For all the data we can scrape out of rocks, shells and cylinders of ice, what we really need to know, in detail on a planetary scale, is how much energy comes in and how much goes out. That can only be measured (even roughly) with satellites.
This paper rattles the whole table of key numbers, with empirical results. It puts core numbers into a new perspective, numbers like the 3.7Watts per square meter that a doubling of CO2 is supposed to add to the surface budget.
The models are hunting for imbalances and build-ups in planetary energy. But according to the observations, the longwave (infra-red) energy coming onto the earth’s surface, the infamous back radiation, is 10 – 17 W/m2 higher than in the famous Trenberth diagram from 1997. So the models are trying to explain tiny residual imbalances, but the uncertainties and unknowns are larger than the target. The argument that “only the forcing from CO2 can fill the gap in the models” is not just argument from ignorance rhetorically, but factually too.
Another major implications is that water is churning up and falling out of the sky faster than the experts thought. The Earth’s evaporative cooler is lifting more water, taking more heat, and dumping that heat in the atmosphere. At the top of the atmosphere heat is radiating off the planet to offset the radiation coming in. On the water planet, it really is all about water.
(Click to enlarge) Figure B1 | The global annual mean energy budget of Earth for the approximate period 2000–2010. All fluxes are in Wm–2. Solar fluxes are in yellow and infrared fluxes in pink. The four flux quantities in purple-shaded boxes represent the principal components of the atmospheric energy balance.
The main observational data comes from the ARGO ocean buoys, and the ERBE and later CERES satellites.
An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations
Climate change is governed by changes to the global energy balance. At the top of the atmosphere, this balance is monitored globally by satellite sensors that provide measurements of energy flowing to and from Earth. By contrast, observations at the surface are limited mostly to land areas. As a result, the global balance of energy fluxes within the atmosphere or at Earth’s surface cannot be derived directly from measured fluxes, and is therefore uncertain. This lack of precise knowledge of surface energy fluxes profoundly affects our ability to understand how Earth’s climate responds to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. In light of compilations of up-to-date surface and satellite data, the surface energy balance needs to be revised. Specifically, the longwave radiation received at the surface is estimated to be significantly larger, by between 10 and 17 Wm–2, than earlier model-based estimates. Moreover, the latest satellite observations of global precipitation indicate that more precipitation is generated than previously thought. This additional precipitation is sustained by more energy leaving the surface by evaporation — that is, in the form of latent heat flux — and thereby offsets much of the increase in longwave flux to the surface.
The effect of CO2 forcing “is lost in the noise of uncertainty”.
Hat tip to Doug Hoffman for the phrase is his, from well-written review. Furthermore:
“What this means is that all current climate models are based on bad assumptions. And because the raw output of those models do not reproduce the actual state of the environment, climate modelers have applied “adjustments” to get the numbers to work out. The result is that climate models are both fundamentally wrong and have been wrongly adjusted”
The authors describe just how lost:
“For the decade considered [2000-2010], the average imbalance is 0.6 = 340.2 − 239.7 − 99.9 Wm2 when these TOA fluxes are constrained to the best estimate ocean heat content (OHC) observations since 2005 (refs 13,14). This small imbalance is over two orders of magnitude smaller than the individual components that define it and smaller than the error of each individual flux. The combined uncertainty on the net TOA flux determined from CERES is ±4 Wm2(95% confidence) due largely to instrument calibration errors12,15. Thus the sum of current satellite-derived fluxes cannot determine the net TOA radiation imbalance with the accuracy needed to track such small imbalances associated with forced climate change11.”
Look at the errors on the budget (the imbalances listed on the right hand side). TOA means top of the atmosphere. CMIP5 means the climate models. Once again, the models are not predicting the measurements, especially at the surface. As explained in the paper, comparisons with models are not insightful here because the models are tuned (trained) on these numbers — in other words, the models are constructed so as to give these numbers, the numbers are not predictions or calculations of the models (as in the infamous “we put the physics in and then the answer pops out” statement).
Figure 1 | Surface energy balance. Observed and climate model deduced energy fluxes (all in Wm2) in and out of the TOA (a) and at the surface (b). The observed fluxes (containing error estimates) are taken from Fig. B1 and the climate model fluxes are from simulations archived under the World Climate Research Programme’s Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) twentieth-century experiments. The fluxes from a 16-model ensemble are summarized in terms of the range in model values (maximum and minimum fluxes) with the ensemble mean fluxes given in parenthesis. ‘SW in’ and ‘SW out’ refer to the incoming and outgoing (reflected) solar fluxes at the TOA and ‘LW out’ is the outgoing longwave radiation. Similarly ‘SW down’ and ‘SW up’ refer to downward and upward (reflected) solar fluxes at the surface, and ‘LW up’ and ‘LW down’ refer to the upward emitted flux of longwave radiation from the surface and the downward longwave flux emitted from the atmosphere to the surface, respectively. SH and LH refer to latent and sensible heat fluxes.
It makes sense that a professor of hydrological processes at JPL would lead a team to push forward the bounds of our knowledge of planetary radiation. Graeme Stephens is a physicist and meteorologist who studied at Melbourne Uni, then worked at CSIRO, before going to JPL.
How much don’t we know about rain and snow?
Though latent heat and evaporation are so important to our energy balance, the uncertainties on the water cycle are large. How much rain falls on the oceans? We only know to within 10 or 20%.
“New global precipitation information from the CloudSat radar suggests that precipitation has been underestimated by approximately 10% over tropical ocean regions49 and by even larger fractions over mid-latitude oceans51–53. (2) The total contribution from snowfall to the global precipitation is also not precisely known and has been excluded from previous global latent heat flux estimates. Based on new estimates of global snowfall54, we estimate the contribution to the total global latent heating is approximately 4 Wm–2 (Supplementary Information). For these reasons, the value of latent heat flux stated in Fig. B1 has been increased by 4 Wm–2 over the Global Precipitation Climatology Project49 estimate of 76 Wm–2 and then increased by 10% (8 Wm–2). The uncertainty on annual oceanic mean precipitation lies between approximately ±10% and ±20% (refs 51,56). The quoted uncertainty on the evaporation (±10 Wm–2) derives from our very sketchy understanding of the uncertainty in global precipitation.”
For comparison, the IPCC 2007 Energy Budget Diagram (originally from Keihl and Trenberth, 1997)
UPDATE: John Hultquist in comments points out the original diagram comes from ** ‘Modern Physical Geography’, 2nd. Ed. (1978 & 1983) by Strahler & Strahler: Figure 4.11, p. 65. This uses numbers taken from a W. D. Sellers ‘Physical Climatology’ book of 1965 (Univ. of Chicago), Tables 6 & 9.
..
And here is Trenberth, Fasullo and Keihl’s energy budget from 2009:
H/t to Michael Asten.
REFERENCE
Graeme L. Stephens, Juilin Li, Martin Wild, Carol Anne Clayson, Norman Loeb, Seiji Kato, Tristan L’Ecuyer, Paul W. Stackhouse Jr, Matthew Lebsock & Timothy Andrews An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations, Nature Geoscience, 5, 691–696 (2012)
Well, the colours have improved and the numbers have changed since 1997, but still the old coyote can’t seem to get his “Acme” product to work properly to catch that pesky roadrunner.
Still, we’ve clearly made savings on the “Thermals”, down to 17 from 24, so that’s good isn’t it?
Question: Are the CEOs of “Acme” Trenberth, Keihl, et al?
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The TOA says we’re still gaining heat. What do cough “skeptics” cough use to forecast? Uncertainty is not always a friend.
Also I just googled “only the forcing from CO2 can fill the gap in the models” but only this site is returned. A strawman argument perhaps?
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Jimmy
An analysis based on Difference of poor estimates of only the known factors, and ignoring the unknown factors
has one major characteristic.
It Does Not Work.
You cannot mathematically resolve the balance!
KK
Of course I realise that this is only a small problem for “virtual” scientists like yourself, but the whole point of science is that when you use it, it has to work.
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james says:
How about this for uncertainty; IPCC, AR4 says the AGW forcing is +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] W m–2. Levitus 2012 says AGW forcing is 0.27 Wm-2 per unit area of earth’s surface.
Yet, according to this new paper the TOA forcing is 0.6 Wm-2 based on the TOA imbalance!
Yet, the same paper says “The combined uncertainty on the net TOA flux determined from CERES is ±4 Wm2(95% confidence) due largely to instrument calibration errors”. That’s nearly 7 times the declared imbalance.
The point of this article is that uncertainty. That uncertainty means that AGW is unproved and possibly disproved or at least drastically mitigated.
Do you have anything sensible to say to that?
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OT, but not really, this poll at fairfax asks:
Please vote according to your conscience.
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I think Joolya is in trouble. At 4:55pm AEDT, the count was 14858 votes for 77% No, 23% Yes.
Not a good look, Jules!
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Was that the AWB wheat for oil scandal?
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Of course it is. Doubt doubt doubt. That’s all we ever seem to get from “skeptics”.
Reducing the uncertainty IS WHAT SCIENCE IS ABOUT! Highlighting that uncertainty exists is NOT the same as disproving the theory of AGW.
“AGW is unproved” – a strawman argument. Proof is for maths, reducing uncertainty for science.
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You’re obviously a troll; the paper Jo discusses shows a level of uncertainty in the TOA energy balance which is much greater than the imbalance which AGW alleges; the size of the uncertainty means there is effectively an equal chance that there is no imbalance at TOA, and therefore no TOA.
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I think the point is that with those amounts
of uncertainty it makes sense (as you said)
to try and reduce that uncertainty with more
measurements.
But it does not make sense to act as if the
science is settled, to tolerate no dissent, and
to be completely arrogant and dismissive.
With large uncertainties you keep your mouth
shut and go collect more data.
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With uncertainty present, you must fall back on historical precedent. Clearly the climate has gone through much variability. If you cannot prove with certainty that CO2 IS causing a change, then the default certainty is that natural causes are.
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You’ve confused uncertainty in the amount of TOA radiation with the certainty that GHGs trap heat. Two completely different things.
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James: “You’ve confused uncertainty in the amount of TOA radiation with the certainty that GHGs trap heat”
That may be so but I’m sure you could find a Climate Scientist somewhere who could either
1. subtract them
or
2. multiply them together.
KK
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I’m confused? Quantify CO2 caused “heat trapping”. TOA radiation uncertainty only compounds the problem.
Clearly these are BOTH areas where there is uncertainty, it doesn’t matter that they are “completely different” things.
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James says:
from the paper:
So you’re wrong.
TOA imbalance is the only reliable indication that more energy is in the system. GAT cannot represent the Earth energy balance because of SB effects. And the paper says that the error range for TOA energy balance is 4Wm2 while the estimated TOA imbalance is 0.6Wm2.
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James – Of course it is. Doubt doubt doubt. That’s all we ever seem to get from “skeptics”.
JK—— and all we ever get from Al Gore’s zombies is wild exaggeration, scary stories and NO EVIDENCE.
Why don’t you show us the actual evidence that man’s CO2 is disrupting the climate?
Of course, we both know:
1. Nature emits over 95% of the annual CO2 emissions.
2. CO2 FOLLOWS temperature in Al Gore’s ice cores.
3. Water vapor causes about twice as much greenhouse effect as CO2.
4. Unusual weather is NOT evidence of its cause.
5. Correlation is NOT evidence of causation.
6. Climate correlates better with solar cycles than with CO2 and over centuries.
7. Climate models are not evidence for a variety of reasons including the fact that they are considered poor by the top climate scientists in their own emails.
Be sure to explain how the Medieval, Roman, Egyptian and Minoan warm periods were NOT caused by Man’s CO2 and the recent one was caused by CO2.
Thanks
JK
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AGW is NOT a theory..There has never been one solid corroboration of it.
It barely reaches the “suggestion” status. !!
if you knew any science, you would realise that.
Which are you? social scientist, arts student, philisoophy ???
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James says…
Gasses trapping heat ha? Hey james, can you give me a real life example of a gas trapping heat?
Maybe you can give me some pointers on an experiment I can do to demonstrate that a gas can trap heat.
thnx in advance.
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James, “strawman”? Not remotely. If you understood the theoretical basis for attributions of climate change you would know that I’ve exactly paraphrased the main fallacy of the IPCC.
From FAR Chapter 9 (attribution) Executive Summary, p 655.
Their key specific dominant reason:
Sorry that will come as a bit of a shock for you, but the entire basis of “90% likely” comes from the logical fallacy known as argument from ignorance, or put another way, “we don’t know what else could have caused the warming, so it must be CO2, because that’s the only thing we can think of.”
Given that the models don’t know what caused the MWP, or the holocene optimum, or the LIA, obviously they are missing a “key forcing factor” or three.
Google this phrase: “No climate model that has used natural forcing only has produced the observed global mean warming trend” and see 300,000 results.
PS: “Doubt doubt doubt?” No — skeptics are not here to “Add doubt” — we’re here to discuss reality. The models don’t work, you can’t provide evidence that they can predict the climate, but we can provide evidence that they don’t. I didn’t use the word “proof”. (Your strawman.) “doubt doubt doubt” is just “reality reality reality”, and your only response is to pretend we individual, disorganised, unpaid commentators have a “strategy” that is anything other than just calling it as it is. Who is the conspiracy theorist?
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It would have been better if you have quoted them directly originally rather than make up your own interpretation.
But then you still have a problem. The IPCC attribution is for a period from “the second half of the 20th century” (Note how what is in quote IS actually what they say?).
Wouldn’t it be nice if you were talking about the same timeframe! What was it you said, something about “argument from ignorance”?
You’re out of luck there – GOOGLE PRODUCED ZERO RESULTS, perhaps you meant “words” instead of “phrase”?
As for attribution, no the scientists don’t just say it must be CO2, they understand the molecular properties of GHGs and they look at other possible causes. The results – http://www.skepticalscience.com/a-comprehensive-review-of-the-causes-of-global-warming.html
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Yikes, Sks as a source; definitely a troll; for model hindcasting look at Koutsoyiannis.
Anyone who says that AGW is not packaged on JUST CO2 is disingenuous, a liar. Natural variability has been discounted as has TSI by AGW; speaking of which TSI can explain all temperature movement as Stockwell’s paper [short version] shows.
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You may want to pull your neck in, just because you found skeptical science and you now think you know everything I would suggest you do a little more research before basing your whole argument on SkS.
Try: http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/09/skeptical-science-censorship-of-poptech.html
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@cohenite, wow, a website that allows you to self-publish without peer-review: http://fs23.formsite.com/viXra/form2/index.html
Impressed me be not.
@Shevva, Mistaken you be:
https://itsnotnova.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/poptechs-list-of-confusion/
http://www.skepticalscience.com/meet-the-denominator.html
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And not a single mention about the gate keeping or comment deleting at SkS, very blinkered, like I said down thread I’m not going to engage with a close minded troll.
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Poor James posting more long debunked propaganda,
http://www.populartechnology.net/2011/02/google-scholar-illiteracy-at-skeptical.html
Rebuttal to “Meet the Denominator”
In a desperate attempt to diminish the value of the list of peer-reviewed papers supporting skeptic’s arguments, Rob Honeycutt from Skeptical Science not only lies but puts on a surprising display of his Google Scholar Illiteracy. He fails to use quotes when searching for phrases, is unable to count past 1000 and fails to remove erroneous results. It is clear that not only does he not understand how to properly use Google Scholar, he has no idea of the relevance of any of the results he gets.
Update: Rob was forced to concede I was correct (though never owns up to blatantly lying) and has desperately made a flawed updated “analysis”. His original inaccurate number of 954,000 results went down to 189,553 results (which he fails to mention in his update) of which 160,130 (84%) CANNOT BE VERIFIED due to the 1000 result limit imposed by Google Scholar. The remaining results are irrefutably filled with erroneous nonsense that has to be individually removed before any sort of accurate count can be taken (see the updates for more information). None of which was done leaving his post to be worthless and those who cite it computer illiterate.
http://z4.invisionfree.com/Popular_Technology/index.php?showtopic=4328
Rebutal to “Poptech’s list of Confusion” #2:
An alarmist spammer who comments at Jo Nova’s site by the screen name “Blimey” and around the Internet as “itsnotnova” continues doubling down on his insanity. After having his original blog post completely refuted he decided to add new lies, misinformation and strawman arguments to it. He is so incompetent that he did not even read the list correctly (Lie #4) or understands that “Letters” is a term used to describe a type of peer-reviewed scientific document format in certain scholarly journals such as Nature (Lie #13).
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From the IPCC:
You quote this, and it confuses me. It says, quite simply, that if you don’t include the greenhouse effect, the models don’t match what actually happens. So therefore the greenhouse effect is important and has to be included. It would be the same if you left out the sun, or any of the many other forcings taken into account by the models – they wouldn’t work, and you’d have to add in the missing piece(s).
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Actually two papers came out this year (one is Dessler 2012 and I don’t recall the other) which said only models without anthropogenic CO2 could reproduce the 2000-2009 (inclusive) decade.
