by Judith Curry
Too rapid a movement towards a low-carbon economy could materially damage financial stability: a climate Minsky moment — Mark Carney
A recent speech given by Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, entitled Resolving the Climate Paradox. The whole text of the speech is well worth reading, here I focus on excerpts related to the idea of the ‘tragedy of the horizon.’ Excerpts:
When I spoke at Lloyd’s of London a year ago about the financial stability risks arising from climate change, I, in effect, highlighted two paradoxes.
1 First, the future will be past. That is, climate change is a tragedy of the horizon which imposes a cost on future generations that the current one has no direct incentive to fix. The catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors including businesses and central banks. Once climate change becomes a clear and present danger to financial stability it may already be too late to stabilise the atmosphere at two degrees.
2 The second paradox is that success is failure. That is, too rapid a movement towards a low-carbon economy could materially damage financial stability. A wholesale reassessment of prospects, as climate-related risks are re-evaluated, could destabilise markets, spark a pro-cyclical crystallisation of losses and lead to a persistent tightening of financial conditions: a climate Minsky moment.
The final and most important channel involves transition risks, which could result from the adjustment towards a lower-carbon economy. Changes in policy, technology and physical risks could prompt a reassessment of the value of a large range of assets as costs and opportunities become apparent.
The speed at which such re-pricing occurs is uncertain but could be decisive for financial stability. There have already been a few high profile examples of jump-to-distress pricing because of shifts in environmental policy or performance.
Tonight, I would like to discuss how building new markets – in climate transition and green finance – can help resolve the tragedy of the horizon. Over the past year, the focus of G20 Leaders and the aegis of the FSB have spurred important progress. The upcoming German presidency of the G20 now has a historic chance to mainstream climate finance and turn risk into opportunity.
Clear policy frameworks that encourage sustained private investment are thus essential, including those that mobilise private investment to finance the transition to the low-carbon economy. As I will discuss, the magnitudes required are significant, the horizons long, and the distribution Pareto improving.
Therefore, Paris clarifies actual and stretch objectives. It provides detailed climate policies and creates the prospect of a future ratcheting up of efforts. In doing so, it greatly increases transition risks as well as opportunities. By bringing forward the horizon, it puts a premium on the ability of private markets to adjust.
Smooth adjustment is crucial because transition risks are how success could turn into failure. Specifically, sudden changes in policy, technology and physical risks could prompt a reassessment of asset values as costs and opportunities become apparent. In other words, an abrupt resolution of the tragedy of horizons is in itself a financial stability risk.
The point is that the more we invest with foresight; the less we will regret in hindsight. Financial stability risks will be minimised if the transition begins early and follows a predictable path, thereby helping the market anticipate the transition to a two-degree world. And that requires the right information. On this front, there has also been considerable progress in a short period of time.
Markets that value the future
Financial policymakers will not drive the transition to a low-carbon economy. Governments will establish the frameworks, and the private sector will make the investments.
Nonetheless, financial policymakers do have a clear interest in ensuring the financial system is resilient to any transition hastened by those decisions. Our role is to help develop the frameworks for markets to adjust efficiently.
Given the uncertainties around climate, not everyone will agree on the timing or scale of adjustment required. The right information allows sceptics and evangelists alike to back their convictions with their capital.
A market in the transition to a two-degree world can be built. It will reveal how the valuations of companies that produce and use fossil fuels might change over time.
It will expose the likely future cost of doing business, paying for emissions, changing processes to avoid those charges, and tighter regulation. It will help smooth price adjustments as opinions change, rather than concentrating them at a single climate “Minsky moment”.
And it would allow feedback between the market and policymaking, making climate policy a bit more like monetary policy, with policymakers learning from markets’ reactions, and markets internalising policymakers’ objectives, strategies and instruments. When rates are low, the present value of future returns and risks are greater.
That is why a vocal minority are already calling on businesses to invest for the future, including by supporting the transition to a low carbon economy, and for investors to internalise the risks and opportunities of climate change. With better information as a foundation, we can build a virtuous circle of better understanding of tomorrow’s risks, better pricing for investors, better decisions by policymakers, and a smoother transition to a lower-carbon economy. By managing what gets measured, and building a mainstream green bond market, we can help resolve the Tragedy of the Horizon.
JC reflections
A transition away from fossil fuels by the end of the 21st century is not unlikely, independently of a climate change driver. The key issue is whether and how fast climate change should drive the transition away from fossil fuels.
Carney makes important points about the Tragedy of the Horizon and also transition risks. A Minsky moment is a very real and substantial concern regarding rapid emissions reductions. He proposes that that a green bond market, combined with better information, can help manage the Tragedy of the Horizon as well as transition risks. This proposal sounds much more appealing to the broad political spectrum than regulations and taxes.
I find this point to be key:
Given the uncertainties around climate, not everyone will agree on the timing or scale of adjustment required. The right information allows sceptics and evangelists alike to back their convictions with their capital.
Pingback: The tragedy of the horizon – Enjeux énergies et environnement
Why is everyone so fixated on a 2100 that is never going to happen in remotely the way we can now imagine? Right, so we need affordable, clean energy. Wind and solar have convincingly demonstrated their inability to fill this role. Nuclear is expensive and vulnerable to terrorists. Unaided, humans might possibly have a working fusion reactor by the year 2050 and be able to deploy an economically viable model by 2100.
AI is going to change all that. Its raw power and repertoire of skills is growing exponentially. We’re aware of this, but still we fail to factor it into our vision of the future. Uber’s self-driving cars arrived with no more than a ho-hum. Facebook analyses pictures as they load and provides a text description that you can see briefly if you have slow internet. Your phone understands you far better than you understand it. We take this all for granted, because AI is so seamlessly integrated into our lives.
Why do we have so little faith in technology? The Industrial Revolution gave us machines to multiply the power of the human body. Now we have machines to multiply the power of the human mind. Even if global warming were to be catastrophic without urgent corrective action, technology will create solutions. Like generals who plan their campaigns by assuming that vital ports and cities will have been captured, we should assume that, thanks to AI, the clean energy problem will be solved.
There is a really good documentary on AI you need to watch. I watch it now and again to remind me of the risks associated with AI. It is called “The Terminator”
Should we Fear the March of the Robots?
http://www.acting-man.com/?p=32628
May I suggest a correction: Fossil fuels made possible the Industrial Revolution which gave us machines to multiply the power of the human body, which, in turn, made possible machines to multiply the power of the human mind.
One good solar flare and you can wipe your crack with technology.
We’ll all be rubbing sticks together to make fire.
If humans want to survive, they better be equipped to do so WITHOUT technology, lest we wind up with a Terminator cyborg chasing us down the street.
As far as clean energy, human society should focus on efficiency, generally, first. Namely cleaner alternatives to gasoline (namely US ethanol made from sweet sorghum [vs. corn], and ethanol made from sugar cane [as in Brazil]).
A passenger car that gets 80mi to the gallon, weighs a mere 1,500 lbs. and has a top speed of 110 mph., that costs under $25,000 should be a big seller. Stuff like that. The world has probably 1.1 billion cars that use the internal combustion engine, we should be increasing relying on ethanol to power them, instead of trying to figure out how to make the planets vehicular transportation base obsolete overnight. Ethanol made wisely, in an engine designed to burn it, will help combat “climate change” significantly. Virtually any vehicle made after 1980 anywhere on the planet can handle at least E15 fuels without harm to the engine. Ethanol can keep those 1.1 billion vehicles that tool around planet Earth running for a long, long time.
+1
I suggest that we defer to the immutability of physics over the uncertainty of economics. The reports coming from the scientists studying Greenland and the arctic on the rapidity of change are frightening. Humans have the ability to adapt to changing economic circumstances but not so well to major shifts in the climactic environment.
Arctic warming is normal during solar minima, because of the increase in negative North Atlantic Oscillation.
“The reports coming from the scientists studying Greenland and the arctic on the rapidity of change are frightening.”
I’ve never seen a frightening equation in physics. I have seen plenty of people who are easily frightened.
Boo!
“Humans have the ability to adapt to changing economic circumstances but not so well to major shifts in the climactic environment.”
Anatomically modern humans have existed around 100,000 years. As best I understand it, the last ice age was around 10,000 years ago. Was it hard on them? I imagine it certainly was and the human population was not likely anywhere near what it is today. An ice age or other climatic event causing stress on humans will no doubt mean harsh times economically.
However, harsh economic times are just as deadly today as they would be in an ice age. Harsh economic times were deadly 50 years ago, 100 years ago, during the medieval warm period and throughout history economic hard times have been deadly. If you doubt this then you are not paying attention and if you are not paying attention this might explain why you encounter so much doubt in regards to hysteria.
Uncle Robot,
I’m not frightened at all. Why are you frightened that Greenland may once again have the population to sustain 16 Catholic parishes and a monastery or two?
James Hansen seems very frightened of coal. Are you frightened of churches, perhaps?
Thermometers react to heat, not CO2. The hottest places on Earth have the least GHGs in the atmosphere. 100% correlation.
The coldest place on Earth is below the freezing point of CO2. The CO2 affects the temperature not one iota.
You can’t even produce a falsifiable GHE hypothesis involving CO2, so you just pretend that it isn’t necessary. Cargo Cult Scientism.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. The trough might run dry.
Cheers.
Back n 2008 the queen asked her hosts at the London school of economics why they did not see the credit crisis coming.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/3386353/The-Queen-asks-why-no-one-saw-the-credit-crunch-coming.html
Mark carney is our idiot chairman of the bank of England who hopelessly misjudged the strength of the British economy following Brexit and reduced interest rates to half a percent for reasons that mystified the rest of us.
Had he ventured out of his ivory tower or spoke to non academics he would have seen that the UK was thriving. Consequently I find it difficult to take anything he says seriously. NOr richard Tol nor lord Stern.
Tonyb
Why no one saw it coming? Indeed. I still ask that. Growing up in the 50s, 60s, 70s or 80s, as certain as the sun rising, was that house prices would go up. Always. Generations of consumers and financial experts and bankers and economists all drank from the same jug. Housing prices will always go up.
Bank executives considered their housing portfolio as being the least risky, even the securitized instruments. One senior Bank executive said after the Crisis he spent less than 1% of his time on housing investments.
In the period 2004 to 2007 my daughters routinely watched some version of “Flip this House”, where 1200 sq ft bungalows were sold for $400,000 to $600,000. While they were in the hot markets of California, Arizona and Florida, the median household income was not that much greater than the national average. When I watched those shows, I never could understand how a small to median sized house was selling for 8 to 12 times median income. The time honored 3 to 4 to 1 ratio had been abandoned. Nothing made sense to me.
After the Financial Crisis I read several books that came out in 2009 and 2010. The lending standards had collapsed. Liars loans. Negative amortization. Banks had been selling their mortgages and they were heavily involved in securitization of mortgages. All of these new processes and products had turned the normal safeguards upside down. Every step of the way beginning in the 1990s with the acquiescence and encouragement of the Federal government, the entire financial system took another step toward fragility and collapse.
Those who should have known what was going on in the hottest housing markets apparently never watched those “Flip this House” shows. If they had,then they would have understood those activities were not sustainable. A quote in your link had it about right. “Everybody thought everybody else was doing the right thing”
“The Big Short” movie is must viewing or read this book ” The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” by Michael Lewis. With the upcoming “Coronation” on January 20th all the rules will be rewritten with the same result as 2008-2009. “Buckle up, it is going to be a rough ride.” – Betty Davis
Tony,
Thank you for that insight. When I read the post was quoted from the Governor of the Bank Of England, I sat up, took notice and expected a sane, rational discussion. Instead I read paragraph after paragraph of unsupported ideological beliefs and assertions. What absolute rubbish and it’s coming from someone we should be able to trust. (see my comments below).
The great mystery to me is why the UK couldn’t find anyone to do the job and had to hire the former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney. Maybe he did well but scale, and economic drivers are a bit different
Gregory
There is an elite of the elite who continually support each other and get their fellows into key jobs.
we have a prime example with Chrisine Lagarde-boss of the IMF- who was convicted of a type of ‘fraud’ a couple of days ago. The French court says they did not want to hand down any criminal sentence due to her international importance (and the fact she is French)
Lo and behold, within a day her fellow elites at the IMF had re-elected her!
The rest of us would be in jail if we did the sort of things the elite can get away with.
Mark Carney is merely one of those operating in the Stratosphere, whose talents, I fear, completely elude me. A sort of Kardashian of the financial wotrld
Lagarde and Carney are PRECISELY the sort of people we voted against with Brexit in the anger at anti democratic institutions (such as the EU) that are nowhere near as great as their supporters believe, run by people who arrogantly assume they always know best.
tonyb
“tragedy of the horizon” = bad poetry.
I’d rather look at a hockey stick shaped graph, honestly.
Not much of a choice.
Andrew
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/science/arctic-global-warming.html?emc=edit_tnt_20161221&nlid=69116055&tntemail0=y&_r=0
Uncle robot
Explorers noted that glaciers had reduce substantially from the early 1900’s
I noted this in one of my articles
‘Additional scientific information comes from the 1971 book ’Times of Feast, Times of Famine-A History of Climate since the year 1000’ by Dr Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie-a renowned French historian- page 82 onwards, which here references information on the various recent waves of warming;
“The most spectacular amelioration is that of arctic or sub arctic regions, the areas at the extreme limit of Nordic colonization from Greenland to Spitzbergen . In the 1930’s Scherlag diagnosed a winter amelioration November-March of plus 5 degrees C at jakobshavn (Greenland) comparing the periods 1883-1892 and 1923-1932. At Spitsbergen the winter increase reached the phenomenal height of 8 to 9 deg C in the decade 1930 as compared with the normal for 1912-1926.”
Other reports from Russia suggest considerable winter warming which encouraged explorations that saw the northern sea route opened in the 1930’s.
Tonyb
No ship sailed through the passage in the 19th century. Several
came within 150 km of doing so, without the aid of an engine, chart, or functioning compass. A similar outcome would be well within the
bounds of probability today.
https://seagrant.uaf.edu/nosb/2005/resources/arctic-explorers.pdf
John – On further investigation you may well find that 21st century norms are significantly different from 20th century norms?
The paper you quote is dated 2003!
Mark Carney – Maurice Strong incarnate. If either one were actually a “real” Canadian, I’d be terribly embarrassed. Good riddance to both!
From a link posted by Dr. Curry to twitter: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296331005_Holocene_climate_change_in_Arctic_Canada_and_Greenland
“Between the years 1050 and 1300, Europe underwent an agricultural revolution. Crop yields multiplied by at least threefold. Europe’s population followed suit, tripling in less than three centuries. The average European lifespan increased by as much as two decades. Towns and cities reemerged, and with them came new crafts and a revival of trade.” (http://study.com/academy/lesson/the-medieval-warm-period-and-new-agricultural-technologies.html)
Spiking Temperatures in the Arctic Startle Scientists:
“Walt Meier, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said that the current warmth had been brought on by fluctuations in the jet stream, which have allowed frigid air to make its way south into North America and warm air into parts of the Arctic.”
Global Warming, a decisive influence the weakening and “fluctuations in the jet stream”?
Not really. I recommend eg.: Observation of a tidal effect on the Polar Jet Stream, Best and Madrigali, 2015. (full text: http://clivebest.com/blog/?p=6778)
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
Washington Post on November 2, 1922
I have read similar contemporary accounts too numerous to count. And not just about the Arctic, but climatologists expressing concerns of destabilized glaciers in Antarctica over 100 years ago.
In the early 1950s I heard about how hot the 1930s were. Not just from my grandparents, farmers all, but from my textbooks and newspapers and TV. This was a given, as certain as the Depression.
Only when I entered the Temple of Climate Science did I learn it was an illusion, just an urban legend filled with mythology and inaccurate anecdotes. Not science.
True science is data that has been adjusted. The recollections of millions of people count for nothing. Algorithms count for everything.
A slight “nit” over the misuse of “Minsky Moment.” A Minsky Moment is a crisis paradoxically born of stability (It takes its name from Hyman Minsky and his financial instability hypothesis). Minsky believed that a long period of stable financial markets led to ever increasing risk tolerance (and often risk-taking) which in turn led to a sudden collapse in the market. His ideas have been used to explain both the crisis in Asian markets in the late 1990’s and the Great Recession that we’re still living with. Carney is apparently using the phrase to describe any sudden economic shock.
I’ve written about this at http://www.resilientus.org/minsky-moments/. Here, the East Anglian email leaks might be construed as a Minsky Moment. The guardians of the conventional climate wisdom engaged in increasingly risky behavior because no one was calling them on it until some hacker got sick of it and spilled the beans. You might also say that HRC had her own Minsky Moment in November.
+1
Thank you.
Right, there is no relationship between CO2 levels and global temperatures. It’s good to know that we can ignore physics.
