Nature ties itself in knots here, and reveals a lot more than they probably meant too, but mostly about themselves rather than about Antarctica. If it’s correct, the implications from this study are pretty big, not that the study will tell you that. The term “Global warming” is tossed under a bus, along with almost all the Antarctic man-made scares of the last two decades. The political nature of Nature is on full display.
This time Nature claims it has found the cause of the Antarctic pause. Apparently this now finally resolves yet another conundrum (fantastic, what!) that was, as usual, not called a conundrum until it was solved. Another secret problem fixed. Where was the press release telling us there was a problem?
Those who said there was a conundrum were just deniers. It’s right there in the press release, paragraph two:
The study resolves a scientific conundrum, and an inconsistent pattern of warming often seized on by climate deniers.
Which rather begs the question: If there was a conundrum then the skeptics who pointed it out were not deniers, but correct. And if there was no conundrum, and deniers were denying something, then this is not a new finding at all. Alternately perhaps some researchers “knew” the answer they were going to find, and the other researchers, who can’t see the future, are deniers?
Is Nature reporting a discovery, or issuing a political press release?
The use of “denier” in a science paper has a price. How, I wonder, does Nature define homo sapiens climate denier? — Bipedal primates who deny the sky?
Researchers now throw global warming under the bus?
“When we hear the term ‘global warming,’ we think of warming everywhere at the same rate,” Armour said. “We are moving away from this idea of global warming and more toward the idea of regional patterns of warming, which are strongly shaped by ocean currents.”
Look out for the death of the “global warming” term, and the rise of regional warming scares. Reality bites again.
The miracle of deep ocean currents?
Perhaps the paper has some teeth to it, but it’s not obvious in the press release. They appear to be announcing discoveries from text books. It’s been known for years that the deepest oceans take about 1000 years to turn over. So it is entirely expected that the water around Antarctica is old and cold.
The circumpolar current and deep ocean circulation has been known for years (as in this old popular map).
Deep, old water explains why Antarctic Ocean hasn’t warmed
The waters surrounding Antarctica may be one of the last places to experience human-driven climate change. New research from the University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds that ocean currents explain why the seawater has stayed at roughly the same temperature while most of the rest of the planet has warmed.
Apparently climate modelers didn’t know basic ocean circulation and thought the heat would just mix downward — yes, even I am a bit amazed at this next para:
“The old idea was that heat taken up at the surface would just mix downward, and that’s the reason for the slow warming,” Armour said. “But the observations show that heat is actually being carried away from Antarctica, northward along the surface.”
Really – that was the old idea?
Look out here: It will take centuries for us to run out of cold ocean…
The Southern Ocean’s water comes from such great depths, and from sources that are so distant, that it will take centuries before the water reaching the surface has experienced modern global warming.
Follow the implications — this is going to keep going. Antarctica will be fine for centuries? There’s no rapid sea level rise coming and no imminent destruction of the shelf? Forget all the images of penguins dying from global warming which is regional not-warming in Antarctica. So were all the papers blaming “global warming” for Antarctic icebergs, starving penguins, and collapsing ice shelves all wrong in attributing them to man-made warming which won’t arrive there for centuries? Could be.
Observations and climate models show that the unique currents around Antarctica continually pull deep, centuries-old water up to the surface — seawater that last touched Earth’s atmosphere before the machine age, and has never experienced fossil fuel-related climate change. The paper is published May 30 in Nature Geoscience.
“With rising carbon dioxide you would expect more warming at both poles, but we only see it at one of the poles, so something else must be going on,” said lead author Kyle Armour, a UW assistant professor of oceanography and of atmospheric sciences. “We show that it’s for really simple reasons, and ocean currents are the hero here.”
Gale-force westerly winds that constantly whip around Antarctica act to push surface water north, continually drawing up water from below. The Southern Ocean’s water comes from such great depths, and from sources that are so distant, that it will take centuries before the water reaching the surface has experienced modern global warming.
Ocean circulation is fairly textbook stuff, hardly a new discovery. The image below is from a post in 2010 where William Kininmonth explained the importance of our ocean circulation. Surface water pushes north.
…
And we’re back to “modeled discoveries”. Call it simulated science?
Someone put dye into a climate model? That’s got to be bad.
In the Atlantic, the northward flow of the ocean’s surface continues all the way to the Arctic. The study used dyes in model simulations to show that seawater that has experienced the most climate change tends to clump up around the North Pole. This is another reason why the Arctic’s ocean and sea ice are bearing the brunt of global warming, while Antarctica is largely oblivious.
Seems the real deniers were the ones who denied the Antarctic Pause, and the failure of the climate models.
All the modelers said CO2 would amplify the warming at both poles. The models were wrong.
REFERENCE / Peer reviewed political flyer
Emily R. Newsom et al. Southern Ocean warming delayed by circumpolar upwelling and equatorward transport. Nature Geoscience, May 2016 DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2731
Excellent – something to show my credulous relatives.
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I have noticed on a few occasions that the water dripping from Tasmanian oysters was past it’s “use by” date.
I thought to myself at the time, “Gee, that water must have been there a long time”.
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Yep! It’s that “old water”. It’ll confuse you every time. 😉
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And I thought “old water” was what you found on the bedsheets of your 98 year old grand mother…
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So Roy you are still locked in the backward looking, LNP stooge mode of thinking that only focuses on the “old water” huh? You really should be looking at promoting the clean new water of the future. The clean new water of the future is where we should all be focussing our attention.
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Is that concentrated water or dilute water?
40
It is dehydrated water. That is the only type of water which is able to give us the predicted drought/flood.
50
Whatever happened to heavy water? 😉
30
What did you expect. They blamed the Old Water. 😉
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Who would have thunk it? I am Googling “regional warming scares as we speak”. Yew bewdy!
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Who would have thunk it? I am Googling “regional warming scares as we speak”. Yew bewdy!
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Don’t know how double post happened, sorry!
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Nah, Your a denier!
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An increase in red hot chilli crop yields is an example that shows that carbon dioxide causes heat. But I can’t think of any other examples where it does.
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🙂
60
Hey…..talking about cold and chilly, May was quite a chilly one as months go wasn’t it!…..I wonder if the climatecrats will try saying it was the hottest May ever? Guess we’ll see shortly.
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Well Robert, that’s just the thing we are looking at on this thread, variability.
No doubt you had a cold May, but here in Newcastle it was unseasonably Warm.
What we need is an average!
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Robert what you say applies to Perth – the coolest April/May maximum temps on record at the BOM Perth Metro Mt Lawley site (1993 – present). Perth has experienced “winter-type” weather in the last month of Autumn.
May – 1.4 degrees below average and a lot wetter with 112mm.
April – 0.9 degrees below average and a lot wetter with 68mm.
Don’t mention AGW in Perth – no one believes it anymore except the delusional “Warmists” and they will be totally distraught when the GM/LIA kicks next decade. Remember that verse from “American Pie” – “the day the music died” well maybe Ross Mclean can pen another hit song next decade entitled “Cold American Pie” – “the day the Theory of AGW died”.
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‘ “American Pie” – “the day the music died” well maybe Ross Mclean can pen another hit song next decade entitled ‘
Is that Don’s brother?
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Got me Alan – a faux pas by yours truly – I actually know a Ross Mclean (similar age to Don) and he will be honoured to write that song next decade although it won’t reach the dizzy heights of Don’s 1971 classic but like that great song, it will deliver a very impt message including – ” but the levee was dry but not from AGW and ……”. The song, like the GM/LIA, will be cool comfort to the distraught “Warmists”.
40
The last few days of May were pretty cold here and now it is the Freezing First of June. I’ve been covering the lime (as in citrus) and other tender plants at night for a while now. Last year we lost every lime thanks to frost and to the reducing enjoyment of our G and T.
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Well, I spend quite a bit of time retreating to a place on a coastal lake by the South Coral Sea where I am at the moment. At night over the last two weeks had to put on a second and third blanket, rug up, and close the bedroom deck doors! lol.
Turning to another issue that is affected by the weather. The birds on this lake, hundreds of cormorants, pelicans and black swans are badly affected by the pesticides and herbicides (weed killers) the local government swamps the surrounds with incessantly. If you drive around the adjacent main roads you see a permanent and continuous dead foliage strip along each side of the road and under the fences for kilometers on end and many fluoros spraying the stuff around indiscriminately.
In the colder and wetter weather the fish that the cormorants eat disappear and it was explained to me by wildlife vets that these birds start living off their fat tissue, which is where their system stores all these pesticide etc poisons that inevitably get into the fish that they eat all the time. We literally have to rescue ‘drunk’ cormorants even walking down the middle of the highways sometimes.
So it was very interesting to read an article in the Australian today headed “Pesticides blamed for crash in bee populations.” In the journal “Nature Publications” a published scientist has found that pesticides are to blame for a dramatic crash of bee populations over the past decade. Apparently Albert Einstein said once that he predicted that mankind would not survive half a decade beyond the extinction of bees (unless mankind figured out how to pollinate food crops in a world with little or no bees).
When are the bureaucrats going to stop waisting their time on non issues like co2 and climate change and start being concerned about the real issues like this that we all face.
Whenever I see the endless strips of sprayed dead weeds in public areas I also wonder just how much this has to do with the increase in cancer incidence, not to mention the effect on all the animals. I see no concern for these issues whatsoever coming from the left socialist, meant to be compassionate, side of politics.
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+1000 Robert Road.
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R. ..sorry, unnoticed predictive text got away from me. 🙁
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Ah yes, but the Greens are “saving the planet”! And they’re too busy to actually do the job that they originally set themselves!
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Most of May was quite warm in Sydney – well above average temperatures, but as soon as the climate alarmists started talking about an expected warm dry winter (great for golf), temperatures plummeted and along came the rain.
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You called it Robert. Wednesday night ABC news stated hottest May ever with a representative from the Climate Change Council saying its definitely climate change at work. No mention of the strong el nino (of course)
20
In UAH, May 2016 with 0.55ºC is SECOND to 1998 with 0.64ºC
UAH for Australia become available in a few days.
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For Southern Hemisphere..
In UAH, May 2016 with 0.44ºC is SECOND to 1998 with 0.71ºC
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What is the northern hemisphere?
20
Affected by the El Nino much more… as we all know… even you… maybe
2016 0.65
2010 0.59
1998 0.57
Tell me Gee … do you know what a transient is?
apart from the definition of your park bench address ?
21
So.. absolutely NOTHING to do with CO2.. agreed?
Not “global” warming,
Not part of any “trend”
Just a one off energy release from the tropical oceans… ie a COOLING event
do you understand enough to realise that ?
21
Humm?, how old is the warm water being released from the current declining El Nino?
It is good to see “Nature” has discovered ocean currents. The first few hundred meters of the ocean contain hundreds of times more energy then the entire atmosphere. Input to this region has immense variation from solar spectrum changes over solar cycles , which, as far as I know have never been quantified as the residence time of disparate solar insolation into our oceans is not known or studied.
Has anyone actually read the paper?
Did the quantify historical changes in the T of the ocean currents which eventually upwell in the southern ocean around Antarctica?
Did they find quantifiable increases in aspects of these ocean currents which will make any measurable difference EVER in the upwelling southern ocean zones?
Or is it turtle models all the way down to the “wart on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea”?
00
Ahh, the word is warmth is making the crops more toxic – not just hotter!
http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=27074&ArticleID=36181&l=en
Funny – when we had extreme heat spells ’round my area the veggies seemed fine – bigger, maybe, but not toxic.
10
No sh*t, Sherlock!
You can see why these people are paid the money.
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What is this “we” nonsense? If that were the case you (we?) would not need to find the average temperature. We could use the temperature anywhere to show warming.
It does shed some light on the associated cognitive dissonance of claiming warming now if the average has increased but disavowing warming in the past if it did not happen everywhere at once.
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Graphic, you nailed it.
” If that were the case you (we?) would not need to find the average temperature. We could use the temperature anywhere to show warming.”
Yep, if the average, regional, etc. data show no warming, now the Alarmists can use a small area or even a single point to scream Local Global Warming!
As each global warming hypothesis and fact gets debunked by reality, the Alarmists always have a fallback definition or claim to continue slurping $ from the taxpayer and living the high life. The Green Blob lives!
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If it’s local it ain’t global, eh?
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Don’t forget, these are the same people who gave us Global Average Temperature – as if the average value of lottery balls was meaningful!
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I like concise and penetrating comments like this.
Really captures the issue.
Reminds me of that old song;
Old MacGorey had a warm one
Ee I ee I owe
And on that Earth it
Was too warm
Etc
Here a warm,there a warm
Everywhere a warm warm
Get it to the U.N.
Give us the money
Have a nice day, we live in a times of ideal natural climate.
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Next they may even find that the upwelling of old, cold water is not constant in it’s flow rate, temperature or CO2 content.
Oh bother, there goes the models again.
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You would think it a prerequisite of climate science/oceanography to conceptualize things in three dimensions plus time.
71
It was intentional that we saw the global average as happening globally. It made it easier to ignore that a fraction of a degree change in the average of samples, that need adjusting, were not evenly spread around the globe and supposedly showed that everyone could see the effects here and now, had to be taken with a pinch of salt.
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There is a little problem with all this instant hocus pocus science. How does the universally predicted warming get from the air to the ocean without actually warming the air? So we have gone from +5C in 100 years to the oceans stole my warming? Even Prof Turkey had a waffly science sounding explanation about adiabatic winds for being trapped in ice which was not supposed to be there, even though he had seen it in photographs.
What sort of scientist takes 30 years to discover the oceans have a great effect on air temperatures, being just as thick and a mere 340 times more massive than the thin atmosphere and containing 50x as much free CO2. Next they will be saying that warming ocean surfaces actually releases more CO2 and we have come full circle. The concept of equilibrium which underpins all science is amazingly absent in these snap conclusions, each more right than the previous.
The most important rule when you promote a new insight into why you were right all along is to never admit to being wrong in the first place. Even in the ‘debate’ Malcolm Turnbull talked about ‘The Science’ as if it was Holy Writ, scripture, a complete system of beliefs and traditions not to be questioned. I prefer real PM Tony Abbott’s accurate description, crap.
