R. Gates

The oceans are the main energy reservoir for the planet. Change them, even a little, and you will affect the entire system.

Sure they are the “main energy reservoir”, but define “even a little”.

A pretty hefty 2C increase in average atmospheric temp equates to a 0.002C increase in average ocean temp.

Don’t tell me that such as increase is going to have major impact on anything – it’s simply not credible, Gates.

As Pekka has pointed out, the oceans are the heat sink that keep our planet from overheating as a result of minor forcing changes (such as 2xCO2).

Max

R. Gates

Why express ocean heat content in joules (which nobody but a scientist can relate to) rather than degrees C (which everyone understands)?

Very simple.

If one read that the average ocean temperature rose by X thousandths of a degree over time period Y, no one would get excited. Many would even ask: “how in hell could they measure such a small increase?”

But if one read that it increased by Z zillion joules, one could get real worried.

It’s what’s called “framing”.

Max

“Individual photons have no memory of the temperature of the object that emitted them, which is why the Cotton theory is bunkum. Imagine a radio photon which is emitted only at very cold temperatures naturally.”

Not just very cold objects emit radio- a warmer human body
would also emit radio photons, naturally.

“Can it not be absorbed by anything warm? Does your radio not work?”

Being near a 50,000 watt radio tower does not warm a radio absorbing it’s radio waves.

A radio is detecting a radio signal and amplifying it- or rather, it’s amplifying the signal it’s carrying.
Advantage of radio is tends to go through things- not be absorbed easily
by most things- if it was absorbed by air, they would not work. It passes through walls, but thick bunker walls has more affect upon it.

If a radio signal is absorbed and converted to heat it can’t be detected by a radio, but a radio signal doesn’t need to be absorbed to be blocked from being detected by radio.
A large radio disk can detect radio signals from an asteroid tens of millions of km [or 100 or 1000 millions] from Earth. It can get better signal
by using radar [and sending and bouncing a stronger radio signal off the target].
That radio wave or long-wave infrared can be detected [by instruments designed to detect them] doesn’t mean they warming things.

What would be important is the intensity of the signal.
Put hand near a campfire and you can feel it’s heat, stand 100 feet away from it, and you don’t feel it’s heat- less intensity.
Put a campfire 10′ apart- have 5 of them- one middle, 2 on either side. Stand back 100′ from them- they still aren’t going feel warm.

How does a molecule of CO2 [or million of them] at distance of 100′ warm anything?
How much do CO2 molecules 10′ or 1′ away warm anything?

The five campfires could be detect if one were on Moon- but doesn’t means they are heating the Moon.

To monitor global warming, we need to keep track of the changes in Joules in the climate system … – Pielke Sr.

 
tempterrain:

No the plastic is not transparent (in the strict sense of the word) to microwave radiation. Yes, MW radiation does appear to pass through it, and water inside a sealed plastic container does get heated almost as fast. But the radiation does not pass in a straight line through the plastic, like light does through glass. This is because it is “pseudo scattered” and thus follows a random path. Microwaves are nothing like x-rays, after all. Try recording shadow images on film on the other side of a thick plastic sheet with MW radiation passing through it. Do you get sharp shadows as with x-rays or light passing through glass?

No, clouds at night, if cooler than the surface, can only slow the rate of cooling of the surface. They cannot make it warm up by way of radiation.

No, less than 2.5% of the solar radiation gets through the Venus atmosphere, and only 1W/m^2 gets through at the poles. So the rest of it is either reflected or absorbed and re-emitted back to space. So how can it affect the surface temperature? How does sufficient thermal energy actually get into the surface at the Venus poles? You may assume that the Venus atmosphere is not as hot as the surface at the poles, and that atmosphere has a thermal gradient with a mean of about -9C/Km to -10C/Km up to the tropopause.

Sorry to have to mark you 0/3 for those questions.

No, I agree it’s not possible to leave radiation out, and nor did I do so in my paper – see Appendix.

