You have so many good comments it is sometimes hard to pick the best. In this case, not so much. You have just summarized a big part of the debate using a level of math most grade school children could handle and driven the point home with the most simple of truths.
If the people telling us we need to change our lifestyle drastically are not williing to lead by example, why should we pay attention to them.
To Pekka’s “so what”, I will add a “whatever”.
Gbaikie tossing numbers about is par for the course. And pointless to boot.
My best editor is fear of creating work for Miz Curry. You should see what I really think.
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P, you’ve got to make better sense of the three nearly identical rates of temperature rise. It is perfectly possible that Nature did all three. Even if Nature didn’t contribute all in the last quart. of the last cent., the last decade, nay fourteen years, wreak havoc on the strength of the CO2 effect.
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Societies have evolved two sensible ways of getting at “the truth”: 1) An adversarial system, where both sides have equal opportunity to present their best case and decisions are made by a group chosen for its impartiality or popularity with voters. Unfortunately, elected representatives often don’t have the time and inclination to understand scientific issues in depth. 2) A diverse group of experts who haven’t taken a public position on an issue study the problem and make recommendations.
Climate scientists want the IPCC to be both prosecutor and jury of CO2 (and the species that emits it). Perhaps the public in developed nations have begun to recognize that the self-selected elite that control the scientific content of the Summaries for Policymakers resembles the self-selected elite that govern China.
If you are a climate scientist who feels compelled to publicly advocate for various political policies, don’t destroy the impartiality (credibility?) of scientific reports on climate change by serving on committees that write such reports and by insisting that they reflect an artificial scientific consensus. If you are a climate scientist who hasn’t publicly advocated for political policies or is known for your independent views, please volunteer to serve. If your organization is producing a report, don’t expect me to take your report seriously if you haven’t made an honest effort to get at “the truth”.
“People fail to see the irony in quoting Feynman as the expert on the falibility of experts”
Exactly right.
Everyone will be aware of sayings like “science, in answering one question will always raise two more” and “the more you know about any particular subject the more you realise how much you don’t know” And, of course, the more scientific expertise and knowledge anyone acquires , the more they do realise that as experts they become ever more ignorant.
That’s not to say that they actually do become more ignorant of course. It just seems that way to them. Just because they don’t know everything , it doesn’t mean they know nothing. Its the millions of non experts out there who do actually know nothing, or next to nothing, who really could be described as ignorant, except they just much less aware of it.
Feynman wasn’t saying that experts were infallible either. If you read his writings it is obvious that he was always aware that he could be wrong, and was always looking for ways to prove himself wrong. But he wouldn’t have thought he was wrong just for the sake of it. He wouldn’t have thought that one of his undergraduate students would know more he did , for example. That’s the really dumb interpretation of his oft quoted remark.
Does not agree with rule 10 of the IPCC and what their definition of consensus meant.
The point is not what is possible, but what is the best estimate for climate sensitivity and what are it’s limits.
We know that the effect does exist. That’s not questionable, the strength is.
Then there are further questions on how we should react on what we have learned about climate sensitivity, but let’s leave that to another discussion.
Pekka, I think, provides one of the best explanations of skin layer physics.
While LW penetration is exceedingly shallow, the percentage of OHC attributable to the physics of LW is surprisingly high.
So what?
“Because Earth’s average annual rainfall is about 100 cm (39 inches), the average time that the water spends in the atmosphere, between its evaporation from the surface and its return as precipitation, is about 1 / 40 of a year, or about nine days.”
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2008/VernonWu.shtml
So. 100 times 22.7 million joules is 2270 million watts per sq meter
510 million sq km is 5.1 x 10^14 sq meters. Which is
2.27 x 10^9 times 5.1 x 10^14 = 1.15 x 10^24 watts
The total amount sunlight in a year that reaches the top of atmosphere or intersect the disk of earth is 1360 watts times the disk area in square meter times the number second in a year. The result which gives the upper limit of sunlight which could have some effect upon earth. And will give within one order of magnitude the amount sunlight the reaches the surface.
Radius of earth: 6 378.1 kilometers.
Squared and pied: 127.8 million square km
Which is 1.28 x 10^14 sq meters
Or 1.74 x 10^17 watts per second.
which 5.4 x 10^24 watts in year
Total sunlight per year at TOA: 5.4 x 10^24 watts in year
Total energy used to make rain in a year: 1.15 x 10^24 watts
1/5th or more of all sunlight evaporates water.