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The really big problem, as Jo implies, is that if your heat is ‘stolen’ somehow by something 340x as massive (average depth of 3.4km), the increase in temperature is 1/340th or 5/340 or 0.014C. So there is no problem and the fish would not notice. You then have a real problem and massive inconsistency in explaining how the temperature suddenly went up 0.5C in ten years and stayed there. Surely that should be stolen too? You really have to think people make this stuff up and then publish with a few old charts. What happened to real science? When does any old explanation do?
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“There is a little problem with all this instant hocus pocus science. How does the universally predicted warming get from the air to the ocean without actually warming the air?”
Little problem? More like major problem.
The only way the ocean is actually heated is solar radiation (and a very small amount of geothermal from below). Sure climythologists claim its cooling rate can be slowed by incident LWIR from the atmosphere, but they are packed so full of it, it is spewing out of they lying mouths.
Climastrologists actually have no plausible mechanising as to why CO2 causes ocean warming. Build the experiment and check. I did. I know you did less. (ever considered doing more?). Fill both target containers below strong and weak LWIR sources with 40C water and monitor cooling rate. Whoops! No difference in cooling rate. Seems surface incident LWIR cannot heat nor slow the cooling rate of water free to evaporatively cool via a ratiatively cooled atmosphere.
The only thing CO2 does is cause immeasurably slight cooling. But “immeasurably” is the catch. There is a world of difference between Konrad saying slight cooling and David Evans saying slight warming. That would be the divide between science and politics. David picked the wrong side. The Internet remembers, forever.
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“There is a little problem with all this instant hocus pocus science. How does the universally predicted warming get from the air to the ocean without actually warming the air?”
The Sun emits short-wave radiation. The Earth reflects some back into space without absorbing it, currently fluctuating a little above and below about 30% of about 1360 Watts per square meter that falls on the disc that faces the Sun. Since the surface of the Earth is about four time the area of the disc, downward solar irradiance is about 70% X 1360 /4 = 240 Watts per square meter.
The Earth is too cool to radiate in the short wave part of the spectrum. The Earth can REFLECT short wave energy, but re-radiates (emits) only in the long wave part of the spectrum. See: Google Books, Goody and Yung, page 4.
https://books.google.ae/books?id=Ji0vfj4MMH0C&pg=PA68&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false
So about 30% of solar energy is is reflected back to space by land and plants and ice and snow and clouds and aerosol particles in the atmosphere. This reflected energy is excluded from the energy balance calculations.
All solar energy that is not reflected back to space (about 70%) is absorbed by and heats the air and aerosols, ice and snow, land, oceans, plants and animals, about 240 Watts per square meter on average. Some of this energy s ultraviolet, but most is visible light to which the atmosphere is mostly transparent. The oceans are partly transparent, and depth of penetration varies.
The solar energy that penetrates the water is mostly short wave energy, mostly visible light, less tha 0.7 micro-meter. The albedo (reflectivity) of the oceans is typically only about 6%, so 94% of visible light falling on the ocean surface penetrates and is absorbed.
Apart from thermal infrared energy (above about 10 micrometers or so), not much long wave energy leaves the ocean. (When we want to define coastlines, we use a wave band that shows the ocean as black, wavelength from about 1.5 to 2.5 micrometers, because seawater does not emit energy in the middle long wave part of the spectrum.)
Most solar energy falls in tropical latitudes and between 23.5 degrees north and south, where the oceans occupy about 70% of the surface. So it’s obvious that most solar energy that reaches the bottom of the atmosphere enters the oceans and does so as visible light. That energy exits the oceans as thermal energy, mostly as the latent energy of evaporation.
This leaves hanging the question of balance between incoming and outgoing radiation. Incoming and outgoing must balance, or at least must adjust in the direction of balance (equilibrium). The wavelength at which the Earth radiates and the amount of energy the Earth radiates depends on its temperature. So if, for some reason more or less energy enters or leaves, the Earth’s temperature will increase or decrease. At this higher or lower temperature, the Earth will emit more or less energy until a new balance is found, if ever.
If ever, because the Earth’s climate system can reach an instantaneous balance, but never reach a stable balance.
To appreciate how much energy imbalance is revealed by the data, we can look at the figure reported James Hansen and others in 2011, estimated from ocean heat content (OHC).
“The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.58 ± 0.15 W m-2 during the 6-yr period 2005-2010, confirms the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change.
Hansen, James, et al. “Earth’s energy imbalance and implications.”Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 11.24 (2011): 13421-13449.
Note the precision of the estimate. Both the downward and upward radiation have measurement errors. So we have to add about 239 + 239.58 to get the total basis. This is a precision of 1.2 parts per 1000 for six years for the entire globe.
What did Dr Hansen’s colleagues think of that? First they rounded 0.58 to 0.6 W m-2. And then they said that such precision is not possible with existing technology.
“The net energy balance is the sum of individual fluxes. The current uncertainty in this net surface energy balance is large, and amounts to approximately 17 Wm-2. This uncertainty is an order of magnitude larger than the changes to the net surface fluxes associated with increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (Fig. 2b). The uncertainty is also approximately an order of magnitude larger than the current estimates of the net surface energy imbalance of 0.6 ±0.4 Wm-2 inferred from the rise in OHC. The uncertainty in the TOA net energy fluxes, although smaller, is also much larger than the imbalance inferred from OHC. (TOA means top of the atmosphere).
Stephens, Graeme L., et al. “An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations.” Nature Geoscience 5.10 (2012): 691-696.
URL: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n10/full/ngeo1580.html
To make certain readers don’t miss the point, I summarize. Dr. Hansen told us that the Earth’s energy imbalance of a little over half a Watt per square meter compared to 240 Watts incoming “confirms the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change.”
His colleagues said that the uncertainty in the net radiative balance is 17 Watts per square meter. More meaningful error bars would be +0.58 +/-8.5 Watts per square meter. This implies that the uncertainty in radiative balance is not merely the quantum, but also the sign of the imbalance. Dr Hansen’s data cannot tell us whether Earth was warming or coolong.
Now it may seem I am being unduly harsh with Dr Hansen, but I have followed his career as a scientist and as a political activist and I am convinced that he is a true believer in the “Coming Catastrophe” and I wish that he had not spent so many years of his life distressed by this illusion.
As Doug Hoffman says, “Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical.”
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Sure. However the proposition was that the air would get warmer, imbalances notwithstanding. That is what all the models predicted and they are all wrong.
The planetary temperature as measured by satellites at distance has not changed in 20 years. That has to be far better than land based thermometers. Also as noted in the article, heat absorption by the oceans and an imbalance hardly matter when you consider the incredible mass of the mobile oceans, something only now being considered. It is the major recipient of all heat as you point out but has been left out of the equation for a long time and is only now being belatedly considered as a backhanded way of explaining abject failure in every prediction.
My particular continuing concern with Hansen’s “human-made greenhouse effect” is that while CO2 has gone up 50%, this is alleged without proof of any sort to be a largely man made increase. No evidence has been given except rough coincidence. Even then the reverse conclusion is more likely. Heating the oceans would expect to release the 98% of free CO2 in solution in the oceans by simple Henry’s law in Physical Chemistry. Hot lemonade. However nothing is said. This man made CO2 allegation can be proven or disproven and without man made CO2, the whole logic collapses.
You can easily measure the amount of Man made CO2 in the air by radio carbon dating the CO2 and it is well under 5%, closer to 2% in 1956. Fossil fuel has no C14, unlike modern CO2. If the 50% increase was man made the C14 would be down 33%.
As for whether the greenhouse effect actually works with CO2, CO2 is a tiny trace gas and it is generally agreed that CO2 alone cannot produce a noticeable warming without amplification from secondary evaporation of H2O a real green house gas. This is an effect which is known not to exist because there is no hot spot over the equator. So there is no CO2 warming and while CO2 continues to rise, the temperature is not changing, another absolute proof.
So whatever Dr Hansen is on about, there is no logic to this human made greenhouse effect. Water is and remains our major greenhouse gas, if only because clouds are largely opaque at many frequences, unlike nearly transparent and tiny CO2. In absolute terms CO2 is inconsequential and even if it was important, we do not control CO2 levels. The sun does.
Inferring a world disaster from a slight alleged imbalance and an unproven argument about man made CO2 makes you wonder why such an unlikely, unproven and even very silly hypothesis has resulted in all those windmills. They are still being built. The windmill industry is not sustainable.
I also have concerns about these amazing calculations averaged over all latitudes, seasons, night and day, temperatures and cloud conditions. There are time delays too. Also something which is in balance on average at a given time may not be in balance at all times.
This is all about fossil fuel and Western democracies and the UN. In all the reading I have done, I have yet to see any proof of man made global warming. It is all hand waving and yelling without facts. As for man made Climate Change, it is impossible to follow how you get CO2 driven Climate Change if you cannot get a change in temperature. This is just busted, a fantasy.
42
“The solar energy that penetrates the water is mostly short wave energy, mostly visible light, less tha 0.7 micro-meter. The albedo (reflectivity) of the oceans is typically only about 6%, so 94% of visible light falling on the ocean surface penetrates and is absorbed.”
Pray-tel how one can easily see city lights reflected from a nearby body of water (lake, river)? Your claim of 94% absorptivity of any natural surface is as bogus as every other part of your pre-canned Climate Clown nonsense!! Not one word of what the academic meteorologists, (climatastrophists) CLAIM has any scientific meaning whatsoever!
315
You see it at an angle at night?
20
“Pray-tel how one can easily see city lights reflected from a nearby body of water (lake, river)?”
Pray tell, what have city lights at night got to do with sunlight got to do with sunlight that penetrates the ocean surface?
You describe my explanation as “…bogus as every other part of your pre-canned Climate Clown nonsense!!”
In my opinion, your habit of using abusive language like this here and in many of your other comments makes me wonder if you are still in high school. If so, I wonder if you will ever pass your science courses.
131
Frederic,
do have a care. Will is indeed old, grumpy and abusive. But what would you expect from someone old enough to write the core of MODTRAN code so carelessly abused by climastrologists while living through the AGW hoax?
It’s not just SW reflectivity that is the issue. It is LWIR emissivity. Water is weird. My early experiments showed water having a high LWIR reflectivity, low LWIR emissivity at lower angles of incidence. Climythologists claim over 0.9 emissivity for water covering 71% of our planet. Wrong. Hemispherical emissivity for water in LWIR is below 0.7. Will found this out via empirical experiment before I was born.
If you want to challenge Will, show your empirical experiments. “But you’re rude” is not a scientific argument. Will is rude. He’s also right. I checked.
315
“Climythologists claim over 0.9 emissivity for water covering 71% of our planet. Wrong. Hemispherical emissivity for water in LWIR is below 0.7. Will found this out via empirical experiment before I was born.”
…
Did either you or Will read what did I said about energy emission from water?
…
I said, “That energy exits the oceans as thermal energy, mostly as the latent energy of evaporation.”
…
As for empirical evidence, I cited my experiments with LW bands of multispectral satellite images.
…
“When we want to define coastlines, we use a wave band that shows the ocean as black, wavelength from about 1.5 to 2.5 micrometers, because seawater does not emit energy in the middle long wave part of the spectrum.”
…
All of this was in answer to the question, “How does the universally predicted warming get from the air to the ocean without actually warming the air?”
…
Will’s age has nothing to do with it. In 1964 I began developing a major FORTRAN program on an IBM 360. But I don’t use my advanced age as a reason for misreading a comment and then posting something like this, “…bogus as every other part of your pre-canned Climate Clown nonsense!!”
…
The last line of Will’s diatribe condemns him out of his own mouth, “Not one word of what the academic meteorologists, (climatastrophists) CLAIM has any scientific meaning whatsoever!”
…
Which shows that he shot his mouth off without even reading my comment. Because my conclusion was,
…
“Dr Hansen’s data cannot tell us whether Earth was warming or cooling.”
…
The polite way in which I expressed my disagreement with anorthodox climatologist differs from the crude way Will expresses himself is because I still remember what my parents taught me about good manners.
170
Frederick,
I like to think Will suffers from “Finger Tourette’s Syndrome”. It’s brought about because of all the typing necessary to really explain over and over again what is wrong with “Climate Science”.
I took it badly for quite awhile then I started to read between the outbursts. There is value there and you don’t need to take it personally. He knows things and he has a pretty keen sense of humor.
014
Frederick
First of all thank you for posting here on this blog.
Next Will.
He has previously been given some stick ( http://joannenova.com.au/2015/10/new-science-16-building-the-alternative-model-and-why-it-solves-so-many-major-problems/#comment-1760017 ) about his often unintelligible writing, but deep down there is something, something that may indicate a good understanding of the reality of radiation in our atmosphere, and therefore the cooling of it. Of course this does not excuse the behaviour, but Nobody is perfect esp me and so how likely is it that we will see change?
So much of the “scientific” writing about climate change is written by people whose academic qualifications are short on real science and long on “Environmental “Science”.
One of my own pet peeves is the poor use of models (http://joannenova.com.au/2015/10/new-science-16-building-the-alternative-model-and-why-it-solves-so-many-major-problems/#comment-1760326) and the failure to isolate ALL relevant sources and sinks and stick to the issue: Human Origin CO2.
As far as Will’s comment about your post above I would have felt you were entitled to say that he had a slanted view of the material and ask why was he trying to make an issue out of the “reflected ” energy from a few 50 watt light bulbs; is a few hundred Watts spread over a view window of say 1000 sq metres really such a big issue.
My own wish is that Will would not be so cryptic and try to do one single post where he condenses his idea of how energy moves towards our Earths surface and then away from it.
He may do a good job of it , who knows.
KK
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Intended first link
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/10/new-science-16-building-the-alternative-model-and-why-it-solves-so-many-major-problems/#comment-1760216
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Finally, that killer of all mankind, man made global warming science is settled some more, uh again, I mean still.
Thank goodness that the threat Al Gore warned us about is over. No more CAGW.
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Jo
Thank you for a clear, logical dissection that again shows some dangers of detouring around text books of the recent past.
