Here’s an idea for commenters to sink their teeth into — Stephen Wilde postulates a mechanism where convection can neutralize the effect of changes in greenhouse gases. The focus in David’s series of blog posts has been on radiation, but the troposphere is governed by convection. The tropopause is the boundary where convection runs out of oomph, and above the tropopause, in the stratosphere, radiation rules supreme. Airliners like to fly at the bottom of the stratosphere (“thirty thousand feet”), just above the convection and water vapor in the troposphere, because it’s calm. But sometimes turbulence from the troposphere punches up into the stratosphere, so think of Fig 1 below if you are asked to suddenly sit in your seat and fasten your seat belt.
All the focus on radiation imbalances tends to ignore the powerful effects of gravity and convection. To get a sense of how important gravity is, ponder that a mere 3km above the surface the pressure is 300hpa lower, but gravity stops the surface air from rushing up and equalizing that. Imagine if there were two sites on the ground where pressure was, say, 1000hpa and 700hpa, and they were only three kilometers apart, we’d have some kind of monster Cat-10 cyclone on our hands. (If gravity ever “stopped”, we get some sense of just how fast the air would leave the planet.)
I have this vision of the tropopause as being flat (as it is in so many diagrams) but Stephen Wilde points out that it’s a lumpy roiling creature. Sometimes it’s a lot further or closer to the surface than the “average” and in that variation lies a kind of loophole. Air is constantly rising and falling in a tricky “adiabatic” way — where blobs of air (officially called “parcels”) rise and fall without mixing with the surrounding air. A blob heats up over a desert, say, and rises, expanding to the the top of the tropopause (or overshooting it). Blobs of cold air can also sink and reverse that process, but Wilde points out that it isn’t symmetrical. The blobs can overshoot at the top, then slide and mix with the stratosphere in a non-adiabatic way, until they reach a lower altitude before turning into a “parcel” and sinking back to the surface. That gap where the air slides from a high spot in the bumpy tropopause to a low point is important.
The troposphere is constantly churning – low pressure systems work like vacuum cleaners drawing warm air up from the surface to the tropopause. High pressure cells do the opposite, drawing in cold air from the tropopause and pulling it back down to the surface. Generally the high’s are broad and slow moving, and the lows are smaller, faster and there are more of them.
There is constant interplay between convection and radiation, with convection attempting to follow the lapse rate but radiation distorting it.
The “lapse rate” is how quickly it cools as one ascends — on average about 6.5 C per km of vertical ascent. If the air were perfectly dry it would be nearer 10 C per km (the dry adiabatic lapse rate), and if it were as wet as could be then it would drop to around 5 C per km (the moist or saturated adiabatic lapse rate).
Stephen Wilde, who has a long and avid interest in meteorology, explains an idea he has on interplay between radiation, convection and lapse rates. Though it is not quantified, it is worth a discussion. See where that leads…
— Jo
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Neutralizing Radiative Imbalances Within Convecting Atmospheres
This article sets out a simple mechanism whereby planetary atmospheres can be rendered thermally stable over time despite huge variations in the atmospheric content of radiatively active molecules such as greenhouse gases, material released by volcanic outbreaks of a vast size, and material vaporized in large asteroid or meteor strikes.
Ian Plimer has a new book out today, as usual, skewering sacred cows.
“Only when Third World children can do homework at night using cheap coal-fired electricity can they escape from poverty.”
From the press release:
Click to buy from Connor Court Publishing
HEAVEN AND HELL: THE POPE CONDEMNS THE POOR TO ETERNAL POVERTY
by Professor Ian Plimer
The recent papal Encyclical was on climate and the environment. This book criticises the Encyclical and shows that we have never lived in better times, that cheap fossil fuel energy has and is continuing to bring hundreds of millions of people from peasant poverty to the middle class and that the alleged dangerous global warming is a myth.
I have great respect for the Pope’s sincere wishes to end pollution and poverty. We all share the same sentiments. The solution is to use cheap coal-fired electricity and not to demonise coal and other fossil fuels. The Industrial Revolution and the growth of East Asia and India shows that with cheap coal-fired electricity, people are brought out of poverty. It has happened to hundreds of millions of people over the last 20 years.
Burning coal releases CO2. This is the gas of life. Plants feed on CO2 and there has been a greening of the Earth with the slight increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. The food for all life on Earth has been wrongly demonised as a pollutant. Some 97% of CO2 emissions are natural.
It has yet to be shown that CO2 drives global warming and all models of future climate based increases in CO2 have failed. Despite hysterical predictions based on models, planet Earth has not deteriorated due to an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. Nature and humans add traces of a trace gas CO2 to the atmosphere
The planet has not warmed for more than 18 years, models predicted a steady temperature increase over this time and a predicted hot spot over the equator has not eventuated. The models are not in accord with measured reality and are rejected. The science on climate change is far from settled, there is no consensus and there is no demonstrated evidence of human-induced global warming.
The Turnbull government has announced that that the offer of funding has now been withdrawn for the The Lomborg Consensus Centre in Australia. The bullies, and emotional hysterics win this round. At UWA he was called “dangerous”. At Flinders Uni people were “repulsed” by Lomborg . But the irrational emotional language means the fear of the freeloaders is on display. They are very very scared of critical press releases from any credible sources. No one who questions the holy power of the Wind and Solar Gods can be employed in Australian academia. Can wind-farms stop the storms? Thou shalt not ask!
