical systems. I know you have problems with this idea – but if it is the reality of the world then it needs to be faced. I think facing it opens up a new way of thinking in which the coupling of cimate components is the critical issue.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
CD, if the ocean absorbs shortwave and emits IR, you can’t claim that the emissivity is less than 1 because it absorbs more at one wavelength than it emits at another. These are different wavelengths and emissivity is only defined for each wavelength or a given range of wavelengths. In the IR the ocean absorbs and emits with the same efficiency which is near 1. That is, it absorbs nearly all the IR photons it receives at the surface, and emits close to its own black-body potential given its surface temperature.
Jim D said, “In the IR the ocean absorbs and emits with the same efficiency which is near 1. That is, it absorbs nearly all the IR photons it receives at the surface, and emits close to its own black-body potential given its surface temperature.” Great, that accounts for less than 50% of the energy the ocean receives and all of the energy is emits. Are you tax accountant by any chance? :)
CD, it has other ways of losing energy. There is this thing people call convection.
To be more precise, the heat flux and evaporation that ultimately support convection.
Jim D, very true, the heat in the ocean below the skin layer convects toward the surface where it can emit in its spectrum, conductively transfer heat to the atmosphere or promote evaporation. The infrared radiation absorbed in the skin layer is either emitted in its own spectrum or convects upwards or causes evaporation. Some tiny portion of the energy at the surface diffuses downward against the rising convection. Everything seems to be biased upward Jim?
So the confusing part is that most of the more alarmist GHE affectionados tend to focus on a small percent of the overall thermodynamics by quoting very specific accuracy of emissivities that are nearly meaningless in the grand thermodynamic ocean/atmosphere thermal boundary scheme :)
For the solar radiation that enters the water, it turns to heat and that energy will diffuse fast at least to its short-range surroundings. That is very easy to determine from measurements several meters down, where one can see the correlation of air to subsurface temperatures within a day or two:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/data_deliv/deliv.html
This is all very intuitive stuff and common knowledge. The water will get warm if exposed to the sun, excepting the direct reflectivity.
What am I missing that you are trying to convey?
WebHubTelescope | April 8, 2012 at 3:04 pm |
“This is all very intuitive stuff and common knowledge. The water will get warm if exposed to the sun, excepting the direct reflectivity.
What am I missing that you are trying to convey?”
You’re excepting only the reflectivity. The evaporative and convective cooling of the water needs to be excepted too. Missing a flux or two.
Say Edim, I was responding to Captain #1’s claim that water won’t get warm when exposed to electromagnetic radiation. Apart from the radiation that reflects, the rest will heat the water. Again, captain claims that the water won’t get warm. Isn’t that weird that someone would think that the water won’t get warm when irradiated? That is awfully odd for a fisherman to say that spends his days on the water off the Keys. Casting his line for tarpon day after day without realizing that the radiation (minus the part that reflects) beating down from the sun is actually warming the water.
And I take it, Edim, that you also think that the sun is not heating the water?
Since you didn’t refute the captain, I assume that you also believe that only a tiny portion goes into heating, exactly as the Captain said: “Some tiny portion of the energy at the surface diffuses downward against the rising convection. “ That seems to be a common misconception among the skeptics here, that the laws of physics don’t apply to the climate.
Some very bizarre notions.
CD, there is a downward component that is very important. As long as the forcing from increasing CO2 persists, there is a warming of 0.2 degrees per decade affecting an increasingly deep layer of the ocean.
Web Jim D, I know y’all have great faith in the impact of increasing CO2, but the Ocean’s do not seem to share your faith.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/WarmingoceanUAH.png
You can complain about the satellite data all you like, but it is much better suite to global average sea surface temperature than HADSST2. The Argo also seems to agree with the lower than expected warming.
You are not getting close to the 0.2C per decade you expect. That tends to indicate that something is over estimated. What could that be?
I suspect that when it says Mid-Trop Ocean, it means the mid-tropospheric levels above the ocean.
JIM D, Sorry about the confusion, the plots are all mid troposphere NH, tropical and SH oceans. The mid-troposphere has very little variation from the lower troposphere and should show greater warming. UAH was used because it actually shows greater warming than the RSS.
The much greater land warming appears to be a combination of land use change amplified by CO2 increase and land use change impact on the accuracy of the surface station data.
Even in UAH you can see that La Ninas now are as warm as El Ninos used to be in the early 80’s.
Jim D, yes you can. I never said that there is no warming or that CO2 has no impact, only that the CO2 impact is lower than estimated. To get a better estimate of what the impact actually is requires more information and the solar minimum, if it is actually prolonged, should improve estimates. There is also some land use changes large enough to remove some of the uncertainty also. Canada, the US, Brasil and Argentine have over 200 million acres of the conservation agriculture and that is growing. The moisture retention change alone should be noticeable.
WebHubTelescope | April 7, 2012 at 2:04 pm | Reply
“You are forgetting Kirchoff’s Law which states that at equilibrium absorbtivity equals emissivity at all frequencies. “
you are weasel-wording the fact that this is an integral across all frequencies. The point is that this doesn’t have to equate one-to-one emission and absorption for every frequency in the spectrum.
———————————————
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff%27s_law_of_thermal_radiation
It’s not weaseling. It’s textbook corollary of Kirchoff’s Law.
You might also find yourself enlightened by further corollary as follows (ibid)
Any physicist worth more than than paper his Stanford degree is printed on knows these corollaries. The second is blindingly explicit in that no stinking greenhouse effect can possible raise an internal system temperature at any given point above that of a perfect black body for the given input power. Period. End of story. Go argue with Kirchofff if you think otherwise. Try to publish it. I dare anyone.
I don’t have to because it has already been published — see the greenhouse gas theory. No referee would allow me to claim anything new or novel and the submission would get rejected. I must be missing something that you are trying to convey.
physicistdave | April 6, 2012 at 5:36 pm | Reply
David Springer wrote:
>Thermodynamic realities are the stock in trade of engineers and I’m an engineer.
I began my professional career in theory and operation of meteorological equipment in the military. I took part in the shakeout of the first Doppler radars in the 1970’s. It was toughest, longest school the military offered and was 40 hours per week for one year of nothing but theory and operation of various electronic and mechanical systems. After I got out of the military I took up computer science as a major in college and went on to design numerous pieces of hardware and software over the next 20 years. Several of my innovations from 30 years ago are in just about every computing device on the planet today.
Electromagnetic theory topped the list in the military. But even so my interest in a wide array of sciences has been intense all my nearly 60 years of life. In college in addition to computer science courses I took oceanography, marine biology, astronomy, organic and inorganic chemistry, human anatomy and physiology, child psychology, and probably some that don’t come to immediately to mind. I couldn’t make up my mind at first exactly what field I wanted to get into. For the past 12 years I’ve been financially indepedent and comfortably retired doing what I’ve wanted to do and that has included thousands of hours of study in biology and earth sciences which didn’t get much attention during my 25 year working life.
physicistdave | April 6, 2012 at 5:36 pm | Reply
“Your question is an interesting one, though. Empirically, look at Venus —”
The Venus canard? Really? That’s your story and you’re sticking with it?
No solar energy even reaches the surface of Venus. It’s surface temperature is part of the temperature gradient extending from its molten core to the surface. On the earth the surface (ocean floor or land surface) has comparatively unrestricted path to the infinite 3K heat sink which is the cosmos. Thus the millions of degrees AG (Al Gore) temperature of the earth’s interior declines to a relatively low temperature by the time it reaches the surface. On Venus when that internal energy makes its way up through the rocks it reaches a surface with 90 bar of CO2 which is not anywhere near the easy escape it has on the earth so the gradient from core to surface is a shallower decline and extends up through to the bottom of the cloud layer.
And THAT my friend is the only physically possible way for the surface Venus to be as hot as it is. If there were a way to make things hotter than the input power could raise them we’d be all over it constructing artificial greenhouses that got hot enough to generate dry steam to power turbines which turn the shafts of electrical generators and we’d have free clean power and a vastly different civilization. Duh.
PhyicistDave, David just gave you an excellent opportunity to wow the masses with a radiant only top of the atmosphere explanation of the runaway greenhouse effect or to get a little more in depth on how conductive heat transfer can maximize the heat content of a super critical fluid which can only release that stored energy to space in a radiant spectrum limited by the temperature of the fluid.
Then how the mass of the planet limits the emission spectrum to 184Wm-2, which happens to be close to the sublimation temperature and pressure of the predominate gas, where on Earth the more diverse mix of gases provides for a higher emission rate due to the predominate greenhouse gas, H20.
David Springer | April 7, 2012 at 11:57 am |
I read you talking about 90 bar of CO2 acting as an impediment to dissipation of heat from the core of Venus.
I read Jinan Cao talking about how efficient a heat dissipater CO2 is.
Please, clarify which of you is wrong, and exactly why.
Venus canard is really annoying. Before anyone claims that interior heat from the planet makes its way out through 90 bar of CO2 it’s been known (at least by space exploration fanatics old enough to be alarmed by Sputnik) that Venus’ lower atmosphere is isothermal. This was first discovered in 1969 by radar imaging.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/164/3883/1059
So what that means you have one fantastic insulator (iso-thermal atmospheres are non-convecting by definition) in that 90 bar of CO2 in the Venusian atmosphere so the molten core of Venus is still pretty damn hot at the surface because the energy still has to work its way out through miles and CO2 starting 90 bar before it gets an easy path to space. Presumably the core of Venus is much hotter than the earth because it’s been far better insulated than the earth’s for billions of years (presuming Venus’ lower atmosphere has been isothermal 90 bar CO2 and should have started with equal mass for gravitational compression energy and an equal amount of radioactive elements. This isn’t a runaway greenhouse on Venus. It’s molten rock with internal fission heating that’s been really well insulated for 4.5 billion years in other words. That’s not a greenhouse by any stretch of the definition.
geothermal gradient on Venus
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc1979/pdf/1455.pdf
Geothermal gradient on Venus ostensibly the same as the earth at 30C per kilometer. Isothermal lower atmosphere of Venus is 32 kilometers thick. CO2 is a worse thermal conductor than rocks, that’s a given because it’s a gas. Surface temp of 500C has a peak emission frequency of 3.75 micrometers. CO2 has its first good absorption band near that wavelength. So the superdense CO2 lower atmosphere doesn’t conduct as well as rocks, it is relatively opaque to peak emission frequency of 500C blackbody spectrum, so that only leaves convection and we know it doesn’t convect because it’s isothermal. So what happens is that once you get below the clouds on Venus when you “dig” down into the lower atmosphere it’s something like digging into the rock crust on the earth. If the 30 kilometers of isothermal lower atmosphere of Venus insulates about half as well as rock then that fully accounts for the surface temperature purely due to internal heat from the planet. On Venus the top of the crust might as well be thought of as the top of the lower atmosphere in other words because of the continuation of the geothermal lapse rate at some significant percentage of lapse rate through rock.
To whoever asked about CO2 being a good conductor that’s only relative to other gases. Gases are (write this down) generally poor conductors compared to liquids and those are poor compared to solids.
http://physics.info/conduction/
Conductivities vary for material being greatest for metallic solids, lower for nonmetallic solids, very low for liquids, and extremely low for gases.
David Springer | April 7, 2012 at 3:33 pm |
To whoever asked about CO2 being a good conductor that’s only relative to other gases. Gases are (write this down) generally poor conductors compared to liquids and those are poor compared to solids.”
And yet, on a Venus:Earth comparison, 90 bars of 99% CO2 is almost infinitely better at heat dissipation than 1 bar of 75% N2.
Even given that before the Oxygen Cataclysm, ratios on Earth were somewhat different, on a timescale of the age of the planets, given the comparable ratio of night sky on them (insignificantly greater, I think, for Venus given its closer orbit?) we’d hardly expect Venus to be so much better at holding on to its core heat if Jinan Cao is even 1% right (he’s approximately 1% right, I imagine).
So, no, absolutely no, patently Venus must dissipate heat from its core at least as rapidly as Earth; this was established decades ago, though some still remember the faulty logic that led to the false conclusions of the 1970’s.
Climate scientists are in general agreement that 100’s of degrees of Venus warming can’t be accounted for by solar radiative CO2 GHG effects alone. But the fact that buried in this trapped heat, that 30 degrees could be contributed by trapping solar radiation is likely true, though as you imply hard to verify. So then you look at this almost fluid layer of CO2 trapping the radiant heat from the planet and you say to yourself that CO2 is a pretty good insulator/filter for infrared radiation.
The earth is also pretty hot a few kilometers down and we can thank the pressure and temperature down there from heat diffusing from the core for giving us crude oil and natural gas. If it wasn’t so hot, then we would have had more oil as the complex hydrocarbons wouldn’t have all eventually cracked into CH4.
So its really a matter of 6 of one versus half-a-dozen of the other, in comparing the planets. If we had 30 degrees of global warming, which is a fraction of Venus, no doubt we would have problems. The scientific pieces of the puzzle always have to fit together, so your points about Venus are important to consider.
Bottomline is that CO2 has a more significant physical impact on Venus, whereas for us the impacts of CO2 are largely geopolitical. The supplies of fossil fuels generating the excess CO2 are dwindling, and we have few backup strategies in place.
You’re babbling now, Web, and taking off on a tangent about internal heat and how it might generate so-called mineral oil (inorganic crude oil). That’s crank science. I’m even more disappointed in you now.
David Springer
I think you read too much into Web’s comments.
Petroleum is commonly understood as requiring heat and pressure in its formation. That implies nothing about inorganic mineral oil.
Web, “natural gas” is methane and doesn’t need to be broken down from liquid or solid hydrocarbons. Landfills generate usable amounts of methane but they don’t generate oil or coal first and they aren’t deep enough for geothermal heat to be of any aid. Methane is also a metabolic byproduct of anaerobic bacterial metabolism – archaebacteria to be precise. It was certainly produced in large quantity in the early solar system non-biologically and retained in gas worlds but it wasn’t retained by rocky planets. Whether it can be generated inorganically on rocky planets is a matter of heated (pardon the pun) conjecture. Mars has some small amount of methane in the atmosphere that waxes and wanes with the seasons IIRC and the lack of any demonstrated means of it being replenished in the Martian atmosphere inorganically it’s taken seriously as a possible sign of archaebacterial life within the lithosphere. The archae kingdom is thought to the first form of life to emerge some one billion years prior to eubacteria on the earth. It includes the extremophiles such as things that live in mines which eat iron and excrete sulfuric acid or deep ocean vent organisms that eat sulfer compounds and excrete methane. God I love science. There’s just SO much to know and only so many decades you get to explore it.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the supply of fossil fuels, Web. Much as Obama sucks it was totally unfair to mock him about fuel from algae and the U.S. government sinking $17M into it. Exxon-Mobile sunk $600 million into a joint venture with Craig Venter, a spinoff from the Venter Institute called Synthetic Genomics to develop an algae species suitable for producing liquid hydrocarbon fuels from air, sunlight, and water. Non-potable brackish or seawater is fine but needs nutrients NPK added like poor soil and/or municipal wastewater which is already nutrient-rich. An area the tenth the size of the Texas panhandle can produce all the liquid fuel consumed in the United States and there’s little if any modification of internal combustion engines to use it. Not only that but the cost of production is cheaper than oil ever was to say nothing of the $100/bbl it is now. This is real. Exxon isn’t the business of sinking half a billion dollars into junk science like certain of our political class has repeatedly done. Nature handed us the technology on a silver platter. All we have to do is cut & paste bit of this organism with bits of that organism to get what we want instead of what natural selection cobbled together into discrete organisms. Alcohol and fuel oils in nature are undesireable byproducts of metabolism i.e. they do little to nothing to help the critters that make them become fitter competitors. All we have to do is optimize the metabolism for those byproducts and then provide our new critters with artificial protection so they don’t have to worry about competition with wild organisms. We’re agonizingly close in genetic engineering technology to get this done. Almost certainly long before any competing alternative energy source could be developed (incompatibility with existing infrastructure kills most of them right off the bat) synthetic biology will have it done. Exxon expects large scale commercial production of biofuel within 20 years which, if Venter is a bit lucky, he’ll live long enough to see it happen. I’ve personally been anticipating this since 1987 when the engineering opportunities inherent in synthetic biology became apparent. It’s part of what was called nano-technology back then. Microbes are like tiny programmable self-reproducing robots than can build things to specification with molecular perfection almost literally free of cost.
You want to hear something really wild… carbon is a building block in virtually all the interesting things that can be assembled by biological means from hydrocarbon fuels to wood-like materials to carbon composite bodies to soylent green. Virtually all material needs become almost free for the taking. So long as the supply of atmospheric carbon holds out at any rate. That’s a limiting factor and what is bound to happen in the not so distant future is there will be limits on how much carbon individuals and businesses and nations can take out of the atmosphere rather than how much they can put in. Mark my words. The fossil fuel era is nearing an end and the beginning of the greatest technological age, the age of synthetic biology, is imminent.
David Springer
Any references to explain in detail the economics of algae fuel and how it is so wonderfully low?
Even though ATPase is about 99.9% conversion efficient, I understood the basic photosynthesis was practically limited to about 2.5% conversion
efficiency. See Savage “The Scum Solution”
Economic Feasibility of Commercial Algae Oil Production in the United States Fisher, 2011
They show a number of improvements needed. The issue is how practical those are to achieve.
Sandia Lab reports mentioned a theoretical efficiency limit of concentrated solar ferrite cycle water to hydrogen of about 70%. Practically they seek a solar input to hydrogen of about 20% from which they project making methanol at a 7% overall efficiency. See:
Methanol production from CO2 using solar-thermal energy: process development and techno-economic analysis
and
Summary Report: Direct Approaches for Recycling Carbon Dioxide into Synthetic Fuel 2009
The economics of both are controlled by the need to cover land area in mirrors and to support them, or equivalently to provide support for the algae slurry.
David Springer wrote to me:
>The Venus canard? Really? That’s your story and you’re sticking with it?
David, your point is not relevant to my point: I think you are probably wrong, mainly because I think that thousands of miles of rock are probably better thermal insulators than Venus’ atmosphere.
But, in any case, you and I agree that Venus’ atmosphere *does* have an insulating effect and results in a higher surface temperature than it otherwise would, whatever the ultimate source of the heat. That is the point I was making against our anti-blanket brigade friends, such as Myrrh.
Dave
Dear Dave,
Thousands of miles of rock is yet another canard. You’re an awfully shallow thinker. The earth’s crust is at the surface temperature of Venus a scant 10 miles down. Let’s see, if I’m charitable with you and we make that a thousand miles of rock (singular) then you’re only exaggerrating the required insulative property by two orders of magnitude.
Now calculate again, buckko, whether 32 kilometers of CO2 in an isothermal atmosphere beginning at 90 bar on the surface with upwelling far infrared at 3 microns can insulate as well as ten miles of rock. Execise a bit more due diligence this time. Pretend it’s a real question and getting it wrong would cause loss of blood and treasure. You know, like an engineer has to work through a problem not like an unaccountable academic.
The extinction altitude of 3 micron radiation in the earth’s atmosphere is several kilometers. That’s at a CO2 partial pressure of what, 0.003 bar? So let’s see. The extinction altitude on Venus with a CO2 partial pressure of 90 bar would be 30,000 times lower. Again being charitable the extinction altitude would be about the length of my johnson and that’s not being charitable to my johnson.
David Springer wrote to me:
>If there were a way to make things hotter than the input power could raise them we’d be all over it constructing artificial greenhouses that got hot enough to generate dry steam to power turbines which turn the shafts of electrical generators and we’d have free clean power and a vastly different civilization.
That makes no sense. If, as I and most scientists think, the sun is the primary source of Venus’ temperature, that is not, as you say, “a way to make things hotter than the input power.” The source of the energy would be the solar photosphere, which is, of course, at a much higher temperature than the surface of Venus.
No Second Law violation at all.
I take it you are not a scientist?
Amazing how many people who have never seriously studied statistical mechanics consider themselves experts on it! Do all of you also consider yourselves experts at brain surgery and open-heart surgery?
Dave
Dear Physicist Dave,
re; thermosphere temperature
If the thermosphere were on the surface of the planet it would be considered a high quality vacuum. Its high temperature is an abstract. A measurement artifact of atoms so isolated from their neighbors they never touch and are free to be accelerated by kinetic energy in high energy photons to very high velocities. This does not happen normal circumstances and doesn’t pass the giggle test in being compared to sensible temperature.
Try again. Explain to me how I can heat water on the earth’s surface into dry steam without using lenses or mirrors to concentrate solar power at the expensive of surrounding surfaces which are thus deprived of it. C’mon dude. You’ll be the richest person in the world overnight if you can do that. The plain fact of the matter is you cannot and that’s because to do so violates the most basic laws of classical physics. You know it and I know it. What’s your agenda here?
David Springer wrote to me:
>re; thermosphere temperature
Sorry, but I said nothing about the “thermosphere.” Nothing at all.
You are arguing with yourself.
I hear that this only indicates psychosis if you actually listen to yourself!
DS also wrote:
>Try again. Explain to me how I can heat water on the earth’s surface into dry steam without using lenses or mirrors to concentrate solar power at the expensive of surrounding surfaces which are thus deprived of it.
Huh???
Again, you are talking to yourself. I said nothing of the sort.
DS concluded:
>The plain fact of the matter is you cannot and that’s because to do so violates the most basic laws of classical physics. You know it and I know it. What’s your agenda here?
Well, now, let’s see. Everyone here who actually is scientifically trained seems to agree with me on these very basic science issues. Please note: as I have said, again and again, I am a critic of the “climate consensus,” for pretty much the same reasons that Judith has given in man, many posts. I am certainly no apologist for Hansen, et al.
But, I do have a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford: my only agenda is to point out the errors in the basic physics by people such as yourself. I think Judith has a similar agenda: are you also accusing her of having a secret agenda? (Hmmm… maybe you are.)
Now, where did you say you got your own Ph.D. and in what discipline?
Dave
I can afford the psychosis Dave. I made millions of dollars as an engineer and retired in my early 40’s. I’m very very good.
Now knock off the ad hominems, the appeals to authority, and whatever other logical fallacies you’re now resorting to in order to avoid answering pointed questions…
Tell me, how does a surface at equilibrium lit by 1000W/m2 possibly emit more than 1000W/m2 without an internal power source? If you can do that you can erase the U.S. national debt in one fell swoop because you will found a way around the first law of thermodyamics.
Man up and admit it can’t be done. The greenhouse effect is indeed limited by the solar constant.
jerkid wrote to me:
>Tell me, how does a surface at equilibrium lit by 1000W/m2 possibly emit more than 1000W/m2 without an internal power source?
Your fantasy, not mine. By all means, tell us how this is supposed to work!
I don’t see how it can work myself, but, as you say, it is your fantasy.
BTW, I think “jerseykid” is a sockpuppet for David Springer because he is having problems with the WordPress commenting.
I am almost certain that David Springer is not taking account the spectral variations in radiation that are possible. The point is that a surface at a temperature of tens of degrees higher than 365K can also emit only 1000 W/m^2. It depends on what kind of spectral filter lies above the surface. If the filter is one that suppresses certain infrared wavelengths from radiating outward, the temperature of the surface can rise. This provides the deviation from perfect blackbody radiation.
Not everything is a perfect blackbody radiator, which derives from a distribution of photon wavenumbers predicted by statistical mechanics with no constraints other than filling the state space of a volume with quantized wavelengths. This deviates as the constraints change, so that if certain wavelengths are filtered, the temperature has to change.
what makes no sense, Dave, is your notion that an insulator, which you at least admit is how what the greenhouse effect actually does what it does, is cause a surface with no internal power source to emit more energy than it absorbs at equilibrium
follow along now – we have a surface lit by 1000W/m2
a surface at a temperature of 365K emits 1000W/m2
how can I possibly emit more than 1000W/m2 from that surface when it receives no more than 1000W/m2?
where does the energy come from? magic? tiny invisible green martian energy fairies? where? it has to come from somewhere, Dave…
jerkid wrote to me:
|>what makes no sense, Dave, is your notion that an insulator, which you at least admit is how what the greenhouse effect actually does what it does, is cause a surface with no internal power source to emit more energy than it absorbs at equilibrium
As you say, it makes no sense, but then it is your fantasy, not mine.
jerkid also wrote to me:
>how can I possibly emit more than 1000W/m2 from that surface when it receives no more than 1000W/m2?
I don’t know. How can it? It’s your fantasy — why don’t you fill in the details yourself?
jerkid also wrote:
>where does the energy come from? magic? tiny invisible green martian energy fairies?
It’s your fantasy novel — make up whatever answer amuses you! Why would I want to contribute to your novel?
Hopefuly, taking this to the bottom of the discussion.
Wijnand | April 6, 2012 at 2:34 pm | Reply
I have a question.
What is a lurker like me to believe? The one guy’s claim based on the real world data or the other guy’s claim based on the belief that we know?
@@@@@@@@@@
I wrote in response to Steven Mosher the following.
“And the reason is simple. The modern reliable data shows absolutely no sign whatsoever of any CO2 signal; any sign that adding CO2 to the atmosphere actually causes global temperatures to rise. If you claim this modern data proves a CO2 effect, then where is it?”
Steven never replied. The reason for no response is obvious. As has been observed over and over again, the scientific method demands that if there is good observed data, it ALWAYS supercedes hypothetical estimations. There are NO exceptions.
So, Wijnand , the answer to you question is absolutely obvious. You conclude that Steven Mosher does not know what he is talking about, and that my observation that there is no CO2 signal in the modern temperature/time graphs is absolutely and completely correct. So we know for a certainly that the climate sensitivity for doubling CO2 from current levels in the atmosphere is indistinguishable from zero.
Well, a. of e. is not e. of a., but still where the heck is it?
=============
Jim Cripwell | April 7, 2012 at 1:24 pm |
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/LNCO2vstemp.jpg
Wijnand and fellow lurkers, if this is still a question for you, it will always be a question, as it is for me.
The answers are, if anywhere, in the observations and in reasoned analysis, for the most part. But we can see that even the redoubtable Steven Mosher gets tired of repeating himself in the face of entrenched refusal to accept fact.
The mortal wound is in the presumption of greenhouse effect predominance in the rising trend; the coup de grace is the decades of cooling fore and aft of the Good Ship Gaia.
============
..even the redoubtable Steven Mosher gets tired of repeating himself in the face of entrenched refusal to accept fact.
Case in point.
Except of course Kim that from a total Earth system perspective, there has been no cooling for decades, and your continual statement that there has either indicates ignorance of the facts or something worse.
I call the top around 2005-2006.
============
Top around 2005 or 2006 you say? Hmmm…hard to explain 2010 being warmer, and of course, we’ll have a few toasty years in the near future with El Nino once more hitting around the time of a solar max. But all this is tropospheric energy, which is far more subject to short-term noise and natural fluctuations. In the big heat sink of the ocean, warming has gone on without pause for many decades is in less affected by the short term noise.
There is of course no statistically significant difference in surface temperature between 1998, 2005 and 2010. There is some warming in ARGO to 2000m from 2003 – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=vonSchuckmann-OHC.gif
‘This study uses proxy climate records derived from paleoclimate data to investigate the long-term behaviour of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). During the past 400 years, climate shifts associated with changes in the PDO are shown to have occurred with a similar frequency to those documented in the 20th Century. Importantly, phase changes in the PDO have a propensity to coincide with changes in the relative frequency of ENSO events, where the positive phase of the PDO is associated with an enhanced frequency of El Niño events, while the negative phase is shown to be more favourable for the development of La Niña events.’ Verdon, D. C., and S. W. Franks (2006), Long-term behaviour of ENSO: Interactions with the PDO over the past 400 years inferred from paleoclimate records, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L06712, doi:10.1029/2005GL025052.
Take this as a starting point – an increase in the intensity and frequency of La Niña and a decrease in intensity of El Niño over another 10 to 20 years. There is so much science on this.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
The multi-decadal signal can be seen in the dominance of La Niña to the late seventies, El Niño to 1998 and La Niña again since.
‘As noted before, all of the ten two-year La Niña events between 1900 and 2009 ended up either as a continued La Niña event for a third year (four out of ten), or switched to El Niño (six out of ten), with none of them ending up as ENSO-neutral. The year 2012 promises to remain “interesting”.’
A weak El Niño may emerge this year – it won’t offset the major cooling of the 2 year La Niña we are still in. ENSO has cloud effects. So in CERES we get cooler temps in the beginning of the decade to warmer in the middle with weak El Niño and cooler again in 2011. It is ENSO/PDO and cloud as Dessler and other have discussed. In attributing warming the SW term needs to be accounted for.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=ceres-swanomaly.jpg
Something similar seems to have happened in the period to 2000 in both ERBE and ISCCP. http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Wong2006figure7.gif
My guess – similar to the literature dealing with initialised decadal forecasts – is for ENSO/PDO effects to dominate and for solar variability to amplify through the polar annular modes. Cooler influencs for a decade or 2 more. Refusal to acknowledge this even as a potential is sheer idiocy.
Best Regards
Captain Kangaroo
Bart you give a reference
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/LNCO2vstemp.jpg
Would you give some sort of explanation as to what the three graphs are supposed to show. I cannot understand what they are or where the numbers they show come from.
At least Girma’s graph
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/compress:12/plot/gistemp/compress:12/detrend:0.1/offset:-0.075/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/detrend:-0.83/offset:-0.35/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.0001/detrend:-0.83/offset:-0.9/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.0001/detrend:-0.83/offset:-0.64/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/offset:2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/offset
is completely self explanatory.
Jim Cripwell | April 7, 2012 at 5:07 pm |
For Doc Martyn’s link, best you search for the post Doc Martyn used it in, as it’s a pretty clear statement “modern data proves a CO2 effect”.
If you can’t find “Boden Keeling CO2 curve” by using Google, or “GISS Temperature” to understand where Doc Martyn got the numbers from, or how to get the logarithm of CO2, I’m not going to be much help to you. You’ll need a grade 9 math teacher and an introduction to the Internet, not me. Here’s a starting point that may help: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html
Here’s one that may interest LIA afficionados, suggesting a close CO2-LIA link: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/graphics/lawdome.smooth75.gif
As for what Girma’s graph ‘explains’ is that anyone can be see whatever they want, if they ignore enough of what’s there.
You’ve been provided, by my count, well over a dozen answers that demolish your repeated claim of “no sign whatsoever of any CO2 signal”.