It’s worse than that. The three years since the beginning of 2010 have global lower troposphere temp down 0.4C. If the models including ACO2 couldn’t reproduce the global warming pause from 2000-2009 they’re going to be even more confounded by the rapidly falling temperature since 2010.
The CAGW thesis is falling like a house of cards. Of all the contrary research I’ve seen over the years Stephens 2012 is by far the most damning. Blockbuster doesn’t seem adequate to describe it.
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The Stephens (2012) paper is very useful, because climate models tend to greatly underestimate observed global precipitation. This revision of the Earth’s annual energy budget goes some way toward resolving the discrepancy. In other words it will help improve the accuracy of climate model simulations of precipitation.
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What a disappointment. I was just sitting on the balcony with my wife explaining my topic for a PhD dissertation and now it seems that these guys have either beaten me to or it or someone else will pick up on it and do so.
Back to the drawing board.
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Hang in there Fred; there is plenty of scope left on this topic.
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Fred, I don’t know your particular area of expertise, but I might suggest study of radiative fluxes in urban areas with the weekly aerosol cycle. Quantification of the effects of anthropogenic aerosols* is a huge gap in our knowledge of the factors that contribute to climate change.
*While the models have precise values for various effects (although individual models vary greatly in the actual values they use), they have little empirical basis.
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Morning all.
Say you are responsible for a large enterprise. Let’s call it the Government of Australia. Let’s say you hear about some scary story – let’s call it “climate change”. Let’s say that the solution to this problem is recommended by a lot of people who have a vested interest in the sorts of solution they propose. You are a “young and naive” lawyer and have no concept of scientific principles. What do you do? Spit on the electorate and introduce or carbon tax…Or do something called due diligence?
Of course not.
Cheers,
Speedy
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More and more we’re seeing real scientists challenge the orthodoxy. The hole in the dam is only going to get bigger.
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Well said, and I agree.
However, the die-hards (JB comes to mind) will be just as dismissive as ever.
Best regards,
Mark H.
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nobody minds real scientists challenging things.
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You finally accept being a nobody?
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Hole? More like dam wall made of sticks put together by a drunken beaver.
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Does a tiny change in atmospheric CO2 make a beaver drunk ?
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or does it depend on the amount of alcohol that is with the CO2. ?
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“real *blog* scientists”, I think.
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Only one problem: the perpetual motion machine has an energy gain of 44%.
It’s (345.6-239.7)/239.7, a bit up on the 40% of Trenberth et. al. 2009.
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Could you explain a bit more about this?
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The models use the Schwarzchild approximation, two radiation streams. At the boundaries they assume ‘back radiation’ and OLR, because they are produced at the boundaries, also radiate in the opposite direction, standard radiation physics.
But they introduce a perpetual motion machine, and that is wrong. Therefore, there is a measurement problem.
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I too would like to know your reasoning.
But may I suggest you read the article again, before giving us an explanation?
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again?
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The most interesting aspect of this is that the TOA “imbalance” is so small it may not exist. No “missing heat” that would mean. This could affect more than just “models.”
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Another wheel comes off the bandwagon …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y18z-18tJw&feature=related
Pointman
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You have gotta just love the first picture (Figure B1).
It shows all of the incoming short wave energy landing on South East Asia (which is plausible to anybody who has lived there for any length of time) and all of the outgoing long wave radiation departing from North America (which is obviously caused by all the hot air and rhetoric emanating from Washington). And, the annotations imply that all of the surface imbalance comes from Australia (that would be the Federal Government, I presume).
But the best bit is that it doesn’t show the Shaky Isles at all, which means that none of the so-called climate (whatever) can be New Zealand’s fault!
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R.W., you hit the nail on the head with that on Washington D.C.
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“ . . . famous Trenberth diagram from 1997.”
Such diagrams were in textbooks** when he took his first science class, so why does it get named as though Kevin T. created it? ‘Tweaked’ it might be the proper term. ‘Infamous’, okay. ‘Wrong’, okay. Adding the ‘1997’ to the phrase eases the pain a little, but any phrase should not suggest either he or the diagram should be awarded any points toward the next great science prize.
———
** ‘Modern Physical Geography’, 2nd. Ed. (1978 & 1983) by Strahler & Strahler: Figure 4.11, p. 65. This uses numbers taken from a W. D. Sellers ‘Physical Climatology’ book of 1965 (Univ. of Chicago), Tables 6 & 9.
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Thanks John, noted now in the post. Cheers, Jo
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“So the models are trying to explain tiny residual imbalances, but the uncertainties and unknowns are larger than the target.”
Yes, yes – I wrote a similar comment on my website nearly two years ago.
But no! Energy balance does not govern climate. Climate governs energy balance. Climate is “controlled” by natural cycles whch appear to be related (in ways not yet understood) to planetary orbits.
We are approaching the maximum of a cycle of about 1000 years. But a superimposed 60 year cycle was rising in the last 30 years of last century and caused alarm for those who did not understand the cyclic natural of climate. Carbon dioxide can never have any effect whatsoever, because the Earth still cools primarily by sensible heat transfer over which backradiation can have no effect. See my “Radiated Energy” paper and the October 2012 paper by Joe Postma – both in the publications menu at http://principia-scientific.org/
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The original Man Made Global Warming by CO2 Fantasy lasted so long because it it was presented as final
pivotal concept in the long scientific struggle to capture the essence of Earth’s Temperature change.
Focus was therefore applied to the micro functioning of CO2 as an infra red absorber and emitter and so long
as this focus remained there all was well.
The trust in the “scientists” skill and honorable behaviour was the essential obscuring cover that kept the
whole idea on the rails and allowing UN and Governments alike to funnel money to combat AGW to the friends
and backers.
But as always, the terms and conditions are always important in any transaction and this is the case with scientific analysis.
It turns out that our trust in the science had been misplaced and the terms and conditions had been obscured from view, and analysis.
All of the other factors, besides CO2, which had been assumed by the public to have been isolated and quantified had in fact been left out.
Water, for example, with all its energy transfer capacity had been totally ignored and it seems deliberately
left off the analysis, raising serious doubts as to the scientific credibility of the proponents of of CO2 AGW.
Once the doubts were raised there was anger that the good reputation of science had been used as a screen to
cover politically inspired scams and the resulting full analysis of the claims showed that the CO2 thing was
a scam and that not even a dumb but honest scientist could have been stupid enough to believe the “science”
behind the Man Made aspect of the claims.
It was always a deliberate scam for personal and group advantage.
The above Energy Budget is much the same and it can only be described as PRIMITIVE.
There are too many factors to be listed and quantified to say that there is any real chance of isolating a back radiation effect by a Difference analysis of estimated inputs and outputs.
It is a massive problem to do a mass, heat and momentum balance on the Earth.
A staggering problem that labels anyone claiming to have the complete answer as a SCIENTIFIC FOOL.
A DIFFERENCE ANALYSIS CANNOT WORK IN THIS PROBLEM where the object is to quantify one small factor.
As Jo points out, the target is so small compared with known factors and their variability let alone all the unknown ones.
The only solution is to physically measure back radiation or what ever it is that takes the fancy of Climate Scientists.
If you can’t measure it then maybe it doesn’t exist?
KK
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For some of the researchers, it was definitely played for maximum personal gain, but I think the primary reason for AGW’s rapid acceptance and entrenchment was ideological. Far too many people are predisposed to blame mankind for every perceived problem in the world, and to use it as an excuse to impose their values, beliefs and solutions on everyone else.
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Sorry OT, but I think this is another one of those comments which makes you wonder how some people get to the positions they are in
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Ross,
Do you have a link to that?
The statement is just begging to go viral …
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RW. It came from Tom Nelson’s blog
http://tomnelson.blogspot.co.nz/2012/10/warmist-cara-santa-maria-brings-up-if.html
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hmmm… how do they get the error of 0.4 in the 0.6+/-0.4 using those TOA measured values?
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In the above energy budget diagram I don’t see the outgoing heat from radioactive decay in the Earth’s core. While small compared with the heat from the Sun, it is not insignificant. The heating effect happens all over the Earth, including in the dark and at the poles, unlike the effect of the Sun. Without the radioactive heat source, the Earth would long ago have cooled down.
Einstein calculated the heating effect and said: “I came into the room, which was half dark, and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience and realised that I was in for trouble at the last part of my speech dealing with the age of the earth, where my views conflicted with his.”
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2011/jul/19/radioactive-decay-accounts-for-half-of-earths-heat
“About 50% of the heat given off by the Earth is generated by the radioactive decay of elements such as uranium and thorium”
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Hi Jaymam
There are also the energy considerations from the Earth’s rotation and frictional losses from air and water interacting with the biosphere plus energy associated with chemical reactions in the degradation that occurs with nature plus the energy associated with the growth of new plant and animal life plus many others.
ALL energy must be accounted for, not just the bits that the CAGWers want to highlight.
KK
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I’m sorry, my quote about the age of the Earth was from Lord Rutherford, not Einstein.
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jaymam:
The power flux density from internal radioactive decay (and possibly other factors) is less than 0.1 W/m2, and it varies very little over time. It can safely be ignored in this type of analysis.
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The Trenberth diagram shows “Net absorbed 0.9 W/m2″. Your 0.1 W/m2 for internal radioactive decay is around 11% of the net value, and therefore should not be ignored.
It’s also unclear to me whether the 0.9 W/m2 is for the whole of the Earth’s surface or just the heated side, in which case radioactive decay could be 44% of the net value of solar radiation. It’s probably not, but anything is possible using Trenberth’s figures!
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Good point that the radioactive decay is constant whereas the solar phase is only for half the time.
KK
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I would focus much more on the uncertaincies in any of the other power flows — look how big the differences are between the different estimates — before I would worry about this tiny and constant flow.
The imbalance of 0.9 or 0.6 W/m2 net imbalance in these models is averaged over the entire earth’s surface over the course of an entire year. At any point on the earth at a given instant, it can be plus or minus hundreds ow W/m2. The issue of how these are properly averaged out to supposedly between 0.5 and 1.0 is much more problematic than than a steady 0.07 W/m2 (to be more precise).
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Hi Curt
Good point that it’s a constant flow and therefore cannot be a factor in any variations that happen.
Therefore no need to quantify it.
Unfortunately there are many other factors not spoken about, which have not been named, let alone
quantified and these need to be checked.
KK
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It’s estimated at 60-80 milliwatts per square meter. Rocks are really good insulators and there’s a couple of miles of them even under the ocean before they get hot enough to convect and thus lose the insulating quality.
On a side note internal heat accounts for the high surface temperature on Venus. That’s because unlike the earth Venus’ 90 bar CO2 atmosphere is just as good as rocks at insulating. So the geothermal lapse rate of 3C per 100 meters doesn’t end at the top of the rocks like it does on earth. Digging down into the atmosphere on Venus is like digging down into the rocks on the earth – it gets pretty freaking hot after a few kilometers!
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The Bolter talked to William Kininmonth last night on 2GB radio Sydney. Good stuff on the Gore idiot as well.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/2gb_november_1/#commentsmore
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The Bolt idiot talking to the Kininmonth idiot…
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The Brooks idiot talking to himself again.
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why is the system stable though. why do other planets run away, but not the earth.
I would be a lot happier if I understood that (in laymans terms)
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Earth is 70% water and the evaporation and
condensation can carry huge amounts of heat
and the added clouds due to evaporation
can also reflect sunlight and counteract the heat.
These are possible reasons, not completely proven.
The CAGW folks believe some types of clouds will trap
the heat thus having positive feedbacks.
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The record highest mean annual temperature anywhere on the planet, 34.4C, was recorded from 1960-1966 in Dullal, Ethiopia. It’s a salt desert very close to the equator. It has annual rainfall of 1 to 3 inches so it’s also very dry.
If the hydrologic cycle resulted in so-called water vapor amplification we would reasonably expect the highest mean annual temperature to happen in equatorial rain forest equatorial ocean where there’s a buttload (technical term) of water vapor in the air. Adding to the mystery of why the highest mean annual temperature is a bone dry desert is that the record was set 50 years ago. Fifty years ago there was 22% less CO2 in the atmosphere. So one might reasonably expect that the record high mean annual temperature would be more recent instead of 50 years ago since it ostensibly has a big boost from all that CO2 today.
In my view this is just more evidence that on a water world it really is about the water. There was a drought in Dullal in the early 1960′s and the decreased absolute humidity was more effective at raising surface temperature than 60ppm of CO2. The hydrologic cycle is a negative feedback is how I explain it. I’m all ears if anyone has an alternative explanation for Dullal.
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Obviously, when there’s a lot of moisture in the ground, much of the solar energy goes into evaporating the water, but when there’s no moisture to speak of, the solar energy goes into raising the temperature of the ground, which then raises the temperature of the air.
In California, a lot of the urban high schools are installing artificial-turf sports fields, mainly because grass fields cannot hold up to the heavy use that is needed. The main problem with these fields is how hot they get on a sunny summer day, much hotter than a near by grass field. It’s a great illustration of how evaporation limits the daytime temperature increase. Some people have asked that these turf fields be hosed down before use, but since a secondary justification for these fields is to save water in arid California, that request usually gets turned down.
When the sun goes down, the rate of cooling is largely determined by the humidity in the air. Visitors and newcomers to California in the summer from the humid eastern US are shocked by how quickly it cools down in dryer California, and of course, the inland desert cools off even more quickly. And if the evening cooling in a humid area gets to the dew point, the temperature drop slows to a crawl.
So it’s easy to see how and why water decreases the rate of change in both the warming and cooling directions, but not as obvious how it would change the mean temperature.
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Fact is they don’t run away, in nature systems always reach an equilibrium due to negative feedbacks in the end.
Venus for example is not hot because of the imagined Greenhouse effect but rather because it has a thick blanket of gas 100 times that of the earth, it is 0.7 times the distance from the sun as the earth (meaning it gets about twice the insolation (square law). And it is very volcanic, which means a lot of internal heat is trapped by it’s thick atmosphere. The Temperature of Venus is governed by the depth of it’s atmosphere.
As I understand it (someone correct me if I am wrong). If I have a KG of gas at sea level and raise that to say 1000m it must gain 1kg*1000m =1000 Joules of potential energy. To even this out (because energy conservation applies) the 1KG of gas must lose 1000J of another form of energy (Heat) so that conservation is obeyed. Gas at higher altitude must be colder if energy is evenly distributed though the atmosphere.
So since Venus has a Deeper atmosphere and the temperature at Top of Atmosphere (TOA) is the same as earth, it stands to reason that the bottom of atmosphere has to be much hotter if the total energy per unit volume is to be constant throughout the atmosphere.
Venus = “Other Planets” aren’t hot because of some runaway process, they are hot because the equilibrium they are in (that is the controlled point) is different to the earth governed mostly by the depth of their atmospheres.
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re; gravitational potential energy
That’s correct IMO. Thermal energy is defined as the sum of kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy. A thermometer only measures the former. So a pound of air at sea level in a non-convecting (istothermal) atmosphere holds the same thermal energy as a pound of air at TOA. The thermometer reading must be adjusted for altitude to make a true measure of thermal energy instead of just a measure of motion. This goes way back to the golden age of physics when Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Loschmidt were arguing about it. Maxwell and Boltzmann basically outvoted Loschmidt and with a wave of their hands declared the gravito-thermal effect enabled a perpetuum mobile of the second kind and thus was bogus. Perpetuum mobiles of the second kind, it should be noted, are not prohibited by the laws of thermo-dynamics. Perpetuum mobiles of the first kind (that violate conservation) are prohibited. Maxwell’s Demon is a perpetuum mobile of the second kind. It’s still unsettled physics to this day. Nobody figured out how to construct a PM2K but that doesn’t mean there is no way. Gravity does weird stuff. If it can dilate time then acting as Maxwell’s Demon seems kind of tame in comparison.
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Those who still believe the carbon dioxide hoax need to come to realise that energy balance does not determine climate. As I have said above, it’s the other way round. As no one seems to have noticed, let me repeat: Climate determines energy balance. Climate itself is determined by the incident solar energy which fluctuates in long term natural cycles probably related to planetary orbits.
Earth’s surface temperature cools as heat from the Sun is transferred back to the atmosphere. This process is dominated by sensible heat transfer, not by radiation which accounts for less than 30% of such transfers.
All that backradiation can possibly do (according to physics) is slow that 30% of cooling which is due to radiation. Meanwhile, the other 70% merely accelerates to compensate, thus leaving no net effect on the overall rate of cooling. What comes in from the Sun will get out again by one means or another. When there are long periods of natural warming there will of course be a build up of energy being retained. The thermometers tell us that, without even having to measure the energy balance. But the opposite is the case when cooling sets in.
Backradiation is not the cause, because it cannot transfer heat to a warmer surface. It can only slow radiative cooling. See my peer-reviewed paper on PSI recently cited by Joseph Postma in his October 2012 paper.
Doug Cotton
.
