1. True, 2. true, 3. true, 4. incomplete, it's also about reradiating, getting rid of the heat again 5 not answering the question, where is it? What is the verification? So, for the latter you could use the scientific method, predict what the consequences of your guess are, and then wait to see if the consequences happen or not. Like the 15 year norm of the Met society. That's a prediction done a few years ago. You cannot modify predictions as you go along. That's moving the goal posts. Maybe I may call in the help of Judith Curry in the crossfire of the thought police:
The essential problem here is that the prevailent greenhouse gas hypothesis ignores convection as a redistribution vector for heat radiation into space.
No, it doesn't. Section 8.6.3.2 of the IPCC fourth assessment working group 1 report covers the effects of convection (primarily cloud formation.) (BTW the claim "scientists are ignoring X!" is trivially easy to disprove, and not all that interesting. I could do the same and just claim that you don't realize that methane is also a greenhouse gas, or that you don't understand that albedo changes also affect warming.)
your getting ahead of yourself and confusing yourself by conflating issues. Take the blinders off for a minute and stop reacting every time someone mentions the H word. look, when a molecule of carbondioxide absorbs a photon in the wave band in question, that energy is stored, with a halflife, as rotational energy. It has been known since Rudolf Clausius formulated his kinetic theory of gasses in 1857 that rotational energy is one of the ways that a gas stores thermal energy. So, according to Clausius' s formulation of the kinetic theory of gasses point four is neccessarily true. The questions you're asking are about the fate of the thermal energy retained by the carbondioxide. That is a seperate point to the point I was addresing. What do you want me to verify? The conservation of mass and energy? The beer lambert law? The kinetic theory of gasses? no, failure to change your hypothesis and predictions in the light of new evidence is religion, not science.
No, that isn't a null hypothesis either. You haven't posted a null hypothesis yet. That's probably because you don't know what a null hypothesis is. Nothing you have posted suggests that reradiation by greenhouse gasses would act to cool the atmosphere faster, btw - even if the atmosphere were the whole of the "globe" in the "global warming" term, which it is not. Apparently not - although she is an actual scientist, and would be of some help if actual scientific reasoning were your mode of operation. You could, that is, if you posted answers, or analyses of those questions of hers - but that wouldn't be as helpful to your real agenda as the innuendo you can whistle up without taking responsibility for it, by leaving the questions hang.
I'd love to see what empirical evidence there is, that demonstrates the correct applications of these physical laws to justify global warming scaremongering. That's essential, accept that your predictions were wrong, so if the Am Met society did the bold prediction of 15 years no warming required before the models were deviating from reality, then that's just as it is. The models are wrong. Sorry I have little time now, since it's almost 50 years now for another 22 November approaching. That's priority now.
How do you think that the conservation of mass to assert that 1kg of carbon burned produces 6kg of carbon dioxide has been applied incorrectly? How do you think that simple harmonic motion and subsequently quantum mechanics has been applied incorrectly to predict that carbon dioxide absorbs IR radiation in the band emitted by the earth because of rotational transitions has been applied incorrectly? How do you think that the beer lambert law to assert that increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases the IR radiation absorption by the atmosphere has been applied incorrectly? How do you think that the conservation of energy to assert that the IR energy absorbed by the carbon dioxide must be stored by the carbon dioxide in some form or other until released or used has been applied incorrectly? How do you think that the kinetic theory of gasses to assert that because it is a rotational transition, and rotational energy is a form of heat energy, that this takes the form of warming has been applied incorrectly. And if there is no hiatus? If it's just an example of selection bias? An artifact of the fact that HADCRUT4 fails to achieve global coverage, covers those parts of the globe that it does cover unevenly, and in not guessing the behaviour of those areas it does not cover inherently assumes they are behaving in an average fashion? Addendum:An explanation by (one of) the paper authors Would you change your position if it turned out to be based on an artifact of the method used to calculate an average rather than on actual physics or data?