You always ignore, or pretend to misunderstand, the very clear and ample evidence your assertion is simply wrong.
This pathological condition of yours ought be a concern to you. If you had a like red-green colorblindness, you wouldn’t be allowed to drive.
Bart, You write “You’ve been provided, by my count, well over a dozen answers that demolish your repeated claim of “no sign whatsoever of any CO2 signal”.”
On the contrary, no-one has provided a single graph with the X axis as time, and the Y axis showing a CO2 signal. If you can provide a link to one such graph, I would be grateful.
And if you cannot spare the effort to explain three graphs that you referred to, which have no explanation as to what they mean or where the data comes from,, I am not going to watse my time trying to find out what they are supposed to mean.
Bart R. wrote:
>If you had a like red-green colorblindness, you wouldn’t be allowed to drive.
Nope — I have a couple of family member who are RG colorblind and had no trouble getting a license.
I’m afraid Jim’s problem is much more serious.
Jim Cripwell, what do you mean by “CO2 signal”? Is it the expected decadal warming rate from the CO2 increase? If I say the expected decadal warming rate from CO2 addition has recently grown to 0.15-0.2 degrees/decade then your plot of the signal is the temperature curve itself versus time which you can compare with this “CO2 signal”. The last three decades have been 0.15 degrees warmer than the previous one.
Jim Cripwell | April 7, 2012 at 8:28 pm |
Doc Martyn went you one better. You ask for “a single graph with the X axis as time, and the Y axis showing a CO2 signal”.
Doc’s middle graph shows, at R^2=0.77 (which, though I disparage it a bit, is pretty good), the Temperature:LN(CO2) line. It’s remarkably straight. It’s a smoking gun. It’s more than just a CO2 signal, it’s a signature.
Granted, it could be better. If you plot the 10- or 12- year lagged T:ln(CO2) graph, it resolves much more nicely.
If you want to back-graph the points of Doc Martyn’s middle graph (sourced in the data of the Boden-Keeling graph, which also shows a pretty impressive CO2 signal by eye with Time as the X axis) onto the top graph, then you’ll have what you’re asking for.
However, as others have pointed out, I doubt anyone cares enough to do your work for you, at this late date, given your past demands.
I sure don’t.
Sorry Bart, Doc Martyn’s middle graph does NOT have time as the X axis. There may be a relationship between CO2 and all sorts of things, but what I am looking for is a CO2 climate sensitivity signal in a temperature/time graph. And that is what simply does not exist.
physicistdave | April 7, 2012 at 10:08 pm |
I’d wager when taking their driving test, no member of your family who has a license ever said, “What stoplight? I didn’t see anything!” twelve times in a row.
Bart R wrote to me:
>I’d wager when taking their driving test, no member of your family who has a license ever said, “What stoplight? I didn’t see anything!” twelve times in a row
Of course, they learn the *position* of the different lights in standard streetlights.
Dave
.. thirteen times in a row.
He didn’t even make it to the end of the fourth paragraph.
I’d love to get a response to this question from Mosher…or anyone, for that matter. Mosher has some good experience with reading thermal signatures, but I’ve never heard him complain about how it takes many hours (days?) for IR radiation to propagate from source to receiver. This long delay is, of course, necessary for GHE feedback to be positive, i.e., for heat to linger in the atmosphere overnight and contribute 32C to the Earth’s average temperature.
Steven, when you say “[Increase in the effective radiating height] slows the rate of radiation to space” have you ever seen numbers applied to the distribution of delay? I’m curious about the shape of the distribution (is it Gaussian?) and the median delay. I think the delay due to added CO2 is on the order of microseconds when the median delay is several milliseconds. When you were working on tracking thermal signatures, were you waiting many hours for thermal signals to propagate?
KC wroite:
>Mosher has some good experience with reading thermal signatures, but I’ve never heard him complain about how it takes many hours (days?) for IR radiation to propagate from source to receiver.
Maybe you have not heard Steve complain about it because it is not true, and because your assumption is false that:
>This long delay is, of course, necessary for GHE feedback to be positive
Look: I lean in general towards the *negative* feedback camp, myself. But, when you post stuff that assumes as established facts something that any competent scientist rejects, why do you expect scientists to respond in detail to your posts?
It’s like Claes Johnson’s crackpot stuff on relativity: almost no physicists bother to respond because we assume we could give this as a homework assignment to even a mediocre freshman, and she could point out the errors.
In all sincerity, don’t you really think it would be reasonable for you to actually go to the trouble to learn actual textbook physics, to learn and really try to understand what college textbooks actually say about the Second Law, radiation, etc. before you badger real scientists claiming to have disproved those textbooks?
I think the New Testament is all wet, but I have at least bothered to read the New Testament., the whole thing. Couldn’t you extend the same courtesy to scientists?
And, if you won’t, do you wonder that we treat you as a sick joke?
Dave
Dave, you view things from the inside, but you do not have knowledge of what it looks like from the outside when investigating.
Take Evolution as an example where the outsiders are mocked in similar fashion.
But what is the basis of dialogue – what are the definitions being used ?
Trait : A qualitative characteristic
Characteristic: A distinguishing quality, trait
And the other definitions are the same
I’m doing my homework, PhysicistDave. Currently I’m reading Max Planck’s The Theory of Heat Radiation and I’m up to page 69. So far, there is nothing in there that supports GHE (back radiation) heating of the Earth’s surface by 33C, but I’ll carry on. We all agree that today’s solar input will escape to space, but you think the distribution and average time delay is irrelevant? Really? Have you ever designed a feedback network? Let’s say I want to offset an AC output by 33mV (drawing a correlation to an average 33C temperature increase). I can’t do that with negative feedback. I’d probably rectify and scale the output and return that signal as an always positive DC offset. Using cold, thin air, what is the mechanism for adding a 33C (10%) temperature offset to our surface temperature, PD? Good luck with that.
In any detailed explanation of the GHE, there is always a handwaving step. The Earth’s surface is warmer because OLR is trapped, blocked or stored. Really? How long is it stored? What is it stored in? What are the mechanics of this human-controlled outgoing radiation modulator?
For the record, instead of “sick joke”, I prefer to be called a buffoon. Thank you.
Ken Coffman wrote to me:
>I’m doing my homework, PhysicistDave. Currently I’m reading Max Planck’s The Theory of Heat Radiation and I’m up to page 69.
That is very unwise. You need to read a modern presentation such as Reif.
http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Statistical-Thermal-Physics-McGraw-Hill/dp/0070518009
At $30 used, a steal.
Nobody’s getting my dog-eared copy:
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/5079/reif.gif
Jim Cripwell wrote:
>Steven never replied. The reason for no response is obvious. As has been observed over and over again, the scientific method demands that if there is good observed data, it ALWAYS supercedes hypothetical estimations.
Or, maybe he never replied because *everyone* agrees that the data are very “noisy,” it is very difficult to pull out the true signal from such noisy data, and, therefore, there is real debate among honest people as to what the data mean (yes, I know, some people really have not been honest, and I am rather angry about that, but there really are some honest people on both sides).
I’m on the “opposite side” from Steve: i.e., I am more skeptical about the climate consensus that (I think) he is. My view is similar to Judith’s, maybe a tad bit more skeptical than hers.
But, disagreement does not always prove dishonesty. And, a failure to answer a question may be simply a matter of knowing that the question does not offer the simple answer one’s interrogator is insisting upon.
And, perhaps, most important, perhaps Steve feels he has better things to do with his life than to spend most of it answering accusatory “questions” from people who are not only scientifically illiterate, but *willfully* scientifically literate. We scientists are not slaves who serve at the beck and call of any anti-scientific crackpot who happens to insincerely ask us a question. Many of us are willing to spend a bit of time answering sincere questions from people who are willing to put in some serious time and effort to learn some real science.
But, when it becomes obvious that they are just being hostile for the fun of trying to prove they are not the intellectual inferiors that they really are, well, the appropriate response is simply “Shove it!”
Understood?
Dave
physicsdave, you write “Or, maybe he never replied because *everyone* agrees that the data are very “noisy,” it is very difficult to pull out the true signal from such noisy data, and, therefore, there is real debate among honest people as to what the data mean (yes, I know, some people really have not been honest, and I am rather angry about that, but there really are some honest people on both sides).”
On the contrary, Girma’s graph shows very clearly what the noise is; +/- 0.25 C. The graph also shows a signal of +0.06 C per decade. clearly visible above the noise. But there is no sign of an alleged CO2 signal of 0.2 C per decade. Which is inexplicable, unless the CO2 signal does not exist
Understood?
You just admitted that the noise exceeds the signal. Pretty noisy. And, the main point is that different people disagree as to the proper method for extracting the signal from the noise, and get different results as a consequence. I doubt Steve (or any other scientist here) is interested in going into all the details about this for the benefit of people who go out of their way to be insulting and obnoxious to scientists.
Ah, so when your infatuation with your self-annointed lettered expertise causes you to talk down to people who are not members of your club and they become offended by being lectured like they were students in a class and because you can’t retaliate by giving them a bad grade you retreat into a sullen silence because they aren’t giving you the humble civlity bordering on reverence that you so deserve. I got news for you. I have a 99.97 IQ and I can buy and sell people like you all day long. Go sit on and spin you boorish ass.
physicsdave, you write “You just admitted that the noise exceeds the signal. Pretty noisy.”
An irrelevant comment. The relative size of the noise and signal is irrelevant. What matters is whether the signal can be clearly distinguished in the presence of the noise. From Girma’s graph, the answer to that question is a definite YES. The signal of +0.06 C per decade is clearly visible above the noise of +/- 0.25 C.
The issue that the proponents of CAGW refuse to accept is that Girma’s graph also shows clearly that, following the immense increase in CO2 emissions in the late 20th century,which still continues, the temperature time graph has not changed at all. There has been no discernable CO2 signal whatsoever, caused by the huge increase in CO2 emissions. There ought to be a signal of at least +0.2 C per decade, but no signal at all is discernable. That is why I claim that the climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 from current levels is indistinguishable from zero, as deduced from the observed data.
physicsdave, On more mature thought, not only is your comment irrelevant, it is also just plain wrong. The noise is measured in temperature; the signal in temperature divided by time; different units and different Dimensions. It is equivalent to trying to compare joules and watts.
Bart R says:
“Before BEST, the data was extremely poor and proposed mechanisms somewhat cludged-together. With BEST and slightly refined descriptions of processes, there’s been a more than order of magnitude change in the confidence we can assign, on temperature alone.”
BEST has done virtually nothing to address the major problems with land-station data: inadequate spatio-temporal coverage in many large regions and record corruption by UHI effects throught the urban-dominated data base. No century-long small-town records have been discovered in regions egregiously lacking same. The addition of snippets of record too short to capture quasi -centennial variations and the “kriging” of distant longer records under the assumption of spatial homogeneity adds very little to resolving the great uncertainties concerning secular trends.
John S. | April 7, 2012 at 4:24 pm |
I don’t get how the two statements are mutually exclusive, at least up to where yours stop being quite so factual.
BEST isn’t perfect, and no one can wave a magic wand to suddenly create orders of magnitude more historical data than is really available (sorry, tonyb — but keep trying).
BEST certainly threw a spammer into UHI arguments, and there’s certainly enough data for the BEST conclusions about UHI, which relegate it to an effect too small be two orders of magnitude to be very important overall.
Don’t get me wrong, UHI is clearly real and valid and scientifically interesting. It’s just not what its proponents claim.
So, yes, BEST can’t give us enough data to determine if it’s even possible to create GCMs with predictive power of any sort; it can, and did, however, clearly demonstrate several important facts about global land temperatures in the past two centuries, most especially toward the last third of that range of values.
Making up objections that _some_ uses remain invalid means we shouldn’t use BEST in the ways it _is_ valid seems a “burning good, books bad” argument for the victory of ignorance over observation.
BartR
See my reply to you about historical data here
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/06/aerosols-and-atlantic-aberrations/#comment-191122
On a more general note a great deal more historical data has actually become available over the last 20 years or so, which comes from a wide variety of sources that were obscure or neglected. A small ftraction has been digitised but most are in printed books/records/diaries.
Ironically, just as more historical data has become available it has become less fashionable to utilise historical climatology as coincidentally computer power has at the same time become much bigger, and complex models are possible.
Phil Jones on a good day writes some interesting material as does Camuffo but its generally to support their existing positions rather than query it. However I noted this from his 2000 book ‘History and climate-memories of the futrure?’ This chapter from Phil Jones-page 61
‘ All five series (instrumental records) show long term warming from either the late 18th or early 19th centuries. Recent years are only marginally the warmest of the entire series because of the warmth of the 1730′s (particularly in western europe) and the 1820′s (northern Europe)”
The five series are CET DE Bilt Berlin Uppsala Stockholm.
tonyb
BEST doesn’t begin to address the UHI issue in any incisive scientific way. They set up straw-man statistical tests on badly biased data and get chaff for results. Cities of the size typical for having century-long records throughout most of the globe quite consistently show temperature increases >.5K/century relative to similar records in the countryside. Only novices who have never taken field measurements would find their conclusions–based on artificially stitching together inhomogeneous snippets of record from an ever-changing set of stations–remotely credible.
John S. | April 10, 2012 at 8:55 pm |
In mathematics, a single counterexample suffices to disprove a claim.
I’ve encountered several qualified and experienced people with field experience who find BEST’s conclusions on UHI remotely credible; hence your conclusion fails. :D
I don’t agree with Muller and Curry et al. about everything they’ve done. There are difficulties with the global temperature record, which I’ve been vociferous in pointing out.
However, the BEST UHI observations, analyses and arguments stand head and shoulders above the general condition of the UHI discourse, largely in agreement with the most advanced work on the topic.
Disparaging the BEST UHI without much more work and study than has yet been published and reviewed is bankrupt of reason.
UHI and its impact on urban temperature records is a matter of physics, not mathematics. The effect is so stark that it registers clearly even on car thermometers when driving from the open countryside into the city and vice versa. Detailed scientific studies to quantify the effect have been
performed, inter alia, in Winnipeg, Melbourne and Tehran.
That there are several “qualified” people who think that UHI has negligible
effect on yearly average temperatures over climatic time-scales may be
true, but their thoughts are irrelevant to the scientific question. There
are tons of people who hold forth on matters quite beyond their field of
competence–especially so in “climate science.” Wedded to ad hoc methods
of constructing anomaly series from scraps of data, they seem unaware of
direct, apples-to-apples comparisons beween validated century-long records
from urban and neighboring small-town stations. It is only by making
measurement location a fixed, rather than uncontrolled, variable that truly
scientific determinations of UHI discrepancies can be made.
Unfortunately, there is such a dearth of valid, century-long, small-town
records outside the USA, that truly indicative comparisons cannot be
made on a geographically representative basis. That’s what opens the field
to unphysical, statistical speculation wherein the properties of the
inadequate data base are conflated with those of the real world. Urban
signaturesd are spread thereby to vast unmeasured areas by kriging.
Some months ago a perceptiver commentator on WUWT posted the results of a
bona fide compilation of discrepancies between a geographically
representative samples of urban and non-urban annual averages in the USA.
It is the first latest graph found here:
s1188.photobucket.com/skygram
These results are corroborated by my own work (which goes considerably beyond simple comparisons that I will not get into here). Before plunging further ahead, I’d urge you to become acquainted with the only posting I’ve seen on the web that presents physically meaningful results on UHI on a quasi-continental scale. BEST deserves
disparagement for avoiding meaningful comparisons
The link should read: s1188.photobucket.com/profile/skygram
John S. | April 11, 2012 at 5:49 pm |
Mathematics without Physics is still all of Mathematics.
Physics without Mathematics isn’t even superstition.
And I couldn’t comment on a perceptive commentator on WUWT; the only few I knew of were moded off.
I’ve laid out very specific objections to BEST’s methods and conclusions. You’ve not responded in any substantive way to the issues raised, indulging instead in evasive obiter dicta, even when concrete evidence is presented to illustrate the point. I don’t have time for such games.
John S. | April 12, 2012 at 6:10 pm |
I’ve laid out very specific objections to BEST’s methods and conclusions. You’ve not responded in any substantive way to the issues raised, indulging instead in evasive obiter dicta, even when concrete evidence is presented to illustrate the point. I don’t have time for such games.
As you insist you’ve laid out very specific objections to BEST’s (not yet complete) methods and conclusions with concrete evidence presented to illustrate the point, I’ve gone back and tried to extract what you may mean by this that more substantive answers may be made in detail.
Please correct if I miss any.
1. BEST has done virtually nothing to address the major problems with land-station data..
BEST has produced at least one paper in peer review to addres specifically the major problems with land-station data that may be answered by statistical methods and moderately careful review.
Your “virtually nothing” is a term relative to some subjective standard it seems only you are fit to determine, and which the world must accept from you without question.
By the measure of what BEST did for UHI, WUWT — though it did significantly raise the level of discourse — would be said to have done ‘virtually nothing’.
By the measure of the better research, analysis and one hopes much, much more data collection, that future decades or centuries may bring, sure, BEST will at those future dates be considered ‘virtually nothing’.. except a stepping stone in the process of furthering knowledge.
2. ..inadequate spatio-temporal coverage in many large regions
Agreed. Who could dispute this?
And yet.. what exactly is ‘adequate’ again? Adequate to what use? Adequate to dismiss the crackpot theories of some floating around before BEST? Absolutely yes. Adequate to resolving every question about UHI? Absolutely no.
3. and record corruption by UHI effects throught the urban-dominated data base.
BEST appears to have significantly dispatched this claim. There are disagreements about some of BEST’s definitions, but looked at closely in the actual data and impacts on outcomes, the confidence level within the dataset is good enough that it is not reasonable to disagree with BEST on this point, and it is not reasonable to still hold that corruption significantly diminishes the utility of the extant data.
It’d be better were there two orders of magnitude _more_ extant data, and if it went back several millennia, but there’s no magic wand to fix that.
4. No century-long small-town records have been discovered in regions egregiously lacking same.
Misses the point. You’re upholding an impossible standard of perfection.
And.. if Steven Mosher’s claims bear out (
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/04/lindzen-et-al-response-and-parry/#comment-191709), then incorrect.
A reliable method for extrapolating SST from land records in effect could create century-long records all up and down coasts, where they are egregiously lacking. I know, not exactly what you’re talking about, but an illustrative example pertinent to the questions you raise.
5.The addition of snippets of record too short to capture quasi -centennial variations..
Which snippets are labelled and segregated and have extremely little impact on outcomes.
6. .. and the “kriging” of distant longer records under the assumption of spatial homogeneity..
It’s a convention. The whole concept of a global mean temperature, or a global land temperature, is an artificial construct. If you don’t like the construct, go to the raw data and build another, explaining your choices and how they make for a better definition.
Nothing’s stopping you; indeed, BEST made this _more_ doable.
7. ..adds very little to resolving the great uncertainties concerning secular trends.
Right. It merely takes the uncertainty in the global temperature record down from about one in nine to about three in a thousand on the question of whether there is a multidecadal global warming trend.
That’s very little. 11% to 0.3%; hardly a big step in resolving power. (<=This is sarcasm here. The last line. The one starting "That's very little," and ending "..power.")
8. “..a matter of physics, not mathematics..”
You supply many opinions about physics, but only one link to someone who drew a picture that’s a little bit mathematical.
That’s hardly substantive.
Using Google Scholar, in five minutes I was able to find at least five studies before BEST that came to similar startling conclusions about the UHI shadow effect cooling downwind regions. These Physics papers used numbers. Lots of them. From observations. Many of them.
You, John S.. have used less than superstition.
Well, Bart R, you make it abundantly clear that your ideas about matters
climatological come mainly from reading stuff on the web. Particularly
telling in this regard is the link you provide to the speculations of a
polemicist whose pronouncements show far more cleverness than scientific
gravitas. Mosher promotes BEST uncritically based on the sheer bulk of
data and blind faith in a simplistic statistical algorithm. Data
validation based on proven signal discrimination methods remains terra
incognita.
As seen in a recent blog discussion, he has great difficulty in
understanding that statistical synthesis of long “global” temperature
time-histories from record fragments in an unevenly distributed, largely
urban data base carries urban singularities into the global synthesis via
kriging. Seemingly logically, he argues that the UHI impact on the global
average must be small, because urban areas constitute but a few percent of
the global land area. This argument perversely ignores that in many large
regions of the globe the only long records come from urban sites. This has
a huge impact on the “trend” produced by synthesis. Such results cannot be
considered unbiased reconstructions of actual quasi-centennial variations of
the regional climate.
Contrary to your claim that BEST avoids scraps of data, it actually chops
many intact records into pieces in seeking a regional LS fit to a
simplistic boostrap model of homogeneous spatial variability. There’s far
more than the assumed constant monthly offsets evident in actual
temperatures recorded in any region. While BEST’s so-called “scalpel” may
ameliorate some step discontinuities due to station moves or to
instrumentation changes, large Type II errors in accurately identifying
such cases and establishing datum levels lead to distortions at the higher
frequencies as well.
Computational experimentation shows that the end result of such piecemeal
synthesis resembles a mildly high-passed average of the records. In fact,
the power spectrum of BEST’s global temperature index for the 20th century
does not differ very materially from that of white noise. So much for
claims of vastly improved “data quality.”
Experienced geoscientists have no difficulty in grasping these issues of
data integrity or in recognizing the physical basis of UHI from first
principles. It lies in the low specific heat (and often low bond albedo)
of man-made materials which replace the natural vegetation and in the local
injection of waste heat from buildings, motor vehicles and electrical usage.
As hamlets grow into towns and towns into cities, the surrounding excess
temperature bubble expands and intensifies, creating a (not necessarily
linear) trend at the station. It is changes in these factors and in air
flow patterns over decades and centuries, rather than the present
population size or building density in the vicinity of the station, that
produce singular low-frequency components in long urban records, generally
not found in the less-disturbed countryside.
UHI was first recognized in London in the early 1800’s. Beginning with the
seminal work of Oke in the 1970’s there’s been a growing scientific
literature on studies at various time scales. On climatological scales the
results of Karl and Williams (1986), Roth et al (1989), Goodridge (1996) and
some others come to mind immediately. The graph I linked to is entirely
consistent with these results, but is uniquely oriented toward assessing
the impact of UHI on quasi-continental-scale averages throughout the 20th
century. There’s no indication that stations on urban fringes, which may
benefit from cooler air drawn in from the countryside by enhanced urban
convection, were used in determining the urban – nonurban discrepancies, as
you imply. If anything, such stations would likely be classified as urban.
Your response misses a very crucial point: the necessity of
maintaining measurement locations fixed throughout time for rigorous
detection of changes in climate. Alas, most of the stations in the data
base were not even set up until the middle of the last century. The ranks
of longer nonurban records are remarkably thin outside of the contiguous
USA. Only the Alice Springs record covers the entire century in the vast
Australian outback. BEST’s postulated universal spatial “correlation
length” fails miserably when applied across different climate zones or (at
the trend-affected low frequencies) acrosss urban or land-use boundaries
within a zone. Geophysicists know better than to krig across fault
structures; it’s time for “climate scientists” to learn the same lesson.
Sound science is not simply an algorithmic exercise. It requires insight
based on masterful comprehension of basics, diligently validated data, as
well as incisive analyses. And it requires a receptive, objective mind. I
leave it to scientifically competent readers to decide whether your
ad-hominem-tinged presumption that I “have used less than superstition”
to undergird my objections to BEST’s aberrant results and radical
conclusions is remotely credible.
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John S. | April 16, 2012 at 9:50 pm |
One is amazed by what you believe you can deduce about a stranger on the Internet, when you so disparage readings ‘mainly from the Internet’.
Alas, that you use so little of the Internet in forming the foundation of your deductions, else you may have noticed that Mosher and myself have a longstanding and rather bitter difference of opinion on exactly the views of his that you attribute to me. I’ve called some of his work “Harry Potter Statistics,” and excoriated his practices of using snippets of impossible to verify Canadian data without understanding the limitations of his source, in a manner not dissimilar to what you say BEST does. (Which, considering Steve Mosher’s close connections to a small part of the project, it’s not hard to see why you may be confusing him for the whole project.)
Note, that’s his statistics, his practices, his opinions and his views. As a human being, I’ve never met Mr. Mosher. I don’t know him personally, I have nothing against him, for all that we have a wide chasm between us of beliefs and attitudes, and I regard highly his determination, cleverness and resourcefulness, as well as respect his professional achievements and substantial body of support for the advancement of science.
Though he is a polemicist (and worse.. he’s good at it), he reminds scientists to take seriously their obligations, rather than to take themselves too seriously.
You, on the other hand, appear to seriously believe you’ve set out your case in enough detail that we can all psychically guess what you mean without you being under the least onus to say what exactly that is.
How is one to take such voodoo argumentation as anything but superstition, or less?
Now that you’ve supplemented your hand-waving with actual detail, the epithet ‘superstition’ is clearly inappropriate.
‘Elitism’, it appears, is more apt.
Internet sources aren’t good enough. Seven levels of statistical validation of methods and open peer review aren’t good enough. The idea that there may be other experienced statisticians in the world who might have handled larger and more complex datasets than your particular favorite ‘experienced geoscientists’ (who remain nameless?) never occurs to you. The idea that there may be other factors than were considered by Oke some four decades ago with less than one percent of the data currently available to BEST, and other qualified geoscientists lately before BEST, never occurs to you. (While Socrates, who also originated the UHI idea, somewhat before the 1800’s and not in London, goes uncredited by you.) The idea that your personal reading, that apparently ended when Jerry Maguire shouted, “Show me the money!”, might have been supplanted by more recent developments never apparently occurs to you.
If incisive analysis is required for science, then your argument is doomed.
Rejecting mathematical truths and replacing them with outdated opinion is the act of an old guard that cannot come to grips with time passing them by.
I’m amused by your rapid move from one groundless presumption to another in
your uninsightful reply. Such boorish personal attacks should find no place in scientific debate.
Nothing has seriously challenged the basic first-order physics of UHI
development that I sketched. Your allusion to research du jour on
second-order effects, such as cooling by haphazard plumes of aerosols and
particulates is largely irrelevant to climate-scale urban discrepancies
with validated nonurban records, located not necessarily downwind and on
the order of ~100km away. Such plumes would cool the cities of origin even
more, due to higher concentrations. Yet, in neo-capitalistic China and
Russia, urban temperatures are rising particularly fast.
V. Ramanathan has conjectured “global dimming” due to increased atmospheric
pollution as an explanation for the deep dip in surface temperatures that
culminated in 1976. The inconvenient fact is that this dip, which had some
alarmists talking about a coming ice age, was experienced primarily at
nonurban stations. Contrarily, most urban records show little, if any,
dip. All of the published “global” surface temperature indices more
closely resemble the urban signature during that period, indicating
corruption by UHI intensification in the post-war era.
Despite the fact that I distinguished amply between Mosher’s views and
yours, you take pains to distance yourself from him in your reply.
Nevertheless, your views on BEST’s project clearly converge on its putative
value. You both tout the sheer bulk of the data base and the “mathematical
truth” of the processing algorithm. I recall hearing John Tukey at a
research symposium decades ago presciently warning about the perils of
growing mountains of unvalidated data in trying to understand physical
reality. IIRC, he said: “We don’t need more data; we need better,
concentrated information measures.” Sadly, BEST provides little of the
latter, while trumpeting the former. At best, they obtain a statistical
description of a geographically incomplete, patently biased and otherwise
mangled data base. Even the most rigorous mathematics has no compelling
power over physical reality. Trusting the results of a huge computational
effort as if they were immune to the GIGO principle is a sure sign of
scientific gullibility.
Finally, I find it richly ironic that you should bring up Socrates in a
gratuitous display of historical one-upmanship. It was he who declared that
knowing the limits of his knowledge is his greatest strength. May his
wisdom guide your career in the blogosphere.
Curiosity is beyond the pale of knowledge.
==============
John S. | April 18, 2012 at 9:11 pm |
One upsmanship? You think you’re still only behind by single digits?
Do you put everything through a blender before reading it, that you so misapprehend what citations you make?
I have no intention of speaking for Steve Mosher, but if he’s made the statements you claim, then I clearly haven’t put enough space between his views and mine. However, based on track record, I think I’ve left enough.
UHI is real. I’ve said so in the past. It’s provable by Physics and by observation, where there is enough observation. It’s important and its study valuable. However, UHI is a next-to-nothing, on its first order Physics, amounting at most to an order of magnitude less than the much larger GHE based on exactly the same first order Physics.
BEST and other studies looking at evidence of the urban shadow effect are at least as important as UHI, among other things in understanding the limits on the Greenhouse Effect’s much smaller and weaker cousin, UHI.
As to this argument of yours that suggests or implies more observation is worse than less observation, all other things remaining equal, or even that BEST made too little effort to validate its data. In some ways, sometimes, this argument holds water. You may have noted exchanges between tonyb and myself on this topic. Expertise certainly plays an important role in judging data, so long as we avoid mere argument from authority. Do you have a list of UHI experts who have dismissed UHI as completely as you have, and perhaps some expert arguments as to why? Because that’d be a nice change.
However, BEST’s validation is beyond a gold standard. Textbooks ought be inspired by the BEST approach to statistical verification of the validity of observations where serious questions about quality arise. Is it perfect? No. Is it far better than the prior bases for UHI claims? Absolutely, by every objective standard.
If you still wish to hold patriotically to your subjective judgements and faith in the names of dead old scientists, that’s fine. Who am I to attack a man’s religion?
Oh, and that word, “boorish”; clearly you’ve missed me being boorish. This isn’t it. However, after passing through that akrasiac blender you appear to use to prepare your reading material, I can’t guarantee what you’ll imagine has been written.
Serious demands on my time and mounting technical difficulties encountered
in posting here force my final remarks to be very brief, ignoring your
persistently personal tack.
BEST’s data validation procedure indeed is virtually nothing, compared to
military-grade signal discrimination/detection methods. It amounts to
little more than elementary statistical tests applied across an
inhomogeneous spatial aggregate of variously flawed time-series.
Time-domain testing–absolutely critical to maintaining signal
integrity–is absent at appropriate scales. That scarcely constitutes
validation “beyond a gold standard.” Nor does removing a small number of “rural” stations, so sorely lacking around the world, from a mountain of other data and noting the small impact upon the “global” result constitute a valid basis for dismissing UHI effects.
