I’ve been engaging in some discussions with people I shall politely call climate “skeptics”. It struck me that it’s a bit like the classic Black Knight scene from Monty Python. Start off being polite and complimentary. The resonse is unpleasant and aggressive. A metaphoric battle ensues. No amount of pretty clear evidence will convince the “skeptic” to change their mind. When it’s clear that there’s not much point of carrying on, they will insist they’ve won and that you’re a coward who’s running away.
P.S. For those unfamiliar with Monty Python, or who don’t have a sense of humour, I’m very certainly not suggesting that the solution to the online climate wars is to take up arms against climate “skeptics”, or engage in any form of physical violence.
...and Then There's Physics 
Alternatively:
I think the black knight types are generally in it for the fight, no real interest in the science or consequences, just climate ball players.
Willard,
Yes, that is an alternative sketch.
Small,
I think that many are simply in it for the fight, even if they won’t admit it (to themselves, in some cases).
Alternatively
I wonder at the efficacy of 40-year-old comedy. I enjoyed Monty Python at the time. Who knows? Perhaps it’s a case of the classics enduring.
I have noticed that the syncopated nature of climate conversations on this and other consensus blogs seems to have a direct correlation with the amount of control exercised by the blogger. As I recall, people didn’t run away from Bart Verheggen’s blog–he didn’t evaluate and decide the fate of each comment, sometimes at a glacial pace. I think the ‘conversation’ benefited mightily from that.
And 10 years later, I would still argue that the best mechanism for keeping the climate conversation fresh and focused would be the establishment of a wiki focused on climate change, with text evaluated by recognizable figures from two of the three sides in the argument, such as ATTP or Bart and Judith Curry or Steve McIntyre. Blue for text accepted by the consensus, red for text accepted by the non-consensus, purple for text accepted by both.
“I’ve been engaging in some discussions with people I shall politely call climate “skeptics”. ”
Citation required
vtg,
It was on cliscep, and I have used some artistic license 🙂 (partly, because most of my comments were ultimately not posted).
Climate skeptics is polite. Usually the consensus folks call us climate deniers, which is not polite and also inaccurate. But I do consider myself a climate skeptic, in that I think only about 1/2 of the warming is caused by humans and 1/2 is from natural causes. I think I might also be called a lukewarmer (a term I believe was coined by Steven Mosher). I consider the denier label very very rude and so I appreciate that you have moved away from calling people by that label.
Thank you ATTP.
ThomasFuller2 would that be the Prof Curry that refuses to discuss the argument of Salby that she promoted on her blog, and the Steve McIntyre that dismisses valid statistical arguments as “arid pontificating” while trying to defend an obviously bogus paper (Douglass et al.)?
Tom,
Some of that is a feature, rather than a bug. I’m quite comfortable with the tone of the comments here, and that was partly due to quite strict moderation early on. The reason why it’s difficult to keep the climate conversation fresh, is that it’s difficult to not end up repeating oneself over and over again. The goal is not really to have interesting and novel conversations (as nice as that might be) but to highlight our best understanding of climate change. This hasn’t changed all that much in recent years (other than the evidence more strongly confirming the anthropogenic nature).
Rick,
I see you’re buying into the comedy aspect of this post 🙂
This is not impossible, but rather unlikely. It would imply that either we misunderstand the direct effect of increasing atmospheric CO2, or have over-estimated – by quite a lot – the change in external forcing, or that somehow the system does not respond the externally-driven warming, but does to internally-driven warming. The latter is logically inconsistent, and the first two seem rather implausible.
Richard “ I think only about 1/2 of the warming is caused by humans and 1/2 is from natural causes. ”
specifically what are the natural causes post 1970?
p.s. I think “alarmist” is at least as rude and (more generally) inapplicable than “denier”, however the reason I don’t tend to object frequently or use the word “denier” is because It’s just a flesh wound ;o)
Or rather ‘‘tis but a scratch”
A few years ago the BBC was awash with climate denial and couldn’t mention climate change without inviting a denier to contradict the science. The same was true for many newspapers. However, in the last year or so it’s become very clear to even the average citizen that climate ‘skeptics’ are a fringe group—rather like the ‘flat-Earthers’—who are completely out of step with the rest of society, never mind the scientific community. The distinction must surely become more obvious with every passing day.
Tom, Thanks, although PM may not be pleased.
> Climate skeptics is polite.
It’s also inaccurate. Contrarian is better:
***
> I have noticed that the syncopated nature of climate conversations on this and other consensus blogs seems to have a direct correlation with the amount of control exercised by the blogger.
Playing the ref is boring and against AT’s rules. Judy’s and Tony’s and Paul’s are mostly dead. There always has been moderation at Bart’s when a façade of plausible deniability broke down and the contrarian propaganda became too loud.
Besides, the concern is somewhat ironic.
Willard:
> I have noticed that the syncopated nature of climate conversations on this and other consensus blogs seems to have a direct correlation with the amount of control exercised by the blogger.
Playing the ref is boring and against AT’s rules. Judy’s and Tony’s and Paul’s are mostly dead. There always has been moderation at Bart’s when a façade of plausible deniability broke down and the contrarian propaganda became too loud.
Besides, the concern is somewhat ironic.
Tony has piled cocertina wire on his automated censorship border wall , producing conversation about as lively as a Norwegian Blue in an echo chamber.
But Judy has left matters to usual suspects in her conntrarian commentariat, which still twitches if you press the Twitter button.
Their cricket noises following decapitations in the libel courts can be amusing too.
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2019/06/things-anthony-watts-judith-curry-dont.html
A lot of the AGW skeptics I’ve come across are actually fans of science in general, but think climate science, specifically, has been subverted for political ends, “NASA is fudging the numbers. If you believe what
they’re selling you’re even a bigger fool than I thought”.
This represents an entirely different mindset than those with views like Richard Arrett, who have simply reached a different conclusion than the consensus. To put the two groups in the the same boat and call them both deniers doesn’t seem fair.
@Rick
Re. “I think only about 1/2 of the warming is caused by humans and 1/2 is from natural causes.” You have to deny more than a bit of consensus science in order to come to this belief. If you deny something, what noun applies according to most dictionaries?
ATTP, as an occasional contributor to CliScep I have back end privileges. I rarely head over there these days, as I don’t feel qualified to discuss Brexit-related matters, but I noticed and approved three comments of yours that were pending. If there were others, let me know.
“It was on cliscep”
I’ve said it before – up to you of course, but commenting on sites where calling you a “rape troll” is acceptable is, IMO, not a good idea.
Richard and Tom – re “Climate skeptics is polite.” and “I have back end privileges”
Tom F:
”
I wonder at the efficacy of 40-year-old comedy. I enjoyed Monty Python at the time. Who knows? Perhaps it’s a case of the classics enduring.
I have noticed that the syncopated nature of climate conversations on this and other consensus blogs seems to have a direct correlation with the amount of control exercised by the blogger. As I recall, people didn’t run away from Bart Verheggen’s blog–he didn’t evaluate and decide the fate of each comment, sometimes at a glacial pace. I think the ‘conversation’ benefited mightily from that.
And 10 years later, I would still argue…
”
Richard A:
”
But I do consider myself a climate skeptic, in that I think only about 1/2 of the warming is caused by humans and 1/2 is from natural causes. I think I might also be called a lukewarmer (a term I believe was coined by Steven Mosher). I consider the denier label very very rude and so I appreciate that you have moved away from calling people by that label.
”
Tom F:
”
I disagree with you–I don’t think…
I wouldn’t judge…
I have corresponded with them for several years. And I will tell you that these are intelligent people of good will who actually believe scientists are adjusting various data streams with malign intent. I do not agree…
”
Could you guys maybe work a few more instances of the first-person singular nominative pronoun into your comments concerning the black knight?
What ClimateBall really needs right now is more blog-etiquette editorializing, opinion-anecdotes, and identity politics.
“VTG, as someone who has been blogging and commenting on blogs for over a decade, I disagree with you–I don’t think a blog or blogger should be judged by their commenters. ”
1. I disagree. Indeed I take the precise opposite view.
2. It was indeed one of the authors.
“you should ponder what leads them to that position. It did not just pop into their heads unaided.”
1. Lewandowsky had a very convincing hypothesis on this.
2. See your note on Brexit.
My response to Tom seems to have appeared before his comment which prompted it.
I mean, I know I’m quick witted and all, but not *that* quick
Thomas Fuller :
“–I don’t think a blog or blogger should be judged by their commenters.”
One should not judge a dog by its fleas, but a flea circus is another matter.
“–I don’t think a blog or blogger should be judged by their commenters. ‘
I also disagree, at leat if the blogger makes no attempt to discourage bad behaviour of their commenters.
FWIW, IMHO Cliscep is pretty much condemned by their best commenter, never mind the worst, judging by my one visit there.
It’s a mystery, all right.
(It appears that I went back in time to respond to Tom’s post at 8:28 pm)
VTG, as someone who has been blogging and commenting on blogs for over a decade, I disagree with you–I don’t think a blog or blogger should be judged by their commenters. It’s quite possible that the comment you’re referring to was made by one of the many authors at Cliscep, in which case my remark is irrelevant and yours should hold sway. But on the whole, I wouldn’t judge ATTP’s efforts here by the worst of his commenters, and nor would I do so for Cliscep.
Regarding the current thread over there, something those who are regulars here should really take to heart: I have corresponded with them for several years. And I will tell you that these are intelligent people of good will who actually believe scientists are adjusting various data streams with malign intent. I do not agree with them–at all. However, you should ponder what leads them to that position. It did not just pop into their heads unaided.
Of which you should be ashamed, especially given the first quote on the front is just normal scientific parlance for a clever technique, with no intent to deceive and the second is just hyperbole as humour.
Of course as I work at UEA and have worked with CRU, I’m sure you will simply dismiss my view as biased (which may contain traces of irony).
“However, you should ponder what leads them to that position”
I suspect the iron law of crank magnetism – let me guess they are all rabid Brexit “no dealers / WTO” endlessly crapping on about “GAT24” and “if only brexit wasn’t sabotaged by remainers” (despite all the Brexit secretaries the foreign and trade secretaries being rabid brexiteers too)
you get more sense on the David Icke forums
> Thanks for the plug [refers to a comment that has been deleted because it messed up with WP’s threading – W]
It looks more of a way to put “someone who has been blogging and commenting” into perspective than a plug. Mileage varies, but not to the point of breaking basic pragmatics. Speaking of which, a recent exchange:
[Vladimir] Estragon has been writing about me again.
[Estragon] My article was not about your work, but about Pozzo’s.
[Vladimir] LOL, you mention me 5 times in your piece.
[Estragon] Pozzo wrote about you. I mostly wrote about Pozzo.
[Vladimir] Unlike Pozzo you have speculated incorrectly and pejoratively on my motives and mischaracterized the focus and substance of my work.
[Estragon] Pozzo may flatter you and I don’t, but it’s Pozzo who has mischaracterized the substance of your results, and in my opinion you should state exactly that in a plain and unambiguous way.
[Vladimir] This is false […] This is false […] This is false […]
[Estragon] Je me fiche de tout ça. If I concede all those points it doesn’t weaken the thrust of my article or help Pozzo’s.
[Vladimir] LOL – well, good to have that on record.
[Lucky] Apologies for butting in, but this does seem to be a key issue. Pozzo’s article does indeed seem to be implying no link between [A and B]. This seems to be patently false, for many reasons.
[Vladimir] Should you guys ever wish to read and engage this large body of peer-reviewed work […]
[Lucky] Should you ever wish to respond to the point being made, you are welcome to do so.
[Vladimir] Every time I invoke our actual research you run away with a little snark.
[Lucky] If you think Pozzo’s article fairly represents your work, then it would seem that you’re comfortable with articles that use your work to make incorrect inferences about the relationship between climate change and extreme events.
[Vladimir] Pozzo writes accurately […] He also summarizes accurately […]
[Lucky] Again, it’s not explicitly about you, or your work. It’s about how it’s being used in articles like that presented by Pozzo.
[Vladimir] So long as you guys keep writing about me and my work I’ll continue to think that you guys are writing “explicitly about” me and my work. Quirky on my part, I know.
[Lucky] You could always try reading what is written. Quirky, I know.
Just a flesh wound, I guess.
> I know I’m quick witted and all, but not *that* quick
Seems related to the usage of the WP bell button at the top right.
vtg,
You are, of course, quite right. I had forgotten about that episode, though.
Tom,
In my view this is largely inconsistent. You can’t be intelligent, of good will *and* believe scientists are adjusting various data streams with malign intent.
“In my view this is largely inconsistent. You can’t be intelligent, of good will *and* believe scientists are adjusting various data streams with malign intent.”
That was the argument against the scientists working on the “star wars” anti-missile shield in the ’80s (that they were fudging the ability to accomplish the task of hitting a missile).
All of peak oil advocacy is the art of claiming government (IEA and EIA) and private industry scientists are falsifying data on the availability of gas and oil.
Re-read what the anti-GMO gang said and wrote about scientists who worked in genetics and said the food was safe.
Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists have certainly doubted nuclear scientists.
Unfortunately, accusing science of fraud has a long history with no particular political pedigree. It doesn’t really work to suggest that disbelieving “science” it’s all fair and good when you agree with it.
Also there still is a Flat Earth Society.
Oddly enough, Flat Earthers OFFICIALLY acknowledge “climate change,” though the term “global” is conspicuous in its absence:
This is an issue that extends well beyond climate science, right? Example: Even though Trump is known to constantly lie about anything and everything, to his 30% to 35% core supporter audience it doesn’t matter.
so we have this comment:
Jeff said:
The conventional oil is obviously heavily depleted in the USA since the industry has gone to extreme lengths (and heavily leveraged debt) to pry secondary oil out of shale deposits. Of course this won’t last either, yet one can’t convince people like Jeff of this inevitability.
Black knights exist for every progressive issue.
jeff,
I didn’t say it had a political pedigree. I was suggesting that intelligent people who have good will would probably not do it.
@Dave Benson
Most flatearthers are climate change deniers (sort of obvious but worth repeating) and most UK ones are also very keen Brexiteers, and I imagine their nonsense musings on Brexit would be indistinguishable from the guys/gals at CLISCEP
@Corey That tweet seems to come from the flatearth society – I am not sure whether they actually believe it, historically it was used as a rather tongue in cheek satirical name to highlight the fact the members took slight contrarian / sideways view on many things – not that they actually believed in a flatearth
this was certainly the case 20 odd years ago – maybe they have been inundated with “entryist” – but even that tweet (like the one that says “members all around the globe”) has a sly self awareness that is missing from committed and well known/active flatearthers (Mark Sargent, Bob Nodel, Eric Dubey, Jeranism, Dave Murphy etc etc)
Mark Sargent – one of the “stars” of the modern flatearth movement even asserts that he was a committed conspiracy theorist, 911 Twoofer – tick, Chemtrailer, tick, Climate change denier -tick – etc etc before he went full flatearth
Mark viewed flatearth as “madness” – but after a couple of YouTube videos (by Eric Dubay – the father of modern flatearth) he convinced himself and produced his own one video “200 clues ..”
it is simply the pull of crank magnetism
these videos contain all sorts of science btw – a sort of alt.fysics (the Cavendish experiment, the Michelson–Morley experiment, light refraction and diffraction etc etc,)
hence most people would have a hard time debunking them in a casual conversation – they know their stuff tbh
Belief in a flatearth is a small but rising and very active belief system atm
Is dismissing the actual research (identifying and quantifying biases in the data) and accusing the scientists of [cognitive] bias ‘good will’
‘Throughout, the paper talks of biases in the data and how they are removed. But the authors seem to be oblivious to the biggest source of bias, that taking place in their own heads.’
Personally, I’d say “no, it isn’t”.
The most recent, and monster sized, rain event is in the Irkutsk region of Siberia. For the hardly believable photos and videos see the Siberian Times.
There’s a truism that power never gives up power without a struggle. It is also true that such a struggle can be violent or non-violent. I find it instructive to remember that after 9/11 the first named domestic terrorist group in the US was the non-violent Earth Liberation Front. Or those who are completely cool with/pragmatic about violence project this predilection onto any organized resistance to a violently maintained status quo.
Can a loyal ‘opposition’ to such violence – and our nations seem to be good at doing that violence together – be a threat to power that maintains itself through violence?
In this interchange, as framed, wielding a sword of reason in a battle for truth may, in another framing, also be unwittingly making a fool of oneself; being the butt of a joke one doesn’t get … or, is a different/second Black Knight possible? Remember, on [a]social media, engaged in contraversary creates economic value. Since this interchange has been ongoin, can you be sure your knowledge and arguments were not being gathered to improve climateball skills; increase revenue potential?
Regardless, and to increase the plausibility that those who do violence are denied the high ground* in this fight, when might we hear that academia, via its social institutions, has collaboratively implemented a zero carbon economy business plan for this sector?
* I saw yesterday that the Republican relection campaign for 45 has raised $105 million – as compared with Obama’s $86 million at this time in his relection bid. So if money defines high ground …
A bit late now! But you should heed the furore over the release of the exploding kids video.
which is just a copy of Python how not to be seen
Some people just do not understand Python humour!
————————————-
Richard Arrett says: July 2, 2019 at 3:45 pm
Usually the consensus folks call us climate deniers, which is not polite and also inaccurate.
————————–
Most sceptics deny that there is a problem that needs addressing what would you call them?
the denier title is used because they say there is no problem and will not change their view. It has nothing to do with the holocaust.
Rabett had a post which I think is very relevant
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2019/05/eli-is-getting-impatient.html
it comes down to questioning the denier:
Why are you stealing the sacrifice of those who died in the Holocaust?
You use the sacrifice of others to deflect criticism of your duplicity
Another bunch who wants to steal the suffering of the Holocaust victims for themselves.
OK, I read the cliscep post and comments.
Weird how they get called deniers and no-one takes them seriously.
Is Paul Matthews *really* an academic?? This one presumably https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/mathematics/people/paul.matthews
Amazing.
Re. “All of peak oil advocacy is the art of claiming government (IEA and EIA) and private industry scientists are falsifying data on the availability of gas and oil.”
Many managers, politicos, administrators,. etc. routinely falsify data in an attempt to control the msg. Re. oil, consider how the oil company responsible for the longest spill in the Gulf of Mexico falsely reported the spill was generating only THREE gallons per day. I highly doubt any scientist they may have hired found that value. Certainly I know of no peer reviewed source which published it.
This is expectable because managers, politicos, administrators,. etc. get paid and promoted for messaging which is good for the company/entity they work for and they rarely get fired for lies in the interests of their employers.
While there are and have been scientists who have falsified data/results scientists most definitely do NOT get paid and promoted for such behavior. In fact even one instance of such is often a career ending move in terms of getting further grants, etc.
There is some middle ground, Tobacco Institute scientists certainly shaded things if not outright lied. Teller likely shaded things over Star Wars. But look where many of that group went: They are now shilling for oil corporations and think tanks. Teller and Fred Singer then–and Happer now–are most definitely not publishing any peer reviewed science. They were and are politicos. They are not in any positions producing peer reviewed science.
vtg,
Yes, I’m pretty sure that is the same Paul Matthews. You might expect an academic associated with cliscep to provide some kind of moderating influence. In this case, you’d be wrong.
“Any future comments from Mosher will go into moderation and will only be let through if they are written in clear English and say something relevant and true.”
Pity they weren’t running away from Eli, but never mind ;o)
jgnfld says:
Agree on this one. jeffnsails850 is projecting a fallacious argument. What we have to remember is that the “peak oil advocacy” that he criticizes originates from earth scientists that are neutral observers — and so they can’t fabricate any data, which makes it the converse of the climate scientists’ dilemma.
In short, climate scientists are accused of Hiding the Decline in the global temperature hiatus, while for peak oil, it’s the bureaucrats who are accused of Hiding the Decline in oil availability.
This Paul Mathews has what appears to be a strong background in fluid dynamics, which is known to be a very frustrating discipline in terms of predicting long-term behaviors. I can see how a degree of cynicism can set in on not being able to make real mathematical progress — c.f. the Navier-Stokes equation millennium prize problem. It may not be his issue but that is definitely what bothers certain other skeptics that I run into, manifesting at least in part in the Curry “uncertainty monster” skepticism.
Snape, what would you call a Young Earth Creationist who accepts micro-evolution within Kinds but insists on Special Creation of Kinds?
Along with the Black Knights, I also run into the Lloyd Virgil Christmas types who are willing to dismiss the issue of global warming as long as there’s a chance that it will be manageable.
“In short, climate scientists are accused of Hiding the Decline in the global temperature hiatus, while for peak oil, it’s the bureaucrats who are accused of Hiding the Decline in oil availability.”
Here’s the education history of the current chief “bureaucrat” for the US Energy Information Agency Dr. Linda Capuano’s, a former Rice University professor and fellow of that school’s Baker Institute for Energy Studies:
Linda was awarded the Technical Excellence Award by the Society of Women
Engineers and the IBM Outstanding Achievement Award, recognizing
contributions to computer memory storage. She received her PhD in materials
science and engineering and MS in engineering management from Stanford
University; an MS in chemistry and a BS in chemical engineering from the
University of Colorado at Boulder; and a BS in chemistry from the State University
of New York at Stony Brook.
Per ATTP, do people who question her manipulation of data disagree with her, or lack “intelligence and good will”? How does one tell the difference?
Jeff,
Maybe I wasn’t clear. I’m talking about a situation where people think there is some kind of global conspiracy. I’m not talking about a situation where there is clear evidence for a scientist (or group of scientists) manipulating data. If people believe that the global surface temperature datasets have been manipulated, then that implies a large number of people are involved in doing something explicitly dishonest and that another large number of people (who should be able to work this out) accepting this. It’s hard to see how someone who is both intelligent and of good will believing that this is actually possible.
who actually believe scientists are adjusting various data streams with malign intent. I do not agree with them–at all. However, you should ponder what leads them to that position. It did not just pop into their heads unaided.
Probably has a lot to do with this (false charges of tampering by folks who either ought to know better or ought to be ignored), which is then spread as gospel by this, . (cranks with a platform).
jeffnsails850 says:
“Per ATTP, do people who question her manipulation of data disagree with her, or lack “intelligence and good will”? How does one tell the difference?”
Another point is that bureaucratic agencies such as EIA and IEA have consistently overestimated oil production forecasts over the years. If you look at early forecasts from those agencies, we should be thankful that those didn’t come true, otherwise we would have much higher levels of atmospheric CO2.
Perhaps in the case of bureaucratic organizations it’s hard to tell the difference between lack of skill in forecasting and deliberate fudging of forecasting.
It may also be that some folks are just predisposed to conspiracy theories.
Err, no. You’re confusing 3 with 30,000. The argument that led to the court case was about where it lay between 30,000 and 60,000 (or numbers like that – I can’t be bothered looking for the exact numbers and it’s the order of magnitude that counts anyway, plus it was fluctuating so there is no single magic number). The early, pre-video estimates were joint by the company and the Federal Government who were looking at the same data and checking each other’s homework, but based at that stage only on satellite images of the surface slick. The company couldn’t falsely report what it didn’t know, just provide a best estimate.
When the early ROV footage came in it was clearly increasing over time, so we don’t know what the initial flow rate was before cameras were on it. That’s exactly what you’d expect, bearing in mind that a lot of the first material to erode was synthetic rubber and composites. When the flow rate got high enough to lift sand from the unconsolidated reservoir, steel eroded. It’s possible the BOP actually held for the first few hours or days. The US regulator did a BOP review about a decade ago which found they only work perfectly a third of the time, but in another third they give hours or days of little or no flow before the composites fail, so from the POV of evacuating personnel, two thirds was the right metric. The purpose was to support making them mandatory onshore, where you can run away and even minutes more evacuation time could mean the difference between life and death. Offshore, you’d need hours.
Tom –
I wonder at the efficacy of 40-year-old comedy.
How does efficacy and comedy (no matter the age) go together?
Interestingly, the elephant in the room regarding the 30,000 or 60,000 argument (that they should have known the Top Kill wouldn’t work) is why they stopped pumping at a rate that could have killed 30,000 but not 60,000. It wasn’t for lack of pump power. The pumps had plenty in reserve, but the government set a maximum pump rate because the prevailing view at the time was that it was a back-side blowout which had compromised the shallow casing strings, and pumping harder could turn it into an underground blowout (like Frage off Brazil), which would be even harder to control. Why did they think that? Because Halliburton insisted their cement design was good and it was the Operator’s decision not to use spacers which left a weakness uphole not downhole. Despite having run two lab tests and two computer simulations which said the cement design was bad. They were fined $500,000 for that concealment when the information came out, after the Top Kill failure. IMHO that was a bigger piece of misinformation than arguments about the flow rate. The Top Kill may well have worked at maximum pump rates.
In the event the shallow casing was fine and the blowout was downhole, due to bad cement and a failed casing shoe. Everyone in the industry who knew what to look at (the pressure-volume curves in the final kill, which were streamed live) realised that on the day of the final kill. Would the government have authorised a higher pump rate if they’d known the cement design was bad? Possibly not, perhaps probably not. Why not? Because a cement and casing failure in the same well is extremely rare as they’re independent barriers, and peoples’ thoughts turned to design or construction flaws higher in the well. An underground blowout can take years to kill, and in many if not most cases is never really dead. They’re still monitoring one offshore Norway from ten or twenty years ago. It would have been a big call, like atmospheric geoengineering for climate change.
Steering back onto topic, all this is known from publicly verifiable sources. And we know about actual tobacco, second-hand smoke and acid rain conspiracies. Stuff with billions of dollars at stake gets out and yet we’re supposed to believe that thousands of climate scientists have maintained a 100% tight-lipped conspiracy for decades? All for the sake of a professor or post-doc’s salary? With the penalty of jail time if they’re caught and had accessed US Federal funds (misuse of Federal funds, mail fraud if the funds or lab equipment came from out-of-State). Really? OTOH the funding of misinformation is well documented here and here (the tables in the supplementary material are the most interesting bit).
ATTP: “If people believe that the global surface temperature datasets have been manipulated, then that implies a large number of people are involved in doing something explicitly dishonest and that another large number of people (who should be able to work this out) accepting this.”
I understood you just fine.
Capuano leads an agency that reviews the work of hundreds of scientists in government, academia and industry world wide and collates them into a report(s) on the state of energy with various projections for the future.
Sound familiar to any other organization you follow?
If her agency were really misleading people, it would require a large number of scientists, globally, involved in doing something explicitly dishonest.
FWIW- I think it’s perfectly fine to be skeptical of Capuano’s work and anyone else’s for that matter. But if you’re going to laugh at people who believe in global conspiracies of thousands of scientists, it’s best not to argue such conspiracies are not only plausible, but common- energy, GMO, vaccinations, nuclear power, smoking, absolutely anything dealing with the military, etc etc etc.
jeff,
I’m no longer sure what point you’re trying to make. I think it’s pretty silly to think that global surface temperature datasets are being fiddled, given what this would imply. This doesn’t mean that I think there are no occassions when such suspicions may be warranted. I just think that in this circumstance it’s pretty silly.
I agree with ATTP, it isn’t the IPCC that generates the datasets, they are produced by different competing organisations, at least one of which started out from the assumption that there were, shall we say “undue biases”. In the existing datasets. That is very obviously an entirely different kettle of fish.
Another issue is that some of those being accussed of “fiddling the data again and again and again” are on social media and interact with some of those who make these accusations. It’s not as if they’re faceless people who nobody knows. They’re right out there in public engaging with people about this topic (as well as publishing their papers).
“Conspiritards” is a nickname I use to describe people who tend to believe in highly implausible theories. Of course, what’s plausible or implausible is a matter of debate.
*******
“Snape, what would you call a Young Earth Creationist who accepts micro-evolution within Kinds but insists on Special Creation of Kinds?”
