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How much sunlight makes it to the surface?
We all know how powerful clouds are. Just stand outside on a patchy day — feel the goosebumps. These megaton floating conglomerates of water act as vast shields — they cover 60% of the surface of Earth, and even a small change makes a big difference. While changes in the total amount of direct sunlight coming off the sun are very small, the changes to the amount of reflecting surfaces floating above Earth are, proportionally, at least twice as large, and possibly much much more influential. The IPCC includes changes in sunlight (TSI), so it does not make sense to ignore the larger and more powerful changes in the Earth’s albedo (fraction of sunlight that is reflected) due to “external” factors (due to factors other than feedbacks to surface warming). Both contribute to the amount of sunlight heating the surface, or “absorbed solar radiation” (ASR) (before feedbacks).
There are lots of reasons clouds might change that are not included in standard climate models. Just for starters — cosmic rays may seed cloud formation. Aerosols released by plants, plankton and marine life do — some aerosols are included, […]
I did a spot on the ABC Drum today. Very odd to do it from a studio where I could not see any of the panel at all, and didn’t know the etiquette of how these things work. (I know a lot more now). But I’m glad to have a chance to speak, even if it was short.
So just in case there is anyone out there thinking that Lord Deben had some good points, here’ s what I was thinking as he spoke without pausing to breathe, and here’s my reply (it would have been nice to say it on air):
Firstly, all of this presupposes that there is a reason to reduce CO2. Thousands of scientists and millions of measurements suggest not.
That aside, saying Australia is “not a special case” is to deny geography and demographics.
The UK might have the fastest growth rate in the EU but Australia’s population growth rate is two-to-three times faster than the UK. Do those people count? Not in climate change maths. Australia’s population has grown by 38% since 1990. It’s massive and it matters.
Adding more wind power won’t help solve the […]
It’s taken five years to figure it out, but apparently climate change is even worse than the last time we thought it was worse. Who knew? Once upon a time, glaciers were at a constant perfect position. Life was paradise on Earth and all the animals were happy. But then mankind built that first planet-destroying coal powered station in 1880 and now mountains are being moved, the Earth is changing.
Or at least, that’s sort of what the press release implies. What this tale is really about is the way the media hyperbole is just another excuse to repeat The Climate Mantra even if has nothing much to do with what the paper. What were those observations again?
If Nature, the formerly esteemed journal, was half what it used to be, it would have helped young Michele Koppes keep a longer term perspective, and not lace the press release with baseless speculation. Probably she’s seen a few too many Greenpeace-BBC specials and thinks Antarctica is warming (when the satellites show it isn’t). And curiously, the part that is warming happens to be right over the edges of the tectonic plates where the volcanoes are. She might think climate models work […]
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The ground is not the sky
Here’s a big big flaw that is easy for anyone to understand, yet has lain at the core of the climate models since at least 1984. Indeed, you’ll wonder why we all haven’t been chuckling at this simplistic caricature of our atmosphere for 31 years.
The theory underlying the alarm about CO2 is built around a bizarre idea that blocking outgoing energy in the CO2 pipe is equivalent to getting an increase in sunlight. The very architecture of all the mainstream climate models assumes that the Earth’s climate responds to all radiation imbalances or “forcings” as if they were all like extra sunlight. (We call that extra absorbed solar radiation (ASR) to be more precise. It’s all about the sunlight that makes it through to the surface.)
Extra sunlight adds heat directly to the Earth’s surface, and maybe the climate models have correctly estimated the feedbacks from clouds and evaporation and what-not to surface warming. But it is obvious, in a way even a child could comprehend, that this is not the same as blocking outgoing radiation in the upper atmosphere, which is the effect of increasing CO2. […]
Good news, a spot of media coverage.
Perth Edition, The Sunday Times
Miranda Devine: Perth electrical engineer’s discovery will change climate change debate
Photo: AustralianClimateMadness
A MATHEMATICAL discovery by Perth-based electrical engineer Dr David Evans may change everything about the climate debate, on the eve of the UN climate change conference in Paris next month.
A former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science.
He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly.
He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.
It turns out the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has over-estimated future global warming by as much as 10 times, he says…
The series of posts flows under the tag: “Climate Research 2015″
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Australians have voted against a carbon tax twice. Liberals threw out Turnbull over the introduction of an emissions trading scheme in 2009, yet here he is, barely leader for two weeks and already they are floating a timeframe for the introduction of emissions trading.