We’ll spend $10 billion on “Clean Energy” but not even $4 million to analyze whether that money was well spent. Did it change the global climate? Anyone?
Lomborg accepts the establishment science, but even with a $4 million sweetener he is too threatening to the monoculture of Australian universities. Turnbull must know that Lomborg’s economic analysis would have awful news for the renewables industry and would show up the emissions trading scheme for the pointless waste of money that it is. This tells us exactly how much Turnbull cares about academic freedom, the Australian taxpayer and the environment.
Should we purge Australian universities of people with academic credentials lower than Lomborg?
Albert Parker writes to me to point out that Lomborg has 36 papers on scopus (not to mention bestselling books, and countless influential articles in places like The Wall St Journal). If he’s not good enough for Australian academia nor are most of the the people who opposed him and questioned his credentials:
Dr. Frank Jotzo, climate economist at the Australian National University, claimed in The Guardian that the Copenhagen Consensus Center methodology “has no academic credibility” and pointed to fundamental flaws in the way the CCC assessed the impacts of climate change. On Scopus he’s published about same papers of Lomborg (Jotzo, Author ID: 6603207810, Documents: 38).
Professor Stuart Bunt, of the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, and vice president of the UWA Academic Staff Association, that told DeSmogBlog “Some very young applicants, for example to our own school, have better publication records than Lomborg”. But he himself has only published half as many papers as Lomborg. (Bunt, Stuart, UWA Author ID: 6603083320, Documents: 18).
Dr David Glance, the director of the Centre for Software Practice, told DeSmogBlog that “some academics wanted to know if it was too late to cancel the centre entirely”. But Lomborg has published three times as many papers as he has. (Glance, David George, UWA, Author ID: 36709716800, Documents: 11).
Alan Jones pretty much sums up the situation about Christopher Monckton’s prediction last year about Tony Abbott and Stephen Harper. Listen to Monckton from 40 seconds.
“They want $100 billion. In a world that’s broke, swimming in debt…” — Alan Jones
“David King was asked whether all the nations of the world were now, in principle, ready to sign their people’s rights away in such a treaty. Yes, but there are two standouts. One is Canada. But don’t worry about Canada. They’ve got an election in the Spring of 2015 and we and the UN will make sure the present government is removed. He was quite blunt about it.
The other hold out is Australia. And Australia we can’t do anything about because Tony Abbott is in office until after the December 2015 conference. So that means you all have to guard Tony Abbott’s back. Because the Turnbull faction, in conjunction with the UN, will be doing their absolute level best to remove your elected Prime Minister from office before the end of his term and , in particular, before the end of 2015, so that they can get 100% wall-to-wall Marxist agreement. They do not want any stand-outs. And the most likely stand-out at the moment is Australia. So look after him.” — climatescepticsparty
King may have been fantasizing and blowing his own trumpet (the Canadian election was not close). But to openly brag in public about removing a democratic government with UN help is remarkable.
There will be some agreement signed in Paris, for the sake of PR and to keep the gravy flowing. That is guaranteed. The question is, “how much” will that agreement matter? Will it be all show and no teeth? How many billions will the pretend environmentalists and unproductive parasites drag from the world’s middle-class? How much power will they get to interfere with democracies? Will there be a get-out clause?
The Australian BOM, and an actual real debate on global warming
The interview with Jennifer Marohasy about the BOM is introduced around the 7 minute mark. Around the 9 minute mark Jennifer talks about a remarkable meeting called by MP Craig Kelly yesterday at Parliament House on Monday this week. For the first time, people like John Church was forced to do a live debate with people like Bob Carter and Jennifer.
Jennifer described the event in an email. At one point Dennis Jensen pinned down Mark Howden with a question, forcing him to admit that everything he was presenting came from a model rather than direct from data. Straight after that several in the audience left the room. I guess they’d heard enough. Bizarrely, when confronted with a UAH (satellite) graph of temperatures of Australia pausing flat for 17 years, Guldberg dismissed it because he “didn’t know where the data came from” and Howden improbably suggested that combining all the atmospheric layers showed “warming”. Thank goodness Jennifer was there to set them straight! When cornered, establishment scientists flounder because they have been shielded from skeptical questions.
Jennifer Marohasy describes question time during the meeting:
Here we get into the nitty-gritty (as much as we can) of the energy coming off the planet. Looking at the spectrum of outgoing infrared we can learn a lot from the Nimbus data. In the graph below we can see a lot more energy comes from certain wavelengths, and given that the curve would follow the “grey” shape if it was a single body emitting, we can also see how some “pipes” are blocked.
The CO2 band shows a large obvious indentation, but don’t be fooled, most of that curve looks the same at much lower concentrations of CO2. As CO2 levels rise in our atmosphere there is little effect on the radiance of the coldest parts of the CO2 band, what changes is in the “wings”.