Geoff.
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Jo and Geoff: excellent points about re-examination of the old text books. They are full of information that refutes the pseudo scientific crap that has been churned out by the Warmists these last two decades and a half. Back about 12-15 years ago practically every television news bulletin carried yet another story of a major mass of ice calving off the Antarctic ice shelf and using it as an example of “this (gasp!) dangerous global warming that we are now undergoing!” Remember all that? Guess what? It’s just a normal process in a part of the world that remains very cold. How about that!!!!
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Other breakthrough scientific news: Rocks are hard, fire is hot, and water is wet.
Incredible!
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Lionel!!! Water is WET!!??
Do you have any scientific proof??
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That depends on your definition of hard, hot and wet.
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Reality is not dependent upon your definitions. Your definitions must be dependent upon reality or they are without a referent and thus have no meaning.
There is a quality known as hardness and rocks exhibit that quality by not deforming with light to medium pressure. The reference hardness is YOU. You can be deformed using light pressure. Thus you are not hard.
Hot is a relative measure of temperature and is dependent upon your reference temperature. The reference temperature is YOU. Your temperature is approximately 98 degrees F. The temperature of fire, with only one exception I know of, is above the burning temperature of wood. Thus compared to YOU, fire is HOT.
Wet is a quality of a liquid that adheres to a hard surface. Most usual hard surfaces can become wet because water adheres to it. Various man made materials cannot be made wet with water. However, since YOU are the reference, water can adhere to you. For example, stand outside in the rain. You WILL become wet unless you are covered with a material to which water will not adhere.
Simply defining hard as soft, wet as dry, and hot as cold does not change the nature of rocks, water, and fire. If words are to have any meaning, they MUST refer to something that exists in reality. The fact you think, feel, imagine, and fantasize differently is irrelevant to the things that exist.
The problem of our age is that reality is held to be irrelevant and optional. Only feelings, opinions, and beliefs are held to be “real” and therefor define “reality”. The reason this leads to failure, death, and destruction is that reality doesn’t pay attention to your feelings, opinions, and beliefs. It is what is, it is only what it is, and it is your responsibility to be coherent with reality or you will fail, suffer, and die. You have no choice in the matter.
Bottom line: Proof implies the existence and validity of reality. Thus, proof means showing the coherence between the statement subject to proof and the contents of reality with feelings, opinions, and beliefs excluded from the process.
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Lionell, you’re thinking like a denier, this is the new-world-science here today. Hot is how it feels to you, wet is how depressed you feel, and hard is not allowed in schools anymore.
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Nice bit of Reality there Lionell.
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Hi Lionell,
I agree with most of what you say, except for,
vampire, werewolf, ghost, angel, demon, faerie, etc…
Words with a physically defined referent are a subset of the set of meaningful words.
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You may intend or feel those kinds of words have meaning but that so called meaning is at most an intent – a fantasy. You and others may even agree what they look like and how they behave yet there can be no offering of physical evidence for such creatures. You have only your words and the words of your fellow believers as evidence. Even a 97% consensus of the population of the earth, that your descriptions are correct does not make the object of your intent exist nor your beliefs and fantasies, true. Such words are parts of a totally subjective word salad with no validatible and verifiable content. In other words: meaningless – absent of cognitive content.
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Sorry. Lionel, those words do have cognitive content. They conjure up ideas in our minds, and that is cognitive content. The ideas may not represent real things, but that does not take away the ideas. The words are meaningful.
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Unless, of course, you define “meaningful” as “referring to things in the real world, and not to anything imaginary”.
Though I can’t see why you should.
And wouldn’t that make it a bit difficult to speak of mathematical entities, and especially imaginary numbers?
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RoHa,
1. Taking your argument at face value: According to you, the meaning of those words are the contents of your mind. The content of my mind says those words have no meaning because they have no referent to anything but the content of your mind. Why should your mind dictate the meaning while mine can’t? What we have then is an resolvable conflict with no way out but “yes it is” and “no it isn’t” and “yes it is” and ‘no it isn’t” in endless recursion. Why, because there is no objective referent for the content of your or my mind and thus no way to communicate anything. Rather like a parrot talking to itself in a mirror and as without cognitive content. I don’t know about you but I am not a parrot mouthing meaningless sounds.
2. You confuse fantasy, mental pictures, and that little man saying words to you for cognitive content. If that were the case, your dreams and night mares are also parts of cognition. Not all things that go on in your mind are acts of cognition.
3. The science of mathematics has the reality of counting as its foundation: One rock, two rocks, three rocks. The ability to measure also comes from counting as in counting the number of reference standards that fit into the thing to be measured. Ditto for the highest reaches of mathematics. There is an unbroken chain of logic that connect the highest concept to the basic “one rock, two rocks …”. Unless and until you have traversed the full chain from the lowest to the highest and back again, you don’t know mathematics any better than a parrot who announces “two plus two equals screech screech”.
4. What you are forgetting is the possibility of higher level concepts based upon carefully and thoughtfully organized hierarchical abstractions from lower level concepts to the highest. The process of forming that hierarchy is cognition. The wild creation of descriptions of fantastical imaginary creatures with impossible and contradictory powers is about as far as you can get from actual cognition and still be alive.
5. I agree you can’t see why I should see “to mean” is to refer directly or indirectly thorough a careful chain of logic to things that actually exist. But I do mean exactly that.
In other words, to think means to think about something. That something to be something must exist or be logically derivable and reducible to that which exists. Otherwise, you are not thinking. You are simply making noises inside your head that are as inaccessible to others as they are devoid of actual meaning beyond your own foggy miasma of internal intent.
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1. Your first argument simply points out that we disagree about the meaning of “meaning”, and that you cannot see a way of resolving the disagreement.
On your principles, I am inclined to agree that we cannot resolve it, since there does not seem to be an objective referent for the word “meaning”, and so both your and my discussion of meanings are just “parts of a totally subjective word salad with no validatible and verifiable content.” We are both mouthing meaningless sounds, or, rather, writing meaningless marks. Perhaps you can find a way to escape this difficulty.
On my principles, I would point out that the conventional use of the word “meaning” is to refer to the ideas that words evoke, and I see no good reason for not following that convention.
2. If you want to restrict “cognitive content” to mental content which is cognition of the real world, go ahead. That restriction does not automatically imply that only words with cognitive content are meaningful in my concept of meaningful. Why should I accept your concept? What advantage would there be to it?
4. I haven’t forgotten the possibility of higher level concepts based upon carefully and thoughtfully organized hierarchical abstractions from lower level concepts. (This is an extension of your original claim that may well provide you with an escape from the difficulty I referred to above.) But the words for those concepts are still words which refer to ideas.
How is our thinking impaired by not restricting “meaningful” to words which refer to only one type of idea? We can still condemn talk of vampires, honest politicians, Marxist conspiracies, and so forth, as being talk of non-existent entities.
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RoHa June 1, 2016 at 2:41 pm
“How is our thinking impaired by not restricting “meaningful” to words which refer to only one type of idea? We can still condemn talk of vampires, honest politicians, Marxist conspiracies, and so forth, as being talk of non-existent entities.”
How about some existent entities such as Ted Kaczynski? Anyone that can fool the damn FBI for that long, must be my hero!
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Lionell Griffith June 1, 2016 at 3:06 am
“Bottom line: Proof implies the existence and validity of reality. Thus, proof means showing the coherence between the statement subject to proof and the contents of reality with feelings, opinions, and beliefs excluded from the process.”
Perhaps a bit of consideration of the vast difference between the physical (measurable) and the real (there exists) would be in order and be clearly explained! Concepts or ideas clearly do exist so are real. The physical generally does not include concepts but can at times, to circumvent the confusion of the immesurable. Case in point:
This Earth’s equator, with radius 4000 miles and angular velocity 15°/hr, yields an eastward tangential velocity of 1000MPH, surface roughness dragging boundary layer atmosphere with it.The atmosphere is not attached to the Earth and is free to move in any direction. Geometry will show that that 1000MPH atmosphere is resolved into orthoganal components 15°/hr angular and 35MPH radially outward. Neither can be measured! There is little or no angular difference in velocity between surface and atmospheric boundary layer. The 35MPH radially outward does not physically exist. What does exist in its place ,and is measurable, is a 34Pa decrease in surface pressure at the equator, that cannot be explained without further measurement, and much more conceptual thinking, that can try, but is unlikely to fully explain this physical! I hope this sparks some interest in how this Earth’s atmosphere may possibly work! 🙂
All the best! -will-
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I have no problem with the existence of concepts and ideas. They are vital to the way I work and produce values for myself and others. However, for the concepts or ideas to have meaning within reality and not strictly fantasy, they must be founded on THINGS that actually do exist outside of the mind doing the fantasizing. Otherwise, the abstractions making up the concepts and ideas are floating freely and disconnected from reality.
I hold such floating abstractions to be without cognitive content EVEN when I hold them as floating abstractions. Unless and until such things are connected to external reality by an unbroken chain of logic and evidence , they will remain as floating abstractions without an objective referent (ie meaningless).
It is a high price to pay but it is the price we humans must pay to stay alive and thrive. When such an approach is abandoned, one is living by luck, charity, or theft either directly or indirectly from governmental handouts. In the long run, that kind of policy will always fail.
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Lionell Griffith June 2, 2016 at 8:31 am
“It is a high price to pay but it is the price we humans must pay to stay alive and thrive. When such an approach is abandoned, one is living by luck, charity, or theft either directly or indirectly from governmental handouts. In the long run, that kind of policy will always fail.”
I totally disagree! Your philosophy is but jerking off in the cloakroom! Concentrated effort of trying, failing, trying again, somewhat different, is called learning, Learning cannot be taught, it must be done by self.
When your children are poking at bugs with sticks, the caution ‘bug bite you’ is an attempt at teaching. It is the ‘Wah!, bug bit me’! that is the learning! The resultant ‘Oh poor sweet baby'(hug), may or may not be a learning tool!
All the best! -will-
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In due respect Lionell, this is a hangup of yours. I don’t doubt that you have been successful without dealing with this hangup but I have to ask what might you accomplish if you didn’t assume “meaningless” when floating abstractions abound?
I also don’t expect you will accept my analyses either but it is offered freely and worth every penny.
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Mark D. June 2, 2016 at 9:15 am
“I also don’t expect you will accept my analysis either but it is offered freely and worth every penny.”
GRIN! 🙂
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Mike,
There’s some films I could recommend if you want hard, hot, ‘n’ wet.
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Names please.
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I’m afraid you’ll have to do your own research.
A hard job, but someone’s got to do it 😉
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David Smith June 2, 2016 at 2:27 am
“I’m afraid you’ll have to do your own research.
A hard job, but someone’s got to do it 😉 ”
David Smith June 1, 2016 at 12:29 am
“Mike, There’s some films I could recommend if you want hard, hot, ‘n’ wet.”
Reed’s question was to establish the veracity of your use of adverb ‘could’!!
Can you or not!!!!!!
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“Rocks are hard, fire is hot, and water is wet.”
Very Latest News flash Breaking: “Scientists” discover the difference between wet and dry, soft and hard, and hot and cold.
Scientists working on ‘hot and cold’ have found the exact temperature that indicates the transition from hot to cold or from cold to hot with certainty and incredible accuracy..
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“Scientists working on ‘hot and cold’ have found the exact temperature that indicates the transition from hot to cold or from cold to hot with certainty and incredible accuracy.. ”
Those same scientists have also discovered that the average temperature of boiling water depends upon the temperature of the water when it was first put on the heat.
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Ha Ha good one James.
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Those same scientists have also discovered that the average temperature of boiling water depends upon the temperature of the water when it was first put on the heat.
….. and the altitude the kettle was at when coming to the “boil”.
Too many variable for a reasonable margin of error? Perhaps 97% confidence?
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No, Pete, kettle is at sea level – gotta have some point of reference.
But I have found that as the minimum temperature increases so to does the average temperature of boiling water, but try as I might the actual boiling point never seems to increase – WTF.
Do you suppose that fudging daily minimum temperatures in the same way would actually increase daily average temperatures without the daily maximum temperatures increasing at all… ?
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Could that be why NASA shows 1964 as the same minimum as 1885?
(That was some time ago and NASA figures are subject to monthly changes)
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Ah! James, my fault for not making it clear. I live in Blackheath at 3500ft. Water boils at about 95C and soft boiled eggs take 6 minutes, not 5! Thus my sarcastic comment re too many variables.
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Is that a 97% consensus?
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.
97%!!
Is that another example of the all pervasive climate alarmist science’s “Cook’s Constant”?
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and it will only get worse with climate change (not everywhere but more extreme in some places).
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I am not a scientist nor am I an engineer. BUT! Is it possible that all this stuff about pollution is just a bunch of garbage because we as humans do not understand enough about the planet yet?
We should all be dead by now from what we were told in the 1960’s, yet here we are doing better. Fossil fuels come from the earth, why would they be bad? All this CO2 BS the greenies keep spewing. shouldn’t we have died before the year 2000? Population keeps rising, people live longer, poverty is declining. Maybe we need to understand more about the planet?
Abiotic oil is supposedly BS, yet there are some people with technical knowledge that are starting to question that. Does the earth actually produce oil as part of a natural process? Does anybody really know? We have been running out of oil for ever. In the October 1977 issue of Fortune magazine we were told that within 30 years we would have a shortfall of oil. Well 2007 was 30 years on and what do we have now?
The more I read up on this stuff, the more skeptical I become. The green movement is BS!
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.
No. Were doomed. It’s over.
So let’s party!
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Abiotic oil is not BS. It is the best explanation.
The “fossil fuel” story is for little children to enjoy as they giggle at the concept of dinosaurs becoming oil.
[I have no idea what put this in moderation since I can find nothing wrong with it. Do be prepared for your implied premise to be controversial though.
This is off topic so don’t go too far with it.] AZ
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For those wishing to further explore the biogenic/abiogenic petroleum discussion, this makes useful reading.
(Mantle-like Trace Element Composition of Petroleum – Contributions from Serpentinizing Peridotites. Szatmari1 P. et al.)