Uncle robot
I am Merely pointing out that the arctic melts substantially on a regular basis. The last time was around 1912 to 1940 . The previous time around 1818 to 1840 . We know of the warming in the early 1700’s from Hudson bay Co trading records and the early 1500’s warming from Russian records and of course the Vikings were present in Greenland for some 400 years. All these were without the help of co2 . Perhaps the current levels are having an effect today or perhaps not, but it is not unprecedented.
Tonyb
Not unprecedented Tony?
http://greatwhitecon.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/nsidc_global_area_normanomaly-20161218-1024×256.png
Surely you jest?
Jim hunt
In case you mised it, your chart covers the satellite record from 1978
As far as I am aware all the events i cited are prior to that date.
Tonyb
So Jim, you have heard of the Beatles? They hit the international scene about 1962. Or maybe Rudee Valley. Early 20th century. History actually was being made before that data.
Cerescokid kid
I dare say that one or two of the bloggers on this site may predate the satellite era…
Tonyb
Ceresco – “She loves you” was the first single I ever bought.
Tony – When was the last time the global sea ice anomaly declined that far that fast?
What evidence can you provide that “the northern sea route opened in the 1930’s”? Here’s a closeup of the open NSR this year, for comparison purposes:
http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2016/08/northabout-races-for-the-date-line/
Jim hunt
Here you go. It’s a part of an article I wrote a couple of years ago
‘Historic note; The opening of a Northern sea route (also called the Northeast passage) has implications for understanding ice dynamics of the time, becoming an important supply route during World War 2 although until the period in question was not useable in any practical manner, as noted here;
“In 1932, a Soviet expedition led by Professor Otto Yulievich Schmidt was the first to sail all the way from Arkhangelsk to the Bering Strait in the same summer without wintering en route. After a couple more trial runs, in 1933 and 1934, the Northern Sea Route was officially defined and open and commercial exploitation began in 1935. The next year, part of the Baltic Fleet made the passage to the Pacific where armed conflict with Japan was looming.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Sea_Route’
There are numerous references from the 1920’s to early 1940’s of drastic melting of arctc ice during the winter and very extensive general glacier melting with very high warm anomalies . I posted references to these just a day or so ago.
Tonyb
Before the satellite era, we built a hot-air balloon that flew over the North Pole.
“I am Merely pointing out that the arctic melts substantially on a regular basis. The last time was around 1912 to 1940 .”
the records you trust for this period are More more sparse than other records which you doubt.
There is nothing in the documented records of that time period that even Allow for an apples to apples comparison with what we have today.
Where we have nearly complete data… you sow doubt.
Where we have fragmented anecdotes that suppport your narrative, you exercise ZERO DOUBT.
Tony – You haven’t answered my first question, and you quote Wikipedia as a reference in answer to my second.
Surely you jest?
Jim hunt
No, I quoted you an extract from my article which included a reference from wiki. Here is the article. It is a greatly expanded version of the article carried here a year or so earlier
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/22/historic-variations-in-arctic-sea-ice-part-two/
The addenda hold numerous additional refetences
Google the first few words of my comment and it will take you to the right
Place in my article.
It is not often that I am genuinely surprised by a comment but yours did. I have assumed you have a reasonable knowledge of modern arctic history but had not realised your historical knowledge means you are not able to see the present in its proper context to the past.
Are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that the northern sea route was not operable from the 1930’s onwards?
In answer to your other question, which I thought I had answered I would repeat that satellite records started very recently, many years after you bought your first Beatles record and long after they split up . The sea ice decline in that very short period is apparent. Without satellite records I would be guessing as to whether or when there was a similar decline previously but merely point to other periods of decline pre Beatles.
We must look much much further back into our climate history before we can start using with confidence the words ‘unprecedented’ as many do.
Tonyb
Tony – A (recent) historical note:
http://www.aari.ru/resources/d0015/arctic/gif.en/2016/20160927.gif
The Northern Sea Route remarkably free of sea ice at the end of September 2016. Can you dig up anything similar from the 30s and/or 40s?
Jim
No, because we did not have satellites in the 1930’s!!
From the short time for you to respond it is clear you did not read my article with hundreds of references, contemporary and modern.
Can I ask if you think the northern sea route was not operating in the 1930’s?
Tonyb
Tony – Please don’t be patronising.
We were typing our previous comments simultaneously, so I hadn’t previously seen your 4:14. Now that I have followed your link to the den of iniquity that is WUWT I note that you state:
Sea ice charts have been published (by DMI) from 1900 to 1956 for the Arctic seas.
At the risk of repeating myself:
You [still] haven’t answered my first question,
What [additional] evidence can you provide that “the northern sea route opened in the 1930’s”?
Has the cat got your tongue Tony?
At the risk of sounding patronising, are you aware of this shiny new study of Arctic sea ice extent going back to 1935?
September Arctic sea ice extent: 1935-2014
http://greatwhitecon.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Diablo-35-14.png
Which year from the 30s/40s would you like to pick for comparison with 2016?
“I am Merely pointing out that the arctic melts substantially on a regular basis. The last time was around 1912 to 1940 .”
the records you trust for this period are More more sparse than other records which you doubt.
Yes – confirmation bias can creep in to the unknowns and unmeasured, regardless of what pre-conceptions one is self confirming.
However, there is another indirect indicator – seasonal temperature.
Latent heat released by freezing accounts for the winter max of Arctic temps. Paradoxically, summer melt takes heat, and summer Arctic temperatures are either normal or even slight lower than normal.
The temperature profile of this also happened in the past, as did intervening period of the opposite signal:
https://i2.wp.com/climatewatcher.webs.com/ArcticFingerprint.png
Jim
Please do not descend into rudeness as I had thought we were having a perfectly reasonable discussion.
If you had read my article you would see that nowhere do I claim that the 1930’s are directly equivalent to the last few years although we do have a serious case of apples and oranges.
There was remarkable warming however which lasted several decades and which appeared to occur in both hemispheres. A century previously there had also been remarkable arctic warming and at various other times in the historic record, of which the greatest was probably during the Vikings. There has been general warming since around 1700 although not linear.
The September chart you linked to had been sent to me by the author some time ago for my comments. It’s interesting but needs proper evaluation and put into context with other months and needs backtracking to 1920 or so.
The reason I asked if you seriously wanted proof about the northern sea route is that it is a very well documented period. There are numerous books about it in such as the met office library and the Scott polar institute in Cambridge and a variety of articles including I believe some in national geographic. There are lists of the ships that passed through and the charges made for them.
If you read my article there are a variety of references. If you can not find these or a google search reveals nothing let me know, but before I spend my time on it I need your confirmation that you are seriously disputing what I had thought was a well known historical fact. In which case it might be worth an article in its own right and that certainly won’t happen until well after Christmas.
In the meantime I wish you a happy Christmas
Tonyb
Tony – I am “disputing” that current Arctic temperatures and sea ice area are “not unprecedented” going back to the early 30s when reasonable charts are available, albeit not satellite derived.
It seems that at least you agree with me,that in actual fact current Arctic sea ice area is unprecedented over that period?
Jim hunt
I did not say that it was ‘unprecdented’ going back to only the 1930’s .
As I said in the article
‘ The arctic in those pre satellite days was simply too large to be effectively and continually monitored. Observers getting close enough to the ice edge to make physical observations might be deterred from proceeding further by apparently impenetrable ice although better, more open conditions, might lie beyond. Data from such as the Russian sector – where much warming occurred, was not always taken into account. (However, the reader should be aware that, as Larsen noted, ice did sporadically return, whilst reports from 1939-45 are sparse for obvious reasons.)
In trying to determine the true extent of sea ice melt during the period we run the risk of comparing apples-physical observations, and oranges- satellite altimetry, and the different methods employed over the years creates uncertainties over whether each accurately picked up what is ice, what is water covered ice and what is open water. This makes it difficult to determine how modern ice extent compares to the past with any certainty.
However, the conclusion must be that drawn that warming was more widespread in the arctic generally -not just the Atlantic side-than is currently noted in the official sea ice data bases covering1920-1945/50 and that the official records appear to substantially overstate the ice area extent. Some of the thinning of the ice and reduction of glaciers noted today appears to have had their genesis in the period referenced, or earlier.
The 1920-1940’s arctic sea ice melt can therefore be seen as remarkable, albeit the caveats about apples and oranges need to be applied. Looking at the evidence available from each of the arctic oceans means the ice extent probably (but not certainly) lies somewhere within that experienced during the first half of the 2000’s, but was almost certainly not as low as 2007 and 2012, the causes of which are out with the scope of this paper.’
The warming was remarkable however coming as it did out of a notably cold period and also included both hemispheres. We tend to fixate on post 1978 figures and easily forget the earlier periods.
There are numerous references to the northern sea route in the article so will you agree that the northern sea route was open in the 1930’s? Thank you
Tonyb
Jim hunt
I have got a much longer reply to you in moderation. In the meantime this snippet I posted a couple of days ago is relevant
https://judithcurry.com/2016/12/21/the-tragedy-of-the-horizon/#comment-831714
Tonyb
Tony – “The northern sea route opened in the 1930’s.”
If you haven’t already done so in your invisible comment, please show me the ice charts.
jim hunt
my ‘invisible comment’ has been in moderation for some 4 or 5 hours. Perhaps Judith is at her Christmas office party knocking back the sherry and mince pies?
If you find the time to read my article I originally linked to, you would see numerous references to Arctic and Antarctic warming and numerous references to the Northern sea route, including that by Zubov is his widely read book on the arctic and this route in particular.
The warming seemed to start in earnest around 1920 although references to shrinking glaciers at both poles precede this by a decade or more.
tonyb.
jim Hunt
It really would be much easier if you read the article as there are numerous references in it, but here is a useful document I linked to in it that was presented at the Arctic change workshop in Washington
http://mclean.ch/climate/Arctic_1920_40.htm
tonyb
Tony – It would be helpful if you selected an ice chart from the 1930s to illustrate your point.
jim
here is a very good history of the NSR which includes tonnages from 1945
https://www.nersc.no/sites/www.nersc.no/files/fulltext-3.pdf
my own article adds considerable detail to the establishment and usage of the route from the early 1930’s
tonyb
How did the 1933 NSR voyage of the Chelyuskin work out Tony? Hopefully this is of some help?
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02203/1933_08.jpg
Jim
Did you actually read my article where I confirmed that there was considerable variability in ice during the period and although there was general warming there were some years when navigation was still very difficult?
Assuming you have read the other various links I am sure you now agree that the NSR was established and used extensively in the 1930’s and there is a huge amount of data relating to the retreat of the glaciers?
Whether that general warming laid the foundation for modern polar warming effects by reducing ice thickness and the amount of multi year ice or whether the glaciers ever fully recovered from their retreat is an interesting topic for discussion.
Tonyb
Tony – Since I’ve now pointed you in the right direction perhaps you would be good enough to post an ice chart from the 1930s showing the NSR sufficiently free of sea ice for a small yacht to get from one end to the other without getting trapped in the ice and eventually sunk?
Jim hunt
Talk about squirrels!
I never said anything about a small yacht or made any sort of claim that such a vessel could travese the route.
I pointed out with numerous contemporary and modern references that the arctic and Antarctic warmed considerably during the 1920 to 1940 period and there is considerable evidence of widespread ice melting and glacier retreat.
I also pointed out that the NSR was established in the 1930’s which you now appear to be accepting. I also pointedout there were still difficult sailing conditions at times during this warming period.
Tonyb
here tony
https://nsidc.org/data/docs/noaa/g02176_aari_charts/
August 1952. Russian sea ice data, East Siberian Sea and Laptev Sea.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02176/pngs/1952/E19520818_tc.v0.png
August 1953. Russian sea ice data, East Siberian Sea and Laptev Sea.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02176/pngs/1953/E19530831_tc.v0.png
For curiosity, august 2016, NOAA.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Aug/N_201608_extn_v2.png
DMI sea ice charts shows those seas frozen in august 1952 and 1953. probably because;
“Coverage is considerably better over Greenland, Iceland, and Spitzbergen than for the rest of the Arctic, and direct observations over the Western Arctic are particularly sparse over the entire period of record. From 1946 to 1956, the ice edge in this region solely reflects annual climatology; the DMI probably did not have access to any data in this region because of the Cold War.”
https://nsidc.org/data/docs/noaa/g02203-dmi/
And then there’s this.
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Arctic-Sea-Ice-1920-1975-768×505.jpg
Targeting that dip in 1960 in Vinnikov et al. Arctic Ocean sea ice extent chart, above.
Russian sea ice data, East Siberian Sea and Laptev Sea.
August 1959.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02176/pngs/1959/E19590819_tc.v0.png
August 1960.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02176/pngs/1960/E19600824_tc.v0.png
August 1961.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02176/pngs/1961/E19610823_tc.v0.png
Russian sea ice data, Kara Sea and Barents Sea.
August 1959.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02176/pngs/1959/W19590819_tc.v0.png
August 1960.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02176/pngs/1960/W19600822_tc.v0.png
August 1961.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02176/pngs/1961/W19610821_tc.v0.png
Targeting that peak in 1962-63 in Vinnikov et al. Arctic Ocean sea ice extent graph above.
Russian sea ice data.
August 1962.
East Siberian Sea and Laptev Sea.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02176/pngs/1962/E19620821_tc.v0.png
Kara Sea and Barents Sea.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02176/pngs/1962/W19620824_tc.v0.png
August 1963.
East Siberian Sea and Laptev Sea.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02176/pngs/1963/E19630821_tc.v0.png
Kara Sea and Barents Sea.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/NOAA/G02176/pngs/1963/W19630823_tc.v0.png
To be precise, that graph which I refer to as Vinnikov et al. is actually from
Hoffert & Flannery, 1985. Flannery seems to be from Exxon Research and Engineering Company, a genuine oilman.
https://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/5885458/#page=178
More from,
http://notrickszone.com/2016/11/28/there-has-been-no-significant-net-change-in-arctic-sea-ice-extent-in-the-last-80-years/
Sajave – Any chance you can help Tony out with a nice ice chart from the 1930s?
Quality not quantity!
Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld with his crew aboard the Vega ship starting from Karlskrona, Sweden, on 22 June 1878, made it almost to Bering strait in one shipping season. And they did scientific research while on route. Did Northabout need any assistance?
“The Vega Expedition (Swedish: Vegaexpeditionen) of 1878–1880, under the leadership of Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, was the first Arctic expedition to navigate through the Northeast Passage, the sea route between Europe and Asia through the Arctic Ocean, and the first voyage to circumnavigate Eurasia.[1] Initially a troubled enterprise, the successful expedition is considered to be among the highest achievements in the history of Swedish science.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_Expedition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Erik_Nordenski%C3%B6ld
re. Northabout
http://polarocean.co.uk/
Sojave – If you mean assistance from an icebreaker, then the answer is no.
If you mean assistance from technology unavailable to the likes of Otto Schmidt and Adolf Nordenskiöld, then the answer is yes. For example the Polar Ocean Challenge team were able to download weather and ice charts to their onboard laptop.
“I dare say that one or two of the bloggers on this site may predate the satellite era…”
I was born a couple weeks after the launch of Sputnik and a few days before Albert Anastasia climbed into the wrong barber chair.
btw “Rudee Valley” may be the best two words posted on this blog in in 2016.
UR, yes we can ignore your physics. There is no evidence of GHG warming in the satellite record since it began in 1978, none. Observation Trumps your “physics”, whatever strange thing you meant by that.
The radiation physics of CO2 is but a tiny fraction of what is going on. Your so-called physics is merely an abstraction, like the rate of fall of a feather in a vacuum, which is not where we live.
If your “physics” is a god perhaps you should capitalize it.
> There is no evidence of GHG warming in the satellite record since it began in 1978, none.
There’s a word for wilful blindness, Wojick:
http://data.remss.com/msu/graphics/TLT/plots/RSS_TS_channel_TLT_Global_Land_And_Sea_v03_3.png
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_November_2016_v6.gif
> There’s a word for wilful blindness
“Wilful-blindness”?
Hyper-literalism may not help keep me from being profane, W.
No evidence of GHG warming?
http://greatwhitecon.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Izen-LOTI-WfT-20161215.gif
Surely you jest?
relationship between CO2 levels and global temperatures
So far, so good.
It’s:
the relationship back between global and local temperatures
the extent of change
the impacts
the net of benefits and detriments
and the natural changes of future population
that make the case for harm suspect.
Tony – So you do agree with me that current conditions in the Arctic are unprecedented since 1930!
Jim
If you had read my article in the first place It would have saved us an awful lot of time as I specifically state in it that 2007 and 2012 melting exceeded that known from at least 1935. To that we should add 2016
Presumably you will also agree that there was considerable melting of arctic ice and Antarctic and arctic glaciers during the 1920 to 1940 period and the the NSR was established in the 1930’s?
It is now nearly Christmas eve here and family duties must take precedence for the next few days.