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The regulation of energy flow that Doug mentions comes from the pressure gradient in the atmosphere, if any part of the atmosphere is hotter than it should be for the pressure/temperature gradient at that point, convection and conduction immediately try to balance it. Any small warming from back radiation of a trace gas would be immediately compensated for. There can be no warming effect, just a change in the way the energy is transferred.
Moisture in the atmosphere actually INCREASES the energy transfer away from the surface because of phase change latent heat and general specific heat increases.
[fixed] ED
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“There can be NO warming effect, just a change in the way the energy is transferred.
grrr, anyone elese ever noticed themselves dropping these little negatives accidentaly when they type. I seem to keep doing it, and not picking them up when I re-read the post !!
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stop being so positive.
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No !
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No!
Ah
I finally got it after 3 hours.
I’m not slow, it’s just my brain.
KK
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Sometimes and some places there’s no water to evaporate. In that case the remaining two channels, sensible and radiative, have to channel the energy away. In order to do that surface temperature rises which both forces more energy out through the atmospheric window and also raises heat flow via conduction. That’s really well established physics and is the operating principle in a zillion electronic gas detectors like this one:
http://www.raesystems.com/sites/default/files/downloads/FeedsEnclosure-TN-169_NDIR_CO2_Theory.pdf
The amount of surface warming from CO2 is vastly exagerated because latent transport negates it but only if there’s liquid water available for the hydrologic cycle. It’s quite dry at times over land especially in the winter.
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principia scientific org is not a scientific journal. It’s a website set up by climate “skeptics” in order to “peer-review” each others “research”. It’s not by co-incidence that the paper “citing” yours is also “published” on the same website.
Let us know when you managed to publish in a proper scientific journal rather than a “skeptics” website. You may need to rebut existing papers on the topic – you don’t appear to have accomplished that yet.
spotlighton-principia-scientific.html
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Jimmy
I remember a long way in the past having some difficulty with Doug’s comments but find the current material, bye and large, quite useful.
The recent Principia paper is sometimes long winded, as I am myself occasionally, and it is a little bit philosophical but in terms of science it certainly out-does the political rubbish from the UNIPCC and the like.
They are also not doing any harm to others.
kk
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Only doing harm to our funny bones.
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Gee
Always keep your elbows close to your body.
Stop gesticulating so much.
KK
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James. Principia Scientific International is an organisation – with a website, of course. I understand we now have about 120 members, and that number grows each month. We engage in extensive communication among ourselves regarding all this, and all of us are open to criticism, both from within and outside the membership. That in itself is part of the “open review” process to which our publications are subjected. You are very welcome to email us or attempt to publish a rebuttal of any of our papers. Before you do, you may wish to peruse the backgrounds of just some of our members here.
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Thanks Doug, Let’s look at the first member -
Chairman & Founder Member: Timothy Ball
Ball is a Canadian climate change skeptic and was previously a “scientific advisor” to the oil industry-backed organization, Friends of Science.
Seriously?
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Are you Sirius?
Surely you’re joking.
No I’m not.
Don’t call me Shirley!
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And your point is ???…….. NO point at all… Another pointless comment !!
Industry NEEDS to get the science right, their existance depends on it.
Politicians and advocates on the public teat…….. Not so much
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Hi Andy
James seems to be unaware that the Warmer-Green-CAW activists have good company in Big Oil.
Both have keen interest in keeping Nuclear power out of the equation.
KK
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Funny I get to another of your completely useless, factless, idiotfull comments and realise I have been trolled up thread, shame on you for making me waste 10 seconds of my life reading your drivel.
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How is Michael Mann’s lawsuit against Dr Ball going?
Last I heard it was still hung up in the discovery phase, with Mann refusing to comply with court orders to produce various documents requested by Dr Ball.
One wonders why Dr Mann (and his lawyers) think that defying court orders is a valid legal strategy.
One also wonders if he will use the same strategy in his lawsuit against Mark Steyn…
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Oh! Forgot to mention, Dr Mann’s lawyer is a Big Oil funding recipient… as well as accepting ‘donations’ from the Climate Science Defence Fund to cover Dr Mann’s legal expenses.
A finger in both pies, as it were.
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And James, if you’d like to read hundreds of comments on my paper, it does appear on at least six websites with the most discussion here on Tallbloke.
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http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/about-cru/history
This is a link to the History of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
Down at the bottom of that page is an list of their funders.
Among those founders are British Petroleum and Shell.
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But.. but… don’t the warmies claim that its we “deniers” who are the ones funded by Big Oil… when it is in fact one of their main ‘research centres’ that was actually founded (and funded) by the 2 largest Oil companies in the world?
Mind = Blown….
(/sarc)
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Yes, but it is a very impressive name!
But I think that Doug is a bit of a nutter, which is to say that he has an unusual approach to science. Sorry Doug.
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Certainly one you will never understand..
It’s called REALITY !!!
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Principia Scientific is the Sky Dragon Slayer’s home base. Where those guys leave the reservation is somehow believing that an isothermal atmosphere is hotter at its base than it should be from the ideal gas law. In fact it’s precisely the temperature it should be and higher altitudes are colder than they should because kinetic energy is traded off for gravitational potential energy. Add in the energy in gravitational energy and the books balance. This is NOT why Venus is hotter at the surface than it should be. It’s hotter because the uber-dense atmosphere is trapping geothermal heat welling up from the molten mantle.
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See WUWT
So “we have no evidence, lets make up a story and pretend that it is true”. Dogma?
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No. Lets wait for record summer heat waves in the US, record low arctic sea ice minimum, and New York being hit by 2 hurricanes in 12 months. It won’t convince the “skeptics”, but the vast majority will realise that the scientists were pretty much on the money.
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The US heatwave this summer was not as bad as those in the 1930s, when virtually all of the all-time records were set.
We really don’t know how the Arctic summer ice in recent years compares to the 1920s and 1930s, but we know those decades had a lot less than the 1970s and 1980s, when the satellite records began.
The 1950s had many more hurricanes hitting the middle Atlantic than this past decade has, including two major hurricanes in one year (1954). My parents lost their roof in Boston to one of them. If that happened today, the alarmists would be all over it. It looks like we are in a weather pattern now that is much like that of the 1950s – warm Atlantic and cold Pacific, for one – that encourages things like hurricanes to go up the Atlantic seaboard.
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Curt, John has had evidence presented to him before. He doesn’t consider evidence. He won’t respond.
Thanks for posting this for the rest of the readers that DO consider evidence instead of gossip.
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The DENIERS are still under attack
http://canberra.climatexchange.org.au/book-launch-a-short-introduction-to-climate-change-by-tony-eggleton
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ooo, AVG didn’t like your linked site very much !!!
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I’ve always found AVG to be a wonderful tool when sorting out the AGW troll sites from the real scince ones, Andy.
On the topic of AVG, Site Advisor, Anti-Virus software, and Internet Firewalls… perhaps friend Eric was referring to the DDoS attacks that brought down Jo’s site in the past?
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I’ve just posted this in the slayers discussion, hadn’t seen this one, but pertinent here:
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/a-discussion-of-the-slaying-the-sky-dragon-science-is-the-greenhouse-effect-a-sky-dragon-myth/#comment-1163132
The models are of a complete fictional world: without Water Cycle, without real gases, without real heat from the Sun – there is no real physics in the basic Greenhouse Effect model.
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No Myrrh, those things are in the models. But sadly you too are a nutter.
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Johnny boy, true to form … don’t deal with the science, just go straight to the insult.
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To be fair he dealt with the science before going to the insults.
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In this case going straight to the insult is warranted.
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There is a need for a unified team to solve this graphic, rather than numerous semi-separated researchers taking a poke at bits and pieces of it. Over a year ago I noted on a blog that inadequate attention was given to the far IR, say 30-100 micron wavelength. Now it’s getting some attention. That attention is not complete. If one selects a narrow bandwidth, like 40 +/- 0.1 microns, the behavior of that bandwidth as it travels through a very variable atmosphere is not a linear behaviour that can be given a simple equation. Then, if you shift to (say) 35 +/- 0.1 microns, you can’t assume that ant of the constants used at 40 can be used at 35. The exercise rapidly becomes a very comples set of related equations, but we lack direct measurement confirmation of many of them. One of the reasons that we lack confidence is instrumental error. (Cut & paste here from Wiki) “An infrared detector is a detector that reacts to infrared (IR) radiation. The two main types of detectors are thermal and photonic (photodetectors). The thermal effects of the incident IR radiation can be followed through many temperature dependent phenomena. Bolometers and microbolometers are based on changes in resistance. Thermocouples and thermopiles use the thermoelectric effect. Golay cells follow thermal expansion. In IR spectrometers the pyroelectric detectors are the most widespread”. In an ideal world, someone would confirm that eacech design, each instrument, produces results within the error estimates that are useful, at all relevant wavelengths, for all relevant atmospheric compositions.
There is another concept that could be a problem. Help appreciated. We use Watts per square meter as units. We talk about top of atmosphere. If this is taken at the tropopause, it can be between 8 and 15 km above the surface of the the globe. An imaginary sphere 10 km above the globe’s surface has an approximate area if 508.37 square km, but if shifted upwards to 15 km, it is 509.17 square km, a difference of 0.4%. When we are chasing small % variations, and when keeping Watts constant, is this effect to be taken into consideration? Should we not say “Watts per sq km at a nominated altitude”?
Hence, yes, it’s all about accuracy and we are far from an accurate solution, especially for the whole diagram.
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30 microns is the peak emission frequency of an object at minus 175C.
http://www.spectralcalc.com/blackbody_calculator/blackbody.php
The lowest temperature ever recorded on the earth is minus 90C. Where on earth do you believe this temperature becomes relevant in the surface heat budget?
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Well said Dave.
Quantifying a problem work every time.
KK
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Hi Geoff
In modeling it is important to stick with what we actually experience.
Measuring the actual values is critical and the first stop and actual theorising can be done after.
The climate models and energy balances are an interesting scientific work but are not really models in the
accepted engineering sense; they are just concepts that have been unable to function are models and need further work.
My own view of the energy balance work is that it is very interesting but a diversion from the real target
which is to restore sanity to science and politics.
This blog was originally set up to counter the CO2 – Superheater theme and we have digressed way past proving
that CO2 is IMPOTENT not important.
We are now in a new phase of the conflict and the targets are to consolidate a reply to the Rent seekers such
as the Australian Wilderness Society, WWF, the IPCC, the UN, the Green Left TV addicts who never go near the
bush and all politicians who want to tax us.
The Eco madness that is destroying our economies must stop and the only way this can happen is if the
population at large is able to be shown the reality, the false science, the money grubbing politics and
“science for dollars” that is feeding off this monster.
It is a gigantic task given the state of the media and the entrenched strangle hold that vested interests
have on society.
It is no longer a science problem; it is one of communication and political revolt.
KK
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Global Annual Mean Earth Energy Budget… But the earth spins on its axis with a 24 hour period. Seems to me that the earths energy budget is a daily calculation with residuals affecting the new day every day. Why don’t the models show this effect.
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Jo,
Slight problem with these…
DO NOT INCLUDE TILTING OF PLANET OR ROTATION OR EVEN PRESSURE DIFFERENCES…
Just OBSERVED with no motion considered.
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Joe
If you did that you would have an inconvenient explanation for the polar oscillation we are seeing presently: arctic ice attrition and antarctic accumulation.
There will, in the future be the reverse, with the Arctic going back to the ice sheet that was there 30,000 years ago and perhaps the Southern pole losing ice to become habitable again.
Milankovic cycles are best left out of this, people like James would never wrap their mynds around it.
KK
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Blockbuster – A journal article backs up opinion held by skeptics that was previously based on nothing at all, and which will be used to claim that the entirity of climate science has been debunked.
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Here are some numbers for you Mattb
Calculated back in 2010
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/working-out-where-the-energy-goes-part-2-peter-berenyi/
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As opposed to the ‘climate computer models’ which cannot even accurately ‘predict’ the past correctly, let alone give an accurate forecast for the future, yet are widely touted by AGW adherant as ‘THE PROOF’ eh Mattb?
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Yes, it’s ironic that I made an elementary error in a note about errors. In the numbers above, the imaginary spheres whould be in millions of square km, not plain sq km, but the outcome is the same in the magnitude of the error. Sorry about that, I picked it up before being alerted to it from Switzerland. Might as well add here that incoming radiation from the Sun might not show this effect, because it is anout parallel beams, but the outgoing is divergent. This would seem to have relevance for comparing incoming with outgoing at top of atmosphere.
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I know a mechanical engineer who spend over 40 years designing very large scale heating, cooling and ventilation systems for mines and commercial buildings. He told me that there is no possibility of accurately modelling energy flows involving the atmosphere/ocean system because of the vast number of unmeasurable variables.
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Hi BB
I have been saying this for some time.
As a metallurgist, with some training in the analysis of complex, high temperature, interacting physical and chemical systems, it is easy to see the problem.
Inputs and outputs have no rhyme nor reason as to their behaviour and cannot be accurately dealt with properly.
It is not a matter of just attaching a cool label like “chaotic” to these variables and waffling on about it before pulling a rough guess out of the air.
It is also not a factor of how big a computer you have; what’s the use of a computer if you have no clue what’s happening to those factors that are identified and have been poorly assessed.
Many factors have not even been identified and have not even been given a label such as the disturbed fluctuations that were labelled chaotic.
Man Made Global Warming is a Chaotic Science and deserves a decent funeral.
KK
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“Man Made Global Warming is a Chaotic Science and deserves a decent funeral.”
Sorry KK, I have to disagree with you.
I doesn’t deserve a funeral at all…….. just left to rot, in the nice warm sun,
and release its CO2 to the atmosphere where it belongs.
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IT doesn’t !! not I doesn’t.. typo (or very bad grammar).
me.. cremate.. I want my CO2 and other carbon to go to the atmosphere, too.
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Andy
You have overlooked something.
If it’s given a funeral ……. there has to be a eulogy.
And that is where the whole smelly life of this monster can be exposed.
Best not to let it go quietly and slink off without throwing a few rocks after it.
KK
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BlockBuster: BBC goes wide open on ClimateGate.
The Game’s Up.
Last Night, Halloween, BBC Radio 4, the thinking person’s backround music , broadcast
Climategate Revisited.
Here it is on iPlayer, (available for 60 days). Not sure if it can be accessed from other regions , unless you haven a Web Gateway in the UK .
Is it only a matter of time till the ABC broadcasts it though?
Features the likes of Lord Lawson GWPF, with some harsh words for the BBC, Steve MacIntyre, Andrew Montford (of Bishophill) and much more.
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In the words of Richard S Courtney no less, over at WattsUp…,
if I may:-
”
Friends:
I have just heard the radio show.
Amazing! By BBC standards it was balanced and fair.
It gave views of representatives of both ‘sides’ and views of journalists on the effects of both climategate releases. It suggested that Climategate 3 may be imminent.
I commend everyone to listen to it on BBC Radio Player. Yes, I know it is from the BBC but it is not the usual BBC extreme pro-AGW propaganda.
Richard
“
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It would be a good time for “climategate 3″, to counter the recent weird weather. However I doubt it will be that successful. The original climategate got everyones hopes up, but climategate 2 was a fizzer that didn’t fulfil the hype of the original. Actually, why bother keeping this depressing franchise going. When you can only go downhill, and you are already buried up to the axles in mud at the bottom of the valley – then its time to give up.
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Well G was is there any argument ,the hoax is explained
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Over at the Hockey Schtick is this possibly related post.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/astrophysicist-explains-why.html
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If we look at Trenberth’s energy budget diagram on page 314 here we see 333 W/m^2 backradiation and only 396 W/m^2 for radiation from the surface to the atmosphere or direct to space. I would argue that, 333 of the 396 is merely scattered backradiation which, as explained in my earlier posts, does not transfer any (new) heat from the surface. So only 396 – 333 = 63 W/m^2 is transferring heat. Sensible heat transfer is shown as 80 + 17 = 97 W/m^2. Hence we have a total of 63 + 97 = 160 W/m^2 transferring heat from the surface. Of this, 97 / 160 = ~61% is transferred by sensible heat transfer. However, of the 63 W/m^2 of radiation we see that 40 W/m^2 goes straight to space. Hence carbon dioxide can have no effect on that cooling. That leaves only 23 W/m^2 being absorbed by the atmosphere.
So, we have 23 / 160 = only14% of heat transfer from the surface can possibly be affected by water vapour, carbon dioxide and their colleagues, (whom I refuse to call GHG’s) and it is not too hard to imagine other cooling processes accelerating to compensate for any slowing of this 14% of all heat transfer from the surface..
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Hi Doug
That’s a good way to put the problem
KK
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ps.
not commenting above on the accuracy of the calculation used or even whether this assessment is correct; but if it is true, it is a good way of isolating the role of CO2 and highlighting or de-highlighting it.
kk
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“is not too hard to imagine other cooling processes accelerating to compensate for any slowing of this 14% of all heat transfer from the surface..”