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Agree with John, abiotic is a crock, go for it if you like or even an example of a known deposit. Meanwhile I’ll stick to biogenic as you know what – it works
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in ‘Tectonics‘ by Damien Clossen (2011)
Part 7, Chapter 13. Tectonics and Petroleum, pp 329
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Manfred – so what? Can’t access the publication but the title says it all
“Mantle-like Trace Element Composition of Petroleum – Contributions from Serpentinizing Peridotites”
So where is the example of a known abiotic sourced deposit of hydrocarbons?
See John’s reply below
Again let’s go with what works, as a geologist I do, it pays the bills for myself and many others. Oh yes review the others but they are usually a waste of time
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Um, Titan perhaps, don’t really see a biotic source of the dominant liquid (Methane) there? This would suggest an abiotic origin would it not?
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So you have visited to sample it?
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Just found the full paper via your early link, from the abstract it is just discussing trace elements but will read in full though not holding my breath
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Oh pullease!!!! Why don’t you bring yourself up to speed with modern oil geochemistry. Try googling petroleum biomarkers for instance.
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John,
while it is clear some hydrocarbon deposits do have a fossil origin, it cannot be claimed with certainty all do. There are planets and moons in our solar system with seas of hydrocarbon, clearly of abiotic origin.
As to bio-markers in oil, contamination is plausible for some deposits. Indeed the depth at which anaerobic organisms are now being found in mine water has raised serious questions as the origin of said bio-markers.
However even if some hydrocarbons are naturally produced by nuclear sub-surface processes, we don’t have any idea of the rate of production. This is why we must still be conservative regarding their use. For instance, hydrocarbon powered aviation should be restricted to only green “elites” travelling first class between taxpayer funded virtue signalling blather-fests.
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Come on Konrad,name the hydrocarbon deposits that are not dominantly biotic. Don’t think anyone denies the presence of minor amounts of abiotic methane but beyond that.
Would really like a reference to where ‘contamination is plausible for some deposits’ and big deal if ‘anaerobic organisms are now being found in mine water’- again references
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Konrad June 1, 2016 at 8:13 pm
“John, while it is clear some hydrocarbon deposits do have a fossil origin, it cannot be claimed with certainty all do. There are planets and moons in our solar system with seas of hydrocarbon, clearly of abiotic origin.”
Why oh why can we not admit that “no one knows”?
Go to the Greek God festival, jump the bones of any good looking Goddess!, then claim immunity?
“However even if some hydrocarbons are naturally produced by nuclear sub-surface processes, we don’t have any idea of the rate of production. This is why we must still be conservative regarding their use. For instance, hydrocarbon powered aviation should be restricted to only green “elites” travelling first class between taxpayer funded virtue signalling blather-fests.”
GRIN 🙂
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If true, pretty cool, eh?
http://www.viewzone.com/abioticoilx.html
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Pretty hard to take seriously a site that has a graphic of dinosaurs when discussing oil and gas formation and includes statements like …’Proponents of so-called “abiotic oil” claim that the proof is found in the fact that many capped wells, which were formerly dry of oil, are found to be plentiful again after many years,’ or
‘ Vladimir Kutcherov adds that there is no way that fossil oil, with the help of gravity or other forces, could have seeped down to a depth of 10.5 kilometers in the state of Texas, for example, which is rich in oil deposits.’
The abstract of the paper is not very convincing either
‘There is widespread evidence that petroleum originates from biological processes. Whether hydrocarbons can also be produced from abiogenic precursor molecules under the high-pressure, high-temperature conditions characteristic of the upper mantle remains an open question’
And ends with (my bolding) ‘Our results support the suggestion that hydrocarbons heavier than methane can be produced by abiogenic processes in the upper mantle.’
But no evidence they are.
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‘…we as humans do not understand enough about the planet yet?’
The Klimatariat has known for decades that Antarctica wasn’t warming but, being the cowardly bunch that they are, nobody raised the issue until their mortgages were all paid off.
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Not cowardice -> Avarice.
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So if this effect works now it worked in the past and the Antarctic resisted warming in previous warm periods too. So the MWP which was supposed to be a northern hemishpere effect was just doing the same thing the warming is now.
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There is clear scientific evidence that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) both impacted the Antarctic Peninsula.
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That shows there could still be hope for Climate Scientists, or for one person at least.
It displays a desire to learn from, and maybe challenge, the imperfect models. Not just use them to crank out another paper that merely reconfirms the standard preconceptions that were used to construct the models.
The difference between the two approaches, IMO, used to lie somewhere between a good undergrad and a late-course PhD student. In much of Cli-Sci the undergrad seems to be the Professor these days.
Great post, Jo.
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Sorry to say but it was a tracer simulation not actual dye
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The Antarctic region is cold,
Because ‘warming’ has failed to take hold,
Leaving models confused,
That young water refused,
Through currents to mix with the old.
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Sorry to disrupt this important thread , but the big story breaking today in Europe is an attack on all of us and our freedom of expression on the internet , the Trojan horse that’s going to shackle the freethought media , a horse being run by the European union and the owners of the big technology platforms , I hope PAT or anyone can find a link to post here as I can’t from work . ASSOCIATED PRESS , EU LINKS UP WITH TWITTER , TECH FIRMS TO COMBAT HATE SPEECH . Thanks and sorry for being off topic
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Doubtingdave, I think the bigger problem is actually that the nature of the current social-media thing is changing politics. Some good, and plenty of bad, will likely come out of it in the long term.
In the short term, social media like Twitter owes its success to rousing the opinions or emotions of many people in a very short space of time. Thus a politician in front of the MSM, who are dutifully following Twitter, suddenly has to deal with what used to be called “a mob”.
Stock exchanges around the world are familiar with this phenomenum and the people who set out to deliberately engineer them. Sometimes such events may occur ‘randomly’, as in the original “go viral”, but stock exchanges have software designed to prevent or short-circuit such things.
Twitter has made rabble-rousing part of their business model. They are now currently between a rock and a hard place. Their business model is based on encouraging quick, short responses which lead to miscommunication, anger and abuse. Some measures of their traffic volume are now actually falling, maybe as a direct result.
For a non-profitable non-dividend-paying “growth-stock” that is shrinking, that must really suck for investors and their lackeys who promote corporate interests. [Yes, I’m looking at you, BBC pension fund 🙂 When is the BBC going to explain its charter-busting promotion of Twitter]
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Thanks Michael, what concerns me most is that Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook are heavily involved just after being caught red handed supressing conservative leaning news on his platform whilst promoting left leaning news , even to the extent of fiddling the news trending poles . Breitbart news now have a exclusive on this story under the header ; MAJOR LIBERAL ORGS SLAM FACEBOOK- EU PLANS TO BLOCK FREE SPEECH
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Only “Twits use twitter.
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They should call twitter….. Fwitter…an accurate description of this idiot sphere.
140 characters is not enough for any in depth comments ….its only enough for insults from
imbeciles…the CAGW true b’lver gang in particular !
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And only the Twitterati think its news.
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What to they mean by “old water”? Isn’t most of the water on earth roughly the same age, billions of years old?
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I’ll take a stab at this question; refer to Lionel Griffith at 11.1.1.1:
“Old” water would be water has NOT been participating in the formal “water cycle” we all learned in primary school. While something of a mis-nomer in-and-of-itself, it is the water which participates last in the eternal oceanic overturning. The ‘old’ water around Antarctica takes longer to circulate into the typical ocean currents than the usual 600 – 800 years of normal ocean circulation.
Yes, you are correct, the vast majority of the water on Earth has been here for a long time. Some “new” water is created when you speed down the highway in your family Yugo, or keep your winter home warm with methane (or other gaseous hydrocarbon fuels).
Not all of the water on Earth is involved in the water cycle, though. As an undergrad, I was present for some testing at a proposed geothermal electrical generation power station. At the risk of sending this to moderation, I’ll state for the record that the consensus of professional scientists who were leading the project claimed that the water being used to drive turbines (connected to electrical generators) was “juvenile” water. The meaning of ‘juvenile’ in this context means that the water coming from within the Earth had not been in the water cycle for at least several tens of millions of years, or could even have been from within the mantle itself, and had never really been in the water cycle before. The claim was that the signature of the isotopes within the water itself led to the conclusion that it was indeed ‘juvenile’, and not ground water seeping into the well bores.
Recall that some entrained water is subducted into the mantle along with sediments, etc, at oceanic trenches. Since it takes several millions of years to cycle those materials back to the surface through volcanism, what comes from deep within the Earth is typically called ‘juvenile’, just by virtue of the residence time outside of the water cycle.
If that is unclear, I’ll see if I can help to reduce any confusion.
Regards to all,
Vlad
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Very well put Vlad.
Clear as water.
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Vlad @ #17.1
Just to refresh your memory, an Earth science research discovery from 2014;
Live Science; Planet Earth
**********************************
Rare Diamond Reveals Earth’s Interior is All Wet
[ quoted variously;]
A battered diamond that survived a trip from “hell” confirms a long-held theory: Earth’s mantle holds an ocean’s worth of water.
“It’s actually the confirmation that there is a very, very large amount of water that’s trapped in a really distinct layer in the deep Earth,” said Graham Pearson, lead study author and a geochemist at the University of Alberta in Canada.
The worthless-looking diamond encloses a tiny piece of an olivine mineral called ringwoodite, and it’s the first time the mineral has been found on Earth’s surface in anything other than meteorites or laboratories.
Ringwoodite only forms under extreme pressure, such as the crushing load about 320 miles (515 kilometers) deep in the mantle.
What’s in the mantle?
Most of Earth’s volume is mantle, the hot rock layer between the crust and the core.
Too deep to drill, the mantle’s composition is a mystery leavened by two clues: meteorites, and hunks of rock heaved up by volcanoes.
First, scientists think the composition of the Earth’s mantle is similar to that of meteorites called chondrites, which are chiefly made of olivine.
Second, lava belched by volcanoes sometimes taps the mantle, bringing up chunks of odd minerals that hint at the intense heat and pressure olivine endures in the bowels of the Earth.
Seismic waves suddenly speed up or slow down at certain depths in the mantle.
Researchers think these speed zones arise from olivine’s changing configurations.
For example, 323 to 410 miles (520 to 660 km) deep, between two sharp speed breaks, olivine is thought to become ringwoodite.
But until now, no one had direct evidence that olivine was actually ringwoodite at this depth.
“Most people never expected to see such a sample.
Samples from the transition zone and lower mantle are exceedingly rare and are only found in a few, unusual diamonds,” Hans Keppler, a geochemist at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, wrote in a commentary also published in Nature today.
Earth’s deepest ocean
The diamond from Brazil confirms that the models are correct: Olivine is ringwoodite at this depth, a layer called the mantle transition zone.
And it resolves a long-running debate about water in the mantle transition zone.
The ringwoodite is 1.5 percent water, present not as a liquid but as hydroxide ions (oxygen and hydrogen atoms bound together).
The results suggest there could be a vast store of water in the mantle transition zone, which stretches from 254 to 410 miles (410 to 660 km) deep.
“It translates into a very, very large mass of water, approaching the sort of mass of water that’s present in all the world’s ocean,” Pearson told Live Science’s Our Amazing Planet.
[ Partial cross-section of the Earth showing the location of ringwoodite in the mantle.]
Plate tectonics recycles Earth’s crust by pushing and pulling slabs of oceanic crust into subduction zones, where it sinks into the mantle. This crust, soaked by the ocean, ferries water into the mantle. Many of these slabs end up stuck in the mantle transition zone.
“We think that a significant portion of the water in the mantle transition zone is from the emplacement of these slabs,” Pearson said. “The transition zone seems to be a graveyard of subducted slabs.”
Keppler noted that it’s possible the volcanic eruption that brought the deep diamond to Earth’s surface may have sampled an unusually water-rich part of the mantle, and that not all of the transition-zone layer may be as wet as indicated by the ringwoodite.
“If the source of the magma is an unusual mantle reservoir, there is the possibility that, at other places in the transition zone, ringwoodite contains less water than the sample found by Pearson and colleagues,” Keppler wrote. “However, in light of this sample, models with anhydrous, or water-poor, transition zones seem rather unlikely.”
Ride on a rocket
A violent volcanic eruption called a kimberlite quickly carried this particular diamond from deep in the mantle. “The eruption of a kimberlite is analogous to dropping a Mentos mint into a bottle of soda,” Pearson said. “It’s a very energetic, gas-charged reaction that blasts its way to Earth’s surface.”
The tiny, green crystal, scarred from its 325-mile (525 km) trip to the surface, was bought from diamond miners in Juína, Brazil.
The mine’s ultradeep diamonds are misshapen and beaten up by their long journey. “They literally look like they’ve been to hell and back,” Pearson said. The diamonds are usually discarded because they carry no commercial value, he said, but for geoscientists, the gems provide a rare peek into Earth’s innards.
The ringwoodite discovery was accidental, as Pearson and his co-authors were actually searching for a means of dating the diamonds. >>>
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Thanks ROM, that’s fascinating.
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Interesting indeed. This might be the answer to a bible mystery.
7:11In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the
broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. 7:12And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
8:27When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: 8:28When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the
: 8:29When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: 8:30Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him;
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That wasn’t quite the formatting I was expecting. Bugger 🙁
Note to self, use preview…
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Wonderful summary, ROM. Thank you for that. Hope the idea of ‘old’ and ‘new’ water is now better understood by the participants of this thread.
Vlad
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Did they forget that cold water is denser and sinks? Sure displacement by the wind can upwell some old cold water, but the wind isn’t always present, isn’t always strong enough to cause this upwelling and the S pole is a powerful source of new cold water to replace anything that upwelled to the surface. It will not take mere centuries to exhaust the cold (old or new) water, but will take until the Sun reaches its red giant phase and consumes the Earth.
This is a classic case of acknowledging only the small slice of reality that can be spun to support a cause while ignoring anything else. This is how politics works and this is how Nature reports.
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It’s not that I disagree with any of this but I’m puzzled — what is “old water”? How does water get old? I think that the bulk of water on Earth has to be the same age. Do they mean water that hasn’t been near the surface for a long time as I think? Or is it something else. Or is that your term, Jo? In any case it’s a confusing choice of terminology.