A happy Christmas to you
Tonyb
Jim
As I was signing out I noticed that I now have two comments in moderation, the one I posted around 6 hours ago and one I posted a couple of hours ago.
Presumably Samta might deliver them to you by the big day! Good night
Tonyb
Xmas duties do indeed call, so have a good one Tony.
Did you bother to read my series of articles on the recent voyage of the little yacht Northabout? If you had you would no doubt have appreciated my point about the modern definition of “open”.
I’m still awaiting your pick of the year in the 1930s in which the NSR was most “open”. I have a sneaking suspicion it won’t conform to, for example, the current Canadian Ice Service definition. Maybe post festivities we can discuss the ill fated Chelyuskin in more detail too?
Santa lives just around the corner from us here in Great White Con Ivory Towers. One of his little helpers just informed me that he’s too busy mopping up his basement to worry about delivering presents:
http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2016/12/december-2016-arctic-report-card/#comment-216803
Jim hunt
Just off to get the Christmas turkey. Why does everything go so mad for one meal on one day?
Anyway exciting news as I have just discovered incontrovertible proof of extreme natural warming in the 1940’s in America.
I have just watched an old documentary called ‘holiday Inn’
In it two distinguished professors travel to Vermont to examine snow conditions. Prof bing Crosby and prof Danny Kaye inexplicably involve themselves in some signing and dancing as they realise their research can not proceed due to a total lack of snow. This was around 1948!
Eventually the naturally occurring warm spell is overcome as a sudden stratospheric warming event changes the warm weather for extreme snowy conditions. The two professors and their large team of researchers rejoice by singing lustily.
I will make one last post of my usual seasonal proof that Charles dickens is responsible for our expectations of a snowy Christmas then shifting furniture and laying tables beckons
Tonyb
Wow TonyB,
I’d definitely trust those two. They’d have to be THE authority! :). I remember Danny Kaye in the 1955 movie “The Court Jester”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS75NtlH3gI
Remember this scene?
“,The Pellet with the Poison’s is in the Vessel with the Pestle”
er serfs foods uppermost consideration in that season
of wild winds ‘n cruel frost. The meagre hare, turkey if
yer can get it, the pudding! See me 3fth Edition /The
Four Seasons. Part 4.
… Christmas Dinner with the Cratchits.
‘… But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs Cratchit left the room alone – too nervous to bear witness – to take the pudding up and bring it in.
Suppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it should break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it while they were merry with the goose – and supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were supposed.
Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered – flushed by smiling proudly – with the pudding like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half – a – quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.
Oh a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest successs achieved by Mrs Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it. but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.’
Tonyb
Looks like you’re being trolled. If not he would have read what you wrote by now.
Peter Lang – “I remember Danny Kaye in the 1955 movie “The Court Jester”
I see your Danny Kaye and raise you a Bob Hope almost 20 years earlier (go to 1:14:30).
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xm8c2f_never-say-die_shortfilms
Harkin – Here’s a suggestion for you. Read this from cover to cover:
http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic33-1-3.pdf
Then report back on what insight it offers into the “openness” or otherwise of the Northern Sea Route in the 1930s.
Thanks in advance.
Jim – I counted at least four times that Tony asked you if you read something he posted and yet you still haven’t answered.
Until you answer him with specifics I will just have to assume you are now trolling me.
You’re welcome in advance!
Harkin – Yet another “stern reply“. And it’s Xmas. The season of good will to all (wo)men!
You will no doubt have noted that I’ve read lots of stuff that Tony appears not to have managed to get around to as yet. Perhaps a New Year’s resolution is called for?
Uncle
Right, so the evolution of all the multicellular phyla happened during the Cambrian explosion, which thrived and spread while atmospheric CO2 was 5000-10000ppm. Thos included corals and other marine organisms with mineralised tissue that somehow did not dissolve in carbonic acid. Contrary to CAGW theory.
It’s good to know we can ignore palaeontology. Or like creationists try to discredit it. And no – you can’t hide behind a “dim sun”, it is not a coherent argument.
More like the relationship between the two not being well understood Uncle.
“The right information allows sceptics and evangelists alike to back their convictions with their capital.”
Give tax breaks for enriching atmospheric CO2 levels, and stop engineering a massive financial opportunity for the banks on the basis of guesses of future warming and wild claims of how that would effects weather events and peoples lives. Then we stand a chance of dealing with the next climatic downturn.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2949/full?utm_content=buffer856af&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
This is a good paper, I’ve been tweeting it
A Wiley open access paper, now that’s a real anomaly.
Repost:
Bjorn Lomborg’s article Impact of Current Climate Proposals says:
Well, this is disturbing and disappointing. First, an unsupported and unjustified assertion that global warming is a very real problem (even IPCC admits the evidence for that beliefs is lacking). Second, he defines impact as temperature change, conveniently avoiding the issue that temperature change is not a measure of damage or benefit.
This another clear example revealing that the climate alarmists have failed to make their case that GHG emissions will do net-damage globally. They are clutching at straws trying to keep their failing belief alive.
Correcting Mosher using his own words: the climate alarmists have lost. They have no case. They cannot show that GHG emissions are a threat to the global economy, let alone to human civilisation (which is what James Hansen et al. would like us to believe).
I thought we were past fitting linear least squares to temperature data. Wrong data or wrong procedure for autocorrelated series.
Trying to fit data with estimated numbers(for convenience in climate modelling) turns it into another model, not better data, and not suited for the intended purpose.
A reanalysis implies there is an original analysis to be compared to. I didn’t see one.
Steven Mosher — You cited a paper & Dr. Curry expresses that it’s a good paper.
Could you give us a couple of major bullets (conclusions) that you believe that Dr. Curry and you agree on in this cited paper?
Experts at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) have issued a new assessment of temperature trends and variations from the latest available data and analyses. They present evidence that global warming slowed less from 1998 to 2012 than first thought.
Early in 2016 the global temperature appears to have first touched or briefly breached a level 1.5 °C above that early in the Industrial Revolution, having touched the 1.0 °C level in 1998 during a previous El Niño.
A wave of applause for Da Paws, Denizens!
You forgot to mention David Rose’s two UK articles pointing out that since that early 2016 moment, temperatures have fallen further and faster than ever before.
Ristvan – You forgot to mention that Mr. Rose was propagating porky pies:
http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2016/12/post-truth-global-and-arctic-temperatures/
http://greatwhitecon.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/80N-SON-20161211.gif
Looks like a dead cat bounce to me from the last El Nino, and no La Nina in sight.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_November_2016_v6.gif
jH, please prove your porkie lie assertion. I think Rose’s second article says you cannot. Also see GWPF for thurther datails. Your problem is you lose. Your fuether problem is you pretend not to. Not a good combination.
Ristvan – By way of just one example, Mr. Rose asserts and you repeat that “temperatures have fallen further and faster than ever before.”
Please prove it.
I forgot to mention it was a quote, Sir Rud.
From the article Judy found interesting.
Fsncy that.
Jim. Noy according to RSS, UAH, HADCRut, even GISS. And all those charts were illustrated withmsource references in his second article. Anyone can easilyverify that. Which makes you the one telling porky pies and posting misleading graphics.
That proves nothing Ristvan. Mere hand waving.
By way of additional context, you and Judith still haven’t answered a previous question of mine. Please see:
Expensive ENSO Expertise
Jim H
I’m curious how you characterize a “no answer” as a “stern” reply. I can understand a no answer as a “no” reply but if there is nothing to use an adjective on to modify, exactly what little rhetorical trick does one use in making no reply as anything but no
reply. I doubt when she made no reply she intended it to be stern. But the following paragraph which I’m not writing and will not show up anywhere will certainly be intended to be stern.
Ceresco – http://lmgtfy.com/?q=no+answer+stern+reply
Thanks for the heads up. I’ll add a link to that effect!
And let’s look at all the “damages” as a result of fossil fuel use, rising Co2, and rising temps.
http://www.acting-man.com/blog/media/2014/08/Population-vs.-food-production.png
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2016/05/10/blogs/dotfamine/dotfamine-blog480.jpg
http://www.moralcaseforfossilfuels.com/data/
> let’s look at all the “damages”
All I see is two graphs.
Add this one:
http://www.motherjones.com/files/column_1.jpg
Source: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/03/charts-cost-iraq-war
Willard – try using the left button on your mouse to click on the link at the bottom.
> try using the left button
All that it gets me is Epstein’s crap, Barnes.
No hit for “damage” on that page.
He haz teh Tweeter, so I already know he’s more into “but the poor” than doing real damage estimates.
Evidently it’s still not possible to have an adult dialog with Wee Willard. Some things never change.
Willard
During the same period we will have spent $355 Trillion for Social Programs. And all that we will have gotten for that treasure are more fetal positioned, thumb sucking, helpless idiots.
So what’s your point?
Puppy Dave considers that a graphical squirrel should be a dialog.
Speaking of mortality rates:
https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2016/03/mortality-slope-fixed.png&w=1484
Via Death Donald.
https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2016/03/mortality-slope-fixed.png
Bjorn Lomborg’s article Impact of Current Climate Proposals says:
Well, this is disturbing and disappointing. First, an unsupported and unjustified assertion that global warming is a very real problem (even IPCC admits the evidence for that beliefs is lacking). Second, he defines impact as temperature change, conveniently dodging the fat that temperature change is not a measure of damage or benefit.
This another clear example that the climate alarmists have failed to make their case that GHG emissions will do damage. They are clutching at straws trying to keep their failing belief alive.
Correcting Mosher using his own words: the climate alarmists have lost. They have no case. They cannot show that GHG emissions are a threat to the global economy, let alone to human civilisation (as James Hansen et al. would like us to believe).
Is that, ‘we’ as in centralized government planners or ‘we’ as an enlightened and free people, making individual decisions in the best interests of ourselves and our families, guided by Judeo-Christian ethics and personal responsibility?
Paris-type thinking could be nothing more than a new, high tech heathen at the gate. The outrage of we see unfolding in the ME is not driven by climate change. But, would it be any different is such behavior was carried out in the name of global warming?
The real tragedy is that blaming CO2 for climate change is a mistake.
Because the duration between absorption and emission of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) for CO2 molecules is approximately 6 micro seconds (µs) but thermalization (the process of absorbing EMR and conducting the absorbed energy to other molecules) for any atmospheric molecule at sea level takes approximately 0.0002 µs, essentially all terrestrial radiation absorbed by CO2 is thermalized. Similarly, all EMR absorbed by water vapor (WV) is thermalized. The thermalized energy is expressed in the froth of molecular velocity and spin with molecular speeds characterized by the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. It is observed as temperature and pressure of the gas.
Molecular species are identified as greenhouse gases (ghg) by the property that they absorb/emit EMR at wavelengths of significant terrestrial radiation (approximately 6-100 microns (µm). CO2 absorbs/emits at only one wavelength in that range (15 µm broadened at sea level to about 14-16 µm by pressure, etc.). Water vapor molecules, however, have, according to a count reported in a 1938 paper (Astrophysical Journal, June 1938, v 87, no 8, p 499) “about 170 lines in the range 75-550 cm-1” [133-18.2 µm].
Global average WV at sea level is approximately 1.5% = 15,000 ppmv while CO2 is only 505 ppmv so there are approximately 15000/505 = 29.7 times as many WV molecules as CO2 molecules. Thus in the typical case, there are 29.7 X 170 ≈ 5100 absorption/emission ‘opportunities’ for WV plus one opportunity for CO2 for a total of 5101. If you double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the number of opportunities increases to 5102. The resultant increase in warming effect (if any) is (5102-5101)/5101 = 0.000196. This increase of about 0.02% is insignificant.
Climate sensitivity is not significantly different from zero.
But CO2 molecules can emit radiation without having first absorbed it.
That’s a fatal blow to your argument.
Sorry, but it’s a fact that CO2 can gain energy from collisions with other molecules and then emit radiation, and that blows your ship out of the water.
I was under the impression that the whole global warming theory was based on the absorption of energy from the sun by CO2, thereby ultimately trapping energy, leading to increased global temperatures.
Am unsure of the validity of Mr. Pangburns theory, but your response seems somewhat knee jerk.
Personally, I think the whole global warming theory is hysterical religious fanatism, as the underlying mathematics of the climate models simply do not support making forecasts of the planet’s distant temperatures. Review the basic assumptions involving solving non-linear partial differential equations and it becomes painfully obvious the models are being grossly misused.
bobdroege,
You’re talking Warmist nonsense.
CO2 at absolute zero emits no radiation, by definition. If it’s emitting radiation, it has a temperature of some sort.
Any matter must absorb energy to rise above absolute zero. In the absence of a suitable external energy source, CO2 will keep emitting radiation previously absorbed, and cool as a result.
This is how dry ice is formed. No cold rays, just allow the CO2 to get rid of its energy.
Maybe if you express your statement about collisions in terms that show you understand the mechanism involved, you might discover that you have overlooked a couple of important aspects.
CO2 has no magic properties. The GHE does not exist.
Cheers.
bob – “CO2 can gain energy from collisions with other molecules and then emit radiation” is reverse-thermalization and is what happens at very high altitude as discussed at http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com .
Thermalization and the complete dominance at low altitude of water vapor in reverse-thermalization explain why CO2 has no significant effect on climate. Terrestrial EMR absorbed by CO2 is effectively rerouted to space via water vapor.
> I was under the impression that the whole global warming theory was based on the absorption of energy from the sun by CO2, thereby ultimately trapping energy, leading to increased global temperatures.
Almost, but not quite. In its most grossly oversimplified form, the enhanced greenhouse effect theory rests on the atmosphere being far more opaque to terrestrial radiation than solar radiation. So increasing a GHG like CO2 has negligible effect on solar energy absorbed, but impedes the loss of absorbed solar energy into space.
> Am unsure of the validity of Mr. Pangburns theory, but your response seems somewhat knee jerk.
There’s been some history.
> Personally, I think the whole global warming theory is hysterical religious fanatism, as the underlying mathematics of the climate models simply do not support making forecasts of the planet’s distant temperatures.
That response seems somewhat knee jerk.
> Review the basic assumptions involving solving non-linear partial differential equations and it becomes painfully obvious the models are being grossly misused.
Not even deterministic nonperiodic flows can create or destroy energy, kellermfk. Climate models are about describing and predicting changes to the attractor, not the midday high temperature in Toronto on July 1, 2100.
Not so fast, they can emit radiation as a result of kinetic interactions, but they do so at a minimum of the next quantum down in energy, and often several quanta down. The total emissivity of CO2 can be derived by several methods and the result is always 10^-3 with the consensus at .002.
The dismally low emissivity of CO2 blows the kick the can radiative model out of the water. Radiation by CO2 looking down is undetectable by MODTRAN in the pressure broadened muck below 300 meters.
> Radiation by CO2 looking down is undetectable by MODTRAN in the pressure broadened muck below 300 meters.
Yet MODTRAN picks out CO2’s signature below 300 meters looking UP just fine, gymnosperm.
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Zg9PC66s4PQ/WFuG4DwiTDI/AAAAAAAABII/pqxHqWxS9kQa8OfISB3JUX3Yx5fJUJj_QCLcB/s1600/MODTRAN%2BCO2%2B400ppm%2B0km%2Blooking%2Bup.png
Dan:
“Thermalization and the complete dominance at low altitude of water vapor in reverse-thermalization explain why CO2 has no significant effect on climate. Terrestrial EMR absorbed by CO2 is effectively rerouted to space via water vapor.”
But it doesn’t.
The Earth losses its terrestrial IR to space by passing through It’s entire depth. And it is this that is the key.
Look up the Beer-Lambert law and note the term for path length.
At altitude WV is orders of magnitude less prevalent and CO2 can dominate by absorbing and then emitting it finally to space at a lower rate due to its coldness.
Then of course we have an enhanced effect in dry climates at the surface – deserts and the poles.
To talk of just the surface and average WV there entirely misses the science.
Tony – IMO Beer-Lambert law applies to the rate of absorption vs altitude which is essentially complete within tens of meters (at those wavelengths where absorption occurs) . Thermalization/reverse-thermalization applies at the molecule level after a photon has been absorbed by a molecule. Thermalization is how EMR warms the atmosphere.
Dan:
“vs altitude which is essentially complete within tens of meters (at those wavelengths where absorption occurs) . Thermalization/reverse-thermalization applies at the molecule level after a photon has been absorbed by a molecule.”
Dan, that’s like saying that the intervening miles of atmosphere to space are irrelevant!
And that once re emitted further thermalisation cannot occur.
Shine a torch through mist/fog, it is back scattered to you. Assuming you have an IR torch then that IR will, get through (yes? – has to as WV is not a perfect insulator). So it leaves the (WV) saturation zone. It is then under the influence of CO2 molecules aloft until TOA.
That is why BL comes in.
“Thermalization is how EMR warms the atmosphere.”