I did warn that the Turnbull agreement with the Nationals to keep Tony Abbott’s climate policies means almost nothing. It’s easy for him to keep the “target” and shift towards an Emissions Trading scheme (ETS) and he and Greg Hunt are suggesting that already.
Indeed, some of the fine print Turnbull probably wanted was already written in Abbott’s plan. Thanks to Al Gore and Clive Palmer, the possibility of emissions trading was left in the Direct Action legislation.Why else would Gore fly out here to stand next to a coal miner? And what did he offer Clive in return we wonder? Suddenly, Palmer demanded an ETS for his vote, but finally settled for a clause saying an ETS should be “reviewed” if our main trading partners brought one in. So Turnbull can technically keep the Abbott “plan” but entirely break the spirit of it. The Nationals (and 54 pro-Turnbull Liberals) will look like fools if they […]
Psychological projection anyone?
Remember how some climate scientists wanted to give up debating science and potentially jail skeptics instead? These were the 20 “scientists” who reasoned by looking for “tobacco tactics” in opponent’s arguments. They called for a RICO investigation — a the kind of racketeering investigation done on the mafia. I pointed out their team used more “tobacco tactics” against skeptics than anything the skeptics did, but looks like that may have been only the minor part of their projection of their own flaws.
It turns out that the scientist driving the letter, along with his wife and daughter, has made over $5m above his university salary, and now questions are being raised in Congress about his “double dipping”. The National Science Foundation is very unhappy about scientists who blur the line between their university and their outside consulting, and earn twice for doing the same job. I hear people have been jailed for this sort of thing.
Have a look at how well the leader of the group-of-20 has been doing: meet Jagadish Shukla, professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University, who must now be wishing he hadn’t called for an investigation.
Their letter was posted […]
Energy is emitted to space from many different heights in the atmosphere, depending on the wavelength (not to scale, suggestive only).
One more quick post of mostly uncontroversial foundation for the math-and-physics-heads among us. But it’s a must for anyone who wants to talk Stefan-Boltzmann and follow the details of the next posts. My intro here, just has the gist without the equations.
Mostly the IPCC will agree with this post, but they might be a bit snooty that David thinks their “effective temperature” is too much of an approximation conceptually, and the slightly more complicated idea of a “radiating temperature” is needed. Strictly, the effective temperature idea treats Earth like it is a black-body at infrared, which it isn’t really. Earth is almost a black-body, but not quite.
There is no single layer that radiates to space, instead emissions come from many different heights, depending on the wavelength. We could average the emissions into “one layer”, but doing that would lose detail that matters when computing sensitivity to increasing CO2.
Technically the Stefan-Boltzmann law is not supposed to be applied to Earth, because there is no single physical radiating surface […]
Conventional models assume increasing atmospheric CO2 warms the surface, then apply the feedbacks to the surface warming. But if feedbacks start up in the atmosphere instead, everything changes.
This is a post with big potential. A feedback the other climate models miss?
All the establishment models assume carbon dioxide warms the sky, which leads to the surface warming*, and the feedbacks then apply to the surface warming. It’s in the model architecture, the models can’t do it any other way. But what if the feedbacks don’t wait — what if the feedbacks start right away, up in the atmosphere? What if, say, CO2 warms the air, and that affects humidity and or clouds right then and there? These would be feedbacks operating on tropospheric warming, and they can reroute that energy.
Potentially, this blows everything away. If the energy blocked by increasing CO2 is merely escaping Earth through emissions from another gas in the atmosphere, like say, the dominant greenhouse gas, water-vapor, then could this explain why the effect of Co2 has been exaggerated in the conventional models?
We call this the “rerouting feedback” because when it’s harder for energy to escape to space through the CO2 pipe, this […]
Carbon markets = corruption
Fake markets are easy to scam, because no one really wants or cares about “the product”. Fake markets are dangerous tools. Judging by the way people act, the point of carbon markets is to feed bureaucrats and bankers, not to change the weather. If that’s true, it’s entirely predictable that yet another scandal has run for years, and no one “noticed” or acted to stop it. Not only were diesel cars scamming the lab tests for pollution, but other cars were built to exploit loopholes (that may be legal) in the lab tests for fuel economy as well. The audacity is remarkable — real car CO2 emissions are often a gobsmacking 40- 50% higher than reported, even in top brand, expensive cars.*
As much as two-thirds of CO2 cuts since 2008 may have been imaginary and made by cars that were only fuel efficient in the lab. CO2 “pollution” doesn’t hurt anyone, but misleading fuel economy figures may have cost owners €450 a year more in fuel to run. The companies known to get suspiciously good results on fuel economy (so far) are BMW, Mercedes, Renault and Peugeot. Companies using software to get around other pollution […]
The national conversation is all about “seeming” and “confidence”. Greg Hunt (Environment Minister) boasted that he stopped an investigation into the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), and prevented “due diligence” being a part of a one-day wonder “forum”.