It’s also not possible to leave out the effect of gravity on thermal gradients, as explained in my paper. And this is far more significant, because it raises the Earth’s surface to over 300K, but then water vapour reduces the “lapse rate” so the surface stays at around 288K.

Who’s next?

NickB

Talk about biased “reporting” !!!! You say “Dr. Michael Mann sued Tim Ball and the Frontier Center For Public Policy for libel” but you omit saying that Michael Mann lost that case because he failed to produce any evidence supporting any GH contention.

Now let’s leave out any more red herrings shall we?

Where are your answers, NickB, to the questions tempterrain failed to answer correctly?

JCH

Pielke Sr. is absolutely correct of course.

If you try to “monitor” OHC in degreesC it becomes invisible.

But you should “report” it in degC (as well as joules), so normal people can see that it is an extremely small amount of warming, unless, of course, you are trying to frighten them with “zillions” of joules.

As I said, “framing” is what it’s all about.

Max

Steve Mosher:

The code for the Haar fluctuation analysis (in MatLab and Mathematica) may be found on my web site:
http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/Lovejoy.htm

Wllis:

The point about the decrease in the standard deviation of the means of an increasingly long series is mathematics, that’s why it can be stated with confidence!

Doug Cotton posts “What you seem to be forgetting is changes in gravitational potential energy as molecules move freely between impacts. Has the penny dropped yet? There’s plenty of detail on this in the Appendix of my latest paper.”

LOL … one good thing about Doug Cotton/PSI posts is that they encourage Climate Etc readers to verify for themselves that:

• In general there are more equations in just one Climate Etc post than in all the Doug Cotton/PSI manuscripts put together, and in particular the change of gravitational potential energy is explicitly accounted (in eq 3).

• The oft-cited, free-as-in-freedom reference “Making Sense of the Legendre Transform“, in particular the sections (page 7) titled “The route of physics: interpretation of the equilibrium condition” and (page 8) “Legendre Transform With Many Variables” clearly review why (in general) the thermodynamic equilibrium of any insulated system is isothermal … including columns of fluid in a gravitational gradient of course!

• For Climate Etc folks so minded, general-but-abstract thermodynamical arguments can always be verified by the concrete-and-particular numerical calculations, as detailed by the Frenkel and Smits textbook. In our modern computational era, pretty much any general theorem can be checked by explicit computational simulation, and textbooks like Frenkel and Smit detail exactly how to do this.

It’s mighty good that the above three paths all lead to the same conclusion: orthodox thermodynamics just plain works! And it’s mighty fun to verify all these things for one’s self  as modern computers and the modern free literature permit and encourage!

And everyone, have fun learning new thermodynamical physics! Because the surest sign that rational skepticism has hardened into ideological denialism — and perhaps it’s the main reason why denialist posts are generically ill-tempered and abusive? — is simply this: genuine scientific calculations are FUN and denialist calculations AREN’T!

So check out all three paths to thermodynamical understanding, Doug Cotton/PSI researchers/Climate Etc readers.

And everyone, keep smiling!

JCH

Here we are discussing the BEST land-only record. But, as we know, the ocean is the real heat sink (as Pielke Sr. has advised us), so we should also look at what is happening there to get a full picture.

Why am I rationally skeptical of the OHC results being reported?

Prior to 2003 the measurements are next to worthless, so I will ignore these. Since the air above the ocean surface was showing warming, it is logical to assume that the water at the surface was also warming, but the actual measurements are so spotty and inaccurate, that they should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Once ARGO got set up in 2003, the first results showed net cooling to 2008 (Josh Willis’ “speed bump”). Everyone was amazed.

“Errors” were found in the ARGO measurements; when these were “corrected”, the results were almost flat, showing very slight warming.

At the same time, we had the Hadley sea surface temperature showing warming from around 1990 to 2001 (0.167C per decade), which shifted to slight cooling starting in 2001 (0.065C per decade).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2001/to:2013/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1990/to:2001/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1990/to:2013/trend

Isn’t it reasonable to assume that if the air just above the ocean surface warms (or cools) over an extended time frame, such as a decade or more, that the upper ocean water will also warm (or cool) over this time frame?