Again, no it’s not – you are saying that only the air containing the WV is warmed. And that is the only consequence ( I think)
Any GHG molecule absorbing a photon of IR can re emit and cool and so pass on the LWIR energy.
CO2/H20 strongly absorb and emit photons in IR. Because of Kirchhoff’s law, this activity is a zero sum game, the molecules absorb exactly as much as they emit. There is therefore no net heating of the atmosphere by IR.
“zero sum game” Thermalization spreads the absorbed photon energy so rapidly throughout the thousands of surrounding molecules so that there is virtually undetectable heating rate (increase in T2) and the energy returned to the GH molecule is tiny and will take a long time to statistically accumulate enough energy in any given GH molecule to re-emit a photon.
If there was then when fog formed it would have a -ve feedback effect on itself by warming and then burning off via a reduction of RH!
Fog does not warm. It cools.
It warms the ground via back-radiation and continues to cool at the top to space ….. where CO2 further inhibits escape.
Net loss to space ( in absence of solar).
Dan, sorry, you are espousing Sky-Dragon Physics.
Aside from that….
What would happen if there were no non-condensing GHG’s present in the atmosphere in your view?
https://scienceofdoom.com/2010/07/17/the-amazing-case-of-back-radiation/
https://scienceofdoom.com/2011/01/23/understanding-atmospheric-radiation-and-the-“greenhouse”-effect-–-part-two/
Mike maybe I can make some sense by talking way over your head.
In order for gaseous CO2 to emit radiation it must have some molecules in an excited vibrational state.
The population of those excited states is determined by temperature alone.
The emission of radiation from molecules in those excited states is first order.
Yes, Virginia, there is a greenhouse effect and yes indeed, it does affect climate.
Brandongates
You really do not understand the fundamentals of trying to solve complex, non-linear partial differential equations. If you did, you would quickly conclude that the uncertainties and complexities involving climate models are so vast that it is impossible to establish whether or not the solutions are unique and useful.
Further, let’s review a little history. The whole issue started out as “catastrophic global warming” and after a few years devolved into “global warming”, ultimately degenerating into “climate change”. The whole damn thing is a scam aimed at forcefully taking money from the poor and middle class to benifit a chosen few elitists.
Tony – You say “like saying that the intervening miles of atmosphere to space are irrelevant! And that once re emitted further thermalisation cannot occur”. No it isn’t. Because water vapor at sea level has about 5000 absorb/emit lines compared to only one for CO2, CO2 doesn’t start to become a significant IR player again until the WV peters out above 10 km or so.
You say “Any GHG molecule absorbing a photon of IR can re emit and cool and so pass on the LWIR energy”. Lots of folks appear to be unaware that the relaxation time (time that elapses between absorption and emission of a photon by a molecule) is about 6 microseconds compared to about 0.0002 µs for thermalization. This mandates that absorbed EMR be thermalized. This is described further with links to source data at http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com
You say “There is therefore no net heating of the atmosphere by IR”. The common observation that cloudless humid nights cool slower than cloudless low-humidity nights demonstrates this statement to be nonsense.
Fog, cloud, rain, snow, etc. particles contain millions of molecules and exhibit Planck spectrum radiation with intensity proportional to T^4 like other liquid or solid bodies.
If there were no non-condensing ghg, planet average temperature would be regulated by WV pretty much like now.
Much (but not all) of the physics applied by the authors of Slaying the Sky Dragon appear, on very cursory review, to be correct.
They appear to not understand the Kiel & Trenberth graph. I improved on it at http://consensusmistakes.blogspot.com by accounting for thermalization. There is a link there to the calculations.
They deny the existence of any greenhouse effect or greenhouse gas including WV. I assert that water vapor has made the planet warm enough for life and that the contributions of non-condensing ghg are not significant.
They assert humans have no effect on climate. I agree for CO2 but countering of planet cooling which would otherwise be occurring is caused by the increasing trend for WV which appears to be substantially due to spray irrigation.
At the link above you will find identification of the three factors, in an equation which matches average global temperature (98% 1895-2015) and projects to 2020 explicitly and to 2037 depending on what happens with sunspots.
Dan:
“You say “There is therefore no net heating of the atmosphere by IR”. The common observation that cloudless humid nights cool slower than cloudless low-humidity nights demonstrates this statement to be nonsense..
That is NOT what I said.
I said that “thermalisation” is almost instantaneously passed on and that that fog or cloud does not retain it. If it did it would burn off!
Of course cloudless humid nights cool more slowly than dry cloudless nights. Been there and done that for 32 years of N-shifts with the UKMO.
I fail to see how this in any way discredits CO2 from doing what is has empirically been shown to do.
Namely trap some of the LWIR that H2O does not in the drier parts of the Earth’s atmosphere and re-radiate it again, some reaching back to the surface.
“If there were no non-condensing ghg, planet average temperature would be regulated by WV pretty much like now.”
And no it wouldn’t.
There needs to be a non-condensing GHG else WV would condense to H2O and precipitate out PDQ, as this paper shows……
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Lacis_la09300d.pdf
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/lacis10-no-ghgs-hd.jpg
How else did a “snowball” Earth ever thaw if it were not for volcanic CH4/CO2 given near 0.9 albedo?
And reading the rest of the above I have to conclude you come the “class” of a certain Doug Cotton – and therefore discussion would be fruitless.
TaTa.
bobdroege,
You may not understand that an electron may absorb a proton of a much lower energy than is required to effectively translate that electron to a different orbital shell, in simple terms.
Photons possess no rest mass, but do possess momentum. A molecule may merely experience a change in velocity or direction as energy is absorbed, and momentum transferred as a result.
For example, frozen CO2 may be unfrozen purely by absorbing photons emitted by gentle friction, or anything above the freezing point of CO2. The energy of these discrete photons is insufficient to excite the CO2 molecule. The frozen CO2 still warms, and becomes gas.
CO2 can emit photons of an infinite number of wavelengths – say between the energies from zero to the minimum level required to excite the molecule. There is no lower limit to the energy a photon may have, nor any theoretical upper limit.
Most Foolish Warmists’ understanding of photons, and their interaction with electrons, is on a par with their understanding of chaos – not very good.
No GHE. Not even a little bit. Heat makes thermometers hotter, not CO2.
Cheers.
Mike,
You seem to have read a little Feynman, but skipped the whole Quantum Mechanics chapters, that’s where you have gone way wrong.
Only 3 bucks, not even a sawbuck
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/quantum-physics-for-dummies-steven-holzner/1102490932/2675576453031?st=PLA&sid=BNB_DRS_Marketplace+Shopping+Professional_00000000&2sid=Google_&sourceId=PLGoP4747&k_clickid=3×4747
Spend some, you probably have enough in the cushions of your couch.
bobdroege,
I am declining your suggestion.
I don’t know whether you are ignorant or endeavouring to be as unhelpful as possible.
As is usual with Foolish Warmists, you demand that others do this or that, because you are unable or unwilling to provide any facts at all that support your mad assertions.
Others will notice that you have not disputed anything that I have said, or even asked for clarification.
Just handwaving, possibly trying to make inconvenient facts go away.
Refusing to provide the grounds on which you believe I am in error, and then refusing to provide assistance to correct any supposed error, is characteristic of faith based cults. Just like the Climate Cult of Latter Day Scientism.
You can’t even produce a falsifiable GHE hypothesis involving CO2. Just wild claims that believers in reality are wrong. Fantasy is not fact.
If you believe I have made a factually incorrect statement, please quote me, and provide some factual basis to support your belief. If you can’t, others may think you’re as clueless as the rest of the delusionalists who believe in the unstated, non-falsifiable, and non existent GHE.
Cheers.
> You really do not understand the fundamentals of trying to solve complex, non-linear partial differential equations. If you did, you would quickly conclude that the uncertainties and complexities involving climate models are so vast that it is impossible to establish whether or not the solutions are unique and useful.
Your PhD is in what and from where, Mr./Mrs./Ms./Dr. kellermfk?
Alternatively, you might explain exactly why “complex, non-linear partial differential equations” preclude the ability to estimate the statistics of a climate attractor.
> The whole issue started out as “catastrophic global warming” and after a few years devolved into “global warming”, ultimately degenerating into “climate change”.
Not that it’s relevant to anything important about the physical science, I’m wondering where is it that you read that particular history?
> The whole damn thing is a scam aimed at forcefully taking money from the poor and middle class to benifit a chosen few elitists.
On the bright side, you leave me little uncertainty about your political science credentials.
> Mike maybe I can make some sense by talking way over your head.
I don’t think any of what you wrote was over Mike’s head, bobdroege.
@toni banton
“How else did a “snowball” Earth ever thaw if it were not for volcanic CH4/CO2 given near 0.9 albedo?”
How about the black stuff spewed by the giant volcano eruptions and dramatically changing (lowering) the albedo of the ice?… like it has already happened recently (on a much smaller scale, of course) with Alpine glaciers, and Himalayans as well?
Robert:
“How about the black stuff spewed by the giant volcano eruptions and dramatically changing (lowering) the albedo of the ice?… like it has already happened recently (on a much smaller scale, of course) with Alpine glaciers, and Himalayans as well?”
That’s actually a good point but thinking about it, it would need to be a sustained assault of ash as with slowly rising temps then more snowfall would occur to cover the ash. Whereas increasing non-condensing GHG’s would not have that limiting -ve feedback involved.
Mike,
You have made factually incorrect statements, and here is an example, and that is why I suggested you read Quantum Physics for Dummies.
“You may not understand that an electron may absorb a proton of a much lower energy than is required to effectively translate that electron to a different orbital shell, in simple terms.”
The photon must be of the discrete energy necessary to raise the electron to a higher unoccupied molecular orbital, a lower energy will not do.
and
“CO2 can emit photons of an infinite number of wavelengths – say between the energies from zero to the minimum level required to excite the molecule.”
CO2 can only emit photons of wavelengths corresponding to the energy difference between allowed transitions between molecular orbitals.
Here is another falsifiable hypothesis regarding the greenhouse effect, I have provided an example previously and can provide more until I get blisters on my fingers.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas because it absorbs and emits photons of wavelength 3.5 and 12 microns.
That one is both falsifiable and false.
So there you go.
Tony – I cut/paste your words and you deny you said them. It is not surprising then that you are gullible enough to not see the circular reasoning of Gavin Schmidt and like thinkers. He uses a model that includes the false notion that water vapor depends on CO2 to ‘prove’ that water vapor depends on CO2. The resulting graph you posted above is nonsense.
You probably even fail to grasp the mistake made by the EPA in not recognizing that any effect from ghg would be integrated over the duration that ghg is in the atmosphere so duration cancels out.
I wonder how much wider the separation between the rising CO2 level and not-rising average global temperature (flat for 18 yr except for current el Nino) will need to get before you realize that you have been deceived.
Dan
You make an important point – atmospheric thermal dynamics are not only about radiation. There is also convection and brownian energy transfer. (Convective exchange probably then reappears as radiation.) That heat only exchanges in the atmosphere by CO2 IR is one of the core tricks of the CAGW illusion. We are asked to believe that all the N2 and O2 and other gasses are thermally inert – or else they somehow fantastically amplify the effects of a single trace gas. This is nonsense.
The world managed to shift from an economy built mostly on burning wood to an economy where most work was done by hydropower, small scale water driven mills of all kinds from sawmills to ore stamping mills. The world did that without subsidies, studies, government loans, mandates, or government involvement of any kind. Didn’t cost the taxpayers a dime.
The world then managed to shift from an economy built mostly on water power to an economy where most work was done by wood fueled steam engines, small scale wood-powered steam driven mills of all kinds from sawmills to ore stamping mills. The world did that without subsidies, studies, government loans, mandates, or government involvement of any kind. Didn’t cost the taxpayers a dime.
The world then managed to shift from an economy built mostly on small wood-fired steam power to an economy where most work was done by coal fueled steam engines, larger scale coal-powered steam driven mills of all kinds from sawmills to ore stamping mills. The world did that without subsidies, studies, government loans, mandates, or government involvement of any kind. Didn’t cost the taxpayers a dime.
The world then managed to shift from an economy built mostly on large coal-fired steam power to an economy where in addition to coal-fired steam, a large amount of work was done by oil fired engines, diesel mills of all kinds from sawmills to ore stamping mills. The world did that without subsidies, studies, government loans, mandates, or government involvement of any kind. Didn’t cost the taxpayers a dime.
Finally, and most recently, cheap fracked natural gas is shifting the world from an economy built mostly on large coal-fired steam power and diesel power to an economy where in addition to those sources, a large amount of work is being done by gas fired turbine engines, large plants making electricity to power everything you can think of. The world did that without subsidies, studies, government loans, mandates, or government involvement of any kind. Didn’t cost the taxpayers a dime.
So I object greatly to the idea that the government and the intelligentsia and the scholars and particularly the spending of my hard-earned taxpayer dollars are necessary midwives to any future changes in power. I reject that claim root and branch. Judith, all the experts in the world are doing nothing but distorting a process that has always run perfectly well without such busybody meddling, and in the process wasting billions of dollars.
The market has proven more than adequate to ensure a smooth transition to the next step in cheap reliable power. LEAVE IT ALONE! And let me invite you to take your oh-so-educated and oh-so-scientific hands out of my wallet! Finance your own damn green fantasies.
Look at the record of the DOE loans and grants under Obama. Cratered. Crashed and burned. Billions of dollars of taxpayer money wasted, thrown away, enriching the already rich. LEAVE THE ENERGY MARKET ALONE! All that your damned eternal and assuredly well-intentioned meddling has done is DRIVE UP ENERGY PRICES FOR THE POOR, not to mention the rest of the world. Through increased energy prices, you are screwing the poor to the floor while reducing economic output, and you think you have the moral high ground?
Not happening.
Anyhow, Dr. Judith, that’s my 100 Venezuelan bolivares worth … thanks as always for your blog.
w.
Dialogue between Willis and Dr. Tol (in comment section): https://rosebyanyothernameblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/15/the-bogus-cost-of-carbon/
Just being the devil’s advocate here, Willis, as is my wont.
The railroads, coal fired steam locomotives, were the interstate highway system (another federally subsidized masterpiece) of the 19th century in the US, Canada, and Australia. In the US they were subsidized by checkerboard land grants. Didn’t cost the taxpayers a dime at the time save the loss of manifest destinied public land.
The point is that lazy faire is not always best, and subsidies are not always wrong. The trick is to get them right, and I totally agree that nearly all current green subsidies are flat out wrong. Still, there may be a good one in there, maybe Tesla shingles?
Thanks, gymnosperm. You appear to be conflating a change in transportation technology with a change in energy sources. The railroads in the US originally ran mostly on wood. When it became more economical, they switched over to coal.
Choice of fuel was not affected by the checkerboard system of land grants. That was not intended to and did not affect energy sources. It affected transportation, but not energy.
Best regards,
w.
Willis,
Excellent comment. Brilliantly written. I agree 100% with what you say.
I’d add that the next great energy transition will be to nuclear power. only nuclear can supply the equivalent of all the world’s power effectively indefinitely. The transition to nuclear began in 1951 (operation start date 1953) and was then stalled in the late 1960’s – arguably by the environmental evangelists and anti-nuclear protest movement. Progress is still stalled: see Figure 2 here: http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/46/027/46027300.pdf
Peter,
Is that the basic reason for The Donald’s tweet today about more nukes? “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” Does he know the difference between a weapon and a nuclear power plant?
Does Kellyanne need to get hold of his tweet device before it is too late and he pushes the wrong button like Homer Simpson?
the shredder2015,
I suspect Donald does know the difference, and probably has a much better understanding than you.
This might provide you with some better understanding of the important difference between the anti-nuclear weapons protest movement and the anti-nuclear power protest movement:
The RAND Corporation, 1985, Origins, Goals, and Tactics of the U.S. Anti-Nuclear Protest Movement”
http://www.rand.org/pubs/notes/N2192.html
Here’s an excellent book written in 1978 which explains how the anti-nuclear power protest movement blocked progress. This crowd are responsible for an enormously costly (to GDP growth and human well-being) half century delay in progress.
Alan Wyatt, 1978, The Nuclear Challenge: Understanding The Debate
I will take a look at the references below you have provided. Thank you.
I really don’t care what he does or doesn’t know. But what I do know is that I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. We can expect something similar in some other part of the world and his damn twitter account will get us all killed.
“The Bedford Incident” is the best analog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOll3v55Dmo
“So be it.” THE DONALD ELECT
“We can expect something similar in some other part of the world and his damn twitter account will get us all killed.”
Think he’ll be crazy enough to give nukes to the Iranian Mullahs??
Oh wait, never mind.
Re Trump’s Nuclear tweet.
One is going to have to learn Trumpese. Expand has more than one meaning. Trump found mean expanding the number of warheads, the number of delivery systems or the capability of either or both. It’s twitter guys. One doesn’t post white papers on it.