There is no way that other heat transfers WILL NOT compensate. Ideal gas laws mandate it.
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!
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AGW qualifies as “not even wrong”.
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Yeah, sure. Explain that to all the “skeptics” who accept pretty much everything about AGW except the size and sign of the feedbacks.
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The provenance of this 398 (or 390) Wm-2 surface emission figure really needs to have the blowtorch applied to it. On my understanding it is a derived figure from the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, based on the average measured near-surface temperature of the Earth. As far as I know this level of average emission has never been directly measured – please correct me if I’m wrong.
My proposal is that the NEAR-surface temperature, which is determined by the lapse rate (increasing temperature with decreasing height) should not be equated with LWIR emitted from the ground and oceans. The atmosphere, like the oceans, has some thermal inertia and the heat content only needs to be replenished by incoming SW radiation (however distributed and converted) to maintain a steady-state average temperature. Yes?
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Yes Chris. The thermal inertia is not only in the oceans, but also not far underground where the temperatures remain very stable despite the seasons. The air we live in is usually at most 3 degrees cooler than the ground (or ocean) beneath in calm weather conditions. This is of course due to sensible heat transfer – simple molecular collisions which transfer over 60% of all the heat that leaves the surface. See my post above which calculates that only 14% of heat transferred from the surface is absorbed by the atmosphere. Of course only a very small percentage of that 14% is absorbed by carbon dioxide. Need I say more?
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Hi Chris,
“As far as I know this level of average emission has never been directly measured”
I agree, if it could be measured then we could convert it to electrical energy just as we can do with solar panels.
The beauty of this radiation (if it existed) would be that we could have 24/7/365 free energy. Free energy for all, day and night! Heck, if they could produce it, I’d be willing to pay for it! No need for windmills, solar cells, nuclear, hydro, coal, gas etc.
How many “Back Radiation” energy suppliers are there?
Hmm, maybe perpetual motion machines don’t work. 324+ from surface to atmosphere then 324+ from atmosphere to surface then 324+ from surface to atmosphere then…
Reduce the 390+ surface to air by 324+, ignore the 324+ air to surface immeasurable and we might then be approaching reality.
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I think your understanding of “Perpetual Motion” is wrong. The Law of conservation of energy says Energy cannot be created or destroyed only transformed from one for to another. So the Energy doesn’t magically dissapear, reflected energy can recombine and reinforce incident energy. Also there is no law of conservation of work, one unit of energy can result in many units of work. In theory we humans could extract useful effects (Work) on every transformation of energy from one form to another reusing the same unit of energy over and over, in Practise this is very hard to do.
For example by using 1 unit of energy I can concentrate (pump) 3 units of heat from one place to another (Let’s say from one room to the adjacent room ) Think Airconditioning. So my 1 unit of energy has cooled one room by 3 units and heated another room by 4 units. I have done 7 units of Work cooling, + heating, using only one unit of energy input.
When I take the two rooms together though (The Total System) I have only added 1 unit of energy to it, since the 3 units I moved from one place to another cancel each other. So I am only left with the energy I put into the airconditioner.
How much difference can I put between the two rooms, (well neglecting the efficiency of the thermal cycle). How much difference there is depends on the rate of gain compared to the leakage of energy between the two rooms, the heat in the hot room and cold in the cold room will rise until the energy leaking between the two rooms equals the rate of energy transfer due to the aircon. This is dependent only on the insulation in the wall! That’s equilibrium.
Sorry, to disappoint but the climate model, doesn’t necessarily violate conservation)
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Hi bobl,
I’m not sure where I intimated that energy magically disappears or that I accused AGW scientists of not conserving energy. In fact I think they do a very good job of “conserving” it by having it cycle between the atmosphere and the surface.
You may be correct about my misunderstanding of perpetual motion, but as I see it, that cycling of radiation is doing no work. It is not being transformed as is the higher frequency input radiation from the sun to the lower frequency exiting radiation from, or through, the atmosphere.
If I were to consider the TOA as a black box, I note that 341 enters the system, 102 exits unchanged and 239 exits at a lower frequency. Conclusion: The system is at equilibrium. Everyone’s happy, energy in = energy out. However, I must assume that there is an additional internal energy recycling system operating, otherwise 239 would not exit at a lower frequency.
The problem with the black box is that I can’t see that there are energy transforming processes occurring within it. Processes that are converting the radiant input energy to create living (and eventually non-living) matter, to motion of the air, to motion of the water, to the generation of electrical energy, all of which (and much much more) are transferring energy from one form to another. From bushfires, cyclones, tsunamis, tides, thunderstorms and more, those processes plus gravitational forces are conserving energy by transforming it. They are measurable and observable and are present, day and night. Trenberth’s missing “heat” is right there, hidden in plain sight. So Trenberth’s task, (should he choose to accept it) is to measure and calculate all of that energy and explain why the energy contained within the TOA exceeds the input solar energy. I would argue that 17 from thermals and 80 from evaporation just won’t cut it.
The cycling of radiation from air to surface and back again without loss, (like a perpetual motion machine) is neither measurable nor observable. If it were then warmists and sceptics would not be arguing. Whilst it remains as radiation bouncing back and forth, It is not performing measurable work nor is it capable of performing measurable work, it’s net effect is zero. So whether it’s 333, 13 or 0, it serves no useful purpose and it still comes out of thin air.
I apologize for the long rant, but that’s just how I see it. Do I have numbers to assign to the processes above? No, but I do think that the energy budget of the earth is a bit more complex than an “Acme” diagram of a handful of radiation arrows going up and down. But, like Sgt. Shultz, “I know nothing!”
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Correction: only 14% of heat transferred from the surface is transferred by radiation which is absorbed by the atmosphere.
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That’s better!
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That 14% will probably have an variability of +/- a few percent.
A little extra CO2 may, perhaps, alter the value by a tiny fraction of a percent.
Immediately compensated for by other energy transfer mechanisms.
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Well, they still live in the flat world at 2 times the distance from the sun, waiting to see when the first 3D model will come.
It is first time that we some some uncertainties. Finally we have that clearly shown, it is a step forward.
However I am a bit skeptic on it: the incoming radiation from the sun was recently corrected down from 1365 to 1361 – which makes 4 W correction, or in the flat model 1 W, but the uncertainty is only 0.1.
The imbalance of 0.6+-0.4 at TOA even if the uncertainties of the other fluxes is greater.
Then again this is a mixup of net heat transfer with interchange which confuses, Keeping a clean net heat transfer is a much better model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Breakdown_of_the_incoming_solar_energy.svg&page=1
as Doug above observes, as it gives a proper idea of what net heat fluxes are influenced
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The real problem with these models is that they have attributed all radiant heat energy from the Sun to shortwave, the “shortwave in longwave out” meme from AGWScienceFiction.
We cannot feel shortwave, all the heat we feel direct from the Sun is longwave infrared, aka thermal infrared aka radiant heat. The Greenhouse Effect energy budget claims this doesn’t exist.
These models are junk science. A deliberate science fraud introduced into the education system.
AGWSF has done this so that it can pretend that all real world measurements of downwelling thermal infrared “from the atmosphere” are from “backradiation/blanketing by greenhouse gases” because “only shortwave from the Sun does the heating of Earth’s land and ocean”. Which is physically impossible.
What do any of those numbers mean when the real beam heat from the Sun has been excised?
What is the matter with these so called “climate scientists”? How can they be so completely and utterly incompetent that they don’t even know that they don’t know the difference between Radiant Heat and Radiant Light?
Countless industries all around us know the difference, used in billions of appliances for the different properties and processes of these distinctly different electromagnetic energies as known from the Sun.
We’ve known since Herschel that HEAT from the Sun is invisible and we know better than Herschel now, because our measurements are more exact, that not even all invisible infrared is thermal, near infrared isn’t thermal. Near infrared is not hot, we can’t feel it as heat any more than we can feel visible light as heat, they do not heat us up. They do not heat us up because they are incapable of doing so, they work on a different level. They are classed Reflective not Thermal, Light not Heat.
It is the real direct Heat from the Sun which heats us up, heats up the land and ocean and heats up the land and water at the equator so intensely that we get our huge winds from equator to poles and all our dramatic weather.
Visible light cannot do this.
These energy budgets, from whichever source they first came from.., are gobbledegook. Impossible in real world physics.
Until, and unless, this is addressed head on, these discussions will remain rooted in the fictional world created to push AGW and the Greenhouse Effect.
Their deliberate intention was to confuse, so let’s stop the confusion.
Now.
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Tell these people they have it all wrong, that they don’t need to produce windows which block the beam heat from the Sun because it doesn’t get through the atmosphere, and tell them that their optimising of visible light is heating their clients’ rooms..
http://www.stanford.edu/group/narratives/classes/08-09/CEE215/ReferenceLibrary/EDR%20Design%20Briefs/sg-2-design.pdf
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As usual, you get it completely wrong because you don’t understand the basics. In a section of your linked file, they discuss minimizing the total heat let in (if that is what you want) through the skylight by absorbing or reflecting the infrared portion of sunlight in the skylight surface. This is not to say that the visible portion of the spectrum does not heat the interior, just that the infrared portion heats it without providing any additional light.
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Umm… “We cannot feel shortwave, all the heat we feel direct from the Sun is longwave infrared, aka thermal infrared aka radiant heat. The Greenhouse Effect energy budget claims this doesn’t exist.”
ORLY?
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This is when I found out what was happening, when pages on NASA were being doctored to fit in with AGWSF agenda: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/28/spencer-and-braswell-on-slashdot/#comment-711886
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Amen
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Why?
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trying to educate you in science is against my better judgement, but I’ll give it a try.
These ‘energy budgets’ are far too simplistic and do not replicate real life natural systems such as our Earth. They may appear to support the GHE hypothesis, for which they gain vast exposure but they are simply gobbledegook cartoons.
Let me demonstrate.
Take a common red brick which is emitting radiation at the rate of 480wm2. Place it over a gravel surface emitting at the rate of 240Wm2.
According to the ‘energy budgets’ a la’ Trenberth & Kiehl etc, the flow of energy is from the red brick to the gravel.
Wouldn’t you agree with that Matt?
However, upon closer scrutiny, you would find that the red brick has an emissivity of 0.93. Using the SB equation, if it’s emitting 480Wm2, it would have a temperature of about 36 DegC.
Gravel on the other hand, has an emissivity of 0.28, if it’s emitting 240Wm2, it would have a temperature of 78DegC.
The point here Matt is that one cannot simply add radiation fluxes by way of simple arithmetic and pretend to know the energy budget of a complex system such as Earth. GOBBLEDEGOOK is what it is.
Borrowing from one of the great scenes in the Blues Brothers Matt, DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?
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Are you suggesting that an object emitting 480Wm2 somehow RECIEVES net radiative energy from an object emitting 240Wm2? now THAT would be gobbledegook.
there is nothing about small interractions that prevents an approximation of the surface of the earth as a whole.
Your claims of gobbledegook are gobbledegook, I’m afraid.
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You haven’t seemed to get it Matt. Think about it for a while.
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I figure I’ve thought about it plenty.
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Myrrh — Your confusions would get you flunked out of any undergraduate electricity and magnetism physics class or engineering heat transfer class (with neither having anything to do with climate change). As many have told you, visible light is perfectly capable of heating objects. Red lasers, whose (single) frequency is entirely within the visible band, are commonly used to melt steel — it is an important industrial process now, and you probably have many products that were processed this way.
The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs is using blue laser light, whose (single) frequency lies entirely within the visible band, to heat deuterium/tritium pellets to temperatures over a million degrees to successfully create nuclear fusion (not sustainable yet, though).
Photons at all frequencies carry energy and are capable of heating anything that absorbs the photon. This includes visible light, as I have explained. It includes the near infrared, which provides almost half of the energy from the sun, and the large majority of energy from incandescent lamps. It includes the far infrared, which is radiated from objects near our ambient temperatures.
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The Sun is not a laser, as soon as someone comes back with that I know they don’t know what they’re talking about.
AGWScienceFiction has excised the actual direct beam heat from the Sun, which is THERMAL INFRARED. Thermal means “of heat”, it is the electromagnetic wave of heat. Heat cooks stuff.
Visible light cannot cook anything, it is too small to affect the whole molecule of matter, it works on the electronic transition scale.
This is a scam. I’m pointing out what they have done and for what reason, to claim that any real world thermal infrared downwelling from the atmosphere is from “backradiation/blanketing from greenhouse gases”.
IT IS A HUGE HOAX. IT IS THE BIGGEST SCIENCE FRAUD SO FAR IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE.
You’ve been had. Visible light FROM THE SUN converts to chemical energy in photosynthesis, into nerve stimulation in sight, it does not convert to heat – it takes BIGGER energy to convert matter to heat, to heat something up takes POWER. Visible isn’t heavyweight enough.
What don’t you understand when I say that this science fraud was introduced into the education system? For the oiks. Real applied scientists in thermodynamics know visible light is not a thermal energy, it is classed Reflective.
It’s of no interest to Thermodynamics. Radiant heat from the Sun is what heats the Earth’s land and water and us.
These models are stupid. They’ve created a totally fictitious world with its own impossible in reality fisics..
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no one said the sun is a laser. As soon as someone has to make stuff up like that even though the actual statement is there for all to see, that’s when I know they don’t know what they are talking about.
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Curt used a laser as an example in #36.5
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he used a laser as an example that visible light can heat objects. in response to:
“It is the real direct Heat from the Sun which heats us up… Visible light cannot do this.” in #36.
Myrhh’s response “The Sun is not a laser” is thus irrelevant as such a statement was not made. \
you follow?
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Myrrh — You’re just digging yourself deeper. You can’t even follow a basic argument.
You repeatedly say that visible light cannot heat objects. I counter with examples using visible-light lasers. The reason that the lasers are a good example is that they have a single frequency, entirely within the visible-light range. This is unlike the sun or incandescent lamps, which put out a broad spectrum that includes both visible light and near infrared. Yet lasers, containing only visible light, are used every day to heat things, including melting steel and aluminum. I work with this process regularly. Entire companies are built on this fact. This completely refutes your argument with absolutely verifiable facts. Done.
You bring up Herschel’s experiment that discovered infrared radiation. In repeating Newton’s experiment that split sunlight into the full spectrum of visible light, he noticed that the surface outside of the red end of the “rainbow” got warm, which was his fundamental discovery. But this is not to say that the surface on which the visible light falls does not also warm. It does! (This is very easily verifiable. You should try it.)
The only thing special about “visible light”, other than properties that vary gradually along the entire electromagnetic spectrum, visible and not, is that human eyes can detect it. Other species’ eyes can detect different ranges of frequencies, some into what we call ultraviolet light, and others into what we call infrared. So in defining this visible light with these supposedly unique qualities that you propound, which species’ eyes should we use in specifying the range of this “special” electromagnetic radiation?
Many, many engineered systems are designed assuming visible light can transfer energy as heat. They would not work if this were not the case. These properties are easily verifiable in the lab, not dependent on speculative computer models or anything like that. All your nonsensical assertions are doing is letting alarmists claim that skeptics don’t understand basic physics. I said in my last post that you would be flunked out of a college science or engineering class. Now I think you couldn’t even make it through a high school science class.
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Oh, and each photon of visible light carries more energy than a photon of infrared, the energy being proportional to the frequency (inversely proportional to the wavelength), and the frequency of visible light being higher than that of infrared. So your argument about why visible light cannot heat is exactly backwards.
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Curt
That represents my basic understanding of the energy situation too.
KK
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Nice prose Curt,…though your explanation of light “heat” is somewhat problematic. A blue laser may in fact induce a temperature increase of the targeted radiated surface, but visible light alone is not equate to increase temperature. You eluded to this yourself. The inefficiencies of an energized incandescent bulb @ 100W has sufficient IR to bake a cupcake, yet the same lumen produced by LEDs will not. Nor will 4x the LED lumen…nor 10x. So the question to you Curtis, how many proportional high frequency LEDs (600 nm) does it take to bake a cupcake?
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I suggest to cook a cupcake it will require maybe 100 watts of LEDs ?
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L.J. – There are a bunch of different issues here. Lumens are defined as units of visible light, which is what we care about for devices that are supposed to produce visible light. An incandescent light bulb turns less than 10% of the incoming electrical power into visible light, with most of the rest into infrared light. (A little is lost to conduction and convection.) So for every watt of visible light, there are close to 10 watts of infrared.
By contrast, a plain LED, like a laser, puts out a single frequency of light. In “white” LEDs, the light you see is from phosphors covering the LED itself, which put out a few separate narrow frequency bands that our eyes interpret as white. In neither case is there infrared radiation of any significant magnitude. So an incandescent bulb that puts out X lumens is creating almost 10 times the radiant power than an LED with the same X lumens of visible light output.
As in climate, you must consider other heat transfer modes than direct radiation. A kid’s oven that uses a 100W light bulb does not cook by direct radiation (that would be broiling). Instead, it mostly heats the surfaces of the oven, which heat the air in the oven, which then bakes the cupcake.
