Not so much, his position, as near as I can tell, is that an IR transparent atmosphere absorbs heat by conduction from the ground but has no mechanism to dissipate it. Adding greenhouse gasses to an IR transparent atmosphere allows heat energy to be piped to the top of the atmosphere with a net cooling effect. His assertions are accounted for (to the best of my understanding) in IPCC models and have been well characterized since at least the '60s (I have one of the seminal papers on the matter floating around somewhere I think). His position ignores the fact that a carbon dioxide molecule has an equal probability of re-radiating the photon in any direction, meaning there's a 45-50% chance that it will be re-radiated back towards the ground. The consensus of these papers, however, disagrees with Andre's position in that greenhouse gasses cause cooling in the lower atmosphere and heating in the upper atmosphere.
Can we attach a pilot light to cow butts and burn the gas? This is my invention Victor.. Not yours.. Here is a photo of my new "Cow butt igniter"... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_gWx19v_x8 Yet another world problem I have solved...
I'm afraid I may have giving a wrong impression of my position, which is merely: 'use the scientific method'. So if Svante Arrhenius or Guy Callendar realize that CO2 has radiative properties, they "guess" that this may lead to atmospheric heating. Since methane has also radiative properties, higher concentrations should also lead to higher lower tropospheric temperatures. Then we "compute the consequences of the guess" with modelling, yes even from the 1960's, to see what it would imply ie climate sensitivity for doubling radiative gas concentratations. "Then we compare those computation results to nature, ..compare it directly with observation to see it works". Something like comparing the global methane concentration with the Antarctic isotope proxy for global temperature to see if a forcing behavior can be found: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! "If it disagrees with experiment.." etc etc Maybe the guess was qualitatively right but it appears to be dwarved quantitatively by noise and other processes.
Here it is (second sentence fourth row): Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Source I take it that this is fair use. Maybe just check my previous post and the scientific method. Ah, while we're flipping trough the pages of the Two Mile Time Machine, why not read a few other lines: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Tired of all these scientific graphs? Here is relief: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Not news in Brazil. We know our greatest contribution, by far, to GHGs is our, world's largest (by head count, not dollar value)* cattle herd. This is partly due to nearly 85% of our electric power coming from hydro-electric dams and the large fration of our cars using CO2 neutral sugar cane alcohole fuel.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Cheaper and sustainable will win over gasoline some day. Why not now? * Our cows walk to find grass, often on hilly terrain not with other economic use. Thus they are healthy, (read that as "tough beef") with less fat than those feed corn in confined feed lots for "finishing". Brazilian beef is the healthy choice for humans, with zero risk of mad cow disease but Australia, I think, gets greater dollars in annual sales. In energy and food production, Brazil is world's most advanced, ecologically valid, sustainable country, by far!
Trippy, thanks, your remarks were helpful. It was John Tyndall who discovered the radiative properties of various greenhouse gases (at about the same time Darwin was finally getting around to publishing Origin). So you see the scientific method is quite honest. First came the search for an explanation for the Ice Age, which Fourier (about the time John Q. Adams was defeated by Andrew Jackson) discovered that the Earth was not behaving like a radiator should, and was therefore retaining heat through the greenhouse effect. Then came empirical evidence: John Tyndall, who was reputed to have a knack for thinking outside of the box, invented the ratio spectrophotometer, which gave him an unprecedented means of measuring the absorptive properties of gases in the air. He discovered that water vapour was a principal contributor, noting: Without water vapor, the Earth would be held in the iron grip of frost. It wasn't until the era of the Spanish-American War that Arrhenius (more of a tinkerer) and esp. Callendar (more the true physicist) repeated and retested Tyndall's work, separating out with better accuracy the absorptive properties of the main constituent gases best known today. My point is that the process used was just about the reverse of how you state it. First came the observations (there was a melting of glaciers; the Earth is retaining heat) , then the questions searching for cause (does the atmosphere absorb IR), then the hypotheses and testing (Callendar: the gas which is most variable must be regulating the climate), and finally the conclusions (CO[sub]2[/sub] is the primary regulator). As a general rule, that kind of logic is fine. But when you select an anomaly for your test case the general rules