Sceptic agrees global warming real.

[Trippy]

Based on the following (and other recent, more accurate and studies, not making the two false simplifying assumption of your link, and including several important aspects, like cloud effects, which your link does not)

I've told you before, one of the two things you specifically complained about was an illustration of one set of results. An example. This is why I keep saying you haven't understood the paper.

I now think it is 99% certain that the oceans can not boil...

So then you admit that I and the paper were correct, because that was why I cited the paper in the first place remember?

...although some others including a widely respected NOAA scientist / climate expert / (James Hansen) also gave condition (burn all the economically available fossil fuels in the next few centuries) in which the models then used (and much more complete and accurate than the old model of your link) did predict the oceans would boil.

You need to be clearer here.

Also, did you ever stop and woner why I gave you one of the original treatments of the problem rather than any of the other options I had avail?available to me?

None-the-less the extinction of humanity and most life forms seems likely according to the latest and most complete models. The following is Hansen's 15 April 2013 POV: Thus my efforts to show it is essential to switch, as outlined in post 1436 of the "Apocalypse Soon" thread to a non-fossil fuel energy system ASAP will continue, but I will no longer (as Hansen has also stopped), suggest that the oceans may boil. - Only that the present fossil fuel based energy system is likely to lead to human extinction, if not greatly suplimented with some solar (or nuclear) energy system.

Good, because my point this whole time has been the same thing. The earth does not receive sufficient insolation to boil off the oceans.

Tell me, did you ever play SimEarth? Driving the dominant sentient life form to boil off the oceans was something of a passtime for me.

BTW, "storms" refers to Hansen's book Storms of our Grandchildren written several years ago, when he too (falsely) expected the oceans to boil.

Contrary to what scientists who came before him suggested.

First the claim that one needs to look at 700 or 400 posts to find and read a post with given post number is NONSENSE.*

Strawman - That's not the claim I made. I only said that my post was buried 400 posts back in the thread and that anyone wanting to find it would have to get through them first, a task that is, I am sure, more than many can be bothered with.

Secondly you posted before I completed my post...

How unreasonable of me, replying promptly to a post.

in which Hansen and others tell several faults with your link specifically (and others work from that era).

I may have missed that if it was in the portion you quoted.

I don't need or intend to discuss your link's flaws more, as it is a very crude early effort. Imagine assuming wide layer of constant 200K air next to the surface and that the surface pressure is some fixed arbitrary constant despite ocean water evaporating and changing the atmospheric pressure and densit...

And once again you demonstrate you haven't understood the paper. You keep saying this and it's still just as wrong.

They modeled the troposphere as turbulant and convective, and the stratosphere as isothermal. Do you understand the significance of that? Apparently not. This is what I mean by your objections being based in a failure to understand the paper rather than actual flaws in the paper.

totally ignoring cloud effects, which even the more recent and vastly superior computer models have trouble with accurately modeling plus totally ignoring the positive feed back interaction between CO2 release rates, CH4 and it destruction rates, and I think H2O and the other GHGs decomposing in the UV.

Ignoring clouds means they're examining a worst case scenario, as does assuming the oxiatioln of earths entire crustal inventory of carbon, something far on excess of anything you have described.

If that is not enough "discussion" for you, I'm sorry but will not give more reasons why after more than an hour of careful study of your link, I totally reject its conclusion, as the more modern studies have done too.

The conclusion that according to you Hansen now supports? That we can not boil off the oceans?

*PS I did my undergraduate work at Cornell, which is a "land grant" college and thus ROTC was required of all males, in my era. I did learn one thing in the class, when told how to quickly zero a mortar shell on target: Fire first very long then intentionally some what short. Don't be silly and just incrementally change the range setting. I.e. in your case, jump twenty pages, note the post number and fall back 10 pages if you have gone too far. With modest intelligence you can then guess the page number the post you seek is on with no more than one page error.

This is almost insulting.

First off, what you describe here is almost exactly the method I used. In computing when you use it to search a list it's call,ed the binary search method. I've. Coded a variation of it to try and find the prime roots of a secondary Prime, I've also used it to pinpoint pollution sources in river catchments of hundreds of square kilometers resulting in convictions in a court of law.

That wasn't the point I was making. The point I was making was that most people probably aren't going to bother.

 

[Michael]

Yes replacing BTUs of oil with methane is a help, but that is not what Japan is doing. They are replacing nuclear energy with more fossil fuel burning. I also think they will disturb the safely stored deep methane clathrates with their extraction and release tons of methane unburned.

I was speaking with a chemist about this over coffee last week. We thought that it can't really be a problem because lava flows and heat vents and all sorts of natural phenomena impact those huge reserves of methane hydrate and nothing ever happens (at least that I know of).

 

[Billy T]

... That wasn't the point I was making. The point I was making was that most people probably aren't going to bother.

If that was your point then why tell how many posts were in the thread they were even going to go to? Explaining first they would need to look thru 700 then correcting that or only 400 posts.
Yes I understand they only assumed most of the mass of the atmosphere was at fixed 200k and did do more accurate analysis for the higher levels.
Yes I understand they assumed several different fixed surface pressures, but point is the surface pressure would be changing with time, not fixed as conditions evolve as modeled in better models.

So I still think these two assumption I noted as gross over simplifications, long ago in the "Apocalypse thread" are just that. I did not note the many other (about 10) false assumptions and neglected items that Hansen noted in the first paragraph of his 15 April 2013 post. He is the expert, not me. I can't be expected to find all their faults, just the most obvious ones.

 

[Trippy]

This is why I say you do not understand the paper:

If that was your point then why tell how many posts were in the thread they were even going to go to? Explaining first they would need to look thru 700 then correcting that or only 400 posts.