The hotter a thing is, the more energy it radiates, so in this graph the higher amounts of OLR (outgoing longwave radiation) are coming off the warmer surface or air closer to it. Turn things upside down in your mind, the high readings come from low-altitude places which are warm (like the surface), and as the readings get lower in radiance, they must be coming from colder spots at higher altitudes. The lowest part of the CO2 absorption band in the graph is in the stratosphere, where it’s very cold. The highest parts of the CO2 band in the graph are from CO2 low in the atmosphere. The “wings” represent emissions from CO2 all the way up and down the vertical air column.
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In terms of “pipes” David has managed to estimate the comparative sizes of different pipes, with a table I haven’t seen elsewhere — which I’ve graphed here. (Though we expect the IPCC crew would have done this ).
This graphic below is roughly the size and height of the emissions escaping to space. (The CO2 height is the height of its “average” emitting temperature, which is not that useful, as most of the emissions are coming from lower down and further up rather than at the “average”. We don’t use that height in the analysis that follows.) See below how David calculated this and all his references. I’m surprised at how big the CO2 pipe is. A similar amount of energy is coming off CO2 molecules as is radiating from cloud tops or from the surface?
Don’t miss David’s figure 1 below, which is an important graph we will need to refer too. Those emission layers matter!
–Jo
A rough idea of how much energy is escaping through each pipe, and the average altitudes that the emissions come from. (Note that in the case of CO2 the average emission temperature is about 244 K, which corresponds to a height of 7 km in the troposphere, although the CO2 emissions layer is largely well over 20 km in the stratosphere.)
We are going to add a model of outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) to the sum-of-warmings model we completed in the last post. However before we can construct the OLR model we need some basic information about OLR — such as how much OLR comes from each emission layer. In this post we collect that information from various sources.
Introduction
We described how the greenhouse effect works in post 6, where we discussed emission layers and pipes. Most OLR is emitted by the four main emission layers — the CO2 emissions layer, the water vapor emission layer (WVEL), the cloud tops, and the surface. Nearly all OLR is emitted by the main four emission layers plus the ozone and methane emission layers, so in this post we are going to collect parameters on those six emission layers.
There’s a lot of cheering going on in the lead-up to Paris, but not a lot of action, and definitely, no actual journalism.
Newsweek reports on the 81-company-cheer-squad with not a single mention that any of these companies could be investing, getting government kickbacks, or profiting from “climate change”.
Much to the White House’s delight, 81 companies have signed the president’s American Business Act on Climate “pledge,” a non-binding resolution that is effectively a vote of confidence in the executive branch heading into international climate talks in Paris later this year.
When Exxon supported a few skeptics was that described as a “vote of confidence in skeptical science”?
The big agreement is for “collective attention”:
The pledge doesn’t create new taxes or rules, but it amounts to an agreement among industry leaders that climate change is real, human-influenced and worthy of collective attention.
It amounts to nothing. Welcome to the Cabaret.
Who’s in the cheer squad?
“The White House on Monday announced that a total of 81 companies, including Alcoa, General Electric and Procter & Gamble, have backed a U.S.-sponsored pledge supporting action to combat climate change.
All these companies are not in any way doing this for the profit 😉
“Companies as varied as Apple and Google, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, Pepsi and Coca-Cola and even General Motors signed off on the White House–backed pledge, which means that they have verbally committed to efforts like purchasing 100 percent renewable energy and reducing deforestation in supply chains.
Some may believe; others know a good PR opportunity. And for some it’s just good business.
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 the real world there is no way to hold temperature, clouds, humidity or anything constant while changing the surface temperature — and mathematical trickery won’t make it so. (Lucia packs the changing variables under a term she calls Rp — which is a bit like hiding income in an offshore tax avoidance scheme.) The bane of basic climate analysis that inevitably it has to use partial derivatives while unrealistically holding all else constant — the issue is ignoring the risk and uncertainty that brings.
Notably, Lucia didn’t link to our reply to her first post (despite the post being a request for a reply from David). Nor did she email us either time she published (despite having our emails). Does she want the truth, or just to indulge in point scoring snark? If she’s hoping for an easy target, she’s picked the wrong people. – Jo
As with Lucia’s first post, having read carefully through her second post and its comments, I’m still waiting for Lucia to find any mistakes in my posts or even made any informed criticism of them.
Lucia’s first post alleged I made had mistakes with differentials in post 3 of the series of posts about basic climate models. We showed her in more detail how to do them in our reply, applying an online class note from MIT that I had referenced in the first post. Lucia’s second post has no mention at all about any mistakes with differentials, which I’ll take as implicit acknowledgement that I was right — as were Held and Soden [1], and Pierrehumbert [2], whose model development I was copying. No retraction or apology from Lucia though. No one reading Lucia’s two posts would know that I was correct about differentials all along and Lucia was wrong; they’d get quite the opposite impression.
Lucia moves on to the issue of “strictly hypothetical” partial derivatives
In her second post, Lucia moves on to attacking my claim in post 4 that the partial derivatives in the conventional basic climate model, such as the Planck feedback (the reciprocal of the Planck sensitivity, λ0), are “strictly hypothetical”, and she claims that the basic model “can be developed without resorting to these “strictly hypothetical” partials”. As with her first post, Lucia was quite disparaging of me but did not bother to email us — we weren’t so discourteous (we email Lucia immediately we post about her).