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Hi Myrrh
That, #36, is one of the best pieces I’ve read on this blog.
Although most of us have science backgrounds it is still hard to sort reality from false claim at times on
areas we don’t work in.
What’s happened with the AGWSF just goes to show how important it is to have experts who work and use
“science” at a practical level to lead us out of the scam.
The CAGW scam was very well put together, by experts, as someone recently claimed here about a month ago.
All the right things were mentioned, it sounded coherent and plausible, at least for a while.
Your comment sounded plausible, real and believable and I think it’s the one I’ve been looking for.
Great piece.
KK
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I am disappointed KK
Myrrh’s non-science has been thoroughly debunked on another thread. Listen to Curt!
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Hi Chris
They all sound so plausible.
What am I gonna doo?
caught again.
KK
Will look into this in greater depth later.
I hate being conned
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but KK not only were you conned, you claimed it was the best piece ever on this blog!!! In fact it was not “conned”, it was simply not being skeptical, and not understanding. One could rightly extrapolate that you believe the more complex skeptical arguments because they are consistent with your personal bias, as you clearly do not understand the science.
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Hi Matti
I am very competent in a number of areas science but unlike Klimate Hypochondriacs, when I am out of my depth, I say so.
Luckily, as in all good science, a higher qualified member of the team came to my rescue.
How’s your team going Matti?
KK
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“I am very competent in a number of areas science”
Really? Wow.
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“”Really? Wow”".
Yes, and especially CAGW where Climate Scientist are way out of their depth
KK
Yes Matti
We’re all looking for answers.
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Thank you KinkyKeith!
I’ve seen it countless times that scientists knowlegeable in their own fields will still use AGWScienceFiction memes from a different field, because they have no reason not to take these as science basics, and these are very cleverly tweaked from real physics to make them sound plausible.
That’s the technique of cons, here to use terms and properties and processes from real physics but flip them in mid air and associate them with something that isn’t real in physics. Done enough times, and this has been very successfully introduced into the education system, these tweaks become the new basics, and then the arguments begin to justify them which are also provided by the AGWSF meme producing department.
And this can get extremely convoluted and difficult to deconstruct and show because too many explanations from real physics have to be brought in. That’s why I’ve ended up narrowing this down to the missing heat..
I entered the fray when I found that there were arguments about this.., and began to seriously examine the claims of a one aspect because it interested me and I couldn’t find any discussions on it, the claim that carbon dioxide could accumulate for hundreds and even thousands of years in the atmosphere.
I told the PhD in physics teaching at university level, who was giving me information on AGW, that this wasn’t possible because carbon dioxide was heavier than air, it would always sink to the ground displacing air unless work was being done on it. He replied that carbon dioxide was so well-mixed that it couldn’t be separated out, without an extraordinary amount of work being done on it, as in separating out again ink which had been poured into water.
Now, that was easy to falsify – and I came back with examples, I thought well known, from the real world of carbon dioxide separating out in mines, in volcanic venting, in breweries. I think he was genuinely shocked, he removed his post where he disparagingly said it couldn’t separate out, he was also a moderator on the forum, but still maintained that it was well-mixed and kept referring me to the gas laws. He now admitted that carbon dioxide could pool on the ground, but came back with ‘a large amount of it brings down the air with it’, without of course being able to give any explanation of how it managed that..
I really wanted to get to the bottom of this and wanted to be sure I really understood what he was saying. I proposed a scenario since he had at least admitted that carbon dioxide could pool on the ground:
there is a room in which carbon dioxide has pooled on the ground, nothing is done to change the conditions which allowed the carbon dioxide to pool on the ground, no windows opened, no fan put on, no work done. I said the carbon dioxide being heavier than air will remain pooled on the ground, he said it would rapidly diffuse into the air of the room and very quickly become thoroughly mixed and couldn’t then become unmixed without an extraordinary amount of work being done.
He taught this a university level, said he’d fail me for my views in the exams he set..
His explanations came from “the gas laws”, I put this as a meme quote because when I examined the gas laws more closely as they were using them to explain their well-mixed defying gravity carbon dioxide, I found that they had taken the descriptions of some ideal gas and were claiming that these were actual real physics properties of carbon dioxide. They actually claim that carbon dioxide, and nitrogen and oxygen, are ideal gas!
The exclamation mark will only make sense to someone who actually knows the difference between ideal gas and real gas; no real gas obeys the ideal gas law, because, the ideal gas is purely imaginary. Useful as a basis of calculation, but only by putting back in all the properties and processes of the real world which ideal gas doesn’t have, volume, attraction, weight – ideal gas isn’t subject to gravity.
They get their “well-mixed” because they say that “carbon dioxide is an ideal gas which diffuses through the atmosphere at great speeds under its own molecular momentum bouncing off the other ideal gases in elastic collisions and so becoming thoroughly mixed”
An “ideal” gas comes from a time when scientists were trying to work out what gas was, and Van der Waals then came along and said that the calculations would never make sense until volume was taken into consideration. So, what AGWSF has done here, is take an error from the past history and used this to build up a scenario from it ignoring all subsequent work, much as they have done with Arrhenius.
What they have in claiming that the atmosphere is ideal gas molecules zipping through at great speeds (“as in a container”), is an atmosphere of empty space. They don’t have the real gas atmosphere which we have around us. They have excised the whole of our real gas atmosphere as they have excised real heat from the Sun and excised the Water Cycle.
They don’t know that their empty space atmosphere isn’t real world because the real world heavy, voluminous fluid gas atmosphere that we have is simply never mentioned and so don’t realise all their radiation arguments go from the surface direct to empty space missing out the atmosphere completely.
Like rain is never mentioned in their Carbon Cycle. All rain is carbonic acid because water, liquid and gas, and carbon dioxide have a great yen for each other, attraction, and so carbon dioxide shares in that the residence time of water in the atmosphere, 8-10 days – “accumulating for hundreds of years” falsified in that too.
And, they don’t realise what they’re actually saying in their “well-mixed” empty space ideal gas scenario is they have no sound in their world..
..which is probably why they have such difficulty hearing this.
It is going to take a lot of desconstruction to explain to them how this fictional world has been created, not least because there is no internal coherence in the AGWSF fisics and the rebuttal memes continue to mix and tweak to confuse further.
As an example here, they give two scenarios to claim that carbon dioxide is well-mixed – spraying scent in a classroom and ink poured into a glass of water. Both these in reality are convection currents in action in our real fluid gas air and fluid liquid water, but by stating what the children are seeing, this is junior classroom stuff, is how carbon dioxide spreads rapidly the children continue to associate these effects with the nonsensical explanations they are given later that it’s “ideal gas”, and, “Brownian motion”. It doesn’t matter to AGWSF that these are completely different from each other in properties and processes, because AGWSF has taken out all differences in properties and processes. As they have with eliminating the differences between light and heat in the meme “all electromagnetic energy is the same and all create heat when absorbed”.
Ideal gas and Brownian motion can’t be understood without first knowing that real gases have distinct properties and are different from each other (real and ideal are actual technical terms here), but most importantly, that real gases have real volume, weight and attraction, are subject to gravity where heavier than air gases sink and lighter than air gases rise, and which means, that real gases are not like ideal gases, they can’t travel at great speeds through our atmosphere as if empty space because the volume of other gases prevents this. That’s why we have sound. And so a particle moved by Brownian motion isn’t going anywhere fast.., it’s on nanometer scale and within the volume of the fluid’s convection currents anyway.
.. not easy, to explain one thing needs to explain several related aspects. Just taking the scent spraying has to then include the particular effect alcohol has at the interface with water in the scent, which is why alcohol is used to promote the rapid diffusion of a perfume, and so on and so on. They, AGWSF, has the easier part, just give a fake fisics meme and drum it in and those not questioning it will take this as if a real world basic in physics and extrapolate from it as if real.
That those who have been taught these memes can’t even stop when they extrapolate to obvious nonsense is not their fault, logically “backradiation” means that “a hunk of meat left in an igloo while the hunter goes off for a few hours will be a cooked dinner for him on his return”.
Or as here, re heat and light from the Sun, it’s appears perfectly logical to say “the Sun gives off very little longwave infrared” or “longwave is blocked by an invisible barrier from entering the atmosphere”, if you’re taught erroneously that “visible light heats matter” – you don’t notice that what this is actually saying is the Sun gives off very little heat and no heat from the Sun reaches us!
Those so taught don’t understand they’ll actually living in a cold world without wind and weather and with no sound, because they haven’t had any reason to question these basic fictional fisics memes.
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Myrrh, with regard to the non-mixing you suggest, why are we able to breath at the surface? We produce CO2 and CO in significant quantities. I suppose you’ll claim CO2 is removed by plants so what about CO? It is also heavy. If these gasses remained un-mixed as you suggest, we’d be able to measure the difference at different altitude and any low spot would be a deadly uninhabitable place.
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Mark,
At first glance I thought you were suggesting that humans exhale CO. Had to read it a second time…
You raise an interesting question though. What does happen to CO in the atmosphere? I can’t believe it simply remains for ever. So where does it go?
Can anyone help me out here?
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Hi Roy
CO aka “The Poison” is very reactive ; it wants to grab hold of other atoms and form CO2.
So if it gets access to more O2 it will do just that and neutralise itself into harmless CO2,
The Golden Gas.
KK
CO basically can only exist in confined spaces where access to oxygen is restricted.
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KK,
Forgive me but my chemistry education was a long time ago.
So 2CO + O2 -> 2CO2. Right? But is this a spontaneous reaction or does it need a push of some kind? Also, if it’s completely spontaneous your answer implies a half life for CO. Any idea what it is?
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Hi Roy
I think what we need to do is compare the enthalpy of formation of CO2 and CO .
I suspect that CO with it’s reputation of being a poison would have a very low threshold to react with say water to form CO2 and H2 or oxygen to form CO2.
Whichever of those reactions has the lower threshold will be the predominant one depending on moisture content of air locally.
KK
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The fact that Carbon Monoxide is classified as a poison, has no bearing on the chemical reactions it can take part in.
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KK,
I’m only sure of one fact about carbon monoxide. And this is well known from studying smokers because cigarettes produce CO. Any smoker is walking around with half a case of carbon monoxide poisoning because blood has a greater affinity for CO than for CO2. It literally sucks up the stuff. Once it’s in your blood it doesn’t exchange easily for O2 in your lungs like CO2 does but stays around a while, compromising your breathing ability. So it doesn’t require as high a concentration of CO to be dangerous as it does for CO2 (< 700 ppm). Pilots are warned about smoking for this reason.
I was told by my chemistry professor (long, long ago in galaxy far, far away) that you could be in a perfectly breathable atmosphere as far as O2 and CO2 content and still die of carbon monoxide poisoning if the CO level was high enough. She likened it to cyanide gas which is even worse. Needless to say, I didn't try the experiment.
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PS: The CO half-life in “fresh air” is 5 hours (per Wicki).
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I didn’t imagine this would have been so entertaining to you all. Of course it was supposed to be CO in Myrrh’s imaginary non-mixing atmosphere. There, because these gasses are heavier than air we’d see restricted exchange with oxygen and presumably more and more CO2 and CO at the surface. Since this isn’t observed, Myrrh is wrong.
Again, let me repeat: Myrrh is wrong.
P.S. anyone can experiment with CO2 mixing at home: In a small room with a door, discharge a short burst from a CO2 fire extinguisher into a 5 gallon plastic pail (no lid). Initially by lowering a lit match or candle into the pail, you’ll be able to see the flame will extinguish. Thus showing the heavy gas is contained. However, it is partly because it is also cold from the discharge (compressed gas expansion and all). Leave the pail in the room with windows and doors shut. Check periodically using the lit match and you’ll find that the CO2 does in fact leave the pail (the match will stay lit). It took less than 15 minutes for the CO2 to dissipate when I did this simple test. I made no attempt to measure or control temperature. It is likely that the CO2 would dissipate even more quickly if the gas was at the same temperature as the room.
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Interesting.
Some mechanism lifted the heavier than air CO2 out of the bucket. What was that, do you suppose? Air movement from the door shutting and then opening, perhaps? Or is there a less obvious reason? Hmmm.
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Hi RW
What about it’s eagerness to take part?
Can you expand?
KK
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Hi RW
Roy’s item prompted recall from a long time back; the bonding in CO is less stable than that in CO2 and
as Roy says in air it has a half life of 5 hours.
KK
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Hi KK,
I am bored. Nothing interesting is happening in the world today, apart from somebody blowing up the UN office in the Dama Rose Hotel in Damascus.
The Syrian rebels will get the blame, and UN Officials will call a crisis meetings in New York. Boring.
Hmm, combines with free Oxygen … memories stir. When it came to Chemistry, I was a rock solid “C” student, with minor tendencies towards “D”.
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Rereke says:
A few smart people came up with this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion
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Brownian Motion?
Yep, that also rings a bell.
As I freely admit, I never really got into Chemistry. I acquired the minimum number of credits required for my degree by adopting the age-old tactic of all night cram sessions.
It made sense at the time, but was quickly forgotten.
So thanks for that, and for the reference.
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Hi Myrrh
Have only read the top bit of your big one but am curious about what happens to the inbound solar “energy” in the UV and visible spectra.
Graphs show that some of the UV and Vis do not reach Earth’s surface; but a lot does.
The quantities are expressed as watts / m2 and total energy in the UV and Vis seems to be much larger than in the IR zones.
What happens to the huge amount of energy in UV Vis spectra.
You imply it doesn’t convert to heat?
Where does it go?
Obviously where it hits plant matter it shows up as energy used to create plants and other life, but is there detail on what happens with water and rock and earth/sand?
KK
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Hi Myrrh
My original comment :
“Your comment sounded plausible, real and believable and I think it’s the one I’ve been looking for.”
Unfortunately the cup now passes to Richard C who has provided a good , plausible explanation of what happens to the UV and Vis ; it can convert to heat.
Anything measured in watts/m22 cannot just be pushed away., the energy must be accounted for.
KK
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Good god, Myrrh, you keep demonstrating your profound ignorance with every post! CO2 is well-mixed in the atmosphere – that is simply a demonstrable fact. You can take measurements high up in the atmosphere and the CO2 concentrations will be very similar to those at ground level. When you keep making these claims that are easily disproved by direct observation and measurement, you don’t do much for your credibility.
Now it is true that if you had a completely still environment and you introduced denser CO2 at the bottom, it would not mix well with the less dense gases above. It is like a skilled bartender creating a fancy multilayer drink by very carefully adding layers of different density.
The claim is not that CO2 will mix with less dense gases through diffusion in still air, but rather that the air is not still, with winds, updrafts, and the like constantly churning the air and causing mixing at a much higher rate than the density differences will cause it to separate out. If you took a stirrer to the bartender’s carefully layered drink, you would end the separations. But again, the fundamental issue is the fact that CO2 is welll-mixed in the atmosphere that we have, as can easily be measured, and your examples of enclosed spaces simply are not relevant.
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Why hasn’t the full AIRS data been released? Top and bottom of the Troposphere still unavailable.
All we have is the conclusion from the mid troposphere:
In other words, carbon dioxide is lumpy in the atmosphere. Of course it is, it is subject to gravity being heavier than air and will generally not travel far from its source before displacing the fluid gas air and sinking back to the surface.
What doesn’t come down in the rain – all pure clean rain is carbonic acid, because there is great attraction between water and carbon dioxide. In this carbon dioxide shares in water’s residence time in the atmosphere which is 8-10 DAYS.
Carbon dioxide is neither well-mixed in the atmosphere nor is it capable of accumulating.
More junk science from AGWScienceFiction meme producing department which has taken rain out of the Carbon Cycle and turned the real gas carbon dioxide into the imaginary ideal gas without properties of volume, attraction, weight – so without gravity.
All the basic fisics of AGWSF’s Greenhouse Effect world is fantasy. Impossible in the real world.
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Myrrh # 36
Give it a rest, you’ve been told the same at WUWT. UV (shortwave by convention) heats the ocean to several metres and burns skin.
The climatology conventional division scheme of IR (SW and LW) is simply a convention (CIE). Solar IR falls within IR-A and IR from GHGs, clouds, aerosols and surface (OLR) falls within IR-C:-
IR-A: 700 nm–1400 nm (0.7 µm – 1.4 µm, 215 THz – 430 THz)
IR-B: 1400 nm–3000 nm (1.4 µm – 3 µm, 100 THz – 215 THz)
IR-C: 3000 nm–1 mm (3 µm – 1000 µm, 300 GHz – 100 THz)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared
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“The climatology conventional division scheme of IR (SW and LW) is simply a convention (CIE). Solar IR falls within IR-A”
Should read:-
The climatology division scheme of IR (SW and LW) is simply a convention (CIE). Solar IR falls within IR-A [and IR-B[
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Thanks Richard
You’ve just answered my 36.6.2.2 above
and my 43.1.1 s below.
KK
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Using radiative physics to describe the movement of energy in the atmosphere-ocean system is like using Archimedes Principle to design an aircraft. It won’t work.