What do you think, JCH?

Max

“A thermos does not warm the coffee; it reduces the rate of heat loss. Therefore the coffee is warmer at some later time than it would be without the insulating vacuum. Thermoses can be and are improved by silvering the surface of the glass. This will reflect radiation back into the coffee, thereby further reducing the net radiated heat loss.”

But main thing that makes a thermos work is inhibiting heat from conduction and convection of heat.
It is only slightly improved by the silvering.
Or silvering by itself, does make a thermos.
A silver cup would cool faster than a ceramic cup- silver is excellent
conductor of heat.
A heavy ceramic cup, doesn’t work as good as thermos
but works slightly better than less heavy cup [more a bit more
heat capacity and more insulation]
But if you don’t screw on the lid, a thermos works about a good as
ceramic cup- preventing evaporation of the hot coffee is large
factor.
And of course CO2 does not reflect infrared. Reflection is bouncing
the radiation back. Whereas CO2 absorbs and emits in all directions.
Nor is CO2 gas an effective as glass or ceramic [or rock] in terms of absorbing longwave IR.
The total amount CO2 in our atmosphere if it were liquid or solid
would be about 4 mm thick [a square meter has less 4 mm think].
And 4 mm of glass, ceramic or rock absorbs more longwave IR.
Night vision which use a special type glass which transparent
to longwave IR can “see” thermal heat and the CO2 in atmosphere
is mostly transparent [high level of CO2 from a fire doesn't significantly
block the signal- nor higher concentration of CO2 in urban areas
or +1000 ppm CO2 of normal indoor air.]

Jim D | January 20, 2013 at 1:20 pm | Reply
This is the crux of the debate, isn’t it. They say that simple ideas on climate sensitivity due to GHGs that go back to Arrhenius a century ago..

It’s an answer from gobbledegook, the ignorance not of the data but of the scientists who continue to use unproven premises. Arrhenius didn’t have the faintest idea of what Fourier really said and imagined the atmosphere as being what Fourier said it wasn’t:

The “Greenhouse Effect” was originally defined around the hypothesis that visible light penetrating the atmosphere is converted to heat on absorption and emitted as infrared, which is subsequently trapped by the opacity of the atmosphere to infrared. In Arrhenius (1896, p. 237) we read:

“Fourier maintained that the atmosphere acts like the glass of a hothouse, because it lets through the light rays of the sun but retains the dark rays from the ground.”

This quote from Arrhenius establishes the fact that the “Greenhouse Effect”, far from being a misnomer, is so-called because it was
originally based on the assumption that an atmosphere and the glass of a greenhouse are the same in their workings. Interestingly, Fourier doesn’t even mention hothouses or greenhouses, and actually stated that in order for the atmosphere to be anything like the glass of a hotbox, such as the experimental aparatus of de Saussure (1779), the air would have to solidify while conserving its optical properties (Fourier, 1827, p. 586; Fourier, 1824, translated by Burgess, 1837, pp. 11-12).

So your arguments from authority, Arrhenius, are worthless, you have not established that there is any such thing as this “Greenhouse Effect” concept you claim exists.

And, this is regardless whether you go with the “classic CAGW Greenhouse Effect” which has clouds and carbon dioxide blocking longwave infrared from the Sun then magically absorbing longwave infrared from the Earth, or the variation that the Sun doesn’t produce any longwave infrared, heat radiation, which further idiocy supposedly answers the “classic” gobbledegook.

Your, generic, other argument from authority waving your hands in Fourier’s direction is also gobbledegook – Fourier said nothing about radiated heat apart from heat flow – do read further about this on Timothy Casey’s “The Shattered Greenhouse” from which I’ve quoted: http://greenhouse.geologist-1011.net/

(1) Venus, Earth and other planets and moons with atmospheres verify the existence of thermal gradients caused by diffusion of kinetic energy at the molecular level. There is no other possible explanation for the fact that the surface temperatures and thermal gradients are as the hypothesis predicts. Probability analysis confirms the hypothesis with an extremely high degree of certainty.