Not sure what I would call them, but the Young Earth Creationist’s belief in micro-evolution seems to be a necessary fine tuning, or caveat, in their overall belief system. It would be hard to deny, for instance, that the physical characteristics of dogs have changed/evolved over time.
“I’m no longer sure what point you’re trying to make.”
Why? It’s really clear- if you think people who claim climate scientists are conspiring lack intelligence and good will, then it stands to reason you think the same of those who see conspiracy in the EIA and IEA.
Either global conspiracies are plausible or they aren’t. You can’t really argue both.
The other problem with your point is that it’ uses language to unfairly tarnish. I don’t think Paul alleges a global conspiracy at the EIA, I think he’s skeptical of the results of a bubble mentality. That’s a rational, reasonable concern even if I don’t share it.
Therefore it would be unfair to say that Paul lacks either intelligence or goodwill or that he’s asserting a global, malignancy in science. He disagrees with the EIA.
> Either global conspiracies are plausible or they aren’t.
Exactly:
“Doubt is our product.” F.L.
Denial is an unfortunate side-effect of over consumption.
Both enable persons, businesses and governments to absolve themselves from any present accountability of the future consequences of their choices and actions while pursuing short term gains of money, power, and influence.
This is the defining characteristic of all examples of fraudulent, manipulated or biased data in medicine, energy reserves or physics.
Future consequences are cast into doubt, or outright denied, to enable gain.
Climate change and AGW science reduces doubt and reveals more of the future consequences, the very opposite of dubious or biased research that has been recognised in other instances.
Perhaps the best example of this wish to deny the future for the sake on current gain is the recent US executive edict that climate projections and the resultant impacts must be limited to a 20 year horizon. Nothing beyond 2040 was to be considered. It is prioritising the present over the future in a manner that is myopic at best.
In addition to further downsizing the hiatus, HADSST4 raises EBM TCR and ECS estimates by 8%.
https://twitter.com/conspiraboomers/status/1146511805155614721
James Dellingpole has just reported the passing of the Greatest Living Climate Skeptic, but as always, the Second Greatest Climate Skeptic is alive and well.
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2019/07/eye-shock-horror-dellers-outs-climate.html
The Cornwall Alliance certainly can’t complain about being called “deniers” – their mission statement is full of the things they deny.
Whatever the appropriate name is ( I tend to use ‘Contrarians”), it is definitely not “Skeptics”. In my experience most of the people who take contrarian positions are extremely credulous, prepared to believe anything which fits their preconceptions
Here is a ‘Black Knight’ avoiding at every turn admitting he has been decapitated, while employing his considerable fighting (political BS) skills to land several hits on his opponent.
Notice how he manages to get the main GOP climate position across;-
1) The GOP will never disrupt an existing profitable FF industry
2)We are already reducing emissions with fracked gas and clean coal.
3)China and India only promise to reduce emissions in the future, why should we do more.
4)Obama was bad for interfering with profitable business, the current DEMs are worse, they want socialism.
while it is repeatedly pointed out he is headless.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/24/politics/mike-pence-climate-crisis/index.html
Snape, my evolution-denial analogy was that there is no scientific basis for accepting microevolution only, at least if you accept that the world is 4.5 Bn years old. Given how quickly selective breeding has changed domestic crops and animals, what’s to stop all those little steps adding up to a giant step, to the point where a Bronze Age Middle Eastern herder would have called it a new Kind? Although, as Darwin and the Victorian geologists realised, you do need more than a few thousand years, so I should have specified an Old Earth Creationist. There is no logical reason, other than Divine intervention, for evolution to stop at Kind boundaries. And it’s a remarkable coincidence that their acceptance of science stops precisely at the point where to go further would challenge their religious beliefs.
The analogy is of course with lukewarmers, who accept the reality of greenhouse gases, and that we’re to blame for at least some of it, but arbitrarily reject 90% of the science. The bits that say we’re to blame for all of it, not half, and that ECS is more likely to be near the middle of the range not the bottom, and indeed that given observed TCS, it’s virtually impossible, barring new physics, for ECS to be at the bottom of the range. And by the same remarkable coincidence, the acceptance of the science stops precisely at the point where acceptance would lead logically to choices which are political or economic anathema to them.
Like I’ve said elsewhere, there are very few science deniers who deny all science. Most only deny the bits they can’t live with, and accept the rest. That’s the norm, not the exception.
DaveGeologist
Thanks for clarifying. I wonder, though, if you’ve missed the distinction I was trying to make. I’ll use another analogy:
Lukewarmer)
A grandsmaster at chess tells a novice he’s made a terrible move. The novice argues, “I agree it wasn’t a good move, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as you say.”
Conspiracy Guy)
Again, a grandmaster at chess tells a novice he’s made a terrible move. This time the the novice says, “My move was just fine and you know it. Why are you lying? Have you been betting on me losing games – now giving me bad advice so I won’t improve?”
The lukewarmer’s error is arrogance, placing his opinion above that of the expert. This is very different than Conspiracy Guy, who questions the Grandmaster’s honesty and motives rather than his expertise.
*****
Playing devil’s advocate to micro evolution: the creationists would argue that although different breeds of dogs have evolved over the centuries, they are all still 100% “dog”, with none moving an inch towards another species. Same argument would hold for the indigenous populations of Peru, whose bodies have in some ways adapted to the high elevation of the Andes, but who are still 100% human.
If you make the grandmaster a Medical Doctor and the game, Cigarette Smoking, the analogy works better.
Richard Arrett:
Hmm, this claim has been made before. I’m skeptical, but willing to be convinced by adequate documentation. After about 1/2-hour Googling for “lukewarmer”+”climate change”, the earliest link I can find is to a comment on Jennifer Marohasy’s blog dated 8/26/2008, by one Steve Short:
AFAICT, it was a couple of years later that our Mr. Mosher became associated with the label: in a comment on Steve McIntyre’s blog dated 01/04/2010, Mr. Mosher says:
Within three months, in a post on DesmogBlog dated 03/30/2010 and titled Climategate: An Autopsy, blogger Morgan Goodwin says:
I’ve faithfully reproduced her strikeouts along with two of her links. Unfortunately, the Steve Mosher link is broken, and the one for Patrick Courrielche leads to the current ‘Media’ page at Breitbart.com.
In any case, the ‘lukewarmer’ label in this context is obvious enough that anyone can claim to define it. For example, Tamsin Edwards in 2015:
YMMV, but that definition is acceptable to me. Yet while lukewarmers may acknowledge that the globe is warming and that it’s anthropogenic, their lack of concern is outside the mainstream of scientific opinion. IMNSHO, the soi disant lukewarmer’s pseudo-skeptical dismissal of the costs already being paid for AGW, in homes, livelihoods and lives all over the world, is a species of denial.
Best way to fight climate change? Plant a trillion trees
Seth Borenstein
2019 Jul 04
Phys.org
But don’t stop with just the first trillion. “Irrigated Afforestation of the Sahara desert and the Australian outback to stop global warming”, Len Orstein et al. The pdf is freely available via the abstract on the Internet.
@snape
interesting you use Chess in your analogy
my brother is a Chess Grandmaster – (British Chess champion a few times – peak ELO rating of 2640 which put him in the worlds top 20 at one point)
he is a big conspiracy (Moon Hoaxer) theorist – I suppose following on from the great Bobbie Fisher who was also magnetically attracted to crank views
and ATTP makes a good point re “They’re right out there in public engaging with people about this topic (as well as publishing their papers).”
it must have been totally lost on the conspiracy theorists re the broohaah over Climategate that the Trenberth “travesty” quote was actually just restating his position in a recently published paper – and not some hidden revelation given secretly to a select few – some conspiracy!!!!!!
err – that’s bobby fischer
Snape, (and Mal) that’s the definition I would call luckwarmer not lukewarmer. Because those holding that view lack the scientific expertise to determine that it’s real, we caused it, and by a remarkable coincidence, it will proceed just far enough, and no further, that we don’t have to take any actions they don’t want us to take. The sole basis for that belief is crossing their fingers and hoping for the best, i.e. relying on luck. That the dice will throw straight 1’s. There’s usually a giveaway when you come to the actions we might take: ones attractive to or tolerable by the political left are out, those palatable to the political right are in. Science and engineering are agnostic to politics. In the real world, both sides should face something they don’t like (and no, I and most on the Left don’t want to give up our cars and steaks – we like having them). Same goes for technological solutions. Relying on unproven and probably expensive albedo modification or sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, while rejecting subsidies or starter funds for proven technologies. Spending billions on flood defences that the best science says will be inadequate and need more billions spent later. Mandating only a 20-year forward look for infrastructure that will still be around in 50 or 100 years. Gambling that something better will come along while not doing the things we can do but don’t like, i.e. relying once again on luck.
I’d reserve the arrogance charge for the likes of Lewis and Currie, who do know enough to make a meaningful contribution, but should also know enough to realise that they are outliers and ask themselves: why? Why is their’s the One True ECS? What are the odds that they’re the Galileo or Einstein and not the Fleischmann and Pons (given that Galileo and Einstein were in the scientific mainstream and explained observations that other scientists agreed with).
On the microevolution point, that’s why I had to introduce the Old Earth. Although you might not have to, because of course domestic breeders stop when they get to what they want and prevent further evolution. Just as you need a farmer to decide when a cow is the right size, you’d need Divine intervention to stop it continuing to evolve to larger size if that increased its fitness. Witness island gigantism and dwarfing. I’m pretty sure that if Moses had encountered packs of Chihuahuas and packs of Great Danes, he wouldn’t have considered them one Kind or species. Nor would Linnaeus if he’d found them in South America and didn’t know the history of dog breeding. Can they even interbreed without artificial insemination, and can the Chihuahua carry a Great Dane fetus to term? If not, that would make them separate species by one definition. At least Tigons, Ligers and Mules are viable to the first generation.
“Notice how he manages to get the main GOP climate position across;-
1) The GOP will never disrupt an existing profitable FF industry
2)We are already reducing emissions with fracked gas and clean coal.
3)China and India only promise to reduce emissions in the future, why should we do more.
4)Obama was bad for interfering with profitable business, the current DEMs are worse, they want socialism.”
1. And the Democratic Party will destroy the $1 billion a day domestic FF industry, unless you point this out, in which case said destruction is just a “right-wing lie” and they will point to Obama, who doubled the U.S. FF industry. In short the Dem policy position is to trust them that they won’t do what they say they will do.
2. Not sure anyone is saying that about clean coal, but the gas part’s true. This according to Obama, who rightly takes credit for it given that he oversaw the development of the modern large U.S. FF industry.
3. It’s a global economy? Who knew? You’ve known there was bi-partisan opposition to giving China a free pass on emissions since 1997 when the US Senate voted 97-0 against Kyoto. Anyway, why would China be emitting anything? Wind and solar are cheap, effective, and rapidly scalable, which means they obviously have had no need for coal. Please explain why every COP allows China and India to use coal for purely Earth-hating reasons given that everyone in the climate movement knows they could have grown faster at less cost with solar panels.
4. Obama belatedly argued that some future president would have to undo what he did for the FF industry, the current Dems are eager to do so as long as they can nationalize it first.
> And the Democratic Party will destroy the $1 billion a day domestic FF industry
Thoughts and prayers:
“I think I might also be called a lukewarmer (a term I believe was coined by Steven Mosher).
Hmm, this claim has been made before. I’m skeptical, but willing to be convinced by adequate documentation. After about 1/2-hour Googling for “lukewarmer”+”climate change”, the earliest link I can find is to a comment on Jennifer Marohasy’s blog dated 8/26/2008, by one Steve Short:”
we covered this in detail at Lucia’s
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/lukewarmer-new-word/
I liked the term and started using it regularly, then people ( Boris) at rank exploits asked me to define it exactly.
here is an example
“I’ve faithfully reproduced her strikeouts along with two of her links. Unfortunately, the Steve Mosher link is broken, and the one for Patrick Courrielche leads to the current ‘Media’ page at Breitbart.com.”
weird how people think I was only an advocate of open source when I was a developer and maintainer of a few open source R packages.
meh
> Democrats are required to vow to do things they have no intention of doing
As opposed to no political coalition known to the history of mankind. OK, I get it – someone mentioned the GOP, so you had to go for the tu quoque. It’s done now. Please don’t make it your new ringtone.
Meanwhile:
“Thoughts and prayers:”
yes, from petro states like Russia and Saudi Arabia. The adults understand fossil fuels aren’t going away anytime soon- which is why Obama did what he did while saying the opposite.
It’s one of the sad things about US climate politics, Democrats are required to vow to do things they have no intention of doing while praying voters are smart enough to realize they don’t really mean anything they say. It promotes a cynicism that results in more Trump. Joe Biden will be just as tough on Exxon as Barrack Obama was and Donald Trump currently is- we’re all simply supposed to pretend there’s a difference.
Steven Mosher:
OK, you evidently were associated with the term on the pseudo-skeptical blogosphere as early as 2008, and on the science-based one by 2010. I maintain the word is sufficiently obvious in this context that no one owns it. AGW realists and deniers alike may freely redefine it, assigning positive and negative connotations as they please.
Dave_Geologist:
Heh. And what of our Mr. Mosher 8^D? I hasten to add, he appears to have changed his mind about some things, IMHO a commendable response to newly acquired, hands-on knowledge. Predictably, it cost him cred with die-hard pseudo-skeptics!
Steven Mosher:
Well, your BEST page says:
He has subsequently dedicated himself to the open source and open hardware movements, working as the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Openmoko, where he championed the FreeRunner open phone and later founded Qi hardware, a company dedicated to creating “copy left” consumer products. He has written and maintains several R packages devoted to analyzing temperature and climate data with open source tools.
Go figure.
@-Dave
“Just as you need a farmer to decide when a cow is the right size, you’d need Divine intervention to stop it continuing to evolve to larger size if that increased its fitness. Witness island gigantism and dwarfing.”
Actually this is one of the argument for micro-evolution but not macro-evolution.
Both domestic breeders, and the variation in size, shape and form of similar kinds shows limits, constraints on how far change can be selected for. You can breed for the colour and length of hair on a dog, but not for the number of toes.
Creationism starts with the premise that Kinds are absolute Platonic ideals that exist in the mind of the Creator. The species we see are just the gross material forms of these ideas shaped by the exigences of base matter and micro-evolution. On this basis the similarities within a Kind are just variations on the ideal, and while Kinds may have similarities, like dogs and cats, the variations cannot turn one onto the other because they are based on separate concepts of the ideal form
.
Darwinian evolution proposed the radical idea that biological form was much more malleable, or continuously variable with no constraints on the way form, function, and development could evolve, as long as it made small steps.
To be honest, until the discovery of DNA and HOX systems and the emergence of evo-devo the idea that there were constraints and limits on the distance and direction that evolution could travel was well supported by the evidence with the concept of absolute forms defining ‘Kinds’ as just as rational a premise as open-ended macro-evolution that could evolve between Kinds, but was obviously constrained by other limits, like limb and toe number, without any explanation why.
@an older code
Holy cow! I’ve never played anyone as good as your brother. Definitely weird that he believes in conspiracy theories, but as mentioned so did Fischer, “He suffered from distrust, obsessions and delusions, and showed erratic behavior. For example, he thought people were trying to poison him, so he only ate food cooked by his mother or sister.”
Whoops, that referred to Paul Morphy, another of the all time greats. 😏
Who knows, maybe there’s some sort of correlation between genius and schizophrenia? Mad Scientist syndrome?
“These industries also employ large politically active workforces that also apply pressure on central governance to perpetuate their current security.”
No. China built new energy capacity rather than attempting to replace existing capacity like developed nations. That politically active industry and workforce wanted the cheapest fastest energy growth- which the Western environmental movement has been saying is solar and wind ever since Al Gore called it “cheap and easy” almost 20 years ago.
@-jeff
“1. And the Democratic Party will destroy the $1 billion a day domestic FF industry, …”
But probably not fast enough.
You have an over-optimistic view of the power of a National central government in controlling global business. AS you point out Obama was only able to steer the industry, not radically change it.
@-“2. Not sure anyone is saying that about clean coal, but the gas part’s true.”
Pence said it about ‘clean coal’ in the interview I linked, although in an ambiguous form that enables credible deniability that he meant it as other than an aspiration. Trump has been rather more explicit.
“America is blessed with extraordinary energy abundance, including more than 250 years worth of beautiful clean coal.”
While it is true that gas reduces CO2 emission relative to old coal plant, it is a marginal improvement that is favoured by the industry, not a realistic response to the actual problem.
@-“3 Please explain why every COP allows China and India to use coal for purely Earth-hating reasons given that everyone in the climate movement knows they could have grown faster at less cost with solar panels.”
It is only recently that wind and solar became competitive with the established engineering of coal fired power. There are also powerful business interests in mining and manufacture that seek to perpetuate the use of coal in power generation and in industry where it is used for metal and cement manufacture. These industries also employ large politically active workforces that also apply pressure on central governance to perpetuate their current security. The conflict is between how fast employment can be expanded in other fields as jobs shrink in a shrinking FF industry. For most governments, even a centralised authoritarian State like China, those political/economic factors Trump the requirement implicit in climate science to reduce CO2 emissions at a much faster pace.
@-“Obama belatedly argued that some future president would have to undo what he did for the FF industry, the current Dems are eager to do so as long as they can nationalize it first.”
Obama was right, he was limited by the impotence of the executive to do anything more than nudge the business behmoth of the FF industry very far. IT will require a future government to make a radical change. But think ‘Norway’ as an example of the State controlling the National FF business.
Energy generation could be nationalized in rather the same way road construction was by FDR in the New Deal. Instead of each State colluding with private industry to build its own roads with limited interstate coordination, central government can ordain that a comprehensive and consistent generation and distribution system be built that incorporates the best methods with a system delivering the best outcomes to consumers and business.
Just as the interstate highways improved the overall economy and quality of life when they were constructed as a public work of infra-structure improvement.
@-jeff
“That politically active industry and workforce wanted the cheapest fastest energy growth- which the Western environmental movement has been saying is solar and wind ever since Al Gore called it “cheap and easy” almost 20 years ago.”
The Western environmental movement (?) may have been claiming that solar and wind are cheap and easy, but I would need a citation of any claim that it was the cheapest before about 2015.
Just as no credible scientific source would claim that ‘Natural’ factors were dominating climate change since ~70s, no credible economic source would claim cheap coal in the form of a established old, simple to engineer design built next to the coal source was undercut by solar or wind until Chinese development and manufacture flooded the market in the late 2010s.
> the earliest link I can find
The oldest occurence of the “luckwarm” brand I could find is 2006-10-08. Here’s how I traced the filiation:
St Bernards have dewclaws on their hind feet. It is a trait one could breed for, al though that is illadvised.
” I maintain the word is sufficiently obvious in this context that no one owns it. AGW realists and deniers alike may freely redefine it, assigning positive and negative connotations as they please.”
How would that distinguish it from any other word?
nobody owns any word. you are always free to redefine any word.
Whether or not you suceede is a diferent matter.
my hope was to define it in such a way that skeptics might find it acceptable AND that
it was consistent with the mainstream science.
failed obviously
DM, if his favoured ECS is 2.7°C and not 2.7°F, most people I’ve encountered who self-identify as lukewarmers, here and elsewhere, would disown him and call him an alarmist. far too close to the centre of the IPCC range. Lukewarmer these days tends to mean the 1.5°C-and-no-higher bunch.
izen, there was a whole bunch of evidence for Kinds not being bounded, long before Hox genes or even DNA, starting in the 19th Century with transitional fossils, both between groups and within a group over geological time. And surely the Platonic ideal of a Fish doesn’t include one that breathes air and walks and bounds across mudflats on it front fins? That Kind should have ended with the Dutch East India Company. Or one that breathes air and gives milk to its young? Or the Platonic ideal of a mammal include one that the Bible classed as a Fish? That Kind should have died when the first whaler observed his victim’s teats. If you stretch Kinds far enough to accommodate that sort of contradiction, it should have been obvious to anyone not blinded by religion that Man was a member of the Ape kind.
Snape, of course the idiot savant, tortured genius and mad scientist memes have a long history. I suppose there may be something in it, in that being a genius must require some mental deviation from the norm, and where there’s one their may be others – for example (Just-So warning), the allele for “schizophrenia” may have piggy-backed on the allele for “genius”, because they’re adjacent or on the same chromosome. That would have imposed a negative selection pressure in a pre-literate society. Maybe that’s why we’re not all geniuses!
jeff, I don’t think anyone serious has been claiming wind and solar was cheaper and easier than anything else. Just than than anything else low-carbon I doubt your Gore reference, because he’s such a hate-figure in some quarters that there are a thousand mis-quotes, most deliberately invented then spread by the gullible or consciously or unconsciously motivated, for every true quote. Oh, and (for Steven too) renewables overtook nuclear in the UK about five years ago, and are pulling further ahead. By 2017 in the UK:
Two firms said they were willing to build offshore wind farms for a guaranteed price of £57.50 per megawatt hour for 2022-23.
This compares with the new Hinkley Point C nuclear plant securing subsidies of £92.50 per megawatt hour.
Onshore wind is cheaper still but NIMBY. Fine I presume on the wide-open US Plains. Nuclear NIMBYism is of course orders of magnitude stronger. There’s a small wind farm a mile from my house, and the biggest in the UK is just a few miles away. No big deal. The operator, Scottish Power, recently sold all its fossil-fuel and hydro stations to go 100% renewable. Interestingly, it’s building a big battery farm beside the wind farm, and its hydro sales included the Cruachan pumped-storage unit, so it’s obviously decided batteries are the future.
Dave Geologist
It’s also possible that the rate of mental illness among the highly gifted is no different than the general population, but they simply have a better chance of becoming famous. Being famous, their problems (including madness) receive extra scrutiny. If not a world champion at chess, Bobby Fischer for example may have been just one of the thousands of homeless living on the streets of New York, largely ignored by the rest of society.
“Maybe that’s why we’re not all geniuses!”
Then again if genius was common, a genius would no longer be considered a genius.
****
You and izen need to be careful when defining a Kind. Too many, and they wouldn’t have all fit on the Arc!
“DM, if his favoured ECS is 2.7°C”
If forced to make a point estimate… 2.7C
Tom Fuller was 2.5C in the past or at least accepted that as a planning tool.
So couple that estimate of 2.7 with a strong dis belief in RCP 8.5 as BAU
and couple that with lower bound estimates of climate damages
And couple that with a personal discount rate that says forget about the future and
I am a full blown denier in some folks minds.
meh
izen says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_destruction
No help required, the free market does it on its own
Dave Geologist, I enjoy your comments when they regard your background and profession. I learn quite a bit.
However, when you err significantly in your descriptions of your opponents on climate policy, it makes me wonder if your other posts have similar inaccuracies. I do hope not.
Another blast for the past:
ClimateBall past was a blast.
Even better:
Vintage September 2012.
As Barry Woods is not participating in this conversation, one wonders what willard is thinking by citing him–does he thing Mr. Woods is representative of lukewarmers, or an appointed spokesperson?
willard must have liked his simple description of lukewarmers quite a bit, to use it twice. Sadly, it describes his blurred vision, not reality.
Lukewarmers derive their position from examination of data, not the positions of either alarmists or skeptics. The data strongly points to sensitivity of the atmosphere being significantly lower than the 3C stake in the ground planted by climate activists. And that is the definition of lukewarmers–those who, after examination of the data, hold that sensitivity is significantly lower than 3C.
Attempts to affix other political positions, attitudes towards their opponents, policy prescriptions, etc., are akin to either blindfolded children trying to pin the tail on the donkey, or blindfolded children trying to whack a pinata. Blindfolded children being the common point and perhaps the most salient.
“And couple that with a personal discount rate that says forget about the future…”
At least Mosh was honest.
“[T]he 3C stake in the ground planted by climate activists.”
Because Paleolithic data and the Precautionary Principle are for suckers.
> willard must have liked his simple description of lukewarmers quite a bit, to use it twice.
Making things up has always been Groundskeeper’s forte. In any event:
Last time I quoted [this quote from] NG, it was in 2015. NG was still listed in Tony’s lukewarm [links] category. Now it’s 2019, and Tony dropped categories altogether.
***
> Sadly, it describes his blurred vision, not reality.
Barry’s vision about his own beliefs looks just fine:
“As Barry Woods is not participating in this conversation…”
Not until summoned thusly:
Lewandowsky.
Lewandowsky.
Lewandowsky.
Thomas fuller wrote “However, when you err significantly in your descriptions of your opponents on climate policy, …”
Somewhat ironic, l’d suggest.
I’m having a similar type of argument about immigration policy over at Lucia’s. I state my policy and my support for the declared Democratic policy. The people I am corresponding with say I advocate open borders. Rinse, repeat.
You want to know what lukewarmers believe. You quote skeptics and members of the active climate community. You ignore what lukewarmers say. Rinse, repeat.
(That should be “paleoclimate” @ 8:37 pm, and apologies to most for machine-gunning the thread.)
Thomas Fuller wrote “Lukewarmers derive their position from examination of data, not the positions of either alarmists or skeptics. The data strongly points to sensitivity of the atmosphere being significantly lower than the 3C stake in the ground planted by climate activists. And that is the definition of lukewarmers–those who, after examination of the data, hold that sensitivity is significantly lower than 3C.”
The rational decision on policy depends on the whole distribution of plausible values of ECS, and especially the upper tail, as the impact function rises faster than linearly. It would be a better argument for inaction if you could rule out high ECS, rather than merely argue that it is low.
Personally, I don’t think a rational assessment of the evidence suggests a most like value that is much different from that of the IPCC. I’d have more confidence that it was a rational examination if it were presented without portraying those who agree with mainstream science as activists or alarmists. That is more suggestive of partisan bias than examination of data.
Also, rather than “significantly lower”, why not actually specify a range that you consider plausible so that it can be discussed?
> You ignore what lukewarmers say.
The third time now you just say stuff in this thread. That ought to be enough.
There are
Matthewwarmers
Markwarmers
Lukewarmers
and
Johnwarmers
Don’t forget handwarmers.
I think the climate responsibility denier focus on extreme Environmentalists and the threat of globalist/socialist/nannystatist world government a worse kind of deliberate mis-categorising – portraying genuine, well informed people who are concerned about the climate problem, very few even suggesting such a course, as something much more unreasonable and unpalatable than most of them and their policies actually are. We just had an election here where calls for limiting coal mining were portrayed by large elements of mainstream media as all about giving in to what unreasonable and unreasoning green extremists want – and decades of expert advice about the climate problem, including extraordinary recent communications urging action by the US National Academy of Sciences as well as the IPCC – were passed over completely. Rallying opposition to political extremists is much easier than rallying them in opposition to the advice of the world’ leading science academies.
As for the idea that people are examining the data and deciding for themselves what climate sensitivity is – that unqualified people outside of science agencies and academies should make their acceptance that we have a serious problem dependent on personally confirming it – is fraught with potential for getting things very wrong. I suppose it is admirable to attempt to do so, but reaching a different result to the top science agencies does not mean you should set aside what they say and treat it like it is wrong; appealing to authority is far more reliable at getting things right.
Plant trillions of trees:
http://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/694/trillions-trees
as well as stop burning fossil fuels.
“And couple that with a personal discount rate that says forget about the future…”
At least Mosh was honest.
#####*
there is a famous “discussion” i had with MT
where he labelled me a pychopath for suggesting that i value the present generation more highly than future generations.
C’mon, Steve–that’s not why you’re a psycho… 🙂 It’s the K-Pop.
> where he labelled me a pychopath for suggesting that i value the present generation more highly than future generations
My recollection differs. Citation needed. Here’s one:
https://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2011/04/moshers-team.html
Cf. also Sharper00’s comment. In another post, mt’s related figure hits the bull’s eye:
https://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2010/01/ok-getting-serious-again.html
(Cf. guthrie’s comment for how to counter that.)