As anticipated (see Comment 37.1.1), Lucia makes her own derivation of the basic model, aiming to avoid partial derivatives where “everything is held constant”. She thinks she succeeds, but she fails. An alternative approach that got around the obvious problem with the Planck feedback (that it impossibly relies on holding all climate variables constant except OLR and surface temperature*) would clearly be an improvement, but it would almost certainly have been discovered decades ago in a problem space as small and as intensively researched as this.
We’ll skip over most of the detail of Lucia’s more complicated approach, and just focus on the crucial piece of her development. Consider the OLR function, R. Lucia does not want to use the arguments used in post 4 for G (or downward flux, ASR – OLR):
where the surface temperature is TS, there are n driver variables V1,…,Vn, and there are m feedback variables, U1,…,Um. (I’ll continue to use the notation in posts 2 to 4, rather than Lucia’s more limited and cumbersome notation.) Because the feedbacks are only functions of the temperature TS — that is, schematically Ui =Ui(TS) — Lucia prefers to write the OLR as
and let R depend on feedbacks via TS . Fair enough.
But Lucia wants to avoid using the partial derivative ∂R/∂TS where all the drivers and feedbacks are held constant — this is the “Planck feedback” (which isn’t really a “feedback” as the term is used elsewhere in this series — see post 2 and post 3 where it is discussed and defined). This is important so I’ll stress it: in the standard development in post 3, ∂R/∂TS means the derivative of R with respect to TS when all the drivers and feedbacks are held constant — and since (nearly?) every climate variable depends on feedback, basically this means holding “everything else constant” except the OLR R and temperature TS.
Can Lucia develop the basic model without “holding everything else constant” at some point?
Lucia splits R into two parts, one where drivers and feedbacks are held constant and one where they can vary, by setting
where she defines Rp (which she also writes as “Rpe“) as the OLR that “would arise on an earth whose temperature is TS” and the values of the feedbacks are the same as the feedbacks “of the current earth”. Also, Rp “does not vary with” the drivers. That is, Rp is OLR as a function of temperature only, and which is independent of the drivers and feedbacks — so Rp is the part of the OLR where the drivers and feedbacks are held constant. The other bit, R-tilda (the R with the squiggly line on top in Eq. (3), which cannot be typed in this text), is just the remainder of the OLR, namely R less Rp — it is the part of OLR that depends on the drivers and feedbacks. Fair enough.
Lucia then develops the basic model, successfully — which is no great achievement because she is basically copying the standard approach in Held and Soden but with her different notation.
Lucia then goes on to claim, in several variations, that in her formulation of the basic model “partial differential are not taken holding “everything about the climate” constant”. Not so. Lucia’s equations (7) and (9) both contain dRp/dTS, and her result for the ECS in her Eq. (8) thus also contains it. Because she defined Rp as the part of the OLR that holds drivers and feedbacks constant,
Yep, she has the conventional Planck feedback in her formulation too — the derivative of OLR with respect to temperature, holding all drivers and feedbacks constant.
Lucia just reinvented the wheel with different notation
Merely due to her definition of Rp , she can write the Planck feedback with straight derivative symbols instead of partial derivative symbols. This is mere notational trickery and legerdemain; Lucia is fooling herself and her readers with her multiple claims to the effect that her formulation does not contain partial derivatives that hold everything constant. “Her Planck feedback” is the just same as the conventional Planck feedback — dRp/dTS holds feedbacks constant, and since (nearly?) every climate variable is affected by feedbacks to surface warming, Lucia’s Planck feedback holds “everything about the climate” constant” too.
UPDATE, 20 Oct 2015: Lucia has added an update to her post, a few hours after this post went live. She says
My formulation does not hold “everything about the climate” constant while taking a differential. It either holds “T” constant or “CO2” constant. Nothing else.
Early in her post Lucia defined Rp(e) with
where Rpe(T) is defined as the outgoing radiation that would arise on an earth whose temperature is T and has the ice, cloud ,water vapor and CO2 of the current earth; this does not vary with log2(CO2).
Is not that holding ice, cloud, and water vapor constant? Does that not imply that Rp holds constant both the feedbacks (ice, cloud, and water vapor are the feedbacks considered in the Held and Soden treatment she is following) and the drivers (CO2 is the only driver in her context)?And does not holding feedbacks and drivers constant hold (pretty much) everything about the climate constant — except for what is involved in the differential ratio, of course?
Holding T constant in Lucia’s formulation holds the feedbacks and thus “everything in climate” constant. And yes, Lucia’s Planck feedback is the same number as the conventional one that explicitly holds “everything about climate constant”.
In a new development, Lucia did at least email us when she added the update: her entire email reads
You are so confused.
Well, at least she emailed us.
*The Planck conditions for evaluating the Planck feedback or sensitivity conventionally are that all else besides tropospheric temperatures and OLR are held constant — so there are no feedbacks, all tropospheric temperatures (including the surface temperature) change in unison, and stratospheric temperatures are unchanged (Soden & Held, 2006, pp. 3355-56). There are some arbitrary choices to be made, such as whether it is the specific or the relative humidities that remain unchanged as the troposphere warms, or what happens at the tropopause.
“The tax will be introduced in the next six months, according to a statement from the Ministry of Industry, Energy, and Tourism. It will apply to solar power systems with a capacity of over 10 kilowatts.