Why not mention Clausius Clappeyron? However, the proof is in the pudding. Sure it's fine to apply multiple single relationships in a complex environment, but since you have no ensurance that you covered every single one of them, for instance the heating of an inert atmosphere by convection, then you're still working with the scientific method. IE guess, predict the outcomes, wait and see if you're right. That is if you don't stop short as many do and go like: the models predict and hence it's true. Isn't that convenient, play hide and seek? RSS and UAH don't have that coverage problem nor do they have problems with Urban Heat Island effects for that matter, nor homogenization problems that makes the older historic values cooler and cooler with every new run. But that also means that we only have more or less trustworthy (somewhat) data since 1979. Here is how their trends compare for 15 years, 17 years (the Santer norm) and 20 years, whatever you want to pick (notice that I replaced GISTEMP with NCDC data). Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! source for 20 years of regression, it's probably trivial to see how to compile other periods. Note that I did repair some errors from the previous version. And again, right of the blue 'now'-line is merely a continuation with white trendless noise averaged around the average of the last period of regression to see what the effect is of past pertubations. What would make me change my mind? Well I have no problems whatsoever that "heating of the planet" could equal the radiative effect as calculated without feedbacks ie some 1.2K for doubling CO2. But I would like somebody finally to falsify the non radiating non-black body model, otherwise one could easily argue that adding more greenhouse gas cools the planet better because the convected energy the top of the atmosphere radiates out more easily, with more greenhouse gasses. But it's all about those feedbacks isn't it?
Actually, with the Alaska Villages, yes we are the cause. Our construction and energy use patterns are a direct threat to the permafrost. It has nothing to do with GLOBAL warming, it has to do with foundation conduction and warming. The native told the whites about 100 years ago that settling in one place for many years was a bad idea, but we told them they had to anyway. Oh well!
indeed, on the one hand why not, and on the other hand I have elsewhere, although, it applies to water rather than carbondioxide. You seem to be going off on a tangent here and displaying a knee jerk reaction to my use of the H word. Quantum mechanics, which has been tested nu.erous times and passed every test thrown at it so far, predicts that carbon dioxide has a rotational transitions producing and absorption feature centered somewhere around 13-15 microns (I forget the exact number). When we measure the absorption spectrum of the atmosphere in this region we observe an absorption band with the characteristics of the absorption caused by the rotational transitions of carbondioxide. But somehow this isn't good enough for you? That would be great, if that was what was being done. Isn't that typical - knee jerk denialism. See? Two can play at that game? Yeah they do - not even Anthony Watt or Judith Curry would support you on this one. According to Judith Curry, (one of) the problems with Cowtan and Ways paper is that coverage near the poles is spotty, which is supported by the UAH coverage maps, and there may be issues with the accuracy of the data obtained because the microwave emissions from the area are complex. The satelites don't pass directly over the poles and have to look sideways at the for significant swaths. There are also issues with calibrating readings between different satelites due to inorbit instrument degradation. Do you see what's going on here? I'm using climate change denial blogs to refute your climate change denialism. on the basis of the understanding I have of how the measurements are gathered, I question this assertion. this is more baloney. The data is homogenized to account for on-orbit degradation of instruments and variation between instruments in subsequent missions. You understand how a-physical some of those words are with the way you strung them together, right?
You've been seeing it for years, been linked to it by dozens of people, had it quoted to you dozens of times. You lack comprehension, not exposure. The fact that atmospheric temps are increasing fastest for the minimums recorded during winter nights at higher latitudes, for example - you've seen that a half dozen times that I know of. It's not a question of falsification - you postulate circumstances not found in reality, and get consequences not found on real planets, no problem. No one is going to argue that adding more greenhouse gas will cool the planet better by increasing convection to the upper atmosphere and subsequent radiation loss, because in the first place all experiment, thermodynamic theory, and collected evidence contradicts that proposal; and in the second no one can come up with an argument to support it without postulating things like non-radiative gasses heated and cooled by conduction only and windless atmospheres that remain "inert" while thermally stratified on a global scale.
So foundation construction has caused the sea ice to melt, exposing the shores to more erosion? I had no idea that we build foundations so far out to sea!