Donald
My apologies if my comment was obtuse. I try to communicate clearly but seem to have failed in this case.
I asked- “What data should drive a reasonable person to the conclusion that a warmer world is worse overall for humanity over the long term?”
My point here is that the science community has not been able to reach a consensus on what the temperature is likely to increase by as a function of additional CO2 and that figure is essential to determine the net impacts to humanity over the long term. Understanding the rate of any warming in any specific area is a key to understanding whether humans will be harmed or helped and by what amount. Putting out a forecast that includes a margin of error that is insufficiently bounded is meaningless since the rates of temperature rise that could result would include results that would be both of no concern and potentially a great concern. The outputs of the models need to be reliable and sufficiently bounded to have meaning.
I asked- “Now to make it a bit more practical and unfortunately more difficult- What data should drive the leaders of any particular nation to conclude that their nation will be worse off or better off overall over the long term?” In order to determine whether the people of an individual nation suffer harms or benefits will depend upon the changes in temperature, wind and rainfall patterns that would occur in that particular nation. There are NO MODELS today that can provide us with reliable information to determine these impacts. In spite of there be no reliable models to describe the changes in temperature, wind and rainfall patterns, a great deal has been written in peer reviewed papers stating how much worse humanity as a result of it getting warmer.
Faustino
Point taken but at least the risk-adjusted returns for potential extreme weather events has an expected value. Compare that to mitigation costs in the US when other countries have no intention of reducing their emissions. In that case you are always dividing by zero.
Right, so the fact the governments haven”t adopted the IPCC’s recommendations, means the IPCC has been making them.
Idiotic, Bart, even by your standards.
And I suppose McIntyre is hopeless on paleo and stats, right?
For Mosher:
http://itia.ntua.gr/getfile/1212/1/documents/2012EGU_homogenization_1.pdf
SHAP indicted. Enjoy.
I thought that (a) was the phenomenon thought by AGW defenders to be responsible for the “greenhouse effect” – IR absorbing gases absorb IR and therefore heat. (personally still looking for anyone who can show me experimenal proof.)
For Mosher:
http://itia.ntua.gr/getfile/1212/1/documents/2012EGU_homogenization_1.pdf
SHAP indicted. Enjoy.
There’s a complex layer of air very close to the skin. Also the topmost molecules of water have a special environment that differs from the interior just a few molecules further down. These thin layers on both sides of the separation are so special that defining the temperature may be a little difficult. energy is transferred in this layer between water and sea by all available physical processes: conduction, evaporation and radiation although radiation is a little different as it connects directly the topmost micrometers of water to the lowest meters of the atmosphere at wavelengths of strongest absorptivity/emissivity of water vapor and CO2.
Very close to the surface the relative humidity of the air is essentially 100% and the temperatures of the topmost skin and the lowest air are very close to each other. On both sides rather large temperature gradients are common. Thus the temperature may be more significantly different a few meters higher in air or one meter deep in the water.
All forms of energy transfer are weak if the temperatures on both sides of the surface are essentially equal, that includes also evaporation. When the temperature difference grows all grow rapidly. Evaporation may be typically the strongest mechanism, but that depends on the moisture of the air of the lowest atmosphere. Whether it is or is not is not so important, because the other mechanisms are also strong enough to keep the temperature difference small.
When wind brings dry air to the surface evaporation gets stronger and under such circumstances it may by much stronger than other mechanisms cooling the skin to a significantly lower temperature than air at some distance (like a few meters) from the surface. At distances of fractions of mm the temperature of air is, however, closer to that of the water even in that case.
Because CO2 is well into the self-absorption mode at 200 ppm in a long optical path, so absorptivity does not increase with concentration, on a cursory examination, there can be no CO2-AGW. However, the band IR suppression argument given above reinforces the argument.
As for cold heating warm, can’t happen ever without an external energy source – 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. The problem is those who thought up this argument, led by Aarhenius, have got it wrong. Aarhenius was blasted for his mistake by Bohr and Angstrom.
Imagine the reaction of real scientists in a real science to such a statement.
And not a peek out of them. Just silent approval.