The Ministry said the tax is intended to ensure that solar panel users contribute to the cost of maintaining the country’s electrical grid, as they use it as a backup supply. “
They’ve been trying to get this tax through for a long time. It’s described as unpopular by the usual suspects and, improbably, as a tax on the “Sun” (but will the sun pay, I wonder?). Supposedly, I imagine, the indignation at solar users having to pay is because it’s a human right to have access to a national grid and back up generation, and slaves should install and maintain that without being paid?
This evil government thinks businesses selling solar energy to the grid should be treated … like businesses, and worse, suffer from free market prices. Oh the horror:
“At the same time, residential customers have to pay a series of charges — dubbed a “tax on the sun” by detractors — and have to give away any power they deliver to the grid for free. Energy producers wanting to sell excess power to the grid at spot-price rates must register as a business.
Madrid, 27th July 2015. The worst predictions have come true: Spain does not attract investment in new wind power capacity. In the first half of 2015, not a single megawatt has been installed in the country, leaving the total at 22,986 MW
Wind power, remember, is competitive and cost effective. I can’t think why Spanish investors have all disappeared. (Which strangely happened in Australia too. No subsidies to suck on?)
In most ways, David Evans’ alternative model is exactly the same as the conventional model. But a reconnection of one forcing, and an additional factor, can make all the difference. Finally, climate model architecture is getting analyzed and discussed — the conventional structure has been in place for over 40 years.
In the conventional basic model the radiation imbalance caused by CO2 is treated like extra sunlight, amplified by the same feedback processes that amplify warming caused by the sun. But as we explained, the effects of CO2 are not just confined to the surface of Earth, but spread through the atmosphere. In the alternative model the warming caused by CO2 is allowed to have its own unique response. Only after the separate “warmings” of the Sun and CO2 are calculated can they be added together. The conventional model adds them too soon, while they are still radiation imbalances, and assumes the Earth’s climate responds to both in the same way — it’s too simplistic.
David’s model also allows for other factors to change cloud cover, with the addition of an input for externally driven albedo (EDA). In conventional models, clouds are just a feedback to surface warming, but we already know that anything that affects the particles that “seed” clouds can dramatically change the amount of sunlight arriving on Earth’s surface. These factors include cosmic rays and aerosols, and although we don’t know exactly what these are, we have data on how much energy arrives on Earth’s surface so we can still allow for the effects of whatever it is that changes the Earth’s albedo (reflectiveness). — Jo
The sum-of-warmings model is the expression of the organizing theme of the alternative model, namely that each climate driver has its own specific sensitivity and feedbacks (“response”), and that the small surface warmings due to the various drivers are independently calculated then added.
The assumed linearity of the climate system for small perturbations means that small temperature perturbations due to the various climate drivers do not significantly affect one another — so the effects of the various climate drivers superpose.
David Siegel has written six books, four of which were international bestsellers. He’s a Democrat voter, and he wants to preserve the environment. He wants that so badly he actually cares about the data, the graphs, and the arguments. (He cares about the outcome, not just about whether he looks like an environmentalist.) When challenged to find evidence, he looked, and was surprised, then he looked more and was shocked. “As I learned more, I changed my mind. I now think there probably is no climate crisis and that the focus on CO2 takes funding and attention from critical environmental problems.”Which is a similar path to mine eight years ago. I was once a Green who believed in man-made global warming. (And I was a vegetarian).
Having studied both sides, he’s written up a very sharp page, condensing what he discovered, and with a personal narrative, plus great graphs and provocative questions. Siegel wants skeptics to reach a newer crowd, to push the boundaries by sending them links to his page. (Hey, it’s a good marketing strategy for his site right? True, but he does make a real point.) He’s written one page hoping to win over people who are more liberal minded, and it just might open some eyes. It’s very readable.
I did a similar thing. As a former Green, my instinct was to compress the whole debate to four points and put it in The Skeptics Handbook. (My first post). The second Skeptics Handbook expanded into issues that show up on the left leaning radar — more about people, intimidation, vested interests, and money.
He sent his feature article to news outlets, and they all knocked it back. (Imagine that!) It’s the scoop that no one wants, because of the baggage. Even newspaper editors don’t want to be called names like “denier”.
Welcome to the world of skeptics David, where you find out who your true friends are!
Basic models take a top down approach, focusing on gross input and output rather than all the details within the system (which is mainly left to the feedbacks parameter). This makes them very different to the GCMs, which attempt to add up the climate from the bottom up and predict based on adding up grids and guesstimates of clouds, humidity, ice, etc.
The energy coming in to the Earth is called absorbed solar radiation (ASR). It varies significantly. The Earth will absorb the peaks and troughs of this to a certain extent. If we step back and look at the big picture, the question is how many years does it take for a step up in incoming energy to spread its way through the climate system, vanish into the top layer of the ocean, come back out and be released to space. To some extent that extra energy gets absorbed for a while before being released. David analyzed this system from the outside, graphing it like a low pass filter in electronics. (How much “noise” of spikes and troughs in ASR is being smoothed out by the Earth’s climate?)