Really? Did you think that comment through before typing it.

Yes I understand they only assumed most of the mass of the atmosphere was at fixed 200k and did do more accurate analysis for the higher levels.

No Billy, this is not what they did.
They modeled the Troposphere using their convective radiative model and modeled the stratosphere as being isothermal.
The Stratosphere lies above, not below the troposphere. The Troposphere contains 80% of the atmospheres mass and 99% of its water vapour.
Do you understand your error yet?

Yes I understand they assumed several different fixed surface pressures, but point is the surface pressure would be changing with time, not fixed as conditions evolve as modeled in better models.

Again, this is not actually what was done.

So I still think these two assumption I noted as gross over simplifications, long ago in the "Apocalypse thread" are just that. I did not note the many other (about 10) false assumptions and neglected items that Hansen noted in the first paragraph of his 15 April 2013 post. He is the expert, not me. I can't be expected to find all their faults, just the most obvious ones.

You're just as wrong now as you were then.

 

[Billy T]

...
Basically they posit four scenarios - A1, A2, B1, and B2 - with different assumptions for cultural change and efforts towards sustainability. These scenarios result in a year 2100 temperature change of +1.1 to +2.9C (best case) to +1.4 to +6.4C (worst case.)

Thanks. Here from your post 160 link is their graphical summary of CO2 levels vs. time. Note the levels are normalize to the 1990 level being unity, but un-normalize it was ~ 350 ppm verses more than 400ppm 23 years later (in late 2013).

I focus on the scenarios that do show this increase factor of 400/350 = 1.143 (or 14.3%) as those that are being confirmed by reality, but that only eliminates a tiny fraction of the scenarios. I.e. no real basis, yet, from the IPCC to predict CO2 level or rate of CO2 release. Simple curve fitting (a linear term of 2ppm plus about 0.01ppm quadratic term) would seem to be more predictive of what to expect. I.e.

CO2 (Y) = 400 + 2(|Y-2013|) + 0.01(Y-2013)^2 where Y is the year I expect is better guess for Y> 2013 up to at least 2050. That would predict CO2(2050) = 400+74 + 13.7 = 487.7 and for Y < 2013 use CO2(Y) = 400 - 2(|Y-2013|) - 0.01(Y-2013)^2

This "predicts" CO2 (1990) = 400 - 46 - 5.3 = 348.7 or exactly correct given the seasonal variation. See graph below:

It may be very immodest, but I think I'm predicting more accurately and with much higher precision than the IPCC is. They need to be very vague, to preserve creditability, I don't so can be precise in my predictions. What I would love to see is an equation that ties CO2 level to global warming temperature, say for location = Washington DC, but given how much hot air is produced there we need an additive constant for that location.

What we really need is an equation that then ties the temperature to the rate of CH4 release or atmospheric concentration. I note that my predicted CO2(2050) level is lower than most of the scenario lines in the IPCC graph above - I.e. I seem to be more optimistic than they are, on average. Perhaps Doha is not as dead as most think and the world's government will intervene. The pollution problems in China may be why or the increasing cost of oil production, switching more to electric etc. cars will cause this better scenario to be the real one. I can even hope my message about the feasibility of most of the world running on sugar cane alcohol comes to be more accepted.

 

[Trippy]

Billy, are you going to respond to post #164 at all?

Do you understand yet the magnitude of the error in statements such as this:

Yes I understand they only assumed most of the mass of the atmosphere was at fixed 200k...

You are also substantially in error with this claim:

...totally ignoring cloud effects...

Section 3b starting on page 481 is titled "Effect of Clouds". The entire subsection is devoted to discussing and modelling the generalized effects of clouds. Figure 8 shows their modeled effects at various atmospheric pressures. While the treatment may be simplified, and they were not included in the temperature model (because he was interested in the maximum temperature) their effects were, none the less, considered.

In summary:

Fig 6. on page 479 suggests your objection regarding pressure - that they only modeled a 2 bar atmosphere is wrong. The modled up to a 270 bar atmosphere which is the maximum surface pressure available based on the earths oceanic water inventory and three times the observed surface pressure of Venus. If you disagree with this, you need to provide the vapour pressure calculations to prove it.

The body of the work suggests your objection based on the 200k is in error. They modeled the Troposphere which contains 80% of the mass and 99% of the humidity according to their convective-radiative model. A cursory examination of fig 5 on page 479 suggests that the transition from troposphere to isothermal stratosphere was not held at a fixed altitude, but rather was calculated. It was only the stratosphere which was treated isothermally, and as I have pointed out repeatedly, the top of the Venusian stratosphere is observed to sit at a temperature of 250k. Additionally, Fig 3 on page 478 shows the predicted outgoing IR flux at the top of a dense moist atmosphere as a function of stratospheric temperature for a fixed surface temperature (650k). They also detailed how their model could be improved in this regard.

Your objection regarding clouds seems to be in error. Although they were not included in the model, their effects were examined, and the results are presented in section 3b starting on page 481, and including Table 1 and Fig 8 on page 482.

 

[billvon]

It may be very immodest, but I think I'm predicting more accurately and with much higher precision than the IPCC is.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And given that your previous prediction for "steam death" was off by about an order of magnitude, you have ways to go.

They need to be very vague, to preserve creditability, I don't so can be precise in my predictions. What I would love to see is an equation that ties CO2 level to global warming temperature, say for location = Washington DC

That you think there is a simple equation that does this indicates that you have just begun thinking about the issue. There is a lot more to it than "an equation."

What we really need is an equation that then ties the temperature to the rate of CH4 release or atmospheric concentration.

There is no such equation, just as there is no exact correlation in historical data.

 

[Trippy]

There is no such equation, just as there is no exact correlation in historical data.

