Climate deniers - Who are they? What do they believe

No they don't, they reinforce each other. Here they are again:

1. Means that as the earth gets warmer, the total amount of energy emitted increases, as does, as I recall, the amount emitted in the long-wave raditation bands that greenhouse gasses absorb increases until a certain point where the earth emits more radiation in regions where the atmosphere is transparent. There is only one way of increasing the amount of outgoing radiation, and that is increasing the amount of incoming radiation (because the black-body law predicts the two are balanced). There are two ways of increasing the radiation received at the surface - increasing the amount of insolation, or increasing the amount of radiation emitted in all directions by the atmosphere.

Earth achieves a balanced radiation budget -> Humans burn carbon which produces carbon dioxide -> Carbon dioxide produced by humans stays in the atmosphere until it is removed (mostly by the ocean) -> Increasing carbon dioxide levels increase the amount of longwave radiation stored by the atmosphere as thermal energy -> The thermal energy stays in green house gasses until it is transferred to non-greenhouse gasses or re-emitted -> energy absorbed by non-greenhouse gasses is stored until it is transfered back to greenhouse gasses -> Atmosphere warms -> long-wave radiation emitted by greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere increases -> total radiation received by the earths surface increases -> Earths surface warms until the incoming matches the outgoing -> Earth acheives a balanced radiation budget.

Perhaps you could explain to the rest of us where exactly they "negate/balance each other" rather than glibly dismissing it?

Simple. We start with the milankovich cycles. Conservation of energy predicts that decreasing the amount of solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere decreases the total amount of radiation received at the surface. Black body radiation predicts that decreasing the total amount of radiation received at the surface lowers the earths temperature and reduces the amount of radiation emitted by the surface. The beer-lambert law predicts that as the amount of incident radiation decreases, so must the amount of radiation absorbed. As the amount of radiation absorbed by the atmosphere decreases, so does its temperature. As the earth cools, its albedo starts to increase. As its albedo increases, blackbody radiation predicts that the proportion of radiation reflected increases and the amount of radiation emitted decreases. This effect also decreases the incident radiation seen by atmospheric carbon-dioxide with the same consequences as a result of the beer-lambert law.

The observation is correct, the conclusion drawn from it is wrong. The conclusion you have drawn is flawed in that it completely ignores, for example, this:

su·per·im·pose transitive verb \ˌsü-pər-im-ˈpōz\

: to place or lay (something) over something else
: to place or lay over or above something <superimposed images>
Merriam-webster

superimpose
Line breaks: super|im¦pose
Pronunciation: /ˌsuːp(ə)rɪmˈpəʊz, ˌsjuː-/
verb
[with object]
Place or lay (one thing) over another, typically so that both are still evident:
Oxford

What you're doing here is introducing (or at least trying to) the denier fallacy I alluded to in my previous post.

Your conclusion is wrong because:

The only thing implied by the current hiatus is that something is removing thermal energy from the atmosphere at approximately the same rate that increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by 13% put it there, or, something has reduced the total amount of radiation reaching the earths surface by that amount. Yes, there are well known exceptions, for example turbid scattering, however, turbid scattering in the atmosphere is a consequence of aerosols and dust, which are a good way of reducing the incident radiation at the surface.

The Beer-Lambert law was originally forumlated in 1729. In the 285 years since it was first formulated it has been tested millions of times by chemistry students around the world. Not just chemistry students - every time a commercial laboratory does a colourmetric test for an analyte, they're testing the beer-lambert law.

By this I presume you mean that big glowy thing in the sky, the massive natural thermonuclear reactor which weighs more than the rest of the solar system combined. While yes, it's true that without the big massive glowy thing in the sky the temperature of the earth would be 3k, it's also true that the properties of the atmosphere raise the average temperature from something like -20 or -15, and the only way to correctly predict the temperature of the earth is to account for the heat energy absorbed and retained by the earth's atmosphere.

But hey, if you don't think changing the composition of your bedding influences how warm it keeps you, then feel free to go camping in the arctic with a pair of cotton sheets to keep you warm, I'm sure everything will work out fine.

 

The Beer Lambert Law, in a nutshell, describes how absorbing species absorb as a function of the concentration of those species and the path length of the light through those species. Absorption psectroscopy - for example, colourometric analytical techniques, work on this basis using a fixed path length. One of the things it means is that if I have a known species in solution absorbs at a specific wave-length, then with a few samples at known concentrations, I can measure the concentration in an unknown sample. The same principle works with gasses as well as liquids. It simply requires the production of a calibration curve.

Does this help?