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Even I can understand that BB
KK
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Meaning; it’s a very good analogy.
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meaning “it sounds convincing but in all honesty I haven’t the faintest clue what any of this means”
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Now Matti.
Your team, if there was one, would be telling you that you were comparing apples with pears because on this one I am fully aware of the meaning.
I have given you a thumbs up for making a good effort.
Keep up the good work Matti
KK
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There really is no point in trying to “prove” anything with Energy Budgets or associated models. TOA energy imbalance is not the forcing factor: climate itself is. See the big picture!
For more detail re-read my post here.
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“TOA energy imbalance is not the forcing factor: climate itself is.”
I think it is actually the atmosphere and the massive amount of HO2 available as a biuffer, that is the regulating entity, and “climate” is the result..
I know, just semantics
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.
Hydrogen dioxide?
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Oh , darn typo again.
But I know what I meant tpo type.. I hope.
Don’t ask me to play piano.. sculthorpe got nuffin on me !!!
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.
Sorry Andy, couldn’t resist.
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Climate is controlled by natural cycles as in this post above.
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Ok, natural cycles that influence the atmosphere.
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This has always been a problem: (so they ‘modelled’ and ‘adjusted’ it to match).
CERES satellite data measuring incoming and outgoing energy at the top of the atmosphere tell us there is an imbalance of 6.4 W m2. Calculations from knowing the absorption spectrum of CO2 is that a doubling CO2 would account for only 3.4 W m2.
But, from the ‘known’ amount of recent global warming the amount of energy imbalance ‘required’ is estimated to be only 0.85 ± 0.15 W m2 (Hansen et al. (2005)).
Loeb etal 2009 ‘Toward Optimal Closure of the Earth’s Top-of-Atmosphere Radiation Budget’ J. Climate, 22, 748–766:
“… uses an objective constrainment algorithm to adjust SW and LW TOA fluxes within their range of uncertainty to remove the inconsistency between average global net TOA flux and heat storage in the earth–atmosphere system.”
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Regarding TOA imbalance, the discrepancies arise because they fail to consider variations in energy stored beneath the surface. Yes, temperatures are fairly stable at a reasonable distance down, but they can vary, and a small variation represents a lot of energy. Same goes for the oceans. The whole exercise is pointless. They may as well just measure temperatures, determine if the world is warming or cooling and deduce that there must be a rise or fall in stored energy somewhere – so what? It’s not drving climate: CLIMATE IS DRIVING IT. I guess people want to keep their jobs in research.
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Hi Doug
Your comment”
“The whole exercise is pointless. They may as well just measure temperatures, determine if the world is warming or cooling and deduce that there must be a rise or fall in stored energy somewhere – so what? It’s not driving climate: CLIMATE IS DRIVING IT. I guess people want to keep their jobs in research.”
Well put Doug!
KK
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KK I think this thread has established that you have no clue.
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Hi Matti
Unfortunately I can’t give a thumbs up for that.
It lacks originality and is repetitive.
Try harder Matti.
KK
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Stephens et al (2012) available in entirety here:-
‘An Update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations’
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8gkbto14cy8ip2y/ngeo1580.pdf
I note that the only CMIP5 model to actually mimic temperature so far this century (INM-CM4, Russian Academy of Sciences) is also the only model to exhibit positive all-sky OLR (Figure 2a).
Those Russians just might know something that everyone else doesn’t.
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Hi Richard
I’m in trouble with Myrrh’s 36 above.
What do you make of it?
Any comment.
KK
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KK, I think you should be more interested in the words of Curt.
Myrrh has had difficulty in the past.
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Thanks Mar D
I don’t read everything that is posted and so reading one comment in isolation can be dangerous.
I know from basic physics that when light / solar radiation hits Earth it goes through several spots where diffraction will occur as almost all of the approach path will not be at 90 degrees to change zone.
This spread of frequencies that occurs at the space/atmosphere and atmosphere/ water boundaries should send the energy spectrum towards the infra red end where energy is less.
Generally any incoming solar radiation should end up as IR eventually after “bouncing off the walls” for a while unless it goes into something specific like photosynthesis.
I think that one of Curt’s earlier comments included mention of lasers which rang alarm bells, perhaps unnecessarily.
I will go back and try to follow it through.
My theoretical understanding is OK but the world is a big interactive place and actual real world phenomena are full of surprises.
More work to do
KK
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Well it doesnt ‘bounce’ of anything. IR photons are either emmitted or absorbed giving the recipient electron extra energy and reemmitted at lower energy (frequency)
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Hi TRU
In that post I was addressing one specific topic, Namely that incoming Solar will be degraded to lower
energy radiation through a number of different types of physical interaction with nature.
One example I gave was what happens in diffraction.
Does anybody have an explanation as to what happens when inbound solar hits ground , rock or water;
there are a lot of comments here and a lot of mudslinging but we should be able to work it out?
Energy is lowered; ie. ” bouncing off the walls”, a bit colloquial I know but maybe you could cut some
slack there.
It’s not much use telling me about photons, there are reams of discussion about it over at SkS but
they still cant explain what happens to each frequency in the solar and what the macro ie. measurable effect is.
Richard’s reference above sends us to a paper that uses a mix of measured values plus a range of
values simulated in models to assess the Earth’s energy balance.
I admire his interest in that area of science, and I think it is very worthwhile but at the moment it
is not developed enough to be used in the Man Made Global Warming by CO2 debate.
The key to doing a good energy balance is to understand all of the factors; until we know what happens to each part of the incoming and outgoing spectra we can’t move on.
Even when this is done in maybe 50 years time it will still not allow an estimate of the CO2 effect on T but it will be interesting science none the less.
There is a good analogy between a sail boat with a lot of lead in the keel and the atmosphere with a lot of water in it; both are self righting.
If the boat turns over it will flip back up; if the Sun pumps too much heat into the Atm then the Earth’s system will increase the cooling rate to maintain equilibrium with the Deep Space at 1.6 C deg above abs zero.
KK
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That should have been proof read; Mark
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MIA (missing in action) from MOST climate and budget calculations. Rotation of the Earth (highly relevant) Axial tilt, Coriolis effect. To add from the SUN, CME, Solar proton flux, geomagnetic disturbances, solar cycles, influences on the jetstreams, The earths body, undersea volcanism..list is endless. hmmf…………
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KK, earlier I posted a couple of Wikipedia refs to help you out, but the post disappeared. Anyway, look up ‘sunlight’, then ‘infrared’. Incoming shorter wave IR is different from the longwave lower emergy IR emitted by the earth back to space.
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Thanks Chris.
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The main question we were looking at was whether the UV and Visible spectra can convert to heat in the atm.
This is important because that’s where most of the nominal energy is in incoming solar.
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Stephens et al arrives at a 0.6 W/m-2 TOA imbalance from CERES data.
Roy Spencer has CERES Global Radiative Flux Anomalies 2000 – 2010 (2 graphs, 1 ENSO corrected) in his May 19th, 2011 post:-
‘Indirect Solar Forcing of Climate by Galactic Cosmic Rays: An Observational Estimate’:-
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/05/indirect-solar-forcing-of-climate-by-galactic-cosmic-rays-an-observational-estimate/
First, it is difficult (impossible?) to see the average +0.6 W/m-2 positive imbalance from Stephens et al that should be apparent in the black “-Net” curve on the “radiative gain” (bottom) side of 0.0 (I think). Spencer – “Note I have plotted the variations in the negative of Net, which is approximately equal to variations in (LW+SW)”. Since Stephens et al do not graph out the data they used it is impossible to make a comparison (possibly Supplementary Information might shed some light).
Second, it is equally difficult (impossible?) to see in the ENSO corrected graph, a discernible 0.24 W/m-2 imbalance increase over the decade as a result of the posited CO2 forcing (using the IPCC forcing expression) because the data is simply fluctuating about 0.0.
I just don’t see the Stephens 0.6 imbalance in either of Spencer’s CERES plots – where is Stephen et al’s imbalance?
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Answering my own question – where is Stephen et al’s imbalance?
Stephens et al state:-
Presumably, the average OHC flux since 2005 is 0.6 below the 0.0 baseline on Spencer’s CERES plots.
The references are:-
13. Lyman, J. M. et al. Robust warming of the global upper ocean. Nature 465, 334–337 (2010).
14. Willis, J. K., Lyman, J. M., Johnson, G. C. & Gilson, J. In situ data biases and recent ocean heat content variability. J. Atmos. Ocean. Technol. 26, 846–852 (2009).
There seems to be a great deal hanging on the work of Lyman et al and Willis et al.
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Two different TOA imbalances from 2 different methods.
Stephens et al 2012 (satellite obs, Sfc flux obs) :-
Douglass and Knox 2012 (implied from OHC):-
The DK12 imbalance looks much more like an average of Net SW+LW in Spencer’s CERES plots and the certainty is greater than Stephens et al.
DK12:-
Stephens et al 2012 Supplementary Information:-
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n10/extref/ngeo1580-s1.pdf
Looks like there’s still a ways to go before the TOA radiative imbalance (if in fact it is imbalanced) can be reliably defined.
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A fascinating series of exceptionally well presented comments by one Berényi Péter taking on the Skeptical Science regulars re TOA radiative imbalance May, 2011, Starts here at #109:-
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=178&p=3#50619
Snippet from that comment (my emphasis):-
Gets better at #139:-
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=178&p=3#51256
Snippet from that comment (my emphasis):-
State-of-play now Stephens et al 2012, TOA imbalance 2000 – 2010, 0.6 ±0.4 (TOA, CERES), 0.6 ±17 (Sfc, GEBA, BSRN) and Douglass and Knox 2012 (implied from OHC), TOA imbalance 2001 – 2008, −0.034 ±0.06.
Quite a game.
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I’ve just resolved confusion I’ve had over the Stephens et al TOA uncertainty (0.4 vs 4, both are correct, sort of). From page 1 of the paper:-
And,
Somehow, the huge uncertainty of the satellite data (±4 W/m2) becomes more certain (±0.4 W/m2) when “constrained” by OHC even though Douglass and Knox find a much different imbalance implied from OHC (−0.034 vs 0.6).
This just gets better and better.
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While looking for whatever I could find showing the latest CERES TOA net flux vs OHC flux this paper came up:-
‘On the determination of the global cloud feedback from satellite measurements’
T Masters, 23 August 2012
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/3/73/2012/esdd-3-73-2012-print.pdf
“Due to the low correlations between global surface temperature and dCRF, it is clear that the variations in the cloud forcing are resulting from other changes in the climatology, and that clouds are acting as more than simple feedbacks on these timescales.”
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Most of the UV is absorbed by the ozone layer high in the atmosphere.
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That was intended for KK in reply to post 46.1.1.
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Good. That’s logical.
“with the rest being caused by visible light that is absorbed then re-radiated”
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Prove it, prove the fantastical fisics memes produced by AGWScienceFiction that “shortwave from the Sun heats the land and ocean and that “longwave from the Sun doesn’t”.*
Science Challenge: Prove that visible light from the Sun physically heats the land and water at the equator to the intensity this is actually heated which gives us the great winds from equator to poles and the dramatic weather systems we really have.
*There are two ‘explanations’ given for “longwave from the Sun does not have any part to play in heating the surface”. The first and still basic Greenhouse Effect is that “there is an invisible barrier around the Earth like the glass of a greenhouse which prevents longwave infrared from entering the atmosphere” and the second, “the Sun gives off very little longwave infrared and we get only a tiny bit of that so insignificant”. The first I’ve been told is the explanation from those holding CAGW and the second from those pushing AGW.
Either way, it’s utterly stupid, because it means that there is no heat at all from the Sun in the AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse Effect.
Longwave infrared is thermal infrared in real world physics, aka radiant heat; it is the Sun’s heat in transfer by radiation. Thermal infrared is the Sun’s thermal energy in transit. One of the three ways heat is transferred, the other two being conduction and convection.
Shortwave from the Sun cannot heat matter, these are not thermal energies. Thermal from the Greek means of heat, it is the electromagnetic wave/particle/photon of HEAT.
HEAT heats stuff up, just as you use it to cook your dinners. Heat heats by moving the whole molecule of matter into vibration, which is kinetic energy which is heat. Shortwave from the Sun cannot do this.
Water is a transparent medium for visible light, it isn’t even absorbed! It is transmitted through transparent mediums unchanged, except slowed down. The atmosphere slows down visible light and the ocean some 14 more strongly, it’s still fast..
Visible light is absorbed by the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, that’s how we get our blue sky, reflection/scattering on the electronic transition level..
so how much is this heating the air in the fictional Greenhouse Effect world?
There is no heat from the Sun in the fictional AGWSF Greenhouse Effect energy budget, because, it has taken out the real heat from the Sun which we know is the Sun’s heat reaching us, thermal infrared, and substituted shortwave for it, which cannot heat matter.
You must be shivering poor things..
..in a world without life around you.
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Here’s the spectroscopy for water:-
http://omlc.ogi.edu/spectra/water/gif/hale73.gif
UV in the range 315 nm to 400nm is not well blocked by the atmosphere. The penetration of water over that range is approx 5 to 15m but the absorption coefficient decreases markedly. Energy is absorbed over the pathlength of penetration but less energy is absorbed as penetration increases. That loss (and the narrow range) is offset by far higher energy-per-photon levels in the UV range than in the IR range, see the EM spectrum:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
Energy-per-photon decreases from 12.4 eV (EUV/NUV) to 124 meV (NIR/MIR). The radiation in the UV range is obviously far more energetic than in the IR range. UV Sunblock is available for this reason (and for the different UV A and B skin penetrations) but how much IR sunblock is sold?
IR is just more efficient over a wider range than UV. The penetration is less than UV (down to about 3m) but the absorption coefficient is much higher over a wider range so obviously solar IR heats water more efficiently and in greater quantity than solar UV does.
The convention is that IR from the Sun is shortwave (CIE) with the shortwave/longwave boundary at 3 – 4nm. IR-A and IR-B (less than 4nm) from the sun by integral of energy under the curve does the bulk of heating, no dispute. I suspect, although haven’t seen a study, that the integral of the energy under the 315 nm to 400nm UV curve is more substantial than people realize due to the aforementioned energy-per-photon levels. The shortwave/longwave distinction is merely convention however to separate heating agent (solar SW) from non heating agent (re-emitted LWIR).
Climate science makes the error that re-emitted LWIR is a heating agent when it is not.
You’ve wasted enough people’s time and clogged up the threads all over the net with your rants Myrrh – give it a rest now.
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I’ve heard all that before, what don’t you understand when I tell you this is a clever scam manipulating real physics? You think by quoting all those “absorption” figures you somehow prove that visible/shortwave heats land and oceans?
Well, you don’t. You think uv ‘burns’ because it’s heating you up..
You have no idea what these energies can and can’t do.
So find out, properly. Prove that visible light is physically heating the land and water at the equator to the intensity these are heated which gives us our great equator to pole winds and dramatic weather systems.
Unless you can prove this, that visible light from the Sun physically heats matter, raises it temperature, which means moving the whole molecule into vibration which is kinetic energy which is heat, you cannot say that visible is doing the heating of land and water. Land and water are heated intensely at the equator, it’s the differential heating of land and ocean which gives us our wind and weather systems. You have to prove that visible light can actually heat matter intensely.
This is a very simple challenge. Surely you have such information at your finger tips? It’s been your, generic, claim for quite some time now..
..go fetch. Because until you can show proof, this is a science challenge, all you’re doing is pretending to know what you’re talking about because you can read the fake fisics brainwashed into you.
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>”Prove that visible light is physically heating the land and water”
No-one is claiming this Myrrh. And now you’ve jumped from “prove…..that “shortwave from the Sun heats the land and ocean” to “Prove that visible light is physically heating the land and water”. I’ve proved the former but there is no reason whatsoever for anyone to prove the latter.
My comment addressed the heating effect of solar UV and IR vs non-solar IR, I said nothing whatsoever about the visible range and never claimed any heating effect from it. Visible light characteristics and effects is another story that is clearly beyond your capability and impossible to discuss with you.
I stated unequivocally that the bulk of heating is by IR-A and IR-C. That is supplemented by UV as I laid out. If you can’t understand this Myrrh, there’s no certainly no point discussing visible light.
You can stop being an idiot on a wind-up mission now Myrrh – enough is enough. I have no more response for you.
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“Absorption” does not equal “heating”.
Show me how UV and Near Infrared physically> heats water.
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Hi Myrrh
It’s true that there has been a scam about what does and does not happens to inbound solar and it’s resulting effect on Earth.
It seems to be that you have taken the false aspect of the Warmers Idea of “UV in and IR out plus returned IR from the atmosphere” and gone a little bit too far in trashing the whole thing.
From what people are saying here is that the entering UV will heat up anything it is absorbed by and the energy can be re radiated as IR.
The totally crazy part of the warmer scam is that this IR can somehow “collect” or accumulate in the sky and beam back at us.