Ocean currents I can understand, however. And I’ve wondered for years why the climate change camp has kept insisting that Arctic and Antarctic floating ice is melting from increasing air temperature above it when warmer water below it seems like such a better candidate to investigate. The specific heat values of air and water just don’t compare with each other, thus the ability of slightly warmer water to melt significant amounts of ice is so much greater than the ability of slightly warmer air. I assume air at atmospheric pressure.
As for the premise Nature has put forth, IT’S ABOUT TIME!
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From the description I assume “old water” is sea water that has been sea water for a very long time, as opposed the sea water that was recently river water, ice or water vapor. Also, or alternatively, “old water” could be sea water that has stayed in the same region at similar temperatures for a long period.
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You could be right. Do I remember correctly that sea water is slightly more dense than fresh and consequently they don’t mix very rapidly? Or does it even matter?
41
Perhaps Old Water is water that has appeared on Antiques Road Show?
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Jo needs to supply something a little less intoxicating on this blog. I mean, old water is having a very detrimental effect, don’t you think? 😉
50
yeah it just means it has been stuck in some part of the water cycle for a long time
20
Old water is a bit like the ancient trees in Lord of the Rings, the Ents. It is stuff from ancient times that comes to save us (at least temporarily) and be the hero.
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“Which rather begs the question: If there was a conundrum then the skeptics who pointed it out were not deniers, but correct.”BINGO!
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Quite so. And if you read the paper you’ll see they have cited a whole lot of science which draws the conclusion that there is a conundrum and that further research is needed to resolve it. In other words you would be correct but you would not be pointing anything out that they didn’t already know about and as this paper shows the standard boring old paid by government scientists were already on to it without it being pointed out (ie you weould not be pointing out since that implies that something was not known or noticed)
11
You know the conundrum was basically all noise and no signal, so they ignored reality and agreed more work needed to be done.
Pathetic.
40
and what did you think of the new work?
10
‘The Southern Ocean has shown little warming over recent decades’
True
‘…upwelling of unmodified water from depth damps warming around Antarctica’
Maybe
‘… greenhouse gas-induced surface heat uptake is largely balanced by anomalous northward heat transport associated with the equatorward flow of surface waters’
Rubbish
‘These findings suggest the Southern Ocean responds to greenhouse gas forcing on the centennial, or longer, timescale …’
More rubbish
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sounds like you agree with what you already knew to be the case and disagree with what you don’t. Lucky you don’t plan scientific experiments.
Or a more helpful way of putting this is, how would you interpret their data?
31
Antarctica is getting colder and the ocean circling is also cooling without the aid of upwelling.
The Southern Ocean carbon sink has gone into cruise control and the nearby old growth forest is also hard at work.
http://www.c3headlines.com/2016/05/scientific-research-confirms-increased-co2-improves-southern-hemisphere-forest-growth.html
As you know water vapor is by far the greatest greenhouse gas and it puts a damper on temperatures no matter how much CO2 is floating about.
Southern Ocean responds to oscillations on the centennial and longer timescales and has nothing to do with carbon dioxide gas forcing.
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Its also worth remembering that the cooling of the Southern Ocean and the increasing extent of sea ice is all down to a positive Southern Annular Mode (SAM).
20
Here is a snapshot.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1pbxgxlcN3o/UiG8cq-nM2I/AAAAAAAAApU/541ZAJTNiHM/s720/SAM%2520time%2520series%25201960%2520to%25202010.png
20
So all that stuff that was released before the publication that is the subject of the blog post.
How do you interpret their data given that you don’t like their interpretation
10
The data has obviously been tortured to get the desired outcome, you should take climate change more seriously.
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thanks for the succinct and insightful analysis. Write to the editors with that one and I’m sure they will withdraw or correct
10
Let’s not worry about them, the upwelling came to an end late last century.
‘Since the turn of the millennium, upwelling has generally subsided in all sectors apart from the Pacific, halting this anomalous release of stored CO2 into the atmosphere.’
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-09-revived-oceanic-co2-uptake.html#jCp
10
Gee Aye, the Subtropical Ridge should have its centre closer to Dubbo than in the Great Australian Bight. What do you make of this?
http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/charts/synoptic_col.shtml
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well it is certainly further south than typical for the winter (which can be further north than Dubbo). The prognostics are predicting a lot of change over the next few days.
I don’t think my opinion of the factors causing this using only that map, my eyes and my brain will be very edifying. Why are you asking?
00
Its natural climate change and I thought you might be interested in witnessing the start of a mini ice age.
The CMIP5 models show the STR is intensifying and has a clear poleward movement in the Southern Hemisphere winter (Grose et al) and presumably increased ice extent.
It pours cold water on AGW.
00
Thank-you Jo for this report and …
While the publication ‘Nature’ investigated the abundant use of prefossilized coprolite in science, it was found that 97% of the most offensive odoriferous elements were freely venting from the stagnant putrefaction pool of ‘Climate Science™”.
In conclusion it is considered this is caused by investigative atrophy.
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of course that’s male bovine prefossilized coprolite 🙂
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MBPFC = ‘male bovine pre-fossilized coprolite.
I s’pose it has a ring to it, but just doesn’t come out right …
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Tish boom, or is that boom tish
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Maybe a bovine laxative would fix that?
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You should see what it looks like when a cow shits over yonder in the middle of the night, on a real time 8-13 micron FLIR (forward looking infra-red receiver). Tail goes straight out. Explosive Vesuvius follows then plop on ground, with sparklers emanating upward like that milk drop photograph! We all help others to get up from ROFLMAO!
All the best! -will-
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Jo wrote:
Yep, they’ll get it on their hands and fingers and it will go all over the papers on their desks. What a mess. The goldfish won’t look like goldfish any more.
Thank you Jo.
That line made my day. 😛
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The Paper also debunks a part of GISTEMP. The global data is split into 8 bands by Longitude. The most southerly encompasses Antarctica and mostly. They have temperature data going right back to 1880, but there were no permenant bases on Antarctica to collect temperature data until the 1950s. The most Southerly temperature station before that was Base Orcadas. I found the temperature anomaly for Antarctica until 1950 was extremely erratic, showed cooling in the early twentieth century (when the rest of the world was warming) and was very similar to Base Orcadas.
In terms of the Ocean current charts, Base Orcadas is roughly where the warmer surface currents circuling Antartica overlay the cold currents moving from the Atlantic. This explains the variability, and why it cannot be a temperature proxy for anywhere else.
40
The implications of the above is that global average surface temperature anomalies based on land thermometers and random samples from the oceans might be quite wide of the mark. Shifts on ocean currents may be a cause of localized temperature trends that are quite different from other areas. Long term shifts in weather fronts may be another. As a consequence, the attempts to eliminate real biases, such as the UHI effect, may do the opposite. Because in many areas of the world the best temperature records tend to be in towns (where the are people to read them) the most consistent temperature trend across a region could be the UHI effect. I discuss this further here.
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They’d better toss the whole mess soon. California’s getting tricksy with the laws, and if this one passes BEFORE the mess is tossed, well, the warmistas will be on the end of a stick they were waving at everyone else.
All quail before the California Inquisition!
http://overlawyered.com/2016/05/california-bill-revive-lapsed-statutes-limitation/ (plenty of links in this little piece to items previously covered)
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Something else to consider is that while the Thermohaline circulation is commonly considered to be driven by density differences, the trigger is the hydrological effect of water pushing up from the bottom at the equator to replace the relative difference between evaporation and precipitation. Net evaporation towards the equator effectively pulls the ocean surface up while net rain towards the poles pushes the surface down, thus deep cold water pushes up at the equator, pushing the thermocline up with it, but never reaching the surface. The slightly cooler surface water resulting from removed latent heat is heated by the Sun reestablishing an equilibrium thermocline insulating deep ocean cold water from warm surface waters. Note that in most of the latitudes where there is net precipitation, there is no effective thermocline, so the net precipitation can be considered to replenish the deep ocean cold while gravity drives the colder denser water down. Yes, density differences matter, but it’s not the whole story.
The implication being that as long as there is net evaporation towards the equator, net precipitation towards the poles and that each pole is in darkness for months, there will always be enough cold water to sink and replace that which is pushing the thermocline up. Furthermore, since the thermocline effectively insulates deep ocean cold from warm surface waters and deep ocean cold is clamped at 0C, the only water that reacts to changes in the planets equilibrium temperature is that in the thin slice of warm ocean water above the thermocline plus a thin slice of the thermocline itself and not all of the water in the worlds oceans. This is why the planet responds fast enough for us to recognize seasonal variability and is why the time constants on the order of decades to centuries needed to support CAGW theory can be precluded.
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As I read it the premise of this study is to suggest the ‘old cold deep water’ in the oceans act as earth’s cold air conditioner that is offsetting our dangerous acceleration of CO2 production.
Of course time is running out as there’s only so much ‘old cold deep water’ to go around and once again us greedy selfish humans don’t care while we march towards oblivion.
I wonder if these CAGW alarmists know there’s a difference between scepticism and pessimism?
91
Given that +95% of the World’s water is completely unknown, climaganda has a nerve using the term ‘old’ water. As much nerve it seems to segue seamlessly from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’ and ‘weirding’ and then to invoke ‘regional warming’, the very thing that falsified the ‘global’ failure of IPCC models. Given the less than 1C warming in the last century (Lloyd 2015), which lies entirely within natural variation, such proclamations remain politics.
But politics it has been said, is the art of lying. These climate folk lurch between both badly.
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Manfred, you said –
” Given the less than 1C warming in the last century (Lloyd 2015), which lies entirely within natural variation, such proclamations remain politics.”
Natural variation? Natural variation!
You’ll have the wrath of the grant wallowers howling at you from the trough-house. Climate scientist will be spluttering their Penfolds Grange Shiraz 1973 reading about your belief in “natural variation”.
Good gawd, “natural variation” is why ‘climate science’ was invented – TO KILL SUCH A NOTION!
You seem not to understand that the only variations allowed are those that mankind inflicts on the planet.
/saroff 🙂
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“and the rise of regional warming scares”
Regional warming from the AMO, and El Ninos is all there has been in the whole satellite record.
Despite the rise of CO2, there has been no warming in the southern SH outside the tropics for 20+ years. 38 years in the Antarctic.
Even in the NH most of the tiny amount of warming has come from EL Nino events and the upward leg of the AMO (which is now heading back down again)
121
typo correction
….no warming in the southern hemisphere outside the tropics….
51
“All the modelers said CO2 would amplify the warming at both poles.”
Confirmed by the Union of Concerned Scientists:
“[Global Warming] is expected to be more rapid and severe in polar regions compared to other places on Earth.”
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Humanity is now aware that Antarctica cannot melt and flood water world, but does the Southern Ocean carbon sink become invigorated because of a particular mechanism?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/southern-ocean-sink-turns-the-tide-on-climate-change-alarm/news-story/3e86309f1f65c80bc43a5852c7216090
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Ken Stringer has been showing us the pause for the world’s regions for a long time.
He is using UAH V6 and the planet hasn’t warmed for 18 yrs 9 mths and Antarctica has cooled slightly since Dec 1978 and OZ hasn’t warmed for over 21 years
The only place to show recent warming is NH extra tropics, by about 0.17C per century. Big deal. Here are all the graphs and his comments for all the regions.
https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/the-pause-update-april-2016/
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Sorry above should be Ken Stewart not Stringer. Grrrrrrr.
40
so how are the alarmists like Reuters’ Doyle handling this news? this is Doyle’s gotcha finale:
30 May: Reuters: Alister Doyle: Antarctic seas defy global warming thanks to chill from the deep
It was unclear if the cold waters could delay a melt of ice locked up on land in Antarctica, the biggest worry about the continent that could sharply raise global sea levels.
Colin Summerhayes of the Scott Polar Research Institute, who was not involved in the study, said even the slight warming in waters to about 1 degree Celsius (33.8°F) had been bad news for ice shelves around the fringes of Antarctica.
“Even water that cool is still warm enough to melt the ice at the base of the ice shelves,” he wrote in a comment
http://news.trust.org/item/20160530140307-ollcr/?source=leadCarousel
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Looks again like a lot of commenters are commenting on someones comments on someone who has not read the paper’s take on the paper.
Here is the doi (as Jo provided 10.1038/ngeo2731 and here is where you paste it http://sci-hub.bz/
This site looks dodgy and it will send you a pdf without asking but it passes all government and university firewalls so it must be safe!
It is good for the soul and the brain to read past the abstract yourself.
22
Time to analyse the science as well as analyse the spin?
20
Maybe . . ‘false teeth’
Sorry couldn’t resist!
GeoffW
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This 2015 study found that an increase in Co2 emissions actually cools Antarctica. But I suppose you all heard about this study through our MSM? Funny I missed it too.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL066749/full
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I think that you are on to something Neville.
Have a look at the Earth emmission spectra on p15 of this paper.
http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/12170.pdf
The emmission spectra were recorded by the Nimbus 4 satellite over the Sahara, the Med and Amtarctica. Over the Sahara and the Med there is a dip in the spectrum at e CO2 wavelength implying that CO2 is absorbing surface radiation.
Over the Antactic however there is increased radiation at the CO2 wavelength indicating that CO2 is and emmission pipe in those cold temperatures.
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I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a bit but my knowledge of radiation physics is not up to the task. CO2 absorbs at specific wavelengths and some of the energy goes to vibrational energy (temperature). What happens to the rest? My limited understanding tells me that there will be considerable reemission of photons at different energy levels.
Can someone out there enlighten me as to whether this is the case and, if so, at what frequencies does this occur? Are these frequencies characteristic to the molecule?
40
This diagram by Robert Rhode is quite good and is widely reproduced.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Transmission.png
It shows the absorbtion spectra of water vapour, CO2, methane and some other gases.
As I understand it a CO2 molecule may absorb an infrared photon and vibrates. It can then either re-emit a photon or pass the energy to other air molecules by collision. Also the reverse can occur. CO2 vibrates after a collision and emits a photon.