His justification:
“In doing this, it is important to note that public trust in the Bureau’s data and forecasts, particularly as they relate to bushfires and cyclones, is paramount,” [Greg Hunt] said.
It used to be that public trust occurred when organizations were fully investigated, accountable, and found clean. Now “Public Trust” is apparently increased when there are no investigations, or only weak whitewashes. Either the public has got a lot stupider, or the media and ministers have.
Plenty of the self anointed (those who know more than the dumb punters) thought Hunt’s boast was a big achievement. Anthony Sharwood, News Corp journalist (oh for a “reporter”!), wondered if the government was paranoid for wanting to check the BOM. Perhaps next he’ll be calling for global corporates to figure out their own tax bill; who needs professional auditing, right — it’s just “paranoid”?
But the bad news for Hunt and the Bureau (and Sharwood) is that the Truth will out, the […]
A few weeks ago UK Minister Amber Rudd cut subsidies to solar in the UK. I thought the UK government might be showing some signs of making sense, but now it appears Rudd was saving up for a UN gift:
The UK is increasing the money for climate activities in the development pot by at least 50%, to a further £5.8 billion of funding from April 2016 to March 2021, including at least £1.76bn in 2020. The UK is a leader on climate finance – we are the only G7 nation to meet the 0.7% aid commitment and the only one to enshrine it in legislation.
The UK is a leader on climate finance – we are the only G7 nation to meet the 0.7% aid commitment and the only one to enshrine it in legislation.The UK is a leader on climate finance – we are the only G7 nation to meet the 0.7% aid commitment and the only one to enshrine it in legislation.
Luckily it doesn’t cost money to fix the weather, it makes money.
To ensure a more secure and prosperous future for us all, the UK is playing its part […]
The Earth’s atmosphere is a leaky bucket, with four big holes (and a lot of little ones).
Whole libraries have been filled with talk of a single characteristic emissions layer — a simplistic idea that there is one effective “surface” that radiates to space. It exists in an abstract sense, after sufficient averaging, but it’s a paradigm that doesn’t help us think clearly. In any case, it’s too simple for our purposes in this series. In reality there are many layers that radiate to space, different for each type of molecule that can emit longwave radiation (which means infrared). Then there are the surface and cloud-tops too.
Energy comes in one way but leaves through at least four different paths.
To follow this series you’ll need to understand the concept of four pipes through which energy flows to space. It’s a powerful idea and big advance on the simpler notion of one-pipe-in and one-pipe-out. For those not as familiar with photons and excited molecules, you may want to read the “Background” section at the end of the post first.
For a photon there are a lot of paths to space
Some photons at Earths surface will be at […]
And the series continues, poking another hole in the models, with bigger holes to come.
See the larger version in the post below
What if CO2 caused more greenery, which produced more volatile organic gases, which increased rainfall and changed cloud cover? The models would be blind to it. They’re “supercomputer-complicated”, but miss many of the feedbacks on Earth. The only feedbacks the models consider are ones that occur because of changes in temperature. And worse, it’s not just changes in temperature, but specifically, changes in surface temperature.
If, say, cosmic rays caused a change in cloud cover, or the Sun influenced ozone which in turn caused the jet streams to shift closer to the equator, there are no feedbacks worth mentioning according to the large GCM models. The conventional basic model assumes, is built on the idea that nothing causes changes to Earth’s climate unless it works through surface heating — and the GCMs have the same architecture. Cloud cover does not change ice cover. Ocean currents don’t change cloud cover. Changes in biology don’t change clouds. Only changes in surface temperature changes cloud cover.
It’s a good place to start looking for missing negative feedbacks (though, […]
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How the landscape is shifting. If we give people the right question instead of the usual loaded surveys, they surprise us. Here’s an opinion poll with an outrageously skeptical option: “climate change is a total hoax”.
Bloomberg Politics National Poll
31% of US voters surveyed said they strongly or mostly agreed.