Trump may not be clear (i.e. it is a topic he is mostly unfamiliar with), or he may be intentionally trying to be vague.
timg56 | December 26, 2016 at 3:58 pm |
Thanks, Tim. You are right about learning Trumpese. Trump’s use of Twitter is fascinating. I discuss his nuclear tweet over at my new blog here.
My regards to everyone,
w.
Giving new meanings is just a way of walking back statements. You can’t take what he seems to say first as his final word once he has spoken to some people behind the scenes. Tweeting is his tool for blurting stuff out, usually ill-considered 3am thoughts.
JimD, “Giving new meanings is just a way of walking back statements. You can’t take what he seems to say first as his final word once he has spoken to some people behind the scenes.”
Let’s see, back in June it was reported that Putin planned to put 40 more intercontinental ballistic missiles into service, probably because the US allowed build up of nato forces on the borders, facilitated the coup in the Ukraine and activated the anti-missile system in Romania. So Trump saying “strengthen and expand nuclear capabilities” would be a response not a unilateral diplomatic brain fart.
We are already in an arms race just like we are already in international trade wars, we just have someone admitting it.
Trump should know that the Russians can’t afford another arms race unless he takes the sanctions off them. Perhaps he wants to do that. You tell me. I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone does, including Trump at this point.
JimD, “Trump should know that the Russians can’t afford another arms race unless he takes the sanctions off them. Perhaps he wants to do that. You tell me.”
How about Trump instead of me? “Let there be an arms race,” Trump replied, “because we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”
Now what Russia needs to win an arms race is $100 plus dollar a barrel oil and a monopoly on natural gas to Europe. Trump’s energy plan will keep oil prices down, so easing sanctions would be more of a gesture. I imagine Trump will not have any problems with gestures as long as he controls the main lever.
captd, you know Trump’s plan better than he himself does. He looks like he makes it up as he goes along. How do Assad and Iran fit in with your Trump/Putin plan for global dominance? Maybe Taiwan and israel can be their allies. Possibly Turkey and India too, because he has property there, and North Korea because his friend Dennis Rodman is buddies with Kim Jong-Un. Trump’s worldview is different for sure. It will be interesting.
JimD, You are wandering off a bit there. You might need to back off the lame stream news for a while.
I get my news from Trump’s tweets like you do.
Willis,
Absolutely wrong on the government subsidy issue for energy plants. I’m short of time now, but will have more to write later this evening.
The fact is that hydropower in the US was built almost exclusively with Federal money, 75 percent of all capacity was built with Federal funds.
Coal-fired power plants for decades enjoyed a huge assist from the government via being exempted from compliance with Federal air pollution laws.
You did not mention nuclear power, but that energy source was and remains perhaps the most heavily subsidized form of power production.
US Department of Energy paid for many studies over the decades on energy production.
The facts do not support your assertions.
Roger Sowell | December 22, 2016 at 12:29 pm |
Always good to hear from you.
True. I was not discussing the Government building known and tested technology. I was discussing the Government picking winners in unknown future technology.
Possibly, although I’d have to see a link to the law that says “this applies to everyone but coal fired power plants” to believe it.
You are correct, I’d call that a “semi-success”.
I’m sure they have.
Depends on which assertions you refer to. I say again, the Government has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars betting on unproven future technologies. DOE studies, fine. Pouring billions down a rathole to Solyndra and Alegoa just to be pushing someone’s green fantasies … not fine. And the facts, sadly, show that my valuable hard-earned taxpayer’s money has indeed been wasted.
Thanks for your comments,
w.
Another example of Sowell’s ignorance and the absolut rubbish he writes every time he posts here:
You did not mention nuclear power, but that energy source was and remains perhaps the most heavily subsidized form of power production.
To the contrary, the US Federal subsidies alone are over 100 times higher for solar and 15 times higher for wind than for nuclear
Solar = $280/MWh
Wind = $36/MWh
Nuclear = $2.10/MWh
https://i2.wp.com/i.imgur.com/m72CxQv.png
http://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pdf
For Willis Eschenbach re coal power plants being exempted from air pollution laws:
http://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/2016-ELI_Grandfathering.Coal_..Power_.Plant_.Regulation.Under_.the_.CAA_.pdf
This is a small document at only 11 pages and has more than one dozen citations/references.
It gives an overview of how most of the coal power plants operated for 45 years without meeting Clean Air Act emission standards.
There are hundreds of articles written on the subject.
Roger Sowell | December 23, 2016 at 12:13 pm |
Your link did not work. However, I don’t see the relevance in any case. I said that we achieved the changeover from wood to coal without any government support, subsidies, etc.
I absolutely don’t see how government exemption from clean air regs a hundred years after that changeover has anything at all to do with what I said.
w.
There are two things that markets do not handle well, externalities and ‘the tragedy of the commons’ . An example of both is air pollution cause by coal generation stations, addressed in the US by the CAA and unaddressed yet in China. The CAWG argument is both. So if there is a C and an A in GW, then market intervention would be justified. Problem is, the case for neither has yet been made by IPCC or anyone else.
Rud,
The markets may have handled the pollution caused by coal generation stations if not for the disruption to progress caused by the “Progressives”. If not for the “Progressives” and the anti-nuclear power protest movement, nuclear power could cost around 10% of what it does now. If the pre-disruption nuclear cost reduction rates and deployment rates had continued most new baseload capacity built since the 1970 may have been nuclear instead of coal. In that case, the air pollution problem caused by coal fired generation would be minimal now. What blocked progress was political, legislative and regulatory response to the anti-nukes scare campaigns and the resulting huge cost escalation of nuclear power plants. It was government intervention in markets that impeded the development of nuclear power and caused the disruption to progress – and the huge economic, environmental, and human-welfare consequences of it.
For Peter Lang,
As usual, your false statements on nuclear power are easily refuted.
The cost to install the turbines and generators alone are approximately ten percent of the total build cost in a modern nuclear plant.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2016/08/a-nuclear-nut-claims-90-percent-cost.html
Hinkley Point C is a case on point. $20 billion build cost estimate and $1.9 billion for GE turbines with generator.
Thanks again for the laughs!!! I get a good laugh reading your attempts at defense of nuclear power. So do my engineer pals.
Hinkley C is not representative sample. It was designed to be grandios. It is beyond economic scale.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/hinkley-point/
In passing, the DOE grant process is utterly corrupt and lacks basic “checks & balances.”
Specifically, unlike Federal procurements, grants are made without recourse. Ordinarily, if a bidder believes irregularities were involved, they can request a Government Accounting Offoce review. That is not the case with the DOE – fact, I have letters from both DOE & GAO lawyers attesting to this peculiar feature of DOE grants.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have awarded to specific companies and universities with virtually no tax payer protection. The DOE grant process has degenerated into a reward mechanism for cronies & pals of the DOE and administration in power.
It gets worse. A number of grants require that DOE labs must be involved. That is more commonly known as extortion.
The remedy is painfully simple: make the grant process transparent, competitive, and allow GAO review upon request. That would, however, mean Congress would actually have to do something useful for a change and pass the necessary minor changes to existing Congressional Acts.
And the commercialization of crude oil derivatives saved the whales.
Somewhere in that list, you could mix in increasingly intrusive government regulation that started out as net beneficial to what is clearly now over-regulation of fossil fuel energy while giving a complete pass to environmental impacts of so-called “green” energy, which,by the way, is not possible without fossil fuels
McKitrick’s T3 Tax: a solution to the Horizon Tragedy
Ross McKitrick proposed his Global Warming: Temperature-Indexed Tax
(Tropical Tropospheric Temperature (T3) Tax) that promises a solution to the Horizon Tragedy. He based it relative to the actual temperatures of the Tropical Tropospheric Temperature, Earth’s most sensitive region to anthropogenic global warming effects from global climate models. This should delight both “climate alarmists” as going up with strong anthropogenic warming (as predicted by all IPCC climate models, and NOT going up if nature dominates and there is no alarming anthropogenic warming (as current evidence shows.)
McKitrick, Ross R. (2008) “The T3 Tax as a Policy Strategy for Global Warming” in Nakamura, A. ed. The Vancouver Volumes, Trafford Press
See also McKitrick’s December 2016 PRESENTATION TO THE HARVARD ELECTRICITY POLICY GROUP PANEL ON CARBON PRICING
For more by McKitrick on carbon pricing see 27 pp: McKitrick (2016) PRACTICAL GUIDE TO THE ECONOMICS OF CARBON PRICING
As much as I like and respect Ross and his work, I absolutely do NOT want a tax linked to whether the temperature of the planet goes up. Here’s my reasoning.
The temperature of the planet has been increasing (in fits and starts) for something like 300 years since the Little Ice Age, and nobody knows why, except the answer most likely isn’t “humans”.
It seems that both you and Ross think it’s a brilliant idea to bet against an ongoing 300-year trend.
Me, I’m a man who learned to count cards at blackjack and go up against the casinos. But betting against the house when the house is on a 300-year streak?
… not so much …
w.
Willis Eschenbach I heartily agree. Thus we need to relate it to a statistically significant anthropogenic signal, NOT the null hypothesis of default global warming from the Little Ice Age. Thanks for pointing that out.
The point is that the more we invest with foresight; the less we will regret in hindsight.
The point is that the more we invest with flawed foresight; the more we will regret in hindsight.
There is nothing more flawed than climate models that always get everything wrong!
Including yours, n’est pas?
“Once climate change becomes a clear and present danger to financial stability it may already be too late to stabilise the atmosphere at two degrees.”
The climate’s been changing for four and a half billion years.
“Stabilising the atmosphere at two degrees” is a nonsensical phrase, as a moment’s thought will indicate. The connection to “clear and present danger to financial stability” is a non-falsifiable assertion, supported by precisely nothing concrete.
Maybe the writer has been infected with James Hansen’s delusions about the evil nature of coal.
It’s all interesting, inasmuch as it conflates climatology and economics, both of which are equally useless, based on real, rather than modelled, performance.
What the heck is financial stability anyway? Nobody gets richer or poorer, businesses do not fail, everybody has a job, and there is a chicken in every pot? Looking for a useful definition of financial stability leads to the usual vague assertions.
Maybe God created climatology to give economics an air of respectability, or maybe the other way round. Nobody has shown that astrological protections would produce worse results in either field. Sad.
All part of the rich tapestry of life, I suppose.
Cheers.
Whoops. Predictions rather than protections.
No cheers for me!
The greatest paradox: Intelligence Agencies Make Their Living by Lying
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/intelligence-agencies-make-their-living-by-lying-now-theyre-truthful/
This is a bad start – an unsupported statement of belief, not fact:
I agree there are huge financial and economic risks of pushing mitigation policies. Until there is persuasive evidence that GHG emissions are likely to be significantly damaging, the only policies that are justifiable are ‘no regrets’ policies. The Paris Agreement and Obama policies are a long way from ‘no regrets’ policies. At present there seems to be no persuasive case to support the premise that GHG emissions will do more harm than good (See comments at the top of this thread https://judithcurry.com/2016/11/25/week-in-review-science-and-policy-edition-3/#comment-826494 for the basis for this statement).
Sure have. Look at these charts to see how energy consumption growth slowed dramatically around 1970. The root cause of this is arguably green-Left-“Progressive” policies blocking progress and causing a dramatic slow down in world GDP growth. The world has not recovered and progress is still blocked. … Thanks “Regressives”.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/world-energy-consumption-by-source.png
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/per-capita-world-energy-by-source.png
Sounds like the next round of dumb policy advocacy after the failure of the Kyoto Protocol and the EU ETS.
Climate finance equals tax burden subsidies and unnecessary energy costs. In an undistorted market there would be zero climate finance.
Another damned bureaucratic boondoggle driven entirely by ideological belief.
There can be no justification for any climate policy, other than not regrets policies, until we have a valid damage function and and SCC estimate with acceptable uncertainty. We are nowhere near to having that. There has been little work done on collecting the evidence to define and validate the damage function for 20 years. This is the Achilles Heel of the CAGW alarmists’ belief.
Uncle – Don’t forget the rapidity of change in the Antarctic at the moment:
The 11th Key Science Moment of 2016
Here’s the latest edition of the “graphic graphic”:
http://greatwhitecon.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/nsidc_global_extent_20161220.png
AGW is slow and steady.
If change is rapid,
that in and of itself is probably an indicator that dynamics are the cause, not AGW.
“that in and of itself is probably an indicator that dynamics are the cause, not AGW.”
Not in the Arctic, much more likely a combination of both, as neither AGW nor natural variation can be isolated from each other.
The warming AGW trend has the chaos of weather superimposed.
Thus taking the long-term trend further off of line on occasion.
Vis the slow-down in (atmospheric) warming due the lengthy -ve PDO/ENSO regime.
Where ice is concerned it would only take a few poor freezing and deep melting seasons to make a marked difference given the fragility of Arctic sea-ice in terms of lack of multi-yer ice.
The Antarctic is different however and this drop in sea-ice is odd IMO.
Not in the Arctic, much more likely a combination of both, as neither AGW nor natural variation can be isolated from each other.
The Arctic seems to have an open borders immigration policy, and sea ice has been fleeing as fast as it can:
http://psc.apl.uw.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/sea_ice_motion_anomaly.png
How does this compare to longer term variations?
Will it continue? What if it does? What if it doesn’t?
Maybe so Eddie, but I could swear that I remember certain quarters of the cryoblogosphere touting the global sea ice area graph as conclusive proof that there’s no such thing as “global warming”, let alone the “anthro” flavour thereof.
https://www.cato.org/blog/spinning-global-sea-ice
Please make sure to remind them all that “dynamics are the cause”, not forgetting Pat Michaels.
And a couple of years ago Antarctic sea ice was at “record highs”. Big deal either way. Put 100 years of Satellite data together and one might have something to discuss. Prior to that it is all just a shrug of the shoulders.
+1
Ceresco – Don’t forget to remind Pat Michaels et al. about that.
Remind me, is he related to Pat Sajak?
Well, this is just meaningless nonsense. Carney addressing his patrons and toeing the propaganda line.
Beside the trivial stuff it’s all what the climate establishment wants to hear.
“Given the uncertainties around climate, not everyone will agree on the timing or scale of adjustment required. The right information allows sceptics and evangelists alike to back their convictions with their capital.”
Listen to his predecessor Mervin King who has more interesting things to say these days about pricing future risks: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLochPiFHojBa3wck8BRhOc3q_hmVAg6Vu
“When rates are low, the present value of future returns and risks are greater.”
This is trivia and an euphemism to console those who are concerned about the high costs.
This is the basis for Tobins great Q-theory from around 1970 which has been the theoretical basis for central bank policy ever since. Currently this policy is about to collide with its horizon and we will have to empirically find out what lies beyond. The economists are still guessing. Atlantis?
The real problem with “two degrees investments” is the lower eroi with its concomitant low return on investment. It will reduce the possible growth rate further at an inopportune time in a massively over indebted world and may precipitate its financial collapse. Just what Carney is supposed to manage away “whatever it takes”. If this is a Minsky moment then a reverse one where one is changing the equation of risk on the side of the real world while one is tapped out at the financial side.
Returning to Mervin King: there are no proper futures marktets to price this correctly even if politicians were able to figure out what they will do and where an when and to whom. Which they currently have no idea of. Just “do something” no matter the cost to assuage the climate fear instigated in some people by a handful of “experts”.
“eroi” should perhaps be more clearly “eroei” (energy return on energy investment)
Here is a first outline of the Great Plan (in properly pc gendered lingo in the German version):
http://www.wbgu.de/fileadmin/templates/dateien/veroeffentlichungen/sondergutachten/sg2016/wbgu_sg2016_en.pdf
Schellenhuber just lectured Ms Merkel an policy makers ahead of the upcoming G20 meeting in Hamburg about how to properly govern this planet including tax-policy, social justice and all along the line of this report.
Since the climate issues are too complicated for politicians to understand it only seems appropriate to hand the policy making process over to the knowledgable experts. It worked so well with central banking where they also had come to some scientific consensus how to do this.
Chilling. Excerpts: “There is a risk that some countries – in order to avoid
a rapid phase-out of fossil energies – will engage in a massive expansion of nuclear energy and large-scale deployment of untested technologies such as carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS, also in combination
with bioenergy – BECCS), possibly supplemented by high-risk geoengineering measures, e.g. manipulation of the global radiation budget.”
“The WBGU recommends in particular that G20 countries establish transformative sovereign wealth funds, which we also call ‘future funds’.”
They are after money as always, under the guise of hypothetically preventing a hypothesized temperature rise. So far, the experienced temperature rise has been beneficial.
So, so, so the ‘rapidity of change’ so, so, so are the condos in Miami filled with 3 feet of ocean water, are the condos on the lower east side of Manhattan under water as predicted nearly a decade ago – the damn hubris that man can affect the climate is ponderous, eff’ing ponderous. Lets ensure clean air, clean water, cheap affordable electricity via COAL and making sure what comes out the stack is nil and CLEAN. Lets get the third world out of the third world by bringing them into 2016 with affordable energy.