Forgive the expression but I think you and I know this is crap, but it doesn’t automatically make the
first part about UV > IR wrong.
When I was kid and no doubt when Roy was kid there were canvas containers that used “dry ice” aka frozen CO2 to keep ice cream cool.
It smoked, and you could “see” the CO2 dropping over the side of the container.
Actually what we were probably seeing was the ice that had been frozen by the cold CO2. Things may not always be what they appear.
There is a story about recent CO2 emanation from an African lake and it’s parallel to a biblical description of death of “first born” that seems to confirm the accuracy of the bible.
This relates to the inability of CO2 to mix in some circumstances.
That is so, but it has little relevance to the Global Warming problem and in my mind is a bit like all the talk about energy balances and stuff; not really on target.
Science is simple; the problems in interpretation only come when we take it out of the laboratory and into the open air.
That’s when we need the input of experts in each particular area of study.
Outdoor science as we have discovered needs to be a collaborative effort.
KK
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KinkyKeith –
The totally crazy part of the warmer scam is that this IR can somehow “collect” or accumulate in the sky and beam back at us.
Forgive the expression but I think you and I know this is crap, but it doesn’t automatically make the
first part about UV > IR wrong.
UV works on the DNA level, it is not a thermal energy, prove that it heats up matter..
What does it take to get you all to see what I’m trying to tell you?
I’ll put it in caps.
WE HAVE KNOWN SINCE HERSCHEL AND SUBSEQUENT BETTER MEASUREMENTS THAT THE HEAT WE FEEL FROM THE SUN IS THE INVISIBLE LONGWAVE INFRARED, CALLED THERMAL INFRARED WHICH MEANS “OF HEAT” TO DIFFERENTIATE IT FROM NEAR INFRARED WHICH IS NOT THERMAL.
What you are all significantly failing to grasp is this great heat from the Sun is measured HERE ON THE EARTH’S SURFACE.
Wake up will you? AGWScienceFiction says it doesn’t exist!
WAKE UP WILL YOU? AGWSF SAYS IT DOESN’T EXIST!
Instead it gives nonsense memes about why it doesn’t exist, it gives two version.
The first says there is an invisible barrier like the glass of a greenhouse which prevents longwave infrared from entering the atmosphere so it can’t reach the surface to heat it.
The second says that the Sun gives of very little/no longwave infrared and very little of that/there is none to reach the surface of Earth and so can’t heat the surface.
It then says that “SHORTWAVE DOES THE HEATING OF THE EARTH’S LAND AND OCEANS” – IT SAYS THAT “THIS SHORTWAVE IS THEREFORE HEAT”.
This is so utterly stupid it defies belief that they have got away with brainwashing everyone into thinking like this, but they have.
WE CANNOT FEEL SHORTWAVE. WE CANNOT PHYSICALLY FEEL SHORTWAVE, WE CANNOT FEEL SHORTWAVE AS HEAT.
SO, WHAT IS THE HEAT WE FEEL FROM THE SUN WHICH WE CAN FEEL HEATING US UP AND WE CAN FEEL HEATING UP THE PHYSICAL MATTER AROUND US?
Do you see the problem now?
AGWSF claims there is no heat from the Sun!
And all of you seem quite content to argue for it.
I’ve seen quite a few ‘presentations’ where they give real world physics facts about heat and then follow immediately with idiot science, such as you’ve given example.
Unless and until you can all get a good grasp of what I’m trying to tell you, you will continue to be confused by this technique.
How does UV heat matter? It can’t.
Heating matter means moving the whole molecules of matter into vibration, shortwave cannot do this. They are tiny, they work on the electronic transition level not on the molecular vibrational level.
Rub your hands together, that is mechanical energy causing the molecules in your skin to heat up. That is what is meant by heating matter. That is what it takes to heat up land and water at the equator to get our wind and weather systems. Actually cooking of matter. Shortwave simply can’t do this.
If you want to continue claiming it can then prove it.
We feel heat from the Sun, we cannot feel shortwave. So what is this heat from the Sun?
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Aggh, sorry about that, missed out end blockquote, hungry old dog distracted me.
But, this is very important. Until you do get a grasp on what I’m actually trying to tell you, you won’t be able to see the sleights of hand that go into hiding this from you.
What is the heat you feel from the Sun?
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Myrrh
Did you ever get through that degree?
You cannot feel the energy entering your skin via UV simply because there are NO RECEPTORS for that wavelength.
The energy is still there and must be accounted for, what is left over after damaging the DNA of your skin is converted to HEAT.
There is no other way; the Laws of Conservation of energy demand this.
KK
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You’re mixing teminology up. The energy in all radiation of any frequency is electro-magnetic energy, not thermal energy.
Thermal energy is converted to EM in a source of radiation (blackbody) and then the radiation transports EM energy.
If and only if the radiation strikes a target which is cooler than the source will some of the EM energy be converted back into thermal energy. Some will also be re-radiated and some of it converted to thermal energy only when it strikes a yet cooler target.
For quantification of this process and much more detail see Sections 1 to 5 of my paper.
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Thermal means, from the Greek, of heat, it is the electromagnetic wave of HEAT.
It is not the same thing as the electromagnetic wave of LIGHT.
These are different categories for a reason.. Near Infrared is classed with LIGHT, not HEAT, it is not a thermal energy, nor is visible or uv. These are classed Reflective not Thermal – these are non-thermal shortwaves that AGWScienceFiction claims heats the Earth and claims that there is no thermal infrared, heat, direct from the Sun .
And it created the meme “all electromagnetic energy is the same and all create heat on being absorbed”, to sell the con.
What it has done is brainwashed a whole generation into not knowing the difference between heat and light. We’ve known since Herschel that the Sun’s heat we get is the invisible infrared. Since Herschel our measurements have become better, we now know that not all infrared is heat, near infrared is not, it is not hot, we cannot feel it. We cannot feel visible or uv as heat, they are not hot. They are not thermal energies. They cannot do what thermal energies do, they cannot heat up matter.
So we should not speak of rays of “light” or “thermal radiation” but rather just “radiated
energy” for such is neither light nor heat.
A gamma ray is not a radio wave. They have different properties and processes. That is the whole point of giving these different names!
Visible light works on the electronic transition level on meeting matter, thermal infrared works on the whole molecule level vibrational, moving these molecules into vibration is what heats matter up.
Rub your hands together, that is mechanical energy moving the molecules of your skin into vibration, heating up your skin.
This is what thermal infrared, the Sun’s thermal energy on the move to us, does to our skin, it heats up matter, it heats up land and oceans.
It takes great heating of land and water to get our wind and weather systems. Heat from the Sun COOKS us.
Visible light cannot do this.
The AGWScienceFiction meme “all electromagnetic energy is the same and all create heat when absorbed”, is a sleight of hand, a con.
You can extrapolate all you like from this, but you will never understand then the differences between electromagnetic waves, what they can and can’t do.
AGWSF has taken out all the differences between these energies so that it can pretend that the thermal infrared measured downwelling from the atmosphere is from their fictional “backradiation/blanketing from greenhouse gases”.
And it’s brainwashed through all the general education system. However, traditional physics is still taught, that’s why some people can design different appliances for catching the different energies of light and heat, photovoltaic and thermal panels, and some can design windows to save on air conditioning which are optimised to let in non thermal visible LIGHT and keep out thermal infrared which is RADIANT HEAT.
So, how is this “one size fits all electromagnetic energy” converted by matter into radio waves, into gamma rays, into xrays..? Does the plant somehow take this undifferentiated electromagnetic ‘energy’ and convert it first to red and blue light before it then absorbs it and uses it for conversion to chemical energy, sugar? How does it create the green light it reflects back out? What are these amazing mechanisms in a plant which do this? How do the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen convert this ‘undifferentiated electromagnetic energy’ into visible light before absorbing it with their electrons and scattering it? And why they hell should they?
You will not understand my argument until you get back the distinctions between the different electromagnetic waves. Light is tiny, electronic transition level is all it can manage..
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Myrrh, you’re not even understanding the arguments, so it’s impossible for you offer a coherent rebuttal. Let’s break it into baby steps.
The measured spectrum of the sun’s electromagnetic radiation output is very close to that of an ideal blackbody radiator at 5500K. The intensity of output peaks in the range of 400 – 700 nanometer (nm) wavelengths, which is almost surely why our eyes are sensitive to this range of wavelengths. About 45% of the sun’s output is in this range. About 10% is at shorter wavelengths, what we call ultraviolet, but very little of this reaches the earth’s surface, because it is absorbed in the ozone layer. About 45% is at longer wavelengths than visible, what we call infrared. Virtually all of this has wavelengths shorter than 3000 nm (3.0 microns), so we call it the “near infrared” (near to visible-light wavelengths), or IR-A and IR-B.
The measured spectrum of the electromagnetic radiation output by most solid and liquid objects on earth is reasonably close to that of a blackbody radiator at around 300K (27C), with some areas a few degrees warmer and some a few degrees colder. At these temperatures, the spectrum output covers the range of 4 – 100 microns (4000 – 10,000 nm). This is commonly referred to as the “far infrared”, or IR-C. Note that there is virtually no overlap with the wavelengths from the sun, which makes attribution much easier. All of this that I have said is easily verifiable through direct measurement.
The gases of the atmosphere, including the “greenhouse gases” H2O and CO2, are almost entirely transparent to radiation in the range of the solar spectrum. However, H2O and CO2 are not so transparent to radiation in the range of the earth’s thermal spectrum. If your eyes could see in those wavelengths, the air would seem a lot more opaque (cloudy) when the humidity is higher. Again, all of this can be verified with direct measurements. The fact that gases like CO2 and H2O pass through virtually all of the sun’s radiation to earth, but not all of earth’s radiation to space, is the essence of the “greenhouse effect”. (The term is an imperfect metaphor, of course.)
You completely misunderstand the concept of heat. Electromagnetic radiation at any wavelength/frequency carries energy. The energy E carried by an individual photon is E = h * v, where v is the frequency and h is Planck’s constant. If this photon is absorbed by something it strikes, it adds energy to that object, usually in the form of heat, by raising the temperature of that object. But it can also cause a chemical change, as in photosynthesis, to raise the energy level of the struck object, or an electrical change, as in a photovoltaic cell, or a phase change, as in evaporating water.
When the sun is high overhead and the air is clear, there is a power flux density of about 1000 W/m2 at the earth’s surface. About half of this is in the visible range, and half in the near infrared, with essentially none of it in the far infrared. You claim that only the 500 W/m2 that is in the near infrared can heat objects. This would come as a profound surprise to those using solar thermal systems that can measure heat transfer into their system from the solar radiation of far higher than 500, and actually close to 1000 W/m2. Again, easily measurable and verifiable.
All of the assertions you make are so easily proved false by simple observations and measurements that can be made in the present. (It’s not that they don’t agree with the projections of speculative computer models as to what will happen in a century.) People point this out to you over and over, and you just can’t or won’t get it.
Note to JoNova’s community: I spend time on these responses not so much to convince Myrrh, who is probably beyond hope, but to keep others new to the subject from being taken down the wrong path.
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Thanks Curt.
Your explanations and those of Richard have been helpful.
KK
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Sigh. I know the arguments, that’s why I’ve come to the conclusions I have.. Deal with my conclusions, don’t keep regurgitating the faked fisics of AGWScienceFiction put in place to dumb you down.
You are welcome to believe that we get no heat direct from the Sun…, just don’t teach it to the next generation who will end up being as useless as you, generic, in any applied science where the difference between non-thermal shortwave and thermal infrared is required knowledge..
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What happens, Myrh, to the energy in all the various wavelengths in sunlight that pentrates deep into the ocean where it gets very dark. If white light hits a white sheet of paper most is reflected as light – OK? What happens to its energy when it strikes a black sheet of paper?
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And other comments.
What I’m asking for is for you, generic, to show me how visible heats the land and water, to show how it physically heats the land and water. This is the AGWScienceFiction claim in its Greenhouse Effect. It says visible light is the energy from the Sun which directly heats land and ocean. It has taken out of its Greenhouse Effect energy budget the direct, beam, heat from the Sun which is THERMAL INFRARED. This is contrary to the tried and tested and used in countless applications teaching in traditional physics.
Regurgitating AGWSF memes which show zilch understanding of “absorption” is not useful in this, it shows avoidance of my actual question, which was why the meme rebuttal was created in the first place..
Why can’t you all concentrate on my actual question?
Show the physical process by which you claim that visible light from the Sun heats matter, give empirical show and tell. You can’t. You can’t find any explanations anywhere because visible light can’t do this. That’s why the science field that studies it is OPTICS, it is not in THERMODYNAMICS.
That’s why all I get back is waffle, and ad homs. You can’t find it because it doesn’t exist.
What don’t you understand in “doesn’t exist”? Visible light is not a thermal energy, it cannot heat matter. It works on a completely different physical scale, the scale of electronic transitions and not the scale of molecular vibration. Visible light isn’t big enough to move molecules of matter into heat.
Visible light cannot cook the land and water at the equator to give us the huge equator to polar winds which come from the differential heating of volumes of the fluid gas air by the the intense heating of land and water at the equator.
I’m asking for proof of the AGWSF Greenhouse Effect claim that “visible light from the Sun is absorbed and heats land and water and beam thermal infrared from the Sun doesn’t play any part in this”.
Deal with what I’m asking for.
Show how visible light from the Sun physically heats land and water at the equator because if you can’t, you not only have no wind or weather in your fictional world, you have no heat at all from the Sun!
If you can’t address this directly, ask yourselves why you can’t. Why can’t you give me the information I’m actually asking you for?
I’m asking for PROOF that visible light from the Sun directly heats, raises the temperature of matter, of land and water as at the equator which is heated intensely by the Sun.
Because you have taken out the electromagnetic wave of beam heat from the Sun which actually does this in the real world, which is thermal infrared, and substituted shortwave visible light which does not have the power to do this..
Please, try to get your heads around what I’m saying here.
It’s for you to prove the AGWSF Greenhouse Effect energy budget which has excised the real world invisible beam thermal infrared and substituted for it the claim that visible light does its work.
If you can’t prove this Greenhouse Effect claim, then you have no heat in your world!
Do you understand what I’m saying here?
Get a grip on this.
Because – you have taken out the direct beam invisible heat transfer by radiation from the Sun, thermal infrared, aka longwave infrared aka radiant heat, which does have the power to move molecules of land and water, and us, into vibration, to heat us up, to cook us intensely.
This is a direct science challenge. Prove your damn claim or stop making it..
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OK Myrrh
Let’s have a look.
UV, on the solar irradiance diagrams, is allocated a large watts / m2 rating.
The UV which reaches the Surface demonstrates that it has energy by causing skin cancer and damaging plastic left out in the sun.
Many commentators say or indicate that UV can be absorbed and re radiated as heat; to me that seems now to be confirmed by so many people off this site that I am reasonably confident of this.
As to Visible.
ps I have read your comments and there are some well thought out patches but there are also some uncertain patches and I just wonder , do you have any sources that we could look at that confirm that visible can’t convert to thermal energy?
This earlier comment looks at the overview of the problem:
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/blockbuster-earths-energy-balance-measured-models-are-wrong/#comment-1167165
Practical science is a collaborative effort and maybe you are going to help us understand something that we are misconstruing.
It seems counter intuitive to think that a highly energised form of radiation, like visible does not convert to heat, where those spectra on either side of it do?
KK
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Hi Myrrh
Found this comment on some forum or other:
“However, visible light can feel warm too if it is concentrated enough. If you doubt this, focus some
sunlight on your skin with a magnifying glass. Strictly speaking, as a control one should first
eliminate the IR in the sunlight, but most glass lenses are not very IR-transparent anyway, and trust
me, intensely focussed sunlight without IR also feels pretty hot; also, think of a laser burn.
I hope that is warmly illuminating, or at least illuminatingly warm. Jo “”
The writer does sound like he knows his stuff, and while I may have said this before and not been 100% it does sound very convincing.
KK
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Hi Myrrh
here is another anecdotal comment that is relevant:
Reply
PeteFowler365 says:
“We only feel mid infrared as heat.
Near infrared, close to visible light, such as the light from the LED of a TV remote, doesn’t register as heat when you shine it on your skin.
Neither does far infrared, near the microwave part of the spectrum, which is why you need to take care with microwaves; they can cook you before you feel any damage.
But visible light is absorbed by your skin and converted to heat, so light or near IR of sufficient intensity are perceived as heat.”"
KK
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Hi Myrrh
One of the reasons why we have such small, sensitive apaertures controlling light entry to out retinas is because if too much is taken in it would cook our sensitive sight mechanism.
Try and think outside the square and temporarily dump the Warmer Scam thing that is restricting your scientific vision.
Visible will heat but it is true that it’s spectral range is small, try to separate the detail.
KK
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Why are you so confident when I keep asking for the physical means for this and no answer forthcoming?