See what happens when you ask a good question?
QUESTION:
I’m going to read stances some candidates have taken on key issues. For each, please tell me if you strongly agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, or strongly disagree. (Read list. Rotate.)
Total Agree Total Disagree Strongly Agree Mostly agree Mostly Disagree Strongly Disagree Not sure Climate change is a total hoax 31 65 17 14 20 45 4
In March 2015 a Gallup poll on Climate Change suggested that 24% of the US population worried “Not at all”. I called these the “implacable skeptics”. I’d argue now that the implacable skeptic group stands at 31% who agree that it is a “total hoax”.
Has it really grown this much since March? Perhaps the ramp up of the US presidential campaign, with Republican candidates like Trump competing to be openly skeptical and even […]
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And so begins the list of errors. The conventional basic climate model (see post 1 for why it is important, post2 and post 3 for what it is) is based on partial derivatives of dependent variables, and that’s a No No. Let me explain: effectively basic climate models model a hypothetical world where all things freeze in a constant state while one factor doubles.* But in the real world, many variables are changing simultaneously and the rules are different.
Partial differentials of dependent variables is a wildcard — it may produce an OK estimate sometimes, but other times it produces nonsense, and ominously, there is effectively no way to test. If the basic climate models predicted the climate, we’d know they got away with it. They didn’t, but we can’t say if they failed because of a partial derivative. It could have been something else. We just know it’s bad practice.
To see an example of how partial differentials can produce quixotic contradictions in a normal and simple situation, see what happens when they are used with the Ideal Gas Law in this PDF from MIT.
Partial derivatives are useful […]
Wait til you see what Lance Pidgeon has found. He was looking at the BOM website temperature archive maps of Australia for early last century (using AWAP data). He was wondering how the Bureau of Meteorology could possibly create maps this detailed for specific days that long ago. He was especially curious about the remote, vast areas where there were no thermometers, yet there were wiggly jiggly temperature lines on the map, shaded as if they had meaning. I’ve heard that more people have visited the South pole, than have stood at the point in central Australia where the three large western and central states meet.
Then he noticed something positively strange — April 14th in 1915 and one year later in 1916 looked almost identical, as did the same day in 1917. The more he looked, the weirder things got. He plodded, year after year, all the way from 1911 to 1917, then through Jan, Feb, March, and so on. Worse, he tells me he could keep going right through to 1956 without seeing much change (though there are interesting exceptions). After that, temperatures of the area start to vary from year to year, like the “weather” we’d […]
Read the post to see it properly.
A feast. A feast! For those who want the meat, the math and the diagrams (don’t miss the diagrams). As far as we know, this is the first time the architecture of the basic climate model has been laid out in one place on the Net. This is the most math heavy post this series, but it has to be done, and properly. This is where the 1.2 °C direct effect of doubling CO2 gets amplified to 2.5 °C with fairly basic physics. If the equations are not your forte, look at the “the Establishment Case” below the equations to get some idea why establishment scientists find it mind-bendingly hard to imagine how climate sensitivity could possibly be much different.
For commenters who know there are problems with this model (don’t we all), one of the points of doing this is to get through to the establishment leaders — to speak their language instead of having separate conversations. Of course, for some minds it will not matter what skeptical scientists say, but for other, key people, it will. We would expect seeing the flaws laid out so clearly will undercut the implacable […]
Imagine the crime of trying to audit the BOM?
Last year, Graham Lloyd wrote in The Australian about how the BOM had made whopping two degree adjustments to data which turned cooling trends to warming trends and instead of improving the data, it created discontinuities. The BOM’s eventual explanation lamely exclaimed that the stations “might” have moved. (And they might not, too. Who knows, but remember this is what 95% certainty looks like.) Lloyd wrote about how historical records of extreme heat at Bourke had effectively been thrown in the trash. Who cares about historical records?
In response to the embarrassment and revealing questions, Tony Abbott wanted an investigation. But Greg Hunt, and The Dept of Environment opposed the investigation and opposed doing “due diligence”. What are they afraid of? Instead, Hunt helped the BOM set up a one-day-wonder investigation with hand-picked statisticians that wasted another nine months before admitting that the BOM methods would never be publicly available or able to be replicated. If it can’t be replicated, it isn’t science.
The BOM’s defense is always that their mystery method is considered “best practice” by other agencies around the world — who share the same incentives to exaggerate warming, […]
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