The image may explain why our proverbial Black Knight keeps coming back for more. Controversy sells. The luckwarm brand sells. To give an idea of the number of times our dynamic duo sollicited our attention centered around their brand and the CAGW meme, here is a tag:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/tag/lukewarmers/
There are other posts too, e.g.:
I could list the last times one specific member of that duo lost a limb hereunder, but it’d be nice if we all could have some ClimateBall vacation for a change.
And to put things in perspective:
Tom,
I disagree. There are plenty of people who claim to be Lukewarmers who say things that are clearly consistent with what people have described here. There may be some who do not, but that is the problem with associating with a label. You don’t get to easily disassociate yourself from the more ridiculous aspects of that label.
Tom,
This is exactly the problem. The data does not support this view. If you think it does, then you haven’t examined the data properly. You may have found *some* data that supports this view, but that doesn’t mean that you get to then ignore all the other data and then claim that Lukewarmism is based on some kind of sensible analysis of the data; it isn’t.
Tom and Steven, I struggle to see how an ECS of 2.5°C or 2.7°C is significantly different from 3°C (where significant in this context means enough to require seriously different policy decisions). RCP8.5 with 2.5 ECS will, according to mainstream scientific research, leave us with parts of the world where the wet-bulb temperature is above 35°C for a sufficient part of the year that they will be uninhabitable without 100% reliable 24/7 aircon, and where outdoor agriculture and construction will be impossible for days, weeks or months of every year. Livestock will perish unless you put them in air-conditioned sheds, and crop yields will be seriously affected. Just like with 3°C, but arriving a couple of decades later
1.5°C is a totally different matter. We could get a Paris-lite outcome of 2-3°C warming by 2100 despite an RCP8.5 trajectory. That’s what I would call lukewarm: the world doesn’t warm as much, despite BAU emissions. And that’s by far the most common usage I’ve seen in the commenting world, whatever the origins of the term.
These other attitudes (a bit caricature-y I admit but IMO with more than a grain of truth) don’t fit the etymology of lukewarm:
The world will warm as much but it will be OK because technology, or because higher levees, or because farmers will adapt, or because Basra will lose its brownouts and get 24/7 electricity and the oil price will soar because Peak Oil and even the poorest will be able to afford aircon, oh and sorry about the corals.
Or it won’t warm as much because BAU won’t continue as usual, despite no incentive to change from the usual, or because fission plants become cheaper than O&G, or because the O&G runs out in 2050 (but wouldn’t we resurrect coal if there are no adverse consequences?), or because fusion breakthrough, or because sky-glitter with no bad surprises, or because uninvented CO2 drawdown technology gets invented (but why bother if you can just build higher levees?).
Or the damage won’t be so bad because CO2 is plant-food and RP Jr says damage won’t increase globally, ever, because it hasn’t, yet, in the USA from hurricane landfalls (arguably, perhaps, if you squint the right way at the right figures), and we can move the wheat-belt north and it won’t take 4,000 years to turn tundra into farmable soil like it did at the end of the Ice Age.
Or the bad things might happen but I don’t care because I value today much more than tomorrow, and me and mine above people in Africa and Asia, and anyway I feel lucky and although I accept mainstream climate sensitivity estimates, I feel lucky therefore I expect the least bad outcome and will always plan for that and not for the most likely or worst outcome. If (when) it comes, I feel lucky about our ability to mitigate, despite having spent decades not planning mitigation.
Most of that is what I would classify as luckwarmerism: something will turn up because I feel lucky. I could buy lukewarm if is is used metaphorically: “I am lukewarm about climate action because politics, because economics, because bias for inaction, because unicorn technology, because resistance to change, because God will save us (or at least the worthy), because NASA faked the Moon landings, or because I feel lucky”. But all of those have more etymologically correct and less misleading descriptions.
I will try to find the reference Willard
in the mean time it is quite interesting to see the wingnuts
https://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2011/04/getting-them-nodding.html
blather on about the Koch brothers.
Turn the clock back to 2011 when folks like me were arguing for a re look at some obsverational data
And what did we hear ? denier, delayer, blah blah blah, doesnt believe in AGW
blah blah blah
What did we get? Berkeley earth, Cowtain and Way, and Now some really good SST updates.
ECS is one of the most uncertain aspects of climate science. Seems like a shaky foundation to build you climate belief system on. Needs a lot of shoring up I would imagine.
Interesting
https://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2011/04/okies-from-muskogee.html
read the comments Willard. The conversation is reference there, so it must predate this post
Chubs — Instead look to the paleoclimate corresponding to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Currently about the mid-Pliocene or possibly even the Miocene. The sea stand was about 25 meters higher than now.
Chubs — Instead look to the paleoclimate corresponding to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Currently about the mid-Pliocene or possibly even the Miocene. The sea stand was about 25 meters higher than now.
Chubs — Instead look to the paleoclimate corresponding to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Currently about the mid-Pliocene or possibly even the Miocene. The sea stand was about 25 meters higher than now.
Speaking of not knowing when you no longer have a leg to stand on. Ed Berry has published a paper in what I suspect is a predatory open access journal here. The paper is yet another arguing that the rise in CO2 is natural. My favourite line is “Cawley [5] is a key paper for the IPCC theory.” ROTFLMAO – pure comedy gold! ;o)
“Tom and Steven, I struggle to see how an ECS of 2.5°C or 2.7°C is significantly different from 3°C (where significant in this context means enough to require seriously different policy decisions).”
I never said it was.
Let me try to reconstruct my thinking from that time
the range was 1.5 to 6, with 3 usually quoted as the best value, in ADDITION you would
see a fair amount of concern about higher values. In simple terms folks might say 3 or higher.
Notice the tendency to hint at the higher values.
I simply said we bet its under 3C ( 3c as median) and above 1.5C.
This is merely POSITIONING the consensus. the same way someone might say 3C or higher.
There were 2 tricks: trick 1, see how many alarmists would reject this. trick 2 seeing
how many skeptics would accept it.
trick 1 worked better than trick 2.
problem with trick 2, too many dummies who insist it IS below 3C
One way I thought it might drive policy is along the lines of mcKittricks tax. But
I’m not too keen on that anymore. Fee and dividend looks better to me now.
I would say in that time period I was more hopeful of a “engineering” approach to policy
where ECS might play a strong role, but it’s clear than an engineering approach
( targets, budgets, etc) will fail as a foundation for policy. we wont have a rational policy.
the west wont at least.
Sm”There were 2 tricks: trick 1, see how many alarmists would reject this.”
Looks like the definition of an alarmist may be equally absurd :o)
I point at
[1] The data strongly points to sensitivity of the atmosphere being significantly lower than the 3C stake in the ground planted by climate activists.
and
[2] Too many dummies who insist it IS below 3C.
That is all.
“The skeptic ‘side’ has Lindzen, Dyson, Christy, Curry et al. I have read their papers…”
LMFAO.
Dyson?! Absolutely ludicrous.
Lindzen? AT LEAST a decade of pure denial.
Christy? Endless UAH machinations suggest not.
Curry? No need to beat THAT dead horse.
—-
For shame, Tom.
‘I personally think sensitivty is 2.1C Almost 10 years ago I did a guest post on WUWT saying let’s use 2.5C for planning purposes–a safety margin makes sense for both mitigation and what I like to call pre-adaptation.’
How many times does it needs to be said that using a most likely value for planning purposes is ignoring everything we know about decision making under uncertainty?
Cherry picking Nic Lewis is not a rational examination of the data.
I should add, using a “safety factor” on ECS of 0.4C is absolutely ridiculous, as the Knutti et al diagram shows, the actual uncertainty is way larger.
Of course, I suspect Tom is going to continue to ignore my criticism of his posts…
“The expressed positions of climate scientists have not changed over the past decade–66% believe ‘half or more’ of the current warming is due to human emissions of greenhouse gases.”
And 34% DON’T?
Citation?
Dikran, it is indeed a predatory publisher – Science Publishing Group, aka SciencePG. Jeffrey Beall has written about them a few times.
The journal itself has managed to publish a grand total of 11 papers (exactly half the number of people on its Editorial Board) since the first submission of a paper in December 2016. This includes a paper by the well-known fraudster “Alireza Heidari” of the “California South University” (https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/02/21/down-the-rabbit-hole-with-alireza-heidari). The topic of that paper is completely unrelated to atmospheric or oceanic science, supposedly the focus area of the journal.
Funnily enough, this has cost Ed Berry a whopping 1470 US dollar to get published, even though he could have gotten it published for ‘only’ 970 US dollar in a journal of the same Publisher that has many more published papers, including the recent Hermann Harde paper you have mentioned some weeks ago: “Earth Sciences”.
Dave said:
Thank you
The equivalent of the ongoing “What color is this dress?” argument, which like that can be easily resolved just by inspecting the data.
thomaswfuller2 says:
No. The value is ~3C for a doubling of CO2, same as it has been since the Charney report circa 1979.
Marco, cheers – I note they also have eight (8) “peer reviewers” ;o)
We have all seen the recent flurry of observation-based or observation-aided analyses of sensitivity, and we all remember that the results come in far lower than semi-empirical, model-based efforts. We have all watched Nic Lewis on YouTube and read his posts at Judith’s and Mac’s. We have all seen the chart showing the downward trend in sensitivity analyses over time. TCR now looks like a value (if single value it is) of 1.2-1.5 and ECS estimates are getting to as low as 1.6C.
They are not dispositive and other analyses have come in with higher values since then. But the temperature record has been consistent–no decade has come in with GAT rises over .19C during the current warming period. The expressed positions of climate scientists have not changed over the past decade–66% believe ‘half or more’ of the current warming is due to human emissions of greenhouse gases. They believed that in Bray, von Storch et al in 2010 and they believed it in Verheggen, Rice, et al in 2013. Your ‘side’ has Hansen, Mann, Trenberth, Santer et al. The skeptic ‘side’ has Lindzen, Dyson, Christy, Curry et al. I have read their papers and listened to their testimony before Congress. I come to Real Climate every morning with my cup of coffee and end up clicking over here from their site. I also read Judith’s blog every morning. False balance and all that, don’t you know.
I personally think sensitivty is 2.1C Almost 10 years ago I did a guest post on WUWT saying let’s use 2.5C for planning purposes–a safety margin makes sense for both mitigation and what I like to call pre-adaptation. Skeptics were contemptuous of the idea. Climate activists have been more contemptuous of my existence on the planet. I don’t know which amuses me more.
willard, Steve’s just pissed because I outed his psycho tendencies’ origin in K-Pop. But if lukewarmers were all dummies and psychos, you wouldn’t waste your time on them.
“We have all seen the recent flurry of observation-based or observation-aided analyses of sensitivity, and we all remember that the results come in far lower than semi-empirical, model-based efforts.”
I remember two papers from Lewis and Curry claiming those results, and a subsequent gush of studies exposing shortfalls in this approach.
What other analyses were included in that “flurry”?
Tom, rather than
“TCR now looks like a value (if single value it is) of 1.2-1.5 and ECS estimates are getting to as low as 1.6C.”
I think you meant
“If you only pick the methodology I prefer then TCR now looks like a value (if single value it is) of 1.2-1.5 and ECS estimates are getting to as low as 1.6C.”
Your consistent cherry picking is, well, consistent.
See earlier conversations on whether you are in agreement with IPPC or not.
Weasel words, Tom.
Much of what you post here is simply untrue.
> But if lukewarmers were all dummies and psychos, you wouldn’t waste your time on them.
In the end, individuals matter little. It’s all about the persistence of the arguments. The simplest characterization of luckwarmism would be the bag of tricks to push the limits of justified disingenuousness. Our blackest ClimateBall knights have yet to find how to reach bottom. The limit keeps being lowered:
Yet another reason why audits never end.
(And put your shirt back on. You look ridiculous.)
Revealed vs. expressed preferences, here on display.
> AFAIK, I am the only one publishing a roadmap
AFAIK, none of these roadmaps are related to the smarmy concerns you keep recursing here, and how you deal with refutation.
You keep saying stuff. Commenters keep telling you you’re saying stuff. You rip off your shirt.
As Very Tall recently suggested:
While I understand you may feel your ear tingling by this Monty Python character, I implore you to stop baiting people.
Tom ignores the point about not using most likely values when making decisions under uncertainty. Who could have predicted that? Oh, yes, I did.
Tom, toy keep claiming this, but it clearly misrepresents the position. The IPCC simply describes impacts, it doesn’t judge the significance. People are entitled to describe these impacts according to their own judgement. This does not make these descriptions inconsistent with the IPCC. It would be quite nice if you could try to get this quite simple point.
> The IPCC does not overestimate impacts.
From the same comment:
Rope-a-doping to “but activists!” won’t work. It never does. Yet here you are.
Tom is black-knighting the shit out of this thread.
Dikran –
How many times does it needs to be said that using a most likely value for planning purposes is ignoring everything we know about decision making under uncertainty?
I’m guessing by this you mean that a ‘most likely value” should be placed in context that reaches out into the scale of high damages from low probability outcomes on one end, and of course low damages from low probability outcomes on the other?
Am I correct?
OK – really weird stuff going on with time stamps..
My most recent comment appears time stamped well before other comments that I read before I posted my comment. Either a software glitch, or I’ve stumbled into some time travel porthole. (My money is on the former).
Not that it matters, probably, just thought I’d mention it.
To recent commenters: AFAIK, I am the one on this thread who has published roadmaps for mitigation and pre-adaptation to deal with climate change based on 2.5C sensitvity. Instead of whining about the credibility and qualifications of the sources of my position, please feel free to come up with your own. Choose your own sensitivity–you do seem sensitive enough to do so.
AFAIK, I am the only one publishing a roadmap for the implementation of the Green New Deal. Instead of providing commentary on my background, qualifications and probable destination, why not come up with your own?
Joshua,
Yes, sopme very weird stuff going on with the timestamps. Not sure why.
Okay, I don’t know if this is the problem. But the system was set to UTC+0, rather than British Summer Time. I’ve tried setting it to UTC + 1, which should then be the same as my local time. [Edit: I’ve actually now set it to London time, which should take summer time into account automatically]
VTG, the IPCC does not overestimate impacts. The activist climate community does. In fact, they ignore the IPCC’s very clear description of projected impacts. Revealed vs. expressed, etc.
ATTP, you write, “Tom, toy keep claiming this, but it clearly misrepresents the position. The IPCC simply describes impacts, it doesn’t judge the significance. People are entitled to describe these impacts according to their own judgement. This does not make these descriptions inconsistent with the IPCC.”
The extreme of that proposition seems to be that someone could describe a hangnail as a medical emergency. I’m not suggesting you do that wrt climate impacts. However, people like McPherson, McKibben, Romm and the slim, trim ex vice president pretty much travel a long way down that road.
The unknown factors in the system are all on the warm side of change. Most of these are positive feedbacks, e.g., rapid thaw of permafrost. The negative feedbacks like Lindzen’s tropical Iris hypothesis have so far been shown to be nonexistent or trivial.
If we are going to be surprised, it will be to the warm side because of the asymmetry. If one is weighting response to likely risk, it should be weighted toward the warm side of 3 degrees for ECS. Right now our response is equivalent to what one would expect for about 1 degree ECS.
Tom,
And the other extreme would be someone describing a cardiac arrest as a minor inconvenience.
I don’t agree with you with respect to all of the above names, but McPherson seems to indeed describe the impacts in a way that is far too extreme. However, I think you associate very strongly with groups who would be on the other extreme of this distribution.
What do they do by association? Seems like there’s a saying there somewhere. I have always kept the wrong kind of company. Sharpens the mind, you know.
Wow. Al Gore is fat. How far we’ve progressed over these past few years, eh?
Tom,
What I’m suggesting is that there are indeed some people who exaggarate the likely impacts of climate change. I don’t, however, see why you’re really in a position to criticise such people. I think you, very obviously, downplay the significance of the impacts of climate change.
Willard –
Is “Al Gore is fat” on your Matrix? (I know, I know, scratch my own itch. What can I say, I’m lazy).
If not, while it may be subsumed in another category, given the frequency with which it appears, I’d suggest it deserves a place all on its own?
Mitch
“The unknown factors in the system are all on the warm side of change.”
Do you happen to know if the following idea has been studied?
From Javier, near the bottom of Judith Curry’s most recent post:
“More energy to the Arctic in winter means more energy lost by the planet. I do not think it is a coincidence that the warming of the Arctic in winter coincides with the Pause in global warming. If that is the case then climate scientists have the whole Arctic amplification story backwards. It is cooling the planet, or at least preventing more warming, and not a cause for alarm.”
It caught my attention because I’ve had similar thoughts, and wrote about them a few months ago at Realclimate.
Al Gore has lost weight. He is slim and trim. Trying to counter the skeptics’ characterizaton somehow merits criticism here. But then, what doesn’t?
Snape –
Looking past the rhetorically disguised
lie embedded in an argument that a “pause in a global warming” manifests as a concentration of warming into a particular area,
If the dynamics play out as you theorize, does your theory include any speculation about the long term, i.e., will the planet “cooling” continue in perpetuity because of the concentration of energy in the Arctic, and is thee some point at which that concentration of energy in the Arctic spins off its own set of (deliterious for humans) developments on its own?
Tom –
Good point. How did I not understand the relevance of Gore’s weight, eh?
Interesting that you respond on that topic (the victim card never gets old, does it?) but uniformly don’t answer when I ask you direct questions on actually relevant topics (offering some excuse that it might be a distraction to answer on topic questions… as opposed to discussing Gore’s current weight, eh?)
BTW, Tom –
If you’d like to answer on topic questions rather than discuss Al’s weight, I’d be happy to provide them again.
Flurries question? How many papers are there in a a flurry?
Have there been a flurry of papers suggesting observation-based estimates of climate sensitivity could be biased low.
Umm, Joshua, the only question you have asked me on this thread was, “How does efficacy and comedy (no matter the age) go together?” Sorry I cravenly ducked it. I find that things I thought were funny in the past do not seem funny to me now.
Joshua, the whole probability (plausibility) distribution should be considered, rather than any specific value. ISTR there was a very good post here illustrating how the distribution and impact function can be combined to find the distribution of cost (and thus select the action most likely to minimise it).
If the impact function rises sharply, the minimum risk decision is likely to be dominated by the upper tail, so as I keep saying, it is fine to show that ECS *may* be low, but it would be much more reassuring if skeptics could *rule out* high ECS.
Of course Tom isn’t clearly isn’t going to address that point.
Tom –
the only question you have asked me on this thread…
I wasn’t referring to questions on this thread or stupid questions like the one I asked you on this thread. I was referring to question such as those that I asked you about how you define the term catastrophic, or other questions on somewhat meaningful topics. If you’re ready to answer such questions now, I’d be happy to re-ask them. But I won’t waste my time if you’re just going to not answer them as happened previously
I will answer your questions, Joshua, but I’m going to lunch with my aunt now, so it will take two or three hours. But I will answer serious questions–but please, no gotcha have you stopped beating your wife. I would also ask willard and ATTP to assure me that my answers will be posted.
“VTG, the IPCC does not overestimate impacts.”
A straight answer. Appreciated.
So, the logical conclusion is that you believe the IPPC overstates potential warning. Correct?
Chubbs says: “ECS is one of the most uncertain aspects of climate science. It is a shaky foundation to build your climate belief system on. Needs a lot of shoring up”. There’s a reason for that. Uncertainty is your friend if you want to delay action “because uncertainty”. More importantly, poorly constrained theories and observations with lots of investigator degrees of freedom are a nice place to farm false positives and false negatives, and aberrant results. I’m reminded of Phase II of the “memory of water” fiasco where they tried to demonstrate radio transmission of the memory (yes, really). Instead of using chemical titration to confirm the transmission, they used as their assay a Heath Robinson arrangement of surgically removed hamster hearts kept going with perfusion (I may have got some details wrong from memory, but I kid you not). My suspicion is that there was some subconscious belief in “vitalism” going on, and they thought it would work with live assays, but not with chemistry. Of course it was an incredibly noisy system, and inconsistent because each heart was different, and they needed a baseline run where you had to assume the heart’s response was not changing due to deterioration while on life support. A gourmet recipe for false positives and false negatives.
Funny thing is, the only people who base their “climate belief system” on it are lukewarmers, luckwarmers, and deniers as a strategy for avoiding accusations of denial. Oddly enough, they’re also just about the only people in the debate who have a “climate belief system”. The rest of us don’t. We have evidence and the scientific method. We don’t believe. We’re persuaded by the evidence. Belief is unnecessary. That’s why in the science community, ECS is an emergent property from models driven by the laws of physics. You neither have to believe or disbelieve. It’s just there. And the range is what it is. Crude calculations that have already been proven wrong (or, if you prefer, answer the wrong question and return a result that is not globally-averaged ECS) by doing the same calculation in an Earth sectored by latitude are what believers want and need to reinforce their beliefs. Scientists in general don’t need that, but some go there to swat gnats, and others because poking at the model helps you understand the model and make the next model better. For example, IIRC some of those pokes have led to insights into why theone iteration of Planet Earth we have available for inspection is not currently at the P50 of successive CMIP ensembles.
Joshua
My thinking is that the loss of Arctic sea ice during winter months, and much of spring and fall as well, produces a permanent negative feedback to global temperature rise as a result of less insulation (from ice).
It obviously produces several positive feedbacks as well – so it’s complicated. Again, wondering if this is an idea that’s been studied?
Javier’s idea is a little different. As I inderstood it: heat is carried in the atmosphere from low, humid latitudes to higher and drier latitudes where there is less of a GHE. Again resulting in a negative feedback. Makes sense to me.
It’ll take me a while to dig them up. Maybe not until tomorrow.
I will re-ask them in good faith just as I did originally.
@ snape
imv, and with reference to my brother – being intelligent/genius (however these are defined) just affords a denier better internal mechanisms in maintaining a fiction and carrying an argument
plenty of youtube videos of flatearthers debating with astrophysicist, and David Irving wrote some acclaimed history books
but denial is still denial
Dave Geologist, of the Lukewarmers I am regularly in contact with, not one advocates delaying action. Just saying. I don’t want this to be about me, but I have been advocating action for the past 10 years. And Mosher has said repeatedly–you pick the sensitivity you like and let’s get started. I know the activist community is not enamored of Fast Mitigation, but those who have signed on to it are eager to get going, as are those more recently who are talking about a trillion trees, soil management and the like.
No lukewarmers are calling for the withdrawal of subsidies for EVs or solar panels. No lukewarmers are agitating for a return to coal–if anything, most are hoping nuclear power stages a comeback.
So I don’t see what your comment is referring to.
Tom, is Matt Ridley a Lukewarmer?
@Joshua
“If the dynamics play out as you theorize, does your theory include any speculation about the long term, i.e., will the planet “cooling” continue in perpetuity because of the concentration of energy in the Arctic, and is thee some point at which that concentration of energy in the Arctic spins off its own set of (deliterious for humans) developments on its own?”
To the first part: as long as the air temperature in the arctic is colder than the temperature of the ocean below, loss of sea ice represents the loss of a layer of insulation. A permanent negative feedback.
To the second part: Arctic warming is already having deleterious impacts to humans. For example, thawing permafrost has damaged roads and buildings in Alaska and elsewhere. An observation, no need to speculate.
*****
An older code
I had a friend in college, a grad student in chemistry so clearly no dummy, who nevertheless believed we were being watched by aliens. All the governments of the world knew about it but kept it under wraps…..
I’ve thought about it for years – how can someone demonstrate such a high level of reasoning in one area, but so little in another?
ATTP, he certainly has claimed to be. In a series of posts in 2013, I disputed most of his specific reasons for such a claim (https://thelukewarmersway.wordpress.com/?s=matt+ridley). He participated in the conversation up until it was interrupted by his appointment to the House of Lords.
I would put him as close to, but not quite a lukewarmer, but as the lukewarmer position is pretty much self-defined and fairly elastic (and I am not the arbiter of such thiings), I’ll just leave it at that. Is Joe Romm representative of the climate consensus? Turnabout’s fair play…
Tom, I’m not the one who is claiming no one associated with a label has ever done anything worth criticising.
5 papers is a handful. less than 5 is a few. 6 to 39 is a flurry. 40 or more is scores of papers. I hope that is helpful
500 papers is a ream.
Speaking of which, Tom.
“Is Joe Romm representative of the climate consensus?”
And what about Ted Kaczynski?!
Corey, why are you equating Joe Romm with Ted Kaczynski?
thomasfuller2 – “of the Lukewarmers I am regularly in contact with, not one advocates delaying action.”
Yes, but are they advocating and supporting the kinds of actions already on the table and that have a chance of actually happening or advocating things that are not on the table that are not? Advocating reduced support for what we are doing in favour of what we are not can turn aiming for the perfect into an enemy of doing what we can – and it is a position that can bear a strong, real world resemblance to advocating delay.
mrkenfabian, I think you’re directing your concerns to the wrong group of people. As I see it, it is the Fast Mitgation team and lukewarmers who are saying let’s get started on actions that can forestall 0.6C of warming this century and buy us time for more comprehensive mitigation strategies to get rolling
And it is parts of the activist community that are looking askance at us for advocating this.
Snape quoted the biologist Javier:
I saw that too. Shorter Javier: “Something is preventing excess energy from warming the globe, even though it is warming the globe”
@Paul Pukite
No. He’s saying there might be even more excess energy if it wasn’t being transported to the Arctic so fast, where it can take a shorter path to space as a result of the lower humidity there (Ok, the last part’s me, not him).
Not that I completely agree. There are the well known positive feedbacks from Arctic amplification – less albedo, methane released from thawing permafrost, etc. The NET of the various feedbacks would, IMHO, determine whether or not Arctic amplification has an overall positive or negative influence on GW.
Snape, Certainly, but remember that the way Javier phrases everything it’s intended to feed into Curry’s uncertainty dynamic. The negative feedback already includes Planck, which is also “cooling the planet”.
The fact that a huge heat sink is attached to your CPU, with a fan directed at fins to disperse the heat isn’t hiding the fact that your computer is getting warm, LOL.
> Is “Al Gore is fat” on your Matrix?
The Contrarian Matrix is for the best contrarian arguments. Ideally each line should lead to a serious published citation. I will try to include the citations in the site itself, to make the project self-contained.
I’d put “but Al” into a more recent project – a list of tags for the usual talking points. There is no real project title yet. They’re tags to faciliate tweet search. How about ClimateBall Bingo?
Here’s the list I have so far:
#But1940
#But2ndLaw
#But70s
#ButABC
#ButAbsoluteTemps
#ButAcid
#ButActivism
#ButAdjustments
#ButAl
#ButAlarmism
#ButAnonymous
#ButAntarctica
#ButBAU
#ButBirds
#ButBjorn
#ButBlackBody
#ButBureaucracy
#ButCAGW
#ButCausation
#ButCCS
#ButCensorship
#ButCommunism
#ButConsensus
#ButConspiracy
#ButCooling
#ButCosts
#ButCET
#ButCG
#ButChina
#ButClouds
#ButCycles
#ButDamascus
#ButDems
#ButDaPaws
#ButDenier
#ButDebateMe
#ButDick
#ButDogma
#ButEinstein
#ButEngineering
#ButFreeSpeech
#ButGalileo
#ButGeologicTime
#ButGeos
#ButGrants
#ButGreenland
#ButGreta
#ButGrowth
#ButH2O
#ButHippies
#ButHolocene
#ButHotSpot
#ButHurricanes
#ButIceAge
#ButIcon
#ButIntegrity
#ButIPCC
#ButLag
#ButLIA
#ButJim
#ButLukewarm
#ButMike
#ButModulz
#ButMWP
#ButNed
#ButOceans
#ButPopper
#ButPlantFood
#ButPredictions
#ButProjections
#ButPropaganda
#ButProxies
#ButRCPs
#ButRevelle
#ButResilience
#ButRSS
#ButSatellites
#ButSkepticism
#ButSchneider
#ButSeaLevel
#ButScience
#ButSkepticism
#ButSimon
#ButSO2
#ButSocialism
#ButSubsidies
#ButTaxes
#ButTheDecline
#ButTehGoddard
#ButTraceGas
#ButTreeRings
#ButTheAuditor
#ButTheLeft
#ButThePaws
#ButThePoor
#ButThePress
#ButTheSun
#ButTime
#ButTone
#ButTrees
#ButTribalism
#ButUnstable
#ButVenezuela
#ButVenus
#ButVolcanoes
#ButWeather
#ButWeWin
#ButZeIssue
Paul
I very seldom agree with Javier, but there IS a good deal of uncertainty. Hence the large range of potential outcomes from a doubling of CO2. Maybe this is an example?