“So, so, so the ‘rapidity of change’ so, so, so are the condos in Miami filled with 3 feet of ocean water, are the condos on the lower east side of Manhattan under water as predicted nearly a decade ago”
Would you care to provide evidence that SL was forecast to rise by 3 ft by 2006 please?
Unless you mean more than that, as I assume these “condos” did not sit at SL exactly?
Here you go.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi4koXrs4jRAhVH5iYKHVlOB6UQjRwIBw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.evcforum.net%2Fdm.php%3Fcontrol%3Dpage%26t%3D17199%26mpp%3D15%26p%3D8&psig=AFQjCNHRN6IhuKmaL2tjiabJF00s5glnWQ&ust=1482516749433305
Scott
try again
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fourchangingclimate.files.wordpress.com%2F2011%2F01%2Fpost-glacial_sea_level-incl-3-mm-yr-1-trend.png%3Fw%3D450%26h%3D307&imgrefurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.evcforum.net%2Fdm.php%3Fcontrol%3Dpage%26t%3D17199%26mpp%3D15%26p%3D8&docid=xFr6dirI3uPLBM&tbnid=z9DeImltktXrSM%3A&vet=1&w=450&h=307&itg=1&bih=816&biw=1230&q=1996%20sea%20level%20prediction%20by%20holman&ved=0ahUKEwiHmsyys4jRAhXFKCYKHVevBrQQMwhpKD0wPQ&iact=mrc&uact=8
Sorry, how does that give proof of a forecast of a 3ft rise in SL by 2006?
There was none BTW.
Here is a Hanson paper warning 1 meter per decade of 2007.
http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/sea-level-rise/slr-research-summary/2007_Hansen.pdf
Google errased the earlier ones.
past predictions as fake news.
Scott
Tony
Does a WUWT old article count?
I can’t find the real ones.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/22/a-little-known-but-failed-20-year-old-climate-change-prediction-by-dr-james-hansen/
Will look over the week end for fun.
Scott
Scott:
From the paper ….
“The IPCC (2007) midrange projection for sea level rise this century is 20–43 cm (8–17 inches) and its full range is 18– 59 cm (7–23 inches).”
And….
“Rahmstorf (2007) has noted that if one uses the observed sea level rise of the past century to calibrate a linear projection of future sea level, BAU warming will lead to a sea level rise of the order of one meter in the present century.”
And……
“Under BAU forcing in the 21st century, the sea level rise surely will be dominated by a third term: (3) ice sheet disintegration. This third term was small until the past few years, but it is has at least doubled in the past decade and is now close to 1 mm/year, based on the gravity satellite measurements discussed above. As a quantitative example,
let us say that the ice sheet contribution is 1 cm for the decade 2005–15 and that it doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. That time constant yields a sea level rise of the order of 5 m this century.”
Yes he is arguing for an acceleration of SL rise due to ice melt/break-up.
But I don’t see where he says an acceleration from 1mm/yr contribution to become 1m 9 years later !
Reblogged this on The Ratliff Notepad.
If the rest of his central banker thinking is as wooley as this, the £ is in big trouble. CAGW. 2C. Every canard in the Warmunist Creed. His horizon problem is a reformulation of the economically false precautionary principle.
“Financial policymakers will not drive the transition to a low-carbon economy,”
They might if there was a low carbon economy.
They tried to build it but no one came.
They even had a cornfield.
The climate solutions that are expensive aren’t the ones that are effective !
There’s no scientific reason for there to be substantial political disagreement on climate policy. Assuming that skeptics/lukewarmers would generally support Bjorn Lomborg style polices, even if at a lower priority, the only reason for political disagreement is ignorance or a quasi-religious impulse to do something painful to the economy for the moral sake of it.
After my nap, it occurs to me, that we are ignoring the obvious when it comes to government creating an economy.
If ‘policy makers’ want a low carbon economy they should outlaw it.
Mandatory sentences for possession of solar panels.
Drive a Prius – go to jail.
Look to the result of Prohibition.
Look to the War on Drugs.
Windmills could be as cheap and available as heroin.
There could a whole new market of expensive rehab resorts for celebrities addicted to a low carbon lifestyle.
The grand power of government is before our eyes if we just open them.
Concerning the link to the “Update on Mann’s lawsuit against ” against critics Mark Steyn and other, I think data Mannslaughter is the real crime here…! Even the the IPCC discontinued its use of the hockey stick as a propaganda tool.
brandonrgates,
As to what might preclude the calculation of the future position of a strange attractor –
“At some values of the parameter the attractor is a single point, at others it is two points that are visited in turn, at others it is 2n points or k × 2n points that are visited in turn, for any value of n depending on the value of the parameter r, and at other values of r an infinitude of points are visited.[1]”
– from Wikipedia, but true enough.
The position of the strange attractor is continuously varying. Hence its name, This is the nature of chaos. Many people, including scientists and mathematicians, do not accept that chaos exists, or give it lip service, while confusing it with randomness.
Running the logistic equation with a variety of input values can show that two arbitrarily close initial values may lead in the one case to chaos, in the other case to a steady state, zero for example. There is no minimum value which may determine the outcome.
Probabilistic determinations prove to be worthless. I love chaos – often it can be used to explain everything, but predict nothing.
Cheers.
Science and engineering is on the cusp of a breakthrough to the next transformative technology – synthetic biology. This will usher in an age of prosperity and finally make the 1960’s promise of electricity too cheap to meter a reality all over the world. Bacteria will soon be programmable and essentially become self-reproducing robot construction workers able to build just about anything without assistance. Among those things are virtually any durable good and any carbon compounds including hydrocarbon fuels, electrical transmission lines, and arrays of solar collectors. Everything we need will be grown not manufactured.
This is going to happen long before fossil fuels run out and long before aCO2 can cause significant climate change problems. The only real risk in this is widespread economic collapse that would stall the flow of R&D needed to bring the next technological revolution to fruition. Draconian measures that make fossil fuel use much more expensive create just such a risk; a risk that the OP lays out.
So I say full steam ahead. Use fossil energy riches to drive the science & engineering needed to make clean renewable solar energy and synthetic hydrocarbon fuels too cheap to meter. Climate alarmists STFU and get out of the way!
Gingrich badly needed in Trump administration to be science & technology advocate. I don’t think many people know about Gingrich’s long love affair with science & technology. Excepting the monumental time & money wasters in culture wars cult sciences (evolutionary biology and climate change) Newt is an articulate advocate for science calling for a doubling of federal spending on science. We ought to partner with Russia on science & technology as they are extremely good at getting stuff done on a shoestring budget where US science establishment is extremely poor at it.
http://imgur.com/a/V42Zi
Newt Gingrich, a major Trump ally, has a complicated love affair with science
http://imgur.com/a/OgSiB
https://www.statnews.com/2016/12/16/newt-gingrich-trump-future-science/
the abstractions in Carney’s remarks leave no sense of how to accomplish what i agree with Judith are an attractive central tenet — “The right information allows sceptics and evangelists alike to back their convictions with their capital.” I just don’t think Carney is actually committed to this at all.
He implies that Paris is “the information” when, indeed it is Paris that skeptics would bet against as useful policy for humanity.
at root I see nothing unique about what he suggests: put a price on carbon and then let people invest in carbon or non-carbon energy. (which is only modestly semantically different than what is already being done, i.e., gross subsides to green energy). These seem far removed from ‘no regrets’ policies.
If we took all the subsidies currently being expended in a single year and instead banked them for one year to provide an endowment for prizes for solving energy technology chokepoints – batteries/storage and generation at some $ kwh threshold – and from there forward everyone invests accordingly, that might be a little more no-regrets (albeit one can never account for all the unintended consequences even of desirable technological advances so it is even a little presumptive, e.g., technological forcing of fuel mileage standards largely resulted in people driving longer distances).
so the subsidies are discontinued from there forward offering a boon to the economy. if noone solves the problem[s] and claims the prize[s] it grows every year while folks would continue to invest in fossil fuels. if the prize is awarded, depending on the licensing arrangements contemplated, investment shifts to the new technology over the arc of patent.
Those who believe that a green economy is just over the next hill can invest there, facing a lack of return if they are unable to accomplish more economic parity with traditional fuels. Those who believe the problems less readily soluble can double down on traditional energy infrastructure and face stranded investments.
Once man-made climate change becomes a clear and present false danger, we may have already ruined the financial stability of the western world. It may already be too late to stabilize the economies of the world. Brexit is a start, Clexit is a start, Trump is a real good start to fix some really bad policies.
Brexit ?! give us a break, only thing the three Brexitier ministers are interested is which one gets the Chevening mansion for Christmas
http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/12AC2/production/_90428467_6d50df77-8be2-4ddc-9e76-50461fdebd83.jpg
Bungling Boris, the madam PM’s favourite got it. The other two aren’t amused.
Happy Xmas and prosperous New Year to all.
There’s tragedy on the horizon for Michael Mann. Mark Steyn might be taking his deposition soon.
http://www.steynonline.com/7643/walking-in-a-legal-wonderland
bobdroege,
You made some bizarre and incorrect statements relating to photon absorption and emission by CO2.
You appeared to quote “Quantum Physics for Dummies” as giving support to your fabrications. Unless you are able to provide a reference in the publication to support your nonsense, it might appear that you are just making stuff up, as is generally the Warmist Wont.
As to the ability of CO2 to be heated, and subsequently cool. Claiming that this comprises a falsifiable hypothesis for a supposed GHE, is quite simply nutty. All gases can be heated. All gases will cool, if all external energy sources are removed – of course, this includes other matter above absolute zero.
There is no GHE. Trying to introduce sciency talk and jargon in the hope that nobody will challenge your assertions, won’t change the fact that you cannot raise the temperature of a thermometer by using CO2.
Pretending that you understand chaos or quantum physics won’t achieve the impossible.
Cheers.
Mike,
“You made some bizarre and incorrect statements relating to photon absorption and emission by CO2”
Which statements did I make that are incorrect?
I haven’t read Quantum Physics for Dummies, so I didn’t quote from it, though you might gain some insight into the greenhouse effect if you picked up any general Quantum Physics text.
Try this short essay
http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/22/1/pdf/i1052-5173-22-1-44.pdf
Try to get the difference between greenhouse gases and other gases that do not absorb and emit infrared radiation.
Oxygen and nitrogen, for example can not be heated by exposing them to infrared radiation like CO2, methane, water vapor and other greenhouse gases can.
Though, that is for pure gases, a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen can be heated by infrared if it contains CO2.
bobdroege,
Your mind reading abilities are deficient. Maybe you need a refresher course. Any Foolish Warmist might be able to help.
I am curious as to how you decided I have not read any Quantum Physics texts. Did you have some evidence to that effect, or just more Foolish Warmist assumption?
Warmists love demanding that others read this or that. Usually, the result is laughter at the foolishness of the Warmist. Your reference author claims to be an astrophysicist. Someone sharing the same delusions as James Hansen, perhaps. I note he’s redefined words away from their normally accepted scientific meanings, and seems to have no conception of the interaction between light (photons) and matter.
A load of rubbish.
Your statement that O2 and N2 cannot be heated by exposing them to infrared radiation is purely nonsense. Tyndall measured the heat absorbing properties of many gases, and determined fairly accurately the relative opacity of gases including dry CO2 free air, CO2, O2, N2, and many others, for what we now call different IR wavelengths of light.
Liquid nitrogen, for example, rapidly warms and becomes gaseous, at temperatures above its liquifying point. If you understood the mechanism by which this happens in terms of photons interacting with matter, you would realise that your statement that nitrogen somehow is resistant to warming is nonsensical.
Maybe you are thinking about relative absorptivity. Even this will lead you astray. At certain pressures and wavelengths, Tyndall measured CO2 as absorbing around 1750 times as much IR, as dry CO2 free air.
Unfortunately for the GHE enthusiasts, there are 9996 molecules of other gases for every 4 molecules of CO2 in dry air. The relative absorptivity of the CO2 is 4×1750 = 7000 compared with 9996×1 = 9996.
Add in H2O, particulates, and all the rest, and you will see why NASA agrees that around 35% of insolation doesn’t even reach the surface to be measured. Lack of heat, rather than additional heat!
No GHE. No miraculous CO2 super fantastic quantum physics disobeying properties.
Cheers.
Sigh.
“Tyndall’s experiments also showed that molecules of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and ozone are the best absorbers of heat radiation, and that even in small quantities, these gases absorb much more strongly than the atmosphere itself.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Tyndall/
Jim D,
You’ve wasted a good sigh, and still haven’t contradicted anything I said.
There were Tyndall’s speculations – the luminiferous ether, the meteoric origin of the Sun’s heat, the role of water vapour in the atmosphere, and so on.
There were, on the other hand, Tyndall’s reproducible experiments.
Unfortunately, foolish NASA employees, whether the undistinguished mathematician Gavin Schmidt (who masquerades as a scientist), or the NASA management personnel at the Rogers Commission, tend to confuse fantasy with fact.
In regard to the Rogers Commission-
“Feynman was clearly disturbed by the fact that NASA management not only misunderstood this concept, but inverted it by using a term denoting an extra level of safety to describe a part that was actually defective and unsafe.”
Foolish Warmists elevate this sort of thing to ridiculous levels. Cooling becomes heating, climate creates weather, and so on.
If you want to have a good sigh, consider the foolishness of the GHE proponents – not even a falsifiable GHE hypothesis involving CO2 to be found. Just the same old speculation passed off as fact!
Cheers.
MF, which part of Tyndall’s experiments do you think were wrong, and why? Who else backs up what you say, or are you just making this up yourself?
MF, at least since you said it didn’t contradict you, you agree with the paragraph I quoted. This is actually a step forwards for you. Congratulations.
“Tyndall’s experiments also showed that molecules of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and ozone are the best absorbers of heat radiation, and that even in small quantities, these gases absorb much more strongly than the atmosphere itself.”
Jim D,
Once again, you are confusing a misleading NASA employee statement with fact.
Tyndall wrote what he wrote. The fact that NASA employees and Warmists find his results inconvenient, won’t make the facts go away. You are quite free, as is anyone else, to read Tyndall’s publications. You may even choose to replicate his experiments. Hopefully, you will obtain much the same result, allowing for improvements in equipment over the years.
The misleading NASA statements about what Tyndall wrote are Warmist misdirection on a couple of different levels. Taking just one – the opacity of CO2 to certain wavelengths of light is certainly far greater than dry air. What the deceptive NASA person fails to point out, is that there are only 4 parts per 10000 of CO2, which means that even if CO2 was 2500 times more opaque, it would then be only as opaque as the rest of the air.
Silliness and misleading statements still won’t create a mechanism whereby the application of CO2 will cause a thermometer to become hotter.
Keep trying for a gotcha. I’m sure I make the odd mistake from time to time. The usual run of Foolish Warmists are unable to distinguish fantasy from fact, so the chances of one actually figuring out when I’m mistaken are remote. Go your hardest, anyway. I can take it, I’m sure.
Cheers.
Mike,
You can read Tyndall for yourself,
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Radiation_(Rede_Lecture)
He found that CO2 absorbed 750 times more than N2 or O2, a pretty good result for the mid 1800s.
Though I work with UV detectors and have an idea of what an absorbance of 1 means.
I could post the picture of the CO2 laser again, where it passes through the air without heating it and only when the beam hits the target do you get any heating.
Here is a cite, Nitrogen doesn’t absorb until the ultraviolet.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1957ApJ…126….1W
Sorry, it’s another astrophysicist.
You posted
“The relative absorptivity of the CO2 is 4×1750 = 7000 compared with 9996×1 = 9996. ”
That is the greenhouse effect, I am glad you admitted that there is such a thing.
Now we can move on to the trace gas hypothesis.
bobdroege –You can read Tyndall for yourself…
Well you must realize that poor Tyndall didn’t have the benefit of Mike (There is no GHE) Flynn’s superior insight. For instance,
No doubt, therefore, can exist of the extraordinary opacity of this substance [water vapor, in this case] to the rays of obscure heat; and particularly such rays as are emitted by the earth after it has been warmed by the sun.…Remove for a single summer-night the aqueous vapour from the air which overspreads this country, and you would assuredly destroy every plant capable of being destroyed by a freezing temperature..
Alas, Tyndall thought his experimental results showed that the atmosphere created…a greenhouse effect. Too bad he didn’t have Mike (There is no GHE) Flynn around to explain what his own experiments meant.
MF is having a lot of trouble understanding Tyndall’s results. It appears to be a mental block of some kind which leaves him stuck at a 18th century view of the science. Next he will step it even further back and disagree with Pouillet and Fourier. His level of not understanding something knows no bounds.
bobdroege,
The result of your link –
“Requested scanned pages are not available “
What a surprise! A link to nothing at all!