(2) There is no problem considering which has the greater entropy, isothermal or isentropic conditions in a gravitational field. I defy anyone to prove that isothermal gas has greater entropy in a gravitational field. I don’t respond to “fan’s” generalisations which have no physical or mathematical proof at all. I have provided all the calculations necessary in the Appendix of my paper.

(3) Isothermal conditions would require creation of energy every time a molecule moved upwards, supposedly retaining kinetic energy whilst gaining potential energy.

(4) I have derived the thermal gradient from the assumption that there are isentropic conditions, not isothermal. I get the same quotient as is generally accepted by climatologists for the dry adiabatic lapse rate, and is certainly there in Wikipedia also, even though they derive it in a clumsy way.

(6) It is absolutely obvious that, if a cylinder of air is such that it is isothermal, then the air at the top has more (PE+KE) than the air at the bottom. This is very obviously not a state of equilibrium with greatest entropy. Such equilibrium with maximum entropy occurs only when (PE+KE) is the same at all levels.

(7) The thermal gradient has now been demonstrated in over 800 experiments with suitably insulated cylinders of air, water etc. There is of course more detail in the PROM paper with links to supporting documentation.

Well I’m glad it has been established that the European snow is from stratospheric warming, ie exactly the opposite of what we expect of carbon dioxide. Now if the boffins at the Met office like Peter Stott can just get their head out their arse and into looking at actual data then they might start to claw back some of the lost respect.

Steven Mosher | January 20, 2013 at 5:22 pm |
manaker its not an argument from ignorance.
The structure goes like so.

1. Given: Gghs cause warming
2. Given: Volcanoes cause cooling.

If you take these two givens and fit the data your residual looks like AMO with natural variability being about .17C per decade.

Of course it could be something else. it could be ln(unicorns) works better to explain the data.

The point is you dont need to appeal to anything else to explain the the data. Take an example from evolution.
Evolution explains what we see in terms of life forms on the planet.
Of course it doesnt rule out a sneaky deity that really controls everything, but explanatory parsimony suggests that adding entities that are not necessary, is well, not necessary.

If you want to object then deny #1 and be a skydragon

Now, you can’t even get that right, you’re the one’s believing in skydragons..

“1. Given: Gghs cause warming”

The greenhouse gases “causing warming” are predominately nitrogen and oxygen, the heavy voluminous ocean of real greenhouse gases, Air, which is our atmosphere. It is these which act as a blanket around the Earth slowing the rate of cooling and so avoiding the extreme lows of heat loss from the surface as seen for example on the Moon without any atmosphere.

AGW/CAGW have misattributed this effect to their own fiction “The Greenhouse Effect greenhouse gases” and have done so on the science fraud that the minus 18°C temperature is only without them, when a) this temp figure is for the Earth without any atmosphere at all, without nitrogen and oxygen, and b) the temp without the “the Greenhouse Effect greenhouse gases” would be around 67°C.

Taking out the Water Cycle but with the rest of the atmosphere of mainly nitrogen and oxygen in place the temp of the Earth would be 67°C.

So, let’s get this straight, your “AGW/CAGW Greenhouse Effect greenhouse gases and their effects” are based on an out and out lie.

This garbage in explains the garbage out we get from you, generic AGW/CAGW “climate scientists”. You’ve created a fictional sky dragon, and some of us in the real world can see how you’ve manipulated physics to come up with your fictional claims.

It is simply no longer possible for me to take any of you seriously as scientists who believe in such a silly fictional skydragon at complete odds, and fraudulently so, with the real physical world around us – less of the sarcasm from you would be in order..

“2. Given: Volcanoes cause cooling.”

Of interest here:
“”Scientists are convinced these plumes contain so many cooling sulfate particles that they may be masking half of the effect of global warming,” noted the July 20 Wall Street Journal.

Assumption Was Wrong

However, a team of researchers from NASA and the University of California at San Diego reported in the August 2 issue of the British science journal Nature that they sent instruments into “brown clouds” of aerosols over Asia to measure their effect on temperature. To their surprise, the researchers discovered the common assumption that aerosols lower temperatures was wrong.