…
In a low pass filter graph against frequency, the response of the filter is a flat line at lower frequencies, so all the bumps and wiggles in ASR at those low frequencies are faithfully reproduced in the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR). We know for sure that if the Sun gave off more energy (or somehow indirectly reduced our cloud-cover so that we absorbed more energy) that over a period of say, 200 years, the relationship is one to one. More energy in, equals more energy out. But the question is, how short a period does that apply too? Obviously not say 5 minutes. What kind of time-frame does the low pass filter work on?
The answer is a bit complicated because in every solar cycle (roughly every 11 years) there is a separate effect called the “notch” — the sun churns over it’s magnetic field, releases a little bit more solar radiation — and some effect we haven’t pinned down yet reduces Earth’s sensitivity to that extra bit of incoming radiation. (For those familiar with low pass filter graphs, that means the elbow or bend in the low pass filer graph gets obscured by a separate effect, which is the notch around 11 years.)
In the end, the best we can do is come up with a range, but it’s still useful. The low pass filter effect operates on a similar time-frame to the totally separate notch effect. Ultimately the outer edge of the Earth’s Climate system (including the atmosphere and the land we live on) absorbs, shares, and emits 90% of those spikes and troughs either within about 2 years, or maybe about 8 years, depending on which side of the notch the bend in the low pass filter graph is (the notch obscures the very range we are interested in).
The empirical transfer function and the notch are ahead of us in this series, and for now we are just concerned with modeling the thermal inertia, by describing it with an equation.
— Jo
This post derives the relationship between absorbed solar radiation (ASR) and the radiating temperature, which is at the heart of the solar response in the sum-of-warmings model within the alternative model.
This relationship is found to have the same structure as that of a simple low pass filter, so the thermal inertia of the Earth is mimicked by a low pass filter. The radiating temperature, which determines the outgoing longwave radiation (OLR), is a smoothed version of the ASR — slow changes in the ASR are faithfully reproduced in the radiating temperature and OLR, but faster changes are attenuated.
The result for transitions between steady states is straightforward and agrees with the conventional basic climate model; the main interest here is the time lag or thermal inertia when not merely modeling the changes between steady states, which is used later in the notch-delay solar model.
Philippe Verdier is a household name in France where he does the weather on the nightly news on “France 2”. He’s releasing a book “Climat Investigation” being launched right now, outing himself as very much a skeptic, saying top climate scientists “have been “manipulated and politicised”. He decided to write the book because a year ago he was horrified when the French Foreign Minister got all the weather presenters together and urged them to use the term “climate chaos” in their broadcasts.
The France-2 response to force him off air is the best publicity his book could get. The Streisand effect will do his book sales a big favour. But lets hope wisdom prevails, and he is able to keep doing his job. Send feedback to “France 2” about this forced holiday — what better proof that free speech hangs by a thread, and the edifice of the Great Global Warming Scare is only maintained by bullying and intimidation. About half of all meteorologists are skeptics. How many of them don’t speak up out of fear? The 97% consensus is not created by science but by coercion.
In a promotional video, Mr Verdier said: “Every night I address five million French people to talk to you about the wind, the clouds and the sun. And yet there is something important, very important that I haven’t been able to tell you, because it’s neither the time nor the place to do so.”
He added: “We are hostage to a planetary scandal over climate change – a war machine whose aim is to keep us in fear.”
His outspoken views led France 2 to take him off the air starting this Monday. “I received a letter telling me not to come. I’m in shock,” he told RTL radio. “This is a direct extension of what I say in my book, namely that any contrary views must be eliminated.”
Inexorably, energy is headed for the coldest vacuum. It’s just a question of how long and what path it takes to get there. On Earth there are four main “pipes” to space — the CO2, water vapor, cloud tops, and surface pipes (see post 6). The basic establishment model treats “trapped” heat as if it were “adding heat” (see post 9). But partially blocking one exit pipe out of four is not the same as adding energy to the incoming pipe. Adding more energy on the incoming side means the total outflow must be higher. But merely slowing the outflow in one pipe means the total outflow remains the same, it just redistributes itself among the four outflow pipes.
David is proposing a paradigm shift in how a basic climate model is organized. This post is a road-map for building an alternative model.
The current paradigm starts from the assumption that reducing the outflow in one pipe is equivalent to the effect of increasing the inflow on the single incoming pipe — it is a radiation balance, where all imbalances are equivalent regardless of origin. Doubling CO2 is “equal” to 2% more sunlight. (So sayeth Hansen 1984.) The feedbacks all work through this same paradigm — all radiation imbalances are equivalent to more sunlight, the sun heats the surface, and therefore the feedbacks need only respond to surface warming. But if something else warms the atmosphere instead, there are no “feedbacks” in the conventional basic model — the model is blind. If one of the feedbacks to atmospheric warming by CO2 was to increase the flow through the cloud tops or water vapor pipes, the current climate models could not show that, could not even “think” it.
Getting the language right from the start: Any conversation about climate models pretty much leaps straight into quicksand. The paradigm shift needs to begin with the language, and the establishment mucked up both terms: “forcings” and “feedbacks”. “Forcings” doesn’t refer to any old force that affects the Earth’s climate, rather it refers to things assumed to have the same effect as more sunlight. “Feedbacks” doesn’t mean any feedback, in establishment language it only means things that happen in response to surface warming. By definition, the limiting language sets everyone up to get stuck in a dead-end, to think only long the lines of the current architecture.