Tyndall was correct. Tropical arid deserts lack water vapour. Drop to below freezing, and receive far more sunlight than England. However, raising night time temperatures and depressing daytime temperatures due to additional insulatin in the atmosphere does not result in “Hottest year EVAH!”
As to the atmosphere (mostly N2 and O2) not absorbing radiation, you’re dreaming. From Wikipedia –
“Average annual solar radiation arriving at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere is roughly 1366 W/m2.[6][7] The radiation is distributed across the electromagnetic spectrum. About half is infrared light.[8] The Sun’s rays are attenuated as they pass through the atmosphere, leaving maximum normal surface irradiance at approximately 1000 W /m2 at sea level on a clear day.”
Sorry, but there is no mechanism by which CO2 in the atmosphere can cause a thermometer to become hotter. Thermometers react to heat, and CO2 has no heat creating properties.
The Earth’s surface has cooled for four and a half billion years. If it has decided to heat up again, it is most certainly not due to CO2.
Still no GHE. Keep living the fantasy, if it makes you feel better.
Cheers,
Jim D,
Tyndall carried out his experimental work mainly in the 19th century, not the 18th. I realise Warmists have only a loose grip on reality, so I’ll cut you some slack.
Still no GHE, is there? Not even in the 21st century! Just a lot of handwaving by undistinguished mathematicians masquerading as scientists, people too dim to know whether they received a Nobel Prize or not, and assorted delusional psychotics.
No real science to be found. Cargo Cult Scientism might suit you, but real scientists treat climatology with the scorn it so richly deserves.
Cheers.
Yes, MF, your views still predate Tyndall’s experiments, which is why I said 18th, although it could be 17th too. You can check the observational evidence for a link from a currently running experiment where we have been ramping up global CO2 by 30% since 1950 to see what happens to global surface temperatures. Check out the results here.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1950/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.01/offset:-3.25
Jim D,
You might like to point out the scientists in the 18th century who agreed that there was no falsifiable GHE hypothesis, or that there was no GHE.
You might be indulging in a spot of deny, divert and confuse, but of course I don’t claim to possess mindreading abilities, unlike Foolish Warmists!
There is no “currently running experiment” that shows that CO2 creates heating. There is a short term correlation, up until some 18 years ago, between estimated global CO2 levels, and adjusted air temperatures in a few locations over land, and even fewer guessed temperatures over the oceans. What a surprise!
However, the long term results show that the Earth’s surface has cooled since its creation. According to measurements, supported by current knowledge of physics, the Earth is cooling at somewhere between 1 and 3 millionths of a K per annum.
Your silly assumption that correlation is equivalent to causation has even been rejected by the U.K. Met Office, who admitted that statistical analysis of past temperatures was invalid in determine the existence or otherwise of CO2 warming. A pointless waste of time, in fact. Even the BBC has given the Met Office the sack.
Luckily, it appears that even the US is slowly waking up to reality. I’m in favour of more CO2 in the atmosphere – it’s plant food, and levels have been getting dangerously low recently.
You can panic twice as much on my behalf. I don’t care, so you’ll feel happier keeping up the overall panic level, I guess.
Cheers.
MF. Rinse and repeat. You are now arguing with yourself again when you try to quote Tyndall. Try to find an actual quote with the numbers you state, and I will show you a quote you misunderstood.
Jim D,
Maybe you could quote me directly. I don’t quite understand what it is you seem to be complaining about. If you believe I have quoted Tyndall incorrectly, you might post the appropriate quote.
If I have cut and pasted from one of Tyndall’s publications, it may have contained a typographical error, I suppose. The various editions contain revisions. I generally quote from the latest printing I can find.
Are you seeking assistance, or just indulging in Warmist silliness?
Still no GHE. Trying for irrelevant gotchas won’t make a GHE magically appear.
Cheers.
The quote I find from Tyndall is that he could not find a measurable effect from oxygen and nitrogen.
” Through air, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, on the contrary, the waves of ether pass without absorption, and these gases are not sensibly changed in temperature by the most powerful calorific rays.”
And he was right. This is more recent work which I predict you will also have trouble believing.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL051409/pdf
Jim D,
Tyndall –
“346 HEAT A MODE OF MOTION.
The following table gives the relative absorptions of several gases, at a common pressure of one atmosphere. It may be remarked that the differences between air and the other gases would be still greater if the brass tube bad been employed ; but the use of it would have excluded the corrosive gases mentioned in the table.
Name Air. 1
Oxygen. 1
Nitrogen. 1
Hydrogen. 1 . . .
Carbonic oxide. 90
Carbonic acid. 90 . . . “
Before you complain too bitterly, this is from the 1906 edition. You might also note that the relative opacity varies with pressure.
As I have pointed out, Tyndall’s later work contained revisions based on his experiments and measurements.
As to your quote containing reference to waves of ether passing, I presume you know that the ether, like the GHE, doesn’t actually exist.
In any case, without reference to the wavelengths involved, absolute opacity cannot be determined. Merely trotting out speculation and assumption dressed up as fact, doesn’t really help your cause.
Your reference supposedly supporting the totally irrelevant nature of O2 and N2 contains –
“Finally we would like to stress that this work concerns only the contribution of N2 and O2 to the natural greenhouse effect.”
Eh? So N2 and O2 actually act just like CO2? Must be magic, indeed. Warmists are starting to realise the atmosphere has a mild insulating effect. Nights are warmer, days are cooler, and a damned good thing it is! Otherwise we might boil during the day, and freeze during the night. Just like in places without much GHG – like the arid tropical deserts.
Cheers.
MF, so if you do the mathematics from the actual atmospheric values, you find that molecule for molecule O2 + N2 add up to something like a million times less effect than CO2. Is that the number you were looking for, or the one you hoped you would not be shown?
Jim D,
From your link –
“Over Antarctica the combined effect of O2 and N2 increases on average to about 38% of CH4 with single values reaching up to 80%. This is explained by less interference of H2O spectral bands on the absorption features of O2 and N2 for dry atmospheric conditions.”
You apparently think that a millionth is around one ninetieth (according to Tyndall), or maybe 0.38 up to 0.8 compared with CH4 , which is supposedly much more potent. Or maybe you have no clue about physics, preferring to believe Warmist models, and like nonsense.
Maybe you could consider doing all those calculations yourself. They all seem fairly pointless though. There isn’t a GHE anyway.
I’ll leave you to your fantasy. Maybe you should read the links you provide, before posting them. They might just make you look silly.
Cheers.
MF, you have not yet figured out the molecule for molecule comparison from their global numbers. Should I do it for you or are going to go ahead and do that for yourself? Maybe you can report back.
Mike,
I never said the atmosphere doesn’t absorb infrared light, only oxygen and nitrogen, although they do indeed make up 99% of the atmosphere it is the trace gases that are responsible for the absorption of infrared.
your quote
“As to the atmosphere (mostly N2 and O2) not absorbing radiation, you’re dreaming. From Wikipedia –
“Average annual solar radiation arriving at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere is roughly 1366 W/m2.[6][7] The radiation is distributed across the electromagnetic spectrum. About half is infrared light.[8] The Sun’s rays are attenuated as they pass through the atmosphere, leaving maximum normal surface irradiance at approximately 1000 W /m2 at sea level on a clear day.” ”
That’s the greenhouse effect, the absorption of infrared light by gases in the atmosphere.
If the atmosphere absorbs it from the sun, it also absorbs it from the earth.
Glad you can see the light.
Pat Cassen,
If you prefer Tyndall’s speculations to his experimental observations, good for you!
Still no evidence that surrounding a thermometer with CO2 will cause its temperature to rise.
No GHE. Not even a falsifiable hypothesis to that effect. So sad, too bad.
Cheers.
In this 6 year old article I provided proof that Charles Dickens is solely responsible for our impression that Christmas is always cold and snowy and which has therefore shaped our perception of growing AGW for 200 years.
https://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/bah-humbug/
A merry Christmas to all denizens and to our host Judith who even now will be wrapping presents for each of us which will be symbolically placed around her Christmas tree.
Tonyb
I’ll second that!
TonyB,
I’ll second your merry Christmas wished to all, with special best wishes for Judith. I hope 2017 is really good for Judith and for Climate Etc. and all denizens
And an excellently merry Christmas to all, whatever your beliefs may or may not be.
Christmas cheers to all!
Festive greetings to one and all from somewhere not too far from the North Pole:
https://twitter.com/BosTechTweeter/status/804359850775941120
Jim D (and others similarly inclined),
Woe, woe, thrice woe! Doom, doom!
We’ll all be fried, boiled, grilled or toasted, you say. I really don’t care. I’m assuming I’ll die one day.
Frying, boiling, grilling, or frying are at the bottom of my list. Feel free to worry on my behalf. I can’t be bothered.
Cheers.
“A market in the transition to a two-degree world can be built.”
How easily Consensus make-believe is slipped in to the discussion. Carney of course ‘knows’ how much warming man is causing, and that measures to limit it to two degrees are feasible. No need to bog down discussing this ‘settled’ ‘science’, just plough on with the politics, ignoring dissent.
bobdroege,
You wrote –
“That’s the greenhouse effect, the absorption of infrared light by gases in the atmosphere.
If the atmosphere absorbs it from the sun, it also absorbs it from the earth.”
So does a sheet of cardboard, or a pane of glass. No GHE, I’m afraid. No one has ever demonstrated a method of making a thermometer hotter by using CO2, or by reducing the amount of energy it absorbs.
You may have noticed that after the Sun passes the zenith, the surface begins to cool. It continues to do so all through the night, as well.
Talking rubbish like “It’s hotter than it otherwise would be” won’t help. The arid tropical deserts, or the surface of the Moon show how hot things get with reduced GHGs.
The Earth has been cooling for four and a half billion years. No great areas of molten surface around these days. Keep on with the fantasy. Live in denial all you want, but you still can’t make a thermometer hotter with CO2, no matter how much CO2 you surround it with.
Now is your cue to talk about models or trends, make appeals to self appointed authorities (the usual collection of bearded balding bumbling buffoons), or anything else to avoid acknowledging that the GHE cannot be shown to exist. Good luck. The Earth continues to cool, as it should. The phenomenon is known to real scientists, and the mechanism is clearly understood.
Cheers.
Mike,
“So does a sheet of cardboard, or a pane of glass. No GHE, I’m afraid. No one has ever demonstrated a method of making a thermometer hotter by using CO2, or by reducing the amount of energy it absorbs.”
That’s wrong, a pane of glass nor a sheet of cardboard do not act as a greenhouse gas, that’s just anti scientific rubbish.
This
“You may have noticed that after the Sun passes the zenith, the surface begins to cool. It continues to do so all through the night, as well.”
Is also rubbish, the hottest part of the day usually comes a couple hours past when the sun passes the zenith. And sometimes weather events cause the temperature to go up during the night.
More Rubbish here,
“The Earth has been cooling for four and a half billion years. No great areas of molten surface around these days. Keep on with the fantasy. Live in denial all you want, but you still can’t make a thermometer hotter with CO2, no matter how much CO2 you surround it with. ”
The molten surface phase of earth’s history ended roughly 4 billion years ago, and the earth has been warming and cooling periodically since, you ever hear of glaciations, hot house periods and ice house events?
“The phenomenon is known to real scientists, and the mechanism is clearly understood.”
Ah, the no real scientist fallacy!
The Earth cools because its surroundings are colder, but the Sun warms the earth because the earth is colder than the sun.
You forget that part.
“Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest”
S&G
And evidence that there is no greenhouse effect would get you the Nobel Prize, and not the one they gave to the IPCC.
Bob,
Your disingenuous reply is just stubbornness to the nth degree. Your purposeful obtuseness in regards to Mike’s reply to you is concerning, to say the very least. When Mike stated:
“So does a sheet of cardboard, or a pane of glass.”
His statement is undeniably and quite obviously in response to this comment you made:
“If the atmosphere absorbs it from the sun, it also absorbs it from the earth.”
So, when you reply to that with this:
“That’s wrong, a pane of glass nor a sheet of cardboard do not act as a greenhouse gas, that’s just anti scientific rubbish.”
It is painfully obvious to anyone reading (even a cursory reading which is all I did before stopping at your remark and reading harder) that you either lack the necessary comprehension skills it takes to argue effectively, or you’re just deflecting.
The remainder of your post is more than reasonable or seems to be. The problem is your initial response which is so poorly thought out and so absurd it taints what follows, or, at the very least, forces the reader to reign in their judgments long enough to read the rest of your post.
Don’t let your karma run over your dogma.
bobdroege,
I said the surface, not the climatological fantasy that the air temperature up to a couple of meters above the surface is the surface temperature.
For example –
“The ground surface temperature is more extreme, having risen to 201 F (93.9 C) on 15 July 1972 (Fig. 1). This is possibly the highest recorded temperature in the world.”
Looking at the instrument traces, and calculating the local noon, rather than clock time, guess what? People talking about maximum temperatures are generally referring to air temperatures. I wasn’t.
The Earth has not warmed and cooled periodically. This is physically impossible on a global scale. As long as the interior beyond the influence of the Sun is above the isothermal equilibrium temperature due to the energy received from the Sun, the interior will continue to cool, by means of radiation from the surface.
As to the Sun warming the Earth, it doesn’t, as a whole. The maximum surface temperature due to the unconcentrated rays of the Sun is less than 100 C. The interior of the Earth is estimated to be in excess of 5000 C. Heat flows from hotter to colder, not the other way round. Furthermore, only one side of the Earth is exposed to the Sun. The other side is radiating to space according to normal physical laws.
The wondrous non existent GHE cannot even prevent the local surface cooling markedly during Winter.
As to a Nobel Prize. I believe the IPCC received a Nobel Peace Prize. So did Al Gore. Nothing to do with science, really. The GHE does not exist, and there is not even a falsifiable GHE hypothesis. Difficult to falsify something when its proponents can’t even tell you exactly what it is!
Still no GHE.
Cheers.
The GHE does not exist, and there is not even a falsifiable GHE hypothesis.
Wiki puts the GHE: “The greenhouse effect is the process by which radiation from a planet’s atmosphere warms the planet’s surface to a temperature above what it would be without its atmosphere.”
If you believe the Steffan Boltzman equation, then you can calculate the “emissive” temperature of earth by solving for temperature based on outgoing LWR. Compare that with surface temperature over a seasonal cycle, and you get something like this:
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/TE_SFCT.png
Were there no atmosphere, or an atmosphere without GHGs ( and clouds ) GHE theory indicates there would be dots along the “unity” line, wherein surface temperature is equal to the emissive temperature.
Instead, with GHGs ( and clouds ), as theorized, observations continue to corroborate the GHE. This is quite falsifiable and has not been falsified.
Turbulent Eddie,
Nope. Not a falsifiable hypothesis. Cannot be shown to be false by means of reproducible experiment, and it’s not sufficient to try to get over this hurdle by claiming experiment is impossible. That defeats the requirement that a scientific hypothesis needs to be framed in such a way as to be capable of falsification.
In any case, observations of the Moon’s surface show that far higher temperatures are achieved in the absence of GHGs. Likewise, the highest surface temperatures on Earth occur in regions where the least amount of GHGs occur.
Calculating an average temperature for the Earth’s surface is a mathematical absurdity. Apart from magma continuously reaching the surface, both on land and the ocean bed, and thermal vents, the highest and lowest surface temperatures vary between around 90 C and -90 C. Where measurement and calculation disagree, I’m inclined to favour the measurement.
Models are useless. Before the first liquid water formed, the minimum temperature on the surface was above 100 C. Before the first ice formed, the minimum was above 0 C. No one has ever measured the total energy leaving the Earth’s surface at a given moment in time. Talk of calculating a surface temperature is fantasy.
Wiki is plainly deceptive, not to say wrong. It pretends that a reduced rate of cooling results in increased temperature. Night, or winter demonstrates the fallacy of this approach.
The fact remains that there is no plausible mechanism whereby a thermometer can be made hotter by the action of CO2. No GHE, no ether, no unicorns.
Cheers.
Nope. Not a falsifiable hypothesis. Cannot be shown to be false by means of reproducible experiment
Sure it can. And it is everyday – the average surface temperature is greater than the average emissive temperature which is the hypothesis.
In any case, observations of the Moon’s surface show that far higher temperatures are achieved in the absence of GHGs.
That’s interesting but not what the GHG theory indicates. For the moon, without GHGs or clouds, the surface temperature is nearly identical to the emissive temperature ( higher when sunlit, lower when dark, but Tsfc = Te in both cases ).
There’s a certain amount of hubris for anyone posting on climate and I’m no different, but I’ve been humbled by some mistaken ideas in the past. I suggest that you re-evaluate your claims.
Turbulent Eddie,
The average emissive temperature is impossible to calculate. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself – for the Earth’s surface, at a precise time of your choosing. Then one hour later, perhaps.