I have some reservations about Robert Rhode’s diagram, including the fact that what he shows as the Earth emission spectrum does not match actual observations very well.
30
Peter,
Not exactly. The kinetic energy of a typical gas molecule in motion is less than the nominal energy of a LWIR photon involved in GHG absorption/emission, so the possibility of a collision energizing a GHG molecule is nearly zero. Collisions between GHG molecules and O2/N2 may result in the GHG molecule emitting a photon and a small amount of energy may be taken from or given to the linear kinetic motion of the GHG molecule as it emits or absorbs a frequency slightly away from resonance. This is the mechanism behind collisional broadening which has an equal probability of speeding up the molecule as it does of slowing it down. The primary way that GHG effects can heat O2/N2 is indirectly by being absorbed by liquid or solid water in the atmosphere which then collides with O2/N2 gas molecules.
And yes, the spectrum is not what we observe from space as we see significant energy in the absorption bands. The spectrum shown is what passes through the transparent parts of the spectrum and does not account for those re-emission from GHG molecules which eventually leave the top of the atmosphere (about half of the energy that does not pass through the transparent window).
50
Thanks CO2.
You make a good point which I had not considered i.e. that Robert Rohde only shows the atmospheric window in his diagram. The real spectrum includes the GHG emissions. That explains the discrepancy quite nicely.
30
“Not exactly. The kinetic energy of a typical gas molecule in motion is less than the nominal energy of a LWIR photon involved in GHG”
What nonsense! You are confusing the fake rms molecular energy with the 2mv change in momentum within the interval of collision/repulsion. The 0.066 ev required for thermal 15 micron emission from that highly resonant molecule is easy to obtain, and the work function for such emission is way less than that.
05
“I have some reservations about Robert Rhode’s diagram, including the fact that what he shows as the Earth emission spectrum does not match actual observations very well.”
The chart shows nothing of an emission spectrum! That chart is a lopsided cartoon of the measurable gas attenuation of the modulation that may be present on electromagnetic radiative flux! There is no way to distinguish unmodulated (DC) flux through a gas and such flux from that gas!
05
The kinetic temperature of a gas is determined by the mass and speed of colliding gas molecules in motion. All of the photon energy absorbed by a GHG molecule is converted into rotational or vibrational energy which for the most part is stored as a resonance in the periodic variability in the shape of the molecules electron cloud. While the nucleus does move around a bit, being thousands of times heavier, the motion is thousands of times smaller.
Equipartition of Energy is often misinterpreted to consider the vibrational/rotational motion of a molecules electron cloud as a degree of freedom of mechanical motion that is shared with all others, but this is distinctly different from physically translating, vibrating or rotating the entire mass of a molecule. For one thing, modes of storing energy in electron shells are constrained by the laws of quantum mechanics and only relatively large, specific quanta of energy can be added or removed at once, while the physical motion of a molecules mass is not necessarily quantized, except perhaps at the Planck scale. Another way to express this is that storing energy in electron clouds is a narrow band process, while storing energy as matter in motion is a broadband process.
Of course, if you put a thermometer in it, the temperature will reflect this stored energy since energy is stored only temporarily and is quickly emitted as another photon which is absorbed by another molecule resulting in a flux of absorption band photons and photons affect temperature sensors in much the same way as collisions with air molecules do. After all, joules are joules.
40
Thanks.CO2.
40
I just thought I might do a quick check on that.
Calc Tool gives the energy of an IR photon of 15micron wavelength (CO2) as 8kJ/mole = 1.3×10^-20J/molecule.
http://www.calctool.org/CALC/other/converters/e_of_photon
Average kinetic energy/molecule of diatomic gas=5/2KbT.
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/average-kinetic-energy-of-molecules.655102/
Say N2 at room temperature; 5/2×1.38×10^-23×288=1×10^-20J/molecule which is approximately the same.
I might have made a mistake, but if not I would say that a collision between an N2 molecule and a CO2 molecule could give the CO2 enough energy to emit an IR photon at 15 micron wavelength.
20
If CO2 does not derive energy from molecular collisions and then emit a photon, how then do we explain the emission spectra derived from the Nimbus 4 satellite over Antarctica which I noted in 36.1 and again here. Scroll to page 15.
http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/12170.pdf
30
Peter,
Your T is too high for the average atmosphere. My calculation was based on mv^2/2 which worked out to be a little less. In any event, the kinetic energy of a collision must be much greater than the energy of a state transition in order for any significant possibility that a collision will cause a state transition. If its the same, the molecule stops moving and its effective temperature becomes 0K which is very UNLIKELY. If less, the effective temperature would need to drop below 0K which is impossible.
20
Peter,
A few points to make about these plots. First is that using a linear wave number scale makes the effects from CO2 and H2O seem more more important then they really are, relative to the energy in those bands. A more appropriate scale would be a log scale of wavelength in which case the 15u band shrinks to be proportional to the actual energy in that band. Another point is that as cold as it is in Antarctica, water vapor is nearly absent and at 210K, we are even below the melting point of CO2. Here’s a more representative plot based on energy density and is the calculated composite result (average clouds + clear) from my version of Hitran for the mid latitudes.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/absorb/absorb_spectrum.png
Regarding the Antarctic data, it’s not clear whether this is looking at surface ice or clouds and what season was the measurement made. Based on the temperature, I suspect its during winter when clouds are warmer than the surface. In any event, the total energy leaving the polar regions is a tiny fraction of the energy leaving the planet.
30
co2isnotevil June 2, 2016 at 1:50 am
“Peter,Your T is too high for the average atmosphere. My calculation was based on mv^2/2 which worked out to be a little less. In any event, the kinetic energy of a collision must be much greater than the energy of a state transition in order for any significant possibility that a collision will cause a state transition.”
What makes you think that some ‘state transition’ is a requirement for thermal EMR flux origination?
“If its the same, the molecule stops moving and its effective temperature becomes 0K which is very UNLIKELY. If less, the effective temperature would need to drop below 0K which is impossible.”
You certainly have a weird idea of what temperature is!! As long as a molecule is a gas it retains all of the heat of evaporation of that matter!
04
OK then, let me fumble through this.
Which is not a quantum process?
Which is a different process from the excitation of rotation / vibration?
I read this a few times and can’t decide if “resonance in the periodic variability in the shape of the molecules electron cloud” is the same as “modes of storing energy in electron shells”
How does the energy of this photon compare to that of the incident photon? Or, to put it another way, how does the spectrum of the emitted photons relate to the absorption spectrum?
Its been a lot of years since I was on even a nodding acquaintance with quantum mechanics.
20
G’day L.C.:
If I could refer you to the reference I found once (about 15 – 20 years ago … ) I would send you there. It was a ‘handout’ for an on-line Physics class from a major university; it may still exist, but time constraints limit the amount I can devote to finding old references.
What I saw was more than enough “proof” that CAGW was a total scam, especially when you combine what this class handout showed, vs. Al Gore and his “Inconvenient Truth” cartoon of a 15-micron photon going “up” into the atmosphere, and being ‘reflected’ back to the ground.
This ‘handout’ stated (unambiguously) that one of six things can happen to said 15-micron photon, when absorbed by a carbon dioxide molecule:
1) The photon can be re-emitted, more-or-less as it was before absorption; note that Al Gore shows the re-emitted photon as knowing which direction is “down”, so it only goes back to the Earth, and not in a random direction …
2) The molecular bonds can vibrate (may or may not include a change in K.E.);
3) The molecular bonds can stretch and rebound multiple times (may or may not include a change in K.E.);
4) The molecule can rotate at a faster rate (may or may not include a change in K.E.);
5) The K.E. can change (usually accompanied by an immediate collision with another atmospheric molecule; this is commonly called ‘conduction’). What climastrological models fail to consider is that anything in the Earth’s atmosphere which gets warmer also starts to convect, which is a primary process in our atmosphere;
6) The energy gained by the absorption of a 15-micron photon may be dissipated by emission of several lower-energy photons, say in the radio range.
So this idea that when a CO2 molecule “absorbs” a thermal IR photon, that the same photon comes back to Earth to cause heating is ludicrous, to say the least. There is a 1-in-6 chance of that happening to begin with, and then, an emitted 15-micron photon has 4-pi-steradians of angle to depart its “host” ! It’s about a 50/50 whether said photon ever makes it back to Earth in the first place!
Also realize that the above discussion involves processes which take place in times measured typically in nanoseconds, or less. We can treat the above discussion as an isolated event, taking place as it were over a time span of several minutes, but the reality is that it happens continuously, and instantaneously also.
Hope that helps. It would be great if some of the artisans and Brainiacs here and at Anthony’s could come up with a video that shows the above processes. Maybe it could be incorporated into a “Skeptics Handbook, e-version, II” or something like that.
Regards,
Vlad
40
Lightning,
The electron shells of GHG molecules absorb all the energy of an incident photon and its the electron shell that vibrates which is translated to the nucleus, but because of the mass difference, the nucleus hardly moves. This is distinctly different from spinning an entire molecule around some axis. BTW, CO2 has no modes of rotation, but it can be physically rotated around any axis
The modes of storing energy in an electron shell are different resonant modes of the electron. Schroedinger’s wave equation predicts and describes both the quantization of energy stored in electron shells and the non quantization of motion.
In most cases, an energized GHG molecule will emit one or more photons whose total energy is the same as was absorbed. This gets complicated when collisions are involved and less energy can be emitted as photons as the molecule speeds up or more energy can be emitted as photons as the molecule slows down. It’s important to recognize that the amount of energy converted is a small fraction of the total energy involved and that there is an equal probability that the molecule will speed up or slow down, thus there is no NET transfer of energy from photons to translational motion.
40
The physics in the absorption and emission of light by molecules is far more complicated than comment bites here.
Standard treatise on atomic spectra, by Condon and Shortley, fills 432 pages of text. Herzberg’s treatises fill 581 pages for diatomic molecules, 538 pages for polyatomic molecules, and 670 pages for the electronic spectra of polyatomic molecules. Bohren and Clauthiaux on Atm. Radiation: 470 pages, Townes and Schawlow devote 648 pages to microwave spectroscopy. And the physical strain of just lifting these nearly 3500 pages is as nothing compared to the mental strain of absorbing them.
The interesting link posted by Neville 10:43am Fig.s 2,4 and explanation is a decent & much shorter summary worth reading/absorbing in this field.
——
co2isnotevil: “The electron shells of GHG molecules absorb all the energy of an incident photon..”
I’m wondering how these shells absorb the photon’s angular momentum too. Actually this comment is temperature dependent, is inconsistent (for air at STP) with the paper in the link “contributions to the absorption of the Earth’s radiance by the first 100 meters of the atmosphere” posted by Peter C 12:21pm: “The CO2 spectrum is dominated by the bending vibration, centered at 667 cm–1.”
Rotational energies also are quantized similar to electronic energies. Carbon dioxide has a bending mode with frequency 667.4 cm−1 (15 μm) and an asymmetric stretching mode with frequency 2349.2 cm−1 (4.25 μm). The asymmetric stretching mode is infrared inactive. It is CO2 vibration-rotational band near 15 μm that is the infrared active major player in the global surface warming & upper atm. cooling scenario associated with increased carbon dioxide well mixed in Earth atmosphere.
At normal terrestrial atm. trop. temperatures, the air molecule average energy (Boltzmann constant*T) is appreciably less than the separation between electronic energy levels (~100*Boltzmann*T) but not separation of rotational energy levels (~1/3*Boltzmann*T) . For those reasons, can ignore electrons in determining the energies of gas molecules for troposphere meteorological purposes. Electron levels move the specific heat of STP air negligible amount as borne out by testing.
——
Vlad: “What I saw was more than enough “proof” that CAGW was a total scam…”
I just laid out some specific ref.s to compare each item of your unnamed reference “found once (about 15 – 20 years ago … )”. You will do better science basing your comments on actual observations abounding in those named ref.s.
For example, none support your contention “The photon can be re-emitted”, all support the photon is absorbed by CO2, i.e. photon death. Any emitted photon is born anew. A photon transmitted: lives on.
120
Lt,
Yes, it is more complicated, but simpler explanations are easier to digest, even if not completely accurate, albeit accurate enough.
All of the photons energy is EM in origin (i.e. a resonant LC circuit whose impedance is Z0/a, Z0 -> impedance of free space, a -> fine structure constant) and all of this energy is absorbed by the electron shell, whose impedance is the same as a photon (hence the easy conversion back and forth). There is often confusion that kinetic terms like spin, angular momentum, etc. are applied to quantum mechanical state which are really just resonances constrained by the speed of light, the specific geometry (static or time varying) and of course, Schroedinger’s wave equation. While we can think of such concepts in the particle domain for the purpose of conceptualization, we can also quantify them as wave functions where spin, angular momentum etc. have different interpretations relative to the behavior of the wave.
The 15u absorption band is strictly vibrational. There are no rotational modes of CO2 that can be excited by a 15u photon.
30
co2isnotevil 8:37am – The simplest explanations work only when they are possible. Your electron shell explanation is not possible for Earth trop. air at STP where the air avg. molecular energy is of the order boltzmann constant*T. There is not enough energy in STP absorption/collisions for electronic energy level increases.
To kick up one electronic energy level you are going to need absorb energy order of 100*boltzmann*T as I wrote. As a consequence of conditions normally found in Earth trop., photon energy levels are not sufficient to increase electronic energy from predominant base level to the next highest electronic level. For the next highest rotational, vibrational energy level all you need is 1/3 to 10 * boltzmann constant*T, hence rotational, vibrational quantized levels are the predominate earth air energy absorption methods not electronic as you write.
“The 15u absorption band is strictly vibrational.”
Once again you reduce to a simple explanation that is not possible. In reality, measurements show, CO2 bonds are not constrained to a line: as the triatomic molecule bends at 667.4 cm−1 (15 μm) the concurrent rotation along the line (also quantized) causes a changing dipole moment thus CO2 15 μm band really is measured to be rotational-vibrational.
If ALL the internal modes of motion of molecules, including those of their electrons, neutrons, and protons, contributed significantly to the specific heat of gases, the world would be measured a much different place.