David explains that his alternate model is a shift from adding radiation imbalances due to the various things that influence the climate (which means establishment defined “forcings”), to instead adding temperature perturbations caused by any kind of warming factor. Where the current models adds up forcings and applies the same feedbacks to the bundle, David’s model will treat each force on the climate separately and allow different feedbacks for different forces. Solving the big-one… climate sensitivity: Any climate model is essentially one big complicated equation. In this case, the sum-of-warmings model ends up with two crucial unknowns in the one equation, so it can’t be solved. But David builds a second model on the outgoing radiation, an OLR model. Now with two equations and two variables, it can be solved, at least enough to put an upper bound on the climate’s sensitivity to CO2.
Below, David lays out the plan for assembling the new basic climate model (the “zero-D” one, not the GCMs). Remember, the point of the basic model is that it is the simple application of basic physics that gives climate scientists implacable confidence that they are basically right. They are so convinced they can’t even imagine how it could be any other way, which is why government funded science is never going to get out of this rut unless someone outside the paradigm shakes them out.
— Jo
“Dunno”, says the Minister of Dams, “We blocked off part of that pipe, but the dam is hardly getting any fuller?”
This post discusses the strategy used to develop an alternative model, one which fixes or ameliorates all the aforementioned problems with the conventional basic climate model — namely applying the solar response to non-solar climate influences (post 9), omission of feedbacks that respond to climate drivers directly rather than to surface warming (post 5 and post 7), and heavy reliance on unverifiable partial derivatives (post 4). The improvements come at the cost of requiring more climate data.
It’s time to stop pussy footing around. We need higher levels of CO2. It is morally and ethically irresponsible to be silent while millions starve, biodiversity is under threat, and people are dying from cold weather.
Carbon dioxide increases crops, forest and plant life by 14% and is worth $140 billion, just in agricultural production. Thanks to CO2, forests have been protected because farms are more efficient in a higher CO2 world.
Countries that don’t do their part in producing enough carbon dioxide emissions need to lift their game. Coal use should be favoured over nuclear, hydro, wind and solar. Countries like France are free-riding on the nations like China, the US, and Australia — which are helping to green the world and feed the starving.
The advantage of higher CO2 for all C3 crop plants is spectacular. That’s rice, wheat, barley, rye, cotton, sugar beet, spinach, and potato. C4 plants evolved in the last 30 million years to be good at dealing with low CO2 atmospheric concentration (corn, sugarcane, cabbage, broccoli, sedge, daisy.) Most plants are C3.
Figure 1: Carbon dioxide fertilization (in ppm, horizontal axes) of C3 crop and C4 weed Source: von Caemmerer et al. (2012).
Cold kills more than heat does, even in hot towns more people die in winter:
The pattern of a higher death rate in the colder months also holds for all-cause mortality in tropical and subtropical areas in China, Bangladesh, Kuwait, and Tunisia. Mortality rates apparently also peak in winter in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Mexico City and Monterrey, Mexico; Santiago, Chile, Cape Town, South Africa; and Nairobi, Kenya (see Figure 9). It is also the case for the southern US states of Florida, Texas, California and even Hawaii.198 In addition, in Cuba, deaths from heart diseases and cerebrovascular diseases, which account for 37% of all deaths, peak in the colder (winter) months.
Conclusion — higher CO2 concentrations improves both human and plant well-being.
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 the thread there were already scores of pointless comments. I emailed her to correct things and connect David and Lucia, but evidently she didn’t want an answer to her query direct by email. She wants it all out in public so people can learn, which is a nice sentiment, but we would rather post new research than run classes. (Sorry Part 11 is delayed — It took hours to read and unpack the misguided comments.)
We all could have saved a lot of time if Lucia had read the post carefully, or just asked before publication. We’ve tweaked my introduction to the post to clarify things, but all the scientific points and equations David raised remain the same. She is, of course, welcome to come here and comment. We hope the Blackboard will give us more useful feedback next time.
Just to remind everyone, the point of Post 4 was that the implacable confidence of climate modelers who say it’s “basic physics” is based on partial derivatives of dependent variables that might be close enough, or might be quite wrong, no one can tell. The advertising doesn’t fit the product.
Lucia Liljegren thinks I made a mistake with partial derivatives in Eq. (2) of post 3 of the “New Science” series of blog posts when describing the conventional basic climate model. She also had difficulty understanding post 4 about the use of partial derivatives in the basic model, and thinks Eq. (1) of that post or the text just around it is definitely wrong.
Having read carefully through her post and its comments, I fail to see she found any mistakes in my posts or even made any informed criticism of them. Joanne and I have emailed her and tried to point out her mistakes, but she ignores any content and insists only that I made a mistake with partial differentials and that she only wanted to discuss it in public. Ok, now we are discussing it in public.
A couple of weeks ago Associated Press (AP) decided to change the way it refers to the imaginary monsters called “climate change deniers”. Apparently after years of namecalling, they think maybe “climate doubters” would be better. (Hands up all the people out there who doubt we have a climate? Exactly.)
Maybe one day AP will start to write in accurate English?
Why now? After a relentless decade of petty illogical names, AP are not dropping the term because it’s insulting, baseless, or an abuse of any literal English language definition. Instead, they have only just noticed the nasty implications of holocaust denial? Really?