I've posted it in the past, but Archer did some work in this direction in 2007: Methane hydrate stability and anthropogenic climate change

The objection I have seen to Archers work (one of them anyway) is that he doesn't consider short enough time frames.

 

[Billy T]

Billy, are you going to respond to post #164 at all?...

No more than I have. I wasted more than an hour when you first directed me to that paper reading it. By memory, I think they assumed two things, not true (1) fixed, but different in different computation runs, surface pressure instead of letting it increase as more water evaporated and (2) a large band (~40% of their altitude range) next to the surface with temperature fix at 100C LESS than the current surface temperature. Thus their conclusion that earth doe not over heat is built in by assumption.

I had not noticed it until Hansen called my attention to it but their clouds were also fixed (in all characteristics such as fractional coverage, transparency and absorption with no wave length dependency, etc.) in any run instated of varying as the simulation ran - (It is widely believed by the experts that the cloud cover decreases as the CO2 increases.) and, as I recall, there was no consideration of chemical changes with altitude as UV certainly does induce - especially with respect to the rate of decomposition of CH4. Feel free to correct my memory - but don't expect still more replies. I have little interest in these early crude models.

Hansen's comments were directed at the errors almost all models of that era had. As you object to me just giving post and thread numbers, I repost, Hansen's first paragagraph I quoted with some bold added to high light the typical errors in early models::

" Originally Posted by http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exaggerations.pdf
The concept of a runaway greenhouse effect was introduced (12) by considering a highly idealized situation with specified troposphere-stratosphere atmospheric structure, a simple approximation for atmospheric radiation, and no inclusion of how clouds might CHANGE as climate changes, as is appropriate for introduction of a concept. More recent studies (13) relax some of the idealizations and are sufficient to show that Earth is not now near a runaway situation, but ...the studies do not provide a picture of where Earth is headed if all fossil fuels are burned."

Contrast that with a more modern and complete model such as:
"Gary Russell has developed a global model that solves the fundamental equations with the minimum additional physics needed to investigate climate sensitivity over the full range from snowball Earth to a hothouse uninhabitable planet. The additional physics includes accurate spectral dependence of solar and thermal radiation, convection, and clouds. " - Also a quote from Hansen's 15 April 2013 paper.

 

[Trippy]

Now Billy, I've been polite. I've refrained from some additional comments that reflect my feelings on this situation. I've shown you the courtosey of reading your post in full and responding to it in depth, I'd appreciate it if you returned the favour. I've spent around 5 hours preparing this post, between research and typing. I'd appreciate it if you'd show me a little... I dunno, consideration?

No more than I have.

You should, and consider what I said in post #166.

I wasted more than an hour when you first directed me to that paper reading it.

Clearly an hour was not enough time. You haven't understood it, and the more reading I do, the more convinced I become of that.

By memory, I think they assumed two things, not true (1) fixed, but different in different computation runs, surface pressure instead of letting it increase as more water evaporated...

Nope. Pressure was calculated using P[sub]s[/sub] = 1 + pCO[sub]2[/sub] + pH[sub]2[/sub]O, where pH[sub]2[/sub]O is the saturation vapor pressure of water at the surface T[sub]s[/sub]. The calculation of the saturation vapour pressure of water is detailed in Appendix A.

Either your recollection is flawed, or your understanding is.

and (2) a large band (~40% of their altitude range) next to the surface with temperature fix at 100C LESS than the current surface temperature.

I have explained this to you, repeatedly and you have ignored it repeatedly.
Here is a scaled schematic of the structure of earth's atmosphere:

The layer they assumed was Isothermal was the Stratosphere, the second layer from the earth, not the layer next to the surface. Note that this diagram includes the 'average' temperature profile observed in the earths atmosphere.

They assumed the Stratosphere, the second layer from the bottom (not the bottom layer as you have repeatedly stated) is Isothermal, so they have not, as you claim "fixed the temperature next to the surace at 100k less than the current surface temperature."
Figure 5 from the paper:

Illustrates my point. Note that it's not the layer directly above the surface that's isothermal, but the second layer up, the stratosphere, not the troposphere, the same thing I have said to you how many times now?

Also note that the altitude at which the transition from the troposphere to the stratosphere occurs is not fixed, but rather, it is allowed to vary. Allow me to repeat myself, your objection is based on you not having understood the paper properly.

Thus their conclusion that earth doe not over heat is built in by assumption.

Only if we accept your misrepresentation of their paper.

I had not noticed it until Hansen called my attention to it but their clouds were also fixed (in all characteristics such as fractional coverage transparency and absorption with no wave length dependency, etc.) in any run instated of varying as the simulation ran - (It is widely believed by the experts that the cloud cover decreases as the CO2 increases.)

No they weren't, they examined a range of fractional coverage as detailed in Section 3b, the parameters are detailed in section 2c.
*A single cloud layer.
*Log normal droplet size distribution with a mean size of 5 microns.
*Thickness one pressure scale height.
The scattering properties were broadly wavelength dependent, as was the extinction properties.

...and, as I recall, there was no consideration of chemical changes with altitude as UV certainly does induce - especially with respect to the rate of decomposition of CH4.

They considered a simplified atmosphere of Carbon Dioxide and Water. In later papers, however, Kasting has also considered Methane (he's done a lot of work modelling Earth's early atmosphere.

Feel free to correct my memory - but don't expect still more replies. I have little interest in these early crude models.

It's not your recollection I take issue with, but your understanding, it's wrong at a number of levels and whether you realize it or not it is leading you to make wrong assumptions and frossly misrepresent the paper.

