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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 […]
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, […]
…
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 […]
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 […]
This is the most uncontroversial post ever put on this blog — it’s everything the IPCC would agree with and the key to their unshakable confidence.
This post is for the independent thinkers, the brains that want to know exactly where the famous, core, 1.2 °C figure comes from. That’s the number of degrees that a doubling of CO2 would bring, and it’s a figure that underlies decades of research and the figure that the big models are built around. Here, as far as we know, is the simplest, accurate reference to that reasoning and their maths. We have always assumed the 1.2 °C figure is correct, and focused on questioning the feedbacks that are assumed to drive that base figure up to 3°C (or 6°C or molten-Venus-here-we-come!)
We are not criticizing the estimate here, but this is so key and central to the whole climate-clean-green industry, and the models, it has to be laid out. This is the source of “implacable confidence” among the leading thinkers of establishment climate science. It is long past time that skeptical scientists put these details — warts and all — out in public. Dr David Evans is laying out the foundation […]
For those of you who are die-hard puzzle solvers here to spar about cutting edge research: good news, here’s where we begin the long awaited update to Dr David Evans’ climate research. There are a few surprises, sacred cows, we did not expect we would need to challenge, like the idea of “forcings”.
Government science is stuck in a rut, strangled – trying to capture the creative genius of discovery and force it through a bureaucratic formula, like it can work to a deadline or be judged by the number of papers, or pages, or citations, or by b-grade officials. Blogs are new, but this form of independent scientific research, done for the thrill of discovery, outside institutions and funded by philanthropists, is the way science was mainly done before WWII.
For the first time we are going to explain the architecture of the inner core of the climate models, the small model at the center that the big GCM’s are built around. It is mostly a physics model, and it’s mostly “basic” and mostly right. It’s the reason for the implacable confidence of the establishment in the climate debate. But there are a couple of big problems… […]
By Jo Nova
Apparently some New Zealand officials are toying with a whole new science curriculum which sounds like a return to the stone age. All the hard stuff about electromagnetism, elements, mass, motion, and molecular bonding has been replaced with UN Agenda 21 items like climate change and biodiversity.
Who needs to know the periodic table when you can learn the new religion of “Climate Change”? Knowing actual physics and chemistry will just hold you back in your drive to understand the intersectional suffering of the oppressed swamp antechinus.
NZ Teachers Shocked Physics, Chemistry, Biology Missing From New Science Curriculum
By Rebecca Zhu, Epoch Times
New Zealand science teachers have raised alarm over an early draft science curriculum, which lacks any mention of physics, chemistry, and biology.
Mr. Johnston [senior fellow of the New Zealand Initiative think tank] warned that if this draft went through, high school graduates wanting to pursue studies in physical sciences or engineering would need to be taught from scratch by their university.
Who is Mr Johnston kidding? As if universities will fight for the physical sciences… they didn’t even fight for “male and female”. Academics are driving this […]
By Jo Nova Warn the bankers, our climate models are not something to invest in say the modelers
A group of top climate modelers have come together to warn bankers that climate models are wonderful but basically useless for predicting things that financial models need — like the trends in the hottest, wettest or windiest weather in any city on Earth. Often the expert models can’t even agree on the sign. Will it get bigger or smaller? It’s that bad.
The raw truth of just how unskilled these models are is laid bare in the graphs. The modeling team chose London, Mumbai, New York and Beijing and picked the nearest 100km x 100km “square” on the map. They ran about 37 models on 3 scenarios and achieved something that looks like a painting done with a jet engine.
The modelers can’t say if the hottest maximums in Beijing will get hotter. Even if the world warms 2 degrees (by random happenstance), Beijing’s hottest-days might actually get cooler. The rainiest days of the year could be more extreme unless they’re less extreme. And the windiest days will definitely be stronger, weaker, or about the same. Get it?
The quote of the […]
We can hear the angst and confusion — Another “nasty La Nina?”, “Something weird is going on”, “They (La Ninas) don’t know when to leave”. Oh no!
These are not the words we’d expect to hear from experts who can 97% predict the climate a century from now. The bad news for the modelers is that the climate on Earth seems to be controlled more by the Pacific Oscillation than anything else and they have no idea what drives that pattern, so they can’t predict it more than a few months ahead, and sometimes not even then. And if they can’t predict the Pacific — they can’t predict anything. The hottest of hot years are El Nino, and the coldest years are La Nina and the greatest modelers the world-has-ever-known still get their barbecue summers wrong. The droughts, the floods and the bushfires follow the swinging surface water of the worlds largest ocean. Whenever they happen, the models say “climate change” but the models never tell us which will hit us this time next year.