I’m not sure what you’re saying here, “The negative feedback already includes Planck, which is also “cooling the planet”.”
Different parts of the planet hold in heat better than others, with the Arctic representing an especially leaky area.
By “cooling the planet”, I think he meant compared to otherwise.
As the ocean surface absorbs the summer sunlight the ice otherwise would have been reflecting, the air-sea interface gets much warmer, which will inhibit the loss of ocean heat to the atmosphere. The arctic ocean will gain energy in the same way the rest of the oceans have been: Minnett’s theory. In the winter it’s going to shed heat transported plus heat gained from open waters in the summer, so winter 2-meter will experience additional warming.
[1] The data strongly points to sensitivity of the atmosphere being significantly lower than the 3C stake in the ground planted by climate activists.
and
[2] Too many dummies who insist it IS below 3C.
That is all.
There is a distinction between noting some recent science and INSISTING
Tom gavin’s preference for 2.7 doesn’t make him a denier, your preference for 2.5 makes you one.
Other folks refusal to lay out a plan doesn’t make them deniers or delayed, you laying one out makes you a denier or delayer.
The simple fact is they can choose any statement of yours past or present to lump you into the camp they choose to.
Hulme gets this too.
Someday they’ll go after hansen.
It’s in nature of all tribes, a kind of purity thing.
Maybe they will make up a funny salute.
TomFuller writes “I would put him as close to, but not quite a lukewarmer, …”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
If Hulme gets it, maybe it’s because he writes stuff like this?
I genuinely think that people who regularly get criticised should seriously consider if they’re speaking truth to power, or if it’s because sometimes they just talk nonsense. The latter is so much more likely than the former.
Snape, since when has there been a pause in warming? In Javier’s dreams? Given that the planet has just experienced its warmest June on record, it makes me wonder where these people get their information. Willard needs to add ‘pause’ to his ‘but’ list. It is another of the discredited canards that contrarians repeatedly rehash. To put it bluntly: there never has been a pause. Javier, who calls himself a ‘biologist’, is completely wrong.
How much uncertainty is there? Have you read the Charney report from 1979? Clearly not. Meteorologist Jules Charney commissioned several leading atmospheric scientists as well as climate modelers to predict what potential effects the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels would gave on atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and global temperatures. They concluded that it would lead to a doubling of CO2 levels (to around 480 ppm) within a century with surface temperatures rising around 3 degrees. Remember, this was in 1979, almost a decade before Hansen’s congressional testimony. The Charney report argued that there would be significant societal and environmental consequences of a continuation in the unlimited burning of fossil fuels. We now know that the fossil fuel industries commissioned their own scientists at around the same time to evaluate the same issue, and they drew the same conclusions. Ten years later, in 1989, scientists met at Noordwijk, the Netherlands, to discuss what should be done. This is when the industry of denial shifted into gear. Unfortuneately, because of their immense PR efforts and influence, we have done virtually nothing since. The consequence is that the amount of CO2 humans released annually into the atmosphere almost doubled between 1990 and 2018. In 25 of the past 26 years, the emissions of CO2 were higher than the previous year.
In essence, we have known for at least 40 years what the effects of burning fossil fuels will be on atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and that, if unchecked, we risked inflicting serious damage on ecosystems across the biosphere with significant societal consequences. Most importantly, we have effectively done nothing about it, dragging our feet and capitulating to industries and corporate lobbies hell-bent on short-term profit maximization with less than lip service paid to the future. The frustration I get reading blogs and comments on blogs is that some people write as if we have all of the time in the world. They think that this is a nice little discussion in which we can all calmly sit together, sip tea and chew the fat. Many who adopt this approach lack even a basic understanding of the underlying science or of the broad ecological effects that are unfolding before us. I study some of these effects – I am writing a large review about extreme climate change related events such as heatwaves, droughts and extreme rainfall on invertebrates right now – and this blinds them to the true scale of the predicament. They refuse to see that we are sitting on the edge of a precipice below which is a deep, dark, terrifying void. The symptoms of climate change are all around us and they are not trivial.
I am extremely pessimistic because I see few signs for optimism. The metaphor that “we are fiddling while Rome burns” is more appropriate than ever before. Denial is more rampant than ever, despite of the overwhelming empirical evidence and scientific consensus. I rarely write into blogs these days because what’s the point? Just more fiddling. The same tired, discredited memes – e.g. the pause, CO2 is plant food, the sun is responsible, the world is cooling etc. etc…- repeated over and over. These are depressing times.
SM wrote “Tom gavin’s preference for 2.7 doesn’t make him a denier, your preference for 2.5 makes you one.”
While I tend to avoid labelling, a preference for 2.5 doesn’t make Tom a denier, however thinking a “safety margin” of 0.4C on ECS is, shall we say, “failing to acknowledge the full distribution of plausible values”.
Oops “on ECS is” should have been “on ECS is reasonable is”
SM “The simple fact is they can choose any statement of yours past or present to lump you into the camp they choose to.”
A bit like Tom does with “alarmist” and “activist” ? Who is ‘they”?
In my opinion, Javier is out of his depth.
ATTP, Hulme appears to be conflating the everyday use of “existential” (a very serious threat, but stopping short of extinction – for example, surely WWIII was an existential threat during the Cold War, but surely some humans would have survived) with an etymological definition, extinction of the human race. You’d have through a professor would know better.
Although from a quick Google the root appears to be “existence” not “extinction”, so even etymologically it need not refer to extinction. For example, the collapse of our current civilization would be an existential threat to humanity (to our current way of existence), but stop short of extinction. ISTM his essay only applies to that tiny (vanishingly small?) set of use cases where the writer explicitly ties it to extinction, IOW the death of all humans.
A couple of points:
1) There is nothing in observations that indicates that ECS is <3. EBM are model calculations not observations. The recent observed temperature trend has been well predicted by climate models, while EBM are underestimating recent observations (EBM predict temperature rise of roughly 0.12 C/decade). Main problems with EBM: limited 19'th century obs, aerosol forcing uncertainty both amount and location, and the fact that global-average surface temperatures are not neccessarily a good metric for feedback/energy balance per recent papers. Recent papers based on cloud and paleo observations generally support climate model vs EBM ECS estimates. Expect IPCC6 to give little weight to EBM vs other methods of estimating ECS.
2) Javier/Snape have latitude impacts of warming backwards. Its cold at the poles because solar heating is lower not because the losses to space are greater. Radiation losses occur from the upper atmosphere not the surface. There is more mixing between the surface and the upper atmosphere in the tropics so surface warming is more readily lost to space there. Note this latitude pattern effect is why the global average temperature can be a poor feedback metric limiting EBM. See paper below for details.
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/50/13126
@JCH
Your comment through something of a monkey wrench into my thinking on this. I could be completely wrong – still trying to work it through.
@jeffh
I didn’t at all agree with Javier’s claim about the pause. It was the other stuff I was interested in, mainly because similar thoughts were already floating around in my head.
Idle speculation, really, which is why I was wondering about research.
According to Wikipedia, only two climate models were reviewed in the Charney Report: Manabe’s, which gave an ECS of +2.0C, and Hansen’s with an ECS of +4.0C (Did that make Manabe a denier??).
They were apparently deemed equally credible, because Charney tacked on a 0.5C margin of error to each end, coming up with a most likely range of +1.5C to 4.5C.
That estimate has stood for 40 years and represents the measure of uncertainty I was talking about.
I think you know I agree with your comments about impacts. Much worse than most people seem to realize.
Hi Snape,
They compromised. Akio Arakawa assessed Manabe’s model and Hansen’s claim that it was an underestimate. Of course Wanabe wasn’t a denier; he made the most of what information was available at the time. Three degrees was the ‘middle ground’ conclusion. It seems remarkably prescient today, given that people like Javier are writing piffle on blogs like WUWT and elsewhere. Who is he anyway? You stated that he is a biologist but aside from his first name (if that is real) he hides behind anonymity. A biologist? I hardly believe it. I am a biologist and I am interested to know his background. My guess is that he has few or no peer-reviewed papers in any scientific field.
But it doesn’t matter. We are debating over pedantics. The planet is committed to a 2 degree rise no matter what we do thanks to 40 years of denial and procrastination. There is even a greater chance now that the planet will warm 6 degrees it staying under 2 degrees. A two degree warming alone will have (is already having) huge social and environmental consequences. Four degrees or more and we are done. Certainly we can discuss uncertainties until hell metaphorically freezes over, but little or nothing is being done to mitigate GHG emissions. There is plenty of greenwash and corporate PR going around to ensure that we ‘stay the course’.
> Willard needs to add ‘pause’ to his ‘but’ list
ButDaPaws is already there.
> There is a distinction between noting some recent science and INSISTING.
You mean noting the same recent science for a decade and INSISTING that what matters is the lowest bound of justified disingenuousness.
Jeffh said:
Yes, he Javier is indeed a molecular biologist. Judith Curry accidentally posted his full name next to a guest post of his and I can confirm that his scholarly credentials check out in that discipline. And can confirm from the moderator at the POB blog where he has also contributed a guest post on the carrying capacity of the earth. He has just as pessimistic an outlook on the Earth’s future as you, but that scenario apparently doesn’t involve AGW.
@ Willard
Looks nearly complete, with the exception of #ButElNino
But, if a scientists explains why DaPaws never it happened, that proves DaPaws.
Why is it I only ever see Mosh pout after Tom’s backed himself into a corner again?
Paul, I am afraid that being a molecular biologist does not confer immediate wisdom as to the effects of AGW on complex adaptive systems… I am a population ecologist and the signs that warming are harming biodiversity at all levels of organization and across different ecosystems are everywhere. The empirical literature is full of papers showing this. In particular, extreme events attendant with warming are particularly harmful, especially when combined with other anthropogenic stresses.
If Javier is as pessimistic as me, then its surprising that he writes guest pieces for WUWT, which not only disputes warming but an array of other environmental problems. It is therefore bizarre that he openly writes for a contrarian blog. IMHO he should stick with his reductionist biology. He is not qualified to comment on AGW or its effects.
Dave,
Indeed, but his essay also jumps between existential and emergency, as if somehow claiming it’s a climate emergency is equivalent to claiming it’s an existential threat. A problem I had with his essay is that he wrote it as if he has some kind of intellectual authority, but really it just comes across as him not liking the current narrative. This is fine, but being an academic who happens to work on climate doesn’t really give someone some authority to proclaim the narrative we should be using. They’re entitled to their opinion, but it’s not really worth more than that of others (caveat; there’s a difference between an expert highlighting errors in what people are promoting, and an expert disagreeing with the tone of a public narrative).
Willard –
I offer some suggestions for consideration…
But…
Echo chambers
Librul media (or MSM – I see you have “the press” but I think a finder point on it might be in order)
Religious fanaticism
Feynmann
Lysenko
McCarthy
Eugenics
Group think
Lowfat food
Plate tectonics
Ulcers
DDT ban
No Ozone Hole
One World Government (has dropped off lately but was once quite prevalent)
The Replication crisis
Safespaces/snowflakes (I see you have a close relative in free speech, but maybe could be included?)
Postmodernism (post modern science, normative science)
I’m sure I’ll think of others later…
Oh, how could I forget but…
Linear non-threshold
Gleick
Solyndra
I don’t think you realize what your various lists actually indicate.
”
Oh, how could I forget but…
”
ButTheirEmails.
ButSalbyWow.
ButStadiumWave.
ButStormSurge.
ButTheLeveesFailed.
ButObama/Hillary/Pelosi/A.O.C.
ButHollywood.
ButWe’llBeDeadByThenAnyway.
But…
There is no global temperature
Diurnal change/seasonal change
How can you estimate in tenths of degrees (the margin of error is bigger than that)
Cook 18
Lew
But…
Vikings
Ethanol
Burning wood in England
And of course…
UHI
> Looks nearly complete, with the exception of #ButElNino
I’ll add #ButENSO. I doubt it’s complete, as J’s suggestions make clear. The list is not systematic. It really is a compendium of talking points I’ve heard in the death thread mentioned in Rachel’s interview:
https://twitter.com/nevaudit/status/1148271142463037440
(Ann-Sophie’s work on the philosophy of smell may be the next #WeAreScience chat.)
I may need to filter the topics in a mindmap, e.g. echo chambers may be subsumbed by #ButTribalism, and #ButC13 is covered by #But97. I added #ButLew, #ButFeynman, #ButLysenko. There are also connections with the Matrix to be made. When the work takes shape, I may do a post on this.
As for the project name, would you prefer ClimateBall Bingo, Climate Bingo or Contrarian Bingo?
The Very Reverend Jebediah Hypotenuse says:
“ButSalbyWow.”
LOL, but at the same time “oh no, not again” ;o) / 😦
As I think about it, “but UHI” is problematic since it brings in a lot of legitimate science as opposed to just being a fallacious argument. So I think “But weather stations” would be a preferable alternative.
W/r/t the project names, of the three I’d vote for Contrarian Bingo as the other terms might be considered inaccurate since the list is culled from only one side of the climate, or climateball divide. That said, FWIW I’m not a huge fan of the term contrarian since many of the presenters of those arguments aren’t really contrarians in some broad way. They are only selectively contrarian, which doesn’t to me merit a label of contrarian. The choice wasn’t offered, but my vote would be for “Skeptic” Bingo.
> I don’t think you realize what your various lists actually indicate.
Keep saying stuff.
> “but UHI” is problematic since it brings in a lot of legitimate science as opposed to just being a fallacious argument.
They’re more talking points than arguments. Every single point can be valid from time to time. What matters most is their relevance. The “but” indicates some deflection.
#ButUHI is related to #ButAdjustments. Should they be distinguished? Depends on the granularity of the talking points we have. Having too many items in the list makes the list cumbersome to use. There’s a trade-off.
Willard –
There’s a trade-off.
Sure. But I’d suggest that two of the trade-offs against the granularity attribute might be the ubiquity attribute and the prominence (or prestige or esteem) attributes – in which case ButUHI ranks highly. I guess it would also depend on how you’re defining utility.
But it’s all good.
> my vote would be for “Skeptic” Bingo.
Contrarians ain’t no skeptics, with or without quotes.
Contrarians might be selectively so by sheer necessity. It’s really hard for a label to apply in a general manner. We still have problems with chairs and tables:
SM:
#ButGavinInvestigatesECSForALiving
#ButTomProvokesControversyForALiving
OP:
…or cut off arms 8^).
Willard –
Contrarians ain’t no skeptics, with or without quotes.
Yes, I agree that the folks in question mostly aren’t skeptics. And the quotation marks are meant to connote that they aren’t likely skeptics.
Being someone with descriptivist tendencies, I certainly agree that you should use whichever word you feel best conveys the meaning you want to convey. But FWIW (and I note you haven’t paid for my opinion) when I hear “contrarian,” at least outside the climate-o-sphere, I think of someone who disagrees for the sake of disagreeing, or who almost automatically disagrees with the opinion of whomever he/she it talking with. What we have with “skeptics” is almost the antithesis of that because they reflexively disagree with only one set of opinions. It the disagreement isn’t neutrally targeted without intent or purpose. Many almost always bend over backwards not to disagree with anyone who shares their “skepticism.”
Of course, in the “climate-o-sphere,” the term takes on a kind of vernacular connotation…
They’re more talking points than arguments. Every single point can be valid from time to time. What matters most is their relevance. The “but” indicates some deflection.
I agree that there is some deflection, but I don’t think that deflection really applies all that much. The talking points represent arguments that “skeptics” believe invalidate AGW. IMO, to deflect one usually needs a kind of meta-awareness that there’s something that needs to be deflected. The see arguments in support of AGW as obviously wrong, the product of religious fanatics who are perpetrating a fraud so they can create a one world government. Most “skeptics” are true believers in the arguments they make, and thus they feel no need to deflect. “Alarmists” really are just like Lysenko. Same, same but different. They aren’t deflecting, IMO, but trying to protect the world from tyranny.
The flurry not withstanding, this paper looks to be a very interesting paper.
> when I hear “contrarian,” at least outside the climate-o-sphere, I think of someone who disagrees for the sake of disagreeing, or who almost automatically disagrees with the opinion of whomever he/she it talking with
A contrarian is simply “a person that takes up a contrary position, especially a position that is opposed to that of the majority.” For our purposes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrarian
So I would not mind taking the prescriptive position on this.
***
> I don’t think that deflection really applies all that much.
Of course it does. Talking points are interjected in a way that disrupt the flow of this very thread. Look how our visiting Black Knight rope-a-doped from one talking point to the next. The first comments were about moderation. Then it switched to some misunderstanding, which got cranked up to accusations of misrepresentation. This sufficed to establish #ButLukewarm. It took less than ten comments.
Then to keep in the game, our Black Knight needed to acknowledge Very Tall’s point, a point that lingered on for more than six months:
Notice the structure. The first sentence is a concession. The second sentence is a but, i.e. #ButActivism. It acts as a deflection.
Either the IPCC’s position is luckwarm, or it ain’t. It obviously ain’t. As the Auditor said in the O’Donnell affair, end of story.
Chubbs
“2) Javier/Snape have latitude impacts of warming backwards. Its cold at the poles because solar heating is lower not because the losses to space are greater. Radiation losses occur from the upper atmosphere not the surface. There is more mixing between the surface and the upper atmosphere in the tropics so surface warming is more readily lost to space there.”
You’ve misunderstood our argument. Well, mine at least:
Water vapor has two mostly offsetting influences on global temperature – warming because it’s a greenhouse gas, cooling because it produces the clouds, increasing albedo. So in an arid region, for example, the lesser GHE is to some extent offset by clear skies.
During the long Arctic winter this is not the case. The cooling effects of low humidity/GHE are not countered by clear skies, because there’s no sun!
So heat advected to the Arctic in winter has an unusually clear path to space.
******
Surface warming is NOT more readily lost to space in the humid tropics. Quite the opposite.
Snape – the GHE is determined by the altitude at which IRRadiation is not absorbed. The upper atmosphere is pretty dry because it is so cold. Thus it does not seem to me to automatically follow that surface humidity has that strong an effect on the (clear sky) GHE.
This sort of question seems to me why we have GCMs to try and understand how these effects apply.
DM
My description of water vapor is pretty standard, but I agree with your second point about GCM’s. From NOAA:
“As a greenhouse gas, the higher concentration of water vapor is then able to absorb more thermal IR energy radiated from the Earth, thus further warming the atmosphere. The warmer atmosphere can then hold more water vapor and so on and so on. This is referred to as a ‘positive feedback loop’. However, huge scientific uncertainty exists in defining the extent and importance of this feedback loop. As water vapor increases in the atmosphere, more of it will eventually also condense into clouds, which are more able to reflect incoming solar radiation (thus allowing less energy to reach the Earth’s surface and heat it up). The future monitoring of atmospheric processes involving water vapor will be critical to fully understand the feedbacks in the climate system leading to global climate change. As yet, though the basics of the hydrological cycle are fairly well understood, we have very little comprehension of the complexity of the feedback loops.”
Snape,
How old is that quote? As far as I’m aware, there’s reasonable evidence now that relative humidity will remain roughly constant, which allows one to reasonably constrain the water vapour (and lapse rate) feedback. The biggest feedback uncertainty is clouds.
Snape, my point was about the altitude of the water vapour. It isn’t clear to me that more surface evaporation means more stratospheric/upper tropospheric water vapour. The GHE still exists in deserts, presumably because fast winds in the upper atmosphere mix the GHEs, even though the surface atmosphere is dry.
Joshua:
Well, why do they think that? IMHO it’s worth asking how recognition of anthropogenic climate change came to be identified with tyranny. Are your “skeptics” all blameless victims of professionally-crafted propaganda, funded by the Koch Klub? Are they merely deflecting their innate tribalism onto an illusory enemy? Do they truly not recognize any social costs ensuing from whatever they might want to do, or do they just think they’re entitled to externalize as much of their private cost as they can get away with?
Questions like these seem germane to any practical resolution of the problem.
ATTP:
“The biggest feedback uncertainty is clouds.”
NOAA via Snape:
“As water vapor increases in the atmosphere, more of it will eventually also condense into clouds, which are more able to reflect incoming solar radiation (thus allowing less energy to reach the Earth’s surface and heat it up)… …we have very little comprehension of the complexity of the feedback loops.”
These statements are certainly consistent, perhaps even synonymous.
Snape
“Water vapor has two mostly offsetting influences on global temperature – warming because it’s a greenhouse gas, cooling because it produces the clouds, increasing albedo. ”
I don’t think that’s right on clouds. Dependent on type, altitude and time of day, cloud feedback cam vary from positive to negative. It’s likely to be net positive (ie heating).
I’ll try and find a reference.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40641-016-0052-8
Fig 4
snape,
You seem to commenting under a different name. If you’re happy for me to post the comments, I will. If you’d rather comment again under your chosen pseudonym, just go ahead and do so.
vtg,
Yes, I had missed that snape’s quote included a discussion of clouds. You’re right, though, that the response of clouds can both reflect light (low-level) or effectively act as an insulator (high-level). The response of clouds to warming is uncertaint, but most of the recent work suggests that the cloud feedback will amplify the warming.
Mal –
I don’t see blame as particularly relevant, but I definitely don’t think it is of any practical benefit.
I don’t think they’re victims of propaganda. They seek out information that confirms their identity orientation – just as do all humans, pretty much, particularly in polarized contexts that overlap with ideological orientation.
I think that there’s some pretty solid evidence that a common frame for the climate war, which IMO functions mostly as a proxy for a larger ideological identity struggle, is defined by antipathy towards the “other.” For example:
and…
***
> Do they truly not recognize any social costs ensuing from whatever they might want to do, or do they just think they’re entitled to externalize as much of their private cost as they can get away with?
I’ve been trying for a few years, now, and I have yet to get a “skeptic” to engage with me on a discussion about externalities.
[Fixed. No need to insert the blockquote tag for every paragraph. –W]
Cloud cover in the Arctic winter is going up. Overall, it has a warming effect; amplifies winter warming.
thx. actually I was trying to end the blockquote after “…works in non-elites” to end the blockquote from the article.
and then have a gap with something like “Mal says” And then start another blockquote for quoting Mal with “Do they truly not recognize”
One more reason to use the “>” marker in addition to the blockquotes.
I added asterisks.
@JCH
I had a chance to think about your earlier comment,
“As the ocean surface absorbs the summer sunlight the ice otherwise would have been reflecting, the air-sea interface gets much warmer, which will inhibit the loss of ocean heat to the atmosphere. The arctic ocean will gain energy in the same way the rest of the oceans have been: Minnett’s theory. In the winter it’s going to shed heat transported plus heat gained from open waters in the summer, so winter 2-meter will experience additional warming.”
This is saying that the heat gained in summer from open water will carry over into the winter months. True of course, but that doesn’t prevent open water in winter from being a negative feedback.
“Cloud cover in the Arctic winter is going up. Overall, it has a warming effect; amplifies winter warming.”
No doubt it has a local warming effect, my question is about the global.
****
@Chubbs
“Radiation losses occur from the upper atmosphere not the surface. There is more mixing between the surface and the upper atmosphere in the tropics so surface warming is more readily lost to space there.”
Observations don’t agree:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/global-maps/CERES_NETFLUX_M
*****
@ATTP
“How old is that quote?”
Not sure:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/faq/greenhouse-gases.php?section=watervapor
I apparently misunderstood DM, and was just trying to show that water vapor is commonly known to be a GHG.
Sorry about the silly pseudonym. Back to my usual.
*****
@Dikran
It’s my understanding that GHG’s near the surface create a situation for LW surface radiation akin to someone fighting through a crowd to get somewhere. In this case the destination is space. Sure, adding GHG’s will raise the altitude that this radiation “breaks free”, but the crowded area nearer the surface is where much of the work is being done…….. producing backradiation and increasing residence time.
IOW’s, the higher altitude “clear path” is in my mind more an outcome of the GHE than a description of the mechanisms at play.
*****
@VTG
Sorry, I haven’t had time to read your link yet. I was thinking of the tall, bright cumulous clouds of the humid tropics, which we know produce a strong albedo. It’s interesting that measured at the TOA and averaged over a year, the dark rainforests of Indonesia have about the same albedo as the much brighter Sahara. Less radiation to space, though, because cloud tops at ~30,000 are WAY colder than the desert surface, and radiation is a function of temperature.
Snape wrote “It’s my understanding that GHG’s near the surface create a situation for LW surface radiation akin to someone fighting through a crowd to get somewhere. In this case the destination is space. Sure, adding GHG’s will raise the altitude that this radiation “breaks free”, but the crowded area nearer the surface is where much of the work is being done…….. producing backradiation and increasing residence time.”
I don’t think that is the case. The only way the planet can gain or loose energy is top of the atmosphere radiative balance. The warming of the lower atmosphere is a consequence of that imbalance. You appear to be making an argument about the local effects of the Arctic on global temperatures, so it is global energy balance that matters; everything else is merely redistribution of energy AFAICS.
Snape
“I was thinking of the tall, bright cumulous clouds of the humid tropics, which we know produce a strong albedo. It’s interesting that measured at the TOA and averaged over a year, the dark rainforests of Indonesia have about the same albedo as the much brighter Sahara. Less radiation to space, though, because cloud tops at ~30,000 are WAY colder than the desert surface, and radiation is a function of temperature.”
I don’t know enough to comment meaningfully on the specific feedbacks of each cloud type.
I would observe
(1) that it is not necessarily true that higher temperature will result in the cloud type you pick being a net negative feedback ie radiative losses increasing faster than Stefan-Boltzmann
(2) That it’s the overall impact of clouds globally that matters, not any analysis of a particular cloud type in a particular region.
Dikran
“I don’t think that is the case. The only way the planet can gain or loose energy is top of the atmosphere radiative balance.”
Yes, but the increase in residence time I mentioned is what creates that imbalance. It’s also what creates the larger pool of energy in the atmosphere and consequently more backradiation. Here’s a simple example of what I mean by residence time:
a) place a coin into a jar once every minute. Then, also every minute, remove a coin. There will always be just one coin in the jar – one leaving at the same moment a new one arrives.
b) again place a coin into the jar every minute. This time, though, we’ll only remove one coin an hour, thus ncreaing the residence time for each.
During this first hour the jar will be filling up with coins. At the end of the hour, the first coin you placed into the jar will be removed. It’s residence time is up. A minute later the second coin placed into the jar will be removed……..and so on. Now there will at all times be 60 coins in the jar, one exiting every time a new one enters. Equilibrium of coming and going.
“Yes, but the increase in residence time I mentioned is what creates that imbalance. It’s also what creates the larger pool of energy in the atmosphere and consequently more backradiation. ”
This seems like a very odd way to conceptualise the issue, and I doubt there is any physical basis for it.
Specifically, what is this “pool of energy” and how would you quantify it (in joules)?