UV does not burn your skin by heating it. It works on the DNA level, it scrambles it. Your body produces melanin to protect you from this, your tan, if the UV is too intense for you and the melanin production can’t keep up, then your skin is scrambled, there is no heat in the damage! There is no heat in the ‘burn’.
UV is shortwave classed with Light not Heat. We cannot feel it. It is not a thermal energy, it cannot physically heat up matter by moving the molecules into vibration which is what it takes to heat up matter.
The real heat from the Sun does this, thermal infrared. We can feel the real heat from the Sun.
AGWScienceFiction has eliminated the real heat from the Sun from their Greenhouse Effect energy budget.
And I’ve explained why. So it can pretend there is a “backradiation/blanketing from greenhouse gases” when they measure any “downwelling longwave infrared from the atmosphere”.
They’ve taken out the real heat from the Sun.
I’ve explained that visible works on a different scale, electronic transition, this does not move the molecules into vibration which is what it takes to heat matter. Go to the Optics pages and tell me how much you can find there about the supposedly great thermal work that visible can do..
..there should be a whole science devoted to it..
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OK Myrrh
You want the physical process.
UV approaches a tarred road, some of it is reflected from the shiny surface but most of it is absorbed.
Now, if you or I were to jump into a large pool of tar we would be slowed down; that is what happens to the UV; it slows down
As it slows down , it’s wavelength increases until it reaches that of IR.
When this point is reached, the energy in the UV is now felt as HEAT.
This process is called PHYSICS.
btw Did you ever get through that UNI degree you were talking about and if so what UNI was that?
I’m starting to become a little concerned at all the “warmers did this” comments that don’t address the physics.
There is a mechanism; when radiant energy moves from one medium to a denser medium, the wavelength increases. ie UV is able to transform to IR
KK read my everyday examples above
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You obviously don’t know that visible light is slowed down some 14 times more travelling through the ocean than when travelling through our atmosphere, this slowing down isn’t changing the visible light at all. Different mediums slow down visible light to different extents, that’s why diamonds sparkle so beautifully, because it is a great slower down of visible light.
In the atmosphere the visible light from the Sun is absorbed by the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, these become energised briefly and as they come back to their ground state they emit the same energy they absorbed, blue light in blue light out, no change in wavelength, but all the absorptions and emissions slow it down. This is electonic transition of reflection/scattering, blue light being more energetic than the longer visible wavelengths gets bounced around more, that’s how we get our blue sky.
Water is a transparent medium for visible light, this means it isn’t absorbed at all, but transmitted through, unchanged. You can think of it as a dance, the visible light tries to join in but can’t and in trying is slowed down before it gets passed along where it goes through the dance again. This of course is still very fast..
These memes from AGWScienceFiction have so distorted real physics basics that you, generic, simply have no idea of the gobbledegook you’re regurgitating. But, it is difficult now to get real physics on this clearly stated.
Wiki is particular bad, because Connolly (sp?) went through and made thousands of changes to promote the AGWSF fisics. Here’s a page example, good descriptions of light and then this deliberate fib sleight of hand obvious only to those who know it’s wrong, the claim that an incandescent lightbulb radiates mainly visible light, when further up the page the correct information has been given:
This last is simply not true, an incandescent light bulb emits around 5% visible light, light, and 95% thermal infrared, heat.
This is what the wiki page on incandescent light bulbs says:
That an incandescent light bulb gives off practically all of its energy in heat, thermal infrared, is extremely well known in applied science, the knowledge in the science field of lightbulbs is extensive, because the range of uses we can get out of it.
Difference between Incandescent and LED: http://john000.hubpages.com/hub/How-Do-LED-Bulbs-Provide-Savings-Compared-to-Incandescent-Light-Bulbs
There are lightbulbs designed for use in greenhouses to optimise visible light for photosynthesis while taking out the great heat generated from lamps, a standard model has a water cooled system in place because water is a great absorber of heat energy, a great absorber of thermal infrared, like our oceans…
There is extensive knowledge of lightbulbs in animal rearing, here’s an example: http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~mdarre/poultrypages/light_inset.html
Think about this, the Sun is a huge ball of heat, like an incandescent bulb it is radiating out much more heat than light, visible light is a tiny amount of the radiation from the Sun.
So, although the information on the real physics of light and heat is still out there, it is more difficult to find uncorrupted. I’ve given before the quote from an old page from NASA which says that the heat we feel from the Sun is longwave infrared, now it teaches that infrared doesn’t even reach us..
All electromagnetic energies are not the same, they are all distinctly different and they do not all create heat on being absorbed. They have their own properties, such as colour, heat, size, etc., and their own distinct processes on meeting matter, and, their energy is used in other ways besides creating heat…
Photosynthesis is not visible light converting to heat, it is converting to chemical energy not heat energy, sugars out of water and carbon dioxide. Sight is not visible converting to heat, but to nerve impulses. Visible light is not hot, it has no heat to give anything. It has no heat to move molecules of matter into vibration.
From the first link I put up:
“If I stand in front of 100 watts of radio waves or light waves, nothing bad happens to me. But if I stand in front of 100 watts of gamma rays or X-rays, bad things will happen to me. Why? Violet scatters the most, and red the least.”
What you are going to have to do if you want to get through the confusions that are still being deliberately created about this, is, I think, to get a grip on heat. This has been so mangled by AGWSF that you, generic, have no ‘sense’ of what heat is or what heat does.
Think how much heat it takes to cook your dinners. The Industrial Revolution began when man discovered that heat energy could be used to do a huge amount of work, the steam engines kick started all this. The term horsepower comes from this time of understanding heat’s power.
Heat to do work needs to be direct – it’s not much use for you to try cooking your dinner by first heating the whole kitchen, random heat like this isn’t capable of doing work, it is called waste heat in Thermodynamics (which is what “backradiation” is..).
The direct heat from the Sun is its thermal energy on the move to us, this direct radiant heat is called beam. This is capable, physically, of moving the whole molecules of matter into vibration, which is what it takes, which is what is necessary, for something to become heated up, to cook.
Visible light, and shortwave uv and near infrared cannot do this. They cannot be the heat source from the Sun which is heating up land and water at the equator.
Heat we get from the Sun still taught as thermal infrared.
We cannot feel shortwave, these are not thermal energies, they are not hot. It takes real thermal infrared, radiant heat direct from the Sun, to heat up our land and water without which we do not have any wind and weather.
This is such an important point, I can’t understand how none here arguing against me appear able to appreciate it. This is a blog discussing climate.. Don’t you know how we get our great winds from the intense heating at the equator?
Anyway, this is how I discovered that NASA had also changed from traditional teaching about the real heat from the Sun to the AGWSF memes:
OK, I can’t think of anything else to give you to show that traditional physics still teaches, and accurate because very well tried and tested in real world applications, that shortwave are not thermal energies and cannot do the work of radiant heat, thermal infrared.
We cannot feel shortwave. That is simply a fact. What I’m saying by this is, that the heat you feel direct from the Sun can’t be shortwave, because we can’t feel shortwave. It can only be radiant heat from the Sun, the invisible thermal infrared as Herschel discovered, that you are feeling as heat, so, it does reach us, just as it reaches Herschel. Regardless what the corrupted data graphs and so on show..
Oh one more thing. One of the two versions of why “we don’t get thermal infrared from the Sun” is claimed to be because “the Sun produces very little longwave infrared”. Remember the fib above about the incandescent bulb.
The Sun’s electromagnetic spectrum is usually shown from the Sun’s ‘surface’, this is the visible light surface and is much cooler around 6,000°C, and only a thin band of a few hundred miles compared with the next band up, but the thickest and hottest band of all is the outer Corona, millions of miles thick and millions of degrees hot.
Only someone who has been brainwashed into believing that the Sun produces little radiant heat from a millions of miles thick millions of degrees hot Star can fail to appreciate how lacking in rational logic they are..
They have been brainwashed into believing that shortwave is the heat they feel from the Sun. And it is now in the general education system, but not taught by traditional physics teachers.
So, you can continue to claim that no real direct heat from the Sun reaches us, which is only the invisible thermal infrared, but please, don’t teach this to the next generation, or we’ll have no one left who hasn’t been dumbed down by AGWSF and is Greenhouse Effect energy budget..
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Seriously Myrhh and KK you are both absurdly wrong. light does not change wavelengths when it “enters” tar. we get SW from the sun. end of story.
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whoops I knew that was wrong as soon as I typed it…
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Myrrh – Every time I think you can’t get more ridiculous, you do. You keep making assertions that are completely and demonstrably false. Your latest one is that the explanations of the science of basic electromagnetic radiation have recently been revised by the AGW people to push their agenda. But all of this has been well understood in a coherent way for almost 100 years now. My textbooks from the 1970s covered it in the ways I have been explaining. My father’s textbooks from the 1940s covered it in the same ways as well. All of this was before the climate scares. Today’s textbooks on the subject cover it in the same way.
You claim that ultraviolet, visible light, and near infrared radition cannot transfer heat. But the totality of the sun’s output in in these three ranges. It produces essentially no radiation in the same “far infrared” band as the earth’s own thermal radiation. This is all measured every day many places on earth. Yet somehow, we get heat from the sun. Your theories cannot explain it.
People spend a lot of money on window coatings to keep out near-infrared radiation, which you say cannot heat things after it passes through the windows. Why do they do this if it is as useless as you claim. Even with these coatings, with essentially only visible light passing through the windows, why do the HVAC people account for the heat load caused by the visible light when sizing the heating and air conditioning systems? According to you, they shouldn’t bother.
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I find that difficult to believe, in traditional physics the Sun’s energy has always been described as “light and heat”. These are two entirely separate categories in traditional physics, they are not the same thing. When traditional text books say the “heat from the Sun” they mean thermal infrared, they do not mean shortwave visible light which is not a thermal energy, which is not the electromagnetic wave of heat, but is the electromagnetic wave of light.
In traditional physics we have improved on measurements from Herschel’s work, he moved his prism by hand at the edge of a table.., we now know that not even all invisible infrared is thermal. We know that near infrared is not thermal, that is why it is classed in light and not heat, in Reflective and not Thermal. Herschel didn’t know that there was a difference in SIZE between these wavelengths, the more energetic the smaller they are, his measurements of visible were including the larger spread of thermal.
AGWScienceFiction has produced a fisics which has taken out all the differences between the properties of electromagnetic waves in its fake fisics meme “all electromagnetic energy is the same and all produce heat on being absorbed”, and it has therefore taken out all the difference in process. It has taken out all sense of SCALE. The much smaller, highly energetic visible light is not a more powerful energy than the longer thermal infrared. It is so small that it gets bounced around by the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere.. That’s how we get our blue sky.
AGWSF has by sleight of hand associated “highly energetic” with “power to do work”. But the power to do work for visible is on a tiny scale, on the electron level, not on the bigger molecular level. Which is what has to be moved to heat up matter. Visible does not work on this scale.
AGWSF has taken out all the differences between heat and light so people can’t see this difference, so when reading old textbooks you associate mentions of “heat” with shortwave, but heat from the Sun is still traditionally taught as being the longwave infrared, the thermal infrared so when I read them I know this is what they are talking about, heat not shortwave light. WE still have this heat from the Sun, thermal infrared, direct from the Sun. It still reaches us. You have taken it out.
I’m trying to point out the sleight of hand here..
This is where the AGWScienceFiction have introduced another sleight of hand, what you are actually saying is the Sun produces no heat..
..you don’t realise this is what you’re saying because you’ve been brainwashed into believing the Sun only produces shortwave which it has brainwashed you into thinking is the Sun’s heat. Which is why I keep asking you to concentrate on my actual challenge. You won’t be able to see how this is a sleight of hand until you try proving that these shortwaves can actually, physically, heat matter.
As I’m trying to explain, and I do realise this isn’t easy to get one’s head around. These coatings take out the beam thermal infrared from the Sun, longwave infrared, which is heat, you don’t realise this because you don’t have this in your fictional world created by AGWSF.
So, look at this the other way. These windows are designed to optimise visible light – if visible light is heating the Eath’s surface matter by being absorbed as in the cartoon greenhouse, then these windows are a complete waste of money for those wanting to save on air conditioning costs..
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I would be interested in your description of how heat differs from light, when you consider that all we get from the sun is electromagnetic radiation at a wide range of frequencies.
In the physical world, different materials respond (or not, as the case may be) to specific ranges of these frequencies. We humans will interpret some frequencies as light, and others as heat, because we have inbuilt sensors for those frequencies. The caucasian skin also responds to frequencies in the ultraviolet frequency band, although we do not have any direct sensors tuned to those frequencies.
The response of various materials (both organic and inorganic) is dependent upon their resonant frequency at the molecular level, and how “attuned” they are to that particular frequency.
Now, in terms of re-radiation, firstly the material has to resonate with the frequency of the electromagnetic radiation striking it. To re-radiate, the frequency of the output radiation must be the same, or a harmonic, or a sub-harmonic, of the materials resonant frequency, and is often all of those. This means that the re-radiation at any particular frequency will always be significantly less that the original frequency, and this “frequency scattering” effect means that re-radiation is an extremely inefficient process, without some form of amplification.
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No we don’t, we get radio waves and visible light and heat.. These are distinctly different from each other, they have their own distinct properties and processes, and they react in different ways on meeting other matter, which is what they also are.
It is a meme produced by the AGWScienceFiction’s department dedicated to screwing with real physics which has brainwashed a whole generation into thinking that “all electromagnetic radiation is the same and all produce heat when absorbed”. Real science is about the discovery of differences, of what things are and what things can do.
Visible light is absorbed by the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere which results in reflection/scattering – so how much is our blue sky heating the atmosphere?
There is no internal coherence in AGWSF fisics, because it’s designed to confuse not to educate.
Water is a transparent medium for visible light, but AGWSF claims that the water in the oceans “absorb” visible and visible heats this. It’s physically impossible. What they do here is ‘play on the word’ trick, confusing meanings of “absorbed”.
This is another sleight of hand produced by AGWSF – we have sensors etc. because these have distinct properties of matter. A photon is a package of particles as in the Sun’s thermal energy on the move to us is thermal infrared, it’s the properties and processes of these which are different from each other. Visible light cannot physically heat up matter, regardless whether we can sense this or not..
You’re going into unneccessary detail which is a distraction to my argument. Please concentrate on my actual argument.
Show how visible light actually physically heats the land and water at the equator to the intensity these are heated which give us our huge, huge, huge, equator to poles winds and dramatic weather. [By the differential heating of the fluid gas atmosphere].
Because, and please do take this on board, if you can’t show this, if you can’t prove that visible light physically heats matter, physically heat the land and water, then you have no weather in your world.
But even more ridiculously, you do not have any heat from the Sun in your world.
Because, you have eliminated the real heat from the Sun which does heat matter, which does physically and intensely heat the land and water at the equator to give us our huge winds and weather. Which is what we feel heating us.
I do understand that this is difficult to grasp because it is such an enormous scam, but that is what it is.
Unless you can prove that these shortwaves do the heating of the real direct heat from the Sun, thermal infrared, as claimed by AGWScienceFiction in their Greenhouse Effect, you have no heat from the Sun in your world.
You have eliminated the real heat from the Sun: longwave infrared aka thermal infrared aka radiant heat.
That is the problem here..
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Unbelievable.
I guess Rereke forgot about the magical fairy dust we get from the sun.
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Curt says…
But that’s just not true. The Sun produces orders of magnitude higher radiation in the far infra red.
It is true that this band is but a fraction of the total output of the Sun. But this total output is orders of magnitude higher than Earths output.
The planck curves used to compare the Suns output to that of the Earth are and have always been misleading. If one was to insert earths planck curve inside that of the Suns, it would appear as a flat line.
Please note that the y-axis is logarithmic.
Radiation from the Earths surface only has to travel a few kilometres, whereas radiation from the Sun travels millions of kilometres, hence, by the time solar far-infrared arrives at the top of atmosphere, it is weaker than the far-infrared that travelled up from the Earths surface. (so it is claimed)
Though it may seem a picky distinction, it is important to be accurate.
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That’s why I used the qualifier “essentially”. I guess I could have said “many orders of magnitude less than in the visible light band”. I think the log plot you show is misleading in this sense.
I could also have said that at the earth, the far infrared from the sun’s Planck radiation is “many orders of magnitude less than the far infrared from the earth’s own Planck radiation”.
But “essentially” is good enough for a blog comment.
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Curt, you said:
Sure enough E = h * v. However, a surface which absorbs a photon oscillating at an frequency slower or equal to it’s own, will not, statistically, increase temperature. Said otherwise, cold/slow/less energetic radiation does not statistically increase the energy of a warmer/faster/more energetic surface.
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This is where you’re wrong. If the object absorbs the photon, its energy is increased by the energy E of that photon (by the First Law of Thermodynamics – conservation of energy). Now if this object is warmer than another object that is radiating toward it by virtue of Planck radiation, it will transmit more, and on average more energetic, photons toward the cooler object than it receives from that object.
A photon has an associated frequency of electromagnetic radiation, but what is a surface’s frequency, anyway?
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