Hey, Trippy :wave: excellent post. Very thought provoking! Here you're referring to K. Ångström's 1900 rebuttal of the 1896 work by Arrhenius, which expanded on Tyndall's 1861 paper, which we might say was seminal. BTW I'd love to find a clean English version of Ångström's 1900 paper. It appears that he said (roughly) the difficulties multiply in the absorption bands of two different elements having to store this water vapor and carbon dioxide above each other, and therefore it depends on the separation of the two. And of course that means just what you said. But it turns out that the other guys -- and we should add Fourier (1824) to this for a trio -- were (among other things) searching for an answer to one of the puzzles of the day: what caused the end of the Ice Age? Fourier had correctly deduced that there was a greenhouse effect that accounted for the excess heat but of course he lacked the technology to explain in detail how it worked. Tyndall and Arrhenius had the advantage of adequate instruments to measure the heat absorption effects of light on various gasses, and Arrhenius (a child savant aptly named Svante Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) did a pretty good job of incorporating all of the knowledge of that era into constructing an atmospheric heat budget, which we could say is the first attempt at modeling the atmosphere. Arrhenius worked the puzzle backwards and calculated that a plausible reduction in CO[sub]2[/sub] could have caused the Ice Age, and a concomitant rise in CO[sub]2[/sub] would cause global warming. (Conversely, there was no way to get there assuming only water vapor forcing, a point that I think Ångström completely missed.) About the time Ångström published this 1900 work you're referring to, striking down Arrhenius' paper, Arrhenius was moving up the ladder into the Nobel committee, and of course became a laureate himself for other foundational work as a sort of father of chemistry. And it was then, just a little later, that Arrhenius publicly connected global warming to anthropogenic CO[sub]2[/sub]. Whether it was out of reverence for Ångström's father (founder of spectroscopy) or what, even though Arrhenius had countered Ångström's rebuttal (I haven't found that text at all) it does seem there was a lull in trying to resolve this, other than a 1901 paper by yet another Swede who joined the fray in Arrhenius' favor. That was Nils Ekholm, who tried to build a comprehensive picture of geophysical and climate processes throughout the entire history of the Earth, including a rather definitive conclusion of an idea only then dawning on many people, which was that life had existed for many thousand million years. And thereafter it looks like there is little activity to resolve the conflict between Ångström and Arrhenius until the real father of anthropogenic CO[sub]2[/sub], G. S. Callendar, published in 1938. And I could go on but I’ll leave that for another post. This is one of the more remarkable sides to the story of the history of climate science. It turns out that the Mauna Loa Observatory was founded in the midst of this (1955). There is some lore that the military helped with setting up the facility, and kept an interest in the work that started there around 1957 for the exact reasons you describe. MLO was the product of the chance meeting of several key individuals who shaped its mission. One was the visionary who made the original request to use the volcano for weather research, a Weather Bureau meteorologist and WWII pilot whose studies of hurricanes included flying into them, the venerable Dr. Robert Simpson (who I think turned 101 yesterday). Simpson by chance happened to run into a Bureau of Standards expert named Ralph Stair who was having trouble with dust affecting his solar radiation measurements out West. Simpson suggested Stair should join him in the clear skies of Mauna Loa, and was able to secure a little money and the needed approvals to pull it off. Meanwhile two other scientists had a chance meeting: oceanographer Roger Revelle and postdoc geochemist Charles Keeling. This is another place where the woes of the atomic age enter the scene. The Navy asked Revelle help measure the effects of an underwater detonation and during his measurements Revelle found that the CO[sub]2[/sub] levels were lower than they should be. A year after teaming with Keeling, Revelle published a paper explaining that CO[sub]2[/sub] absorption by the oceans might be insufficient to keep up with the pace of emissions and global warming could result. Keeling and Revelle shared information and a mutual interest in the work of Callendar. Keeling wanted to establish a baseline for atmospheric CO[sub]2[/sub] levels so that it could be possible to measure trends, and Revelle wanted to do the same with ocean levels. Revelle pulled strings at his home base, Scripps Institute, and through his Navy connection, and found funding to buy Keeling his instruments. I do think there was money in that purse that originated from the weapons testing surveillance community. Keeling set up three stations in Antarctica and another atop Mauna Loa beside Stair's solar radiation station. By 1957 he had his baseline and by 1958 he had first evidence of a CO[sub]2[/sub] ramp. This was the virtual beginning of NOAA, although that would not formally occur until 1970 (during Nixon’s politicization as you mention below). No doubt the military was directly interested in their work, and of course there was tremendous collateral technology, esp. improvements in spectroscopy (in reference to the error of Angstrom) that would have been developed in furtherance of monitoring Soviet testing as you noted. Plus, I am quite certain things