I’m pretty sure that clouds are [still] a known unknown … but much less so than in 2000 when I first learned about the challenges they presented to modelers. With what is now known about clouds, this discussed importance of annual “average” is significantly becoming a/the problem. For example, the TOA animation that was shared by Snape with Chubbs, reveals a significant difference between the dynamics at the poles (Greenland’s ice sheet’s dynamics withstanding). The two seasonal lifts in the tropopause which the [discounted/dismissed] Inuit hunters have observed have increased when their generational knowledge (i.e., at least going back to the ’50s) are not factored for because of averaging, and don’t apply [yet!] at the South Pole. The hunters’ observations indicate that the increased refraction during the Arctic twilight is absolutely pertinent when considering causes regarding the “early” loss of sea ice and permafrost relative to what the models predict/predicted (the always-behind-the-observations thing). These failures should – motivated reasoning withstanding – effect a bit less professional hubris than is currently strutting about about averages supports. But it doesn’t. At least on this blog and its comments.
Furthermore, since we know the crap we dump into the atmosphere in the northern mid-latitudes migrates north, and that twilight is defined via an earth surface based bias, isn’t it well reasoned to accept that the Arctic’s extended twilight is neither twilight (as assumed where the learned live), nor short (i.e., anything that an annual averaging elucidates due to twilight’s mid-latitude shortness and, averaged, insignificance, regarding the known unknowns)?
Radiation, convection, and conduction are all in play. While radiation does seems to dominate, it may need to share its academic spotlight with the other two means of heat transfer. And do so seasonally … as soon as the data and computer power is available!
In the meantime, doesn’t sapience suggest the all-knowing academic roosters need to trust the uneducated when it comes to the hunters’ data and the increased seasonal refraction of solar insolence that causes it? And both at the surface and in the air column where soot collects and disperses an unconsidered quantity of heat in the Arctic by all three heat transfer? (& this may be increasingly significant everywhere as AGW and natural positive feedbacks of abrupt climate change unfold.)
Or, I’m a still looking for help getting these toothless hunters the credit they deserve for identifying the mechanism by which annual averages and observer bias have incorporated unintended error into the models and deluded the gullible into not seeing just how BIG the “too” is in “2L8” … but for geo-engineering [that will mess up big time if/as models and annual averages are trusted to attempt to effect it].
sNAILmALEnotHAIL …but pace’n myself
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCeDkezgoyyZAlN7nW1tlfeA
life is for learning so all my failures must mean that I’m wicked smart
>
“Yes, but the increase in residence time I mentioned is what creates that imbalance. ”
Err, no, it doesn’t. The imbalance is caused by the effective radiating layer being higher, and therefore colder and thus radiating less energy out into space. The atmosphere then warms as a consequence of that imbalance.
Snape – Better to look at outgoing only instead of the net – max in the tropics and subtropics.
DM
I’ve enjoyed looking at insulation – with the GHE being a variation – in different ways. Your way is perfectly valid. It can be easily understood by a funny analogy:
A man is standing on the moon (where convection doesn’t add confusion) with just one shirt on. This layer of clothing is radiating to space at a rate defined in large part by its temperature, and has been warmed by the man’s body.
If he puts on an extra layer of clothing, this new layer will be colder than the one underneath, “thus radiating less energy out into space.” Like you said, this creates an energy imbalance, with more being produced by his body than is being shed.
Again, a valid description, and backradiation/residence time was never mentioned. So I agree with you even if you don’t agree with me.
Snape The imbalance is not due to “residence time”, as you claimed. your last comment does not address that either by acknowledging the error or by defending it. That is not the way to conduct a scientific discussion.
It is meaningless to talk of residence time of energy (as it only exists as a discrete element [if then] while it is a single photon).
@VTG
My interest in water vapor/clouds, WRT the arctic, is just a matter of curiosity….wondering if heat carried there in winter from lower latitudes contributes to a faster or slower rate of global warming. But you’re right, their influence on any singular location isn’t what’s most important.
“Specifically, what is this “pool of energy” and how would you quantify it (in joules)?”
If you have two rooms filled with air – similar levels of water vapor, nitrogen, etc. – the hotter room will have more total energy. That’s what I meant. Not unlike, I suppose, the term “OHC” as used by NOAA. To put a number on it in terms of joules is beyond my pay grade.
@Dikran
I may very well have made a mistake regarding what caused tbe imbalance. The “colder layer” sounds better at the moment but I need to give it a night’s rest.
As for the discrete photon part, or rather the lack therefore, here’s what I’ve come up with: Suppose an area of earth’s surface, clear skies above, were to emit a short pulse of energy – how long before the pulse is observed at the TOA? The answer might approximate the residence time of LWIR moving, en masse, from surface to space.
Snape, if it is in an absorption band, the answer is likely to be meaningless as the energy of the absorbed photon is likely to be redistributed, which was the point I was making.
If you say something that is incorrect, then say so, replying without acknowledging that someone has pointed out an error comes across as evasion.
The ‘height of the effective radiating layer” explanation is pretty much standard and has been around at least since Ekholm’s paper from 1901.
Snape
“Specifically, what is this “pool of energy” and how would you quantify it (in joules)?”
If you have two rooms filled with air – similar levels of water vapor, nitrogen, etc. – the hotter room will have more total energy. That’s what I meant. Not unlike, I suppose, the term “OHC” as used by NOAA. To put a number on it in terms of joules is beyond my pay grade.
But that’s just saying that the temperature of the atmosphere is higher, which is a circular argument.
Snape said:
Well, there is the concept of the Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW), which is an immense pulse of upward propagating energy, creating a relief valve of sorts. This is one way in which the stratosphere influences the troposphere, and the correlations between SSW, QBO, and the polar vortex are of course prime research topics
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/111568
Invoking “just so” narratives describing what’s happening aren’t going to cut it here. I agree that nothing short of working out the GCMs and rooting out the patterns through simplified physics are the only way that anyone will be able to model this well enough to make predictions.
So Snape, you have just wandered into an area that the warming coupling is unclear. Like with everything else, start with the most fundamental processes and work your way forward. That’s the QBO for me
@DM – I’m used to my infrequent comments not being responded to here, but your critique re Snape is not one based on the three means of heat transfer: radiation, conduction, convection. Snape is more right than you when he references the pushing through a crowd metaphor. Just because radiation is the key/macro means of heat transfer both into and out of the atmosphere, this does not mean the other two are without agency. When a system is perturbed, such as we have done, isn’t it foolish to assume that the data we have (due to what we are looking for/at, & model – within the limits of current computation power) means we have our thinking cap on right?
Snape, entropy makes what you are thinking about mostly irrelevant. The mid-latitude heat disperses quite efficiently on its way north into the arctic. It is the particulate matter, particularly soot, that is more significant when it comes to warming the Arctic atmosphere. The mid-latitude methane that travels with it, in conjunction with outgassing in the Arctic, exacerbates the retention of the heat gained. I think of our pollution as tiny solar collectors that, with the seasonal increase in refraction, collect and transfer more of the solar irradiance. As best as I have been able to discover, this increased solar gain is not modeled.
@ATTP, concerning the how many joules question, isn’t the best way to quantify that number is by starting with how many joules are required to close the gap between modeled and observed Arctic sea ice loss (& reverse engineer the exponential forcing and timeframe that would generate the difference) … and whittle away at that? Given the lack of data, the error bars will be uncomfortably large, but the Inuit observations suggest such is simply an inconvenient truth. 😉 Our mid-latitude biases are the problem when evaluating polar dynamics … particularly regarding the import of twilight (which brightens with altitude and gives the tiny solar collectors we keep sending north more energy to collect and transfer).
sNAILmALEnotHAIL …but pace’n myself
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCeDkezgoyyZAlN7nW1tlfeA
life is for learning so all my failures must mean that I’m wicked smart
>
Greg “@DM – I’m used to my infrequent comments not being responded to here, but your critique re Snape is not one based on the three means of heat transfer: radiation, conduction, convection. ”
It is all about radiation, which is the only way the planet can gain or lose energy. The reason the radiating layer is colder is due to the lapse rate, which is to a large extent due to convection. Energy of outbound photons there are absorbed by GHGs is largely redistributed by collisions between gas molecules, which is conduction. The explanation I gave is completely standard, and as I pointed out is over 100 years old.
@Dikran
If we mentally divide the troposphere into discrete layers, like an onion, the highest radiating layer will be coldest because it receives no backradiation. The second highest layer will be second coldest because it receives the second least amount of backradiation. This pattern continues, moving downwards, until we reach the layer nearest the surface, which is warmest because it receives the most backradiation. GHG’s, top to bottom, are therefore involved in the process. The notion that water vapor needs to be at a high elevation to contribute to warming is nonsense.
@Greg Robie
Thanks for the vote of confidence regarding the “crowd” example. Your comments, BTW, are very interesting! I would enjoy a discussion……although it will have to wait a few days because I’m heading out today on a summer adventure.
@Paul Pukite
Your right of course about needing GCM’s. Not so much about the QBO part. (Just kidding, way over my head).
@VTG
A circular argument? The nerve!
Again, just kidding. I’ll try and prove you wrong when I get back. Happy trails everyone.
Snape,
You do realise that the temperature profile in the atmosphere is largely set by convection, not by backradiation?
@DM, I concur … BUT! 😉
Unless I don’t understand the point, isn’t this century-old understanding (being stated via motivated reasoning?) as dismissive of the unquantified role of our “tiny solar collectors”/TSC? 😉
In terms of the climate system, aren’t TSCs generated from the incomplete combustion of fossil carbon – AND – a new perturbation of the system? Hasn’t the amount of TSCs/unit of fossil carbon combusted decreased over time? In addition, isn’t the increasing seasonal lifts of the tropopause in the Arctic also an increased volume for TSCs to reside there? Doesn’t this mean they collect unmodeled solar irradiation due to the difference between mid-latitude and Arctic ‘twilight’ … & that the amount is increasing? Isn’t this [plausible/probable/highly possibly significant] additional warming worth trying to quantify … rather than attempt to defend a knowledge base that isn’t very accurately modeling observed Arctic sea ice loss?
Are you intending to assert, dismissively, that what is known is what is correct? Please clarify – if I’ve misunderstood. While the understanding that is stated is correct, doesn’t what is correct – also – require correcting?
=)
sNAILmALEnotHAIL …but pace’n myself
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCeDkezgoyyZAlN7nW1tlfeA
life is for learning so all my failures must mean that I’m wicked smart
>
Snape, the fact that I use a more advanced explanation of the greenhouse effect should suggest to you that I am probably already familiar with the simpler analogies (such as insulation) and understand their flaws.
What ATTP said (see also my response to Greg)
Greg wrote “being stated via motivated reasoning?)”
Sorry, life is too short for discussions with people who make that sort of accusation without any evidence.
What Snape said about residence time causing the imbalance was incorrect, I have explained why. That is not being dismissive, and I resent the implication.
Snape,
@ATTP, Dikran
“You do realise that the temperature profile in the atmosphere is largely set by convection, not by backradiation?”
Well, I realized even before seeing your comment that I had committed a grievous oversight – in that the atmosphere gets thinner and thus colder with altitude, GHE or not.
I was picturing an idealized situation, similar to what is seen in izen’s animations or Eli’s green plate. Please think of my description in that way as well. My point still stands, the role of GHG’s at low altitudes are vital to the process. You can’t just look at the TOA or highest emitting layer to see the GHE. The mechanics underneath are the real drivers.
It is not clear to me that my thoughts on residence time are incorrect.
If at the TOA less energy is leaving the system than arriving, this represents an imbalance. That imbalance is created because the upward flow of energy has slowed. Which is equal to saying its residence time has increased. Energy is hanging out in the system a little longer before leaving.
‘My point still stands, the role of GHG’s at low altitudes are vital to the process.’
I don’t think that is true. If you had an atmosphere where GHGs only occurred at high altitude you would still have convection and thus a lapse rate, and you would still have a GHE AFAICS.
‘The mechanics underneath are the real drivers’
No, I don’t think that is the case. It is the rising effective radiating layer that causes the imbalance. That imbalance only goes away when the radiating layer is warmed, but that is a consequence of the energy gained due to the imbalance, not the cause.
For Snape,
Chris Colose has a good description of the greenhouse effect, the money shot is here:
To the simplest approximation possible:
1) Higher GHGs result in higher effective emission height, because the atmosphere is more opaque to IR, so must be thinner before photons can escape to space.
2) The intensity of those emissions (W/m2) and therefore their temperature, must, however, be unchanged, in order to maintain the energy balance of the planet.
3) The lapse rate (rate at which temperature falls with altitude) is, to first order, unchanged.
4) Therefore, the temperature at the surface must rise.
Obviously, that’s a noddy description, but I think it has all the key points. Note that the fact that GHGs are saturated at ground level is irrelevant – it’s only the height at which they cease to be saturated changing that matters.
Snape, I have already pointed out why residence time is not a meaningful concept for energy. Say a photon of visible light reaches the Earth. Precisely when is the moment when that energy leaves, i.e. how can we find its residence time?
Snape,
Here is outgoing radiation, strongest in the tropics and sub-tropics.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/30368
Very nice graphic, Chubbs. That graphic and text that accompanies is pretty clear. Any theories about outgoing radiation probably should fit well with the observation of outgoing radiation. Theories that don’t fit well with the observations might be described as magical. And not in a good way.
Well, more something takes up residence on the surface, and in the layers of the oceans, etc.
DM re “Sorry, life is too short for discussions with people who make that sort of accusation without any evidence.”
My intent of including that term (or, if it makes a difference, observer bias) was intended as a means of considering a questioning of surety. Looks like that didn’t succeed.
So, and regarding “evidence”:
Isn’t motivated reasoning a [necessary] neurological adaptation regarding the ‘successful’ evolution of a self-conscious critter? Don’t we all [mostly] unconsciously access it when we feel we need to? Isn’t our as-good-as-gets an ongoing discipline to be consciously aware of motivated reasoning’s subterfuge and our being fully rational? Or, a no-evidence-is-necessary thing; a we-cannot-not-do-it thing; a we need “TheOther” thing (because we tend to self-organize socially to ‘conspire’ to protect a trusted – re experienced homeostasis – iteration of motivated reasoning).
For example, what I am replying to is a second assertion of what is correct (& I’m [again] not disagreeing, BTW), which does not address the unquantified TSCs and the increased solar gain they effect – both since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and since the increase in seasonal lifts of the Arctic tropopause became observable (last 70 years?) that points to a [likely] increase in the solar irradiation our planet’s atmosphere captures.
FWIW, I have not followed this thread closely (a family reunion and returning home to a water crisis regarding my permaculture homestead-scale brook trout aquaculture on a seasonally dry hillside … & ’tis the season!). I am not up to speed in terms of what Snape was asserting regarding his metaphor, only that his metaphor deserved more than the dismissing it was being given. What I did take in aligns with ATTP’s point about convection. It is my understanding that as the altitude increases, radiation, as the dominate means of heat transfer becomes even more dominate (or, more relevant, the other two means (though mostly one – convection) of heat transfer approximate zero). So, given the ‘flaws’ in simpler insulation analogies, is it possible to imagine that such simpler/irrelevant metaphors might need to have that irrelevance revisited –to the degree fossil carbon TSC are a new perturbation; a seasonally rising tropopause in the Arctic constitutes increased solar irradiation capture thanks to these TSCs?
Also FWIW, once upon a time I was a urethane foam insulation contractor. 😉 …& the amount of O3 I helped kill is =(
‘My intent of including that term (or, if it makes a difference, observer bias) was intended as a means of considering a questioning of surety. Looks like that didn’t succeed.’
I wasn’t born yesterday.
@DM, neither was I 😉 …but wasn’t the knowledge we profess born of yesterday?
As I asked in my first post to this thread, “when might we hear that academia, via its social institutions, has collaboratively implemented a zero carbon economy business plan…?” As long as that is not happening, isn’t one hundred year-old knowledge, functionally, just intellectualized fairytales? Also, given that the knowledge that was brought to bear against the threats and questions raised by our continued combustion of fossil carbon is not able to accurately model sea ice loss, isn’t, motivated reasoning withstanding, this a condition where surety/observer bias becomes a part of the problem?
…& in answer to @VTG (not @ATTP – MyBad), the [dynamic] “pool of energy” was – & approximately/very roughly – 1 trillion joules/yr. in 2000 when the IPCC Third Assessment Report was being readied for publication. Currently, using the PIOMAS 1979-2018 average of sea ice loss. If the current actual anomaly is used it is 2.5 times. And when the Arctic sea ice is gone, three trillion joules will constitute this “pool of energy”.
As @JCH says, “something takes up residence”.
And, if my simple math and graph extrapolating data are correct, it is the latent heat of fusion that, in the negative, does so … or is part of the mix.
It is not so much a case of heat residing somewhere as it is a matter that a critical reservoir of cool is not coming back. The planet’s iceboxes are broken.
The “push” Snape imagines in his metaphor of crowds is a matter of perspective, and VTG, [interestingly] different. The force is entropy, and in my mind such is more of a pull. Regardless, it is resisted. And that resistance is greatest at the surface.
Big picture with 100 year-old knowledge, only radiation matters @DM, but with the Industrial Revolution a new and constant forcing – soot from fossil carbon combustion – started perturbing the system. As TSC, or tiny solar collectors – tiny sun catchers for the more Pollyanna among us! 😉 – don’t they need to be factored into our knowledge base in ways that might help explain the 2.5 trillion joules that knowledge can’t account for today?
Again, enter our toothless illiterate Inuit hunters. Their observations concerning the shift in the Arctic sunset says that the seasonal lift of the Arctic tropopause has created a new place for the TSC to do their thing (& isn’t it ‘ironic’/an example of motivated reasoning that the primary means of heat transfer is conduction?). The SOUSY data from Svalbard suggests the end of melt season lift is about three months in duration. The lift is not likely more than a kilometer (& likely less). Regardless, that seems to me to constitute a significant new ‘playground’ for TSCs to absorb and conduct heat. At 10-11Km, the space is effectively almost 2° latitude south of its actual location. The Inuit observations suggest that this ‘playground’ got created over the past 70 years.
And I’m still looking for help “whittling” away at this. @Snape, I’d be happy to talk when you get back.
(Oh, one last thing. @DM, there is a second version of the previous comment somewhere. My attempt to post it via the website pushed the emailed original out of wherever it was stuck – and took its place? This emailed comment got stuck, now I’ll see if this post on the webpage does as well, oh well! 😉 …& its a small price to pay for the connectivity that pushes me into new insights; connects me with valued information.)
VTG
Earlier you accused me of making a circular argument, so I looked back at tbe comment in question,
“Yes, but the increase in residence time I mentioned is what creates that imbalance. It’s also what creates the larger pool of energy in the atmosphere and consequently more backradiation.”
Thanks, good catch. Should have been, “backradiation increases residence time creates larger…..”
What I wanted to say, in simplest terms, is that when CO2 redirects the radiation it absorbs – it forces that energy to travel farther to get where it’s ultimately going. Farther takes longer and taking longer creates an overlap, with new arrivals showing up faster than the current residents are leaving. Energy starts to accumulate in the system.
I can’t argue with the lapse rate reasoning, but seems like more a logical outcome than the description of a process,
“If A is greater than B, and B is greater than C, then A is greater than C.”,
tells us nothing about how A came to be greater than B.
@Chubbs
I think we’ve been talking past one another. Probably my fault because I didn’t do a good job of explaining myself. Sorry about the confusion.
– You never said net radiation is greater in the Arctic than the tropics.
– I never said out-outgoing radiation is greater in the Arctic than the tropics.
Snape,
The concept of “residence time”.
Residence time of what? Presumably you are referring to photons?
If do, how would you define or measure such a time?
How is it affected by carbon dioxide?
Can you post a reference for this “time” or is it purely of your own conception?
VTG
I was first introduced to the idea a few years ago by the commenter Barry, at Roy’s blog. He used it to help explain the carbon cycle. Since then, I’ve noticed it applies to all sorts of things…..traffic jams, checking accounts, radiators, population, rivers. Especially useful for a general understanding of thermodynamics, which otherwise can be very confusing. It comes up on Wikipedia, but I’ve never bothered. More fun to speculate, and everything below is my own conception.
Residence time: the amount of time something spends (resides) in a given space or reservoir. Photons works as a way of forming a mental picture, and that’s basically what I was doing. Just like dots in izen’s animations.
RT = number of residents divided by rate of entry – once a steady state has been reached. So if 3 coins are dropped into a jar every second, and there are always 60 coins in the jar, we know that each coin was in the jar for 20 seconds – its residence time.
Starting from an empty jar, RT = the time it took for a steady state to arrive. Knowing RT and rate of entry, we can find how many coins will be in the jar at steady state (I used this example in a comment upthread). Knowing RT and number of coins in the jar at steady state, we can find the rate of entry.
There is a steady population of ants in Bob’s house, with four entering every second and four leaving every second. How many ants are in Bob’s house?
You could answer this question if you knew the ant’s average residence time.
Snape,
I am very familiar with the concept of residence time.
I do not understand what you think its relevance is to photons in the atmosphere.
I’ve come very clearly to the conclusion that you, likewise do not.
VTG
I can’t tell what you’re saying in the last sentence, “I’ve come very clearly to the conclusion that you, likewise do not.”
I likewise do not what?
VTG
You said, “I do not understand what you think its relevance is to photons in the atmosphere.”
I explained my thinking here,
“…….. when CO2 redirects the radiation it absorbs, it forces that energy to travel farther to get where it’s ultimately going. Farther takes longer and taking longer creates an overlap, with new arrivals showing up faster than the current residents are leaving. Energy starts to accumulate in the system.”
VTG asks “Residence time of what? Presumably you are referring to photons?”
Snape wrote: “Photons works as a way of forming a mental picture, and that’s basically what I was doing. ”
I detect a pattern – a pattern I have seen before.
Snape,
you clarified earlier that by “energy” you meant sensible heat – energy defined by the temperature and mass of the atmosphere.
You are now talking about the “residence time” of that “energy”, and indicate that you mean photons.
Photons travel at the speed of light; they do not “reside”.
Your concepts are, I fear, hopelessly confused. I would suggest that the only way to resolve this confusion is for you to write down what you believe as mathematical equations. That forces the discipline to be precise about what you mean by “residence time”, “energy” and so on. Continued discussion will not, I think, clarify this.
Finally, I note that you cannot provide a citation explaining your ideas, but instead explain that you picked up this concept from blog comments. If you can find no other place these ideas are used, that should tell you a great deal about how useful they are.
Dikran, we crossed. I hadn’t read that earlier discussion, looks like you’ve already covered this.
Unfortunately Snape seems to be making a habit of this sort of thing, from the previous thread:
What becomes of a photon when it is absorbed? Does it cease to exist? If it continues to exist within the absorbant, what is its name?
@Dikran, VTG
One thing first….. while I appreciate all your feedback, I think it’s a little unfair to Greg Robie, who had some interesting things to say, and clearly spent a fair amount of time writing them, but has been largely ignored.
*****
That being said, I found a paper (quite easily, BTW) that hopefully addresses some of the math/method/measurement questions that I can’t, and maybe helps explain the relevance of the concept “residence time” to the flow of energy through Earth’s atmosphere:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.01932
Snape AFAICS, that doesn’t answer the question. They are also applying the concept of residence time to a situation where it has no physical meaning without explaining the benefit of doing so. Their conclusion
I ask again:
BTW AFAICS their calculation has no real relevance to the greenhouse effect, it is basically estimating the effect of the thermal inertia of the atmosphere. Of course this will be misleading as the atmosphere is strongly coupled to the oceans, which have a far greater thermal inertia.
Note that Snape’s initial statement was:
which is clearly talking about the path taken by individual photons, which simply is not how energy is transmitted through the atmosphere out into space. Not surprising that Snape won’t give a direct answer to my question.
Well, kudos to Snape for looking up some equations.
Where to start with the “paper” that’s been turned up?
A proper fisking would be an interesting project for a high school student. Maybe start with asking singe questions.
1. Basic thermodynamics.
a) What is the baseline used for the “energy in the atmosphere” terms in equation 2?
b) Baselines for energy in thermodynamics are arbitrary. What difference would using a different baseline make to the conclusions of the paper?
2. Basic Dynamics.
The paper concludes the “residence time” for energy in the earth’s atmosphere is 56 days, and that “after a global thermal perturbation, the atmosphere
would need about a couple of months to return to equilibrium.”
a) Newton’s Law of cooling can be used to define a characteristic time constant for thermal heat transfer. How would you calculate this time constant for the Earth’s atmosphere, and how does the numeric value compare to the “residence time for energy” defined in the article?
b) What measurements could be used to empirically define a characteristic time constant for the atmosphere? Consider seasonal and diurnal changes in your answer.
3. Critical Thinking.
How would you evaluate the quality of this journal article?
Consider
a) Quality of the work from your own knowledge of physics
b) An assessment of the breadth and depth of the bibliography.
c) External evaluation of the quality of the journal
Dikran asks,
“Say a photon of visible light reaches the Earth. Precisely when is the moment when that energy leaves, i.e. how can we find its residence time?”
That’s a loaded question, in that you believe the correct answer will prove my viewpoint to be faulty and yours correct, a conclusion I strongly disagree with.
– To the first part: It would be very difficult, more likely impossible, to know the exact moment an individual photon had been emitted. And following its path to space, only remotely conceivable if it remained a discrete entity as a member of the atmospheric window…. just as big a problem.
– To the second part: why in the world would you need to? From my comment above, that would be like thinking you needed to follow an individual ant around Bob’s house for a year, when you already had the means to find the average residence time of the whole ant population via a calculation? The folks who published the paper I linked to would have thought the idea – trying to follow an individual photon from surface to space – just as ludicrous. They were already able to make a calculation/estimate from already known values!!
– It also begs the broader question, is a concept arrived at through reasoning or other means, rendered invalid and meaningless just because a direct measurement is impossible? Some of Einstein’s ideas were, at the time, impossible to verify. Should they have therefore been deemed unworthy of discussion and discarded?
(To be clear, I’m asking a broad, hypothetical question here, in no way limited or specific to the discussion at hand).
(Is this an example of tortuous logic, or merely mental gymnastics? I ask for a friend.)
If a photon strikes a tree in the forest, does it make a sound?
@Corey
Maybe your friend was late to the conversation? I would agree at least that wordy, hard-to-follow is a fair criticism. Sounded good at the time, but in hindsight wish I had taken more care before hitting send.
I’ll try and do better with the next question I’m too scared to answer.
Snape wrote “That’s a loaded question, ”
No, it isn’t, it is about physics and the meaning of “residence time”. Leave the rhetoric please.
“– To the first part: It would be very difficult, more likely impossible, to know the exact moment an individual photon had been emitted. ”
because if you cant tell when the energy has left, then “residence time” has no meaning. Residence time is the average amount of time something spends in the system before leaving. If there isn’t a point where it leaves, there is no residence time.
” From my comment above, that would be like thinking you needed to follow an individual ant around Bob’s house for a year, ”
evasion. There is an identifiable point at which the ant leaves though, so it can have a residence time. Putting a time limit on the observation period that is shorter than the residence time is obviously specious.
” The folks who published the paper I linked to would have thought the idea – trying to follow an individual photon from surface to space – just as ludicrous.”
How many times does it need to be said that individual IR photons don’t generally make it from the surface to space, which is what makes “residence time” a meaningless concept.
” It also begs the broader question, is a concept arrived at through reasoning or other means, rendered invalid and meaningless just because a direct measurement is impossible? ”
It isn’t the fact that direct measurement is impossible, it is that the thing that is measured by residence time does not exist to be measured.
“Should they have therefore been deemed unworthy of discussion and discarded?”
Who said it was unworthy of discussion? I have been discussing it and arguing why it is not useful.
Actually, reading it more closely, I can see that Snape has evaded the question entirely
“– To the first part: It would be very difficult, more likely impossible, to know the exact moment an individual photon had been emitted. And following its path to space, only remotely conceivable if it remained a discrete entity as a member of the atmospheric window…. just as big a problem.”
It isn’t a measurement problem, but a theoretical problem of defining when the incoming photon can be said to have left the system. Most IR outbound photons will be absorbed and their energy redistributed by collisions. The energy emitted from IR photons from the effective radiating layer will be a mixture of small contributions from very many inbound photons, and so the time the photon leaves is undefined, even in principle.