If you have any specific questions, I'm more than willing to try and answer them.

From that perspective I'm priveleged in that I've hads the opportunity to personally test them all.

Understandably so.

On the one hand it's a shame the issue became politicized the way it had, on the other hand it became politicized because a group of scientists in the late '60s and early '70s had sufficient evidence to convince - I think it was Nixon - that it was an important issue that needed to be dealt with at the level of the federal government.

You may not understand the science of it, but researching the history of it is educational.

 

I'm ignoring nothing.

I'm well aware of that, in fact, that's part of my point.

Didn't claim the did - in fact if you took the time to understand my posts before replying to them you'd realize this and might even have a chance of making a cogent response. As it is, so far you've failed so dismally you've left me almost nothing to respond to except to point out that so far all you've done is agree with me even though you seem to think you're disputing some point.

I'm also well aware of the problems with considering the milankovich cycles as being the only driver of the earths climate (as well as some of their resolutions).

Nothing to address here either - Curry's argument is, strictly speaking, and appeal to personal ignorance with a reference to the 2nd law of thermodynamics thrown in to make it sound convincing. Personally I can conceive of several ways it might occur, and several heat sinks that I don't know if they're accounted for - for example, the melting of ice and evaporation of water are both endothermic processes. Also, ENSO, as one example, periodicly brings cold water to the surface in places where it is not normally present.

Then the debate is bogus and bordering on dishonesty for a number of reasons ranging from the fact that much (for example) IR spectrosocopy is conducted in open air - IE the atmosphere, and supports the assertion. More over, we've measured the changes of the absorption in the atmosphere both from the ground and from space, and guess what, they're behaving exactly as predicted.

Either you're being dishonest, or you haven't understood what I've actualy said, because what I've said is that it doesn't have to because the anthropogenic forcing is superimposed on top of the natural cycles. The hiatus/slowdown is irrelevant to the predictions made by the Beer-Lambert law because it's a consequence of other factors in the system and the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis allows us to predict that slowdowns in the rate of warming will occur from time to time, and will continue occuring.

No. What's lacking is your comprehension as to how the Beer-Lambert law applies in the environment, what it's role is in climate change (in spite of my best efforts to explain it to you in every day language), and what predictions it actually makes in relation to the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis.

Oxygen doesn't burn, it allows things to burn. Moreover this, combined with this:

Is a logical fallacy, it's an argumentum ad absurdum. You're essentially using a nonsensical analogy to ridicule the argument. More to the point, your analogy is a dishonest one because it requires ignoring context and moving goal posts.

Yes... And?

Have you finally understood my point? Remember what the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis actually is? That there is a warming trend superimposed on the natural cycles, not that the natural cycles are some how supplanted by this. When we look at the temperature record we see one or two similar hiatuses interspersed with periods of exaggerated warming. This is precisely what we expect to see when we have a monotonic linear increasing trend superimposed on a sinusoidal pattern. This current hiatus is nothing special. There are one or two similar hiatuses on the record (depending on how you count them). These lasted longer and had significant cooling trends. This one does not have a cooling trend, it has a slight warming trend that fails the test for significance at the 95% confidence level.

My prediction, based on my observations is that this hiatus will continue for probably another 10-15 years, at which point we will enter a period of exaggerated warming comparable to the '80s, then, after aproximately 15-20 years of this warming the climate will enter another hiatus.

 

One reason for the apparent hiatus probably has to do with heat stored in the ocean. Ocean currents do ensure mixing of surface waters and deep waters, but the process takes a long time. Warming in the Pacific Ocean, in particular, tends to go in cycles. At the moment, as I understand it, the western Pacific is warmer than the east, and the ocean as a whole is acting as a heat sink for the atmosphere. But that won't last forever. In a decade or two that heat will be dumped back into the atmosphere and then the atmospheric warming trend will get back on track according to its long-term observed trend.

 

There's a lot to learn about the global climate. Not surprising, since it's an incredibly complex system. But there's also a lot of effort being put into working out what's going on.

The basics are undeniable, though. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means a warmer planet. There's no doubt that atmospheric carbon dioxide is on the increase, and there's no doubt that the planet is warming. There's also no doubt that human beings are contributing to the current warming by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in staggering quantities.

 

And that is one of the mistakes that has been made - once upon a time there were two apporaches to the problem, one was the grey-body approximation, which treats the atmosphere as a greybody layer at some altitiude, and the other was the CKD approach, which, as I understand it bins the spectral absorption lines and works with actual calibration curves. Even though the CKD approach was first used in the 80's by planetary scientists, climatologists insisted on using the grey-body approximation which leads (naturally) to some wrong predictions (I always assumed they used the CKD approach and was surprised to discover they didn't).