go out the window. Now you need to understand the anomaly, which reboots the scientific method back to step one. Reboot to the new observations (methane fell and temperatures fell; yet methane is a GHG). Now we need to formulate a new question (was biotic methane reduction the result of extinctions; was there a hydroxyl anomaly; etc.) and that leads us to the modern day with the various kinds of hypothesis testing you see in play. This is a work in progress, so there is no single conclusion that has yet reached consensus. Perhaps some budding pioneer will emerge and resolve it in our lifetime. But since paleoclimatology sometimes has at best fragmentary data laced together with proxies and conjecture, it doesn't always come with the high confidence intervals of the studies of our current climate. And for that we need IPCC, the science agencies and the universities to put together the pieces of the paleo puzzle. Not the modeling per se, which is the method of reverse-engineering nature into a complex of systems, subsystems and finite elements, but the product of modelling--simulation, or synthesis, which is the empirical counterpart of analysis. I disagree that they rely on consequences of guesswork, though, since there is data to tie any model to the system it emulates. Evidently you are referring to modeling Callendar's conclusions about CO[sub]2[/sub] about the time the Rough Riders came home from Cuba. As you see from this account of early modeling, the purpose was toward predicting circulation. It began under a different umbrella, namely as a weather prediction tool, motivated by a deadly hurricane ca. 1954, which eventually prompted the founding of the National Hurricane Center, and, by a related coincidental meeting of the founders of NOAA, led to the fusion of talents from four key several key reasearchers: the director from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (Roger Revelle), who mentored a NOAA co-founder (geochemist Charles David Keeling) -- both were pursuing Callendar's work -- and a solar irradiance expert from NIST (Ralph Stair). The Hurricane Center founder who brought Stair to Mauna Loa, triggering the involvement of Revelle and Keeling, was meteorologist Dr Robert Simpson who I believe just turned 101. I mention this to point out that climate science is based first and foremost with observation. By the time the first models were (ca 1969), Keeling had over 10 years of evidence that CO[sub]2[/sub] was rising sharply, and Roger Revelle's report that the oceans were not absorbing the gas fast enough (to permit a leveling off) was some 12 years old. And Revelle's science report to the White House was several years old, the report stating the evidence for carbon pollution which was received by LBJ, who ordered funding for more research. During the Nixon administration a Democrat succeeded in reviving the report, which probably was the real reason Nixon created NOAA and the EPA (as opposed to actual concern for the issues usu. indentified with Nixon's detractors - the hippies.) That's a very one-dimensional reduction of a complex system. Methane is one small piece of the puzzle and for all practical purposes it can be ignored when discussing the overriding concern about athropogenic damage -- which is, as you read in Keeling's and Revelle's scientific papers from the 50s and 60s -- CO[sub]2[/sub]. I guess I'll leave it on that note. You seem to be concened about quality control in the field climate science but it's just not clear to me how Dryas methane is "a problem".
Because Methane is increasing through the entire period, but clearly there are periods of decreasing temperature, therefore methane can not be the source of warming. I don't know if I can find them again, or if I emailed myself the links, however, at work the other day I came across a series of comparisons of things like measured long wave IR absorption spectra, measured up welling and down welling long wave IR radiation, and I think maybe two or three other salient things. The comparison was between measurements that had been made in the '60s and '70s and today, and the results were all consistent with the predictions made by the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. So if Andre wants confirmations, maybe he could start by understanding the predictions that have actually been made, and looking for works like those testing the predictions.
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Figure 1 of Increases in greenhouse forcing inferred from the outgoing longwave radiation spectra of the Earth in 1970 and 1997 There's also MEASUREMENTS OF THE RADIATIVE SURFACE FORCING OF CLIMATE Radiative forcing - measured at Earth’s surface - corroborate the increasing greenhouse effect Comparison of spectrally resolved outgoing longwave data between 1970 and present Spectral signatures of climate change in the Earth’s infrared spectrum between 1970 and 2006 So that's what, five pages that empirically confirm the predictions of quantum mechanics combined with the Beer-Lambert law and the conservation of mass and energy. That's the thing that continues to amaze me. Andre talks a lot about wanting to see the basic predictions confirmed, and talks like they've never been tested, but the truth is, they have.