If you wanted to borrow terminology from the carbon cycle, then “adjustment time” would be way more appropriate.
I asked ” Snape, I have already pointed out why residence time is not a meaningful concept for energy. Say a photon of visible light reaches the Earth. Precisely when is the moment when that energy leaves, i.e. how can we find its residence time? ”
where do I mention measurement? Nowhere.
Dikran,
re the linked paper, have you read it? It uses internal energy to define residence time. But internal energy has no meaning as an absolute number, only relative to some reference state. So they could entirely arbitrarily defined a difference reference state and come up with a different residence time.
That residence time could be zero. Or it could be negative!
Their calculation on the sun does in fact come up with a negative residence time. However, they get around that by redefining the energy term as modulo, again entirely arbitrarily.
It’s extraordinary.
Yes, but only looking for justification of the concept, I didn’t check the calculations. The Kelvin-Helmholtz time is essentially an adjustment time (the time taken to adjust to a change in the sources and sinks), rather than a residence time.
Anyway, I am fed up with the constant evasion. If there is no point where it can be said (even in principle) that an incoming photon of energy has left the system, then the concept of “residence time” seems to me to be deeply misleading and likely to cause misunderstandings.
FWIW, I think their paper is basically saying that if the Earth was instantaneously transported into deep space and a perfect insulator placed between the surface and the atmosphere, then the characteristic timescale on which the atmosphere would lose its thermal energy would be about 56 days. That doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to me, but I can’t immediately see how that is useful in a discussion of climate change.
I should point out that under those circumstances there wouldn’t be much convection, so the processes that govern the loss of energy to space would not stay the same, so while it may be a reasonable ball-park figure, I wouldn’t rely on it for any quantitative analysis.
Dikran, that’s their conclusion, but not what the calculation they lay out actually does.
Well, I tried to find some value in the paper*!
* I hope people will do the same for mine ;o)
“If there is no point where it can be said (even in principle) that an incoming photon of energy has left the system . . .”
If the photon enters as visible light and exits as infrared, then it isn’t the same photon. The concept of residence time might have utility for processes with discrete immutable entities entering and leaving a system, but that isn’t the case here.
Mark B – indeed, a photon of outbound IR leaving the atmosphere probably isn’t the same photon of IR that was emitted from the surface either.
There is a usual but violently incorrect idea running through this thread of comments and a lot of the discussions about the greenhouse effect. Photons have no memory. A photon ceases to exist when it is absorbed and begins to exist when it is emitted. There is no conservation law for the number of photons.
When a photon is emitted, the energy of the emitting system decreases. When it is absorbed the energy increases. In multi-particle systems like a gas, liquid or solid, the energy which was localized, is then themalized (becomes thermal/heat energy) in really really short times. If the photon energy is thermalized and net flux of photons in and out of a system is zero, the temperature of the system does not change and the rate of emission depends ONLY on the temperature.
If diffusion of thermal energy is slow, there are temperature gradients in the system, but one can assign temperatures to small parts. One describes this situation as a local thermodynamic equilibrium. If you can measure a temperature of a part of a system, it is in local thermodynamic equilibrium. More precisely if all modes of motion can be characterized by the same temperature then you have a local thermodynamic equilibrium
Unnecessary vtg, Indeed impossible because it’s only a preprint on arxiv.org, and not a peer-reviewed journal paper.
Thanks to Eli for clear explanation about the lifestyle of photons. I thought about suggesting to photons to heat, but I could not have given the clear explanation that you delivered. Well done, sir.
I’d like to second what smallbluemike said.
“Unnecessary vtg, Indeed impossible because it’s only a preprint on arxiv.org, and not a peer-reviewed journal paper”
Hmmm. Weird. When I searched yesterday it turned up a hit in “Izvestiya, Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics” https://rd.springer.com/journal/11485
But doesn’t now. Was on my phone, I expect I messed something up somehow.
And third for Eli’s explanation – my understanding of the relative rates of emission vs thermalisation came from your blog, thank you!
> If the photon enters as visible light and exits as infrared, then it isn’t the same photon.
A photon is not unlike Brexit after all.
A toast to Eli’s future post.
I searched on Google Scholar and only saw the arxive versions. And a search of the journal doesn’t find it. Mayhap there is an odorous rodent or Actinopterygian involved? Or the editors realised their monumental error and decided to minimise embarrassment and damage to the journal’s reputation?
Silica aerogel. That’s the ticket. Enabling Martian habitability with silica aerogel via the solid-state greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect in 3 cm (it’s an almost perfect thermal insulator). Nice diagram too.
The guy a century ago who got the GHE wrong because he collapsed all the CO2 to a layer at the surface should have made the thermal conductivity so low the top of the layer was at upper troposphere temperatures. Then he’d have been about right.
No confusion over the lifespan of an individual photon. I never intended to suggest, literally, that photons were bouncing around in the atmosphere like pinballs, therefore taking a longer route to space. That’s what’s happening to ENERGY. So a ball of energy is a useful visual aid. Why? Because energy is invisible, and it’s hard to picture something we can’t see. Izen uses this idea in his animations:
The closest approximation in the atmosphere I could think of to a ball of energy is a photon. Yeah, I realize an individual photon is created and lost in the blink of an eye. Seems like a problem to the folks on this thread, not to me.
If the quantum of energy it represented was carried in a downward direction, that particular quantum of energy, for that brief moment, was not heading towards space. A delay getting to where it’s going. This is where residence time fits in. It may not be a useful concept for calculations, but it’s an accurate representation of reality.
Once more:
10 photons are moving upwards, 10 units of energy. They strike a molecule of CO2 and get absorbed……no longer exist. Energy is conserved, however, and 1/2 of the energy they represented will be reemitted in the form of new photons. These new photons will be redirected in a general downwards direction. So even though the ten photons themselves didn’t get bounced around, the ENERGY they represented did.
(I realize this is not a complete picture. Conduction, convection, reflection etc. make it much more complicated)
*****
As for the paper, I was very dubious of the result. Seemed way too long. Maybe OHC was not properly considered. Difficult task.
” This is where residence time fits in. It may not be a useful concept for calculations, but it’s an accurate representation of reality.”
No, you have that *exactly* the wrong way around.
“The closest approximation in the atmosphere I could think of to a ball of energy is a photon. Yeah, I realize an individual photon is created and lost in the blink of an eye. Seems like a problem to the folks on this thread, not to me.”
Yes, and we have patiently explained why it is a problem, but you keep ignoring it. Energy doesn’t exist as “balls” – for instance how does that relate to the vibrational or kinetic energy of gas molecules (which is what happens to most of the absorbed IR photons)?
Dikran
It’s a problem if you look at the ball/photon analogy literally. And you seem incapable of looking at it in any other way. “Hey, izen, you’re hopelessly confused. Co2 doesn’t emit 40 joule balls of energy”.
Maybe an example of a LACK of residence time will help show how the idea relates to thermodynamics? Reflection. A flux of energy leaves the object the instant it arrives. No time for energy to accumulate.
> Seems like a problem to the folks on this thread, not to me.
Seems like it’ll become your problem soon enough if you don’t succeed in finding a way to communicate your ideas instead of turning this into an ode to how you’re misunderstood.
Once energy is thermalized the system has no memory of where it came from or when,
As for the paper, I was very dubious of the result. Seemed way too long. Maybe OHC was not properly considered.
You haven’t read it, have you?
It’s about the atmosphere, not the ocean.
VTG
“You haven’t read it, have you?
I took a quick peak, does that count?😏
Glad you embarrassed me, though, because at second glance the error jumped out:
RT = total heat content of the atmosphere divided by rate of input. TOTAL rate of input, not just the input from one square meter. Correct value is millions of times shorter than 56 days.
Ok, well now I’m not so sure. I can’t really figure what’s going on with the equation, and that seems like way too big an oversight. Maybe the numerator was in square meters as well? FWIW, haven’t had math since freshman year of college.
Help,
did they calculate the average total heat content of a column of air rising from a one square meter surface area to the TOA? And used this as the “box”.
@-Snape
“It’s a problem if you look at the ball/photon analogy literally. … “Hey, izen, you’re hopelessly confused. Co2 doesn’t emit 40 joule balls of energy”.”
I hope I haven’t confused you with the ‘balls of energy’ model, it certainly was not meant to be a LITERAL depiction of the process which is why I warn –
I intend to simplify even further.
1)-All inputs and outputs of energy are quantised into fixed amounts.
2)-All directions of emissions are quantised into a 2D plane and the 4 orthogonal directions; N. S. E. W.
3)-The boxes (plates, molecules, planets) are perfect black-bodies with zero albedo. they absorb and emit at all energies.
4)-Events that are simultaneous and continuous are depicted as staggered in time and rate.
Note that the whole process depicted can be thought of as happening in an instant of Planck time. An increase in ‘residence time’ for some arbitrary reified quantity of energy is not required. What processes of thermalization or inter-conversion of forms of energy within the boxes and how long it takes is irrelevant, the diagram depicts it over time with different rates simply so that there is time to count the ‘balls/quanta of energy.
When ‘residence time’ is invoked in explaining the GHE it is a virtual quantity intended to make it easier to imagine how an energy imbalance can develop, not a real measurable time.
This is why the speculation that different ‘residence times’ at the poles and the tropics have an effect, is a category error or conceptual misunderstanding of the underlying process.
And why your continued insistence that it has some sort of relevance when you are shown how that is wrong, makes you look like the Black Knight insisting “Tis but a scratch…”
Hi izen
Love your animations!
I was using photons in a non – literal way to try and explain my idea. It kept being taken literally, so out of frustration I sarcastically wrote what you have in quotes.
Maybe you’re right, though, I’m just a persistent fool like the Black Knight.
Are you ok with this?
Lay a hose in a straight line across a 10 by 10 meter square of icy cold pavement. Hot water is flowing through the hose at 1 meter/second, so any given molecule of water will reside within the square for 10 seconds. The cold pavement is obviously warmer where the hose is lying on top.
Now wind 40 meters of hose through the square instead of the original 10 meters. Any given water molecule will consequently spend 40 seconds flowing within the square. A four fold increase in residence time.
Also, a four fold increase in surface area of hose warming the pavement. Notice the rate of flow through the hose never changed!
The point being, the increased warming and increased residence time were inextricable. One couldn’t have happened independent of the other.
This is how I see things WRT the atmosphere. A stronger GHE = longer residence time. One cannot happen independent of the other.
@-Snape
“Are you ok with this?
Lay a hose in a straight line across a 10 by 10 meter square of icy cold pavement. …”
Almost, but you still have a sequential version of the energy travelling through the system.
Instead think of the hose delivering water into a 10 by 10 box with one low side that allows the water to flow out in a nice little waterfall. The inflow speed, (but not amount) causes turbulent mixing in the box.
Now raise the low side by a couple of centimetres. The water in the box gets deeper, but the flow in and out stays the same. However it makes no real sense to claim that any ‘bit’ of water spends longer in the box and that is why the water is deeper.
(maybe I should animate it …!)
@-Snape
Perhaps the conceptual metaphor could be improved by replacing the hose with water delivered by continuous rainfall.
When the outlet is raised, does it make any sense to claim the water in the box got deeper because each raindrop spent longer in the box ?
Apologies, I’m away on holiday, so haven’t been following this as closely as I should have.
Snape,
You can’t really regard energy as having some residence time in the same was that you can discrete particles. It’s true that electromagnetic radiation can be in the form of energy packets (photons) but this energy packet is not fixed. As others have pointed out, as these photons interact with matter, energy is conserved, but the form of enegy changes. It ultimately becomes thermalised, and there is no way to track the origin of some amount of energy.
It’s really much better to simply determine if a system – or part of a system – is in energy balance, or not. If it is, the amount of energy remains fixed. If not, the energy content will change until energy balance is achieved.
Snape wrote ”This is where residence time fits in. It may not be a useful concept for calculations, but it’s an accurate representation of reality.”
Snape wrote “It’s a problem if you look at the ball/photon analogy literally.”
The hole you have been digging has reached your antipode.
” And you seem incapable of looking at it in any other way. “Hey, izen, you’re hopelessly confused. Co2 doesn’t emit 40 joule balls of energy”.”
I object very strongly to you putting words into my mouth that I didn’t say, especially if they are insulting to a fellow contributor. I have no problem with izen’s animation because it is fine as an analogy, it is only when you try and relate it to physical concepts like residence time that it is no longer appropriate.
Snape wrote:
No (IMHO).
@-Snape
This is a figurative illustration, NOT a literal physical representation.
Or how AGW works on a Flat Earth…
Snape,
Yes, we are talking past one another. Par for the course. We all seek simple explanations and build a worldview around them. Very useful survival tool, but problematic when the landscape changes.
izen impressive animation, as always, but I’m not sure this one works too well. “Surface warms as depth of lapse rate increases” doesn’t seem accurate to me. The trophosphere doesn’t significantly deepen as far as I am aware from increasing CO2, and lapse rate feedback is not the reason for the increase in surface warming. Similarly, while the rising of the effective radiating layer reduces the immediate outflow, that stops once surface warming reaches the effective radiating layer and radiative balance is achieved once more.
@-Dikran
““Surface warms as depth of lapse rate increases” doesn’t seem accurate to me. The trophosphere doesn’t significantly deepen as far as I am aware from increasing CO2, and lapse rate feedback is not the reason for the increase in surface warming. ”
The original idea is stolen from Tyndall who described the GHE as like putting a weir or small dam in a stream and deepening the pool behind that obstruction.
I may well have the details wrong, or could have expressed the process better.
The intention was to show that rising CO2 increases the altitude at which radiative energy loss is equal to solar energy gained.
When energy balance is restored the higher tropopause, or level at which there is energy balance will mean the surface is warmer with the same lapse rate.
I know it is all a bit more complex than that, but the rise in the effective energy balance emission level combined with a moderately constant lapse rate gives around half as much warming at the surface as it does at the tropopause IIRC. Sof D covers it in more detail here and throughout other posts.
izen, I think Tyndall was thinking about energy being damed rather than the depth of lapse rate increasing.
This is always the problem with analogies, they are useful, but you also need to be very careful about not emphasising the bits where the analogy does not reflect reality (e.g. lapse rate) but emphasising the aspects where it does. … and then have a pointer to the next level of detail to explain why the weak points are weak points.
Perhaps “surface warms as energy accumulates behind sluice” rather than “depth of lapse rate increases”?
I think the tropopause is the height at which the lapse rate changes sign and I think it is mostly set by convection? I think the effective radiating layer is lower than the tropopause and distinct from it. However this might be an opportunity for someone more knowledgable to apply yet more Kintsukuroi to my understanding of climate ;o)
note also that the effective radiating layer is only an abstraction, it isn’t really a layer as such.
“I think the tropopause is the height at which the lapse rate changes sign and I think it is mostly set by convection”
I think it’s the height at which convection stops, which amounts to the same thing as lapse rate changing sign. I think it is caused by radiation becoming the dominant mode of heat transfer.
But I suspect my ignorance is more profound than yours…
From teh wiki, the WMO definition:
The boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere, where an abrupt change in lapse rate usually occurs. It is defined as the lowest level at which the lapse rate decreases to 2 °C/km or less, provided that the average lapse rate between this level and all higher levels within 2 km does not exceed 2 °C/km.[1]
Elsewhere I read a key driver is UV absorption heating the stratosphere.
@ATTP, Dikran, VTG, Izen…etc.
I don’t know how to counter your argument except with another metaphor. It took a lot of work and might be my last try.
It’s a single iteration of what I see as trillions upon trillions of similar events occurring throughout the atmosphere.
Scenario 1)
Izen is standing at one end of a football field, holding a blob of energy he had gained from the sun. He sprints to the opposite end in 10 seconds, where the energy is released. A ten second resident time.
Scenario 2)
He does the same thing again, except that when he gets to the 50 yard line, he dumps his blob into a pot of water.
Izen disappears, but Dikran grabs another blob of energy out the pot, same amount that was put in by Izen, and runs back to the near end zone. Same side of the field that Izen had started from.
He dumps the blob into another pot of water, and promptly disappears.
Willard grabs a new blob out of the pot, and runs the length of the field, where he releases it.
******
In both scenarios, a blog of energy moved from one end of the field to the other. This took twice as long, however, in scenario 2.
Each of the runners ran at the same speed, so the difference in residence times was a matter of distance, the path was twice as long in scenario 2.
In both scenarios, a blog of energy was released at the far end zone, but only in scenario 2 has energy added to the pot at the near end zone. Energy was conserved in both.
****
Most important!
In scenario 2, if at the 10 second mark a new blob of energy had been placed into the near end zone pot by the sun, the water in the pot would have gained heat.
An overlapping of upwelling and downwelling energy, with a new arrival sharing the same space and time as a blob that, in essence, had not yet left.
Small correction, should be, “… but only in scenario 2 was energy added back to the pot at the near end zone.”
Something important I left out: the 100 yard football field is meant to represent a tiny, micrometer layer of the atmosphere, with the process in scenario 2 playing out in trillions of such layers, producing a tiny slowing and warming in each:
“If diffusion of thermal energy is slow, there are temperature gradients in the system, but one can assign temperatures to small parts. One describes this situation as a local thermodynamic equilibrium.” – eli
The cumulative effect being an overall hotter but slower river of energy moving from surface to space.
@-Dikran
“note also that the effective radiating layer is only an abstraction, it isn’t really a layer as such.”
Yeah, reality is always more complex than simple models. SoD goes into detail about how the ‘layer’ from which energy leaves the Earth is actually a composite of all the different components emitting/absorbing in their specific wavelengths.
But to expose my own misconceptions in this…
LWR emitted from the surface is absorbed by GHG in the atmosphere and promptly thermalised.
That drives convection which is the MAIN process that moves energy from lower levels were absorption/thermalisation dominates to the level(S) where there is insufficient atmosphere above to absorb, thermalise and continue the convective transfer, and radiative loss becomes dominant. So the point where the lapse rate stops is where convection stops. It is set by the amount of absorbing/emitting gases in the atmosphere driving thermalisation, so an increase will raise that point.
But when the climate system is at, or close to thermal equilibrium the temperature at the point where radiative energy loss dominates MUST be sufficient to equal the solar energy coming in.
If that is higher because more GHGs are absorbing and thermalising the atmosphere below it, and the lapse rate set by convection is also relatively unchanged, the surface will be hotter than it was.
But, ““surface warms as energy accumulates behind sluice” or outlet would probably be a better, less confusing label. I will be amending the animation accordingly.
Convection is also the reason Snape’s latest football analogy fails. The runners with their blobs of energy are blocked and outpaced by the convective movement of the tight-packed crowd of ‘spectators'(N2 O2 ?) who fill the field untill they thin out, stop convecting, and define the point where a runner CAN get over that ‘goal line’.
@izen
In the analogy, the three runners represent photons who carry energy to the pot of water. They disappear as the energy they carried is absorbed and thermalized.
Check a physics book, and you’ll find the trio is able to pass right through the tight-packed crowd you described, as if they were, well, invisible.
The process I described is what warms the surfaces the crowd collides with, transferring the extra heat via conduction.
@-Snape
“Check a physics book, and you’ll find the trio is able to pass right through the tight-packed crowd you described, as if they were, well, invisible.”
Check a physics book and you will find the mean free path at sea level for LWR is less than 10 feet.
Its the crowd carrying your (thermalised) buckets as a handful of energy each that are rushing (convection) towards the ‘end zone’, not the photons of energy.
Improved labels and file-size !
@izen
“Check a physics book and you will find the mean free path at sea level for LWR is less than 10 feet.”
Are you suggesting that the GHE only operates at the layer 0 – 10 feet?? That a molecule of co2 at an altitude of say, 500 feet, is not receiving any upwelling IR? As in, all the near surface heat is being carried right past by convection?
Would an IR detection device, pointed downward from that altitude (500 feet), come up empty? (Atmospheric window doesn’t count)
******
Love your graphic, as always. A picture can be worth a thousand words.
As I see it, what’s happening in my analogy and the convective processes you are talking about are not mutually exclusive. They are occurring at the same time and in the same places, with convection being the dominant upward transport, but not the only.
Please keep in mind the idea of residence time WRT convection as well, with the upward velocity of energy carried by mass a good deal slower than the speed of light.
*****
If you’re still interested, I think I could make a convincing argument for how residence time relates to the “box of water” idea you mentioned.
@-Snape
“If you’re still interested, I think I could make a convincing argument for how residence time relates to the “box of water” idea you mentioned.”
You probably could construct an argument, but I would not be interested and it would probably just annoy Dikran more and not convince anyone.
Unless there is an identifiable ‘thing’ or ‘ant’ that you can track through the system the residence time would be referring to a fictional consruct, not a useful or measurable parameter.
In the two narrow bands where photons can pass through the atmosphere without significant absorption, the visible and the atmospheric ‘window’ for LWR around the 8-14um region, a photon leaving the surface would reach space at light-speed.
But for most other wavelengths, and the majority emitted from the surface as a result of the S-B law and its temperature, the atmosphere ‘looks’ like a thick fog. A fog, cloud, or thick smoke is probably the closest we come to seeing the sort of absorption in the visible region of the EM spectrum that LWR ‘sees’.
Would it make much sense, or be useful to describe how thick a fog was, or how far you could see the lights of an approaching car by describing it as an increased residence time for the light from the car?
I would strongly advise working through the Science of Doom explanations of the GHE, there are several multi-part series on all the aspects from the simple to the complex, with side-digressions dealing with the most common errors and mistakes that are raised. It deals with the complexities of just where and how the surface loses the energy absorbed from sunlight is extended detail.
Some grasp of the basics, and the additional complexities might prevent you from constructing ‘models’ of what is happening that contain known errors and problems. Avoiding raising zombie issues prevents those who already have this understanding dismissing you as ignorant.
Avoiding repeated constructions of wrong conceptual versions when otters have told you they are wrong and pointed you to why, will prevent you annoying some people (Dikran?!) to the point of apoplexy.
Or Joshua wondering whether you are ‘engaging in good faith’. (grin)
It is a complex subject and we all make mistakes and have misconceptions about the details, but one of the benefits of these sort of discussions is that the hard-won knowledge science has acquired can be spread to dispel those errors.
It is when someone tenaciously clings to their original errors as seen in the ‘science report’ thread with Prof Zharkhova that suspicion is raised that the purpose of the claims is not to improve the science, but to promote a economic-political agenda.
That the display of Dunning-Kruger is the dog of science being wagged by the tail of partisan ideology.
Snape “I don’t know how to counter your argument except with another metaphor”
You do understand the point of this article about the Black Knight?
Sometimes the reason you can’t counter an argument is because you are wrong (and, like the Black Knight, don’t have a leg to stand on).
I pointed out that you had contradicted yourself and you have ignored it and carried on. You have offended me (by putting offensive words in my mouth) and ignored it and carried on. I have given you counter arguments, which you have ignored and carried on. That is not good faith discussion.
Snape writes “Are you suggesting that the GHE only operates at the layer 0 – 10 feet??”
No. Izen understands how the greenhouse effect actually works, but you don’t. It isn’t about the fate of photons emitted by the surface, it is about the photons that actually escape to space. That is about the GHG at the top of the atmosphere, not the bottom. This has already been explained to repeatedly, but you have preferred your analogy to something closer to the actual physics.
Snape writes “Check a physics book, ” Oh, the irony”
Izen writes “You probably could construct an argument, but I would not be interested and it would probably just annoy Dikran more and not convince anyone.”
I suspect that is the intent.
izen/vtg, thanks for the kintsukuroi, much appreciated, will give it some thought.
izen the animation looks much better, but I am still a bit uncomfortable about mentioning tropopause, I think I’d just go for outlet and perhaps mention effective radiating layer. Might make a very good stepping stone from the blanket analogy towards the Ekholm/SoD explanation.
One last version for the Flat-Earthers…
Looks good to this flat-earther ;o)
> Check a physics book.
Good idea. Come back when you do. Report.
Eventually the energy out will approximately balance the energy in, which is ~340.2 watts per square meter. With Izen’s animation, how can that actually happen?
@Willard
Izen: “Convection is also the reason Snape’s latest football analogy fails. The runners with their blobs of energy are blocked and outpaced by the convective movement of the tight-packed crowd of ‘spectators'(N2 O2 ?)”
Me: “Check a physics book, and you’ll find the trio is able to pass right through the tight-packed crowd you described, as if they were, well, invisible.”
*******
Outpaced? Maybe, but N2/O2 aren’t very good blockers.
“You have already learned that Earth’s atmosphere is composed primarily of nitrogen and oxygen. These gases are transparent to incoming solar radiation. They are also transparent to outgoing infrared radiation…..
http://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/module-2/how-greenhouse-effect-works.php
@-Snape
“Outpaced? Maybe, but N2/O2 aren’t very good blockers.”
But are excellent at mugging the H2O and CO2 and stealing any energy those molecules have acquired from absorption of LWR photons and carrying it off as thermal energy.
@-JCH
“With Izen’s animation, how can that actually happen?”
This is a figurative illustration, NOT a literal physical representation.
In reality the ‘outflow’ notch is the whole outer surface of the atmosphere, usually referred to as the tropopause or TOA.
Although as has already been mentioned that is a simplification. The outflow of that ~340.2 watts per square meter occurs within a volume where net radiative loss exceeds net absorption and thermalisation.
@Dikran
My position is that GHG’s have a warming effect at EVERY layer of the atmosphere, not just the first 10 feet or at the very top.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the “green plate/blue plate” diagrams. If a third plate were placed between the two, let’s call it “teal”, the blue plate would most definitely get warmer. Middle layers, not just the outside or top, contribute to surface warming.
Are you still trying to argue this is not the case?
[No more what abouts and what ifs. -W]
@-Snape
“what if an IR detector at an elevation of say 500 feet were pointed towards the surface, are you thinking there would be no LWIR left for the device to catch…… ”
Of course there would be LWR, the molecules in the air are communists, they share everything with their neighbours.
While the O2 and N2 gain thermal energy from the H2O and CO2 they also give it back and those GHG molecules may then emit a photon of LWR. So the GHGs below 500 feet will be emitting half their photons upwards. Most of which will be re-absorbed within a few feet… Its a continuous cycle of energy exchange between photons and thermal energy in the atmosphere until the density of GHGs above reaches the point where it is sufficiently transparent to the LWR emitting molecules to allow the energy to escape further thermalisation.
I used to have these conversations on other forums about a decade ago about the mechanisms of AGW, it seems strange to find that the SAME level of wilful ignorance and attempts at ‘gotcha’ objections is STILL going on.
Please work through the Science of Doom site and stop trying to re-animate zombies.
@izen
My argument is that the GHE is taking place in millions of micro layers, all the way from the surface to the effective emission level, and not interfering with conduction or convection. This is supported by upwelling radiation being detected at every level as well.
*******
YOUR description, it turns out, has an uncanny resemblance to what I often came across from deniers. In a nutshell,
“Surface warming is quickly thermalized, then carried to high altitudes by convection, where it is released with a clear path to space. No time for backradiation or GHE.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Looks like Snape isn’t going to give up. Note he didn’t even try to address the point about convection. The point is that N2 and O2 are not blockers. They recieve the thermalised energy from IR absorbed by GHG is the lower atmosphere and convection carries it upwards to a height from which the re-radiated IR can actually escape.
There would appear here to be no real attempt to engage with the counter arguments, just evasion. Again.
Snape “Any energy? So I’ll ask again, what if an IR detector at an elevation of say 500 feet were pointed towards the surface, are you thinking there would be no LWIR left for the device to catch…… all of it stolen by conduction/convection?
Citation please”
Snape, you are not listening. The atmosphere below 500 feet is also re-radiating LWIW both upwards and downwards, so the detector would capture that. Where did the energy for those photons come from? AIUI, not primarily IR photons the molecule has recently absorbed, but the thermalised energy present in the bulk atmosphere, which includes the N2 and O2 that occasionally collides with, and transfers energy to the GHG molecules in the lower atmosphere.