The flip side is that, to my knowledge, no currently used model treats the earth as a uniform grey-body sphere. There's no need to when we have maps (and tables) of clear-sky albedo using a 2.5 degree grid.

 

Because the claims are about different time-scales - as i've pointed out several times now, where you have a monotonic linear increasing function added to a sinusoidal or pseudosinusoidal function, you get periods of hiatus or cooling interspersed with periods of exaggerating warming, depending on the relative strengths of the two functions to begin with. This is the kind of behaviour that we see in the temperature record and the current hiatus is hardly unique. The most distinguishing feature of this hiatus is the fact that even though it might fail a test for significance at the 95% level, the trend is positive, where previously it's been negative.

 

The hypothesis being tested, in this case, is whether or not any warming has occured over a specific period. The assertion that is made is that there has been no significant warming. for the last 15 years. When we test whether or not there has been any significant warming over the last 150 years, including the last 15, then as I recall that passes at least the 95% threshold, and I seem to recall it's also significant at the 99% level. Remember, we're discussing a short term trend versus a long term trend. Currently, if you plot the residuals based on the trend over the last 150 years, they're still positive and the current hiatus would have to continue for something like another 70 years (based on current trends) for the residuals to be <= 0.

:shrugs: The data supports the existence of sinusoidal cycles of varying periods, and known causal mechanisms for them exist - the NAO, PDO, and ENSO, to name a few.

On the one hand, I'm not sure if I agree with you, and on the other hand I've never actually made such a claim. The founding principles - Quantum mechanics, Conservation of mass and energy, the beer-lambert law, black-body radiation, are all as solid as the big bang theory. The grey areas arise in the theory because determing the fate of the heat energy once it has been stored in the atmosphere is where things start getting messy.

 

As an aside - mostly for Milkweed's benefit, to illustrate the problem with cherry-picking.

This is Fig 3. from Hansen et al, 1981:

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Notice something important about the 'anomalous warming' in the '40s? What does it say to you about the Reykjavik data?

 

I wasn't specificly referring to the hockey-stick graph.

There's a measurable one, it's just not staticticly significant at the 95% confidence level.

You will seldom hgere me talking about prooving anything, only ever evidence for or data supporting - take from that what you will. The best I, personally, can do at this point is to point to where similar circumstances have arisen previously in the temperature record.

Even weather comes basically down to the conservation of mass and energy, it's driven by the transfer of heat and mass from one location to the other. In principle the weather, and the climate are as trivially predictable as the tides. The difference is that the weather and the climate are sensitive to starting conditions, where the tides are not. The poorly understood grey areas don't involve new effects, but rather they involve things like the fate of heat energy, how it is used to do work and so on, as well as some of the follow on effects from that which lead to things like changes in the way carbon dioxide is absorbed in its natural cycles, changes in cloud composition and distirbution and so on and so forth. All of these effects, however, affect the same basic principles that I espoused. At the same time I'm fairly sure that I have written more complete lists somewhere. I've been having some of these conversations for so long my recollection is a little hazy.

Right, but that's not actually the claim I made. Quantum mechanics is relevant because it correctly predicts (for example) the absorption bands of the roto-vibrational transitions of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gasses) - these being the bands that absorb the earths outgoing longwave blackbody radiation.

True, however, that's not where quantum mechanics comes into climate change.

 

All you've done here is compound your initial error without understanding what it was. You've also added a new error which makes your analogy less relevant than it was before. I understood your analogy in the first instance, I'm pointing out that I consider it deeply flawed and fallacious.

A number of things make it significantly different, and you still have the basic physics to attend to - but as I said before, if you don't think that altering the composition of the bedding will change how warm it keeps you, I've got some cotton sheets you can take on an arctic expedition.

More cherry picking and misrepresntation I see.

Strangely, I almost find myself agreeing with you here.

Have you tried finding anything more recent than a few days ago on this forum? There's an additional point that warrnats mentioning here. I have done a lot of research over time in addressing the posts of climate deniers, so it's entirely possible that I might not be able to point to a post as early as 2009 because - even if I could find a specific post from five years ago, the paralells between this 'hiatus' and previous ones might not have occured to me at that point. Also in 2009 i'm fairly sure I was more focused on the autocorrelation and tehe fact that the data set was too small.

And yet so far everything you've had to say has been right-wing talking points and you've ignored substantial portions of the posts I have made in order to focus in on these talking points.

My condescending attitude? This has the look and feel of a cop-out.