Hansen's comments were directed at the errors almost all models of that era had. As you object to me just giving post and thread numbers, I repost, Hansen's first paragagraph I quoted with some bold added to high light the typical errors in early models::

" Originally Posted by http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exaggerations.pdf
The concept of a runaway greenhouse effect was introduced (12) by considering a highly idealized situation with specified troposphere-stratosphere atmospheric structure, a simple approximation for atmospheric radiation, and no inclusion of how clouds might CHANGE as climate changes, as is appropriate for introduction of a concept. More recent studies (13) relax some of the idealizations and are sufficient to show that Earth is not now near a runaway situation, but ...the studies do not provide a picture of where Earth is headed if all fossil fuels are burned."

Contrast that with a more modern and complete model such as:
"Gary Russell has developed a global model that solves the fundamental equations with the minimum additional physics needed to investigate climate sensitivity over the full range from snowball Earth to a hothouse uninhabitable planet. The additional physics includes accurate spectral dependence of solar and thermal radiation, convection, and clouds. " - Also a quote from Hansen's 15 April 2013 paper.

No they weren't, and here's how I know.

I asked James Hansen.

You see. I read your link, in it's entirety, only I went further. I looked up the references that Hansen cited. The first reference, the reference (12) in your quoted portion is this paper:Ingersoll AP, 1969: Runaway greenhouse - a history of water on Venus. J. Atmos. Sci. 26, 1191-1198. This paper uses a very different approach to that used by Kasting. Essentially, Ingersoll treats the atmosphere as if it was a grey-body. The seond reference, the reference (13) in your quoted portion, the paper that Hansen is saying is the more modern, better approach is this paper: The Runaway Greenhouse: implications for future climate change, geoengineering and planetary atmospheres. uses a different method. It also heavily cites Kasting's 1988 work and draws on it to derive some limits (as near as I can tell, having only skim read it at this point).

In the process of looking further into some things, I came across a set of lecture notes by James Kasting in which he was highly critical of the grey-body approximation for the atmosphere. Having realized that this was the same approximation that James Hansen was critical of I decided to email him and ask him.

Here is a redacted version of the email I sent him. Now, I don't expect you to believe me, however, I'm not going to give you my personal details, so, if you want verification you'll have to settle for me forwarding the email to Fraggle Rocker and him confirming it in thread.

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 10:32 PM, Sean Leslie <████.████@████.████.██> wrote:

Hi Dr Hansen.

I understand you probably receive hundreds of emails per day, but I have a brief question about your essay on climate science communication.

In your essay you mentioned that:

The concept of a runaway greenhouse effect was introduced by considering a highly idealized situation with specified troposphere-stratosphere atmospheric structure, a simple approximation for atmospheric radiation, and no inclusion of how clouds might change as climate changes, as is appropriate for introduction of a concept.​

I find myself in something of a quandary. A colleague of mine was suggesting that, in a nutshell, if we weren’t careful we would boil off the oceans and force the Earth to switch to a “hot state” with 600k surface temperatures and a 10,000 PSI atmosphere. I cited James Kasting’s 1988 paper “Runaway and Moist Greenhouse Atmospheres and the Evolution of Earth and Venus: Icarus 74, (1988)” as demonstrating that such a fate was unlikely, in indeed it was possible at all -because, basically, the Earth didn’t receive enough insolation. My colleague has found half a dozen reasons to ignore Kasting’s paper, which to the best of my ability to discern are based on misunderstandings of Kasting’s paper.

More recently, they have decided that your comment quoted above was referring to Kasting’s convective-radiative model as opposed to the grey-atmosphere models which, from what I can tell, Kasting is also generally critical of. So my question is this: Do you include Kasting’s model in that comment? Or were you referring to the models which treat earths atmosphere effectively as a grey-body.

On a more personal note, I’ve always been something of a fan and have admired your enthusiasm for the topic of climate change.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback you could offer.

Sincerely.

████ ████

The response I got was this:

From: James Hansen [mailto:████████@████.███]
Sent: Friday, 16 August 2013 3:16 p.m.
To: Sean Leslie
Cc: James Hansen
Subject: Re: Regarding: Exaggeration, Jumping the Gun, and Venus Syndrome.

No, we do the radiation accurately with the correlated k-distribution method -- you certainly do not want to use a grey approximation for this problem.

Do you understand?

I asked him "Do you include Kasting’s model in that comment?" Where "that comment" was specifically the text you're citing, and the response I got was: "No, we do the radiation accurately with the correlated k-distribution method -- you certainly do not want to use a grey approximation for this problem."

To the best of my ability to discern, Kasting's paper used the correlated k-distribution method, or something very close to it.

There's something else I want to point out to you:
This is Figure 3 from the "Exemplar" paper.

Compare it to figure 5 above.

Do I need to explain the significance of that? Or are you ready to admit that it was you, rather than the paper that was wrong?

 

[Billy T]

Your link was to paper:
Runaway and Moist Greenhouse Atmospheres and the Evolution of Earth and Venus; Kasting, J. F, 1987
The validity of its analysis, I think, is questionable , but I have admitted based on more recent analysis that the oceans will not boil. (99+% sure).

Now Billy, I've been polite. I've refrained from some additional comments that reflect my feelings on this situation. I've shownyou the courtosey of reading your post in full and responding to it in depth, I'd appreciate it if you returned the favour. I've spent around 5 hours preparing this post, between research and typing. I'd appreciate it if you'd show me a little... I dunno, consideration? ...

In spite of telling you I would not reply more as I have little interest it the paper submitted for publication on 12March1986 with the computer calculations in it done in or before 1986 and its authors even admitting that because of cost consideration they had to make simple models rather than solve the radiative / convection equations as more modern computation with faster computer can do, I will try to reply. I am looking at the paper again. It is a PDF and difficult to copy, so first I am testing if I can quote from it:

As I did before, and you ignored, I tell that is only the start of my reply, assuming I can quote from that PDF article, so please wait to see the whole reply before responding. I.e. I am posting this so I don't lose it when switching back to the article.