I’m all in favor of more bona fide observations . A few hundred intact
records, uncorrupted by UHI and distributed reasonably evenly in the world
would provide far more reliable estimates of “global” temperature over the
last two centuries. Alas, nothing of the kind is in existence. In South
America, the record at Rio was the only one available for many generations.
Deus-ex-machina synthetic approaches using tens of thousands of record
snippets do not a reliable proxy make.
The critical issue is not what fraction UHI constitutes of the misnomered
GHE, but the fraction of the changes observed in surface temperatures since
the beginning of instrumental records. It proves to be of the same order
of magnitude as the changes and far more coherent with other factors than
with CO2 concentrations. Attribution to AGW does not withstand closer
analytic scrutiny by cross-spectral techniques nor by well-grounded
thermodynamic considerations.
Have a good weekend.
John S. | April 20, 2012 at 7:58 pm |
Military…?!
I use a hay fork on hay, not a dinner fork.
Doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as hay, nor that nutrition from hay doesn’t eventually make it into my diet through intermediate processing by rumination.
BEST has limitations. Dismissing it entirely on invalid purposes, while upholding the inferior UHI record is hypocrisy.
BEST tends to better frame the context of the UHI, within the large body of knowledge. As you use the body of knowledge argument to build up UHI, again rejecting BEST on that basis is also hypocrisy.
As so much consilient evidence corresponds to BEST, we have fairly good verification of the success of BEST’s methods.
Use less DL. More LP.
Chris Colose | April 6, 2012 at 10:51 pm | Reply
“It’s pretty much right that the greenhouse effect acts to bring the surface temperature somewhere between the “effective” blackbody temperature and the photosphere temperature.”
That’s nutso.
“The hyperphysics link is embarrassingly wrong about why the greenhouse effect warms. It’s certainly possible to change the albedo by adding greenhouse gases, either by direct Rayleigh scattering (though you need a lot more CO2 than anything relevant to the Earth case for this to matter), or by feedbacks, but the greenhouse effect itself works independently of the planetary albedo.”
No, the award-winning Hyperlinks website is owned by a UofG physics professor who built it as an instructional tool for physics teachers. The mistakes being propagated here are embarrassing in that they are literally elementary mistakes. I happened to like the language he used for the greenhouse effect which is 100% accurate. You can literally see it in spectrographs taken looking downward at the atmosphere. There are absorption bands where there shouldn’t be absorption bands in far infrared. The albedo of the planet is reduced in those frequences. Experimentally proven. This is the one and only thing that greenhouse can do. If you don’t know that you don’t know spit.
David Springer | April 7, 2012 at 4:41 pm | Reply
Yes it is experimentally proven that there are IR absorption bands. How does that have anything to do with heat energy transfer:
a. within the atmosphere where other modes exist and the second law determines direction
b. between earth and sun in the day and earth and universe at night
Do you have experimental evidence of heat trapping by IR absorbing/reemitting gases?
Yes. I put into evidence as Exhibit A several million ventilation system controllers for high occupancy buildings that detect level of CO2 by shining beam of light through a sample of air with a known CO2 concentration and a sample of ambient air. A simple forumulaic comparison of power output from two phototransisters yields the CO2 concentration in the ambient sample. When it hits a high trip point ventilation fans are turned on that exchange air with outside air so the building occupants don’t choke on their own “pollutant” CO2 emissions.
This is essentially John Tyndall’s laboratory appartus which took up a large room reduced to the size of a thimbal and made far more accurate by modern technology.
Sorry, John Tyndall’s experiments explicitly did *not* measure heat trapping, only “failure of transmission” or likely scattering of IR waves.
Exhibit A is a red herring, just as Tyndall’s experiments are.
Yes John Tyndall’s experiments did explicitely measure IR “trapping”. He shined an IR light source of known intensity through all kinds of gases at many different pressures and measured the intensity of the light coming out the other end of the tube. The apparatus was brilliantly constructed. Tyndall was one of the most prolific and important experimental physicists of the golden era of classical thermodynbamics. His work has only been improved upon to this day. If you don’t understand his work that’s your problem not his.
blouis – If you are arguing that CO2 does not capture IR photons of certain wave lengths, then you need to explain to me how IR spectrometers work. I’ve used them quite a lot.
David and Jim2,
I have read Tyndall’s original works. Yes he was a methodical scientist with an important place in history. His work is important because he demonstrated that apparently “transparent” gases are not “transparent” to heat (IR). However, *never* did Tyndall measure *warming* in the gases, nor did he measure *scattering* (absorption/reemission) by the gases.
Now some might like to deny the existence of the reemission phenomenon, but science doesn’t say that.
To assume “heating” of the IR “scattering” gases is a logical fallacy, and I have not yet seen *any* evidence that this has been measured in a laboratory *ever*. Please present evidence if someone knows where it is.
If one wants to talk in analogies, shining visible light through smoke attenuates, reflects, and scatters the incoming light. That one can measure attenuation on the other side (as Tyndall did for IR) does not mean the light was “absorbed”, and nobody would ever think that for visible light. No different to shining invisible light (IR) through particles (CO2 molecules) that absorb and reemit in random directions, just that people’s scientific logic has been suspended to support the fantasy greenhouse gas hypothesis.
blouis79
Tyndall certainly DID measure absorption and re-emission. He shined an IR source into a highly polished brass tube filled with a test gas. The tube was capped on each end by rock salt windows (how he obtained optical quality rock salt crystals large enough cut and polish into windows is another story as well as how he cut and polished them but I digress). He projected the light through a vacuum and through dry air and measured the energy with a galvanometer at the opposite end. His equipment wasn’t sensitive enough to tell dry apart from a vacuum but it was plenty sensitive to enough record large drops in power when certain other gases including water vapor, methane and other hydrocarbons were tested. He also discovered that it was the number of molecules of the absorbant gas that mattered as he could either double the pressure or double the length of the test chamber to get identical results. He also discovered that the absorption did not increase linearally with number of molecules of gas but rather diminished in absorptive capacity per unit of gas as the number of molecules in the radiative path increased.
The galvanometer didn’t lie. What was happening was that calorific gases (quaint term) absorbed a portion of the projected radiation and remitted some of that backwards toward the source instead of forward to the galvonometer. This in point of fact the so-called downwelling IR from gases like CO2 and the amount of downwelling is precisely the amount of energy missing from the galvanometer when the test chamber contained a vacuum instead of the gas.
Reading about he set up the experimental apparatus is fascinating. For instance the galvanometer was so sensitive he had to read it through a telescope because a person’s body heat close enough to read the dial would mess it up. In order to dry his gases he passed them through a chemical cannister with very hydrophillic chemical in it. His most stable source of calorific rays was a copper plate covered with lamp black which was the wall of a vessel filled with boiling water which of course reaches a very stable temperature equal to the boiling point of water for whatever atmospheric pressure was in the lab that day. The galvanometer was an analog affair that was very sensitive and very linear only over a very small deflection range so he devised a shutter that allowed him to conduct each experiment precisely at the most sensitive linear range of his antique thermopile and voltmeter. Just the construction alone was great reading to say nothing of confirming and expanding upon classic thermodynamic theory.
bloius79
Heat trapping is a misnomer. Nothing is trapped. The back radiation reduces the rate of radiative cooling of the back-irriadiated object. If there’s another free path such as evaporation then the oject will cool through that path instead. If it can’t take path to regain equilibrium its temperature will rise until the higher radiative loss rate makes up for the increase in back radiation slowing it down. This may also take the form of increased conductive heat transfer the rate of which, like radiative transfer, is dependent on the temperature difference between the two things involved in the exchange. Now what the AGW boffins know but don’t admit in public is that over the ocean where there’s a practically infininte supply of water to evaporate the increased back radiation simply raises the evaporation rate and instead of the surface getting warmer the energy is whisked away in latent heat of vaporization which reappears as sensible heat in the cloud deck so you get a smaller lapse rate from surface to cloud and a higher lapse rate from cloud to space with no change in surface temperature. This cuts the amount of greenhouse warming by CO2 down to 30% of what it would be if it were over a global desert instead of a global ocean. To make up for that so we can get our panties properly twisted in fright they invented a water vapor feedback that is three times as strong as the CO2 which causes the increased evaporation. This water vapor amplification is utterly contemptible claptrap. Clouds have a negative feedback so the total effect of water vapor is a slight net cooling. This is amply proven by the fact that the highest mean annual temperature in the world happens over an equatorial desert where the atmosphere is as dry as dry gets near the equator with only 1-3″ of annual rainfall. Adding insult to injury the record was set 50 years ago and hasn’t been exceeded since then so all the extra CO2 over that desert can’t even make up for the abnormally low humidity that accompanied a long drought in the early 1960’s.
I’m a luke warmer. The only warming done by CO2 is over land and it happens where the most where and when there’s the least water vapor to interfere with it which means that higher latitudes with colder dryer air on average than lower latitudes with wetter warmer is where it happens. All that I’ve written is in perfect agreement with all the instrumental temperature record.
.
So, jerseykid, it’s nice to know people do actually sometimes read original sources.
So you agree there is no heat “trapping”. Not that Tyndall measured warming in the gas column, he didn’t as I have been saying for a long time.
That the absorption and reemission can contravene the second law was also *not* demonstrated by Tyndall, nor anyone else in history that I or anyone round here can find.
Also note that the concentrations of gas measured by Tyndall were 1-2 orders of magnitude higher than atmospheric. But you have noticed it is all about the molecules in teh path, not their concentration of distance. Using Tyndall’s results as a guide, what sort of difference might 3.4m of 100% CO2 cause??
Will the 3.4m of CO2 warm or not, and by how much?
jerseykid;
“The only warming done by CO2 is over land and it happens where the most where and when there’s the least water vapor to interfere with it…”
Yes, and it does SUCH a good job of keeping the deserts warm at night!!
;)
This is excellent historical information from David Springer.
The non-linear nature derives from the logarithmic sensitivity of forcing to CO2 concentration. The way to understand this is to consider differential increases of gas concentration. In the test chamber experiment, this is just a differential increase in the length of the tube. The scattering cross-section is just a proportional increase to how much gas is already there so it integrates as the ratio of delta increase to the cumulative length of travel of the photon:
So as the photon travels a length of tube, it gets progressively more difficult to increase the amount of scattering, not because it can’t but because the photon has had a large probability of being intercepted already. That generates the logarithmic sensitivity.
The analogy to to the test chamber is the height of the atmosphere. Excess CO2 pops out at the top of the atmosphere as Mosher describes, and that increases the length of the travel of the outgoing IR photons, and the same logarithmic sensitivity results. This is incorrectly labeled as saturating behavior, instead of an asymptotic logarithmic behavior caused by a law of diminishing returns.
I haven’t seen this derived in this specific way but the math is high-school level integral calculus that illustrates the basic mechanism. The actual model used by Andrew Lacis and other climate scientists is to configure the cross-sections by compositing the atmosphere into layers or “slabs” and then propagating the interception of photons by CO2 by differential numerical calculations. I think there is also broadening of the spectral lines involved as concentration increases, but the first order result is the logarithmic sensitivity.
The broadening is what I think is not well considered. At higher temperatures and pressures broadening is most likely, decreasing with altitude. This is the temperature dependence I mentioned which is mainly due to the decreasing degrees of freedom as collisional transfer decreases and the sublimination temperature and pressure is approached. The more rapid decrease in the specific heat of CO2 is a fairly obvious indication. :)
Captain D, I look forward to your complete simulation of this broadening effect. Hand-waving is plenty good enough to get oneself motivated. That’s typically the way I approach it. I see a hand-waving explanation such as Springer put forward with the Tyndall effect, and then I quickly prototype it into a model. In that case the model is a simple integral calculus expression that logically transcribes what Springer said into a mathematical formalism. Thus a model is born.
You just have to get your motivation level up to transcribe your thoughts into action. You may fear that it is complicated but if the effect is first order as you seem to think, then there must be a straightforward model and simulation that will show this. It is rare that it is not the case.
Web you are a pip, you would ignore basic evidence in favor of a speculation that broadening may occur that that it may possibly enhance the impact of CO2 than look at why it will happen and why it will reduce the impact of CO2. You would rather use basic diffusion rate equation that provide good results in a limited range than determine why they degrade as they approach the limits of their ranges. The fun is in the anomalies!
CO2 is a triatomic molecule with limited degrees of freedom. The energy associated with those degrees of freedom is N^(kT/2), your favorite relationship, note the T. The specific heat capacity of CO2 reduces from 0.89 at 350K to .0.73 at 200K at one atmosphere. But below 200K, depending on the pressure, something happens, it reaches a sublimination point. That would have a serious impact on the degrees of freedom. I get stiff when I get too cold, so does CO2. At 184K (65Wm-2), which just happens to be the apparent temperature of Venus with its nearly 100% CO2 atmosphere, it no longer has optional degrees of freedom. Remarkably, the minimum temperature of deep convective clouds is 185K (67Wm-2), slightly higher than Venus because Earth has slightly higher gravity.
Since that is your favorite relationship, E=N^(kT/2), I thought you might like to do the curve fitting, I am more of a big picture kinda guy :)
For the infinite greenhouse effect nutballs – no Virginia, that can’t explain why the earth wasn’t a giant snowball billions of years ago. The greenhouse effect is limited by the available power from the sun. You can’t get more power out of something than gets put into it. Period. Barring internal planetary heat or significant variation in solar constant the mean power output of the earth is capped by the mean power input from tthe sun.
If the greenhouse was not limited in this way there’d be no faint yound son paradox. It would simply be asserted that the greenhouse effect was sufficienct to maintain a liquid ocean with 900W/m2 of power input from the sun and that would be the end of it.
I am stunned by the lack of essential knowledge in physics by a great many of those who pretend to have a good understanding of the basics.
The Race is On – Faint Young Sun Paradox Alive and Well
05/31/2011
Faint Young Sun Paradox Not Solved, Says NASA
Last year, scientists claimed to have solved the faint young Sun paradox. They were wrong. Now the paradox is back and more puzzling than ever.
kfc 05/31/2011
15 Comments
Liquid water has flowed on Earth for some 3.8 billion years, since not long after the planet formed. The evidence comes from rocks that date from that period which seem to have formed under the action of water.
But this presents palaeontologists and geologists with a problem. At that time, the Sun was some 30 per cent dimmer than it is today and would not have provided enough heat to keep water liquid on the surface.
This is known as the faint young Sun paradox and it has puzzled scientists since the 1970s when astronomers first pointed it out. But it didn’t really worry anybody. The obvious solutions are that the Earth was warmer because it reflected less heat from the Sun, it had a lower albedo, or that it was victim of a runaway greenhouse effect. One of these must be right but nobody was sure which.
But last year, a group of researchers claimed to have solved the paradox. They said that the make up of rocks from that time exclude the possibility that the atmosphere was rich in a greenhouse gas such as methane or carbon dioxide.
Instead, the Earth must have had a lower albedo and therefore must have absorbed more heat from the Sun than it does today. The lower albedo, they argued, was the result of fewer biological particles in the atmosphere. These nucleate water droplet formation. So without them there would be fewer clouds and less sunlight reflected into space.
These guys published their solution in Nature and the problem was thought to have been solved. (We looked at another mechanism that may have prevented cloud formation in the early atmosphere about a year ago.)
But today Colin Goldlatt and Kevin Zahnle at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field re-ignite the controversy.
They’ve looked at this problem again and studied the effect of fewer clouds. They say that however you do the numbers, this could not have made the Earth hot enough to allow the existence of liquid water.
Clouds have two effects. In general, high clouds trap heat while low clouds reflect it. “Therefore the absolute upper bound on warming by decreasing cloud reflectivity would be found by removing low clouds entirely,” they say.
When you do that in a computer model of the Earth’s early climate, you get no more than half the heating necessary to maintain liquid water on the surface.
“We show that, even with the strongest plausible assumptions, reducing cloud and surface albedos falls short by a factor of two of resolving the paradox,” say Goldlatt and Zahnle.
So the paradox is alive and well; and more puzzling than ever. Last year we discovered that a greenhouse effect can’t explain the paradox. Now we know that a lower albedo wouldn’t have done the trick either.
So the race is back on to nail this problem once and for all. Get your thinking caps on.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1105.5425: Faint Young Sun Paradox Remains
Sorry about the double pasting above and lack of linkage to original material.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26825/
Faint Young Sun Paradox Not Solved, Says NASA
Last year, scientists claimed to have solved the faint young Sun paradox. They were wrong. Now the paradox is back and more puzzling than ever.
kfc 05/31/2011
–more at link
The earth has a molten core.
a banana is yellow
When ripe, most commonly.
========
For those who can’t understand, the paradox is apparently about the impossibility of the earth having a surface of water when the sun shines poorly.
Does not the fact that the core of the earth having a temperature of 4000-7000K and that some of that heat emerges at the surface visible as hot springs and volcanoes indicate is is possible heat from the core may actually be responsible for part of surface temperature.
We accept that the sun has a variable output of heat. Why is it so?
Why can’t the earth’s core have a variable output of heat? Have we been measuring it?
It’s possible but unlikely. Radioactive decay rates are among the most dependable constants in nature although some scientific creationist crackpots might argue otherwise. So too is the rate of cooling very well established for different kinds of materials in various environments. These are empirically established and the material datasheets used by engineers for all kinds of purposes.
That said it’s remotely possible that hot spots in the crust and plumes from the mantle that constitute the so-called ring of fire and cause less frequent volcanism elsewhere could wax and wane significantly and thereby release more or less internal heat it’s wild speculation with no plausible explanation for how it might happen.
David Springer | April 7, 2012 at 5:22 pm | Reply
Radioactive decay might be dependable, but the varying output of the sun is measured and documented scientific fact.
Changes in the conduction of heat from core to surface are evident at places with hot springs.
You “remotely possible” changes in conduction of heat from the core are more likely to be true than the pure fantasy greenhouse effect.
The greenhouse effect cannot possibly explain the faint young sun paradox. After you eliminate the impossible what remains, however improbable, is the truth. What we have remaining after eliminating the greenhouse effect is our star behaving far outside the bounds of thousands and thousands of other stars just like it or something very very wrong in our understanding of geothermal energy flows.
It ain’t called a paradox for nothing.
I wonder to what extent the interior of the earth is modified by variable solar magnetic effects. Also the earth’s magnetosphere, joint product of earth & sun, has it a role?
Unknown unknowns out the kazoo.
========
David – just for the record, I’m not a creationist. However, there is this:
March 20, 2012
…
The system works by measuring differences in gamma radiation emitted when atoms in radioactive elements “decay,” or lose energy. This rate of decay is widely believed to be constant, but recent findings challenge that long-accepted rule.
The new detection technique is based on a theory that radioactive decay rates are influenced by solar activity, possibly streams of subatomic particles called solar neutrinos. This influence can wax and wane due to seasonal changes in the Earth’s distance from the sun and also during solar flares, according to the theory, which is supported by data published in a dozen research papers since it was proposed in 2006, said Ephraim Fischbach, a Purdue University professor of physics.
…
http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2012/120320T-FischbachSolar.html
Oh, we can’t measure it. We know the core temperature lies between about 4000K and 7000K.
What would be the core temperature on earth if there was no sun?
What are the relative contributions to heat energy being conducted from the earth’s core vs heat energy absorbed from the sun?
Oliver, help us out here.
We aren’t likely to solve the faint young sun paradox on a blog.
Easy, I recollect it’s in the files somewhere. Forty-two comes faintly to mind. Gimme a bit.
========
1. See reference #09 here: http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
2. We are slowly moving closer to seeing the link between the Climategate problem and our vanishing “Bill of Rights” !
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-25
Ordinary citizens and scientists publicly demonstrate our own inability to govern every time we accept government-sponsored, consensus gobbledygook as scientific fact – “Dark energy”, “Higgs boson” (God-particle), “Oscillating solar neutrinos”, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear/Space Science
http://www.omatumr.com/
omanuel wrote:
“1. See reference #09 here: http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/”
I was foolish enough to go look. After ascertaining that it appeared to be published on an online repository for crank science called The Journal of Modern Physics I googled the journal’s impact factor. It’s 1.44. I didn’t know it could get that low and still be listed. For those who don’t know the journal gets an average of 1.44 citations per paper it publishes. You can get that high by citing yourself in less than two subsequent papers! LOL
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear/Space Science
http://www.omatumr.com
The Apollo program ended 40 years ago. I did a quick survey of your publishing history. You were a regular whirling dirvish in the 1960’s, 1970’s and even some of the 1980’s. Then it looks like something major happened in your life and you went from publishing in high impact journals like Nature with high double digit impact factors to low impact journals with low single digit impact factors. Care to say what happened? Often that’s a sign you ceased doing anything that really mattered and strolled into your dotage cups on a pension and a penchant to indulge in flights of fantasy. I’ve seen it happen to others in the same way. Physics is a cruel mistress. You do you best work before you reach 30 years of age and it’s all downhill from there. Like professional boxer who gets punch drunk before middle age.
Ollie wrote:
>Ordinary citizens and scientists publicly demonstrate our own inability to govern every time we accept government-sponsored, consensus gobbledygook as scientific fact – “Dark energy”, “Higgs boson” (God-particle), “Oscillating solar neutrinos”, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
Ollie, neutrino oscillations have been confirmed down here on good ol’ solid terra firma: see, for example, http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.1669 . This is not speculative physics.
Look: I guess something went awry when you worked with NASA. I’ve seen stupidity, laziness, and outright corruption in a lot of government-funded science, too. But, the mere fact that it is government-funded does not make it wrong: even the old Soviet Union managed to turn out some good, government-funded science (and, admittedly, a disproportionate amount of bad science — when I was a grad student, a post-doc warned me not to trust any Soviet experimental results until they had been confirmed in the West, which turned out to be wise advice).
Science is judged by the evidence, not the source of funding: we don’t care who funded Galileo or Newton; we care what their evidence was.
Dave
Just thinking out loud, the moon was a good deal closer to the earth several billion years ago producing huge tidal affects. A good geologist might be able to shed some light on how much hotter the interior might have been during this period.
Jim
“Just thinking out loud, the moon was a good deal closer to the earth several billion years ago producing huge tidal affects. A good geologist might be able to shed some light on how much hotter the interior might have been during this period. ”
Or because the moon more “recently” hit earth.
“The moon likely started as a giant ball of magma formed from the remains of a collision by a Mars sized object with the Earth about four and a half billion years ago. After the magma cooled, the moon’s crust formed. Then between 4.5 and 4.3 billion years ago, a giant object hit near the moon’s South Pole”
See video:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/vid-tour.html
Also if closer and 500 to 1000 degrees, it might radiate some heat to Earth. Not sure where the moon was in Earth orbit when the South Pole-Aitken Basin was formed.
Don’t we agree that if Earth surface was say 300 degree and the Moon was 300 degrees, that the Moon would cool quicker- because the Earth has more atmosphere. The Earth is also more massive.
Most experts would say the Moon stopped being volcanic active, billion years ago. Or was volcanically active for about 3 billion years. The cause for the volcanism of moon was the heat from formative impactors [including earth as one of “impactors”]. So if the Moon takes 3 billion to cool, how long does it take for a larger body with an atmosphere to cool?
Thanks for the link. What an incredibly rare and wonderful planet we live on! Is it possible that these events (close, very hot moon, combined with a very seismically active shallow crust) led to conditions that would allow water to remain in liquid form.
Jim
The sun is same story. Class M stars like the sun are exceedingly stable over their main sequence lifetime which lasts billions of years. They grow gradually hotter a well known rate as they age based upon looking at hundreds of thousands of class M stars in the sky around us in various stages of life from birth to death. There is no known mechanism or observation hinting that large variation in power output over short spans of times ever happens or ever can happen. Slight variation on the order of 1% due to chaotic flows of various kinds disturbing the surface are understood to some extent and well observed but more than that is conjecture without basis.
That conjecture is without basis.
yeah, that’s what I thought
Curry uses IP blocking…
my comments were not appearing under my regular id
not appearing with a changed email address
but start showing up using an anonymous proxy to change my IP address
caught red handed censoring Curry, for no violations whatsoever of commenting rules
what have you got to say for yourself sweety?
jerseykid wrote:
>yeah, that’s what I thought
>Curry uses IP blocking…
Oh, I am shocked! Truly shocked!
Professor Curry created this blog, her own posts are the main “value added” hat cause people to come by and read the blog, and yet she dares to exercise a tiny bit of control over who can post here?
Why, why, that is almost as evil as controlling who can walk into your house, dip into the fridge for a bite, and then go into your bedroom and take a nap.
I mean, where would Goldilocks be in a world like that?
Eh, Goldilocks?
stuff goes into spam rather randomly, Dave Springer seems to be today’s puzzling “victim” of the spam filter
I really touched a nerve, didn’t I, Dave? I bet you were a real joy at the office when someone caught you in a mistake and tried to make you take ownership of it.
Now, let’s get back to you explaining to me how a surface at equilibrium illuminated by 1000W/m2 can emit more than 1000W/m2. Call perpetual motion machines of either kind a hobby of mine. I was a patent maven at Dell and participated along with 10 other engineers in reviewing about 10 patent abstracts submitted by employees all over the company in every field of expertise from novel business processes (boy did we clean up on those as they had just become fair game for patent protection in the 1990’s) and it always seemed just patently unfair (excuse the pun) that the patent examiners automatically rejected any perpetual motion patents. Since a surface at equilibrium emiiting more energy than it receives without an internal energy source is in fact perpetual motion I’m quite anxious to hear how a theoretical physics PhD from Stanford of all places would explain this to a patent examiner. Humor me, doc. Pretend I’m a patent examiner and I’ve got your claims in front me that you’ve invented a machine that produces energy from nowhere.
Good luck.
Oops, we reviewed about 10 patents PER WEEK at Dell in the patent committee. I was a member for two years for a total of about 1000 patents over 1000 weeks. I put my stamp of approval on about 300 of them and so far as I know all 300 were eventually awarded a patent. My name is on four of them or, at the time, about 1% of the patent portfolio of a company doing $20 billion in annual sales. Not too shabby. It was sort of a cottage industry for engineers. Each engineer was required to submit at least two abstracts per year to meet peformance plan objectives. Generous stock options were awarded upon filing and vested over a period of five years come hell or high water but they vested 100% when and if the US PTO granted the patent. All of mine were granted within 24 months of filing without objection. The stock options for those turned out to be close to a cool seven figures. Like being the sole recipient of a Nobel prize without the ignomy that went along with Al Gore and Barack Obama’s or the award shared by all the IPCC authors. I’m not ashamed admit I value merit recognition certificates with presidents faces on them more than any other kind.
Oops, we reviewed about 10 patents PER WEEK at Dell in the patent committee. I was a member for two years for a total of about 1000 patents over 1000 weeks. I put my stamp of approval on about 300 of them and so far as I know all 300 were eventually awarded a patent. My name is on four of them or, at the time, about 1% of the patent portfolio of a company doing $20 billion in annual sales. Not too shabby. It was sort of a cottage industry for engineers. Each engineer was required to submit at least two abstracts per year to meet peformance plan objectives. Generous stock options were awarded upon filing and vested over a period of five years come hell or high water but they vested 100% when and if the US PTO granted the patent. All of mine were granted within 24 months of filing without objection. The stock options for those turned out to be close to a cool seven figures. Like being the sole recipient of a Nobel prize without the ignomy that went along with Al Gore and Barack Obama’s or the award shared by all the IPCC authors. I’m not ashamed admit I value merit recognition certificates with presidents faces on them more than any other kind.
huh… some real oddities in wordpress blogdom today
sorry about the double post I’m just not very patient today
If you have black uphostery, park your car in the sun with the windows up, the surface of the diver’s seat will indicate than it is emitting more that you might think.
There is a real Tyndall gas effect and it can increase the temperature of the surface. What is missing on the climate side of the debate is a reasonable upper bound for the Tyndall effect based on physics. There are a number of climate scientists getting off their fat tails and lopping off the fat tail of that uncertainty :)
capt.dallas, the glass greenhouse or tin greenhouse has been long ago explained as a convection-blocking effect preventing cooling. Nothing to do with Tyndall there.
The Greenhouse effect is an extreme version of the Tyndall Gas effect. Convection is not contain in the atmosphere of course and is a negative feedback on the Tyndall gas effect. Like water vapor, CO2 does absorb and emit radiant energy in it spectrum, but it is limited to its spectrum which is approximately 15% of the total outgoing radiant energy. The basic physics that a doubling of CO2 can produce an additional 1.2Wm-2 of forcing is correct, but that additional forcing is offset by increased convection and latent cooling. CO2 is like a space blanket with a crap load of holes in it. There is no way another holy space blanket is going to create a real greenhouse effect. Don’t fool yourself into thinking there is no effect, it is just not as large as the alarmists have fooled themselves to believe.
Yeah dude but your black upholstery will not get hotter than the blackbody temperature for the energy it gets from the sun at high noon or whenever that happens barring some concentration of the light onto a small spot by a mirror or lense. It just ain’t gonna happen. These are the constraints that people developing solar power collectors have to work with. This is physical law and its inviolable except perhaps by God and his magic factory making solar collectors with greater than 100% efficiency isn’t running at the moment…
Captain D is back on track. I agree the main gist is to pin down the uncertainty, and not to toss out the fundamental ideas.
Web, I toss out ideas because that is what I thought these forums were for. I still am certain that the conductive impact is not negligible, convection due to increased CO2 is a negative impact that is not negligible, the ratio of combined atmospheric absorption to surface absorption is a negative feed back and that Arrhenius provides a good limit of perfection that will never be obtained.
Oh, and that your rate equations also only provide an upper limit, not a realistic mid-range estimate :)
capt.Dallas
My black upholstery emits exactly what I expect it to emit. At 32N latitude that’s quite a bit short of boiling water at sea level but maybe enough for a third degree burn if you stay in contact with it long enough and it’s thick enough to hold its temperature. White upholstery hope in next to naked and drive away no problemo. I use this (on the outside of the car not the inside) to illustrate how a few grams of black pigment in a kilogram of white paint spread over a few hundred hundred kilos of metal car body is enough to raise its temperature tens of degrees C more than a white car on a clear day at noon. A few grams of pigment is all it takes. So for anyone who says a trace gas such as CO2 can’t do much well a trace pigment on a car body sure can so why can’t a trace gas do the same?
Your description of the physics is better than most that I happen across in these free-for-all blogs. Good for you.
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 | April 8, 2012 at 12:19 am |
I’m curious.
Convection pretty much stops at 17 km, I’d been led by looking at the data and hearing out the specialists to believe.