… those who reject climate science say the phrase denier has the pejorative ring of Holocaust denier so The Associated Press prefers climate change doubter or someone who rejects mainstream science.
Perhaps the real reason they stopped using it is because they finally realized how the unscientific poisoned term is making believers look … unscientific. Can anyone find me one homo sapiens denialia? Who’s a political activist then, and not a scientist? To the Guardian and Slate commentators who protested the loss of their favorite insult I say, yes, please, keep the “climate denial” coming. It is so overdone, it helps skeptics. Don’t stop now!
The AP StyleSheet wants reporters to use the term climate scientist and climate doubter. The Jo Nova stylesheet will stay accurate: there are skeptical scientists, and there are unskeptical ones. Anyone who believes a model can measure the climate better than a satellite is not a scientist.
We’re keeping the name skeptic
But as AP stops “denier” and swaps it for “doubter”, they’ve also said they won’t use the more accurate and correct term “skeptic” for climate skeptics. In a backhanded way, the AP are conceding that skeptics have won back the term skeptic, and what really worries the herd-followers is that they are looking unskeptical. As I said in 2009, what’s the opposite of skeptical? — Gullible. Look out, here come the suckers.
When I first started blogging, skeptic was a term of disdain, people would write to me regularly telling me to avoid the term and call myself a climate realist. But I would have none of it. We wanted the word skeptic back. (Now we are coming after the term scientist. )
Here’s how AP tries to justify not calling skeptics “skeptics”:
Some background on the change: Scientists who consider themselves real skeptics – who debunk mysticism, ESP and other pseudoscience, such as those who are part of the Center for Skeptical Inquiry – complain that non-scientists who reject mainstream climate science have usurped the phrase skeptic. They say they aren’t skeptics because “proper skepticism promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims.” That group prefers the phrase “climate change deniers” for those who reject accepted global warming data and theory.
The fake skeptics
AP wants to call fake skeptics “skeptics” but not allow skeptics to use the term.
Some of the most unskeptical people on the planet call themselves “real skeptics” and meet in clubs to bravely denounce spoon benders and astrologers. I tangled with one called Skeptico in my early blogging – I naively thought real skeptics would not use argument from authority, and would be interested in empirical evidence instead of popularity contests. Instead I discovered that there is a class of people out there who desperately want to think they are independent thinkers, but on pretty much every topic they side with mainstream progressive opinion. These are a fake skeptics who trumpet their membership as if it makes them terribly clever, but swallow the fashionable approved line on any topic that has actual political importance. We can usually find them on the same side as “political correctness”. Repeat after me: the government is always right. These are the people who talk about logical fallacies, who know what they are, but use them ad lib, and the make up excuses as to why it’s OK. They’ll tell you argument from authority is poor reasoning, but then use it themselves and say it’s a legitimate way to do things in science.
But while they pretend to fight for reason, they advocate the namecalling term “denial” of those “who refuse to accept the reality of climate change”? Here’s news for AP: no one denies the reality of climate change (except the drones who say the climate was perfect before the T-Model Ford was invented). The reality is that 28 million weather balloons say the climate models are wrong, and 35 years of data from two satellite systems agree. Not to mention countless proxies from every continent on Earth and 6,000 boreholes sunk below the worlds oceans. The models can’t model the past climate, why would any skeptic think they might work on the future?
The “reality” the CSI are fighting for is one defined in unaudited committee reports and based on computer simulations, not reality as defined by observations.
My recommendation to AP: call real skeptics skeptics, and call those who believe everything big-government says “believers“.
China is making the world’s products, but in terms of carbon they are horribly inefficient compared to the West. Old factories and coal fired electricity mean the country is pouring out CO2 — not that that matters, but it rather puts the squeeze on anyone who thinks it’s good for the environment to shut down clean western factories and give that production to China.
Figure 2 | China’s emission exports and the top exporting provinces. a The emissions embodied in goods exported from China to the US, EU and Japan are shown, representing 58% of all emissions embodied in trade in 2007 (the largest flows are labelled in MtCO2 yr-1.
A new study came out by Lui et al. with headlines all over like “Goods manufactured in China not good for the environment, study finds”. But none of these media outlets put a number on it — how much more polluting were these Chinese factories? The answer was right there in table 1 of the paper. Lui et al compare 15 products made in China and the EU, and found that China produces 4.4 times the emissions of CO2 in order to produce the same product.
When Chinese workers make steel, they make 2.8 times as much “pollution”. When they make cast iron, its 4.1 times as “polluting”. When they make polypropylene, they generate 18.4 times as much CO2. When a factory moves from the West to China, the Greens should spit chips.
Table 1 | Life cycle carbon emission intensity for 15 products from China and EU.
The data comes from 2007, but is very detailed, even breaking down emissions from separate regions of China. In terms of exporting emissions, no country comes close to China (Graph a, below). In terms of importing emissions, the US heads the pack, followed by Japan, Germany, the UK, and then China (Graph d). If we look at exports of emissions minus the imports, China tops the list again while Australia just makes it into fifth spot.
Graph g below suggests Australia is the 5th highest net exporter of emissions. More than any other western nation, we are a high emitter of CO2 because of what we export.
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