Paper's page 475 column 1, Section (c):
"Clouds were excluded from most of these calculation..." I'm sorry but had to retype just the start of the paragraph as even with

I can not make the text in the image that I could copy into word, post. I will try to see if I can get a figure to post. (I have a new windows 8 computer and that may be part of the problem. If you can post that paragraph, I thank you.)

I really don't have more time to spend fighting to post quotes and figures from the paper, but now admit that their fig2, which assume the surface pressue is fixed at only twice the earth's present pressure may be just and illustration - that they may have used other, higher surface pressure. I am sorry you, despite my warning of not going to reply more, spent 5 hours replying.

I will admit to not fully understanding the paper as doing so is hard because part of the time they are speaking of Venus, not Earth. As I (like Hansen) have changed from "boiling the oceans might be possible" to that "oceans boiling is at least 99+% impossible in earth's orbit," You are beating a dead horse. I also note that at least 6, I think 8, times I have clearly stated that I was not predicting the oceans would boil (or Earth would switch to its hot stable state).

I have more recently noted that earth will be "human free" if only the oceans evaporate a little faster than they do now (adding more humidity to the air) and temperatures climb to only 40C on the wet bulb (Hansen say a wet bulb of only 35C will exterminate most creatures).

Certainly, as I have discussed in many post for several years, the steady and increasingly rapid release of CO2 is unpresidented in Earth's history (except for brief volcanic "burps") and now is sufficiently rapid that the methane hydrates are decomposing (both in shallow oceans and thawing tundra) so are adding CH4to the air more rapidly. CH4 is a "3D molecule" so at least 10 times more dangerous GHG than "linear 1D molecule" (CO2 = OCO) so the growing CH4 in the air is a cause for concern.

Not only is the CO2 release mildly self accelerating (a positive feed back, as air conditions run more, dead plants decompose more rapidly, forest fire are more frequent, even soot on ice in western Greenland is increasing the albedo, etc.) but the release of CH4 is strongly self accelerating. The carbon stored in those hydrates is a greater quantity than the carbon that was ever stored in in coal and oil! (I. e. global warming makes the methane hydrates rate of decomposoing accelerate.) As the ocean surfaces warm, the really "wicked" GHG in the atmosphere increases. Unlike CO2 and CH4, H2O is a permanently polarized molecule. It of course has absorption bands more effective at blocking IR escape than the other GHG, but as it is a tiny dipole charge distribution so it can absorbe at nearly all wave lengths by changing its rate of rotation.

Your task, if you chose to accept it, is to find some paper showing the wet bulb temperature cannot reach 35C. Again, I accept that the oceans will not boil. As I and many others (Hansen included) once feared they might. Only a wet bulb of 35C will kill us all (after the rich running air conditions, find the power company no longer functions and there is no food at their grocery store, etc. as most humans are dead.) Any such paper you find, will not be very reassuring, if it ignores the accelerating rate of CH4 release, which in the last 25 years has become faster than the atmospheric destruction rate - I.e. now atmospheric concentrations of CH4 are now growing, not essentially static as they were with release rate = destruction rate.

I will certainly read that paper with much more interest and attention than I gave to your older paper (A simplified model with calculations made at least 28 years ago).

I just noticed / remembered you were able to post figures from the paper, so I copied from your post to post this one:

Note from the left one that ALL altitudes are shown with only 200K (or less), even the surface - I think that was the basis for my perhaps false assertion than they assumed a surface temperature 100C leass than currently exits.

 

[Trippy]

Your link was to paper:
Runaway and Moist Greenhouse Atmospheres and the Evolution of Earth and Venus; Kasting, J. F, 1987

Correct. The same paper I directed to James Hansen to. The same paper that uses a more accurate spectral approach rather than working from a grey-body assumption.

The validity of its analysis, I think, is questionable...

And this forms the basis of our current discussion. Yes, the model makes assumptions, yes, the model has weaknesses, but, most (perhaps maybe all) of the assumptions work in the direction of warming, rather than cooling the planet because James Kasting was interested in finding the maximum temperature. One of the reasons why I have been so persistent with this is because it seems to me that all of the objection s you have thus far articulated appear to have been based on misunderstandings of the paper, rather than weaknesses in the paper itself.

...but I have admitted based on more recent analysis that the oceans will not boil. (99+% sure).

That's good to hear.

In spite of telling you I would not reply more as I have little interest it the paper submitted for publication on 12March1986 with the computer calculations in it done in or before 1986 and its authors even admitting that because of cost consideration they had to make simple models rather than solve the radiative / convection equations as more modern computation with faster computer can do...

I didn't claim the paper was perfect, but I cited it for a reason. It was one of the original works on the matter, and it came to the conclusion that a runaway green house was unlikely or impossible. The idea that the earth could become a runaway greenhouse did not arise from models that use a spectral approach as Kasting did, but rather, arose from another approach which Kasting, and subsequently Hansen are both (rightly) critical of which treat the atmosphere as a grey-body. If you're not familiar with the term a grey body emits following blackbody radiation, but also considers reflectance.

I will try to reply. I am looking at the paper again. It is a PDF and difficult to copy, so first I am testing if I can quote from it:

As I did before, and you ignored, I tell that is only the start of my reply, assuming I can quote from that PDF article, so please wait to see the whole reply before responding. I.e. I am posting this so I don't lose it when switching back to the article.

Ahem. Now you're making accusations. In the post I assume you are referring to, there was nothing that I saw that indicated that you had any intention to come back and post further.