With convection, what goes up must come down, and faster convection up equals faster convection down, as a pure mass balance issue.
So, the hotter stuff going up and losing heat sooner, which sounds like your negative feedback, is not balanced by that hotter stuff coming back down that spent less time giving off its heat, too?
How significant can we say is a negative feedback, when it may have no effect, or even positive net effect, because we’ve never measured for either and have only the sketchiest models at such small scale?
Especially given there’s 600 km nonconvecting atmosphere on top of that, where one understands more or less all the important action happens?
Bart R | April 8, 2012 at 12:52 am |
“Especially given there’s 600 km nonconvecting atmosphere on top of that, where one understands more or less all the important action happens?”
Yes, where CO2 enhances radiative cooling to space, by increasing “forth-radiation”.
Edim | April 8, 2012 at 1:16 am |
Oh. That’s so cute!
You could have a real future in forth-yard gardening, forth-stabbing, forth-flips, forth-room deals, as a running-forth, a forth-stop, with forth-talk and forth-handed compliments.
Bart R, now you have it forthwards.
jerseykid wrote to me:
>Now, let’s get back to you explaining to me how a surface at equilibrium illuminated by 1000W/m2 can emit more than 1000W/m2. Call perpetual motion machines of either kind a hobby of mine.
Howe can we “get back” to something we were never doing?
jer.. also wrote:
>I’m quite anxious to hear how a theoretical physics PhD from Stanford of all places would explain this to a patent examiner. Humor me, doc.
Nope, you lose, Goldilocks.
Okie dokey dopey. I can lead a horse’s ass to water but I can’t make him produce a brain fart. Expect me to repeat my question to you whenever I run into your sorry ass in the future.
what a dishonest player!
take lessons from Gavin did ya?
sorry doctor curry… I was the administrator of a high traffic wordpress blog for several years and on occasion some of my subscribers were inexplicably tossed into the spam queue as if they had inexplicably become persona non grata to Akismet
usually when I find my IP address being blocked it’s because someone blocked it on purpose
again my apologies – you seem to be a good egg and I shouldn’t have said what I did
no other damage done at any rate – it’s easy enough to change my IP address with an anonymous proxy when the need arises
forgive me for not using my real email address when using an anonymous proxy because one of the ways to monetize an anonymous proxy is by harvesting email addresses that pass through them that would otherwise not be accessible to anyone but you and I and wordpress
And I’m STILL waiting for physicistdave to explain how a surface illuminated by a 1000W/m2 source can emit more than 1000W/m2 without any other source of power. That’s just SO laughable but I don’t hear laughter coming out of physicsboy. Just whining at the lack of respect he’s getting. Such drivel is not deserving of respect. Not a bit of it. I understand completely why there’s nothing but the sound of crickets outside the offended little boy attitude. Schmuck.
What about if you focus a 1000 W/m2 light (e.g. direct sunlight on a clear day) to a point? If it gets hotter than 90 C it emits more than 1000 W/m2 from that point.
Jim D,
There are basic principles of optics that, as I understand it, prevent you from focusing it to a point. However, as I understand it, you can, in principle, produce a spot close to the temperature of the photosphere: you get something of this sort with solar ovens, which can indeed reach surprisingly high temperatures (though, of course, in practice not nearly as hot as the photosphere).
That sort of reasoning is part of what I had in mind in saying that I think one can fairly easily prove that GHGs cannot cause the earth to get hotter than the photosphere. In practice, there are, as I also said, surely limits that mean GHGs cannot get the earth nearly as hot as the photosphere.
However, as the case of Venus shows, enough of a blanket could most probably make the earth hot enough to make life on earth impossible. I agree with others who have posted on this thread that it is exceedingly unlikely that anthropogenic CO2 would lead to that result.
Weird that jerseykid keeps saying that I said things I never said, especially since anyone can look through my above comments and check for herself as to what I said. Of course, some people do suffer from problems that make it impossible for them to actually just look at the record: I suppose it would be unkind to be cruel to people such as jerkid..
Dave
jerkid wrote to me:
>And I’m STILL waiting for physicistdave to explain how a surface illuminated by a 1000W/m2 source can emit more than 1000W/m2 without any other source of power. That’s just SO laughable but I don’t hear laughter coming out of physicsboy.
Oh, no, I’m laughing a lot!
What I find incredibly hilarious is that you think *I* should explain something that I never said! *You* keep saying it, not me.
I assure you that you will wait forever for me to explain your fantasy.
Why on earth would I try to explain it?
Oh, yes, this is funny indeed.
Stick a fork in physicistdave, he’s done.
Folks who aren’t scientists, if you’re wondering: the comments on this topic in discussions between several pairs of participants pretty much exactly sounds the way real scientists talk to each other face to face, and behind each others’ backs, too.
In fact, it’s downright polite compared to real life exchanges.
I rarely run into anyone in real life who say things as asinine as what I witness here. Getting laughed at and humiliated in front of peers for saying something incredibly stupid in the real world is a whole lot different than having it happen on a blog so there’s a lot more effort making sure your brain is engaged before putting your mouth in gear. Here you just slink off to a another blog if it bothers you or go on without missing a beat because blog comments are buried in obscurity in a matter of hours if not sooner. In real life your boners can haunt you forever. Let out a massive brain fart in high school and it might result in your pals giving you a nickname they’ll use for the rest of your natural life. Let’s make an experiment with physicistdave. We have him on record essentially saying the greenhouse effect has an upper bound limited only by the temperature of the sun. So that means I can somehow illuminate a square meter with 1000 watts of solar energy and somehow get it above 365K which means it must be emitting more than 1000 watts per square meter. Clearly a brain fart of massive proportion for anyone able to pass a high school physics exam let alone a purported theoretical physicist with a Stanford PhD. I’d ask for money back from Stanford but I digress. So far he’s just pretending like he didn’t actually say it and I’m not worthy of an explanation because I’m rude even if he did say something like that. Moving along without missing a beat. If this was the real world I’d have called over a few coworkers and made a real horses ass out of him. Of course if this was the real world he’d have back pedaled at the speed of light and deprived me of the entertainment at his expense I’d have surely otherwise had.
jerseykid | April 8, 2012 at 1:08 am |
I believe I’ve run in circles much like you describe, in Piscataway for one. And yet, only a little muck ever really sticks. The guy who called Albert Einstein “Moptop”? Forgotten. One hardly ever says, “Thomas ‘Big-Ears’ Edison” or “Bill ‘Hound Dog’ Clinto..” Hrm. Maybe that last one’s a bad example.
However, you err as regards blogospheric memory. I still get tagged by the unforgiving multitudes with typos and inversions from over a year ago; how long ago were some of the obscurest Climategate emails actually sent, that people uphold as treasured discoveries every few weeks, still? Al Gore’s ‘invention’ of the Internet is, by necessity, older than the Internet, and he’s still routinely tagged with that pearl all over the Internet.
Also, in a theoretical sense, Dave wouldn’t be so wrong to begin a problem by framing the upper limit of Earth’s temperature with reference to the Sun. Theoreticians think Big Picture thoughts. In his worldview, someone disparaging such framing would be as alien to he and his circle of pals as he seems to you and yours, in that sense.
I’ve poked plenty of fun at Dave, not long ago, about Dark Energy and CERN. He was remarkably tolerant of the light joshing.
If you think you’ve said anything that hits him closer to the mark than I have, you’re likely mistaken in Dave’s estimation.
After all, while you were spending all your time and effort being technically brilliant, I was spending mine honing nasty quips about technically brilliant colleagues.
You get to enjoy the fruit of your brilliance. I get to reap the returns on name-calling and petty pranks.
Hound dog Clinton? Try “Slick Willy”.
It was certainly a bad example in more than one sense.
Bart R wrote of me:
>Also, in a theoretical sense, Dave wouldn’t be so wrong to begin a problem by framing the upper limit of Earth’s temperature with reference to the Sun.
Yes, of course, that’s what I said. To say “Greenhouse gases cannot make the earth’s temperature higher than the photosphere” of course does not logically imply that GHGs *can* get the earth’s temperature as high as the photosphere temperature. I never said or implied that. Indeed, I have said the contrary again and again.
Heaven knows why jerkid is determined to ascribe his own fantasies to me, but they are *his* fantasies, not mine.
Weirder and weirder.
Dave
jerkid wrote of me:
>We have him on record essentially saying the greenhouse effect has an upper bound limited only by the temperature of the sun. So that means I can somehow illuminate a square meter with 1000 watts of solar energy and somehow get it above 365K which means it must be emitting more than 1000 watts per square meter.
That is a malicious lie.
I said that I thought it could be fairly easily proven that you could not get earth’s temperature higher than the photosphere. I also added that, of course, it almost surely can be shown, but not as easily, that the temperature cannot get nearly that high as the result of greenhouse gases.
Why on earth you keep lying about this and claiming that I said things I never did escapes me.
How weird.
“You can’t pin me down because, as I keep ]saying, again and again, *I don’t know* what that limit is!”
Then you either do not understand Kirchoff’s Law or you don’t accept it.
Either way you’re a disgrace to Stanford.
PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT!!!!!!! I fart in your general direction.
No, it was a not a malicious lie. It was an inference.
I said (in essence) “the greenhouse is limited to 278K” and you said “it is limited to 5500K”.
This is analgous to me claiming that Venus’ (I know how much you love Venus) orbit is currently limited to 0.7 AU and you saying it’s limited to 200 AU.
How am I supposed to take that? You offered a preposterous limit. A limit which is fact an optical limit not a greenhouse limit. No possible optics can use solar light to heat something hotter 5500K. Given that the earth isn’t at the focal point of a parabolic mirror that stretches out past the moon or at the focal point of a magnifiying glass of the same dimension then without some means of concentration the earth’s mean temperature is limited by having a maximum possible mean power input of 342W/m2 which is about 277K.
I can’t quite figure out WTF is up with you. Did you have some sort of major brain injury since getting your sheepskin from Stanford? I read somewhere you’re a stay-at-home dad homeschooling your children. I can respect that. I made enough money at my chosen profession to leave the rat race and I did the stay-at-home homeschooling dad gig too. But my action was by choice. I wonder if yours is by necessity and your intellectual prowess is now limited to supervising children studying K-12 material. From the content of your comments it would appear that way and I’d question the competence to even do that. Based on what you’ve written I wouldn’t let you teach physical science high school that’s for sure.
(I’ll put the reply where it belongs)
The only truthful thing that he said is that he plays with computers…. the jersey puppet .
DS wrote to me:
>No possible optics can use solar light to heat something hotter 5500K.
Precisely.
Bart R wrote:
>Folks who aren’t scientists, if you’re wondering: the comments on this topic in discussions between several pairs of participants pretty much exactly sounds the way real scientists talk to each other face to face, and behind each others’ backs, too.
Well, yes and no. Scientists can be as mean as the next guy.
But, it is not common for scientists to claim in public that another scientist said something on the public record that he did not say and that it is easy to verify that he did not say. jerseykid, on the other hand, keeps demanding that I explain to him something I never said, something that he created out of his own fevered imagination. (jerseykid is, of course, not a scientist.)
Scientists usually do not do that, since it would obviously make them look, at best, foolish, at worst, strangely unhinged.
Dave
Yea, the only truthful thing he said is that he works with computers… figures…
“BartR | April 7, 2012 at 11:11 pm |
Folks who aren’t scientists, if you’re wondering: the comments on this topic in discussions between several pairs of participants pretty much exactly sounds the way real scientists talk to each other face to face, and behind each others’ backs, too.”
Very too bad!
I wish you all would behave like engineers.
Bart hit the nails on the head; “exactly sounds” like what’s wrong with climate science…
… hit the nails on their heads…
It’s not that scientists aren’t behaving like engineers. You don’t have be an engineer to not behave like third graders at the playground during recess. It definitely helps though! The big enabler is having any occupation in which you are held accountable for your mistakes. A pilot or a cab driver makes a mistake they can crash and die killing themselves and others. An electrician makes a mistake someone gets electrocuted or a house catches fire. A plumber makes a mistake and a house might get flooded. It’s like that. What happens when an academic at university makes a mistake? At most a mistake on one paper is corrected by another paper and no one but a few people in his peer group ever notices. The climate change brouhaha is all about these unaccountable academics creeping out of their unaccountable cloistered lecture halls and trying to dictate public policy with nothing but empty paper claims produced and reviewed in the usual unaccountable way to back them up. Unfortunately for them once they start doing things where the consequences of them being wrong might result in lost blood and treasure then engineers and others accustomed to scrutinizing claims with those kinds of consequences are saying it’s a huge pile of ideological bullsh!t atop a small and inconsequential secondary effect of fossil fuel consumption. The engineer does a cost-benefit analysis and finds no justification whatsoever for the suggested modifications in the manner in which fossil fuels are used to power and grow an infrastructure tasked with keeping 6 billion people housed and fed.
David, I would have said ‘behave like industrial scientists’, as I knew once. But I think that idea would would have been lost.
Agreed about academia… that will never, never change.
Way back when, in the military, scientists were called ‘longhairs’, tho the delta was small. The children of flowers ruined that sobriquet…
David Springer | April 9, 2012 at 9:16 am |
“The engineer does a cost-benefit analysis and finds..” but did you, David?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/climatedesk-stop-climate-change-cost/
Virtually everyone with the resources to thoroughly cost out the whole of the story comes to a similar conclusion within a few percent independently, and regardless of method.
People with an axe to grind, or poor resources to attempt the analysis, come out with a wide variety of obviously inflated results when working independently, and when citing one another seldom demonstrate the least measure of fact-checking.
There are still people citing Lomborg in one or another of his many later-repudiated ‘analyses’. Nova? A childish and obvious hack job two orders of magnitude higher than any other independent guestimate. Ergas? Impossible to tell where the analysis ends and the rant begins, other than ‘somewhere in the first page’. Inhofe? He’s been corrected more often than a keyboard with a faulty multiplexor. Lamar Alexander? His reports prove the opposite of the reasons he cited for commissioning them.
Yep, that’s the way they talk about each other, but trying to influence journals NOT TO PUBLISH competitors work is a horse of a different color. That is NOT how science works.
Jim2 wrote:
>trying to influence journals NOT TO PUBLISH competitors work is a horse of a different color. That is NOT how science works.
Unfortunately, that sort of behavior is more common than one might think. One of the reasons I was not that shocked by the Climategate e-mails is that I have seen that sort of behavior again and again in science. It is despicable, of course, and one of the reasons a lot of scientists are becoming skeptical of some of the claims of the “global warming” community.
In the end, though, the scientific method does succeed, and the jerks are left in the dustbin of history.
Dave
cap’t.Dallas
Actually convection is contained within the troposphere except for really kick ass convective cells which can, rarely, punch up through into the lower stratosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratosphere
There needs to a whole lot more due diligence around here before pen is put to paper. Simple errors in encyclopedic knowledge abound. It isn’t that hard to get in the habit of checking your facts in this brave new world where you have pretty much all the world’s knowledge indexed and catalogued and searchable in an eyeblink by google. Hell with my phone I don’t even type my questions anymore I just ask the silly thing in plain spoken english and it understands perfectly almost every time. In a world where it’s that quick and easy to double check what you assume are facts there is really no excuse for making errors of fact at the encyclopedic level.
Well, I don’t want to dispute wiki, but there is more than an occassional little punch through in the Stratosphere. “The stratosphere is a region of intense interactions among radiative, dynamical, and chemical processes, in which the horizontal mixing of gaseous components proceeds much more rapidly than in vertical mixing.” From the wiki link
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/
It is a lot less chaotic than the Troposphere, but there still is a lot going on.
Convection in the stratosphere is the exception which proves the rule.
Stop prevaricating and accept your small lesson about convection above the tropopause like a man.
Well, that convection is the relief valve and the jet stream the mixer. In the general scope of things, that limited convection would be meaningless, but since a doubling of co2 is predicted to increase forcing by 3.7Wm-2, it is significant. How often the convection punches through is important.
bartr
re; all the more less important action happens in the non-convecting portion of the atmosphere (i.e. above the troposphere)
Important to who? Nothing lives that high and few things even fly that high. Essentially all the weather happens in the troposphere. That’s where global climate disruption is going to happen, if it happens at all. The weather report doesn’t usually say “it’s 80 below zero in the stratosphere today with clear skies and calm winds”. Nobody cares. This top down analysis of the atmosphere that’s fashionable among climate boffins is only because everything is dirt simple up that high up because there’s no convection and water is essentially frozen out far below. You can’t screw up a weather forecast for the stratosphere.
jerseykid | April 8, 2012 at 1:55 am |
So.. you’re complaining about a part of the world with no meteorologists, not much (relevant) Chaos, and that happens to be the entirety of the location of the dynamics that determine the temperature of the meteorologically messy space confined within the bounds of its envelope because why?
It can’t be screwed up?
And yet, Jinan Cao screws it up royally.
Not to mention a few who make parallel mistakes with Venus.
Nothing in the first 17 km matters much that isn’t 1) albedo, 2) CO2E balance that penetrates the last 600 km, or 3) deep ocean circulation, at least on scales between a dozen years and .. well.. ever, really.
Bart, Bart, Bart…
The ocean is a fluid every bit as much as the atmosphere. It has 2000 times the heat capacity and 1000 times the mass. And YOU think that only the upper wisps of the atmosphere matter? Not even the troposphere where most of its miniscule mass is contained? Are you f**cking insane? I believe you must be.
jerseykid | April 8, 2012 at 3:06 am |
Can’t get the helium out of a balloon to make your voice all squeaky without opening a hole in it.
Well, okay, technically helium seeps through balloons fast enough that someone clever, patient and resourceful enough could get the heli…
Anyway, the point is “inside”, and “outside”. Like you learned from Sesame Street.
Out there, where the Sun is and the void of space is, where all that inbound and outgoing radiation are.
In here, from 17 km up right to the core, where all that messy stuff that is pretty much either determined by the temperature the 600 km shell sets given what is outside it, or isn’t deterministic at all.
Anything from Outside (above 617km, give or take solar tide) that makes it to the oceans that will have an effect or be affected will experience it in 12 years of mixing or less, or else it would have happened anyway due dominant decadal flows, due the oceans having orders of magnitude more heat capacity and mass, and also all that surface area and biota, if you want to get really messy.
Reductionist. Insane. Potayto. Potahto. Am I wrong? Prove it.
BartR
Your mention of Sesame Street is revealing. I’m too old have watched it so I really can’t relate to it. I’ll try to adjust my lectures to you accordingly if you’re still thinking in those terms. Judging by my children and grandchildren they seem to lose interest in Sesame Street by 8 or 10 years old. FYI I’m the Captain Kangaroo, Rocketship 7, moose and squirrel generation.
Here ya go… tailored just for you.
http://www.zoodles.com/free-online-kids-games/third-3rd-grade_physical-science
Go forth and learn my [great grand]son!
mention of Sesame Street
Spurious and failed conjecture. I’ve since mentioned a rave, and have earlier discussed the dawn of monetary policy.
Your deductive methods are a bit like a man who’d compare convection in the troposphere with advection in the mesosphere, stratosphere and points more removed as if in the same category.
Oh. They _are_ the deductive methods of the same guy. Oops.
No, sorry Bart. Wispy isothermal gases in the top of the atmosphere do not control what happens in the troposphere. The sun almost shines straight through the upper atmosphere like it wasn’t even there and the thermal radiation coming up from below also passes straight through it virtually uneffected. The tail doesn’t wag the dog. The action of interest is in the global ocean and after that in the troposphere. Once water is out of the picture the non-condensing atmosphere and dry land are about as interesting as the weather on the Moon. Water is what makes all the interesting and important stuff happen. Water makes our weather. Climate is simply the average of weather so water makes our climate do interesting things too.
David Springer | April 9, 2012 at 8:47 am |
Let’s try it this way. Imagine a doorman at a noisy, crowded rave.
The doorman’s station is one of the entrances to the party.
The doorman’s role is to filter who goes in and who stays in.
As all entrances have a doorman with exactly the same function and topology, we can pretend there’s only one entrance/exit and one doorman, to simplify our case.
We’re going to pretend our doorman is not very proactive, to avoid unintentionally creating a Maxwell’s Demon.
So, if you’re a DJ at the rave, all the action is at the sound table.
If you’re a substance abuser, all the action is at the substance pushers.
If you’re there to piss off your parents, all the action is in front of your cell phone camera, taking pictures you’re sure they’ll snoop into.
But if your role and function are knowing what’s going in and what’s coming out, you’re at that one entrance, like the doorman. Which in the case of Earth is a 600km shell of somewhat thin cold air.
If your role and function are knowing what the energy balance is, you, like the doorman, at that one 600km passageway, only monitor things that matter to the energy balance.
What proportion of what goes below and above that 600km shell, a trivial issue since almost everything inside the shell is either determined by what passes through the shell, or is highly nondeterministic.
So, sure, I fibbed a bit, in my simplification in some non-outcome-affecting way. Do you have a better simplification?
Which are you? Doorman, DJ, druggie, dilettante?
Captain Kangaroo | April 7, 2012 at 9:41 pm |
“My response is and always has been that one must build a conceptual – an imagined visual model – in some detail before maths can be applied in any sensible way. ”
Yeah well my response is that one must internalize first principles at least intuitively before any mental model can progress beyond the unconstrained fictions of the imaginary world such as young children inhabit for a time. I can only come to the conclusion that physicistnutballdave has spent far too many hours in the theoretical physicists’ fantasy world called the multiverse where the physical constants can take on any arbitrary values has lost track of the values they assumed in our universe. I really can’t begin to explain how shocked I am that any sane physicist on this planet would dispute Kirchoff’s Law for radiating bodies in equilibrium. I’m flabberghasted. Stupified nearly beyond words. Relegate to flinging juvenile insults because it’s a juvenile mistake and it seems the only level playing field he can possibly compete with me on. Stanford should be burned to the ground for graduating this imbecile.
There are lots of things to be understood by data and for which simple radiative concepts are not useful. My statement was in the context of understanding climate and not just ‘first principles’.
‘The global coupled atmosphere–ocean–land–cryosphere system exhibits a wide range of physical and dynamical phenomena with associated physical, biological, and chemical feedbacks that collectively result in a continuum of temporal and spatial variability.’ Hurrell et al 2009
I suggested elsewhere that Kirschoff was not the correct approach for a body not in equilibrium – as we can see the Earth is not from the 1st Law of thermodynamics.
At top of atmosphere –
Energy in – Energy out = d(S)/dt – where d(S)/dt is change in the global energy content. The latter obviously changes and therefore the planet is not in equilibrium.
@bonkersphysicistdave
“I said that I thought it could be fairly easily proven that you could not get earth’s temperature higher than the photosphere.”
This is totally bizzare. But go ahead prove it. Then try to prove you can get a any surface temperature higher than a blackbody in equilibrium with a 1366W/m2 power source which is a damm far cry short of photosphere temperature. Over 4000K short of it you dipthong.
Psychotisistdave
I shall presume nothing more from you than an acknowledgement that no surface temperature on the earth can possibly exceed 5000K+ photosphere temperature of the sun.
This I suppose is progress. Let’s move along to better define what you believe to be the limit.
Given a solar constant of 1366W/m2 TOA can any point on the earth’s surface become hotter than 415K?
Forgive my going slow. It’s proving difficult to pin down some actual number below the surface temperature of sun which you believe to be an upper limit for the earth’s surface temperature. If you agree with the above we’ll have whittled it down from over 5000K to under 500K. Then we’ll whittle it down further until you finally admit that the earth’s mean temperature in equilibrium cannot possibly exceed the blackbody temperature of the mean power input of 342W/m2. I know this might be very painful for you but it’s for your own good. You’ll feel an overwhelming sense of relief about knowing the limits of the physically possible and not having to toss about ridiculous statements like “I think it can be easily proven that the earth can’t get hotter than the sun”. I mean wow. I have never, ever heard a more asinine declaration than that from anyone with a pulse and a passing grade in an accelerated high school science curriculum. Seriously.
jerseykid wrote to me:
>I shall presume nothing more from you than an acknowledgement that no surface temperature on the earth can possibly exceed 5000K+ photosphere temperature of the sun.
Ah, at last! You’re finally willing to acknowledge that I only said what I actually said! Took a while, old chap.
jerkid also wrote:
>It’s proving difficult to pin down some actual number below the surface temperature of sun which you believe to be an upper limit for the earth’s surface temperature.
You can’t pin me down because, as I keep ]saying, again and again, *I don’t know* what that limit is!
jerkid also wrote to me:
>Then we’ll whittle it down further until you finally admit that the earth’s mean temperature in equilibrium cannot possibly exceed the blackbody temperature of the mean power input of 342W/m2.
Well, Venus.
Obviously proves that your conjecture is mistaken.
And, there is a well-understood mechanism (the so-called “greenhouse mechanism” — yes, I know, a misnomer) that explains how that can happen.
I know that many people here, perhaps including you, think there is a Second Law proof of your mistake. Fine: present the proof. I don’t think one exists.
It is easy to misunderstand the Second Law. As you know, Creationists make a career of doing so! And, as I related earlier, when I was a callow sophomore, I thought the Second Law forbade heat exchangers: obviously, I was wrong.
So, present your proof, if you have one.
But, as to demanding that I prove that it does not violate the Second Law, well…
Venus.
Dave
In a single second, Earth absorbs 1.22 x 10ee17 joules of energy from the sun. Distributed uniformly over the mass of the planet, the absorbed energy would raise Earth’s temperature to nearly 800,000K after a billion years, if Earth had no way of getting rid of it.
–Dr. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert
Yes. If one could somehow construct a one-way mirror that allowed energy to enter a system but not leave it then there would be no limit to how hot something could become. You could even use the 3K background temperature of the universe as the heat source. The mirror in essence acts like Maxwell’s Demon.
Such thinking lies behind countless attempts to build perpetuum mobiles of the second kind. These need only be a working implementation of Maxwell’s Demon. There is no proof that Maxwell’s Demon is an impossibility! The controversy rages on and so too do attempts to build Perpetuum Mobiles of the Second Kind for that very reason. None have succeeded. Kirchoff formulated a law that appears to be the governing principle which ultimately reduces every attempt at perpetual motion of the second kind. A common corollary of Kirchoff’s Law is worded thusly:
Emissivity cannot exceed one because the absorptivity cannot by conservation of energy. So it is not possible to thermally radiate more energy than a black body, at equilibrium.
This limits the mean surface temperature of the earth to 6C due to the mean power it receives being 342W/m2. Of course it can be much warmer than that at any single location for any instant in time. The maximum possible instant temperature anywhere would be limited by peak energy of 1366W/m2. That’s a bit above H2O boiling temperature but the atmosphere seldom if ever allows that much energy to reach the surface. The rule of thumb for engineers designing solar collectors is 1000W/m2 at high noon on the equator on a clear day. That’s about 8C short of boiling at standard pressure. Thus in order to boil water at sea level requires concentrating solar energy with mirrors or lenses which can then heat something up to the temperature of the sun’s surface 5500C. At that point you run into a limiting law of optics which says you can’t bring something into better than perfect focus. If you perfectly focus the sun’s image you get a image with precisely the same brightness of 5500C.
I’m not a theorectical physicist and don’t have the first clue about how these laws are proven or even if they are proven. All I know is that these laws work and no attempt to disprove them has ever succeeded and there is almost unimaginable wealth and fame awaiting anyone who can violate them in practice. So in essence anyone claiming the sun at current intensity can raise the mean temperature of the earth above 6C is claiming perpetual motion and I’m not buying it.
Stop saying “Well Venus” when I’ve answered time after time that Venus’ surface temperature is the same as the earth’s crust at a distance of ten miles down. Venus’ surface is geothermal heat not solar heat. A 90 bar layer of CO2 over the rocks on Venus makes for a dandy insulator that alters the geothermal gradient of its crust. So in effect digging down into Venus’ lower atmosphere is akin to digging down into the crust.
You should know better than to keep repeating that Venus is violating basic laws of thermodynamics. Engineers perhaps are simply far more wary of claims that violate first principles in thermodynamics because those first principles are invariably (so far) governing principles which cannot be overcome. So Dave, if somethink looks like it violates any first principles in thermodynamics look closer and if have the smarts you’ll see it wasn’t really violated. Venus is a great example – the crustal surface isn’t heated to 500C from above it’s heated to 500C from below. Easy peasy. Some perpetural motion schemes aren’t so easy to figure out.
Oh, and by the way, Dave. The Diviner survey of temperatures on the lunar surface found no instant temperature exceeding 400K. That makes perfect sense to me. I should hope it does to you too. What doesn’t appear to make sense to you, correct if it does make sense to you, is that there is no conceivable means of raising any higher temperature on the lunar surface which doesn’t involve concentration of solar energy with mirrors or lenses which would by consequence lower the temperature elsewhere and thus have no effect on the mean. It is not at all clear to me that you understand the implications of the corollary to Kirchoff’s Law which states:
“the emissivity cannot exceed one (because the absorptivity cannot, by conservation of energy), so it is not possible to thermally radiate more energy than a black body, at equilibrium”
Do you dispute this or not? If you don’t how could you possibly limit yourself to saying that it is not possible for the earth to thermally radiate more energy than the surface of the sun. That’s a pretty safe statement, Dave. It’s about like saying that the ocean’s tides can’t get high enough to reach the moon. Well, yeah. That’s true. But they really can’t even get to low orbit. Or to to top of Mt. Everest. Or to top top of the Empire State Building. Or to top of Lady Liberty’s panties. I would probably want to do some reasearch below her panty line. ;-)
jerseykid wrote to me:
>The Diviner survey of temperatures on the lunar surface found no instant temperature exceeding 400K. That makes perfect sense to me. I should hope it does to you too.
I suppose it makes sense: no atmosphere to speak of, therefore no greenhouse effect to speak of.
jerkid also wrote:
>“the emissivity cannot exceed one (because the absorptivity cannot, by conservation of energy), so it is not possible to thermally radiate more energy than a black body, at equilibrium”
>Do you dispute this or not?
No, I don’t: the whole point of the greenhouse effect is that the CO2 reduces emissions from the earth in the IR, so that, in order to balance the radiation input, the earth must heat up so as to punch more IR through the CO2.
Simple enough, and pretty obviously valid from a physics perspective.