70
LT,
To energize a ground state CO2 molecule, all that is needed is the energy of a 15u photon or about 1.3E-20 joules. You seem to agree with me that there is not enough translational energy to do this by collision, but you don’t seem to think that the absorption of a 15u photon can. BTW, the translational energy is 2/3*kT, which is about 6E-21 joules at 288K or about 1/2 of the energy of a 15u photon. I have no idea where your 100*kT value came from since 1.3E-20 joules (the energy of a 15u photons) is only about 4/3*kT.
There is no dipole moment of a spinning, but not vibrating (ground state), CO2 molecule, thus rotational modes are not IR active. If its vibrating as well, the dipole moment comes from the vibration and is slightly modified by concurrent rotation and what this does is add fine structure to the absorption spectrum. The point I’m making is that the tiny amounts of conversion between rotation and vibration consequential to collisions have an equal probability of increasing or decreasing rotation, thus no net energy from GHG absorption is directly converted into rotational energy.
10
co2isnotevil 3:34pm – “I have no idea where your 100*kT value came from..”
I get that. To kick up one electronic energy level you are going to need absorb energy order of 100*boltzmann*T.
As you confirm, there isn’t enough 15 μm photonic energy to do so hence your “The electron shells of GHG molecules absorb all the energy of an incident photon..” is not correct at STP per measurements. The quantized energy levels of molecule rotation ARE found spaced close enough together (~1/3kT) to absorb the incident 15 μm photon.
Ground state CO2 molecules in nature are indeed both rotating and vibrating (bending 667.4 cm-1) – the dipole is evident by measurement. I cited enough ref.s for you to look up the test results. I realize reference really means archival which loosely translates from the latin into “no one reads this stuff.”
70
No argument from me; this was an attempt to help the individual named “Lightning Camel” who asked a question. Of course the quantum Physics of this is much more complicated than my “… unnamed reference … ” (I promise, if I ever find it again, I’ll ask Jo or her mods to put it up for us) would have us believe.
Please recall that in everything we know, study, learn, we start with simpler parts, and gradually extend into the multi-thousand page references on Emission/Absorption Spectra. My ‘dissertation’ was not intended to be accurate down to a hairy gnat’s eyelash, just a broad discussion of what I learned (for the first time, mind you) about what a CO2-molecule can do when it reaches an excited state. Prior to learning that, I had the impression that an absorbed photon ONLY resulted in the emission of a fresh photon, of the same energy (obviously, I disputed the concept so graphically illustrated by the subsequent Inconvenient Truth that the photon automatically and unidirectionally headed back towards its source, the Earth. In that cartoon, we see the ‘warmists’ attempting to explain a rather complex process in a simplified manner). Remember, to teach someone something, you have to approach it at their level; approaching a question from a learner at your level is a guarantee of failure.
That being said, I would again appeal to those with artistic and scientific abilities to consider creating a video of some sort, which would show each of the possible outcomes, as listed in 36.1.1.2.1. We start with an opening shot of a “sample” of atmosphere, 2499 molecules of N2, O2, Ar, H20, and a single CO2 molecule. We zero in on the CO2 (after some introductory remarks about the general make-up of the atmosphere), then cut to the animations of the CO2 in isolation, and show it absorbing a 4-micron photon (followed by results of that absorption), then a 15-micron photon, and the subsequent results. It might be worthwhile to work into a comparison which shows a single CO2 and the proper proportion of H20-molecules (say, a nominal 50-to-1, give or take), each doing their thing (spectroscopically). With your background, you could advise the production crew, to assist in making it as accurate as possible, within the limitations of what we can reasonably expect to show in a 3-to-5-minute video, presented at the educational level of most adults. The goal here would be to make something which drives another stake through the heart of the CAGW-vampire, unassailable by the likes of Gavin, Al, Kevin, J’mma et al… Once you make it clear to someone that one molecule in 2500 does NOT dictate the temperature of the other 2499, we gain the high ground.
Thanks for the comment Lt. Cusper. My regards, as always,
Vlad (the Impaler of Warmunists and other scammers … )
11
Vlad 11:17pm: “consider creating a video of some sort”
I’m a great adherent to a supremely important law in the history of science: “the Infinite Chain of Priority: Somebody Else Always Did It First”* so the video very likely already exists.
“Once you make it clear to someone that one molecule in 2500 does NOT dictate the temperature of the other 2499, we gain the high ground.”
Consider that the 1 molecule has 1,000x the avg. translational KE of the 2499. When molecules collide, translational KE can be transformed into rotational and vibrational energy and vice versa. This expectation is borne out countless times every day on pool tables all over the world. Also, as expected in the top post, when cooler water upwells into warmer water.
*Tony Rothman, 2003: “Everything’s Relative and Other Fables from Science and Technology”, John Wiley & Sons, p. xiii.
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Unlike the ‘pool table’, the atmosphere is 3-D, so collisional energy does something else: it brings about convection, which is a thermal stabilization (and ultimately, release) mechanism. Whatever else CO2 does, it also causes the atmosphere to seek an equilibrium condition (which it never reaches), which then brings about other effects.
Are you implying that the effect of increased CO2 is linear? We add more CO2 to the atmosphere, so there is more ‘heating’ effect on the atmosphere? Just in case that is your position, then you are not up to speed on the diminishing effect of more CO2. Geological evidence proves that the effect diminishes with increased concentration; had it not, we would have gone thermal runaway back in the Cryogenian, if not before.
Vlad
10
Vlad 2:13am – “collisional energy does something else: it brings about convection”
Convection is not from micro collisions, convection is macro, thermally driven mass motion in fluids, brought about when a fluid is warmed from below in a gravity field. If the fluid is not warmed from below, there are still micro collisions but no macro convection. The thermally driven fluid motion in the top post is in part from convection and in part from different temperature & density gradients.
“Are you implying that the effect of increased CO2 is linear? We add more CO2 to the atmosphere, so there is more ‘heating’ effect on the atmosphere?”
No, given long term Earth ~steady state, the SW&LW IR photon numbers are reasonably fixed in&out; thus an increase in IR active gas such as CO2 means fewer and fewer unmarried photons available to date. The effect is logarithmic decreasing.
CO2 cannot “heat” the total atm. as it burns no fuel like the sun. Added IR active CO2 extinction coefficient increases the clear atm. optical depth thus as I wrote “global surface warming & upper atm. cooling” over/under ambient without the added CO2. As I wrote the interesting link posted by Neville 10:43am Fig.s 2,4 and explanation is a decent & much shorter summary than a text, worth reading/absorbing in this field.
51
You all may find this site of interest — http://nov79.com/gbwm/hnzh.html#ten
10
So, why the dings?
Vlad
10
Dings?
What are dings?
[Abbreviation for dingoes kidneys?(H2G2 reference)]
20
Hi Tom,
“ding (n) …
…(13) an annoyance; esp. for the purpose of being picayune; … ”
Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary, 1973
Supposedly, CO2isnotevil, Lieutenant Cusper, you, Jo, and I should be playing on the same team (he indicates the logarithmic decay of CO2’s “warming” effect), but takes issue with trivia.
Instead of taking issue where there (really) is none, it would be nice if Lieutenant Cusper would devote the same energy to finding the video he thinks already exists (I’ve not found it in many years of looking), or lending his expertise into creating such a video gratis, or otherwise taking the fight to the enemy.
Your thoughts, Tom?
Vlad
10
Yes, we all seem to be worrying about the finer points of CO2 theoretical effects when in reality CO2’s effects are measured as negligible/lost in the noise.
Certainly the whole smelly edifice of AGW/CC is getting hit on all sides — e.g. —
From http://www.co2science.org/articles/V19/jun/a1.php
20
Well blow me down. I thank you all for your work to answer my queries. First off, I know that this is very complex and I appreciate some of you are probably frustrated trying to simplify for those without the required background.
molecule
What I take from this is that when a molecule CO2 absorbs a photon there are various ways the energy may be apportioned. Occasionally a photon of similar wavelength may be emitted but it is much more likely that there will be no photon or a photon of different wavelength.
Lots of things follow from this but, if my basis is correct I thank you.
Vlad, you do good things here but the origin of your name absolutely brings tears to my eyes.
20
Lightning,
The most likely result is the emission of a photon. The reason is quantization where all of the photon energy absorbed by a GHG molecule must be released all at once or not at all and of course, the probability of stimulated emission by an energized GHG molecule upon capturing another photon is near 100%. The most likely scenario is that an energized GHG molecule collides with N2/O2 and re-emits a photon very near to the energy of the photon that energized the GHG molecule in the first place. Any slight difference may end up as physical motion of the molecule, but its equally likely that the emitted photon will be have a little more energy in which case it steals a tiny bit kinetic energy from the molecules motion. Note the distinction between a molecule moving (kinetic temperature) and a molecule vibrating (EM temperature). One manifests temperature by collisions and the other manifests temperature by photons. The difference as it relates to the planets radiant balance and surface temperature is important to understand and whose importance is often lost by improper conflation.
The crucial things to understand is that at most, only a very tiny part of the captured energy is not emitted as a photon and because the photon can be a little more or a little less energetic then the photon that energized the molecule, the net conversion of photon energy to the kinetic temperature of molecules in motion is zero. Note as well that while rotation is quantized, the quantum of energy is very low and in the microwave band which leads to the fine structure in the emission/absorption spectrum of CO2. The nature of this fine structure alone is the evidence that most of the energy captured is emitted as another photon.
Only when re-emitted photons are absorbed by atmospheric water can any significant amount this energy be transferred to the translational motion (i.e. kinetic temperature) of N2/O2. But then again, the kinetic temperature of atmospheric O2/N2, whether heated by GHG’s or any other means, is irrelevant to the radiant balance, the sensitivity and anything else about the planets climate since O2/N2 does not radiate energy in any relevant energy band, either back to the surface or out into space. It’s kinetic temperature is simply slaved to the surface temperature and the lapse rate arising from gravity.
10
worth looking at all the opinions, including Michael Mann, from last November:
Nov 2015: LiveScience: Elizabeth Newbern: Antarctica Is Gaining Ice, So Why Is the Earth Still Warming?
NASA recently released a study suggesting that the Antarctic Ice Sheet is gaining more ice than it is losing — a finding that, at first blush, seems to contradict the idea of global warming. So, how can Antarctica be gaining ice mass in a warming world where ice sheets are collapsing and the melting is predicted to increase sea levels across the globe?…
http://www.livescience.com/52831-antarctica-gains-ice-but-still-warming.html
30
this story must be rattling the CAGW mob.
Reuters’ Doyle piece is dated 30 May so, even with time difference, it’s well over a day old.
Australian has had its piece online for 22 hours. yet, at this stage, there is no coverage from NYT, WaPo, BBC, ABC, Fairfax, Guardian or, indeed, from most of the rest of the MSM!!!
Antarctic seas defy global warming thanks to chill from the deep (Alister Doyle)
Reuters – 30 May 2016
Mystery of Antarctic’s surviving ice cap explained by ‘old’ water
The Australian – 22 hours ago
50
I have been reading a book about Antarctic exploration. One thought I had was that there seemed to have been more Antactica sea ice in Cook’s time 1770-1790 since he made several attempts to find land in the Antrctic region but was unable to penetrate beyond 65S due to a wall of ice.
Captain James Clark Ross managed to penetrate a peripheral wall of ice in 1841 and then was able to sail way further south than anyone had done before reaching about 75S and finding the edge of the Ross ice shelf and the coast of Victoria land.
Since then ships seem to find open water as far as Commonwealth bay at least in mid summer.
In recent years Antartctic sea ice extent has been increasing which would imply that the Antarctic region had been warming since the Little Ice Age but is now getting colder whereas Arctic sea ice extent has continued to decrease hence warming. It is perhaps moot as to whether sea ice extent is a good proxy for temperature but it seems to me that it might be quite a good one.
Climate scientists do not seem to have a good explanation for that
60
So now its old water versus new water ?
Sounds like old BS versus new BS!
Wasn’t the hot water hiding in the deep ocean , suspiciously where no one can find it , much less measure it ?
The Climate Kookoos are redlining the BSometer .
The closer Trump gets to the Presidency the more the true b’lvers and renewable racketeers become hysterical for fear of losing their strangleholds
70
So, the paper in question “explains” why the warming was not uniform.
However, the same logic that is used to bolster the global warming hypothesis is used to discredit the MWP.
From https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151204145919.htm
Warmist, the just gotta have their cake and eat it, too?
111
Studies show MWP prominent in Southern Hemisphere, and covering most of NH
http://notrickszone.com/2016/05/31/body-of-proof-large-number-of-studies-show-medieval-warm-period-prominent-in-southern-hemisphere/#sthash.2s3gUFRo.dpbs
http://kaltesonne.de/mapping-the-medieval-warm-period/
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Look, I hope no-one is going to use this latest study to suggest that we aren’t doomed. That would be going too far.
130
Does that mean “they” will not need any CO2 trading now ?…just kidding..we need it to save the penguins or bankers..or something..or is it all doom ahead with..”its nearly not as worse as we thought..but it worse ever..” or some other meme for the morose..
50
Another great blogg Jo.
The Artic Pause conundrum (with emphasis on ‘con’);
You have covered all the pertinent points and highlighted the related flaws in the green argument. They do seem to have shot themselves in the foot with this one.
GeoffW
41
no wonder WaPo is not keen to report this study!
20 May: WaPo: 10 things you should know about sea level rise and how bad it could be
by Rob Motta, James White and R. Steven Nerem
Recent research has raised concerns about the possible collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and how this could double sea level rise projections for 2100…
1. There is enough water stored as ice to raise sea level 230 feet.
Most of this ice is located in Antarctica and Greenland. Antarctica, with an area 40 percent greater than the United States, is covered by an ice sheet almost a mile thick that holds about 200 feet equivalent of sea level. Most of that ice is — for now — stable, but scientists are concerned that the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which holds about 11 feet of potential sea level rise, has reached a tipping point and will collapse…
4. We could melt it all.
The Earth has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Scientists estimate that if it warms by about 4 to 5 degrees Celsius (7.2 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit), which is projected to happen by the end of the century if we don’t act on climate change, then all the ice will eventually melt. That’s 230 feet of sea level rise…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/05/20/10-things-you-should-know-about-sea-level-rise-and-how-bad-it-could-be/
about the writers: Motta has worked in the energy and environment field as a program manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. White is professor of geological sciences, professor in the environmental studies program, and fellow and director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Nerem is a professor of aerospace engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and leader of NASA’s sea level change team.