So here we are with hints that there might be another La Nina, a third in a row, and Oh-the-disappointment! The modelers thought there […]
David Evans speaks to Emmett at Resolving Reality radio on why he shifted to being a skeptic (4:15 mins), and on the current state of the climate debate and where climate modelers get their “implacable confidence” from (5:20). David discusses the impasse — the standoff. It’s possible that climate modelers can have the physics right but the model paths wrong.
Quite a bit of the interview is aimed at people new to this debate. Regular readers might enjoy more on the Sun’s role (22 minutes). And some of the history, like the rich pickings of working for the Gravy Train (32:15 minutes).
At 33:00 David discusses the audacious threat to national sovereignty and the near miss of 2009. Useful history to remind us of what is at stake. David goes on to discuss the systematic demonization of non-PC views — he argues that climate change was the test case for the newer more aggressive model of stamping out discussion in so many areas.
David’s research work continues, he prefers to keep a low profile and stay out of the “blood sport” online. I’m not going to put a date on it, original discovery doesn’t work to a timetable, but […]
There is no new science here but it could be the most simpering advertising I have seen dressed up as “reporting”. IPCC: Climate scientists consider ‘life changing’ report
by Matt McGrath, Environment correspondent, BBC
It is likely to be the most critical and controversial report on climate change in recent years.
Scientists are meeting this week, right now, to try to save the world or to produce a PR and marketing excuse, whichever comes first. After 20 meetings just like this one even slow journalists like Matt McGrath at the BBC know exactly what the scientists will say before they have said it.
When is news not news:
After a week of deliberations in the city of Incheon, the researchers’ new report is likely to say that keeping below this limit will require urgent and dramatic action from governments and individuals alike.
When is news totally fake news:
These researchers, who are unpaid, have reviewed the available scientific literature on the feasibility, impacts and costs of staying under 1.5C.
This is true Pravda quality press. Does any one of these 86 researchers, getting a paid trip to South Korea to write a […]
For years, skeptical scientists have been pointing at data that showed the the world started warming somewhere from 1700 – 1820. This has been known from glaciers, sea level studies, ice cores, boreholes, ocean heat content estimates, and more proxies than any climate-nerd cares to name.
Finally, expert climate modelers are “surprised” to discover this:
“…their study had detected warming in the Arctic and tropical oceans from around the 1830s, just 80 years after the Industrial Revolution started in England. “It was an extraordinary finding,” she said. “It was one of those moments where science really surprised us. But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago.”
How many grant dollars did it take to figure out what skeptical scientists have been saying for years?
The correlation with global temperatures and actual numerical human emissions is abysmal, so now Abrams et al ignore the numbers and appear to suggest that “The Industrial Revolution” itself started the warming — as if the mere invention of the steam engine heated the world.
[Dr Abram] said the study attributed the gradual warming to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions linked […]
Cut the blob and the blob reforms
Thanks to Prof Peter Ridd for the nice one-liner.
Back in February, the new head of CSIRO, Larry Marshall, agreed that the “debate was over” and sacked 350 pointless climate researchers who were studying stuff that was already settled. Marshall’s crime was to hire people to solve the climate problem rather than just keep the cheer squad. But the eco-carers were outraged. Seems that a cheer squad is important.
What does this mean? Not much for climate science or skeptics, its only fifteen jobs and $37 million over 10 years. It’s just another line of press releases advertising The Blob. More government waste.
Mr Hunt has announced an extra 15 jobs focusing on climate science, as well as additional support, costing $3.7 million a year. He said it would increase the number of climate researchers from 100 to 115 after the latest round of job cuts is taken into account.
These researchers are being paid to find a crisis, so they will only find the truth if it happens to coincide with a crisis. Imagine the outcry if Hunt had hired 15 full time skeptical scientists for ten years? Imagine […]
We welcome collaboration, but empty, uninformed ill-will doesn’t help the unresourced skeptics to beat the billion dollar green machine. It’s time for Lucia to admit she got it wrong. Lucia’s second post failed to clarify anything. She didn’t acknowledge that she had not found a single real mistake David’s work, nor did she apologize for getting so much wrong. Having decided everything David was doing was “crud” after reading two paragraphs, she now has the onerous and pointless task of trying to defend a hasty uninformed position.