would have turned out differently if there had not been the funds and support that the NOAA founders got, for exactly those same reasons. Indeed with the advancement of spectroscopy, and with the instruments in place and MLO and Antarctica, and the high altitude aircraft and then the first weather satellites, and with the weather modeling work that Simpson’s Hurricane Center would devise, and Revelle’s introduction of the issue into oceanography, there was a rich ground for more refined studies that era. That's probably why half of the papers in this list were published then. One of my reasons for going into so much detail was to speak to that, and to remind folks that the founders of NOAA were not only real people from entirely different specializations, but also truly visionary -- even the government employees among them. And Ralph Stair brought not only his expertise in solar measurements, but as a Bureau of Standards employee he brought quality control. (In one of his anecdotes he laments that the MLO building was oriented towards magnetic south instead of geographic south, noting that it taught him a lesson in wording construction contracts). If you flip to page 9 of this 1965 document (p 111 of the original) you'll see that Revelle and Keeling went on to prepare a report explaining (among other topics concerning pollution) the hazards of anthropogenic CO[sub]2[/sub]. Pres. Johnson signed it and published it to his agencies, expressing the need for more research and asking for recommendations. By 1969, former Democratic Sec. Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, now an Urban Affairs official and acting on the information in the 1965 report, wrote a memo to Nixon's Chief of Staff, John Erlichman. Moynihan was interested in advancing the cause for the environment through NATO, to add a civilian branch dedicated to research of environmental and climate issues. Hence he writes It is a natural for NATO, but also some rather sobering remarks, like It is now pretty clearly agreed that the CO[sub]2[/sub] content will rise 25% by 2000. Erlichman of course would go on to serve 18 months in prison for his role in Watergate, during which time Moynihan accepted a position as Ambassador to the UN. (I think there is more evidence of Moynihan's intentions for NATO at the Nixon Library, but I haven't found the digitized pages.) A few months prior to this memo, Al Gore graduated from Harvard, having just completed a course under visiting professor Roger Revelle. I believe Moynihan inspired Nixon to pursue environmental programs, as these fell naturally out of his interests in urban affairs, and were not far from his prior work dealing with occupational hazards as Sec. of Labor. And within a year, both the Environmental Protection Agency and NOAA were created. The politicization of this by Nixon, as you appropriately noted, is of course not a reference to the internal initiatives by Democrats and the sciences they were promoting within the Government, but rather Nixon's desire to bring this to the political stump in an attempt to win the hearts of the war protesters who were burning US flags across the street from his window. He knew they were emotionally invested in protecting the planet. I guess I'll leave it here. Sorry if this got away from your original point about the improvements in spectroscopy which is great stuff, but I also wanted to bring some of the historical detail, both as a tribute to greatness, and also to trump some of the myths being spun by the denialists. Not that anything I will say is going to stop them. They’ll stop when ExxonMobile pulls the plug on them, and when ICR and the fundies finally get a life.
Thanks... This response (of mine) seems somehow... Lacking... That would be the one, yes. No need to apologize - your post was most enlightening. It left me feeling so ignorant of the detail, it's a refreshing feeling. I delved into, and continue to raise the history of the hypothesis for precisely that same reason. Thankyou.
It's caused by the greenhouse effect. CO[sub]2[/sub] is a greenhouse gas. Increasing the greenhouse gas concentrations hastens the rate of ice melt. What exactly are you looking for? The ice recedes every summer so I suppose the answer you're looking for is 11,700. Maybe you could try to say what you mean. I wouldn't call it a null hypothesis but I'll falsify whatever I can. Switching to the link you gave to the other thread: Explain. Regardless of that fact on average the atmosphere emits heat into the surface and it's absorbed, raising surface temperature to some average level which is currently increasing faster than the slope attributed to the interglacial. Regardless of that it's an average effect. Yes there is copious energy radiating from Earth's atmosphere out into space. Not sure what you mean. I have no idea what models you are referring to. At the oversimplified level you're describing, you are averaging over time, so it's taken care of. That looks like the Solar Constant ÷ 4 which is the average energy flux. That is if you're looking for how much the surface is receiving. Cosmic radiation is negligible. The next step is to derate the 340 by 0.7 due to albedo leaving about 240 W/m². I already did the albedo, so next is to compute T = (240/σ)[sup]1/4[/sup] (σ = 5.67E8) which gives you -18.14°C. You can supply the rest of the explanation for how you are walking this back to . . . a point? That seems like a laborious way to couch it. Why not just say the ground gets warm? Because the rest of whatever it is you're trying to say loses me. I can't follow you with a picture. May I suggest you speak to this one: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/atmos/energy_balance.htm