Instead, aerosols were found to substantially amplify the Earth’s greenhouse effect.”
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/new-aerosol-study-refutes-global-warming-theory

Hi Peter,
Some of us look on government as a necessary evil and not our
master, others see it as a vast public utility to be free ter grow and …
grow…and… GROW.
Beth

Sorry – should also have added this:

Now that “the facts” show no warming (= slight cooling) since the turn of the millennium, it’s all too short a period to be meaningful.

But these are not ‘the facts’. This is the point here. You *cannot assert* that there has been no warming, let alone slight cooling since 2001. The data are contradictory (several reconstructions show warming, as we know) and the period *too short* for definitive pronouncements.

But your entire argument with R. Gates rests on exactly such definitive pronouncements. What I am attempting to explain to you is that you have no argument.

Vaughan Pratt:

No one gets tenure in a science department for demonstrating that “we don’t know how to solve this problem”

I have no idea why you’d talk about tenure. The requirements for getting tenure are very different than the requirements for doing science. The fact one may not get a particular societal reward from an action has no bearing on whether or not that action is right and/or scientific.

Science cannot advance by waiting until a theory with no problems emerges.

Duh? Nobody has suggested otherwise.

Science advances instead by improving the prevailing accepted theories.

Part of that process is identifying flaws in theories/methodologies. But one doesn’t have to find an alternative before pointing out such flaws. One doesn’t refrain from pointing out a bad answer simply because he or she doesn’t know the right answer. That’d be silly.

Imagine someone pointed out a problem with part of some scientific project even though they didn’t know how to fix it. Which of these responses would you give?

1) You didn’t give me a solution so I’m going to ignore you.
2) Oh, thanks for pointing out that problem. We’ll look into it and see how to fix it.

I say the second is how science should work. Zeke says the first is okay because the person didn’t give a “proper response.”

Do you have any kind of causal connection to propose for a cycle with such a large change in trend magnitude as ~1990-2012?

Sorry, not following. BEST (the subject of this thread) shows a trend for that period of

1990-2012: 0.141 C/decade

If you’re allowed to pick any dataset and any period then you can prove anything you want, as I illustrated with examples just now in response to Max.

If you stick to the data that this thread is about, namely BEST, and stick to honest decades, not your cherry-picked periods some of which aren’t even decades, then you get these trends:

1970-1980: 0.060
1980-1990: 0.034
1990-2000: 0.264
2000-2010: 0.268

All that these trends show in conjunction with the following further decadal trends

2000-2010: 0.268
2001-2011: 0.030
2002-2012: −0.062
2003-2013: −0.004

is that decadal trends are meaningless.

The longer the time series the more significant. Those who complained in connection with my poster that 160 years is not long enough to be significant for estimation of multidecadal climate can hardly turn around and claim significance for a mere 10% of that amount!

Here’s ter the inheatrent right of enery ter move up, down sideways, anyways.And here’s an interesting chart and table on Modran
Downward LW Radiation at the Earth’s Surface.

http://notrickszone.com/2012/08/07/epic-warmist-fail-modtran-doubling-co2-will-do-nothing-to-increase-long-wave-radiation-from-sky/

“When the radiative physics underpinning the ‘greenhouse effect’ is falsified and an alternative explanation for why the average surface temperature isn’t below freezing is established, then we can talk about this further.”

This is simple. Radiative physics is only a part of the problem, which is a multi-modal heat transfer problem – the surface is cooled by evaporation predominantly. The surface cooling fluxes in annual and global average are:
- evaporation (latent heat transfer) – 45%
- radiative cooling surface/atmosphere – 29%
- convective cooling – 14%
- direct surface radiation to space – 12%

The surface isn’t below freezing because the atmosphere is insulating it. Expecting the Earth’s surface to have an effective temperature according to Stefan-Boltzmann law is mind-boggling. The bulk of the atmosphere (N2, O2) insulates the surface.