Put a thicker and thicker blanket around the earth (that lets most of the visible, high-temperature radiation from the sun through but that blocks a lot of the low-temp IR from getting out), and the earth has to heat up. The reason earth cannot get hotter than the photosphere is that, if it were the same temp as the photosphere, its thermal spectrum would be similar to the photosphere’s — largely in the visible spectrum — which the CO2 does not block much. Then input and output would balance and no further increase in temperature.
That is my proposed “proof,” by the way: I think it is correct, but I am not sure.
I’m pretty confident there is some proof that shows that the earth cannot get anywhere near that hot, but I do not know what that proof is.
And, I suppose you don’t, either. If you do, feel free to share it.
Dave.
“No, I don’t: the whole point of the greenhouse effect is that the CO2 reduces emissions from the earth in the IR, so that, in order to balance the radiation input, the earth must heat up so as to punch more IR through the CO2.
Simple enough, and pretty obviously valid from a physics perspective.”
Dave, it’s too simple (simpletone) and not valid from a physics perspective. CO2 may reduce emmisions from Earth in the IR, but there’s evaporation/convection to balance the radiation input, at least to a degree. Furthermore, if CO2 absorbs, it emits too and enhances the atmospheric radiation to space. The atmosphere cools exclusively by radiation, as all agree. The surface cools multi-modally, again as all agree.
Edim wrote to me:
>Dave, it’s too simple (simpletone) and not valid from a physics perspective. CO2 may reduce emmisions from Earth in the IR, but there’s evaporation/convection to balance the radiation input, at least to a degree.
Yes, I know that, and so does everyone else. Yes, the first-order effect from CO2 does indeed produce various second-order effects — convection, increased water vapor in the atmosphere, etc. Everyone agrees those feedback loops matter, and as I have said many times, my “gut feeling” is that the negative feedback loops predominate. As I have also said, I do not consider my gut to be scientific proof.
You said you have some background in engineering: in that case, you should know that negative feedbacks normally reduce the magnitude of a disturbance, but do not actually reverse its sign.
That’s *all* I am saying: the initial effect of the increased CO2 is to warm the planet slightly, the feedbacks kick in, and then it gets really messy. Probably, you still get some warming — maybe very little, maybe a fair amount.
Dave
Dave, you should be able to back up your gut. Consider the average radiant layer of CO2 relative to H2O. If it CO2 is below H2O, it can more efficiently heat the surface, if it is above H2O it more efficiently heats upper atmosphere. Diffusion down is much slower than convection up. With the higher CO2 radiant layer upper level convection increases and the lower H2O radiant layer behaves like a ground plane for a transmission antennae. With higher rates of upper level convection, the jet stream rapidly distributes heat for more efficient radiation to space. The tropospause is a very efficient radiant heat sink as the stratosphere temperatures show.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/UAHoceansmidtroposphere1979to2002and2002to2011.png
The radiant impact of CO2 also decreases with temperature. Compare the specific heat capacity of CO2 to N2 or O2. If you determine the optimum radiant altitude and temperature of CO2, you can determine the magnitude of impact, relative to optimum. With a temperature and pressure term for the limited ln(Cf/Ci) relationship, you should be able to satisfy your gut :)
.
I’m not sure what the proof is, Dave. All I know is that if the mean temperature of the earth cannot exceed 6C with a 1366W/m2 solar constant without violating Kirchoff’s Law. Kirchoff’s Law has been confirmed by experiments countless times and never been broken for breaking it means that the law of conservation of energy has been broken and the experimental proof would constitute a perpetual motion machine. Like the US patent office I reject perpetual motion out of hand.
Thanks for playing.
David Springer wrote to me:
>I’m not sure what the proof is, Dave. All I know is that if the mean temperature of the earth cannot exceed 6C with a 1366W/m2 solar constant without violating Kirchoff’s Law.
Well, you have not succeeded in convincing people who know a great deal more physics than you do that this follows from Kirchoff’s law.
And, as you say, you have no proof. Perhaps, if you actually tried to prove your conclusion, using a careful formulation of Kirchhoff’s law, you will discover why your conclusion is not true.
All I can say is that you seem unable to convey to competent scientists why you think your conclusion follows from Kirchhoff’s law.
Until then, it is just your personal belief, without anything supporting it.
Good luck.
Dave
So we are all agreed? Greenhouse gas molecules absorb photons and the resulting kinetic energy from bending and stretching bonds heats the atmosphere. More molecules absord more photons and the atmosphere warms. Warmer molecules emit more photons in the IR. There is no ‘notch’ in the emission spectrum for God’s sake. Otherwise we would see it measured directly rather rather than brightness temperature calculated.
Can we move on from the basics? This is an intersting site – http://www.whoi.edu/main/topic/abrupt-climate-change – climate change when it happens is abrupt and non-linear.
Good link Capt and I recommend the FAQ on climate change to lay readers such as myself, which, while generally quoting the IPCC and the mainstream POV, an appropriate emphasis has been placed on the high levels of uncertainty around the AGW hypothesis.
This is aggressively misguided. I can understand that someone can be misguided in their views, but to propagate this outward takes a special kind of misanthropy. To just blatantly ignore scientific evidence that has been around since the first radiance spectrum were measured by satellite in 1970 is pathetic.
I did one of my own runs of Modtran earlier and sketched out the balance of radiation in the figure below, where the blue and yellow regions largely compensate each other:
http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/2450/spectralenergybalance.gif
I did this to demonstrate where the bulk of the 33 degree C warming comes from.
Here is the explanation from NASA which gives a little more insight into the history and how the integration balance is calculated:
http://climate.gsfc.nasa.gov/static/cahalan/Radiation/EarthRadVblackbody.html
The spectral notch is right there and you have to believe that your eyes are lying to make the jump that this is inferred from a brightness calculation.
Why Captain Kangaroo/Chief Hydrologist must continue this deceit, I probably will never understand.
Over the years, I have not always paid strict attention to the skeptical arguments, but I am reminded of the sane Tim Lambert’s run-ins with his fellow Australian Louis Hissink.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2004/12/hissink.php
Perhaps this is just tradition with Australian climate bloggers. They cannot face the science so must argue by sideshow.
Webby,
‘Radiance and spectral radiance are radiometric measures that describe the amount of radiation such as light or radiant heat that passes through or is emitted from a particular area, and falls within a given solid angle in a specified direction.’ So this is a little bit different to total power flux. Total flux can’t decrease in the relevant wavelenghts from 1st law principles. The planet warms and emissions in the IR increase.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
Sorry Kangaroo. The notch is a direct measurement by spectrometers looking downward from altitude. You’re entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts. The notch is a fact.
So sorry Ganglious – we were talking power fluxes. As I explain above the flux in IR increases with temperature to move towards a dynamic energy equilibrium at TOA. You don’t get less energy leaving the planet in the relevant windows – you get a warmer planet that emits the same amount. The frequencies shift with Weins Displacement Law but this is minor at Earth temperatures.
What isn’t measured in spectral radiance is the photons going in all directions after being absorbed and reemitted. Hence you get a notch. This is baby physics – you are obviously entitled to your own facts but I suggest you try for a more nuanced context.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
Now the Captain Kangaroo believes in a notch whereas before he didn’t. Listen people, he is just playing us and flip-flops because it increases FUD. He indicts himself with his own words.
WebHubTelescope | April 10, 2012 at 7:23 am |
We’re only just noticing this now?
Captain Kangaroo | April 8, 2012 at 5:27 am | Reply
“So we are all agreed?” No.
“Greenhouse gas molecules absorb photons and the resulting kinetic energy from bending and stretching bonds heats the atmosphere.”
It heats the CO2 molecule not the surrounding molecules.
“More molecules absord more photons and the atmosphere warms.”
Not much. Air is a lousy conductor. The CO2 molecule reemits a photon of the same frequency most of the time before it has a chance to bump into a nitrogen molecule and lose the energy that way.
“Warmer molecules emit more photons in the IR. There is no ‘notch’ in the emission spectrum for God’s sake. Otherwise we would see it measured directly rather rather than brightness temperature calculated.”
There is a notch for God’s sake and it is directly measured. A spectrometer looking down from above sees deep notch at CO2 absorption frequency. The bottom of the notch follows a continuous black body spectrum curve for a characteristic temperature that’s about 20C (IIRC) below the curve in the IR window portion of the spectrum. That works out to an emission altitude (or optical depth) of about 2000 meters (don’t quote me on the emission altitude or the depth of the notch I worked out the numbers once and am working from memory). I worked from a spectrogram looking down over the Arctic ocean from a height of 20 kilometers. It was in an Atmospheric Physics textbook whose name escapes me but I remember as being printed by Sundog Publishing and the illustrations are available online.
Jim, I think captain means no peak. He agrees there’s a trough. Absorbtions bands are colder than the windows. All agree?
Edim said:
Captain K took me to task for calling it a notch. A notch is the opposite of a peak where I come from. A trough and a notch are synonymous. The term notch comes from the world of signal processing, where engineers use what are known as notch filters. If you are not an engineer, perhaps that is an unfamiliar term. It might be different in Australia where everything is upside down.
Recall that the Captain replied to me as follows:
Web, my bad. I misunderstood.
‘Notch filter’ is used in the US too. Can’t speak to whether it’s used elsewhere but I presume it is used in all english-speaking countries.
Sorry, David.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/modtran17tropicalup37000.png
17km looking up tropical there is the peak/notch with 37500ppm
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/modtran17tropicalup375.png
Same spot with 375ppm CO2 blocks more of the spectrum, but water vapor still has plenty of room to radiate.
that should have said peak/notch plugger :(
For a quantitative detailed analysis see Line By Line radiation/absorption models which quantitatively evaluate each of some 3500 absorption frequencies (“lines” or “notches”). e.g., see HARTCODE by Ference Miskolczi.
For an example of Atmospheric IR absorption see Miskolczi Slide 2:
The stable stationary value of the Earth’s global average atmospheric infrared optical thickness
Dave Springer / jerseykid wrote:
“The sun provides 342W/m2 at the top of the atmosphere. If the atmosphere were totally transparent so that every joule of that energy could be absorbed and converted to thermal energy by the earth’s surface then the maximum possible mean temperature is 6C. […] Perpetual motion is not possible and yet, anyone claiming the solar constant is 1366W/m2 can drive the earth’s mean annual surface temperature higher than 6C is proposing perpetual motion.”
physicistdave wrote in reply:
“Empirically, look at Venus — I think that conclusively disproves your conjecture — the surface of Venus is a *lot* hotter than your conjecture would imply.”
As physicist Dave politely pointed out, Dave Springer’s statement is incorrect – perhaps Dave Springer meant to write that the Earth’s effective temperature cannot go above 6C (for the Sun’s current output).
According to Dave S’s incorrect conjecture, Venus cannot have a mean annual surface temperature more than about 58 deg C. In reality, Venus’ mean annual surface temperature is about 460 deg C.
Venus’ surface temperature, as I pointed out in detail, is an extension of its geothermal gradient of 30C/kilometer. 90 bar of isothermal CO2 above the crust of Venus is a very effective insulator, especially given that the surface emission at 500C is 3.75um which is an absorption sweet spot for CO2. This layer of insulation at the top of the crust is missing on the earth. The result is that the top of the crust on Venus is like the crust at a depth of 10 miles on the earth because the uber-dense CO2 covering the crust insulates as well as ten miles of rock. The earth’s crust at 10 miles deep is the same temperature as Venus’ crust at the surface.
Thanks for playing.
You had written : “Perpetual motion is not possible and yet, anyone claiming the solar constant is 1366W/m2 can drive the earth’s mean annual surface temperature higher than 6C is proposing perpetual motion.”
Earth’s mean annual surface temperature is around 15 deg C.
~15C is the average temperature of the ocean surface. The average temperature of the entire ocean is ~4C. The reason the surface is warm is because of stratification – warm water floats over colder water. The fully integrated average temperature of the earth is the average temperature of the ocean not the mechanically separated warmest water.
If anything were to perturb ocean stratification we would quickly discover, the hard way, what the real average temperature of the earth is with a 1366W/m2 solar constant.
David Springer | April 10, 2012 at 9:42 am |
Which.. significantly more likely than efficient temperature mixing of the top ten miles of the Earth’s crust?
Our usages for ‘earth’ and ‘average’ are part of our dispute; it takes some goodwill to acknowledge these terms useful in weather predictions and scoring dentists for toothpaste commercials are extremely poor for climatology.
Dave Springer, in the statement of yours I quoted, you wrote that the mean annual surface temperature of the Earth cannot exceed 6 C as it would violate the laws of thermodynamics. Your statement is clearly wrong, refuted as it is by the fact that actual mean surface temperature is around 15 C.
I’m guessing that you didn’t mean to refer to surface temperature – anyway, if you don’t want or are unable to acknowledge or correct your mistake (or thank physicistdave for originally pointing it out), you don’t have to of course, and there seems little point in wasting more time on it.
WebHubTelescope
TIME, 9-April-2012
Cover story:
The Truth About Oil
New breakthroughs are actually increasingglobal supplies. But the era of cheap oil may be gone forever.
…
By one account, the presalt reservoirs off the central coast of Brazil hold as much as 100 billion barrels of crude; that is another Kuwait
Girma, Brazil is not Australia. You need to worry about where your own country will get its oil from.
The Time magazine article seems to think the USA and perhaps Brazil is OK, and that is only from heroic last-gasp attempts to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
This is the activity that is happening on the Bakken in NoDak, USA
http://sayanythingblog.com/files/2011/11/article-0-0ECF298000000578-278_634x324.jpg
Note the lights out on the western side, out in the middle of nowhere, where all the activity is.
What people don’t yet realize is that every one of those rigs has a lifetime of a couple of years. The output of hydraulically fractured shale is transient, and it only works once in the area. Once the lights go out, they have no where else to fracture. Bizarre, but that’s the extremes that mankind will go through to get energy. We are all lucky to experience the transitory miracle of an energy dense fossil fuel.
Do you note the facilitation of movement of drilling rigs down Petrobras way?
=========
Bart R | April 8, 2012 at 12:52 am |
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 | April 8, 2012 at 12:19 am |
I’m curious.
Convection pretty much stops at 17 km, I’d been led by looking at the data and hearing out the specialists to believe.
With convection, what goes up must come down, and faster convection up equals faster convection down, as a pure mass balance issue.
So, the hotter stuff going up and losing heat sooner, which sounds like your negative feedback, is not balanced by that hotter stuff coming back down that spent less time giving off its heat, too?
Yes, what goes up must come down but not at the same location it went up. Tropical convection migrates toward the poles where it warms. So the poles receive the benefit of the falling dryer air. How much benefit the poles receive depends on the potential temperature of the air. The more rapid convection removes more moisture and provides more time at colder average temperatures for the air to lose heat. That reduces the potential temperature of the air at altitude reducing the heat transferred to the poles.
How significant can we say is a negative feedback, when it may have no effect, or even positive net effect, because we’ve never measured for either and have only the sketchiest models at such small scale?
That is definitely an issue. The surface temperature in the southern hemisphere sucks in comparison to the northern hemisphere which is not exactly stellar. That is one of the reasons I prefer the satellite data which while not perfect appears less suckie :) The Satellite data indicates that the southern extent of the global has cooled or at least not significantly warmed since 1979. The Antarctic cooling is an indication that the increased convection is allowing greater heat loss to space. A better approach would be to use the potential temperatures of the atmosphere instead of surface temperature.
Especially given there’s 600 km nonconvecting atmosphere on top of that, where one understands more or less all the important action happens?
Above the tropopause there is little change in conditions that impact surface temperatures. Stratospheric cooling should indicate any changes that would have impact, but that cooling is not consistent with GHE theory. The rate of stratospheric cooling changed following Pinatubo which could be due to aerosols, water vapor or the approach of an equilibrium pseudo state. the 1998 El Nino implies a state change, but damned if I can figure out what of the multitude of variables changed. What ever it is, is does not appear to be CO2 related.
Also, the nonconvecting is incorrect. There is still convection (advection) which impacts radiant heat loss.
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 | April 8, 2012 at 10:09 am |
A brief review.
100 years ago:
a) Warm air rose due convection: warm air is less dense; being less dense than the cooler air around it, it was relatively bouyant.
b) That ‘packet of air’ rose until it reached equal buoyancy with the air at the same higher altitude. Mainly convection stopped at or before 17 km. (Remembering ‘packet’ is a convenient fiction, air isn’t solidly stuck to itself.)
c) That warm air packet gave off some of its heat at every altitude up to 17 km before it was displaced by new warmer air ‘from below’.
d) Displaced, and denser due being cooler relative to the air displacing it, the ‘old’ air fell, still losing heat if it had any in excess all the way down until it again reached equal bouyancy.
e) Vertical travel was accompanied by horizontal travel, very biased in terms of moving hotter air from the horizon toward the poles, and also influenced by the spin of the Earth to form a net diagonal at all altitudes circling the globe.
Today:
a) 1. We know the air gets significantly warmer than 100 years ago.
2. But does this mean it is that much less dense than the cooler air around it?
3. Is the ‘cooler air’ warmer, too, than cooler air of 100 years ago?
4. We have speculations, and some reasoning leads us to be fairly certain much of the ‘cooler air’ is as cool as it ever was, especially in the dead of night and dark of winter.
5. We also know some of this cooler air is much warmer than it was 100 years ago, some of it far warmer relative to 100 years ago than the warmest air.
Where does the balance lie? Only measurement could confirm, and we didn’t much measure these things very well 100 years ago. We don’t measure them well today, either.
b) 1. What does Bernoulli tell us about changes in bouyancy with changes in speed, if anything?
2. I know pressure changes with speed.. does this make the 17km line rise, or fall, as a net, if the speed actually changes?
3. Did the speed really change?
4. Was it a uniform change? How much and in what ways was it nonuniform?
5. It seems sensible that if any temperature ought still be as cold now as it was 100 years ago, the cold 17 km above us in the dark sky is it. It seems sensible therefore that warmer air will experience a greater gradient today than a century ago on the whole. But do we measure it?
6. You suggest sucky satellites. I suggest satellites are far, far suckier than you suggest.
c) Heat shedding is on a continuum. We don’t suddenly teleport all the heat at the surface by convection to 17 km up. Other means than convection come into play all the way up. Therefore, the differences between last century and now are margins of margins of margins, not taken from the whole all at once.
d) How much warmer than 100 years ago on the whole is this colder, descending air? How much less or more dry?
e) How do the rates of vertical and horizontal motion compare? Did we measure this well enough then, and do we now, to know?
Bart, the satellite data is much more up to the task that surface data. With the satellites you have slices of atmosphere that can be analyzed to see the subtle variations. The ARGO ocean data is about the best we have going and it tends to agree with the satellites. Do we have enough data to be conclusive? No, but the indications with improving data is lower CO2 impact higher land use impact.
That makes perfectly good sense, because the initial estimate was not based on science but the average of disagreeing scientists. If this had been a horse race between Hansen et al and Manabe et al. the game would be over.
With consistently decreasing estimates of potential warming, land use mitigation and responsible efforts to improve energy efficiency and increase reliable proven alternate energies is smart. Going nuts to solve something that may not be a problem is not.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/WarmingoceanUAH.png That is enough evidence to go slowly.
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 | April 8, 2012 at 5:43 pm |
No, but the indications with improving data is lower CO2 impact higher land use impact.
The.. indications of improved data we don’t have at this time?
That would be called ‘guess’, ‘hope’, ‘belief’, ‘fantasy’, and ‘fiction’.
Land use, CO2 emission, sincerely I don’t care which one is raising the CO2 level, or if some third effect, or all of the above.
My issue is, the CO2 level is rising, the Carbon Cycle is therefore oversubscribed.
That makes it a scarce resouce, which makes it rivalrous. No one can use it without denying its benefit to someone else.
That is, if both use it, the CO2 level rises still more.
Lucrative use of the resource is also easily and cheaply excludable, for the simple reason we now do have good measures of the CO2E effect of virtually every lucrative process on the planet, which makes up some 70%+ of any nation’s CO2E contribution.
Sure, an ETS may be required for the less-than 30% remaining lucrative CO2E contribution, but again we already monitor some 95% of those emissions one way or another, or soon will, as a matter of BAU for other reasons. So there’s not much additional cost there, either.
The conditions of a rivalrous, excludable scarce resource being met by the Carbon Cycle, it is an imperitive of Market integrity to privatize this former Commons, to avoid the extinction of the resource, which is the Tragedy of the Commons.
Thinking about what the Carbon Cycle is, and knowing that the Tragedy of the Commons _inevitably_ ends only in extinction or privatization, the choice is simple.
Simple, except in the case of lunatic fanatics who refuse to see it.
Bart, the solution if there is 3 plus degrees of “negative” impact is different than if there is 1 degree of “positive” impact. Continued over reliance on fossil fuels is and has been an issue for some time. Over use and degradation of agricultural real estate is and has been an issue for some time. Changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and the ocean is and has been a problem for some time.
The preserving and improving agricultural real estate is in progress and has been in the US since the dust bowl. The agricultural tragedy of the commons is in less developed and politically unstable nations that don’t have the power of privatization to help. We learned the hard way and so will they. Life is tough, but it is their nations, they have to have the desire to solve their problems. At some point they while have the need or desire to imitate our successes, if we actually succeed. That is a large question mark with all the less than stellar ideas being forced to fit.
The key is allowing entrepreneurs to do their thing. They know the issues and they have the desire if there is reward potential worth the risk. It doesn’t require a government plan to redistribution the assets, They want to redistribute assets the old fashion way, by earning them. As I said before, it is much more productive to let private enterprise invest the R&D money with the carrot of tax breaks on future profits than to throw money at technology of the future that tends to reduce the desire for competition.
Rational regulation with obtainable goals it the role of government. Take the requirement for Cellulose ethanol that is not yet available. That is whacked! Coal specific emission limits, that is nuts. 15millirem per year, 15% of the already conservative limits, for nuclear waste storage. That is not regulation that is enforcing ideology.
The US needs to level the playing field so that we take care of our own issues instead of outsourcing our problems, It is called leading by example.
The lunatics who refuse to see it are lunatics that we have no control over unless we wish to get aggressive. Not something I recommend. We need to get our own houses in order.
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 | April 8, 2012 at 8:56 pm |
Which house any nation gets in order by privatizing rivalrous, excludable, scarce resources by whatsoever scheme best suits each nation.
In America, retail carbon F&D is the clear winner over command and control.
For Australia, one suggests Thunderdome.
Max
Where are you?
Long time no see!
Bring this to the bottom of the discussion again.
Jim D | April 7, 2012 at 10:30 pm |
Jim Cripwell, what do you mean by “CO2 signal”? Is it the expected decadal warming rate from the CO2 increase?
@@@@@@@
Let me try and explain. If we plot time, the independent variable, on the X axis, and temperature, the dependent variable, on the Y axis, there could be a part of this graph which has a positive slope. If this positive slope can be shown to be caused by rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, then this is the CO2 signal.
As an example. If we take Girma’s graph, and instead of doing what it does, there was a sudden change of slope from +0.06 C per decade to +0.26 C per decade around the time that the CO2 levels in the atmopshere started to increase rapidly, then we could conclude that the extra +0.2 C per decade was caused by the rising levels of CO2, and then this 0.2 C per decade would be the CO2 signal. Knowing the rate at which CO2 was rising in the atmopshere, it is then simple to calculate the climate sensitivity. We would then have a value for the climate sensitivity of CO2 based on observed data; something very preferable to the hypothetical values now widely quoted.
As it happened, the graph has shown no sudden change in slope at the time when CO2 values started rising rapidly, so we can conclude that there is no CO2 signal, and the climate sensitivity of CO2 added to the atmosphere from current levels is indistinguishable from zero.
Jim, the warmists already realized there’s no CO2 signal – now they increasingly talk about the lag and the “warming by the end of the century”.
First there was a signal, but now it disappeared and it will appear by the end of the century.
Gaia’s making sure we have a little heat tucked away for when we really need it. Did you just say she’s off to the casino?
================
Edim, you write “Jim, the warmists already realized there’s no CO2 signal ”
I hope you are correct. What I am waiting for is one of them (Judith Curry?) to actually say so. When that happens, I will break out the champagne
Jim, unfortunately we cannot rule out additional CO2 causes some warming. Lindzen acknowledges this. A warming of about 1 deg C is expected for doubling of CO2 concentration. The main argument is whether the feedback is positive or negative. We skeptics believe it is negative, they believe it is positive. So with the negative feed back, the increase in temperature at the end of this century due to increased CO2 would still be about 1 deg C, not IPCC’ from 2.4 to 6.4 deg C.
Girma, You write “Jim, unfortunately we cannot rule out additional CO2 causes some warming. Lindzen acknowledges this. A warming of about 1 deg C is expected for doubling of CO2 concentration. ”
I agree that CO2 causes some warming; the question is how much. Lindzen, in fact, does not acknowledge this. What Lindzen says is that “even if I were to acknowledge a 1 C in warming for a doubling of CO2, there is no problem.”
The 1 C for a doubling of CO2 is based on highly questionable physics. It is purely hypothetical and completely meaningless.
Lindzen:
“If we doubled CO2, it’s well accepted that you should get about 1 degree warming if nothing else happened. […] But 1 degree is reckoned as not very significant. The question then is: is what we’ve seen so far suggesting that you have more than that, and the answer is no.”
http://bit.ly/h41iFa
Jim, we have to accept the 1 deg C warming as a result of doubling of CO2 concentration from 390 ppm to 780 ppm.
Girma, you write “Jim, we have to accept the 1 deg C warming as a result of doubling of CO2 concentration from 390 ppm to 780 ppm.”
I do not accept this, even in Prof Lindzen says it is correct. The number is based on the assumption that “the structure of the atmosphere does not change”. Or in other words, you can do the estimation by ONLY looking at the effects of radiation, neglecting conduction, convection, and the latent heat of water. Or, in other words, the lapse rate does not change. This assumption has NEVER been justified or validated; it is just an assumprion. From my very limited knowledfge on the subject, it seems to me that is very unlikely to be correct. But this story has been repeated over and over again so often, that people have failed to go back to where the number originally comes from, and so cannot see that it is completely hypothetical and meaningless.
Jim
In my calculation, I have found that 1ppm increase in CO2 concentration increases the GMT by 0.0028 deg C.
Here is the correlation graph: http://bit.ly/IgF6o4
So for doubling the current concentration of CO2 of 390 ppm, the increase in GMT is
390 (ppm) * 0.0028 (deg C/ppm) = 1.1 deg C
So climate sensitivity is 1.1 deg C.
Girma, I have been misinterpreting what you are saying. I thought you were referring to a no-feedback climate sensitivity of CO2 being 1 C for a doubling of CO2, which is what Lindzen was referring to. No-feedback climate sensitivity is impossible to measure, and is a completely hypothetical and meaningless number.
You figure relates to total climate sensitivity, which is a completely different issue. Whether total climate sensitivity is 1 C for a doubling of CO2, I doubt. Correlation is not the same as causation. I would need to see a lot more than just one figure with a couple of lines on it, before I would accept that you are correct.
Jim
Here is the way I understand it.
Here the 30-years GMT trend graph.
http://bit.ly/HjXkTC
This graph shows the 30-years GMT trend not only oscillates but it has itself a linear warming trend.
Note that the 30-years GMT trend is the slope of the smoothed GMT curve.
That is d(GMT)/d(year) = 30-years GMT Trend
From the above equation, you can determine the smoothed GMT curve by integration of the above equation as
GMT = Integration of the 30-year GMT Trend.
We have seen that the GMT trend has an oscillating and a linear warming functions.
When you integrate the oscillation function the result is still an oscillating function. However when you integrate the linear warming function what you get is a quadratic function. This function increases with time and I believe it is related to the increase in CO2 concentration. Mind you, I am not saying the increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is due to human emission. It could be the result of release from the oceans as a result of our warming world since the little ice age.
That is how I determined the following smoothed GMT function:
http://bit.ly/HRvReF
Jim, how would you explain the existence of a quadratic function in the temperature record?
If we accept the data, that is what it says.
Girma you write “Jim, how would you explain the existence of a quadratic function in the temperature record?”
I dont even try. I merely ask the question, how can you prove conclusively that what you have observed, whatever that is, is definitively caused by an increase in CO2? With all the unknowns as to what causes changes in global temperatures, I dont see how you can possibly have established that CO2 must be the cause of the correlation that you have observed.
Jim
At least it is good we agree AGW IS NOT a problem as they claim. At most a 0.6 deg C warming by 2100 is not a problem. But they exaggerate with their positive feed back a warming by 4 deg C by 2100. That is not true. This will be proved within the next 20 years when the GMT does not rise to 1 deg C by 2030 as IPCC predicted, but lies between 0.2 and 0.6 deg C, with 100% confidence.
For 2011, the GMT was 0.34 deg C, down from 0.53 deg C for 1998.
Girma, you write “At least it is good we agree AGW IS NOT a problem as they claim.”
Yes we agree on that. However, we disagree on a rather fundamental issue. You seem to believe that it will, eventually, be possible to detect some form of effect on GMTs from all the CO2 we are adding to the atmosphere. I am convinced that the data we have collected over the last 30 years or so, proves conclusively that the climate sensiivity for a doubling of CO2 from current levels is indistinguishable from zero, and it will never be possible to show that CO2 has any effect on GMTs, whatsoever.
And that is a pretty fundamental difference. (And you did not answer my question.)
The expected signal would go from 0.003 degrees per decade in 1900 to in excess of 0.15 degrees per decade by 2000, so it is only in recent decades it becomes more visible, but it matches the rise since the 70’s and the general upward curve seen in Girma’s plot, and made more obvious by his helpful superimposed straight lines.
@ Jim D | April 8, 2012 at 2:42 pm … reply:
JimD, as I can recall, you said something like: ‘’you can only tell the truth as a joke’’. Judging by the rest of your comments – you must be living very, very serious life… talking about o,003C a decade warming for the 1900… They didn’t even have sensitive thermometers, to monitor to one thousandth of a degree… (that’s what no 3 represents in 0,003C… it’s not 0,004 – it’s 0,003C) Jimmy my mate; as long as you know when you are lying, that it’s a lie – you are safe. If you start to believe in your own lies; then you should immediately ask for psychiatric help.