The idea of a “residence time” for that thermalised energy, as we have repeatedly explained to you, is meaningless.
As for a citation, I suspect any decent book on the physics of the greenhouse effect would do, but since you don’t accept even the basics of the argument when presented to you, why should I think you would read the paper/book cited?
I haven’t read them for a long time, but I strongly suspect the SoD articles that have already been mentioned are the citation. Why not go and read them?
izen said:
A blog not recommended at all by me. Instead, to someone like snape that is obviously well-meaning but has said “FWIW, haven’t had math since freshman year of college” I would recommend two pieces by Pierrehumbert.
The one in Physics Today that points out what is involved in trying to wrap your head around a GHG interacting with an electromagnetic spectrum
Click to access PhysTodayRT2011.pdf
And the one Pierehumbert wrote for Slate demonstrating how he thinks in the largest possible context
https://slate.com/technology/2013/02/u-s-shale-oil-are-we-headed-to-a-new-era-of-oil-abundance.html
> There would appear here to be no real attempt to engage with the counter arguments, just evasion. Again.
And you’ll just “observe” stuff about people. Again.
Relitigating every single point leads to exponential exchanges. It can’t be constructive.
> Outpaced? Maybe, but N2/O2 aren’t very good blockers.
The website you cite and quote isn’t a physics book.
@Willard, ATTP, izen and all
Did I need to quote a real physics book to convince you that a photon can pass right through a molecule of N2 or O2? That’s just quibbling, though, because I failed in the bigger point – trying to explain my viewpoint.
Here izen is using a visual metaphor to explain the GHE. For the sake of simplicity, things like Oxygen, Nitrogen and convection we’re omitted. I get it. It’s a metaphor. I wouldn’t say it “fails” based on what was not included.
******
For the same reason (to keep it simple), I left oxygen, nitrogen and convection out of MY metaphor. The runners represent photons, which dump their energy into pots of water to be thermalized. The pots of water are intended to represent molecules of GHG’s.
Nearly every response to my metaphor, all negative, implied it failed and I am confused, that I need to learn real physics. Why??
Because I failed to include oxygen, nitrogen, conduction/convection! Yes, it’s frustrating to be misunderstood.
Snape wrote “For the same reason (to keep it simple), I left oxygen, nitrogen and convection out of MY metaphor. ”
You stated that residence time is an accurate representation of reality, not a metaphor.
“This is where residence time fits in. It may not be a useful concept for calculations, but it’s an accurate representation of reality.”
Residence time does apply to your metaphor; however it cannot be applied to reality because in reality you can’t ignore oxygen, nitrogen and convection because they are the principal means by which heat is transferred to the effective radiating layer and subsequently lost to space. That means it is a bad metaphor.
> Did I need to quote a real physics book to convince you
Why would you try to convince me? If your point relies on knowledge we can find in physics textbooks, go first and show you looked into one. Armwaving and handwaving don’t mix.
***
> Nearly every response to my metaphor, all negative, implied it failed and I am confused, that I need to learn real physics. Why??
As far as I can see, you’re making otters work for you and you don’t reciprocate. Contrarians misapply physics. You can’t contradict them successfully, and try to find a model that would get to them. So you play devil’s advocate, in the hope to get responses you could copycat elsewhere. It obviously isn’t felicitous, as it gets you in a spot where you don’t understand neither side of the exchange.
What are you exactly trying to illustrate? Focus on that.
@Dikran
“HOWEVER the green/blue plate analogy is only explaining one aspect of the greenhouse effect and it doesn’t explain how the top of the atmosphere radiative imbalance initially arises.”
True, which is why I added the “teal” plate in between the blue and green. I was hoping you would see the connection. The teal plate, initially, redirects 1/2 of the energy the green plate had previously been receiving. An imbalance at the “top” of the system. The green plate cools as a result. Sound familiar yet?
Eventually the blue and teal plates will warm to the point where the green plate is receiving the same energy it had previously. Steady state.
****
It turns out this process, backradiation, sheds light on a source of confusion for several people on this thread…..the higher effective radiating layer. Every time a new layer is added, the blue plate will get hotter. This is demonstrated, using simple math, in the multi layer variant of the “green plate” diagram:
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-simplest-green-plate-effect.html?m=1
The “surface” layer, the one closest to the source of heat, will receive the most backradiation and be hottest. Every successive higher layer will receive a little less backradiation and be a little cooler.
This continues to the top or, outermost layer, which receives no backradiation at all, and consequently comes to the same temperature the surface layer would have been if it had received no backradiation.
Given a constant lapse rate, and starting from a higher surface temp than previously, the effective radiating level must be higher. This is usually explained backasswards.
Snape wrote:
Just to clarify, as you can tell from the URL/title of the webpage, izen is not explaining the GHE, he is explaining backradiation. They are not the same thing. Backradiation is only one component of the GHE mechanism.
> Sound familiar yet?
For the last time, please say what you mean.
““HOWEVER the green/blue plate analogy is only explaining one aspect of the greenhouse effect and it doesn’t explain how the top of the atmosphere radiative imbalance initially arises.”
True, which is why I added the “teal” plate in between the blue and green. ”
The teal plate doesn’t explain how the top of the atmosphere radiative imbalance arises either. There is more to the GHE than backradiation. This has been explained multiple times. It starts with the rising of the effective radiating layer, because of an increase in abosorption of outbound IR above it due to increasing GHGs. The surface warming is then the eventual result of the energy imbalance.
I have a hypothesis that the problem with datestamps being out of order (e.g. this one) might be specific to posts that go through moderation?
I think the problem with datestamps is that I’m now in a different timezone and I think that may be confusing the system. I’ve tried setting my wordpress timezone to be the timezone I’m in currently.
@Dikran
“Just to clarify, as you can tell from the URL/title of the webpage, izen is not explaining the GHE, he is explaining backradiation. They are not the same thing. Backradiation is only one component of the GHE mechanism.”
You do not need to clarify those sorts of things to me, Dikran. I used the term GHE a tad loosely, because the animation shows energy being absorbed and “backradiated”.
The heart of the GHE.
ATTP I blame computer science ;o)
Snape “You do not need to clarify those sorts of things to me, Dikran. I used the term GHE a tad loosely, because the animation shows energy being absorbed and “backradiated”.
The heart of the GHE.”
Well if *I* don’t clarify these things, perhaps *you* need to be more precise.
You may consider backradiation to be the heart of the GHE, I’d disagree, but either way it isn’t what causes the energy imbalance that is the initial cause of the warming, which was the point I have been making from the outset, in response to your claim that “Yes, but the increase in residence time I mentioned is what creates that imbalance. “.
Snape “My position is that GHG’s have a warming effect at EVERY layer of the atmosphere, not just the first 10 feet or at the very top.”
Nobody is claiming that GHGs only warm at the top of the atmosphere, but that the cause of the radiative imbalance that results in surface warming is at the top of the atmosphere.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the “green plate/blue plate” diagrams. If a third plate were placed between the two, let’s call it “teal”, the blue plate would most definitely get warmer. Middle layers, not just the outside or top, contribute to surface warming.
Are you still trying to argue this is not the case?
I have NEVER argued that is not the case. HOWEVER the green/blue plate analogy is only explaining one aspect of the greenhouse effect and it doesn’t explain how the top of the atmosphere radiative imbalance initially arises.
@Willard, Dikran
Maybe this will help expain why an imbalance at the effective radiating layer, ERL, or a change in it’s altitude, is solely the result of the unique talents of GHG’s – their ability to absorb and radiate LWIR:
Let’s say the blue plate represents Earth’s surface. A little off, I realize, because on Earth the sun’s energy is being conducted downwards and radiated upwards. In Eli’s diagram, the blue plate radiates to both directions.
Moving on, the green plate could represent the ERL of Earth’s atmosphere. Placing the teal plate between the blue and green, is like placing GHG’s between Earth’s surface and the ERL. Repeating myself a little, and starting at a steady state:
1) The teal plate redirects some of the energy the green plate had been receiving from the blue.
2) This results in the green plate temporarily absorbing less energy than it is emitting.
2) The green plate cools as a consequence.
3) Getting colder, it begins to emit less.
4) Meanwhile, solar input has been constant.
5) Because output from the system has decreased (again, as a result of the green plate being colder), while input from the sun has not, an overall imbalance has been created….more in than out.
6) The system warms as a result.
7) Notice the imbalance, and resultant warming, was entirely the result of the teal plate being placed somewhere in the middle.
8) A change “below” resulted in an imbalance at the top.
Relating it back to Earth’s atmosphere, GHG’s represent trillions of microscopic “teal plates”. They absorb, share with others, and continuously redirect energy that would otherwise have had a clearer path upwards……
…..just like a teal plate in Eli’s diagram – intercepting and redirecting energy that otherwise had a clear path to the green plate.
****
I didn’t need to invoke the concept of residence time, although I could have. Sometimes there are two ways to view the same thing. One clear, the other not so much.
[Fixed. -W]
FWIW, there are a couple of simple issues above that should be cleared up.
The tropopause is the level at which the temperature of the atmosphere starts to rise. The reason it starts to rise is ozone in the stratosphere absorbs solar UV light (btw 200 and 306 nm) which warms the stratosphere. Because the stratosphere is warmer than the troposphere below the temperature inversion stops convection at the level of the tropopause and in the entire stratosphere. It is called the stratosphere because the lack of convection means there is no vertical motion of atmospheric gases above the tropopause, eg it is stratified, until one reaches the stratopause.
As to Snapes handwaving on the green plate effect (TM-ERabett), just make plates above the surface transparent to NIR/VIS/UV and the analysis follows.
Damn!! That’s not right either. The Earth has exits in every direction, not just one. The surface being heated as though by an internal source do to Earth’s rotation.
– A linear representation…. the blue plate in the middle, getting the sun, with teal and green plates to each side.
– even better, place more an more holes in each plate (fewer GHG’s) as they work their way away from the center.
– this would approximate the GHE + thinning atmosphere.
Hi Eli
I was typing while your post appeared. Thanks for your input. I’ll try to figure it out. My hand waving is more thinking out loud. As you see, it’s very maleable, not meant to be a declaration of truth. Although I know that’s how it comes across.
Sorry to always attach your name to what for me is a generic concept. “Tina’s pink plate” instead, so you don’t get accociated with my stupidity?
Maybe you like the last idea?
@-Snape
I am beginning to concur with Dikran.
There is a point where the continued inability to engage with the refutations and counter-arguments that a poster encounters becomes increasing challenging to ascribe to ignorance or a cognitive deficit.
Especially when they show a facility for creative ambiguity and evasion.
It becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion the conduct is intentionally malicious.
@izen
– Could you give a direct quote of something I wrote today that was malicious?
– Could you give an example, 1 through 8, or adjacent comments, that you think are not accurate?
– I explained why I think adding GHG’s to the lower/middle atmosphere will create an imbalance of input/output at the ERL, ie. like little teal plates.
– Dikran agreed that adding a teal plate between the blue and green would make blue hotter, a process akin to Co2 (teal plates) making the surface hotter. The surface becoming hotter, lapse rate unchanged, the ERL must necessarily be higher.
That’s just math. Your diagram is much better. It shows, from what can tell, a higher outflow resulting thicker/taller layers of heat.
– I explained that yesterday’s analogy, to keep things simple, intentionally omitted a big part of the process. Namely, how N2, O2, h20 aquire, thermalize, exchange, and carry heat upwards to the ERL.
– I also tried to explain in the analogy how an individual photon may only travel a very short distance, microscopic, and then cease to exist upon absorbtion by a GHG. If still not clear, it’s not through willful ignorance or malicious intent. I’m willing to go through it and explain what each scenario was intended to get across.
– Please be more specific so I know exactly what you think I left out or don’t understand. or where you think I acted maliciously.
– some of the things I said yesterday I wish I had back. I was frustrated. Taking a lot of criticism to boot.
@-Snape
“– Could you give a direct quote of something I wrote today that was malicious?”
Yes, the whole of the post following this question shows the pattern of creative ambiguity and evasion that is persuasive that your purpose is to play ClimateBall.
I used to enjoy that, but nowadays it gets old quite fast.
I do credit you with prompting me to create some relevant animations however, for which I thank you.
I think we’re past diminishing returns.
Oh I like this analogy.
I also like this analogy.
Snape wrote:
Moving on, the green plate could represent the ERL of Earth’s atmosphere. Placing the teal plate between the blue and green, is like placing GHG’s between Earth’s surface and the ERL. [emphasis mine]
How many times does it need to be said than an increase in absorption ABOVE the ERL is what causes the ERL to rise and hence the radiative imbalance? At least once more, it would seem.
BTW please don’t use points when we agree “Dikran agreed that adding a teal plate between …” as support if you then fail to mention that I went on to explain why that point was irrelevant/misleading.
I’ve given things a bit of thought. and it seems to me that for a positive greenhouse effect, we would require the effective radiating layer (ERL) to be below the tropopause, because otherwise if the ERL rose it would be warmer, rather than cooler, and so would radiate more IR into space than before, rather than less, and the GHE would cool the planet rather than warm it.
Obviously there will be radiation from above the topopause, but this suggests that most of the radiation (and hence the ERL) is below it.
However, I may be missing something and am happy to be corrected.
Snape wrote ” I explained why I think adding GHG’s to the lower/middle atmosphere will create an imbalance of input/output at the ERL, ie. like little teal plates.”
The flaw with that explanation is that it assumes that radiation and back-radiation (by GHGs) are the primary means of heat transport in the lower/middle atmosphere, however it has repeatedly been explained that convection is the primary mechanism. Hence the teal plate placed in the middle does not accurately represent what is actually happening in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Dikran, Eli answers all questions before they are asked
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/12/answer-to-puzzler-couple-of-days-ago.html
Thanks Eli, I learn more when my intuition is incorrect, but I am willing to put up with being right every now and then! ;o)
I think Plato’s Cave is a clearer analogy though, but its not funny. Of course I’d wonder what Teh Willard thinks of it.
Here it is as explained in the TV show, Legion;
Maybe if we started explaining things in terms of what we perceive to be the cave walls versus what we personally know. I try to own my opinions versus what I consider objective facts.
In oil and gas the persistent ‘Cave Wall’ is that fracking is safe and oil wells don’t leak. (I think the “Fracking doesn’t cause earthquakes”, cave painting has finally faded.) Yet as a professional I get a constant supply information about wells leaking, how we detect them, as well as how we repair and prevent said leaks. Pointing that info out in public is often attacked by a ‘Black Knight’ from Plato’s Cave.
In the forthcoming infrared remake of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Black Night will be played by a short termpered methane plume.
> I think Plato’s Cave is a clearer analogy though, but its not funny.
I don’t know if Plato was the first red-pilled hispster, but I know of no conspiracy theory that does not relies on a similar myth:
https://twitter.com/hjvinke/status/993272569263460355
An opportunity to post my Plato’s cave ‘joke’.
Unfortunately this visual joke needs explanation, the shadows spell epistemology, written in water…
I intended to give up climate blogs yesterday, but after reading the last few comments am feeling confused and curious, with no sense of closure. Does Eli agree or disagree with what I wrote about “teal plates” in the atmosphere? Or does he agree with Dikran/Izen’s account?
This is 100% a matter of curiosity (I had trouble understanding his link). If it turns out he agrees with the latter version, it begs a few questions/
Where does the 340 w/m^2 downwelling come from???
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget
All from the first 10 feet or so?
If so, would a reading from an IR measuring devise pointed upward from an altitude of 10 feet be a tiny fraction of what it had measured when held only a few feet lower??
Do you see what I’m asking?
To better clarify my confusion ..lol
There’s a version that says N2/O2 molecules surround GHG molecules so closely, that the latter seldom have time to emit radiation. Almost all energy transfer is through collision instead. Izen indicated this process starts at about 10 feet above the ground.
So as mentioned above, would imply that an IR gun held and pointed upwards at 10’ would measure next to nothing, but held just 10 feet lower would measure 340w/m^2 (as a global average of course).
Sounds absurd. I might have to buy an IR gun and see for myself before I believed it. What am I missing?
“There’s a version that says N2/O2 molecules surround GHG molecules so closely, that the latter seldom have time to emit radiation.”
AIUI The N2/O2 molecules also transfer energy to GHGs molecules by collisions, which can then re-radiate the energy. Thus we have back-radiation. However most of the absorbed outbound IR from the surface is thermalised at some point on its way out and thus residence time is meaningless. I suspect that if that is in equilibrium, then almost as much energy is being re-radiated downwards as upwards, so there is little net “movement” of energy from that process.
“Almost all energy transfer is through collision instead.”
no, apparently it is by convection rather than conduction.
“What am I missing?”
convection.
@Dikran
I wrote,
“There’s a version that says N2/O2 molecules surround GHG molecules so closely, that the latter seldom have time to emit radiation. Almost all energy transfer is through collision instead. Izen indicated this process starts at about 10 feet above the ground.”
I realize convection is involved, but that’s not was I was asking about.
The description (it was from a different post by Eli, I’ll have to look for it), described a race. If I remember right, about 2000 non-radiating molecules for every GHG molecule. So when a GHG molecule acquires energy, either by absorbing a photon or through collision, he said it usually collides with another molecule before having a chance to emit a photon. If I recall, the ratio was said to be about 100,00o collisions for every one emission.
How does this account explain a downwelling IR flux of 340 w/m^2 at the surface?? Remember, by comparison, only 163 w/m^2 is absorbed by the sun.
*****
Me: “Outpaced? Maybe, but N2/O2 aren’t very good blockers.”
Izen: “But are excellent at mugging the H2O and CO2 and stealing any energy those molecules have acquired from absorption of LWR photons and carrying it off as thermal energy.”
The surface absorbs in total about 500w/m^2. Of that, about 340 w/m^2 are returned as backradiation. Izen’s statement does not appear to agree with observation.
Snape, seriously, rather than construct your own model of the GHE from scratch, your time would be much better spend first understanding the standard model.
Even Pablo Picasso first learned standard methods before innovating his own, and I strongly suspect you are no Picasso.
“The surface absorbs in total about 500w/m^2. Of that, about 340 w/m^2 are returned as backradiation. Izen’s statement does not appear to agree with observation.”
Sorry, meant to write, “The total UPWELLING surface flux, (including evapotranspiration and conduction /convection) is about 500w/m^2 ……..”
VTG
Whatever model, standard or otherwise, needs to agree with observations.
It gets worse. Of the upward IR flux from the surface, only about 358 w/m^2 are actually absorbed by GHG’s. ~ 40 w/m^2 pass through the atmospheric window.
So of the 358 w/m^2 upward IR flux absorbed by the atmosphere, all but 18 w/m^2 are returned to the surface as backradiation.
> Whatever model, standard or otherwise, needs to agree with observations.
And the other way around:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly
Please stick to numbers from no on.
@Willard
I presented numbers from NASA. Are you suggesting they are suspect because they don’t match what is described by Izen and Dikran?
Apologies for not getting more involved in this discussion; I’ve been on holiday. I’ll try to have a read through the thread when I’m back.
> Are you suggesting they are suspect because they don’t match what is described by Izen and Dikran?
I’m suggesting by “please stick to numbers” that you stick to numbers.
Are you suggesting that you can bait me in answering all your leading questions of the form “are you suggesting”?
@ATTP
Thanks!
I know I’ve been instructed to stick to numbers, but I think it would be helpful to see my argument in its entirety, not just the NASA figures.
A few things to consider which somehow slipped through the cracks: The convective motion of oxygen, nitrogen and water vapor through the atmosphere is better known as wind. It generally blows sideways (advection). Wind blowing upwards, in the izen, Dikran scenario is called updraft or thermals. Thermals are most often formed where the hot sun warms a surface. For every thermal, there is somewhere a corresponding, descending mass of air. Neither one, the atmosphere is said to be stable.
Whether the air is rising, falling or stable, if you point an LWIR detector towards the surface it will detect an upward flux of IR that can be measured in W/m^2. Pointed upwards, it will detect a flux of backradiation. It gets colder at night even if the air is still, and it’s always night on 1/2 the planet.
Maybe you can see now why statements like this give me pause?
Regarding N2/O2
“But are excellent at mugging the H2O and CO2 and stealing any energy those molecules have acquired from absorption of LWR photons and carrying it off as thermal energy”
Consider also that thermals in the tropics and elsewhere can carry huge amounts of energy to the ERL, but rather than a free ride towards space will form clouds. The thermalized energy of h20, n2 and o2 gets stuck below the cloud tops, which at that altitude are well below zero F. The cloud tops therefore emit relatively low amounts of radiation.
It should also be noted that above the tropics, where thermals are strongest and most prevalent, there is a net GAIN at the TOA. More radiation downwelling than upwelling.
(My argument on this thread just came full circle).
I realize this is a lot of hand waving, but it’s pretty basic stuff. Meteorology 101.
Anything I got wrong should be easy to spot.
Snape, when you have no clue, don’t keep on diffing
“It gets worse. Of the upward IR flux from the surface, only about 358 w/m^2 are actually absorbed by GHG’s. ~ 40 w/m^2 pass through the atmospheric window.
So of the 358 w/m^2 upward IR flux absorbed by the atmosphere, all but 18 w/m^2 are returned to the surface as backradiation.”
You make the error of assuming that the thrmal energy absorbed from IR radiation can be differentiated from the thermal energy absorbed from convection including condensation of water vapor, so that is another 104 W/m^2.
As usual Eli worked it out before you asked (which is a strong hint, that you are not only wrong, but wrong in boring ways)
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2018/09/heat-has-no-hair.html
Its hard to say what you got right or wrong without numbers Snape.
Code up your verbal decription into a physical model and we can check that way.
Convection is not wind
Snape, you referenced Wikipedia not NASA;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget
In fact it seems you are referring to anything but a definitive source. i.e. specifically what paper which was published and peer reviewed is confusing you? Talking on the internet is all kinds of interesting, but if you are actually concerned, you need to be really really specific. Grabbing different data sets looking bits and pieces just doesn’t say anything. Its just a total waste of time.
Russell Seitz says: July 20, 2019 at 11:22 pm
In the forthcoming infrared remake of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Black Night will be played by a short termpered methane plume.
Russell, how would people know its the Black Knight? We’ve already determined that the visibility of methane (short tempered or not) is dependent on politics.
Mosh,
Yes indeed. As, in fact already noted a week ago or so.
Your concepts are, I fear, hopelessly confused. I would suggest that the only way to resolve this confusion is for you to write down what you believe as mathematical equations. That forces the discipline to be precise about what you mean by “residence time”, “energy” and so on. Continued discussion will not, I think, clarify this.
Snape,
I think the problem is that all (public) explanations of the greenhouse effect are simplifications. It seems that you’re taking some of these too literally, or haven’t quite understood what they’re trying to explain.
A quick attempt:
Greenhouse gases block outgoing longwavelength radiation. This reduces the outgoing energy flux and causes the system to warm until energy balance is attained. One way to envisage this is that there is a layer in the atmosphere where energy is able to be radiated directly to space. This is a simplification, but it’d reasonable. For our atmosphere, this is at about 5km. The lapse rate (typical temperature gradient in the atmosphere) is about 7K/km. If the radiating layer is at 5km, then the surface will be about 35K warmer than this layer. Since this layer has to radiate as much energy per square metre per second as the Earth would in the absence of an atmosphere (and with the same albedo) it will have a temperature of 255K. This means the surface will have a temperature of about 290K.
The final thing is that the lapse rate (temperature gradient) is essentially set up convection. If it were steeper, convection would set in and it would drop back towards 7K/km. If it were shallower, it would be heated from the surface upwards, until it again got close to 7K/km. It isn’t always 7K/km, but this is the typical value to which it will tend.
I’ve written this quite fast and have to go and enjoy the last day of my holiday. Hope this helps.
Snape wrote “I realize convection is involved, but that’s not was I was asking about.”
yes, but you keep ignoring it, even though it has been pointed out to you that it is the reason your “teal plate in the middle” thinking is misleading you.
“The description (it was from a different post by Eli, I’ll have to look for it), described a race. If I remember right, about 2000 non-radiating molecules for every GHG molecule. So when a GHG molecule acquires energy, either by absorbing a photon or through collision, he said it usually collides with another molecule before having a chance to emit a photon. If I recall, the ratio was said to be about 100,00o collisions for every one emission. “
If only 1 in 100,000 photons get re-radiated before a collision but there are 100,000 collisions in that time that transfer enough energy to a greenhouse gas molecule, then you would be seeing one re-radiated photon out per absorbed photon in. The nice kind of thing about this kind of physics is that it sometimes ends up being quite symmetrical.
Snape wrote “Neither one, the atmosphere is said to be stable.”
Hadley cells
ATTP wrote “The final thing is that the lapse rate (temperature gradient) is essentially set up convection. If it were steeper, convection would set in and it would drop back towards 7K/km. If it were shallower, it would be heated from the surface upwards, until it again got close to 7K/km. It isn’t always 7K/km, but this is the typical value to which it will tend.”
This seems to me an important point that explains better than why convection is important. In the absence of convection, the “teal plate in the middle” analogy would be useful, and would indeed show that adding more GHG at low altitude would cool the ERL, and hence generate a radiative imbalance. However that would also increase the thermal gradient in the troposphere, which would increase convection in a way that would work to reduce the thermal gradient once more. To work out which wins out, and how completely, you would need a physical model. However the fact that most climatologists since Ekholm have gone for the “raising of the ERL” rather than “cooling of the ERL”, I suspect convection wins out fairly comprehensively.
Snape, what ATTP said.
I think the diagram I posted earlier about using silica aerogel to warm Martian soil is nice. Enabling Martian habitability with silica aerogel via the solid-state greenhouse effect.
Think of the translucent, low-thermal-conductivity material as the troposphere. Relabel “Visible” as “Visible plus the UV that doesn’t get blocked by the ozone layer plus the near-IR that passes through the atmosphere”. Stop the UV above the IR emitting height. Give it sunglasses that block some UV but are transparent to visible and IR. Then apply the First Law of Thermodynamics. No need for crowds or footballs. Energy out = energy in. The temperature at the top of the aerogel is fixed. It has to be so that IR emission matches solar irradiance. The temperature gradient in the aerogel is set by the thermal conductivity of the material. Because it’s a solid it can’t convect. In the atmosphere, the temperature gradient is set by the lapse rate, roughly speaking the convection threshold. The surface temperature is simply calculated from the radiating temperature at the top of the aerogel, the thickness of the aerogel and its thermal conductivity. Simple arithmetic.
Geez, I’m a little overwhelmed by all the comments. Haven’t even had time to read Eli’s link. It will take some time to digest everything and come up with some intelligent responses. Forthcoming but don’t hold your breath. Just a few for now.
******
@Steve Mosher, VTG
I think that’s some good advice, I’ll get right to it. How old will you be in 20 years?
****
This may help moving forwards so we’re on the same page. Please correct me if I have it wrong. In my own words (WRT this conversation):
– convection: molecules carrying energy from place to place within a room, for example. Random mixing.
– wind: a form of convection, but the molecules are moving laterally as a current.
– thermals: similar to wind, but the current is flowing upwards and was initiated by a warm surface.
*****
ATTP wrote: “Greenhouse gases block outgoing longwavelength radiation. This reduces the outgoing energy flux and causes the system to warm until energy balance is attained.”
Here’s a rhetorical question for you. How does blocking the outgoing LWIR reduce the outgoing energy flux?
*****
Dikran said,
“yes, but you keep ignoring it, even though it has been pointed out to you that it is the reason your “teal plate in the middle” thinking is misleading you.”
Please stop saying I’m ignoring things! You took this sentence out of context, “I realize convection is involved, but that’s not was I was asking about.” I was referring to a particular paragraph. Convection was one of the main ideas in my last comment and going forward.