Paper's page 475 column 1, Section (c):
"Clouds were excluded from most of these calculation..." I'm sorry but had to retype just the start of the paragraph as even with

I can not make the text in the image that I could copy into word, post. I will try to see if I can get a figure to post. (I have a new windows 8 computer and that may be part of the problem. If you can post that paragraph, I thank you.)

Whether or not you can copy and paste from a PDF depends on the individual PDF. Some PDF's are stored as pages of text, others are stored as a series of images (each page is an image). Kastings paper is a series of images, as is Ingersoll's paper. Hansen's essay and the Goldblatt paper on the other hand are both stored as text.

I really don't have more time to spend fighting to post quotes and figures from the paper...

Install Paint.net it's a reasonable quality open source (free) digital image manipulation suite. Sign up to Flickr. It's a free image hosting website that allows remote linking of images. The shortcut keys you're interested are "alt + print screen" and "ctrl + print screen". Ctrl + Printscreen takes a 'photograph' of your current desktop, in it's entirety, and stores it in your computers memory. You can then paste this photograph into paint.net crop it, save it, then upload it to flickr. Alt + Print Screen takes a photo of only your currently active window (the last window you clicked on). It's how I manage to post figures from papers.

I'm used to multitasking. My current PC runs two monitors. At this moment I have six windows open. Three browser windows, one of which has 7 tabs open in it. An Acrobat Reader window with Kasting's paper open in it, paint.net and notepad, which I find indepensible. Somewhere around I have a more typical work day screen-grabbed.

but now admit that their fig2, which assume the surface pressue is fixed at only twice the earth's present pressure may be just and illustration - that they may have used other, higher surface pressure.

I'm glad to hear it.

This is Figure 2 from Kasting's paper:

The text from the document reads thus:

Figure 2 shows the net upward infrared and net downward solar fluxes for a moist greenhouse atmosphere with a surface temperature of 100°C. The surface pressure of this atmosphere is 2 bar, half of which is attributable to water vapor and the rest to N[sub]2[/sub] and O[sub]2[/sub]. The solar flux shown here is consistent with a solar constant of 1.136 S[sub]0[/sub] - the value required to acheive flux balance with the outgoing infrared radiation at the top of the atmosphere. Infra red fluxes have in this case been calculated at all levels; this extravagance is not retained in the calculations presented in the next section.
Figure 2 demonstrates that water vapor is a much better absorber of thermal infrared radiation than of visible and near-infrared radiation: The net inrared flux eclines by nearly a factor of 1000 towards the surface, whereas the net solarflux decreases by only a factor of 3. The lower portion of this atmosphere should therefore be convective, as indeed it has been assumed to be. This prediction is in apparent conflict with the results of Watson et al. (1984), who found that the moist convective region of a water-rich atmosphere should be underlain by a region in radiative equilibrium. Their calculations is not strictly comparable to the one shown here; nevertheless, it is hard to reconcile their results with the large differences in visible and infrared opacities calculated by the present model. The most likely explanation for the difference between the two models is that their estimated opacities were lower, as indicated by the persistence of transmission windows near 1.02, 1.22, and 1.6 [microns] in the lower portion of their model atmosphere.​

They're examining a specific instance and comparing it to the results of another paper which presumably uses a similar methodology. I say presumably because I haven't taken the time to look it up.

I am sorry you, despite my warning of not going to reply more, spent 5 hours replying.

I'm persistent because in the past you have shown yourself to be reasonable, and I have been genuinely convinced that the faults you have articulated have not been faults with the actual paper. Sometimes I reply for the benefit of third parties as much as mu interlocutor.

I will admit to not fully understanding the paper as doing so is hard because part of the time they are speaking of Venus, not Earth.

A step in the right direction.

The paper is not a climate change paper, nor is the Journal it was published in a climate change jounral. The paper is a planetary science paper examining the evolution of the Venusian atmosphere compared to the atmosphere of Earth, the Journal is a premier planetary science journal, and the author is a planetary scientist. The paper, however, is relevant because it is not a grey body treatment, which as you now realize is inaccurate, and examines the conditions underwhich a planet might evolve into an venus like state. I linked to it because it comes to the conclusion that the earth has insufficient insolation to evolve into an venus like state, cites several other papers that come to the same conclusion, and is not a grey body treatment which always struck me as being unreliable.

As I (like Hansen) have changed from "boiling the oceans might be possible" to that "oceans boiling is at least 99+% impossible in earth's orbit," You are beating a dead horse. I also note that at least 6, I think 8, times I have clearly stated that I was not predicting the oceans would boil (or Earth would switch to its hot stable state).

That's not what you originally said, and it's also not actually the source of our current disagreement. You have in the past mentioned runaway greenhouses with atmospheric pressures of 10,000 PSI (680 bar) - another reason I cited Kasting's paper, because they explicitly stated that there was only enough water in the oceans to raise the air atmospheric pressure to 270 Bar, which is still three times the atmospheric pressure of Venus.

I have more recently noted that earth will be "human free" if only the oceans evaporate a little faster than they do now (adding more humidity to the air) and temperatures climb to only 40C on the wet bulb (Hansen say a wet bulb of only 35C will exterminate most creatures).

Certainly, as I have discussed in many post for several years, the steady and increasingly rapid release of CO2 is unpresidented in Earth's history (except for brief volcanic "burps") and now is sufficiently rapid that the methane hydrates are decomposing (both in shallow oceans and thawing tundra) so are adding CH4to the air more rapidly. CH4 is a "3D molecule" so at least 10 times more dangerous GHG than "linear 1D molecule" (CO2 = OCO) so the growing CH4 in the air is a cause for concern.