Since in USA they decriminalized it for medicinal use; you and Girma must be overmedicating yourselves – to think that somebody will believe that: by monitoring on 0,00000000000001% of the places essential – to know the APROXIMATE global temperature by +/- 3C inaccuracy; people should believe that swindlers know in accuracy by one thousandth of a degree…?!?!?! Tragically, looks like Girma even believes in those lies… is he on a heavier ‘’medication’’? is it possible that; Columbian Cartel is contributing to the phony GLOBAL warming also? Needs urgent research. If you can sink so low – the sinking feeling could be from too much snorting… Because the GLOBAL warmings are only in some people’s heads, not in nature, not on the planet; because extra heat overall in the troposphere is NOT accumulative! Instead of you and Girma monitoring temperature on every cubic meter from one poll to the other – my advice is: you should take your own temperature – both of you must be hallucinating, to expect anybody to believe in your crap. Must be hi-fever, OR the ‘’hallucinative side-effects from overmedication…? Apart of you and Girma, I don’t see many others to be so shameless and suggest of knowledge to one thousandth of a degree temp with ‘’precision’’ for the WHOLE planet. Since it was decriminalized for medicinal use, more and more Americans started to believe in the PHONY global warming… correlation is too obvious. JimD, please don’t drive when medicating, I want you to enjoy and survive Easter
JimD, Vaughn didn’t let you become a dissident. Are you prepared to tell the jury: if Vaughn Pratt is part of the elite, deciding who is going to get; how much from the loot money; or if he is only of the lower genera and IQ, overenthusiastic green KGB hit-man? 0,003C temp, is very heroic / stupid
Stefanthedenier, so if I take a temperature now and one hour from now and it changes by 1 degree, I have achieved a miraculous accuracy of 0.0003 degrees per second even if my thermometer can’t measure better than half a degree. I see.
Jim D | April 9, 2012 at 1:03 am said: Stefanthedenier, so if I take a temperature now and one hour from now and it changes by 1 degree
Jim DJim D, with your thermometer, statistically you can average the temp for your ‘’BEDROOM’’, no worries (NOT, if you don’t have data for the coldest minute also – swindlers don’t take for the coldest minute). But for the whole GLOBAL temperature… where are you going to position your thermometer… under your armpit, or into some other place?! Your cheap trick will work on the D/H Fake Skeptics / the flat earthers. They know exact temperature on the WHOLE planet for 1234BC, when the earth was flat and 2/3 of the GLOBE didn’t exist – ‘’before the invention of the thermometer’’ That means; against your one thermometer – you are only half the liar than they are. Just tell them that; for IPCC is used 6000 thermometers, that will convince them. As long as you don’t tell them that: 6000 thermometers are sufficient for 6000 rooms…. Hilton hotels have 12000 rooms – wouldn’t be enough. They cannot notice that the planet has bigger troposphere than 6000 rooms; because every fake Skeptic has common sense / logic and honor/dignity of a fence post.
They don’t even monitor for the coldest minute / the word ‘’cold’’ obviously irritates them – it spells ‘’long jail terms’’. Also Jim, if you monitor for one hour temperature – will not tell you even close; what the average temperature will be for that same day. They are monitoring for you and Girma, only the hottest minute of the day – but are ignoring the other 1439 colder minutes for that day; EVEN THOUGH THEY FLACTUATE INDEPENDANTLY and never same as the hottest minute. One minute, will not tell you the temperature for that day – they have temp from 365 minutes, for the WHOLE year… from 6000m3, for the WHOLE planet. On the witness stand, under oath; those and many other questions I have prepared for the leading Swindlers; there questions cannot be silenced, or avoided.
Jim, the genuine non-believer in ANY phony GLOBAL warming – but believer in constant big / small climatic changes, says: ‘’’if they monitor for every 10 minutes of the year; for every 10m3 in the whole troposphere, they will see that: overall every day of every month and year has exactly the same temperature. Because the laws of physics and my formulas prove that: EXTRA HEAT IN THE TROPOSPHERE IS NOT ACCUMULATIVE !!! For the last 150y, in the troposphere hasn’t accumulated enough EXTRA heat, to boil one chicken egg!!! The truth will win JimD, you are pissing against the wind… not a prudent position to chose.
It works out to be 10000 chicken eggs for every square meter of the earth’s surface over the last century (assuming one egg is equivalent to bringing 1 kg of water to the boil). An average 1 W/m2 imbalance adds up to that. That’s one egg per square meter every three days on average.
@ Jim D | April 10, 2012 at 12:01 am | said: It works out to be 10000 chicken eggs for every square meter of the earth’s surface over the last
century (assuming one egg is equivalent to bringing 1 kg of water to the
boil).
JimD, according to longitude, looks like you are on similar longitude as me = not ”decriminalized for medicinal purposes” the hallucinatory substances. you must be hallucinating that the surface temperature is warmer by 85C now than 100y ago. Suggesting to know what the correct GLOBAL temperature was 100y ago – that doesn’t say anything about the temperature; but about your credibility. in the backyard you can find 10 different variations in temp. My 3-4 year old question hasn’t been answered by any swindler from both camps: ”WHAT WAS THE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE LAST YEAR” ?!?!?!
Nobody knows correct GLOBAL temp for last year to save his life. You know correct temp for 100y ago? Take it easy on that stuff. You are starting to sound as WebHub; he talks things that wouldn’t make sense to an earthworm, just to contradict. Jim D, check on my formulas; because other people do -after when you are avoiding the facts that counts… appears silly for you to talk about warmer / colder planet. Jim, don’t be with the losers. People telling constantly lies, cannot be good people. Chronic liar = embarrassments, disasters follow. Think about it, first. .
stefanthedenier, I don’t know if you know any physics or applied mathematics, but if you do, try figuring out how much water you can boil (starting at 15 C for example) per square meter with 1 W/m2 applied over a century. There, in just plain physics, you will see your answer. [Heat capacity of water is 4200 J/kg/K].
@ Jim D | April 10, 2012 at 9:42 pm
JimD, I said: judging by the time of day you make comments – you are on longitude… are you OZ boy (the highest carbon rip-off in OZ = biggest human shame), or Kiwi (with methane rip-off). Please stop making a fool of yourself. The EXTRA ACUMULATED heat, for boiling your Easter bunny eggs – I hope comes from too much Easter vino, not hallucination from magic mushrooms; what you green people experiment. When you get sober, start using some common sense: not the amount of EXTRA heat produced; but ‘’NO EXTRA HEAT IS RETAINED’’! Extra heat in the troposphere is not ACCUMULATIVE; same as a full bucket of water – doesn’t accept extra water! (All proven in details on my website)
When extra heat is produced in Australia – for those 12h(1 W/m2 applied over a century), on opposite longitude, same amount of heat is wasted = zero accumulation. Stop thinking as the ‘’Flat earthers’’ the Fake Skeptic D/H! All the ‘’physics / mathematics’’ drivel used by both camps is a woo-doo science, NON- ISSUE; as a smokescreen – desperate attempt to suffocate the truth. Jimmy, if YOU know any physics, you will understand this: if troposphere get warmer than normal; can double in volume in 30seconds, and waste twice as much heat. Double volume will not increase heat absorption; because oxygen + nitrogen are transparent – but will expose it to double the amount of extra cold space. That’s why the good lord made the laws of physics: as soon as the air cools to previous temperature – to shrink to previous volume. Otherwise, if O+N stayed expanded for another 20 minutes => would have redirected enough extra coldness, to freeze everything in the tropics. ‘’nature’s self adjusting mechanism’’ never fails. Because the laws of physics say: O+N expand / shrink INSTANTLY, in change of temp. I’m here to point to non-permanent visitors / the secular people (80% of people on the street); not to rely on the fanatic nutters from both camps, to get the truth. It’s up to you, when you will face the reality. Or, when you will disclose: did you have your thermometer under your armpit; or in your other place, to monitor your ‘’GLOBAL’’ temp?!
Tomorrow the troposphere will have exactly the same amount of heat as yesterday. Today the sun will produce tremendous amount of EXTRA heat + the geothermal heat released + all the heat produced by burning fossil fuel; ALL will be wasted, instantly. O+N know exactly how much extra they need to expand – to get read of that extra heat, INSTANTLY. Same goes ‘’for the last 100years (1 W/m2 applied over a century) All gone. Your eggs will remain uncooked = > will become rotten, same as your knowledge of physics. The longer you delay facing the reality -> the more rotten eggs you will receive, on your face. Just a friendly advice. Girma can claim insanity, justifiably; but your ‘’warmer planet’’ now, than 100y ago… Aussie taxpayers will make you look funny without testicles… ouch, is it worth the spoils? Unless all of you address my formulas => you are all plying with your water pistols, and nothing more
s_the_d, you wrote 3 paragraphs and not one correct statement. Amazing. You live in your own world with its own physics. I am not returning to this after your next reply, so it will be wasted.
Who said climate is chaotic?
Not me.
Here is the climate pattern for the last 100 years!
http://bit.ly/HRvReF
Yes, climate is not chaotic as previously thought.
It has a pattern.
The observed global mean temperature oscillates by +/- 0.2 deg C about a smoothed GMT curve defined by the equation:
Smoothed GMT = 0.11*cos(2*3.1416*(Year-1880)/60) + 2*10^(-5)*(Year-1880)^2 + 0.0035*(Year-1880) – 0.485
For the last 100 years, 100% of the observed GMTs lie in the models band defined by the above equation.
Is it not reasonable to assume the observed GMT continues to lie within the models band for at least the next couple of decades?
Does not the result shown in the above chart disprove IPCC’s claim of 0.2 deg C warming for the next two decades?
Don’t you think this is an important result?
I want the equation
Smoothed GMT = 0.11*cos(2*3.1416*(Year-1880)/60) + 2*10^(-5)*(Year-1880)^2 + 0.0035*(Year-1880) – 0.485
to be called …………….
Girma | April 8, 2012 at 6:28 pm |
Who said climate is chaotic?
Not me.
Which is yet another reason why, Mr. Orssengo, no one takes you seriously.
My advice to you?
Mail your PhD. back where you got it from, and resign from engineering, before your school and your profession discover how sorely you disgrace them.
I play the ball, not the man.
I also don’t respond to those who play the man.
Girma | April 8, 2012 at 8:14 pm |
Mr. Orssengo.
Tell me why the ball keeps having the wrong values for the competing claim painted on it?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:11/mean:13/from:1910/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2000/trend/offset:-0.1/detrend:0.031/plot/best/from:1990/trend/detrend:0.3/offset:-0.1/plot/best/from:1990/trend/offset:-0.27/detrend:0.3/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend
Series 5 is where you paint the IPCC trend line.
Series 6 is where your own narrative says it belongs.
Your ball has scored an own-goal, by your own rules, except if you’re the judge and you redraw the boundary lines to fit your team’s purposes.
This is all, of course, utterly irrelevant for a number of reasons; not least of which is the methods used to make the ball, the playing field, the net and the sticks are invalid.
I’ll play the ball if the game is fair.
Where I’m playing a cheat, I’ll call the foul.
Right now, there’ve been so many fouls, I’m calling for disqualification due unsportsmanlike and ungentlemanly conduct.
As shown in the following IPCC graph, its projection starts at (2000, 0.4) and ends at (2030,1).
http://bit.ly/xQBnVn
That is exactly what I showed in my graph.
http://bit.ly/HRvReF
Let others be the judge.
I have provided both graphs above.
Girma.
you zeroed the graph wrong idiot.
Bart, If Girma is playing the ball, he is playing defense, not offense.
Washington Generals skill-level at that.
Here is Girma’s model if you stretch it out to 2200. Nice run of accelerating climate heating there, Girma.
Is there a foul for piling on?
Compare to http://orssengo.com/GlobalWarming/GmtModel.PNG
Steven
Instead of the scolding please tell me clearly what I did wrong
WebWebHubTelescope
I specifically said the model could apply only in the short-term of about two decades.
So you admit that you have no model and are merely practicing trendology. Well, we already knew that you had no offense to speak of.
You create a model with a quadratic and then limit the quadratic to a short time span. How quaint. Can you imagine if Isaac Newton said that
but warned that it only worked for t=0 to t=2 seconds?
WHT
Please don’t compare an empirical model with a theoretical model.
The empirical model is just curve fitting to establish the CURRENT climate pattern
Thanks for the site that you can use to plot mathematical functions
I’m afraid it’s like giving a gun to a child.
More like LEGO bricks. Guns are dangerous.
Girma, you’ve plotted hadcrut3vgl from 1910 onwards. The series begins in 1850, and your GMT formula diverges from the observational data for most of period you’ve omitted. You should discuss this.
You wrote: “Does not the result shown in the above chart disprove IPCC’s claim of 0.2 deg C warming for the next two decades?”
No. Historical data can’t disprove a prediction about the future.
Oneuniverse
No. Historical data can’t disprove a prediction about the future.
But the models prediction should be considered reliable at least for the next two decades because it agreed with ALL THE OBSERVED DATA FOR THE LAST 100 YEARS. The model shows flat trend until 2030, but IPCC claims 0.2 deg C per decade warming.
selti1 | April 8, 2012 at 8:41 pm |
Uh.. did you somehow miss where the point of the triangle is on the IPCC graph, at 1990?
Which, again, is irrelevant.
You said yourself you were interested only and solely in trend on this graph.
That requires you compare like to like; starting temperature to starting temperature. Either you start in 1990 with the trend line exactly intersecting your own model line, or in 2000 with the trend line exactly intersecting your model line.
Starting the IPCC curve significantly _above_ your model line simply abandons your own narrative; the only apparent reason for this is to cheat.
And to address your ‘last 100 years’ argument.. 100 is an arbitrary number. If 100 is good, why isn’t 150 better? If 100 is better than 150, then why isn’t 66 better than 100? 44 better than 66? 27 better than 44?
You set the playing field. It is a playing field unlike any ever seen before, unique to your needs and style of play. You make up the rules, which again are unlike any ever seen before, and flout the ordinaries of the sport. You hold all the cards, have your finger on the wheel, have weighted the dice, have an extra row of pawns, and still you present a losing argument.
Have a look at the graph here – it shows 2 things.
1. A warming trend much less that 0.2 degrees C/decade
2. No warming for another decade.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/
The paper this is based on suggests no warming for an indeterminant period.
Swanson suggests that warming will resume after 2020.
I don’t think the latter case is rigorously made.
But if Girma is limiting his case to 20 years he is on reasonaly safe ground becasue we are in a cool Pacific decadal mode.
I don’t know how this can be misunderstood – this should really be in the realm of yes we agree about this but instead there are simply arguments from cognitively dissonant claptrap.
But if Girma is limiting his case to 20 years he is on reasonaly safe ground becasue we are in a cool Pacific decadal mode.
Yes, I do.
Girma | April 8, 2012 at 9:56 pm |
Mr. Orssengo. 1910-2030?
You would have only two full periods in that range.
No graphical analysis would be considered competent on only two periods of a trigonometric function.
This has been explained to you before.
If you’re claiming you can produce two periods of fit on not the raw data itself but on a hand-picked smoothed curve for a particular subset of the raw data.. you’re producing a simply fraudulent claim.
It’s extraordinarily dishonest to substitute the smoothed curve for the raw data and derive an R-value from that. If you did this same thing in certain business situations, you’d be committing a crime.
Bart R
Well, you have provided a nice commentary as to why we ought to ignore Girma’s graph. What we’re missing is a critique of Swanson’s graph as requested by Captain Kangaroo. Ray Pierreumbert’s defense at RealClimate was:
Of Girma and Raypierre, who is to be the goose and who the gander?
blueice2hotsea | April 9, 2012 at 7:30 pm |
Pointlessly awful though Swanson’s graph could be, depending on the context of its use — and I can’t comment, not really being a follower of the author nor having his works repeatedly waved under my nose for months on end — it’s significantly better than Mr. Orssengo’s efforts in and of itself.
1. No periodicity of any sort is pretended. No trigonometric function, no problem of failing to have enough periods of data (3 or more, depending on the nature of the claims) to support the claim.
2. No predictions.
3. No claim the model line represents anything but the 1979-1997 linear fit.
4. No use the IPCC trend line in any way other than the IPCC used it, so no requirement to change its location to fit the author’s narrative.
5. No using R values based on smoothed graphs compared to model functions.
6. Less clutter.
So, if you’re asking for a critique of the ‘Swanson’ graph in and of itself on its own merits; I’m not at this time prepared to do so, knowing too little about it.
It does appear to, through the red ‘return to warming’ line, accept or imply a failure to warm that looks methodologically suspect. Not having read the method, I couldn’t say.
Mr. Orssengo’s methods of repeating the same invalid methodologies with spectacular energy and low self-criticality, those are easier to comment on.
Le Pétomane,
Certainly you may embrace ignorance as a defence. Do not expect it to carry much weight in the court of public opinion.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
Bart R
The point of Swanson’s graph and its presence at RealClimate was to offer a measure of qualitative support to the awful prediction of Smith et al 2007 “Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model.
My take is that Swanson’s narrative and Pierrehumbert’s defense are entirely plausible – albeit quantitatively inadequate. Likewise, Girma’s graphology could also be viewed as inoffensive qualitative artwork, especially while simultaneously squinting at the statistical overreach in MBH98.
What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Bart R
Who is the goose? Dr. Orssengo or Dr. Pierrehumbert?
Oops. That should be: Who is the goose, Dr. Orssengo or Dr. Swanson?
blueice2hotsea | April 9, 2012 at 10:35 pm |
One can compare geese to ganders.
In strict logic, a pile of meaninglessly irrational supposition, error and invalidity doesn’t get compared to anything else; in much the same sense as no one considers the food value of a distant galaxy in a sodium-reduced diet. Incommensurable.
Again, I can’t help you.
You seem to have an itch against the Swanson graph; for what reasons I cannot say, and don’t care.
While Robert I Ellison may be eager to pounce in ignorance with strong opinion at every turn, there’s no opinion I have about something I have no reason to read.
In itself, the image you present may be either fairly flawless depending on the context of its use and what narrative (unsupplied by you) description of methods and sources is given by the author. I have no way to say.
Bart
My model is an empirical one. It is not a theoretical solution that apply everywhere. It is just curve fitting to model the last 100 year climate.
It does not apply for the climate pattern of the 19th century.
It does not apply for the 19th century may be because climate change occurred at the end of that century or the early GMT is not reliable.
“It is just curve fitting to model the last 100 year climate.”
So what value does it have?
Louise queries the value of modelling the last 100 years and I am inclined to agree. While your enthusiasm is appreciated Girma I cant help feeling the you are out of your depth when you are attempting to use smoothed data for curve fitting.
There simply isn’t enough reliable data to get valid results. You are extrapolating far too much with data which is too limited in scope as a time series. You are doing the same sort of things that Mann and other mainstream climate scientists have been doing for the past 20 years..
Peter – I don’t think of curve fitting as modelling. I think there is value in genuinely modelling the climate of the past 100 years* but not drawing pretty lines through some of the data and claiming it means anything. This is like comparing joining the stars to make pretty pictures (constallations) and thinking that tells us anything about astrophysics.
* i.e. comparing observed data with predictions from models based on physics
Louise,
The scientists of Astrology understand the Zodiac, and are able to predict the future already. So, why do we need AGW scientists too? We can do more, with less.
Absolutely – what Bart called it was spatio-temporal chaos and not choas. There is a difference. One has temporal dimensions and the other has – well – a spatial dimension too.
There is no pattern Girma and even if there were there is no likelihood of reliably detecting a 60 year oscillation in a 150 year record.
This ENSO proxy hows climate at a Holocene scale:
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=ENSO11000.gif
There were abrupt climate shifts around 1910, the mid 1940’s, the late 1970’s and 1998/2001. Anastasios Tsonis – who identifies these shifts quantitatively – said that ‘our interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural’. The changes include ENSO as a significant influence on climate at this scale and it seems unlikely that we have seen in the 20th century more than a fraction of the intrinsic variability of ENSO. We are currently in a cool Pacific decadal mode – we just are – and it might last another decade or two. We should ruminate on just what the underlying dynamics are – they are fairly dramatic.
Beyond that there are dynamics of atmosphere, cloud, ice, snow, ocean circulation and biology that determine the future trajectory of climate. Climate is the outcome of couplings and feedback that result in abrupt and nonlinear change. I think that the trajectory of climate following the next climate shift – that is due in a decade or two – is indeterminant. ‘The future’s another country, man… And I still ain’t got a passport.’
Robert I Ellison
Come on Rob
Are you saying there is no pattern in the following?
http://bit.ly/HRvReF
Yes, the individual observed GMT is chaotic, but the smoothed GMT is not.
Girma | April 8, 2012 at 9:37 pm |
When Robert I Ellison and Bart R both agree in exactly the same way about exactly the same thing, and that thing is that you’re doing it wrong..
That means next to nothing at all.
However, by the sort of logic you have yourself appealed to, it is 100% ironclad proof.
That is pretty scary!
‘Absolutely – what Bart called it was spatio-temporal chaos and not choas. There is a difference. One has temporal dimensions and the other has – well – a spatial dimension too.’ (sarc)
Sorry – forgot to turn the sarc. switch to on.
My visa’s stamped and signed by Livingston and Penn.
===========
Being on a slow boat to Solar City sounds more like a day trip to the Florida Keys – but even then unless you know the amplification rules the risk is being declared persona non grata.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
CLIMATE SENSITIVITY CALCULATION
By Girma Orssengo
I have got the following surprising result.
You have already seen my GMT equation below that is valid ONLY (that is for WHT) for the last 100 years:
http://bit.ly/HRvReF
I plotted the quadratic component of the smoothed GMT equation that is given by (2*10^(-5))*(Year-1880)^2 against CO2 concentration. This is the plot I got.
http://bit.ly/IgF6o4
This result shows a correlation R^2 of 0.997 between CO2 concentration and the quadratic component GMT.
This result shows an increase in CO2 concentration of 1ppm results in an increase in GMT of 0.0028 deg C.
As a result, climate sensitivity, which is the change in GMT for doubling the current CO2 concentration, is given by
390 (ppm) *0.0028 (deg C/ppm) = 1.1 deg C.
So the climate sensitivity is 1.1 deg C.
Do you agree?
Is this publishable material?
Please find hole in it.
Girma | April 8, 2012 at 11:57 pm |
Mr. Orssengo
Heck, in many ways, it’s not much worse than many other published works in the field.
If you’re lucky, it’ll go relatively unnoticed amid the background noise of Skydragon Slaying, the Himalayan meltdown of 2035, The Twilight Saga..
Go ahead. Publish it.
Just don’t claim later your friends here didn’t do everything in their power to dissuade you from such a course.
Girma | April 8, 2012 at 11:57 pm |
Mr. Orssengo, one of the first things people who look at your work will attempt is to recreate it, and compare it with actual data.
No one will look at your smoothed lines when comparing the curve you propose to actual data. At least, not if they have the least wit or reason.
Below is a link to what roughly they will see:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/plot/gistemp-dts/from:1990/trend/offset:-0.15/detrend:0.1/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2000/trend/offset:-0.1/detrend:0.031/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:1910/trend/detrend:-0.11/offset:-0.15/plot/hadcrut3vgl/to:1880/trend/detrend:-0.2/offset:-0.35/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:5/mean:7
They will see that all of your curve prior to 1910 has no skill at all.
They will see that select 30-year segments of your curve, compared to actual data not to smoothed data, again, has no skill at all.
They will see that the IPCC projection from 1990 better matches the actual data than your own projection, significantly.
They will see you replace a logarithmic function in your second graph with a quadratic, apparently simply because you can’t explain what is causing a known logarithmic relationship to behave for the data you have in a way you can’t distinguish from your quadratic equation.
If they are exceptionally kind, they will tear you to ribbons publicly in reviews.
If they are unkind, or you have made any enemies, they will use this to impeach your competence.
I agree the model does not work before 1910. The reason for this discrepancy could be because of the fact that the earliest GMT measurements have large uncertainty. It could also be the case that there was a change in the climate pattern at the beginning of the 20-century making the climate pattern for the 20th and 19th century different. I provided the climate pattern for the 20th century.
This is an empirical model that could only apply assuming there is no change in the climate pattern.
‘…. be pleased to let us see the worthy lady you talk of…and then if we find her possessed of those matchless charms of which you assert her to be the mistress, we will freely, and without the least compulsion, own the truth which you would exert from us.’ ‘Had i once shown you that beauty,’ replied Don Quixote, ‘what wonder would it be to acknowledge so notorious a truth? the importance of the thing lies in obliging you to believe it, confess it, affirm it, swear it, and maintain it without seeing her; and therefore make this acknowledgement this very moment, or know, that it is with me you must join in battle, ye proud and unreasonable mortals.’
On certainty and uncertainty . H/T Cervantes and Don Quixote.
I’m certain oared vessels were used @ Lepanto. No error bars, but missing limbs.
=========
Why commitment, when the observed global mean temperatures are already below commitment level?
http://bit.ly/HnYPQf
The models are definitely wrong!
That is for Steven and Bart who said my graph relative IPCC’s projections are wrong
Clearly IPCC’s projections are
2000 => 0.4 deg C
2010 => 0.6 deg C
2025 => 0.9 deg C
Steven& Bart are you not going to retract your accusations?
1990 => 0.2 deg C
1980 => 0.0 deg C.
Is that your understanding of what the IPCC claimed?
I’m not saying the IPCC’s projections have any relation whatsoever to your graph.
You’ve got a narrative that your model has a curve or function following a trigonometric function, and comparing it to a straight-line function of 0.2C/decade.
To make that comparison valid, your model line and the 0.2C/decade curve you claim to be comparing it to (NOT the IPCC projections, but your 0.2C alternative) must start on one particular date at the same temperature.
If you have no agreement of temperature with the IPCC whatsoever, that’s cool. Because you’re not talking about temperature. You’re talking about trend, only. You said so yourself.
You have said the IPCC projection was 0.2C in 2000, and 0.4C in 2010. Logically, that means you choose 1990, at 0.0C as your base date.
The 0.2C slope must intersect the temperature of your model in 1990, or there is no valid comparison.
This is how trend analysis works.
You don’t compare two trends of the same thing from completely different starting points; such an incommensurable state is an invalid basis of establishing performance.
No.
Here is my reading of the IPCC projections
2000=>0.4 deg C
2010=>0.6 deg C
2015=>0.7 deg C
2025 => 0.9 deg C
Check the above values here => http://bit.ly/HnYPQf
Or better
IPCC predictions
2005 => 0.5 deg C
2015 => 0.7 deg C
2025 => 0.9 deg C
Girma’s model extended from
http://orssengo.com/GlobalWarming/GmtModel.PNG
I have said my model describes ONLY the last 100 years climate and could be extrapolated for the next 20 years.
It does not apply before 1910. It don’t claim it will apply after 2030.
It is a good empirical model that describe the last 100 years climate.
Can any one provide the smoothed GMT curve that IPCC uses? Is it better than my model?
Or better, as you’ve moved the goalposts one more time:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/plot/gistemp-dts/from:1980/trend/offset:-0.16/detrend:0.1/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2000/trend/offset:-0.1/detrend:0.031/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:5/mean:7/from:1910
Your model looks worse and worse when compared to the raw data, Mr. Orssengo, the earlier you move the start of the 0.2C/decade slope.
This isn’t that a 0.2C/decade slope is so hot, from 1980. It’s that your model is so poor.
el manco de Lepanto
The publications at Principia Scientific International show why carbon dioxide has absolutely no effect on climate, so sensitivity is zero. See, for example, my peer-reviewed paper Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics on the site.
I am proud to be an active member of PSI and, as such, I am in daily email contact with many of these main stream scientists, including professors and PhD’s in various disciplines such as physics, applied mathematics, chemistry, climatology and astro physics. The numbers are approaching 40, including well known new members just announced.
What I write are not just my theories. We are all in agreement that standard physics and empirical results back us up.
Doug Cotton wrote:
>I am proud to be an active member of PSI and, as such, I am in daily email contact with many of these main stream scientists, including professors and PhD’s in various disciplines such as physics, applied mathematics, chemistry, climatology and astro physics. The numbers are approaching 40, including well known new members just announced.
Doug, a while back Judith wrote on the fallacy of arguing from a supposed “scientific consensus”: in science, it is *evidence* that counts, not consensus.
But, you have exalted that fallacy to a whole new, and utterly bizarre, level. Instead of claiming an actual consensus, you claim a mere 40 scientists (okay, approaching 40!) as reason to believe in your theory.
Of the huge number of scientists in the world today, it would not surprise me if you could find a mere 40 who believe in leprechauns!
As to your claim:
>What I write are not just my theories. We are all in agreement that standard physics and empirical results back us up.
Well… we have *very* well tested laws of radiation– Maxwell’s equations, and the quantum theory of radiation — that disagree wildly with you guys. The fact that your paper makes no serious efforts to come to grips with that fact is utterly and conclusively damning.
Dave
Those of us interested in climate science usually have some facility with statistics. The strange statistical anomaly that I see on this thread is that several AUSSIE commenters are essentially hijacking this commenting site with bizarre theories on climate. And it is not as if there is any kind of cohesiveness to their arguments, as they appear independently outlandish in their viewpoints.
We have these Australians:
Captain Kangaroo/Chief Hydrologist who spews garbage
StephanTheDenier who is incomprehensible
Doug Cotton who is nuts
Girma who is just pathetic
Jinan Cao who now tips the scales
The entire discussion thread has largely turned into a few of us trying to refute all this garbage that these Australian crackpots put forward. There are also other Australian commenters who prod these kooks on, and this is what we are left with — PhycistDave rightly pointing out that what we are essentially doing is arguing with a group of people that believe in leprechauns, and that are very persistent about it !
What is this sociopathology all about? Is this as Bart implies, really some sort of national pasttime, to punk and play practical jokes on what is ostensibly people engaged in a serious topic?
Mosh suggests to go over to Lucia’s or Jeff Id’s blogs for some serious discussion. I just happened to check out Lucia’s Blackboard, and it certainly looks much more serious than this place, which has essentially jumped the shark IMO.
WebHubTelescope | April 10, 2012 at 8:57 am |
Dude, srsly.
While sticking my nose into the internal matters of other countries and what may cause their citizens to behave whatever foreign way foreigners will doesn’t interest me, so too doesn’t being said to imply xenophobic attitudes toward people of the upside-down persuasion.
At least the Aussies care. In their own way.
I think for many it boils down to simply not understanding first principles. We have the Dragon Slayer crowd (one example of whacko skeptics) saying that atmospheric pressure alone somehow sustains a higher surface temperature than Kirchoff’s Law allows and on the other side we have establishment climate boffins claiming that the insulating effect of greenhouse gases can somehow sustain a higher average surface temperature than Kirchoff’s Law allows. They are both equally off the deep end as far as I’m concerned. Both propose what are essentially perpetual motion scenarios.