20
OT
After crowing about the strong wind generation for South Australia last month, I can’t see RenewEconomy putting up any mention of today’s lacklustre figures.
Right now [Wed 01 Jun at 15:15 (NEM Time)], the mighty 1477 MW of South Australia nameplated wind turbines are generating 24 MW
An awe inspiring 1.625% capacity factor
And the Aneroid site show that the capacity factor has been below 25% since 3pm yesterday, below 20% since midnight, below 10% since 7am and below 5% since 9am.
Now I know South Australia has been losing industry and installing lots of solar panels but seriously – this is beyond a joke. The interconnector and gas plant figures will make very interesting reading tomorrow.
60
And what will happen if the possible closing of Hazlewood actually happens? Vic wont be that keen to give away what they don’t have
50
If Hazelwood closes it won’t just be bad for SA. Vic will also be in trouble. What distresses me so much is that they call our brown coal,”dirty coal”. No it is not. It is beneficial coal.
51
… ”dirty coal”
Based on propaganda that claims CO2 is a pollutant. So lignite, being very wet, requires more of its’ mass to be burnt to supply a set amount of energy compare with black coal, so emmitting more CO2/mJ. Ash content (ie. mineral content) also affects this.
20
But Ian both ash value and elements such as sulfer levels are low in these Latrobe lignites.
By the way coal doesn’t actual have an “ash content”, it is only ash once it’s combusted so it can have an ash value but not a content- sorry to be pedantic 🙂
30
The good thing about Hazelwood being such an old plant is that the boiler/generator units are quite small by today’s standards at 200MW each. This means any shutdown will be staged and the grid will show stress before the whole plant is shut down, bringing the whole shutdown process to a screeching halt.
I’m guessing that once half the units are offline, there will be a calm, hot day or early evening where all the possible demand has been shed (looking at you, South Australia) and all other baseload generation and the imports from the Snowy maxed out and peakers strained and then brown outs will occur at the fringes of the grid. Combined with the panic calls from South Australia (while they can still make them), the Victorian government will be forced to face reality and the old faithful will be brought back up to full capacity and planning for its successor will begin.
All supposing South Australia’s grid hasn’t collapsed on its own prior, bringing Australia as a whole to its senses.
30
Analitik -the French owners are considering shuttering the whole lot according to industry sources yesterday. If they do it would be fun to see what happens if it just happens with short or no notice.
20
Further to Hazelwood – from International Coal News
“Owner Engie has told the French Senate that it was planning to quit coal-fired power altogether, and is seriously considering shuttering the 1.5 gigawatt Hazelwood power station at Morwell, which generates about 6% of Australia’s electricity and almost 25% of Victoria’s power needs.”
I can see tears
00
1 Jun: NatureWorldNews: John Raphael: Study: How Deep, Old Waters Delay Antarctic Ocean Warming
This explains the commonly used inconsistent pattern of warming in the Arctic and Antarctic by climate change deniers…
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/23176/20160601/study-deep-old-waters-delay-antarctic-ocean-warming.htm
following is much more suited to ABC:
1 Jun: ABC: Australia has warmest autumn on record, BoM says
The average temperature for the past three months was 1.86 degrees above average, beating the previous warmest autumn in 2005.
Autumn’s hottest day was 47 degrees Celsius at Mardie in Western Australia on March 3.
The coldest day was -2.5C at Thredbo in New South Wales on May 27.
About half the country experienced its warmest autumn ever, with records set in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and the Northern Territory.
Minimum and maximum temperatures were also above average for most areas around the country…
“We had much warmer than average sea surface temperatures surrounding our coastline, we had El Nino active for most of that time,” she (Climatologist Felicity Gamble) said…
Southern Western Australia was the only part of the country where autumn temperatures were average or below average over autumn…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-01/australia-has-warmest-autumn-on-record/7467758
10
Popcorn big time; Off Topic!!
The Chiefio; E.M. Smith who made an appearance here a few posts back was quick off the mark with this one as his post is dated 1st June and the mid west is about 14 hours behind us here in Oz.
Huff Post Pulled Article
And a link to the article from 3 days ago;
Hillary Clinton to be Indicted on Federal Racketeering Charges
[ the infamous RICO that recently Shukla and his 20 [ ? ] co-signers were promoting to be used against prominent skeptics. He is now under Federal investigation himself for activities not regarded as legitimate! And thats my being very careful and avoiding the big “F” word.]
If this report ion Clinton is genuine and we will wait and see about that, it could go a long way to explaining why Sanders is still running in the Democratic pre selection despite his being way behind Clinton in delegates.
50
Back to our program dear readers!
———–
As we are discussing the deep abyssal ocean currents some quotable paras from a Stanford course lecture [ probably from around the late 90’s] might make a lot of folks here think.
As the warmists with their very limited imaginations have trouble thinking about anything beyond their models and their fixations on CO2 being in total control of the global temperatures, they will be excused if they have trouble comprehending the following paras and just what they might mean for mankind when, not “if”, these drastic climate shifting phenomena once again appear as they have done regularly down through paleo history.
________________________
Page 12; The ocean conveyor Belt.
Quoted from page 14
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Climate alarmist science is beginning to look like the “Ouja Bird”.
Going round and round faster and faster in ever decreasing circles until it flies up its own ****** and disappears forever!
Met Office: Gulf Stream Slowdown Due To Nature Not Climate Change
Abstract
30
Another recent peer-reviewed political flyer in Nature:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7603/full/nature17423.html
10
UNEP’s “poison chalice”!
1 Jun: Deutsche Welle: Study: Climate change makes our food more poisonous
Extreme weather is increasing toxins in our food – which can be fatal. As temperatures keep rising, it seems the problem will only get worse. DW interviews a chief scientist at UNEP.
Extreme weather is increasing the levels of toxins in our food, according to a new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
With global temperatures set to rise by more 3 degrees Celsius, scientists warn the problem will only get worse. DW spoke with UNEP chief scientist Jacqueline McGlade out of Nairobi.
Deutsche Welle: What were the main findings of the report?
Jacqueline McGlade: The United Nations “Environment Frontiers Report” this year identifies emerging issues that include what we call the “poison chalice”: toxin accumulation in crops in response to climate change…
http://www.dw.com/en/study-climate-change-makes-our-food-more-poisonous/a-19297308
10
31 May: WSJ: Brian Spegele: China’s Coal-Plant Binge Deepens Overcapacity Woes
China is building power plants it doesn’t need amid low coal prices and local efforts to create jobs
In a whir of hammering and welding, construction crews in the industrial town of Shouguang put finishing touches on a new coal power plant that testifies to a building binge by Chinese companies—one that is compounding an oversupply of power…
Tens of billions of dollars will be spent over the next two years. Investment in thermal power projects jumped 20% last year even as China’s power demand fell…
China already has more power-generating capacity than any other country. It is projected to add nearly 200 gigawatts worth of new thermal power capacity between 2015 and 2017, according to an analysis by Fitch Ratings Inc. That is more than the entire electrical capacity of Canada. While some capacity would be for natural gas, most will be coal-powered…
http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-coal-plant-binge-deepens-overcapacity-woes-1464692337
1 Jun: Reuters: Nina Chestney: Record new global renewable capacity installed in 2015: report
New installations of renewable power generation capacity (including hydropower) rose to 1,848.5 gigawatts (GW) globally in 2015, an increase of 147.2 GW from the previous year, Paris-based REN21’s annual renewables global status report showed…
Global new investment in renewable power and fuels (excluding large hydropower) rose to $285.9 billion last year from $273 billion in 2014, the report said.
Including large hydro projects, new investment was at least $328.9 billion, REN21 added…
“The renewables train is barrelling down the tracks, but it’s running on 20th century infrastructure – a system based on outdated thinking where conventional baseload is generated by fossil fuels and nuclear power,” said Arthouros Zervos, chair of REN21.
For governments to achieve their emissions cut targets under a global deal to tackle climate change called the Paris Agreement they need to integrate more renewables into the grid; design policies to financially discourage fossil fuel investment and remove risks from investing in renewables, the report added.
http://news.trust.org/item/20160601071832-vhke9/?source=gep
10
there’s a typo in the first sentence – ‘too’ should be ‘to’
[The way to call attention to things like this is to send email to, [email protected]. This will get the fastest attention to making the correction.] AZ
20
So, by the time that the Antarctic region begins to warm, the northern ice cap will be very cold, or not. Maybe we can convince some of the more ardent warmists to move to the South Pole, the only bastion left in a warming world. Then we could introduce the polar bear to control the population of warmists as I hear they breed like rabbits! (the warmists, not the bears) 🙂
50
It’s déjà vu all over again:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/27/ipcc-fails-to-come-clean-over-global-temperature-standstill/
————————————————
John West says:
September 27, 2013 at 10:19 am
A reminder as to one of the reasons why “the pause” is important:
Back in 2007 Norman Page asks in comments @ RC:
“what year would you reconsider the CO2 – Warming paradigm if the CRU Global annual mean temperature is cooler than 2005 – 2009…?”
Gavin Schmidt answers:
“You need a greater than a decade non-trend that is significantly different from projections. [0.2 – 0.3 deg/decade]”
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/a-barrier-to-understanding/
At that time it was outside the paradigm for there to be a decade without a warming trend. Now that we’re at a decade and half they’ve shifted the paradigm to accommodate the lack of warming as if they always expected this sort of thing to happen and it doesn’t change a thing. But something has changed; their paradigm has shifted in the “skeptical” direction (they’ll deny that). Consider one of the early skeptical arguments to catastrophic warming: the ocean is a massive heat sink that will moderate the warming. Here we are now with moderated warming and suddenly the past skeptic position is the alarmist position and they won’t even admit we were right. Oh no, they saw this coming all along while calling us “deniers” for predicting exactly what has happened. WUWT?
The paradigm has shifted towards lower sensitivity as well, again they can’t bring themselves to say skeptics were right.
Starting to look like a pattern to me.
————————————————–
No Doubt, it’s a pattern alright.
50
Norm Page nominated the great climate shift happened around 2003, exactly the same time as the southern ocean carbon sink picked up a notch.
This should be good news but the warmists say increased acidification is the other side of the coin. Anyway the ABC did reveal this gem.
‘CSIRO and Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC scientist Bronte Tilbrook, who collaborated with scientists from America and Europe on the research, said the sink had increased again by about 0.6 billion tonnes of carbon per year — about six times Australia’s emissions.
“What it’s shown is while the sink did weaken in the 1990s, it looks like it’s coming back since about 2002,” he said.
00
Save me reading the paper …..
WRT where the dyes were used, does Nature mention the size of the tank, the shape of its base or how ocean volumes were simulated? Was it in a very big building? Were heat lamps used to simulate the Sun? What did they use for floating ice? How did they produce the “old water”?
10
I’d tell you but it would be easier if you read the paper
10
Damn! 😉
10
OK… I will put you out of your misery. The tank is about the size of a server…
00
So, I DO need to read the paper. Damn again! It’s paywalled ……
00
Easily overcome: pasted from above
Here is the doi (as Jo provided) 10.1038/ngeo2731 and here is where you paste it http://sci-hub.bz/
This site looks dodgy and it will send you a pdf without asking but it passes all government and university firewalls so it must be safe!
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A useful bit of information. Thanks GI.
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Schopenhauer supposedly never actually wrote the quote that is often attributed to him – viz., “all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
But he did write “To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.” (Der Wahrheit ist allerzeit nur ein kurzes Siegesfest beschieden, zwischen den beiden langen Zeiträumen, wo sie als Paradox verdammt und als Trivial gering geschätzt wird.)
Pretty much the same thing, and to be frank if Nature is walking back the Cult’s core theology, it might be time to have a party, because nek minnit it will be taken as self-evident that there’s a pause that might last generations.
As time passes and the now-ageing High Priests of the Cult of Thermageddon start shuffling off the mortal c., we will be able to test the aphorism attributed to Planck…
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
C’est à dire que truth advances one funeral at a time. Hasten the day…
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There is nothing new in this story. Witness Rachel carson of ‘Silent Spring’ infamy in 1957:
“The ocean currents are, in a way, the most majestic of its phenomena.
The spinning of the globe, the winds that deeply trouble the waters of its surface or gently embrace it, and the influence of the sun and the moon are forces closely linked with the great currents of the ocean, and it is for this reason that they are called “the planetary currents.”
Since the world began, the ocean currents have undoubtedly changed their courses many times (we know that the Gulf Stream is no more than sixty million years old), and it is impossible to describe their pattern in the Cambrian period, for example, or in the Devonian, or in the Jurassic.
During the brief period of human history, however, it is most unlikely that there has been any important change in the major patterns of oceanic circulation. This is not surprising, for the forces that produce the currents have shown little disposition to change materially over the eons of earthly time.
The primary driving power is supplied by the winds; the modifying influences are the sun, the rotation of the earth ever toward the east, and the obstructing masses of the continents.
As the surface of the sea is heated by the sun, the water expands and becomes lighter.
Probably a slow exchange of polar and equatorial waters is brought about this phenomenon; the heated water of the tropics moves poleward in the upper layers, and the colder and heavier polar water sinks and creeps toward the equator along the floor of the sea.
But these movements are obscured and largely lost in the far greater sweep of the wind-driven currents.
The steadiest winds are the trades, blowing diagonally toward the equator from the northeast and the southeast. It is the trades that drive the equatorial currents around the globe, the direction of their main streams being always westward.
However, the rotation of the earth exerts a deflecting effect, and when the equatorial currents meet an obstructing continent, they are turned to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern. Because of the combined action of these and other forces, the current patterns are slowly circulating eddies, turning to the right (or clockwise) in the northern oceans and to the left (or counterclockwise) in the southern.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1951/06/16/the-sea-wind-sun-and-moon
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