Certainly Methane is a more efficient absorber than carbon dioxide... It also has a shorter halflife because it is not thermodynamicly stable in an oxidizing atmosphere and is prone to photolysis.

Not only is the CO2 release mildly self accelerating (a positive feed back, as air conditions run more, dead plants decompose more rapidly, forest fire are more frequent, even soot on ice in western Greenland is increasing the albedo, etc.) but the release of CH4 is strongly self accelerating. The carbon stored in those hydrates is a greater quantity than the carbon that was ever stored in in coal and oil! (I. e. global warming makes the methane hydrates rate of decomposoing accelerate.) As the ocean surfaces warm, the really "wicked" GHG in the atmosphere increases. Unlike CO2 and CH4, H2O is a permanently polarized molecule. It of course has absorption bands more effective at blocking IR escape than the other GHG, but as it is a tiny dipole charge distribution so it can absorbe at nearly all wave lengths by changing its rate of rotation.

The flip side is that the presence of water in the atmosphere is strongly controlled by the Clapeyron-Clausius equation (I think that's the right one anyway) and the absorption bands for water are more completely saturated than they are for methane or carbon dioxide.

Your task, if you chose to accept it, is to find some paper showing the wet bulb temperature cannot reach 35C.

I'll pass, if it's all the same to you. Although having said that, the paper that I linked to earlier - Methane Hydrate Stability and Anthropogenic Climate Change has done some work analyzing various methane release rates, the likelyhood of various scenarios, and what their likely outcomes are.

Again, I accept that the oceans will not boil. As I and many others (Hansen included) once feared they might.

Good.

I will certainly read that paper with much more interest and attention than I gave to your older paper (A simplified model with calculations made at least 28 years ago).

A simplified model thirty years old that was already so good that it has only recently been improved on and is still widely used. The same model that is sanctioned by Hansen as being more accurate than any of the alternatives.

Perhaps you need to set your biases aside from time to time.

I just noticed / remembered you were able to post figures from the paper, so I copied from your post to post this one:

Note from the left one that ALL altitudes are shown with only 200K (or less), even the surface - I think that was the basis for my perhaps false assertion than they assumed a surface temperature 100C leass than currently exits.

Yes. They did runs at 260 K (-15°C) and 300 K (25°C) to confirm the accuracy of their model.

260 K The effective temperature of a greybody with an albedo of 0.3 (low end for earth's range) is 255 K. They used an albedo of 0.22 (I think). This may be a reflection of that.
300 K and 1 atm is "Standard Ambient Temperature and Pressure" (Not to be confused with IUPAC STP). 300K is also the standard temperature used in some european emission standards.

Hopefully that explains that to your satisfaction?

After all if the model doesn't predict earth like conditions with an earth like atmosphere at an earth like location...

 

[Billy T]

... The same paper I directed to James Hansen to. The same paper that uses a more accurate spectral approach rather than working from a grey-body assumption.

I identified two assumptions in the paper that lead me (correctly or incorrectly) to reject its conclusion, that Earth was too far from the sun for the ocean to boil.
Neither was the assertion that they used a grey-body radiation model.

I think you asked Hansen the wrong question (and thus got his reply about using grey-body radiation modeling being a serious error). You should have asked:

“ What defects or omissions in the widely read and cited Kasting's 1987 paper lead him to reject its conclusion so he too suggested in his book, Storms of our Grandchildren, published long after the paper appeared, that the Earth's oceans could boil and leave Earth a sterile planet? ”

He is the expert and could tell you much better than me what is so wrong in the paper that its conclusions can and should be ignored as Hansen did too.
(Even though more correct models run a couple of decades later, confirmed that the Earth's oceans will not boil.)

... Now you're making accusations. In the post I assume you are referring to, there was nothing that I saw that indicated that you had any intention to come back and post further....

Then you don't read what I wrote or you even copied and included in your post 155. I said and you copied:

“When writing a post I can not easily go into another thread to copy the link without losing what I have written so I either post the incompleted post (as I will this one) or give just the post number, which I have written on paper.”

Thanks for the detailed instructions on how to copy and post part of a PDF file when it will not let you do that in the normal simple way. I will probably never be so desperate to copy and post from a pdf that I will do all that, but it is nice to know that it is possible, even if quite complex.

 

[Trippy]

You're missing the point here Billy:

I identified two assumptions in the paper that lead me (correctly or incorrectly) to reject its conclusion, that Earth was too far from the sun for the ocean to boil.

Yes, I'm aware of that. The basis of our discussion has been the fact that based on my understanding of the paper your objections have been things that you haven't understood correctly from the paper. In this regard I have two aims. The first aim is to help you correct your understanding. My second aim is to stop other readers from falling into your traps based on your misunderstandings.

Neither was the assertion that they used a grey-body radiation model.

Didn't say it was: re-read what I have said in this thread, take the time to understand it rather than simply reacting to it.
I was doing some additional research.
I came across some lecture notes by James Kasting which he uses for teaching.
Those lecture notes used parts of his 1988 paper and were condeming of the grey-body model.
I then asked Hansen which class of early models he was condeming, the early grey-body models or the early models which took a spectral approach.
He stated it was the grey body models. He doesn't explicitly call it that, but Kasting's model is a cumulative k approach but you have to examine Appednix B very closely to understand that.

I think you asked Hansen the wrong question (and thus got his reply about using grey-body radiation modeling being a serious error).

You're entitled to your opinion.