Considering predictions, a few decades ago, this chap, Velikovsky, guessed that Venus was born out of Jupiter, and caused a lot of upheaval when it passed close to Earth :bugeye:. He predicted that this idea would mean that the surface of Venus would turn out to be scorching hot still. His prediction was right. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Maybe reread Alley. You constantly have to challenge the law/theory/mechanism and try to refute it. A correct prediction is a just another white swan in the all-swans-are-white hypothesis, until you move to Australia. Another prediction, mentioned before, was something like the 17 years Santer norm, not going too well, it seems. Considering the radiative proportions, you could have included the MODTRAN model, a nice tool to play with. Originally develloped to optimize the seekers of IR missiles. This is the basic null-run for a standard atmosphere. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Now if we insert for instance 10 ppm CH4, against currently some 1.7 ppm or so(?) a six fold increase, then we get: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! we see that the upward heatflux decreased from 287.91 to 284.11. Now if you insert one (1) degree in the box "Ground T offset, C" then you'll see that you have apparantly restored the outwelling long wave radiation. Which seems to mean that extreme increases of methane have only a very limited effect on the 'equilibrium' temperature. We can also superimpose the graphs of the two runs, to see the difference in the black ellipse: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Not exactly a band where you can absorb a lot of IR with more methane. Another restriction is of course that this is a pure radiative model, disregarding the effect of convection, cloud forming, effective emission height, etc. Then we get the much more hotly debared feedback discussion. The message however seems that the radiative capacity (often erreneously indicated as greenhouse effect) of methane in the atmosphere is very limited. More later.
I really don't care about Vellikovsky's predictions. Bringing them up is a red herring, among other things, his predictions were never held as consensus and run against the laws of physics, and the guy was, quite frankly a nut job. What's your point here, that a broken clock can be right twice a day? I really don't know why you're bringing Vellikovsky into it. Some inane attempt to discredit the opposing argument by association I suppose? I really do tire of this kind of rhetoric and I have been both friendly and patient in this regard. My tolerance, however, is rapidly approaching zero. If you want to try and refute the beer lambert law, or quantum mechanics, feel free. Another red herring? My tolerance is zero by this point. The 17 year point goes back to a previous discussion you and I have already had. Do we really need to revisit it? Or are you done trolling. I suppose I could have. As predicted - remember, the upward IR flux is as measured looking down from an altitude of 70km according to the parameters that you have in your screen grab. The hypothesis predicts that the methane absorbs the radiation that would otherwise be radiated outwards (or upwards) absorbs, then re-emits it. The probability of the radiation being re-radiated in any given direction is equal, and so the probability of any given molecule of methane re-radiating the radiation back towards the ground is between about 45-50% depending on the altitude. This is all stuff I have pointed out already. What's your point here. That increasing the partial pressure of methane by a factor of 6 causes about a 1K rise in ground temperature? The area under that graph is w/m[sup]2[/sup] and to make a valid comparison would require some integration which that graph is not accurate enough to use for - half the space you're referring to is taken up by the graph lines themselves. Probably why you're the only person in this conversation trying to infer anything about temperature from it. As Alexander Pope wrote in "An essay on Criticism": A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.
Exactly. The temporary plunge in levels of methane is interesting in its own right, and is a conundrum. Something dramatic occurred, and people disagree about what that might have been, but it doesn't cause any problem for man made global warming theories. The line of argument here is reminiscent of anti-evolutionists. Find something which the theory finds hard to explain, and present it as proof that the theory is wrong.
No offense intended whatsoever. Since it seems that my line of thoughts and narrations are so encrypted and impossible to follow, I just tried to give a clear, obvious and humorous example to demonstrate that correct predictions do not guarantee that the guess is correct. Sorry that I failed miserably. Also if Modtran cannot help to give a rough ballpark figure of climate sensitive for doubling CH4, could you please indicate, how/where to find it?
We already know quantum mechanics is correct, and methane shows no behaviour that defies either quantum mechanics or the beer lambert law. The point here being that this isn't some broad guess, but some quite specific predictions made by well tested theories. If the climate is somehow behaving differently then the problem is not with this end of the model. Archer 2007 examines a number of methane release scenarios and computes warming for them. He also takes the timescale of the releases into account. I've linked to the paper multiple times on this forum, however, if you haven't found the paper by thw time I'm back in front of computer I shall provide you with a link.