Lucia didn’t have to dig the hole deeper but she tried. To turn her mistaken accusations into something useful she transparently shifts the goals and won’t join the dots. Evans was critiquing Held, Soden, and Pierrehumbert. He described how they relied on partial derivatives of dependent variables, impossibly holding everything else constant in climate and thereby incurring unknown errors. Lucia now says “but they could’ve done it a different way without them” and perhaps hopes no one notices the unspoken admission that David Evans was right.
The bizarre thing is that you don’t need a maths degree to know her method is silly on its face. In […]
Here’s a lesson in when to post and when to email. Over at the Blackboard, Lucia couldn’t make sense of David Evans’ post on partial derivatives, but instead of emailing us or commenting here, she published her unresearched thoughts and and asked her readers instead. Only most of them didn’t know either and it didn’t help that the quotes were misattributed, and Lucia’s assumptions were wrong. Together they generated a thread of fog, arguing about irrelevant points in maths and models that didn’t apply. Having admitted that she is confused about what David was saying, in comments she went ahead and called him confused, declaring he didn’t understand maths, and was spouting nonsense. (Steady on Lucia.) In the nicest possible way David explains he’s right, she’s wrong. And he had defined and cited everything correctly too (it was all in the post, or linked to it).
Her post is titled: “Questions to David Evans: What do you mean about partial derivatives?”. Lucia had my email, but posted: “I’m hoping David or readers who understand his point can clarify for me”. However she didn’t email us after that either. So by the time I tripped over […]
To paraphrase: People who disagree with my economic predictions should not get funds.
UPDATE: What an extraordinary moment. UWA has announced that due to the unexpected “passion” of the staff and students they have to cancel the Lomborg Consensus Centre (May 8th 2015). Does UWA do science-by-passion?
The Australian Government is spending $2.5 billion on Direct Action to reduce atmospheric carbon. They offer to spend a tiny $4m extra setting up a centre for an economist who studies the effectiveness of action to change the climate.
Tim Flannery’s reaction to the Consensus Centre:
“…it’s an insult to Australia’s scientific community.”
It’s an insult I tell you! Imagine taking Australia’s climate scientists seriously, and setting up an economics centre to solve the crisis they say is occurring. How could any scientist stand that.
Lomborg-the-economist agrees completely with the IPCC and Flannery on the climate science. But he disagrees on the economic and policy positions. Obviously it’s a disaster if the Flannery-IPCC economic predictions are subject to analysis.
Flannery, self-satirical, on the appointment of Lomberg:
“Mr Lomborg’s views have no credibility in the scientific community. His message hasn’t varied at all in the last […]
Bernie Lewin and the GWPF have launched an excellent historical paper” “Hubert Lamb And The Transformation Of Climate Science. For those who don’t know Hubert Lamb was the founding Director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (the infamous CRU of ClimateGate). He was also a skeptic.When he died the then director called him “the greatest climatologist of his time”.
He spent most of his career convincing the world that Earths climate was constantly changing. The irony then, was that the UN then redefined “climate change” to mean man-made climate change, and honored him with a building stocked with researchers who spent a lot of the time playing down all that natural variation. He earned the good will and reputation, and the UN spent it.
Lewin captures the repeating patterns of history. For decades Lamb fought the dogma that claimed the Earths climate was unchanging. He succeeded and was rewarded, but then the dogma was reborn in another guise:
.,.
“..Right through to the end of the 20th century the claim was that both models and data were showing the enhanced greenhouse effect emerging out of the background ‘noise’ of natural variations. Thus […]
As the wonderful Delingpole puts it, timber framed buildings have been banned in the UK since the Great Fire of London in 1666. But in 1999 environmental experts decided it was alright again, and the rules were changed. Nottingham University used all their intellectual prowess and rigorous training, and decided to make their new science labs “Carbon Neutral” in the hope that they might be able to change global weather. The labs were designed to meet the most rigorous bureaucratic rules, but burnt down before they were finished.
Late last week the £20 million GlaxoSmithKline Carbon Neutral Laboratory for Sustainable Chemistry was razed.
More than 60 firefighters dealt with the fire at its peak, after the first 999 call at 8.36pm on Friday.
Notts Fire and Rescue Service received more than 150 calls from concerned members of the public as flames and plumes of smoke could be seen for miles around. Social media was filled with photos and messages of shock and support.
It must be comforting to know it was built to the most stringent bureaucratic standards and designed by teams of top research academics.
8.9 out of 10 based on 117 ratings […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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