It’s also completely irrelevant. The Warmists seem to be claiming that CO2 in the atmosphere causes the Earth’s surface to get hotter – not just “warmer than it would otherwise be” – as in “Hottest year EVAH!” This requires the involvement of magic, rather than physics. It’s just completely nonsensical.
A Thermos flask keeps things hotter (or colder, often overlooked), but does not increase their temperature, which is what Warmists appear to be claiming.
I’m not sure how you would reconcile the Earth’s surface temperature before the first ice formed, with its actual temperature. Would its calculated emissive temperature be colder or warmer than it should have been? What about deserts? When the surface temperature is 90 C, is that warmer or cooler than you calculate it should be? If the temperature then falls to below freezing, is that still warmer than it should be?
It doesn’t make much sense, and there doesn’t seem to be a GHE hypothesis involving CO2 which explains how temperatures are supposed to increase – hot, cold, year on year, summer, winter, and so on.
And the hypothesis needs to be able to be falsified by reproducible scientific experiment. Not comparing a model,against an estimate, for example.
So no, no GHE, no luminiferous ether, no unicorns.
Cheers.
Sorry, Jean Paul if my response seems disingenuous, but Mikes reply was nonsensical, we are talking about the greenhouse effect which is a phenomena of gases, not solids.
So I found Mikes response rather obtuse to say the least.
Mike,
50 milliwatts vs 1360 watts per square meter.
You can do the math or maybe not.
“The ground surface temperature is more extreme, having risen to 201 F (93.9 C) on 15 July 1972 (Fig. 1). This is possibly the highest recorded temperature in the world.”
Well, except for some pools of lava near an erupting volcano perhaps.
If your theory is that the surface of the earth is warm due to internal heat you would have to consider that for the record.
@Mike Flynn says “The fact remains that there is no plausible mechanism whereby a thermometer can be made hotter by the action of CO2.”
While Flynn’s comments are sometimes perceptive, in this case he is spreading misinformation, I agree with Turbulent Eddie.
As in the past, I refer to the experiment described by https://www.john-daly.com/forcing/hug-barrett.htm wherein the optical transmission through a gas cell containing amounts of CO2 comparable to the atmosphere is shown.
A spectrometer functions by dispersing radiation into component wavelengths using a “monochromator” and measuring how much of each wavelength is transmitted by a sample.
It is common that far IR spectrometers use bolometers, a type of thermal detector to measure radiation. They are not just thermometers, but very sensitive thermometers.
When the Hug-Barrett instrument was tuned to the wavelength of CO2, some monochromatic energy did not pass through the cell.
The detector “saw” reduced 667/cm radiation passing through the sample, that is, there was a loss of heat at the point of the detector.
By conservation of energy, this heat had to go somewhere. The energy from the spectrometer source/monochromator was absorbed by the sample, not the detector.
Have no doubt that a precision measurement of the cell temperature would demonstrate a small increase in temperature within the cell when the instrument was tuned to the CO2 band.
It would not be particularly difficult to equip an IR spectrometer with a temperature sensitive cell to prove to Mike that energy is conserved.
So for the second time I ask @Mike Flynn, in the Hug-Barret experiment, where did the CO2 band radiation go that did not arrive at the detector?
Far be it from me to put words into Mike Flynn’s mouth – but here is how I read Mike’s objection.
Mike (I believe) doesn’t like people saying that CO2 “warms” or is a greenhouse warming gas.
Mike is looking at CO2, by itself, without any radiation going through it.
I think of it this way – take a box with a thermometer in a dark room at room temperature.
Substitute CO2 for the atmosphere in the box (also at room temperature).
Let sit for 24 hours (in the dark).
Will the thermometer have risen?
I think not.
That is all Mike Flynn is saying (I believe).
Well that and that the Earth has cooled since it had a molten surface.
Most readers keep introducing radiation into Mike’s comments – when I believe Mike is talking about CO2, by itself, not having any magical warming properties.
Just a thought.
Mike (I believe) doesn’t like people saying that CO2 “warms” or is a greenhouse warming gas.
And that seems valid – CO2 doesn’t create energy.
But the Greenhouse Effect ( or the Atmospheric Effect ) is about the temperature of the surface of a planet relative to its emissive temperature. Considered in this way, the GHE is falsifiable and tested with every day’s observations. Further, the enhanced GHE ( that surface temperatures should rise, relative to the emissive temperature, from additional GHGs ) is also falsifiable and tested.
It is not so much the principles of global warming, but the extent, meaning to climate, and impacts that are at question.
Richard Arrett,
You’re right, of course. CO2 heats nothing. The supposed GHE only appears in the presence of bright sunlight. Not indoors, not at night, not when a cloud obscures the Sun, not in winter, or when its raining.
It cannot actually be demonstrated by repeatable experiment, and no GHE hypothesis involving CO2 has ever been formulated that explains why the effect only seems to work in sunlight, or why the hottest surface temperatures on the planet occur where there is the least GHG.
CO2 does not augment radiation. It has optical depth at all, that’s right, all, frequencies. Before you jump down my throat, the only totally transparent medium is a lack thereof – a vacuum. Hence Einstein specifying the speed of light (all frequencies, no exceptions) in a vacuum.
Anything that prevents heat reaching your thermometer results in a fall in temperature.
No heating of the planet (or anything else at all) by reducing the amount of energy reaching it.
Thanks for pointing out the obvious. It seems to escape many people – Warmists for example.
Cheers.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but a non-contact thermometer reading IR from a surface is actually showing you the emissive temperature by absorbing emitted IR.
What I’m referring to is the Effective Temperature, or Effective Radiating Temperature, sometimes also referred to as the emissive temperature.
1. measure e, broadband emitted thermal energy from earth by satellite
2. consider Steffan Boltzman: e = sigma * Te ^ 4
3. solve for Te, the emissive temperature
4. compare to surface temperature Tsfc
5. note that Tscf > Te.
6. repeat
Turbulent Eddie,
“Let’s look at the Earth. The Earth has an albedo of about 0.367.[8] The emissivity is dependent on the type of surface and many climate models set the value of the Earth’s emissivity to 1. However, a more realistic value is 0.96.[9] The Earth is a fairly fast rotator so the area ratio can be estimated as 1/4. The other variables are constant. This calculation gives us an effective temperature of the Earth of 252K or -21 °C. The average temperature of the Earth is 288K or 15 °C. One reason for the difference between the two values is due to the Greenhouse effect, which increases the average temperature of the Earth’s surface.”
So we guess an average albedo, we pretend the Earth is evenly illuminated on one side, we guess an average emissivity, and assume nothing changes over time. We then make a spurious calculation which gives a pointless non falsifiable average of 252 K. We then compare one guess against another, and claim that the reason that one guess is obviously wrong is due to a GHE.
Now consider the surface before any ice formed. The minimum temperature must have been above 0 C, I hope you’ll agree. Assume appropriate emissivity and albedo values. Calculate the resultant effective temperature. Compare it with a global average surface temperature absolutely certain to be above 0 C.
Your calculations are not worth a cracker. CO2 does not increase the temperature of anything at all, average or otherwise. No magical one way insulating properties, which would be necessary to create rising temperatures over time. Climate is the average of weather, self proclaimed climatologists are a motley collection of pseudo scientists, either misguided, delusional, gullible, or just plain thick as two short planks.
Still no GHE. Just more Cargo Cult Scientism dogma.
Cheers.
OK, I’ve done what I could. Good luck in your struggles.
@Richard Arrett For this discussion you cannot isolate temperature from radiation.
Still agreeing with Turbulent Eddie, the phenomenon of the “greenhouse gas” interaction is a non equilibrium effect wherein two separate systems (surface and atmosphere) are partly coupled through the radiative properties of the relevant molecules.
So, no, there is no greenhouse effect in an isolated room or atmosphere that is entirely at equilibrium, CO2 or no CO2.
This may be what Flynn is saying, but if so it has nothing to do with the GHG effect.
So here is Flynn’s experiment. Start with two transparent containers each containing two thermometers. Put N2 in one, put N2+CO2 in the other. Irradiate both with a CO2 laser. Observe the temperatures. I predict the one with CO2 will get warmer. I will leave Flynn’s prediction to Flynn.
None of it matters because so far there is a lack of evidence to support the belief (which is what CAGW is) that GHG emissions will do more harm than good; The first 11 of 12 comments here explain the evidence is lacking: https://judithcurry.com/2016/11/25/week-in-review-science-and-policy-edition-3/#comment-826494
4kx3,
Your experiment is misleading.
Of course the CO2 will get warmer. It absorbs more heat. However, a thermometer placed beyond the CO2 gas will not get as hot as a thermometer placed beyond the other. Less heat gets through. Tyndall demonstrated this more than 150 years ago. It has been reproduced and confirmed in university physics labs uncounted times.
The atmosphere prevents more than 30% of the insolation reaching a thermometer on the surface. Result? Lower temperatures.
Run your experiment. Confirm what any reasonably competent physics student learns in the lab. A vacuum is transparent – anything else isn’t. CO2 does not cause thermometers to get hotter when between a heat source and the thermometer.
No GHE. Not even a falsifiable GHE hypothesis. All the Waffling Warmist Weasel Words in the World won’t overcome this inconvenient fact.
The Earth has cooled over the last four and half billion years.
No GHE.
Cheers.
By the way, nobody needs to read my mind.
The GHE cannot be demonstrated to exist, in the sense that a thermometer can be caused to be hotter by the application of CO2 in sunlight.
The GHE does not exist. Neither does the luminiferous ether, which at least was initially supported by a falsifiable hypothesis.Experiments showed the hypothesis to be incorrect.
The GHE doesn’t even have a testable hypothesis. Just claims that it somehow increases the temperature of the surface of the Earth, day by day, year by year, century by century, until we all presumably boil, toast, bake or fry!
It seems odd that anyone would believe that London Bridge, say, is a degree or so hotter than it used to be, on a freezing London day. If it’s even colder tomorrow, is it still hotter than it used to be?
The henges at Stonehenge have been absorbing sunlight for thousands of years. Should they be hotter than London Bridge? Nonsense.
I’m merely an unbeliever. I don’t believe in unicorns either.
Cheers.
“Just claims that it somehow increases the temperature of the surface of the Earth, day by day, year by year, century by century, until we all presumably boil, toast, bake or fry!”
If you believe it says that, you are already hopelessly wrong and beyond help. Do you want to try again and state the theory properly or have you already reached the limit of your understanding with this statement?
Jim D,
“Key U.S. projections
By 2100, the average U.S. temperature is projected to increase by about 3°F to 12°F, depending on emissions scenario and climate model.[1]”
Do you think the EPA is being intentionally misleading? Or does the temperature magically stop increasing in 2100?
The head of the IMF, presumably reasonably intelligent –
“In response to a question from the audience, she said: “Unless we take action on climate change, future generations will be roasted, toasted, fried and grilled.”
Ridiculous, I know. Just as ridiculous as Gavin Schmidt, and his “Hottest year EVAH!” Maybe you could tell me what the falsifiable GHE hypothesis is. Asking me to state what the non existent GHE “theory” is, seems to be the height of absurdity, given that the GHE doesn’t exist.
If you believe that the GHE exists, you should be able to state what it is in clear and unambiguous scientific terms. If you can’t, your GHE belief is religious in nature, depending on faith.
Still no GHE.
Cheers.
MF, until you can prove you can state the theory correctly, your thoughts on it count for nothing. What you continue to do is known as a straw man argument. You state it wrong, and proceed to complain about your wrong statement of it. Worthless.
Jim D,
If you agree there is no GHE theory, I’m fine with that.
If you believe that a GHE theory exists, you should be able to state it. Of course you can’t, because there isn’t even a falsifiable GHE hypothesis!
Just claims that seem to vary from moment to moment. ‘It’s worse than we thought.” “No it’s not.” “Models are useful for predicting future climate.” “Wait a minute, we didn’t mean predictions, we meant projections or scenarios.” ‘Future climate states are not predictable.” “Only 55 days . . . three months . . . two years . . . five years . . . to save the world.”
Climate is the average of weather. Studying averages achieves nothing, and even the UK Met Office has reluctantly been forced to admit that statistical analysis cannot be used to support any claims that CO2 has has any predictable effect on weather at all.
Cultism, with much fervour but no facts.
No GHE. So sad, too bad – for Warmists with their snouts in the trough.
Cheers.
If I say insulation keeps things warm, you say, impossible, insulation can’t heat things up. It’s like that. Complete cross talk. No point in it.
Jim D,
Not even a good try. No hypothesis, no theory, so try to change the subject. I’ll demolish your strawman, anyway.
What has insulation to do with “Hottest year EVAH!”, anyway. Do you not understand the difference between not cooling as fast, and getting hotter? Coolrooms have insulation to keep things cool. They don’t make things colder. Warmists don’t seem to know the difference between getting hotter and getting colder!
I’d try to steer you back to the subject of the non existent GHE, but I expect you might wander off in several directions at once, trying to avoid the fact that there is no falsifiable GHE hypothesis, let alone a GHE theory.
Still no GHE! Maybe you could try chanting some Warmist Manntras, and repeating sciencey words like “forcings”, or “back radiation”. The facts won’t change, but it might cheer you up a bit.
Cheers.
I am trying to see what building blocks you have for an explanation. The answer appears to be not much. How insulation works? Check, no. How about why clear nights generally cool faster than cloudy nights? You either have no idea or will dispute the fact. Think hard, and concentrate on staying on topic. If you understand this part, you are almost there.
Jim D,
Maybe you could actually state the GHE hypothesis. Are you trying to imply that the greenhouse effect should really be called the insulating effect? You might well have noticed that desert temperatures can drop below freezing – not much insulating effect there! Or does the insulating effect only create heating while the Sun is shining brightly?
What has happened to the insulation when temperatures drop to -70 C during the 6 months of sunlight near the South Pole? Maybe it all moves to hot places when it gets cold – who knows?
Pure fantasy, Jim D. You’re as delusional as the usual climatological balding bearded bumbling buffoon pretending to be a real scientist!
Astrology looks perfectly respectable by comparison with climatology, wouldn’t you say?
Still no GHE.
Cheers.
Hypothesis #1: doubling CO2 warms the surface temperature by several degrees.
Observations in support of hypothesis.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1950/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.01/offset:-3.25
In fact you noticed that deserts with dry air cool faster than regions with moist air. That is a start, because water vapor has a greenhouse effect, and when there is less of it, it cools faster at night, right? These are just all the little factoids that GHE explains that leave you clueless without it. Earth’s surface temperature is 288 K, but it only radiates at 255 K from outside the atmosphere. How is that possible? GHE? Earth was warmer 50 million years ago. How? GHE.
MF, you predictably return to your usual confusions between solar heating and IR cooling. You ask for a hypothesis and don’t accept the one that there is. Maybe you think it is not falsifiable because it is true anyway. Your mind seems to be a swamp of wrong thinking. I can’t help you with your struggles.
Jim D,
Do you realise you have posted 15% of the comments on this and the previous thread and they contribute nothing constructive. They are simply empty vessel yap.
This one is a good example of hypocrisy :
“Cross talk”, as you call it, is what you do most of the time!
“Granted, the authors admit that this is a thought experiment only based on a particular set of assumptions — Trump’s policies don’t exist yet, so they cannot be evaluated directly. Nor can the world’s response to them. “We caution against overinterpreting the numbers of this analysis because of the large uncertainty in how the economic and ideological shift in U.S. governance will affect greenhouse gas emissions,” they write.”
Thought experiment? Analysis?
It’s worse than we thought (unless it isnt, and we wouldn’t know the difference, by the look of it!).
I’ll go away for a while – for a good laugh!
Cheers.
Mike, You are right.
But climate alarmist can make up claims faster than we can analyze and debunk them, and then shut our voices. My suggestion is to state uncontroversial physical and biological facts as they are, rather than to argue with warmunists (not applying this name to the participants of this forum) about hundredths degrees of Celsius and merits of peer review by peers of Michael Mann. This is a good attempt of a summary of science related to climate changes.
RE: ” I’ll go away for a while . . .”
Yes, from what I’ve read you’ll be busy. . .
RE: Michael Flynn: National security adviser
Flynn also told off Obama for talking about climate change after the Orlando terrorist attack. At least Flynn has his priorities straight.
Apologies: The above is from Jo Nova’s site.
http://joannenova.com.au
“Climate change denial in the Trump cabinet: where do his nominees stand?”
@Mike Flynn I submit that my example above, which satisfies your request wherein “a thermometer can be made hotter by the action of CO2” is an exact analog of the green house gas effect (not to be confused with any true green house effect).
A difference in internal heating occurs when there are differences in the radiative properties of materials at different temperatures which share radiation fields.
We live inside the transparent container, the atmosphere of the planet, and are surrounded by CO2.
I do agree that a monochromatic laser is a poor approximation to thermal radiation from the ground.
If you deny that CO2 has any impact on temperature, do you make the same claim about water vapor?
Thank you for helping me focus my argument.