*****
I’m trying to express one simple idea using math – coming soon. Reminds me of starting off in college thinking I might want to be a scientist. Soon realized I loved the concepts but hated the math.
*****
A little comic relief before you all have to eat your hats (kidding). My neighbor recently read the diary of a distant relative from Missouri, passed down through the generations. The woman wrote,
“I make a point of always taking two baths every year, even if I don’t need to.”
anoilman asks, July 22, 2019 at 7:12 am:
Russell, how would people know its the Black Knight? We’ve already determined that the visibility of methane (short tempered or not) is dependent on politics.
As you can see:
The Black Knight cannot be confused with a French Knight, as he is too chivalrous to fart in your general direction
via GIPHY
snape
‘@Steve Mosher, VTG
I think that’s some good advice, I’ll get right to it. How old will you be in 20 years?”
X + 20. solve for X
I’m not sure why my age matters. the point of you putting your ideas into numbers and equations
is so that ANYBODY can understand it. Not me in particular. Not sure why you want to personalize it when the task is to depersonalize it.
as for your convection questions, start with radiative transfer, if your work comes into conflict with this then you havent just broken science, you’ve broken working engineering.
@Steve Mosher
Sorry, I was being sarcastic. I have no programming experience and my most advanced math was calculus as a freshman in college. To express these ideas through math/models would probably take 20 years of study. I was wondering, jokingly, if you guys would still be around to see the result.
The izen, dikran version of what’s happening is similar to a denier argument I battled at UAH. It went something like this,
“Convection carries almost all surface heat to the ERL, where the air is very thin and the energy has a mostly clear path to space. There is little or no time on the way up for backradiation. N2/O2 molecules are packed so closely around each GHG molecule it seldom has time to emit. Almost all energy gained near the surface is quickly thermalized and passed around by collision. Where is this mythical GHE?”
Izen and Dikran are super smart and well informed, and obviously not deniers, but the two versions are so close I can hardly tell them apart (aside from the final line). That’s what has me puzzled.
In the absence of convection, the atmosphere would have to reach purely radiative equilibrium, and the lapse rate would be much greater than currently observed (assuming the same distribution of water vapour – i.e., no water vapour feedback). Manabe and Strickler did those calculations back in the 1960s, as I discussed on this old thread at Skeptical Science:.
https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php?p=23&t=1114&&a=164#69161
A direct link to the figure from Manabe and Strickler’s paper (same SkS comment):
As for wind/convection, in atmospheric science, the term “convection” is usually limited to up/down motions, and “advection” is used for horizontal heat transfer by wind.
Of course, wind involves turbulence, so even horizontal wind involves vertical mixing. And conservation of mass requires that any vertical motions be balanced by horizontal motions: you can’t get an upward plume at point A along with sinking air at point B without some wind between the two (different directions at different altitudes).
Globally-averaged, of course, vertical air motion sums to zero. If you can’t figure out why, don’t play the game.
“Globally-averaged, of course, vertical air motion sums to zero. If you can’t figure out why, don’t play the game.”
Thanks Bob, I’ll see what I can do.
Continued from my comment to Steve Mosher….
So yesterday I was trying to counter the Izen/dikran version the same way I had previously tried to counter the similar denier version. Reminding people that thermals are only part of the picture and presenting the NASA figures (I obviously botched the one Eli caught. It was good to review his “heat has no hair” post).
Snape
If your goal is correcting a skeptic, forget it.
Even if they made an honest mistake the conditions are such that almost nobody
can admit an honest mistake. Wirness DK trying to get a simple admission from
Tol for example. This is not a one sided affair. the debate is so charged that any mistake
or admission of mistake by any side is taken way out of context.
If your goal is understanding how GHE works, it is pretty simple.
Snape “Please stop saying I’m ignoring things!”
You are ignoring convection. As ATTP explained the lapse rate is largely set up by convection, so if your “teal plate in the middle” causes a cooling of the ERL, convection will strengthen due to the increased thermal gradient and warm it up again. AFAICS that is why the “teal plate in the middle” hypothesis is incorrect (at least as a model of the Earth’s atmosphere).
“– convection: molecules carrying energy from place to place within a room, for example. Random mixing.”
No, there is nothing random about convection, perhaps you are thinking of diffusion? Convection is due to density differences due to differences in temperature and it transports heat in the direction of the thermal gradient (although you also get advection at the top and bottom of the convection cells, or e.g. due to the coriolis force).
SM wrote “I’m not sure why my age matters.”
I think Snape is indicating that using maths to explain his ideas would take him a very long time. Me too, which is why I don’t have the hubris to think that I know better than the worlds climatologists, so I try to understand them, rather than try and work it out from first principles and not listen to advice/suggestions/criticisms from others.
Snape “The izen, dikran version of what’s happening is similar to a denier argument I battled at UAH. It went something like this,”
Oh, how I enjoy being likened to a denier. However, since I have just been giving the basic explanation of the greenhouse effect that is used in mainstream science (e.g. Ekholm 1901), then if it sounds like a denier argument, then perhaps, just perhaps, there is something you don’t understand (and you should ask questions, rather than assume izen and I are wrong)?
“There is little or no time on the way up for backradiation. N2/O2 molecules are packed so closely around each GHG molecule it seldom has time to emit.”
I’ve already explained why that is not the case here. The collisions will transfer energy to GHG molecules as well as take it away. Thus there is still the back-radiation that we observe.
“Izen and Dikran are super smart and well informed, and obviously not deniers, but the two versions are so close I can hardly tell them apart (aside from the final line). That’s what has me puzzled.”
No, I’m not super smart, or particularly well-informed, it is just that I listen to those that are smarter and better informed than I am. I also ask questions when I don’t understand things. Asking questions and giving straight answers to questions is a really good way of discussing science, but unfortunately not very popular on blogs.
Snape said “So yesterday I was trying to counter the Izen/dikran version the same way I had previously tried to counter the similar denier version. Reminding people that thermals are only part of the picture and presenting the NASA figures (I obviously botched the one Eli caught. It was good to review his “heat has no hair” post).”
Why are you trying to “counter”, rather than consider whether the criticism raised is valid and trying to understand it? There is more to convection than thermals, as I pointed out here.
I would thoroughly recommend watching SM’s video of Prof. Pierrehumbert explaining the GHE on a courdoy sofa.
Eli thinks it is time to withdraw respect for Snape and his act, unless, of course, dealing with his ignorance feigned amuses anybunny. In which case go for it.
To all:
My argument all along has been that GHG’s throughout the atmosphere, not just the ones residing at the ERL, contribute to the GHE. They produce an imbalance – more energy coming in than leaving. The whole system warms as a result.
The warmer atmosphere causes the outflow to be higher, as illustrated in izen’s recent diagrams.
This is the mechanism by which the ERL is raised to a higher level.
*******
Do you take Prof. P literally, as if GHG’s are little musclemen pushing a heavy weight skyward?
Once higher, then and only then does the GHE kick in??
*****
Notice early in the video he said GHG’s cause the atmosphere to be more opaque to upwelling radiation. Is it only more opaque at 5 Kilometers altitude?
*****
@Dikran
“You are ignoring convection. As ATTP explained the lapse rate is largely set up by convection, so if your “teal plate in the middle” causes a cooling of the ERL, convection will strengthen due to the increased thermal gradient and warm it up again. AFAICS that is why the “teal plate in the middle” hypothesis is incorrect (at least as a model of the Earth’s atmosphere).”
This is a terrible oversimplification. Given a GM warming of 0.17C/decade, that translates to a rate of 0.00000194 C/hour.
That represents an adjustment to a similarly infinitesimal cooling. The adjustment time may have been months or years.
This idea is illustrated by imagining a dam blocking the outflow of a reservoir. Raise the dam 1 meter, and the outflow will stop until the water level rises to adjust. This is clearly evident. Cause and effect.
Now imagine instead the dam is raised at increments of 10ths of a millimeter over many years, eventually totaling the 1 meter. Same result, but the process described above is never actually witnessed.
Snape says “This is a terrible oversimplification. Given a GM warming of 0.17C/decade, that translates to a rate of 0.00000194 C/hour. “
LOL the “appeal to infinitesimal numbers”.
Eli says : “Eli thinks it is time to withdraw respect for Snape and his act, unless, of course, dealing with his ignorance feigned amuses anybunny. In which case go for it.”
Yup.
@-“Eli thinks it is time to withdraw respect for Snape and his act”
Came to that conclusion 3 days ago.
There is a pride in knowing stuff and showing off your knowledge.
There is that conceit being exploited for attention…
[Enough baiting. – W]
snape.
“This is the mechanism by which the ERL is raised to a higher level.”
wrong. ERL is determined by the opacity above it. increase the opacity and ERL rises. by fucking definition.
What is being lifted? A few CO2 molecules? Yes, The entire layer of the atmosphere?
Hi JCH
Izen’s diagram looked feasible so I tried to work with it. Hand waving.
Almost everything I’ve read is more about heat being trapped (figuratively) rather than carried to 5 Kilometers. This being just one of many examples:
“They observed that Earth emits heat to space from the planet’s surface as well as from the atmosphere. As both heat up, say by the addition of carbon dioxide, the air holds more water vapor, which in turn acts to trap more heat in the atmosphere. This strengthening of Earth’s greenhouse effect is known as water vapor feedback. Crucially, the team found that the water vapor feedback is just sufficient to cancel out the rate at which the warmer atmosphere emits more heat into space.
The overall change in Earth’s emitted heat thus only depends on the surface. In turn, the emission of heat from Earth’s surface to space is a simple function of temperature, leading to to the observed linear relationship.”
http://news.mit.edu/2018/how-earth-sheds-heat-space-0924
Hard to find simpler than that:
https://news.mit.edu/2018/how-earth-sheds-heat-space-0924
Should be enough to meet many contrarian concerns.
@Willard
This is saying that WV is absorbing heat from very specific wavelengths, the ones trapped producing the warming. Heat builds up, so the wavelength not being absorbed becomes more intense and “flow faster”.
“This is he says explains that, while water vapor does absorb heat, or infrared radiation, it doesn’t absorb it indiscriminately, but at wavelengths that are incredibly specific, so much so that the team had to split the infrared spectrum into 350,000 wavelengths just to see exactly which wavelengths were absorbed by water vapor.
In the end, the researchers observed that as the Earth’s surface temperature gets hotter, it essentially wants to shed more heat into space. But at the same time, water vapor builds up, and acts to absorb and trap heat at certain wavelengths, creating a greenhouse effect that prevents a fraction of heat from escaping.”
There’s a lot of research looking into water vapor feedbacks. An area considered anything but simple.
I don’t think it supports your claim.
If you’ve managed to work out what Snape’s claim is, you’re a better man than I.
VTG FWIW I’ve asked for that comment to be deleted as I should know better than to respond to Snape’s games (I wonder if the username might be a hint ;o)
Willard –
Is, “But maybe it’s underwater volcanoes wot dunnit.” on the matrix?
many theories
“Notice early in the video he said GHG’s cause the atmosphere to be more opaque to upwelling radiation. Is it only more opaque at 5 Kilometers altitude?”
It is the opacity above the ERL that matters.
Say the ERL is at h.
This MEANS that the conecntration (“c”) above h is such that LWIR escapes freely to space.
The GHE is e
now increase ‘c’ .
h is no longer the ERL. the concentration above h will now be c`
now, there will be some altitude h`
at h` the concentration above h` will now be “c”
c increases to c`
h increase to h`, such that the concentration ABOVE h` is now c
the concentration that allows the free escape
h`>h
GHE is now e`
He uses the word “lifted”. Why? What got lifted? So far, the thread. In the video, RPH calls his explanation an over simplification. Then it appears he’s accused of making an oversimplification. This whole thing is genuinely pointless.
Is, “But maybe it’s underwater volcanoes wot dunnit.” on the matrix?
An interesting question.
How about this interesting website, which has the answer? [spoiler: YES, IT’S DEFINITELY UNDERWATER VOLCANOES – OF COURSE IT IS!]
http://www.plateclimatology.com/
JAQing so an emertius climate scientist near you doesn’t have to.
VTG “wow!”?
> Is, “But maybe it’s underwater volcanoes wot dunnit.” on the matrix?
#ButVolcanoes is in the bingo, yes.
The card is getting bigger and bigger:
https://twitter.com/nevaudit/status/1153642338415235073
And now “tectonic and volcanic activity” has been added to the Lots of Theories level of the Contrarian Matrix:
The Contrarian Matrix is for the best contrarian arguments. Ideally each line should lead to a serious published citation.
Where on earth would #ButDick link?
The thread on geothermal at Judith’s is quite something, up their with her all time classics.
Myself and several others have pointed out she’s confused absolute for anomaly geothermal flux (one of whom claims to have confirmation from Wunsch). Response: crickets.
But point to a nutcase website? “Interesting”
published at principia “Interesting”.
And yet Prof. Curry says that she hasn’t had the time to work out whether Salby’s theory is correct or not.
To be fair to Prof. Curry, she seems keen for fringe views/theories to be heard, which I would fully agree with. However I don’t think you are doing them any favours if you promulgate them uncritically or give encouragement (“interesting”) that is not warranted, especially if it is an issue where “echo chambers” are a problem.
> Where on earth would #ButDick link?
Dick Lindzen.
If it’s starts with a “but”, it’s not an argument. Talking points belong to the bingo. If it’s an argument (ideally a published one), it belongs to the Matrix. Calling the former project the ClimateBall Bingo and the second project the Contrarian Matrix might help distinguish the two. The distinction between real arguments and simple talking points is more important than the one between denial and contrarianism.
Suppose someone tells you that there’s lots of research going on on clouds. That could be a way to minimize climate sensitivity. We’d reach Level 1, e.g. The GW has been less than predicted or overestimated by the models.. This could in turn be developed (negative feedback, known unknown, Iris hypothesis, etc) but I’m not sure it should. In the end specific reasons don’t matter much.
There’s still lots of work ahead. I’m tempted to turn my climateball.wordpress.com into a climateball.net website for all the bingo moves.
I’ve been wasting way too much of my life staring at a screen, arguing on science blogs. Get a life, right? It’s like an addiction. So I started asked my wife to restrict access, like how parents restrict access to adult content on their 10 year old’s iPhone.
Here’s a list of the blogs I can’t access:
UAH
Tamino
Cliff Mass
WUWT
Rabbett Run
Moyhu
Realclimate
SkepticalScuence
Curry Etc
……. now ATTP
VTG said:
Saw that — good catch by you two. Curry seems to have ongoing problems with concepts related to absolute vs relative, temperature for example.
And now she is also encouraging an idea by a former oil geologist asserting that underseas volcanic vents trigger El Ninos? I don’t this is borne out of a drive to be intellectually curious, but more as evidence to feed her uncertainty charade.
Paul, I fear you are right. “Anything but IPCC” seems to be the sum total of content.
Someone should satirize a coal vs. solar duel. Coal=The black knight & Solar=The white knight.
Check out the stock charts of the leading coal companies and compare them to the solar companies.
BTU(Peabody coal) vs. SPWR(Sunpower)
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTU?p=BTU * new all time low today(1/8/2019)
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ARCH?p=ARCH
VS.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPWR?p=SPWR
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ENPH?p=ENPH
If you really want to piss off the deniers go over to WUWT and point out how capitalism pick winners and losers and fossil fuels are clearly losers.
jacksmith4tx.. Have you looked at drilling?
My experience in industry is that companies are struggling everywhere. with low prices, extraction costs, and shipping costs. Natural gas is a bad word in drilling. Fracking for oil is constantly battling cost issues.
Post global financial melt down, the US started printing money. Oil and gas sucked up whatever they could, but they haven’t made money on it. (Enron Oil and Gas got a $2.4 billion? hand out from trump’s tax bill, but are now making losses, and laying off.)
They aren’t drilling ‘new wells’, they are drilling ‘child wells’. Meaning, they know they can’t get much oil any more, and they are drilling into ‘good rock’.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Fears-Of-US-Shale-Demise-May-Be-Overblown.html
Just skim a few articles here;
https://www.desmogblog.com/finances-fracking-shale-industry-drills-more-debt-profit
Sean Spicer for a spokesman, that must be a sign of hard earned honest quality.
https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/10/02/sean-spicer-next-act-fracking-industry-chosen-keynote-speaker
I can’t get too negative on oil and gas because we get so many petrochemicals from them. Maybe the biggest problem with FF byproducts is we just can’t figure out how to economically recycle them. Plastics, fertilizers, VOCs(volatile organic compounds) not to mention CO2.
jacksmith4tx: Meh… I mean yeah, but I think that we’re selling future generations pretty short. petrochemical feed stocks are getting more and more expensive, and more and more environmentally viscous to deal with. We have leaks into water supplies, and no real effort to prevent. Damage to our water supplies are pretty permanent.
“WASHINGTON – U.S. crude oil production in each of the first five months of 2019 showed increases over their 2018 levels, with April 2019 establishing a new monthly record. ”
EIA, July 31, 2019.
https://www.worldoil.com/news/2019/7/31/eia-us-crude-oil-production-continues-to-set-records
And 2018 was a record year.
Coal is being supplanted by gas, not solar in the US. The coal industry isn’t doing well, but one bright spot is that it is exporting much, much more than it used to- particularly metallurgical coal, but steam as well.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=38774
“U.S. crude oil production in each of the first five months of 2019”
Yet the rest of the world is down
Blowing money on shale oil as Concho, Pioneer Natural, Whiting are having problems.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-31/whiting-petroleum-fires-one-third-of-workers-cuts-output-target
Crude oil is no longer a money-making business — all shale oil is leveraged and production is only sustained because the USA economy demands it.
@Steve Mosher
Notice Earth’s surface recieves about 340 w/m^2 in backradiation from the atmosphere. The ERL, at a temperature of about 255K, does not emit a downward flux of that magnitude. This shows that GHG’s in layers below the ERL play an important role in determining the surface temp.
*****
If I’m wearing a t-shirt, sweater and raincoat, I could explain the thermodynamics as follows:
“I’m at a comfortable temperature. Given the room I’m in remains at a steady temperature, the only way I can get warmer is if the outer layer I’m wearing transfers less heat to my surroundings than is produced by my body. An imbalance at the “ERL”, so to speak.
Putting on another jacket over my raincoat will do this. I’ll start getting warmer until the new outer layer transfers the same energy as before.”
*******
This is all true. It would be a mistake, however, to infer from this that the t-shirt or sweater (underlayers) do not produce warming.
Snape,
What do you mean? They don’t generate any thermal energy. The thermal energy is still being generated through chemical reactions in your body, the rate of which does not even need to change. What’s changing is the rate at which energy is transferred through the insulating layers, which leads to a higher temperature on the inside of those insulating layers.
“What do you mean?”
What I meant is simple. If you add another layer of clothing under your shirt or sweater, you’ll get warmer.
It would be a mistake to think you could only get warmer by adding an extra outer layer.
This is analogous to Steve Mosher (and others) errant thinking that only by adding GHG’s at or above the ERL will the surface get hotter.
*******
From what layer of the atmosphere does most of the 340w/m^2 absorbed by the surface come from?
0 to 1000 feet? 0 to 500 feet? I don’t have an answer, but a downwelling flux emitted from close to the surface will come from where GHG molecules are warmest and most numerous.
And as mentioned, the GHG molecules at around 5K are too cold and too few to produce a downwelling flux of 340w/m^2.
As I understand it the lower atmosphere effects redistribute heat, (mostly) without adding or removing it – although probably there are small differences to things like cloud formation and direct radiation in other bands from ground to space. Surface temperatures are affected but not the total energy. But the principle changes that raise global heat content occur high up, where atmospheric opacity to IR lessens and GHG molecules can re-radiate back to space – and circulating air comes back down, retaining heat that otherwise would be lost to space.
ATTP:
Iteration is powerful in more than finite element modeling:
In pre-goose down parka days, early Himalayan alpinists, iike Mallory ,dressed for high altitude success in up to seven very thin Chinese silk shirts.
@Mrkenfabian
“As I understand it the lower atmosphere effects redistribute heat, (mostly) without adding or removing it….”
Well, we know there must be a layer of atmosphere, starting just above the surface and extending upwards, that combines to emit a downward flux of 340w/m^2. This is the GHE. Without it, the surface would only receive the roughly 164w/m^2 from the sun.
Repeating myself a little – let’s say this layer is at an attitude of 0 to 500 feet. As more GHG’s are added, it gets thicker, more opaque to upwelling IR. Surface radiation doesn’t make it as high before being absorbed. The result is backradiation from a hotter, more dense layer of atmosphere.
> Repeating myself a little
You’re past a little.
Snape wrote “What I meant is simple. If you add another layer of clothing under your shirt or sweater, you’ll get warmer.”
unless you are dead. As ATTP said, the clothing isn’t the source of the warmth.
“This is analogous to Steve Mosher (and others) errant thinking that only by adding GHG’s at or above the ERL will the surface get hotter.”
You do realise the “and others” includes the climatologists?
As has been explained repeatedly, it is the TOA energy balance that determines whether the climate system warms or cools, essentially everything else is just redistribution of the systems energy.
The key thing is that near the surface, convection, not radiation, dominates net energy fluxes (ignoring shortwave), and it doesn’t actually matter much whether it takes 50m or 100m for radiation to be reabsorbed, because the net longwave flux is almost zero (upgoing and downgoing longwave almost exactly cancel).
So any argument that tries to understand the bottom of the atmosphere using radiation alone is doomed to fail.
Ben McMIllan – indeed, as has repeatedly been pointed out to Snape.
I guess I’m mostly trying to figure out the best way to explain this clearly for my own benefit.
What about:
If you are sitting in the surf with water flushing down through your ill-fitting wetsuit, it doesn’t matter how thick the wetsuit is because almost all the energy is being carried away by convection rather than by conduction.
That might be, more strictly speaking, advection rather than convection.
I’ve been thinking about what would happen (in the absence of convection) if there were no GHGs below the ERL, but the problem is that it is difficult to make any argument about the lapse rate in the absence of convection. IF the thermal structure of the atmosphere remained the same, then I would expect the surface to be cooler as the backradiation would then be coming down from the ERL, which is relatively cold, so there would be less of it. But that is a big “IF“.
So how about no GHGs in the lowest 500m? My intuition (and that is all that it is) would be that you might see a thermal inversion with the air above 500m warmer than the air below (as it is absorbing some of the IR from the surface). In which case, you might see pretty much the same temperature at the surface. The temperature of the ERL is fixed by incoming SW if the system is in thermal equilibrium, but what would happen would depend on the lapse rate, so without considering convection we don’t know what would happen.
Just thinking out loud.
If there were no convection, all the energy would be transported by radiative diffusion and the surface would be much warmer (the greenhouse effect would raise surface temperatures by something like ~66K, rather than ~33K).
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that one of the reasons that Arhenius got a climate sensitivity of around 6K was because he wasn’t aware of the role of convection.
ATTP – ah, yes, of course! Convection transports energy away from the surface – duh! ;o)
@Ben
“The key thing is that near the surface, convection, not radiation, dominates net energy fluxes (ignoring shortwave), and it doesn’t actually matter much whether it takes 50m or 100m for radiation to be reabsorbed, because the net longwave flux is almost zero (upgoing and downgoing longwave almost exactly cancel).”
Downwelling LW is the key thing.
If the GHE were greatly enhanced, suppose 450 w/m^2 downwelling from the atmosphere, Earth’s surface would be much, much hotter, yet you would still be able to claim the net upward flux is dominated by convection.
BTW:
– Upwelling LW is about 398w/m^2
– Downwelling LW is about 340w/m^2
The atmosphere is colder than the surface. From the 2LOT, it’s no surprise the net favors the former.
Snape “Downwelling LW is the key thing.”
Hubris.
@Dikran
I’ve come across hundreds of people who would agree with you. Here’s an example:
“A point of contention that seems to have evolved into a hinge point is back radiation. The claim by promoters of the global warming hype is that heating of the upper atmosphere by carbon dioxide results in radiation flowing back toward the earth increasing the temperature near the surface of the earth.”
http://nov79.com/gbwm/bacr.html
> I’ve come across hundreds of people who would agree with you.
Unless you can put one of Dikran’s claims next to your excerpt and show how they’re the same thing, dear Snape, don’t bother to comment.
Snape. That is not someone that agrees with me. Back radiation comes to the surface from essentially all altitudes, but as I said much earlier:
You need to understand the other parts as well to understand the whole. Convection cannot be ignored. Whether the planet gains or looses energy depends on the TOA energy balance, which depends on the temperature of the atmosphere where IR can escape into space. The rest is just redistribution.
[Quotes, please. -W]
[Quotes, please. -W]
As far as backradiation is concerned, the surface has an average temperature of ~288K and hence is radiating about 396W/m^2. It only receives about 160W/m^2 from the Sun, so – given that it isn’t rapidly cooling – it must be receiving energy from somewhere else. This is essentially the back-radiation coming from the lower atmosphere. If it wasn’t there, the surface would be losing more energy than it was gaining and would be rapidly cooling. Since it isn’t, it must be in approximate energy balance – hence, backradiation.
If the net (upwelling minus downwelling) radiative flux isn’t enough to balance the input from the sun hitting the surface (~160W/m^2), then something else must carry the power. That something is convection.
And as soon as convection turns on, the temperature gradient is set/limited by the adiabatic lapse rate.
The net longwave radiative flux (outside the atmospheric window) is ~40W/m^2 near the surface. Double it somehow, and convection is still needed, and the lapse rate still sets the temperature gradient near the surface (not radiation).
Ben,
Yes, convection transports energy in the atmosphere. That doesn’t change, though, the the surface needs to receive about 330 W/m^2 from the atmosphere in order to be in energy balance.
Here’s some quotes. Willard.
Me: “What I’ve tried to explain, Dikran, is the mechanisms that determine “the temperature of the atmosphere where IR can escape into space” are found throughout the troposphere, not just 5K or above.”
Me: “In Southern states, it’s common for people to rely on sunshine and ambient air to heat their swimming pools. Even on cold nights the pool will stay warm. You could calculate the pool’s total heat content in joules.
Had the pool remained empty, most of that energy would have found its way to the ERL. All else being equal, less energy arriving at the ERL = cooling or slower rate of warming.”
Me: “Or more simply: Consider a house with no insulation in the attic that’s being heated by a furnace. Add insulation and the roof will temporarily cool. Being cooler, it will radiate and convect less energy to the ERL.”
Tall’s Law of thermodynamics:
Vintage 2013. Still valid.
> Here are some quotes.
Quotes to establish your claim about Dikran, Snape.
This is your last chance. Use it well.
OK, but my point is that even though the IR fluxes are large, they mostly balance, so they can be largely ignored for the purposes of understanding energy transport at the bottom of the atmosphere. The reason radiative fluxes mostly balance is that convection limits the temperature gradient, which means the bottom of the atmosphere is a similar temperature to the surface.
All of the objects in the room I’m sitting in are emitting of order 300W/m^2 of IR: the raw number is huge compared to the convective fluxes. But the imbalance, not the gross flux, is the interesting thing, which is of order of a few W/m^2.
Famous American liberal documentary maker Michael Moore is releasing a film claiming wind and solar don’t work, “aren’t real” and do nothing but make money for the fossil fuel industry. Apparently it also takes aim at the use of burning wood to make renewable power.
https://www.apnews.com/933b49681b0d47d3a005d356f35251ab
re Jeff Ails:
Of course they “don’t work” in comparison to the energy density and convenience of crude oil. Unfortunately, crude oil is on its last legs due to the fact that it’s a finite and non-renewable resource and so we will have to make due with alternatives.
Paul-
It looks like Moore’s argument is that wind and solar aren’t actually alternatives as they require fossil fuels. And that he was mislead into thinking they were alternatives.
We could dam some rivers or burn more trees, I suppose.
Well, then get your nuclear energy going and you can arrange for your Republican thought leaders to do all the necessary government oversight, LOL
Drive-by done, guys.