The phsical limit for the earth’s average temperature is set by the average power it receives from the sun plus the internal heat of the planet (which is a large factor on Venus but a tiny one on the earth). This limit is 6C. The global ocean’s average temperature is colder than that so Kirchoff is safe. A thin layer on the ocean’s surface is heated above the average temperature in the tropics and spreads poleward staying on the surface because warm water is less dense than cold. This has nothing to do with greenhouse gases and everything to do with the simple fact that the ocean is stratified. Disturb that stratification and the average surface will plummet to the average and take surface air temperature down with it.
Is “boffin” really a British slang word for scientist?
Is it meant to be used like nerd?
At least to me, science used to be a universal language, but I get the feeling when all these cultural antagonisms get enmeshed, it becomes a free-for-all, as all the reference points turn into word salad.
David Springer wrote:
|>on the other side we have establishment climate boffins claiming that the insulating effect of greenhouse gases can somehow sustain a higher average surface temperature than Kirchoff’s Law allows.
No, David, we scientists are not saying that at all. We are saying that you misunderstand the implications of Kirchhoff’s law. Of course, since you decline to state how you draw that conclusion from Kirchhoff’s law, we cannot show you at exactly which step you are making an error.
Dave
Web,
Can’t offer an explanation for my compatriots……except to say that every country has it’s crackpots, ours just seem over-represented here.
Let’s put it down to sampling error.
Then why do you all keep going back to the Error Bar & Grill?
Nobody makes errors anymore; they’re everywhere.
========================
Michael, At least you care. Until I started noticing the number of trolls here, I thought at least there was some representation from Tim Lambert and other Australians that had some common sense and could use logic. Vaughan Pratt too, the master logician.
As it is, it looks like a statistical anomaly that every open discussion forum has to suffer through.
Or is it John Cook, who runs the http://SkepticalScience.com web site that they are mad at? Are they mad that he coopted the skeptical scientist tagline?
Web – do you have a reference or any other information that explains how an increase in CO2 affects water vapor – the main secondary feedback to my understanding. Is this behavior described only in computer models? I certainly understand that more CO2 will elevate the temperature, but that alone does not pose a problem. It is only if there are significant secondary effects that amplify this initial increase that a problem could occur. The discussion of this is sparse, especially when it comes to specific mechanisms.
Jim2,
Here are some simulations and links that may interest you:
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/blog/isaac-held/2011/10/26/19-radiative-convective-equilibrium/
mattstat – That’s a pretty nebulous explanation at best how CO2 affects water vapor.
Jim2: mattstat – That’s a pretty nebulous explanation at best how CO2 affects water vapor.
It was no explanation at all. The writers hope to develop more of the theory and computations in the future.
The link between warming by CO2 and the knock-on effect WRT water is the weak link in the CAWG argument. No one seems to have a handle on it, yet we are expected to become serfs because of it. That’s the real problem CAWG proponents have. It isn’t that the can’t communicate well, it’s that they have nothing of import to communicate.
Girma who is just pathetic
Do you mean this => http://bit.ly/HnYPQf
Girma
Bart R has patiently proffered numerous suggestions for improving your trend comparison. And he has heroically expanded on Steve’s terse comment re zeroing the graph. It’s time thank them, especially Bart R.
Look at the projection of global mean temperature changes from the IPCC’s third assessment. It includes the second assessment projections in green. Both projections begin in 1990 at the same point of zero temp change. On your graph, that zero point is shifted nearly 0.2C higher. How about move it down or renumber the axis?
And notice how neither your own projection or the raw temp data pass through the same zero point of the other projections? Seriously. The best way to hi-light trend divergence would not be to put anomalous vertical offsets on everything which ought to start at the same place.
blueice2hotsea
Oh, you want to see the original Nobel Prize winning graph?
Okay, here it is => http://bit.ly/xColbo
Well we can at least agree that the Dragon Slayers, which Cotton fancies himself amongst, is a bunch of cranks. They just don’t seem to understand that the dry lapse rate is an artifact of measuring only sensible temperature and that in reality a pound of dry air in the stratosphere holds the same amount of energy as a pound of air at sea level. Thermal energy is the sum of kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy. Molecules higher in the atmosphere get there by trading off kinetic energy for altitude but they retain every joule of that kinetic energy as gravitational potential energy. Thermometers don’t measure the gravitational component and they just can’t seem to grok it. They also seem to completely miss out on the fact that there are two applications of the ideal gas law. One application is in a closed vessel where volume is fixed and pressure varies with temperature. The other application is in gravitational confinement where pressure is fixed and volume varies with temperature.
Nicely summarized, sir.
I wonder if would help the Slayers if we describe air molecules as little airplanes. Every pilot knows that airspeed and altitude are interchangable. As long as you have airspeed you can increase pitch and gain altitude while airspeed bleeds off. Conversely if you have altitude you can decrease pitch and gain airspeed while altitude bleeds off. Graviational potential energy is just as real as any other kind but it appears it might require a piano falling on the Slayer heads from a tenth story window to pound the lesson home.
Tonyb @8/4 3.36pm:
Hmm, expensive obligatory drinks… I’ll jest bring my own.
Antipodeans do that sort of thing.
Beth
I have a sister who lives in Adelaide. That could explain a lot.
As regards bringing your own drinks, by all means do so but there is a (large) corkage charge :)
tonyb
Paging Erl Happ.
========
IPCC compared to Observation => http://bit.ly/HnYPQf
Bart R
April 8, 2012 at 9:16 pm
Starting the IPCC curve significantly _above_ your model line simply abandons your own narrative; the only apparent reason for this is to cheat.
Steven
April 8, 2012 at 10:37 pm
you zeroed the graph wrong idiot.
Bart & Steven, your accusations are incorrect.
Just for fun:
http://xkcd.com/1040/large/
Why is it everyone is so witty, precise, informative and correct when disparaging the opinions of those disagreeable to me, while so clumsy, inaccurate, misinformed and erring when differing with my own opinions?
http://bit.ly/HnYPQf
Is that “cheating”?
Girma
Please read this.
Oh, you want to see the original Nobel Prize winning graph?
Okay, here it is => http://bit.ly/xColbo
OMG! Help Bart R!
Or please pass the goose sauce. :)
Bart, the answer that question is Greek, to you…
…a Greek…
Bar Bart,
Har Hark.
======
Reading through this thread, I have the impression that it’s characterized by more than the usual number of misconceptions regarding basic greenhouse gas physics, as well as misunderstandings about infrared thermal energy transfer into the oceans. I won’t address the latter point, but the greenhouse principles are so fundamental that it might be worthwhile to call attention to a couple of informative sources on these principles. The main one is Raymond Pierrehumbert’s Physics Today Article on Radiative Transfer. After carefully reading that article, readers should understand why the Earth’s surface, in radiative equilibrium with absorbed surface and atmospheric solar radiation (about 239 W/m^2 based on total irradiance of 1361 W/m^2 and corrections for geometry and albedo), can radiate at a far higher level than 239 W/m^2 and with a correspondingly higher temperature, without violating the First or Second Laws of thermodynamics or Kirchoff’s Law.
The second article, from the University of Arizona, elaborates on aspects of this, with a particularly interesting reference to a runaway greenhouse effect. In essence, if either planetary albedo somehow declined precipitously, or solar irradiance increased (as it ultimately will in the distant future) for absorbed solar radiation to exceed 310 W/m^2, the Earth would become susceptible to a runaway climate in which increases in temperature caused sufficient water evaporation to prevent the higher temperature from allowing higher energy escape to space until the oceans completely evaporated and the Earth could then heat up enough to re-establish radiative equilibrium at a temperature hundreds of degrees hotter than today – again with no violation of any laws of thermodynamics.
I think many readers already know this material, but I see enough confusion in the thread to warrant citing the sources for anyone who is interested.
Simple heat exchange physics requires the multi-modal (combined) heat transfer at the surface to be solved properly. The bottleneck is the atmospheric radiative cooling to space, where CO2 may help. At the surface there’s no bottleneck, it’s free to cool by any of the heat transfer modes available , as long as there’s a temperature difference.
Fred – from the U of A article:
• Cloud feedbacks: Cloud coverage increases the albedo, lessening the
absorption of starlight and promoting cooler conditions. On the other
hand, because the tropospheric temperatures generally decrease with
altitude, cloud tops are typically cooler than the ground and therefore
radiate less IR energy to space, promoting warmer conditions (an effect
that depends sensitively on cloud altitude and latitude). These effects
compete with each other. As yet, there is no consensus on even the sign—
much less the magnitude—of this feedback for the modern Earth. The
situation is even less settled for early Earth and other planets, leading
to a fundamental uncertainty in climate models.
82
Fred, I agree that the greenhouse effect is pretty basic. Lindzen accepts it for example which should be evidence enough in its favor. However, what is troubling is that some of the consequences of it such as the tropical hot spot seem to be missing in action. I do think there is still some room for refining the theory based on more sophisticated views of convection.
If the Earth were perfectly transparent to all incoming energy and a perfect insulator of all outgoing radiation, the temperature of the Earth would be equal to the temperature associated with the peak value of the incoming radiation. For 1361Wm-2 peak, the surface temperature would be 393.6K, pretty toasty. However, it the atmosphere were a perfect insulator, the internal core temperature could be felt at the surface and the temperature would be equal to the maximum core temperature. It there were not radiant cooling, the Earth would be a mass of plasma.
Perfect insulators do not exist, so the Earth ain’t.
For the dim sun, if the radiant cooling of water vapor and CO2 decreased by the same percentage as the sun, the surface temperature would be the same. The heat of fusion and the heat of evaporation limit the maximum and minimum temperatures. Liquid water would exist on Earth if the peak incoming solar energy absorb at the equator was over 315Wm-2 plus the minor radiant spectrum of the atmospheric gases. Energy will be transferred to the atmosphere by conduction, there will be convection so the atmosphere will have heat that can only be released through conduction or radiation.
Conduction may be slow, but what is time to a universe?
Dallas – You don’t understand the greenhouse effect, and I would urge readers not to heed your comment.
Sorry for being curt, but your first paragraphi is completely wrong.
Actually, the first two sentences.
Fred, what I describe is just thermo. If you add more energy to a system than is lost by work or entropy, the energy accumulates. If you release more energy than is input, the energy of the system approaches zero.
You should read the Pierrehumbert article. He disagrees with your figure of 393.6 K and instead cites a value of 800,000 K (after a billion years).
What heats the Earth, after it’s reached the Sun’s temperature?
He might want to check his model :) Even the most massive stars at the origin of the universe are only estimated at 120,000 C. With a perfectly insulated atmosphere, entropy, the escape of highly energetic molecules would limit the maximum temperature.
Edim – In order to make a point, Pierrehumbert is hypothesizing a scenario contrary to fact – the possibility of perfect insulation against escape of radiation combined with some transparency to incoming radiation.That isn’t possible, but if it were, his figure of 800,000 is the temperature the Earth would acquire.
I don’t want to belabor the point, but it’s important to realize that with a potent greenhouse effect, it is possible for radiative equilibrium to be associated with surface radiation far in excess of the wattage of absorbed solar radiation, and a correspondingly much higher temperature, all without violating any laws of physics. If someone doesn’t understand why this is so, he or she doesn’t understand the greenhouse effect. I do think the Pierrehumbert article is helpful in this regard. For anyone desiring a more sophisticated understanding, his 600+ page book is an excellent source.
Edim | April 10, 2012 at 3:29 pm |
What heats the Earth, after it’s reached the Sun’s temperature?
Same as what heats a black hole in the same situation, which is about the only equivalent to the ‘transparent to all inbound, perfect insulator to all outbound’ model.
It’s as meaningless a case as division by zero, hence is termed a singularity.
Capt. Dallas wrote::
I>f the Earth were perfectly transparent to all incoming energy and a perfect insulator of all outgoing radiation, the temperature of the Earth would be equal to the temperature associated with the peak value of the incoming radiation.
Sorry, but Fred is right, and obviously so. Under your hypothesis, energy keeps coming in without any going out, and, therefore, the energy content of the earth (and, so, its temperature) increases without limit.
By the way, that is the well-known and obvious proof that you cannot actually construct a filter that is transparent going in and totally opaque going out, since the result above would violate the Second Law
Dave
Countefactual arguments are always problematic when they are used to demonstrate anything else than that they are counterfactual.
As they cannot be accepted in full, it’s always a matter of taste to decide how far the imagination is set free of realities.
Thus i don’t give much credit for an argument that tell’s how the surface of Earth would reach any temperature higher that that of the sun based on the energy received from the sun. Making such arguments will create more confusion than understanding.
PhysicistDave said, “By the way, that is the well-known and obvious proof that you cannot actually construct a filter that is transparent going in and totally opaque going out, since the result above would violate the Second Law” True, that is the conundrum with the hypothetical. Could an energy flux of 1361Wm-2 warm an object that is at a temperature capable of emitting 1361Wm-2? I say no. Before that point is reached the mass balance would override the energy balance. The Earth would shed its atmosphere. Greenhouse gases shed energy before the mass cannot be contained by gravity or you end up with a Mercury.
Ray Pierre’s 800,000K is obviously impossible. If you consider the escape velocity for the planetary mass you arrive at a reasonable limit. If you consider all the thermal properties of the atmospheric gases, you would arrive at a lower limit. CO2 is a greenhouse gas because it has rotational and vibrational degrees of freedom that diatomic molecules do not have. As it approaches a low enough temperature it would lose some degrees of freedom. On Venus, that temperature
oops, lost the last few lines, On Venus, that temperature is 184K on Earth 185K, due to the difference in mass.
Dallas – Raypierre’s 800,000 K was intended to be impossible, as everyone has stated, but was given to make a point – as long as an impediment to radiative escape exists, surface temperature can rise to great heights before outgoing radiation balances incoming radiation. It’s not limited to temperatures emitting only the total watts of absorbed solar
radiation.
As to 1361 Wm-2, I’m not sure why you picked that number (4 times the actual average incoming solar), because it’s somewhat beside the point. However, I don’t see why the Earth”s surface couldn’t in theory absorb and emit that much and more, because that would result in a temperature less than that of the surface of Venus. I’d like to stay on the main topic, though – the greenhouse effect causes surface temperatures and radiative fluxes to exceed the blackbody radiation and temperature that would exist in the absence of the greenhouse gases, and this doesn’t violate any physical laws.
Fred, I am looking for the maximum “possible” Greenhouse gases can definitely cause the surface temperature to be greater than the “average” .The 4 times is the ‘peak” which should determine the maximum possible.
In the dim sun problem, the average would be 30% less, the peak would be 30% less, but the GHE does not have to be 30% less. Over time the water vapor level would reduce, causing less surface cooling and less heat transport to the atmosphere with convection. The average water vapor radiant layer would be lower, allowing more of the surface heat to be retained by the other GHGs above the water vapor average radiant layer. The peak value, 4 times average would be the maximum surface temperature possible. There would be equatorial liquid water even though the average temperature would be below freezing.
What we have now is more CO2 raising the CO2 average radiant layer. The increased CO2 appears to be increasing the rate of moist convection, as evident by the near zero tropical ocean warming the past decade of two. That is a negative feedback. Over land the warming is greater. There is less water vapor to provide the negative feedback of increased rate of convection.
In the Antarctic, there is less warming than expected, (BTW I am using mid- troposphere for that statement not the surface stations which have very limited coverage and very short duration.) which is possibly due to the lack of water vapor, which can be a positive impact if higher than the CO2 radiant layer or an negative feedback if lower than the CO2 radiant layer. With clouds this is obvious, but it looks like it can also occur with just moisture because of the shared radiant spectrum wavelengths.
I believe there is enough information to estimate a more realistic maximum GHE impact for our atmosphere if we can determine the optimum radiant layer altitude for the individual GH gases.
In the jumble of data it is hard to find any solid evidence, but looking at the exceptions of the rule, the relative heights of the radiant layers (H2O, CO2 and O3 primarily) appears to be more important than the absolute height of any one layer.
No Dallas, the solar “peak” does not describe the maximum possible. surface emission. The surface temperature can rise to a level greater than that corresponding to the peak solar insolation, which in any case falls on only a tiny fraction of the surface so that there is no reason for it to have any special meaning. For example, if somehow the Earth’s albedo declined precipitously, the maximum surface temperature could exceed that associated with 1361 Wm-2. There is no theoretical reason linking the maximum solar flux with the maximum emitted surface radiation. Rather, the maximum surface temperature and emitted flux are determined by the characteristics of the greenhouse absorbers – in particular, the absorber that involves a condensible substance that can exist in both liquid and vapor phase – on Earth, it’s water.
It’s true, of course, that all other things being equal, a higher solar irradiance will be associated with a higher maximum temperature, but you can’t simply calculate the maximum temperature from a knowledge of the solar irradiance.
Fred is right in noting that 1361 W/m^2 has no strong connection to the maximum radiation the surface can receive or to the maximum temperature the surface can reach. The maximum attainable level of radiation and the maximal attainable temperature are determined by the temperature of the sun and the ratio of transmittivity of energy by the atmosphere for solar radiation to the sum of all mechanisms that allow the surface to loose energy to the open space.
One upper limit for the Earth surface temperature is given by the tempeature of the sun as any atmosphere would be equally transmittive for the radiation from the surface and for the radiation from the sun, when the temperatures are equal. That’s of course far above other limits, but figuring out what the real limits are for an counterfactual Earth depends on what is included in the ways the Earth is allowed to deviate from the real one.
Fred, 1361Wm-2 may indeed be a more realistic upper limit. The temperature of the sun as Pekka said, may be a limit for some hypothetical cases, but the mass of the Earth would limit the “surface temperature” well before that that limit is reached. The thermosphere, with little thermal mass can have a high temperature but the actual energy content is extremely low.
1361Wm-2 is of course not felt at the surface, the highest recorded temperature on the surface is 57C or 330K (672Wm-2) with a likely solar insulation at the surface of around 1100Wm-2 at that time. The lowest recorded temperature was -89C, 184K (65Wm-2). So there are likely more realistic maximum and minimum temperatures than theoretical values that don’t consider more of the basic physics.
Numerically 1361 W/m^2 may well be more reasonable, but I cannot see any justification for picking this particular value over any other value.
1361 is a number relevant in absence of any greenhouse effect and larger than 340 for purely geometric reasons. This argument has absolutely nothing to do with the GHE ant it’s totally pointless to bring it to this discussion. The strength of GHE is limited by spetral properties of gases in combination with other heat transfer mechanisms present in the atmosphere, not by the ratio of the surface area of a sphere to the cross section area of the sphere.
Pekka, the 1361Wm-2 is just a maximum which may be useful as a baseline or reference. What percentage of that baseline is obtained at peak condition would indicate the combination of transmission and absorptivity of the surface/atmosphere. Albedo if fine, but it doesn’t indicate the heat stored, only the heat that can be absorbed.
The maximum surface flux and temperature for Earth as a greenhouse effect is hard to estimate exactly because it depends on estimates of water continuum absorption as a function of pressure and concentration, but it is well above 1361, and probably above 2000, and the maximum temperature is well above 400 K.
Fred, I have no doubt that with all other things remaining equal that one can make a case for much higher GHE impacts. All things rarely remain equal. The use of the 1361Wm-2 is to estimate a “realistic” maximum. In the tropical deserts which can have over 1000Wm-2, the maximum temperature ever measured is 57 C which is about 670Wm-2 of equivalent OLR. That is less than 50% of the 1361Wm-2 limit I am pondering. It is pretty unlikely that 10 doublings of CO2 could double that temperature.
I wouldn’t call it a “realistic” maximum, Dallas, but simply arbitrary, because it happens to coincide with solar irradiance. The realistic maxima I cited don’t apply to current conditions, which are not “maximal”, but would apply to a future Earth where irradiance has crossed the Kombayashi-Ingersoll boundary, or a hypothetical current Earth where albedo has greatly declined. The former scenario is inevitable and the latter hypothetical and extremely unlikely, but both illustrate the maximum capacity of greenhouse effects based on water vapor to create a runaway climate. If you want to say that such a maximum can’t be achieved for millions of years, you would be right, but there is still no reason to use the figure 1361 for any purpose at all. No near term climate change will even come close, and eventual climate change will far exceed that figure.
Incidentally, thanks for posting a link to the new Stevens/Schwartz review, which looks like it has a lot of worthwhile material.
Fred I under stand that, but it is called a solar constant for a reason. Using it as maximum should make it easier to translate current maxima and minima to past temperatures. Lake Tanganyika for example has a few interesting reconstructions which would be nice to compare to a more accurate baseline.
When people realize that they are very wrong (http://bit.ly/HnYPQf, with the original => http://bit.ly/xColbo) they move into insults!
WebHubTelescope => “Girma who is just pathetic”
Bart => Girma is a “Cheat”
Steven => Girma is “idiot”
In other words, the AGW emperor has no clothes!
According to the IPCC, last years GMT of 0.34 deg C should have been 0.65 deg C, 0.3 deg C higher (wrong by half the warming of the 20th century!)
Oh, I forgot the original data => http://bit.ly/HysIA9
Your mistakes have been explained to you over and over again. You refuse to learn. Basically the rest of us are at a loss. When someone refuses to learn we try to explain that: a) they are motivated by something other than the truth ( cheat) b) they are emotionally disturbed. c) they are stupid.
As I challenged you: please try to promote your stuff at Lucia’s. There you will find people from all walks of science and engineering. Some skeptics, some lukewarmers, some warmists. They will hand you your hat. Not because of what you believe about Global warming, but because we dont like shitty analysis: not shitty analysis by warmists and not shitty analysis by kooks. It’s the math Girma. Nothing personal. If you wont listen, then we get to explain your stubborness.
Steven
The one and only one question I want to ask you is the following?
Is the following projection of the IPCC valid?
1) Original IPCC projection => http://bit.ly/xColbo
2) IPCC VS observation => http://bit.ly/HnYPQf
I don’t engage in name calling and I let the personal abuses drop like water on a ducks back.
Mr. Orssengo
If you stop turning this into personalities, you may notice that it’s not about personalities.
I don’t know you personally. I’ve never met you, shaken your hand, seen your face, heard your voice, sat across a chess board from you or rubbed elbows with you at a dinner table. I have nothing personal against you.
I’ve had several and distinct disputes online with Steven Mosher, WebHubTelescope, Dr. Curry, Robert Ellison, and, well.. just about anyone who seemed willing to exchange ideas with me. I have a great deal of respect for Steven Mosher’s abilities, WebHubTelescope’s brilliance, Robert Ellison’s awe-inspiring energy, force of character, wit and intellect; I cannot say enough good about Dr. Curry, even disagreeing with over eighty percent of the opinions I’ve ever seen her express outside of her published research.
Having met none of them, the really horrible things I say to them about their ideas are never personal.
Let’s review what people have said about your ideas, not about you.
Robert I Ellison => “there is no likelihood of reliably detecting a 60 year oscillation in a 150 year record”
WebHubTelescope => “bizarre theories on climate”
Bart R=> “Starting the IPCC curve significantly _above_ your model line simply abandons your own narrative”
Steven => “you zeroed the graph wrong”
blueice2hotsea => “neither your own projection or the raw temp data pass through the same zero point of the other projections”
Jim Cripwell => “we disagree on a rather fundamental issue”
Louise => “what value does it have?”
peterdavies252 => “extrapolating far too much with data which is too limited in scope as a time series”
Tom => “We can do more with less.”
oneuniverse => “You should discuss this.”
This is all speaking to the graphs, methods and ideas you are putting forward. It isn’t even remotely true that you have been the target of all of these very kind people who have taken the time to read, consider and comment on your ideas, methods and graphs.
I’m not about consensus. Not at all. However, you’re slamming every one of these people with a falsehood by slamming Steven, WHT and myself with this accusation that we’re persecuting you, as their criticisms about these ideas are not so different from ours, and in many cases are overlapping or identical.
I somehow doubt any of us can expect any apology from you for this. Which I assure you, I’d fault none of us for taking personally.
Girma | April 10, 2012 at 2:48 pm |
In other words, the AGW emperor has no clothes!
Mr. Orssengo, I need to ask.. do you think _you_ are the AGW emperor? Is that why you think people are after you? For your clothes?
Falks
The GMT residuals are normally distributed!
http://bit.ly/InDiHo
Tonyb:
Corkage Tax! Jest another example of the old country exploiting the colonies. :-(.
Here is how the greenhouse effect warms the ocean – http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=939
‘Sunlight penetrating the surface of the oceans is responsible for warming of the surface layers. Once heated, the ocean surface becomes warmer than the atmosphere above, and because of this heat flows from the warm ocean to the cool atmosphere above.’
‘The rate of flow of heat out of the ocean is determined by the temperature gradient in the ‘cool skin layer’, which resides within the thin viscous surface layer of ocean that is in contact with the atmosphere. It’s so named because it is the interface where ocean heat is lost to the atmosphere, and therefore becomes cooler than the water immediately below. Despite being only 0.1 to 1mm thick on average, this skin layer is the major player in the long-term warming of the oceans.’
Nothing to do with diffusion which is where the discussion with Webby and Bart started. The warm atmosphere doesn’t warm a cold ocean. They simply misapply the 2nd law of thermodynamics through misunderstanding which of the oceans and atmosphere is warmer or cooler. But it all goes into handwaving, meaningless drivel, insults, personal attacks and
The other notch issue is absurd. Certainly spectral absorption is what it is. But with increasing greenhouse gases the atmosphere warms and emissions increase in accordance with the temperature according to the Steffan-Boltzmann for a grey body.
J* = εσT^4 – I assume everyone is familiar.
Emissions cannot increase or decrease more than to balance incoming energy over the long term. The simple global energy budget applies.
Energy in – Energy out = d(S)/dt – where d(S)/dt is the change in global energy content. If everything else were equal and greenhouse gas emissions ceased then d(S)/dt tends to zero and Energy in = Energy out. Energy out in the adsorption bands is restored in a warmer atmosphere. Greenhouse gases absorb and emit in the same frequencies – these are discrete energy states where the energy and frequency is related through the quantum idea –
E = hv where E is the energy in a photon (literally an energy package). h is the Planck constant and v is the frequency. Energy is absorbed at a specific frequency – electrons move into a higher orbit. When the energy is emitted again – a photon emitted – then it is the same energy quantum absorbed and therefore the same frequency. Ultimately the same amount of energy in the IR is emitted as previously from a warmer atmosphere.
This website is really degenerating past any possibility of rational discussion. The fault with this is with Bart and Webby who are so prolific and respond with such personal and partisan attacks that it is impossible to discuss subtleties with without getting buried in content less drivel. Not that any of the above is exceedingly subtle. They simply misunderstand some basics and go off into mad rants.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
The first line is wrong. What you quote is not the greenhouse effect, it just describes how something can get warm when exposed to sunlight.
Heat flows from regions of high concentration to regions of low
concentration. The specific scenario is the slow diffusive movement of thermal energy into the ocean. This takes place from the surface layer on down. The sun’s rays of course will heat the surface layer, and if the air is warmer than the surface, which is typical, a gradient will get set up which will also heat the water to some extent.
I totally agree with James Hansen who first described this diffusive flow in his famous 1981 Science article. This article was reviewed recently
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evaluating-a-1981-temperature-projection/
Note that his projection assumed a diffusion coefficient of 1.2 cm^2/s which was based on fitting an ocean warming model with data from 1880 to 1978. The response to the heat stimulus has a well known general shape which essentially tracks a square root with time if a thermal unit step is applied.
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2012/01/thermal-diffusion-and-missing-heat.html
If you want to see Hansen’s derivation go here (Lacis on there too!), and you can see the square root of time:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1985/1985_Hansen_etal.pdf
Captain Kangaroo sure does hate science. The rest of his comment on
radiative physics is just as bad.
and if the air is warmer than the surface, which is typical
That cannot be. It is the surface that warms the air, not the other way round. As you go up from the surface, the temperature decreases.
Hey dickweed, I know you don’t have the talent, but you can always do a crosscorrelation from buouy measurements. Here is one I did a while ago. Look at the top plot which shows that air temperature leads the sea surface temperature.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lsWgjpo5PJk/TpPAfdezcAI/AAAAAAAAAjw/uuTECWDZeDM/s1600/seatempccorr.gif
It obviously makes sense because the air always warms up first every morning and the water temperature lags a bit behind. While the air temperature is higher than the water temperature, the gradient will be in the direction of water and that is the direction of equilibration. That is an immutable law, as heat always diffuses away from a higher temperature region.
pointless dickhead alert.
For the general reader not familiar with American usage and idiom..
The epithet Web uses is considered mild in much of the USA, especially moreso for some raised in rural areas, or demographically by age.
On the other hand, the faintly innocuous ‘boffin’ Web referred to elsethread will cause a storm of blushes to appear on the cheeks of fans of Twilight or Hunger Games if said in the classroom by an adult.
It’s amazing the idioms there are out there.
Captain Kangaroo gets upset whenever someone shows initiative and processes real-world data.
Never fails.
WHT
You are comparing land with sea.
Relative to see the land and the air above it warm first.
I got to ‘hey dickweed’ and thought and thought that is was just another pointless and abusive comment.
I reserve the term for sockpuppets.
Obviously SELTI1 and GIRMA are the same person.
Like CAPTAIN KANGAROO and CHIEF HYDROLOGIST are the same person.
Like LATIMER ALDER and STERLING ENGLISH and ??? are the same person.
Like how many more of these people are sockpuppets but we have no way of knowing it.
The skeptics have no scientific arguments so they resort to sockpuppetry to make it look like they have greater authority, and to breed FUD wherever possible.
It is really a pathetic display of agenda-driven manipulation.
Everyone knows my name in full – I said explicitly that I was dropping my peacefull hydrological pursuits and taking a commission on the side of the good guys in the climate wars.
No one know knows who you are. Some type of engineer or other with a failed postgraduate career, on trick in misapplied curve fitting, not much understanding of the broader nature of climate and a line in tribal abuse and calumny.
girma
re; as you go up from the surface temperature decreases
An equilibrium atmosphere (non-convecting) is isothermal. That means thermal energy is the same everywhere. That DOES not mean temperature is the same everywhere. Temperature is a measure of kinetic energy. Thermal energy is the sum of both kinetic and gravitational potential energy. So if you take a pound of air at the surface (which has no gravitational potential energy) and a pound of air at say 20,000 feet the former will be warmer but if you add the joules in gravitational potential energy of the latter to its temperature they would both be the same temperature. The lapse rate is an artifact of thermometers not being able to measure gravitational potential energy. But gravitational potential energy is just as important and real in the atmosphere as it is in a piano about to fall out of a third story window and land on someone’s head below.