You should have asked:

“ What defects or omissions in the widely read and cited Kasting's 1987 paper lead him to reject its conclusion so he too suggested in his book, Storms of our Grandchildren, published long after the paper appeared, that the Earth's oceans could boil and leave Earth a sterile planet? ”

But I don't need to. I've read the paper, multiple times, I've spent far more time studying it then you have. I'm well aware of what the shortcomings of the paper are, what assumptions they've made, and what directions they can be expected to push the surface temperature. It helps that the authors have been fairly candid on the matter. As I have pointed out repeatedly, Kasting was looking for the maximum temperature, so the assumptions he made tended to push the temperature up, not down.

He is the expert and could tell you much better than me what is so wrong in the paper that its conclusions can and should be ignored as Hansen did too. (Even though more correct models run a couple of decades later, confirmed that the Earth's oceans will not boil.)

I don't need him to tell me, I'm capable of working it out for myself. Just as I'm perfectly capable of realizing that different groups of scientists may have been using different models to describe the same thing. The general impression I get is that, for a time at least, where the planetary scientists were using a spectrum based approach and crunching absorption values across specific wave number bands, the climatologists were treating the atmosphere as a grey body. It wouldn't be the first time it happened. To me it seems stupid because I'm something of a polymath and have no qualms about borrowing models from one science to use in another where it fits better, however, I'm also aware that the '70s and '80s seemed to see an increasing inwards focus where specialists became incresingly focused on their own branch and multi disciplinary studies were generally discouraged. That has changed. Maybe Hansen was simply unaware of the Cumulative K Distribution methodology when he published "Storms of my Grandchildren."

Has that ever occured to you? He may be an expert, but he is, when push comes to shove, only human. He may simply have been unaware of the CKD approach until recently.

Then you don't read what I wrote or you even copied and included in your post 155. I said and you copied:

“When writing a post I can not easily go into another thread to copy the link without losing what I have written so I either post the incompleted post (as I will this one) or give just the post number, which I have written on paper.”

Take a moment to listen to yourself Billy.

I simply missed it when I went back and looked before I replied to you. No biggy. I live in a house with two children under the age of five and a wife with Multiple Sclerosis. My life is prone to distraction and interruption. Occasionally I miss things irrespective of how careful I try to be when reading anothers post. Either I got distracted and overlooked it, or simply didn't parse the bracketed comment the way you intended it to be parsed.

Thanks for the detailed instructions on how to copy and post part of a PDF file when it will not let you do that in the normal simple way. I will probably never be so desperate to copy and post from a pdf that I will do all that, but it is nice to know that it is possible, even if quite complex.

It's not that complicated. Also, if you hold down the Shift key when you click on a link it will open it in a new window, preserving your post as you type it. Like wise, if you hold down the Ctrl key when you left click on a link it will open it in a new tab, also preserving your post.

 

[Billy T]

Trippy as you seem to know about computers perhaps you (or any one else reading) can tell how to attach a file on my desk top to an Email. With my new windows 8 my yahoo email is ALWAYS full screen - I have not found any way to change that. So I can't see the file on the desk top to click on it and / or drag in into the attach part of the Yahoo page.

If I just click on the attach box of the yahoo page and new screen opens and I can find the file I want to attach in that new screen, I click on the file, I open the file, etc. and then go back to the Yahoo page but File is never attached. Yahoo's help is useless - it just tells me to do what I have tried many times. If I could just make the yahoo page less than full screen I could drag the file as suggested.

 

[Trippy]

Trippy as you seem to know about computers perhaps you (or any one else reading) can tell how to attach a file on my desk top to an Email. With my new windows 8 my yahoo email is ALWAYS full screen - I have not found any way to change that. So I can't see the file on the desk top to click on it and / or drag in into the attach part of the Yahoo page.

If I just click on the attach box of the yahoo page and new screen opens and I can find the file I want to attach in that new screen, I click on the file, I open the file, etc. and then go back to the Yahoo page but File is never attached. Yahoo's help is useless - it just tells me to do what I have tried many times. If I could just make the yahoo page less than full screen I could drag the file as suggested.

I don't really use Windows 8 (my wifes computer came with it preinstalled). However, it sounds like either you need to get out of Metro Mode (do you have a desktop visible when you close IE?) or you need to press F-11 to get out of full screen mode.

Are you using IE and doing it via webmail, or are you using the bundled software (presumably a variant on outlook)?

You wouldn't be trying to email Hansen Kastings paper by any chance would you?

 

[Trippy]

Billy T, if you're still having problems with it...

When you log in to Yahoo! Web Mail, and click on compose a new message, you should see something that looks like this:

If you click on the paper clip (circled) then you will get a dialog box that looks like this:

Which you can then use to navigate to your file location.

 

[wellwisher]

During the end of the last ice age, there was a very significant global warming far worse than today. The glaciers had grown from the arctic, to about central Europe and central USA. This global warming caused all the animals to panic, since they assumed doom and gloom caused by cavemen and fire. The glaciers did melt, all the way back to the Arctic circle, but still life went on. The frozen land became home to thousands of new species. The doom and gloomiest of today, who capitalize on the windfall of fear, think warming is unique and seem to forget about history before man. That history is inconvenient truth, to quote Gore, since it makes it harder to exploit the fear for those who are bring taught revisionist history.

 

[Trippy]

During the end of the last ice age, there was a very significant global warming far worse than today. The glaciers had grown from the arctic, to about central Europe and central USA. This global warming caused all the animals to panic, since they assumed doom and gloom caused by cavemen and fire. The glaciers did melt, all the way back to the Arctic circle, but still life went on. The frozen land became home to thousands of new species. The doom and gloomiest of today, who capitalize on the windfall of fear, think warming is unique and seem to forget about history before man. That history is inconvenient truth, to quote Gore, since it makes it harder to exploit the fear for those who are bring taught revisionist history.

That sure is an interesting fairy tale you have there. Where'd you get it? The Grimm Brothers?