This sounds like you’re trying to generalize to a model for circulation. Unless you have some reference material that speaks to what you're trying to describe, I'd probably have to label it as speculation. Except that the Earth doesn't rotate in quantum steps of 180°. So I have no idea how this could happen. Presumably you mean something other than what you actually said. The whole system is radiating out into space, yes. I presume you're referring to cooling at night. You recall that we averaged over time so I'm not sure where you're going with this. I wouldn't go that far. Suffice it to say there is a diurnal atmospheric tide that varies with the oscillating insolation. From an individual's vantage point, anything could happen since air masses have their own systemic behavior. (real earth?) The way you've just described it sounds like setting the stage for the generating winds. If you mean to say that there is no radiation from the dark side of the Earth then no. If you want to speak to a variation in the amount of radiation then that's fine. But keep in mind what the actual IR imagery looks like, which an ill-defined set of amorphous nodes that well up and fade unpredictably (without complex models to assist). I think you mean to say heat flows from source to sink which we've established. So wherever you think the heat is at this step it's not going to violate conservation of energy. There will be a continual transport to a lower energy state and that includes the amounts radiated into space. Since I haven't agreed with most of what you've said, I'm not able to reach that conclusion. That makes no sense to me. It would help if you'd supply a reference if you're talking about actual science. Sounds like you arrived at that through a back door so I'd have to characterize it as speculation. I'm not sure what the purpose of this exercise was. If you want to compare atmospheres, why not compare Earth with Venus.? Again, unless you were deep inside some esoteric topic from some reference you're using it sounded like a layman's first attempt at modeling something, but I'm not sure what. In any case I found no reason to connect this with the actual science which has plenty to offer. If you just made this up then I guess I'd ask why. I mean, if you're interested in understanding the science behind global warming then IPCC and its vast resources would be the ideal place to start. In any case, I see nothing here to shed light on climate change. Considering you're disparagement of the experts IPCC it seems strange to me that you want to discuss anything on a technical level at all. After all, they represent the best folks in the world when it comes to atmospheric thermodyamics and chemistry, plus all the other stuff we haven't even talked about.
Thankyou! You just triggered something that has left me face palming for overlooking it because it's so obvious. One of andre's complaints has been the division of the solar constant by 4 to arrive at the surface flux. He objects to this because it requires treating the earth as a perfect greybody, then he complains about the lack of consideration of the diurnal cycle. But here's the thing. The 4 comes from the diurnal cycle. As a patch of equatorial ground rotates across the sun facing side of the earth solar radiation varies as something like 1+Cos(t) where t is the angle as a function of time. 0 at 6am, 90 at noon, and 180 at 6pm. The average value of that function I half the maximum value. So, over the course of the first half of the diurnal cycle, the average insolation is half the maximum. During the second half of the diurnal cycle there is no insolation, and so the average insolation across the entire diurnal cycle is 1/4 of the peak insolation. So we arrive at the same figure by ignoring geometry, without making assumptions about the thermal properties of the earth, and considering only the rotation of the earth.
I thought we had settled the factor 1/4 comes from receiving the incoming radiation on a disc and retransmitting it from a sphere. If you make that one dimension less, with a circle, the incoming energy hits 2r for the diameter of the circle and retransmits it on 2pi*r. No factor 4 there. Again, for visualizing, suppose you give the moon an atmosphere of nitrogen hypothetically. The sunny side is around boiling while the night is extreme cold. Wouldn't that generate convection in the atmosphere?
It is insane that arguing Global Warming is a worthy notion! If a Asteroid was heading for earth and it had a 5% chance of impact and destroying everything what would we do? A) Study it and hope we can prevent the collision through science or B) Ignore it and hope it is conspiracy Theory. Global Warming should not be shoved aside during debates because it is inconvenient. It can potentially cause a lot of death and destruction and warrants study/efforts if nothing else. In other words. Anybody wasting their breath arguing against Global Warming is a moron. If you are right you may save a few billion dollars in pollution controls, but if you are wrong those billions of dollars turn into billions of lives lost. I mean can you afford to be wrong?
Earth surface temperatures are determined by a large number of factors, how can we know that it's the greenhouse effect of CO2 (rather than greenhouse effect of H2O for instance, or cloud cover or anything else) that makes the difference? Please read the Stadium wave for plenty more on cycles. I'm looking at the other comments and I understand that I'm a very lousy explainer. But the main issue is, do we need greenhouse effect to heat the atmosphere or can convection do the job? (like I learned some 45 years ago, for the theory of glider flying.)