This makes sense if you think about how the upper air molecules get there in the first place. They are the ones that happen to get bumped upward more than downward or sideways and as they ascend they lose kinetic energy and gain an equal amount of gravitational potential energy. As altitude increases the probability decreases that any particular molecule will get more upward bumps than downward than downward so density decreases with altitude. This is why I was comparing a pound of air at one level with a pound of air at another level. If we take equal volumes instead of equal masses then of course energy density is greater nearer the surface but that doesn’t detract from the fact that pound for pound, neglecting moist convection, they have the same thermal energy content.
An isotherm by definition is a contour of equal temperature. I kind of get what you are saying but according to the definitions this has to be rephrased. Certainly at higher altitude, there is less energy density as the air is less dense. Yet temperature is an intrinsic property of the system, which means that it does not depend on the volume or size. So for temperature to be constant means that the individual particles have the same thermal energy but they can be distributed nonuniformly through the system, in this case, fewer and fewer particles per volume at higher altitudes.
The first line comes from sceptical science which he earlier said was right and supported what he was saying. I wish he would make up his mind.
If you look at any energy budget – http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Topics/energybudgets.html – the upward IR flux at the surface flux exceeds the downward flux. This is so because the surface is heated by visible light. It is really just energy conservation.
At the surface – Energy in (sw) + Energy in (lw) = Energy out (lw) + thermals and evaporation
=> 161 + 333 = 80 + 17 + 396 – we seem to have a 1 W/m^2 energy imbalance. How about that.
The oceans must emit more in IR than they receive because a portion of the energy they get is visible. The skin effect is testimony to that – the layer that is 100microns thick that is cooler than the water below because there is a net loss of IR. The oceans cool to the atmosphere which cools to space. If all webby has is a 1981 Hansen paper – it is obviously wrong. Why should I even bother to read it if it flies in the face of the first law of thermodynamics. It is a weird blind spot in warministas that I have seen in Fred before.
And if all he has is handwaving about Steffen, Boltzmann and Planck – why should anyone listen.
He sure is clueless about science.
A kangaroo court.
Painful to watch a civil engineer fake knowledge on radiation physics and statistical mechanics. He thinks we have a blind spot, while his knowledge is completely barren. The charade will continue I am sure.
I think we covered the first and secaond laws of thermodynamics in plumbers school.
Ya got nothin’ but the air warms up before the ocean in the morning? Idiot.
The surface heats. Then the air in contact with the surface warms. As the air next to the surface warms, its density decreases and rises to be replaced by the surrounding cool dense air. The cycle continues.
The oceans are vast and have room to contain many truths.
Not all of what Robert I Ellison says is incorrect in every particular.
The sea is often warmer than air above it, meaning its temperature can be higher than the air.
This isn’t the universal or only case, but that’s a quibble for later.
The sea is almost always warmer than air above it, if one means it holds more energy than the air above it. Brine has about two orders of magnitude more heat capacity than dry air.
The air/ocean interface is nuanced and not monolithic. Surf and strong waves don’t act like smooth water and mild waves. Conditions of humidity, fog, cloud, precipitation, shallows, angle of incidence, windspeed, air pressure, agitation and even biota affect heat exchange. And as in all things, we’re not comparing the ocean to some abstract absolute, but to its own past, when in many ways it was similar to what it is now — so much so that general statements without concrete and detailed observations are meaningless. And we don’t have those observations, not by nearly enough.
Though, as I’ve slept since, I have no recollection of starting this.
I thought for sure someone else invented the ocean.
Rubbish – we are talking about fundamental laws of physics. There can be no quibbling. The energy entering the oceans in the visible band must leave it in the IR which will always be greater than downwelling IR from the atmosphere.
Why can’t the ocean heat content increase instead?
The ocean both warms and cools Jim. If downwelling IR increases – because the atmosphere is warmer – the net IR upward from the ocean decreases and if the inputted energy from the sun stays the same the ocean must warm pushing more IR upward tending to restore equilibrium.
Whatever the downwelling IR – the outgoing power flux must approximately equal that plus the Solar visible component entering the oceans give or take a little warming or cooling. It makes no difference at all to ‘global warming’ it is just more strictly true by the laws of thermodynamics.
In fact it does make a difference in that if we are not talking slow diffusion but fast radiative – there is nothing in the pipeline because equilibrium in the coupled atmosphere ocean system is very quick. I have shown the numbers and the formula – and linked to scepticalscience for God’s sake. What else could I possibly do?
Those are severely limited equations to use in this context. They need to be written as continuity equations. That is how lags get introduced and boundary conditions get resolved. For most flow problems, physicists start with a master equation such as the heat equation and go from there. That’s the approach I take, but Captain Kangaroo despises anyone that actually looks at empirical data and tries to make sense of it based on first-principles modeling.
Unbelievable. Physics starts with understanding the physics of systems. In this case it is analysis from the 1st and 2nd law of thermodynamics. If you make assumptions that are not physically realistic it leads to the most fundamental error. That of being an idiot and then compounding it with further idiocy.
The place you have made a wrong assumption is that Ein=Eout. There is storage, known as ocean heat content, and some in the land too. The OHC has been steadily increasing, not going up and down, and its increase ties in with the changing balance at the top of the atmosphere where CO2 forcing has been steadily increasing through 1 to 2 W/m2 at present in the last 100 years. Your wording dismisses storage as though it is random fluctuations, when it is the main term responding to CO2 that actually enables Eout to change if you think about it.
Yea, JD, That’s what I was getting at. Captain Kangaroo thinks that the 1st and 2nd laws involve adding a bunch of numbers together and then seeing how they balance out. Well, a lot of work went into those numbers, which he seems to dismiss. To understand how much of that heat actually diffuses into the ocean requires a variation of the heat equation model. This maintains continuity across the interfaces and into the bulk of the heat sink.
That is the analysis that essentially produces the numbers that Captain Kangaroo claims as the 1sts and 2nd laws. What people don’t realize is that those laws are just the basic ideas, and the analytical model behind the scenes does the heavy lifting. Cripes, I could say that a transistor works by the 1st and 2nd laws, and that by itself ain’t gonna get me a job as a device designer.
Captain Kangaroo is like the rooster that crows before dawn and then takes credit for the sun rising in the east. A totally empty poseur.
In contrast, Hansen and Lacis and that gang know their stuff, and it’s just fascinating to read back on how much they got right on the first take.
In contrast, Hansen and Lacis and that gang know their stuff
Is that a big joke?
The observed data is tracing Scenario C => http://bit.ly/HJa3Bn
Scenario C drastically reduces trace gas growth between 1990 and 2000 such that the greenhouse climate forcing ceases to increase after 2000.
Did you read my comment read my comment at 1.20 Jim? This is diverging into the twilight zone. With Webby as a paricularly creepy monster of ignorance and fear. Goodbye.
CK, if downwelling IR increases the ocean warms. You admitted this much at 1:20. Adding CO2 causes downwelling IR to increase, so it causes the ocean to warm. We are in agreement, yes?
I was never in disagreement with anthing but that diffusion of heat from the atmosphere to the ocean is a physically preposterous notion. It works by warming in the sun and net cooling in the IR along with some evaporation and convection. Certainly one can mimic warming with some function or other and data smothing as a diffussion process but this is far from physically realistic.
While molecular diffusion is a minor process, there is eddy diffusion in turbulent areas, and also overturning by conveyor belt currents that also act to mix warmer water down and colder water up. All these come under the category of diffusion in a slab ocean approach to energy budgets.
JD, Yup, thermal diffusion takes place at many different scales. The value that Hansen used for the diffusion coefficient, 1.2 cm^2/s must take into account all the rates of diffusion that occurs, from plain old thermal conductivity to large scale eddy diffusion. I believe he just assumed an average; which works out pretty well, mainly because diffusion is a disordered process and adding more disorder does not change the mathematical result that much. For the most part, the mean diffusion coefficient is the important number.
What I have done is generalized that approach and came up with a variant of the diffusional response that accounts for a maximum variation in the diffusion coefficient assuming a mean value. This is a maximum entropy method. The nice thing is that it makes the math much simpler, removing the erf() family of solutions and replacing it with non-transcedental functions.
Of course, with a pure mathematical slab approach, they can work it out numerically just as well.
So now we are talking about turbulent mixing in the ocean as a diffusion process? Try modelling that with any physical veracity. Here’s a clue it is not for the main part surface currents incorporating warmer into deeper water but eddies forming over deep ocean mountiand and valleys.
The ‘skin’ is the critical factor in ocean warming as the scepticalscience article I linked to says. You guys should try for a consistent story. After all you are the tribe of consensus.
Really – this is goodbye
Chieftain has no real clue about diffusion, so bye to you too.
Read Hansen’s paper for the explanation.
The upwelling IR is 396 W/m2 – downwelling is 333 W/m^2. Webby you are as wacky as anyone on the internet. Energy can can enter the ocean only in the short wave. So your diffusion concept is physically impossible, absurdly conceived of and ridiculously argued. So you are stupid as well as being abusive and bullying.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Topics/energybudgets.html
Capatain Kangaroo, You are a lying manipulator, a poseur when it comes to real science. You make up this narrative to suit your own agenda, which appears to be some Australian pasttime of trolling.
This is what I said earlier on in the thread:
Note the bolded part, you jerkwad. I said the air will heat the surface to some extent, because it will, as that is the direction of the gradient, when the air warms before the water warms. Your problem likely is that civils are not really taught mathematical physics that well and don’t probably think in terms of gradients.
Heat flows in the direction of the gradient, from regions of high thermal energy (high temperature) to regions of low thermal energy (high temperature) . Do you understand this, Captain Kangaroo? This is not hard to understand in one dimension, and one can add other terms due to convection effects, but thermal vibrational energy by itself can only flow by diffusion :
Just as a burning candle placed in the corner of a room will heat the room to some extent
Here is an experiment. Take a slab of water, insulated on all sides by a perfect vacuum, and start heating it by strong sunlight. Watch how slowly that water will cool down once the solar is removed.
That’s right, it only cools relatively slowly because I have just artificially created a thermos bottle. In a vacuum, the slab can only dissipate thermal energy by infrared radiation, and this is a sllow process for lukewarm temperatures.
The fact is that water can warm and cool by a number of mechanisms, and if one wants to be complete about it, then you have to consider all the pathways for dissipation, whether it be radiation, convection, evaporatiom/condensation, melting/freezing, dilution, or thermal conduction/diffusion.
What Hansen did was remove all the exchange mechanisms that are conserving (such as phase changes) and treated the general convection problem as a random walk (i.e. convection can go either way). This then creates a modeling scenario that involves a radiation forcing term, an interface between two volumes, and a diffusional mechanism. The result is the general Fickian response (i.e. uptake is square root with time) that shows up in the thermal response curves from Hansen’s papers published in the early 1980’s.
Does everyone now understand what this is all about? Probably not, because faux skeptics don’t want to understand.
BTW, this turns the scenario into a planar diffusion problem, one of those problems that for me, as a semiconductor physicist, I can solve in my sleep. Diffusion is diffusion and the master equations are similar in construction.
Captain Kangaroo
You’re right to cast aside ocean/atmosphere diffusion (which I take to mean conduction) as of lesser importance. In the tropical ocean heat budget (google ocean heat budget) it’s a minor term of less than 10% of the budget and it goes from ocean to air. It’s a minor term because the difference in temperature between ocean and air surface is very small and without a large delta no great transfer by conduction is possible.
You are however wrong about the way IR works over water. Water is completely opaque to far infrared. It is absorbed in a surface layer thinner than human hair. Thus over square meter of ocean surface you have a constant input of a few hundred watts of power into milliter of water. What happens when you pump that much energy into that small a volume of water, he rhetorically asks. It vaporizes. Increase the downwelling infrared over the ocean and the water temperature does not change but rather the evaporation rate rises and the energy is promptly convected upwards as latent heat of vaporization warming neither the ocean nor the air near the surface. The end result is a warmer cloud not a warmer ocean. The big kahunas in the ocean heat budget is shortwave input and latent heat output. Radiative cooling of the ocean is only about half of what evaporative cooling removes and conduction isn’t even worth looking at in a first approximation. The physical result of evaporation is an ocean skin layer approximately 1 millimeter deep that averages about 1C cooler than the water below it. Only breaking waves disturb the cool skin layer and only at the point where they break. The cool skin layer reforms within 10 seconds of being disturbed. There is little actual breakage of the ocean surface it’s dominated by swells and swells only act to mix water at a depth equal to the height of the swell. Wind driven swells are great at keeping the mixed layer mixed but they do very little to mix the top millimeter downwards.
Another confirming observation is continentality. At any give latitude there is far less seasonal variation in ocean temperature than land temperature. This is because the vast majority of absorption of solar heating in the summer occurs below the skin layer and the air tends to be more humid so the evaporation rate is lower. Unable to get rid of the heat fast enough by any of conduction, radiation, or evaporation it is stored until winter when the air is dryer and evaporation rate increases. So the ocean stores summer heat until winter rolls around and causes ‘continentality’. Land has no significant capacity to store summer heat into the winter. On very dry land such as a desert radiative cooling is by far the dominant means and land cannot evaporate in response to downwelling far IR so it must indeed rise in temperature in order to shed the energy. The atmospheric greenhouse effect is thus largely confined to land surfaces. Acknowledging this simple fact clears up all the consternation in trying to explain the temperature record.
We of course being land surface dwellers are living in the (small) zone where CO2’s greenhouse effect is significant. In the global picture it’s really not a big deal UNLESS one buys into the water vapor amplification narrative. CO2 over the ocean indisputably puts more water vapor into the atmosphere. If the net result of that is positive feedback then we have a problem. All the empirical evidence shows no such positive feedback from water vapor because you can’t get more water vapor without also getting more clouds. The highest mean annual temperature anywhere in the world is the place with the least water vapor and clouds – an equatorial salt desert with 1-3″ inches of annual rainfall.
So the facts of the situation appear to be that yes, Virginia, CO2 can cause a maximum of 1.1C doubling but only over dry land. Any water that’s available for evaporation reduces the amount of warming that CO2 can bring about. This of course leads to more warming in colder regions (read higher latitudes) because where you have land covered by snow & ice part of the year you have a time when evaporation comes to a screeching halt. Given the northern hemisphere has twice the land mass of the southern we will notice the CO2 warming the most as milder northern hemisphere winters, over land, at latitudes where it gets cold enough to snow instead of rain. This is exactly what we observe. And this is a GOOD thing as it extends growing seasons exactly where they most need to be extended. Add to that the beneficial effect on plant growth rate and fresh water requirements and the beneficence of anthropogenic CO2 is amplified even more. The only downside to anthropogenic CO2 is we can’t sustain it indefinitely. When we run out of fossil fuels we’ll need to invent soime other way of keeping the atmospheric CO2 level artificially elevated!
Webby, it’s a question of degree.
Sure, if the air is warmer than the ocean then it will heat the water to some extent as you said.
But, given:
a) the ~1000x thermal capacity of water,
b) the air cools quicker than the ocean at night, and
c) during the day the ocean receives far more energy from sunlight than from the air even if it’s cooler,
the ocean is far more likely to heat the air than the other way round.
Web said, “Conduction isn’t even worth worrying with in the first approximation.” True, let me know when you catch up :)
The majority of energy leaving the ocean IS NOT IR. It’s latent heat of vaporization. This is empirical. Confirmed a million times.
Captain Kangaroo | April 11, 2012 at 12:03 am | Reply
“Rubbish – we are talking about fundamental laws of physics. There can be no quibbling. The energy entering the oceans in the visible band must leave it in the IR which will always be greater than downwelling IR from the atmosphere.”
Your reply is half rubbish. Energy enters the ocean in visible and near infrared and leaves predominantly (by a factor of almost 2:1) as latent heat of vaporization not far infrared. Everyone modestly informed on local heat budgets is aware of that factoid. Trenberth tried to hide it from dummies who don’t notice on his cartoon that net IR cooling is 63W/m2 while latent heat is 80W/m2. He tried to hide by the rather ridiculous means of showing absorbed far infrared at 363W and emitted far infrared at 396W. The big numbers make it look scary and dominant over other things but in reality we only care about the net FIR which is only 63W making it a smaller number than evaporative cooling. The whole
global warmingclimate changeglobal climate disruption narrative is built upon this kind of obfuscation of simple physics and observations. It takes a thousand PhD’s and a million papers to maintain this house of cards and one Joe the Plumber to knock it down. Climatology is a forensic science trying to masquerade as a hard science. Few except those with vested financial or ideological interests by into the charade.Net IR is of the same order of magnitude as latent heat – but we are talking about ocean warming and evaporation goes only in one direction of cooling. If you look at only isolated comments – you are bound to get the wrong idea.
No one is ignoring latent heat.
While you guys are having a great time with the energy budget, remember that the Trenberth cartoon has a few errors. It misses 20 Wm-2 of radiant energy transferred to the atmosphere. Trenberth also uses the lowest estimate for thermals.
http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/staff/stevensbjorn/Documents/StevensSchwartz2012.pdf
That is a pretty good critique of the state of the Energy budget.
I don’t really care when the broad tendencies are known. We know that there are large errors and that the actual fluxes are dynamic and regional even local. Just the big picture Dallas.
d(HC)/dt = (SWin + IR in) – (IR out + latent + conduction and convection) – where fluxes are converted to unit energy. This is a simple 1st law energy budget. Energy in less energy out equals the change in heat content. HC is the heat content of the ocean. The energy in approximately equals the energy out give or take a little warming or cooling.
Only when IRin > IRout can the cool ‘skin’ become a warm ‘skin’. Only when IRin > (Ir out + latent heat + conduction and convection) can the atmosphere warm the ocean – which is a first law impossibility because you also have all this energy from the visible component struggling to get out.
The atmosphere doesn’t warm the ocean, it prevents it from cooling faster than it would without an atmosphere. Take the GHGs out of the atmosphere, and the ocean becomes colder (like a clear dry night). Add GHGs and the ocean becomes warmer (like a cloudy night).
Well that’s what I have been arguing – but don’t know enough to completely discount the potential for local effects that might reverse the general principle.
Bart said
‘The oceans are vast and have room to contain many truths.’
Yes, surely that is so. Having spent quite a few hours in my rowing boat over several months on the ocean 200 yards from my house taking SST samples in connection with my article on SST’s here, and the resulting conversation with Dr John Kennedy of the Met office,
http://judithcurry.com/2011/06/27/unknown-and-uncertain-sea-surface-temperatures/
it is apparent that at these latitudes (south coast of Britain)
1 The sea is warmer than the air during the winter for some of the time. A couple of weeks ago the air was 10C warmer than the ocean, two weeks prior to that the air was 10C cooler.The ocean temperature itself of course during the winter changed very little but the air did.
2 The sea will warm from around 8C in a normal winter to around 16/17C in a normal summer. Both will vary by a couple of degrees in more extreme seasons.
3 The top few metres of water is very poorly mixed with distinct bands of warm/cold water adjacent to each other on the surface and at vertical bands
4 Sea surface temperatures will warm very rapidly in warm sunshine and drop several degrees overnight at the shoulder months, but less so at night in the summer when nights are warmer
5 The number of times when the air and surface water temperatures are the same is limited.
6 Putting water in a bucket to measure it -as practised for 100 years- is daft unless there are substantial safeguards.Water in a bucket will rise in temperature very rapidly in left in the sun and cool if left in the shade (if the water ambient was higher than the shade ambient. As a result bucket temperatures for much of the year shoud be taken within a few seconds of the sample being taken.
7 One patch of water can be at a substantially different temp to another immediately adjacent. Depth makes a huge difference to water temperature. Mixing is best in stormy weather
My observations were practical and not scientific but did have some general validity.It is difficult to see the value of an ‘average’ global temperature especially historic ones.
tonyb
Its not difficult to see the value at all.
In the satellite era we can measure the surface temp very accurately.
with argo we also get good measurements.
When we compare the land/ocean contrast ratio we find that it is roughly constant. That constant actually allows you to predict the past SST if I know the past land temp. Then of course you can check this by computing the average of the actual measures. Go figure. The SST you can predict from the land temps comports with the actual measures, despite the problems with those measures. So, yes there are a large number of complicating factors in the measures, but the beauty of averaging reigns supreme. Oh, the land/ocean contrast is one thing that models do a pretty good job of getting right.
Mosh
Hmm. i think we should engrave ‘go figure’ on your tombstone.
Bad data is bad data and can quickly morph into irrelevant or pointless data. We shall agree to differ but look forward to your article on the validity of global temperatures in due course.
It probably got lost in the confusing maze of comments but I asked you to cite me again the links to the papers you mentioned-julios etc. Your original reference is hiding somewhere and I dont want to have to equip a full scale search party to locate it. i do want to read them and will promote them in the queue ahead of the arctic articles I am reading which are generally very dull.. Thanks
tonyb
Sunlight penetrating the surface of the oceans is responsible for warming of the surface layers. Once heated, the ocean surface becomes warmer than the atmosphere above, and because of this heat flows from the warm ocean to the cool atmosphere above.’
That is very logical to me.
Three off topic comments: 1) I thank some of you for the lessons in snide. I saved pages of them from this thread to inspire my own comments the next time I’m involved in a cat fight with fools.
2) Thanks also for the lessons about the religion of climate science (religion because belief is way more important than the scientific method to many here).
3) My mother advised me years ago to not argue with fools because soon no one would be able to tell the difference. So, thanks to many here for the proof of that bit of wisdom.
The only possible response is that: There ain’t no consensus!
So, is Web Hub Telescope really a telescope. Nah…couldn’t be… even us Antipodeans aren’t stupid enough to think that. So, who might you be,
WHT? Something, a ‘je ne sais quoi’ suggests to me that you are not an Australian. :-)
Beth
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/10/conservation-in-the-anthropocene/#comment-191637
I’m trying to provide high quality literary services here, but in return you need to pay your corkage charges
tonyb
Tony b, while i admire your persistancy, a quality that enabled you to carry through with your investigation into ‘The Long Slow Thaw’ be warned! My nephew calls me ‘a Spring Day’ … I am a lean and mean red headed Scot and I will not pay yer imposte. (I am also descended from a long line of court jesters) .
Beth
Ok, I will waive the corkage imposte if you promise never to quote Robbie Burns.
tonyb
As that is not an issue of principle founded on serious consideration…. i …. accept .
If you and your Antipodean sister ever come to Melbourne, I will buy you both a drink. LOL
Beth
You’re on.
tonyb
Jim D | April 11, 2012 at 11:51 pm |
“CK, if downwelling IR increases the ocean warms. You admitted this much at 1:20. Adding CO2 causes downwelling IR to increase, so it causes the ocean to warm. We are in agreement, yes?”
You’d be agreeing over something that is wrong. Downwelling far infrared over the ocean raises the evaporation rate without raising water temperature. You cannot heat water from above with far infrared if the surface is free to evaporate in response. Write that down.
David,
Your repoly at David Springer | April 12, 2012 at 10:34 am | is very interesting.
I would, however, ask what role do you believe that the constant churning of the ocean due to wave action possibly has your infrared budget description?
The AGW promoters claim it is very important as a tool to convect that hot surface layer into the deeper water.
The top millimeter of the ocean is cooler than the water below it. This is measured. Swells don’t mix it downward but a breaking wave will. The layer reforms within 10 seconds of the break. This is also measured.
What exactly do these people believe is mixing downward? The cool skin layer? How does mixing cooler water with warmer water serve to warm the warmer water? That simply makes no sense at all. There’s just no getting around it. This is how it works and all the observations support it.
David,
Evaporation is a function of temperature, wind speed and relative humidity. It is a significant proportion of the budget – http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Topics/energybudgets.html – but you can’t get a simple relationship between an automatic increase in latent energy and an increase in downwelling IR. There is an energy dynamic that results in a change of energy content in the oceans.
The top 100 microns of the surface is active in IR and it really must be on average cooler than the underlying water as more IR is emitted by the oceans than is received. So the ‘skin’ is generally cooler rather than warmer because the net energy loss happens at radiative speeds and the mixing occurs at a much lower rate. It is colder water that gets mixed into the mixed zone.
You have to understand the meaning and importance of the skin effect. Where there is a reduced gradient between the atmosphere – because of atmospheric warming – the skin is less cool and the rate of energy flow between the ocean and atmosphere slows resulting in ocean warming. But all the energy that accumulates in the oceans comes from the visible wavelengths.
The oceans and atmosphere are coupled radiatively and though latent and convective processes. The flow of energy is from the sun to the oceans to the atmosphere and back to space. This is a pretty obvious idea.
Robert I Ellison
No. The skin layer is cooler due to evaporation not radiation. Evaportion is more efficient than radiation in most circumstances. That’s why we have sweat glands instead of radiator fins.
Between 30N and 30S latitude latent heat flux is twice radiative (100W/m2 vs. 50) while sensible flux hardly moves off the zero line anywhere.
Study the following diagram for a minute then tell me what if anything you don’t understand about it offer some sort of similarly authoritative source for something contrary. I grow weary of your baseless unsupported hand waving, Kangaroo.
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter05/Images/Fig5-7.htm
In general, study this until you understand it:
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter05/chapter05_06.htm
These are the distributions and magnitude of different components of surface energy budgets for the entire globe. It’s critical to understanding climate where and how energy enters and leaves the system. For instance in figure 5.8 you see extremes, hotspots in northern Africa for thermal radiation. These are the hottest climates in the world and they also happen to be the dryest. That’s because the water cycle has a slight negative feedback and the surface is hotter where there is no water. This is the big mistake of warmmongers who posit that the additional water vapor caused by more CO2 generates more warming. It doesn’t. More water vapor doesn’t increase surface temperature. In figure 5.9 we see that same region in North Africa stand out as havin the lowest latent heat flux in the world. Like my momma used to say “It’s dryer than a popcorn fart”. Latent heat flux of course dominates the globe because most of the earth’s surface is liquid water. In equatorial rain forests one can see where latent heat flux becomes dominant over thermal by a wide margin but in general thermal radiation dominates nowhere except sub-tropical and temperate land masses (discounting near the poles where there is little thermal radiation and essentially zero latent heat loss). Sensible heat flux (conduction) is small everywhere but note that the sign (surface heats the air or air heats the surface) changes in places you might not expect. Whites and blues are places where air warms the surface. You expect this at the poles and it happens there but there’s also a band on the equator where the sign goes just slightly positive (1-3W of surface warming by conduction instead of the cooling you might expect).
well David – I suggest you use the much later energy budget in the link I have provided a couple of times already and look at net IR flux.
You should also try to understand this which I have provided previously as well – http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=939
IR cools the oceans because the energy leaves the water. Vaporisation occurs because the molecule is energetic enough to overcome the restraint of skin friction. The molecules condense in the atmosphere – the energy is liberated and the water precipitates. In this case the energy is internal to the molecule and both the molecule and the latent heat move into the atmosphere. Evaporative cooling happens when the surface itself supplies the enthalpy of vaporisation and the molecules then take that energy away from the surface. A different thing entirely.
And while it true that the energy is no longer in the ocean in a global sense – it has nothing to do with the 100 micron ‘skin effect’. The net loss in IR on the other hand is in the IR active zone of the top 100 microns or so.
You might also note that the discussion was entirely in relation to oceans.
In general – your attitude is not only ignorant and ill-informed but ill-bred and uncivillised as well. It is people like you spoil it for the rest.
Best regards
Captain Kangaroo
Captain Kangaroo | April 12, 2012 at 3:52 pm | Reply
David,
“Evaporation is a function of temperature, wind speed and relative humidity. It is a significant proportion of the budget – http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Topics/energybudgets.html ”
Which part of Trenberth’s famous cartoon do you not understand? Surface thermal absorption is given at 333W/m2 while thermal radiaiton is given at 396W/m2. Third grade calculus (396-333) then reveals that net thermal radiation is 63W/m2. To the left of that in the cartoon is a thing labeled evapo-transpiration. This is given to be 80W/m2. Now where I went to school 80 is a bigger number than 63 therefore latent heat loss exceeds radiative heat loss even in Trenberth’s troubled mind. It isn’t just a significant portion of the budget it’s the single largest piece of the cooling side of the budget about 5 times as large as conduction (labeled “thermals” in the cartoon) and 1.3 times as large as radiative.
I much prefer the color coded global charts I provided to you in the link to the TAMU “Introduction to Physical Oceanography” textbook so we can how each of the individual components is weighted all across the globe. But I guess if you can’t grok Trenberth’s cartoon (which is the opening diagram in the TAMU textbook chapter, by the way) I don’t expect the more subtle aspects can be understood either.
Evaporation can’t increase because the air at the water interface is already saturated. The only way to achieve that is to warm the water first to reduce the relative humidity. Evaporation is not a free variable. It is tightly constrained by thermodynamics at the interface.
No, it isn’t usually saturated but sometimes it is. Water vapor is lighter than air and rises. As it rises it is subject to adiabatic cooling. If it’s saturated it condenses almost immediately and you get fog. Fog is certainly not all that unusual but in the big picture it’s one of the less than 10% things that can be ignored in a first approximation.
Thanks for playing.
Lindzen has reponded to Hoskins, Mitchell, Palmer, Shine and Wolf.
http://thegwpf.org/the-climate-record/5437-richard-lindzen-response-to-the-critique-of-my-house-of-commons-lecture.html
Kim @ 18/ 4 9.47pm
…or paradigm’s paling fence.
Peekin’ through the knotholes, what do my wondrous eyes see?
==========
….rainbow lights and dancin’ shadows. If only I could …
Nordhaus writes on the issue CHL raise on funding..
This is a ludicrous comparison. …. Yale University, for which I work, averaged $1.4 million per year over the last decade. Union of Concerned Scientists stated that ExxonMobil “has funneled about $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to .
OK so among the largest sources of skeptical funding ponied up $2.3 million per year, and just one of the hundreds of Universities (this one known most for it’s law and business schools) got 2/3ds as much.
It seems Prof. Nordhaus kinda proves the CHL point rather well.
Moreover, if that is an example of the quality of his refutation of the 16, then there is nothing he said to dissaude on their original arguement.
Your site doesn’t show up properly on my iphone – you may want to try and fix that